Park Hill Sheffield

Park Hill, in front, and the Hyde Park development behind 

Built between 1957 and 1961, in a flurry of post-war optimism, brutalist behemoth Park Hill in Sheffield is Europe's largest listed building. The slums it was built to replace began to be cleared in the 1930s, but work stopped for the second world war before architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith started designing the flats in 1945.

Newspaper cutting from The Star, 15 Mar 1955 describing the new Park Hill Flat Scheme (from Sheffield Libraries and Archives)

It wasn't long before Park Hill had gotten a pretty bad name for drugs and crime (nicknamed San Quentin by residents) but is now being redeveloped so is likely to become a much nicer place to live (for those who can afford the redeveloped flats, I guess).

Brutalist archtitecture owes a big debt to modernist Le Corbusier, and more locally to the Smithsons, British architects from Sheffield and Teeside who were early proponents of raw, rough-hewn finishes, exposed workings and pipes. Modernist architecture at that time was so deeply idealistic. The attitude of the architects towards the people they were building for was unconsciously quite patronising but they did design buildings where they genuinely believed residents would have a better quality of life. After the mess of the second world war, these guys literally wanted to build a new Britain. In a programme on BBC Radio Four, one of the architects fully admitted that their motives were utopian, adding they wanted to forget the horrible things that had happened and wipe the slate clean. Misguided as their intentions may have been they were certainly a long way from the ensuing reality - the experience of people who ended up living there in the following decades as they became oppressively crime-ridden is pretty godawful. The buildings became rundown, damp infested and structural problems developed on top of the anti-social behaviour, lack of community and isolation.

The Smithsons, speaking at the International Congress of Modern Architects in 1953:

"'Belonging' is a basic emotional need- its associations are of the simplest order. From 'belonging'- identity- comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails."

Ironic really coming from these guys, as they not only inspired Park Hill but Paul Smithson designed the hideous Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, one example of brutalist architecture guaranteed makes the heart sink and the bile rise.

In the clip below there's some nice footage of more 'mature' Park Hill residents talking about the tenements they lived in before - the intro is well naff though so skip straight on to about 0:55.