MVRDV’s Silodam in Amsterdam

Whether it is in television series such as The Wire or films such as Gomorrah, La Haine or Meantime, the depiction of social housing in popular culture tends to be of an inescapable, dehumanising ghetto, a chunk of dysfunctional city that drains its citizens of responsibility and respect. It inevitably appears as a world of isolated, alienating towers set in a landscape of bleak desolation.

Yet a pleasant stroll through the tree-lined streets of one of London’s most desirable postcodes should be enough to question this depiction. Pimlico is a peculiarly London type of place. It is a favourite residence of members of parliament – only a few minutes from Westminster – and it has at its heart a compelling combination of the monumental grandeur of the Tate Britain and a slightly disjointed but extraordinary collection of social housing types spanning a century. There are the flats of Peabody Avenue of 1875, awesome cliffs of London Stock brick, one of the city’s earliest and most substantial social housing schemes. There is the Millbank Estate, designed by the London County Council architects’ department between 1897 and 1902. They created beautiful but robust buildings of elegant red brick, socialist in nature, arts and crafts in style.

Then there are the striking checkerboard façades of Page Street. This was a late-1920s social housing scheme by an architect at the peak of his inventive powers. Sir Edwin Lutyens made his name designing houses for industrialists, grand banks and memorials. Solid, urbane and intriguing, it is an austere series of blocks relieved not only by the patterned façades but by exquisite details, elegant classical porticos and shopfronts and fine brickwork.

Towards the river is the Churchill Gardens Estate, one if the first British social housing projects to wholeheartedly adopt modernism. Designed in 1947 by architects Powell & Moya, astonishingly still only in their mid-20s, it comprises a series of elegant towers and low-rises, originally heated by waste energy from Battersea Power Station opposite. And all this at the heart of one of the city’s most desirable quarters. It is impossible to imagine anything similar happening today.

Social housing no longer drives agendas. It is instead delegated to the private sector, relegated to the back ends of private housing schemes, a utility grudgingly supplied by developers. Since councils stopped building housing under the Conservative government in the 1980s, the supply of social and affordable housing has fallen to the private sector as a trade-off in negotiating planning permission for big residential schemes.

Sir Edward Lutyens’ checkerboard façades on London’s Page Street

It has not been all downside. Pimlico is, by any measure, a special case. Social housing provision was, it is true, far more characterised by huge, ill-maintained slab blocks in desolate locations on the edges of cities. Similar housing policies from the US to Europe led to a tragic ghettoisation of the post-industrial proletariat, a policy still having repercussions as those blocks are filled the second time around by poor immigrants. The new policy of integrating social housing into private development aims to avoid exactly that ghettoisation. But, you could argue, it also emasculates social housing and its design, delegating it to a back-of-house function.

The history of modern residential design has been, for good and for ill, dominated by the need for mass housing. In England the garden city movement founded by Ebenezer Howard has remained a seemingly irresistible trope, with its vision of small houses in pleasant suburban settings, a reaction to the fearsome slums of the British industrial city. In Germany the first serious architectural manifestations of the modern movement and the Bauhaus were addressed towards the need to house workers. The 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart showcased model dwellings by major modernist architects including Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut. Moisei Ginzburg’s 1930 Narkomfin Building in Moscow envisaged a future of solidly non-bourgeois communality in an elegantly austere structure that in turn much influenced Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, arguably the most influential residential building of the modern age.

Virtually every big development in the form and architectural language of modern housing has emerged from the drive for social housing. While it is impossible to defend the worst excesses of the crumbling concrete towers that have come to characterise the peripheries of every city from Detroit to Vladivostok, it also needs to be considered that in delegating the provision of housing entirely to grudging developers there might be big opportunities being lost.

One of the oddest quirks produced by the UK planning system is that, at least in space standards, social housing is often far better than that available in the private market. The huge volume of housing being built in the postwar era led to the emergence of a comprehensive and extremely humane set of minimum standards for social housing. Commonly known as the Parker Morris Standards, these were discarded in the deregulation of the Thatcher era yet they somehow survived in the tightly regulated realm of social housing provision.

“These ideas of space standards are starting to make a real comeback as requirements are now more rigorous in the social than in the private sector,” says Paul Finch, the chairman-elect of the UK’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. “We’ve seen that some poor-quality housing will sell if there’s nothing else on the market while the conditions for public funding have led to a drive to expect certain standards of space. I think we’re seeing a commitment to quality over quantity.”

There are a few isolated instances of extremely fine new social housing. One of the exemplars is the development of New Islington in Manchester, north-west England, led by Urban Splash and the Manchester Methodist Housing Association. Here architects FAT and De Metz Forbes Knight have created terraces of depth and beauty. Developed with the right degree of consultation and flair, they are laying the roots of an alternative to the grim low-rise estates that formerly characterised the area. There is also Adelaide Wharf in east London. Designed by AHMM for First Base, this is a mixed tenure canal-side building in Hackney in which the social element is inextricably integrated into the larger scheme. “The private sector buys land up, develops it and moves on but we’re responsible for the long term, which gives us a very different perspective,” says Peter Reay, First Base development manager.

Claire Bennie, principal development manager of Peabody (still building houses 135 years after Pimlico) agrees: “The private sector could innovate in housing but why would they? Houses are not like cars or furniture, where people seem to be getting more discerning about design. When they buy a house most people will buy something quite ordinary, so that’s what the market supplies. When we build more modern properties people always say, ‘I wouldn’t have thought this kind of thing was for me but I love it.’ ”

Peabody has also attempted to pioneer developments in prefabrication and off-site construction. Its London schemes at Murray Grove (Cartwright Pickard Architects) and in Beaufort Court (Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio) have seen experiments with prefabricated modules and panels that private housing is loath to undertake. If these methods were applied more widely the economies could begin to radically address the nation’s housing shortages. “The risks are less than you’d imagine,” Bennie says. “You have to employ people who care and the only way you’ll get good buildings is by using good architects and challenging them.”

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles

Architects, who are so often blamed for the disasters of postwar housing, do, of course, care and believe that housing is important. “Good housing is the sign of a civilised society,” says architect Ian Ritchie. Jonathan Sergison (of Sergison Bates, which has worked on social housing in both the UK and Switzerland) expands: “In Switzerland there has been a continuous modern programme and housing is seen not as being about profit but as being about a contribution to society.”

Architect Alex Ely, who was commissioned by the London Development Authority to write a report on housing standards, compares the UK unfavourably with the continent, citing the standards set by the Netherlands. The brilliant mosaic of MVRDV’s Silodam in Amsterdam has become a defining image, a massive block that seems to float in the sea like an overloaded container ship. Elsewhere in Europe, some of the world’s most inventive and brilliant architects, from Herzog & de Meuron to Foreign Office Architects, have been building affordable, innovative and beautiful social housing. Both use shuttering systems and blinds to create economical, expressive, lively façades, the former in France, the latter in Spain. It can be done.

Ironically, the end of the great era of municipal housing occurred at the point that architects were beginning to re-engage intellectually with it. Architects Patrick Hodgkinson and Neave Brown were creating templates for urban housing that segued effortlessly into the historic London context yet still produced visionary architectures. Hodgkinson’s recently refurbished and hugely successful Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury (1965-1973) and Brown’s Alexandra Road in Camden (1969-1979) suggest that innovative architecture can coexist with history and communicate with it while providing exemplary homes. Back in Pimlico, Darbourne and Darke built the delightful brick Lillington Gardens Estate (1961-1971), a big, varied set of brick structures with a rich, sculptural architecture, balconies, walkways and wonderfully quiet and green gardens.

None of these evoke the familiar image of dumb towers set in wastelands and each proposes an innovative, mixed and architecturally inventive landscape. Without a serious, politically and socially committed programme of social housing, we will never properly address the housing crisis and we are unlikely to see the likes of these compelling buildings in this country again. Architecture as a whole is much the poorer for it.