Post-war social housing
was already considering how to adapt housing provisions across the country to be more in line with cultural changes. They proposed an ability for council tenants to buy their homes, albeit with heavy restrictions to maintain the overall stock (Schifferes, 2020). This was unpopular with Labour councils up and down the country and had to wait for a Conservative government for it to come into effect.
In addition to cultural changes, questions were raised as to the safety of council estates. One of Margaret Thatcher’s senior advisers, Alice Coleman, believed that the long corridors and open green spaces which characterized post-war modernist estates ‘ contributed to crime ’ (Cordell, 2016).
(Figure 9: Dunleavy, 1978, p. 457)
She was not alone with this thinking, and indeed in the late 1960s newspaper coverage swung from 43% in favour of high-rise flats to no articles ‘ advocating increased levels of high rise housing provision ’ in 1968 (Dunleavy, 1978), as shown in figure 9.
In the 1979 general election, the state of social housing was a key issue, with the Conservatives proposing and later conducting a radical departure from all previous governments, of both parties, since the war. Thatcher’s primary housing policy – Right-to-Buy – simultaneously forced councils to sell all council-owned homes at a drastically reduced and subsidized rate (if the tenant wanted to buy), while banning the construction of any new homes. In south London, which is constrained by the Greenbelt, this resulted in the social housing stock rapidly decreasing, as evidenced in figure 8 which shows the decrease in social renting following Thatcher coming to power. Hopkins explains that, behind the Right-to-Buy scheme, was the belief that the post-war modernist ‘ concrete tower blocks were so alien to their inhabitants that they somehow served to exacerbate the problems of social deprivation they were designed to alleviate ’ (Manson, 2016). However, much of the research conducted by the Government which led to the scheme was based on unstable premises. For instance, Coleman used vandalism and mental disorders as a measure of the failure of modernist estates (Cordell, 2016). Despite the connection between these factors and modernist social housing being unclear, Thatcher’s government moved away frommodernist high -rise housing towards subsidies for private builders to build much lower density housing; Coleman believed that individual houses with a front and back garden teach respect for private spaces. Right-to-Buy has been maintained by all governments since Thatcher, and indeed still exists today.
Conclusion
The history of modernist social housing in Britain is the dream of another way to live: a way which reduces inequality and promotes social cohesion. At modernism’s core lies a deep desire to improve the
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