Altered Estates

Estate regeneration in the spotlight

In the 1960s and 70s nearly three million homes were built by local authorities in Britain. Most of them incorporated new ideas about town planning, the design of the home and methods of construction.

It is these estates which have been – and continue to be – the main focus of subsequent major regeneration initiatives, including David Cameron’s recent declaration of action on ‘sink estates’. The Prime Minister accuses the worst estates of ‘entrenching poverty in Britain – isolating and trapping many of our families and communities’.

Like many observers he believes that non-traditional design is a significant part of the problem. Regeneration specialists know that the issues are far more complex, but most would at least agree that design can contribute to the social and economic success or failure of places.

The four architectural practices behind this report have been involved with the regeneration of housing estates for four decades. They started to advise communities and local authorities on estate improvements soon after the last concrete panel was craned into place in the mid-1970s.

Since then these practices have worked under successive political initiatives and funding models to improve, remodel or replace dozens of estates in London and around the UK. They have seen what works and what does not.

In response to the renewed political focus on estate regeneration, this report contains a distillation of their combined experience into a series of recommendations on how best to meet the challenges of today.

We hope this report will be of interest to communities, local authorities, housing associations, our developer clients and professional colleagues, including other architects who have come more recently into the challenging field of estate regeneration.

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