Stock Bricks and Brutalism

You should go on this walk. If you are reading this, you are the type of person who would enjoy this walk. For a lot of the audience it seemed like it was a pilgrimage, linking the Stations of the Cross from the first social housing to the apogee of the Balfron

Andrew Parnell leads his group through about 150 years of housing history. From Victorian Laissez-Faire policy terraced streets through economic Neo-Georgian of Will Crooks House, through the era defining Lansbury Estate to exemplars of brutalism, like Robin Hood Gardens.

This walk was a perfect companion piece to the screening of Utopia London – filling in the gaps and making the conversation visceral.

You can’t help but notice Canary Wharf, pretty much everywhere you are in Poplar. It bookends one end of the story of ‘Stock Bricks to Brutalism’, which tells the story of London through housing, it is essentially a journey from church provision, to the market, via the welfare state – from faith to finance.