It takes a brave or foolish soul to build two-storey-high windows slap bang on the pavement in East London. Still braver, or more foolhardy, to surround those windows with walls so white that you could fool yourself even in the January drizzle that you’re in a sun-baked Moorish town in the south of Spain. It’s like sticking “Kick Me” on your bum.
“But they wouldn’t!” Peter Barber is aghast. “Somebody would see them. There’s no hiding place here. And say they do graffiti the walls, just whitewash them.”
Barber has just completed the most innovative piece of large-scale housing built in Britain for years. He wants Donnybrook Quarter, situated on the junction of Old Ford Road and Parnell Road, near Victoria Park, to instill a sense of community. The properties, now all sold, range in price from £175,000 for a one-bed flat to £200-250,000 for a two-bed, and £325,000 for a four-bed townhouse.
Our fear of public space, our lack of respect for others, has been exacerbated by 30 years in which the urban landscape has either been systematically privatised or abandoned, leaving towns ghettoised, either ultra-polished or decrepit. The get-off-my-land agenda in cities has been a conscious retreat from the so-called social engineering of the postwar years, turning them into a scatter of defensible ghettoised fiefdoms.
Barber is an optimist. “I want the place to be cheerful, like switching a light on in the city.” That’s why those glass windows are there, right on the street too, not cowering behind gates and railings. “It’s easy to put up barriers in the city,” he says. The antidote to privatised urban space is openness — faith, not suspicion.
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Barber’s development replaces a postwar slab-block estate, a brand of modernism that, if anything, was too optimistic about the public realm, too sure that its citizens would be responsible. Now, in place of streets in the sky come streets very much in the city. These are terraced houses, subdivided into various sizes and types — for singletons, families, couples, some private, some social — interlocked, designed to jumble together, not ghettoise, the city.
A two-storey house for a family, reached by a side entrance on to a courtyard, sits above a ground-floor flat for a couple, or next to live/work spaces and studios. It’s dense, housing twice the number of the old postwar block. All windows are placed so that every space is visible. There are no dark crevices where ne’er-do-wells can gather.
The estate agents selling the private flats wanted the place gated. “Over my dead body,” Barber barks. “The street’s the common room of the city.” He sees his houses as a little chunk of the city, and, using carrots and sticks, he wants you out on its streets.
Here’s one such stick: all homes have a front door straight on to the pavement — there’s no avoiding your neighbour. Here’s a carrot: planters sunk into the pavement in front of your house encourage you to plant petunias. “The architecture suggests that here’s a nice place with various rules; it’s up to you to make it work.”
Its conception — a one-off competition by the Architecture Foundation — suggests that this might be the exception rather than the rule. But big housebuilders are now courting Barber; he’s just completing, with the architects Jestico and Whiles, a much bigger, if less radical, version in Barking, a mile from the barely designed estates of Barking Reach which were lambasted by the Institute of Public Policy Reseach a fortnight ago.
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Old Ford Road, in contrast, looks like a real sustainable community. Will it work? The first tenants move in this week. Barber’s sown the seeds. Let’s see what grows.