A Walk Around Tower House, Chalvey
View looking North up the Crescent, Chalvey.
The Crescent is a long, V-shaped street that is among Chalvey’s oldest, dating back to the late nineteenth century. Most of the houses along it are typical Victorian terraces, with some 20’s additions near the top. Overlooking it is Tower House, one of two tower blocks that were built here in 1966, one of only a few such high-rises to be built in Slough (until recently, that is). So in the same picture we have two different centuries’ approach to high-density housing: the tight-knit, compact Victorian terraces, with minimal but personalisable front ‘garden’ spaces (and a garden at the back), modest variations in visual design (but no difference in size)– and then the high-rise, characterised by its identical apartments with no distinction between different properties, minimalist verging on austere style, and a communal space at its foot to serve as ‘garden’ for all (not visible). Out of the two styles it is the low-rise, discernibly individual housing that has always won out as the favourite of the British public, but it is the multi-storey, high-density block that is once again being used as a myopic solution to the town’s housing shortage.
Close up of Tower House, Chalvey. Count the windows!
The mid-century obsession with high-rise building didn’t make much of a mark in Slough, but these two towers, built in 1966 (the heyday for such structures) remain as a reminder. Perhaps the ultimate expression of communal housing, the only marks of individuality come from the tiny views through each window– a patterned curtain here, a flag there. The sight of clothes awkwardly hung to dry by the window is the hallmark of these buildings. As you would expect, there is zero variation in window size or layout, no ornament (even the slight cornice halfway up seems more structural than aesthetic) and a minimalist, repeated colour scheme. The design is to act as a leveller of its occupants, allowing no differences in status and no visual sign of social mobility, upwards or downwards. This might have been a nice, humanistic idea had the chosen, default social level not been so unappealingly low and meagre: the end result simply became a twelve-storey tall advert for the occupants’ poverty.
It would be inaccurate to say that tower blocks fell out of favour with the British public, as they were never fully in favour to begin with. Occupants with aspirations of their own space and individualism could only look out the window at everyone else’s modest, but distinct properties, while parents complained that it was no place to raise a family; perhaps the only impressed tenants were people in need of affordable one or two bedroom accommodation who at best saw the flats as temporary and expedient measures.
And yet architects loved them– le Corbusier‘s Utopian talk of “streets in the sky” and socially-equalled communities enclosed in single buildings, plus an ecological desire to minimise built-up urban areas led to design after design for multi-storey monsters. Local authorities quickly latched onto the idea of housing large numbers of people in small, high-density concentrations that would be quick and theoretically cheap to put up, particularly at a time when slum-clearance was still a national housing goal. It was ironic then, that so many of these projects simply devolved into vertical slums, marred by disrepair, poor maintenance and monotony of design, and characterised by lack of social mixing and anti-social behaviour.
Communal area at the foot of Tower and Ashbourne Houses, Chalvey.
In lieu of a private garden, the occupants of communal housing such as these tower blocks get communal green space to go with it– fully communal, as the space is as open to the rest of the public as it is to the people who live in the towers. Here there are a few trees and some modest playground activities for the children, a slide, a swing, a frame, a childhood’s worth of play, activity and nature condensed to an area not much larger than the towers’ car park, a precious nugget amidst the drudgery.
This would make it all the more keenly felt, you would think. But alas, don’t get too used to this scene: Slough Borough Council have spotted it and, you guessed it, want to build over it. The plan is to demolish the two 60s tower blocks and build new housing over their stead and over this all-important green space. It is a sad indictment of the current thinking in town development that someone can look at the only public greenery in the neighbourhood for these kids and treat it as expendable or unimportant, thinking “we should squeeze more housing on there” instead. Why is the council always so quick to build on the few remaining green spaces when there are still so many undeveloped brownfield sites sitting around dormant?
As usual, the concerns of residents have fallen onto deaf, indifferent ears. The end result will be a dangerous density of people in an environment that will be even less dignified than what exists now. There is no point in trying to solve Slough’s housing shortfall by making it less habitable, as all the town will end up with is more misery shouldered by more people. There isn’t grass to graze a cow, Betjeman wrote, in his poem about Slough; in the future, you’ll be lucky if there’s enough to nourish a bunny.
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