Years of waiting will end today when the Byker Wall in Newcastle is listed among the top 5% of buildings in the country.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport will announce that the landmark housing development overlooking the Tyne and which dominates the skyline in the east of the city is to be Grade Two-star listed.
The top-notch designation comes six years after the Byker estate was first considered for protective listing because of its international reputation.
The 200-acre development, built between 1969 and 1982 and considered to be architect Ralph Erskine's masterpiece, is home to 9,500.
The multi-coloured and multi-shaped Byker Wall echoes both Hadrian's Wall, which runs under nearby Shields Road, and Newcastle's medieval town walls.
At a time when slum clearance populations were being rehoused en masse in council estates and tower blocks, the Byker Wall took a radically different approach by working closely with the people who were to live there and offering a wide variety of different home styles.
It also retained Victorian churches, pubs, and swimming baths which had served the 19th Century rows of Byker terraces that were being demolished.
Byker is being listed by Culture Minister David Lammy, following advice from English Heritage.
He said: "The Byker estate is an extraordinary and outstanding piece of architecture which has attracted attention throughout its life.
"Its influence, both on design and the way we involve communities in the planning process, has been profound.
"It is right that it should now get the extra protection that listing provides.
"But listing does not mean that a building should be preserved unaltered for all time. Rather, it is a marker that the estate is important and decisive in its architectural influence, deserving special consideration if development plans ever come forward." The DCMS says the Byker Estate is regarded as being both of historic and architectural importance, and has been influential on housing projects up to and including the Greenwich Millennium Village.
The estate has won many international awards, including a Civic Trust Award and the Veronica Rudge Green Prize for urban design from Harvard University.
It is regarded as a significant social achievement because of the carefully phased process of development that attempted to preserve the social make-up of a tight-knit community.
Newcastle City Council deputy leader David Faulkner said: "This is fantastic news. The Byker Estate with its iconic Byker Wall is internationally renowned as both a superb example of Ralph Erskine's architecture and as a leading example of social housing."
'It's the most fantastic place to live'
Byker Wall resident Colin Dilks described the listing news as "absolutely fantastic."
He said: "I live in Newcastle because it lets me live in the Byker Wall. I wouldn't live in Newcastle if the Byker Wall wasn't there."
Mr Dilks, who is a member of the Byker Community Forum, said: "It is the most fantastic piece of urban design in the 20th Century.
"It has a mixture of different housing, green space, it is quirky and colourful and pedestrians have priority over traffic, which is vitally important."
Mr Dilks hopes that the listing will mean more investment in maintenance of the estate and better housing management to tackle tenants who cause problems for others.
Ralph Erskine, who died last year aged 91, also designed the Greenwich Millennium Village. He born in London but moved to Sweden in 1939.
Inspector of historic buildings for English Heritage Elain Harwood said: "Byker was the best work he ever did. Instead of making everything look the same, Erskine's Byker was a place of sheer exuberance with homes facing south, balconies, and its own micro-climate.
"He talked daily to the people who were going to live there and was not some individual on a pedestal in a town hall. "
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Listening to the community
As demolition plans were revealed for the close-packed rows of Tyneside flats in Byker, Newcastle City Council was faced with pleas from local people that they wanted to stay together and keep their community spirit.
So, in 1968, the council appointed architect Ralph Erskine.
As work began in 1970 his team set up his office in a former undertaker's parlour in the area, which has survived and is now used as a housing office. People could call in and talk about their housing preferences.
To the north, Erskine designed a wall ranging from 12 to three storeys to protect the estate from cold winds and traffic noise from what was then an expected urban motorway and is now the busy A193 urban link road into the city. The Wall mixes heights and shapes and makes imaginative use of decorative coloured bricks.
But he created an open aspect to the south to make the most of the light, sunshine and views across the river and the city.
This is where he sited main living rooms, gardens, walkways and balconies.
As well as the flats in the wall, there were low-rise courtyard homes, terraced houses and three and four-storey blocks. As links with the past, part of the original Raby Street was kept, cobbles and kerbs from the old streets were reused, as was carved stone from the Victorian Town Hall in the Groat Market.
A brief designed to guide development in the Tyne Gorge between Newcastle and Gateshead describes Byker as having achieved "iconic status".
The Architects' Journal in 1976 described the development as "possibly the most brilliant solution to the problem of modern urban mass housing" and the New Statesman magazine in 1977 described it as "the most spectacular housing development of recent times."
Newcastle-based architecture historian and lecturer Dr Tom Faulkner said yesterday: "The Byker Wall remains an outstanding example of a more humane attempt to solve the problems of social housing. Its status is such that it has been visited by professionals from all over the world.
"It used materials like brick and wood instead of too much concrete, and tied in with the concept of walls which is quite powerful in Newcastle with Hadrian's Wall and the medieval walls."
