Image of Park Hill Flats above Sheffield Midland Train Station in the 1960s, taken by Flickr user sparkgap's dad.Let's play word association...
"Tower blocks..."
Try to avoid the following images: lifts smelling of urine, fear of crime, Ronan Point, concrete, demolition, windows, nowhere to play...
Why has this image developed ? Is this the image you had ?
The development company URBAN SPLASH has some intriguing web resources on their work to rethink our cities. Their website starts with an image of Park Hill Flats.
Several of their developments would be a useful counterpoint to the more negative images that people might have...
I used to live in Huddersfield, and just up from the road in Newsome where I lived was an old mutli-floored textile mill with a huge chimney which was sat empty, but would perhaps now have been redeveloped into luxury apartments.
Park Hill flats are an image I have seen regularly for the whole of my life: squatting on the hills on the approach to Sheffield from Rotherham - appearing as I sat on the 69 bus from Rotherham. I have spent some time wandering and driving through them at intervals over the past few decades as well - including when I worked in Sheffield at the Geographical Association's HQ. I've also been up to take photographs of them several times.
"Streets in the sky..." was the original plan for this block. They were built to replace slum housing which was of a desperately poor quality, with few facilities.
Each apartment had a front door which looked out onto a twelve-feet wide access deck ('street'), which ran from one side of the scheme to the other. Bridges carried the street through the entire scheme, allowing milk floats to trundle from door to door.
Jack Lynn was worried that the lobby space in other Modernist estates tended to become a no-man's land, serving neither public needs nor offering privacy to residents, and it was hoped that the 'streets' would solve this problem. He remarked enthusiastically on the different colours of linoleum at each doorstep as proof that residents' individuality was not being smothered by gargantuan surroundings.
But Park Hill's problems quickly became apparent. The streets allowed some of the worst aspects of urban life to remain (muggers found they made convenient getaway routes), whilst failing to preserve the better aspects.
They were never really streets in the real sense. Although the architects had included shops, a school, and a pub in order to create a distinctive community within the estate, the access decks were really just long walkways with none of the vibrancy, diversity, and organic feel of a city street which has grown and changed over decades or even centuries.
Read the text in the Urban Splash brochure to get a nice feeling for the importance of Park Hill flats.Sheffield didn't just have Park Hill. There was also the Kelvin Flats and Hyde Park Flats.
Check out the WIKIPEDIA page, which suggests that Park Hill Flats are Europe's largest listed building...
LISTER MILLS, Bradford
Also don't forget the classic Geography Programme about Glasgow which features Basil Spence's designs, and the couple who live in them, and Kitty Murphy.
