The revival of urban council housing

Peter Barber’s work shows that it is possible to deliver publicly funded housing of real quality at an affordable cost by reviving forgotten building types and urban customs.

The density at McGrath Road is remarkably high for a building that does not exceed four storeys and provides so generous an amount of open space.

1 Introduction
2 Donnybrook Quarter
3 McGrath Road and North Street
4 Burbridge Close
5 Kiln Place
6 Edgewood Mews
7 Reviving the tradition of council housing
8 Related articles on Designing Buildings Conservation.

Introduction

The Victorian street lined with terraced houses, each with its own front entrance and private open space at the rear, is a powerful symbol of urban domesticity. Social bonding and community engagement have thrived in these densely populated developments and, despite large-scale clearance and replacement in the post-war period, many such dwellings have survived. In part this was due to enlightened local authorities that bought up and improved the privately rented houses, giving their residents secure tenancies and thus conserving the identity of settlements across Britain. The economic and social benefits of municipal housing, however, were undermined by the policies of the Thatcher government, which introduced the right for occupants to buy council houses at subsidised prices and curtailed local governments’ power to build new dwellings. Housebuilding was thus placed in the hands of the private sector and housing associations, which favoured the suburban model.

In 1999, following the election of the Labour government, the architect Richard Rogers was invited to set up an urban task force to establish a vision for towns and cities, based on the principles of design excellence, social wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Towards an Urban Renaissance, the task force’s report, foresaw an urban environment of mixed communities, car-free and densely developed. A former member of Rogers’ office was Peter Barber, who had set up his own practice in 1989 specialising in social housing, and whose work most convincingly brings to life the intentions of the Rogers report.[1]

Several Peter Barber Architects’ (PBA) schemes have now been built across London, the typical site being leftover backland, redundant car parks or former garages, sites that most contemporary house builders would reject. But instead of the usual slab blocks of apartments with single-aspect flats served by central corridors favoured by commercial developers, PBA’s approach draws on the urban grain and vernacular forms of previous centuries that give character to historic places. These include back-to-back units, once commonplace in northern England and the midlands before they were condemned as insanitary, walk-up tenements as found in Glasgow, shared courtyards, narrow streets, balconies and open terraces.

Donnybrook Quarter

One of Barber’s earliest projects was the Donnybrook Quarter in Bow, completed in 2006 for Circle 33 Housing Association. It consists of 42 homes arranged in a series of tightly packed two- and three-storey terraces. Each home has its own front door opening on to a pedestrian-only street and a small square, and either an outdoor private yard or roof terrace, a significant achievement in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, where 70 per cent of social housing has no outside space. Oriel windows and balconies give character to the smooth white rendered facades.

McGrath Road and North Street

Concerned that white render might not be adequately maintained in the future, PBA’s later schemes have all been faced in brick. A prime example is McGrath Road, Stratford, built for the London Borough of Newham. This is a perimeter block around a courtyard, reminiscent of the much larger Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna of 1927–30. It contains 26 units, 19 with two bedrooms and the others with three bedrooms. Those on the entrance front and south side are back-to-back units, treated as tower houses, with a single room on each floor and at third-floor level a living room with a roof terrace. Each also has a balcony that stretches the full width of the facade. The density – 620 habitable rooms per hectare – is remarkably high for a building that does not exceed four storeys and provides such a generous amount of open space. McGrath Road, with its unorthodox layout, has proved successful with young people from the vicinity seeking starter homes, and can be bought through a shared-equity scheme, with payments split between conventional mortgages and a council loan.

Back-to-back dwellings are also used at North Street, Barking, where 14 council houses form a fortress-like island in an otherwise chaotic urban setting. Each house is entered through a private open space shielded by brick boundary walls.

Burbridge Close

PBA’s project at Burbridge Close, Becontree, is designed for older people, particularly those seeking to downsize and thus freeing up larger council houses for families. The client, Barking and Dagenham Council’s regeneration company BeFirst London, approached Barber to advise on developing a redundant backland garage site on the vast Becontree Estate. His solution was to build four units on each side of a shared pathway. Six of the houses are single-storey cottages, while the end pair at the junction with Fitzstephen Road are two-storey. There are no rear gardens, but each has a sitting-out area by the front door that encourages neighbourliness. The idea for the layout was derived from Choumert Square in Peckham, a Victorian alleyway with cottages to each side and no back gardens. But with its wavy roofline and arched brick lintels, Burbridge Close has its own lively character reminiscent of historic village alms houses.

Kiln Place

Barking and Dagenham Council is not alone in identifying garage areas and leftover spaces with potential for new social housing and environmental improvement. A similar exercise carried out by the London Borough of Camden resulted in PBA making interventions at Kiln Place, a 1960s housing estate consisting of five-storey slab blocks built around green areas. In 1999– 2000, Kiln Place underwent alterations involving single-storey extensions that were intended to improve access to the blocks, with foyers as social spaces. However, the foyers were unpopular with the residents and were later blocked off. PBA’s scheme replaced the single-storey additions with three- and four-storey social housing, and new, safer entrances.[2] In addition, eight private-sale dwellings were built to fund the cost of the seven rented units and other improvements made to the estate. The eight dwellings were built on either side of part of the road that passes around the edge of the estate, six on one side and two on the other. At two and three storeys, these soften the scale of development on the estate and look out on to what is now a pedestrian street. The six three-storey units occupy a thin strip of land that was used for car parking and a sloping bank previously considered unsuitable for development. Here, an unorthodox arrangement of domestic spaces includes placing the bedrooms on the ground and second floors with living spaces at first-floor level. By cutting back the frontage to create an elevated terrace overlooking the street, this enables a connection to a garden at the back of the row.

Edgewood Mews

As with most of Barber’s housing projects, every one of the new dwellings at Kiln Place has its own front door. This is not only a way of achieving greater security, but also allows for higher density and a greater amount of communal open space, since 20–25 per cent of the footprint of shared-access apartments is normally taken up by corridors, lifts and other circulation spaces. Edgewood Mews, PBA’s largest scheme to date, demonstrates this concept most forcibly. Built for Kuropatwa in conjunction with the Home Group Housing Association, it consists of 97 homes, of which half are affordable. On the south side it fronts the hostile North Circular Road in Finchley, and consists of a long, narrow, curving plot that was left over from an abandoned road-widening scheme. Made available under the Mayor of London’s Small Sites Small Builders programme, it had been earmarked for 50 dwellings in the form of apartment blocks at the widest points on the site.[3] Instead, PBA devised a pedestrian mews flanked by dwellings. Facing the six-lane highway is a 200-metrelong, fortress-like facade with parabolic, double-height arched openings at street level, projecting bathroom blocks above and a saw-tooth roofline. At each end is a curious eye-catching tower.

The layout of the buildings is immensely complex. The site rises steeply from the road, allowing for underground parking beneath the mews. Designed to look like town houses, the units on the south side are flats for affordable rents and shared ownership maisonettes, mostly one room deep so that living spaces get ventilation from the mews. Those on the north side are a mix of flats and townhouses. As well as all having their own front doors, most have roof terraces and balconies open to the sun but protected from the noise of traffic. Children play in the mews with no danger from vehicles and the detailed layout ensures that there is a successful balance between privacy and social engagement. What is also remarkable is that the different tenures across the site are indistinguishable.

Reviving the tradition of council housing

In 2022, Peter Barber was awarded the Soane Medal. This recognises those who continue the mission of Sir John Soane to encourage a better understanding of the importance of architecture in people’s lives. A strong believer in social equality, Barber considers that the growing housing crisis can be reversed only by housebuilding for council rent, while halting the sale of council houses under the right to buy. At present he is building several projects for the London Borough of Greenwich, mostly knitted into abandoned parts of council-owned sites. While these are small schemes, what his work shows is that by reviving forgotten building types and urban customs, using traditional materials and construction techniques, and creating spaces that enrich people’s lives, it should be possible to deliver publicly funded housing of real quality at an affordable cost if the politics will permit it.

References:

[1] Architectural Review, July/August 2019.
[2] Architectural Review, March 2021.
[3] RIBA Journal, October 2023.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in September 2024. It was written by Peter de Figueiredo, the review editor of Context.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation