Modernist ideals: The utopian designs of william morris, peter behrens and the social housing schemes of mid- twentieth-century sheffield

Abstract

Music treads malevolently, cautions, holds us back, but the camera turns a corner, just a little too quickly, into the light. A discarded, overloaded shopping trolley snarls at us as we emerge from the unlit walkway. We see a geometric, concrete wasteland, strewn with rubbish and chairs. Washing lines flap fitfully in the breeze like grim bunting. Birds have begun to take possession. This short film was a Channel 4 feature, shown in-between programmes. The unattractive vision is of the Aylesbury Estate (1963-1977), Southwark, an archetypal British housing estate now subject to a major regeneration scheme. As Ben Campkin emphasises, the washing lines-a frequent trope of economic and social deprivation-which festoon the scene were added later to depict the estate as ‘a desolate concrete dystopia’, a '“ghost town” estate’.1 Campkin stresses that this kind of media attention, in which estates are presented as manifesting the failings of society, misrepresents estates, ‘taking them into a representational realm of abstract generalisation’ (Campkin, Remaking London, p. 100).