Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

Author: Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius Year: 1994 (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/glendinning-muthesius-1994-tower-block.md

Summary

Tower Block is the comprehensive historical account of post-1945 Modern public housing in the UK — above all the multi-storey flat, the type that "more than any other… has come to epitomise the postwar 'Modern Dwelling' in the big cities of the UK" (p. 2). Glendinning and Muthesius organise the book around two questions: why were tower blocks held to provide good dwellings (Section I: Design — plan, fittings, construction, and the search for 'community'), and why were they built in such massed quantity, peaking in the mid-1960s (Section II: Production)? Their answers break decisively from the polarised rhetoric of 'triumph' and 'failure': against historians (Dunleavy, Finnimore, Owens) who attributed the high-rise boom to central-government subsidies or contractor pressure, they show that the driving force was municipal pride — the idealistic daring of councillor 'housing crusaders' determined to house 'their people' as many and as fast as possible, most dramatically in Glasgow's 1962 multi-storey 'blitzkrieg' (Councillor David Gibson and engineer Lewis Cross). The book's final move (Section III and Conclusion) is a historian's plea against the polarisation itself: "the major 'culprit' must be the polarisation of Utopia itself" (p. 327).

Key Claims

Statistical base: Between 1945 and the end of 1969, over four million public dwellings were completed — 59% of total housing construction, "hardly matched even in Eastern Europe"; Scotland 85% public, Northern Ireland 64%, England and Wales 51%; Glasgow 71% (interwar 71% vs Northern Ireland towns 6%). Yet two-thirds (64%) of postwar British public housing 1945–79 comprised 'cottages' in vast suburban developments; high blocks only exceeded 20% of approvals in England, Wales and Scotland in 1963–7 (and briefly in Scotland in 1970) (pp. 1–2).
Two driving groups, one movement: 'designers' (above all the London County Council's post-1950 housing architects, backed by the Architectural Review and Architects' Journal) devised Modern flats for reasons of design — Modernity, aesthetics, mixed development; 'producers' (councillor 'housing crusaders' and organising officials) seized the same blocks for pure output. "Modern Council Housing was Modern Architecture" (p. 105) — for the first postwar decade, council housing was the elite of the profession's work.
The 'land trap' thesis: The multi-storey boom was not caused by government subsidy or contractor pressure but by municipalities' response to planning-imposed constraints (Green Belt, New Towns, planned overspill) that threatened their housing land, rate revenue and letting patronage. Cities "seized energetically on the building of multi-storey flats as a way out of the 'land trap'" (ch. 20); the multi-storey subsidies of 1956/57 were an effect, not a cause — Government trailed the cities.
Design versus production: The type was introduced for design reasons (the LCC's Roehampton point blocks, 1951) then appropriated as a production weapon — "one element of the LCC mixed development formula in a manner akin to Walker's use of block dwellings for 'site cramming'". The 1960s clash of 'quantity' and 'quality' ended in the resounding "Defeat of the Designers" (ch. 22): architects' 'open systems' and Development Groups lost to contractors' negotiated and 'package-deal' contracts, which "gave politically strong councils what they required: high blocks, built reliably, quickly and in large numbers" (p. 193).
Glasgow as shock city: Glasgow was "the new 'shock city' of the Modern housing revolution" (p. 220). In 1962 the Housing Committee let contracts for 3,783 flats in blocks of twenty-plus storeys — over half the UK cumulative total to that date. The engine was one outsider-convener, the ex-ILP 'rebel' David Gibson, and one engineer, 'Housing Progress Officer' Lewis Cross ("You are the designers!"), working the package-deal system: "Glasgow Corporation was the power in the land — no Minister sitting in Edinburgh could do much about Glasgow" (p. 179).
Scotland's divergence: Scotland's national tradition of monumental tenement housing, its 85% public share, and low-rent, high-output municipal patronage made it a field of "monumental housing architecture, unexceptional in European terms" branded an 'aberration' within the 'British' context (p. 5). The multi-storey drive "bolstered the flat in Scotland, and extended the Scots–European pattern of apartment blocks across urban England" (ch. 31); Scotland never repudiated high flats in the late 1960s, and Aberdeen built them "right until the very end" (ch. 32). The postwar flats "will remain monuments to a golden age of municipal endeavour" (p. 219).
Northern Ireland's difference: There the new housing drive was "masterminded by powerful civil servants" (Ronald Green's Ministry team) under the Westminster constraint of 'parity'; weak local authorities and the Exchequer-financed Northern Ireland Housing Trust replaced municipal crusaders; high flats were needed for political-religious reasons — enabling slum-clearance on contested inner-city sites (Part C).
Community as the second stimulus: 'Community' — the "big human factor" (Carter & Goldfinger, 1945) — was the postwar design's socio-architectural warrant: from the neighbourhood unit and Radburn layout through Townscape to the Smithsons' street decks and Lasdun's cluster blocks; its sociological collapse (Ruth Glass's Watling; Young & Willmott's revaluation of Bethnal Green; Jacobs 1961) undermined the belief that physical form can determine social life.
Architectural determinism's double career: Determinism was first named as a critique (1960s) and then "reapplied with full force after 1970 — but now as a weapon with which to attack Modern housing" in Newman's Defensible Space and its descendants (ch. 30).
The user as abstraction: The Modern dwelling "was conceived, and was understood at the time to have been conceived, for the… 'passive' user" (p. 5) — Functionalism "meant to envisage, to take care of, all possible functions." User 'participation', introduced against this, was itself first propagated by providers (designers and journalists), not tenants (p. 6).
The mixed development formula: The English compromise — '2, 4, 11' (two-storey cottages, four-storey maisonettes, multi-storey flats for small households) — was systematised by 1958 (Bellamy's Flats and Houses 1958; Cleeve Barr's Public Authority Housing) and abandoned by the late 1960s when the need-fit allocation failed in practice (ch. 5).
Density as value: "'Density', like the 'Daylight Factor' was first of all a scientific way of measuring, but 'High Density' was a value, a particular desire, favoured by reformers and designers in those decades" (p. 38); density was later 'architecturalised' (from open parks to enclosed urbanity) and finally doubted altogether.
Zeilenbau and the open space logic: Gropius's arithmetic (height buys daylight and greenery; "the sun should determine the orientation of houses, not the street") underpinned the scientific layout; blocks of flats were "the logical conclusion" of open-space planning — "The higher the block, the better" (ch. 13).
Construction as the era's science: From the Burt Committee's House Construction (1944) through frame-and-infill, the LCC box frame (Picton Street), and the 1960s large-panel 'systems' (Bison, Camus, Larsen-Nielsen, Skarne, Sectra, 12M Jespersen), the tower crane being "a precondition for all large building projects of the sixties" (ch. 10, 24).
The subsidy question reversed: Special multi-storey subsidies (1956 England; 1957 Scotland; 1962 Northern Ireland) were "proof not of the hegemony of Government over municipalities, but of the enduring political and administrative muscle-power of the big cities" (ch. 21). Government influence was "incapacity": in England organisational paralysis, in Scotland political weakness ("no Minister sitting in Edinburgh could do much about Glasgow," p. 179).
The collapse: Production was undone by its own success — a politically perceived 'housing glut' (late 1960s–70s), management problems and vandalism in the newest estates, the Ronan Point collapse (May 1968), Conservative municipal victories of 1967–8 branding clearance a 'Socialist' policy, and the yardstick used against high flats (ch. 31–32).
The image war: The 1967 Architectural Review campaign "The Failure of 'Housing'" deployed denunciatory photography and the polar images of English village and Georgian/Victorian street against the tower block; "it was precisely this lack of connection between fabric and image which, from the seventies, did not seem to matter any more" (ch. 30).
Management, not form, decides: The surviving cases (Aberdeen's continuous multi-storey programme, Edinburgh's Martello Court reborn as a 'cosy' flat, Balderstone's Leith testimony) suggest that outcomes turned on "skilful management and letting… high-quality finish, and a local culture of respect and care in the habitation of dwellings" (ch. 32).
Historiographical programme: The book refuses both the 'structural' explanations (Dunleavy, Finnimore) and the polarised verdicts (Coleman's Utopia on Trial, Ravetz, Scruton): the 'flats versus houses' debate "appears to us simply flawed" (p. 325), and the historian's task is to reconstruct the providers' values — "with expediency, passion, ambition, rancour, even irregularity" — rather than to judge 'failure'.

Connections

Concepts: welfare-state-housing · public-housing · housing-crusade · zeilenbau · mixed-development · neighbourhood-unit · street-deck · package-deal · towers-in-the-park · housing · modernism · brutalism · utopia · machine-for-living · architectural-determinism · user-participation · suburbanism · satellite-town Authors: Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius · Jane Jacobs · Le Corbusier · Reyner Banham · Manfredo Tafuri · John Summerson · Roger Keil · Per Gunnar Røe Debates: design-vs-production · flats-vs-houses · postmodernism-vs-modernism · dwelling-vs-housing · private-practice-vs-municipal-architecture Related source notes: Towers in the Park (Keil 2015) · The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) · The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) · Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) · Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017)

Direct Quotes

"Truly, democracy is still on trial." — J. Steel Maitland, on the foolproof-lifted towers of 1952 (p. 1, epigraph)

"…they, more than any other type, have come to epitomise the postwar 'Modern Dwelling' in the big cities of the UK." (p. 2)

"It will be interesting to see how such edifices will fare at the hands of the denizens of great industrial towns." — J. Steel Maitland (p. 1)

"The engineer Lewis Cross, Glasgow's powerful 'Housing Progress Officer', incessantly reminded the firms: 'You are the designers!'" (p. 3)

"the Modern dwelling was conceived, and was understood at the time to have been conceived, for the… 'passive' user." (p. 6)

"'High Density' was a value, a particular desire, favoured by reformers and designers in those decades — analogous to the way in which low density, as such, had seemed desirable for Unwin in the earlier decades of the century." (p. 38)

"'sculpture in space' — Hugh Casson, on a Swedish point block (1952)" (p. 54)

"the interior of a house is the property of the owner, the exterior is the property of the public." — L. H. Keay (p. 94, epigraph)

"The frigidity is mutual." — Ruth Glass, on architects and sociologists (p. 103)

"Modern Council Housing was Modern Architecture." (p. 105)

"what the public wants is not necessarily what it should have" (p. 110)

Lubetkin, asked what 'marching shoulder to shoulder with the working classes' meant for the architect, replied simply: "good architecture" (p. 111)

"The moment the man or child steps outside his dwelling, here our responsibility starts, for the individual has not the control over his extended environment that he has over his house." — Alison and Peter Smithson (p. 122)

"Community is by definition a comprehensible thing." — the Smithsons (p. 122)

"Multi-storey housing is likely to be the dominant form of urban dwelling in this century." — A. W. Cleeve Barr (p. 61, epigraph to ch. 8)

"A decent home is the cradle of the infant, the seminar of the young and the refuge of the aged!" — Councillor David Gibson, 1962 (p. 220)

"I can remember an endless stream of older women coming to the office around 1957-9, all with the same question: 'When's ma hoose comin down?'" (p. 220)

"If Manchester had been the 'shock city' of the Industrial Revolution, Glasgow was the new 'shock city' of the Modern housing revolution." (p. 220)

"the Modern flats built in such large numbers in the fifties and sixties will remain monuments to a golden age of municipal endeavour." (p. 219)

"No one would dare interfere with this great machine producing houses!" — R. E. Nicoll on Glasgow Corporation (p. 179)

"I felt an unscientific hatred of them and was looking for scientific material to use against them: it was their appearance, they were inhuman!" — Robert Grieve, SDD planner (p. 244)

"We always reap the whirlwind of the bright ideas of a generation ago … [T]he present harvest of tower blocks comes at the moment when progressive architectural opinion has moved decisively on again." — Nicholas Taylor, 1967 (p. 307)

"It gave her a great deal of happiness — a lovely flat with its own toilet, bathroom, it all looked fine on paper. A year later, she came to me and begged me to get her rehoused — vandalism had broken the lifts, muggings had started, she was virtually a prisoner in her own flat!" — Lord Mellish, on the Heygate Estate's opening-day tenant (p. 319)

"It was like a kind of cancer. At first you still tried to keep your standards up, but you soon learnt it was a waste of time." — Andrew Balderstone, tenant of Edinburgh's Couper Street point block, on the block's slide into 'New Slum' (p. 323)

"Council housing is definitely worse designed than private." / "No more flats should be built." — Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial, quoted (p. 326)

"[From] the desolation that is felt at the realisation of the maddest of all Utopian schemes, the open-planned housing complex, where streets are replaced by empty spaces from which towers arise…" — Roger Scruton (p. 324, epigraph)

"The 'flats versus houses' debate appears to us simply flawed — not just because it obscures deep national-cultural divisions beneath a blandly Anglocentric 'British' formulation…" (p. 325)

"If it is proper to speak of any kind of 'failure' or 'blame' in respect of Modern housing, then in our view the major 'culprit' must be the polarisation of Utopia itself." (p. 327)

Open Questions

Pagination provenance: The raw file carries PDF page-image markers (); printed page numbers were reconstructed at offset −11 (marker 12 = printed p. 1), verified against running heads. A minority of page numbers for quotes spanning breaks are approximate.
Can the book's anti-polarisation stance itself escape becoming one pole of a later debate (its own question: "Is not this very book a continuation of the endless cycle," p. 327)?
Does the design/production dichotomy survive contact with the wiki's production-oriented-practices register (Odom 2018) — is 'production' here the same concept, or a different sense of the word?
The book stops at completion (its concept of the user "largely… an abstraction," p. 5): what would a sequel account of use, management and appropriation add, and which wiki registers (user-participation, interior-as-biography) already carry it?
Scotland's "stay of execution" (no anti-high-flat reversal until after 1970) is presented as national-cultural: does it survive the Keil/Røe comparisons, or is Glasgow an extreme case within a wider European pattern?