FOLAR
Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

Castles in the Air? Landscapes and gardens of public housing

Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

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?

2. Coming Home

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.