Streets in the sky
Jeffery Smith writes about the history of high-rise housing in Britain
When I was a boy in the 1950s I became fascinated by high-rise blocks of flats. From the public library I had consumed architecture books with photographs showing exciting apartment blocks in other parts of the world.
Sheffield still largely consisted of nineteenth century buildings, apart from sites like missing teeth, blitzed in world war two. On these sites in the city centre modern buildings faced in Portland stone were appearing but they did not excite like the pictures in the books, often with their board-marked concrete surfaces left exposed.
Then the multistorey housing started. One in particular, Park Hill, grew up on the valley side over the main railway station. It wasn’t a building. It was geography! Eventually I went along its streets in the sky.
My family lived two miles away in an old and small terraced house. Park Hill was the modern world, the new horizon! Late in the twentieth century, Park Hill was ‘Listed’. A few years later I was of hitchhiking age. Two of us set forth to Marseilles to see the famous block of flats designed by the architect Le Corbusier.
With nothing like a map, when we arrived in Marseilles all we could say was ‘Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’. This was enough. They put us on a bus and we took the Mediterranean air from its rear platform as it delivered passengers to stops along a tree-lined boulevard. And then we were there, beside the Unité. Some twenty storeys high but extending along much further, it was like an ocean liner with multi-coloured balconies instead of portholes and an adventure playground and nursery school for its top deck. It towered – no, it cruised – above the sea of Mediterranean trees.
I wanted to construct this new world and became a civil engineer. I wanted a new world in which people could sail through life: inwardly their homes would be a suite of cabins; outwardly they would sail cheerfully over the world to enrich human experience. I could help build this new world.
Decades later I was helping to maintain this new world. One day I had to inspect a tower block from a hydraulic platform. Looking down from fourteen floors up was not a good idea – I could hardly pick out the vehicle supporting me from other tiny, parked cars and vans!
So, sixty years later and after the fire I felt impelled to make a trip to London to see Grenfell Tower. It was shocking. It towered above Latimer Road station on the Hammersmith and City line, adorned in black ash. How could people’s dreams of a new world come to this? Well, professionally, over the years since I worked as a structural engineer at the UK’s National Building Agency (NBA), which had the role of checking that new ways of building were adequate, I had seen safety and standards ‘deregulated’ and reduced.
In 1981 the government closed down the NBA, it was after all a quango – a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation – against which newspapers had campaigned. It had had its day, they said, though they conceded it had helped develop and validate modern systems of building construction. The private sector could, they said, now do this. However, in my experience, at least, validation of new methods hardly happened.
Now, as much as in those days, I think we need a national building agency that would, amongst other things, guide the way for the nation’s housing to be ‘greened’ almost en masse. Such an agency, with a college of multi-disciplinary professionals – architects, engineers, surveyors, physicists – would consider events thought hardly likely to happen. They would never have allowed tall blocks of flats to be clad in the way they have been. Safer ways would have been devised and verified.
Over the years housing policies and attitudes have changed. Doctrinaire politicians have removed ‘red tape’ because, it was said, regulations hindered prosperity. To me, the bonfire of regulations and safeguards has lead inexorably to the bonfire of Grenfell Tower.
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