Are we on Hampstead Heath or in some bucolic bower? Not quite. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, it's the only mass housing of theirs ever to be built.
The Smithsons were a pair of architectural provocateurs hailing from Sheffield and Stockton-on-Tees. They didn't build a great deal, but nonetheless set the agenda for much 60s architecture in the UK. They were also the first British architects since the Arts and Crafts movement to have any kind of influence abroad. Prolific manifestoists and utterers of no-mix statements, they dressed in peculiar outfits of their own design and had a remarkable talent for winding people up.
This talent has survived them both, unlike this building. After a long struggle, it's about to be demolished to make way for luxury flats. The tenants are being decanted, to use that hateful, mealy-mouthed, objectifying phrase, which really means, evicted.
Brutalist architecture which the Smithsons helped to invent in the 1950s had already gone out of fashion when Robin Hood Gardens was completed 20 years later. It remains a hard sell. Despite a revival of interest among architects and writers on architecture, brutalist buildings are still regularly voted the most hated buildings in Britain in popular polls. This public disdain translates into political disdain, which translates into demolitions. There are real problems with Robin Hood Gardens.
The Smithsons were handed a duff situation. It's strangled by roads, including the ever popular Blackwall Tunnel approach. The air is thick with fumes and noise, and the site is cut off from the wider neighbourhood.
They tried to resolve these problems by erecting walls, which were meant to act as acoustic baffles, and turning the buildings inwards, away from all this mayhem. But the problem with this is that it made the estate seem even more introverted and isolated. The Smithson's surrounded the building with a moat, which is where cars enter and park, and they ribbed the facade.
They claimed that these fins were designed to deflect noise, but they're obviously an homage to Mies van der Rohe's girders, which he used to decorate the facade of the Seagram building in Manhattan. But where Mies used bronze, the Smithson's had concrete. which is now crumbling due to cheap construction and years of neglect. But the Finns do achieve a more modulated facade, which changes the building's appearance with the movement of the sun.
This interest in aesthetics, heavily disguised as functionalism, was picked up by Raina Bannon, who said that brutalism was above all about creating images. If this is the case, Robin Hood Gardens is an image of a fort, its car park moats. It's Protective Palisades, the central mound. The name gives it away.
Like the municipal socialism that built it, Robin Hood Gardens was meant to be a bulwark against the ravages of untrammelled capitalism. But it ended up by being accused of causing antisocial behaviour. These stairwells are dark, unnerving, especially at night, and meanly proportioned spaces, and they still have the unmistakable aroma.
...piss, no matter how much cleaning fluid has been spilled on them. But does design cause crime? Is there a causal link between these spaces and the antisocial activities that have happened in them? Peter Smithson caused a stink by complaining about ungrateful tenants shitting in the lift. But would you shit on your own doorstep?
More likely, the culprits came from elsewhere. Security doors and key fobs were added later, and residents tell me that these dealt with much of the crime and vandalism that plagued these blocks. But these measures also turned Robin Hood Gardens into a gated community. Not exactly the socialist dream. These famous streets in the sky are one of the essential elements of brutalism.
They were meant to be wide enough for children to cycle and play, and to encourage neighbourly mingling. Another way the Smithsons tried to foster a sense of community was by putting twin front doors across from each other in these little side pockets. They referred to these as eddies, set back from the mainstream of circulation on the walkways. Now I wonder if this is what Alison Smithson had in mind when she wrote her rather bizarre essay in praise of the nooks and crannies inhabited by talking voles and woodlice in the stories of Beatrix Potter. The Smithsons had first proposed Streets in the Sky in 1952 in their competition entry for the Golden Lane estate just north of the Barbican.
This network of low interlinked blocks was meant to be an antidote to the kind of problems caused by tower blocks, which up to that point had been the main plank of modernist planning as inspired by Le Corbusier. We can see an example of this sort of building just behind Robin Hood Gardens in Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower. The Smithsons hoped that street life could be designed back in, and the social fragmentation caused by towers could thereby be eliminated. Their proposal for Golden Lane didn't win, and instead the first streets in the sky were built in Sheffield ten years later, in the huge Park Hill estate.
It's been suggested that Park Hill is a more successful implementation of the Smithsons'ideas, and perhaps putting the streets in the sky on the outside of the blocks, facing the Blackwall Tunnel approach, was a mistake, but they had a good reason for doing this. They wanted to put the bedrooms on the inside, facing the quiet central garden. Unloved but not unlovely, the Smithsons created a magical place here, a green island cupped by the two hands of their canted blocks.
The central mound is a sort of sacred spot. It even has a diminutive stone circle on top. The architects claimed it was intended to prevent ball games in the middle of the estate.
which are often a cause of annoyance to older residents. But this place is not anti-child. The presence of these artefacts suggests that there is a strong sense of family-oriented community here. But that hasn't been enough to save Robin Hood Gardens.
Despite a spirited campaign, in 2008 English Heritage declined to list the building. What the inhabitants think about all this is fiercely debated. A council survey found that 75% wanted it knocked down, but another survey done by one of the tenants, found that 80% just wanted it refurbished.
The residents I spoke to expressed their fondness for the community here and for the space between the blocks. They weren't so keen on the water coming through the ceiling, which decades of council maintenance had failed to sort out. Perhaps it would have been knocked down even if it had been listed.
Think of the opportunities. The 200 generously proportioned units will be replaced by 1,500 much smaller homes in a quiver. of anodyne towers. Social rent will be replaced by affordable homes, which of course are anything but affordable to most people. No more grass to mow, far fewer council tenants to answer to.
Think of all that lovely money pouring into council coffers from all these new taxpayers, and into the pockets of the developers. If you want to know why all this is happening, you just need to look to the monster across the A1261.