BRUTALISM AS FOUND

Demolition came for Robin Hood Gardens in December 2017. It was a slow, drawn-out process as the estate’s west block was torn down along its length, but no less violent for it. As images of the initial deep breach in the building circulated in the press and social media, the Twentieth Century Society encapsulated the mood of many: “Feels like seeing an old friend having their teeth knocked out.”

The attempt to demolish the estate reached back some ten years, prompting the Twentieth Century Society to propose it for listing for special architectural interest, in November 2007, with the journal Building Design mounting a campaign and petition to save it in the following February. But in July 2008, Margaret Hodge, Minister at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, ruled against listing, declaring the estate “not fit for purpose,” and the following year Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, granted a five-year Certificate of Immunity from Listing. The Twentieth Century Society’s second attempt to have the building listed, though high-profile, was soon rejected by Historic England, in August 2015. After that it was only a matter of time before demolition commenced.

Robin Hood Gardens, as many other post-war estates, was long characterised as a “sink estate” and a “concrete monstrosity.” These symbolic frameworks have formidable stigmatising effects, readying council estates for demolition and thus serving the global market in real estate.

In liberal democracies across the world the state is in retreat from the provision of public housing, while capital shifts from the circuit of production, with its declining profitability, to finance, insurance, and real estate. Here housing is an investment asset with which to speculate, extract rents, park surpluses, launder money, and facilitate new financial instruments. It results in soaring house prices and the demolition of buildings that drag on the prized “value uplift” – in the UK, council estates foremost among them.

In addition to the thousands of council units razed to date, a recent estimate has 31,000 Londoners facing the loss of their homes due to estate demolition and regeneration, and the Estate Watch project identifies over 100 London estates under threat. In consequence, as Josephine Berry encapsulates the stakes, “housing – an essential structure of care – has become the site of bitter social conflict and class cleansing.”

In this photograph, Robin Hood Gardens is being demolished while Balfron Tower, designed by Ernő Goldfinger, awaits refurbishment for private sale. For decades Balfron Tower suffered the same intensity of symbolic violence as Robin Hood Gardens. Here is journalist Simon Jenkins, for example, writing in The Times in 2000: “Balfron Tower … gives Poplar a final mugging. Its footings are a no-go area for humanity. Trash, chicken-wire and graffiti abound. The tower is without charm or visual diversion. It makes Wormwood Scrubs seem like the Petit Trianon.”

However, at a certain point the fates and representations of the two estates markedly diverged. Robin Hood Gardens continued to be described as a “failure,” a “sink estate,” and a “concrete monstrosity” – for English Heritage, in 2008, it “fails as a place for human beings to live – and did so from the start.” Yet at Balfron Tower, these stigmatising frames were nudged aside, to be replaced by a newfound appreciation for the “monumentality” and “beauty” of Brutalism – a symbolic framework we can call “beautiful Brutalism.”

It is a framework indexed to the move of middle-class homebuyers into ex-council properties, a market resultant of the resale of Right to Buy purchases and the ballooning property prices that have put traditional middle-class housing stock increasingly out of reach. For this class, fearful of council estates and anxious about downward social mobility, beautiful Brutalism serves to cleanse the architecture of its working-class associations, and thus eases transition into the new market. Indeed, in some instances it stridently drives the transition, as in the private redevelopment of Balfron Tower.

In 2007, ownership of Balfron Tower was transferred from Tower Hamlets council to Poplar HARCA (Housing and Regeneration Community Association) at the cost of £1, on the condition of refurbishment. Yet in February 2015, having initially decanted residents with the promise of a right to return, Poplar HARCA revealed a plan that residents and critics had long suspected: to sell all the apartments into the private sector. This is the point at which beautiful Brutalism stepped in, in the form of cultural institutions, design studios, and private developers. Their role, to draw from Bev Skeggs’ research on class appropriation, was to translate, legitimise, modify, and codify the former council estate for middle-class self-making – first as an alienable artefact of cultural consumption and then as purchasable property.

No sooner had the stigmatising trope of the “concrete monstrosity” fulfilled its promise in demolition, it ceded its hold on Robin Hood Gardens to the symbolism of beautiful Brutalism, under the agency, no less, of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Announced with much fanfare, the V&A salvaged from the destruction a three-storey section of the estate for permanent display, the building now described as “a New Brutalist masterwork,” the fragment a “small segment of a masterpiece.”

It is hard not to see the V&A’s fragment as an indictment of today’s social priorities and economic agendas. Here Robin Hood Gardens, or a broken chunk of it, is celebrated, preserved, and lavished with funds as a design artefact for middle-class cultural consumption in the very same moment that it is vilified and destroyed as working-class housing. This appropriation of working-class housing for middle-class self-making is all the more sickening in that it occurs amidst a desperate crisis of housing affordability, a crisis that regeneration schemes, like that of the Olympic legacy, only make worse.

The V&A’s fragment will no doubt contribute to the aesthetic elevation and stabilisation of ex-council housing in the market for middle-class private purchase, but its most direct impact on working-class housing is in estate demolition, counterintuitive though that sounds. Rather than inviting the social violence of estate demolition, as does the trope of the concrete monstrosity, this artefact obscures demolition and contains opposition. For it lifts Robin Hood Gardens – and with it, the social form of the post-war council estate – out of the conflictual terrain of housing in the present and into the sealed and sanitised past of a museum artefact, a nostalgic work of welfare-state heritage.

It seems unlikely that the V&A salvaged from such a large stretch of the building as this, but the demolition which began in earnest by tearing down the structure now slowed considerably to a painstaking removal of façade elements.

It is telling of the delivery of Robin Hood Gardens to middle-class consumption that the first public outing of the V&A’s work of salvage was a major stop on the global circuit of art and culture. The V&A had declined a request in 2008 from the journal Building Design to support its petition against demolition. But now, with the estate half demolished, the V&A championed this “small segment of a masterpiece.”

Considerably reduced in scale to that proposed for the V&A East, the Venice exhibit comprised a section of street deck and balustrade, supported by a façade fashioned from eight of the scheme’s protruding mullions, all assembled together with scaffolding and plywood. Removed from Poplar to Venice, it allowed well-heeled visitors “to stand on an original section of a ‘street in the sky’ – the elevated access deck designed by the Smithsons to foster interaction between neighbours and promote community.”

The V&A claimed that the fragment in Venice took “the vantage point of a ‘street in the sky,’ to look to the future of social housing.” One might ask, if this fragment of Robin Hood Gardens serves to obscure and contain the crisis of social housing, as I contend, why is it positively associated with social housing in this way? In part, this association is a palliative, a virtuous gesture with which visitors can identify, should the reality of estate demolition disturb their pleasure in this fragment of Brutalism. But there is more to it, involving the museum’s prized value of civic exchange.

This value is encapsulated by a remark from the V&A’s Director, Tristram Hunt, when writing against the fragment’s critics. “I see the role of the museum not as a political force,” he writes, “but as a civic exchange: curating shared space for unsafe ideas.” In this way, in the fragment’s curated space of civic exchange, conflict is rendered into conversation. Estate demolition and the crisis of housing affordability is overlaid with a veneer of polite debate – debate fixed on a nebulous future and unhurried by, without impact upon, the desperate realities of the present.

By April 2018, the west block had been ground to fine rubble, while the remaining building, inhabited increasingly by residents on temporary tenancies, awaited the same fate. Demolition, says the architect Anne Lacaton, “is a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.” This is the violence of class society, the violence of housing dispossession and displacement, and it includes appalling ecological consequences.

Though government and the development industry champion regeneration on grounds of its supposed green credentials – thermal-performance cladding, green roofs, photovoltaic panels – the reality is that demolition is a massive waste of the embodied carbon from a building’s construction, and that demolition, removal, and disposal are themselves carbon-intensive processes. Then there are the huge carbon costs of manufacturing and transporting the concrete, steel, bricks, and other materials for rebuild, and of the construction process itself, such that 51% of the lifecycle carbon from a typical residential development is emitted before the building is even opened.

As Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal show us, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the solution is to choose renovation over demolition, accompanied by a design ethics of sensitivity and care for the residents and concrete structures of existent working-class housing. Their motto: “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!”

“Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended,” write David Madden and Peter Marcuse. It “stems from [and reproduces] the inequalities and antagonisms of class society,” of housing as a commodity and vehicle of accumulation against housing as a need. Here, the desperate crisis of housing affordability, disgraceful numbers of families housed in temporary accommodation, and ballooning street homelessness exist amidst, and are produced by, vast surpluses of property and wealth.

This crisis is legislated for and enforced by a plethora of actors – national and local governments, institutional and individual speculative investors, construction and maintenance firms, housing developers, estate agencies and consultancies, global accountancy companies, mortgage lenders, housing associations, private and corporate landlords – who reap vast rewards from what is a booming housing economy, worth in London £2.4 trillion.

No surprise, then, that the solutions proposed by these parties make matters worse. Successive governments and the “finance-housebuilding complex,” as Bob Colenutt calls the nexus of property actors, have constructed the housing crisis “quite deliberately as a crisis of numbers,” for which private housebuilding is the vaunted solution. This empowers the causes of the problem it claims to name, for the crisis is not one of supply but of housing affordability, security, and safety, a crisis made worse by private development, with its estate demolitions and land-value uplift.

We shot some photographs of Robin Hood Gardens at a distance in its Poplar locale, often as the regeneration rose around it. In this image, to the right of the estate is Camellia House, part of phase 1 of Blackwall Reach, now home to many of the former residents of the west block

From phase 1b onwards, the façades of Blackwall Reach look like a flimsy stage set, comprised of bolted-on panels of inch-thick slices of brick. This is the surface dictated by the so-called “new London vernacular” that was dreamt up under Boris Johnson’s mayoralty and has since proliferated across London’s new-build skyline.

Johnson’s aim was to disguise the flood of speculative property development with an aesthetic that is improbably claimed to bear Georgian stylistic preferences. It is said to be tenure-blind, and thus reduce the stigmatisation of social housing. In reality, though, any tenure-blindness that is achieved is the aesthetic correlate of the demolition and privatisation of council housing, rendering social housing invisible to the eye all the better to render it absent in actuality.

After seven years of limbo following the destruction of its partner, demolition of the east block commenced in December 2024. Avoiding the visual and social shock of the image of the west-block demolition, this time the destruction began shrouded behind tarpaulin. The southern head of the building was torn apart from the top down, one floor at a time. There was no media attention; Robin Hood Gardens was long assumed to be already destroyed.

Even with the southern head of the building demolished, in this view, a perspective first seen in Sandra Lousada’s iconic early photographs of the estate, Robin Hood Gardens retains its grandeur. Brutalist to the last.

With the head of the building removed, as if sliced off, kitchen, living-room, and bedroom walls were exposed to the sky. The way that fragments of wall tiling, paint, and plug sockets are still intact, water piping revealed, and the façade mullions secured by scaffolding, reminded me of Nigel Henderson’s post-war photograph of a wall in Bethnal Green after “stopping out.” A vernacular practice of filling in and painting over cracks and pits in the wall plaster, stopping out created an abstract and tactile surface pattern, an incidental aesthetic of the “as found,” in Henderson’s phrase. But stopping out was a process of repair and care, in tune with materials, quite the opposite of the forces of demolition and private capital that lie behind this image.

Wednesday 12 March 2025. A tower-like slice of the tail end of the east block, on the final day of the estate’s demolition, 54 years after it welcomed its first residents.

Walter Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, once observed that museums frame their audience “as ‘a public’ rather than as a class”. That is to say, their presupposition and consequence is a representation of society as cohesive and unified. It is a representation that substitutes for and covers over the reality of class society, where working-class experience is characterised not by coherence but by crisis – a condition of exploitation, dispossession, and insecurity, ever pulled out of shape by the conflictual social relations that condition and course through it.

Museum artefacts serve the same end, Benjamin continues. They are “completed” and “reified,” wrested from the crisis-ridden flux of the social world and inserted into an historical continuum, an integrated narrative of progress through which class society legitimates and propels itself. What we need instead, in Benjamin’s vision, is artefacts that reveal and challenge social crisis, that antagonise rather than consolidate, artefacts that “bear a consciousness of the present that shatters the continuum of history.”

In broad terms, Benjamin’s appraisal here is apt for the V&A’s fragment of Robin Hood Gardens, which in May 2025 opened to the museum-going public at London’s new V&A East Storehouse, now in its finished form, after its earlier incarnation in Venice. Yet this museum artefact, and the crisis-ridden conditions it covers over and consolidates, must be seen in their particularity too. Its social violence is encapsulated in the screenshot above – a Bluesky post by a resident from Glenkerry House, a Brutalist co-op scheme near to the former site of Robin Hood Gardens.

And the fragment at V&A East has an additional destructive valence, pertaining to its new location. As a showpiece attraction in a major state- and culture-led regeneration, Robin Hood Gardens is now arrogated to the Olympic legacy’s class-cleansing of Newham, a borough suffering a deep crisis of housing affordability that has been made worse by the massive private-building programme spearheaded by the regeneration. The fragment, and the care and funds lavished on it, give the V&A East an air of authenticity, a pseudo-identification with the working-class housing and history of east London, all the better to disguise and affirm the regeneration that is expelling the very same class from the area. This is Robin Hood in reverse.

In 2022, I speculated in an article and book chapter about the form the V&A East exhibit would take, some of which accompanies the images above on this webpage. This included a study of the accompanying film by artist Do Ho Suh, which abstracts the social violence of the estate’s demolition into the sumptuous and indulgent global aesthetic of ruins. And I suggested a likely prominence in the exhibit of working-class “community,” whose instrumentalisation for estate demolition has reached the extent that “a community’s inclusion in [public] art has today even come to betoken their imminent displacement,” as Josephine Berry grasps the problem.

Now that the exhibit is realised in its finished form, the film has been diminished in its contribution, no longer shown at spectacular scale and without the reverence accorded by a dark viewing room. But it is still part of the show, with its problematic effects. Community, on the other hand, has been foregrounded even more than I expected, self-consciously asserted in the object labels as a preeminent value of the estate and through the involvement of former residents and young east Londoners. This warrants further reflection.

Former residents’ oral histories are heard through ceiling speakers as one stands on the section of street in the sky, outside the two interlocking apartments, whose hallways and stairways we see through the windows, reconstructed in their original fittings, wallpaper, and panelling, as is the original colour (if somewhat fluorescent) of the exterior woodwork. One voice mentions the local authority’s deliberate, demolition-inviting neglect of the estate. And the residents’ enthusiastic recollections give the lie to the pro-demolition myth, beloved of government and commentariat, that the estate was unpopular. But the overall effect is one of nostalgia, lifting the estate out of the crisis of social housing in the present and into the sealed and sanitised past of welfare-state heritage, as I had speculated. When the Storehouse opened, an uncritical appraisal of the exhibit in the Guardian rather confirmed that appraisal: “Deftly suspended from the gantry, the poignant fragment [of Robin Hood Gardens] now seems as much a relic of a bygone age as the 15th-century Islamic dome from a Spanish palace that is displayed across the hall.” “‘We used to have something called social housing,’ you will be able to tell your grandchildren.”

And yet, in the involvement of young east Londoners, in what appears to be a significant mentoring scheme and including exhibit artworks and a book, here just perhaps are glimpses of the antagonistic artefact that Benjamin spoke of. There have clearly been changes in the shaping of the exhibit since it was first curated in Venice for consumption by the well-heeled audience of the global art circuit. Back then, it was pompously defended by the V&A Director, Tristram Hunt, against the “keyboard warriors and ‘art-wash’ agitators” (his words) who opposed it. In challenging this macabre artefact of London’s social cleansing, we were deemed to be part of an “era of absolutist, righteous identity politics,” as Hunt put it, deploying a framework dear to right-wing pundits when dismissing criticism of the racialised, classed, and gendered identity of the national public (the real reactionary identity politics).

I suspect that Hunt and the fragment’s first curators eventually woke up to the criticism, coming to the realisation that none of this looked good and risked scuppering the future exhibit. And so, in its Storehouse incarnation, after the new curatorial team and the young people came on board, there are indications of a more critical story being told. It remains an open question whether this story is smothered by or even feeds the fragment’s social-cleansing aesthetic, or if it becomes part of a real rift in the culture industries’ appropriation of working-class housing to obscure and legitimise the social violence of estate demolition and regeneration.