The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite

In 1980, the year following the demolition of Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead, the German architect Walter Segal wrote about the effects, on both communities and individuals, of building housing on a mass scale. "To humanise huge structures by architectural means is an unrewarding task,' he commented. The loss of identity, the divorce from the ground and the collectivisation of open space pose dilemmas that cannot be disguised by shape, texture, colour and proportion. A good view over landscaped spaces compensates only a few. The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite.' 

Oak and Eldon Gardens, which replaced an area of back-to-back terraces in the dock side north end of Birkenhead, suffered from their size and scale, as well as their poor design: the dank stairwells leading up to each floor invited vandalism and required a level of maintenance that was unplanned for, either by the council or the architects themselves, therefore help and repairs were not always available when needed. Tenants were, indeed, 'divorced from the ground' by means of stilts, under which their cars would be parked and passers-by would thread through on their way to other destinations. The flats showed English council tenants how it felt to live like bees in a honeycomb: as nuclear families in isolated, identical modules, collected together in a building that overwhelmed them with its size. Its scale, and the principles behind it, suggested an experiment in communal living, but people were not truly living together. At the same time that they sensed a loss of control over their private identity, tenants also had to deal with the consequences of communal services - such as lifts, postboxes and rubbish chutes - being damaged or put out of service by individuals whom they could rarely identify.

It was with equal elegance that Segal pointed out that Britain's targets for housing density that is, the number of households on each hectare of land - could just as easily have been met by building two-storey terraced houses, and that the cost of planning, building and maintaining two flats in an average tower block was roughly equal to that for three or four houses. Time and again council planners were warned of the difficulty and expense of creating new communities from scratch, by sociologists who had studied the effects of slum clearance on the interwar generation, when close-knit towns people were first 'decanted' from back-to-backs into suburban cottages. Such flats seemed to divide and rule over, and to make faceless, the people who lived there.

- Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, London, 2007, p.115-6.