Tearing the city at the seams #5 - A Farewell to Brutalism

You might ask why, on a day off work, I would choose to walk out to Elephant & Castle and explore around the Heygate estate; a notorious example of the crime-ridden council ghettos that dominated Britain’s inner cities during the 50s and 60s.  The answer is twofold:  firstly, that I find myself imbued with a strange and quite nihilistic fascination with such abandoned structures of decaying high-rise living, like physical embodiments of a dystopian imagination.  And secondly, they are currently due to be demolished by Southwark council, and redeveloped within the next 3 or 4 years, presumably shiny and repackaged as ‘luxury apartments’, with all the failings of the past firmly eradicated.

The estate is perhaps the most recognisable encapsulation (although some would argue the case for Sheffield’s Park Hill or Glasgow’s Red Road estate) of the brutalist architecture and urban ideals of its day, and hence why I felt a visit was so important before they cease to exist.  The central London location means that it has been immortalised in film and TV countless times, thereby confirming its place in the public consciousness as the instantly recognisable stage set backdrop to urban decay.

The estate was designed by Tim Tinker and completed in 1974.  An interesting detail in itself since high-rise developments had been prolific as a result of the post-war demand for community housing, and developers would have, by this time, been well aware of the negative side-effects of such structures from their observations, but nonetheless decided to go ahead; almost clinging to the schewed logic of an already failed optimism.  The estate embodies all the high-minded ideals of the brutalist movement, inspired by radical architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.  Their vision was that these ‘cities in the sky’ would inspire a sense of community spirit and collectivism, with open spaces between high-rises to be filled with greenery and vibrant interactivity.  Inevitably though, these estates quickly became incendiary devices for anti-social behaviour, drug abuse, graffiti and violence.

Wandering around the abandoned estate was an oddly disorienting experience.  The sound of heavy traffic from the neighbouring Elephant & Castle roundabout had faded into the background hum of an air-conditioning unit, and with its cracked concrete walls, smashed windows and overgrown bracken, it felt as though I was walking around an old East German communist bloc, stripped of all occupants and left as a vacant relic.  The ground-floor garages were shuttered and locked, resembling a desolate high-street with its recession-hit shops, the embodiment of a model out-stripped by the pace of development.  Glancing up at the shear face of the walls, a flock of satellite dishes still perched from the window ledges like sedentary birds.

The harsh concrete edges, the reliance on the unwavering straight lines and rectilinear geometries, the raised walkways and stairwells all following the same sharp angular style with no room for compromise, struck me as deeply redolent of both the high-modernist ambition of this new ideal for living juxtaposing with the subsequent decline into degradation and failure.  The estate is bordered by four hulking fortress-like apartment buildings that have the effect of closing the estate in on itself, like an inverse gated community that instead of heightening security, actually served as a breeding ground for insecurity and anxiety.

One could be forgiven for experiencing a sense of bewilderment at how anyone – architects, urban planners or inhabitants – could have, at one time, held the view that an estate following such a design could in any way foster enhanced social harmony and cohesion.  But perhaps I’m being overly lavish with the lucre of hindsight, as indeed many residents claim that at the time they were enthused with their new homes and many have in fact campaigned vehemently against its demolition.  Often blamed for the estate’s swift decline is the local council and government’s relaxation of the entry requirements for prospective new tenants, thereby disfavouring more stable long-term inhabitants.

As I wandered around the borderline of the new estate I pondered this point but also the notion that such estates are indeed condemned to extinction as a failed social experiment because their very aesthetics represent all the things we have come to assimilate with urban decay.  Neighbouring the estate, a bloom of new apartment buildings stand almost wilting in their modernist apparel.  They incorporate the jagged, curvaceous designs and playful external cladding that in my view have become just as much a blight on our contemporary urban environment.

In fact, so ostentatiously psychedelic is one particular block’s finement that you have to wonder whether this has been purposefully manufactured by designers as atonement in some way for the grey concrete tedium of their predecessors.  Out on Walworth Street one apartment build incorporates small room-extensions that jut out from the main shell, appearing to overhang the pavement and teeming traffic.  I feel similarly baffled that designers could view such a vertiginously intrusive feature conducive to good living, unless of course those rooms house the toilet facilities thereby converging with the floor-to-ceiling windows to offer inhabitants the bizarre thrill of appearing to excrete down onto pedestrians below.  Neo-medievalism if you like!

You only have to observe these utterly mundane buildings, with their soft edges and shiny streamlined facades steeped in their own homogeneity, as well as the Strata tower (with its mock wind turbines that often give the impression of a hairdryer coiffuring the cloudy wigs of the London skyline), to gain a sense of the sheer short-termism of these architectural phases.

Why exactly is it that common consensus is taken to be the wholesale rejection of these estates simply because they no longer conform with the stylistic fashions of the day?  Do they need to be entirely eradicated, thereby condemning a legitimate period of British architectural history to the annals of recorded memory, or could they instead be gusseyed up with a smattering of shiny steel and glass or more attractive external cladding like cosmetic surgery beautifying a plain face.

The reason I argue against their demolition is that I see worth in renovation and revitalisation rather than rejection and conforming to bland modernist type.  I wonder just how much of the negative mythology of such estates, manufactured largely by the media and enshrined by the creative arts, is to blame for their current demise, purely because to the public they represent the natural terrain for crime, disorder and everything fearful and loathesome about society.

My lasting assertion, walking around the cracked and spalled waste ground was that beneath the surface gloss and the warm exteriors, the collectivist living conditions of these modern apartment buildings can scarcely be any different, except that the psyche of the masses knows to reject it as being unfavourable.  Indeed I understand it is easy to romanticise the dystopian imagery and iconography these landscapes evoke – from the visuals of Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ to the sounds of Manchester’s acid house culture that germinated from Hulme Crescents – and one shouldn’t presume that I myself would be happy to live in such a place.

However, the architecture of the built environment is a structural smorgasbord of the ideals and ambitions of their time and is all the more interesting for it.  By reducing to dust buildings that have fallen from ideological and aesthetical favour, we do ourselves a disservice, and in my view such estates should undergo measures of compromise – the retaining of their ostensible architecture whilst being renovated with more populist modern tropes.  In so doing – and expending far less council resources - local residents might be able to continue their habitation without the propagation of new ‘luxury developments’ that exclude so many of them.  By resisting full-scale change based on short-term prejudices, our urban environments will be far more enlightening and diverse in the long-term.