Thursday 11 February 2010

Rodney Court

If 1960s architecture in the UK is anything to go by, Le Corbusier has a lot to answer for.

The post-war years saw an increase in population and subsequently the demand for housing also grew. City planners in the UK were enamoured by the works of Swiss-French architect and Urbanist Le Corbusier.

Ignoring the fact that a lot of Le Corbusier's city planning was somewhat utopian and short of practical detail, the UK had built huge numbers of high-rise tower blocks for use as Social Housing by the end of the 1960s.

The poorly designed tower blocks were home to vandalism, muggings and break-ins - all aided by the maze of narrow corridors and poorly lit communal areas - symptoms of clumsy design.

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Rodney Court is in Miles Platting in Manchester. Situated between deprived Ancoats and more-deprived Collyhurst, we certainly weren't UrbExing in Beverley Hills.

The building is 38.4m over 13 floors. Most of which are fire damaged. It's currently owned by Urban Splash who no doubt intend to make something great of it.

Heading in on the ground floor, we were aware of the ever-present potential threat of crackheads and hobos. These tower blocks were dodgy places before they became derelict. Luckily, we found a sledgehammer near our entrance which we could take with us to save ourselves.

The only thing we needed to save ourselves from in the end was pigeons. Plenty of pigeon poop on the top floor.

Comedy when Rookie shone his torch into a doorway on the roof and a load of pigeons flew out as if they were bats on Scooby Doo.

2 comments:

  1. Your blog and mine have just been mentioned in the same post on Manchizzle and strangely enough (in my head, rather than by name) this building and it's location is roughly the setting of my novel...!

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  2. What a small world!

    Thanks for commenting :)

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