Park Hill, pictured in 2006, two years after developer Urban Splash bought the Brutalist housing megastructure for £1.
Photographer: Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A Brutalist Housing Relic in Northern England Gets a Surprising Second Life
The restoration of Park Hill, a sprawling concrete development once shunned by public housing residents, has sparked fears of gentrification in Sheffield.
Postwar public housing projects are some of the most divisive buildings in the UK — and outside London, few have grabbed as much attention as Park Hill in Sheffield.
The 995-unit Brutalist megastructure was once a radical vision for working-class life in this city famous for steel production. Perched on a hill overlooking an ornate train station, it was designed by architects Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn with JL Womersley, and built between 1957 and 1961 to replace the area’s crumbling Victorian rowhouses. Park Hill’s best-known feature was its so-called streets in the sky: wide, deck-access walkways meant to evoke the thoroughfares they replaced, large enough to fit a milk truck.