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The Deck Access Housing Design Guide
A return to streets in the sky

Andrew Beharrell and Rory Olcayto

Designed cover image:
Colby Lodge, Walthamstow.
Architect: Pollard Thomas Edwards © Tim Crocker

First published 2023

by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis

Group, an informa business

© 2023 Pollard Thomas Edwards

The right of Pollard Thomas Edwards to be

identified as author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-21894-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-21895-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27045-4 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003270454

Publisher’s Note
This book has been prepared from camera-ready
copy provided by the authors.
The Deck Access Housing Design Guide
The Deck Access Housing Design Guide is the first
practical design guide to deck access housing. It
focuses on the contemporary use of deck access
housing, sharing practical guidance and providing
in-depth case studies, while also presenting
historical context about this flexible and evolving
housing type.
Despite a chequered history that saw it
linked with urban decay and social malaise in
the 1970s and 80s, deck access housing today,
after a 40-year hiatus, is fast becoming the
default solution for mid-rise housing in the UK,
and London in particular. This is in part down to
architects’ renewed interest in post-war Modernist
typologies, but also due to specific planning
standards that favour the qualities – dual-aspect
plans, ‘public’ front doors – of deck access design.
This comprehensive, professional guide
spotlights the best contemporary deck access
housing in the UK and throughout mainland
Europe, explaining and analysing exemplars in
detail. Illustrated in full colour throughout with
plans, elevations, photographs, project data and
annotations, case studies include both new build
and retrofit projects, in public housing, co-housing
and Third Age residential projects.
Andrew Beharrell is a former director and senior
partner of Pollard Thomas Edwards. Andrew
Beharrell has designed and delivered many
award-winning projects throughout his 40-year
architectural career. He now lends his expertise to
PTE’s research and development group Knowledge
Hub, maintaining and improving design standards
across the practice. He has co-authored and edited
a series of influential reports on topical housing
and planning issues, including Superdensity,
Altered Estates and Distinctively Local. He is
a regular speaker at housing industry events.
Good architectural practice flows from an
informed understanding of cultural and design
history coupled with practical guidance and clear
analysis of case studies. That is what this book
provides for anyone interested in, or involved in
the design and delivery of, deck access housing.
Featured architects from the UK
AHMM • Apparata • Cartwright Pickard • Collective
Architecture • DO Architecture • Hawkins\Brown
• Haworth Tompkins • Henley Halebrown • Levitt
Bernstein • Maccreanor Lavington • Mæ • Matthew
Lloyd • Pitman Tozer • Pollard Thomas Edwards •
Proctor & Matthews • PRP • RCKa
Featured architects from mainland Europe
ANMA • Arquitectura Produccions • Atelier Kempe
Thill • Bureau Massa • DAMAST • Estudio Herreros
• Fink + Jocher • KAAN • LEVS • Martin-Löf • MEF
• Muñoz Miranda • Passelac & Roques
• Waechter + Waechter
Rory Olcayto is writer and critic at Pollard Thomas
Edwards. A former editor of The Architects’ Journal
and chief executive of Open City, the organisation
behind Open House London, Rory has worked in
architectural practice, as a videogames designer,
and a journalist, in Glasgow, Liège, Istanbul and
London. He has written and edited books on Mimar
Sinan (The First Starchitect), Richard Rogers (British
Museum World Conservation and Exhibitions
Centre) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (The Hill
House: Not Forever). Rory studied architecture (BSc
and MSc) at the University of Strathclyde.
iii
vi Foreword
Owen Hatherley

1 Introduction
Andrew Beharrell

5 History
Rory Olcayto

51 Case studies
52 Types of deck access
54 United Kingdom
126 Mainland Europe

159 Practical guide

196 Index
200 Acknowledgements
201 References

v
Foreword
Owen Hatherley
Access decks, galleries, walkways, ‘streets in
the sky’ – whatever you prefer to call them, are
extremely commonplace and comprehensively
misunderstood. In Britain, insurers and mortgage
lenders regard them with suspicion; planning
guides advise against them; they might be enclosed
or removed entirely to deter criminal activity.
Yet hundreds of thousands of people in Britain,
mainly but not exclusively in London, use them 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 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.
The easiest explanation for why there is such
angst over walkways is class, and this goes right
vi
back to the 19th century, and the fact that there
were access decks in the ‘improved dwellings
for the industrious classes’ and not in mansion
blocks. Decks then became the norm in the
thousands of blocks built by the London County
Council from the 1920s to the 1970s, whether
neo-Georgian, Modernist or Brutalist, and were
widely adopted elsewhere.
A cramped or mean deck is miserable, as
anyone who has squeezed through a conduit at ten
storeys up with space for single file only will know.
A good deck is a delight – a new way of walking
through the city, a convivial and neighbourly
space, a sort of second balcony shared with
your neighbours. Locked down with Covid-19 on
Christmas 2021, I spent the best part of the day
on the modest 1940s access decks of my block
of flats in southeast London, sharing some gin
and chocolate coins with a similarly imprisoned
neighbour. Design out walkways and ‘design out
crime’ and you’d design that out, too.
vii
Introduction

1
Introduction Deck access housing in Britain is back and fast
becoming the default solution for affordable
Andrew Beharrell
mid-rise housing in London. It is a surprising
turnaround. While the tower block is a more
obvious lightning conductor for impassioned
debate about our housing market and planning
framework, deck access housing has experienced
a much longer and more eventful reputational
rollercoaster – and yet it can provide a more
inclusive, adaptable and healthy answer to the
demand for urban homes. Nevertheless, as anyone
familiar with British television will know, from pulp
fiction like Luther1 to police drama Line of Duty2
– and even the Channel 4 ident filmed in a run-
down patch of London’s Aylesbury Estate3 – deck
access housing is a shorthand for urban dystopia.
Simply put, the deck access revival currently
underway has defied considerable odds.
Deck access offers many potential advantages
over other multi-level housing typologies: dual
aspect homes with cross-ventilation, daylight
from both sides and variety of outlook; every
home having a front door to a ‘street in the sky’
with an enhanced sense of identity and scope for
customisation of the threshold; minimal internal
common parts and the health benefits of increased
contact with the outside environment.

This guide is timely because of the increasing

tendency among local authorities, and especially
the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the
London boroughs, to demand ‘dual aspect’ flats
in new developments. The requirement stems
from a mixture of practical performance targets
(daylight, sunlight, ventilation, and thermal
comfort) and a conviction that dual aspect is
necessary for the well-being of occupants. The
latter is in part a reaction against developments
with long artificially lit central corridors lined with
single-aspect flats, like hotel rooms. What started
as good practice guidance in the Mayor’s London
Housing Design Guide (2009) has hardened into
a mandatory requirement in the latest London Plan.
One consequence of planning policy is
the increasing use of deck access, which can
provide a high proportion (often 100 per cent)
of dual aspect homes. Alongside the planning
pressure to adopt deck access, the arrangement
is popular among younger architects, less familiar
with its stigmatised narrative, who are more
likely to associate it with thriving post-industrial
urban quarters like Hackney Wick or with stylish
continental examples of the genre.

2
The first chapter in this guide provides a short
history of deck access housing in Britain from
its origins in the 1850s up to the end of the 20th
century. The second chapter comprises 17 detailed
case studies of projects completed in Britain
since the millennium, many of them in the last
five years. These projects have been completed
by a loosely-defined ‘school’ of mostly London-
based architects who design much of London’s
new public and affordable housing in a unified,
brick-clad style called New London Vernacular.
These are complemented by 15 more concise
case studies from continental Europe, selected to
showcase the typology’s sheer variety. Although
the focus of the book is UK housing, both the
history section and the case studies seek to place
it within its broader European context. The third
chapter is a practical guide to the complex and
extensive technical and regulatory challenges of
designing deck access housing.
As we show in the History chapter, modern deck
access housing emerged in the Victorian era;
flourished between the 20th century world wars;
was adopted for mass housing production in
the post-war decades and abruptly lost favour in
the 1970s and ‘80s. Indeed the stigma attached
to post-war council housing – which suffered
from extensive and well-documented technical
and social problems – is still common among
developers of homes for private sale, and many
remain resistant to the typology. That may be
about to change.
Deck access housing is a way of arranging flats
and maisonettes along external access walkways,
so that every home has a front door to the open
air. It is therefore distinctively different from the
other common types of flat block in Britain today
(p52), all of which involve internal common lobbies
and corridors linking the street entrance to the home.
In this book we tend to refer to flats and
maisonettes in Britain, and apartments and
duplexes in Europe – although many British
architects and developers use the continental
naming, believing it carries more cachet. In the
same way there are several rival terms for deck
access. Victorian references to access ‘galleries’
for housing, which usually had open railings, gave
way in the 20th century to access ‘balconies’,
which usually had solid brick balustrades.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, the term ‘streets in the sky’
became the tag for numerous deck access council
blocks developed in the wake of the proto-typical
streets in the sky scheme, Park Hill, in Sheffield.
These projects used access walkways to re-
create the social life of the doorstep and terrace,
reflecting a nostalgia for the street life of London’s
blitzed East End and other industrial cities
undergoing post-war regeneration. Contributors
to our contemporary case studies have further
extended the naming of deck access to include
‘ambulatory’ and ‘loggia’. So, we have at least
six English terms to describe the type, before
we even come to the regional and other national
terminologies discussed in the history chapter.
For this book we have chosen to use the
nautical ‘deck’ access as the generic description,
which is the most widely used convention and the
one adopted in the Mayor of London’s housing
guidance. We have also defined seven types of
deck (p53), using descriptive naming: projecting,
supported, recessed, screened, enclosed, atrium
and stepped. Some case studies combine two or
more of these types to form hybrids.
As this book makes clear, deck access housing
can provide a successful and popular model for
contemporary living (and working). However,
there are many challenges to overcome in creating
deck access schemes which not only meet all
the technical and regulatory requirements, but
also provide great homes and places. This guide
aims to help architects to do just that, and to help
planners and clients to understand better the
complexity of the challenge.
1 Filming location details published by Tower
Hamlets Film Office, 21 December 2018;
retrieved March 2022 from www.towerhamlets
filmoffice.co.uk/2018/12/21/ring-in-the-ny-with
series-5-of-luther/
2 Line of Duty, Series 1; Episode 1; first broadcast
26 June 2012; retrieved from BBC iPlayer,
March 2022
3 Christopher Beanland, Channel 4’s Aylesbury
estate ident gets a revamp – starring the
residents, Guardian; retrieved March 2022,
from www.theguardian.com
3
History

5
Deck access housing in Britain
A short history
The story of deck access housing in Britain is the
story of British public housing per se. If we skip
deep historical precedents, like the 17th century
Corralas of Old Madrid or England’s Elizabethan
galleried coaching inns, its origin lies in the mid-
19th century, when philanthropic organisations
in London and Edinburgh were formulating the
first model homes for the ‘deserving poor’. It
is a story of human progress – of falling infant
mortality in regenerated Victorian slumlands.
And it is a story of monumental failure – of 1960s’
and 1970s’ Modernist blocks, built to improve the
living conditions of the post-war working classes,
demolished within years of completion.
The journey 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. The pit-stops along the
way take us to places as varied as a racetrack on
the rooftop of a car factory in Turin, the film set of
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and one of ‘the most hated
examples of architecture in the country’1 that, after
a private-sector revamp some fifty years after it
was completed, found itself on the shortlist for
Britain’s biggest architectural prize.
Those mid-rise deck access housing blocks,
whether pre-fab or Brutalist, in London, Sheffield
or Liverpool, whether now in their prime, or
demolished or facelifted beyond recognition, and
the more recent wave too, mostly in London and
more modest in architectural ambition – they’re
here because Marinetti and Sant’Elia called for
‘metal catwalks’ in their Futurist manifesto.2
They’re here because of public health acts in
Britain’s Victorian cities. They’re here because of
new ideas about communal living in charitable
Glasgow, Imperial Vienna and Communist
Moscow. They’re here because of Le Corbusier’s
6
Rory Olcayto
personal brand of Modernism; because of prefab
technologies; because of slum landlords, aerial
bombing (two million homes were destroyed
during World War II, with many more damaged)
and the comprehensive redevelopment of Britain’s
towns and cities. How do you make sense of that?
Enter the artefact: an advertisement for Unit
Construction’s pre-fab deck access housing design
system in the September 1968 edition of Official
Architecture and Planning. Typical of its day and, as
an actual ‘participant’ in the British post-war rebuild
story – hundreds of homes were built using the
advertised product – it is as well-rounded a guide as
we could hope for. It reads:
Anyone who has walked the medieval
first-floor-level streets of Chester
will see where we drew our
inspiration for Unit Mid-Rise. A wide
access deck is the principal design
feature of the 4 to 7 storey groups
of flats and maisonettes. Separating
people from cars, this elevated street
takes prams and small vehicles such
as milk floats – forms a place for
neighbours to gossip, for children to
play. What does mid-rise offer? The
high densities of multi-storey flats.
A closer community environment than
in high flats where each tower is an
island; friendlier than traditional
2 storey developments where
individual houses and gardens promote
insularity. Highly suitable, too, for
sloping and irregular sites. Package
deal services for local authorities:
everything from site design to
construction and landscaping.
7
Using just a hundred or so words, and two
architectural drawings, the advertisement
codifies a century of urban change, with
allusions to local and international precedents,
the national conversation around Modernism and
community, as well as the wider political forces
that have shaped the housebuilding booms of 20th
century Britain.
When we read that a ‘wide access deck is the
principal design feature’ of Unit Construction’s
pre-fab system, we feel the influence of
architecture’s ‘star couple’, the Smithsons. Their
‘streets in the sky’ concept inspired Park Hill
(1957–62) whose broad decks allowed neighbours
to gossip, children to play, and milk floats to glide
by. It also connects us with Michiel Brinkman’s
ground-breaking social housing scheme in
Spangen, Rotterdam, completed in 1922, in which
first-floor maisonettes are accessed from a wide
concrete deck, the first of its kind in the world.
By referencing the deck’s width, Unit
Construction sought to draw a distinction between
the (ideologically muted, functionally limited)
balcony access flats of old (1900s–1940s) and the
Modernist plan to separate pedestrians from cars
that schemes like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation
in Marseille (1952), much visited by British
architects and planners3, were prime exemplars of.
A typical Mid-Rise scheme, the advertisement
states, is ‘4 to 7 storey groups of flats and
maisonettes’ – a specification informed by several
decades of experimentation that by 1968 had
shown that above seven storeys, decks functioned
less well environmentally.4 Maisonettes, on the
other hand (deployed extensively in Roehampton’s
Unité replicas) had proved to be a good fit, with
bedrooms free from the public glare of the deck
serving the entry level.5
When the advertisement then argues that deck
access housing outperforms both high rise towers
(each one ‘an island’) and ‘insular’ two-storey
houses with gardens, Unit Construction directly
addresses the national debate on how best to
house Britain’s working classes – in ‘Garden City’
cottages, in mid-rise modern tenements (some
with deck access, some with internal stairwells), or
in high rise towers. The debate, still ongoing today,
reaches back to the 1890s when London County
Council drew up low-rise suburban expansion
plans even as it completed dense inner-city
tenements like the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch.6
The claim that Unit Construction’s Mid-Rise
8
system is suitable for sloping and irregular sites
may be a non-sequitur that primarily serves to
reassure local authority clients with limited land
to build on – then a pressing problem7 – but it
also recalls Park Hill, famously draped over a hilly
brownfield site in central Sheffield. Every sentence
is revealing – even the misplaced claim of an
ancestral link with Chester shows that history, fake
or otherwise, had a role to play promoting deck
access housing.
The copywriting demonstrates Unit
Construction’s awareness that much of the British
public were still to be convinced by the elevated
Modernist neighbourhoods replacing traditional
street-based housing throughout Britain’s towns
and cities in the 1960s. There was, too, the lingering
slur, promulgated by leading figures of the day,
including council housing pioneer and former RIBA
President Lancelot Keay, that deck access homes
– often prescribed for citizens made homeless by
slum clearances – were ‘for dirty people’.8
Another sentence, ‘Package deal services for
local authorities: everything from site design to
construction and landscaping’ signposts the era
of peak pre-fab, and the rise of ‘design and build’
contractor-led projects and contracts. In 1966
more than 40 per cent of local authority housing
contracts were for 250 dwellings or more, most
using systems let in non-competitive contracts.
Construction times were cut by a quarter.9
In short, few architects, planners and
councillors needed convincing: mid-rise deck
access was de rigueur, manifesting as a standalone
solution or alongside high-rise towers. This was
the age of Harold Wilson’s vision for a ‘New
Britain’, which urged the Official Architecture and
Planning readership – and its advisory committee,
which numbered Camden’s Sidney Cook and the
LCC’s former chief architect Robert Matthews
among them – ‘to construct the cities of the future,
cities worthy of our people’.10
The two drawings – of the Netherley Estate
in Liverpool – under construction in 1968 and
now long since demolished, are instructive.
They address the target audience directly, telling
them what the end product would look like. The
perspective is suggestive of – once again – Park
Hill (as we shall see, the housing estate looms as
large over the history of deck access housing as it
does over Sheffield itself) while the façade study is
redolent of Le Corbusier’s Unité, with its machine-
made repetitive façades and stacked concrete
decks, smooth surfaces and horizontal lines.
As the ‘grain of sand’ that allows us to see within
it, the ‘whole world’ of deck access housing,
Unit Construction’s advertisement is a valuable
artefact. In retrospect, we can see that bestowing
innovative construction products with a historic
pedigree and linking them to ideas about new
ways of living – as well as traditional community
values – was an effort to build consensus around
a still-contentious town planning approach.
The timing of its publication is significant too.
Between November 1967 and October 1968, more
public (193,320) and private (223,046) homes11
were built than ever before or since. Yet earlier
that year, the Ronan Point gas explosion caused
four deaths and the collapse of the entire corner of
a 22-storey system-built housing block in Canning
Town, London, a pivotal event that would turn the
public against new high-rise projects. The fate of
deck access housing, some of which would fail due
to poor construction (the system-building boom
was widely bodged), some due to changes in the
social and political landscape, would be sealed
in the decades to come when entire estates were
demolished, some after less than twenty years of
habitation. It would not be until the 2010s and the
London Mayor’s demand for dual aspect homes,
that deck access systems would once again be
widely used.
In line with the themes underpinning the
advertisement, we now turn to the slums of
Victorian London, in search of modern deck access
housing’s ancestral past. This will be followed by
a focus on how Modernism and ‘streets in the sky’
transformed urban Britain, and an overview of
deck housing design in the 20th century.
»
Page 7
Advertisement for Unit System Mid-Rise, in Official
Architecture and Planning, September 1968 edition
© Alexandrine Press

Advertisement for Streatham Street, The Dwellings of the

Labouring Classes. Published by the Society for Improving
.

the Condition of the Labouring Classes (1850);

Architect: Henry Roberts (1849)

Above
Spangen Quarter Housing, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Architect: Michiel Brinkman (1922); refurbished in 2010
by Molenaar & Co. architecten. Photo © Bas Kooij

Unité d’habitation, Marseille, France

Architect: Le Corbusier (1945–1952). Photo © Vincent
Desjardins

9
Above
Bob and Valerie Torr with their children Julie, 5, and
Michael, 3, in their flat at Park Hill 2 (later called Hyde
Park), Sheffield, by Howard Walker, 1967
© Mirrorpix

Right
Park Hill and Hyde Park Flats © Bill Stephenson, 1988

10
11
 Origins
Anyone who has walked the medieval
first-floor-level streets of
Chester will see where we drew our
inspiration for Unit Mid-Rise.

As this advertisement quotation makes clear,

modern deck access housing did not appear
fully-formed in the 1960s, although its origins
lie in the urban slums of Victorian Britain rather
than Chester’s historic half-timbered shops. By
the end of the 19th century, deck access housing
schemes for the industrial classes were built in
cities including Edinburgh and Glasgow, Liverpool,
Manchester and London. Many of these referenced
Henry Roberts’ Streatham Street scheme (1849)
and his 1851 model homes with open stairwells
and shared balconies that visitors to the Crystal
Palace exhibition would have seen.12 (There were
several local variations too, like Dundee’s ‘pletties’,
built to house an influx of jute mill workers in the
second half of the 19th century.13) Roberts had
been designing for the ‘industrious and poorer
classes’ whose plight, much discussed in the
previous two decades, remained unresolved.
The idea was that by giving people access to
fresh air, their health would improve and
the spread of disease – typhoid, cholera and
tuberculosis – would slow.
Roberts’ Bloomsbury housing block was a
radical statement of intent. At the time, slum
landlords, presiding over ‘interminable square
miles of wretched shacks, usually of brick with
tile or slate roofs’, demanded of their builders the
simplest job possible: a stripped-down version of
the Georgian brick terrace house.14 Yet here was
an imposing five-storey block in yellow stock brick
with stucco dressings and recessed sash windows.
Its flats – spacious for the time, comprising kitchen
and scullery, living room and in most cases, two
bedrooms – opened on to courtyard decks, an
arrangement inspired by various precedents:
the galleries of Naples’s Albergo dei Poveri, a
six-storey courtyard hostel Roberts had seen in
1829, as well as access decks used in prisons and
hospitals from the end of the 18th century.
Above Nevertheless, Streatham Street remained an
Illustration by John Tenniel from satirical magazine Punch outlier with relatively little ‘deserving poor’ housing
(1888) for an article about London’s slums, entitled
built in its wake. One superb example is Redcross
‘The Nemesis of Neglect’
Way (1864) in Southwark, a five-storey model
Opposite dwelling block with a ground floor of shops. Built for
Building the Boundary Street Estate, Shoreditch, 1895 the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, it was
© London Metropolitan Archives designed with an open stairwell and balcony access

12
to improve ventilation, sanitation and safety.
It would be legislation, some forty years after
the first exemplars appeared, rather than
random philanthropic efforts, which proved
transformational. Some were national edicts, like
the Housing for the Working Classes Act 1890,
while others were local, such as Glasgow’s Police
Act (1892), which encouraged balcony access
housing in Scotland’s biggest city.15
In 1889, on the back of the Local Government
Act 1888, London municipalised, and the newly
formed London County Council (LCC) built the
Boundary Estate, often dubbed the first council
housing estate in the world. It was the first instance
of the ‘state’ providing working-class people with
decent homes.16 The masterplanned, high-density,
self-consciously architectural neighbourhood
would also prove inspirational for Britain’s design-
conscious, post-war Modernist architects.
The driving force was population growth,
which changed in both composition and
distribution in the 19th century. Britain grew
from 11 million in 1801 to 37 million a century
later, with London’s share increasing from 9 to 12
per cent. The other major British cities followed
suit – Glasgow grew ten-fold in the same period,
passing one million in the early 1910s – with a
more-than-twenty per cent share of the Scottish
populace. Living conditions for the urban industrial
workforce were horrendous; homes were poorly
built, dark - and unsanitary.
Roberts, who had begun surveying housing
for the poor in England, Scotland and throughout
Europe, was the key ‘social housing’ player of his
day. Alongside Henry Darbishire, who designed
Peabody’s first projects, he was the first architect
to consider working class housing as a central
professional problem,17 anticipating the concerns
that would occupy architects throughout the
following century (by the 1950s, the LCC had
the world’s largest architecture office, with
5000 professionals focused on council housing
design). Traditionally, architects had considered
housing for the poor as builders, work, urban infill,
with civic buildings – churches, town halls and
banks – providing a more obvious platform for
expression.18 Concurrently, in Edinburgh, the Pilrig
Model Dwelling Company, formed in 1849, was
inspiring novel approaches such as Rosemount
Gardens, designed by William Lambie Moffatt and
built by railway contractor (and architect) James
Gowans.19 It was described by Roberts in Examples
of Efforts in Scotland to Provide Improved

13
 Dwellings for the Working Classes (1861) as ‘a range
of 96 houses . . . disposed on three stories (sic),
with open galleries towards an internal quadrangle,
which they surround, each corner having a stone
fireproof staircase with a washhouse’.
In Glasgow and Edinburgh, where traditional
four-storey tenements facilitated higher densities
(and squalor), there were significant deck access
design developments during the 1890s, that
furthered the cause of housing for the poor.
JJ Burnet’s designs for the Glasgow Workmen’s
Dwelling Company include two ‘courts’ of small
houses, located in impoverished parts of the
city: Cathedral Court on Rottenrow (1892) and
Greenhead Court (1897–99) in Bridgeton (both
demolished). At Rottenrow, two blocks of five and
six storeys,

afford ample opportunity for many

Above
Southeast view of Cathedral Court (1892), Glasgow.
Architect: JJ Burnet. Photo taken in 1970 © Historic
Environment Scotland. Reproduced courtesy of J R Hume
Photograph of Victoria Square, Manchester, by Peter
Williams, 2008 © Historic England Archive
Opposite
Photograph of Tron Square, Edinburgh by Patrick
Geddes, 1889 © The University of Edinburgh
forms of social intercourse between
the tenants and those similarly
situated, and the members of the
University Settlement and allied
societies. They consist on the lower
floor, of a large hall, ... a drawing
room, ... a kitchen, and a small
library. In the drawing room, evening
parties will be given of a perfectly
simple kind. The hall, which will
accommodate over 250 people, will
be used probably twice a week as
a gymnasium, and on the other nights
for meetings of the Literary Society,
the singing class, and for lectures,
and occasionally for smoking concerts.
On the upper flat are the men’s club-
room with class-room attached, and
the girls’ club and class-rooms ...
The remainder of the south block,
and the whole of the north block, are
devoted to dwelling houses, 57 in all,
consisting of 17 of one room, and 40
of two rooms, with a house of three
rooms for the caretaker ... There
is through ventilation, from front
to back of house. A well-lighted and
aired staircase at the east end of
each block gives access to the upper
floors, and balconies there from,
facing the court, give access to
the houses.20

14
15
In Edinburgh, the City Engineers Department
designed High School Yards in the overcrowded
Old Town at Cowgate: two Scots Baronial-style,
five-storey sandstone tenements with rear deck
access balconies. It was the first of six municipal
housing developments – partly paid for by local
government funding – to be built following the
city’s 1893 Urban Sanitary Improvement Scheme
(provided for under the Housing for the Working
Classes Act 1890). The Scottish capital was the
site of further innovation when, in the 1890s,
Patrick Geddes and his wife Anna refurbished
1–17 Tron Square, a four-storey tenement and
courtyard scheme located off the Royal Mile.
Their ten-year project was shaped by the
‘conservative surgery’ urban planning approach
pioneered by Geddes and involved ‘weeding out
the worst of the houses that surrounded . . . the
narrow closes into courtyards’ and improving
sunlight and airflow. The best houses were kept
and restored and provided with deck access
circulation. The impact of these schemes on the
health of residents was considerable: in the High
School Yards area alone, infant mortality figures
fell from 247 to 39 per 1000 in ten years. 21
Architectural innovation – and slums – also
flourished in North West England. In Manchester
in 1894, some fifty years after Friedrich Engel first
publicised the wretchedness of Britain’s urban
poor in The Condition of the Working Class in
England – ‘the highest and most unconcealed
pinnacle of social misery existing in our day’
– the City Council’s first municipal housing,
Victoria Square Dwellings, opened its doors.
Inspired by the city’s Unhealthy Dwellings
Committee set up in 1885, the five-storey, red-brick
quadrangle came with a ground floor of shops,
terracotta details, oriel windows and gable ends.
Designed by Henry Spalding, who had conceived
similar blocks for the LCC, it comprised 237 double
and 48 single tenements (built to accommodate 825
people) accessed from courtyard-facing – and wider
than usual – decks. Victoria Square, High School
Yards, Cathedral Court and Streatham Street: these,
not Chester Row, are the true homegrown ancestors
of Unit System Mid-Rise. And what fine examples
they are – functional, progressive and architecturally
stylish to boot. But as architecture critic Rowan
Moore notes in his 2016 book Slow Burn City, modern
mass housing in the UK has ‘followed both the
precedent of the Boundary Estate and Corbusian
teaching’, and it is the latter which gave rise to the
British post-war obsession with ‘streets in the sky’.
16
The promise of streets in the sky
A wide access deck is the principal
design feature of the 4 to 7 storey
groups of flats and maisonettes.
Separating people from cars, this
elevated street takes prams and small
vehicles such as a milk floats – forms
a place for neighbours to gossip, for
children to play.
This passage from the artefactual advertisement
speaks to deck access housing’s other ancestral
heritage; the Modernist ideas of the 1890s focused on
the transformative power of design and technology.
It signals a break with the deck access systems
of old – the utilitarian balcony access blocks built
in their thousands from the 1900s onwards – and
highlights the pre-fab era of ‘streets-in-the-sky’, a 20-
year period beginning in 1960, when the majority of
Modernist deck access housing in the UK was built.
It also links us with European architectural
thinking in the Netherlands, Italy and France, as well
as the ideas that flowed from that paradigm-shifting
decade and its frenetic change in pace – New York
and Chicago soaring upwards; London’s population
reaching six million and undersea telegraph cables
linking Europe and North America – that gave rise to
a flurry of Modernist movements.
The first of them, Futurism (founded in 1909),
a darkly poetic valorisation of industry, youth,
violence and speed, and the source of the anti-
street polemic that would come to obsess the
architectural avant-garde, proved inspirational. Its
architectural manifesto (1914), written by architect
Antonio Sant’Elia with founder and poet, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, mocked the notion that ‘we
could live in the same houses and streets built for
the needs of men four, five, even six centuries ago
. . . Architecture is breaking away from tradition: it
must start over from scratch . . . We must invent
and rebuild our Futurist city like an immense
and tumultuous shipyard, active, mobile, and
everywhere dynamic, and the Futurist house like a
gigantic machine.’22
That these could be words spoken by a
1960s British planner explaining comprehensive
redevelopment plans is no coincidence. Most
post-war built environment professionals
were motivated by the Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)23 and its relentless
anti-street bias,24 introduced by its founder
Le Corbusier and imported from the Futurist
manifesto with its command to ‘sink the streets
17

Previous page
Drawing: part of the series La Città Nuova,
by Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914
Above
The rooftop test track at the Lingotto car factory, Turin,
Italy. Architect: Giacomo Mattè-Trucco (1916–23). Photo by
Eduard Schlochauer, 1928 © Topfoto
Model of Terrassenhaus by Adolf Loos, 1923 © Institut für
Wohnbau, TU Graz
Opposite
Model makers building the elevated roads and walkways
of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
18
and piazzas, elevating the level of the cities.’25
It was a popular idea. Contemporaneous with
CIAM’s formation in 1928, Lang’s Metropolis
film (1927) and Hugh Ferris’s book Metropolis of
Tomorrow (1929), both portray an amped-up New
York animated with high level roads. Lang and
Ferris would have been familiar with Sant’Elia’s
drawings of monolithic, monumental skyscrapers
linked with bridges and walkways, which together
with its manifesto for urban revolution, ensured
Futurism’s impact on architectural ideation. Le
Corbusier’s plans, in 1923 (Ville Contemporaine)
and 1928 (Ville Radieuse), to remake Paris as a grid
of tower blocks with elevated roadways, appear to
be similarly inspired.
No architect has ever claimed their completed
building was guided by Futurist principles but
the massive concrete-structured, multi-storey
car factory (1916–23) in Turin – also known as the
Lingotto building – most completely embodies a
fascination with speed, elevation and industrial
machinery. Its production line facility shuttled
completed cars up a spiral ramp and out on to a
rooftop test track.
Elevated walkways and animated rooftops spoke
to the Futurist machine metaphor. CIAM member
Alvar Aalto’s tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio
(1932), for example, with its 100-metre sun deck
and seven-storey stack of open-air floorplates,
was, the architect said, designed ‘to function as a
medical instrument’.26
In 1923, as the first cars began doing laps on
a Torinese rooftop, architect and writer Adolf Loos
was presenting his Terrassenhaus design for low-
income families at Inzersdorferstrasse in Vienna.
It adapted the stepped profile and volumetric
Raumplan organisation he had employed in some
of his pre-First World War houses, with two-storey
apartments opening out on to communal terraces
and workshops and communal facilities at ground
level. ‘My proposal has suggested a number of
terraces connected by stairs inside. These terraces
could be called elevated streets,’ Loos explained,
before adding (in words remarkably similar to
the Mid-Rise advertisement): ‘Each home has a
private covered porch where you can sit and relax
in the evening. Children could play on the terrace
without the risk that a car or any other vehicle
hit them.’27 Loos’ scheme inverts the Lingotto
building, elevating people instead of vehicles, but
both resonate with Unit Construction’s promise of
‘Separating people from cars.’
Terrassenhaus remained unbuilt but its focus
on the social potential of its ‘elevated streets’
was shared by Brinkman’s Spangen blocks in
Rotterdam, completed the year before. Although
Dutch architects pioneered galerijbouw28 in the
early 20th century, and specified deck access
housing post-war with the same gusto as the
British, Brinkman’s scheme would remain an
outlier for another four decades. Brinkman’s
design was the first true instance of ‘streets in the
sky’ housing, in that its decks really were broad
pavements, rather than gangways. The four-storey
brick-built complex, still in use today, is centred
around two large courts with concrete balconies
that give access to maisonettes on the first floor.
In its heyday, there were many shared amenities,
including a public bathhouse. It even had large
cargo lifts to allow tradesmen to bring their wares
to tenants’ front doors.
Indeed, the similarities between the 10-feet
wide Spangen decks and the 12-feet wide ‘street
decks’ proposed by the Smithsons in their entry
for the 1952 Golden Lane housing competition
are so striking, you would have thought the latter
was an homage. Yet the husband and wife duo,
credited with popularising ‘streets in the sky,’ cited
Le Corbusier instead, and his Unité d’habitation,
a private cooperative project in Marseille which
completed that year.29 Their design externalised
Unité’s central ‘rue intérieure’ (itself a borrowed
concept – from Moizei Ginsberg’s 1928–29
Narkomfin apartments in Moscow)30 making,
in their view, a genuine urban place that could
recreate the street-life its slum-clearance residents
were leaving behind.
This twist on CIAM’s ideas – and its Futurist
expectation that residents would create unique
lifestyles in response to their Modernist
surroundings – was shaped by changing attitudes
to slum life, sparked by Bert Hardy’s Picture Post
photographs taken in the late 1940s in London’s
East End and Glasgow’s Gorbals. Hardy’s
intimate portraits humanised the plight of the
British working classes, inspiring social studies
that culminated in Peter Wilmott’s and Michael
Young’s 1957 Pelican book Family and Kinship in
East London, which highlighted the disorientating
effect of slum clearances.31
The Smithsons’ cross-shaped plan proposed
family homes accessed from ‘street decks’, on
every third floor. Doors, in pairs, served flats
(above or below) and maisonettes, which came
with generous balconies.32

19
20
In a key drawing, the Smithsons show their
scheme of linked angular blocks snaking across
the competition site, mimicking the gargantuan
scale of recently published French projects, like
the prefabricated Cité Rotterdam, in Strasbourg, 33
won by Eugène Baudouin in 1951 and completed
in 1953 (Le Corbusier was placed fourth). It
too was a deck access scheme, of traditional,
rather than street-deck, variety. Its standardised
appearance was, alongside the Unité, another
clear French influence on Britain’s developing
approach to working class housing. It was pre-
fabricated with a single type of slab, wall and
window, and its 200 metre-plus blocks were
arranged around a vast public green.
The Smithsons’ competition drawings show
another ‘Corb’ influence: a perspective view of the
street decks34 resembles the look and proportions
of the promenade decks of Cunard liner RMS
Aquitania, a photo of which Le Corbusier published
in his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture.35
The Smithson’s didn’t win the Golden Lane
competition – Chamberlin, Powell and Bon did,
with the practice going on to design the Barbican,
a ‘picturesque deck’ arrangement on an adjacent
site – but their scheme, widely published, and
another by Peter Smithson’s friend Gordon Ryder
with Architectural Association student Jack Lynn,
which also proposed wide decks – ‘promenades’ –
heralded a step change in British public housing.
This step change manifested in Sheffield, in
the form of Park Hill (1957–61), a ‘massive cliff
with windows’36 in the words of Roy Hattersley,
chairman of the council’s public works department
when it was built. For Ian Nairn, writing in
The Listener (a popular BBC-produced weekly
magazine) in 1961, its ‘terrifying . . . towering
slabs . . . a wall half a mile long’ were shocking
but ‘inside the scheme this feeling disappears;
each flat has a glorious view of the centre of
Sheffield, and the pigeon-hole effect of a big
block is almost taken away by the brilliant use
made of the street-decks.’37
Reyner Banham, writing in the December issue
of The Architectural Review later that year, was
also struck by its scale, which in his view was
‘able to challenge comparison with the well-
known Cerro Piloto housing outside Caracas,’
completed just ahead of Park Hill and still one of
the largest public housing schemes ever built.
Crucially he understood the significance of Park
Hill’s key experiment:
... these decks are more than
glorified access balconies. Their
width is sufficient to accommodate
children’s games and small wheeled
vehicles for deliveries and furniture
removals, they gather up all the
entrances to flats and maisonettes,
and tenants’ addresses are quoted
by a number on a particular named
deck. Functionally and socially they
are streets without the menace of
through vehicular traffic, and a
lively argument is developing, and
will continue, about the social
function in particular – whether it
works, whether it is worth having –
because here the scheme is certainly
programmatic.
Park Hill was commissioned during John Lewis
Womersley’s reign as Sheffield’s Chief Architect
(1953–64) and under his leadership the hilly
Yorkshire city usurped the LCC as the magnet for
ambitious graduates38 schooled in Le Corbusier
and Walter Gropius.
It was to be built on a rolling, partially cleared,
city-centre site – home to Sheffield’s notorious
‘Little Chicago’ slums but earmarked for
demolition – providing 995 new homes, four pubs,
a school, play areas and around thirty shops, as
well as an automated refuse disposal system.
Womersley gave the job to Ivor Smith and Jack
Lynn, who produced a scheme in just six weeks,
using the same wide ‘promenade’ from Lynn and
Ryder’s Golden Lane design.
Smith said the strategic move that lent Park
Hill its powerful urban presence was achieved
through the application of a constant horizontal
roofline, an idea borrowed from of Le Corbusier’s
Ville Radieuse.39 This meant new housing at the
southern end of the site related to the scale of
the neighbouring houses and, at the northern end,
where blocks reach a height of 13 storeys, to the
scale of the city.
Smith and Lynn grouped dwellings in clusters
three storeys high and three bays wide, containing
two flats below deck and two maisonettes on
deck level and above, each with its own generous
balcony. This resulted in a strongly modelled
façade where the scale of the repeated cluster
and the boldness of the concrete structural grid
complemented the immense size of the building.
21

Page 20
Photomontage of Golden Lane street deck with
Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in foreground,
by Peter Smithson, 1953, Smithson Family Archive
Passenger deck on the ‘Aquitania’, as featured in Le
Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (translated from
French by Frederick Etchells; John Rodker, 1927)
Above
The main pedestrian route at Park Hill (1957–61),
Sheffield. Architect: Sheffield Corporation City Architect’s
Department; Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith. Photo by Reginald
Hugo de Burgh Galwey, 1961 © RIBA pix
22
The decks, Smith writes in his memoir ‘are
quite unlike the narrow access balconies in
a conventional slab block of the time. [They]
connect the whole scheme together and form a
meandering route across the site. Because of the
slope they run to ground at different places in the
direction of a nearby park. Unlike at the Unité, at
Park Hill, the built form creates enclosure, and
in response to the light, the space between the
buildings gets bigger as they increase in height
down the hill. Furthermore, in order to give the
dwellings the best orientation, the deck changes
from one side of the buildings to the other.’40
When the first residents moved into their homes
in 1960 the local newspaper’s verdict was, ‘It’s
“smashing” living right up “in the sky”’.41 Pictures
of a milk float navigating the street decks on a
daily delivery round, bolstered its popular appeal.
Councillor George Cooper, chairman of the Housing
Management Committee, captured the mood of
‘nanny state Modernism’ shaping the national
conversation: ‘Semi-detached houses are “square”
in comparison and forward-looking people should
look forward to living there. These are almost perfect
dwellings. It is now up to you, the would-be tenants,
to make this a really worthwhile community which is
not just technically correct but also socially correct.’42
The first residents were happy, with a
1961 survey of every fifth household returning
overwhelmingly positive responses. ‘There can be
no doubt as to the general feeling of approval for
the decks themselves,’ the report’s author, Park Hill
resident and on-site social worker Joan Demers said,
‘which are appreciated for a great variety of reasons
for protection from weather, for cleanliness, for the
view and for social contacts as well as for privacy.’43
Inevitably, architects, planners and councillors
from across the UK, and the international visitors
that had been visiting the project since it began on
site, began arriving in even greater numbers. In
those early years the press, the establishment and
the residents themselves, loved Park Hill. With major
housebuilders investing heavily in pre-fabrication
supply chains44 it meant the conditions for a rollout
of quicker, cheaper-to-build ‘streets in the sky’
facsimiles, like Unit Construction’s Netherley Estate,
were now in place.
The response from a British architectural
profession eager to prove its Modernist
credentials was impressive; 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 brick- Deck access: design in the 20th century
built ‘battlecruiser’ at Dawson’s Heights (1972) for What does mid-rise offer? The high
Southwark, still astonish today. These traditionally densities of multi-storey flats. A
built deck access schemes are Park Hill’s ‘children’ closer community environment than
and continue to provide safe, spacious and loved in high flats where each tower is an
homes for hundreds of thousands of Britons today. island; friendlier than traditional
Yet the pre-fab building boom – Marinetti’s 2 storey developments where
‘immense and tumultuous shipyard’ – which individual houses and gardens promote
ensured deck access housing’s ubiquitous uptake insularity. Highly suitable, too, for
(industrialised building rose from 15 to 20 per sloping and irregular sites. Package
cent of output between 1964 and 1965)45 would deal services for local authorities:
come tragically undone. Poorly located, poorly everything from site design to
constructed deck access estates fell victim to construction and landscaping
leaks, condensation and infestations and even
partial collapse. ‘The matter I bring before the As this passage from our artefact advertisement
House today concerns the Netherley Estate,’ shows, in 1968 the stock of mid-rise deck access
announced Eddie Loyden, MP for Garston homes was still high: better on cost, buildability
Liverpool, on the 26th of March 1976, ‘which is and community relations than rival house types
in my constituency [but] the problems to which like cottages or towers. It was a decade of
I shall refer are widespread throughout the United experimental deck access housing, building on
Kingdom. The major problems are concerned six previous decades of tried and tested ideas,
with the flats and maisonettes, which were built from the 1920s-built, Viennese-inspired, Ossulston
mainly by the Unit Construction Company. When Estate in Kings Cross, with its imposing, grand
it was built, the estate was considered to be a archways to, some thirty years later, Sheffield’s
planner’s dream, but it has since turned out to be ‘streets in the sky’. Mostly, these homes, like their
a tenant’s nightmare.’46 19th century ‘ancestors’, were built for the working
By the mid 1970s, as recently built deck access classes, although on occasion, innovations in deck
homes began falling apart soon after they were access design for the luxury market emerged from
built, Loyden, whose constituents complained the private sector too. On the following pages,
of water penetration into flats and the poor we summarise its evolution throughout the last
construction of public stairways, must have been century, setting the scene for contemporary case
wondering what a reasonable answer was to
the question Unit Construction asks at the start
studies in the following chapter.
»
of the final chunk of copy in its pre-fab system
advertisement: ‘What does mid-rise offer?’
Shockingly, one woman had fallen to her death
from an unsafe eighth floor window at Netherley,
with two children critically injured by falling from
maisonette landings. The industrialised building
process in which factory-made, structural concrete
panels were fixed together on site – drastically
speeding up construction – was evidently failing.47
By the 1990s several schemes in both England
and Scotland – including Netherley Estate – had
been demolished. Notoriously, every deck access
estate designed and built by the architect-led
Yorkshire Development Group (YDG) consortium
in Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield and Hull, was
flattened in the 1980s.48 These were Park Hill’s
children too. In one sense, it was Futurism’s last
word. The last tenet of the architectural manifesto
states: ‘Buildings will last less time than we will.
Each generation will have to build its own cities.’

23
1900s & 1910s: Following the Housing of the Working Classes Act
The Bourne exemplar 1890, deck access housing – deployed as a solution
to overcrowding in the form of crude metal
balconies fixed to slum dwellings, or new homes
with balcony access built in – became ubiquitous.
Most of the newbuilds were unnoteworthy, a
blank neo-Georgian style dominated, but there
was a positive trajectory too. New ideas slowly
filtered into the UK from Europe, giving shape
to occasionally brilliant exemplars like the LCC-
designed Bourne Estate (1901–03). It provided 763
(mostly) deck access homes in eleven five-storey
blocks and featured green courtyards accessed
through grand arches and façades rich in both
Classical and Arts and Crafts details. Swan Lane,
completed at the same time in Rotherhithe, is
another striking example.

Below
The Bourne Estate (1901–03). Architect: London County
Council Architects’ Department; E.H. Parkes, W.E. Riley.
Photo taken in 1909 © London Picture Archive

Opposite
Section drawing showing deck access, Swan Lane Estate
(completed 1903). Architect: London County Council
Architects’ Department © London Metropolitan Archives

24
25
1920s: Homes for Heroes The six-storey Ossulston Estate (1923) in Kings
Cross – the first high-rise council flats in the
UK49 – mixed the essence of the Bourne Estate
with technical innovation. With its steel-frame
construction, unadorned rough-cast walls,
reinforced concrete balconies and a unifying,
distinctive aesthetic, George Topham Forrest’s
scheme was alive to Modernist ideas, although
contemporaneous European designs (Spangen,
Terrassenhaus and the enormous Karl-Marx-Hof
social housing scheme in ‘Red Vienna’), were more
emblematic of the spirit of the age.
Ossulston Estate was built between the wars,
in the ‘Homes for Heroes’ era, when more than
four million homes were constructed. Roughly
a quarter were council-built, the overwhelming
majority Garden City-style cottages.50 Veterans
and their families were thought to be deserving
of such homes, leading to the construction of
schemes like Manchester’s Wythenshawe, and
Beacontree on the London Essex border.
In 1930, the Labour Government passed a
housing act enabling slum clearance subsidies
based not on the number of houses built but on
the number of people re-housed. Costs were
reduced by trimming cottage specifications and by
increasing the number of flats in big cities, mostly
in London and Liverpool.51 In 1936, flat building in
the capital exceeded cottage building for the first
time,52 with the Ebury Estate and its six-storey
deck access blocks, typical of the period.

Opposite
Walker House, Ossulston Estate, Kings Cross, London
(1927–31). Architect: London County Council Architects’
Department; George Topham Forrest © London Picture
Archive

Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna (1927–30). Architect: Karl Ehn. Photo

taken in 2016 © Christian Hellmich

26
27
1930s: the English Moderne Below
Page Street, Westminster, London (1928-30). Architect:
Edward Lutyens. Photo © Westminster Archives
In Liverpool, a slew of balcony access schemes
– the dynamic curves of St Andrew’s Gardens
Opposite (clockwise)
(1932–35) and Warwick Gardens (1938) in particular
Isokon building, Hampstead, London (1934). Architect: Wells
– devised under the guidance of the city’s chief Coates. Photo taken in 2005 © Justin Cormack
architectural assistant Lancelot Keay, edged Britain
towards a fully-fledged Modernist future. Heath Robinson & K.R.G. Browne’s comedic guide to
modern housing, How to Live in a Flat (1936) © Bodleian
At the same time, in London, two schemes,
Library Publishing
one social housing, the other a private
development evidenced a change in thinking St Andrew’s Gardens, Liverpool (1932–35). Architect:
among England’s architectural elite: the social Liverpool City Council; John Hughes. Photo taken in 2009 ©
John Picton
housing at Page Street, in Westminster by Edward
Lutyens and the Isokon Building, by Wells Coates,
in Belsize Park, a private development with notable
residents including Walter Gropius and Agatha
Christie. The latter, with long strips of concrete
decks forming its public façade, and the former,
with its iconic checkerboard elevations and
theatrical deck access courtyard, were a decisive
break with the English architectural obsession with
past styles.
Still, in the 1930s, there was nothing in Britain
that could match the sleek, functional style of
Rotterdam’s Bergpolderflat, with its nine floors
of deck access flats. (It more closely resembles
British high-rise blocks in the 1950s, with
Bledmundsbury, a bomb-site filler in Holborn,
completed in 1949, the first of them).
Two other developments in this decade would
help shape the future of post-war working class
housing. The first was Elizabeth Denby’s 1938
Europe Rehoused report, in which the social
housing expert advocated building high flats for
single people and childless couples, to make more
room for family houses. The second was colossal
Quarry Hill (1934–1938) in Leeds – influenced by
Vienna’s even bigger 1,382 apartment Karl-Marx-
Hof scheme – which came with a community hall-
cum-theatre, twenty shops, indoor and outdoor
swimming pools, a wading pool, extensive
courtyards, gardens and play areas as well
as a nursery, laundry and mortuary. It was a
‘manifestation of genuine civic virtue’ according
to Roy Hattersley, but one he ensured Park Hill
would outdo when he commissioned it two
decades later.53

28
29
1940s: the rise of the masterplan
In parallel with the national wartime effort, the
1940s was a decade of ambitious planning.
Envisioning a post-war future, two masterplans in
particular mapped a new course for British housing:
The County of London Plan and The Plymouth
Plan, both drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie in
1943. One in six Londoners was made homeless
during the Blitz, and the County of London Plan
outlined a radical rebuild, while Plymouth’s plan
set the template for urban regeneration throughout
the UK. It introduced Abercrombie’s influential
‘neighbourhood unit’54 – a district of between 6000
to 8000 people ‘formed around the catchment areas
of infant and junior schools, bounded by distinct
borders’. This was an idea borrowed from New York
Government architect Clarence Perry who proposed
discretely planned and self-sufficient pockets of
houses and shops.
With its Scandinavian-influenced façades
of coloured panelling and cream rendering,
Somerford Grove (1947) was among the first truly
Modernist post-war estates. Designed by Frederick
Gibberd, this pioneering scheme in Hackney,
mixed a low-rise block of two-bedroom deck
access flats with terraced three-bedroom houses.
Opposite
The Gascoyne Estate under construction, Hackney, London
(1947). Architect: London County Council Architects’
Department © London Picture Archive
Typical living room (1948) proposed for Churchill Gardens,
Pimlico, London. Architects: Philip Powell, Hidalgo Moya
© RIBA pix
30
Modernist housing achieved greater prominence
with the construction of the Thames-side Churchill
Gardens (1947–62) in Pimlico. This enormous
project consisted of a series of nine to eleven-
storey deck access slab blocks, with smaller blocks
of three- to five-storeys and a seven-storey deck
access maisonette terrace, connecting it with the
existing neighbourhood.
It was designed by recent Architectural
Association graduates, Philip Powell and Hidalgo
Moya. Still only in their mid-twenties, they sought
inspiration in ‘30s-built Dutch housing projects
and the Weissenhofsiedlung scheme (1927) in
Stuttgart, with workers’ housing by Le Corbusier,
Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.
Churchill Gardens came with a raft of ancillary
services, including pubs, shops, a restaurant, a
community centre, playgrounds, a day nursery
and, like Quarry Hill, a mortuary. It even included
a large children’s library, with heated bookshelves
courtesy of the estate’s district heating system.55
In Hackney, the first phase of the Gascoyne Estate
was completed. Its distinctive brick balcony access
blocks however, would give way to Unité-inspired
Modernism, in later phases in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
31
1950s: England’s experimental future
When Winston Churchill was re-elected in 1951,
the man who gave his name to Powell and
Moya’s estate shrank the space standards56 the
previous Labour government used during its
housebuilding drive. Nonetheless, it was a decade
of experimentation. Canyge House, a deck access
scheme for essential workers in the central war-
damaged Redcliffe area of Bristol, begun in 1953,
blended an exposed concrete frame with natural
stonework. At Rosemary Stjernstedt’s spacious,
sylvan Roehampton (1952–60) one portion,
Alton West, cemented the relationship begun at
Churchill Gardens between large scale deck access
maisonette housing and Modernist architecture
based on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. At the
other end of London, Colin St John Wilson, Peter
Carter and Alan Colquhoun were doing something
similar with the latest phase of the Gascoyne
Estate. And in 1957, as Park Hill started on site,
Denys Lasdun’s eye-catching Keeling House –
which spliced mid-rise maisonettes with a high-
rise point block – welcomed its first residents.
As John Boughton writes in Municipal Dreams:

Lasdun’s ‘cluster block’ design

(comprising a central free-standing
tower with lifts and services
and separate towers containing
accommodation which ‘clustered’
around it) offered common service
areas on each floor – a place to dry
clothes (before the era of tumble
dryers) and meet and chat. Access
balconies, each serving only two
flats, faced each other obliquely, in
a delicate balance of neighbourliness
and seclusion.57

Above
Alton Estate West, Roehampton (1952–60). Architect:
London County Council Architect’s Department; Rosemary
Stjernstedt © London Picture Archive

Opposite
Gascoyne Estate (1960). Architect: London County Council
Architect’s Department; Colin St John Wilson, Peter Carter,
Alan Colquhoun. Photograph taken from Vaine House ©
London Picture Archive

Plan of Keeling House (1957), Claredale Street Estate,

Bethnal Green, London. Architect: Denys Lasdun © Lasdun
Archive / RIBA Collections, 1957

32
33
34
35
1960s: the car owns the street
Two reports published shortly after Park Hill was
completed shaped the next two decades of deck
access housing. The first, Homes for Today and
Tomorrow (1961), more commonly named after
the chairman of its research group, Parker Morris,
reversed (although not completely) Churchill’s
cuts to space standards and advocated the kind
of wide deck access developed at Park Hill:
‘. . . the need for outdoor space may come to be
found in newer forms of access to the dwelling
associated with covered space in the open air at
the level of the home, and providing some of the
virtues of the backyard and the pedestrian street’.
The second, Traffic in Towns (1963), asserted the
car’s ownership of the street, promoted ‘traffic
architecture’ – in which buildings are designed
to facilitate the flow of transport – and suggested
a new era of elevated housing estates based on
picturesque principles. It suggested:
the central area of a town might be
redeveloped with traffic at ground
level underneath a ‘building deck’.
This deck would rise in a pattern
related to but not dictated by the
traffic below. On the deck it would
be possible to recreate, in an
even better form, the things that
have delighted man for generations
in towns, the snug, close, varied
atmosphere, the narrow alleys, the
contrasting open squares, the effects
of light end shade, and the fountains
and the sculpture.58
structure59, the repetition of geometric forms,
and the elevation of slab blocks on piloti. The
estate is currently being redeveloped – and
mostly demolished – in one of London’s largest
construction programmes.
There would be many more innovative
housing estates designed and built in the ‘60s –
the aforementioned Wyndham Court, Dawson’s
Heights and Lillington Gardens among them –
but by 1967 (a year before Unit Construction’s
advertisement) the national housing conversation
had shifted. By then, several accounts and reports
on residents’ unhappiness with their homes had
surfaced and The Architectural Review published a
new damning critique of Park Hill.60 Yet pre-fab deck
access schemes continued to be commissioned and
built, in response to the housing need exposed by
the first ever English Housing Survey (1968), which
showed that 25% of homes lacked one or more of a
bath or shower, an indoor toilet, a sink and hot and
cold water at three points.61

This approach would be embraced by Camden

Council under borough architect Sidney Cook, in
low-rise, high-density estates, like Branch Hill,
Mansfield Road and Maiden Lane, (by Benson
& Forsyth) and Neave Brown’s Fleet Road and
Alexandra Road. Deck access homes formed part
of the mix on these estates, which, like their high-
rise cousin the Barbican, explored radical elevated,
car free, housing landscapes.
The same approach inspired Southwark’s
Aylesbury Estate (1963–77), the biggest elevated
housing estate in London. It remains controversial
to this day for its superlong walkways connecting
homes at high level and its self-conscious
dedication to Modernist principles – the use of
exposed concrete, an ‘honest’ expression of
Previous spread
Park Hill (1957–61), Sheffield. Architect: Sheffield
Corporation City Architect’s Department, Jack Lynn, Ivor
Smith. Photo taken 1960 © John Donat / RIBA pix
Opposite
Wyndham Court (1966), Southampton. Architect: Lyons
Israel Ellis © Ewan Pearce, 2020
Page 38–39
Dawson’s Heights (1964–72), East Dulwich, London. Architect:
London County Council; Kate Macintosh © RIBA Pix
Lillington Gardens (1961–71), Pimlico, London. Architect:
Darbourne & Darke © Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Pix

36
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nature readers
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
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eBook.

Title: Nature readers

Sea-side and way-side. No. 4

Author: Julia McNair Wright

Illustrator: C. S. King

Release date: December 26, 2023 [eBook #72508]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. C. Heath & Co, 1891

Credits: Carla Foust and The Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATURE

READERS ***
 IDEAL SECTION OF EARTH’S CRUST
ERAS AGES PERIODS STRATA
TERRACE,
BYCHOZOIC MAN QUATERNARY CHAMPLAIN,
GLACIAL
PLIOCENE,
CENOZOIC MAMMALS TERTIARY MIOCENE,
EOCENE
MESOZOIC BIRDS CRETACEOUS
REPTILES JURASSIC
TRIASSIC
PERMIAN,
ACROGENS CARBONIFEROUS,
CARBONIFEROUS
AMPHIBIANS SUB-
CARBONIFEROUS
PALEOZOIC FISHES DEVONIAN CATSKILL,
CHEMUNG,
 CORNIFEROUS,
Etc.
LOW
INVERTEBRATES SILURIAN HELDERBERG,
NIAGARA
LORRAINE,
ORDOVICIAN
TRENTON, CHAZY
POTSDAM,
CAMBRIAN ACADIAN,
GEORGIA
KENESAW,
EOZOIC ALGONKIAN
HURONIAN, Etc.
ARCHAEAN LAURENTIAN, Etc.
AZOIC ERA
FRONTISPIECE.
 Nature Readers.

SEA-SIDE AND WAY-SIDE.

No. 4.
BY

JULIA McNAIR WRIGHT.

“‘Come, wander with me,’ she said,

Into regions yet untrod,
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.’”

Longfellow, Poem on the fiftieth birthday of Agassiz.

Illustrated by C. S. King.
BOSTON, U.S.A.:

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS.

1892.
 Copyright, 1891,
By D. C. HEATH & CO.

Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A.

 PREFACE.
Says Cicero: “There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of that
branch of literature which enables us to discover the immensity of
nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is the branch
which has taught us religion, moderation, and magnanimity, and has
rescued the soul from obscurity to make us see all things above,
below, and between both.”
Such literature as this is now markedly in the ascendant. Natural
science seems to be pre-eminently the coming pursuit of the coming
man, and natural science has been wonderfully popularized in books
suited to those who without expecting to be specialists desire to be
well informed and to look understandingly at the world which lies
about them.
Several decades have gone by since Michelet, with his marvellous
books, “The Bird” and “The Insect,” and Hugh Miller, chaste, graphic,
and enthusiastic in his “Old Red Sandstone,” “The Cruise of the
Betsy,” and “The Testimony of the Rocks,” opened glorious new
worlds before a rising generation. That generation is now doing good
work under the inspiration of the impetus then received. Our library
shelves are to-day affluent in books that are handmaids of natural
science. Tait and Balfour Stewart in their “Unseen Universe” have
brought marvels of world-building within range of our narrower ken.
Argyle in his “Unity of Nature” and “Reign of Law” and “Primeval
Man,” interpreted mighty and far-reaching harmonies. Principal Sir
William Dawson, in his “Story of the Earth and Man,” brings the
successive geologic ages before us with the vividness of some
master-painter. Darwin and Huxley, detailing experiments, have not
scorned to come within the reach of the unlearned mind. In botany,
the pleasing, enthusiastic, if often erroneous generalizations, of
Grant Allen have their use and place beside the stronger works of
Cooke, Gray, Jaegar, Taylor, and others. Our Gray, taking a leading
rank among systematic botanists, did not disdain to write for children
“How Plants Grow.” No man has done more toward popularizing
natural science than Rev. J. G. Wood in his numerous works.
Kingsley, with his exquisite English, has given us “Town Geology,”
and Tyndale has told us of “Forms of Water.” Buckland and Gosse
have written what young and old have rejoiced to read. The elders
have sat down with the juniors to revel in Arabella Buckley’s “Fairy-
Land of Science” and “Life and Her Children,” while Camille
Flammarion has made doubly eloquent to us the midnight skies. It
seems almost invidious to name a few out of the many authors who
have written not merely technical books for study, but popular works
on natural science, to be read on sea-shore and road-side, on a
bench in the garden, or lying under orchard trees, or sitting in the
woods with a brook purling at our feet. McCook has made many
insects our daily friends and teachers. Thompson, Mrs. Treat, and
Olive T. Miller have made the birds not only the guests of our
maples, but of our hearts.
The parent and teacher need no longer complain that they cannot
find the information clearly given needed for replies to multitudinous
hourly “whys” and “hows”: the present age is prodigal to its children.
The Nature Readers have been written to direct the minds of our
youth in their first studies to the pleasant ways of Natural Science.
Their main object has been to cultivate the faculty of observation,
awaken enthusiasm, and direct taste in noble lines.
The present volume is designed to open the way for severer studies
in geology, astronomy, and biology.
THE AUTHOR.
 NOTE.
Natural Science is so placed in the fore-front of the studies of the
present age that no apology is needed for pressing it upon the
schools. To object to this pursuit is simply to write oneself a laggard
behind the times. We can do little that is better for our children than
to teach them that the world is law-full to the core.
Two methods of study are ardently advocated by those who instruct
in natural science. The one demands practical personal
investigation,—nothing but investigation,—deprecates the use of
text-books, and insists upon the object only. Another, perhaps a
lazier fashion, is to ignore the object and relegate the pupil only to
the text-books.
But in medio tutissimus ibis holds here. The child should indeed
observe, and, if it can, discover; but let us by no means deprive it of
the inheritance of the ages.
Why should we set the fortunate child of the nineteenth century in
the condition of the child of the first or fourteenth centuries? Let us
give the pupil the benefit of the best that has been discovered and
detailed.
And what benefit shall he derive from such study? Let us quote from
the Report of the British Royal Education Committee: “If the object of
education is the fitting of pupils for those duties they will be called on
to perform, then instruction in science is second only in importance
to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. No subject is better
calculated to awaken the interest and intelligence of pupils than the
study of Natural Science.”
 CONTENTS.
Lesson Page
I. Earth-Building 1
II. The First Continent 9
III. The Age of Crabs and Corals 15
IV. The Reign of the Pines and the Reptiles 24
V. The Palm and the Max 32
VI. The Starry Heavens 38
VII. A Fragment of the Milky Way 46
VIII. Plan and Progression 56
IX. The King of the Day 64
X. The Queen of the Night 72
XI. Vanished Fauna 78
XII. A Mountain of Fossils 85
XIII. Written in Rocks 93
XIV. Footprints in the Sand 100
XV. The Winter of the World 107
XVI. The First Crustaceans 115
XVII. Stone Fish and Stone Lilies 122
XVIII. The Buried Reptiles 129
XIX. The Birds of Other Days 138
XX. The Early Mammals 145
XXI. A Very Old Family 152
 XXII. The Marvel in Mail 159
XXIII. The Ancient Builder 166
XXIV. An Opossum Hunt 174
XXV. A New Fashion of Pappoose 181
XXVI. Low Down in the Scale 189
XXVII. The Mallangong 195
XXVIII. Beside Australian Rivers 200
XXIX. A Walk among Wonder-Trees 206
XXX. Still in the Wonder-Grove 213
XXXI. A Noisy Family 221
XXXII. The Frog’s Cousin 229
XXXIII. Salamanders 236
XXXIV. A Denizen of the Marsh Lands 242
XXXV. A Stranger from Mexico 247
XXXVI. Some Merry Little Friends 252
XXXVII. The Ancient Monster 260
XXXVIII. El Lagarto 267
XXXIX. Wiser than any Beast of the Field 272
XL. Our Common Enemy 280
XLI. With a House on his Back 285
XLII. A Real Live Mermaid 291
XLIII. Great Whales also 297
XLIV. The Story of a Seal-skin Coat 303
XLV. A Flying Mammal 313
XLVI. Order out of Confusion 321
XLVII. A Remarkable Family 328
XLVIII. The Gnawers 335
XLIX. Odd Toes 342
L. Even Toes 351
PHASES OF EARTH-BUILDING.
Sea-side and Way-side.
 LESSON I.
EARTH-BUILDING.

“Fair world! these puzzled souls of ours grow weak

With beating their bruised wings against the rim
That bounds their utmost flying, when they seek
The distant and the dim.

“Contentment comes not therefrom; still there lies

An outer distance when the first is hailed;
And still forever yawns before our eyes
An utmost that is veiled.”

—Jean Ingelow, Honors.

The starry heavens do not exist merely for us or for our earth.
Among the splendid orbs which roll in space, earth is but one, and it
shines with pale and borrowed light. Unnumbered systems moved
upon their courses before our globe was lighted by the sun. But, for
us who live upon the earth the history of the Universe opens with this
small planet, a part of which we see and know.
It seems to us, when we begin to inquire about our earth-home, that
it must always have been a complete and finished world, just as it
now is. Science denies this. Geology leads us far back, before time
began to be reckoned here, and shows us some of the processes of
world-building. Time was when this firm, beautiful, and life-filled earth
was a vast sphere of gas, destitute of all its present order, and
without germs of life. As the palace or the temple rises into beauty
and harmony out of vast masses of material, such as wood, stone,
brick, mortar, iron, and course after course is laid up in the building
according to a definite pattern, so along the process of earth-
building, force and matter, power and material, have been laying up
the courses of the earth upon a uniform plan.
And is the earth now finished? That we cannot say; there may be
many more astonishing changes yet in store for it. We are now apt to
call it the “solid earth,” because those parts of it with which we are
acquainted, the soil and the rocks, are the most solid things that we
know; but in plain fact the earth may still be partly liquid, with the
exception of a comparatively thin crust. The distance through this
ball, our earth, is nearly eight thousand miles, and the surface, or
crust, is perhaps nowhere over a hundred miles thick. Thus we might
typify the world[1] by a metal ball, having a thin shell of solid metal,
and filled with melted metal. But as this crust, thin as it is in
comparison, has for many thousand years proved thick enough and
safe enough for a dwelling-place for men, I think we need not feel
any anxiety because it is not thicker.
To read the story of this earth-building, it has been necessary for
science to begin at the end; that is, at the present time, which is the
last chapter of the story. With long and patient care wise men have
read back, page by page, the earth-building story; we cannot say to
its beginning, but as far back as science has yet been able to go.
Now we are able to take up the narrative at such beginning as has
thus far been found, and read it forward to our present day like a
plain story. Will this be interesting? It seems to me that it is like some
magnificent fairy tale, more marvellous than the story of Aladdin’s
Lamp, or Sinbad the Sailor, or The Caliph of Bagdad. The nights of
Arabian story were not half so full of wonders as the days and nights,
the vast periods, of geologic story.
Our earth is a globe in rapid motion. The motion is dual, i.e., double;
it rolls over and over upon its axis as you might spin a ball round on
a knitting-needle thrust through its centre; but the ball on the needle
would stay in its place, no matter how many times it whirled over.
The earth, as it whirls, rolls along a great path. Every time it turns
over it measures off on this path a distance equal to its own
circumference, but at the same time it sweeps on with the motion of
the whole system, so that each day it travels over a million and a half
of miles. The earth’s path is not in a straight line; it is nearly circular;
it is what is called elliptical, or partly egg-shaped. As far back as we
can trace earth-history, the twofold motion and the globe shape have
belonged to our planet.
In the earliest state of which we can speak, our earth was a globe of
gas at least two thousand times as large as it now is. Science has
made a guess that, before this, our earth was a ring or layer of vapor
around the sun. This ring, being spun off into space by the rapid
motion of the sun, took, after a time, the sphere shape, and being
held by the attraction of the sun from wandering farther off into
space, has ever since whirled around in a great path about its
ancient source. If this theory be true, then all the other planets of our
system were probably once cast off in their order by the sun, as vast
fiery rings. That must have been an age of grand and splendid
fireworks indeed! If only one had been there to see!
Why cannot we imagine that we were there to see? Can we not
fancy ourselves back, through all the wonderful ages, until we reach
the beginning of all things? The Arabians have a kind of fanciful
being, whom they call an Afrite, or Afreet. They say that this being is
formed of pure heat, smokeless flame. Did any of you ever see, on a
very scorching day, the air quivering above a dry, hot road? That
quivering of hot air is often seen on the desert, and the Arabians say
it is the waving of an Afrite’s robe. Let us fancy we were Afrites,
gigantic flame-spirits, present when the earth, from a fiery ring, had
just become a fiery ball.
Heat, such as we cannot imagine, is the chief characteristic of our
globe at this stage. But being Afrites, and ourselves made of heat,
we shall not mind that. We see that the whirling hot ball has in it all
the atoms which will one day become solid rocks. But these atoms
are kept apart by heat, and are in a state like gas. As we Afrites peer
at the glowing, whirling ball, we see that there are two forces at work
within it. Heat is one force, keeping all particles expanded, and not
letting them come together; but there is another force called
gravitation at work also. This is a force which causes all things to
tend toward each other—to draw together. It is this force of
gravitation which first gives the gaseous ring its globe shape, pulling
its particles together; and as Afrites, we watch with interest the
results of this force by long and slow degrees condensing the matter
of the globe.
While this is going on, we perceive that two great changes are taking
place. First, the sphere is growing cooler, by radiating, or throwing off
its heat. Heat a poker red hot; wave it in the air, and it cools by giving
off its heat to the air. Thus the hot globe throws off some of its heat
as it whirls along its path in space. But as the sphere cools, the loss
of heat allows the particles to shrink and come together and unite
with each other. The uniting of some of these various simple
substances produces other substances, and as the cooling and
uniting go on, the great globe becomes smaller and smaller. As we
are Afrites, and not afraid of heat, we wander into this fluid ball, and
we find that by all this cooling, condensing, and uniting, the material
for future rocks is forming.
Still imagining ourselves Afrites, the next change does not please us
as well. We find that the outer particles of vapor in our great hot ball,
as they ascend into space and cool, unite with each other and
become a vapor like steam, and this steam cools and condenses
into rain and mist. If a plate is held before the nose of a tea-kettle
from which steam is rushing out, the steam condenses at once into
drops of water. If the plate with the water-drops on it is set out in
sharply cold winter air, it is at once covered with frost or ice. Thus it
happened with the vapor about that hot sphere, our world; and the
rain and mist fell back upon the glowing ball from which they had
risen. They helped to cool it and to increase the hardening, but they
were also reheated and sent off again as vapor, to cool once more in
space.
If at that time we, as Afrites, had travelled to some other planet, and
taken a seat there to watch our world from a distance, we should
then have seen it in its greatest beauty as a heavenly body, because
in that age it was at its greatest size, and was far larger than now:
also it must have shone as a clear and lovely star, with a glory which
has now almost passed away.
In the illustration at the head of this chapter the large ring represents
the earth as a vast ball of hot vapor. The very small ring in the centre