The Great Estate: The Rise & Fall of the Council House

Journalist and author Michael Collins presents a hard-hitting and heartwarming history of one of Britain’s greatest social revolutions – council housing.
At its height in the mid-1970s, council housing provided homes for over a third of the British population. From the ‘homes for heroes’ cottages that were built in the wake of the First World War to the much-maligned, monolithic high rises of the 60s and 70s, Collins embarks on a grand tour of Britain’s council estates.
He visits Britain’s first council estate, built as an antidote to London’s disease and crime-ridden Victorian slums, the groundbreaking flats that made inter-war Liverpool the envy of Europe, the high rise estate in Sheffield that has become the largest listed building in the world, and the estate built on the banks of the Thames that was billed as ‘the town of the 21st century’.
Along the way he meets the people whose lives were shaped by an extraordinary social experiment that began with a bang at the start of the 20th century and ended with a whimper 80 years later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0109dvs

Housing Estates – Park Hill Estate in Sheffield

The Park Hill estate, Sheffield: Europe’s largest Grade 2 listed building
Park Hill in Sheffield is a large council estate comprising 995 flats. The structure was inspired by the famous architect Le Corbusier. Leading architectural and historic buildings expert Dan Cruickshank shows us the structure and explains its history. We learn how each floor had broad aisles wide enough for milk floats and how the complex also incorporated a primary school and shopping precinct. Constructed of reinforced concrete combined with yellow, orange and red brick curtain walling, it demonstrates ‘brutalist’ modernism on a European scale. The estate was initially very popular and successful but decayed over time to become an inner city sink estate, described by some as a ‘mugger’s paradise’ or ‘concrete prison’. (from BBC, learning zone)

Clip of the Park Hill housing estate (on BBC)

Bottom up culture led regeneration Bristol

From a former POLIS student. Worth to be looked at…

*Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft*: a community organisation that is working to create their area as a cultural quarter:

www.prsc.org.uk

*Tobacco Factory*: the regeneration of this old tobacco factory kickstarted the gentrification process of the South of Bristol. George Ferguson (the guy in the video) also happens to be a director of the Academy of Urbanism

www.academyofurbanism.org.uk & a great patron of cultural regeneration in the city.

www.youtube.com channel of the tobacco factory

*Artspacelifespace*: a collection of artists that have been invited to temporarily take over the old Police Station in the Centre as the developers (Urban Splash) cannot currently afford to develop it & they realise the potential of artists to revitalize areas.

www.artspacelifespace.com