Slums in the sky?
Peter J. M. Wayne ESTATES: AN INTIMATE HISTORY by Lynsey Hanley Granta, £12, pp. 244, ISBN 1862079099 VLO (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Just after dawn on 16 May 1968, on the 18th floor of a block of pre-cast, system-built flats in Cleaver Road, Canning Town, Mrs Ivy Hodge, a 56-year-old cake decorator rose from her bed as usual. In the kitchen, she struck a match to light the stove for her early morning cup of tea. Then the trapped gas explosion caused by the flame instantaneously blew out the whole of the top, south-east-facing corner of the building, killing four and injuring another 17, and setting in motion a public inquiry whose scathingly critical report concluded that the 200-foot, 22-storey, forever thereafter infamous Ronan Point had literally been bolted together with nothing more than a builder's box full of rust-encrusted pins.
Nobody, it seems, was happier to record the universally hated monolith's post-demolition fate — it now forms the layer of hardcore beneath the runways of Luton airport — than campaigning journalist, ex-council house dweller, author of this, at times, vituperative polemic, Lynsey Hanley, who uses her sharp pen to launch one of the most excoriating attacks I've read in six months of Sundays, not only on the fat, cost-cutting contractors of that particular debacle, but (somewhat nugatorily given her lack of architectural credentials) on the whole modernist (Mieso-Corbusian) manifesto itself and — for all the wrong reasons — the brutal concretisation of our green and pleasant land.
I cannot take seriously any commentator on our built environment who relies on the negative dilettantism of the Prince of Wales to prop up their arguments. As if the heir apparent's now rather predictable comments on a public library in Birmingham — 'a place for burning books rather than reading them' — were not destructive enough in their own right, Hanley weighs in with her own wholly redundant descriptions of this much needed communal facility — 'a big brown sandwich loaf of sand-blasted concrete' — wagging her finger proselytisingly: 'concrete used like this is an enemy of the people's will.' And so she turns her vitriol on arch villain (in her world) architect Erno Goldfinger, who is singled out for a dressing down because he had the temerity (along with his wife `the Cross and Blackwell heiress', Hanley adds pointedly) to move into a flat in one of his own 'monstrosities', Balfron Tower. To demonstrate how happy he was 'to live where he would have others live', Goldfinger would condescendingly throw champagne parties for hoi polloi on the lower floors.
So far as Hanley is concerned, the social malaise we have come to associate with council estates is exclusively connected to high-rise towers and those who design them. But apartments in Goldfinger's now privatised Trellick Tower are selling for up to £300,000 a unit. The upwardly mobile seem content to inhabit Hanley's 'slums in the sky' for all their faults. Would this not suggest it's the people not the buildings they're housed in that are malfunctioning?
Park Hill in Sheffield, 'a giant wall of shoeboxes' that induce 'horizontal vertigo', comes in for a spanking after English Heritage conferred listed status on it before the council turned over the problemsome package to Urban Splash.
Between the lines Hanley denigrates this imaginative redevelopment company as some sort of capitalist nber-sinner associated with trendy (and expensive) loft conversions for private buyers. In fact if she'd troubled to do her homework properly she would have discovered Urban Splash to be one of the most enlightened outfits in the country, taking, as it does, unloved, unwanted concrete structures like the 'Three Towers' in Manchester or the 'Rotunda' in Birmingham and turning them into some of the edgiest, brightest, most sought-after living spaces in our cool Britannia kingdom.
Alas, that's not what council estates are supposed to be about, as Hanley will keep reminding us. It's her New Statesmanlike chip-on-the-shoulder that irritates the most in a book that can be (when she's not bemoaning her disadvantageous beginnings on the Chelmsley Wood Estate in 'North Solihull') both illuminating and beautifully written.
Apart from a fairly understandable (and possibly widespread) misconception about the gypsy etymology of the word `chav', Hanley brings us her not inconsiderable talent to turn a phrase throughout the narrative. Briefly, hers is a tale about 'thousands and thousands of mimsy no-marks' bedecked in `drecky gold jewellery', many of them 'jobless boys parping about on put-put-putty little motorbikes' who live in Tattenberg cake layers of one-bedroom flats' which make 'cookie-cutter stamps' on the 'moony landscape'. These angry young men slob about on their estates stuffing down 'pot noodles — synonymous with seaminess' to ease their 'inner-city cage rage'.
Point made? Of the multitudinous schemes featured — by the end of the 1970s there were 4,500 council-owned tower blocks in the UK — it is the Thamesmead Estate right next to Belmarsh prison in south-east London for which Hanley reserves her most caustic invective. So sink-like had these hectares of reclaimed marshland become that Stanley Kubrick took one look at `the anonymous empty expanse of concrete' and judged it 'sufficiently dystopic' to be the real-life location for his film A Clockwork Orange. That's as maybe. Just after it was built I found myself in need of an eyrie after a prison escape. For six weeks I lay low in a rather elegant town house in Thamesmead, behind which ran (even more surprisingly) an ecologically sound, regenerative `greywater' canal. Every day I watched, bewitched, as a family of swans cruised royally up and down that stretch of man-made heaven. Yet in Lynsey Hanley's wide and macrocosmic sweep (for she is, quintessentially, a political animal) such intimate details — despite her subtitle — pass quite unnoticed.
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