“Housing, housing, housing.” This is how the Labour peer and Londoner Andrew Adonis recently listed the city´s top three most pressing issues. The day before INTBAU’s World Congress, Tomorrow’s Cities: Building the Future, at which the challenges of shelter and rapid urbanisation will be debated, this tour charts 150 years of London´s responses to housing and crisis. Aboard the National Trust´s 1962 Routemaster Coach, the tour will wend its way from south to east London exploring different architectural and social responses to housing from the 1860s to the present day.

The tour opens with the stark contrast of competing buildings by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company and Octavia Hill, Victorian housing reformer and founder of the National Trust. Architecturally very different, both sought to solve the issue of mass migration from the countryside, improve sanitation, and impose a new social order.

Picking up the story at the turn-of-the-century, the Boundary Estate introduces the role of government in solving the issue of housing provision and quality. The next stop, Berthold Lubetkin´s Bevin Court extends that story to the post-war era. The tour will conclude with visits to much more recent responses in the form of the Packington Estate and Highbury Gardens, looking in more detail at approaches to design, ideals for living and building communities.
The tour will be led by expert guides and will include access to sites not normally open to the public.

General Information:

Date: Sunday 13th November 2016
Times: 11.00-16.00 (lunch 13.00-14.00, not included)
Ticket prices: £35

Concessions: £30 (INTBAU Congress attendees/students)

SOLD OUT. All tickets have now sold for this bus tour. Do please look out for future bus tours with the National Trust. 

Note: Full details of the event will be emailed to ticket holders before the event takes place.

If you have any special access needs please contact: emma.king2@nationaltrust.org.uk or on 0207 824 7126