The Evolution of the Council Estate Ideals and Realities

Speaker: John Boughton

Saunders Court, Norwich. ©John Boughton

John’s talk will look at the history of social housing from the nineteenth century to the present-day, with a particular focus on the evolving form and layout of council estates. He will examine the early influence of the Garden City movement and the changing nature of ‘Corporation suburbia’ as council housing grew in the interwar period. After 1945, new planning ideas emerged stressing neighbourhood and mixed development but were adapted with difficulty to the mass public housing drive of the 1960s and the rise of multi-storey development. The well-regarded low-rise, high-density schemes of the 1970s were seen as a corrective to preceding excesses. As council housing declined in the 1980s, regeneration schemes often revived more traditional streetscapes. Throughout this story, politicians and planners have grappled with social change, architectural fashion and the ever-present tension between high ideals and financial possibility.

John Boughton is a social historian. He has written two books, Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2018) and A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates (RIBA Books, 2022). He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool and blogs at municipaldreams.wordpress.com