Time to knock them down The high life is disposable

Roy Hattersley says he was right to build Sheffield's Parkhill Flats, but their days are now over . He says he was right then but th it, and he's ready to see it come down.

It seemed a good idea at the time. And I have no doubt that it was. Parkhill Flats - now simultaneously excoriated by tenants and awarded listed building status by English Heritage - fulfilled a specific and practical purpose. I am biased about Parkhill. I built it. Or at least I was chairman of the Sheffield City Council public works committee which won the contract by competitive tender and finished the job at an earlier date and a lower price than it originally promised.

Then, as chairman of the housing committee, I was responsible for collecting the rents, maintaining the lifts and ensuring that the galleries - "streets in the sky" as they were called - were kept clean and tidy. My name is engraved on the slab of granite which commemorates the opening by Hugh Gaitskell. That does not make me believe that Parkhill must be preserved at all costs. But whatever its future, Parkhill - and the almost identical Hyde Park, which once stood higher up the same hill - were, in their day, glorious. Not a glorious failure but a glorious success.

Parkhill was built in a city which, at the time when the foundations were laid, had 13,000 families on a housing waiting list which offered no prospect of a tenancy for 10 years. And there were 10,000 condemned properties waiting to be demolished. Between the wars, Sheffield had achieved one of the best slum-clearance records in Britain. And, in the early Sixties, the city was building as fast as the contractors could finish the works. But the terraces and the back-to-backs, the legacy of the industrial revolution, disintegrated more quickly than they could be replaced. The government financed part of the cost of new houses out of taxes and the council subsidised rents from the rate fund. But balancing the housing revenue account was still a constant struggle. And land was scarcer than money. Sheffield has more rivers than the Punjab and more hills than Rome. Maisonettes had already been hung from hillsides and 12-storey tower blocks balanced along skylines.

J Lewis Womersley, the city architect, who had built houses on slopes too steep for less adventurous spirits even to consider, said that in the half-light, some of his creations looked like Tuscan hill villages. And he showed the housing committee photographs of St Mark's Square in Venice which proved that a mixture of styles was not an aesthetic disaster. Despite his dedication and his ingenuity - and his membership of the Parker- Morris committee on building standards which made him an advocate of high- quality housing - the prospective tenants rarely liked what he produced. Some of the maisonettes which were cut into hillsides had bedrooms at a lower level than the kitchens. Sheffield families did not like "going downstairs to bed". Living in a one-bedroom flat 10 storeys up a tower block is tolerable to some childless couples. But childless couples are inclined eventually to have children. And even when the accommodation itself was acceptable, the tenants often hated the atmosphere and ambience of the suburbs into which they had been moved. There had been a feeling of community in the slums. As old neighbours were scattered across new estates, that feeling was lost. Perhaps unreasonably, we wanted J Lewis Womersley to replace the cold houses but keep the warm feelings.

Parkhill was intended to meet all the demands in a single development. It was to be both high quality and relatively cheap. That required "system building", reproducing the same pattern of flat time after time. Aesthetic obligations were thought to be satisfied by a design which was meant to look like a massive cliff which rose steep and high behind the Midland station. Sheffielders were used to grit-stone "edges" making sharp escarpments in limestone countryside. The impression was to be enhanced by pouring the concrete (which set to become the building's frame) into moulds of rough wood - thus leaving the pattern of the grain clearing visible. Unfortunately, in the era before clean air, they caught the city's dust and grime. The first complaint against Parkhill was that it looked dirty.

Those complaints were not made for years. Parkhill was designed to meet the wishes - which, perhaps wrongly, we assumed reflected the needs - of the people who would live in them. First and foremost, it preserved the old communities whose back-to-back houses were to be replaced by multi- storey development. Secondly, although it rose high - 19 stories at its tallest point - it was not laid out on the classic high-rise principle of four front doors in the corners of a dark and airless lobby that is only approachable by lift. Parkhill was built out of the fell from which it took its name. Galleries, 10 feet wide, zig-zagged away from the slope on top of each other. They started at ground level and, as the land fell away, "rose" to 19 storeys. Pairs of front doors opened on to the galleries as the front doors of the old terraces had once opened onto the cobble- stoned streets. Prams could be pushed. Milk floats could cruise from step to step. Children could play on the galleries at least as safely as they once played in the road. We knew that the families felt at home when they began to paint white edges on their window sills.

The recreation of the old camaraderie was not Parkhill's only attraction. The flats - some of them at two levels to recreate the atmosphere of traditional houses - were packed with amenities. Water-borne refuse disposal allowed tin cans to be sluiced down a hole in the sink. At a time when launderettes were just being imported from America, Parkhill had tenants' laundries on the ground floor. It also had public houses, each inheriting a name from a public house which had been demolished.

The only sceptic was Alderman Sydney Dyson, a half-blind full-time Labour Party agent who was notorious for his dissident views and outspoken criticism. Dyson was certain that the housing committee should build "workmen's cottages with a bit of garden round them".

Almost 40 years on, it seems that he was right. At the time, tenants no less than the housing committee laughed at his passe opinions. Families who had waited 10 years for a decent house waited two years more to get a flat in Parkhill. The decision to build was undoubtedly right at the time. A decision to preserve may be wrong because of the way the world has changed since 1960.

When Parkhill was built, Britain was far less a middle-class nation than it is today. Working men and women certainly demanded a decent home. But the passions of extended prosperity - garage, fence, garden, drive, car - had not consumed the lower-income groups. In those days, adjacent front doors encouraged confidence, not a feeling of social inferiority. Living cheek by jowl was not the risk it is today. Aerosol sprays had barely been invented and there was little graffiti on the walls. Packs of youths did not stalk the galleries late at night. The occasional drunk urinated in the lifts, but they were not systematically vandalised out of operation. The semi-detached house has become a fortress against violence. The spirit of our time makes Parkhill residents - with washing machines of their own and satellite television - want to become a part of the new individualism, with custom-built bow-windows and curtains which can be identified from the road.

Parkhill was built at a time when council-owned rented housing was popular with every party. I was summoned to London by the housing minister, Henry Brooke - in those days regarded as a right-wing ogre - and told that the government would find the extra money if I could find the contractors to build more houses. Those days have gone. And it may not be possible to destroy 1,000 flats and maison-ettes while there are still families waiting for decent houses. But Parkhill must not be preserved as a monument either to brilliant architects or to councillors who believed they were doing their best for Sheffield. Parkhill was built to meet the needs of the people. If it no longer achieves that aim, it should be demolished.