Mick Hartley

After Culture Minister Margaret Hodge, in consultation with English Heritage, decided it was not “fit for purpose”, the brutalist concrete estate in Poplar is now slated for demolition:

Eminent architects including Lord Rogers, Lord Foster of Thamesbank and Zaha Hadid had claimed that the dilapidated housing estate was a modern masterpiece which should be preserved.

Lord Rogers said in a statement tonight: “All the British winners of the Pritzker Prize, the highest international award for an architect, agree that Robin Hood Gardens is one of the greatest modern buildings in the UK.

“There is not one internationally recognised modern architect or academic included in making English Heritage’s recommendation on Robin Hood Gardens to the minister. We should, therefore, deeply question the authority and objectivity of English Heritage in discussing contemporary architecture of this quality.”

The architects had claimed that while the estate had been badly neglected over the years, it should be refurbished rather than demolished.

The estate’s two council blocks, which boast multi-million pound views of nearby Canary Wharf, will now be demolished to make room for a tower of up to 30 storeys which will undoubtedly attract high end buyers from the City.

During a campaign to save the building, it was lauded as a hallmark of brutalist architecture, which involves extensive use of concrete.

Lord Rogers described the estate, designed in 1972 by husband and wife Peter and Alison Smithson, “as good, if not better” than any other modern building in Britain and compared its layout to Bath’s great Georgian crescents.

I’ve often cycled past, and I’ll admit it’s a striking-looking place. I can see why the architects like it:

Bath’s great Georgian crescents, though? I don’t think so. Would you want to live here?

 

Defenders of the place talk about the state of disrepair that it’s been allowed to fall into, but, although I didn’t go inside the flats themselves, the grounds look in fine condition, and are obviously well tended. If 80% of the residents want to be rehoused, that says all you need to know.

Of course if this wasn’t so near Docklands, where they can put up in its place a new 30-story block for the financiers working in those gleaming Canary Wharf towers, it’d be in no danger: just another sink estate – not nice, but a lot better than some.

[The estate has, needless to say, the obligatory basketball court]