I have been reading Holly Smith’s Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain with the utmost pleasure.
It conveys the ambiguity of the early history of tower blocks. It turns out that Osbert Sitwell was an early, and most unlikely, enthusiast for high rises from San Gimignano to Manhattan and was quoted in support by Dame Evelyn Sharp, the formidable Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government; and the book which promoted the benefits of new housing developments in Sheffield, including Park Hill, was illustrated with a drawing by John Piper, the editor of the Shell Guides.
I have always viewed the failure of Ronan Point as an emblem of the failure of modernism, equivalent to the blowing up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis which Charles Jencks used as marking ‘the death of modern architecture’. But here it appears as the failure of local government and the pressures on the construction industry to deliver new housing at speed. I like the comment by Sam Webb that ‘blaming Le Corbusier for this is like blaming Mozart for Muzak’.
If this early history of high rise housing is to some extent familiar from histories of the period, the later account of community action in London and Liverpool is not. It demonstrates that while families generally disliked being in high rise, there were plenty of people who were perfectly happy, providing the buildings were well maintained.
Unfortunately, what comes out most forcibly, not least from the concluding analysis of what led to the Grenfell Tower disaster, is that councils, and not just Tory ones, are often cavalier about maintenance and ignore the warnings of potential fire and its consequences.
In an admirable way, it complicates the narrative of high rise, by historically informed analysis.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
My parents must have been spooked by what happened at Ronan Point. At the time of its collapse we had been living on the thirteenth floor of our Stepney tower block (Latham House) for 4 and a half years (and I was approaching my fifth birthday). While they were thrilled with high rise living (and especially with the underfloor heating and space it gave them) I remember my mum wouldn’t let my sister and I go to the hit 1974 film The Towering Inferno incase it suggested to us that our living conditions weren’t safe. We spent 16 years in our block and were only rehoused once it had become a very unpleasant place to live with families moving out and being replaced by medical students from the London Hospital. The latter didn’t really care about the things – like keeping the corridors clean – which had made it a welcoming community.
I look forward to reading Up in The Air at some point. Some years ago (certainly before Grenfell) I went for a wander around the bottom of Latham House. I bumped in to a woman who was living there with her small kids who felt that she had ended up in a very bad place. I tried to reassure her that my sister and I had turned out all right and her kids would too but she clearly wasn’t convinced. It is so sad that things have ended up this way. It is a long way from the pride my parents felt – my dad even took some Super 8 footage of the view as we moved in – back in December 1963.
Dear Joan, Yes, I thought of you as I read the book. A lot of it is about how people experienced tower blocks in the early days. Charles