The estate was completed in 1971: 412 dwellings in five blocks of six and eight storeys, arranged around three courtyards, with a district heating plant and a shared laundry. It was praised on completion, condemned within twenty years, partly demolished in 2003, and its floor plans are currently being reproduced almost exactly by two well-regarded practices.
That sequence is not a paradox. It is the standard life cycle of post-war social housing, and the interesting question is which of the failures were architectural.
The flats were good and remain good
Start with the part that is not in dispute. The dwellings are larger than anything built for social rent in the decades since: a two-bedroom flat at 74 square metres against a current minimum around 61. Every flat is dual aspect. Ceilings are 2.6 metres. Kitchens have external windows. Storage is provided as a separate room, not a cupboard.
The blocks are 11.5 metres deep, which is what makes the dual aspect possible, and the cores serve four flats per landing, which keeps the circulation short without the long deck access that the same period used elsewhere and that aged badly.
Residents of the two remaining blocks report high satisfaction with their flats and low satisfaction with everything outside their front doors. That split is the whole story.
What failed was the settlement, not the plan
Three things were designed on an assumption that was never funded.
The courtyards. Semi-public, overlooked, planted, and belonging to nobody in particular. They were designed for a level of grounds maintenance that a local authority provided in 1971 and stopped providing around 1982. Landscape without maintenance does not revert to a natural state; it becomes unreadable, and unreadable space stops being used.
The district heating. Efficient, cheap to run, and dependent on a single plant with a single maintenance contract. When the contract lapsed and the plant aged, 412 dwellings had a heating problem simultaneously. There was no fallback because the design correctly avoided the redundancy of individual boilers.
The undercroft. Parking and storage at ground level, which produced a blank frontage on two sides. Passable when the estate was staffed and the storage was in use; a liability once it was neither.
Each is a design decision that was reasonable given a management model, and each failed when the management model was withdrawn without the building being altered.
From the 1994 estate review “The physical fabric is in fair condition. The principal issues are managerial.” That sentence appeared on page 3 and the demolition proposal appeared nine years later.
The demolition arithmetic
Two of five blocks came down in 2003 and were replaced with 168 dwellings — 71 fewer than the 239 demolished — at an average size 14 per cent smaller.
The replacement scheme was better in specific ways: individual heating, defensible front gardens, a legible street layout, and no undercroft. It was worse in others: single aspect flats on two thirds of the plan, no shared amenity, and a maintenance charge levied on residents rather than absorbed by the authority.
Whether it was a good trade depends on which failure you thought you were fixing. If the problem was the buildings, the trade was sensible. If the problem was that nobody was funding the grounds, then 71 households paid for a management failure with their homes.
Why the plans are being copied
The two practices currently reproducing this floor plan are not being nostalgic. They are responding to a specific constraint: dual aspect, generous, single-stair-per-four-flats housing is extremely hard to achieve within contemporary cost limits, and the 1971 plan solves it.
What they are changing is precisely the part that failed. The courtyards are being drawn as either fully public streets or fully private gardens, with nothing in between. Heating is per dwelling. The ground floor is dwellings with front doors, not storage.
That is what learning from a building looks like — keeping the section and the plan, and refusing the management assumption. It is also an argument for reading condition surveys before demolition proposals, since in this case the survey said what was wrong twenty-nine years ago and was filed.
