Instances of a changed society

Ian Waites: In May 1964, my family moved into this two-bedroomed council house on the Middlefield Lane estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. It was brand new, and had a very 'Contemporary' turquoise front door with a kind of parabolic concrete canopy over it. It had Formica kitchen 'tops', a TV aerial socket, and a 'picture-window’. The estate was one product of local and central government policy to provide new housing for working-class families, and it was characterized by Modernist ideas in architecture and planning. As such, it was very much for the moment, rather than for posterity. Posterity however has not been kind to this estate, which has been subject to a process of ‘planned neglect’, driven by strident critiques of Modernism, and by waning state policy and social support. The purpose of this blog is to help reverse that situation. It will chronicle my research and thinking on the history of this very provincial piece of post war planning and architecture, and on the English post war council estate in general. In 1979, nearly half the British population lived in local authority housing. To me, it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.

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Space and Time

August 16, 2015

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The Radburn Idea 1: nothing lost and a good deal to be gained

... It would appear that there is nothing to be lost and that there may be a good deal to be gained by pursuing the Radburn Idea further, provided always that those who do so take the trouble to familiarise themselves thoroughly with the principles which underlie it. J. Lewis Womersley, 'Some Housing Experiments on Radburn Principles', The Town Planning Review , Vol. 25, No. 3 (Oct 1954), pp. 182-194. It's been eight months (April 2017) since I last posted here (on the perpetual wonders of children making their council estate home environment their own), but this was largely due to me working on what is really the crowning glory of this blog, my book Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time , which was published by the estimable Uniformbooks in the summer. In that book I wrote about how the open plan, pedestrianised spaces of the Middlefield Lane estate enabled its children to play freely across its spaces. As this blog has point...

Supataps

Studies on memory, such as Martin A Conway’s Autobiographical Memory: An Introduction (1990) generally begin with the premise that the experience of remembering is determined by the recall of events or episodes that are dominated by a particular sense of place and time. The memories of our childhood in particular are often dominated by vivid, visual reference-points that are the remnants of the intense and unmediated experiences of a child. Back in June 2013, in a post called You're My World I recalled what I think is my very earliest memory: of me and my Mum and Dad viewing what was to become our new council house in the early Spring of 1964. The one visual reference point I have of that time was the stainless steel kitchen sink unit, and the two chrome taps that hung over the sink. I particularly remember that these taps had little red and blue dots embedded in them, one for hot and one for cold, like this: They were called Supa...

The Radburn Idea 3: The private sphere - 'true' Radburn, 'partially' applied.

In my last post on the development and use of the Radburn Idea in the design of postwar council estates of the later 1960s and beyond, I promised we’d look at how Radburn principles were also used on private housing estates. So, on a beautifully warm and sunny spring morning, I found myself in Peterborough, on what is known as the Netherton estate. At this stage I need to thank Tim Skelton for making me aware of this estate a few years ago, and for supplying me with a set of pdf images of some original, mid 1960s cyclostyled plans for the estate , several of which are reproduced below (I don’t know if they were ‘cyclostyled’ as such, I just take some joy from using that particular word) . Tim suggested to me that while Netherton is ‘not as exciting as some of the private estates in the 1960s’, it nevertheless remains ‘the only serious experimentation with Radburn in line with the original ideal of detached, private housing with on plot parking. It deserves to be better kno...

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