Byker Wall Building Sights

BBC Four Collections - archive

programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

I was asked to pick a 20th-century building that I really liked.

Now, when you're asked something like that,

the mind turns

to the grand

and the mighty -

to the big monuments, to the big guys.

But I've come here not because it's great, nor even because I like it.

I don't know about that yet. This is what we're going to find out.

It's one of the best examples of modern council housing.

It's big and it's small, it's cheap and cheerful,

it's cheeky and it's clever.

It's kind of like a

pomegranate.

It's fruity. Hard edges,

and soft, sweet places inside.

This is the Byker Wall.

Really, it's a hard, thick skin.

It's also an architectural epic - a legend.

It was designed by Ralph Erskine in the late '60s

as the first phase of a slum-clearance programme.

His prototype was the walled city, an

arctic fortress,

a barricade against the winter weather.

But the Byker Wall is a defence

against that inclement characteristic of British cities - the motorway.

MUSIC: "Carmina

Burana" by Carl Orff

The wall reveals its function.

A wall is a wall is a wall,

until you walk through it or live in it.

Inside, these streets in the sky are safe and secure.

They face the light and the landscape.

For people who once had no horizon beyond somebody else's roof,

here there's free access to the sky and the cityscape.

And that's a gift, isn't it?

That architecture can contribute to a community.

For a neighbourhood that once looked into nowhere but a back yard,

there's real pleasure and privilege in the possession of this landscape.

Byker began with a tree bank.

It's got a fifth of the city's total trees

and it's got 3,500 beds of shrubs and flowers.

Each pip in the pomegranate grows and grows and

grows -

so much so that sometimes the people feel crowded out,

or that the trees are stealing their light. And so they get them felled.

Philistines? Not necessarily.

This is an expression of Byker's democracy.

This is public housing and although the public who live here

aren't owners, they are organised.

And they get to influence the environment

beyond their own front door or their own front gate.

This building, for instance, was going to be here.

But the people protested, so it's here.

Private spaces merge with the public.

There's nowhere marooned, doomed,

undefended or indefensible.

And you've got to look really hard

to find anywhere that's wrecked or graffiti,

cos people aren't diminished by the place.

And people - particularly little people -

seem to take possession of the public spaces and make them their own.

But what does all this mean for architecture?

Is it modernist or postmodernist or what?

For sure, it abolishes aggressive phallic architecture

-

all those grey erections which puncture the skyline.

Maybe it's vulval architecture.

It's round, it goes with the contours of the landscape,

it's an enclosure rather than a disclosure,

full of nooks and crannies,

layers and levels and surprises.

Byker breaks with '60s brutalism,

bought off the shelf by post-war Britain.

It broke, too, with an older barbarism -

the private and profitable back-to-backs which, ironically,

became emblematic of

plebeian homesteads.

Erskine's Byker had to match the density of the old back-to-backs,

which housed over 9,000 people.

But every dwelling beyond the Wall has access not only to its back yard

but

to some other

shared, secret garden.

The new units were compact, certainly on the small side, and cheap.

This may not be architecture as art, but it's infinitely artful.

The plastic balconies to maximise the light,

the blue tin roofs that cheer up a landscape that once was dour,

and the wood, rough panels.

They're all ingenious design solutions but, more than that,

they're clever economic compromises to meet the stiff cost constraints

imposed on public housing.

They look flimsy and flighty but, for all their fragility,

they've had remarkable stamina.

They've been up for more than 15 years

and they give a fresh inflection to the meaning of modernism.

This is the new age of plastic and paint.

There's humour here and a kind of honesty. It is what it is.

There's no mock Tudor or Georgian grandeur

to give dignity to a boring suburban semi.

The project's tribulations come less from the non-traditional design

and the unorthodox materials

than from economic mistakes

and political mismanagement.

The district heating system, for instance,

is expensive and inflexible.

It's a folly of its time.

But Byker doesn't suffer from many of the epidemics of British housing,

like condensation.

British homes leak heat like shedding

tears,

but that's not

so so much in Byker, because of the unorthodox design.

And then there's repairs.

That word is the tenant's lament everywhere.

Contractors hired by the council take weeks and weeks,

nay months, to fix things.

And that drives a person crazy.

The crusade against council homes means that tenants,

unlike owner-occupiers,

enjoy no subsidy, no tax relief.

So although Byker is the most popular council estate in Newcastle,

people leave because it costs more to live here

than on this subsidised private estate.

Contractors and direct works

are geared

up to

40,000 traditional

homes,

not 2,000 with tin roofs.

And yet Byker's a pioneering kind of public housing,

which isn't just user-friendly - it's worker friendly.

This is an epic development.

Street by street, the old slums were cleared

while, street by street, the new Byker was built.

It's flawed, of course, but at least, unlike most of its contemporaries,

there's a bit of democracy here.

It's both monumental and modest.

It's a social space

and domestic.

There's something light-hearted about this place. Something lovable.