OK - if I take your point, I think that the Liverpool Waters project would look a lot better, and much less obtrusive on the skyline if it was built to the medium rise, medium density option in your sketch.
You could almost say the the need for high tower blocks is to have architectural statements (art for art's sake) and not for more people on a given area of land...
Like modern art, you either like it or hate it....
---------- Post added at 12:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:27 PM ----------
I did do a check on this picture - http://www.flickr.com/photos/40936407@N07/6982382355/
I presume it's the one you are talking about.
The terrace block touching the NW corner of the green area has about 40 dwelling units and few more on the North end. It alone would take up much more than half of the "blocks" area. Since the towers are about 54 flats each, the blocks are more dense. At the redevelopment (gentrification) level they can even be 108 flats per block, far exceeding the terrace house block density.
(There's none so blind as...)
Please be polite and don't confuse me with Chase - I have stayed polite...
What about St Georges heights, Everton. Wasn't there plenty of green space around there ??
The tower blocks on Menlove ave - not in a park, but are in tree lined surroundings. These flats have always kept well as far as I can tell. I've not been in them, but they have always looked nice in pleasant surroundings.
Don't get confused. They all have the same density.
And no it's not that subjective. Liverpool and Wirral Waters have a lot higher density than anything we've looked at here. Going high is a way of getting that density without a big 'footprint', If you built the medium coverage (ie., footprint) option, the houses at the bottom would be in a deep dark pit.
As I said earlier the driver for high residential tower blocks in Kirkby and elsewhere was cost more than anything else. If you build 20 floors you have a 1/20th the roof area and 1/20th foundation area (albeit possibly deeper). Given the standard of provision of services and the industrialised construction methods (factory panel systems) the downside on services and structure were minimal and the corresponding savings are huge.
That would be very attractive to any council who couldn't get the money from government to build anything else (and a big fat infrastructure bill to pay)
Sounds great but the Ronan Point gas explosion pointed out that workmanship on site needs to be as good as in the factory. And it all came tumbling down.....
Seems to me the real issue for high rise tower blocks was lack of 'ownership' or feeling of belonging (so that the place was looked after on a daily basis) and the cost of the war on vandalism depleting the maintenance budget.
---------- Post added at 12:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:27 PM ----------
I did have a quick look at that. Did you take into account that the houses can be in flats? It would obviously be out of whack to compare 3 bed houses with 1 or 2 bed flats.
Yes Peter, thank you. I hope you had a good repast. I'm hoping to catch the Chelsea match at 7.45 on ITV, but don't think I'm running away, I would like your thoughts on post 131.
I'm sure it fits into your thread entitled Housing Mistakes. I do apologize for rising to the bait over "the layers of the onion" holdings. I'm easily led, that's why I'm still on the tag. (Scouse humour, honestly)
Regards,
Chas
What are you watching Chelsea for???
---------- Post added at 08:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:56 PM ----------
And as I said, the expansion of the cities into the suburbs was neither as a result of land shortage nor was it that that drove up house prices.
And renting is not slavery by any other name. There are many across Europe who enjoy larger and rented homes. Where the alternative is low disposable income and effective slavery to a bank.
You may have deluded yourself that you benefited from ownership. Whereas in fact you didn’t own anything. You may have had a succession of property all if which were actually owned by a bank who charged you for the privilege of living there - life’s a mortgage (or procession of mortgages), then you die. You want to be more careful what you pick up in the school corridor.
And your charming little vignette of social and class envy has little to do with the economics of the housing standards on Cantril Farm or on the size of the dwellings. Rather, the fact that wholesale creation of new communities on ‘virgin’ land is inherently expensive is more relevant.
It is not merely the cost of building a house, it is the cost of everything that comes with it (roads, sewers, services, drainage etc). The landed gentry did not benefit from that, they simply sold land. For them the end of the story.
[As an aside, it’s interesting that you can reap the rewards of the system and that’s clever and ok but it’s not ok for anyone who’s been doing it for a bit longer than you].
It’s small wonder that so little communal facilities (shops...) were built, particularly assuming there were precious few tenants to put up the money that would allow them to be built.
***
Ken Rogers has been very eloquent on the lost tribes as has Terence Davies although maybe rather less sentimental and a bit more realistic. But indeed, we might have done better to stay in Kirkdale and build medium density housing phase by phase but you have to look at the constraints of the time - lack of funds, the massive urgency and the real fear of the outbreak of serious disease - there you go Chas (but I’ve never owned a Golf).
And don't forget, it was tried (staying) and it was a dream to go out to the suburbs. A garden and a house of your own. You needed a letter from God to get in... isn't hindsight wonderful.
But. We should be doing it now.... http://itsliverpoolcityfringe.blogspot.com/
***
Surplus? what surplus? - numbers! I've got a Chelsea match that I'm missing.
Last edited by az_gila; 03-14-2012 at 09:01 PM. Reason: sppelling
There's no answer to that question, Peter. A London club owned by a Russian billionaire, the last English team through to the quarter finals of the Champions League.......but don't read too much into this. I'll be watching Everton on Saturday and Liverpool on Sunday. I must be a glutton for punishment.
Chelsea won incidentally. The match went into extra time.
I try to avoid any Manchester games but it's getting harder to avoid them. ( semi- jokingly)
Chas
Post 131 is not urgent.
The LCC - God was a joke, but getting a permit from the LCC to buy a house was not.
Apparently it was required during the high demand time of soldiers returning and houses lost to bombing - and the start of the baby boom. There was (still is?) some resentment about the other neighbours who lied on their applications.
You didn't read my reply then? Pearls before swine (Joke)
---------- Post added at 09:42 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:29 AM ----------
When everyone was coming home, Dad was sent off to Kenya to fight the Mau Mau. He got back in 1947 by which time...
Mum and he first lived in a house that an Aunt rented in Newsham Park. There were seven families in it! (But they never stopped talking about how good it was - I think they were in the kitchen first and moved upstairs later). Eventually moved to Huyton Village where Grandad rented over a bank and from there to a council flat in Huyton.
Point is, both council and 'tenants' had responsibilities and it wasn't easy.
---------- Post added at 09:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:42 AM ----------
Yes the quip was a bit harsh.
I got around to measuring it and the terraced houses as flats are actually denser than the tower blocks!
However I think there's probably more flats in the tower blocks than you think. So measuring like-for-like (flats v flats) and allowing a few more flats in the tower blocks than you said, I think it would actually be about the same (as the pretty picture suggests) in this case about 60 dwellings per hectare.
However, some of the 'houses' have three bins in front of them...
***
If someone had an aerial picture of one of the estates from the 60s, I think that would really show how much space around the blocks there was.
---------- Post added at 10:24 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:54 AM ----------
This is - more or less, give or take - complete garbage. And I don’t think Winston Churchill needed an interpreter. He does rather well for himself.
Supply and demand has rather more sway on the price of cement than its location. And moveable cement moves to meet the demand for it. Thus increasing, not equalising its price. Moveable cement as an illustration that land shortage increases land price because it is immovable is thus... bollocks.
There has been no land shortage that has driven us to building houses further and further out of town in this city. It is a complete myth. Take a look at the North End and tell me it’s choc-a-bloc. I dare you.
The population of the city has halved since 1938. The displacement into Knowsley and parts of SW Lancs has been absorbed at very low density. There’s space to burn, both in and around Liverpool. And in the centre - did the land evaporate in the meantime? What are you on?!!
The brownfield sites in the North End:
northbrownfield by Peter McGurk, on Flickr
The history of tower blocks in the city neatly illustrates how the poor are callously warehoused, their communities broken up, and how planners and architects are complicit in this.
When the slum clearances began next to no one who was about to be rehoused was involved in the planning of the new estates. Very few who were about to be rehoused would have chosen to live in a high rise block. Remember all those documentaries in the 60s that highlighted the despair and loneliness of the new inhabitants of tower blocks?
And then there were the problems associated with dampness, noise, poor insulation, lifts that didn't work and the anomie that springs from an environment that is poorly maintained.
To be fair, not everyone was against tower-block accommodation: for some reason, a lot of council employees ended up in the pick of the new tower blocks - the ones around Sefton Park and there have been accusations that there was also a 'no blacks' policy in operation for allocation to these flats. Believe it or not, not many council employees ended up in the tower block that came and went on Warwick Street in the space of just over 20 years. I can't think why!
So we had buildings constructed that weren't designed to meet the self-identified housing requirements of the population being rehoused - except the ones in leafy south Liverpool for which there was a waiting list! Hardly a recipe for success. In the poorer parts of the city most of the blocks came and went within a few decades and were never loved by the majority of people who lived in them.
If only the planners and the architects had listened to what people wanted or looked abroad for inspiration from cities that never suffered from inner city blight we wouldn't have the doughnut effect we have now in which the inner city is fighting to survive and some parts of which have given up the ghost.
St Georges Heights were the exception to the rule that I had in my mind that did have plenty of space around it, however, Logan Towers was surrounded by streets as is Heysmoor heights and Marwood Towers to name but another two. You can't include towers that are built in parkland that is already there as a yardstick as in fact, some of the parkland will have actually been taken up to accommodate the towers.
The Menlove blocks are a classic example of this type of housing working if policed properly and not built to a faulty design like the piggeries.
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