Generous windows in the timber-framed entrance spill winter sun across a patterned floor. Light bounces off the glazed tiles lining the walls. Pendant lightfittings dangle from an extra-high ceiling. A wide staircase beckons to residences above and a second glass door leads to a landscaped courtyard at the rear.
“We did whatever we could get away with within a very tight budget,” says architect Paul Karakusevic. He’s showing me the foyer of a new apartment block on the Kings Crescent Estate in the inner-London borough of Hackney. Outside, Karakusevic points to where the blonde Danish bricks of the new apartment blocks “kiss” the darker yellow bricks of retained council housing. Similar in bulk and height, they frame a landscaped courtyard.
The style, I read later, is “the new London vernacular” and aims to draw on the city’s built traditions. The Observer’s architecture critic, Rowan Moore, summed it up as “brick, rectangular, well-proportioned, unfussy — a kind of improved Georgian with better insulation, more generous windows and fewer twiddly bits.”
This is one of many municipal projects designed by Karakusevic’s practice, Karakusevic Carson Architects, which specialises in the regeneration of council housing. Its finish and features defy the clichéd crime show depictions of brutalist British council estates riven by grime, neglect and decay. There is no rubbish, graffiti or dumped furniture; no shadowy corners or dark underpasses.
Originally completed in 1971, Kings Crescent is undergoing a makeover with Hackney Council as developer. The first two phases of renewal finished in 2017 and phases three and four are just getting underway.
At the end of its transformation, the roughly four-hectare site will comprise 767 apartments. About two-thirds will be new, the rest substantially renovated. Half will be sold to private buyers at commercial prices; the other half are designated “affordable,” a term that includes shared-equity housing, rentals discounted 20 per cent or more, and deeply subsidised “social” homes with average weekly rents of £125 (A$250). The whole complex is designed to be “tenure blind,” making it impossible to tell owners from tenants.
With 182 dwellings per hectare — about ten times the density of new suburbs on Australia’s urban fringes — it’s a prime example of medium-rise, high-density housing. But Kings Crescent doesn’t feel crowded. The tallest two blocks on the site will be just twelve storeys high, the rest stop at six. Along with much-needed homes come medical facilities, a community centre, retail outlets, gardens and playgrounds.
I’ve come to see if there are lessons here for the renewal of Australia’s ageing public housing stock, especially in Victoria, where the government is determined to demolish all forty-four of the state’s public housing towers.
Behind green hoardings a giant jackhammer pounds the ground for the next phase of construction. On this icy February day, we’re almost alone on the street that intersects the Kings Crescent estate from east to west. Apartment blocks from the first two phases of the project line the north side, with space for new buildings and a large garden square to the south.
Delivery vehicles and taxis can enter the street at either end, but the urban design firm Muf has “interrupted” it with random boulders, piles of logs, an oversized hammock and a long communal table. This neighbourly space — a “playable street” — links the estate to surrounding suburbs, transport and the twenty-three-hectare grounds of Clissold Park, with its small herd of deer.
Like much of Britain’s postwar council housing, the original Kings Crescent estate looked inward, its central pedestrian zone intended to shield residents from city noise and traffic. In practice, it felt defensive and cut off: rather than encouraging social interaction, the ground-level areas seemed forlorn and abandoned. And by the mid 1990s the estate’s two dominant tower blocks had fallen into serious disrepair.
“They were poorly built in the first place,” says Karakusevic, “and no one wanted to live there.” Inner London’s population had almost halved in the postwar decades, reducing demand for council housing. From the 1980s, sell-offs under Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme cut the council’s rental income, eroding its capacity to carry out essential maintenance. “Those who could afford to move out did,” says Karakusevic.
Just thirty years after they were built, the dilapidated towers were slated for demolition. In February 2000, Hackney Council organised a “net first” live stream of the implosion of the nineteen-storey Barkway Court. The twenty-storey Sandridge Court was brought down two years later, with an actor from the popular soap EastEnders pressing the plunger. The fact that it was the seventeenth council tower to be blown up in the borough shows how quickly high-rise flats went from innovation to eyesore in the popular mind and in planning circles.
“Dystopian”: the Kings Crescent estate in 2012. Karakusevic Carson Architects
But inner-London’s population had already begun to rise again, and local authorities lacked the resources to respond. Sitting tenants could buy their council homes at a massive discount but councils were forced to use that revenue to pay down debts rather than invest in new housing. Along with other restrictions, this made it all but impossible for local authorities to borrow. Municipal home-building ground to a halt.
Attempts to redevelop the Kings Crescent estate foundered. For more than a decade, residents in the remaining medium-rise council housing looked onto a wasteland of rubble. “It was real dereliction, and used as the backdrop for dystopian films,” says Karakusevic. “Residents wanted the council to make it good again.”
In 2007, Labour prime minister Gordon Brown eased council borrowing restrictions, opening a path to finance a rebuild. But then the global financial crisis hit, and austerity measures slashed grants to local government.
Late in his term, though, Brown had also launched a design competition to renew a neglected and maligned housing estate in Barking in East London. Karakusevic Carson won, giving the firm its first big public housing commission. Since then, the practice has grown to more than seventy architects and has been honoured with scores of prizes, including Royal Institute of British Architects awards for King’s Crescent. The practice is developing masterplans for fifteen London councils and has projects on the go in Toronto, Paris and Barcelona. Karakusevic hopes to work in New York and is consulting for Homes NSW in Sydney.
In recent years London boroughs were also encouraged back into the business of building by Labour mayor Sadiq Khan, who grew up on a council estate. In 2023–24, almost 13,000 affordable homes were completed in London, double the number when Boris Johnson was mayor eight years earlier.
Many more are under construction after Khan secured £4.8 billion to support his five-year Homes for Londoners program. City hall claims London started twice as many council homes in 2022–23 as the rest of the country combined, though to call this a “golden era” of council house building is a stretch. It may be a renaissance, but it’s of a different scale and character to municipal dreams of the past.
In the immediate postwar decades, councils had large design departments and half of all architects were public servants. During the 1970s, local authorities around England built about 200,000 council homes every year, with not-for-profit housing associations providing another 13,000 affordable dwellings. In the past five years, only about 60,000 affordable homes have been completed annually, and only about one in ten of them are council houses. Most were built by housing associations or by private developers required by planning rules to include affordable dwellings in major projects.
And while the general category of “affordable” housing has been growing, the subset of homes set aside for people in the most desperate circumstances has not. Last year fewer than 10,000 “social rent” homes were completed in England. By comparison, more than 50,000 dwellings were built in other “affordable” tenures (including 20,000 sold under shared equity schemes).
Given that the number of social homes lost to sales and demolitions is almost triple the number added, ever fewer homes are available for those who need them most. As other affordable options have spread, says a 2024 House of Commons briefing, the number homes for social rent has fallen.
Without enough social housing to go around, councils are forced to put people up in temporary accommodation — private rentals, spare rooms, bed and breakfasts or budget hotels. It’s meant to be a last resort, but in England almost 120,000 households, including more than 150,000 children, live in this precarious system. They can be stuck in temporary accommodation for years, forced to move frequently from one place to another. Conditions are generally abject — cramped, unhygienic and often without cooking or laundry facilities.
“Play Street”: a summer view of the main Kings Crescent thoroughfare. Karakusevic Carson Architects
Housing people this way costs about £75 per night, so London boroughs collectively spend £1 billion a year on temporary accommodation — roughly the same amount available to them under Sadiq Khan’s Homes for Londoners program. In Hackney alone, around 3500 households live in temporary accommodation, and the wait for a two-bedroom flat on council’s housing register is more than fifteen years.
In face of this acute distress, critics ask why the borough and its architects are not building more deeply subsidised social housing. At Kings Crescent Estate, 275 existing council homes have been retained and refurbished, but half of the 492 new apartments are for private sale and most of the rest are set aside for shared-equity schemes or less heavily discounted rentals.
This is not Karakusevic’s ideal world. “Cities have to provide truly affordable housing if they are to function,” he says. “The market will never provide truly affordable housing because private developers have no incentive to build it.”
As he points out, most government subsidies for housing flow to the private sector for things like for site remediation, infrastructure development and first-time buyer subsidies. And while the government budgets more than £30 billion for housing, the vast bulk goes on housing benefits — on helping tenants pay their rent, often to private landlords — leaving a tiny proportion devoted to new housing. As rents increase, government spending on benefits rises too, further constraining investment in building.
Under current financial models, councils and architects like Karakusevic have little room to move. “Council projects have to stand on their own feet,” he says, “so they have to cross-subsidise social housing with market rate rentals and private sales.” Revenue from commercial sales is what makes the Kings Crescent project viable; without that, there would be no refurbishment at all.
Claire Miller, CEO of the UK’s largest housing association, Clarion, laid out the stark calculations before a parliamentary committee. Building a new two-bedroom flat in London costs about £400,000, she said, but the average subsidy is just £60,000, and social rent returns revenue of £100,000 over thirty years. That leaves a funding gap of £240,000.
The gap is filled from two sources: private sales, and councils opting to supply more intermediate housing options like shared-equity schemes and discounted rents, often aimed at nurses, teachers and other key workers. These intermediate tenures are priced to be “as affordable as council can make them without going backward financially,” says Karakusevic.
In Hackney, households are eligible for these intermediate homes if their annual income is below £60,000. (The average nurse’s salary in London is around £40,000 a year.) Affordable rents are set at a third of average local incomes, but this could still be almost double the deeply subsidised rent for a social home.
The irony with projects like Kings Crescent is that the pot of money for social housing increases as the value of private sales rises, which runs counter to a wider aim of making housing more affordable overall. On the other hand, the need to attract private buyers pushes councils to carry out high-quality refurbishments on rundown estates that would otherwise deteriorate further. Social tenants then benefit from well-designed, well-constructed apartments and marked improvements in public amenity and shared open space.
For this cross-subsidy formula to succeed, Karakusevic cautions, designs must be worked out in collaboration with the estate’s existing residents. “Regeneration is problematic,” he says. “It has to be right for the people who are there, so they are not pissed off.”
Karakusevic was taken aback when he heard about Victoria’s decision to demolish all its public housing towers before engaging with residents. He sees top-down approaches as counterproductive and prefers to consider each redevelopment proposal separately. “Plan it carefully, each project individually, with urban designers and architects, working hand in hand with residents,” he says. “What can be retained? What needs replacing? What are the opportunities for tactical and strategic infill, for enhancing the public realm and landscaping, for greater density and public amenities?”
Through resident engagement at Kings Crescent, his practice won community approval to put more dwellings on the estate than were there in 1971. Previous attempts at redevelopment had been less ambitious.
“Early wins are really, really important,” adds Karakusevic. The community needs to see “a proof of concept” in the form of better housing, new facilities and an improved public realm. As examples, he shows me balconies glassed in to create “winter gardens,” adding space and warmth to older flats, and basement garages converted into apartments, transforming sites of anti-social behaviour into extra “hidden homes.” Muf founder Kath Shonfield calls this “premature gratification” — residents get tangible evidence that their concerns and interests are being taken seriously.
Another condition for successful redevelopment is that residents can remain in their homes. Ideally, new homes are built next door to existing ones and tenants move straight across when construction finishes. “A single move should be a key aim,” says Karakusevic.
Victoria’s state government has ruled out such an approach. Housing minister Harriet Shing rejected suggestions that new apartments could be built on open space nearby before existing towers are demolished, telling the Age that residents should not be forced to live on a construction site.
If residents do have to move, says Karakusevic, then they should be rehoused as close as possible to where they live, ideally across the road, and not “decanted” to some distant suburb.
Critics of Victoria’s plans for its public housing argue that demolition should be a last resort, with towers upgraded and refurbished instead. They reckon this would not only be cheaper and less disruptive, but would also have less impact on the climate given the amount of carbon embodied in the existing structures.
Karakusevic thinks such questions must be answered on a case-by-case basis. “Lots of housing built in the 1960s is junk,” he says. “Is there any point in patching up a building for twenty years when you can replace it with a building that will last 200 years?” Nor is refurbishment carbon-free, he points out, since it releases, on average, about two-thirds as much carbon as a rebuild.
He thinks the most important questions in public housing renewal are what structures get built and how long they endure. “A brick can last 1000 years,” he declares, reminding me of the Roman walls still visible in parts of London. Centuries from now, he hopes, people will still be living in his apartments on the Kings Crescent Estate.
Admirable as his architecture is, though, a big difference from the past era of public housing remains. Instead of Kings Crescent being made up of council homes as in its original incarnation, half the dwellings will be privately owned.
When I press Karakusevic on why more social housing wasn’t included, he tells me residents wouldn’t have accepted it. Matching the original number of council homes and funding the redevelopment with cross-subsidies from private sales would have meant squeezing 1200 flats onto the site and entailed building much higher.
“Towers are very unpopular,” he says, “and commercial viability doesn’t necessarily increase with height, because the higher you go more expensive it gets.”
Karakusevic is convinced that public agencies, rather than the private sector, should lead the renewal of public housing. And he thinks Australia’s state governments could get back into the game just as local councils like Hackney are doing in Britain. “It’s not that complicated,” he insists.
He is no fan of market-based approaches like “inclusionary zoning,” which force developers to include a share of affordable dwellings in their commercial housing projects. This compromises designs, he believes, potentially siting a stumpy “affordable” building next to a luxury tower, for example, or “bloating” apartment blocks with extra floors or, worse, creating separate entrances for different classes of residents.
Better, he thinks, to tax developers and funnel the revenue to public authorities to build social housing. “We can’t just fix the housing crisis by creating more supply,” he says. “We need the right housing, in the right places, for the right people, and it must be built to last.”
“If it is beautiful and elegant, people will want more of it in their neighbourhood,” he says as I admire his firm’s work. “If you just build junk, people will resist anything new. If it’s bad density, with a poor public realm and low levels of maintenance, people won’t like it. Stick to the right recipe and make it really good.”
Karakusevic is fond of a Dutch saying: “The bricks don’t make mistakes, people do.” It’s a caution to heed as we redevelop public housing in Australia. If we don’t get the quantity and quality of homes we need, there’ll be no one to blame but ourselves. •
