Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Municipal Dreams Profile picture
Municipal Dreams
@MunicipalDreams
My book 'Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing' was published by Verso in April 2018, now out in paperback.
Jan 3, 2021 • 18 tweets • 10 min read
1/ THREAD: A walk in Camden celebrating (mostly) council housing and municipalism. Firstly, the Regent's Park Estate built by St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council from 1951. Swallowfield (left), a later phase, was designed by Edward Armstrong and Frederick MacManus. 2/ There is some good quality new build from Camden, mostly social rent though sadly built to replace homes lost to HS2. I've written on the Regent's Park Estate here: municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/reg…
Oct 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
1/ THREAD: 'The New Towns of Britain' published by the Central Office of Information in 1964. 'The New Towns are one of the most striking developments in post-war Britain.' ImageImage 2/ Most of the photographs depict the varied housing of the New Towns; on the left, a 'detached managerial-type house' in Glenrothes; to the right, flats and houses in Crawley and terrace houses in East Kilbride. ImageImageImage
Jun 19, 2020 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
1/ THREAD: a walk through Camden from Kentish Town West Overground station to Hampstead Heath station. First up one I couldn't find much about: 63 Prince of Wales Road - a 70s' Camden block, nice gardens to the rear. 2/ Further west, Denton Tower, a 20-storey tower block built by Camden in 1970. It's sheltered and retirement housing now. It looks darker, pre-refurb, in the 1988 image to the right.
May 22, 2020 • 16 tweets • 8 min read
1/ East Tilbury is remarkable - a Czech modernist factory town built in rural Essex. Begun in 1933, it was built by the Bata Shoe Company led by Tomáš Baťa, photographed here in 1932, the year of his death in a plane crash, and in a Joseph Hermon Cawthra statue in East Tilbury. 2/ Baťa foresaw a ‘gigantic new industrial centre...to contain...forty different factories and the houses of the workpeople, together with a railway station, riverside jetty, shops, aerodrome, swimming baths, theatre, dance halls and cinemas’. Here it is, a bit smaller, in 1958:
May 9, 2020 • 23 tweets • 11 min read
1/ THREAD: A walk into Bethnal Green, starting at the 19th century carpenters’ and furniture makers’ workshops in Padbury Court at the northern end of Brick Lane. The nearest has been converted to a one-bed home recently on sale for £875,000. 2/ Tomlinson Close was part of the London County Council’s Newling Estate built in the 1960s. It was the childhood home of comedian Micky Flanagan. (Micky bought a copy of my book at a talk I gave. I recognised him but couldn’t remember his name, not that he minded.)
Mar 29, 2020 • 16 tweets • 8 min read
1/ THREAD: a virtual tour of some exceptional housing in the East End. Starting in Fieldgate Street, Tower House: A ’Rowton House’, completed 1902, to house the homeless. Stalin stayed here when attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. 2/ Fieldgate Mansions, built 1905-06 by the London Hospital Estate: the scene of Communist-led rent strikes in the 1930s and, when slated for demolition in the 1970s, occupied by hippies and the Bengali Housing Action Group.