Sheffield 4: Concrete exoskeletons

The following isn't very good. I wrote it a couple of months ago, but there's been a lot about Park Hill recently, so I didn't post it because it has nothing new to say. But if only to prove I'm still alive, and in orderfor me to be able to move onto another post, here is yet another post on Park Hill with a few photos and scans from AD September 1961, when it was being reviewed, and from June 1955 when Theo Crosby previewed it.




Sheffield currently has two concrete skeletons staring each other out across the railway tracks: Park Hill and St. Paul's Place. Anyone who has alighted from Sheffield train station cannot have failed to notice the huge inhabited wall of a building on the hill to the east, protecting the city centre from the marauding suburbs of ill repute beyond. It's reminiscent of Stanage Edge, a few miles west in the Peak District where all the climbers who congregate in Sheffield cut their teeth along with other body parts. Reminiscent in that it meanders along the hill offering a permanence and definition to a city that is desperately searching for such qualities. Being from quite literally the wrong side of the tracks is still a problem for Park Hill. Between it and the city centre are two tram lines, nine train platforms, four lanes of traffic and a steep valley. The station operator (East Midlands Trains) is also wanting to build gates that only people with a train ticket will be allowed through – big business's privatisation of a previously public route. If this preposterous proposition goes ahead, Park Hill will be all but cut off – terrible news not only for the city, but also for Urban Splash who are currently developing the building almost beyond recognition.


Now the cooling towers have gone, Park Hill is really Sheffield's last remaining icon of any credibility and certainly its only building of international standing. Designed in the 1950s by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith under the supervision of city architect Lewis Womersley, and finished in 1961, it is Europe's largest listed building. And as Reyner Banham noted somewhat incredulously, it is a single building. One that starts at a human four storeys and follows the hill as it falls away, maintaining a level roof height, so that at the other end, it is an impressive 14 storeys tall. The streets in the sky, influenced by the Smithsons' Golden Lane competition entry and of course, Corb's Unité d'habitation at Marseille, both of 1952, are not internal corridors, but quite wide decks every three storeys that forms bridges between the main blocks of flats. These decks continue until they meet the ground so that most flats are reachable without having to take the stairs or lift – as long as they don't mind a long walk round. The flats are ingeniously arranged around a huge concrete H column which encloses the stairs and forms bracing for the concrete frame. Four doors from the decks are arranged two doors either side of this huge concrete column and access four flats – one of one bedroom, two of two bedrooms and one of three bedrooms. In pre-Parker Morris days, these are all of Parker Morris space standards. Unfortunately, all flats require stair access of some sort. The one bedroom and two bedroom flats below deck access are all on a level, but are accessed from stairs down from the deck. The other flats are duplex. There were 992 flats in total in Park Hill, each connected to the communal district heating and each having a Garchey system refuse chute. For people used to outside toilets, this was the lap of luxury.




If it had not controversially been listed in 1998, Park Hill would almost certainly have been demolished. The streets in the sky would now be, quite simply, sky and we would almost certainly be left with bland boxes of dubious cul-de-sac quality. There were many in Sheffield who campaigned for it to be demolished, including the current head of our new Liberal Democrat council, Paul Scriven. The recent BBC programme on English Heritage, “Romancing the Stone”, shows him ranting against the building and then, as head of the council, appearing as martyr, trying to make the best of a bad job. Such commitment and vision is commensurate with Sheffield's loss of confidence and new tight grip on blandness. English Heritage are providing £500k of funding to help with the concrete repairs as the only thing they consider worth saving is the concrete frame. On a trip to Corb's Unité, they learn that ?7m was spent on refurbishing the concrete, whereas Urban Splash plan to spend just ?3m on the whole of Park Hill, a building over four times the size.



Urban Splash, starting from the 14 storey end, have completely gutted the building, including the gradated bricks of the façade. These are to be replaced with anodised aluminium panels. I'm amazed that English Heritage are not concerned to replace the façade faithfully as the rough texture of the bricks are very much a part of the Brutalist aesthetic and there is no architectural reasons why they could not be just cleaned up or replaced. The spandrel panels below the windows will not be missed in favour of floor to ceiling windows, but the aluminium panels reek of trendy shininess and are completely inappropriate. English Heritage is clearly out of its depth with twentieth century buildings, as demonstrated in the BBC programme where almost every comment or answer by posh Giles Proctor was accompanied by joshing and mocking. He's happier on 19th century church roofs.

Park Hill cost a considerable sum when it was built. In 1956 prices, it worked out at £1,950 per dwelling as opposed to £1,600 for an average 2-storey house of the time. Fast forward 50 years and Sheffield is desperate for inward investment and jealous of its Yorkshire rival Leeds where the terra cotta clad lawyers and accountants live.




St. Paul's Place, designed by Conran stands opposite the Hill and will accommodate 331 such “luxury” apartments. The penthouse will sell (or perhaps has already sold) for over £1m. The flats are approximately 12% larger than the equivalent were in Park Hill 50 years ago. St. Paul's is on the right side of the tracks, just a few paces from the city centre and on the site of the old “wedding cake” registry office. It is a 21st century echo of housing policy, conceived in an age when our houses earned more than we did and when housing is still conceived of as capital, pensions, and investment. It will be Sheffield's tallest tower at 32 storeys and ignores the topography in favour of standing tall, proud and arrogantly being seen from all of Sheffield's seven hills. It is a vertical rendition of Park Hill's horizontal empty hive of concrete cells. I was hoping that the recent controversy over the cladding would bring the whole thing to a halt and the concrete monolith would remain a monument to greed. But the council conceded and the developers have got away with cheap cladding which will blight the cityscape for generations, setting the low standard for future developments in the city.



In a country run by big business and banks, councils no longer see fit to provide housing, but rather to pass the responsibility to Registered Social Landlords and Housing Associations. An Englishman's home is no longer his castle, but his pension. Today's New Labour strategy is to make the rich richer and hope the crumbs from their table will feed the poor. Not surprisingly, the gap between poor and rich is widening and we are left in the ridiculous situation where councils pay private landlords to house the less fortunate (a similar situation to the government underwriting the banks to finance PFI contracts for schools and hospitals). Nobody wins but the private landlord, who is, of course, disinterested in improving the lives of his/her tenants. Hence the donation of Park Hill to Urban Splash to develop into a mix of 900 luxury flats and social housing – 200 to be rented by Manchester Methodist Housing Association, 40 for shared ownership and the remaining 660 privately owned. Interestingly, the newly formed Homes and Communities Agency, headed by Sir Bob Kerslake, will be “front-loading” £14m of grants to the credit-crunched project. Kerslake was the former, unelected, head of Sheffield's Labour council and oversaw the demolition of hundreds of council houses without replacement. Or replaced with hundreds of cheaply built “luxury” flats that now adorn Sheffield, half empty and now refusing to fart their fantasy fortunes for their owners. Kerslake was be-knighted for his contribution while, as Owen reported, Sheffield's waiting list for housing has risen from 15,000 in 2001 to as much as 90,000 today. The 21st century's definition of progress.