UK Tower Blocks: complete collection

The Tower Block UK image archive – the principal legacy of our HLF funded projects – is a database of around 4000 images of every multi-storey social housing development built in the UK in the post-war decades. The photographs were largely taken in the 1980s by Miles Glendinning and are made available here for the first time for public use. As many of the blocks documented in photographs have since been demolished, the archive functions in part as a repository of information on important aspect of national and local heritage that is now vanishing. The archive itself catalogued multi-storey blocks as part of the developments within which they were initially commissioned and built. It gives details of notable dates in construction, and other information on the processes of commissioning, designing and constructing mass social housing. While the most historically accurate identification labels in the database are the original overall development or project names, the archive also contains details of the individual blocks built. Beginning as the digitisation of one specific collection of details and photographs, over the course of the three-year-long Heritage Lottery-funded project, the archive expanded as residents and former residents of housing development were invited to contribute their own records, which have now been added to the archive. The images are made freely available under a Creative Commons attribution licence. Associated book: Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius "Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland" (1994) Yale University Press. ISBN: 0-300-05444-0. Print.

The Tower Block UK project is a Heritage Lottery-supported initiative based at the University of Edinburgh, and now fully available via the University’s DataShare research data repository, as well as the original project website (see below) It brings together public engagement and an open-access-licensed image archive in an attempt to emphasise the social and architectural importance of public mass housing, and to frame multi-storey blocks as a coherent and accessible nationwide heritage. Its initial phase of work and data-capture ran from 2014 until 2019, and has now been followed by a legacy phase of updating of data where resources permit, and expansion of the possibilities of public open access to the data – most recently through the present link-up with the University of Edinburgh DataShare project. Tower Block UK emphasises the social and architectural importance of tower blocks and public mass housing in general, and frames multi-storey social housing as a coherent and accessible nationwide heritage – as well as, of course, a massive resource of embodied carbon. As multi-storey public housing blocks increasingly vanish from our urban landscapes, especially in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017, this project answers the need to document and create an engagement with the history of multi-storey social housing at both a local and national level. In re-evaluating the historical, architectural and social importance of postwar high-rise living, the Tower Block UK project has aimed to provide a forum for the sharing of images, experiences and memories. By providing a searchable image archive of historic 1980s images, supplemented with more recent data, in tandem with various public engagement activities, the project has brought together both tangible and intangible sources for engaging with recent social history – and the new linkup with DataShare radically enhances that resource. Through the work of the project and its continuously updated legacy – the Tower Block UK database and archive – we hope to play a role in banishing the negative assumptions surrounding life in multi-storey social housing. This task is all the more pertinent today in an age where the manifestations of the post-war drive to build affordable high-density housing are increasingly disappearing, irrevocably altering the physical and social fabric of the urban environment. The main Tower Block UK legacy site in contains, in addition to the database itself, a diverse range of links to other websites and partner organisations concerned with post-war mass housing, in particular DOCOMOMO, which deals with documentation and conservation of the Modern Movement. Thus the recent translation of the database material into a DataShare collection (the Tower Block General Collection) fits into a well-established landscape of interactive links for our database. We hope this will set the UK experience, including the internationally unique system of ‘council housing’, in a wider global context.

Glendinning, Miles (2023) "Tower Block UK complete collection" Edinburgh DataShare https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/4857