The shocking history of Britain’s tower blocks, from dream homes to death traps

At 5:45am on May 16 1968, there was a small gas explosion in Ronan Point, a 22-storey tower block in East London. Residents had only moved in two months earlier. The photographs of the collapse, which killed four people and injured 17, are unforgettable: each flat visible in cross section, flattened on one corner like a Cubist experiment in geometry. Afterwards, a letter to the Ronan Point inquiry demanded why dukes’ acres of green fields around London remained untouched – all while “human beings should be packed in concrete coffins miles high till the day they die”.

Holly Smith chooses a more ambiguous image for the cover of Up in the Air, her meticulous and compelling debut. Her main argument is that, during the latter half of the 20th century, the tower block became a “crucible for reimagining the welfare state”. She writes lucidly about high-rise living as a feat of modernist architecture, but her main concern is with tenants, not buildings. The book’s cover shows a woman with a blonde beehive standing by the window of a tower block adjacent to Ronan Point, her arms tightly wrapped around her young daughter. 

As Smith points out, she isn’t looking at Ronan Point, covered in scaffolding, but past it, towards another, more securely constructed tower block, half a mile away. It’s an image that neatly summarises the conflicts around which the narrative will turn: past versus future, realism versus idealism, individuals versus model communities.

The most immediate cause of the “state-powered mass housing drive” of the 1950s was bomb damage. But Smith carefully locates the idealism of post-war planners in a longer history of paternalism. Tower blocks, she argues, were only one of a series of responses to the failure and squalor of Victorian cities. When Raymond Unwin, one of the architects of Letchworth Garden City, published Nothing Gained by Overcrowding in 1912, he was advocating for widely spaced cottages rather than high-rise blocks and “half timbering and creamy roughcast render” rather than bush-hammered concrete and brutalism.

The practical problems of raising capital for new Garden Cities meant that only two were ever built, but Unwin’s successors shared his faith in top-down design by experts rather than organic growth. By the 1950s, green belts around major cities had been established to prevent sprawl, and land in inner cities was expensive and in short supply. As the housing historian Elizabeth Denby put it, the choice was now between “beehive building in the centre and chicken-coop building on the outskirts”.

Mixed developments, centred around tower blocks, presented a solution. By building up, architects could make space on the ground for new amenities – playgrounds, sports pitches, nurseries, shops. Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, the first of Smith’s six case studies, provides a spectacular example of this vision: 10-foot wide decks would function not as balconies but communal streets where “prams could be pushed and milk trolleys wheeled”, where there were no cars and it never rained. It was a fashionable idea. Sheffield’s streets in the sky were, Smith argues, a reimagining of Le Corbusier’s “rue intérieure”, sharpened by specific post-war anxieties about the erosion of community life.

The problem – and this is a problem replayed, in one way or another in every chapter – was that architects and planners were unable to make their vision appealing to potential residents. My grandparents, who were moved out of slum housing in Hillsborough in the 1960s, did not, unlike architects and planners, have a romantic view of the merits of living close to their neighbours in the centre of town. They wanted an indoor toilet, a garden, and, optimistically, a garage. They chose to move to a 1920s semi in Longley, on the northern outskirts of Sheffield. In this, Smith suggests they were typical.

Still, some residents took to living “in the air”. The chapter on Liverpool in the 1980s and 1990s uncovers “deep local affection for these homes in the sky” – and not only for the reasons given by one architect from County Durham. “When you live in the north of England everything is dirty, and you think, modern architecture is wonderful.”

Smith’s attention shifts slightly in the second half of the book away from tower blocks as an architectural and social phenomenon and to the history of tenant activism. Her third case study focuses on a radical tenants’ co-operative on a low-rise 1930s estate in Wapping; the fourth and fifth on high-rise tenants’ groups in Newham and Liverpool; the last on New Labour’s housing policy and the regeneration of two estates in Southwark. Compared to the tour de force of the book’s opening – its easy marriage of architectural description and an acute and sympathetic account of the lives of real tenants – these chapters are more closely worked. The lived experience of life in a tower block recedes slightly, hidden behind speeches, surveys and newsletters full of acronyms.

Up in the Air is, in part, a history of tenant activism as failure. Despite their vigorous activism, the 1980s and 1990s saw little improvement in tenants’ living conditions. The old complaints about safety and a lack of community were still there, sharpened by racial tensions and, by the late 1908s, anxiety about gentrification and the Right-to-Buy policy. 

In Newham, tenants campaigned against broken lifts and insect infestations; in Nottingham, doctors warned about mould leading to respiratory problems; in Stepney, the Ocean Estate Tenants Organisation condemned attacks on six Bangladeshi families in its newsletter. It is hard now to read the Evening Standard’s headline after the Ronan Point tragedy – “WHY? WHY? WHY?”– without thinking of the even deadlier disaster 49 years later at Grenfell. 

But, to her credit, Smith resists the easy parallel. When she comes to Grenfell in the epilogue, her description of the fire as a predictable atrocity is all the more persuasive because the picture has been built up piecemeal: tower blocks were, and remain, dangerous places to live. In this sense, Ronan Point was only the most visible failure of a pattern of shoddy workmanship and poor maintenance that affected buildings across the country. 

Smith is never condescending about the brave new world that architects imagined or the structural changes that activists demanded, but she lists their failures with quiet authority and mounting fury. Here, she is well served by her gift for the telling, often ironic, anecdote. A Sheffield Housing department memo praises residents for good behaviour in the “restful” and “tastefully furnished” pubs on the new Park Hill estate. 

Cumulatively, these details build up a devastating portrait of lives wasted and warnings unheeded. After a four-year-old boy called David Cash fell to his death from Abraham Point in 1983, the government minister George Young concluded that “living near the top of a tower block is just no environment for a family” – a view widely reiterated after Grenfell, where 18 of the 72 victims were children and babies. Up in the Air is a superb history of the tower block – and an urgent reminder of the housing inequality it failed to solve.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]