Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them Today
by Stefi Orazi
(Frances Lincoln, £25)

THE estates built in Britain in the latter part of the 20th century shattered the antiquated mould of tower blocks that had dominated public house building since WWII.

Inspired by designs produced elsewhere in Europe and beyond — particularly by Atelier 5, Jacobus Oud, Piet Blom, Moshe Safdie or the Japanese Metabolists — they became symbols of civic innovation and adventure in housing provision that put comfort, space and community living at its very centre.

This book’s author Stefi Orazi, on the lookout for a place to live on such an estate, ended up corresponding with dozens of tenants and hit on an idea of a compendium of what life is like on the 21 of the best-known.

A simple questionnaire provided the answers about living conditions, satisfaction, aspirations and occasional gripes. They were completed with enthusiasm and no small amount of pride.

The estates ranged from the revolutionary Isokon, built in 1934 by Wells Coates, through Sheffield’s Park Hill to London’s Barbican and Camden’s spectacular “golden decade” ushered in by the legendary borough architect Sydney Cook when Peter Tibory, Alan Forsyth, Gordon Benson and Neave Brown changed the face of social housing in England forever.

Some of the respondents invited Orazi to view interiors that are spacious, lovingly maintained and imaginatively, if modestly, decorated. They offer a startling, though somewhat voyeuristic, glimpse behind often maligned “brutalist” exteriors.

The book is thus a loving paean to social housing and a very convincing argument in favour of building on this remarkable and still little-known legacy, when the best of British architecture was employed to solve the basic need of the people and profit was not the sole consideration.

If there is a criticism, it is that the interviewees are uniformly white middle-class professionals — this may be a coincidence but the truth of those estates is that they are, and have been for decades, multi-racial and multi-cultural, where different social classes more often than not mix effortlessly. Sadly the book does not reflect that reality.

Michal Boncza