EP Idea: Byker Wall

 (2017) - It’s been named the UK and Ireland’s best neighbourhood - it’s got top schools, friendly neighbours and community art classes - alongside high levels of poverty.

Byker is best known for Erskine’s Byker Wall, an 1,800-home estate of 9,500 people, which is among the best regarded of Britain’s postwar council estates. It provides a mile-and-a-half-long barrier to North Sea winds, creating a microclimate within the estate while protecting it from the noise of major roads outside. 

Ralph Erskine’s Grade II-listed council estate, built to replace the old Byker neighbourhood, is an examplar of design and public participation – and proof that it is rarely in the interests of people to demolish their original homes

Byker – a tight-knit, 17,000-strong, working-class community of Victorian back-to-back terraces – was demolished. It made way for a wholesale redevelopment of the area, the centrepiece of which was architect Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall estate. 

Original Byker neighbourhood 

Though it has been long since razed, the original Byker community lives on through the work of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, a Finnish photographer and film-maker who moved into the old Byker in 1969. Over a 12-year period, she catalogued the community as it faced the wrecking ball. In 2003, Konttinen returned to make a new film, documenting the lives of Byker Wall residents over a period of six years. The contrast with her previous film is immediate, not least because Erskine’s estate, now characterised by security doors and intercoms, is so different from the narrow streets and back-to-backs of the old Byker.

Today, Byker is best known for Erskine’s Byker Wall, an 1,800-home estate of 9,500 people, which is among the best regarded of Britain’s postwar council estates. It provides a mile-and-a-half-long barrier to North Sea winds, creating a microclimate within the estate while protecting it from the noise of major roads outside.

English Heritage awarded Byker a Grade II listing in 2007, defending it from the swathe of council-estate demolitions currently devastating communities across Britain

Erskine, a deeply committed socialist and Quaker that was heavily influenced by Swedish social democracy, made very considerable efforts to involve the original Byker community in the design of the new development. This was done through a pilot scheme involving 46 households working with architects in the design of their future homes and in the old Byker, where Erskine leased a former funeral parlour as an office and drop-in centre.

Design aspects to work from: 

• Byker Wall was an exemple of both design and an attempt to involve the community in the changes planned for them by those in power. That it failed in so many ways reveals that it is rarely in the interests of communities to demolish the homes they live in.
• Contrast between the old Byker neighbourhood in to now. (community) 
• The fierce resistance of the majority of residents, who desperately want to stay in their homes. (Esates all over UK being demolished - postwar slum clearance) 
• a mile-and-a-half-long barrier to North Sea winds - creates micro-climate within estate + noise cancelled from road