Stockholm Holiday: A right proper estate

Now, there are ways to build a communist style estate. If you were communist, naturally you'd plonk 40 identical tower blocks, put a windswept motorway between them and the tube station and make sure the shops were an inconvenient walk away, and probably ensure that they weren't worth getting to due to lack of stock anyway. That's once you've negotiated the perimeter of the steelworks. People would kill themselves or attempt to obtain high cholesterol alcohol to cope with the daily grind.

However, the Swedes had a different idea. Built 'em nice. Build them with fountains. Put greenery everywhere. Include kids by putting playgrounds in view of the flats, and make sure all the rusty bits and splinters get removed regularly. And what's wrong with a little local dining at places you don't mind going to? And the steelworks? Yes, it exists. Except its a high technology area called Krista, just up the road, with the Swedish HQs of Ericsson and IBM at its centre.

If you're going to do mass housing, you may as well do it right. And Stockholm has. Rarely have I been to a housing estate which feels less like a dumping ground for what the local authority considers its problematic inhabitants, and more of a haven for the kind of middle class people (or those aspiring to be middle class) who wouldn't admit to living in a council flat over here. If our council flats were built to these standards and boasted such facilities, our national obsession with being a so-called home owning democracy would be made a nonsense.

Greenery outside the station. Is it a park?



No, its a housing estate.




And just to prove graffiti exists in the Stockholm 'burbs, this message was found taped to the pissoir in the restaurant at which we'd just consumed a delicious meal.