Housing Estates, London, and Dystopia

Just went to see the Broadwater Farm exhibition, portraying the story of a massive council estate complex in Tottenham made infamous after it's 1985 riots.


Held at Bruce Castle Museum, an interesting site in itself, a strange piece of history nestled in one of the more socioeconomically challenged areas of London. The power of the exhibit was in it's honour of the local people who made Broadwater a success. But underlying it all was the sense that the brutality of the civic system not only crushed a momentum of people's movement but left it dead on the curb.

Broadwater was one of those massive efforts at post-war social engineering, meant to deal with poverty and rising immigration. The huge complex was built and then basically left to decay and within a decade had fallen to such a state of disrepair that it clearly reflects a planned state of structural violence against a community by a council. The failure of these large-scale housing estates was studied by the Land Use Research Unit at King's College in the late seventies. The research of this group influenced Coleman's book Utopia on Trial: vision and reality in planned housing, which featured Broadwater Farm as an example (she was head of the research unit at the time).

The Centre for Spatially Integrated Social Science has a great article on this: Design Disadvantagement.

I also recommend the film Utopia London, which outlines the Labour vision of modern social housing and how in many ways it failed at the hands of politicians and urban planners with no foresight into community and culture.

Finally if you're in London a cycle up to Tottenham to see the exhibit takes you past the smashed windows and boarded shops that mark the result of the recent riots caused by anger over police brutality. Guardian: 'Tottenham in flames as riot follows protest'. 26 years on and history repeats itself, as we move faster towards a social dystopia fuelled by mind-numbing solutions by those in power: BBC: 'David Cameron back councils planning to evict rioters'. Russ Swan has some amazing photos he shot there in 1985 and an good article on his blog entry: Cat and mouse on Broadwater Farm, 1985

To not end on that note I channel the thoughts of Jane Jacobs and her research into the existence and importance of community at the street level and the failure of urban planning to respond to that community in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, something that seems to have not been accounted for in the early planning of Broadwater and most other estates across the country. History doomed to repeat itself....

Press Release:

In 1985 Broadwater Farm experienced one of the worst nights of civil unrest anywhere on mainland Britain. It shocked the nation and nearly destroyed a community. Just months before, Diana Princess of Wales visited to congratulate the Broadwater Farm Youth Association on its success. Today Broadwater Farm is seen as a model of social housing, attracting visitors from around the world. This exhibition will explore the heroic achievements of a community who from the very beginning fought against all the odds. October 2010 at Broadwater Farm Community Centre. Now on at Bruce Castle Museum June 2011 to March 2012