Street Spirit

Meanwhile, Denys Lasdun was spending time in the narrow streets of Bethnal Green in the East End of London, photographing the boisterous street life and trying to work out how Modernists could preserve this community spirit within their social housing projects. His solution was the 'cluster block', of which his biggest and best example is Keeling House.

Opened in 1957, Keeling House consists of four tower blocks and a central service core. The blocks are arranged to look onto one another, and 'hanging gardens' are provided as communal washing areas. It was hoped that the atmosphere of the street below, with busy neighbours frequently bumping into one another as they went about their daily chores, would preserve the traditional community.

But Keeling House was not immune to the problems of community breakdown and vandalism which scarred many other estates, of all architectural types, throughout the UK.

By 1961, doubts about the utopia which Modernism promised were not sufficiently strong to halt Britain's ambitious public house-building projects. But over the next twenty years, public criticism of modernist architects and their work would reach such a ferocity that Modernism- as a cogent philosophy of building a better society through architecture- was almost universally agreed to have failed.