Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in Kensington

Many people across the country were aghast at English Heritage's proposal that a number of council estates, including examples of tower blocks, be preserved for posterity.

But not every council estate and tower block is a modern slum. In fact, well designed and well built, they have survived to continue providing relatively decent housing for working people. They have survived to symbolise a period of postwar architectural and artistic history which is only just beginning to be recognised for the advances it made.

The first postwar estates were a massive advance on the conditions, which the majority of working class people had known. Their development brought together young architects and engineers excited by the prospect of building for the needs of ordinary people. Together they faced a huge challenge. Around 4 million homes were destroyed during the war and many that survived were slums. The 1945 Labour government launched a massive housing programme, and issued new housing and town planning standards.

Many of the proposed housing schemes at this time, such as Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in Kensington, were based on ideas first pioneered by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier,­ blocks of flats and maisonettes built on columns which also contained shops, nurseries, community centres, doctors' surgeries and, in some instances, roof gardens.

These estates were designed for a mix of people, some pioneered special facilities for pensioners or began to look towards the needs of single people. But the money for the more grandiose schemes quickly began to run out. Within three years of winning its 1945 landslide victory, Labour brought in the first austerity measures and cut back on housing standards. A period of corrupt collusion between contractors and local councils followed. One council after another was half bamboozled and half bribed into buying prefabricated tower blocks and low rise housing which no-one knew how to put together. The shoddy materials and building practices of these years resulted in the gas explosion at Ronan Point in East London in 1968, killing five people.

The original idea of prewar architects was for apartment blocks set in parkland and containing all the facilities that people and their families would need. However, the vast majority of working class estates built in the 1950s, 60s and 70s were a travesty of that idea, and even those that did strive to meet at least some of the ideals were undermined by local authority cuts in maintenance and repairs. They were also doomed by the prevailing ideas of those who designed them - reformists with a vision which resulted in some of them believing that everyone should live in Le Corbusier style tower blocks. They were prepared to compromise with the lack of resources made available to build their schemes, and sanction the construction of badly built estates.

Many tower blocks are well past their sell by date and should be knocked down, but we should not demolish them all and replace them with `conventional' houses, particularly when such houses are so small that the former tower block residents protest about being moved, as they have at Hackney's half demolished Holly Street estate. However, until we have a world where people, rather than profits, come first working class housing will remain a problematic issue.