The Importance of the Roehampton Alton West Housing scheme

Philip Boyle reflects on the LCC’s groundbreaking Alton West housing scheme, 60 years after it was first planned.

First published Summer 2014

'What's important in housing are not those functional considerations that up to now have been considered as determining, but rather what one might call 'the abstract content'. That is to say the fact of experiencing pleasure in a space', Jean Renaudie, 1977

A recent consultation document produced by the London Borough of Wandsworth entitled Alton
Area Masterplan - our rehousing commitments (www. wandsworth.gov.uk/roehampton) shows proposals involving the demolition and redevelopment of large areas of the Roehampton Alton West Housing scheme (LCC Architects 1955 -1958, listed GII*). In this article,

I respond to their report and hope to highlight the importance of the Alton West scheme in the context of 'mixed development' and 'point block' housing with reference to a recent informal interview with John Partridge, the group architect for the Alton West scheme. This article calls on the London Borough of Wandsworth to recognise the qualities of Alton West and address issues that need addressing, rather than exacerbating perceived problems.

Large scale and high ambition are not everyday characteristics in UK Social Housing Design but the Roehampton Alton West Housing Scheme along with Park Hill Estate, Sheffield (City Architects Department) and Robin Hood Gardens, Tower Hamlets (LCC, by Architects Alison and Peter Smithson) are three schemes that notably explore the potential available at a large scale and fulfill the ambition to create somewhere special to live. In addition they all involve a particular response both to and with their landscape that was a unique and important element in the design.

The Roehampton Alton West Housing Scheme was probably the most ambitious effort in trying to realise Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse in the UK, and arguably it is in the top ten international efforts of the post-war period in this regard. This opinion has been argued persuasively by historian Nicholas Bullock, and confirmed by the interest shown when on its completion it was over-run with more than 2,000 international visitors. Underpinning the design of Ville Radieuse are ideas of harmony with nature through contact with air, sunlight, the earth and greenery, and the balance between individual privacy and social interaction for wellbeing and health. This notion has been interpreted differently in a variety of contexts from mainland Europe to Brazil, India and USA. To achieve this aspiration in the context of post-war Britain required considerable ambition on the part of both architects and local government, albeit there was a shared concern to improve health.

At first glance seeking to emulate English 18th century Arcadian Garden design for a council estate, can appear something of a pretentious indulgence. However within our temperate island's geography and our common culture, the use of heathland and parkland as an antidote to uncontrolled urban expansion has been linked to that of harmonious balance, from the period of the most enlightened patriarchal industrialists, through to the Garden City Movement. This in turn was a major influence on Le Corbusier's thought. So that for architects post-war, the combination of large scale heathland/park with large scale social housing was a creative opportunity to grasp (this was also the period when green belts emerged in planning policy).

Owen Hatherley has argued that quite apart from the importance of its architectural form, Roehampton was even more significant as an act of political egalitarian social justice by the post-war Welfare State because it represents the largest injection of council tenants into a upper/middle class leafy suburb at that time in the UK. If you visit the estate today it is difficult to establish
its prominence on a casual viewing. Over time with continual neglect and the sort of non-maintenance that amounts to civic vandalism, combined with ill-advised additional planting, the original aims have been undermined and compromised. The current owners of Roehampton Alton West are proposing to reverse the act of social engineering at the core of the estate's ambition. Large areas are to be subject to demolition and sold off on the open market for new housing bearing no relation to the original design. The proposals are wrapped in a coating of spurious social recreational niceties, improved transport measures, a large dose of increased suburban isolation, and not least a tidy profit to those involved in perpetrating this vandalism. (see yellow areas on the opposite plan). An effort should be made to understand the character and qualities of the original architecture as a context within which identified issues needing addressing can be identified and solved.

Mixed Development and Point Blocks in London

The Alton West scheme was designed within the LCC architects department with Colin Lucas as group leader with a team of younger architects (subsequently becoming the practice Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis). Of these, John Partridge had been with the LCC longest, having started employment after the war as 'a local government officer' and then having trained to be an architect at the Regents Street Polytechnic. The others were young graduates from Cambridge and the AA School of Architecture in London. Colin Lucas, because of his inter-war career in the leading modern practice of Connell Ward & Lucas, had the experience and authority to get things done as well as the ambition to work at a larger scale than pre-war on schemes that actually got built.

The prevailing idea at the LCC then was that housing should be 'mixed development', that is to say estates would be more interesting if there were a variety of block sizes and shapes that could be grouped aesthetically and socially to suit different requirements. This idea was one that few could object to, given the prescriptive nature of designing with the block of flats typology in social as opposed to individual housing. The new 'point block' was an important element within the vocabulary of mixed development, by going higher using new construction techniques, you could free up both open spaces and the relationship between blocks.

The economies of the repetitive floor plan were critical in the development of point blocks. Each scheme grappled with orientation to the sun, sound insulation, fire protection and escape, lift access and the service runs required for vertical living. To briefly trace its development we start with the first, a single ten storey block in Harlow called The Lawn by Frederick Gibberd (1950) with its 'butterfly like' plan expansive in relation to the sun. It was closely followed by the Ackroydon Estate in Wimbledon, London by the LCC housing group led by Colin Lucas under HJ Whitfield Lewis, with four widely spaced eleven storey blocks (1951). Planned in a T shape, the flat in the tail of the T reversible in orientation so as to allow all three living rooms some sun. Both The Lawn and Ackroydon blocks were built using concrete frames with external brick and rendered block panels and alternating recessive balconies intended to emphasise the vertical nature of repetitive floor plans and they both benefitted from being set in open surroundings. The young architects in Colin Lucas' group graduated from Ackroydon onto the larger site at Roehampton. The combination of size, 130 acres and 2,611 dwellings, and unusual context adjoining Richmond Park established an importance to which was added controversy. The mixed development idea persisted across the site, as did the point block, interspersed amongst mature trees but a stylistic difference of opinion between designers with a 'Scandinavian' or 'Corbusian' disposition became apparent, dividing design teams for the east and west parts of the Alton Estate. The parts have notably different characteristics that attracted considerable discussion at the time. There were four groups of point blocks on the east (Scandinavian - Architects, Oliver Cox, Rosemary Stjernstedt) and fifteen on the west (Corbusian) side.

Taking the larger Alton West groups it is noticeable that the point blocks are here placed closer together than either Ackroydon or those on the eastern side of the Alton Estate. The closeness of the point blocks is carefully considered and balanced with the deployment of the other blocks and in opening and revealing the magnificence of the landscape. In this respect the scheme transcends the vagueness of the mixed development idea and achieves the liberation and promise of the Ville Radieuse idea. In expression the concrete frame is clad with storey high concrete panels, and the under window and balustrades (to the recessed balconies) are also precast concrete panels, so that both structure and cladding have become one. The material in its undecorated form, celebrating the joints in these blocks, has become known as 'brutalist'.

The repetitive floor plan at Alton West is compact within its expressive rectangular envelope containing four flats per floor – two with two bedrooms and two with one bedroom, each with recessed balconies on the corners. The two lifts serving alternate floors and two stairs occupying the cruciform, tightly planned core are surrounded by bathrooms and service risers. The combination of the simple, closely grouped mono- material point blocks was a considerable achievement in its own right.

Subsequent to Alton West, the point block went through many manifestations, the most distinguished being somewhat formally self indulgent schemes such as Denys Lasdun's cluster block in Bethnal Green (1959). Twice as high, due to advances in fire protection and lift technology by the mid-60s were Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron (1965) and Trellick (1967) Towers, exercises in formal preoccupations with rhetorical Corbusian and Constructivist vocabulary. The ultimate in point block design came in the three Barbican Towers (1959-mid 1960s) within the largest and most ambitious urban restructuring project of the post-war period. They are 37 stories high with three flats per floor and achieve a lavish treatment of reticulated bush hammered concrete materiality. Also noteworthy at the LCC is Canada Estate, Bermondsey (1964) designed by Colin Lucas' group with Philip Bottomley as job architect, on a high density inner urban site with two 22 storey blocks closely spaced. Subsequently in Stockwell in Lambeth George Finch, under Ted Hollomby, pushed the point block further with a sequence of eight point blocks, departing from earlier and contemporary examples in the expression of their external form.

Proposals that erode the original intent

The Alton West scheme applied the mixed development idea together with Le Corbusier's ideas for Ville Radieuse. John Partridge is clear that the team's recognition 'that high building needed landscape' is what sets this estate apart from others of the time. 'What we did was to create a complicated space in the air'. He describes 'the critical importance to this was the disposition of the five 'Corbusian' slab blocks on the highest part of the site angled for a view between the two groups of point blocks, to a copse in the middle and through a gap in the trees over a kind of haha to Richmond Park beyond - in an18th century way', (later planting 'to stop football' has spoilt this view). For John Partridge 'it is a composition which builds up as you look and move through it, a garden... making spaces with trees'. This arrangement with the space opening out through columns or piloti under the separate blocks and the downhill slope through the unfolding open landscape, making this aspect available to so many residents, is one of the great achievements of the layout that is now in danger of being destroyed by the current proposals.

The meandering single storey staggered terraces developed by John Killick, Partridge saw as 'an integral part of the whole composition'. The contrast between them and the larger blocks is another of the charms and surprises of this mixed development, unsurpassed anywhere else. Four storey maisonette blocks were designed to 'delineate an axis which contributes to the composition'. The lower terraces were cheaply built to subsidise the taller blocks and some are earmarked to be demolished and replaced with larger, taller and more extensive blocks spreading around the higher ground of the existing Mount Clare House. This would serve to completely destroy the carefully balanced views of the original scheme. The four storey maisonette blocks have not aged well, and there is a need to redefine the entrances and improve individual access and private gardens but there is no evident reason why they should be demolished and replaced by the cramped internalised housing now being proposed. There is a sustainable argument to retain them and their embodied energy and to up-grade their fabric and performance.

Particular attention was orginally given to the entrance to the site where the local library with housing above
is very carefully detailed. John Partridge recalls that it was built at the end of the process and 'so was an improved version of all the others'. This is borne out by the good condition of this block, which needs some up- grading and re-planning at ground level. The adjacent open space retained and modified would reinforce the celebratory character of this important entrance but sadly the proposals are to fill it with block housing, surrounded with heavy traffic use.

The area in greatest need of attention, and of most important need of help and care is probably the one that is most difficult to realise. This is the open park landscape itself. It is essential that it is not filled in with buildings of intermediate height to 'Suburban Capacity', as proposed by Wandsworth. The openness needs to be maintained and reinforced without obstructions and distractions to keep it as a natural flowing entity and maintain the important link to the adjoining Richmond Park. New planting should be carefully positioned to enhance views. This large estate has an inherent problem in the under-provision of car parking so distributor roads within the park areas are car lined to such an extent that vehicles both dominate the landscape and are insufficiently near to where car owners live. Cars should be grouped immediately adjacent to blocks, within the car owner's control. The priority must be to enable the parkland to become open and safe with the routes clear as part of the landscape that are well lit at night.

This may not be easy to comprehend and will involve meaningful consultation based on agreed criteria and design effort. It will also require expenditure, as in some cases, for example, the parking should probably be underground and secure. It should be possible to include the 'new facilities' that Wandsworth aspires to in locations that do not spoil 'the complicated space in the air'. Wandsworth should look to precedents. A fine 'Radieuse' balance has been achieved and more importantly maintained in the almost contemporary American housing scheme 'Lafayette Park' in Detroit, USA by architects Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Alfred Caldwell. It is vital that we remind ourselves of the unique contribution of the Roehampton Alton West Estate in order that we can understand and build on its important character going forward. Wandsworth's scheme for Roehampton must be upgraded to ensure that its unique aesthetic and social achievements are maintained and reinforced for the pleasure of its future residents.