to be surprised Rhiannon Cosslett is old enough to be an authority on this?

[RobinsAreTerritorialFuckers]

Warning: trivial witterings.

I've read Cosslett's stuff in the Guardian a bit, and I had assumed she was somewhere in her 30s. Maybe early 40s.

I'm a bit surprised to find her coming over all Four Yorkshiremen about tower blocks in the 60s and 70s. Article here: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/17/brutal-way-to-live-truth-about-tower-blocks

Apparently: 'I always laugh when I hear middle-class people – and it so often is middle-class people – fervently defending brutalism. When they wax lyrical about the sparse beauty of, say, the Trellick Tower, you can’t help but think: “That’s all very well, but you didn’t have to live in it.”'

I don't disagree Tower Blocks seem (from my middle-class lack of knowledge) both fairly ugly and not as fun to live in as a nice detached house, but AIBU to be surprised by the tone of this piece?

I think the mistake she makes is to flatten out time.

The experience of living in Park Hill just after it was built in the 60s was utterly unlike that of living in it during the 80s, by which time (thanks partly to underinvestment) social problems had exploded. If you look back at old footage, people talk about how lovely it was to have an indoor bathroom, and how clean and light the building felt after the slum housing from which they had moved. It looks delightful, too. By the 80s, all that had changed. (The thing is, if you don't maintain buildings, they will start to fall apart. Even Buckingham Palace).

However, I agree with her that there is a lazy fetishization of the brutalist by a cultured class that seeks to distance itself from both bourgeois domestic architecture and populism, by an argument that centres in aesthetic discrimination rather than democratic utopianism. The snobbery of someone like Jonathan Meades epitomises it.

violet - I didn't? I was responding to someone pointing out she's much younger than I thought, so obviously didn't have the experience she claimed other people shouldn't appropriate.

Although I will add I agree with some of the comments underneath the article, that the failure of these places will have a lot to do with lack of investment, but sadly that is true of all council/HA places.
People too poor to private rent or buy never get the investment though, so it's not likely to change anytime soon, especially with the demonization of social housing tenants/sell off of houses.

I really like to read her views, and some of the other younger journalists.

The media (and life in general) is so dominated by the vocal baby boomers, it's refreshing to have a shift of tone from that generation. Especially on things like housing, job security, finances which the Guardian has so much on, but too much from the older crowd (living in their huge Islington houses that they bought for a pittance etc etc). They need the angry young voices.

I think she writes a lot of sense.

Shove this....
However, I agree with her that there is a lazy fetishization of the brutalist by a cultured class that seeks to distance itself from both bourgeois domestic architecture and populism, by an argument that centres in aesthetic discrimination rather than democratic utopianism. The snobbery of someone like Jonathan Meades epitomises it.

Yep yep yep.....bang on the money.

Also about her flattening time. I get what you mean, it was much different in the tower block I lived in in the 90s than it would have been in the 60s.

We x posted about the lack of investment!!

When she says 'tower blocks of the 60s and 70s' does she not just mean blocks built then, rather than living there then?

The Barbican is utterly gorgeous though, I love it. But it is completely sanitised, obviously, it's mc pretendy tower-block living in much the same way Mark Warner villages are pretendy pontins!
Doesn't stop me coveting flats there that I'll never be able to afford.

I agree with you Robins, I thought it was an odd article, written as if she had no personal experience/knowledge and had been asked to fill a page. Particularly as I know people who live in the Barbican and it's bloody lovely (and insanely expensive), and Trellick Tower is v. fashionable and expensive now too. Not to mention all the new tower blocks going up and being sold for £££ to rich foreigners...

As shovetheholly says, she is flattening the timescales and missing the key point that it's all about maintenance.

Robins so you'd have thought her equally ill qualified to write the piece if she'd grown up in one during the 1970s?

Lynsey Hanley is your woman when it comes to writing with knowledge and understanding about post-war council housing and living in it... she is just fantastic and would have written a much more interesting piece.

violet - not equally so, no (because I initially thought that she must be talking about her early childhood). But I would find it slightly odd.

irene - YY, shove is making a really good point about the maintenance. And certainly the timeline. I think that's why I've ended up with 'old enough' in my title. I wonder, reading maddad's point about how much journalism is dominated by older voices, if she maybe did that to 'fit in' with the usual age range - maybe even subconsciously? In which case, she's actually talking about her life in the later 80s/90s/00s, but referring to the 60s/70s because that is what we readers 'expect' journalists to be referring to?

Cross post. Will check her out, irene, thanks.

high fives baddogooder

I think she's about 28 years old, so I do think there's something weird about the way she makes the argument. It does rather sound as though she's claiming to have lived in a towerblock since the 1960s, when clearly she's too young to have done so. I think it's probably just over-hasty writing: there's a jumble of pretty ill-sorted ideas in the piece (what is that stuff about legibility about at the end, and how does it fit with the rest of her argument?)

Zoe Williams and Anna Minton are better on housing issues.

Lynsey Hanley, Estates yy, excellent suggestion.

"In which case, she's actually talking about her life in the later 80s/90s/00s, but referring to the 60s/70s because that is what we readers 'expect' journalists to be referring to?"

Yes quite possibly! I also think that the nastiness of living in brutalist tower blocks is a standard trope that has been around at least since the 1980s when they started to be demolished, and she is drawing on this rather lazily without saying anything new or interesting.

Blimey, better burn my History PhD thesis on the fire. It written on a nineteenth century topic; I wasn't born then so clearly know nothing about it.

Mind you my mate who studied Medieval History is properly screwed. His topic is even further removed from the time of his birth and so will know even less. In fact he thesis is probably just page after page of drawings of Cadfael done in wax crayon.

Have you not heard of research op? If writers were limited to covering events in their life time or things they have personally experienced then the scope of writing is going to dry up to next to nothing.

likedylan - It is actually the journalist who is making the argument that if you didn't experience life in a brutalist towerblock, you have no right to an opinion. (She says: 'I always laugh when I hear middle-class people – and it so often is middle-class people – fervently defending brutalism. When they wax lyrical about the sparse beauty of, say, the Trellick Tower, you can’t help but think: “That’s all very well, but you didn’t have to live in it.”')

The OP is actually questioning that logic by pointing out that she is actually too young to have been there during the period under discussion - the 60s and 70s.

I didn't notice any research in the article, Dylan, apart from a quote from Dominic Sandbrook which doesn't say anything new to anyone who has read anything ever about living in tower blocks in the 1970s. Could you point me to this research?

Ooops, posted too soon. Meant to add: I don't think anyone on the thread is actually suggesting you can only understand things you have lived through or buildings you have lived in.

It is actually the journalist who is making the argument that if you didn't experience life in a brutalist towerblock, you have no right to an opinion.

I don't think she claiming that at all, just suggesting that the rose-tinted view the chatterati are naive in fetishising the aesthetic of brutalist tower blocks but ignoring their failings as actual living spaces.

Even if you remain insistent that she is making that argument (which i really don't think she is) why is it not feasible that she grew up in a run-down and badly designed brutalist flat? There are still plenty knocking around and in council ownership.

like, I really wasn't saying anything like that.

Cosslett moves immediately from saying that no one should comment on a tower block they've not lived in, to talking about tower blocks in the 60s/70s. It is not a huge jump to wonder if she means she lived in a tower block in the 60s/70s.

My first response was 'huh? Surely you were about 9 at most?!' and now I realise she was actually not born then.

It's not that she shouldn't feel entitled to comment - it's that she's mixing one kind of comment with another, and the result is a bit incoherent.

From her piece about growing up with her autistic brother (which is excellent and one of the reasons that the standard of this article disappointed me) she grew up in a terraced house:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/07/floods-fires-and-a-very-reggae-christmas-how-autism-touched-my-family

likedylan - I agree with the point about the middle class fetishization - see my post above at 09:23.

I do, however, think that the way she phrases the argument is odd- it's something about the tense she uses, I think. 'That's all very well but you didn't have to live in it' is the phrase she uses - not 'don't have to live in it now' and not 'never had to live in it at any time in the past'. There's something that feels just a bit more personal in that 'didn't', something specific that ties directly into her argument about a particular experience of this architecture in a particular era (the 60s/70s). It does read oddly when you look at her age.

Like I said before, I think it's probably just over-hasty writing. Her output is pretty impressive after all. I'm sure I'd construct far odder sentences if I were writing at that volume!

That was a good article.

I don't think, for me, the issue is where she grew up. Or indeed the fact she's obviously now not so distinct from the middle class hipsters as all that. God knows I'm in a glass house here. It's that there's a funny disconnect between her different claims, and I think that's what made me read bits of it as mocking, though maybe that's the wrong word.

I suspect if she'd written honestly about a childhood in the 90s/00s in a tower block, she wouldn't get the same response as if she refers to one in the 60s/70s, so I guess I shouldn't be irritated with her, I should be irritated with the bigger situation.

Back in March she was 28.
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/12/millennial-baby-boomer-trade-places-stab-envy

• That's what I found strange. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the 'all middle class people love tower blocks' thing just seemed strange to me.

Maybe it's just me!*
The bit you probably can't quite put your finger on is her talking about the middle-class as a group like that, as if she isn't anywhere near middle-class herself currently.

That's usually what gets my goat about writers for the guardian in independent and the like. Talking down to "the little people" about how awful they're being because they assume their targets are all middle-class and privileged, while at the same time appropriating the experiences of the underprivileged and speaking for them.

I don't know if that's the case with this writer, and she did actually have the sort of life that genuinely gives her the ability to speak with authority on the matter, but so many don't and still do that it's really hard to tell these day...