The Power of Home:
The Fitzhugh Estate

Introduction by the ChairWelcome

Welcome, everyone, to another Heritage talk on behalf of the Friends of Wandsworth Common. Thank you for coming out on a fairly cold February night. I'm delighted to welcome Sharon and Carly from the Fitzhugh Estate, who are going to be talking to us tonight and showing the film that Sharon made. Before we get going, a quick plug for the Wandsworth Common Story — copies are on sale at the back — and for our new Heritage Trail leaflet, which we produced a few weeks ago. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Sharon and Carly.

Sharon O'NeillHow the Film Came About

Thank you very much for turning up. The film came about during lockdown. Most of the research and body of work behind it began as a masters project — my final piece was on the estate where I lived, which I started about ten years ago at Brighton University. Since then it's gone through various iterations and evolved considerably. In 2016 I was lucky enough to receive Arts Council funding to put on an exhibition on the estate, celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Then in 2020 I was due to do a walking tour and show one of the flats — my own flat, since I couldn't ask my neighbours for any more favours — but something rather major happened that year, and the pandemic put paid to all of that. In the meantime, we'd also applied to the London Festival of Architecture to present the walking tour. Their theme for that year was power, and with the help of Pam Alexander, who gave me a well-timed shove, we called it "The Power of Home."

Everything was cancelled, but the Festival of Architecture decided to put on a digital festival instead. Sitting at home alone during the pandemic, I thought: I cannot possibly not do something when we've called this "The Power of Home" — because during the pandemic, home was just the most important place there was. So, with a little Dutch courage and a couple of glasses of wine, I submitted a digital proposal. They came back within seconds: yes, they wanted it. I had just under a month to pull some sort of film together. It's mainly shot on an iPhone, with invaluable help from a friend in putting it all together, and it tells the story of how I came to be doing this body of work and the research behind it.

Carly here is also a resident of the Fitzhugh Estate, and for her sins she's the chair of the Residents' Association. She'll be talking a little about the history of the blocks and what was going on in the 1950s that created these five point blocks. Over here you can see a few things we've brought along: the Flat Book, which is an original publication from the 1930s written by the architect of the blocks and his wife; my final masters presentation, which is a reimagined version of the Flat Book using elements of the original alongside my own photography; and finally, the little abridged version I produced for the estate's 60th anniversary, funded by Waites Construction, who built the blocks — one for every flat.

Without further ado, lights off — and here's the film.

The FilmThe Power of Home

The following is a transcript of Sharon's film, as shown at the talk.

The sounds of nature — something many people in built-up areas tuned into during the pandemic lockdown of March 2020. With minimal road and air traffic, birdsong became the soundtrack of the city. Although set beside a busy road, birdsong is a great part of everyday life on this southwest London estate — a feature, I discovered, that is part of an ideology formed in the early twentieth century, realised when the estate was built just after the Second World War, and enjoyed by residents today. This also happens to be where I live.

Generally I'm not here very often, because I work in theatre and TV. Within twenty-four hours I went from being very busy to finding our industry completely shut down, and having to adapt to being at home all the time. I'd never attempted to put a film together before, but the more I thought about the theme of power and the title "The Power of Home," the more I felt compelled to reflect on my own and my neighbours' experience of lockdown. It brought into sharper focus the relevance of the virtual tour, and posed the question: has this ideology stood the test of time? And is there anything we can learn from this blueprint for living?

When I first came to these flats it always felt as though a great deal of care and cleverness had gone into providing a thoughtful living space, but it was only as I started to dig deeper that the full picture emerged. This is the story of the Fitzhugh Estate, and of one architect's vision of the modern world — formed in the 1930s and realised through the homes and lives of its current residents.

A bit of background on how I came to be here. I'm Sharon O'Neill, photographer, curator, and picture editor. My work tends to come out of documentary photography, but with an emphasis on building bodies of research and exploring archives. What really interests me — and what much of my work is about — is the ordinary and unremarkable, which, if you pause to focus on it for longer than a moment, tends to reveal something extraordinary.

A couple of years ago I took myself off to study for a masters in photography, which is how the idea to look at this estate came about. I'd recently watched a documentary by Michael Collins called The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House. It charted what he called one of the greatest social revolutions of the twentieth century — its height coming just after the Second World War, with a massive shortage of housing due to bomb damage and slum clearance, and the post-war feeling for a brave new world epitomised by the Festival of Britain in 1951. The fall, he argued, began in the 1970s with a change in policy on who qualified for council housing, and reached its final death in 1980 with the introduction of the Right to Buy scheme.

This is where the documentary ended, and it left me with many questions. Many council estates still exist, and many of them are not the monolithic no-go zones depicted in the media. Being a resident of one, I realised that where I lived acted as a complete cross-section of that rise and fall — existing council tenants, those who had bought under Right to Buy, and private purchasers who had come in through the open market. I wanted to explore who lives on a council estate now. I wanted to know who the architect was, and to start at the beginning.

There were no records at the local council, as the estate had been built when Wandsworth was still part of the London County Council. But with the help of the archivists at Wandsworth Heritage, we came across a blue cardboard folder containing a torn-out article from the Architects' Journal dated 29th November 1956, about a newly completed estate. It was Fitzhugh. After a great deal of digging, I confirmed that the architect was Dr J.L. Martin — now known as Sir John Leslie Martin. Martin, it turned out, was the principal architect on the Royal Festival Hall, often thought of as the jewel in the crown of post-war British modernism, built for the Festival of Britain. One of my most favourite London buildings. This felt like a Eureka moment, and I jumped straight into a research rabbit hole.

I discovered that Martin had co-edited Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art in 1937, alongside British abstract artist Ben Nicholson and Russian sculptor and painter Naum Gabo. The book highlighted the British contribution to the abstract movement and brought together their shared ideology on art, design, and architecture, with contributions from Mondrian, Le Corbusier, László Moholy-Nagy, Barbara Hepworth, and Walter Gropius. In Circle, Martin wrote about the machine age and the idea that art, design, architecture, and society were not separate entities but elements of the same conversation. He was part of a group of architects who truly believed a better society could be achieved through intelligent design.

Most interestingly, the book gives an early insight into his ideology:

"The building itself is something in the nature of the living organism... the implications of far-reaching planning for air, sun, and view."

He goes on to explain that for these new principles of modern architecture to work, they needed to be balanced with a heightened sensitivity to form, colour, and proportion — and that these new aesthetics would not exclude the ordinary person, because they addressed a sensibility. It was a question of feeling rather than knowledge, making it accessible to everyone. Already, then, he was talking about the environment — planning for air, sun, and view — while insisting that the key to this architecture was an attention to form, colour, and proportion that anyone could understand, because it connected to a feeling. This struck me powerfully. When I first walked into these flats, it had felt exactly like that — a great cleverness in the simplicity of design.

In 1939, Martin wrote a book with architect Sadie Speight — who was also his wife — entitled The Flat Book. It clearly outlines their principles of design for living in the modern flat. Essentially it acted as a catalogue of furniture, fixtures, and fittings, but it also offered ideas and suggestions on planning living spaces and touched on new developments in the design of the modern flat — which is pretty much how we live today: a larger living space, a smaller kitchen and bathroom. The Flat Book was a revelation to me. The introduction is a collection of illustrations and quotes setting out his store. What I could see emerging were the similarities between his design principles and the aesthetics you could see and feel on the estate. For example, on surroundings:

"All housing should have pleasant surroundings. The block of flats, especially in large clearance schemes, is essentially a means of freeing built-up areas and of introducing grass, flowers, and trees. The block of flats which fails to introduce at least some green space is defective from the point of view of living, however successful it may be in returning ten percent..."

I was becoming increasingly interested in this connection between the architect's principles from the 1930s and how they had manifested, decades later, in the present day on the Fitzhugh Estate.

The Estate in Context

Work begins on the council estate in 1953. Martin is commissioned as part of the massive post-war house-building programme, to alleviate the desperate housing shortage caused partly by bomb damage, and partly as a wider initiative by the post-war government to provide decent homes for low-income working-class families. This moment just after the war seems pivotal. Civic architects were handed the task of rebuilding Britain, and British modernism had its moment to shine. Martin was head of the London County Council Architects' Department, which had a reputation for housing some of the greatest British architectural talent of the era.

There is a poignant quote from John McKean, writing about Martin and the team at the LCC, which perfectly describes the mood in post-war Britain:

"The new social agenda centred on the concept of fair shares. The people's war was to be succeeded by the people's peace. Its achievement would be seen in the National Health Service, in education, and in popular housing for all."

Several years ago, the Royal Institute of British Architecture held an exhibition called A Place to Call Home, celebrating these architects and highlighting them as crucial in framing a modern view of the world — providing new and idealistic plans for housing and blueprints for living. The Fitzhugh Estate was very much part of this blueprint. Martin and his team designed state-of-the-art social housing. The building was lauded for its cutting-edge technology, with delegations visiting from Europe and Ireland, and it was featured in the Architects' Journal in November 1956, just as the first residents were settling in.

The five ten-storey blocks were influenced by modernist social housing in Sweden during the 1930s, following the introduction of their welfare state. Humanist in its approach, the design and layout were very much based on social needs, serviced by communal facilities to improve health, hygiene, and quality of life.

Building the Archive

It became clear that I was creating an archive where there hadn't been one previously — not just using established archives, but also exploring the stories and personal photographs of the people who had lived here, and through my own photography, capturing the lived experience of current residents. I photographed their sitting rooms, as this was the significant living space in Martin and Speight's Flat Book, in order to uncover each individual's notion of home and to develop a photographic dialogue between that original book and the article in the Architects' Journal.

Seeing inside the other flats, I slowly realised the connections to the illustrations at the opening of the Flat Book, and how the residents were experiencing the space. After photographing inside the flats and then returning to the Flat Book, you could see interesting parallels in how residents had laid out their rooms — their use of textiles, of classic design furniture. It became clear to me that I was creating a reimagined Flat Book: extractions from the original, the building Martin designed mid-career, and my own photography showing how people live there today. It would act as a visual letter from the future back to the young architect of the 1930s.

The 60th Anniversary Exhibition

In 2016 I put together an exhibition of my work alongside archive photographs by Bill Toomey and architect Oliver Cox, from the RIBA's photographic archives. The location was the Fitzhugh Community Club Room — built at the time of the flats to act as a social hub for residents, though it's now a full-time private nursery during the week. I wanted to reclaim the space by holding the exhibition there for the estate's 60th anniversary, to bring the community together and tell its story.

It was quite a moment. Former residents who had grown up there met the current ones, and quite emotional in some cases. What was significant was the shared, inherent understanding of the sense of space, surroundings, and community.

A Tour of the Estate

There are little pathways that meander to each of the blocks, and the blocks are separated by clusters of trees. Originally this land was given over by the Ministry of Housing from the old Gothic building you see in the background — the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building — on the understanding that as many trees as possible would be preserved and that these clusters would remain, to keep the sense of spaciousness.

Because it overlooks the Common, these are known as point block buildings: a central lobby, with a flat on each corner. The balconies face south, west, or east, so at some point in the day you get full sun in the privacy of your own balcony. They were planned so that no balcony or living room overlooks another — linking back to that idea of planning for air, sun, and view.

On the ground floor there are store sheds — though I was told by an old resident that they were originally pram sheds. You'd wheel your pram in, leave it in your shed, and take everything else upstairs, so you weren't blocking the lobby or negotiating a pram into the lift. They thought of everything.

Directly opposite is the old communal laundry, which I love — it feels frozen in time. Equipped with industrial machinery, dryers and washing machines. What's really interesting is that although the glass is now frosted, it was originally clear, and right outside there were little play areas and sandpits for children, so you could keep an eye on the kids while doing your weekly wash.

The entrance to each block originally had a wall of patent tiles. Over the years most have been stripped away — only two blocks still have them. These were probably the work of Oliver Cox, who was on the team for this estate at the LCC in the 1950s and was apparently very keen to involve young artists in his projects. I love these little flourishes. The attention to detail really does give it something special.

There are two stairwells for each block — one on the north side, one on the south. Originally, a wonderful diamond pattern was painted on the walls all the way down, in different colours depending on which block you were in. Sometimes, if a light catches you just right as you're walking down, you can still see traces of the diamond shapes scored underneath. I think it's actually rather beautiful.

Here we are entering one of the two-bedroom flats. On the exterior of the block are all the bedrooms and the lounge and kitchen; the interior core contains the bathroom and the separate toilet. The kitchen, where a wall has been knocked through in this particular flat, is actually quite ample — you could easily have had a table and chairs alongside the cooking facilities. Moving into the sitting room: not a huge space, but it feels genuinely spacious because of the proportions, and because of this great bank of windows running the entire width of one wall, with a side window as well. Lovely details: polished concrete window sills, put in at the time, giving it a wonderful finish.

Out onto the balcony — ample space to sit out and enjoy the sunshine and the privacy of this little outdoor space, which has been so important during lockdown, but which matters anyway.

Conclusion

It feels like we're at one of those pivotal moments again. Never since the end of the Second World War has there been a moment where our world has shifted so dramatically. Back then they were looking to create a brave new world, a better future for everybody, shattered from years of war. The significance that these flats were built in that moment of hope is not lost on me.

Already the calls have gone up for a revision of how we build living spaces, as we're likely to be spending more time living and working from home. These flats were built sixty-four years ago on a set of principles formed in the 1930s — principles based on designing from the point of view of living. The experience of being in this space twenty-four hours a day has been, overall, a really positive one. The flats aren't huge, but they feel spacious. They're filled with light; the proportions feel just right. The lockdown has highlighted the importance of the private outdoor space of the balcony, and wherever you are you're surrounded by trees, nature, and views of sunrises and sunsets. It is the living embodiment of planning for air, sun, and view.

I said at the beginning that a lot of my work is about the ordinary or unremarkable. And believe me, if you're passing this way and you blink, you would miss it. But this estate — Martin's blueprint for living — has revealed something extraordinary. It is a testament to good design and the true power of home.

CarlyThe History of the Blocks

Without repeating too much of what Sharon has said, I wanted to give you a brief overview of the estate and the context in which it was built. Think about this: a proxy war involving Russia, high interest rates, a shortage of building materials, a shortage of construction workers. I'm not talking about 2023 — I'm talking about 1950. That is the environment in which these flats were built.

The post-war Labour government was entirely focused on rebuilding the country. 1.4 million homes were built in the 1950s. A hundred thousand London families had had their homes destroyed or damaged. It was an enormous task, undertaken in an environment where the cost of money was high — so the focus had to be on producing properties that were efficient and economical to build. I couldn't find figures specific to our estate, but at the Alton Estate — where we have sister blocks — the average build cost at the same period was £2,500 per flat. One of the consequences of scarce materials and tight budgets was that rooms were slightly smaller than they might otherwise have been, and ceiling heights were reduced. The majority of flats on the Fitzhugh Estate are split between one-bedroom and two-bedroom, with a handful of studios on the ground floor. There are 215 properties across the five blocks, and just one three-bedroom flat — the caretaker's.

The Caretaker

The caretaker, who occupied that three-bedroom flat, managed all the facilities on the estate — including all the laundry rooms. He would allocate each household their day for using the laundry, and if you missed your slot, tough luck: you waited until the following week. Joan, who is one of Sharon's neighbours and is now 94, was one of the first residents to move in with her young family. She's my living history of the blocks. Her verdict on the caretaker: he was a bit of a tyrant. He ruled with a rod of iron.

As the 1950s wore on, more and more people began buying washing machines that would fit into their own flats — the average weekly wage by 1958 was eleven pounds and six shillings, which made hire purchase feasible. By the 1960s and 1970s the communal laundry rooms had largely lost their appeal, though they had been wonderful places for people to meet. The original sandpit play areas fenced off beside each block also disappeared in the 1970s, deemed health and safety issues — hard stone bases, the old residents will tell you, resulted in a great many grazed knees and damaged elbows.

Building at Scale

In this period, 1.4 million homes were built under Labour, and then under the Conservative government that came in in 1951 the programme continued. By 1960, two and a half million homes had been built. Whether we'll ever see anything like that again is another question.

One fascinating detail: following the Second World War there was a serious shortage of steel. The LCC decided to take the steel from Anderson shelters, weld it down, and hand it to builders as joists. So a great deal of the steel in these flats came from Anderson shelters — which gives you a rather vivid image of gardens around here having their shelters ripped out. If you're using yours as a garden shed, consider yourself lucky.

Ownership Then and Now

I was genuinely startled by this piece of data. In the 1920s, the rental market was enormous: 90 percent of people in England lived in rented properties, right up to the 1940s. By 1960, 60 percent of homes were owner-occupied. I found that surprisingly high for the period. When I checked what it looks like now, it turned out that in 2000 owner-occupancy was at 70 percent, and it's since come down to around 63 percent. There's actually not that great a difference between the 1950s and 1960s and today, in terms of how many people own their homes.

Architecture: Humanist vs. Brutalist

Going back to something Sharon touched on in the film: Sir Leslie Martin and those LCC architects were phenomenal, leaders in their field. But they were working with planning concepts that had been developed in the 1930s. The war had created a gap in which very little was built, so the 1950s gave these architects the opportunity to take everything they had learned and actually implement it.

What's interesting is that the Fitzhugh Estate, with its American-Scandinavian style, belongs to a particular moment in the early 1950s. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, a lot of that creativity had been lost. The architecture had become more utilitarian — what I'd describe as airport architecture. You could be on any high-rise estate in the world and not know where you were. Whereas something like Alton, or here at Fitzhugh, stands out. The views, the air, the care in the design — these things were maintained.

One detail worth noting about the two-bedroom flats: they were designed with a Central European idea in mind, where a sitting room would function as a living space by day and become a bedroom at night. You can see this in a design from the 1957 Ideal Home Exhibition showing the layout of one of these flats, with a room divider you could draw across during the day to create your sitting room, and open at night to reveal a sleeping space. It's interesting how we've moved from that almost Victorian blurring of living and sleeping, to very specific rooms for very specific purposes — and how open-plan living is now becoming less popular again, with people wanting to close rooms down once more. We go in big cycles.

I've lived in the flats now for nearly eleven years. A little like Joan, as I get older I have no desire to leave and go into a retirement home. I shall be there until the day I drop. Thank you for coming tonight — we love it here, as you can probably tell.

Questions & DiscussionAfter the Talk