Multi‐storey council housing in Britain: Introduction and spread

Abstract

Discussion of housing architecture in Britain since the late nineteenth century has closely followed the conventions of architectural criticism earlier established in Pugin's Contrasts. Here, new styles are advocated as Utopias (in other words, in social and moral as well as visual terms), which, it is asserted, will counteract the fragmenting influence of capitalist Gesellschaft, as embodied in the ‘failure’ of preceding styles. So the complex pattern of architectural fashion, and associated debates, is perpetually forced into a crude dialectic framework of crisis and resolution, involving the pillorying and rehabilitation of successive housing types: nineteenth century terraces and tenements, interwar semis and so forth. Over the past twenty years this argument has been sustained by architectural critics’ condemnation of Modern Movement council housing in general, and one ‘bogeyman’ in particular: the multi‐storey (hereafter MS) block, portrayed as symbol of contractors’ rapacity or architects’ and politicians’ hubris.

More recently, however, such an interpretation has also been taken up by historical accounts of this period. On the one hand, historians concerned with the political and economic context of housing, such as Dunleavy, Merrett and Ravetz, have explained the spread of high flats as a symptom of the supposed contradictions within council housing, caused by landed, contractual and other external pressures. But this self‐confirming framework is found to be of little use as a tool in the discussion of the particular housing circumstances and policies of the several thousand local housing authorities, varying in size from the London County Council down to Scottish small burghs of under 1,000 inhabitants (such as Culross or Inveraray). On the other hand, architectural historians have closely followed the Puginian tradition of Utopian criticism, attacking the Modern Movement and MS flats either for excessive aestheticism, or, conversely, for their ‘debasement’ of original high idealism. Most recently, Andrew Saint's important book has unfavourably compared the anarchic, urgent council housing drive with its tidy, self‐contained small sister: the school building programme, which he commends for its tight control and direction by ‘progressive’ architects in the Ministry of Education, Hertfordshire and Nottinghamshire — architects committed to salubrious Arts and Crafts ideals of ‘fair shares for all’.

It is all too tempting to throw up one's hands in bafflement, along with Saint. The present article, however, attempts an alternative approach: to sketch out a simple chronological framework for understanding the spread of high flats, without resorting to the moralising of the Utopians, or the deus ex machina of the structuralist accounts. Here, the introduction of the MS housing type in Britain in contrasted with its subsequent large‐scale construction, with each of these two phases seen as having been dominated by one particular group, within certain local authorities.

The initial establishment and popularization of high flats between the late 1940s and mid 1950s, to the point where they could be taken up by councils throughout the country, will be discussed first. Here, a decisive influence will be ascribed to the work of architects within a few southern English authorities — most importantly the LCC, whose Housing Committee (HC) was insulated from local housing pressures by its regional scope, and whose housing architects were further cocooned by their decentralized group structure. In this phase, the introduction of high flats was closely linked with the sophisticated visual doctrine of mixed development, which contrasted low and high blocks.

Then, the nationwide spread of MS flats from the late 1950s will be considered. In this phase, a dominant role will be attributed to the HCs of the largest cities, concerned not with visual sophistication but with a short‐term local political objective: to build as many houses within their boundaries as quickly as possible. In pursuit of this aim, endorsed by central Governments, the mixed development pattern was often replaced by estates entirely composed of high blocks and implementation was frequently controlled by engineers, relegating architects and planners to an opposition role. The majority of this section will be devoted to discussion of the high flats of Glasgow Corporation, whose HC exerted a pervasive influence over Government and contractual policy throughout Scotland, and whose large programme was directed by an engineer within the City Architect's department. However, it is also an aim of this article to qualify the general process which it describes — invention by architects, dissemination by HCs — by stressing the variety of conflicting local patterns and circumstances at any one time as seen in the particular balance of forces within any authority, between officials and councillors, groups and individuals. The case of a smaller city, Norwich, standing apart from the main theme of simplification and mass production, will also briefly be described. In this instance the lack of a severe perceived housing problem denied the HC the local and national ascendancy enjoyed by its Glasgow counterpart, and enabled a powerful City Architect, David Percival, to continue building mixed developments containing very few high blocks at all.