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?

3. Evolution of 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