Park Hill was in the news again last week. Nothing unusual in that. The Sheffield Corporation’s housing estate, consisting of 1,000 flats, which overshadows the station and sprawls across the hills of the city’s industrial south-west, is regularly mentioned in Britain’s newspapers.
It was the nature of last week’s comments that came as a surprise. Some got close to being complimentary about what they once dismissed as folly born out of architectural hubris combined with an admiration for the brutalist housing developments in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.
Admittedly, many of the compliments were secondhand. The Richard Hawley musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, currently filling seats at the National Theatre, is set in Park Hill and some of its popularity has rubbed off on the coalfield it calls home. But after 50 years of unremitting criticism, those of us who admit involvement in Park Hill’s creation are grateful for support, no matter how vicarious its origins.
My obsessive interest in Park Hill’s reputation is easily explained. I built it. Or to put it another way, I happened briefly to be chairman of the city of Sheffield public works committee at the time the building work was being finished.
The innovations that made Park Hill famous were less the product of prolonged success than the result of continued failure. Before the war, Sheffield had swept away the Pond Street slums and rehoused its tenants in the biggest council estate in Britain; after the war, it could still claim its housing record was the best in the country. But the best was not good enough. Up to 13,000 families were on a housing waiting list that grew longer every year. At least as many, and probably rather more, inhabited houses officially declared unfit for human habitation.
Sheffield was short of neither money nor enthusiasm. The problem was land. The city that boasted it encompassed more hills than Rome discovered that gradients that could accommodate temples and cathedrals were not suitable for two-up, two-downs with bathroom and lavatory. Houses built into hillsides, which required the tenant to go down to bed, were popular but hard to mass produce. Fortunately, architects of genius hit on what should have been the ideal solution. Sheffield city council was encouraged to think big. What it called a “comprehensive redevelopment” would cover whole parishes with interrelated and sometimes physically connected houses and flats. The ideal site, it was decided, was Park Hill, the next slum along from Pond Street.
The most common criticism is that its instigators were less interested in what the working classes wanted than what they ought to want. The allegation was most forcibly advanced by alderman Sydney Dyson, a Labour election agent with strong views and a loud voice. He claimed, with the authority that came from years of poverty on Labour party pay, that the working man’s ambition was to live in a “decent-sized cottage with a bit of garden at the back” – by which he meant a downmarket version of the owner-occupied houses in Sheffield’s more prosperous suburbs. In vain did I tell him that workmen’s cottages cost more than we could afford. Park Hill, with all its amenities, was meant to be the prototype of the solution to Sheffield’s chronic housing crisis – the shortage of low-rent houses and no available land on which more houses could be built.
It is sometimes said that the chance to design such an ambitious project went to the architects’ head. I believe now, as I did at the time, that Park Hill had to look “posh” – not because nothing is too good for the workers but because the workers had been encouraged to abandon their traditional notion about what houses look like. Fortunately, the architects’ basic plan encouraged the idea that Park Hill, posh or not, was different.
Far-flung parts were connected by “roads in the sky” – strong and wide enough to accommodate a milk float and a permanent temptation to little boys to organise cycle races. The dwellings’ doors were arranged in orderly pairs so as to make possible the neighbourly gossip thought to be a feature of the slums from which the families had escaped. Washing machines – not a feature of every middle-class home 60 years ago – were located on the landings and a water-borne refuse disposal system enabled tin cans and cardboard boxes to be disposed down the sink. At least Dyson’s “cottage theory” was proved to be sentimental nonsense. For a while, families on the waiting list chose to live an extra couple of years in the slums in order to move to Park Hill.
A show that calls itself “a love letter to Sheffield” provides little scope for social realism. So Standing at the Sky’s Edge is mercifully free from asides about the difficulty of young people finding suitable accommodation. But as it is concerned with the lives of three working-class families, the condition of the working class is the unavoidable background to the story. Sheffield, as portrayed on stage, is in crisis. The same crisis we faced, and failed to overcome in 1960.
Park Hill has changed. It has been refurbished – not all together successfully – as a private development and it has been designated a building of particular interest. Most often it is simply dismissed as a white elephant. To me it is a memory of a time when we believed that, given good will and certainty of purpose, the world could be made better.
• Roy Hattersley is a former deputy leader of the Labour party
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• This article was amended on 20 February 2023 to replace an archive photograph that purported to show the Park Hill flats in 1972, when it actually showed another development in the city.
