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BD CAMPAIGN: RESCUE ROBIN HOOD GARDENS
Only listing can save it
22 February 2008
Simon Smithson spearheads BD’s campaign to list his parents’ Robin Hood Gardens estate
Margaret Hodge
BD this week launches a last-ditch effort to list Robin Hood Gardens, the landmark housing estate designed by Alison and Peter Smithson.
The campaign has been strengthened by the intervention of their son, architect Simon Smithson, who has been silent until now.
Smithson, a Madrid-based director of Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, hailed the 1972 estate in Poplar, east London, as his parents’ “best building”.
But there are only two weeks left before English Heritage is expected to make its recommendation to architecture minister Margaret Hodge, who has alarmed heritage campaigners with her increasingly hostile attitude to post-war concrete buildings.
Given the option, the building’s owner, Tower Hamlets Council, is likely to opt for bulldozing the 213-apartment estate as part of a wider redevelopment funded by English Partnerships.
This follows a report by architect Horden Cherry Lee, which has advised that refurbishment is unfeasible on cost grounds. The practice says it would cost more than £70,000 per unit to bring them up to current standards.
Simon Smithson
However, the listing of the estate would make refurbishment more attractive to private sector investment, as seen in the redevelopment of the grade II* listed Park Hill Flats in Sheffield by Urban Splash.
Smithson’s intervention comes amid signs that Hodge favours a new system for evaluating post-war buildings, giving them less protection.
Writing in the March issue of Grand Designs magazine, she said: “When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Smithson said Robin Hood Gardens was of “real quality”, adding that climate change provided a further argument for saving it.
“Whatever you think of it as a piece of architecture, Robin Hood Gardens raises fundamental issues about sustainability and what we spend our resources on,” he said.
English Heritage will finalise its report on Robin Hood Gardens in the next fortnight before submitting it to architecture minister Margaret Hodge by March 21.
To support BD’s campaign for listing the estate, send your name and contact details to the address below. This will be presented as a petition to English Heritage by March 7.
Sign our petition at www.bdonline.co.uk/rescuerobinhoodgardens or email rescuerobinhood@cmpi.biz
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Readers' comments
"a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever" How has this women got this job? Her attitude to architecture is shocking. Every architect nows that you cannot appreciate a building through images alone but by experiencing its built form in person.
I am brazilian and I visited Robing Hood Gardens last September. It was one of the building that I would like to visit so much this time. I could say that a part from this statement, It is one of the most beautiful example of housing of post war.
Keep this gem of a building. Great character, presence and historical importance.
How many middle class, recieved opinion, hummus-eating, black-wearing, architects will be peering though their media-specs wailing what a shame, what a shame thay are going to buldoze a concrete gem, when the a part of their brain that they are trying to block is saying " no way would I want to live there"!. Whilst it certainly is of architectural significance, is it not hugely patronising to tell less well-off people what is good for them to the point of prescribing what kind of home they should live in? Whatever the merits it may have architectually, it is failing people in other ways that the architectural profession should have forseen and addressed in this and countless other devlopments of the era.
The listing of Robin Hood Gardens isn't the most imporant issue I can think of. What BD readers should concern themselves with is the condition of housing in Tower Hamlets generally. I spent a lot of time (and money) when I was a developer trying to get to a viable scheme to refurbish the more physically impressive neighbour to Robin Hood Gardens, Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, which is listed and has suffered similar problems but is absolutely magnificent and would attract many purchasers/investors/renters private and otherwise, given the opportunity, releasing cash for other types of housing nearby. The listing of a building may preserve the architecture, but it's no use to anyone unless the community want to live there and it makes a useful contribution to the local economy. A fabulous piece of Modernist iconographic architecture is a parasite on scarce regeneration resources if you can't achieve that as a minimum. In Tower Hamlets there is a political problem with refurbishing council housing. If you do what needs to be done, you have to introduce private housing to pay for the refurb of the social housing because you don't have enough public money. This costs votes for local politicians. If you simply refurb or redevelop solely for social-for-rent, you will recreate what hasn't worked in the past. The social-for-rent ghettoes in Tower Hamlets breed extreme politics. The political link with the local authority is unhealthy and has hampered regeneration. Listing is right if it is accompanied by money to ensure the liability of being a cultural icon is supported by the state which thinks it worthy of that status. Otherwise it's not viable, politically, economically or socially. In which case I have every sympathy for those who want it knocked down. It would be a shame, but the plight of Tower Hamlets' ghettoes is a greater shame. Lee Mallett Regeneration & Communication
The Smithsons are amongst the 20th century icons in design and forward thinking, as are their buildings. Demolishing any of their work is an act of gross vandalism.