Battery farms in sky

Starting in the Fifties, the people who thought they knew best built multi-storey monstrosities. With the same disdain, they forced others to live in them . . .

T hey were to be Britain’s ‘streets in the sky’, bringing futuristic home comforts to former slum-dwellers and Blitz survivors.

Some 6,500 local authority tower blocks were built in their post-World War II heyday.

But many proved to be highrise dead- ends. And, in the very worst cases, death-traps.

The Grenfell Tower inferno is the latest tragedy in the troubled history of British multistorey living. That it has occurred as we are witnessing a sharp revival in the construction of sky-scraping apartment blocks is a timely reminder of the hazards they can present.

The French modernist architect Le Corbusier is regarded as the father of the residential tower block.

his vision of building vertical communities using concrete rather than brick — his first and most influential multi-storey estate was in the sundrenched city of Marseilles — chimed with the desperate housing needs of post-war metropolitan Britain across the Channel.

Clearance of the insanitary, low- rise slum areas of our Victorian industrial cities started in the Thirties. But by 1945 a further four million homes had been destroyed or damaged by the Luftwaffe.

Prison

The residential housing crisis had grown acute. Many local authorities were drawn to the high-density Le Corbusier model that was under construction: build upwards rather than outwards.

It was to prove a long and painful lesson in the pitfalls of urban planning.

Britain’s first residential tower block was The Lawn in harlow New Town, completed in 1951. It had ten floors and each of its 40 homes had a south-facing balcony — and private indoor lavatory. The concrete core was clad in brick and the whole development surrounded by public space.

The Lawn seemed to herald a brave new world. In fact, it was a false dawn.

Much of the developments that followed were far larger and fashioned in the Brutalist style — characterised by simple, block-like forms and raw concrete construction.

And while views from the upper floors were often spectacular, the human scale was lacking. The blocks resembled factories where their residents often worked — or prison wings.

Warrens of concrete walkways, stairwells and steel-lifts did little to encourage regrowth in uprooted communities. Instead, they fostered antisocial behaviour and crime. Nor were these ‘ streets in the sky’ suitable or safe for children.

What’s more, many were built on the edges of towns, where land was cheap but residents were poorly served by transport links and amenities.

Above all, the building materials and techniques soon proved to be shoddy. Corners were cut — sometimes as a result of corrupt relationships between local councillors and construction magnates.

Not surprisingly, the concrete facades did not wear as well in the British weather. Doors did not fit, roofs leaked. The communal heating systems did not work. Many new high-rises were prefabricated off site and bolted together like a Meccano kit. engineering and safety standards were not adhered to.

Le Corbusier’s Utopian theory quickly became a dystopian reality. The tower block boom reached its zenith in the mid-Sixties, when it accounted for a quarter of all new public hous-rises became higher.

When completed in 1967, the 31- storey Red Road flats on the estate in Glasgow made it the tallest residential development in europe.

The following year saw work begin on Trellick Tower, perhaps Britain’s most famous and controversial residential skyscraper. Less than a mile from Grenfell, it was regularly voted one of the ugliest buildings in Britain.

Designed by fashionable modernist architect erno Goldfinger, its construction began at a time when an incident suddenly challenged faith in skyscrapers.

early on May 16, 1968, a gas stove exploded on the 18th floor of the new, 22- storey Ronan Point development in Newham, east London.

It caused one corner of the tower to collapse. Miraculously, only four residents were killed with another 17 injured.

It was later proved that the prefabricated building method — used on others like it — had an inherent weakness.

When one panel was forced forward by the explosion, the wall above collapsed like a pack of cards. Inevitably, commissions for new tower blocks slowed.

Meanwhile, Trellick became known as ‘the tower of terror’ as criminals exploited the lack of any concierge, meaning anyone could roam the block unchallenged. Vandals sabotaged a fire hydrant on the 25th floor — causing a power cut throughout the tower over one Christmas week.

Corridors became the haunt of drunks, drug addicts, sexual predators, prostitutes and rough sleepers. Muggings were a daily fact of life.

One of the last and most notorious examples of Britain’s tower block building programme was the sprawling Aylesbury estate in south London. When completed in 1977, it was the largest in europe.

Tragedy

Twenty years on, Tony Blair made his first speech as prime minister there, describing residents as ‘forgotten people’.

In 2009, tragedy struck again when a fire at Lakanal house in Camberwell killed six people and injured many others.

The 14-storey block had no fire sprinkler system and Southwark Council (which owns 300 tower blocks, more than any local authority in Britain) was fined £570,000 for safety failings.

Separately, an investigation two years ago found only 13 per cent of councils that owned high- rise residential accommodation had fitted sprinkler systems.

No wonder an estimated half of the tower blocks built in the years after the end of World War II have been demolished.

By 2000, Glasgow’s Red Road was a semi-derelict dumping ground for asylum- seekers, like many other sink estates across the country, and over the next decade they were emptied and flattened.

Shoddy

The old North Peckham estate, where ten- year- old Damilola Taylor bled to death in a concrete stairwell in 2000 after being stabbed, has gone. So, too, has the Aylesbury estate nearby.

Grenfell, like many others, survived and was ‘refurbished’. Perversely, Trellick became a trendy ‘high-rise for hipsters’ — with a veggie cafe.

And, as London’s population swelled, housing was at a premium and foreign investment poured into the city, towers began sprouting up again.

elsewhere, the 47- storey Beetham Tower in Manchester became the tallest residential building in the UK in 2006.

In the same year, a law made it obligatory for all new highrises to have a sprinkler system — but wasn’t back-dated to make sure existing blocks were given them.

The boom continues. More skyscrapers were built in Britain last year than in any previous year and at least 60 will be built in London in 2018.

Previous generations ripped out traditional town centres to make way for thousands of high-rise buildings. Many now say it’s our generation’s duty to act now — and pull down what remains of these dangerous, ageing monstrosities.