The Flat Dan Cruickshank: At Home with the British

In this series,

I'm uncovering the history of the ordinary British home.

I want to explore the homes that most of us live in

and that most of us take for granted.

From Tudor cottages and Victorian terraces

to post-war high-rise flats.

I want to reveal how these often ordinary-looking homes

are in fact extraordinary.

Pull!

In each episode, I'll search out the stories

of how and why our homes were built,

and I'll explore the evidence of centuries of design and redesign.

Since I've got you here, I can explore your plumbing in detail!

Our homes offer a intimate portrait of our public and our private selves.

From the glass in our windows to the gadgets in our kitchens,

they lay bare how healthy, how wealthy, even how happy we are.

She kissed the walls.

We have a lot of common. I'm always kissing architecture. So she loves her terraced house!

I'll uncover the architectural details which have shaped our social

history and transformed our daily lives.

TOILET FLUSHES

I want to go beyond masonry and mortar and come face-to-face with

residents past and present.

I want to understand how they lived and how they transformed buildings

into homes.

This is the Lincoln Estate, Bromley-by-Bow, East London.

A landmark council housing scheme.

It was designed in the late 1950s,

opened in the early 1960s,

and at its heart are two 19-storey blocks of flats.

The construction of these twin towers was part of

a nationwide explosion in high-rise living.

Over 6,000 skyscrapers sprung up in the post-war era,

forever changing the architecture of Britain's towns and cities.

The very term "flat" evokes

an aura of modernism,

of futuristic living high in the sky.

And these towers were indeed a very modern solution to an ever-present

national problem.

In the wake of the Second World War,

Britain was in the grip of a housing crisis.

Two million British homes had been destroyed or damaged

by the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign.

But the impact of the war was just one part of a wider malaise.

The terrace, the solution to a Victorian housing crisis,

had itself become a problem.

Dilapidated, overcrowded and often squalid.

By the 1950s, five million working-class Britons

were living in terraced slums.

Politicians demanded a solution.

And it fell to a group of idealistic post-war architects

to eradicate the problem.

They would shun the traditional house and garden

and embrace Continental ideas of high-rise living.

I want to discover how the high-rise flat became the answer to Britain's

post-war housing crisis and why this modern way of living became

loathed and loved in almost equal measure.

This one estate in East London charts, in microcosm, the story of

a bold architectural experiment to rehouse an entire class.

The idea of multistorey living had been around for centuries.

The Scottish tenement was essentially

a three-or-four-storey block of flats.

In Victorian London, mansion blocks were built for rich and poor alike.

Philanthropic trusts like Peabody and Guinness

put up subsidised homes for workers.

In smart St James's,

the 12-storey Queen Anne mansions so upset Queen Victoria in 1874,

spoiling her view of Parliament,

that new buildings over 80 feet high

were banned in the centre of London for decades.

100 years later,

British architects took the traditional flat and transformed it

to provide mass housing for working people.

They drew their inspiration from a radical new architecture movement

that was sweeping across Europe.

Modernism.

It turned its back on history and ornament to embrace the new, and had

its roots in the intellectual ferment of the interwar years.

Then, Bauhaus pioneers Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe argued

that emerging technologies permitted

a wholly modern, clean, minimal design.

At the same time, the man who came to epitomise the movement,

French architect Le Corbusier, was formulating a radical agenda.

He believed the new architecture had the power to transform the way

people lived and, with it, society.

His theory is exemplified by the Unite d'habitation,

a massive apartment block in Marseille that he designed in 1947.

Inside, each flat is laid out to reflect the utilitarian credo that

form should follow function.

But the Unite also embraced

street-like corridors with shops and cafes.

Its roof had a running track and a children's play area, all inspired

by Le Corbusier's belief in communal, collective living.

For some, he was a false prophet,

his ideal fatally flawed.

To others, a utopian visionary.

And amongst the devotees,

a generation of British politicians and architects.

These buildings, when designed,

were very much part of the modernist vision.

Now, they've been much altered since completion in 1962,

but the vision is still apparent.

They're still very abstract,

very functional in appearance, and the great thing is,

they stand as great sculptural objects in open space,

so that residents would have a mini park to enjoy

and light would flood inside.

In the 1960s, such towers were sprouting up all over Britain.

The Lincoln Estate was designed by the London County Council, or LCC,

Architects' Department.

One of their number was a young idealist, David Gregory-Jones.

He dreamt up the inner-city, 19-storey reinforced-concrete Lincoln

whilst living in leafy suburban Bexleyheath.

In the late 1950s, when David Gregory-Jones was developing his design,

he lived here as a lodger in the Red House,

this wonderful Arts and Crafts masterpiece

designed for and partly by William Morris.

At the time, the Red House was owned by Ted Hollamby,

a leading London County Council architect.

Now, Hollamby and Gregory-Jones had a shared vision.

They believed that architecture had a social purpose.

Its role was to improve the homes, the lives,

the environment of ordinary working people.

At first glance, modernism,

with its emphasis on industrialised mass production and clean lines, was

very different from the Arts and Crafts movement celebrated here,

which took curvy Gothic and handcrafted construction

as its inspiration.

But in fact, the tension and links between the two made the Red House

a ferment of debate.

There was a row brewing about whether hardline modernism

was applicable to soft old Britain.

In 1950s Britain, there were, I suppose, two strands of modernism.

One one could call, I guess, hard,

inspired by the machine age, mass production,

industrialisation and so on, the machine aesthetic.

And the other perhaps one could call soft.

And which did David Gregory-Jones pursue?

Oh, it's very clear,

especially when you're standing here inside the Red House, that

Hollamby and Gregory-Jones followed the softer, if you like, model.

Really based on the Swedish progressive housing programme of the 1930s

where you used vernacular materials, using colour and brick,

incorporating details like planters and timber cladding to kind of

give a domestic feel to this type of modernism.

Tell me about the influence that William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement

and of course the glorious Red House where we're standing,

tell me about the influence they had on British modernism

in the '50s and '60s.

From a very early age, Gregory-Jones really believed in

the social power that architecture could provide to people,

and he was a committed socialist. In fact,

he was actually a fully paid-up member of the Communist Party.

So he certainly shared the socialist values of Morris

and, in fact,

by living here with Hollamby and...

living in this communal lifestyle,

sharing activities and communal spaces and the restoration of this house,

he was really able to kind of play out those socialist ideals.

So they lived here in a Morris-like way?

Exactly. Imagine how exciting that must have been,

to not only be in the house that you've read about and heard about

and was integral to this whole Arts and Crafts movement,

but to actually live it yourself.

Whether working-class East Enders actually wanted to live in

a utopian paradise dreamt up by distant architects

was another matter altogether.

Many cherished their slum homes.

The terrace had given birth to a close-knit community

where life revolved around the tightly packed streets.

Working-class Londoners weren't ready for

the radical change of lifestyle offered by high-rise flats.

I've come to Tower Hamlets archives to gauge the depth of opposition to

the LCC's plans for the Lincoln.

The planning of the Lincoln Estate in the late 1950s

was a highly controversial affair.

That is made clear from these files of memos and letters between

the London County Council, Poplar Borough Council and the Government,

the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.

For example, this memo from the town clerk of Poplar Borough Council,

"Much of the proposed development arises from planning ideas

"which are not very closely related to practical living conditions

"in a borough such as Poplar."

Absolutely right, the ideas were Continental. Le Corbusier.

The great visionary schemes of Continental Europe for streets in the sky.

The LCC sustained its position in the face of opposition from Poplar,

and this is a memo within the LCC reiterating the benefits of the scheme.

"All living rooms would face south

"and would enjoy magnificent views across the river

"to the hills in Surrey and Kent."

Poplar point out that, "On the other hand,

"the Borough Council contend that the main outlook

"would be on power stations, gasworks

"and smoke and grime."

So, basically, you have here the vision of modern living,

the ideal state of modern living,

in conflict with the reality,

as pointed out by the people actually living in Poplar.

Incredibly fascinating.

Now, here we have a response from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government

addressed to the LCC.

This is essentially the planning consent.

The Government has supported the LCC

against the reservations of the local politicians

to build in Poplar, at this stage,

one 19-storey block of housing for local people.

The fierce local resistance to the estate was no anomaly.

The modern flat polarised opinion across the country

as community after community was changed out of all recognition.

In London alone, 100,000 terraced houses were bulldozed as hundreds of

tower blocks rose up from the ashes of the slums.

Planning permission in hand,

it took the LCC just two years to knock this area flat

and to start building the Lincoln.

In the summer of 1962, the first residents arrived,

standing in the shadow of the tower,

all of them council tenants lucky enough to be given a flat in this

futuristic skyscraper.

There was, like, about six people there

and there was six maisonettes available

and we had a choice as to what floor we wanted to live on...

..and I wanted to live on the first floor, I didn't want to go up the top,

so I just took the keys that was for the first floor

and I just let everybody else go and find theirs!

When I first moved in, I was amazed to think there was so much room.

Cos I thought, "Oh,

"I've got another tiny little flat,"

you know, that's what I expected.

And first day I went in, I thought, wow.

Really lovely. I was so chuffed.

Happy bunny, I was.

Sleaford and Gayton House were the tallest skyscrapers in London,

soaring nearly 200 feet in the air.

The entrance vestibule, rather arid, empty,

I suppose to discourage loitering.

Originally, it wasn't an entrance vestibule.

The ground floor was open and the ground floor

would remain available for public use and enjoyment.

I suppose one can see here concrete piers.

Very much in the kind of modernist idea.

Here we are, concrete, concrete here, and then I say,

open from back to front, a vista through the building.

The piers, or piloti, on which the towers rested

were the most visible sign of the Lincoln's debt to Le Corbusier.

To him, piloti were the expression of a structural frame,

allowing adaptable interiors

and ensuring the land on which the building stood

could remain in public use.

The piloti left the towers seemingly floating in space.

The towers were largely made of reinforced concrete

and it was this material that allowed the LCC's architects

to realise its space-age vision.

Concrete is cheap, versatile and incredibly strong

once reinforced with steel,

and it was used to create

pretty much every part of the Lincoln's towers.

Their internal walls, floors

and abstract pattern facades.

I'm at Cemex,

one of the world's largest concrete companies,

to find out how the Lincoln was built.

Concrete used in the 1960s,

is it significantly different to concrete used today?

It's similar in terms of its raw materials.

Specifications have changed massively,

but still made with similar raw materials to this.

-A coarse aggregate.

-Those are basically pebbles.

You may call them pebbles, we would call them aggregate!

-And then it's... I wouldn't call that sand.

-That is sand. That's...

-Water.

-Water, yeah.

-And this is Portland?

-Portland cement.

-Portland cement.

-This is basically...

-Clay chalk, which is heated up and then grained,

so the coarse aggregate gives you the stability and the volume,

-your coarse aggregate.

-Yes, yes.

-Your fine aggregate, the sand,

is giving you your cohesion

and then the cement there is your binder,

your glue, to ultimately give you your compressive strength.

OK, so now presumably one puts them in the mixer.

Indeed, yep.

I've got a whole beach here!

One large coarse aggregate.

Sand.

And now we can add our assembler.

OK.

Yeah.

-It's looking good already.

-We'll add our water, yeah?

Well, I can see why you got into concrete.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

But liquid concrete doth not a 19-storey tower make.

What happens next hasn't changed much in 60 years.

This is Great Eastern Quay

on the biggest new development in East London,

just a few miles from the Lincoln.

Project director Brad Coker is going to give me a crash course in

how to build a 200-foot-high skyscraper.

Steel reinforcement is added to the raw concrete

to give increased load-bearing strength.

This is crucial in tall buildings,

where the weight bearing down on lower stories is immense.

Bars of steel are joined into cages, ready to be used on site.

Can you show me what it would have been like to build the towers

on the Lincoln Estate six or so years ago?

Yeah, we've got the starter steel coming out.

They come out the ground, up to there,

then we've got the steel cage that we saw them making up downstairs.

This is the steel reinforcing for the concrete.

This is it. The strength within the concrete.

Yeah. And what are these?

Basically, what we've got here are little spaces,

so when the shutter goes on, they clamp onto there,

the shutter pushes up against that.

OK, I get it, the shutter, the timber mould,

this in fact gives us spacing

between the steel reinforcing and the concrete?

What you can't have is the elements getting through to the steel

and that rusting.

This one's about to go. You should get this one. That's a good one.

Once the wooden mould, or shutters, are ready,

the liquid concrete is pumped inside via this huge hose.

When the shutter is full,

a machine vibrates the concrete to remove any trapped air bubbles.

So this is the vibrator now, the vibration's going on.

That's it, they're doing that now.

Very quick. They will vibrate that from the bottom up,

they'll check the depth, and then that's left overnight.

So we have seen that pier being formed as we've chatted, that's it.

-That's it, done.

-Here we are.

The shuttering, or mould, has been removed

and here's the finished product.

The hard solid concrete.

-Concrete, yep.

-This was poured yesterday,

shutter was removed this morning,

and that's here now and will be for the next...

-..several years.

-Several years.

Eternity.

It's impossible to overestimate

the importance of steel-reinforced concrete.

Durable, structurally strong.

Cheap, and indeed rather beautiful.

It offered thousands of people the chance to have a home of their own,

and also when concrete was exposed visually,

as on the elevation of a building,

its rather tough and rough and brutal character

helped to define the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s.

That look gave its name to a type of modernism, brutalist,

which comes from the French "beton brut",

meaning "raw concrete".

Exemplified by Balfron Tower,

another extraordinary '60s building just a mile from the Lincoln.

But the Lincoln towers were more about rational and minimal design.

You might expect residents to be living in monkish cells.

Doors closing.

It works!

'But not so.'

Lincoln resident June Needham has lived on the 17th floor

for over 40 years.

-Hello.

-Hello, I'm June.

-I'm Dan.

-Welcome to my home.

Thank you very much. Can I...?

-Come in.

-Thank you.

Have a look round.

Ah, so very nice, the entrance lobby,

-and here, presumably, is the bathroom.

-Bathroom and toilet.

Yes, yes.

Originally, it would have been two rooms, separate rooms.

Yes, there was a wall down the middle

and then they said it would be nice

if we had it in one small room, but bigger.

-Yes, a bit more space.

-A bit more space, yes.

Your flat, the entrance, is at bedroom level,

so here's the bedrooms...

My bedroom.

And the spare room.

-Yes, they're big rooms, aren't they?

-Yeah. They are big.

-Generous.

-The other side is different.

Yes. You enter the other side, presumably.

They go into their kitchen and living room and they go up to bed,

whereas we go down to bed.

Would you like to go upstairs and explore?

I'd love to, thank you very much.

-I'll leave you to it.

-OK, I'll see you in a minute, maybe. Thank you.

'Gregory-Jones's flats are rather unusual.'

They're on two floors.

A design known as a scissor section.

Ah, now, the bedrooms are below,

and up here, the kitchen and the sitting room,

the living area, split-level living.

Very modern. You maximise...

..the space in every way possible, so lots of cupboards.

I suppose original little handle here.

It's a latch, isn't it? Oh, yes,

you press that and you release the button. Oh, OK.

Oh, an airing cupboard.

I guess there was a boiler in here.

Immersion heater now, and lovely detail.

Again, I say, to be efficient, efficient with storage space,

the architects designed these rather charming little sliding holders

for your clothes.

Oh, the kitchen. The kitchen is pretty compact, pretty small,

just a galley kitchen, really.

Very much a machine for food preparation.

The largest room in the flat, the sitting room,

and I suppose also it would have been the dining room,

being next door to the kitchen, dining room and table here.

And, of course, the whole wall here is made of glass,

allowing light to flood inside, of course,

but also offering sensational vistas,

prospects over London, looking south over the docks,

and another favoured modernist detail,

there's a very generous balcony,

allowing one to stand outside and get the air, take in the view,

but also get some exercise. It's big enough.

It certainly is like a street in the sky.

I couldn't go onto the balcony.

My husband, I used to stand right near it and he'd say, "Come on,

"come out here. I'll hold on to you,

"you're not going to fall or anything."

I said, "No, it's too high. I can't go out there."

But once I started going out, you can't stop me going out there now!

It's lovely, really lovely.

I didn't realise they were maisonettes,

and then when you walk through the front door and to the right of you,

there's stairs, and I didn't even...

I thought, "Where the hell do the stairs go?"

Although lacking the ornament you might find in earlier homes,

these flats are extraordinary.

They are supremely functional,

very generous in space and the main rooms are flooded with light.

They offered decent housing for ordinary working people,

housing provided by the state.

They were part of a social and political revolution.

When the Lincoln Estate was designed,

the London County Council had the largest and in many ways the finest

architectural practice in the world.

Indeed, it was responsible for the creation of

some of the most iconic modernist housing schemes in Europe.

I'm now on my way to see original drawings of the Lincoln Estate,

to see how it was initially envisaged

and how it and individual flats were laid out.

Elaine Harwood of Historic England is an expert on the work of

the London County Council's Architects' Department.

How important is the Lincoln?

Or rather, how typical is it of LCC developments of this period?

It's very typical indeed.

It's the real ideal plan of taking an old area,

retaining a few of the public buildings...

..like Frances Mary Buss settlement,

the church. Those sort of institutional buildings survive.

The roads get truncated.

I think Tidey Street's been chopped

to give you more space for grassland and play areas

for leapfrog, marbles, hopscotch.

And so into that...

..net comes a mix of low-rise houses for families,

made possible by having your one or two tall blocks,

so number ten is your block.

So the whole thing gives you 140 people per acre as your density.

A comprehensive development created to make life better.

Here's the ground plan.

What you do have that's a BIG advance

is a boiler room for central heating to the whole block.

This is one of the very first to have central heating.

-And it's communal central heating.

-That's right, yeah.

All the flats benefit. Hot water, central heating.

Everybody gets everything,

at presumably all much the same temperature.

More detail.

This is where we can talk about this amazing innovation here.

This is the section I need.

Helpful at the top.

We've got the main corridor

connecting all the flats to the left,

so you're coming in one side onto bedroom level

and going up those stairs,

across the landing,

to your kitchen and living room and there's your little outside balcony.

On the other side of the corridor,

you come into a little lobby,

into your kitchen, with your living room beyond,

and going upstairs to a landing and your bedroom,

and that's the crossover,

so one lot of stairs do that, one lot of stairs do that,

giving you your scissor section.

In David Gregory-Jones's design,

pairs of flats are stacked one on top of each other

in an elegant crossover layout, minimising wasted space,

maximising the number of people each block can hold.

It also means that all the bedrooms and living rooms are kept separate

on opposite sides of the building

and that each flat has a dual aspect,

with living rooms facing south and bedrooms north.

This was the first time a scissor section inspired by Le Corbusier

had been used in the UK.

It felt so big,

having the two floors.

I thought, "This is brilliant,

"this is, having two floors."

It's just like a house, really,

because your bedrooms are upstairs

and the bathroom's upstairs,

but obviously when they have to come downstairs to bed

and the bathroom, I think that's really weird.

The original plans for the Lincoln

envisaged paved children's play areas and open grassland.

People would flow from them into the ground floor

and the long internal corridors,

all of them completely open to the public.

A reimagining of Le Corbusier's internal streets, shops and cafes.

But here in London,

there wasn't the money or political will

to replicate Le Corbusier's model.

No shops.

No cafes.

It turned out to be a fatal mistake,

but one overlooked in the excitement aroused

by the Lincoln's embrace of technology.

First and foremost,

a lift.

'Lift going down.'

Without which the whole project would have been impossible,

as people laboured up 19 flights of stairs.

Lifts made high-rise living possible.

But they were expensive.

Lifts could add up to 20% to the construction cost of each flat.

Seems amazing. Also,

lifts produced among some housing authorities in the 1950s

a sense of almost moral panic.

They feared lifts would be abused.

Abused by joyriders, or by courting couples,

or abused by tradesmen,

who'd use them as public conveniences

and urinate in them.

Now we're going...

Oh, up.

Afternoon.

Today, the world's fastest lifts

travel at an eye-popping 50 feet a second.

'Doors closing.'

In 1962, the Lincoln's managed a mere five feet.

But it was enough to usher in the high-rise revolution.

Gregory-Jones's transformation didn't stop at the lift door.

Now, a bathroom with constant running water

would have been a sensational innovation for most families

moving into this block in the early 1960s,

families that had come from terraced houses

where often there'd be a bath in the kitchen.

To have a discreet bathroom

with constant hot water, literally on tap,

would have been amazing.

And here it is.

But I suppose more amazing still would have been

a private, internal lavatory.

Lavatories often then were in the yard outside,

in many cases shared with other families.

So, an amazing innovation.

A transformer of the quality of their life.

MUSIC: Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys

In the slums, 40% of households had no bath or shower at all.

Two decades later, and only 10% of us had to share.

Oh, it was...

It was out of this world to just go in there,

knowing that nobody else has been in there, you haven't got to share it.

It was so nice to have my own bathroom.

Lovely.

As developments like this changed Britain...

..it was a change that rippled through the home.

In the old Victorian terraces, the kitchen was the heart of the house,

a room to cook, eat and live in.

In the late 1950s,

compact galley kitchens like this were state-of-the-art.

Strange as it may seem,

the designs were based on ideas pioneered in Germany in the 1920s

by an Austrian architect called Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky.

She came up with something called the Frankfurt kitchen, which

essentially is what we would call a fitted kitchen,

where design meant that the kitchen could be small and compact,

every detail carefully considered.

The Frankfurt kitchen was envisaged as a laboratory or factory,

focused solely on the mechanics of cooking.

Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky used scientific time-and-motion studies

to demonstrate that women were being overworked in badly laid-out bases.

She minimised the space required for basic tasks.

Everything would be within easy, logical reach.

The kitchen was also built to a standardised design,

meaning it could be mass-produced and would be cheap to install.

The essential part of the fitted kitchen

was the integration of space-saving new technology,

such as the fridge.

The fridge removed the need for a cooled larder.

So, one big room could be replaced

by a relatively small object like this.

Now, here's the thing.

Let's put this compact galley kitchen to the test.

I'm about to cook my breakfast.

Cooked, of course, in this wonderful and now almost illicit product,

lard.

It's going to start the day nicely, isn't it?

A big, bulging, greasy sausage.

Excellent.

Lovely white bread.

You see how efficient I am now in my modern galley kitchen.

I simply stand here.

With a mere flick of the wrist,

it goes into the pan.

Preparing a lovely breakfast like this in a galley kitchen

is one of the easiest things in the world. I've hardly moved my feet.

Look. One step from here to here, and all is done.

Let's get this to the family next door,

panting for their vittles.

The kitchen's lovely. I love my kitchen.

It's just... I mean, it's so handy as well.

You cook there, and you go there.

You know? And you don't have to move much!

It's only meant for two people.

But even me and my husband in there, he used to say,

"Get out of my kitchen, this is my kitchen! Get out!"

Because he done the cooking.

The centrepiece of Gregory-Jones's revolution

was the way tenants used the most familiar room in the home.

With light flooding inside, and with this wonderful prospect,

this room was very much the heart of the flat.

And being made as large as possible at the expense of the kitchen

over there meant that it had to be multiuse, flexible.

That's rather modern, isn't it?

So, the family would have been here, as a sitting room.

Dining here.

Children would have been here doing their homework.

It was absolutely the focus, the heart of the home.

This was all part of a nationwide effort

to transform the way we lived.

Just before the first tenants moved in here,

the Government issued the landmark Parker Morris report.

Homes For Today And Tomorrow.

A very important document in the '50s and '60s.

It was a vision, really, of how people ought to live.

And it, importantly, set the minimum space standards for homes and flats,

ensuring people had generous space in which to live,

more space than in the dark and dim Victorian hearth,

the old slums.

Also, it examined the changing nature of life in the 1950s.

It observed all the laboursaving devices that had arrived.

The washing machine, the dishwasher, the Hoover.

Laboursaving devices like that meant more time for leisure.

Between 1950 and 1960,

the proportion of families with a vacuum cleaner doubled.

Homes with a fridge trebled.

And washing machine ownership increased tenfold.

Technology was starting to shape how we lived in our homes.

More leisure time meant more new leisure activities.

One of the great new activities that could be pursued at home

in the 1960s was the television.

In 1960, as many as two households in three had TV sets.

So, watching television replaced the old activity

of gathering around the fireplace watching coals burning.

BUZZING

And with the television...

came the television dinner.

Indeed, a social revolution.

This is BBC Television.

TV dinner was itself a reflection of a change in society.

As more women worked,

there was simply less time for domestic drudgery.

But as Britain changed,

so nagging questions started to emerge

about our new high-rise homes.

The utopian ambitions of planners and architects were revealed to have

a number of serious flaws.

The first crack appeared in the late 1960s.

What had seemed to be the solution for housing problem

became overnight a major problem itself.

We heard an explosion, we saw a load of rubble coming past the window,

and the next thing we knew, half the building was ruddy falling down.

-What did you do then?

-Well, we just panicked, up and run.

On 16 May 1968,

a small gas explosion on the 18th floor of a tower block,

just two miles from the Lincoln,

caused one entire corner of the building to collapse

like a house of cards.

Four people were killed

and 70 more injured in the Ronan Point disaster.

Clues to what went wrong that fateful day lie here

in the Royal Institute of British Architects' archives.

In the mid-1960s,

there was a radical change in the way tower blocks were built.

Concrete was slowly poured onto steel reinforcing on site

in the early developments, like the Lincoln,

giving buildings an inherent strength.

But this was too slow,

too time-consuming to meet the insatiable demand for homes.

The solution was to system-build.

Premade concrete slabs were bolted together as a kit of parts,

leading to a swathe of new identical high-rises across Britain.

Architect Sam Webb gave evidence at the official enquiry

into the disaster.

So, Sam, can you tell me why Ronan Point collapsed?

Well, it was built, literally,

like a pack of cards.

So...

each panel...

..and the floor slabs rested one on top of the other.

And what really held them together was gravity.

When you removed one of them, gravity brought it down.

-There were mistakes made, weren't there, during the construction process?

-Yes.

Well, they should never have built it this high.

It should only have been four storeys high.

-It was 22, wasn't it? Something like that.

-Yes, yes.

Now, these...

These are bits of the building.

That's a floor slab.

Oh, that's a floor? OK.

And this bolt was in the floor slab.

All the ones I saw, and there were lots, were never screwed down tight.

And all that was originally holding the walls

-and the floors together were these pieces.

-Never. That's it?

-That's it.

-That's not a bodge, that was part of the system?

That was part of the system.

And this was to stop...

..the floor sliding off the wall.

Let's have a look at this...

this photograph, which shows a floor.

Here's a wall that's now been removed.

Yes. From there to there should have been solid concrete.

-150 millimetres, six inches.

-That's a load of old paper here.

This is... Blue Circle cement bag.

Which meant that the entire weight of the building

was resting on these bolts, which bent them.

Right. And any extraordinary events,

-even a high wind or explosion, would topple it, as it did.

-Yes.

Ronan Point had very little in common,

certainly from the structural point of view,

with towers like those erected on the Lincoln Estate.

Yet its collapse sent a shiver through the nation,

leading many to reject the very idea of living in high-rise flats.

It wasn't just dodgy builders.

Design flaws and municipal penny-pinching

came to haunt estate after estate.

At the Lincoln, the barren open space outside the towers,

the lack of maintenance and management inside

meant that the open ground floor created by the piloti

became a dark, ominous wasteland.

The estate's open corridors

meant open sesame to opportunist criminals.

The estate was awful.

There was such a load of break-ins, drugs, everything there.

It was really awful.

Rapists we had there.

Blood in the foyer bit.

They'd been fighting and that, you know.

When I moved in, the stairways was terrible.

There was a lot of drugs going around,

they were sitting there burning foils, and lighters.

You'd see people sleeping, vomiting there.

It wasn't... The area was absolutely terrible, I would say.

When it was at its worst, we just got youths hanging around.

but there used to be a walkway through,

and there was a stabbing in there, and he died.

And then there was also a stabbing in the block above that.

A chef. There was a group of youths that stabbed him, and he died.

The 1970s were a dark decade.

High-rise living couldn't survive further cuts in council maintenance

as Britain's economy nosedived and budgets were slashed.

It wasn't just money.

Council homes were previously given to those in work and deserving.

But under the 1977 Housing Act...

..councils now had a duty to house everyone in need,

particularly the homeless.

This meant new residents were often vulnerable and troubled.

On the Lincoln, the pressure told.

Flat after flat fell empty,

squatters moved in.

One of them was Jenny Fortune.

But Jenny wanted to make a difference,

banding together with women on the estate

to create a people's food cooperative

to help the dispirited residents cope

with the soaring cost of living.

Living here made you want to take action, to bring about change,

to make things better for the working people of the area.

There wasn't community on that estate at that point, just the opposite.

People didn't know each other, they were scared of each other.

So one of the things we thought we could do was start a food co-op

and we would go off to warehouses and markets, buy the cheaper food,

come back and distribute it.

And I see you've brought along some publications,

I suppose from the mid-'70s,

and it says here, "People's Food Co-op, Lincoln Estate, Bow."

I remember that sign.

Women's Action, women's lib, isn't it?

Yes, it was all about the idea of how important it is

-to have community.

-This is incredibly interesting.

The estate. This is you collecting views, women, I imagine.

This is comments from people who lived on the estate.

I notice the last box simply says, "Help!"

Which is slightly...

This is a good one. Look. This says,

"The flats don't make it easy to talk.

"The architecture of these places makes it unnecessarily hard."

So loss of traditional community life,

-of talking over the garden fence, that's all gone.

-Yeah.

I remember distinctly the long corridor at the top,

that the doors were always shut,

you never knew who was there or who wasn't there.

-There was a lot of violence. I mean, I was attacked three times.

-Really?

One by some lads, with blood all over their hands.

One by a guy who was probably insane, with a knife.

Once shot at with an air rifle.

But that was common.

Fed up, the Lincoln's residents

started to agitate for changes in the way the estate was run.

One potential benefit of packing so many people into high-rise buildings

was to create open space at ground-floor level,

space that could be formed into delightful park-like gardens

for communal enjoyment.

But of course the creation of space itself was not enough.

The space had to be well designed,

well managed, cherished, nurtured,

loved.

At this period, rarely was that the case.

Often, the open space became abandoned,

became a dangerous no-go area.

That happened here.

Outside I was, like, feel a bit scared.

Normally there was... always there is a problem.

Six o'clock, there's no way we could have been out

and be safe walking on the street.

It felt like I was in prison, to be honest.

In the mid-1990s, many British council towers were demolished...

..written off as too costly to maintain, too expensive to repair...

..too blighted by social problems to be saved.

The fate of the Lincoln hung in the balance.

Morning.

But at the turn of the new millennium they were saved,

by abandoning some of their founders' most sacred principles.

First, public ownership.

In 1998, Tower Hamlets Local Council sold the Lincoln to Poplar Harca,

a housing association.

It's a measure of the desperation that the price was £0.00.

The idea was that the semiprivate Harca could borrow from the banks

where the council couldn't

and use the money to save the estate.

Hugely controversial...

but it worked.

We had the security door put on, which was great.

They decorated all the hallways, painted them all.

Put the new lifts in.

It's much improved, much better,

and it cut down a lot of antisocial behaviour now around.

I feel more safe to walk around.

And they've decorated the outside twice.

They painted it all white.

That was brilliant.

When they first did it, it was like a beacon.

You could see that block for miles.

Oh.

Here we are.

'Crucial to fostering a renewed sense of community

'was the reinstatement of a permanent caretaker.'

That's very efficient, isn't it?

-It's good.

-Was it waiting for us?

I'm joining Danny McFarlane on his rounds.

I suppose, you know, the tenants having you doing this for them,

you know, that's a big deal. It makes it more than just a block,

it makes it a home.

That's the way I look at it.

It's nice to be part of the community that I'm working in.

Of course things are pretty different now.

A few years ago, there wasn't a caretaker every day, was there?

No, not in the old days.

-Yeah.

-He would come in, come out,

but it was falling apart,

-the properties were falling apart.

-Yeah.

And the council didn't have the money to do them.

And the housing associations took over.

Not everyone will agree with me on that

but when you look at the properties now compared to how they was,

-they needed money spent on them and the housing association's done it.

-Yeah.

We've planted apple trees and pear trees next to the block.

-Yeah.

-When I was being brought up around here, if someone had said,

"We're going to plant apple trees and pear trees,"

I would have laughed at them. You know.

But this shows you the East End of London has changed...for the good.

It isn't just the Lincoln that's been spruced up.

Over the last decade, the public image of the high-rise flat

has itself been given an astonishing makeover.

Today, city-centre high-rise flats

built for private occupation or investment

are among the most sought-after properties on the market.

It seems ironic that high-rise living,

the centrepiece of the social housing revolution

of the '50s and '60s,

is now the mainstay of the private-housing boom,

transforming the country's skyline.

In London alone,

there are over 220 residential skyscrapers

being built or being planned.

Just a mile south of the Lincoln is London Docklands,

an area bristling with this new breed of privatised skyscraper.

Eager to discover their appeal,

I'm being sold a show flat by estate agent Adam Dockley.

Right. Ah.

OK, so we'll start in the entrance hallway.

We have a utility cupboard just on the right-hand side here,

which has got your boiler in it.

Through here into the master bedroom.

Windows are all west-facing, so you get the evening sun.

Comfort cooling.

Which is a modern word for air conditioning.

That keeps it at a nice balance?

Yes.

Then you come through here into the reception room

and this has the views onto Canary Wharf.

-Yes.

-And a bit of water.

And then your open-plan kitchen.

Everything's integrated in there, so oven, hob, dishwasher,

fridge-freezer, sink, all that sort of stuff.

How typical is this of high-rise flats being constructed in London

-at the moment?

-Very much so.

I think it is a typical layout, typical construction.

You know, floor-to-ceiling glass windows,

and obviously open-plan kitchens, en-suites and what have you.

So it is typical.

What sort of price is this sort of...?

This one's on the market at 650.

And typically for a two-bedroom in this area

you can go anywhere from 550 to 8-950, depending on how big it is,

what the views are, whether it has parking, the development itself,

if the development itself has 24-hour concierge, a gym, pool,

-all that sort of stuff. Obviously that...accentuates it.

-Yes.

To rent this flat would cost over £2,500 a month,

compared to an average of just £500 for one of the Lincoln's.

Ironically, they're the same size, around 700 square feet.

It seems that private developers have cottoned on to

what the idealists of the LCC realised.

These luxury flats are a reminder that now, as 60 years ago,

building high can be seen as one possible solution

to the city's housing crisis.

As the population of the city increases and building land becomes

ever more rare and expensive, there is simply nowhere to go but up.

The Lincoln's first tenants arrived in 1962, a lifetime ago.

Finally it seems original flaws in vision and design

are being overcome.

Today, the cherished idea of community is also returning.

I'm visiting a sewing school that has taken up residence

in the bottom of Gayton House.

Back in the bad old days this space was a dark, neglected void,

nestling between the piloti.

And we're going to learn how to finish the shoulder and the sides.

OK? You happy with that?

-ALL: Yes.

-OK.

In your view, has this community centre helped to build up

a sense of community on the estate?

Oh, yeah. It does. And it's funny because also you learn...

you learn the culture, you learn how people communicate with,

like, different nationalities and everything

-and sometimes you learn, like, new words.

-Yes, yes.

You know? From other languages.

-Yes. And you meet people.

-Yeah.

-And you get to know them.

-Of course.

-Strangers become friends.

That's why communities are so important, isn't?

It is difficult living in...

-Difficult normally.

-..a very busy city.

All that grows from communal shared activities such as this.

For much of the Lincoln's life,

the original fears of the old East Enders seemed borne out.

The Lincoln was an often divided and isolating place.

But today real strides are being made

to remedy the mistakes of the past.

No matter how much they offered me, I wouldn't move.

I love it there.

A lot of people say, when I say I'm in a maisonette on the 17th,

"How could you live on the 17th floor on a high-rise block?"

But they don't realise until you've lived there how nice it is.

It's really nice.

I mean, if my neighbour didn't see me for a little while,

she would knock to make sure I was OK and stuff like that.

So...which is pretty good.

It's really nice.

Now I think...

..it'll hurt me if I leave this area, to be honest.

I would never thought ten years back I would cry for this area

but probably I will now.

From its birth, the fortunes of the high-rise flat

have been in constant flux,

buffeted by the twists and turns of public opinion.

In the 1950s, they were embraced as an idealistic solution

to a national housing crisis.

In the 1970s, they were loathed as socially irresponsible

and a blot on the landscape.

Today, the private penthouse is synonymous with glamour

and a hefty price tag.

But with another housing crisis on our hands,

with an entire generation priced OUT of owning a home,

perhaps we all need to fall back in love with high-rise living.

Over the course of the series,

I've examined why our homes look the way they do.

It gets tighter.

I've seen how evolving technology...

That's it.

..changing lifestyles...

..and political decisions have all played their part

in transforming our homes.

What has also become apparent is that every era has thrown up

its own unique style of home,

designed and built to meet the specific needs

of that particular time.

Over the years, the buildings we live in have changed dramatically.

From timber-framed cottages to concrete-built skyscrapers.

But one thing has remained unchanging.

All these buildings have become homes,

and homes are always more than just buildings.

They are expressions of who we are.

They are, in their way,

a very particular history of the nation.