Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (29 page)

In reality, Lubetkin was too idiosyncratic to be a modernist, too liberal to be a Stalinist. Far from being a harmonious and cynical collaboration between municipality and architect, the Cranbrook Estate bears the mark of Lubetkin's despair at Bethnal Green and the London County Council, for which housebuilding had become a numbers game, where architectural vision and the sense of building a better world for working people had shrunk to sheaves of norms, regulations and pro formas – the first signs of an entry point for the privatisers (Harold Macmillan coined the phrase Right to Buy in the 1950s). Lubetkin had been thwarted in his desire to ally his ego and talent to progressive causes ever since he arrived in Britain from Paris in 1931. His early commissions were private flats for the wealthy and zoo buildings, including the extant penguin pool at London Zoo. Only for a brief time, when he worked with Finsbury Council in mid-century, did he come close to what he wanted: to listen attentively to the needs of residents and workers, then interpret their commission in his own way, with the support of secure, trusting patrons. Even then he was hobbled by postwar parsimoniousness.

When Lubetkin first expounded his vision for Cranbrook to his council backers, he started with medieval metaphysics and moved through to the Enlightenment via Copernicus, Descartes and Tintoretto. Was this the ludicrous self-importance of a man out of touch with working-class realities, or the sense of responsibility of an artist-craftsman who, despite his disillusionment, couldn't but take seriously the job of building homes for more than five hundred families? I prefer the second version. These were the days when councils' idea of consultation with future residents was to find out how many bodies there were and produce a piece of paper for the architect called a ‘surrogate briefing' which listed the number of units required to put them in. Seen in that light the secret message of Cranbrook
is
its stand-out otherness. The sense it offers to the passer-by that whoever was responsible for it was striving with unusual mental
ferocity to realise an obscure and arcane task he considered incredibly important is exactly the sign Lubetkin and his collaborators wanted to draw. A sign that read ‘No council block must be just another council block'; a sign that read ‘This matters'. He doubted even then whether it would be read. Towards the end of his life, he'd come to feel, he told Allan, that

Doreen Kendall was one of the original tenants of Puteaux House, one of the tower blocks on the Cranbrook Estate, completed in 1964. She's lived there ever since, in a two-bedroom, two-storey flat on one of the high floors; she and her late husband raised a daughter there. The common parts of Puteaux House are a little down at heel but the spaces are generous and light. Looking up from the lobby you can see the teardrop crosssection of Lubetkin's stairwell stretching up to the heights. In the early days children used to slide down the bannisters non-stop from the fifteenth floor to the ground. There's an intimacy and a familiarity within this vertical community. When I visited, we could hear somebody vacuuming the floor of the flat upstairs. ‘She does all the corners every Friday,' Kendall said.

With their discount and an inheritance, the Kendalls were able to buy their flat in 1984. Rents had been going up and they thought they'd have a more powerful voice in dealings with the council if they became leaseholders. On the estate as a whole, about a third of the flats are in private hands. Kendall was astonished when I told her that councils had been forced to use the money they got from Right to Buy to pay down their share of the government's general debt. ‘I thought it was in a pot, waiting to
be used again,' she said. ‘I thought there was a housing account that everything went into and they were just waiting for the government to release it.'

One by one, the original Right to Buyers are checking out of Cranbrook. ‘There's about fifteen that have bought and they've died off and the flats've been sold. Arthur downstairs died over Christmas, and his flat's for sale. Sonny over in Offenbach, he died just before Christmas and his flat's up for sale. They'll be bought by people to be relet on short tenancies. You get to know people, they're very nice, then all of a sudden they're gone.'

Kendall is a fisherman's daughter, born in Milford Haven in 1929, who got her school leaver's certificate and moved from Pembrokeshire to the eastern edge of London to stay with her aunt and look for work. There she met John, a tailor in Bethnal Green, and moved in with him to a private rental in the East End. They were offered a place on the Cranbrook Estate after their old house was demolished.

The standard left-progressive history of what happened in Bethnal Green is that democratically elected, enlightened municipal authorities rescued the poor citizens of the borough from insanitary, crowded slums and gave them modern, healthy places to live at a reasonable rent, places that often delighted their new tenants, before institutional neglect, competitive consumerism and budget cuts took the shine off estate life. But there's an alternative, subversive account, which suggests that at some point – perhaps the 1950s, perhaps even earlier – ‘slum clearance' began to merge into something else, the needless destruction of fundamentally sound old terraced houses which councils could have bought and modernised.

Kendall, who happens to be secretary of the East London Historical Society, subscribes to both versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter's Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,' she said.
‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia Road the houses aren't as nice. It had a huge old garden. The toilet was just outside the back door. It didn't worry us. It had shutters and brass fittings – it wasn't a slum. We were absolutely heartbroken when they cleared the houses from there.'

Rather than seeing the move from St Peter's Avenue to the Cranbrook Estate as an expulsion from Victorian East End Eden to concrete council tower block hell, however, Kendall embraced her new home with the same fervour. ‘I loved it,' she said. ‘I absolutely adored it. We had central heating so we didn't need to light a fire any more. My husband thought we'd moved into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.' The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of the city experienced by other East Enders who moved out to suburban council estates. ‘You knew everybody anyway because you'd moved in with them. It wasn't a case of making new friends.'

Kendall pointed to the armchair where I was sitting and told me Lubetkin had sat in that very place, asking how she liked her new digs. I was sceptical: perhaps it was Skinner, or Bailey? But Kendall insisted it had been the old man himself, strong Russian accent and all. ‘I always had the impression that he was the boss. We all used to come, all the mums, and meet him and he'd say: “How's things working?” He'd come in and have a biscuit and a cup of tea and he'd say that no matter what flat he went into, his décor went with the furniture. He was very proud that everything went together.'

What Kendall has taken from the ruins of her previous home is a determination not to let the authorities mutilate the grandeur and pleasingness of her habitat a second time. She pointed out all the ways the council has departed from Lubetkin and his partners' design. The blocks used to be heated from central boilers, but these were shut down and replaced by individual
boilers for each flat; as a result ugly white pipes now hang off the towers, like sheets knotted together by escaping prisoners. Originally the façades of the towers were cut into by deep openings that left the broad hallways between flats open to the air and gave Kendall a view of St Paul's Cathedral; after the 1987 storm, the council replaced them with blank steel shutters that close off the view from inside and, from outside, echo the bleak appearance of a row of shuttered shops. The green bosses studding the façades of the towers were originally made of concrete faced with glass beads that glittered in the sun; the council replaced them with aluminium boxes. Now when it rains, residents are driven mad by the sound of the drops rattling on the metal. The Historical Society's repeated efforts to get Cranbrook listed have been rebuffed. ‘The council doesn't realise what wonderful buildings they've got here,' Kendall said. ‘We're just the Cranbrook Estate.'

Lubetkin's last artistic statement to the world was his finishing touch to the estate. In his vision, a broad, tree-lined pedestrian boulevard was to lead from Roman Road through Cranbrook to the great open space of Victoria Park. The boulevard exists, but the council refused to buy the last sliver of land blocking Cranbrook from the park's chestnut trees and ornamental lake. Lubetkin filled the melancholy dead end that resulted with a trompe l'oeil sculpture of a ramp and receding hoops, which, as you approached it, seemed to take you towards some mysterious, hopeful future point. It's gone now; the council failed to maintain it. When I saw her, Kendall had just had a circular from the council announcing a new initiative to give children ‘a sense of ownership' of the estate by encouraging them to express themselves freely with paint on the walls around the old sculpture. The project was to be called ‘Bling My Hood'.

In 1963 the anarchist housing writer Colin Ward took a walk through Bethnal Green. He saw one of Denys Lasdun's new council blocks, admired Britain's first ever large-scale council housing, the handsome, Hanseatic-looking Boundary
Estate, and saw the demolition of the area's first great effort at philanthropic housing, the gloomy Victorian model workers' tenements of Columbia Square, funded by Baroness Burdett-Coutts under the badgering of Charles Dickens. The square was being knocked down to make way for another Bailey, Skinner and Lubetkin project. Ward saw temporary wooden housing, the ‘prefabs', some old enough to have gardens round them, some new. Bethnal Green's prefabs were, Ward wrote, ‘simply the latest, temporary exhibit in what is not only a sociologist's zoo, but an architectural museum. It's all there, every mean or patronising or sentimental or brutal or humane assumption about the housing needs of the urban working class.'

Bethnal Green is still an architectural museum, or perhaps, now that Tower Hamlets is officially Britain's fastest growing borough, an architectural gallery, a showroom for housing policies. New housing versions emerge. Converted schools. Converted churches. Converted synagogues. Converted hospitals. Since Pat Quinn moved to Whitechapel the match factory where her mother worked has been turned into private flats. The factory's old water tower was the platform from which the army proposed to shoot down airborne threats to the 2012 Olympics, which were held a mile from Quinn's old house. The borough teems with estate agents. Private developers are building and marketing flats along the Tower Hamlets stretch of the Regent's Canal – which not that long ago was a derelict, post-industrial, don't-go-there-after-dark place – as if the canalfront were the Côte d'Azur. And yet there are still an awful lot of poor people living here, old, sick, unemployed or just badly paid, in the economic shadow between London's two financial districts, the City and Canary Wharf. As everywhere in the South-East, there is a huge, growing, unsatisfied need for housing that doesn't require you to earn an above average income to afford. With the original council housing stock still dwindling and not being replaced, how is that need going to be met? One possibility is that slums
will come back. Already 40 per cent of homes let at below market rents in Tower Hamlets are officially classed as overcrowded. Tower Hamlets has been less forthcoming about overcrowding in the private sector than its eastern neighbour, Newham, which has proclaimed a crackdown on ‘beds in sheds,' but the problem exists. In 2011 a private landlord was fined £20,000 for ignoring orders from Tower Hamlets to improve two ex-council flats he'd bought and rented out. Each flat had two bedrooms and a living room: the landlord had split each living room in two to create, in all, four tiny bedsits. At one flat he'd tried to expand further by building what inspectors describe as a ‘lean-to'. One of the flats – damp, cold and unsafe, infested with roaches and bedbugs – had seven people living in it. A new fad is ‘rent to rent', where somebody will rent a flat and then squeeze subtenants into the available floor space till they're making a premium on the rent they pay the original landlord.

Another possibility is that housing associations will come to the rescue. They now let to many more households in England than councils. What are they? And how did so much come to hang on them?

One of the oddest things about the privatisations of water, the railways, electricity and the rest is that they were framed as binary possibilities: stay or go, stick or twist. Those who had a stake in the outcome were either for privatisation, or for the persistence of state ownership. Other forms of organisation weren't considered. If there were proposals for another way that was neither the nationalised status quo nor stock market flotation, they went unheard. With housing, when Right to Buy came in, an alternative already existed, alongside private and state ownership. Housing associations had existed in various forms since the Middle Ages, philanthropic organisations set up to house the needy. They aren't always charities, though sometimes they are. Technically they're both ‘industrial and provident societies' and ‘registered social landlords'. They're run on commercial lines – they borrow money at commercial rates, they may build
houses for sale or for market rent, they strive to avoid losing money – but they're forbidden to make a profit, they don't pay dividends and they don't have shareholders. Whatever surplus they make is put back in service of their primary function, which is to provide low-rent homes for the less well-off.