From Building Design Online: A Modern Way to Think About the Modernists.

Class and politics are inextricably bound up with how a modernist building is perceived. There is a general conviction that the working class were slotted into a world of concrete walkways and towers when all we ever wanted was the old back-to-backs, with perhaps a little more space, more gardens, maybe without the damp and the dysentery. What can’t be imagined is a context in which we might have welcomed modernism, and in fact approached it as part of a specific collective project. The pervasive class hatred only slightly below the surface of British life (what else does the word “chav” signify?) centres on the feared or ridiculed estate dweller. Yet this decline works both ways. Modernist urban planning could be seen as one of those moments where the workers — the Labour movement — got ideas above its station, the period where, as per Bevan or Lubetkin, nothing was too good for ordinary people.