ABSTRACT
When the first flats were opened in March 1938 the estate had already, in a sense, made its contribution to history. As a stage in the development of housing design it would still be important if it had had-no further history after that date; and indeed it is in this way, jumping from milestone to milestone, that much of architectural history is written. But if buildings are not merely expressions of intentions and ideas, but contributions to material culture that continue to exist and exert an influence, in some cases, long after interest in their design has lapsed, then there is much reason for tracing their further history and use. As we have seen, the concept of the users in general housing policy was inevitably over-simple, even stereotyped. They were ‘the poor’, the slum dwellers who were victims of unhealthy conditions and deserving of ‘improvement’. Locally, though some effort was made to break down and define in more detail the different categories of users, these still ran the risk of being inaccurate or inflexible. Moreover, design intentions could be frustrated by external considerations, like economic constraints or delays in building, and took small account of possible changes in people or environment over the course of time. It is the purpose of the second half of this book to consider these changes and their implications. The task of this chapter is to trace the functions of the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds housing over the course of thirty years, to distinguish the different populations that inhabited it during that period, and to surmise how far these were conditioned by the design or any other special qualities of the estate environment.
