The 1930 Housing Act enabled Local Authorities to work with the voluntary housing sector. This sector was dominated by women's organisations and the Act provided a new avenue for increased participation. The company known as the Women's Pioneer Housing Ltd was run as a Co-operative Society, employing its own woman architect, Gertrude Leverkus (1899-1976) to design each flat. There were four different styles on offer to suit diverse needs and by 1936 it provided 36 developments in London and one in Brighton.
The National Association of Women Civil Servants (NAWCS) had urged the government and local authorities since 1947 to build low cost rentals but shortage of land made single-unit dwellings expensive. NAWCS representatives were impressed by the model Buccleuch House, Clapton Common, London E5 with its 96 flats plus communal facilities for single women, which Hackney Council had built and invited them to visit in 1951.
“What’s the first thing you notice in a place? it’s not because it has nice curves or proportions, it is if their are people in it or not. If you go into an empty restaurant you don’t think if it is beautiful or not, you think if it is safe to eat at.
The derelict place is caught between meaningless and meaningful.
Its about letting go, first it’s slow, you only notice it in the eyebrow, the walk, the speech, then the body sinks and goes down the ground, and gravity takes hold.
At first you don’t notice it, at first it’s too slow.
It’s like you can’t move it now, you can’t do anything, it’ll do something by itself later, all you can do is be around something, I dont know what to do, I don’t know how to handle this I have no idea, I guess in a while I could just get up.
It’s broken down as your routine, as your habits, it’s the way you see yourself everyday, it’s all you built up around to keep your body and the things around you the same everyday. And when one of those things stops working,
Everything shifts.”
Recent years have seen the faltering of economic growth, the erosion of the welfare state and the disappearance of social consensus. Nowhere have these processes cut more deeply than in the inner city, where industrial decline, low income, persistent high unemployment and housing decay are fuelling crime and racial tension to create our most daunting social problem. Combining interviews and eye-witness accounts with his own analysis, the author provides a portrait of the underside of the affluent society and the hidden human costs of public policies. From dying factories to social security offices, from single mothers to street thieves, it offers an insight into the realities of deprivation and social conflict in Britain today.
Patrick Keiller's extraordinary portrait of London re-imagines the city through the explorations of an unseen 'researcher' Robinson and his similarly unseen companion, the film's narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield).
"Tripoli emphasizes political history and architectural traces through the preserved relics of our recent past."
|
