Chelmsley Wood flats to feature in national photo archive

HIGH RISE HERITAGE: Bangor House, in Chelmsley Wood, welcomed
its first tenants in 1970.

TOWER blocks in Chelmsley Wood will feature in a new project, celebrating the history of high rise flats.

Academics at the Edinburgh College of Art aim to create an archive with images of every multi-storey housing block in the UK.

Their hope is to challenge the negative stereotypes about the buildings, which transformed Britain's skyline in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Flats in Chelmsley Wood have been chosen as some of the best-known examples, alongside apartments in Thamesmead, London, The Gorbals, Glasgow and Manchester's Hulme area.

The three-year project will receive £52,900 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and by 2017, as many as 3500 photos will be available to view digitally.

Colin McLean, head of the Heritage Lottery Fund in Scotland, said: "Without archives, vast segments of our nation's history would be missing.

"As the high rise towers that have dominated many towns' and cities' skylines begin to disappear, it is important for us to capture this heritage and give voice to the experience of those who live in these flats and communities."

Prof Miles Glendinning, from the college's conservation studies department, said that the public view of high rise flats had started to shift in recent years and he hoped the project would encourage yet more people to see the structures in a new light.

Highs and Lows: The first of many residential tower blocks was built in Harlow, Essex in 1951. At the time the flats were seen as "a quick fix" for the nation's housing shortage and in fact proved a popular choice with families. But in the rush to erect the buildings, corners were cut and within a couple of decades there were already reports of serious structural problems at many sites around the country. By the end of the 1970s, the tower block boom was over. 

Increasingly the buildings became associated with shoddy workmanship and rising levels of anti social behaviour, The author Lynsey Hanley, who grew up on Chelmsley Wood, went as far as to brand the blocks "slums in the sky", Many councils, who now considered the buildings a failed experiment, took the decision to pull them down. What had once seemed futuristic was rapidly being consigned to the history books....