London's Aylesbury Estate

An Oral History of the 'Concrete Jungle'

Michael Romyn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030514761
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030514778
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

This book looks beyond the Aylesbury's public face by examining its rise and fall from the perspective of those who knew it, based largely on the oral testimony and memoir of residents and former residents, youth and community workers, borough Councillors, officials, police officers and architects. What emerges is not a simple story of definitive failures, but one of texture and complexity, struggle and accord, family and friends, and of rapidly changing circumstances. The study spans the years 1967 to 2010 – from the estate's ambitious inception until the first of its blocks were pulled down. It is a period rarely dealt with by historians of council housing, who have typically confined themselves to the years before or after the 1979 watershed. As such, it demonstrates how shifts in housing policy, and broader political, economic and social developments, came to bear on a working-class community – for good and, more especially, for ill.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. RomynLondon's Aylesbury EstatePalgrave Studies in Oral Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51477-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michael Romyn¹

(1)

Brighton, UK

End Abstract

On the afternoon of 7 September 1976, at the topping-out ceremony of the Aylesbury Estate—the largest of London’s system-built estates—Southwark’s then housing chief, Alderman Charles Sawyer, declared an end to developments of its kind in the borough. ‘We have learnt from our mistakes,’ he said.¹ The event saw glasses raised and smiles for the camera (see Fig. 1.1), but there was no disguising the cynical tenor. Covering the proceedings for the South East London Mercury, reporter Roy Cooper called the Aylesbury the ‘greatest housing disaster in the country’; he went on to describe the estate as a ‘nightmare,’ an ‘atrocity,’ and a ‘monstrous hell.’² This was nothing new. Nearly a decade in the making, the Aylesbury had been in the crosshairs almost from the start. ‘Massive and dehumanizing,’ stated The Times in 1970; ‘It’s almost as if creatures from another world had come down and built their own environment,’ added architectural theorist, Oscar Newman, four years later.³ Even amid the soft-pedalled festivities of the opening ceremony in October 1970, the naysayers found voice. Conservative councillor for Dulwich, Ian Andrews, reportedly ‘walked out … in disgust.’ The ‘showpiece estate’ was, he said, a ‘concrete jungle not fit for people to live in.’⁴ A reputation is usually earned; in the Aylesbury’s case it was born.

Fig. 1.1

Councillors, planners and building professionals at the topping-out ceremony of the Aylesbury Estate, 1976. Alderman Charles Sawyer stands third from the left. South East London and Kentish Mercury, 9 September 1976. (Courtesy of the South London Press.)

Alderman Sawyer stayed true to his word. Following the completion of the Aylesbury, and other concurrent, large-scale developments in Peckham and Elephant and Castle, the borough drew a line under the prefabricated construction of council housing. Southwark was not alone in this. By the mid-1960s, the trend to build high and fast was falling from favour; by the early 1970s the ‘systems building boom’ was theoretically dead.⁵ Marred by the partial collapse of Ronan Point, a 22-storey system-built block in east London, in 1968, and by accusations of environmental determinism, the belief that mass, flatted housing was inherently flawed became normative. Once viewed optimistically as a modern, expedient and transformative solution to the post-war housing problem, large municipal estates had come to symbolise the mistakes of the budding welfare state. As design flaws emerged, and as maintenance programmes were hobbled by a lack of financial planning, and by central government parsimoniousness, the critics’ catcalls only grew more raucous.⁶

The Aylesbury and estates like it would be labelled forevermore with crude slogans and hoary adjectives: inhuman, monolithic, totalitarian, labyrinthine. These were the new slums, the ‘Slums of the Seventies,’ the ‘concrete jungles,’ the ‘High Rise Horrors.’⁷ It was a language that organised a distorting impression, generated hellish meaning, and, for those looking in from the outside, rendered the council block mythic. Conspicuously missing from these narratives were the voices and opinions of residents themselves. Like the faceless figures of the architects’ maquette, council tenants were drawn one and the same; an undifferentiated mass—mute, hapless, or stamped with cheap social stereotypes, such as Thomas L. Blair’s ‘welfstate’ man.⁸ As Patrick Wright pointed out, the bevy of architectural pundits and post-war conservationists appeared ‘remarkably unconcerned about the people for whom mass housing was designed.’⁹ Much of this writing was bound up in a kind of sophistic nostalgia for the shoddy tenements and crumbling terraces that the residents’ new homes replaced. Simon Jenkins, for one, lamented the loss of ‘acre upon acre’ of clearance housing, and, singling out Aylesbury’s ‘towering cliffs and harsh concrete passages,’ looked forward to a time when the towers and slab blocks were consigned to the rubble heap of history: ‘One day we will have the courage and the resources to pull them down and start again.’¹⁰ And this in 1975, when Aylesbury’s builders were still raising them up.

Jenkins would eventually see his wish. Serving as visual grist for the ideological abandonment of municipal housing in Britain after 1979, large-scale, down-at-heel estates were increasingly razed, many under private sector-led renewal schemes, and especially in millennial London.¹¹ Paralleled by a growing portrayal and perception of council housing as an unwholesome tenure of last resort, the act and spectacle of demolition often contained a ‘festive’ dimension, in the words of Ruth Glass.¹² It was as though the piece-by-piece dismantling of the welfare state was cause for celebration, both publicly and politically. Under the guise of regeneration, the Aylesbury is itself creeping along a timeline of its own demise. By 2020, several of its blocks had been torn down; the final phase of demolition is scheduled to begin in 2023.

This book attempts to make sense of the Aylesbury’s fleeting trajectory, which, at first glance, appears wholly dismal. From the contested exigency of its existence, to its inauspicious beginnings, to the marginalisation and steady spiral towards dereliction that outwardly characterised its lifespan, the estate has been pointed up as an example of failed planning, and as an emblem of urban decay. It is the sort of narrative that elides the complexities and diversities of life in a local place, and thrusts working-class districts into conceptual exile. Tony Parker’s brilliant The People of Providence—a collection of oral history interviews with the residents of south London’s Brandon Estate, compiled in the 1980s—demonstrated the fatuousness of general depictions and definitions by showing the reader just how varied, complex and, ultimately, human, estate-life can be.¹³ It reinforced the importance of viewing estates like the Aylesbury as sites of diversity, where people lead different lives, have different stories to tell, experience different degrees of success, happiness and hardship, and have different ways of coping. Council estates are just homes after all. For most residents, they are not media props or architectural crimes or political rationales, but places of family, tradition, ritual and refuge, possessing a social value that—now more than ever—dwarfs the price of the land they are sited on. While necessary to understand the many ways in which the Aylesbury has been presented and perceived by external actors (for these are its histories, too—histories that interacted with one another, and had influence over the estate’s direction), ultimately it is up to those who really knew the estate to have the final say.

Community life on the Aylesbury is the main arena of this study. Whether forged through a commonality of interests, or rooted in shared hardships and interdependences, community on the estate has taken on various forms and iterations since the first flats were occupied in 1969. Even when the population could be broadly characterised by homogeneity and accord, the estate’s size, sprawl and structure fitted it out with a fragmentary dimension; an inbuilt tendency toward separation and difference. Conversely, at its lowest ebb, when the deprivation indicators flashed red, and when certain cultural trenches had been dug, the substance of community life was still present. In order to make sense of this often knotty communal morphology, the estate must be viewed within a context of change. As Jerry White noted, understanding change over time ‘helps illuminate the dynamics—and thus the very nature—of communities.’¹⁴ Behind each shift, each realignment, each twist of Aylesbury’s social kaleidoscope, there were forces at work, internal pressures and paroxysms, as well as outside decisions and transformative trends. This book seeks to identify these forces, delineate them, and chart their impact upon the estate and its residents. Within the community, change could be sited numerously. In participation, for instance, or in the face of social disorder. Or in more inaudible processes, such as the gradual leaking away of original tenants. In certain cases, these sites of change—whether rooted in cooperation or conflict—were symbiotic, with each informing, driving or expediting the other. The same can also be said of those direct and metamorphic forces that buffeted the estate from the outside, such as management practices, housing policies, and successive waves of regeneration. Indeed, the not insignificant fallout of externally made decisions and representations was received with more than just sufferance. As we shall see, inequity could provide a cynosure for tenant discourse; a polestar that engendered communicative processes, social participation and, at the very least, varying degrees of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘The End of Slums’ and the Rise of a ‘Housing Disaster,’ 1945–1970
• 3. Community, in All Its Complexity, 1970–1979
• 4. Plotting a Map to Marginality, 1979–1997
• 5. New Deal? Aylesbury Regenerated, 1997–2010
• 6. Conclusions
• Back Matter