Two kinds of post-war estate side by side: a Barbican-type precinct of towers and terrace blocks on a podium, with a lake, an arts centre and highwalks over the roads; and a Park Hill-type slab snaking across its site, with a street deck every third floor.
The post-war British estate tried to rebuild the bombed and condemned inner city at high density without the streets it replaced. Two answers are shown. To the west, as at the Barbican (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1955–82), the whole site is raised on a podium: vehicles, parking and service stay at ground level, and people move on a deck above, linked to the rest of the city by highwalks. This is the vertical segregation of Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns. Terrace blocks of ribbed concrete stand on columns round a lake and a sunken garden; three towers of some forty storeys rise at the corners; the arts centre is buried in the podium.
To the east, as at Park Hill (Lynn and Smith, 1957–61), a single slab bends across the site, and every third floor carries a deck wide enough for a milk float, on which the front doors open: the Smithsons’ “streets in the air”. On Park Hill’s hillside the roofline stayed level while the storeys rose from four to thirteen; on this flat ground the steps in height show the same count.
Béton brut, the board-marked or bush-hammered concrete left as it came from the formwork, is the material throughout: the “as found” honesty of Banham’s New Brutalism. North of the road stands a group after the Golden Lane estate (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1953–62), the competition the Smithsons lost with their streets in the air. The layout is a composite, not a plan of any one estate.