Rookeries and no-go estates: St. Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of ‘non-street’ housing

Abstract

This essay offers an historical analysis of two kinds of housing. It proposes a connection between the densely packed housing of the poor in nineteenth-century London, the so-called rookeries, and post-war local authority built modernist housing estates. It argues that there are similarities in the spatial character of the two forms, particularly in the complexity of the relationship between the private and public realms, and that this, together with the close identification of both forms with their inhabitants, provoked similar responses in representation and action. The main body of the dissertation is based on historical analysis of two examples, the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London and, in greater detail, the local authority housing estate called Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, in the London Borough of Haringey. Alternating with historical accounts are descriptions and analyses of form and spatial character, and discussion of the ideologies underlying the responses (that is, the ideas that shaped the housing and urban forms, particularly those offered as alternatives to our case studies). Parallels are drawn between responses to the two forms studied in terms of the ‘fear’ in the title of the work, with an attempt to clarify where this fear lay and the nature of the responses.