Packington past and present - The story of three estates

Above: Packington Street’s run-down Victorian terraces in 1964.

It’s finished at last. The new Packington Estate, four years late in completion, was finally officially opened in September, exactly 12 years since work began.

The £198-million development replaces the council estate created for the Metropolitan Borough of Islington in the 1960s. That in turn was a replacement of an earlier Packington Estate – 200 Victorian terrace houses just like the ones still standing in much of Arlingtonia. In 1963 Islington Council bought the privately-owned 10-acre estate for £582,500 (its largest ever property deal) to save the tenants from eviction by the landlords, but then came up with a plan to demolish the old houses and build a council estate of flats. Even though the mostly rented houses were overcrowded and in a very sorry state, the residents were generally not in favour of their demolition. And they had a very vocal supporter.

In 1964 Harry Brack, a surveyor, Islington Labour councillor and member of the housing committee, raged that pulling down the 1850s houses ‘would be a national scandal’. Brack could see no reason for spending the proposed £2 million (equivalent to around £35 million today) on ‘barracks for the workers’ when it would mean the destruction of structurally sound homes for just 25 per cent net housing gain. He believed everyone had the right to live in a Victorian house, and not just the rich. (Others argued in the Islington Gazette that ‘Victoriana should stay in the scrapbook, for it has no place in the space age.’).

Despite a massive campaign by over 400 groups, including the Islington Society, the Ministry of Housing quickly approved the redevelopment – two days before the Council on Appeals was to consider allowing objections to the proposal. The terraces were demolished, the area redeveloped and a concrete estate was built containing 538 flats in 27 six-storey blocks designed by Harry Montcrieff.

Brack was expelled from the Labour Party for publicly voicing his dissent. His daughter Hannah says: ‘He claimed that Islington was building the slums of tomorrow, and in a way after what happened there, he was right.’

Above: the council flats that replaced them, already deemed ‘unsafe’ in 2003.

Indeed, by 2005 Nick Cohen was writing about the Packington Estate in the Guardian that ‘the ugliness and inhumanity of the buildings is as much a deterrent as the fear of crime’. As in so many other estates, the communal spaces were colonised by gangs, the communal doorways were taken over by drug dealers, the windows leaked, the wallpaper peeled off with condensation and everyone could hear what everyone else was doing three, four, five or even six floors away.

(Crime in Packington was not exactly new. An early resident of the old Victorian estate was Celestina Sommer, known as the Islington Murderess, famous for killing her only daughter in 1856 and escaping the death penalty.)

Canalside Square in the same street today

The new council estate was built using the Large Panel System (LPS) method made up of concrete slabs, which architect and fire safety expert Sam Webb described as similar to a ‘house of cards’ and a fire risk. In 2003, the council had to take out all the gas cookers for fear of the catastrophic effects of a small explosion.

In 2004, Islington Council recommended that the estate should be knocked down and rebuilt. Unusually, the residents were consulted about its replacement, and came up with a 40-item wish-list headed by their demand that the homes for sale privately were not prioritised above their rented homes. In 2006 the Council eventually transferred the estate to the giant housing association Hyde, who led on the redevelopment alongside construction firm Rydon and architects Pollard Thomas Edwards. Jan Dubridge, chair of the residents’ board on the estate, recalls: ‘They were the ones who we felt actually listened to what we wanted. There were others who wanted to put 1,000 homes on the estate and one who wanted to put a false canal through the middle.’

The project ran late almost from the start, partly due to the difficulty of dismantling the old LPS blocks. But it has been widely praised and won this year’s National Housing Award for Best Regeneration Scheme. The construction was not without its controversies. The Arlington Association had to work hard to stop heavy lorries driving through the side streets of Arlingtonia, and in February 2013 pedestrian Janette Hastead was killed by a lorry reversing on the building site.

The new estate now has 790 homes. These include 300 privately sold and 490 for social rent – 48 fewer than in the original 1960s council estate. However, the new development has provided more bed spaces, as many of the one- and two-bedroom flats have been replaced with family-sized homes.

It’s all a far cry from the pastoral fields of the 1550s when Dame Anne Packington bequeathed to the Clothworkers’ Company a ‘messuage or tenement called the Crown in Islington; fourteen acres and one rood of land next to it called the Prebend field and three roods of lands known as Great Coleman’s field’. Dame Anne’s second husband Sir John Packington (or Pakington) was Chirographer of the Court of Common Pleas, the officer employed to ‘engross fines’. He was not only knighted and enriched by Henry VIII, but in April 1529 was also granted by the King ‘that he might wear his hat in the King’s presence and in the presence of his successors’.

- There is a memorial to Dame Anne in St Botolph’s Aldersgate.

- Harry Brack died in 2009 from leukaemia.