The case against towerblock living

Last week a group Create Streets createstreets.com published a report outlining the case against towers as a solution for residential housing.

It primarily focusses on the council built tower blocks but the lessons learned apply regardless of whether or not the towers are built by the council or by a private developer.

Until relatively recently tower blocks were overwhelmingly built by councils for their tenants. There were not many built for private owners. Dismissing the evidence as applicable to council blocks only is not relevant because the reason we don’t have a load of failed private tower blocks is that we don’t have many private residential towers of any great age. The key is to act before we have the issue not afterwards.

The report actually highlights the new Kidbrooke estate being built by Berkeley Homes as an example of shared public/private building which fails.

Many of the plans being put forward at present are again for multi-storey living.
They are so different from the town around them that many can be legitimately
described as self-contained, physically distinct developments. Just as in the 1960s
and 1970s there is little chance of many of them relating to or ‘plugging into’
the rest of the city. We are in very severe danger of repeating the failures of those
decades and forcing on some of our citizens an urban framework that the rest of
us consistently reject – the multi-storey estate. Just because the architects’ pictures
look nice and because we are using less exterior concrete does not mean we are
giving people what they really want or need.
One example (among many) is the re-development of the Ferrier estate in
Greenwich. Built in the late 1960s and 1970s of concrete panels the Ferrier estate
was enormous, with eleven 12-storey towers and many other large medium-rise
buildings. By 2003, after no more than thirty years of unpopularity and crime,
the decision was made to demolish and start again.

The first parts of the new Kidbrooke Village development which is replacing
the Ferrier estate are now occupied. More are being built. Kidbrooke Village has
no concrete panels, a better name and is being well advertised. But little else has
changed. In the last analysis, we have replaced one enormous development of
tower and slab-blocks with few real streets with another enormous development
of tower and slab blocks with few real streets. It still does not look like or function
as the rest of London that most people want to live in.

St George’s tower also gets a mention:

…surveys run in the media to find the ‘worst building
in Britain’ or similar consistently feature modernist tower-blocks and slab-blocks.
None feature standard terraced or semi-detached houses. One 2001 BBC list
of ‘Britain’s worst buildings’ was entirely composed of modern tower blocks,
office blocks and large developments (such as the grade II listed but locally hated
Sheffield Park Hill Estate).
However ‘Britain’s worst buildings’ were not just composed of the stained and
fading concrete of the 1960s. The BBC’s own 1980s White City building and the
recent development of the St George’s Wharf in Vauxhall, London, also featured
on the list. A 2005 Channel 4 survey came up with similar results.64 Research
done by the mortgage provider, Cheltenham & Gloucester, in 2004 leads to the
same conclusions. Modern monumental architecture (domestic or non-domestic)
is no more popular than the buildings of forty years ago.

In case your recognised the name – yes this is the same development where the helicopter hit the tower.

The report also highlights Thamesmeade:

In 1971 Stanley
Kubrick used tower blocks and the recently completed Thamesmead development
to symbolise the vicious dystopia of The Clockwork Orange.

The report goes on to discuss communities where rioting occurs:

The degree to which the correlation between post-war estates and crime has not
been removed by better crime prevention measures is clearly shown by the 2011 UK
riots which were exacerbated by our multi-storey estates. According to research by
Space Syntax Limited, a spin-off company of the University College of London, postwar
estates and the 2011 UK riots were meaningfully correlated. They found that:
‘84 per cent of verified incidents in north London and 96 per cent in south London
took place within a five minute walk [400m] of both an established town centre
and, secondly, a large post-war housing estate. Local centres without large postwar
estates nearby were unaffected… Local centres that were unaffected, such
as Stoke Newington, are as well connected as many of the areas where incidents
were recorded… However in these areas there are no large post-war housing
estates in close proximity. This is the case in 75 per cent of the unaffected local
centres within the north and south London study areas…
Most post-war housing estates have been designed in such a way that they
create over-complex, and as a result, under-used spaces. These spaces are
populated by large groups of unsupervised children and teenagers, were peer
socialisation can occur between them without the influence of adults. This pattern
of activity, and the segregation of user groups, is not found in non-estate street
networks. Our analysis of court records shows that the almost three quarters of
convicted rioters in the study areas live on large post-war housing estates.’

These examples from the report were selected because they are close to where we live. I encourage you to read the report – it makes for sobering reading.

But what about Canary Wharf ??

The example of Canary Wharf is often used to support the success of residential private towers. Canary Wharf is though a very unique environment. The majority of residents are from the very well off segments of society and often their flats are week day pied à terres with the main residence being somewhere else. Canary Wharf has a very well funded and active security force which most communities cannot afford. Trouble if it starts is nipped in the bud very fast.

The Royal Arsenal is a community oriented development today that most of us love to live in. This social harmony should not be taken for granted. We run a very grave risk of having our development spoiled and the community we have built severely degraded by mega dense development we don’t want.