Eyesores and scandalously unsafe? Or utopian housing for the working classes? Here are the stories and scandals behind some of the UK’s most revolutionary homes
‘There is nothing, it seems to me, more appalling, more deadening in the urban landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres … High dwellings – I think, really very high dwellings – are an enormous enhancement of the scene.” So said Evelyn Sharp, civil servant and powerhouse within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, in 1955.
Seventy years later, many would disagree. High-rise blocks are regularly denounced as ugly concrete monoliths: repetitive, plain, inhuman, boring …