Owen Hatherley: The Death and Life of the Great Council Estates

Britain is a country in the middle of a housing crisis, with rents and house prices rising far beyond the normal level of inflation, with some areas depopulating and others, such as the south-east, at a historically high level. Aside from the periodic call to ‘build more houses’, there is little sense of a political solution to these problems.

This is especially curious, given that at the end of the 1970s, Britain had some of the highest percentages of people living in public housing in capitalist Europe, reaching a majority in cities like Sheffield and Glasgow. This took a variety of forms, from tenements in the 1900s, semi-detached houses in the 1930s, high-rises and maisonettes in the 1960s, and various experiments with accomodating the historic city in the 1970s and early 1980s. By 2015, it is an increasingly endangered species, with the last remaining stock in danger of ‘stock transfer’ to charities and developers, or simple demolition.

This talk will examine that decline, and the reasons for it. These range from accusations of – and essays in – social engineering from the radical right, changes in architectural fashion which made ‘council estate’ synonymous with a demonised aesthetic, the antimodernist hysterias of the 1970s, failures in construction and quality, and most of all, the creation of a property and financial bubble as the only viable replacement for the decimated British industry.
Text: Owen Hatherley

ÖGFA_Vortrag (auf Englisch)
Owen Hatherley
born in Southampton, England, in 1981; received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London. He writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Icon, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and New Humanist; author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso, 2012), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012) and Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015). He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw.

Kuratierung und Moderation: Michael Klein, ÖGFA