Ralph Erskine’s Grade II-listed council estate, built to replace the old Byker neighbourhood, is an examplar of design and public participation – and proof that it is rarely in the interests of people to demolish their original homes

In a huge city, it is a fairly common observation that the dwellers in a slum are almost a separate race of people with different values, aspirations and ways of being. One result of slum clearance is that a considerable movement of people takes place over long distances, with devastating effect on the social groupings built up over years. But one might argue that this is a good thing when we are dealing with people who have no initiative or civic pride. The task is surely to break up such groupings, even though the people seem to be satisfied with their miserable environment and seem to enjoy an extrovert social life in their locality.”

So wrote Newcastle’s city planning officer, Wilfrid Burns, in 1963. Working with infamous council leader T Dan Smith, Burns planned to demolish a quarter of Newcastle’s housing stock. This was part of Smith’s grandiose vision for a “Brasilia of the north”, which collapsed when he ended up behind bars on corruption charges relating to the Poulson affair housing scandal. But Byker – a tight-knit, 17,000-strong, working-class community of Victorian back-to-back terraces – was demolished. It made way for a wholesale redevelopment of the area, the centrepiece of which was architect Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall estate.



Though it has been long since razed, the original Byker community lives on through the work of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, a Finnish photographer and film-maker who moved into the old Byker in 1969. Over a 12-year period, she catalogued the community as it faced the wrecking ball, producing a valuable archive of social history, which includes an extraordinary film made by the Amber Film Collective, of which Konttinen is a founding member.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The original Byker neighbourhood was demolished in 1970s. Byker Wall was initially intended to rehouse the residents. Photograph: Peter Atkinson/Alamy

Today, Byker is best known for Erskine’s Byker Wall, an 1,800-home estate of 9,500 people, which is among the best regarded of Britain’s postwar council estates. It provides a mile-and-a-half-long barrier to North Sea winds, creating a microclimate within the estate while protecting it from the noise of major roads outside. The undoubtedly forbidding wall echoes Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens, with its 10ft-high acoustic wall, which also shields the East End London estate from the cacophony of traffic noise.



Unlike Robin Hood Gardens, which is to be knocked down imminently, English Heritage awarded Byker a Grade II listing in 2007, defending it from the swathe of council-estate demolitions currently devastating communities across Britain – particularly in London, where more than a dozen estates, housing tens of thousands of people on low incomes, are being demolished.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Despite public participation in the design, fewer than 20% of the original Byker residents were rehoused at Byker Wall. Photograph: Leslie Garland Picture Library/Alamy

Giving its reasons for listing Byker Wall, English Heritage singled out the estate both for its “groundbreaking design … influential across Europe”, and its “pioneering … approach to public participation”. And there is no doubt that Erskine, a deeply committed socialist and Quaker that was heavily influenced by Swedish social democracy, made very considerable efforts to involve the original Byker community in the design of the new development. Outlining his vision to Newcastle City Council in 1968, Erskine made clear that “the main concern will be for those who are already resident in Byker, and the need to rehouse them without breaking family ties and other valued associations or patterns of life”.



This was done through a pilot scheme involving 46 households working with architects in the design of their future homes and in the old Byker, where Erskine leased a former funeral parlour as an office and drop-in centre.



And yet, despite these considerable efforts to involve and retain the original community, once the Byker Wall estate was built, fewer than 20% of the original residents were rehoused there. Peter Malpass, commissioned by the Department of the Environment to carry out a research study on the reregeneration, wrote: “Over 17,000 people lived in Byker at the start of the redevelopment. Fewer than 20% of them were living in the New Byker in 1976. One is only left to speculate what would have happened had the policy not been to retain the community.”



In 2003, Konttinen returned to make a new film, documenting the lives of Byker Wall residents over a period of six years. The contrast with her previous film is immediate, not least because Erskine’s estate, now characterised by security doors and intercoms, is so different from the narrow streets and back-to-backs of the old Byker. The biggest contrast, however, is not the architecture, but the sense of loneliness and dislocation faced by many residents. These include asylum seekers uprooted from their own communities, but the most poignant scenes record the love of an older resident, living alone, for her dog, and how devastated she is when he falls ill and dies.



Konttinen’s original film is not a sentimental account of a bygone age, nor does it shirk the poverty many residents of the old Byker endured. But it is the images of scores of kids playing in the streets, and the music and singing of people in the local pubs, which shines through and defines old Byker. In reality, Byker Wall was more a place of isolated individuals facing challenging circumstances in solitary flats.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children play on the site of demolished houses in Byker, Newcastle. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

Of course, the world has changed immeasurably since the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the type of community immortalised so memorably by Konttinen no longer exists anywhere in Britain. For all its faults, Byker Wall was an exemplar of both design and an attempt to involve the community in the changes planned for them by those in power. That it failed in so many ways reveals that it is rarely in the interests of communities to demolish the homes they live in.



Following the condemnation of planners for postwar slum clearances, of which the old Byker is a part, politicians vowed not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Yet the desire to demolish people out of poverty appears to be irresistible. Today, the cycle of demolition and redevelopment has come full circle as so many of the estates contemporaneous to Byker are also slated for demolition. What characterises all of these communities is the fierce resistance of the majority of residents, who desperately want to stay in their homes. That they are not represented and their wishes routinely ignored represents the abject failure of democracy, both then and now.



Anna Minton is the author of Ground Control, and reader in architecture at the University of East London. She will be one of the speakers at the Guardian Masterclasses How to write about cities seminar on Saturday 23 May

