History

Abstract

The story of deck access housing in Britain is the story of British public housing per se. Roberts’ Bloomsbury housing block was a radical statement of intent. At the time, slum landlords, presiding over ‘interminable square miles of wretched shacks, usually of brick with tile or slate roofs’, demanded of their builders the simplest job possible: a stripped-down version of the Georgian brick terrace house. The driving force was population growth, which changed in both composition and distribution in the 19th century. Britain grew from 11 million in 1801 to 37 million a century later, with London’s share increasing from 9 to 12 per cent. Modernist housing achieved greater prominence with the construction of the Thames-side Churchill Gardens in Pimlico. This enormous project consisted of a series of nine to eleven-storey deck access slab blocks, with smaller blocks of three- to five-storeys and a seven-storey deck access maisonette terrace, connecting it with the existing neighbourhood.