The Great Estate: The Rise & Fall of the Council House

When the monolithic Heygate Housing Estate

materialised at the foot of the road where I lived,

it wiped out the house where I was born,

the tenements that housed my ancestors

as well as shops, schools and churches.

It was 1974. The overcast summer of a global recession.

But the prospect of a better future brightened those sombre days.

Those of us in the rising generation loved it here.

We welcomed every breeze block that brought change.

I guess the estate brought the future closer to home in an area that was dominated by the past.

I remember being dazzled by the Persil whiteness of the fitted kitchens

and the stairwells seemed to head to heaven and away from the slate grey streets below.

I guess we thought this was the modern world and it was ours for the taking.

This estate was built as a taster for the future

yet, at the tender age of 37, it's derelict and it's ready for the demolition men.

Homes like these became part of a landscape of ASBOs and crack dens

that helped sound the death-knell on social housing.

The Heygate's legacy is one of failure

and there are few, I think, that will regret its passing.

But for me, this place, the Heygate, is part of a much bigger, brighter story.

It's part of a revolution and something as important as the birth of the welfare state

or the introduction of secondary education

and something that's often neglected.

It's a chapter in the history of British council housing.

# I can remember when this was the future... #

We really thought that my dad had won the pools and got us this massive house.

It's not that we thought it was owned by the council. That was our house.

At its peak in the mid-1970s, council housing provided homes

for more than a third of the British population...

We lived there 50 years ago.

..marking one of the greatest social revolutions in modern history.

The idea of being able to put the light switch on...

Even now I should imagine there'd be thousands of people

give their eye teeth to have a place like this.

Council housing began with a bang at the start of the 20th century

and ended with a whimper 80 years later.

So how and why did it begin?

Who was it for? Where did it go wrong?

And who is to blame?

The story of council housing begins here,

currently one of London's most sought-after postcodes,

colonised by artists and a media class seduced by its urban edginess.

But back in the 19th century,

Shoreditch was the epicentre of a post-industrial, over-populated metropolis

where poverty, vice, deprivation threatened to consume the entire city itself.

The bulk of the population are a kind of floating group of people

involved as hawkers, costermongers, washer women, shoemakers -

people that the Victorians referred to as the residuum.

Those people who'd been left behind

by the tide of progress. The original Victorian solution

was that the problem of poverty was the problem of the poor themselves.

But in the 1880s, there were riots in Trafalgar Square by the unemployed

and, camped out in Trafalgar Square, were dozens of homeless people.

That was considered to be a national scandal.

Many a zealous politician, Fabian, clergy man and journalist

highlighted the plight of the huddled masses.

In 1883, the Tory leader Lord Salisbury

proposed a Royal Commission for the housing of the working classes.

The impetus for the first in a series of Housing Acts that signalled dramatic change.

At the fag end of the 19th century, a radical idea emerged.

What if the state could house the working classes?

So here, in 1893 in Shoreditch,

on the site of London's most notorious slum, work began on this.

Britain's first ever council estate.

In 1890, all local authorities were granted the option to build homes.

The newly formed London County Council, the LCC,

responded first with these 23 red-brick tenement blocks.

Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement,

each was individually designed under the supervision of architect Owen Fleming

of the Authority's "housing of the working classes" branch.

The buildings were named after villages along the Thames

and built on boulevards that extend from a central communal bandstand.

Fashioned from the rubble of the dismantled slums themselves.

Do you feel like you get a sense of history when you're sat inside your flat?

Definitely you get a feel that

you're living somewhere that's got history to it.

I think that's what's driven my passion.

It was the start of something, I suppose you could say, revolutionary.

The Boundary Estate was officially opened in 1900 by the Prince of Wales.

Over a century later, it still provides social housing to thousands of council tenants.

Although its tenement blocks echoed the social housing

of Victorian philanthropists, such as Peabody and Guinness,

the idea of bringing housing into the public realm

would radically reshape Britain throughout the new century.

You know, it's all very well renting a couple of rooms

in someone's property, but you haven't got that sense of...

belonging.

But for the slum dwellers whose homes it displaced,

the Boundary didn't entirely succeed.

Of over 5,000 people who were evicted from the old slums.

Only 11 moved in to the new estate.

Rents were too high, rules and regulations were too restrictive

so the remainder moved on to slums in near by East End neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, it was the hope of the LCC that the so-called respectable working classes

would prosper, move on, maybe to better neighbourhoods

and those below would move in and learn by example

how to live respectably in decent dwellings.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the LCC continued to build homes in and around the capital.

But it took the carnage of global conflict to make council housing a national issue.

During the final months of World War One,

Britain's natives were getting restless.

The country was hit by strikes at home

while veterans were agitating for a better deal on their return.

The day after Armistice, Lloyd George's coalition government

proposed a policy to pacify the masses.

Sceptics dismissed it as a ruse to stave off revolt,

but it was the outcome rather than the motivation that mattered.

So this is the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919.

It says here, "An act to amend the enactment

"relating to the housing of the working classes."

And when you open it, you see Part One, it says, "It shall be the duty of every local authority

"to consider the needs of their area

"with respect to the provision of houses for the working classes."

This might not look like much, but this is a really revolutionary document.

This made it national. This is the point

where all local authorities were given the green light.

Lloyd George promised "Homes Fit For Heroes"

and it was now the duty of local authorities to deliver.

The policy was expected to survive only until 1927

while the fear of insurrection subsided, and private development revived.

Meanwhile, Britain needed 700,000 homes fast.

And the Government found inspiration in an idyllic housing scheme built at the start of the century.

So, Reenie, tell me what is it that you like about your house in Letchworth?

I just love it down here.

I wouldn't want to move from here now.

-It's quiet.

-Yeah, really lovely.

For 70 of her 90 years, Reenie Williams has lived

in a quaint English country cottage in Letchworth,

the world's first garden city.

The brainchild of social reformer Ebenezer Howard,

Letchworth was a privately funded project.

Its cottages were the vision of a sandal-wearing socialist

called Raymond Unwin, the founding father of the British council house.

Raymond Unwin was an architect who became inspired

by the Arts and Crafts vision, particularly that of William Morris.

Not only the decorative arts, but also Morris's venture

into socialism. Unwin started to explore the idea

of reformed working-class housing, not just in tenements,

the way that they'd been built in London and the industrial cities,

but the idea of individual houses with gardens.

Unwin committed himself to campaigning for decent homes for the working class.

He became the most influential contributor to this document,

the Tudor Walters Report.

Its recommendations underpinned the Housing Act of 1919.

And Unwin's garden cottages became the prototype for Lloyd George's homes for heroes,

including those on the biggest housing estate in the world.

Here in Becontree, 27,000 homes were built between 1921 and 1932

to entice an urban working class away from London's overcrowded East End.

Visiting the estate now, where every home has a plasma screen in the living room,

and more than a few have an old one on the lawn,

I can't help wondering how it felt for those survivors of the war

as they surveyed these streets on a damp afternoon in 1921.

Right, so here we are,

one of the very first homes at Becontree.

This looks like it's not been touched since 1919.

This particular house was built just after 1919. I'd say 1921-22.

When your family moved here, you had eight siblings from Bethnal Green.

Something like a downstairs toilet would have been quite a luxury.

Coming from the East End, it's fabulous. Front and back gardens.

-Yeah.

-Running water.

-Yeah.

-Inside toilets,

-bathroom.

-Yeah.

-Fabulous.

'Bill Jennings has breathed Becontree, man and boy.

'His family moved here in 1954.

'He served the estate as a housing officer for most of his working life.'

Your family with eight kids - all those families coming from the East End,

I bet they couldn't believe their luck.

I think one old lady described it as heaven with the gates off.

Yeah, well probably , I can understand it. You can sense what it must have been like.

It must have been massive compared to what they'd left.

There was something practical and paternalistic in both the layer of these cottages

and the manner in which the working classes were expected to live in them.

If you want to know why the council houses in Becontree and elsewhere at the time

are the way they are, it's all here in the Tudor Walters Report.

You can feel the influence of Raymond Unwin in this.

Unwin believed, almost religiously, that every room had to have a specific purpose.

He hated hallways, he hated landings, but most of all, he hated the parlour.

He thought that the parlour was a room that they just used

perhaps for Christmas or for somebody's funeral tea.

Why not throw the space into a bigger general living room?

This is where you see the distinction between what an architect wanted

and what some of the residents wanted

because the aspirational working class really wanted parlours

because it gave them the status.

It made them feel that they were on their way to becoming middle-class.

There's something very precise and prescriptive about the Tudor Walters Report

and this becomes really apparent when you look at the scullery cos it's here you see

that slightly paternalistic attitude of Unwin and his acolytes,

because they wanted the scullery to be the place where

the working classes cooked, prepared and ate food,

whereas in the past, a lot of that stuff had been done in the living room.

The scullery was being promoted to what we would now think of as a working kitchen.

Everything had its place. There was the mangle, there was the copper.

And there was the sink, which had to be 36 inches long

with a cupboard one side and a draining board the other,

and under the window so that housewives could look into the street

and keep an eye on their kids playing outside.

Becontree's council cottages prescribed a contemporary way of life with remarkable detail,

providing light, spacious homes for more than 100,000 residents.

As with the Boundary Estate,

the aim was to rehouse those dispossessed by slum clearance.

But once again it was the cultivated working classes that moved in,

families whose domestic conduct already chimed with the values demanded by their new landlords.

Monday, the rent man came and it was washday,

and Tuesday was ironing day.

Wednesday was a good clean through the house

and then Thursday was another washday.

Friday was shopping day.

And Saturday, you cleaned the house thoroughly for Sunday, for the weekend.

You took pride in where you lived.

I don't think that happens so much today.

Each new tenant was issued with a handbook in which rules and regulations were listed.

Failure to comply could result in eviction.

OK, what I've got here is the Becontree handbook.

It shows you just how specific these rules and regulations were.

Some of them are quite straightforward.

It says the tenants should clean their windows at least once a week.

Fair enough.

Tenants should have the chimneys swept once every year. That's OK.

But there are other things that are really, really specific.

The tenants shall use the back garden of the premises as a drying ground

but shall not otherwise expose to public view any washing or unsightly objects.

In this day and age,

if those rules and regulations were attempted to be applied,

there'd be protest meetings and marches and all sorts of things.

There wasn't anything like that in our days.

People never dreamt of anything like that.

This is the one I love. This is my favourite.

It says you have to lay linoleum within one foot of any wall,

so basically you have to leave a border all around the room.

That was basically when they came to decorate

so that they didn't damage the lino.

You had to have this wooden border all the way round.

They also kept the privets cut.

If they were cutting your privets and keeping your house clean,

they expected, quid pro quo, you should keep your garden tidy.

This all may sound very prescriptive,

but I think it's as much for the landlords as the tenants

because it was all a new experience, a new experience for both of them.

So I suppose they were really guessing because they had no idea,

either of them, had no idea how this two-way relationship would work out.

The paternalism that applied to the home

also extended into the social sphere of the residents.

The LCC was keen to make Becontree a teetotal town.

But the absence of pubs, as well as shops and markets,

cast Becontree as a town without a heart.

This was a dilemma that would plague local councils for decades.

Having given the working classes ideal homes,

how would it replace the culture and the neighbourhood it had erased?

# Ain't misbehavin'

# Saving my love for you... #

I was really looking forward to coming to Becontree,

not just because it was the first big adventure in council housing

but because it was that first big estate

that was built on the back of the Homes For Heroes initiative.

Even though you look back and think some of those rules and regulations

in the handbooks were particularly strident,

I don't think some of them would go amiss now when you see

clapped-out caravans and the broken TVs on people's lawns.

What I can't bear is that awful pinched Fabian approach

of trying to evangelise about people's social life by not giving them a pub.

But most of all, Becontree gave thousands and thousands of people,

from the East End and beyond a home,

and I think for that alone we should salute it.

Becontree's cottages came to exemplify council housing throughout Britain,

as 170,000 homes were built in the wake of the Housing Act.

But the individual cottage-style dwelling wasn't the only solution to the housing crisis.

The working classes of Liverpool were being offered an alternative foreign vision.

I've come a long way to show you this film from the '30s.

It's a fantastic film about Liverpool

and why Liverpool was important within the story of council housing.

And as you were all from major estates in Liverpool,

I thought it would be great to see what you think about

the estates themselves and what memories you have of them.

I'm introducing to you a film

dealing with one of the most vital social problems of our time -

housing.

It was this man, Lancelot Keay,

who introduced the modern flat into the lexicon if council housing.

Flats were part of a foreign tradition.

For the British, they conjured up memories of old squalid Victorian tenements,

an image that Keay would help to consign to the past.

St Andrew's Gardens is the most important

surviving example of Liverpool's very, very extensive programme

of integral flats, a series of very large estates

that ringed the city centre.

It's the only city outside of London

that's really committed to building flats on this scale.

This is due to the particular circumstances of Liverpool.

You've got a dockside economy, which is casually based,

and people need to be physically close to the docks every single day in order to get work.

So putting everybody out into council estates on the edge of the city

is not really going to work for a city like Liverpool.

The council's housing department looked abroad,

transforming the image of the flat by importing some European modernism.

It's borrowing very much from the so-called Horseshoe Estate in Britz in Berlin,

but the English housing standards of the inter-war period

were a lot higher than those seen in other countries.

The Tudor Walters report laid down minimum space standards,

minimum standards of amenities that the English were, quite rightly, proud of.

For the time, they're incredibly well-appointed, most importantly very spacious,

and you've got ventilation on both sides of the building.

You've got through ventilation which is a crucial sanitary aspect of these buildings.

You've got the idea that any internal corridors are less healthy than

an access balcony which is open to the air, and that's the means of access to all of these flats,

and the same with the stairwells.

So they really couldn't be more different from the dark, dingy

and often very disease-ridden slums that you see down in the city centre.

Liverpool slums were among the most densely populated in Britain.

A public health risk as much as a housing issue.

In 1930 the Ministry of Health, in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government,

instituted a five-year slum clearance plan.

VOICE OVER: 'Slums are gradually disappearing,

'giving way to new development in and around the city.

'Foundation stone, at the entrance to Gerard Gardens, was laid in 1935

'by the Right Honourable Sir Kingsley Wood, then Minister of Health.'

Government subsidies were available for the building of flats

on sites where slums had been raised to the ground.

The epic scale of the estates that emerged astonished contemporaries

and enthralled their new inhabitants.

My first memory of moving to the square

is actually being on the hand cart with my dad

taking the furniture down. We only lived about 400 yards away.

Going up all these stairs going, "Where'd all these stairs come from?"

Someone once said it was like living in a castle, and it was.

It was like a fortress.

All our friends lived there,

all the people you went to school with, but I think, because you knew all the kids,

you also knew the parents and there was a lot of respect at that time.

You always called the parents -

"Hello, Mrs Birchall" - you always called them by their surname.

You knew them, but more importantly they knew you.

That's a powerful commodity when you're a kid, the fact that everybody knows who you are.

I think that's what maybe separate the gangs of kids from the squares where we lived,

with the kids that hang around on street corners now who are totally anonymous.

I think that sense of belonging doesn't exist any more

and I think that's the key.

We all felt as though we belonged somewhere.

I know from personal contact with the tenants who move into the new dwellings

how much they appreciate the amenities provided for them.

I was six and we sat on the floor and ate fish and chips

the first day we arrived, which was lovely because it

was a lovely house and we ran into every room to see what there was.

It was lovely being able to turn the tap on and there was hot and cold.

The idea of being able to put the light switch on,

you know, some lights,

have your own bathroom.

It was just heaven to us kids, you know?

Came in from the landing

and there was a long hallway which was red tiles.

There were three bedrooms and a living room and a little scullery,

which we called the back kitchen.

Everyone got washed in the kitchen,

the little scullery, because there was no sink in the bathroom.

You'd say, "Who's got the soap?"

And someone would say "Winnie's got it," that's my other sister.

She'd be doing the step with it.

The difference between some property and this house and its surroundings

you can see for yourself.

The struggle to make both ends meet has ceased

and we're all perfectly happy and healthy.

Over time the flats that remain have been redeveloped,

they're now privately owned,

but visiting today, you still get a sense

of what they must have meant

for those early council tenants.

That house there was Mrs Bristow's.

-This bottom one on the very bottom, and then Fisher's.

-Fisher, yeah.

Of course... Where the chap has just come out of now...

Do you live in that corner house?

We lived there 50 years ago and we're making a film.

I was brought up there 50 years ago.

-And me!

-I wonder if it's just possible to just have a quick look?

-Oh, would you, please?

-Is there any way we can come up and have a look?

Are you sure? That's great.

-What number is it?

-It was 21B but it's not now.

Are you ready for this?

-How long since you've been here, Tony?

-50 years for me.

43 years for me.

Oh I see, they've knocked into that bedroom and made the living room L-shaped.

That's a much bigger kitchen and we had.

This is massive to what we had, isn't it?

The fireplace was there.

Radiogram in that alcove there. Oh!

-I can't believe this.

-Are you all right, love?

Yeah, just...

A lot of happy memories here though.

Absolutely.

You see where the little hut is now?

-Oh, yeah.

-That was where the swings were.

All the people along the landing, usually at the weekend,

would be out scrubbing their socks right as far as you can see.

The story of council housing in Liverpool isn't simply that of individual homes,

but of vast estates of flats and houses

that formed a vision for the redevelopment for an entire city.

Building was halted by World War Two,

during which the impact of bomb damage made the housing problem more acute than ever.

Council housing was becoming an essential social service,

providing permanent homes, more of a right than a privilege.

I'd love to know from you what you actually think council housing has done for a city like Liverpool.

I remember my mam's face when we first moved into that house.

It was... I just felt overjoyed for her.

There was me mam and dad, nine kids,

11 people in a two-up-two-down cockroach infested slum.

She wanted a brand new four-bedroomed corpy house,

not too far from where we were living thank you very much, and we got it.

And, I've got to say, like, my dad, he brought up nine kids.

We all worked, all paid taxes, we haven't been in prison or anything like that.

Nine kids in a very poor working-class area.

He went away to fight a war when he was a young man,

he fought every day of that war.

He came home and worked every hour God sends, you know,

and of course he deserved a Home Fit For A Hero.

He was a hero, you know.

We were entitled to that council house, you know.

It's not that we thought it was owned by the council,

that was our house, so me mam and dad spent a fortune.

They bought railings, you know.

They spent a fortune on the garden, they decorated,

they changed things around.

That was their house and they looked after it, you know.

It's interesting we're speaking now, it's just been announced that

you can only have short term tenure of council housing in the future.

That's pernicious. Just imagine somebody coming along and saying to us

"I'm sorry, your economic circumstances have changed, your mum and dad have got to get out now."

We'd go...

We'd be in there with baseball bats waiting for somebody to knock on the door.

"Try it now, this is our house!"

You know. It's just... It's ludicrous.

Just cos it's a council house, doesn't mean it's not yours.

In 1945, following a Labour landslide,

the Minister for Health, Nye Bevan, oversaw the creation of a welfare state,

in which public housing would be as universal as health and education.

A utopian vision of council housing for all, that led to the foundation of entirely new towns.

For me, this is where the story gets personal.

While I was still an infant, my uncle, aunt, two cousins, and assorted pets,

broke rank and left London for what seemed an impossibly modern town

beyond the capital's green belt.

My uncle captured his family's new life here in Stevenage

in a series of cine films.

For those of us that joined them on high days and holidays,

it was a place that seemed as alien as abroad.

When I used to come to Stevenage when I was a kid,

it was funny coming to a place like this where

there didn't seem to be anyone on the street,

apart from the town centre, but these cul-de-sacs seemed really quiet and suburban.

When you came into the gardens, you realised everyone was in their gardens doing something.

The utility room was fantastic because my uncle, he would always be filming,

and that's the place where he edited these little films.

which I didn't take much notice of at the time but now I realise it's a fantastic archive to discover.

In 1946, Stevenage became the first of the nation's designated new towns,

built to relieve Britain's inner-city population problem.

Providing not just the homes, but also the jobs,

that would bring a skilled urban working class,

including my uncle, to pastures new.

This was a place for skilled craftsmen

rather than unskilled dockers and whatever.

This is the go-ahead superior working class,

who get their nice house and garden and their good school

and their kids are encouraged to go on to university.

For Nye Bevan, this was the realisation of his new society,

where all classes would live side-by-side.

A world in which home-ownership was for an ever-diminishing minority

and council housing was for all.

This was symbolised by the historic decision in 1949

to remove the working classes clause from the Housing Act.

The proles were no longer made the priority.

Now council housing was moving on

and an increasingly affluent clientele was moving in.

In the early years, it's really about

getting buildings built because there's such a shortage.

But through the '50s, I think these come to stand for much more than that.

They are about giving people a better life.

Hopes for that quality of life

were evident from the modern pedestrianised town centre,

the first of its kind,

to plans for libraries, swimming baths, theatres and public art.

Sisters, Sharon, Christina, and Laura, were born and raised in Stevenage.

When their family migrated here from London's East End,

they became the guinea pigs for Bevan's classless New Society.

All our friends all lived in council houses.

They weren't all the same, there was lots of different designs,

but you never felt anybody was better than you.

We were all the same and that was one of the beauties of it.

I think I was in my late teenage years before I actually realised

that not everybody came from the same sort of environment as us,

because everybody here did.

I think it raised people's expectations coming to somewhere

where they had this high quality housing,

it really did change the way people felt about themselves

and their environment, and, you know, a great step forward.

This great leap forward prefigured a major rethink on the design of the home itself.

In 1959, a party of official-looking outsiders came to town.

They had one question for the locals.

How do we adapt the home for the affluent and flexible future?

The result reflected all that happened to the home,

after a decade in which consumerism, not utopian socialism,

had begun to emancipate the masses.

The Parker Morris Report.

It set out the minimum standards for a council house.

Kids were staying on at school, they were doing exams,

You had O and A-levels, they needed places to do their homework.

It was about making space more flexible.

That a bedroom shouldn't just be a bedroom, a living room just be a living room.

It was about hobbies

and that people were doing more than just huddling round the gas fire.

The report revealed that one household in three owned a car,

two in three had a TV set, one in five had a refrigerator.

You'd have had shops, music, and all of those new consumer durables as well.

The whole music thing was very much part of it.

We had a little record player and we used to put it on and be dancing round the living room to that.

The Parker Morris report duly detailed how many electrical sockets

and how much storage was needed for the floor polishers, mixers,

ironing machines, toasters and bread slicers

filling the homes of Britain's new affluent working class.

I always remember Mum buying a Keymatic washing machine

that you could front load, it was real state-of-the-art.

-It was, yeah.

-It changed our lives.

It felt like being part of a new revolutionary way of living, didn't it? That's what it felt like to me.

It sounds daft to say that but it really did feel part of a new generation.

Stevenage was the first of over 20 designated new towns

built throughout Britain up until 1970,

providing council homes for a population of over two million.

But the new towns made little impact on the slums that still blighted Britain's cities

and politicians feared building yet more houses,

encroaching further on the countryside.

From 1954, following yet another slum clearance programme,

this time by a Conservative government,

urban council housing began to head skyward.

A new wave of architects pounced on the opportunity to design towering high-rise buildings.

And this pair of influential theorists

came up with a concept of putting streets in the sky.

We regard it as a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living

in an old industrial part of a city.

The street was a known, functioning element of the neighbourhood.

That is, your first, as you were, contact with the world around you,

as a child, was playing in the street. So, I think the idea of

the street in the sky was saying, "The street has a lot of very good characteristics,

"can we take that into a high-rise solution?"

-Hello.

-Hello.

-I hope you're Lynn.

-I am, yes.

-I'm Michael.

Oh, pleased to meet you.

'In 1957, work began on Park Hill,

'over 900 flats that delivered Sheffield's urban poor

'from 19th century back-to-backs.

'Such estates may have a notorious reputation today

'but Park Hill's first settlers were thrilled with their futuristic high-rise homes.'

We saw our flat first through a letterbox and we were amazed.

"Oh crikey, we've got a new house!" Well, a flat.

We used to call it a house

because we weren't used to saying flat, of course.

We thought it were absolutely marvellous.

Previous estates such as Becontree had lacked the amenities

of the working-class neighbourhoods they replaced.

But Park Hill's residents found themselves at the centre of a self-contained world.

I think it looks a lot better than estates,

they're just houses, rows of houses.

But here, it's modern.

It were wonderment, you know, we had parks on us doorstep.

All the shops were together in one place.

From a hardware shop to a butcher's shop, wallpaper shop,

there were ironmongers, there were a chips and fish shop.

We used to have a bread van come, selling bread, milk.

"Hey, mam, there's a bread man coming round in a van

"and he's selling bread, and there's a milkman and he's selling chickens!"

Pubs all together, if you know what I mean.

My dad, he could go and get drunk on the inside without getting wet on the outside,

because he could go into every one round the landing, down the lift, straight in.

The best part about it is I come down six steps and I'm here.

He'd never move off here.

He always said, "No, we've got everything.

"Hot water, heating, what more can a working man want?"

As close proximity living is concerned, in general I think it's an example to the country.

Just be careful as you climb up on there. That's it.

'Architects from all over the world came to marvel at Park Hill's modern facilities.'

-So do we go that way?

-Yeah, this way.

'They also found homes that boasted state of the art utilities.'

So Grenville, where are we, where have you brought me to today?

Well, now, we're in the ducts,

which in modern-day language, it's a service tunnel.

These pipes carried underfloor heating, hot water, gas

and a thoroughly modern waste-disposal system

that Park Hill residents remember with particular pride.

To walk into a kitchen,

it just looked like a normal sink

and then once you looked into the bowl,

there were two plugs, a small one, and a big one.

All your food preparation, your plate scrapings, everything all went into there.

It'd take tin cans, it'd take bottles.

In the middle, there were a plunger.

You filled it up with water, with all your rubbish in and then you lifted that plunger.

Whoosh, it went away. Came down through these pipes

and it used to suck everything out and down to the boiler house.

Most of your other rubbish, your bagged up rubbish,

once a week, there were round about 15 to 20 tons,

and that went down to the incinerator and that heats water,

which is pumped round and comes round Park Hill as heating.

So what do you think this place gave to people

that they didn't have before they moved to Park Hill?

To sum it up, there's an old lady who appeared on a film a couple of years ago

and she says, "We thought we'd died and gone to heaven."

You know, people loved Park Hill and they loved the way it were.

You belonged.

Park Hill was a means of keeping the old neighbourhoods together in the city.

The council gave priority to rehousing families,

such as Lynn and her neighbours, from the streets it replaced.

I really understand how you think the streets in those old neighbourhoods, you know,

are here. The width of it feels like a street.

You said landing, it doesn't feel like a landing to me,

-it feels like a street.

-Yeah.

I can imagine over the years, your families and you lot have probably stood outside these doors,

had chats like this and even like a night like tonight, you don't feel frightened.

It's noisy and its busy, but there's no fear.

I miss that noise.

Completed in 1961, Park Hill marked the start of a high-rise boom

that became a defining feature of the council house cannon

from the late 1950s until the late 1960s.

# Since I was very young I realised

# I never wanted to be human size... #

Lifts took homes higher than ever. New factory-style building methods

produced flats quickly and inexpensively

and government subsidies were offered for high-density developments.

The taller the tower, the higher at the handout.

# Tall, tall, tall I want to be tall, tall, tall... #

We think we have here a site big enough

so that when it's finished you'll be able to smell, feel and experience

the new life that's being offered through your full range of senses.

In 1972, at the heart of a changing East End,

the Smithsons, whose theories had inspired Park Hill,

completed a sterling monument to the future.

Its first tenants, and the architect's son,

hold Robin Hood Gardens in high regard.

Well, I was three when I moved in here.

I can still remember the smell of the block, the newness of the block.

I absolutely love it.

You had to keep outside clean.

Windows had to be done at least once a month, with fresh nettings up.

-No, seriously, clean nettings!

-Really?

-Yeah.

-That's fantastic.

Cost a lot of money in nettings, but it always looked nice

and it always looked lovely from the outside.

Today, the pride Sharon clearly feels for her home

seems at odds with the reputation and reality of Robin Hood Gardens.

The estate was completed just 11 years after Park Hill -

11 years in which the high rise experiment had collapsed.

The decline began when many of the rapidly built tower blocks

that shot up from the mid-50s were exposed as cheap and shoddy.

Here in Birkenhead, these two blocks have lasted just 18 years.

Now, they're going to be demolished because they're literally rotten.

By 1967, the government had withdrawn its subsidy for tower-blocks.

And a year later, a gas explosion killed four people at Ronan Point in east London.

What I have done is to assemble a team of experts

to give me a preliminary report by tomorrow

on the factors that need to be taken into account.

Subsequently, the expansive deck access estates,

of which Park Hill was one of the first,

were blamed for fostering crime and breeding antisocial behaviour.

By the time Robin Hood Gardens appeared,

it already seemed like a fossilised idea from an optimistic past.

For one reason or another,

Robin Hood Lane became a kind of lightning rod,

a critique of the perceived failure of social housing.

It had a very negative effect on my parents' career

which was painful to them, because they'd built something which was clearly, in their view,

an improvement over the type of housing that their parents had lived in.

There's no collective memory of those conditions.

In the mid 1970s, it seemed that the homes that had been built

to replace the slums were becoming slums themselves.

But this was part of a bigger picture,

the downgrading of all council housing.

No longer perceived to be a step up, but a step back.

A rise and fall that is epitomised by the story of an estate

that was hailed as the town of the 21st century.

# I'm the urban space man baby

# I've got speed

# I've got everything I need... #

Thamesmead emerged from marshland in Woolwich in 1968.

A mix of houses, maisonettes and high rise flats,

it promised to learn from the mistakes of the past.

One minister declared that it would be,

"The decade's greatest achievement."

It opened with a fanfare,

the spotlight falling on the first family to move in.

I read that your wife said that moving here

was the greatest day of her life.

I mean, obviously apart from marrying you!

Oh, at the time, yes, of course it was,

and I suppose until the day she died.

We felt elated to be chosen

to be the first people on Thamesmead.

'The Gooches had been on the housing list for all 14 years of their married life.'

Harry! Don't be so nosy, you old git, and get off there!

HE LAUGHS

'But when they moved from rooms in a 19th century house

'to a maisonette in a 21st century town,

'the view from their new home was a building site.

'The family were the sole inhabitants on an estate that was a long way from completion.

'They hoped that the world outside would soon be as perfect as that within.'

I feel like I'm going back to the future here, because this is what

-the future looked like in the 1960s in a 21st century town.

-I suppose it did, really.

We had two toilets, which we never had before.

-There was three bedrooms upstairs, plus a study.

-Plus a study?

You see, that's so grand.

The lounge and the kitchen were something we'd only ever dreamed of.

Everything's fitted.

You've got your washing machine, tumble-drier, your gas stove.

This was the place where you had something to eat,

and then you could come into the lounge.

You know, you've got a really, really big lounge.

that's the difference between that and unfortunately, where we lived in Peckham.

You can see how things have changed, because it's kind of open plan now.

-You've got this door. Presumably you can pull this. Can I pull it?

-Yeah, by all means, yeah.

-I feel like I'm going to pull the whole of Thamesmead down by pulling this!

-No!

If I was a kid, I'd have had a field day with this.

We didn't know of anybody that had got a house or a maisonette like we had.

-I think this is my favourite bit.

-It's mine too!

Even now, I should imagine there'd be thousands of people give their high teeth to have a place like this.

Despite the view outside, the Goochs were proud of their new home.

And when they were eventually joined by neighbours,

they, too, felt privileged to be making the step up to council housing.

There was seven of us in a two-bedroomed flat in Hackney.

I was only six and my mum went and dropped me round my auntie's.

Then when they come and got me, they brought me here, to Thamesmead.

I walked in the house, oh my God! It was so big, it was so, so big.

And then my dad turned round and said, this is our new house.

Everything was so new and we thought we was really rich,

that me dad had won the pools and got us this massive house.

Tracey's family typify that first generation of council tenants everywhere.

They felt privileged to be swapping their archaic,

over-crowded rented rooms for modern, spacious homes.

Once past the council's notoriously strict vetting procedure,

they were offered a home for life,

their sons and daughters given priority on Thamesmead's waiting list,

so successive generations could make this their home.

My dad had to have references from his work

to get even a look-in on Thamesmead.

It seemed like when we moved in, on that week,

everybody moved in that week.

It was like, right, this is a new place,

everyone's going to be moved in all together.

'The optimism of Thamesmead's first inhabitants

'is captured in a remarkable series of photographs.'

Right, everyone, I've called you here today because George here

took some fantastic photographs in the '70s of everyone

that went to school in Thamesmead, and I think the photographs tell their own story,

not just about Thamesmead but about everyone here and everyone that's in the photographs.

George Plemper arrived in Thamesmead in the summer of 1976.

He became a chemistry teacher at the local school and, in his spare time,

he began to document life within this new urban landscape.

-Is that George?

-CHEERING

Everything I've heard about Thamesmead over the last 30 or 40 years,

it's had such bad press, but when you look at those photographs,

there's a real joy and a confidence within the faces of those kids.

Thamesmead was made up of people from the East End, from south London.

There was people from Nigeria, Biafra.

And I do think that there was a sense of hope and expectation

about what the future was going to hold for them.

Is that Tracey?

-CHEERING

-Tracey!

-I don't know her!

I was a right mess!

That cardigan as well that I've got on, was two-years-old,

cos I wore it one year and then when another photo come up,

I still had it on!

That's me!

There was an optimism for a bright new future, there was an optimism.

'For my dad, it meant going to somewhere which was better for us.'

-Amazing.

-So you're the same year as my brother, Paul.

We were privileged, I think we was.

Oh, this is a great picture.

'It was the efforts and attitude of those early settlers that made Thamesmead work.'

But in time, a considerably short time,

everything changed for the 21st century town

and for council housing in general.

I remember by the end of the 1970s, Thamesmead had become a dirty word.

If you heard someone had moved there, it was like they'd been

dispatched to some distant gulag of the outer limits of south-east London.

It had become shorthand for council housing

and council housing had become characterised by

antisocial behaviour, crime and dysfunctional families.

It was not only ignorant outsiders that harboured this view.

Your house here is lovely. Everything's organised and

outside, it seems like it's a completely different experience.

-Yeah.

-I just wondered how you feel about that divide.

If you wander round Thamesmead, it is an absolute hole.

Before we moved here, we ticked all the boxes.

I had a job, I could pay my way and we were told

quite categorically that everybody on Thamesmead would have to pay.

Fortunately or unfortunately,

they decided that their policy was no longer viable.

They had to change the rules and had people that were on subsistence,

not that there's anything wrong with people on subsistence.

But that changed everything.

By the mid-1970s, more than a third of the British population lived in council housing.

But at the moment it reached its peak, its image was at its worst.

It needed reviving or a rethink.

Instead it got the death sentence.

We've set in hand the sale of council houses and flats.

We have to move this country in a new direction,

to create a wholly new attitude of mind.

When Margaret Thatcher swept to power in 1979,

the building of council estates came to an abrupt halt.

In 1980, she introduced a right-to-buy scheme,

that offered a generous discounts to established tenants.

A million families purchased their homes in that first decade alone.

But before Thatcher dealt the fatal blow,

the council housing system had begun to implode,

failing to serve the local people on the housing list.

And it wasn't the Tories who were to blame for that.

In 1977, it was a Labour government that made a symbolic and I think fatal change to the Housing Act.

30 years earlier, it removed the working-class clause, making council housing available to all.

Now, it reversed that and the homeless became the priority.

This idea of housing based on need was open to all sorts of interpretation and abuse.

This was the latest in a series of changes that jettisoned those policies

that had previously favoured the long-standing locals waiting to be housed.

Strict vetting procedures,

once a defining feature of estates from Becontree to Park Hill, lapsed.

Initiatives such as Thamesmead's sons and daughters scheme

were abandoned, deemed to be discriminatory.

Estates such as the Heygate,

which for me was once a snapshot of a promising future,

became dogged by sub-letting and itinerant tenants.

By the 1980s, it seemed the noble motivation behind council housing

and the achievements of its formative years

were all but forgotten.

But even now, state housing remains on the political agenda.

A new coalition government has introduced plans

for a further overhaul of the council housing that still exists.

It's new residents will be expected to reapply for their tenancy

every two years and move on if their circumstances improve.

This could destroy the one thing that consistently made it a success

in the face of all that threatened to turn it into a failure.

This idea of council housing as temporary is nothing new.

It's what the LCC hoped when it created the Boundary over 100 years ago.

But council housing was soon providing permanent homes

and it was that sense of permanence that gave so many British people,

not least of all those people I've met in this film,

a reason to have an investment in their homes, in their estates, in their neighbourhoods.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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