The London Festival of Architecture, taking place this month, is this year centred around the theme of ‘community’.
Although a capital wide affair, several events will invite Tower Hamlets residents to consider the impact of the built environment on their lives, as well as hear about exciting ideas and initiatives for the future.
Stock Bricks to Brutalism: Housing Design History in Poplar
This guided walk, taking place throughout the month, focuses on the massive overhaul of housing stock in Poplar during the 20th century. Overcrowding, dilapidation, poor sanitary conditions and bomb damage in Poplar spurred some of the most emblematic and bold designs that continue to divide opinion.
The two hour walk will aim to trace social housing from the end of World War One through to the 1980s. It will stop off at estates built between the two World Wars in the ‘economic Georgian style’ (e.g. Will Crooks Estate) before taking in some celebrated and notorious post-war estates: Lansbury, Brownfield (home to Brutalist masterpiece the Balfron Tower), and Robin Hood Gardens. The walk is led by Andrew Parnell, a qualified City of London Guide, who will be seeking to impart a little of the history of Poplar along the way.
Shoreditch Architecture Surgery
Shoreditch architects Finkernagel Ross, designers of “bold unassuming architecture and interiors for high-end residential, industrial and commercial clients”, are throwing open their doors on 16 June and inviting visitors to come in and have a look at their work.
Models, renderings, and drawings will all be on display, and the practice will also be offering professional advice to anyone who needs it on all matters relating to design, planning or construction, with a 30-minute one-on-one meeting with an architect. There is no charge to attend the architecture surgery, though donations of £25 to homelessness charity Shelter are encouraged.
Lansbury Estate. Photograph: Michael Owens
Homes not Houses: Putting Wellbeing First
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has declared the housing crisis “the single biggest barrier to prosperity” and has vowed to build more houses. But in last month’s East End Citizen, Nicholas Boys Smith of research institute Create Streets argued that housing is not just about numbers. High land costs and limited housing supply, he said, is a “vicious circle” that will lead to buildings that are “less popular and that people don’t want to live in”. Smith will be discussing his own radical lower-rise vision at the Legatum Institute in a panel that includes architecture critic Rowan Moore.
Lonely at the top: The now empty Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Dozens of previously unseen documents which shed light on the recent controversial private sale of listed former social housing block the Balfron Tower have been posted online by a UCL researcher.
As well as forming a comprehensive archive of the architecture, history and living community of the brutalist Docklands building, the cache also raises new questions for Poplar HARCA, the housing association behind the sale deal.
The online collection – www.balfrontower.org – has been assembled by David Roberts, a doctoral student in Architectural Design at UCL and member of the art collective Fugitive Images, who has been studying the Balfron Tower for several years. He has made his research public in order to “contribute to an informed public debate on key issues” about the Tower, including its complicated sale.
Balfron’s social housing tenants, who previously occupied 99 of its 146 flats, voted to transfer to Poplar HARCA in 2006 on the understanding that their flats would be upgraded to the Decent Homes Standard and they would continue to live in them. They were progressively “decanted” from the block between 2010 and 2015 to allow refurbishment to take place. Following a series of setbacks to the project, it was announcement in February that Balfron would be sold as private flats through a joint-venture with developer LondonNewcastle.
The documents on balfrontower.org cover everything from Hungarian-British architect Ernő Goldfinger’s original designs to German-language reviews of the block and the coverage its sale received in the East End Review.
Also included is a financial viability document from 2012 which states Poplar HARCA’s intention that the Tower become a “leaseholder only block”, made up exclusively of privately-owned flats.
From 2010 Poplar HARCA has maintained it would need to sell some of the block’s flats to pay for refurbishment works, but claimed in public until this year that it did not know exactly how many, insisting, when asked, that there was a possibility – however small – that social tenants might be able to return.
Asked about the financial document which suggests this possibility had been ruled out as early as 2012, a Poplar HARCA spokesperson said: “There are significant costs associated with restoring a Grade-II listed building, particularly one in as poor a state of repair as Balfron and the final decision on residents returning could not be taken until the JV [joint venture] was formed in December 2014.
“As has always been the case – and as tenants have always been advised – had funding become available prior to that to allow Poplar HARCA any other option it would have taken it.”
David Roberts hopes the site will allow people to explore the subject for themselves. “As a researcher I have the time and access to information that many others don’t,” he says. “The documents I’ve encountered can be intimidating, difficult to access, or difficult to grasp because of bureaucratic, academic or legal language.
“The website aims to open these documents and processes to the public and help contribute to a more informed public debate.”
Roberts’ research focuses on social housing in East London and emphasises first-hand testimony. He began his research project because a Balfron resident got in touch with him. “She was interested in doing an oral history project with her neighbours before they all leave,” Roberts explains. “It is their voices, from inside, that are rarely heard.
“As we worked together we met more and more residents that spoke frankly about living in the tower – frustration with unreliable lifts and the lack of sufficient funds for repair, joy at the light and space it offers and an unanticipated spirit of neighbourliness, and anger that these cherished things may soon be lost to them.
“One former resident said, ‘On the 23rd floor we felt magnificent. I think for social housing tenants to lose the view is such a terrible theft of experience. You live in the space in a different way.
It affects your being. And that’s critical to your entire existence. And for poorer folk like myself it’s a great loss.’”
High life: The Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Last month’s announcement that the Grade II-listed Balfron Tower in Poplar will no longer contain any social housing but will instead be sold as luxury flats put an end to speculation about its future that has been going on since 2010. But questions remain about its recent past, particularly around how more than 120 family-sized East London flats have passed from the social to the private sector without anyone being evicted.
For all that it is a gigantic and imposing concrete structure, Balfron is also delicate, with spindly, human-scale walkways connecting the service tower and main building. Six flats broad and one flat thick, it is endearingly awkward-looking; broad and slim, tall and squat, rough and rectilinear all at once. All bedrooms are on the eastern face, placed for the sunrise, with balconies to the west for its setting. Designed in the brutalist mood by British-Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger in the late 60s, it is touched by many such small elements of genius. The view is of London, from the Thames Estuary to Hampstead Heath.
For the better part of five years, Poplar HARCA, the housing association which owns the block, has maintained that the people who used to live there – social tenants who were “decanted” to allow refurbishment work to be carried out – might in theory be permitted to move back in. It stated several times that they “possibly but not probably” had a “right of return”.
This “right” wasn’t about law but about money: whether Poplar HARCA could afford to have any social housing in Balfron Tower. Until recently it was still unsure. In an interview conducted in January, Paul Augarde, head of Creativity and Innovation at Poplar HARCA, insisted he still did not know whether or not the budget for the Balfron project would have space for some social tenants to move back in. “It’s never great,” he said of what was then the possible total sale. “You don’t want to sell stuff.”
Poplar HARCA has a lot going for it. It owns and manages 6,000 social rent homes in Poplar and has built over 1,000 homes (social and private) in the last 15 years. It has refurbished all its social lets. It helps jobless residents into work, supports social enterprises in the area and even employs its own small police force. It persuaded Barclays to open the first non-charging cash point in the whole of Poplar and caused a bridge to be built over the four-lane East India Dock Road to connect estates together. It is making physical improvements to the area of a different magnitude to anything the council ever did.
Which goes some way to explaining why residents of the Brownfield Estate, of which Balfron and its neighbour Carradale House are part, voted for ownership and management of their homes to be transferred to Poplar HARCA from Tower Hamlets Council in 2007. But what has happened at Balfron is very different to what they actually voted for.
View from the top of the Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
In 2006, residents were sent a booklet about transferring to Poplar HARCA, two pages of which were of special relevance to Balfron and Carradale. Poplar HARCA would be contractually obliged to refurbish substantially both blocks, and two options for their tenants were proposed: they could remain living in their flats while the refurbishment was carried out, or they could move, as priority tenants, into new homes Poplar HARCA would build elsewhere on the Brownfield Estate. If they took the second option, their current flat would be sold privately to help pay for the project.
Poplar HARCA anticipated around 130 tenants from across both blocks would choose to leave in this first instance. Balfron had suffered from an historic lack of maintenance and anti-social behaviour was a serious problem. Many tenants took Poplar HARCA up on its offer; but many others opted to stay.
In other words, the sale of some flats in Balfron was always on the cards, but so was the prospect of social tenants continuing to live there indefinitely. This initial proposal, on which tenants voted, made no mention of a “decant”, permanent or temporary, nor indeed of any need to leave Balfron at all.
How did we get from this state of affairs to last month’s announcement that the whole of Balfron, now empty of tenants, is to be sold privately?
Crash
Poplar HARCA blames two things: the 2008 financial crisis and the refusal of planning permission for a “linked” proposal for several separate developments it submitted to Tower Hamlets Council. Approval of this proposal would have given it a solid financial resource and lowered its reliance on the sale of unwanted Balfron and Carradale flats to fund the refurbishment and other projects. Forced to apply for new developments site by site, and sell homes at post-crash prices, these flats became one of its few solid sources of money.
Since these events occurred, tenants have been “decanted” and the uncertainty of their “possible but not probable” return promulgated. If – from 2008 onwards – Poplar HARCA strongly suspected it would need to sell Balfron, why didn’t it just make a clean breast of it?
Paul Augarde argues it was simply communicating the truth of the situation, which was that Poplar HARCA did not know what was going to happen. “We were very straight,” he says. “If we’d given an absolute answer” to residents’ questions on returning, he says, “it would have been no. It would have been easier to say no.”
Decant
Poplar HARCA did not attribute the need to remove tenants in 2010 to the need to sell Balfron, instead citing a report which detailed safety risks to their remaining while work was carried out. It decided on this basis to “decant” all tenants. This makes sense – quite how people could remain in flats while their bathrooms and kitchens were renovated has never entirely been made clear. But the “decant” also meant that the sale of homes would from then on always be connected to the prospect of tenants moving back in, not to their being moved out. The question of the sale of homes would be framed around a “right of return”, not a “right to stay”.
This was the manner in which the issue was presented to tenants, who were briefed by Poplar HARCA at the end of September 2010 on the need to leave their homes. The briefing could have been clearer: “Up until reading about the process of decanting I thought we were going to temporary housing and then return,” says Michael Newman, a tenant of Balfron for many years. Printed communications, however, boded ill: “The document that I looked at was on the process of decanting, and it made no statement that I could find on returning.”
The omission caused such alarm that by October it was the subject of an FAQ on a fact-sheet distributed by Poplar HARCA. “Can I move back in when the works are complete?” was “one of the questions we just don’t know the answer to yet”, the sheet stated, before raising the prospect of selling more Balfron flats than originally intended: “We have had to re-think how we pay for the works.”
In November 2010, Newman wrote an eloquent and moving letter to Andrea Baker, Director of Housing at Poplar HARCA, asking if there had been a misunderstanding: “[I] see my flat, my home, as a safe haven with memories of my brothers, and an inspirational, poetic view that has helped me through very difficult times,” he wrote. “I have lived for the past few weeks with the worry of losing my home.
“I am writing to ask you to reassure me about my home and our community.” Baker wrote back the very next day. But she was unable to offer anything further by way of reassurance than the “possibly but not probably have a right of return” formulation.
“Right of return”, not “right to stay”
From 2010, Poplar HARCA worked with residents on relocating. Building work was (and still is) yet to start. As years went by, the realistic option for waiting residents was to cease to pursue even a moral “right of return”.
“I have been treated very well by HARCA in the decant and do feel gratitude for how they supported the move,” says Michael Newman now. He has resettled in Carradale House. “I am now happy where I live. I can see my old flat from the balcony of my new one, and I am starting a new life.”
So is Balfron Tower. Now that all tenants have been re-housed, physically and psychologically, Poplar HARCA has finally applied for planning permission for the refurbishment and has formed a partnership with developer London Newcastle to sell the flats.
What comes of all this? It’s astonishing that a social landlord started with the plan of refurbishing a listed building for its social tenants and found that it was able to do so only if it sold the building into private hands – while still being contractually obliged to carry out the work. Other housing associations may well be put off by this from pursuing such ambitious projects, and it is a shame, to say the very least, that Poplar HARCA, for all its achievements, could not set them a better example.
