Something Worth Keeping – Post-war architecture in England

(A leaflet first published 1996)

If you live in a listed, post-war housing estate, you live in an exceptional place. Yours is one of less than twenty listed modern housing developments in the country – a status only bestowed on buildings of special architectural or historic importance.

It means your home ranks alongside some of the country’s finest and most famous buildings. Listing also brings new responsibilities, primarily for your local authority as manager, to ensure its special qualities remain unspoilt.

England’s new housing

From the late 1940’s until the mid 1960s, England designed the best council housing in the world. No other country has such an ambitious public programme of new housing or slum clearance, and visitors came from all over the world to admire it. Unfortunately disasters like Ronan Point have made us forget that other estates were carefully designed and well built – often using a mix of traditional materials and modern construction methods  to give big windows and balconies. It is time that their good qualities were recognised.

Prefabs

Little housing could be built during and immediately after the War, because of the rationing of the building materials, especially steel and timber. The exception was Coventry, the centre of Britain’s armaments industry, where the local authority built a number of prototype houses in 1941 where the only timber was in the front door.  Better known are the tiny houses of the Temporary Housing Programme initiated by Sir Winston Churchill in 1943: 156,623 prefabs were built in Britain, and we have listed an unusually well-preserved group of the rare Phoenix type, with corrugated walls and roofs.

Housing by London boroughs

Plans to rebuild and revitalise London after the War began as early as 1943, and the capital was one of the first places to see new housing. A competition was held for the building of Churchill Gardens in 1945-6. The large flats were winners of a Festival of Britain Award in 1951, and had the first district heating system in the country, fuelled by waste heat from Battersea Power Station. In modern-day Islington, two small developments were built which combined brightly patterned brick and tilework with a novel form of concrete construction. Spa Green (1946-50) and Bevin Court (1951-4) were by the Russian architect Bethold Lubetkin, designer of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo; the staircase at Bevin Court is a similar geometrical extravaganza of interconnecting circles. The same concrete construction was used by E Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, as Passfields in Catford, where the concrete form is expressed in the big projecting balconies of the largest block. The City Corporation was adventurous too. In 1951 it held what was to be the era’s largest housing competition, for the Golden Lane Estate, a formally-planned group of buildings and landscaped spaces, with a community hall, recreation centre, nursery, public house and shops. The bright colours of the first blocks at Golden Lane are a contrast to the more monumental Crescent House, a later addition to the scheme, and by the vernacular style of the Corporation’s other masterpiece of the period – a series of terraces and flats round a village green at Lammas Green near Forest Hill.

The London County Council

The LCC was also innovatory, but slower off the mark. Its first major post-war estate was a Woodberry Down, where four eight-story blocks were the LCC’s first venture into concrete construction, and the first to be built with lifts. The combination of this new material with traditional deep eaves harks back to Viennese blocks of flats from the early twentieth century – striking in north London! The LCC’s flagship estates were at Roehampton. First came Alton East, a series of towers and lower terraces on the site of Victorian villas, whose gardens were retained as part of the scheme, With their contrasting colours and patterns of brickwork, Alton East is softer and more traditional in feel than its successor, Alton West, built in the grounds of three Georgian mansions which were retained as colleges of higher education. Alton West, with its impressive maisonette blocks set into the hillside, was considered by one American critic as ‘probably the finest low-cost housing development anywhere in the world’.

Housing in the 1960s

By the 1960s, enterprising local authorities were beginning to reject tall blocks of flats in favour of an overall medium-sized development that was more respectful of the existing street-pattern and character of an area. Denys Lasdun’s butterfly-plan blocks at the Greenways Estate, Tower Hamlets, had shown the way as early as 1955-8. The first major scheme, however, to develop the idea was Lillington Gardens, the result of another competition win – by John Darbourne, in 1961. Its height and materials were inspired by the adjoining Victorian church, and started a fashion in housing design which lasted fifteen years. A rare exception to this new trend was Trellick Tower (1967-72), one of the last major works by the veteran architect Erno Goldfinger, whose own home has been opened by the National Trust. Trellick Tower is a powerful composition, but its separation of flats and services into two distinct towers is also very practical.

Housing outside London

Few other city authorities chose to employ architects, relying on builders’ systems in a bid to reach government targets for the provision of new homes. One exception was Sheffield, where an enterprising team of young architects was assembled by the dynamic John Lewis Womersley, appointed City Architect in 1953. The most famous of their many innovative projects was Park Hill, built between 1957 and 1961. The other was Southampton, whose housing department had an adventurous policy of commissioning works from private architects, many of whom are not otherwise associated with public housing. One such was Eric Lyons, noted in the late 1950s for his sensitive infill developments in south London for first-time buyers, but whose Castle House, begun in 1960, was considered by the Southern Evening Echo as “the most successful block in the South of England”. Edward Lyons (no relation) is elsewhere remembered as a planner of schools, hospitals and college buildings, but he designed Wyndham Court as a counterpoise in size and style to the nearby Civic Centre. It is his only major housing work.

What listing means

Listing is a marker to the local authority and English Heritage that your housing has a special quality. Any alterations must be carefully thought through and well designed. Listing does not freeze the building for all time. However, details – such as doors and windows – are important elements in designs like these which gain their architectural form from skilful repetition. It means that necessary improvements and replacements must be carefully considered. English Heritage works in partnership with the local authority and residents to ensure that such estates retain their special architectural qualities while meeting modern needs.

If you own your own home and wish to make major changes you may well need listed building consent from your local authority, especially of you want to make permanent changes to the exterior. Listing covers both the exterior and interior of any building. However, most interiors of public housing do not have fixtures and original fittings of special interest, and your local authority planning officers or English Heritage advisers would draw your attention to any important details. Listing may well cover similar restrictions to those already included in tenants’ agreements and owners’ leases. Your local authority can provide more information