…..but it’s also home to 100s of tower blocks.
Concrete monstrosities like these.
And these.
This is where the real people live, not in the gorgeous historical centre in airy apartments with balconies overlooking coveted squares...
...instead this is more likely to be your view.
And it’s not just Prague, they blot the landscape across the whole of the Czech Republic stretching across the eastern block from Germany to Mongolia. A legacy from the communist era where flocks of people were brought to work in the cities, or rural landscapes were dug up and heavily industrialized.
The Polish call them ‘Bloki’, to the East Germans they were ‘Plattenbau’, Hungarians call them, ‘Panelhaz’ and in the Czech republic they are known as ‘Panelaks’ - they all mean the same, a panel building constructed from pre fabricated materials and an awful lot of grey concrete.
There are panelak settlements (gigantic housing estates) in the suburbs of every city or town in the Czech Republic where 100s of thousands of people live, in 20 storey buildings up 100 metres long – all living the communist dream in ‘collective, affordable’ housing.
But unlike the tower block I lived in for a summer as a student in Hackney Wick where a mix of drug users, gangs, poor single mothers, squatters and a few unfortunate students from North London Poly lived (it was blown up in the late 1990s due to its squalid state) ….these ‘sidlistes’ or housing estates are home to all social classes (remember they are left over from communist times when there was no such thing as class).
They were never built as a form of social housing, these were designed as homes for everyone from university professors, nuclear physicists, to shop and factory workers.
And the fact is that remains true today. According to statistics one in three people Czechs live in a panelak, my husband grew up in one, most of his friends did - architects, lawyers, teachers, TV producers, policeman, bankers, shop workers....
Over the years I’ve got over my prejudices, but it’s hard for any Brit to get your head around the fact that you’re not going to be stabbed or mugged every time you walk through one, to realise this is where the most people and families live.
But the Czechs aren't proud of their concrete cities, lots of people hate them with a passion because of what they represent...
great monuments to communist suppression.
