Essex has long been stereotyped for its bubbly TV personalities, but these days it is better known for its bubbly school roofs. The preponderance of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) – a cheaper but more porous version of the more durable midcentury favourite – in its educational facilities has made Essex, as it often is during general elections, the canary in the coalmine. Last week it was revealed that out of the 147 schools nationwide affected by Raac, more than a third, 58, were in the county – from Jamie Oliver’s old grammar the Joyce Frankland academy near Saffron Walden in the north, to the Bromfords school in Wickford in the south, where reality star Chantelle Houghton was a student.
As always when faced with a mounting crisis, the government sent for a scapegoat, this time reaching further back than Covid and Ukraine – further even than the two-decade tenure of New Labour – to Germany’s invasion of Poland. The Department for Education (DfE) blamed “the second world war” for having precipitated the boom in building in Essex that required cheap materials such as Raac. “We’ve looked at this as Essex does have a large number of the cases and it’s largely because of the fact that there was a lot of postwar building in and around Essex,” said the education secretary, Gillian Keegan.
The idea that Essex was thrown up in a flash as a reaction to the blitz has taken hold over the weekend. “In Essex, which had been heavily bombed in the war, swathes of public buildings were quickly erected using Raac panels,” the Sunday Times reported – but Essex wasn’t “heavily bombed”, not in the way Hull, Coventry and Liverpool were. Instead it was the place the bombed escaped to. It is true the war precipitated a great political realisation that new satellite towns were needed to house displaced Londoners. But, as my book The Invention of Essex relays, Essex had already established itself as a place where stricken Londoners of the lower orders would seek to start a new life. There were local authority initiatives such as Becontree, in Barking and Dagenham, Europe’s largest council estate, which was built from the 1920s, as well as thousands of DIY “plotland” bungalow dwellings built in fields in south Essex, creating a sanitation crisis that made the building of new towns in their place an inevitability. Basildon was one such new settlement where Raac was used to build a minority of its housing estates amid growing postwar demand.
More useful than the second world war to understanding why so many schools in Essex contain Raac is another heavily scapegoated time period: the 1970s. The decade is often characterised as a dark age of strikes and the seizing up of nationalised industries, before the Thatcher government set in motion the changes that by 1990 would have changed union men into “Essex man”. Yet in truth this process was well under way by 1979. Keith Joseph, remembered for being the architect of Thatcherism in the 1970s, had already ushered in an age of market-driven, European-style prefabricated “system building” at scale as housing minister in the early 1960s.
Many of the schools in Essex that have been closed or partially closed due to the Raac scandal were built years after the Essex new towns of Harlow and Basildon were established, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The county architect, Ralph Crowe, implemented a specially designed, flat-roofed and boxy Modular Component Building System (MCB), which had grown out of movements more associated with the European intelligentsia than English planning (Raac itself was invented in Sweden), but was introduced under a competitive, market-led system.
“The attempts in Britain to draw on experience in mainland Europe for modular building were all doomed to failure, as they never achieved the scale they needed to control quality and get the benefits,” says Prof Michael Edwards, a lecturer at the Bartlett school, University College London, who helped plan the new town of Milton Keynes. “A number of the firms went bust. That chapter just ended, in contrast with Sweden, Germany and Denmark, where it was done at a bigger scale – and with the government controlling quality.” As a 1996 report on the merits of school design in Essex noted, for such a system to work it should have been led from the government down: “It was also a mistake … to attempt to develop the MCB system of building to serve a single county, as there could never be sufficient demand to cover the cost of supplying the components”.
In a sense, the UK’s crumbling built environment reflects the tragedy of its first-past-the-post electoral system, where cheap promises and blind deference to ideological mainstays such as “the market” trump functional solutions to people’s lives. “There is a crisis in our government class: no one is represented at a senior level who has technical skills,” says Tom Cordell, a film-maker and campaigner who is the co-coordinator of Docomomo, a body that seeks to document buildings of the postwar movement. “Not to say engineers should run the world, but there should be space at board level … Basically this country is run by PR people.”
Raac was written out of UK usage after the DfE asked the (now privatised) Building Research Establishment (BRE) to investigate school roofs in Essex in 1994. Inspectors found “excessive deflections and cracking” in some of the panels and the department advised all schools that their roofs should be inspected. New Labour (admittedly dragging its heels) planned to respond with a mass refurbishment, but Michael Gove, who had seemingly already “had enough of experts”, decided to scrap the plans to save money when in office in 2010 – another footnote in a general trajectory from collective ambition to a crumbling state.
“To be fair to these buildings, they were doing their jobs – but they weren’t designed to last this long,” says Cordell. “If we were a well-run country we would have people doing repairs to them … but they were handed over to organisations that didn’t have the capacity to look after them.” The mechanisms for testing materials in buildings have got worse and worse, Edwards tells me, citing Grenfell as the most tragic example of what happens when a political class loses touch with the reality of its built environment. “These precast components [such as Raac] were readily available and entered into the repertoire of components contractors can use,” he says. “But of course in recent years local authorities have been pushed, and there have been fewer and fewer inspections.”
The Raac crisis is what happens when a society forgets how to look after the things that it has built, because it has politically disowned them. The progressive weakening of the BRE since its privatisation hasn’t helped matters. “You defund things, you fragment things, you ridicule,” says Cordell. The negligence of the Conservative project, both locally and nationally, has led to an almost carnivalesque state of crisis in the UK, of which aerated concrete is just this week’s sideshow.
When the Whitehall-led new town development corporations were wound up in the 1980s, it turned already inadequate levels of maintenance into a state of inevitable decline. Yet perhaps decline was baked in from the beginning. The original new towns leaned heavily on the promise of profit to get the building done. Land Securities, today the second largest company in the real estate sector in the UK, made its first millions during the early days of the new towns. MPs of the day voiced concerns in parliament. “It really is wrong that private enterprise should be allowed to step in to take the benefit of the advantages which will accrue to the place by reason of a common effort and by reason of public enterprise,” said former Kettering MP Dick Mitchison in 1956. Today, the once thriving urban centres of Basildon and Harlow are bywords for landbanking and deterioration. At the same time as it was offering a new life for the people moving to places such as Essex during a great period of renewal and resettlement, the country was already starting to stop caring about the future.
Tim Burrows writes about society, culture and place. His book The Invention of Essex is published by Profile Books. Additional research by Christine Townley.
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