Have High-Rises Ever Been The Answer To Our Housing Woes?

In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, we asked two experts to offer their perspectives on the impact of multi-storey public housing on Britain’s social landscape since the Second World War

- Chris Bowlby

Tower blocks were originally aimed at a wide range of social groups, primarily from slum clearance programmes. They were meant to be not only a modern, clean and affordable alternative to the slums but also a vehicle for developing social democracy.

In theory, elderly people would take the ground-floor flats, while children would benefit from open spaces and playgrounds, taking them off streets that were becoming increasingly busy with traffic. Inside, modern facilities offered the type of provision that residents could only dream of in the old, overcrowded and unhealthy slums.

This was a top-down process. Local authorities had to apply quick and affordable solutions to the chronic problems presented by the slums. Labour and Conservative governments increasingly pushed local authorities into adopting high-rise solutions. Many councils were reticent, but subsidy from the state meant they were, in practice, given little choice. Tenants had even less influence on the decision-making process. There is very little evidence that they wanted to live in high-rise blocks of flats.

As an experiment in social democracy, high-rises were a failure. They simply did not evolve as coherent communities. From the 1950s, many affluent and skilled workers left the old slum areas, either for new towns, overspill estates or to buy their own homes in working-class suburbs. This increased the concentration of poor and displaced people, as well as immigrant families, in poorer parts of urban areas, especially inner-city developments. It was these social groups that tended to be concentrated in the new flats.