Deck access has become synonymous with failed public housing. So why are Britain’s best housing architects designing deck access homes again?

Buildings.

Southgate Housing (1967-76), Phase I and IA, Runcorn. Architect: James Stirling © Richard Einzig, Arcaid Images

As seasoned British telly watchers know, deck access housing is shorthand for urban deprivation. The first episode of police drama Line of Duty, for example, kicks off with a bungled police raid on a deck access home. Elsewhere, in season three of pulpy, gothicky Luther, we see the titular hero roughing up a bad guy on the broad decks of Robin Hood Gardens. Children’s TV is equally sombre: take Doctor Who’s always-destined-for-something-better Rose Tyler, confined to the open-air walkways on the Powell Estate (Kennington’s Brandon Estate, designed by Ted Hollamby and Roger Westman) until the Doctor whisks her away in his Tardis. In the 2000s, Channel 4 even filmed a Brutalist version of its logo floating in a rundown patch of the Aylesbury Estate, with seemingly no regard for residents still living in the Modernist neighbourhood infamous for its ‘streets in the sky’.

So why then, after decades in the ‘do not use’ drawer, are plans for this controversial housing type back on the drawing boards of Britain’s best public sector architects? Those involved in the first big push since the 1970s include Stirling Prize winners Haworth Tompkins, Maccreanor Lavington and AHMM, as well as finalists Mæ, Hawkins\Brown and Henley Halebrown, and a host of other civic-minded studios from Pollard Thomas Edwards and Levitt Bernstein to Collective Architecture and RCKa. This cohort has an altogether more upbeat view of deck access than programme makers at the BBC and Channel 4.

Stephen Proctor, whose third age scheme for Proctor Matthews in Tetbury is shaped by access walkways, sees decks as an “opportunity to apply the ideas of nurturing social interaction and communality in the wider residential sector.” 2022 Neave Brown Award winner Simon Henley speaks of the decks on Henley Halebrown’s Frampton Park housing as “heightening residents’ awareness of their environment” and offering “parity between a life lived indoors and one lived outside.” Clearly the conversation is changing. What’s going on?

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Southeast view of Cathedral Court (1892), Glasgow. Architect: JJ Burnett. Photo taken in 1970 © Historic Environment Scotland. Reproduced courtesy of J R Hume

It is a question we set out to answer – among others – in The Deck Access Housing Design Guide, published by Routledge in February. Co-authored with Andrew Beharrell, Senior Advisor at Pollard Thomas Edwards, it includes a concise history of this flexible and evolving housing type, recent British and European case studies, as well as practical guidance for the working architect produced by PTE’s Knowledge Hub.

As Owen Hatherley writes in the foreword, it’s not rocket science, the appeal of decks is straightforward. Rather than getting to your flat through a dark, enclosed internal corridor, you reach it through a walkway partly in the open air. Like anything, it can be well designed or badly designed, depending on such factors as width, length and spaciousness; like anything, it is made worse if you don’t maintain it.

But as historian Miles Glendinning has convincingly argued, “There has probably never been another feature in UK public housing which has been so widely criticised, and at the same time so widely used, as deck access to blocks of flats.”

The council housing pioneer and former RIBA President Lancelot Keay, for example, who commissioned dynamic, modernist St Andrew’s Gardens in 1930s Liverpool, said such deck access homes – often prescribed for citizens made homeless by slum clearances – were ‘for dirty people’.
Today, mortgage lenders remain queasy and clients are sceptical. As Claire Bennie of Municipal says, “Many private sector developers won’t build them because there is still a perception this format won’t sell. Public sector clients can be more open to the idea of a deck but there are management implications which they will be concerned about, such as fire escape and the potential for rain to track back towards the building from the deck.”

It is this mix of misperception, a fear of red tape and technical tricksiness – a cocktail blended in the turbulent politics of the 1980s – that the guide seeks to dismiss. In the middle of that decade, five years into the Conservative government’s controversial Right to Buy policy, King’s College London academic Alice Coleman published Utopia on Trial, citing deck access housing and the layout of modernist housing estates in general as a root cause of social unrest in Britain’s towns and cities. Coleman’s research was part of a new kind of criminology of the built environment, imported from the US, and coinciding with Britain’s growing immigrant community, supported by legislation, being housed in estates previously dominated by white British residents.

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PegasusLife Hortsley in Seaford, by RCKa

Yet there were real, evidenced problems with deck access housing too. Alongside the story of genuine human progress – of falling infant mortality in regenerated Victorian slumlands – a more enduring tale of the monumental failure of 1960s and 70s modernist blocks – built to improve the living conditions of the post-war working classes, and demolished within years of completion – has taken hold.

Repercussions are ongoing. Until recently even local authorities in the capital were not quite joining the dots between ‘deck’, ‘access’, ‘dual’ and ‘aspect’, as RCKa’s Russell Curtis, whose Hortsley scheme in Seaford features gently curving enclosed decks, recalls, “A few years ago I sat in a meeting with a planning officer from a certain London Borough who informed me that the deck access proposals we had laid before him would not be supported as ‘we don’t do that kind of thing anymore.’”

Still, as Hatherley explains, “Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain, mainly but not exclusively in London, use [decks] to get to and from their front door every day without incident, myself included; not to mention many more people outside the UK. Many of us actually like it.” The easiest explanation for this deck access angst, says Hatherley, is class.

He’s not wrong. If we skip deep historical precedents, like the 17th century Corralas of Old Madrid or England’s Elizabethan galleried coaching inns, deck access housing emerged in the mid-19th century, when philanthropic organisations in London and Edinburgh were formulating the first model homes for the ‘deserving poor’. In this respect, the story of deck access housing is the story of housing per se.

The journey the book’s history chapter takes, from Henry Roberts’ five-storey Streatham Street deck access public housing, first erected in 1849, to Apparata’s A House for Artists in Barking, completed in 2021, is a long and frequently wild ride. Pit-stops along the way take in the racetrack on the rooftop of Turin’s Lingotto car factory, the film set of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the elevated street decks of Sheffield’s Park Hill – the grandaddy of UK deck access housing – as well as a host of the daring successors it inspired: Darbourne and Darke’s confident, picturesque Lillington Gardens (1964–72) in Westminster; the film-set Brutalism of Lyons Israel Ellis’ Wyndham Court (1966–69) in Southampton, and Kate McIntosh’s hilltop ‘battlecruiser’ at Dawson’s Heights (1972) in East Dulwich.

Most of the architects designing deck access housing today were too young to have practised in the ‘peak deck’ era of the 1960s and 70s, entering a profession shaped not by the public good but by market economics. Yet a public good of sorts is driving this nascent revival: making dual-aspect homes compulsory under the Mayor’s affordable homes programme.

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Taylor & Chatto Courts in Hackney by Henley Halebrown

Unlike continental exemplars – mainly chosen to explore the variety deck access housing can inspire – the British projects, at first glance, appear conservative. The European case studies with long decks and extensive use of timber, for example, wouldn’t be allowed in the UK. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals considerable architectural variety among them: Henley Halebrown’s playful bridges, arches and loggias; the theatrical ‘inhabited’ façade of PTE’s Colby Lodge; Matthew Lloyd Architects new homes harmoniously blended with the historic Bourne Estate; Haworth Tompkin’s brick façades for the Silchester Estate that build on the tradition of early philanthropic dwellings.

Not everything is styled in the pervasive brick-clad New London Vernacular either: Murray Grove, the oldest of the exemplars, is fittingly, given its pre-fab nature, Hi-tech, while the exposed concrete of Apparata’s House for Artists looks related to James Stirling’s 1970s-built deck access scheme in Runcorn. The retrofit exemplars are also unique: the Pantone upgrade of Park Hill, a transformed barracks in Greenwich and a horse stables with cobbled decks reworked by Collective Architecture to provide affordable homes to rent. Elsewhere RCKa’s timber lattice-wrapped stair tower and winter gardens provide a strong foil to its brick-clad street elevation and DO Architecture’s stark reinvention of the Glasgow tenement ploughs its own furrow.

The British case studies only cautiously address the full potential of decks, for example, to foster sociality among residents. Interestingly, among them (outside of Apparata’s socially-planned A House for Artists) this aspect is more fully explored in Third Age schemes (there are four in the book) where, PTE partner Patrick Devlin says, “Wide access decks are popular gathering places.” At Studio Woodroffe Papa’s Dockley Apartments, completed too recently to include in the book, decks extend to offer communal roof terraces and gardens. “The idea of being able to meet a neighbour on the way home in a well-designed building is one that should be discussed and explored further,” says Dominic Papa.

The British case studies are mostly developed by specialist providers (Peabody stands out) on relatively small plots. Large-scale housing developments in the UK are generally delivered by consortia of commercial housebuilders and large national housing associations. These are at the more conservative end of the design spectrum, and many remain sceptical. This will surely change in response to planning requirements for dual-aspect flats and the growth of factory-built housing. In the meantime, the pioneering exemplars in this first-of-its-kind guide show programme makers at least, that there’s nothing to be scared of.