Castles in the air? - aspirations and realities of post war housing and their gardens and landscapes
Five online recorded talks produced by FOLAR and The Gardens Trust, May-June 2023
With a brilliant band of speakers - Dr Catherine Flinn, Luis Diaz, John Boughton, Dr Jan Woudstra and associate professor, Otto Saumarez Smith, these talks span from broad post war politics, the problems of getting UK redeveloped and who held the strings in Whitehall, to a brief history of social housing and the evolving forms and layouts of council estates; there will be details about individual estates, including some contrasting examples from the Netherlands, and what works and what has endured. Influences of the garden city movement will weave its way through the talks, also high rise and low rise, and creating or recreating neighbourhoods. The development of the third wave of the New Towns reveals much about changing social and political attitudes, mobility and the impact of a declining heavy industrial base. What can we learn from all this to help make our new housing better?
Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities - Britain's postwar reconstruction
The postwar built environment in Britain, for the past thirty years, has been condemned mainly as a failure. This perception of failure looms especially large in light of the yawning gap between what was hoped for and what was realized. The rhetoric of blame, for the loss of beauty and even ‘Britishness’ in the rebuilt blitzed cities, has focused on planners and architects. But comments like those above ignore evidence about the background in which this built environment was created. Perspectives are too often shaped by recent biases and values rather than historic context. During and after the Second World War those who wrote and planned for the future focused on hope and potential, publishing modernist visions of new city centres. This talk will focus on how planning for reconstruction was approached, the factors that inhibited realisation of plans, and the realities faced by blitzed cities in postwar Britain.
Catherine Flinn has a doctorate in modern British history and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She previously took degrees in landscape architecture, architectural history and garden history and conservation. She returned to academia following a professional career in architecture, landscape and planning. Dr Flinn has taught at several universities in the US and the UK. Her research focuses on postwar reconstruction - in particular the political, economic and social impacts of rebuilding and redevelopment. Her book “Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities” was published by Bloomsbury and is available in paperback.
2. Coming Home: The spaces and routines of arrival and departure in British housing
This presentation will examine the route and spaces that link the city to the front door in British housing. Using Alexandra Road (1978) designed by Neave Brown for the Camden County Council I will outline the way in the relationship between spaces and actions are reciprocally defined and re-defined rather than deterministic. This is followed by a series of examples from the history of British housing examining different permutations in the way access and arrival have been configured. Starting with the Georgian terrace through to post-war housing and up to contemporary housing I will attempt to demonstrate how different configurations contribute to the way we identify with our homes. As our journey home passes through different landscapes and territories we associate and construct relationships with them, ascribing and defining different levels of community (district, neighbourhood, block, street, neighbours). The argument will be that this arena plays a critical role in our sense of belonging to a place and community or of being alienated from it. A short survey of examples will show that Britain has experimented with many different configurations, perhaps more than any other country. With councils beginning to build housing again and high density a goal for many developments this lost history is worth examining to learn how we can provide opportunities for communities to develop and for residents to feel a part of their neighbourhood.
Luis Diaz trained as an architect at the New York Institute of Technology and attended the Berlage Institute (Amsterdam) in its founding year. He taught at the New York Institute of Technology and co-founded the Brooklyn Architects Collective before pursuing research study at the Bartlett (UCL), The London School of Economics, and the University of Brighton. During this journey he studied with Robert Slutzky, Henri Ciriani, Herman Hertzberger, Adrian Forty, and Richard Sennett. Since relocating to the UK he has taught at the Kent Institute of Architecture and Design and is now Course Leader for the undergraduate architecture course at the University of Brighton. Over the last 25 years his research has focused on housing issues.
3. The Evolution of the Council Estate Ideals and Realities
John Boughton’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
4. Some remarkable post-war urban renewal schemes in the Netherlands by Aldo van Eyck and Herman Herzberger
Post-war modernist housing in the Netherlands is well known as are the suburban housing that materialised, all based on garden city notions of two storey terraced housing and gardens. By the 1970s there was a reaction against this that sought housing in more urban settings while avoiding both high-rise and low-rise schemes. Almere Haven was one such attempt to re-create the atmosphere of older Dutch cities, but this talk concentrates on two schemes, one in Nieuwestraat/ Waterstraat in Zwolle by Aldo van Eyck (1971-5), and Houttuinen by Herman Hertzberger in Amsterdam (1982). These schemes have been praised by architects worldwide but have largely escaped critical review from a landscape perspective. This talk looks at the context, analysing innovation and provides an analysis as to how these schemes have fared.
Dr Jan Woudstra is Reader in Landscape History and Theory at University of Sheffield. He trained in landscape design, horticulture and conservation and practiced as a landscape architect and historian, including the restoration of Chiswick House and Privy Gardens, Hampton Court. He has been teaching part and full time for 35 years, and at University of Sheffield since 1995. Guided by a general concern for the quality of the built environment his research activity has aimed to increase knowledge within the landscape profession and to challenge perceived notions about landscape design and research. He has authored, co-authored and edited many books, most recently, The Politics of Street Trees (Routledge, 2022) and in press is Future Histories, Teaching history in landscape schools.
5. Scrambled City: Deindustrialisation and the Merging of Town and Country in late-Twentieth Century Britain
The original conception of the Garden Cities proposed a new relationship between town and countryside. This talk is about the fullest realisation in Britain of such a merging of the urban and the rural, not least in the Mark III New Towns of the 1970s, which were , bound together by networks of roads, telephone wires, and electricity pylons. The talk will keep in sight the fact that these processes happened in places with existing environmental and architectural histories, and intersected with other centrifugal processes such as electrification, deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and automatability.
Dr Otto Saumarez Smith is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is currently researching and writing 'The End of Urban Modernism in the 1970s'. He is a Trustee and Chair of the Casework Committee for the Twentieth Century Society