Bill Risebero, ‘Architecture in East London’ in Tim Butler and Michael Rustin (eds), Rising in the East?: the regeneration of East London, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), pp. 215-231

pp. 219-23
As a whole, though, the British economy was buoyant, and the Welfare State was able to benefit from the proceeds. In the 1950s, a huge national building programme began: New Towns, city centre redevelopments, hospitals, schools, universities, roads and, above all, a housing programme which aimed at, and frequently achieved, an annual output of 300,000 dwellings.

The East End of London was physically reconstructed. Two square miles of the badly bombed Poplar area became the largest Comprehensive Development Area in Britain, housing a population larger than that of many a New Town. Chrisp Street Market, the Lansbury estate, the Balfron Tower, the Robin Hood Gardens estate, presented:

‘a totally new world, dominated by the tall blocks of flats and by the lower terraces of the three- and four-storey maisonettes, standing in spacious gardens and landscaped squares.’ (Peter Hall, The World Cities (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966)

The mood, as can be seen, was intensely hopeful. The architectural style was modern, derived from the heroic theorists the 1920s and 30s - the Russian Constructivists, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school - for whom modern architecture was synonymous with social progress. During the 1930s, these ideas had not been put into practice on any large scale; the 1950s seemed to offer the opportunity of doing so.

High-rise flats would free up ground space for public gardens and walks. Industrialised building techniques would increase both housing output and housing quality. Nationally-green standards would improve housing design. The principle of comprehensive development would improve living conditions, providing the opportunity to segregate housing from industry and to reduce residential densities. Community facilities would be built to match the needs of the residential population. Public ownership would ensure a coherent housing policy, and the subsidisation of both building costs and rents would endure that housing was available to those who needed it. In the event, the gains were very real; the great housing estates were often an undoubted improvement on pre-war living conditions. And ideologically they were a conspicuous architectural statement that a new world was being born. Behind the physical change lay the implication that a social and economic change was also taking place. There was a strong conviction that physical reconstruction was in itself a means of achieving social reconstruction. ‘Architecture or Revolution’, Le Corbusier had said. ‘Revolution can be avoided.’

This was far from true. A new physical environment was no substitute for social revolution. The economic system, the class structure, the state and its ideological machinery remained much as before, operating as always according to the imperatives of capital accumulation.

So the housing problem suited the needs of the people only up to a point; much more, it suited the bureaucracy and the market. Policies of zoning and of comprehensive development suited building contractors’ wholesale methods - and profits - better than they suited the residents, whose social fabric was disrupted. In high-rise buildings, architectural theory coincided with political expediency; their physical dominance announced publicly that the housing problem was being tackled. Though very expensive, high-rise was also profitable for contractors, given the generous government subsidies.

Industrialised building too, encouraged and subsidised by the Government, became lucrative. At one time some 200 industrialised housing systems were competing for housing authorities’ attentions; under such circumstances efficiency and economies of scale were impossible. Competitive cost-cutting led to lower standards of construction, as was demonstrated in Canning Town in East London in 1968 with the collapse of the system-built tower block Ronan Point.

Space standards, the layout of flats and the minutiae of flat design were determined centrally by Whitehall, though the ‘Parker Morris’ standards and other methods; the gap in comprehension between the bureaucracy and the needs of those for whom they were planning was considerable. Experiments in housing design were encouraged regardless. Such was the drive to increase output, many suspect design theories - ‘cluster’ blocks, ‘scissor’ plans, access decks, high-density low-rise estates - were implemented without much prior research or later feedback. Consultation with the people being rehoused was almost unknown till the late 1960s, when people themselves began to demand it.

In East London, one of the biggest ironies was that while the living environment was being reshaped, its architectural forms trumpeting the arrival of Utopia, the economic environment was being allowed to collapse. Over a twenty-year period, some 20,000 jobs were lost from the Docks themselves, together with many more in associated industries like ship repair, road haulage and manufacturing. Today unemployment among men of working age is around 9.7 per cent for England and Wales, and 12.0 per cent for Greater London. The corresponding figure for the East London borough of Tower Hamlets is 21.8 per cent.

A number of factors have contributed to this: the national long-term decide of traditional industries; the economic crisis of the 1970s, which hit all industry hard; the planning policies of successive governments since the war which have contributed to the relative decline of the Docks and failed to provide any alternative. By the time the Greater London Council made a belated attempt in the 1970s to prepare a co-ordinated plan for the Docklands area, it was too late. In 1979, the Thatcher government began to establish a completely different set of priorities for British industry in general and for East London in particular.

The only response capitalism has to a major crisis is to allow some capital to be destroyed. Thatcherite policy was to protect finance capital - specifically the City of London - at the expense of all other sectors, including industry, for which monetarism became a major burden. This, together with the erosion of the Welfare State, the abolition of the GLC along with its strategic planning role and its re-distributive policies, the virtual termination of the housing programme, and a spate of anti-working class legislation, has been to the great disadvantage of the East End of London.