The conservation of post-war housing

With so much interest in how to build much-needed new homes, there has never been a better moment to celebrate past achievements in the conservation of post-war housing.

Alexandra Road, the first major post-war public housing estate to be listed. (Photo: Steve Cadman).

It was as early as 1993 that the first major postwar public housing estate in England was listed: the Alexandra Road Estate in Camden, north London. Residents (some of them right-to-buy owners, fearing large bills) were concerned by the impact of proposed repairs on their individual homes and on the wider environment of houses, flats, maisonettes, community buildings and a much-cherished park.

Although design had started in 1968, the estate was not finished until 1978, only 15 years previously. In listing terms (that is, measuring from the date of the first work on site), the estate had just made it to 21 years of age. It had hardly reached maturity in many people’s eyes, nor ‘stood the test of time’, as later debates around recent listings would phrase it. In retrospect, listing was an extraordinary decision but one which the outstanding quality of the estate fully justified.

At that point, list descriptions were still pretty basic, a far cry from the extremely detailed ones issued now. Modern list descriptions capture huge amounts of research and make explicit ‘reasons for designation’, perhaps most useful for post-war buildings, where significance can be less obvious than for older heritage buildings. I was aware of the Alexandra Road listing from the point of designation, although I do not remember any press coverage, as I was working in the English Heritage London region, a junior member of the team assessing listed building consent applications.

Many of my colleagues seemed mystified, slightly incredulous and, in some instances, either outrightly disparaging or amused at the decision. Was this really ‘proper’ heritage? Feeling somewhat under-stretched by an inbox that seemed to consist mainly of evaluating applications for dormer windows or back extensions to Georgian terraced houses, I volunteered to take Alexandra Road on as my case. It ended up swallowing up huge amounts of my time; there were, after all, over 500 homes, as well as the community buildings and the especially challenging park.

I was concurrently studying at the Architectural Association (on the now defunct day-a-week building conservation diploma, fully funded by English Heritage in those more affluent times) and I proposed drawing on my experiences for my thesis.

‘Alexandra Road? Is that a tower block,’ queried a highly disdainful Jane Fawcett, former secretary of the Victorian Society, stalwart campaigner alongside Nikolaus Pevsner for St Pancras Station, ex-Bletchley Park decoder and ex-opera singer (I wish I had appreciated more of her backstory at the time).

‘Well, it’s a sort of horizontal tower block,’ I suggested, somewhat taken aback.

With some reluctance and scepticism, my topic was approved, giving me some space to think more widely about the issues raised by the listing, including the desirability and practicality of attempting to control alterations to interiors, concrete repair techniques and the designation of a wider conservation area to protect adjacent buildings not covered by the listing. I visited the estate with original design team members Neave Brown (architect), Janet Jack (landscape architect) and Max Fordham (mechanical and electrical).

I spoke about Alexandra Road at conferences in London, Philadelphia and Bratislava, organised by English Heritage, the US National Parks Service and Docomomo International respectively. There was a huge amount of interest in what was being achieved and a consensus that England was leading the way in both designation of post-war heritage and in developing strategies for its conservation management (albeit, for the latter, by drawing on conservation management planning work originating in Australia).

Over the next few years further public housing listings in England followed steadily: Denys Lasdun’s Keeling House in East London later in 1993, Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron in 1996, Trellick Tower and Park Hill in Sheffield, and Wyndham Court in Southampton in 1998, and gradually more of the London Borough of Camden estates, closely related to Alexandra Road.

More recently, momentum has been lost, and many more recent listing submissions made by the C20 Society and local residents’ groups have been turned down. I most regret the resulting lack of protection for the very high-quality series of estates designed for the London Borough of Lambeth under the leadership of Ted Hollamby, an achievement which ranks alongside the Camden estates programme. Foremost among these are Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens.

These estates have been threatened not just by lack of maintenance and poorly thought-through repairs but also by pressures on local authorities to increase housing provision. Densifying existing estates, building on land already in local authority ownership, was seen as a low-cost alternative to acquiring new sites, and a strategy less likely to be thwarted by nimby objectors. In Lambeth in particular, passionate and highly motivated local residents put up far more resistance than councillors and staff probably anticipated. However, they lacked the extra ammunition which listing would have given them to defend the high quality not just of their existing homes but of the inspired and extremely humane estate layouts which had successfully delivered a strong sense of community.

In Scotland, in contrast, Leith’s iconic Cables Wynd House (popularly known as the ‘Banana Flats’ because of its long, bent, slab-block form) was listed at Category A in 2017. They ‘have entered into popular culture thanks to fictional character Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, residing in the “Bananay [sic] Flats” in local author Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting’, noted Historic Environment Scotland, also emphasising their ‘international excellence in modernist urban design’.[1] HES has also robustly defended the listing of post-war blocks by Aberdeen City architects department and has just completed public consultation on the listing of a medium-rise mass housing scheme at Woodside, Glasgow, designed and built between 1970 and 1974 by Glasgow architectural practice Boswell, Mitchell and Johnston.

While there has been an enormous positive evolution in the approach to the conservation of post-war housing exemplified by the differences between Phases 1 and 2 of Park Hill flats in Sheffield (the first stripping back to just the concrete frame and replacing everything else, the latter very much conservation-led), Historic England now needs a catch-up on listing. Hopefully the success of Park Hill, shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize, will allay fears that listing post-war housing is trying to preserve the unpreservable. Moreover, with so much current interest in how to build much-needed new housing, there has never been a better moment to celebrate past achievements and learn from excellent examples.

[1] www.historicenvironment.scot/about-us/news/iconic-leith-flatsrecognised-at-highestlisting-category/

This article originally appeared as ‘Catching up on listing’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in December 2024. It was written by Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation