To some, the redevelopment of Sheffield’s giant concrete housing estate is long overdue. To others, it represents nothing less than the ruin of the ideals upon which Britain’s welfare state is based

In 21st-century Britain, social housing estates – and particularly those described, usually pejoratively, as “brutalist” – serve as archetypal contemporary ruins. Artworks such as Laura Oldfield Ford’s Ferrier Estate picture them as decayed and dilapidated remnants of a former age now taken over by the creative class.



Even as many of these prefabricated concrete tower blocks have been demolished – usually in spectacular explosive-induced “blowdowns” – some have been reclassified as “unfinished” projects, or ones in need of updating to the new political landscape dominated by neoliberal capitalism.

Park Hill in Sheffield was the largest-scale application of the approach known as New Brutalism, characterised by an emphasis on massive scale, the use of unpainted concrete, and a concern for social cohesion in mass housing.

Wet clothes hanging outside two inhabited flats disturb the sense of Park Hill as an estate consigned to the past

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A lived-in flat holds out against redevelopment in Park Hill. Photograph: Paul Dobraszczyk

By the 1990s its 985 flats and “streets in the sky” – built from 1958 to 1961 by the architects Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn under the auspices of Lewis Womersley, the chief architect of Sheffield’s housing committee – had become known as a failure. Like so many others, it was equated by many with ugliness, social decay, drug use and family breakdown.

Its almost-certain demolition was avoided when English Heritage controversially placed a Grade II* listing on the entire estate in 1998. A long and tortuous process of regeneration began, led by developer Urban Splash, to whom the estate was transferred for free in 2004.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Streets in the sky. Photograph: Paul Dobraszczyk

The renovations started with the tallest block of the estate: its 13-storey concrete frame restored and new apartments fronted by brightly coloured panels. The renovated block was designed in collaboration with the French architect Christophe Egret, and two more adjacent blocks are now in progress.

Earlier this summer the developer held a launch party to promote 182 flats they are currently renovating. At the same time, the firm initiated a 12-month arts programme at the housing scheme, which began with the launch of Sheffield Design Week and the opening of a new gallery – the Scottish Queen – in one of the renovated blocks. With the first phase of the regeneration project (78 apartments) shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, the launch of the new flats – 85 one-bedroom, 93 two-bedroom and four three-bedroom apartments – marks a significant moment in Urban Splash’s plan to redevelop the entire estate, most of which still stands abandoned.

Abandoned that is, save for a handful of residents holding out in the old flats at the low-rise end of the complex – as well as the flourishing Grace Owen nursery school, which has been housed within one of the otherwise abandoned blocks since 1963, and is awaiting relocation in one of Urban Splash’s renovated blocks. This combination of unfinished construction and abandonment gives Park Hill a peculiar but unmistakeable temporal complexity.

On the one hand, in the grass that now grows thigh-high in the vast open space surrounded by the abandoned central blocks, time seems to have stopped, or at least become aligned to the more conventional ruin time of abandoned buildings. A slowed-down present redolent with lost histories, in this case the lives of the thousands of former residents who are summoned up by the endless repeating windows now covered over with identical metal grilles.

Expressed rather too literally in a diminutive piece of graffiti on one of the brick infills – “All those people, all those lives. Where are they now?” (a line made famous by the Smiths song Cemetry Gates) – this sense of lost histories is nevertheless offset by those that still inhabit these ruins, whether the staff and young children of the nursery or those who continue to live in the two flats hemmed in by their deserted counterparts. Here, lived space – whether evidenced by the sounds of children playing in one of the estate’s many playgrounds, or the sight of wet clothes hanging outside the two inhabited flats – disturbs the sense of Park Hill as signifying an architecture that has been consigned to the past.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An overgrown area in the old part of the Park Hill estate. Photograph: Paul Dobraszczyk

These lived spaces also challenge the new vision of Park Hill being partially realised by Urban Splash: for, although the developer will eventually provide 200 new flats that will be available for social rent, the majority (around 600) will be sold on the open market in what the architectural critic Owen Hatherley has called a form of “class cleansing”. With prices for the new two-bedroom flats starting in mid-2015 at £147,000 (well above the average price for similar properties in Sheffield), it’s hard to see the new flats as anything more than a repudiation of the social as understood by the estate’s original designers.

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For some, this represents a healthy development, one that will encourage a new social mixing in the renovated estate even as it squeezes out the poor onto ever-larger waiting lists for council housing. For others, such as Hatherley, it represents nothing less than the ruin of the ideals upon which the welfare state is based, signalling the abandonment of the socially progressive vision that lay behind the design of the original estate. In the words of the Guardian photographer David Sillitoe, the estate “was meant to be the future”; now it, and the utopian ideals it once embodied, have “all gone to rack and ruin”.

This article also appears on Paul Dobraszczyk’s blog Rag-picking History