Demythologising Park Hill, Sheffield: The Hawksmoor Prize Essay 2022

Abstract

The Park Hill estate in Sheffield was one of the most monumental and experimental projects in twentieth-century British housing. Designed by two young architects, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, it was constructed between 1957 and 1961 under the city’s Labour-led council, one of the country’s most visionary post-war local authorities. The estate has been celebrated for its ’streets in the sky’ design, an architectural approach associated with Alison and Peter Smithson which sought to salvage and recreate patterns of working-class community and social life from the slums that were razed during the rebuilding of Britain’s cities. This article deconstructs mythologies that have come to dominate narratives about Park Hill and its approach to community. It shows that the design of the estate did not recreate the pattern of nineteenth-century housing which formerly stood on the site, nor was it conceived to recreate the working-class community which had existed there. In doing so, this article reassesses the supposed political radicalism of the British welfare state in the early post-war period. While Park Hill has been acclaimed as architecturally innovative, its politics were not straightforwardly progressive. Like much post-war reconstruction, it sprang from a dialogue with older liberal frameworks of welfare delivery.