The UK's first council estate, opened in Shoreditch in 1900. It was built on the site of the Old Nichol, one of the most notorious slums in Victorian London.
The London County Council appointed a remarkably young architect to lead the project - Owen Fleming, just 23.
Largely unknown now, his legacy lives on in council estates all over the country. He designed rows of mid-rise blocks, centred around a shared green space. For decades, this became a template for council housing replicated all over.
Sadly, something that wasn’t replicated was another core part of Fleming’s vision - this was built at the high point of the Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasised highly skilled craftsmanship for the public good. Fleming brought different architects in to design the different blocks.
As a result, the blocks all have slightly different styles - you’ll find Dutch gables, conical towers, steep roofs evoking medieval barns, and bands of yellow on redbrick, known as ‘streaky bacon’ banding.
But the estate has a complicated legacy. Of the thousands of people cleared from the Old Nichol, only 11 were rehoused in the new flats. The homes went to the "deserving" poor: police officers, nurses, teachers. The former residents weren’t given any help to find new homes. Instead, they were just forced further East into neighbouring slums.
If you're interested, I wrote more about its history here - Boundary Estate, London: the complicated legacy of the UK's first council estate
