The demolition of two new apartment buildings at Woolwich’s Mast Quay would be daft. The claimed reason – 26 deviations from the development’s 2012 planning permission – cannot justify planners pulling down the £36m high-rise blocks, embodied carbon and all. The developer, Comer Homes, seems to have slashed the proposed roof garden and playground, and pulled back on balconies, disabled access and overall quality. But that does not make the towers uninhabitable. I am sure you can see a dozen worse towers from its top floor.
More than a third of Mast Quay’s 204 units have reportedly now been rented – a two-bedroom flat is around £2,000 a month – with 126 still empty. Like towers across London, the block could well lie mostly empty as an asset on a company’s books until the market improves. But what Greenwich may have envisaged as a luxury riverside hub for young urban professionals is now plainly not what it expected. The council is understandably eager to put things right. It is furious and wants the “mutant” blocks to come down. The developers are appealing the decision, suggesting the council’s public statements were “inaccurate”.
Welcome to another chapter in the towers saga. These structures flourished briefly for council flats in the 1960s and 70s. Popular with modernist architects and planners in thrall to Le Corbusier, they were seen as ideal for high-density living, surrounded by public open space and light. They looked dramatic on paper – but often proved unpopular with working-class tenants used to the close-knit neighbourhoods of city streets, particularly those with children. They were costly for councils to maintain and increasingly hard to let, vulnerable to loneliness, crime and decay. The 1968 partial collapse of Ronan Point in east London led to the virtual abandonment of such council buildings in favour of more traditional high-density, low-rise estates.
Towers later returned to favour in the private sector, largely as city-centre investments and for young urban professionals without families. Unlike the streets they supplanted, they were not flexible. They could not convert to shops or studios, or easily reflect shifts in the property market, for instance between renting and owning. And there is a world of difference between a stroll down a local street and a queue for an endlessly defective lift.
Worse, as was seen in the Grenfell disaster, working-class communities in towers can be ignored over the upkeep and security of where they live. Residents can do little or nothing for the fabric of their block, which relies on the local authority and good offices of some distant landlord. The true safety of a tower block is measured by the wealth of its owner – or at least the size of its service charge.
Smart-ish towers such as those at Mast Quay have spread in the past 20 years across inner London. Councils are desperate for higher-income council tax payers. Wandsworth has been cramming a mini-Hong Kong into Battersea and Nine Elms. According to last year’s Tall Buildings Survey, 341 buildings of 20 storeys or more currently have planning permission and are awaiting construction in London. There are also hundreds more in downtown Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. Even as council-owned towers are demolished as unlettable, private-sector ones soar ever upwards to enhance the priapic status of council leaders.
Sooner or later, as throughout London’s history, the value of these buildings will fall as they decay. Goodness knows what will then happen to their occupancy. The essence of a traditional terrace house is that it can adapt swiftly – and cheaply – as market conditions change. But there is a world of difference between repurposing a Victorian property and a derelict tower block. I am already waiting for the first office tower to be padlocked as unsafe.
The key to successful city living lies in the experience of being part of a communal street. As the American urbanologist Jane Jacobs said of her street, its residents looked after it by instinct. Its nature was to “self-police”. Tower blocks struggle to do that. Cities have to breathe. They have to gentrify and de-gentrify at their own pace. The Woolwich towers appear to have de-gentrified even as they were being built.
What Greenwich should do is re-survey the site, give the owners a list of planning upgrades and demand their implementation at once, plus a fee for causing so much trouble. Then it should never permit another 20-storey tower anywhere again in the borough. It should instead plan the sort of equally high-density estate – council as well as private – that won the 2019 Stirling prize at Goldsmith Street in Norwich. That is the future.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
