Keeling House

The approach to Keeling House is down a series of tight, small roads.  The effect, then, when you turn a corner and come to it, is pretty startling.  It's just there, looming at you, rather like an alien spacecraft that's crashed to Earth and buried itself, nose-first, in the ground, its four wings seemingly more appropriate to interstellar travel than public housing.

Keeling House was designed in 1956 by Denys Lasdun.  He also designed the National Theatre, memorably described by Prince Charles as a "a nuclear power station in the middle of London" and part of the South Bank arts complex whose grim clutter of Brutalist buildings was used by Stanley Kubrick as the setting for one of the most unpleasant murder sequences in A Clockwork Orange.  Lasdun also designed the University of East Anglia, another Brutalist concrete space that doubled as the fictional Lowlands campus, "a swamp of fear and loathing", in Andrew Davies' bleak TV satire, A Very Peculiar Practice.

Brutalism came out of the modernist architectural movement; the term comes from the French, beton brut, or "raw concrete".  The modernist housing theory was to create functional, zoned urban living, to impose order on the organic sprawl of cities.  You can argue that part of the charm of cities is the cheek-by-jowl jostling of buildings of different size, shape and design.  I love walking through the City, for instance, and randomly coming across a tiny little c.15th church tucked away down a cobbled alleyway next to the gleaming glass and concrete offices of some international bank, or the way Leadenhall Market pokes cheekily through the franchised rows of Monsoon, Boots and Tesco.

The key problem with modernist housing theory, though, is it leads to sterile, isolated living spaces, the most pessimistic outcome of that being community breakdown.  Winston Churchill wrote "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us," and it's a theme that's been employed frequently by the brilliant novelist JG Ballard, most pertinently in High Rise, where gangs of residents in a 40-storey tower block lead murderous skirmishes to "enemy" floors.

Lasdun, though, seems to be something of a humanist in all this, and if Keeling House is partly a reaction against the more stringent theories of modernist housing, it also attempts to embrace its more positive aspects.  Here, Lasdun set out to create a vertical equivalent to a typical East End community; each of the four wings, for instance, faces inward, and he designed communal "drying areas" where residents could meet and chat, the purpose of all this to encourage the kind of social interactivity he worried might otherwise be lost.

Certainly, compared to virtually any other example you'd care to mention of high rise housing built in the 1950s and Sixties, Keeling House is a masterpiece of far-sighted vision and an undoubted architectural highlight.  In 1993, the National Trust made it a Grade II listed building; the first council block ever awarded such a status, and the subject of much horror among blue rinse traditionalists.  It was bought by a private developer in 1999, who converted into private flats.  One of them, in fact, recently bought by my friends Neal and Laura.

Walking in through the security gates you come to a slatted bridge [pic 3] that runs over an external water feature [pic 4], only the absence of brightly coloured and exotic fish in the water dispelling a state of Zen-like calm.  Once through the main door, there's an imposing stone concierge's desk in the middle of a glass atrium, through which you can look up at the residential wings, everything very open, very transparent, a statement that this is not like any other council block around, no dark corners, nothing concealed here.  There's something of a sci-fi quality to it; it looks like the kind of place they might have used as the location for an episode of Blake's 7, the concierge desk manned by a masked Federation trooper, that kind of thing.

The apartments themselves run to 48 two bedroom maisonettes, eight penthouses (added by redevelopers Lincoln Holdings), eight one bedroom single-level flats and two garden level maisonettes.  Neal and Laura own one of the two bedroom maisonettes, the living room facing outwards, the view quite spectacularly stretching over to Canary Wharf and beyond.  The redevelopment has seen the addition of wooden floorings, stainless steel window frames and revamped kitchen units.

The whole things is pretty impressive, I have to say.  What interests me is how this building, originally designed to house council tenants, has been refurbished and sold on to what one estate agent describes as "the loft-buying market"; how apparently when it reopened in June 2000 300 people, mostly City folk, turned up for viewings, Keeling House now the subject of TV documentaries and broadsheet articles, the epitome of urban cool in the heart of Bethnal Green.

It seems to me that, perhaps inevitably, Lasdun's admirably humanistic design principles have been commodified.  Sure, it's improved the original building, but that's not the issue.  I just wonder where that leaves social housing.

The German Hospital

Amazingly, for an area that was so heavily bombed during the last war, there are still so many beautiful old buildings in Hackney.  Sure, there's streets of robust Victorian terrace houses that spool off from Lower Clapton Road, Mare Street and Graham Road.  But along with the Art Deco Strand Building, the German Hospital on Ritson Road offers something far more intriguing than your conventional residential housing.

When I was hunting for a new home at the end of 2006, I looked at a one bedroom flat in the Hospital.  The corridors still very much look like hospital corridors, which makes walking down them a rather strange experience -- you keep expecting to see doctors and nurses running hither and yon, racing to some emergency, a look of focussed intent on their faces.  It may be a false memory, but I swear the hallways still had that antiseptic, hospital smell.  The flat I looked at was, sadly, something of a disappointment -- it was pretty cramped, the bed on a mezzanine level, the whole place barely big enough to swing a mouse, let alone anything larger.

But I suppose it was pretty unlikely that anything inside was going to live up to the incredible Tudor Gothic facade.  The building dates from the mid-1800s.  There were around 30,000 Germans living in London by then, the capital's largest immigrant community.  At the suggestion of the Prussian Ambassador, Christian Karl Josias, baron von Bunsen, a hospital was opened in 1845, with 12 beds, on the site of the Dalston Infant Orphans Asylum, "to all who spoke the German tongue, without distinction as to religion and origin, from Switzerland to the banks of the Rhine and from the banks of the Rhine again to the Baltic and the North Sea."

Florence Nightingale visited the Hospital in June, 1846, and was so impressed by the example of the Protestant nursing staff, shipped in from the Kaiserwerth Institute near Dusseldorf, that she enrolled for a three month training course there in June, 1851.  In the first year, 10,000 patients came through the Hospital doors, so the site was developed [pic 1], in 1864, by Thomas Leverton Donaldson, the inaugural Professor of Architecture at UCL.  In the meantime, Nightingale had witnessed the appallingly high number of fatalities while stationed at Scutari during the Crimean War, and recommended that the Hospital deploy a pavilion plan to increase ventilation to reduce the mortality rate.

In 1936, the Hospital's Bauhaus-style East Wing [pic 2] was built in Fassett Square, designed by Burnet Tait & Lorne, riffing on Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanitarium in Finland.  It was intended to house maternity and children's wards, the roof gardens apparently something to behold, views stretching as far as Crystal Palace.  A random fact for you:  the BBC shot the pilot for EastEnders in Fassett Square.

Anyway, what's interesting to me is the story of the Hospital, particularly how the staff were treated by the English during the two World Wars.  It seems that during the Great War, the younger doctors returned to Germany while the older ones stayed on.  At the risk of sounding trite, it clearly must have been a brave decision to make; to stay in the country against whom you're currently fighting a war in order to help your compatriots, particularly with the entire staff branded as "spies".  World War II, though, found the staff interned on the Isle of Man, their places taken by British doctors and nurses.  In 1948, the Hospital was taken over by the NHS to treat psychiatric and geriatric patients, then closed in 1987, finally redeveloped as flats.  It held 95 beds by the time it shut.

According to Foxtons website, you can currently expect to pay £535,000 for a "sumptuous, two bedroomed, lower ground floor flat that offers modern, well-presented living space" in what was once the German Hospital, now a Grade 2 listed building.  On a previous blog, I mentioned how the East End is a palimpsest of its past, that spaces are shuffled, remade and remodelled, but shadows and ghosts remain.  It's an observation, I suspect, I'll come to more than once here.  But I wonder, think about what once went on inside this extraordinary building, how the medical staff coped as cholera epidemics decimated great swathes of London's population in the 1860s and 70s, the Thames, according to Disraeli "a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror", swarming with stink and disease, the noxious horror of London at its peak.  There is no God, or God is a devil.  What suffering was witnessed in that "sumptuous two bedroomed lower ground floor flat"?

Bishop Wood Almshouses

Just a hop, skip and a jump from my flat are the five beautiful Bishop Wood almshouses, built in 1665.  You can still see a few almshouses in the area -- the Geffrye Museum on Kingsland Road was once almshouses, and the almshouses on Balls Pond Road are now used as sheltered accommodation.  That I know of, there's also almshouses in Stoke Newington, on Northwold Road, and Goldsmith's Row, near London Fields.

The East End is a palimpsest of its past, but I have to say I find these relics of lost centuries quietly reassuring.  Just further down Lower Clapton Road, on Linscott Road, for instance, is the portico of what used to be the London Orphan Asylum, built in the early 1800s.  I remember walking past it in some kind of strange, discombobulated state the day after 9/11 and seeing it for what I'm pretty certain was the first time, the words "Everything Is Going To Be Alright" written across it in white neon lettering, part of an installation by Turner Prize-nominated artist Martin Creed, Work no 203.  Anyway, it's now the City Learning Centre, and while Creed's installation has gone the portico is still there.

It were all fields round here once...  It's fascinating to discover quite how much Hackney's changed.  In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys boarded out in what was then the hamlet of Kingsland.  Returning some years later, he mentions in his diary that "it puts me in mind of my boy's time when I used to shoot with my bow and arrow in these fields.  A very pretty place it is."  You would, of course, be hard pushed to find anything approaching a field in Dalston these days.  Writing in 1842, in his History And Antiquities Of The Parish Of Hackney, Dr William Robinson claimed "many noblemen, gentlemen, and others of the first rank and consequence, had their country seats in this village, on account of its pleasant and healthy situation."  Hackney became increasingly attractive to the gentry after the plague and the Great Fire; those folks who wanted to be close to the city but still enjoy something of the countryside, and could afford it, built large properties in Hackney -- like Sutton House, constructed by Henry VIII's Principal Secretary of State, Sir Ralph Sadleir.  What subsequently happened is a matter of public record, as the East End became London's industrial hub and the idyllic rural landscape Pepys had scampered through as a carefree Yoot was replaced by factories, "the stink industries", the area becoming home to the working poor.

Anyway, the Bishop Wood almshouses were founded under the provision of the will of Thomas Wood, the Hackney-born Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry.  They were restored in 1888 and again in 1930.  There's a tiny chapel you can see in the top picture that was added sometime in the 19th century and has 10 pews, for the resident widows.  In all my years living in Hackney, I've never once seen anyone coming or going from the almshouses.  I would, though, love to see inside the chapel.  Just walking past it again, I notice there's services held there everything Thursday morning at 10am.

Greetings from Clapton Pond, East London

Hardly has the same ring as Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, but it'll have to do for now.

My friend Andy's just rung me from whatever Godforsaken lake he's currently bivouaced around in his latest attempt to snag a carp.  The whole pursuit sounds absolutely hellish in this weather.  Well, it is December.  What does anyone otherwise expect..?

Anyway, apologies for the rather rudimentary nature of this first blog.  I'm sure I'll eventually master the Dark Arts of posting pictures, Yootoob nonsense and such like.  In the meantime, here's some other good Clapton blogs:

www.simonecj.com

This is my upstairs neighbour, Simone, who's involved with all manner of worthwhile local activities.  She's a keen supporter of the campaign to return the wretched hive of scum and villainy formerly known as Chimes nightclub back to its former glory as a Cinematograph Theatre.  That's a cinema to thee and me.  She's also rallying the opposing for the proposed licensing of a massage parlour/sauna emporium across the road.

Quite bloody right, too.  In the six years since I've lived here, I've seen this area go from "London's Murder Mile" (as the cover of The Times T2 supplement screamed, oooh, roughly two days before we moved in to Colenso Road), to something approaching a pretty decent place.  It's not just that the Pond's been cleaned up, the fountain re-activated, the roundabout refurbished, Chimes shut down, an organic shop, an Italian deli and the mighty Biddle Bros open -- but, you know, the last thing we need is a knocking shop opening up over the road.  I MEAN, REALLY.

davehill.typepad.com/claptonian/

And this is another local, Dave Hill.  He's a journalist, like me, though he gets to write about proper matters for grown-up papers like The Guardian.  As you might reasonably assume from someone with his background, his blog is pretty forthright in its condemnation of the vagueries of local government, the endless saga of Clissold Leisure Centre and the Yoot of today.

Right, most pressing:  I need to find a new book to read...  I've finished Tree Of Smoke, Denis Johnson's Vietnam epic whose brilliance I'll cover on a later blog, raced through Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (nope, still don't like him), and I'm now toying with Frederick Raphael's The Glittering Prizes, after having listened to Radio 4's recent, excellent adaptation of Fame & Fortune.

Onwards.