Stock bricks to Brutalism: housing design in Poplar

2016-04-08T05:07:00-04:00

The East End of London has been associated with many things: the “cockney” sense of humour; colourful criminals; waves of immigration; and poverty. Not many people associate it with architecture. But it was in Poplar in the south eastern corner of the East End that I chose to do my architectural guided walk, called Stock Bricks to Brutalism: Housing Design History in Poplar. The reasons can be found in the great regeneration of the area’s housing that took place in the twentieth century to address the problems of overcrowding, dilapidation, poor sanitation and bomb damage.

In this one locality, Poplar, you can trace the progression of social housing design from the end of the First World War through to the early 1980s – the days of high volume council housebuilding in the UK – from blocks of flats of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s built using “stock brick” (London’s traditional building material made from the clay on which the city stands) to 1960s and 1970s tower and slab blocks built i...

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Stock bricks to Brutalism: housing design in Poplar