Robin Hood Gardens

Robin Hood Gardens was a council housing estate in Poplar, in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, designed in the late 1960s by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972. The estate consisted of two long concrete blocks connected by broad elevated walkways the Smithsons called streets in the sky, a concept also used at the Park Hill estate in Sheffield and developed partly as a reaction to, and partly in dialogue with, Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation. Built by the Greater London Council, which was later succeeded as landlord by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, the estate treated its aerial walkways rather than individual dwellings as the building's fundamental organizing feature. The western block was demolished between 2017 and 2018 and the eastern block in March 2025, though a three-story section of facade with its original fittings was preserved and is now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum's East Storehouse.