Byker Wall

I was up in Newcastle earlier this week carrying out an interview for my PhD with a local housing association and was lucky enough to go on a tour around the Byker estate. The most famous and striking feature is the Byker Wall, a flatted block that snakes along 1.5 miles of the northern boundary of the site. Its huge, with entrances cut through to the housing and low rise blocks in the centre of the estate, sheltered by the wall. There is a vast array of housing types, painted in primary colours, as well as gardens, small public spaces and community facilities.  Although conceived in the late 1960’s the estate’s design is obviously a departure from the modernist tradition of Brutalist council housing that characterised the era.

[Map of the Byker estate via Great Buildings]

The original estate was built in the 1900’s to provide housing for people working in the ship building industries on the banks of the River Tyne. In 1967 the City Council made the decision to redevelop the area because of the poor condition of the housing stock. They appointed the architect Ralph Erskine to redesign the estate partly because of his approach to the redevelopment, which was based on respect for the social ties and community networks that already existed in the Byker neighbourhood.

• The project was developed in 11 phases to allow for the rolling demolition and rebuilding of homes without the eviction of existing tenants
• Dwellings were pre-allocated so that people could choose to stay with their neighbours
• The design team opened an office on the estate and encouraged people to pop in and talk to them about the redevelopment and to ensure their specific requirements were met in the final design
• Important social hubs like the pubs, the church and schools were retained.

As Lisanne Gibson and John Pendlebury argue in their book Valuing Historic Environments, ‘[t]his was a step change from clearance elsewhere, where the focus was on housing as defective bricks and mortar rather than housing as home and a place of attachment.’

[Image of the Byker Wall via The Architects Journal]

With the decline in the ship building industry in the 1980’s came growing problems of unemployment in the Byker area. Since then the estate and its inhabitants have suffered with negative stereotyping due to a lack of maintenance, a growing number of void properties, as well as a high turnover of residents due to short leases. Things have improved in recent years and steps have been made to improve issues around community safety as well as external and internal improvements to the buildings structure.

Despite these ups and downs, residents still feel that ‘Byker is special.’ Old and new recall with pride that the community were involved in the process of redevelopment. This is interesting because it shows how the approach taken to redevelopment, based on a duty of care for the social as well as the physical infrastructure of the Byker community, lives on in collective memory.