I'm an architect. I remember reading about it in architectural books back in college (no internet then) and admiring it (in drawings that's it). Later I moved to London (early 2000s) and every time I passed by in the DLR I was thinking that must be the ugliest building I have seen in my life (and there are few competitors around). I only realized it was the building in the books like a year later. I finally went to visit inside the gardens, the place was just dreadful (and other things), I left in 5 mins. I would still save it though, but as a reminder to future architects to take people's life seriously and not just draw pretty diagrams for themselves. And as a perfect dystopian movie setting...
My friend had a flat here 18 years ago, I stayed there with her on occasion and essentially inside it was a nice flat and really quite large, the layout was strange, the kitchen/diner was the only room downstairs with the stairs running immediately beside the door. The stairs led to the centre of the upper floor with 2 bedrooms and a small bathroom to the left and the living room to the right. There was a small balcony running along the bedroom side but it couldn't be used as it was absolutely caked in pigeon poop despite the netting. The estate itself was an absolute dive, but that had more to do with the residents and their offspring than the area or buildings. Home is what you make it
One key factor is that how a place looks is the most important part of whether they take care of it or not. Pride is a significant motivator. It sounds like the layout is well designed for efficient living, which is nice, but when the building looks like shit, people will treat it like shit. Certainly the residents housed there are less likely to treat it well - it is still 'rented' and housing antisocial people. But you can't blame the residents, this was literally built to specifically house them. If the better layout alone helped it would make perfect sense to put problem tenants there. One key part is the "community" space is perhaps much more of a negative in an antisocial community and more likely to bring conflict. In streets, you have multiple options for which way you can go and can avoid streets you don't like. Instead this was developed on the soviet mentality that people are a product of their conditions alone and a utopia will spring up in the right setting.
@@carbon1255 interesting. I’ll preface this with acknowledging that I know nothing about architecture, town planning etc. What is the solution to the need for social housing coupled with the need to reduce urban sprawl? I don’t disagree about the inherent issue with high density housing but it seems like it is unavoidable in the long run. So is there any way of producing high density urban social housing where one doesn’t immediately fall into the trap you outlined?
This looks to me like the kind of estate where local councils, with government funding increasingly reduced, made the mistake of not doing any maintenance until it was absolutely necessary. This short-sighted approach meant that in many cases much more money was needed in the long run and building began to look very shabby quite quickly. As a resident it would be difficult to take pride in a building that no-one else is looking after, and inevitably those who could move away would. These factors create a downward spiral of decay where the only exit strategy for the council is to sell it off to a developer.
No in London its no accident, its a deliberate policy of social cleansing. Look at every estate of this era and they are either 'restored' into flats for the rich or demolished so that flats for the rich can be built.
@@jamesneedham6265 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - you're making a logical fallacy and seeing conspiracy. It's not a policy, it's simply what to do with tower blocks that you can't house the lower social strata in without it becoming a nightmare of social problems and lawlessness. After all, they do have to house them somewhere else, it's not like they bus them off to the gas chambers.
@@smorris12 No its far worse they bus them off to Stoke on Trent. But seriously read the work of anna minton, big capital especially. These redeveloped estates never build as many units of social housing as was there before and while that could be a sensible policy of creating a more mixed community, it isn't because the majority of residents kicked out of their homes do not find places in the same boroughs. Also its worth pointing out in many cases the residents kicked out are not council tenants but have bought their home as part of right to buy and are forced out by compulsory purchase with offers way below market value.
@@jamesneedham6265 Yes, and right to buy is offered far, far, below market value? Why should they be offered a house at a lose to the taxpayer, only to be reimbursed full price, at an even great loss to the taxpayer? What housing was there before WW2, and what was the social, ethnic, and cultural make-up of these areas? You said they can’t resettle in the same borough, and yet less than half a century ago the residents were replaced wholesale anyway. There is no tradition or ‘right’ for anyone to claim they’re from that borough when their family has only been rooted there for less than 3 generations.
@@jamesneedham6265 Give me Stoke over the smoke any day! By definition they can't build as many units as they need to reduce the housing density to reduce the problems of hi-rise. Local government housing (of which I have friends who work in the industry) does its best to create housing within a framework of land-owners, current government policy, the demands of the residents based on need (disability etc), NIMBYism etc etc. and tries to steer a path through it all that houses people. There's a lot more accountability and oversite to avoid corruption now than in days gone by so mostly it's trying to get things done. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity!
5:23 Various prominent architects: It's a horrible place to live there, but somebody has to because it's "hugely significant". Maybe it can be a place for "prominent architects" to live.
I like this idea, turn at least one of these monstrosities in each country into an architectural reservation, and if the architects do not live there, they are not allowed to design in that style. But architectural societies have enormous power.
I love the way the creators of these hell zones call them "Gardens". "Well, there's a scraggy piece of grass covered in dog sh*t and a tree that was alive a few years ago."
There's a semi serious rule of thumb about council housing that the more rural and idyllic sounding the name the bigger a crime ridden shithole it is. So beware some estate called Willow tree Meadows or Fluffydown Green.
Yes, many English places have ridiculous names. The cities are full of quarters called "hill" but there's absolutely no bump to stick out. Or this shithole being called a garden.
@@thedman1696 Because they are there 24/7 in the summer. You have to wait for the cold or wet weather to be able to use it or when it's too hot to be outside so then have to brave extreme weather that the chavs can't bear.
I feel concrete just isn't a good building material for Northern Europe with its high rainfall. It doesn't look half bad in arid Spain or the sunnier parts of Greece, but in the UK the rain stains it making it hideous
@@stevenflebbe The Barbican, while horrifically ugly, has benefited from money being spent on maintaining it. Without this money it would be just another graffiti-covered, piss-stained concrete hellhole, like so many of the brutalist-descended buildings around the country. The idea that any of them are worthy of preservation just boggles the mind. As Jago said, most of the pressure to list Robin Hood Gardens came from architects and, looking at some of the garbage that wins, for example, the Stirling Prize, we can see how little regard we should pay to their views.
Maybe if architects were forced by law to live in their creations for at least a year after completion, they might design them a little more sympathetically.
@@tiny_gabi_ Consider the high rises in NY next to Central Park, sometimes it is all about the location. But in the end: If there are people prepared to pay to live somewhere, it will be a decent place to live. If not, it will be a dump. Doesn't really matter if it is a highrise, a villa suburb or a cottage in the woods.
"Modern tower blocks encourage antisocial behavior" "Yes we are going to fix that!" "But how?" "Here is this new style called brutalism, hated by the public, ugly as hell and looks depressing"
@@dagwould It actually can. The more nooks and crannies you create, the more space there is for antisocial behavior. Also, if you move into this beautiful apartment that's clearly being taken care of, people have a higher chance of taking care of it too. But if it's already trashed and old, they don't bother. The environment DOES affect behavior, I hope you'll do some research on that (it's a big topic in Social Work actually)
@@dagwould Surroundings do affect people, very much. The more artificial everything becomes the more insane people become, that's why there is so much crime in cities than natural environments.
Tower blocks were an improvement for the first few years that people lived in them according to the residents themselves because I've read lots of accounts of it, but they deteriorated pretty quickly after that because concrete ages really badly.
I studied this estate quite extensively during my Masters thesis. I went into it thinking “what an injustice to knock down an iconic piece of architecture” and came out agreeing with Historic England - it failed as an estate and was only championed by architects who didn’t live there. The element which Jago doesn’t touch on so much is that it’s actually comparatively low density and next to high value Canary Wharf and the DLR route right into Bank, and this is why they were so keen to redevelop. Whether the new housing will be better than the old is debatable, it’s less interesting for sure. The usual gentrification debate goes on; the new residents will not be the same group of people who used to live in RHG. The site is too valuable for that...
I don't know whats worse, the fact that its been left to rot all this time, or the fact that the redevelopment looks just as depressing, just with reduced ambition
I'd give it another 70 year or so and we'll have a new generation of people calling out these new developments. The skewed windows annoy me to no end...
The problem it was trying to solve was ignored. They built it in Hell. It's sandwiched between 5 lanes of traffic to the East, 4 lanes of traffic to the West, 8 to the North and another 4 to the South.
I went round Robin Hood Gardens about 20 years ago. The flats are a good size and the landscaping was very attractive - but the location is atrocious. Still, I think the idea put forward in this film, of doing them up as student accommodation, would have been a good one. I don't think the new buildings there will be anything like as spacious or attractive.
Maybe it would have looked better if they had built it underground and just grassed over the top. The construction does look like it would make a good fallout bunker.
“Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don’t read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.” - Renzo Piano
comming from they guy responsible for the center pompidou in Paris, the building that looks like is permanently in construction. and the shard in London. I'm not shure, but it looks like he is guilty of the thing he is criticizing
The difference being, if a writer doesn't sell any books, he/she goes hungry, while the architect has already banked his fat cheque on construction completion
"Wikipedia says that the eastern block was demolished in 2019, but I have reason to believe they may be mistaken." You mean like its still being quite evidently there when you go past it?
@@John_Wood_ At the time the video was recorded, Wikipedia said that both had been demolished. Jago says the words I quoted. Hence that bit being in quotation marks.
Good news for Londoners. Robin Hood is also a named eastern entrance for Richmond Park. Nice leafy area and lovely gardens and lush greenery expand out with deer happily roaming as if out on a nature reservation. So Londoners can envisage that picture when hearing "Robin Hood" to banish the terrible nightmare , dystopian vision that the Smithson's gave of our future.
I find brutalism absolutely fascinating for its boldness and ambition and at the same time totally horrifying. The concepts often look great on paper but they almost always fail to produce a pleasant place to be.
Unfinished exterior concrete will always make a building look like a dump. Worse when it rains, even worse after a few years of rain - the black mold takes over. A highly depressing place to live. The paper and cardboard architects models never show weathering effects - should.
there's a building set in New York, Silver Towers, that looks very similar, the major difference is that Silver Towers is housing for professors and well off staff of New York University. the expectation that architecture will solve economic issues of un or under employment, poverty wages is misguided...
Many of the residents liked it, indeed the flats themselves where fantastic. With Robin Hood gardens the problems design wise are the decks where too narrow and the stairs claustrophobic. Also another big flaw, arguably the biggest, was the fact anyone could access the decks which was solved with the simple addition of a security door. Another problem was the parkland as parks are in reality, dangerous indeed any are of nature is at night if its not policed and maintained. One of the oftern ignored aspects of the research by Jane Jacobs is how anti parks she was a most violent crimes happen within urban parkland and so by siting a building in parkland you create a building that's dangerous to access at night.
@@jamesneedham6265 I lived in RHG for 3 years and agree about the flats themselves - when you finally reached you flat it was quite reasonable inside. The buildings themselves were, of course, hideous and did nothing to encourage any sort of community spirit. I don't think I ever went down to the park space between the blocks during the whole of the time I lived there. The entrances to the blocks were on the other sides of the buildings so there was no danger in accessing at night. When I was living there the estate was owned and maintained by the Greater London Council which was much more capable, and probably more willing, to maintain it than Tower Hamlets Council which took it over. That takeover must have signalled the end of a very poorly designed experiment.
Its nigh impossible to get to or from these blocks, I dont think the replacements will be much better. Its a place I find difficult to get an opinion on, some idea that maybe residents should have had a contribution to what they would like the place to look like, but it was designed really at a time when no-one had noticed that the entire east end (bar a few folk) were off to Stevenage and Basildon. Space but access back to the city.
Aesthetically, it could be dressed up with a pressure-washing of the concrete, and some really sharp, well-designed window frames. I mean large 2-storey maisonettes--with *private garages*--just blocks from Canary Wharf? AYFKM? Of course you don't want to move the poor and the unemployed in there.
@@HwoarangtheBoomerang Communist housing worked in Chile but ignorant Europeans just know about their own experience. What can be expected of rough and uncouth commoners such as yourself.
@@lena-sophiewagner2280 Exactly, I think a good part of the reason why it looks so depressing is because it's just so grey and dull. If it was painted in bright colours and maybe had some art or interesting sculptures on it then it would look a lot better (though still not great, there's only so much you can do to disguise the fact that it's a concrete block)
I had a girlfriend who lived there in the late 80s. From the outside it was ghastly but the flats were not bad. Kitchen and living room upstairs and bedroom downstairs. Having spent a lot of time there I would be on the side of demolition. Ugly spaces make for ugly outcomes socially, that been said the whole area was ugly in the late 80s and Robin Hood Gardens sort of fit in.
As someone living I cologne I’m not surprised. But visit Lisbon, Turin, nice, Granada, Amsterdam, Rome, Venice, Seville, Porto . The list goes on. Please don’t extrapolate to the rest of Europe how ugly German cities are
I lived on a council housing estate for the first 18 years of life. My parents were one of the first occupants of Kendal House, Priory Green in Islington, Formally Finsbury at the time. The house, and it's sister Redington House, were designed by the same man who designed the Penguin Enclosure at London Zoo, Bernhard Lubetkin, (apologies if I got the name spelt wrong). It was a wonderful estate, friendly welcoming in my opinion well designed. All the tenants came from the same areas and probably knew each other, they would greet each other when in the street and pass pleasantries. I went back a couple of years ago, (I'm now 68), and the place was a mess, wire security fencing and buzzer entry to flats, graffiti all over the place but more significantly, no children playing in the playground. A sad reflection on today's standards.
The council schemes in my town were mostly lovely when I was wee, and on the whole they still are but there's always a bit where there are problem families or just people who are really struggling and need a lot of help. Problem is for the second group the help isn't there at the level they need. The last one I lived in was pretty good - kids played outside, there was no vandalism, not much trouble, some people were living in houses that had been their parents. It also had a good mixture of housing styles and accommodation for single people/couples as well as families. All of the flats had their own doors as well so no scary, dark closes.
If it's anything like 'Kidbrooke village' they'll just rebuild the same same but different, with less open space between blocks, and label it luxury....
@@mugofbrown6234 I remember the early days of my childhood you could walk from one end to the other on the high level and wouldnt get wet in the rain. Then they started to block bits off as it was a hotbed of crime...
@@annother3350 Yes that was great. You could choose which staircases to go up or down and which level you wanted to traverse. Just a shame the council didn't put the money in to keep it maintained.
@@amandajane8227 I think, as usual, it became a sink estate. I knew people who knew the first wave of residents and they seemed nice and to look after each other and the estate. By the time I had to walk through it, it had deteriorated and was full of graffitti, stolen burned out cars and BNP supporters who would come into our school and beat up unsuspecting black boys on a regular basis...
I love how a good majority of the failures essentially boiled down to "london councils didnt want to pay for the upkeep and when it fell into disrepair, blame the residents for being antisocial" thats that classic classism at work right there.
A new project, or building, or railway are sexy and attractive. Dignitaries get their names on foundation stones. Architects and engineers get written up in puff pieces in industry journals and get industry rewards. And then it has to be maintained. Maintenance is unsexy and boring and maintenance budgets are the first to be trimmed or drawn out in times of budgetary restriction. I guess ease of maintenance should be a primary architectural requirement... but it is not easy to appreciate until much later.
Honestly, that applies to almost every council in the UK, not just London ones. I lived in a tower block in Birmingham - same problems. Hell, the same applies to most council's tenement buildings too.
All estates like this are meant to have a sinking fund, which is a percentage of the rent is invested for long term maintenance. I suspect they are raided for other purposes by the local authorities.
Low cost housing, especially the Government owned variety, is pretty much always run down regardless of country. At some point people will have to accept the obvious fact that poor people are more inclined to engage in anti social behaviour. Factor in the fact that the houses are Government owned and you have a perfect recipe for the decrepit monstrosities we see all over. Blaming the local Govt is sort of besides the point.
I once slagged this building off. Some one, actually called Delboy, in the car said that they grew up there, it was lovely inside and built for the comfort of the residents. I learned to be more humble that day, not to make a judgement based on personal ignorance. It was a good life lesson. Do not judge a book by its cover. I later did a Rolling Stones tour with Delboy. Fantastic guy.
That's silly. If it looks awful, slag it off. We all have to pass such eyesores.If someone gives a personal insight of living there, that makes your knowledge of it richer but it doesn't mean pipe down and keep quiet about what caused you to slag it off in the first place: exterior ugliness - that bloke didn't live on the outside of it, and probably he might have agreed with you, exterior wise.
@@flashtrash7830 That's right. I remember coming 'home' to my awful council block. Not a very welcome sight and didn't help make me feel comfortable or that I belonged. In other words the looks of the building I lived in alienated me. Sure, if you've all got loads of money, you could live in the Barbican, in spite of it being a concrete monstrosity.
There's a massive redevelopment of Paddington going on - almost finished now. And a small 1950s block of council flats was knocked down for a massive trendy block of new apartments. And I often wonder if the original inhabitants were offered a place in the nice new building ? - or shipped off to some other estate sone where .... and I bet I know the answer.
@blacknester i doubt it, when Ealing council knocked down my estate, all the disabled people had to leave the borough because they didn't build any disabled properties on the posh replacements, most of the residents were offered relocation to Wolverhampton which went down like a led balloon of course, all the stress put my father in hospital but the council eventually rehoused him in a crumbling 100 year old terrace elsewhere in the borough which has a tonne of problems they never fix. The south Acton estate was a collection of 2 to 4 bedroom homes spread across a verity of masonets, bungalows and tower blocks with lifts, everyone had a car parking space and there was garages available to rent. The new posh and private estate offered less then 20% of the social housing the original estate had, studio flats only, no parking, and poor doors to the stairs to get up to the social housing on the upper floors, needless to say they didn't get many takers, especially since most of the residents of the estate were families like mine whod been there 40 odd years and the aforementioned disabled people. It was all deliberate I only know one 1 person who took up the offer. Also Ealing council wanted to boot everyone out well ahead of time so they could rent their flats out on short leases to students and things for extra money, they (the council) litterally kicked the garden gate in on my parents masonet and refused to fix it, leading to my parents place getting burgled via the french windows that lead to the garden, something that had never happened before.
@@GreatSageSunWukong a shocking story, but still relevant today. Many local council politicians have directorships, and work together with construction companies. Many people should investigate their respective councils, and look up individual politicians and see what type of gratuities are being handed out. A box at a football match for £500. Splendid meals in Covent Garden for £75 quid. Obviously the current situation has curtailed all that for the moment, but in my view its still an 'unethical practice'. They are obviously NOT attending to our business that we pay them for. They would soon complain and grumble if we 'withheld our council tax'. With regards to your family, this action taken against them is 'Social Cleansing'. It's disgusting and bloody shameful to treat people in this way. Horrendous. I send you my kind regards, and hopefully something will be sorted out soon to help vulnerable people. PS: please view this website, WhatDoTheyKnow.com You can browse and view freedom of information requests to local authorities. There is a goldmine of information on the site, well worth a look. Cheers.👍
@blacknester they use compulsory purchase orders, you don't have a choice. Not that you'd want to buy a council flat anyway, they charge you for building repairs and upkeep of the estate, my aunt bought her council place in North London, she died oweing the local council over 20k for such works she had no say in.
This isn't fair, they ONLY had the inhabitants in mind- but they thought about people more like cattle & the issues with soviet thought in general, that these oppressive structures cure inequality.
As someone who has spent my 9-5 working in a brutalist building and found it extraordinarily depressing I cannot fathom how awful it must be to live in it as well
There's are a few comments about how this project would be much better appreciated and a better habitat if it was cleaned up or better maintained. Brings back memories of my dad who came home a broken man day after day for a period of about 12 months when he was working improving and maintaining similar areas of London. Each and every day he would get to work to have all his previous days work demolished, burnt down, or vandalised. He even received regular abuse and threats while working. My dad was tough but that level of disrespect and abuse was hard for him to handle.
The destruction was due to the attitude of not having any skin in the game by the residents. They do not have to pay fir upkeep so they don’t care if they destroy it. It’s the same way on this side of the pond. I delivered mail to a public housing development that was corporately owned. Those who were on full welfare status would cause ridiculous amounts of damage. They would get behind in their rent to the point of eviction or they would just skip out. One family skipped out on a Saturday night. It took a crew a month to fix all he damage they caused totaling $30,000. What did the residents care, they didn’t have to pay for it.
@@michaeljbrennan3728 Very questionable argument. I've seen horribly run-down privately-owned houses, and well-kept government-owned houses with tenants who've cared quite a bit for their homes (live in one myself). The points Jago brings up about unemployment, a feeling society doesn't care about you (often linked), and the fact that the government has to put those "problem persons" _somewhere_ seems like the major factors. Of course large blocks of (relatively) cheap housing will be the natural place for all those factors to intersect, so they get a bad rep. But if they didn't exist there wouldn't *not* be slums, it's just that the slums would be shanty towns instead. :-(
@@henrikgiese6316 talking about generalising, the privately owned estates where most of the flats are buy to let and many are rented out to council tenants who don't give a f. That sounds about right.
@@z00h Actually, the private houses I was thinking about are various single-family houses. Of course I don't know the owners, but from what I've heard illness, economic disaster, or just plain old age can cause maintenance to be ignored.
@@henrikgiese6316 The problem seems to be ''Problem families'', rather than the housing. A ''Problem family'' was put into a 'Middle class area'' by the council as an experiment...and it was a disaster. Police there 24/7 and neighbours intimidated. Some 'Problem families' think their notoriety is a kind of 'fame' of sorts...Very depressing.
When architects want to moralise rather than build beautiful, you get Robin Hood Gardens. Bright people with low empathy and high ambition who use the rest of us as a social experiment. A good job there are no parallels today, isn't it?
Fantastic turn of phrase.. "..Bright people with low empathy and high ambition ..." However, I'm now unable to read your post without hearing it in Jonathan Meades' voice.
Maybe they are like Richard and Ruth Rogers who bought two houses in a beautiful Regency Terrace opposite the Royal Hospital and.... well the pictures are on the internet. I can't bring myself to describe the houses now. I've always said "Every architect is a graffiti artist at heart."
@@Stafford674 Only a superstar architect could make a mess like that. I counted 20 something steps on a single flight of stairs, wouldn't even meet building regs...
French here, we had/have similar sink estates (TIL this phrase) in large cities across the country. And I've come to realize that the issue isn't the architecture itself, cramming poor people in one place *is* the problem. Tenants don't pay for maintenance (since they're tenants), owners (public or private) have zero short term incentive to pay for any maintenance, so those places collapse (litterally) as unemployment and crime rise, whether they're 20 story tower blocks or much smaller buildings, size and style are irrelevant. As for this particular project, I've seen a whole lot worse, but it's definitely not pretty either!
I dunno, one thing that the conservatives did was to split council house rents into rent and service charges (which immediately impacted things like housing benefit and pension credit but that is another story). With the idea that you could see the maintenance and its costs on an annual breakdown sent through
One thing you notice is that as you drive south these buildings don't look as bad . They seem to be peculiarly badly adapted to the English climate. Damp patches moss and lichen show up quite soon after they are put up. You also get two other things right in my view. You tend to concentrate your modern developments in one area instead of scattering them around among older developments and you add a bit of colour to them so they are not always grey.
@@tincoffin Can Concrete work in UK ? Yes, sort of , the Shell Centre (both sides of the Thames works fine, 55 Broadway and the Holden Stations on the Northern line (though they need a clean), The estate in Camden south of St Pancras, The Royal Festival Hall and National Theatre. Are present day buildings better - no - See Colindale Airport development , and Freshwater Wharf Barking where building for its own sake seems utter rubbish inside and out. Was there any brick older buildings that did not work - yes , North Row (?) Kensington - mostly due to the communal heating.
@@highpath4776 I can't say that I am a fan of the Shell Centre or the others. However to digress here is an amusing story. When it was built the Shell management thought it would be a good idea to abolish the tea lady. Henceforward the tea was to be brewed in a central location and then delivered to various points throughout the building . It was a complete disaster as the tea leaves tended to clog the system and it was rapidly discontinued and the tea lady reinstated. A friend worked there in the seventies .The building was not in a good state but the tea distributor was still very much in evidence but unused. I found this YT video on it : ua-cam.com/video/S-nrYDfY5oc/v-deo.html. I think the tea lady had been brought back when this was made.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this specific building in _several_ zombie apocalypse movies, which tells me it produces just the right level of existential dread and anomie to form a short-hand for cultural breakdown. It reminds of me Brasilia, a city designed and built from the ground up by urban planners to turn all of their models and theories into reality in order to produce a perfect city of the future. Today, Brasilia is the closest thing on Earth to a post-apocalyptic hellscape with a homicide rate higher than that of many countries offically at war.
@@JagoHazzard You know, a sort of overview of London-based filming locations for different films might make for an interesting video. A lot of them show up frequently.
Isn't Brasilia empty and cut of by forest, also it was used in the movie aeon flux, best thing in that film lol, I don't think it Is much like this place though.
It should've been listed - for immediate demolition. As a kid we used to say: "good riddance to bad rubbish". I say it now. It's awful, ugly, out of touch, condescendingly insulting, unlivable. Maybe someone should have suggested they live there themselves. Thank goodness it wasn't made a listed building.
Absolutely.These buildings have no real place in the real world of humanity. Both in living and beauty. At least vast mansions of the olden days had beauty to them and could still come to still be lived in by a few people if not the masses.
@@danielwhyatt3278 balfron is actually real cool and thamesmead had a super cool design that you couldn't find anywhere else whilst balfron is listed and remains standing to this day thamesmead was sadly demolished last year
it is ugly but frankly whatever you build - if you stick a bunch of c***ts in it and refuse to maintain it - it probably wont be the nicest place after a few decades.
Could it be that the reason the buildings look like something out of Dredd is that's precisely where the comics/films/games got their idea of what that scenario should look like?
I wanted it to work. To enjoy those ‘cranked’, ‘articulated’ streets in the air. So I went and had a look. Got inside, wandered along the windswept, weather-facing corridors, nipped up and down the narrow, concrete stairwells. Heard a bang, echoing, somewhere not far enough away. Never felt so claustrophobic, or scared, in my life. When I got back to land, I breathed again.
I come from this area and have known this building for ever. Even as a kid it looked scary to me, and in my 50s now it still looks scary. Went to a house party there in the 80s, grim to say the least
Having lived in Hong Kong, I can say that I don't believe High Rise or High Density housing to be a problem, in and of itself. The problem (I believe), is in putting large numbers of socially inept people, into close proximity with one another. Having said that, building low cost poorly implemented housing and then allowing it to fall into disrepair, will foster unbearable tension within any community.
@@ketchuplad157 It was not meant as pejorative term. People can be socially inept for a variety of reasons and is not necessarily the fault of the person who suffers from it. In a situation such as this one, those who might be thought of as socially inept, have lived their whole life, in a small more or less closed community, where everyone there, is more or less the same. Since these people are also generally speaking, not well travelled, they have rarely encountered people who are significantly different from themselves. Planners, then force together large numbers of people, all of whom, are from different social paradigms, into developments such as Robin Hood Gardens. The fallout from what follows, is almost inevitable.
You are just too polite, there will always be a small section of society that is out to make life miserable for the rest of us. A spot of ink will taint a glass of clear water.
I worked as.a trainee psychiatrist in Tower Hamlets in the 1970s. Specifically, I spent the best part of a year roaming the streets of Poplar and its adjacent conurbations, doing domiciliary visits. By then, most locals had been relocated east in the near-reaches of Essex(also to become urban wastelands). Those who qualified to remain in Poplar most notably included the least adaptable to the concrete jungle. These were the descendants of those who not so very long ago had enjoyed the squalid equivalent in village life, That is, generations of residents inherited new modalities of squalor. Your presentation was excellent because it gave a glimpse of the bungling back story of just one of the failed attempts at East London urban planning. Without having checked I would hazard a guess that no one Councillor, not one architect had ever spent more than an hour on the ground in their target locations, They never experienced the weariness of climbing the steps in endless tower blocks whose lifts had long been abandoned. Not once would they have enjoyed the stench of mostly urine as they might have cruised the stairs and stairwells. Remarkably, here and there in the midst of this disgrace, stood the occasional single house, or terrace of houses. These were in no better state of repair than their hugely ugly concrete confreres. And the people? Nobody ever gave them even a moment’s thought. That’s another story, and this is not the place tp tell it.
I am living in HK, the public estate built in 1970s and 80s have similar long airy corridors for residents to mingle and play mahjong. Which served their purpose and HK people enjoyed their time on the corridor especially during summer hot days.
Great video thank you. Well the house I was brought up in had no hot water no central heating open coal fires, walls running with condensation, damp. privately owned by slum land lords. These new builds were paradise offering security, compared with those slum,and bomb sites I was brought up in. My friend lived at the top of a tower block at Southwark Park. What a view, pure luxury. The development in Dulwich known as the battle ship was very nice, a success had a sense of community. I lived in a flat a round the corner in an old house I looked on in envy.
This is not an area I'm familiar with, so it was a real treat watching this thoughtful and very informative video. You're a treasure. Thanks again for what you do.
That is the sad thing, the layouts are interesting (albeit wider staircases) and it would be nice to have a pitched roof and pillars on the balconies and decoration- however decoration is heresy to brutalist architects- they believe the soviet ideal is correct and that decoration is a capitalist corruption that breeds inequality.
I lived there from 1985 to 2015. The estate was allowed to run down and all of us residents have mixed view on what has happened. I'm still in the area but now in one of the new build of Blackwall Reach. One thing I definately agree, the estate wasnt given a fair chance and yes the new estate is dull and bland compared to what we had, especially during late 80s and late 90s
I found this very interesting. I'm an architect at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), so it's fascinating to compare New York's public housing to that of a foreign city. NYCHA owns about 2,500 buildings housing 5% of the city's population, or a little over 400,000. And how many NYCHA buildings have we torn down since the first public housing development was built here in 1935? Just ONE. Even that was considered a wrong move by the tenants. NYCHA has many "superblock" developments - the key difference is that they are vertical in form, rather than horizontal, which seems to be more common in Europe. But New York is an inherently vertical city, so it fits. The superblock concept is pretty much dead in America, as most cities have demolished their public housing. They looked good on paper, but the reality was quite different. But as far as I know, we have nothing like this in New York. While a few have balconies, none have the outer walkways like Robin Hood. How are these estates maintained? Is there a super or other maintenance people employed on-site? Does it have elevators? What are the apartments like? It looks like not much if any funding has gone into this site for many years. At NYCHA, we are spending many billions on upgrading our buildings - new roofs, new elevators, new boilers, repointing brickwork, and on and on. We have a staff of 500 architects and engineers/construction managers, plus an army of consultants to handle the work we can't do in-house, which is like 90% of the workload. Of course, the population demographics within NYCHA has changed over the years, which brought "issues" to public housing, like increased crime, but there seems to be no solution for that. Unlike replacing a boiler. But hey, $100 a month for a subsidized apartment in Manhattan is a good deal, even if you have to put up with a few "problems."
'which brought "issues" to public housing, like increased crime, but there seems to be no solution for that' - there are plenty of solutions. but since we live in a world with an economic system which actively and shamelessly places profit over people, no profit can be made from those solutions, so they are not be pursued.
Sounds like for you work for NYCHA but haven’t been in an actual apartment inside of said buildings cause y’all buildings are HORRIBLE, sir. & that can’t be blamed on the “Changing of the demographics” so take that subtle racism elsewhere.
@@LususxNaturae Yes, I work for NYCHA as I said. I certainly have been in apartments. Some were awful, and some were unbelievable. I remember going into one apartment - and the tenants - a woman, her baby, and the baby daddy, had big beautiful white leather furniture all throughout their apartment, with marble flooring they installed on their own. Glass tables, and a big washer and dryer. Neither of them had a job, I would say. So...it's a real eye-opener to see the "poor or low-income" having nicer stuff than I had at the time. What a racket public housing can be. Yes, some developments are not good at all, but others are really nice. Some of the buildings we have, you would not know it's public housing. The changing demographics is absolutely true, no matter how much it may hurt your feelings.
Another feature/bug which doomed RHG was that the private balconies, on the greens-facing side, are absurdly narrow, so narrow that they're completely useless for anything aside from fire escapes... or clothes drying lines (posh twats are clutching their pearls). You can't place even a small bistro table on them, let alone a chaise lounge or other patio furniture. Ridiculous.
'What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend." The Prince of Wales, 1984. This is what is required to have an effect!
Leaving aside the questions of social engineering or architects being out of touch, my mind kept going back to the Colliers Wood Tower. I couldn't help wondering if those who voted Colliers Wood the ugliest building in London had ever seen Robin Hood Gardens.
So I Googled that and I'm sorry, but I have to agree with this dubious award. At least Robin Hood Gardens tried some interesting things, both conceptually and visually. It failed utterly and is an eyesore by modern standards, but it's not as grim and totally devoid of imagination as that Colliers Wood building.
I might suggest equally ugly in slightly different ways 😅. But really, I was giving a shout out to another Jago video on Colliers Wood Tower. If you haven't seen it, you can find it here... ua-cam.com/video/1gRSP-VbTW0/v-deo.html
Many years ago I served an apprenticeship at the docks in Falmouth. One of the older tradesmen had a saying "In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice they are very, very different.
The Smithsons are high on the ranking of absolute worst architects ever. Their only celebrated work, the school you mentioned, is butt ugly on the outside, and inside it looks like the bastard child of a basement and a corrugated iron storage shack. Every time one of their buildings are taken down, the world should celebrate. And I say this as a staunch supporter of modernism and functionalism.
The first giveaway is in the style name: Brutal-ism. I prefer Bomb-Shelter-ism. Or, "I can give a good deal on 4000 tons of concrete I can't shift, plus a little something for your holiday fund."
@@valvlog4665 Except that the name comes from the French "brut" ("raw or in its natural state"), not the English "brutal". It refers to the undecorated concrete. Possibly the worst choice of name ever. I mean, it's one thing for us to be all saying "Your building looks like crap" but if you call your style "Soundslikeitlookslikecrapism", you are just asking for it.
@@beeble2003 Like me, vast numbers of people would not know the etymology and take it on face as the English meaning, which visually appears to fit the style.
I was born and raised here I would love to give my perspective. I now live in the new flats. I must say I prefer robin hood as with the walking area there was a sense of community with the neighbours. Now not so much which I really miss. Let me know if you would like an I interview with me will be more than happy to answers questions and comments.
To the point of architects not having to live in these places: Ernö Goldfinger lived in Balfron Tower for a short time, but of course it was new then and he knew he didn’t have to stay
@@ericpode6095 The 007 villain was actually named after the architect when Fleming became miffed at an eyesore building that Goldfinger had erected near the writer's home.
@@cargy930 Yes - Fleming was a strong opponent of 2 Willow Way Erno Goldfingers development of 3 homes overlooking Hampstead Heath. An experimental terrace of modernist homes built on land purchased from Camden Council. Fleming though the designs were an eyesore and would ruin Hampstead, they're rather nice and now one is owned by the National trust - well worth a visit!
"It's kind of a dump. I'm paraphrasing there.". On the contrary I believe you are being totally honest there. At best it should be used for short term residents who just need somewhere to live until they can find somewhere else i.e. students, migrants etc
I was doing some research on some old Brutalism buildings to use as models for the background of a comic I'm working on. Somehow I came across a picture of the Balfron tower and Robin Hood Gardens. I wasn't aware that these buildings were in England...I didn't even know the name of them until I saw this video. I assumed that they were relics of the fall of the Soviet Union.
One observation I’ve had of the success of housing blocks is climate. In Singapore ore Thailand in it works fine as people are dosed up with sun and vitamin d in the warm weather and a flat out of the heat is a relief. In poor old cloudy Britain this is not the case and the lack of garden or outside access makes people feel trapped and miserable, maybe I’m wrong what do you think?
Jago mentions Hunstanton School, by the same architects, and it's a great example of the climate issues you mention: According to Wikipedia, _The extensive use of glazing was a feature, but has become an environmental problem, as it produced a cold building in winter, and effectively a greenhouse in summer._
I understand studies have been done that show in the case of social housing, they should never be built higher than four stories.....in the sense that any higher, and people of low to moderate incomes and perhaps lower disposable incomes, begin to feel isolated, and and as you say, trapped and miserable. I have applied for new built social housing in my hometown....and it is five stories built on top of a seniors community centre. My only concern is that aside from the ground floor, which is concrete, the building is completely built of wood.
FMHammyJ That’s interesting as there was a report the other day that the inquiry into grenfell cladding system has been widened to include timber framed buildings. It’s coming out that the firebreaks between floors and properties are inadequate in real world situations. This is apparently going to make a whole new swathe of new build flats since the 00,s un mortgageable. It’s seems obvious even to laymen like us that building entire block from wood is asking for trouble. Maybe buy a respirator and have some climbing ropes stored in your flat after you move in.
I don't think architects ever price a building and I will bet you that not one of the Architects involved would feasibly be able to afford one of the flats especially as that will just be a studio apartment.
That has nothing to do with the architects. Marketers insist on putting the word "only" before any price, these days, especially if it's a big one. Look at any car advert, for example.
I was brought up in a tower block and lived in one for many of my adult years and loved it. However, councils/housing associations tend to neglect them and to fill them with their worst tenants saying that they’re ‘hard to let’. When we first moved in my dad was the caretaker, something else no longer seen, and everyone thought them very modern posh etc. The caretaker kept an eye on things and maintained and cleaned communal areas, every tenant used to keep their bit of corridor clean, as in the old street system. One big flaw though was being unable to let young children play out without supervision in lifts and you lived 10 or 12 floors up you couldn’t keep your eye on them, so families with young children should never have been put in them. The materials they were built with, concrete usually, doesn’t look good for long so they become very shabby looking in no time. These flats look particularly ugly to me though, but the new buildings are still high rise and look no better, so we all go round again...as I said a flat suited me but my children were older, I was older and my dad kept them clean and vandal free but that was in the 1960s. One thing more that is a big problem is they have no gardens, I did miss that.
I would like to ask what does all that talk about council and such means? These were not in private ownership? Maybe that is the problem, buildings where people actually own a flat are mostly well maintained and colorfully painted, even these classic eastern Europe styled districts can be a pleasant places to live
I always think that there should be more common spaces like soft play spaces for young children and computer lab/homework help spaces for older kids also usable for adults job seeking or doing higher education programs. Residents who serve as playground supervisors/computer helpers get a small stipend that doesn't take away from any benefits they might be receiving. A concierge for each building is a great idea to keep packages safe and to keep track of who's coming and going, especially non residents. Also to put in maintenance requests. It'd be great if council flats were desirable enough that providing a flat as part of compensation was attractive to skilled maintenance professionals. If they live in the building they're taking care of they might do a really excellent job and enlist other residents to keep deliberate vandalism down.
@@bethenecampbell6463 that was always a problem, I think it’s cruel to put families with babies & toddlers in a high rise, they can’t just go out & play.
@@tomgirldouble3249 Absolutely it would be ideal if families with young children could have access to a safe play space where kids could just go out in the back garden and parents could watch from the kitchen window. But high density urban spaces need to go vertical. That shouldn't mean that little kids are stuck inside all day, though. I don't know why every other floor couldn't have an open air play space with little slides, climbing frames, ride ons and make believe spots like a play house, grocery store, or ice cream van. And a couple of comfy benches for supervising adults. People who live there need to be willing to watch each other's kids for a few minutes and work together to keep older kids from vandalizing common spaces. How good of an experience people have in any living situation has a lot to do with what they put into making friends and getting involved in the community. There are things that need to be done to help them so they have the time and energy to get involved.
They neglect them because it costs them money, and the councils never suffer any adverse consequences from it no matter how strident the public slaves are.
So this is what happened when they demolished Nonnatus House? 😀 In all seriousness, brutalist buildings are hard to love. I wonder when it was new if it looked shiny and fresh and compared to the cleared slums, a great step in the right direction. The trouble is that these buildings were built out of rubbish materials, maintained on a shoe string, ignored by successive owners of the buildings and fell into their own pool of concrete fatigue and drug dealers... Would it have been a better looking building had it been built in a different era? Would it have still had the same issues? Probably. I’m not sure if it was worth saving or not - it’s pig ugly from any angle but it’s an important piece of architecture by influential architects. Like you, I am undecided.
Can´t remember were i read it. But an urban planer in my country, when asked about large housing estates and why they almost inevitable fail, answered the following: "You can stack rich people but not poor people"
I had a field trip there for a geography course back in university. This does bring back good memories from an academic perspective (brutalist architecture, social housing, tower blocks, regeneration, etc.), but probably not so good memories if I put myself in the shoes of the occupants of RHG. Personally, I think it's layer upon layer of problems that cannot be solved at once. Sure, you provide the bare essential of housing, but if its occupants are not harmonious and the surroundings are not managed well, it really is not worth it. I guess that's why the regeneration is taking place; to start afresh. All credit to the planners for trying to realise a vision that works in theory, but making it work in practice is another school of thought altogether. Either way, a good throwback to that field trip I went to.
@@gewizz2 And who would you kill to solve overpopulation? Who would you forcibly sterilize? China tried to fix overpopulation and it didn't work. Instead, we must respect human life and recognize that humans have always reproduced more than was needed to maintain any given population level and barring a mass extinction human populations must be expected to increase. Therefore governments must plan for that. The colonization of space must be a distant goal, but allowing even impoverished people adequate space and facilities must be the immediate rule.
@@playwithmeinsecondlife6129 i hear you charles, and what you say makes sense, but i am more inclined to favour nature, trees, animals, etc, humans to me are a terrible thing, so many of them, most of them unsightly fat pigs, with pig minds too, humans are a disgraice,
This was great, and very thoughtful. I'll only add that as monstrously ugly as this building is, I'm not sure bulldozing housing regular people can afford and replacing it with housing that they mostly cannot is a huge improvement. Once again, and I will not tire of telling you, I love your thoughtful explorations into bits of microhistory that would otherwise be forgotten about. Cheers!
Apart from the important question of what people do to blocks of flats, there needs to be better understanding of what blocks of flats do to people. This is a prime example of reducing human beings to a grid reference in a big sheet of graph paper. Or if you prefer, to bees allocated to a cell in a hive. There is nothing in the architechture to confer individual worth to any one resident or family. It is interesting to compare Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. A very similar development, that descended to a state of seeming beyond salvation: eminently ripe for demolition. But the local authority, bravely, decided to save it. Look it up!
I think I'd rather live in a tree in Sherwood Forest than one of those concrete boxes. My next tree neighbours John Little, Will Scarlet and Alan A. Dale all back me on this. No matter how good the intentions, anything that is just endless slabs of concrete is inevitably going to end up looking hard, cold, isolating, grotty and dangerous. It's going to be filled with people who have no alternative but to be there, because a quarter acre block with a garden is well beyond their means, and the seething resentment at that will be mixed with vandalism and spray paint cans to create... well, housing estates.
Roger Scruton was right. this is the Cult of Ugliness. People and communities never thrive when their surroundings are soul destroying. Contrast the Royal Crescent in Bath built in 1774 and loved. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
The irony is that the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hoods day would make the roughest council estate look like Hampstead. It was well known as a really dangerous place because of the bandit who hid in it. Also if you asked the average person in medieval times of they thought the forest beautiful they would say no as the aesthetic sense of the time deemed more orderly Landscapes, Pastoral lands and formal gardens as beauty, which show that such ideas are a matter of perception rather than fact.
"It's going to be filled with people who have no alternative but to be there, because a quarter acre block with a garden is well beyond their means, and the seething resentment at that will be mixed with vandalism and spray paint cans to create... well, housing estates." Same exact thing happens in America. Except we've found it's largely tied to antisocial personalities - most people (even on the very bottom rung) will consciously try to move to someplace with less crime, but there's 10% who are simply lifelong criminal ASBO families who you could put into a luxury mansion and they'll have stolen everything and turned it into a crackhouse the next day. They bring the crime with them - the tower block didn't create them.
I was thinking that cladding the exterior would be a relatively cheap and effective way to hide dirty concrete, and unify the exterior, as well as hiding many ugly utilities. But of course, that opens so many complications now.
@@JaidenJimenez86 It is, the issue is the council broke the building fire regulations for this kind of building, alas, because they approve them they signed them off. It is against the regulation to bridge between the 'cells' of concrete with flammable material. Adding new requirements to building regs to meet emissions targets without fully understanding the existing regulations AND THEIR PURPOSE was a big deal there. You can clad it exactly the same without using flammable, or indeed inflamable material, using rockwool over PIR, though it is a little thicker. But yes, there is no big issue with cladding in general, but in a large building in the concrete cell style it should not be flammable. The only other concern is it can act as a chimney so you do need fire breaks, but they should've been there in the first place, and may have been.
I love this! I read a really good article (which obviously now I can't find) about the brutalist school of architecture and how the majority of architects designing these sorts of buildings actually lived in quaint Tudor cottages and lovely semi detached villas. They wanted to design these buildings, but they didn't want to live in them, and I think that's hugely telling. There's also something uncomfortable about the way a tower block squeezes poorer people in one big box, stacking them all up, out of the way.
I can't imagine that anything moored in a sea of speeding, polluting cars is ever going to be a pleasant place to live. But at the very least, it could have been designed to a human scale, with a proper pedestrian infrastructure. The problem isn't so much the looks as the massiveness of the buildings. The buildings you show at the beginning, designed for the Festival of Britain, seem to have retained a proper scale and appear a much more pleasant place to live. But really, get rid of the cars.
That was very much the style back then. I recently looked at an appartment from that era and my first impression, when stepping out of the two person coffin, sorry, elevator, was of a corridor in a prison, not a communal hallway for 4 appartments. The appartment itself was nice enough, if in dire need of being brought into the 21st century and unsuited to my furniture, but what spoiled the deal for me was I just couldn't see myself "coming home" to that sight every night. And that's coming from someone who's currently living in a high rise council appartment. Not saying our hallways have much in the way of pleasing aesthetics, but they're A LOT less bleak and uninviting.
Pretty standard in London these days to knock down council housing and replace with unaffordable housing no? Just replacing one rectangle with another newer rectangle but with more glass and 10x the price...
Yes they look for any excuse to gentrify an area. Look at what they did to the residents of balfron tower. Would rather they regenerate these buildings. They are very cool in terms of their shape
It is utter hypocrisy for all these architects who started practicing in the 60s and 70s to start campaigning for their unpopular buildings to be listed. They spent their careers arguing that historic buildings should be knocked down and replaced with something that fits the spirit of the age. Now they're in their dotage and concerned about their legacy they want to protect their own failed structures.
I turned up on a site one day and asked the first lad I saw if there was architect there, he said "yeah, howdya know that?". I pointed at the classic maroon Saab parked outside. The beauty of stereotypes is that they're often pretty accurate.
*Government Axiom No. 2:* _"Government, being nothing but a criminal syndicate, always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal, as the stated goal is always a lie."_
I grew up on the Barbican Estate, an adorable space to come of age, work, rest and play - but this is hideous! BTW I'm falling in love with your voice and presentation style ♥️🏆
The term Brutalism is not to do with the looks of the structures. It's something to do with the French term for raw concrete. Although I admit that doesn't sound very tasty...
@@foolsgold6970 actually, it does. early 15c., "of or belonging to animals, non-human," from Old French brut "coarse, brutal, raw, crude," from Latin brutus "heavy, dull, stupid, insensible, unreasonable" it is a loaded term in french. The french word for concrete is unrelated.
...and now waiting for the deluge of cottage dwellers blaming perfectly fine buildings for criminality instead of the people that they were filled with I live on a 34th floor of a public housing tower block in Hong Kong and thd only criminality i see around here is the odd granpa smoking in the park downstairs Fine video Jago,as always,thank you from your faithful follower
It is possible for architecture to encourage better or worse states of mind, which can affect mental, and to a lesser but still relevant degree, physical, health. Not enough to cause or prevent such problems of criminality and the like by itself, but still of some relevance. More the final straw than the root cause, if you take my meaning. The surrounding social and economic situation are much more relevant, if course.
@SteelRodent Only the buildings aren't the cause, they're a byproduct of the economic situation themselves as well. You can tell that pretty quickly by the fact they're made as efficiently and tightly packed as possible in order to be as cheap as possible. They were never going to be filled with professional upper middle class people nor are they in the locations that those people desire. You could build giant fake cottage buildings full of flats but looking like they should be in the quiet english countryside. But the fact it's cheap mass housing; with the associated residents, cut corners, poor maintenance and most likely a local area deprived of good economic opportunities, will still win out over the style of the building. Likewise, you can have ugly giant concrete blocks that have insanely expensive and luxurious apartments in them, only you'll find those in the heart of cities rather than in the cheapest plots going.
I do take fault with this idea that every building should be 'ignorable' - fit into the context so much that you don't even notice it - because otherwise how will architecture progress? The style of little flint cottages are completely unsuitable for a learning environment which needs lots of light & space ect...
Actually it's associated with the phrase "Béton brut" meaning "Raw Concrete." With a(n over) focus on form created from concrete poured in place and adopting the textures and patterns of whatever it was poured into. Much of it was infused with the post war optimism that we could reengineer society through reengineering our urban form, but with precious little focus on how these places would work as homes, offices and cultural spaces in the long term
Maybe it should be preserved as a museum to the failures and horrors of modernism with exhibitions about the misery inside the modernist utopia. Kind of like those museums you build in old jails, dungeons, gulags and concentration camps. including wax figures of the depressed inhabitants, and criminal outcasts.
"Let's create a new style we will call Brutalism, then fill it with the dregs of society and see what the phycologists make of it, should be a good wheeze". "OH LORD, they took our joke seriously and built it, theres our reputation shot to pieces"
It was designed to be a solution to the post-post-war housing shortage and wasn't full of the 'dregs of society' when it was first occupied. Sink estates happen with neglect.
"Brutalism" comes from the French "brut", meaning "in its raw or natural state", not the English "brutal". It refers to the buildings being made of naked concrete rather than covered in decorative elements. It wasn't the architects who decided who'd live there, but their clients, the city councils. I don't like brutalist buildings, either -- at least, not in northern Europe, since any concrete looks pretty awful when it's damp and under a grey sky -- but your description of their architects isn't really fair.
@@eattherich9215 sink estates are created by councils putting the dregs in one, if only there were only enough for one, place.🤔 Fill a tower block or one of these monoliths with the cream and the situation would be different. To say estates create the dregs, sorry must try to be PC disadvantaged hoodlums, is very simplistic. Good manners create contentment whatever the situation. Fill the Ritz with the drags, sorry again hoodlums, and see what happens. Having said the above, with tongue very slightly in cheek, even I might start to be depressed by living in one of these monstrosities .
@@beeble2003 the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. Architects should trained out of having an ego before they are given their first pencil. Architects should design to please the viewer, ie general public, not a tiny cohort of fellow delinquents and vandals .
@@chrisstephens6673 Anyone who wants to design large buildings is going to have an ego. The architects in this case _were_ trying to please the people who lived in these buildings: they were aware of the failings of tower blocks and were trying to make something better. They failed utterly, but they were trying to do the right thing. It's silly to pretend that architecture is just some self-centred conspiracy against the common man.
I don't even know where to begin on how horrific this piece of architecture is. There are no words or phrases adequate enough to describe the stomach churning direness of this estate.
Since you ask... I think it's as dreary as my own Northwestern Washington state. I mean the architecture and the general environment both. Your videos are absolutely amazing. Thank you!
@@VictorSneller It's nothing to do with minimum wage, it's supply and demand and if the poor have 5x what they have now, so will the rich, ie hyper inflation. The only solution is to build up or out. Nobody DESERVES anything if you wan't nice, work for it. That said If the UK keeps importing people who will become competition for space they should think about abolishing green belts.
Architects: "we love it!"
"Then go live there and save it"
Architects: "naah we'll pass"
Architects tend to choose the period properties and mod up the interior a little!
I'm an architect. I remember reading about it in architectural books back in college (no internet then) and admiring it (in drawings that's it). Later I moved to London (early 2000s) and every time I passed by in the DLR I was thinking that must be the ugliest building I have seen in my life (and there are few competitors around). I only realized it was the building in the books like a year later. I finally went to visit inside the gardens, the place was just dreadful (and other things), I left in 5 mins. I would still save it though, but as a reminder to future architects to take people's life seriously and not just draw pretty diagrams for themselves. And as a perfect dystopian movie setting...
@@TARAKATACKY Isn't the problem lack of maintenance? I'm pretty sure lives were being taken seriously. Crime and poverty isn't caused by architecture.
@@TARAKATACKY I'm curiousm, as an architect, what you would have designed?
@@simonkane "Crime and poverty isn't caused by architecture." This is true, but a decent environment doesn't hurt.
Ugly is an understatement. Nice to see that you filmed it on an overcast and rainy day, it provides the perfect ambience!
Not hard to do in England.
@@sandydancer138 I've been to London twice. So much oppressive sunshine both times! I was disappointed.
@@comicus01 London is basically France when it comes to the weather. . . Come up to Scotland next time, you won't be disappointed. ; )
@@sandydancer138 On a perfect blue sky day in summer, that building gave you a shiver down your spine... It was grayer than a rainy day in Siberia.
what are the chances to catch any other day in UK?
My friend had a flat here 18 years ago, I stayed there with her on occasion and essentially inside it was a nice flat and really quite large, the layout was strange, the kitchen/diner was the only room downstairs with the stairs running immediately beside the door. The stairs led to the centre of the upper floor with 2 bedrooms and a small bathroom to the left and the living room to the right. There was a small balcony running along the bedroom side but it couldn't be used as it was absolutely caked in pigeon poop despite the netting. The estate itself was an absolute dive, but that had more to do with the residents and their offspring than the area or buildings. Home is what you make it
One key factor is that how a place looks is the most important part of whether they take care of it or not. Pride is a significant motivator. It sounds like the layout is well designed for efficient living, which is nice, but when the building looks like shit, people will treat it like shit.
Certainly the residents housed there are less likely to treat it well - it is still 'rented' and housing antisocial people. But you can't blame the residents, this was literally built to specifically house them. If the better layout alone helped it would make perfect sense to put problem tenants there.
One key part is the "community" space is perhaps much more of a negative in an antisocial community and more likely to bring conflict. In streets, you have multiple options for which way you can go and can avoid streets you don't like. Instead this was developed on the soviet mentality that people are a product of their conditions alone and a utopia will spring up in the right setting.
@@carbon1255 interesting. I’ll preface this with acknowledging that I know nothing about architecture, town planning etc.
What is the solution to the need for social housing coupled with the need to reduce urban sprawl?
I don’t disagree about the inherent issue with high density housing but it seems like it is unavoidable in the long run.
So is there any way of producing high density urban social housing where one doesn’t immediately fall into the trap you outlined?
This looks to me like the kind of estate where local councils, with government funding increasingly reduced, made the mistake of not doing any maintenance until it was absolutely necessary. This short-sighted approach meant that in many cases much more money was needed in the long run and building began to look very shabby quite quickly. As a resident it would be difficult to take pride in a building that no-one else is looking after, and inevitably those who could move away would. These factors create a downward spiral of decay where the only exit strategy for the council is to sell it off to a developer.
No in London its no accident, its a deliberate policy of social cleansing. Look at every estate of this era and they are either 'restored' into flats for the rich or demolished so that flats for the rich can be built.
@@jamesneedham6265 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - you're making a logical fallacy and seeing conspiracy. It's not a policy, it's simply what to do with tower blocks that you can't house the lower social strata in without it becoming a nightmare of social problems and lawlessness. After all, they do have to house them somewhere else, it's not like they bus them off to the gas chambers.
@@smorris12 No its far worse they bus them off to Stoke on Trent. But seriously read the work of anna minton, big capital especially. These redeveloped estates never build as many units of social housing as was there before and while that could be a sensible policy of creating a more mixed community, it isn't because the majority of residents kicked out of their homes do not find places in the same boroughs.
Also its worth pointing out in many cases the residents kicked out are not council tenants but have bought their home as part of right to buy and are forced out by compulsory purchase with offers way below market value.
@@jamesneedham6265 Yes, and right to buy is offered far, far, below market value? Why should they be offered a house at a lose to the taxpayer, only to be reimbursed full price, at an even great loss to the taxpayer? What housing was there before WW2, and what was the social, ethnic, and cultural make-up of these areas? You said they can’t resettle in the same borough, and yet less than half a century ago the residents were replaced wholesale anyway. There is no tradition or ‘right’ for anyone to claim they’re from that borough when their family has only been rooted there for less than 3 generations.
@@jamesneedham6265 Give me Stoke over the smoke any day!
By definition they can't build as many units as they need to reduce the housing density to reduce the problems of hi-rise. Local government housing (of which I have friends who work in the industry) does its best to create housing within a framework of land-owners, current government policy, the demands of the residents based on need (disability etc), NIMBYism etc etc. and tries to steer a path through it all that houses people. There's a lot more accountability and oversite to avoid corruption now than in days gone by so mostly it's trying to get things done.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity!
5:23 Various prominent architects: It's a horrible place to live there, but somebody has to because it's "hugely significant".
Maybe it can be a place for "prominent architects" to live.
Exactly.
I like this idea, turn at least one of these monstrosities in each country into an architectural reservation, and if the architects do not live there, they are not allowed to design in that style. But architectural societies have enormous power.
It would be interesting to see what they looked like if that was the case.
All those politicians needing* second homes...
Shush - don't mention the Barbican ! lol.
I love the way the creators of these hell zones call them "Gardens". "Well, there's a scraggy piece of grass covered in dog sh*t and a tree that was alive a few years ago."
There's a semi serious rule of thumb about council housing that the more rural and idyllic sounding the name the bigger a crime ridden shithole it is. So beware some estate called Willow tree Meadows or Fluffydown Green.
Yes, many English places have ridiculous names. The cities are full of quarters called "hill" but there's absolutely no bump to stick out. Or this shithole being called a garden.
And always devoid of people because only the four/five most dangerous people who live in the building are "allowed" to use it
@@thedman1696 Because they are there 24/7 in the summer. You have to wait for the cold or wet weather to be able to use it or when it's too hot to be outside so then have to brave extreme weather that the chavs can't bear.
Don't be cruel i counted 6 trees on a one and a quarter acre
I feel concrete just isn't a good building material for Northern Europe with its high rainfall. It doesn't look half bad in arid Spain or the sunnier parts of Greece, but in the UK the rain stains it making it hideous
South America - it is concrete jungle...
I believe it can be a good material if finished properly...as in the Barbican Estates for example.
@@stevenflebbe The Barbican, while horrifically ugly, has benefited from money being spent on maintaining it. Without this money it would be just another graffiti-covered, piss-stained concrete hellhole, like so many of the brutalist-descended buildings around the country. The idea that any of them are worthy of preservation just boggles the mind. As Jago said, most of the pressure to list Robin Hood Gardens came from architects and, looking at some of the garbage that wins, for example, the Stirling Prize, we can see how little regard we should pay to their views.
"
I feel concrete just isn't a good building material for Northern Europe"
Probably why they wrap it in brightly coloured flammable cladding!
Rust stains due to iron in the rock from which the gravel was derived. Used in the making of the concrete from which the building was constructed.
if depression would be a building this is exactly how it would look like
London is full of depressing looking buildings like this.
I feel depressed just looking at it lol. Reminds me of the buildings in Communist Russia
The problem is with the people. The building is fine.
But yes it does look depressing doesn't it. A little power washing and color accents would dress it up in a week.
@@guidedmeditation2396 Yes, some colorful insulated cladding, that's the ticket. Or NOT. How many died at Greenfell?
Imagine working a gruelling 8 hours shift to come home to this beauty.
Id stay at work
It would have made a decent prison, from the looks of it.
It has a face only an architect’s mother could love
I lived there and it was epic
Good place to hang if you catch my drift ;)
Maybe if architects were forced by law to live in their creations for at least a year after completion, they might design them a little more sympathetically.
Ten years, minimum.
Or if we wouldn't dump lack of maintenance and social work on their heads.
Lubetkin lived in High Point I I believe? A relatively successful tower development, albeit only available to richer tenants in reality.
@@tiny_gabi_ Consider the high rises in NY next to Central Park, sometimes it is all about the location. But in the end: If there are people prepared to pay to live somewhere, it will be a decent place to live. If not, it will be a dump. Doesn't really matter if it is a highrise, a villa suburb or a cottage in the woods.
Most architects would jump at the chance, it better than the small semi in croydon most can afford!
9:58 "Hmmm, this housing estate is rather unattractive. Perhaps it would be better if we parked our giant robot caterpillar on it?"
That guy couldn't have been serious, I mean, look at the lightning in the background!
Like putting a bow on a turd.
@@edmundironside9435 It's the beginning of the apocalypse and giant robot caterpillars are attacking the buildings
Lowkey reminds me of the OCAD building in Toronto.
@@Nooziterp1 A more pretty turd on a turd.
"Modern tower blocks encourage antisocial behavior"
"Yes we are going to fix that!"
"But how?"
"Here is this new style called brutalism, hated by the public, ugly as hell and looks depressing"
Buildings can't 'fix' behaviour.
@@dagwould It actually can. The more nooks and crannies you create, the more space there is for antisocial behavior.
Also, if you move into this beautiful apartment that's clearly being taken care of, people have a higher chance of taking care of it too. But if it's already trashed and old, they don't bother.
The environment DOES affect behavior, I hope you'll do some research on that (it's a big topic in Social Work actually)
@@dagwould Surroundings do affect people, very much. The more artificial everything becomes the more insane people become, that's why there is so much crime in cities than natural environments.
4.55 - 'New Penthouse Prices from only £740,000'. Yes, with a view of all this hideousness.
Ah, sweet capitalism.
@@myra0224 Environment affects behaviour 100%. The more natural and organic the better the energy and the social ethos.
Ah, yes. Tower blocks. Flawed on so many levels
My brain imploded on that one :P
Tower blocks were an improvement for the first few years that people lived in them according to the residents themselves because I've read lots of accounts of it, but they deteriorated pretty quickly after that because concrete ages really badly.
Not to mention "floored".
yes, many stories to tell, but few with happy endings.
@@ajs41 "concrete ages really badly"
Roman hydraulic concrete seems to hold up pretty well after some two millennia.
I studied this estate quite extensively during my Masters thesis. I went into it thinking “what an injustice to knock down an iconic piece of architecture” and came out agreeing with Historic England - it failed as an estate and was only championed by architects who didn’t live there.
The element which Jago doesn’t touch on so much is that it’s actually comparatively low density and next to high value Canary Wharf and the DLR route right into Bank, and this is why they were so keen to redevelop.
Whether the new housing will be better than the old is debatable, it’s less interesting for sure. The usual gentrification debate goes on; the new residents will not be the same group of people who used to live in RHG. The site is too valuable for that...
If it is renovated for private sale, the flat owners need to jointly own the *land,* not pay ground rent, and leases, to keep economic parasites.
Interesting point, and you’re right, that is a notable omission.
What a hideous design
@@royfearn4345
If it had weather proof exterior cladding with coloured wall sections, it would look very good.
The architects didn´t live there ! I am shocked .
I don't know whats worse, the fact that its been left to rot all this time, or the fact that the redevelopment looks just as depressing, just with reduced ambition
I find it all very upsetting
The redevelopment looks a lot better
I'd give it another 70 year or so and we'll have a new generation of people calling out these new developments.
The skewed windows annoy me to no end...
The problem it was trying to solve was ignored. They built it in Hell.
It's sandwiched between 5 lanes of traffic to the East, 4 lanes of traffic to the West, 8 to the North and another 4 to the South.
What do they say- location, location, location!
And now they are advertising a 750k penthouse in a location like that.
An estate agent would paraphrase your observation as: "conveniently situated for efficient road connections."
I went round Robin Hood Gardens about 20 years ago. The flats are a good size and the landscaping was very attractive - but the location is atrocious. Still, I think the idea put forward in this film, of doing them up as student accommodation, would have been a good one. I don't think the new buildings there will be anything like as spacious or attractive.
What you say is true of every development in a town or city . They all have to fit in the space available.
Maybe it would have looked better if they had built it underground and just grassed over the top. The construction does look like it would make a good fallout bunker.
“Architecture is a very
dangerous job. If a writer
makes a bad book, eh,
people don’t read it. But if
you make bad architecture,
you impose ugliness on a
place for a hundred years.” - Renzo Piano
comming from they guy responsible for the center pompidou in Paris, the building that looks like is permanently in construction. and the shard in London. I'm not shure, but it looks like he is guilty of the thing he is criticizing
@@goncalodias6402 I think you're condemning Richard Rogers, who just died this weekend, not Renzo Piano from Italy.
@@MajorCaliber they designed the centre pompidou together
The difference being, if a writer doesn't sell any books, he/she goes hungry, while the architect has already banked his fat cheque on construction completion
“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”
Keep ‘em coming Jago. Your content is like manna from heaven in these uncertain times.
Thanks! There’s plenty more on the way!
"Wikipedia says that the eastern block was demolished in 2019, but I have reason to believe they may be mistaken."
You mean like its still being quite evidently there when you go past it?
Western block
@@John_Wood_ At the time the video was recorded, Wikipedia said that both had been demolished. Jago says the words I quoted. Hence that bit being in quotation marks.
I live there I believe it was 2016 or 2017 when it was demolished
The Wikipedia lads must have wanted it destroyed in a quick fashion that they wrote that line in advance.
'What do you think of when hearing Robin Hood?'
Me and like hundreds of thousands of people: 'Nottingham'
Londoners: 'Shitty block of flats'
Yeah as someone who lives in Nottinghamshire I'm actually a little offended that our local legend has been tied to this shithole.
Good news for Londoners. Robin Hood is also a named eastern entrance for Richmond Park. Nice leafy area and lovely gardens and lush greenery expand out with deer happily roaming as if out on a nature reservation. So Londoners can envisage that picture when hearing "Robin Hood" to banish the terrible nightmare , dystopian vision that the Smithson's gave of our future.
I find brutalism absolutely fascinating for its boldness and ambition and at the same time totally horrifying. The concepts often look great on paper but they almost always fail to produce a pleasant place to be.
Likewise
Unfinished exterior concrete will always make a building look like a dump. Worse when it rains, even worse after a few years of rain - the black mold takes over. A highly depressing place to live. The paper and cardboard architects models never show weathering effects - should.
Imagine this place being where you come home to after a lousy day at work. Architects - I'm talking to you.
there's a building set in New York, Silver Towers, that looks very similar, the major difference is that Silver Towers is housing for professors and well off staff of New York University. the expectation that architecture will solve economic issues of un or under employment, poverty wages is misguided...
Many of the residents liked it, indeed the flats themselves where fantastic. With Robin Hood gardens the problems design wise are the decks where too narrow and the stairs claustrophobic.
Also another big flaw, arguably the biggest, was the fact anyone could access the decks which was solved with the simple addition of a security door.
Another problem was the parkland as parks are in reality, dangerous indeed any are of nature is at night if its not policed and maintained.
One of the oftern ignored aspects of the research by Jane Jacobs is how anti parks she was a most violent crimes happen within urban parkland and so by siting a building in parkland you create a building that's dangerous to access at night.
@@jamesneedham6265 I lived in RHG for 3 years and agree about the flats themselves - when you finally reached you flat it was quite reasonable inside. The buildings themselves were, of course, hideous and did nothing to encourage any sort of community spirit.
I don't think I ever went down to the park space between the blocks during the whole of the time I lived there. The entrances to the blocks were on the other sides of the buildings so there was no danger in accessing at night.
When I was living there the estate was owned and maintained by the Greater London Council which was much more capable, and probably more willing, to maintain it than Tower Hamlets Council which took it over. That takeover must have signalled the end of a very poorly designed experiment.
Its nigh impossible to get to or from these blocks, I dont think the replacements will be much better. Its a place I find difficult to get an opinion on, some idea that maybe residents should have had a contribution to what they would like the place to look like, but it was designed really at a time when no-one had noticed that the entire east end (bar a few folk) were off to Stevenage and Basildon. Space but access back to the city.
Great comment, Mark. The sight of Robin Hood Gardens doesn't nothing for the human spirit. No beauty, no comfort, no sense of rest and respite.
Aesthetically, it could be dressed up with a pressure-washing of the concrete, and some really sharp, well-designed window frames. I mean large 2-storey maisonettes--with *private garages*--just blocks from Canary Wharf? AYFKM? Of course you don't want to move the poor and the unemployed in there.
That’s what I thought. Maybe if someone would just paint it white....
Don't try go save that monstrosity. Brutalism is the worst thing since modern art and communist housing. It wears on the human spirit.
@@HwoarangtheBoomerang but surely there must be something that can be possibly done with all those blocks
@@HwoarangtheBoomerang Communist housing worked in Chile but ignorant Europeans just know about their own experience. What can be expected of rough and uncouth commoners such as yourself.
@@lena-sophiewagner2280 Exactly, I think a good part of the reason why it looks so depressing is because it's just so grey and dull. If it was painted in bright colours and maybe had some art or interesting sculptures on it then it would look a lot better (though still not great, there's only so much you can do to disguise the fact that it's a concrete block)
I had a girlfriend who lived there in the late 80s. From the outside it was ghastly but the flats were not bad. Kitchen and living room upstairs and bedroom downstairs. Having spent a lot of time there I would be on the side of demolition. Ugly spaces make for ugly outcomes socially, that been said the whole area was ugly in the late 80s and Robin Hood Gardens sort of fit in.
As a German I find it amusing how people imagine European cities as these Medieval fairy tale towns, while cities mostly look like this.
this
yep dont matter if im in washington or arizona it all looks ugly from the freeway
Disappointing for sure how at least the major ones are like this.
As someone living I cologne I’m not surprised. But visit Lisbon, Turin, nice, Granada, Amsterdam, Rome, Venice, Seville, Porto . The list goes on. Please don’t extrapolate to the rest of Europe how ugly German cities are
@@manuelfigueiredo9401 have you been outside of the tourist areas of Lisbon and Porto!? haha... awful. Countryside is ok.
I lived on a council housing estate for the first 18 years of life. My parents were one of the first occupants of Kendal House, Priory Green in Islington, Formally Finsbury at the time. The house, and it's sister Redington House, were designed by the same man who designed the Penguin Enclosure at London Zoo, Bernhard Lubetkin, (apologies if I got the name spelt wrong). It was a wonderful estate, friendly welcoming in my opinion well designed. All the tenants came from the same areas and probably knew each other, they would greet each other when in the street and pass pleasantries. I went back a couple of years ago, (I'm now 68), and the place was a mess, wire security fencing and buzzer entry to flats, graffiti all over the place but more significantly, no children playing in the playground. A sad reflection on today's standards.
The problem root the area fell into was "diversity", it does that to once nice places.
@@infinitesimotel wow. some open and blatant racism there.
@@stretchchris1 Socially engineered robotic nonsense comment from you.
The council schemes in my town were mostly lovely when I was wee, and on the whole they still are but there's always a bit where there are problem families or just people who are really struggling and need a lot of help. Problem is for the second group the help isn't there at the level they need. The last one I lived in was pretty good - kids played outside, there was no vandalism, not much trouble, some people were living in houses that had been their parents. It also had a good mixture of housing styles and accommodation for single people/couples as well as families. All of the flats had their own doors as well so no scary, dark closes.
If it's anything like 'Kidbrooke village' they'll just rebuild the same same but different, with less open space between blocks, and label it luxury....
I remember the Ferrier estate when I was training. It always fun to go there in an ambulance.
@@mugofbrown6234 I remember the early days of my childhood you could walk from one end to the other on the high level and wouldnt get wet in the rain. Then they started to block bits off as it was a hotbed of crime...
@@annother3350 Yes that was great. You could choose which staircases to go up or down and which level you wanted to traverse. Just a shame the council didn't put the money in to keep it maintained.
@@amandajane8227 I think, as usual, it became a sink estate. I knew people who knew the first wave of residents and they seemed nice and to look after each other and the estate. By the time I had to walk through it, it had deteriorated and was full of graffitti, stolen burned out cars and BNP supporters who would come into our school and beat up unsuspecting black boys on a regular basis...
I love how a good majority of the failures essentially boiled down to "london councils didnt want to pay for the upkeep and when it fell into disrepair, blame the residents for being antisocial" thats that classic classism at work right there.
A new project, or building, or railway are sexy and attractive. Dignitaries get their names on foundation stones. Architects and engineers get written up in puff pieces in industry journals and get industry rewards. And then it has to be maintained. Maintenance is unsexy and boring and maintenance budgets are the first to be trimmed or drawn out in times of budgetary restriction.
I guess ease of maintenance should be a primary architectural requirement... but it is not easy to appreciate until much later.
Honestly, that applies to almost every council in the UK, not just London ones. I lived in a tower block in Birmingham - same problems. Hell, the same applies to most council's tenement buildings too.
Well said
All estates like this are meant to have a sinking fund, which is a percentage of the rent is invested for long term maintenance. I suspect they are raided for other purposes by the local authorities.
Low cost housing, especially the Government owned variety, is pretty much always run down regardless of country.
At some point people will have to accept the obvious fact that poor people are more inclined to engage in anti social behaviour.
Factor in the fact that the houses are Government owned and you have a perfect recipe for the decrepit monstrosities we see all over.
Blaming the local Govt is sort of besides the point.
I once slagged this building off. Some one, actually called Delboy, in the car said that they grew up there, it was lovely inside and built for the comfort of the residents. I learned to be more humble that day, not to make a judgement based on personal ignorance. It was a good life lesson. Do not judge a book by its cover. I later did a Rolling Stones tour with Delboy. Fantastic guy.
That's silly. If it looks awful, slag it off. We all have to pass such eyesores.If someone gives a personal insight of living there, that makes your knowledge of it richer but it doesn't mean pipe down and keep quiet about what caused you to slag it off in the first place: exterior ugliness - that bloke didn't live on the outside of it, and probably he might have agreed with you, exterior wise.
I think a lot of people didn't like. living there, that wasn't all based on the 'book's cover'.
@@flashtrash7830 That's right. I remember coming 'home' to my awful council block. Not a very welcome sight and didn't help make me feel comfortable or that I belonged. In other words the looks of the building I lived in alienated me. Sure, if you've all got loads of money, you could live in the Barbican, in spite of it being a concrete monstrosity.
It looks to me like they've kicked poor ppl out of an ugly old building, then moved rich ppl into a ugly new building 🤑
Yeah, take it from the poor and give it to the rich. In the true spirit of its namesake.
There's a massive redevelopment of Paddington going on - almost finished now.
And a small 1950s block of council flats was knocked down for a massive trendy block of new apartments.
And I often wonder if the original inhabitants were offered a place in the nice new building ? - or shipped off to some other estate sone where .... and I bet I know the answer.
@blacknester i doubt it, when Ealing council knocked down my estate, all the disabled people had to leave the borough because they didn't build any disabled properties on the posh replacements, most of the residents were offered relocation to Wolverhampton which went down like a led balloon of course, all the stress put my father in hospital but the council eventually rehoused him in a crumbling 100 year old terrace elsewhere in the borough which has a tonne of problems they never fix.
The south Acton estate was a collection of 2 to 4 bedroom homes spread across a verity of masonets, bungalows and tower blocks with lifts, everyone had a car parking space and there was garages available to rent.
The new posh and private estate offered less then 20% of the social housing the original estate had, studio flats only, no parking, and poor doors to the stairs to get up to the social housing on the upper floors, needless to say they didn't get many takers, especially since most of the residents of the estate were families like mine whod been there 40 odd years and the aforementioned disabled people. It was all deliberate I only know one 1 person who took up the offer.
Also Ealing council wanted to boot everyone out well ahead of time so they could rent their flats out on short leases to students and things for extra money, they (the council) litterally kicked the garden gate in on my parents masonet and refused to fix it, leading to my parents place getting burgled via the french windows that lead to the garden, something that had never happened before.
@@GreatSageSunWukong a shocking story, but still relevant today. Many local council politicians have directorships, and work together with construction companies.
Many people should investigate their respective councils, and look up individual politicians and see what type of gratuities are being handed out. A box at a football match for £500. Splendid meals in Covent Garden for £75 quid. Obviously the current situation has curtailed all that for the moment, but in my view its still an 'unethical practice'. They are obviously NOT attending to our business that we pay them for. They would soon complain and grumble if we 'withheld our council tax'.
With regards to your family, this action taken against them is 'Social Cleansing'. It's disgusting and bloody shameful to treat people in this way. Horrendous. I send you my kind regards, and hopefully something will be sorted out soon to help vulnerable people.
PS: please view this website, WhatDoTheyKnow.com
You can browse and view freedom of information requests to local authorities. There is a goldmine of information on the site, well worth a look. Cheers.👍
@blacknester they use compulsory purchase orders, you don't have a choice. Not that you'd want to buy a council flat anyway, they charge you for building repairs and upkeep of the estate, my aunt bought her council place in North London, she died oweing the local council over 20k for such works she had no say in.
One last aside: architects often forget the building is a backdrop for the inhabitants...not vice versa.
This isn't fair, they ONLY had the inhabitants in mind- but they thought about people more like cattle & the issues with soviet thought in general, that these oppressive structures cure inequality.
As someone who has spent my 9-5 working in a brutalist building and found it extraordinarily depressing I cannot fathom how awful it must be to live in it as well
There's are a few comments about how this project would be much better appreciated and a better habitat if it was cleaned up or better maintained. Brings back memories of my dad who came home a broken man day after day for a period of about 12 months when he was working improving and maintaining similar areas of London. Each and every day he would get to work to have all his previous days work demolished, burnt down, or vandalised. He even received regular abuse and threats while working. My dad was tough but that level of disrespect and abuse was hard for him to handle.
The destruction was due to the attitude of not having any skin in the game by the residents. They do not have to pay fir upkeep so they don’t care if they destroy it. It’s the same way on this side of the pond. I delivered mail to a public housing development that was corporately owned. Those who were on full welfare status would cause ridiculous amounts of damage. They would get behind in their rent to the point of eviction or they would just skip out. One family skipped out on a Saturday night. It took a crew a month to fix all he damage they caused totaling $30,000. What did the residents care, they didn’t have to pay for it.
@@michaeljbrennan3728 Very questionable argument. I've seen horribly run-down privately-owned houses, and well-kept government-owned houses with tenants who've cared quite a bit for their homes (live in one myself).
The points Jago brings up about unemployment, a feeling society doesn't care about you (often linked), and the fact that the government has to put those "problem persons" _somewhere_ seems like the major factors.
Of course large blocks of (relatively) cheap housing will be the natural place for all those factors to intersect, so they get a bad rep. But if they didn't exist there wouldn't *not* be slums, it's just that the slums would be shanty towns instead. :-(
@@henrikgiese6316 talking about generalising, the privately owned estates where most of the flats are buy to let and many are rented out to council tenants who don't give a f. That sounds about right.
@@z00h Actually, the private houses I was thinking about are various single-family houses. Of course I don't know the owners, but from what I've heard illness, economic disaster, or just plain old age can cause maintenance to be ignored.
@@henrikgiese6316 The problem seems to be ''Problem families'', rather than the housing.
A ''Problem family'' was put into a 'Middle class area'' by the council as an experiment...and it was a disaster.
Police there 24/7 and neighbours intimidated.
Some 'Problem families' think their notoriety is a kind of 'fame' of sorts...Very depressing.
When architects want to moralise rather than build beautiful, you get Robin Hood Gardens. Bright people with low empathy and high ambition who use the rest of us as a social experiment. A good job there are no parallels today, isn't it?
Fantastic turn of phrase.. "..Bright people with low empathy and high ambition ..." However, I'm now unable to read your post without hearing it in Jonathan Meades' voice.
LOL "My play was a great success! But the audience was a failure."
😂
I wonder if the Smithton's ever lived in a brutalism housing tower.
Maybe they are like Richard and Ruth Rogers who bought two houses in a beautiful Regency Terrace opposite the Royal Hospital and.... well the pictures are on the internet. I can't bring myself to describe the houses now. I've always said "Every architect is a graffiti artist at heart."
They should have been forced to.
@@Stafford674 Only a superstar architect could make a mess like that. I counted 20 something steps on a single flight of stairs, wouldn't even meet building regs...
@Crooked Skate Supply Co “worked hard”
Yeaahhhhh...
@Crooked Skate Supply Co Perhaps they worked a normal amount and chose to live in a house rather than expect a handout.
French here, we had/have similar sink estates (TIL this phrase) in large cities across the country. And I've come to realize that the issue isn't the architecture itself, cramming poor people in one place *is* the problem. Tenants don't pay for maintenance (since they're tenants), owners (public or private) have zero short term incentive to pay for any maintenance, so those places collapse (litterally) as unemployment and crime rise, whether they're 20 story tower blocks or much smaller buildings, size and style are irrelevant.
As for this particular project, I've seen a whole lot worse, but it's definitely not pretty either!
I dunno, one thing that the conservatives did was to split council house rents into rent and service charges (which immediately impacted things like housing benefit and pension credit but that is another story). With the idea that you could see the maintenance and its costs on an annual breakdown sent through
One thing you notice is that as you drive south these buildings don't look as bad . They seem to be peculiarly badly adapted to the English climate. Damp patches moss and lichen show up quite soon after they are put up. You also get two other things right in my view. You tend to concentrate your modern developments in one area instead of scattering them around among older developments and you add a bit of colour to them so they are not always grey.
@@tincoffin Can Concrete work in UK ? Yes, sort of , the Shell Centre (both sides of the Thames works fine, 55 Broadway and the Holden Stations on the Northern line (though they need a clean), The estate in Camden south of St Pancras, The Royal Festival Hall and National Theatre. Are present day buildings better - no - See Colindale Airport development , and Freshwater Wharf Barking where building for its own sake seems utter rubbish inside and out. Was there any brick older buildings that did not work - yes , North Row (?) Kensington - mostly due to the communal heating.
@@highpath4776 I can't say that I am a fan of the Shell Centre or the others. However to digress here is an amusing story. When it was built the Shell management thought it would be a good idea to abolish the tea lady. Henceforward the tea was to be brewed in a central location and then delivered to various points throughout the building . It was a complete disaster as the tea leaves tended to clog the system and it was rapidly discontinued and the tea lady reinstated. A friend worked there in the seventies .The building was not in a good state but the tea distributor was still very much in evidence but unused. I found this YT video on it :
ua-cam.com/video/S-nrYDfY5oc/v-deo.html.
I think the tea lady had been brought back when this was made.
Flats with soundproofing as a primary design concept. Still too much to ask for.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this specific building in _several_ zombie apocalypse movies, which tells me it produces just the right level of existential dread and anomie to form a short-hand for cultural breakdown.
It reminds of me Brasilia, a city designed and built from the ground up by urban planners to turn all of their models and theories into reality in order to produce a perfect city of the future. Today, Brasilia is the closest thing on Earth to a post-apocalyptic hellscape with a homicide rate higher than that of many countries offically at war.
There was a nearby tower block that showed up in 28 Days Later - the Balfron Tower.
@@JagoHazzard You know, a sort of overview of London-based filming locations for different films might make for an interesting video. A lot of them show up frequently.
@@NoJusticeNoPeace Greenwich Naval College. Alexandra road estate Camden. Laban building, Deptford. St Pauls church Deptford. Senate House Library.
Isn't Brasilia empty and cut of by forest, also it was used in the movie aeon flux, best thing in that film lol, I don't think it Is much like this place though.
It should've been listed - for immediate demolition. As a kid we used to say: "good riddance to bad rubbish". I say it now. It's awful, ugly, out of touch, condescendingly insulting, unlivable. Maybe someone should have suggested they live there themselves. Thank goodness it wasn't made a listed building.
As a homeless i wish i could have a box room there. Will be a luxury for me
Absolutely.These buildings have no real place in the real world of humanity. Both in living and beauty. At least vast mansions of the olden days had beauty to them and could still come to still be lived in by a few people if not the masses.
Yet.
@@danielwhyatt3278 balfron is actually real cool and thamesmead had a super cool design that you couldn't find anywhere else whilst balfron is listed and remains standing to this day thamesmead was sadly demolished last year
it is ugly but frankly whatever you build - if you stick a bunch of c***ts in it and refuse to maintain it - it probably wont be the nicest place after a few decades.
Lots of lots of brutalism. Pure concrete. Perfect for 1984 Orwell movie adaptation.
If we ask the Germans nicely perhaps they’ll do a repeat of the Blitz.
With all then nice modern toys they now have maybe they might do a proper job of it this time. Lol
Regarding the state of the German airforce - we might have to contract it out to another Nato ally
Where’s Fred Dibnah when you need him.
Nice try! They can't even dynamite their own flakturms! (They tried in Vienna)
A remastered version
It was ahead of its time, it looks like a dirty flat from a futuristic overcrowded city.
It looked like a dirty flat back then.
Think the city blocks from Dredd in 2012 version with Karl Urban.
@@teecefamilykent EXACTLY what I was gonna say!
Could it be that the reason the buildings look like something out of Dredd is that's precisely where the comics/films/games got their idea of what that scenario should look like?
@@eleffbee yes! Either way it works!
I wanted it to work. To enjoy those ‘cranked’, ‘articulated’ streets in the air. So I went and had a look. Got inside, wandered along the windswept, weather-facing corridors, nipped up and down the narrow, concrete stairwells. Heard a bang, echoing, somewhere not far enough away. Never felt so claustrophobic, or scared, in my life. When I got back to land, I breathed again.
Almost a haiku. Yes, they are awful- I think to some peoples eyes they look good on a drawing board, and i'm sure the layout is efficient, but...
I come from this area and have known this building for ever. Even as a kid it looked scary to me, and in my 50s now it still looks scary. Went to a house party there in the 80s, grim to say the least
It's being demolished now
Having lived in Hong Kong, I can say that I don't believe High Rise or High Density housing to be a problem, in and of itself. The problem (I believe), is in putting large numbers of socially inept people, into close proximity with one another.
Having said that, building low cost poorly implemented housing and then allowing it to fall into disrepair, will foster unbearable tension within any community.
@Esther Sparrow I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. Socially inept is not the same as anti-social.
'socially inept people' wowee youre almost as brutal as these buildings
@@ketchuplad157 It was not meant as pejorative term. People can be socially inept for a variety of reasons and is not necessarily the fault of the person who suffers from it. In a situation such as this one, those who might be thought of as socially inept, have lived their whole life, in a small more or less closed community, where everyone there, is more or less the same. Since these people are also generally speaking, not well travelled, they have rarely encountered people who are significantly different from themselves. Planners, then force together large numbers of people, all of whom, are from different social paradigms, into developments such as Robin Hood Gardens. The fallout from what follows, is almost inevitable.
dont even bother explaining. some people are too sensitive these days
You are just too polite, there will always be a small section of society that is out to make life miserable for the rest of us.
A spot of ink will taint a glass of clear water.
I worked as.a trainee psychiatrist in Tower Hamlets in the 1970s. Specifically, I spent the best part of a year roaming the streets of Poplar and its adjacent conurbations, doing domiciliary visits. By then, most locals had been relocated east in the near-reaches of Essex(also to become urban wastelands). Those who qualified to remain in Poplar most notably included the least adaptable to the concrete jungle. These were the descendants of those who not so very long ago had enjoyed the squalid equivalent in village life, That is, generations of residents inherited new modalities of squalor. Your presentation was excellent because it gave a glimpse of the bungling back story of just one of the failed attempts at East London urban planning. Without having checked I would hazard a guess that no one Councillor, not one architect had ever spent more than an hour on the ground in their target locations, They never experienced the weariness of climbing the steps in endless tower blocks whose lifts had long been abandoned. Not once would they have enjoyed the stench of mostly urine as they might have cruised the stairs and stairwells. Remarkably, here and there in the midst of this disgrace, stood the occasional single house, or terrace of houses. These were in no better state of repair than their hugely ugly concrete confreres. And the people? Nobody ever gave them even a moment’s thought. That’s another story, and this is not the place tp tell it.
I am living in HK, the public estate built in 1970s and 80s have similar long airy corridors for residents to mingle and play mahjong. Which served their purpose and HK people enjoyed their time on the corridor especially during summer hot days.
In HK the weather is nice and middle class people live in tower blocks due to land value. It is more comparable to the poor Chinese tower blocks.
I think you like in something that's 10 square meters.
I doubt anyone is gonna play mahjong in the grime of a council estate corridor
Great video thank you. Well the house I was brought up in had no hot water no central heating open coal fires, walls running with condensation, damp. privately owned by slum land lords. These new builds were paradise offering security, compared with those slum,and bomb sites I was brought up in. My friend lived at the top of a tower block at Southwark Park. What a view, pure luxury. The development in Dulwich known as the battle ship was very nice, a success had a sense of community. I lived in a flat a round the corner in an old house I looked on in envy.
Kudos to Jago for recording in typical dreary overcast London weather, instead of waiting for the tourist-brochure sunny day.
This is not an area I'm familiar with, so it was a real treat watching this thoughtful and very informative video. You're a treasure. Thanks again for what you do.
Thanks!
I suppose putting a thatched roof on top along with some Elizabethan style cladding is out of the question.
That is the sad thing, the layouts are interesting (albeit wider staircases) and it would be nice to have a pitched roof and pillars on the balconies and decoration- however decoration is heresy to brutalist architects- they believe the soviet ideal is correct and that decoration is a capitalist corruption that breeds inequality.
I lived there from 1985 to 2015. The estate was allowed to run down and all of us residents have mixed view on what has happened. I'm still in the area but now in one of the new build of Blackwall Reach. One thing I definately agree, the estate wasnt given a fair chance and yes the new estate is dull and bland compared to what we had, especially during late 80s and late 90s
Barely had the time to make it through this longer video as I needed to go train my daughter to fight robots in a few years.
She's training herself - you're just watching her :)
Better still, train her to build her own bigger robots :)
Maybe you haven't seen this: ua-cam.com/video/y3RIHnK0_NE/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Corridor
Re: fightings robots :)
Go for the charging port! Ooooh!
Lol
I found this very interesting. I'm an architect at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), so it's fascinating to compare New York's public housing to that of a foreign city. NYCHA owns about 2,500 buildings housing 5% of the city's population, or a little over 400,000. And how many NYCHA buildings have we torn down since the first public housing development was built here in 1935? Just ONE. Even that was considered a wrong move by the tenants. NYCHA has many "superblock" developments - the key difference is that they are vertical in form, rather than horizontal, which seems to be more common in Europe. But New York is an inherently vertical city, so it fits. The superblock concept is pretty much dead in America, as most cities have demolished their public housing. They looked good on paper, but the reality was quite different. But as far as I know, we have nothing like this in New York. While a few have balconies, none have the outer walkways like Robin Hood. How are these estates maintained? Is there a super or other maintenance people employed on-site? Does it have elevators? What are the apartments like? It looks like not much if any funding has gone into this site for many years. At NYCHA, we are spending many billions on upgrading our buildings - new roofs, new elevators, new boilers, repointing brickwork, and on and on. We have a staff of 500 architects and engineers/construction managers, plus an army of consultants to handle the work we can't do in-house, which is like 90% of the workload. Of course, the population demographics within NYCHA has changed over the years, which brought "issues" to public housing, like increased crime, but there seems to be no solution for that. Unlike replacing a boiler. But hey, $100 a month for a subsidized apartment in Manhattan is a good deal, even if you have to put up with a few "problems."
An interesting take on it indeed. One good point you raise is the outer walkways. I wonder who thought that was a good idea?
Having brick facing in a city of brick buildings helps soften the appearance.
'which brought "issues" to public housing, like increased crime, but there seems to be no solution for that' - there are plenty of solutions. but since we live in a world with an economic system which actively and shamelessly places profit over people, no profit can be made from those solutions, so they are not be pursued.
Sounds like for you work for NYCHA but haven’t been in an actual apartment inside of said buildings cause y’all buildings are HORRIBLE, sir.
& that can’t be blamed on the “Changing of the demographics” so take that subtle racism elsewhere.
@@LususxNaturae Yes, I work for NYCHA as I said. I certainly have been in apartments. Some were awful, and some were unbelievable. I remember going into one apartment - and the tenants - a woman, her baby, and the baby daddy, had big beautiful white leather furniture all throughout their apartment, with marble flooring they installed on their own. Glass tables, and a big washer and dryer. Neither of them had a job, I would say. So...it's a real eye-opener to see the "poor or low-income" having nicer stuff than I had at the time. What a racket public housing can be. Yes, some developments are not good at all, but others are really nice. Some of the buildings we have, you would not know it's public housing. The changing demographics is absolutely true, no matter how much it may hurt your feelings.
Another feature/bug which doomed RHG was that the private balconies, on the greens-facing side, are absurdly narrow, so narrow that they're completely useless for anything aside from fire escapes... or clothes drying lines (posh twats are clutching their pearls). You can't place even a small bistro table on them, let alone a chaise lounge or other patio furniture. Ridiculous.
'What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend." The Prince of Wales, 1984. This is what is required to have an effect!
The Smithsons look like proto-hipsters.
With the mandatory Chinese paper kite on their wall.
Beatniks. Probably read Jack Kerouac and listened to beat poetry. Original cool cats. Always the middle class, well educated who try to be edgy.
Same with hippies , they needed a rich parent or relative to bail them out.
@@pegjames188 If you're contending all hippies had rich parents or relatives, that's just bullshit.
@@deaddoll1361 Indeed...plenty of Hippies were from Working Class backgrounds in the Midlands or Scotland.
I never thought the site of a building could send me into spiraling depression.
Leaving aside the questions of social engineering or architects being out of touch, my mind kept going back to the Colliers Wood Tower. I couldn't help wondering if those who voted Colliers Wood the ugliest building in London had ever seen Robin Hood Gardens.
This has nothing to do with social engineering. It's more of an example of architects being abstract artists.
So I Googled that and I'm sorry, but I have to agree with this dubious award. At least Robin Hood Gardens tried some interesting things, both conceptually and visually. It failed utterly and is an eyesore by modern standards, but it's not as grim and totally devoid of imagination as that Colliers Wood building.
I might suggest equally ugly in slightly different ways 😅. But really, I was giving a shout out to another Jago video on Colliers Wood Tower. If you haven't seen it, you can find it here...
ua-cam.com/video/1gRSP-VbTW0/v-deo.html
@@TreeMovies years of it being covered in shadecloth didn't help either.
@@TreeMovies There is a difference between and office block and a place to live and make home.
Remember white dog pooh? It looks like a cubist version. You can't polish it and rolling it in glitter wouldn't do much either.
Many years ago I served an apprenticeship at the docks in Falmouth. One of the older tradesmen had a saying "In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice they are very, very different.
My grandad used to live there when I was child. I used to play on that green. The new builds will suffer the same fate.
Indeed, I look at new build 'luxury flats' and all I see are future slums. All of them are god awful, every last one.
The Smithsons are high on the ranking of absolute worst architects ever. Their only celebrated work, the school you mentioned, is butt ugly on the outside, and inside it looks like the bastard child of a basement and a corrugated iron storage shack.
Every time one of their buildings are taken down, the world should celebrate.
And I say this as a staunch supporter of modernism and functionalism.
Agreed. Absolute eyesaw. Brutalism was an understatement and another term for cheap and nasty.
We can also celebrate the demolition of anything by John Poulson: hideously ugly buildings, many built through corruption.
The first giveaway is in the style name: Brutal-ism. I prefer Bomb-Shelter-ism. Or, "I can give a good deal on 4000 tons of concrete I can't shift, plus a little something for your holiday fund."
@@valvlog4665 Except that the name comes from the French "brut" ("raw or in its natural state"), not the English "brutal". It refers to the undecorated concrete. Possibly the worst choice of name ever. I mean, it's one thing for us to be all saying "Your building looks like crap" but if you call your style "Soundslikeitlookslikecrapism", you are just asking for it.
@@beeble2003 Like me, vast numbers of people would not know the etymology and take it on face as the English meaning, which visually appears to fit the style.
I was born and raised here I would love to give my perspective. I now live in the new flats. I must say I prefer robin hood as with the walking area there was a sense of community with the neighbours. Now not so much which I really miss. Let me know if you would like an I interview with me will be more than happy to answers questions and comments.
To the point of architects not having to live in these places: Ernö Goldfinger lived in Balfron Tower for a short time, but of course it was new then and he knew he didn’t have to stay
Goldfinger? Did he have a secret underground base under the tower?
@@ericpode6095 The 007 villain was actually named after the architect when Fleming became miffed at an eyesore building that Goldfinger had erected near the writer's home.
@@cargy930 Learn something new every day! 👍☺
I have a couple of videos on his tower blocks on the way!
@@cargy930 Yes - Fleming was a strong opponent of 2 Willow Way Erno Goldfingers development of 3 homes overlooking Hampstead Heath. An experimental terrace of modernist homes built on land purchased from Camden Council. Fleming though the designs were an eyesore and would ruin Hampstead, they're rather nice and now one is owned by the National trust - well worth a visit!
"It's kind of a dump. I'm paraphrasing there.". On the contrary I believe you are being totally honest there.
At best it should be used for short term residents who just need somewhere to live until they can find somewhere else i.e. students, migrants etc
I was doing some research on some old Brutalism buildings to use as models for the background of a comic I'm working on. Somehow I came across a picture of the Balfron tower and Robin Hood Gardens. I wasn't aware that these buildings were in England...I didn't even know the name of them until I saw this video. I assumed that they were relics of the fall of the Soviet Union.
One observation I’ve had of the success of housing blocks is climate. In Singapore ore Thailand in it works fine as people are dosed up with sun and vitamin d in the warm weather and a flat out of the heat is a relief. In poor old cloudy Britain this is not the case and the lack of garden or outside access makes people feel trapped and miserable, maybe I’m wrong what do you think?
You're very probably right.
Jago mentions Hunstanton School, by the same architects, and it's a great example of the climate issues you mention: According to Wikipedia, _The extensive use of glazing was a feature, but has become an environmental problem, as it produced a cold building in winter, and effectively a greenhouse in summer._
An excellent observation .
I understand studies have been done that show in the case of social housing, they should never be built higher than four stories.....in the sense that any higher, and people of low to moderate incomes and perhaps lower disposable incomes, begin to feel isolated, and and as you say, trapped and miserable. I have applied for new built social housing in my hometown....and it is five stories built on top of a seniors community centre. My only concern is that aside from the ground floor, which is concrete, the building is completely built of wood.
FMHammyJ That’s interesting as there was a report the other day that the inquiry into grenfell cladding system has been widened to include timber framed buildings. It’s coming out that the firebreaks between floors and properties are inadequate in real world situations. This is apparently going to make a whole new swathe of new build flats since the 00,s un mortgageable. It’s seems obvious even to laymen like us that building entire block from wood is asking for trouble. Maybe buy a respirator and have some climbing ropes stored in your flat after you move in.
4:55 speaking of 'out of touch architects', that advert for new flats from "only" £710,000!!!
£710k is cheap for London
@@dangerousandy speaking of a flawed system
I don't think architects ever price a building and I will bet you that not one of the Architects involved would feasibly be able to afford one of the flats especially as that will just be a studio apartment.
Oh c'mon, there's millions of Russian oligarchs and Arabian crude pumpers that need their investments.
That has nothing to do with the architects. Marketers insist on putting the word "only" before any price, these days, especially if it's a big one. Look at any car advert, for example.
I was brought up in a tower block and lived in one for many of my adult years and loved it. However, councils/housing associations tend to neglect them and to fill them with their worst tenants saying that they’re ‘hard to let’. When we first moved in my dad was the caretaker, something else no longer seen, and everyone thought them very modern posh etc. The caretaker kept an eye on things and maintained and cleaned communal areas, every tenant used to keep their bit of corridor clean, as in the old street system. One big flaw though was being unable to let young children play out without supervision in lifts and you lived 10 or 12 floors up you couldn’t keep your eye on them, so families with young children should never have been put in them. The materials they were built with, concrete usually, doesn’t look good for long so they become very shabby looking in no time. These flats look particularly ugly to me though, but the new buildings are still high rise and look no better, so we all go round again...as I said a flat suited me but my children were older, I was older and my dad kept them clean and vandal free but that was in the 1960s. One thing more that is a big problem is they have no gardens, I did miss that.
I would like to ask what does all that talk about council and such means? These were not in private ownership? Maybe that is the problem, buildings where people actually own a flat are mostly well maintained and colorfully painted, even these classic eastern Europe styled districts can be a pleasant places to live
I always think that there should be more common spaces like soft play spaces for young children and computer lab/homework help spaces for older kids also usable for adults job seeking or doing higher education programs. Residents who serve as playground supervisors/computer helpers get a small stipend that doesn't take away from any benefits they might be receiving. A concierge for each building is a great idea to keep packages safe and to keep track of who's coming and going, especially non residents. Also to put in maintenance requests. It'd be great if council flats were desirable enough that providing a flat as part of compensation was attractive to skilled maintenance professionals. If they live in the building they're taking care of they might do a really excellent job and enlist other residents to keep deliberate vandalism down.
@@bethenecampbell6463 that was always a problem, I think it’s cruel to put families with babies & toddlers in a high rise, they can’t just go out & play.
@@tomgirldouble3249 Absolutely it would be ideal if families with young children could have access to a safe play space where kids could just go out in the back garden and parents could watch from the kitchen window. But high density urban spaces need to go vertical. That shouldn't mean that little kids are stuck inside all day, though. I don't know why every other floor couldn't have an open air play space with little slides, climbing frames, ride ons and make believe spots like a play house, grocery store, or ice cream van. And a couple of comfy benches for supervising adults. People who live there need to be willing to watch each other's kids for a few minutes and work together to keep older kids from vandalizing common spaces. How good of an experience people have in any living situation has a lot to do with what they put into making friends and getting involved in the community. There are things that need to be done to help them so they have the time and energy to get involved.
They neglect them because it costs them money, and the councils never suffer any adverse consequences from it no matter how strident the public slaves are.
So this is what happened when they demolished Nonnatus House? 😀
In all seriousness, brutalist buildings are hard to love. I wonder when it was new if it looked shiny and fresh and compared to the cleared slums, a great step in the right direction.
The trouble is that these buildings were built out of rubbish materials, maintained on a shoe string, ignored by successive owners of the buildings and fell into their own pool of concrete fatigue and drug dealers...
Would it have been a better looking building had it been built in a different era? Would it have still had the same issues? Probably.
I’m not sure if it was worth saving or not - it’s pig ugly from any angle but it’s an important piece of architecture by influential architects. Like you, I am undecided.
They do look a lot better when they're clean and dry and under a blue sky. Which is to say, not very often, in Northern Europe.
Can´t remember were i read it. But an urban planer in my country, when asked about large housing estates and why they almost inevitable fail, answered the following: "You can stack rich people but not poor people"
I had a field trip there for a geography course back in university. This does bring back good memories from an academic perspective (brutalist architecture, social housing, tower blocks, regeneration, etc.), but probably not so good memories if I put myself in the shoes of the occupants of RHG. Personally, I think it's layer upon layer of problems that cannot be solved at once. Sure, you provide the bare essential of housing, but if its occupants are not harmonious and the surroundings are not managed well, it really is not worth it. I guess that's why the regeneration is taking place; to start afresh. All credit to the planners for trying to realise a vision that works in theory, but making it work in practice is another school of thought altogether.
Either way, a good throwback to that field trip I went to.
I feel that just like tigers, humans need to have lots of space to live in. Crowding is always a fail.
nonsense, uncontrolled overpopulation is the answer.
@@gewizz2 And who would you kill to solve overpopulation? Who would you forcibly sterilize? China tried to fix overpopulation and it didn't work. Instead, we must respect human life and recognize that humans have always reproduced more than was needed to maintain any given population level and barring a mass extinction human populations must be expected to increase. Therefore governments must plan for that. The colonization of space must be a distant goal, but allowing even impoverished people adequate space and facilities must be the immediate rule.
@@playwithmeinsecondlife6129 i hear you charles, and what you say makes sense, but i am more inclined to favour nature, trees, animals, etc, humans to me are a terrible thing, so many of them, most of them unsightly fat pigs, with pig minds too, humans are a disgraice,
@@gewizz2 Yes we are. And the worst thing about us is the lack of charity and fellow feeling we have toward each other.
This was great, and very thoughtful. I'll only add that as monstrously ugly as this building is, I'm not sure bulldozing housing regular people can afford and replacing it with housing that they mostly cannot is a huge improvement. Once again, and I will not tire of telling you, I love your thoughtful explorations into bits of microhistory that would otherwise be forgotten about. Cheers!
Apart from the important question of what people do to blocks of flats, there needs to be better understanding of what blocks of flats do to people. This is a prime example of reducing human beings to a grid reference in a big sheet of graph paper. Or if you prefer, to bees allocated to a cell in a hive. There is nothing in the architechture to confer individual worth to any one resident or family. It is interesting to compare Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. A very similar development, that descended to a state of seeming beyond salvation: eminently ripe for demolition. But the local authority, bravely, decided to save it. Look it up!
I think I'd rather live in a tree in Sherwood Forest than one of those concrete boxes. My next tree neighbours John Little, Will Scarlet and Alan A. Dale all back me on this. No matter how good the intentions, anything that is just endless slabs of concrete is inevitably going to end up looking hard, cold, isolating, grotty and dangerous. It's going to be filled with people who have no alternative but to be there, because a quarter acre block with a garden is well beyond their means, and the seething resentment at that will be mixed with vandalism and spray paint cans to create... well, housing estates.
Roger Scruton was right. this is the Cult of Ugliness. People and communities never thrive when their surroundings are soul destroying. Contrast the Royal Crescent in Bath built in 1774 and loved.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
The irony is that the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hoods day would make the roughest council estate look like Hampstead. It was well known as a really dangerous place because of the bandit who hid in it.
Also if you asked the average person in medieval times of they thought the forest beautiful they would say no as the aesthetic sense of the time deemed more orderly Landscapes, Pastoral lands and formal gardens as beauty, which show that such ideas are a matter of perception rather than fact.
"It's going to be filled with people who have no alternative but to be there, because a quarter acre block with a garden is well beyond their means, and the seething resentment at that will be mixed with vandalism and spray paint cans to create... well, housing estates."
Same exact thing happens in America. Except we've found it's largely tied to antisocial personalities - most people (even on the very bottom rung) will consciously try to move to someplace with less crime, but there's 10% who are simply lifelong criminal ASBO families who you could put into a luxury mansion and they'll have stolen everything and turned it into a crackhouse the next day. They bring the crime with them - the tower block didn't create them.
Hey, at least it wasn't built with an inflamable exterior. That's gives it a big leg up vs other estate housing blocks.
Yes, Grenfell Tower did occur to me too.
I was thinking that cladding the exterior would be a relatively cheap and effective way to hide dirty concrete, and unify the exterior, as well as hiding many ugly utilities. But of course, that opens so many complications now.
@@JaidenJimenez86 It is, the issue is the council broke the building fire regulations for this kind of building, alas, because they approve them they signed them off. It is against the regulation to bridge between the 'cells' of concrete with flammable material. Adding new requirements to building regs to meet emissions targets without fully understanding the existing regulations AND THEIR PURPOSE was a big deal there.
You can clad it exactly the same without using flammable, or indeed inflamable material, using rockwool over PIR, though it is a little thicker.
But yes, there is no big issue with cladding in general, but in a large building in the concrete cell style it should not be flammable. The only other concern is it can act as a chimney so you do need fire breaks, but they should've been there in the first place, and may have been.
I love this! I read a really good article (which obviously now I can't find) about the brutalist school of architecture and how the majority of architects designing these sorts of buildings actually lived in quaint Tudor cottages and lovely semi detached villas. They wanted to design these buildings, but they didn't want to live in them, and I think that's hugely telling. There's also something uncomfortable about the way a tower block squeezes poorer people in one big box, stacking them all up, out of the way.
I can't imagine that anything moored in a sea of speeding, polluting cars is ever going to be a pleasant place to live. But at the very least, it could have been designed to a human scale, with a proper pedestrian infrastructure. The problem isn't so much the looks as the massiveness of the buildings. The buildings you show at the beginning, designed for the Festival of Britain, seem to have retained a proper scale and appear a much more pleasant place to live. But really, get rid of the cars.
my package was designed well
It looks like a prison with windows! Love the content!
Thanks!
That was very much the style back then. I recently looked at an appartment from that era and my first impression, when stepping out of the two person coffin, sorry, elevator, was of a corridor in a prison, not a communal hallway for 4 appartments.
The appartment itself was nice enough, if in dire need of being brought into the 21st century and unsuited to my furniture, but what spoiled the deal for me was I just couldn't see myself "coming home" to that sight every night. And that's coming from someone who's currently living in a high rise council appartment. Not saying our hallways have much in the way of pleasing aesthetics, but they're A LOT less bleak and uninviting.
Pretty standard in London these days to knock down council housing and replace with unaffordable housing no? Just replacing one rectangle with another newer rectangle but with more glass and 10x the price...
Yes they look for any excuse to gentrify an area. Look at what they did to the residents of balfron tower. Would rather they regenerate these buildings. They are very cool in terms of their shape
It is utter hypocrisy for all these architects who started practicing in the 60s and 70s to start campaigning for their unpopular buildings to be listed. They spent their careers arguing that historic buildings should be knocked down and replaced with something that fits the spirit of the age. Now they're in their dotage and concerned about their legacy they want to protect their own failed structures.
Nick B: The Smithsons deserve a kick in the genitals.
I turned up on a site one day and asked the first lad I saw if there was architect there, he said "yeah, howdya know that?". I pointed at the classic maroon Saab parked outside.
The beauty of stereotypes is that they're often pretty accurate.
*Government Axiom No. 2:* _"Government, being nothing but a criminal syndicate, always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal, as the stated goal is always a lie."_
I grew up on the Barbican Estate, an adorable space to come of age, work, rest and play - but this is hideous!
BTW I'm falling in love with your voice and presentation style ♥️🏆
Thanks!
it was one of those "it looked good in white cardboard" projects (before computer animation took over)
Concrete buildings can often look good under a blue sky. And pretty awful under a damp, grey sky. You know, the ones we have in northern Europe.
Architects tend to fall into two groups. Those who try to design around how people live and those who design how they think people "should" live.
if it looks brutal then that's the feelings it will engender in you
The term Brutalism is not to do with the looks of the structures. It's something to do with the French term for raw concrete. Although I admit that doesn't sound very tasty...
I'd say brutalism can look good when done properly
@@foolsgold6970 actually, it does. early 15c., "of or belonging to animals, non-human," from Old French brut "coarse, brutal, raw, crude," from Latin brutus "heavy, dull, stupid, insensible, unreasonable" it is a loaded term in french.
The french word for concrete is unrelated.
...and now waiting for the deluge of cottage dwellers blaming perfectly fine buildings for criminality instead of the people that they were filled with
I live on a 34th floor of a public housing tower block in Hong Kong and thd only criminality i see around here is the odd granpa smoking in the park downstairs
Fine video Jago,as always,thank you from your faithful follower
It is possible for architecture to encourage better or worse states of mind, which can affect mental, and to a lesser but still relevant degree, physical, health. Not enough to cause or prevent such problems of criminality and the like by itself, but still of some relevance. More the final straw than the root cause, if you take my meaning.
The surrounding social and economic situation are much more relevant, if course.
@@laurencefraser exactly,but that magic thinking that you put a drug dealer in some apartment and suddently will become a saint still prevails
@SteelRodent Only the buildings aren't the cause, they're a byproduct of the economic situation themselves as well. You can tell that pretty quickly by the fact they're made as efficiently and tightly packed as possible in order to be as cheap as possible. They were never going to be filled with professional upper middle class people nor are they in the locations that those people desire.
You could build giant fake cottage buildings full of flats but looking like they should be in the quiet english countryside. But the fact it's cheap mass housing; with the associated residents, cut corners, poor maintenance and most likely a local area deprived of good economic opportunities, will still win out over the style of the building.
Likewise, you can have ugly giant concrete blocks that have insanely expensive and luxurious apartments in them, only you'll find those in the heart of cities rather than in the cheapest plots going.
i suspect if the blocks had gone over wholesale to the hong kong community that feels they have to come to the UK that might have been no bad thing.
The StLouis MO development that failed was the demolition section of Koyaaniskatsi. Once demolished nothing was done to replace those towers.
Hunstanton School is now known as Smithdon High School. Hard to miss as completely out of place in North Norfolk! Another excellent video Jago.
Thanks!
I do take fault with this idea that every building should be 'ignorable' - fit into the context so much that you don't even notice it - because otherwise how will architecture progress? The style of little flint cottages are completely unsuitable for a learning environment which needs lots of light & space ect...
@@ThingsiHateLots Concrete isn't progress. It's just ugly.
@@egbront1506 concrete is just a material, its what you do with it which can determine whether its considered 'ugly' or not
Brutalist architecture - the clue is in the name.
It’s based on French “ *brut* “ meaning strong 💪🏽 ... they were designed AFTER THE NAZI BLITZ. Hence, focused on being bomb proof.
Actually it's associated with the phrase "Béton brut" meaning "Raw Concrete." With a(n over) focus on form created from concrete poured in place and adopting the textures and patterns of whatever it was poured into. Much of it was infused with the post war optimism that we could reengineer society through reengineering our urban form, but with precious little focus on how these places would work as homes, offices and cultural spaces in the long term
The problem is it doesn't age well and quickly become an eyesore
it's brutal
Shithole is another
Maybe it should be preserved as a museum to the failures and horrors of modernism with exhibitions about the misery inside the modernist utopia.
Kind of like those museums you build in old jails, dungeons, gulags and concentration camps. including wax figures of the depressed inhabitants, and criminal outcasts.
"Let's create a new style we will call Brutalism, then fill it with the dregs of society and see what the phycologists make of it, should be a good wheeze".
"OH LORD, they took our joke seriously and built it, theres our reputation shot to pieces"
It was designed to be a solution to the post-post-war housing shortage and wasn't full of the 'dregs of society' when it was first occupied. Sink estates happen with neglect.
"Brutalism" comes from the French "brut", meaning "in its raw or natural state", not the English "brutal". It refers to the buildings being made of naked concrete rather than covered in decorative elements. It wasn't the architects who decided who'd live there, but their clients, the city councils.
I don't like brutalist buildings, either -- at least, not in northern Europe, since any concrete looks pretty awful when it's damp and under a grey sky -- but your description of their architects isn't really fair.
@@eattherich9215 sink estates are created by councils putting the dregs in one, if only there were only enough for one, place.🤔
Fill a tower block or one of these monoliths with the cream and the situation would be different.
To say estates create the dregs, sorry must try to be PC disadvantaged hoodlums, is very simplistic. Good manners create contentment whatever the situation. Fill the Ritz with the drags, sorry again hoodlums, and see what happens.
Having said the above, with tongue very slightly in cheek, even I might start to be depressed by living in one of these monstrosities .
@@beeble2003 the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. Architects should trained out of having an ego before they are given their first pencil. Architects should design to please the viewer, ie general public, not a tiny cohort of fellow delinquents and vandals .
@@chrisstephens6673 Anyone who wants to design large buildings is going to have an ego. The architects in this case _were_ trying to please the people who lived in these buildings: they were aware of the failings of tower blocks and were trying to make something better. They failed utterly, but they were trying to do the right thing. It's silly to pretend that architecture is just some self-centred conspiracy against the common man.
I don't even know where to begin on how horrific this piece of architecture is. There are no words or phrases adequate enough to describe the stomach churning direness of this estate.
Since you ask... I think it's as dreary as my own Northwestern Washington state. I mean the architecture and the general environment both. Your videos are absolutely amazing. Thank you!
Don’t experiment on the poor! They deserve traditional, beautiful, and dignified spaces and not to be trapped in some mad architect’s vision.
So they should build their "beautiful, traditional, and dignified spaces" themselves. No one would object.
how about the poor going to work and pay rent?
@@michaelmullin3585 Same vibe as "if your homeless, just buy a house."
'Red Vienna' experimented on the poor. Google the 'Karl Marx Hof' and form your own judgement.
@@VictorSneller It's nothing to do with minimum wage, it's supply and demand and if the poor have 5x what they have now, so will the rich, ie hyper inflation. The only solution is to build up or out. Nobody DESERVES anything if you wan't nice, work for it. That said If the UK keeps importing people who will become competition for space they should think about abolishing green belts.