Smith, Holly; (2024) Up in the Air: High-Rise Housing and the Public in Post-War Britain. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Final PhD submission with copyrighted images excised, 29.01.24.pdf - Submitted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 January 2027. Download (2MB)

Abstract

Combining architectural and political history, this thesis offers a new account of high-rise housing in modern Britain from the perspective of the people who lived there. This novel form of building caught on from the early twentieth century, but truly came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s as mass council housing in the urban reconstruction which followed the Second World War. This thesis considers how the British public has responded to high-rise housing since this burst of construction by studying a series of local community action campaigns on multi-storey estates across the 1970s to the 2010s. It locates these campaigns within a broader political culture – encompassing central government, local authorities, architects, journalists, and community workers – which encircled high-rise housing. These archivally-based, area-specific case studies afford us insight into the grassroots histories of these estates across time. The thesis makes three crucial interventions. Firstly, it rebuts influential arguments that high-rise architecture has been universally unpopular and systematically causes malaise amongst its inhabitants. Instead, it traces a wide range of residential responses to different multi-storey environments across time, stretching between the poles of affection and aversion, to illustrate a more nuanced relationship between space and subjectivity. It identifies the salience of a number of more significant factors – chiefly the priorities of affordability, maintenance, and control – above architectural form in the formation of opinion about housing. Secondly, the thesis troubles conventional narratives of a ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ in support for high-rise architecture, council housing, and public ownership in post-war Britain by demonstrating the mobility of popular feeling on these issues from the 1970s onwards. Thirdly, it shows that scholars need to move beyond the categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in order to understand the history of popular politics. By considering how the public has responded to high-rise housing, the thesis illuminates the recurrence of vernacular political languages circling around the concerns of choice, self-determination, and justice in post-war British history.

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