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Alice Coleman, geographer whose study of failed council estates impressed Mrs Thatcher – obituary

Alice Colman on a derelict site in Tower Hamlets, East London, in 1978 - ANL/Shutterstock
Alice Colman on a derelict site in Tower Hamlets, East London, in 1978 - ANL/Shutterstock

Alice Coleman, who has died aged 99, was a professor of geography at King’s College London whose book Utopia on Trial (1985), in which she launched a scathing attack on post-war high-rise housing estates, so impressed the prime minister Margaret Thatcher that she was given a five-year, £50 million contract to put her ideas into practice.

Her book, inspired by the American architect Oscar Newman’s seminal study Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972), was based on a “design disadvantagement survey” in which she and a team of researchers surveyed blocks of flats, containing more than 100,000 dwellings in total, with the objective of mapping “lapses in civilised behaviour” (litter, graffiti, vandalism, pollution by excrement, and family breakdown leading to children being placed in care) against design features (number of floors per block, dwellings per block, dwellings per entrance, and so on).

Alice Coleman addressing a conference
Alice Coleman addressing a conference

She detected correlations between levels of crime and antisocial behaviour and the design of estates and, in her book, advanced the provocative thesis that badly-designed social housing schemes “breed antisocial people”. Change the design, she argued, and crime and antisocial behaviour would dramatically drop.

Le Corbusier’s vision of a “Radiant City” of tower blocks surrounded by parkland was, she wrote, the “great Utopian blunder”. Taken forward in Britain by an unholy alliance of planners and civil servants, it had been “conceived in compassion” but was “essentially a device for treating people like children, first by denying them the right to choose their own kind of housing, and then by choosing for them disastrous designs that create a needless sense of social failure”.

Such views chimed with much Conservative thinking and, while writing her book, Alice Coleman was commissioned by Westminster Council to apply her ideas to the crime-ridden Mozart estate. A ceremony to mark the removal of four elevated walkways was held at which Alice Coleman was warmly greeted by the then Environment Secretary Kenneth Baker. Two weeks later she was among the select party accompanying the then Prince of Wales on his unannounced tour of council estates. However her efforts to remodel the Mozart estate were frustrated when she fell out with the council. “My goodness, they mucked me about,” she told an interviewer in 2012.

The issue rose to the top of the political agenda following the riots on the Broadwater Farm estate in October 1985, when missiles thrown from high-level walkways ambushed the police and emergency services. In January 1986 Alice Coleman met Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, emerging 30 minutes later with a brief to redesign several other estates. “I was a great admirer of the work of Professor Alice Coleman,” Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, “and I had her made an adviser to the Department of the Environment, to their dismay.”

Critics argued that it was not poor design but poverty and lack of investment leading to poor maintenance and inadequate security that were the main problems, citing more successful developments such as the Barbican Estate, with its brutalist maze of concrete walkways and underpasses, which functioned well because the inhabitants were from high-income groups and had chosen to live there.

Even some who broadly agreed with her on design issues felt that Alice Coleman was too deterministic about their impact on behaviour. Bill Hillier, Professor of Architectural and Urban Morphology at the University of London, argued in 1991 that much came down to allocation policies: “No one wants to live in badly designed blocks so that’s where problem families end up being housed. It’s an allocation problem and if you don’t take that into account you reach silly conclusions.”

Alice Coleman denied the charge of determinism: “Bad design does not determine anything,” she said, “but it increases the odds against which people have to struggle to maintain civilised standards.”

What became known as the “Design Improvement Controlled Experiment” (Dice) was established in 1988 to test her theories on estates in Birmingham, London, Manchester, Nottingham and Sandwell. The estates were to be refurbished according to “defensible space” principles; key alterations included the removal of overhead walkways and the retrofitting of ground- floor flats with small, fenced-off gardens. It was agreed that the accountants Price Waterhouse would assess the results.

However their report, eventually published in 1997, was lukewarm verging on unenthusiastic. “None of the Dice schemes can be judged to have been effective in meeting the (admittedly ambitious) objectives set for it by Professor Coleman,” they concluded. “Compared with the early Estate Action schemes (the most relevant policy alternative) the evaluation suggests that Dice was not a more successful regeneration initiative, nor at best does it appear to have been markedly less successful.”

Alice Coleman viewed the report as intended to undermine her research, and in any case she had had enough. Civil servants, she maintained in 2013, had continually put obstacles in her path: “It was just such a mess. Finally I just wanted to get out of the whole thing.” After Margaret Thatcher’s downfall, the politicians, too, had turned against her: “Heseltine became the Secretary of State and, as Dice was a Thatcher project, determined to foil it.”

Nonetheless Alice Coleman’s study helped to force designers and planners to pay greater attention to design layout when creating new neighbourhoods. Many of the design features she championed became part of the mainstream and in 1986 the Audit Commission in its publication Managing the Crisis in Council Housing, recommended that new developments should attempt to “design out crime” while refurbishment schemes should take Alice Coleman’s work into account. Her ideas also underpinned “Secured By Design”, a police initiative launched in 1989.

Alice Coleman
Alice Coleman

Alice Mary Coleman was born in London on June 8 1923 to Bertie Coleman and Elizabeth, née White. The family home was in Broadstairs, Kent where, as she recalled, her father, who eventually established a removals business, struggled to find work during the Depression, shaping her attitude to poverty and crime: “I think I belonged to one of the poorest families in the country and it has no relationship to crime,” she told the New Statesman in 2012.

After education at Clarendon House, a grammar school in Ramsgate, she trained as a teacher and, from 1943 to 1948, taught geography at Northfleet Central School for Girls, at the same time studying for a degree at Birkbeck College, University of London. After graduating with a First, she took a master’s degree followed, later, by a PhD (1957) both from King’s College London.

In 1948 she joined the Geography Department at King’s, where she became the first woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in 1987.

Alice Coleman with land utilisation maps
Alice Coleman with land utilisation maps

In 1960 Alice Coleman decided to update the national land-utilisation survey first conducted by Sir Dudley Stamp before the war, and recruited a team of some 3,000 volunteers to gather the information. With no funding available, she spent some £65,000 of her own money on the exercise. Although, due to lack of resources, less than 15 per cent of the country was covered with a published map, she reported some of the key results of her research.

It was fashionable at the time to “decant” people from the inner cities, to reduce congestion. However she found that the result was suburban sprawl and inner-city dereliction, made worse by the shortage of jobs, which also shifted to outer suburbs. New building, meanwhile, was expanding into farmland at an alarming rate.

After 10 years she resurveyed parts of east London, south Essex and north Kent and found that much lost farmland had become wasteland. Problems were compounded by what she called “rurban fringe” – the penetration and sterilisation of farmland by urban development, leading to increased farming costs from vandalism and trespass, often resulting in farmland being abandoned.

It was on a sabbatical in Canada in 1976 that she came across the work of Oscar Newman, and was inspired by his thesis that architectural and environmental design plays a crucial part in increasing or reducing criminality. Alice Coleman always acknowledged his influence on Utopia on Trial.

As a former schoolteacher Alice Coleman retained a great interest in teaching the “three Rs”, becoming a critic of “progressive” educational theories, especially the “look–say” method of teaching reading. As well as her work on planning and housing, she published The Great Reading Disaster (2007, with Mona McNee) and Streamlined Spelling (2018).

A recent photograph of Alice Coleman
A recent photograph of Alice Coleman

She won the Royal Geographical Society’s Gill memorial award (1963) and Busk Medal (1987), and, in 1974, the Veuve Cliquot award for outstanding “Women in a Man’s World”. A chance meeting with a graphologist at the ceremony led her to develop an interest in handwriting, resulting in the publication of a Graphological Thesaurus in 1985 and Graphology Across Cultures (2003, with Mona McNee) – and to work editing graphological journals.

Though she was unmarried, Alice Coleman was close to her nieces and nephews and had a wide circle of friends.

Alice Coleman, born June 8 1923, died May 2 2023