The Schools of the London School Board: ‘Sermons in brick’

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Pre-1914

The London School Board built some 400 schools in the thirty years of its existence.  Together, they represent one of municipalism’s outstanding achievements.  Individually, they remain impressive both as architecture and symbol.

Primrose Hill School, Camden, 1885 © Jacqueline Banerjee at http://www.victorianweb.org

The origins of the London School Board lay in the 1870 Education Act – the first attempt to ensure the education of working-class children.  To this point, this had been a haphazard affair, relying on the voluntary efforts of the churches or generally low-quality private provision.

The Act required that sufficient schools be provided to educate all children between the ages of 5 and 13.  Elected School Boards were to be established where provision by other means had proved inadequate.  In London, particularly in its poorer areas, the inadequacy of current provision was so obvious that the Act required the establishment of a Board from the outset.

Education was as yet neither compulsory nor free but London (and 170 other local School Boards) passed bye-laws compelling attendance by the end of 1871 and the state itself decreed that elementary education be compulsory in 1880 and free in 1891.

Passing laws was one thing, implementing them was another.  As Jerry White has argued, the new Board ‘took on the greatest administrative challenge ever faced by an arm of London government.’ (1)  A detailed analysis of Census returns, supplemented by house-to-house surveys, revealed that the Board had immediately to build new schools for some 112,000 pupils.

In another context, a boast of 1092 meetings (121 meetings of the London Board and 971 subcommittee meetings) and over 1000 bye-laws passed in three years might seem a celebration of bureaucratism run wild.  But by the end of 1873, the Board could point to 36 schools completed, 28 being erected, 22 contracted and a total of 79,625 pupils being schooled. (2)

ER Robson (1836-1917)

Beyond this, there was a commitment to design – understood as inextricably linked to purpose – that stands to the credit of the Board and the man appointed as its architect in 1871, Edward Robert Robson.  He  built or supervised the building of 289 new board schools in London between 1871 and 1884.

Architecturally, there had been already a reaction against the florid neo-Gothic of the high-Victorian era.  The Arts and Crafts movement was gaining influence and its impact was shown in Robson’s philosophy of design: (3)

To do ordinary buildings well, using every material rightly and justly, is the first mark of that interdependence between building and architecture which renders the higher and more intellectual efforts of  the latter at all possible…Architecture is not mere display, it is not fashion, it’s not for the rich alone.

But he believed equally that the new schools were ‘henceforth to take rank as public buildings, and should be planned and built in a manner befitting their new dignity.’  In a more sonorous phrase, he described them as ‘sermons in brick’. (4)

Some may think that [Art] has no right to trouble herself where only ragged children are concerned…Yet there is a sense in which she may exert her influence in the highest and best manner.  She may suitably mark a great social movement if invited to be present in the buildings… in making her mark on the schools of the people, show in some wise what the homes of the people ought to be.

He also required that the architecture of the Board Schools be secular, aiming at ‘a pointed character of civil type’ – ‘whether we like it or not, the education of the people is now governed by the lawyer rather than the clergyman’.

For these reasons, Robson sought a precedent rooted in English craft and a ‘simple brick style’.  He alighted on:

the time of the Jameses, Queen Anne, and the early Georges, whatever some enthusiasts may think of its value in point of art. The buildings then approach more nearly the spirit of our own time, and are invariably true in point of construction and workmanlike feeling.

An exemplar of Queen Anne style: Winslow Hall, 1700

Here lay the origins of the so-called Queen Anne style of which the Board Schools are among the best exemples.  Architectural historians will point out that this was, in fact, an eclectic style incorporating Classical, Flemish and French Renaissance influences.  But this hybridity did, nevertheless, provide a distinct and attractive appearance to the schools.

Queen Anne style had also emerged as the domestic architecture of the new middle classes. This model of bourgeois domesticity was not accidental.  Robson believed:

If we can make the homes of these poor persons brighter, more interesting, nobler, by so treating the necessary Board Schools planted in their midst as to make each building undertake a sort of leavening influence, we have set on foot a permanent and ever-active good.

But he also hoped that ‘the working man’ would ‘consider the schools in the light of a property peculiarly his own, of which he may be proud, and not as an alien institution forced upon him by those of superior station’.

Still, the architecture of the new Board Schools was intended to impress and civilise: (5)

Lighthouses, my boy!  Beacons of the future!  Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

Hanover Street School, Islington, 1877 © Wikimedia Commons

The schools’ presence was further enhanced by their scale and elevation.  Typically, they were ‘three-decker’ – a design reflecting their three divisions of pupil: infants on the ground floor, older girls and boys taught separately on the second and third floors. Some of the schools, where the sites were unusually constrained, also had a rooftop pay area.

Harwood Road School, Fulham. From ER Robson, School Architecture.

Cable Street School, Tower Hamlets – now converted into flats

Old Woolwich Road School, Greenwich, now the Meridian School

Internally, there was far less decorative effect.  Originally, the schools were designed with very large classrooms in which several groups could be taught simultaneously by teacher-monitors who were thus more easily supervised.

Aldenham Street School, Camden, second floor. From ER Robson, School Architecture.

Over time and against initial resistance to this ‘Prussian’ model, smaller, separate classrooms, each with their own teacher became the norm.  There was some lag between the innovativeness of school architecture and the very traditional pedagogy it housed.

Old Woolwich Road School, Greenwich

Robson’s passion for design that was both fit for purpose and inspiring went beyond the architectural.  He was designing:

for children whose manners, morals, habits of order, cleanliness, and punctuality, temper, love of study and of the school, cannot fail to be in no inconsiderable degree affected by the attractive or repulsive situation, appearance, out-door convenience and in-door comfort, of the place where they are to spend a large part of the most impressionable period of their lives.

Heating, ventilation, play space, the ergonomics of desks and chairs – all fell under the architect’s punctilious eye.  I’ll spare you the details, important though they are, but this gem – penned by his successor TJ Bailey, the author of another primer on school architecture – caught my eye.   Writing on school playgrounds, Bailey counselled that: (6)

Projecting slabs of stone (millstone grit by preference) should also be built into the walls at intervals for sharpening slate pencils, as otherwise the brickwork is liable to be utilised for this purpose and so become defaced.

Whatever the bigger picture, there’s something impressive about that concern for detail.

Much more could be said (and has) about the Board Schools and early education.  School Boards as a whole came to seen as an expensive and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy as local government developed and were abolished in the 1902 Education Act. 

Old Woolwich Road School plaques, London County Council to the left and London School Board to the right

The London County Council took over the London Board’s duties in 1904.  In a curious twist, when the LCC was abolished in 1965, a directly elected  Inner London Education Authority was created to oversee education in the former School Board area until it too met the fate of its predecessor in 1990. Now, of course, the central state and its political masters marginalise local democracy at every turn and the proud role of locally elected bodies in promoting local schooling is neglected and maligned.

But the London School Board and the system it created deserve recognition.  It met the challenge set in 1870 and it did so, architecturally, with some panache.  Jerry White notes this ‘municipal self-confidence and energy’ and argues too that 1870 represented something more – it marked ‘a huge expansion in London’s public sphere and…the moment when the balance tipped from Church to state in the organisation of public affairs.’  We neglect this history at our peril.

I have written a follow-up post on the curriculum and pedagogy of the London School Board here: ‘No equally powerful body will exist in England, if power is measured by influence for good or evil over masses of human beings.’

Sources

(1) Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century (2007)

(2) School Board for London, The Work of Three Years, 1870-1873

(3) ER Robson, School Architecture (1874). The following quotes from Robson come from the same source unless otherwise indicated.

(4) ER Robson, ‘Art as applied to town schools’, Art Journal, 1881

(5) Arthur Conan Doyle in the person of Sherlock Holmes, cited in Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (1994)

(6) TJ Bailey, The Planning and Construction of Board Schools (1900)

The Downham Estate, Lewisham: ‘the joy of having your own patch’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, LCC, Lewisham

The Downham Estate is another interwar London County Council housing estate – not the biggest or the best of its type, nor the first or the last though at least one of its early residents believed ‘it was paradise’. Maybe that’s why someone thought they should build a wall to separate it from the adjacent private development.  Maybe not.

Downham was conceived when the nation’s ambition to house its people was at its height at the end of the First World War – ‘homes for heroes’ who might otherwise, it was feared, turn a little ‘bolshie’.

A 1920 survey had found half a million Londoners living in insanitary or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation.  The LCC responded with a five-year plan to rehouse 145,000 people in 29,000 dwellings on out-of-town, cottage estates.

Under construction, 1926 © Lewisham Local History and Archives, made available under the Creative Commons licence

In the same year the LCC purchased 572 acres of land along its south-eastern border, mostly in Lewisham but including 61 acres in Bromley, then in Kent.  Construction began in 1924.  The original estate was complete by the summer of 1930.  King George V no less ceremonially opened one of the first houses to be let in 1927.

Downham estate, aerial view, 1929 © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk, EPW028491

Whilst not everyone could cope with what was then a semi-rural locale, many on Downham loved their ‘place in the country’ (1):

It was paradise, we could just look out of my bedroom onto the fields.  You could see the flowers growing and there were cows and horses.

We moved to a house opposite a farm…Compared to the closeness of the East End it was country, you know, the spaciousness of Downham, it was absolutely beautiful.

And, though Downham wasn’t a showpiece like the Wythenshawe estate in Manchester, some attempts were made to conform to garden-city ideals.  Houses were generally sited in tree-lined cul-de-sacs or placed around ‘greens’ and open spaces.  Roads varied in width and length, some were curved. Living rooms were situated to make the most of the available sunlight.

Keedonwood Road © Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

All the new houses had gardens too  Whilst these are now tainted with suburbanism, seeming somehow insufficiently proletarian to some sociologists of the working class, then they were cherished for the colour and greenery they brought to lives previously lived in urban monochrome:

All the gardens on the estate were nicely tended and some were excellent…The well-tended gardens were all part of the scene and in the summer were an absolute blaze of colour.  No one moaned about the grass cutting…It was all part of the joy of having your own patch.

© Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new estate comprised 6071 dwellings – some 400 flats but the large majority two-storey brick houses of solid but not expansive quality. To one later critic, ‘strung together in rows, little street leading into little street, dun-coloured, mouse-like, humble, the estate is the most colourless collection of box dwellings that one could find’.(2)   But that seems a little harsh. 

Downham, 2011 © diamond geezer

Perhaps the estate does look a little dull.  It certainly wasn’t luxury housing in utopian surrounds.  It lacks the Arts and Craft touches of the real garden cities or the ‘cottagey’ feel of even some other council developments   But it was accommodation of a far higher standard than previously enjoyed by the vast majority of its residents and they usually took pride in it:

…each kitchen was complete with an airy larder, a coal-fired copper for the washing, and a large white earthenware sink with a cold water tap.  All the kitchens were furnished with a black cast iron gas stove with brass taps, in fact there was quite a lot of brass around.  The door handles, pump joints and taps were all kept gleaming with ‘Bluebell’ at least once a week.

For tenants less enamoured of ‘Bluebell’, the LCC was keen to encourage – not to say, enforce – respectability:

When we first moved to Downham we had inspectors every so often to see if you were keeping the place clean. The word would go round, the inspectors are coming!…When you moved you had loads of rules to keep. The windows had to be washed every fortnight and the front step cleaned once a week…If you didn’t abide by the rules in the rent book, you’d get a real severe letter from the council.  They didn’t give you many warnings and they’d take action against you.

Such measures didn’t convince all of the respectability of these working-class incomers.  In 1926, a seven-foot high wall capped with broken glass was built across the street to the adjacent private estate, intended to prevent Downham’s residents using the street as a short-cut to Bromley town centre.   The wall remained till 1950.(3)

The wall across Valeswood Road at its junction with owner-occupied Alexandra Crescent

In fact, there was nothing too frightening about Downham’s new population. They generally belonged to the better-off working class – those who could afford rents reaching 21s 5d (£1.07) for the largest five-roomed houses.  Still, it was this same stratum which gave the most solid support to the emergent Labour Party so perhaps there was some underlying sense to the fears of their middle-class neighbours.

One now elderly resident recalls how her mother (‘mad on flowers…a real garden lover’, incidentally):

used to go to a community centre on the estate at Valeswood Road where she belonged to the Cooperative Women’s Guild, the Tenants League, the Gramophone Society and the Women’s Labour Party…No self-respecting inhabitant of Downham would support anything but the Labour Party then.

The reality was that this was an aspirational class – you could almost call them ‘strivers’ – but self-improvement was understood as a collective enterprise achieved through collective means.  A council house reflected both their aspiration and their belief in the role and duty of the state to support that aspiration.

A library and a swimming pool, both opened in 1937, reflect this quest for self-improvement as does the fact perhaps that the entire estate boasted just one pub – built by the LCC and opened for business in 1930 – to serve its population of 29,000.  It was, however, the world’s largest pub – the Downham Tavern boasted a dance hall, beer garden, two saloon bars, a public lounge and ‘lunchroom’.

Later years did not maintain this momentum.  Downham came to feel dowdy and unloved; its amenities declined and seemed – in the context of contemporary expectations – inadequate.

Shopping parade, Downham Way © Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

In 2000, as part of a regeneration drive that did much to revive council estates across the country, Downham received a £10m grant to ‘restore focus and pride to the entire Downham area’ in a project named ‘Downham Lifestyles’.  If the names seem a little voguish, the ‘lifestyle centre’ which opened in 2006 – comprising swimming pool, fitness studio, gym, library, community room, music and drama studio, crèche and two GP surgeries – seems entirely commendable.

Downham Health and Leisure Centre

This was a Private Finance Initiative, the leisure centre is run by a private company and the estate itself has been managed since 2007 by Phoenix Community Housing, a not-for-profit, resident-led Housing Association.

We are not living in an age of municipal dreams but the dreams Downham has fulfilled should not be forgotten – even if it wasn’t paradise.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Age Exchange, Just Like the Country: Memories of London families who settled in the new cottage estates, 1919-1939 (1991).  The residents’ quotes which follow are also taken from this source.

(2) Harry Williams in South London  (1949) quoted in Alistair Black, Downham Estate: Its Origins and Early History from Ideal Homes: A History of South-East London Suburbs

(3) Michael Nelson, ‘Gated Communities: Class Walls‘, History Today, vol 61, issue 11, 2011.  The image is taken from this source.  Other sources refer to the wall coming down during the war to allow access to emergency services.

Alistair Black’s article, referenced above, provides a comprehensive history of the estate. Additional photographs may be found on the Ideal Homes website.

Matthew Hollow, ’Suburban ideals on England’s interwar council estates’, Journal of the Garden History Society, 39 (2), 2011, looks at Downham and the Wythenshawe Estate.

My thanks to the Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre for sharing Downham images online and to diamond geezer for making images available from his flikr photostream.

The Wilson Grove Estate, Bermondsey: ‘A cottage home for every family’

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1920s, Bermondsey

I have a soft spot for Bermondsey and we’re back there again. This is a short article about a tiny estate but Bermondsey Labour Party had come to the conclusion that small was beautiful well before EF Schumacher.

The Council naturally sought health and well-being for its population but it aspired to beauty too – as this earlier post explains.  Living in one of the most densely-settled, slum-ridden and industrialised boroughs of London, Bermondsey’s Labour activists sought to raise the conditions of the people by all means possible.

Lockyer Street, 1936

Slum clearance and rebuilding were, of course, a major priority and it was the nexus of the two that best reveals Bermondsey Labour’s unique brand of political idealism.

In large part, this special quality to local Labour politics reflected the personality of its principal figures, Dr Alfred Salter and his wife Ada. They had joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1908, convinced that nothing other than outright socialism could fulfil their Christian idealism and transform the conditions of the people among whom they lived and worked.

Seven ILP candidates contested Bermondsey’s council elections in 1910 but just one – Ada Salter – was victorious. From this small beginning, Alfred announced his dream:

We’ll pull down three-quarters of Bermondsey and build a garden city in its place.

When Labour did win power – it secured a majority on the council in 1922 – that essential vision remained in place and its first test was to be the clearance of a notorious area of condemned housing in Salisbury Street.

Salisbury Street clearance, 1926 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

These four acres housed some 1300 people. Death rates from respiratory disease were three times the London average, the infant death rate twice the London average. That the housing should be cleared was not in doubt – it had been condemned thirty years earlier. The issue was what would replace it.

Bermondsey Labour’s 1922 election address had been explicit:

The Labour Party stands for a cottage home for every family, and though this may not be possible at the present moment, we shall work and fight for measures tending to that end.  No more Progressive barracks and Coalition skyscrapers!

The high-rise developments they decried were the tenement blocks that were being built to rehouse many working-class families in inner-city London. The plan to transform Bermondsey into a garden city was not to be compromised.

From the Southwark Local History Library and Archive. © Wellcome Trust, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Instead of tenements, Labour proposed a small estate of 54 cottages – ‘trim structures of warm, red brick, some with bay windows, others with recessed doorways, sheltered by an arched doorway’. Each would have three bedrooms, a living room, scullery, larder, bathroom and lavatory with hot and cold water. The new estate would house around 400 people.

Wilson Grove, 1934 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Wilson Grove, 1934 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The estate’s designer was Ewart G Culpin – a leader of the Garden City movement and later a prominent Labour member of the London County Council (LCC).  He would go on to design the modernist Poplar New Town Hall which I’ve written about previously.

In the years immediately after the First World War, this policy of Bermondsey’s was in line with that of the London Labour movement more widely and Salter’s radicalism wasn’t quite so far-fetched. Herbert Morrison had expressed the party’s official policy to the LCC in May 1918 – their object was to: (1)

break up London as we know it, to encourage the exodus outwards…and to plan a wide outer ring on garden city principles…We would build no more tenements…we would build new towns where possible, or garden suburbs where that was the best we could do.

But practically by the early twenties, there was significant opposition to Bermondsey’s proposal for Salisbury Street. A small scheme catering for 400 left some 900 of the current residents displaced. The LCC – then under Conservative control in the guise of the Municipal Reform Party – protested that the plans would:

create not only hardship to…such persons who would have to be accommodated elsewhere, but an unnecessarily large burden on the community for the sake of the favoured few who would be housed in the cottages.

In fact, neighbouring borough councils were also anxious, fearing that any displaced residents of Bermondsey would simply add to their own problems of overcrowding.

The Ministry of Health – responsible for housebuilding subsidies – blocked the proposals and requested the council submit a tenement scheme which would rehouse more people in the borough.

Bermondsey, though, had ‘decided that it would not put up anything of which it would be ashamed’ – ‘it steadfastly refused to warehouse the people in barracks’.

And it won. The short-lived Labour government of 1924 and Minister of Health, John Wheatley, sanctioned the scheme. Work began the following year and the estate was officially opened in November 1928, built by direct labour at a cost of £550 per dwelling.

There was justifiable pride in the scheme, made sweeter by the victory won. The mayor spoke of a:

magnificent piece of social improvement…We have cleared forever one terrible blot on our civic conscience, and we intend to go on steadily with the good work we have started until there is no place in the borough upon which we can reproach ourselves

He boasted £2000 collected in rents and not a penny in arrears: ‘We find that the people have responded magnificently to the Council’s efforts on their behalf, and they are taking infinitely more pride in their homes than ever before’.

There you have the early Labour Party’s paradoxical mix of paternalism and self-improvement in a nutshell. Ironically, it’s middle-class academics and some self-styled revolutionaries who feel most affronted by it. I’d simply point out that this was a conversation occurring within the working class.

If you visit the area today, you’ll find the estate between the new (1999) Bermondsey tube station and the river. And you’ll notice that Bermondsey is not a garden city. The Wilson Grove estate – a new identity to mark the distinction with its past – was the high-water mark of local Labour garden city ideals.

Plans for a second, similar, estate in Vauban Street were blocked and the Ministry once more demanded tenements. Salter stated grandiloquently that Bermondsey would ‘refuse to commit this crime against humanity’. But over time a more pragmatic approach developed.

The garden city ideal remained potent and garden suburbs in the interwar period (such as Becontree and Wythenshawe) and New Towns in the postwar period testify to its lingering power. But the need to rehouse inner-city populations more quickly and on a larger scale and the desire of Labour politicians to provide such larger solutions did – you don’t need to be told – lead to the embrace of multi-storey housing.  

Unavoidable pragmatism and well-meaning ambition did, in the end, trump the principled resolution of Labour councillors such as those in Bermondsey to provide ‘cottage homes’ for all.  

Back in 1928, speaking at the opening ceremony of Wilson Grove, Alfred Salter, now constituency MP, praised the foresight of the council:

that foresight – looking to the future and not only the present – not hurriedly throwing up dwellings which in 50 years’ time will become slums and therefore a disgrace to civilisation…

Having experienced some of the worst mistakes of postwar high-rise, I think we can grant him some perspicacity and the council some credit.

Sources:

(1) This and the quotation which follows come from JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (1993)

Most other contemporary quotations come from contemporary election addresses and newspaper reports provided by the excellent Southwark Local History Library, also the original source of the older images used.

The Blackbird Leys Estate, Oxford: ‘Never accepted as part of the city proper’

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1950s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs

Blackbird Leys, situated on the south-eastern periphery of Oxford, is to all appearances a pretty ordinary, not to say humdrum, council estate.  But it’s achieved notoriety.  Some of this is typical of unloved and maligned marginal estates throughout the country but it’s loomed larger in Blackbird Leys and came to a peak in 1991 when three days of rioting followed a police crackdown on joyriding.

Cowley, 1925

Oxford’s history of town and gown disputation is well-known but the divisions within the city grew after William Morris built his first car in 1913.  From those small beginnings emerged the Morris car factory in Cowley, employing some 20,000 people by the 1970s. Oxford acquired an industrial working class and had to deal with it.

Blackbird Leys was one response.  The city’s population had grown massively in the interwar period and demand for housing was high – there were 5000 on the council waiting list in 1946 and Morris Cars were expanding.   Council planners saw the ‘final solution’ to the housing shortage in the development of large estates on the eastern and south-eastern fringes of the city.

Planning permission was granted in 1953 on 260 acres of land then occupied by a sewage works and farm in Blackbird Leys for an estate of 2800 dwellings with a projected population of 10,000.

The first residents moved in to what was still essentially a building site in 1958.  Work continued over several phases into the seventies when the original scheme was largely complete.

A further expansion took place with the development of the Greater Leys estate on adjoining land in the mid-1980s. Around 14,000 people live in the area now.

Druce Way maisonettes, 1960s

Gentian Road, 1960s

A few residents had moved from a slum clearance area in the city centre and some from temporary housing erected during the war.  Most of the men worked in the car factory and around half the population in the sixties had moved from elsewhere – from Scotland and Ireland in large numbers and from elsewhere in England – for employment.

There were tensions here already that the estate itself did little to warrant.  A local newspaper wrote that the (1):

unlit building sites, inadequate police supervision, parental apathy and the provision of a public house catering mainly for young people, has provided the perfect setting for the idle, the mischievous, and the more sinister night people.

Who were these ‘sinister night people’?  They surely weren’t as exciting as they sound but the phrase gives an early indication of the power of the media to shape perceptions and spread alarm.

Some residents surveyed in Frances Reynolds’ extensive analysis of the estate resented the former slum dwellers:

I don’t like it up here getting all the tail end. It’s a disgusting place. Putting all the backend up here won’t give people like us a chance to make this a decent place to live.

But those who saw themselves as ‘respectable’ might be equally resented by others:

from the beginning the estate was associated with ‘foreign’ workers come to get rich at the factories, with large rough families, and to a lesser extent with slum clearance. It was never accepted as part of the city proper and its reputation began the downward spiral…

From the outset, Blackbird Leys carried a stigma and many of its people felt ignored or victimised in equal measure despite the fact that it was in these early years predominantly an estate of the skilled and employed working class.

One resident recalls (2):

There was this big problem of being labelled. People were not able to get credit and hire purchase if they said they came from Blackbird Leys. Even the vicar could not get a phone in without having to pay in advance. None of us knew why. It was a brand new estate with no past as far as we were concerned. People working at the car works were among the best paid manual workers in Oxford.

That was Carole Roberts who had moved to the estate aged 14 from London when her father found work in the car factory.  She went on to become a Labour Lord Mayor of Oxford but Blackbird Leys would remain her home.

The outstanding feature of the new estate, however, was its demography.  It was built for families and in the sixties one quarter of its population was under five years of age, another quarter of school age.  There were a lot of kids on the estate and later a lot of teenagers.

As to the design of the estate, in a word, it’s unexceptional – which points to both its good and bad aspects.  It was solid, slightly ‘boxy’ housing – good accommodation in and of itself though space standards fell in later years.

Merlin Road

Field Avenue flats

Two fifteen-storey tower blocks with four two-bedroom flats on each floor were opened in 1960s. The Conservative mayor of Oxford who opened Windrush Tower in 1962 described the building as ‘modern living at its best’. But it wasn’t long before the common problems of lack of play space for younger children, lifts breaking down and vandalism of communal areas were being reported.

Evenlode Tower with Windrush Tower to rear © Wikimedia Commons

Housing density was relatively high and there many complained about poor noise insulation.

According to one resident:

They put you all so close together yet it’s a big estate.  I can’t explain it. My neighbours are friendly and yet it’s not a friendly place.  I think it’s because we’re all so close together that there’s always somebody doing something to annoy you, if it’s only music, or lighting a bonfire, or mending a car, it’s because we’re all packed together.

The quote also points beyond straightforward design failings to what sociologists have termed ‘neighbourhood sensitivity’ – a reduced tolerance to the behaviour of others reflecting social differences within the community.

Blackbird Leys – despite the easy stereotype of council estates – was not homogeneous.  The divisions which existed between ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ residents, between owner occupiers (already 20 per cent by 1981) and council tenants,  and between those of different backgrounds  – though ethnicity itself was never a significant flashpoint – reduced tolerance of behaviours beyond the observer’s norm.

The estate was provided open space – particularly in the cul-de-sacs which were built in the early sixties – and later a large recreation ground but these were often not seen as ‘safe’ areas for younger children or inviting areas more generally.  A single large community centre was provided but community amenities as a whole were thin on the ground.

Each of these elements are the quite normal features and failings of estates designed in the post-war rush to build – and build economically.  But they came together in Blackbird Leys in peculiarly combustible form.  The final piece in the jigsaw came in the estate’s changing demographics.

The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act – alongside the unanticipated impact of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy legislation and the halting of council new-build – ensured that ‘vulnerable’ tenants came to form a large part of new tenancies.  This trend was strengthened by the reality that such tenants –in urgent need of housing – were far more likely to be housed in less popular estates with a more rapid turnover of occupants such as Blackbird Leys.

At the same time the eighties’ collapse of the manufacturing economy hit the estate’s economic mainstay.  By the early eighties, the proportion of male heads of household classified as ‘skilled’ had fallen from half to little over a third.  In the same period, the rate of unemployment on the estate peaked at 20 per cent and 50 per cent for those aged 16 to 19.

Statistics indicate that by this time Blackbird Leys was a ‘problem’ estate with more than its fair share of ‘problem’ families.  To select just a couple of examples, the estate contained 15 per cent of the city’s children and 30 per cent of those under social services supervision;  it contained 17 per cent of juveniles (aged 10 to 16) but 27 per cent of those prosecuted for crime.

Of course, such figures are not ‘innocent’.  Residents felt unfairly labelled and ‘picked on’ by the agencies of the state.  The estate’s reputation may also have highlighted problems which were contained or treated differently elsewhere.  Still, the sociological fine-tuning didn’t alter the lived reality of an estate seen by outsiders – and, increasingly, by its own residents – as crime-ridden and dysfunctional.  The residents’ reporting of their own experience of crime or troublesome neighbours confirms this truth even if it’s understood as a complex one.

All this came to a head in September 1991.  ‘Hotting’ – the theft of cars followed by displays of driving prowess on the estate’s streets – had become a local sport for some of Blackbird Leys’ youngsters.  A police crackdown was met by resistance when up to 150 youths stoned riot-geared police officers.

An academic analysis describing such activity as ‘carnivalesque’ is probably designed to enrage Daily Mail readers but the pleasure and meaning of it for participants – in its thrill-seeking and oppositional nature – should be understood.(3)  It was correct to blame media attention – some spoke more darkly of media incitement – for giving a distorted picture of the estate but clearly something had gone wrong.  These marginalised youth on a marginal estate were expressing something, however inchoately.

Another, very different, expression of the local community’s disaffection with the powers-that-be came in 2002 with the election of an Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) councillor, defeating Labour, for the estate.  At peak, the IWCA returned four local representatives.  The IWCA stood on an unashamedly populist platform which stressed New Labour’s abandonment of its class loyalties and called for local action against crime and drug-dealing – against those seen as ‘lumpen’ elements of the local proletariat.

All in all, this seems less a municipal dream, more a municipal nightmare. What more needs to be said?

Well, this for a start, though perhaps it comes too late to challenge all the negatives – two thirds of residents in Reynolds’ survey liked the estate and had no intention of moving.  These contented residents reported they were happy with their homes, their neighbours and neighbourhoods and local facilities.  They were also more likely to have relatives living on the estate.

Mrs Knight, 79 years old, got on well with the local children:

They’re ever so friendly. They call out Hello Nellie when I’m in the street.  They’re never any trouble.  It’s a wonderful place…

A few years later perhaps some of them were stoning the police.

Just last year, a resident who had lived on the estate for 51 years stated (4):

I love it here, even if I won the lottery I wouldn’t move. The area is peaceful, it’s lovely and all the neighbours get on with each other, it’s that community spirit.   Blackbird Leys has so many facilities for children and adults and there’s a lot to do if you are prepared to go ahead and find it.

I don’t claim that these views are representative but they do add nuance.  Council estates are not just bricks and mortar; they reflect complex human dynamics within and the impact of – often very difficult and damaging – political and economic currents without.

Blackbird Leys remains a significantly deprived area: in 2010 Northfield Brook ward was amongst the 10 per cent most deprived in the country – a long way from the ‘dreaming spires’, a marginal estate in every sense of the word.(5)

The Glow Tree which evolved out of a community arts project was unveiled outside the Blackbird Leys Community Centre in 2006.

But Blackbird Leys has always had a community which has survived its problems and battled the stereotypes.  That community exists today in its homes and streets and, semi-officially, in that complex nexus of self-help and state-sponsored regeneration which has emerged since 1997. Crime has fallen drastically, new facilities have been built, black spots eradicated – much has been done (too much according to some disgruntled Oxford residents who feel Blackbird Leys has been singled out for favourable attention) and much remains to be done.

If that seems an anodyne conclusion maybe it’s the only one that captures the past and present contradictions of the estate’s story: never the New Jerusalem, nor ever the Hell on Earth that many portrayed.

Sources:

(1) This quote and unattributed quotes that follow are taken from Frances Reynolds, The Problem Housing Estate. An account of Omega and its people (1986) – Omega was the name Reynolds gave the estate to preserve its anonymity.

(2) Quoted in ‘We’re proud of our estate‘, Oxford Mail, 27 November 1998

(3) Mike Presdee, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime (2000)

(4) Quoted in ‘Project unveils history of Blackbird Leys‘, Oxford Mail, 9 March 2012

(5) Oxford Safer Communities Partnership, The Indices of Deprivation, 2010: Oxford Results

BBC Oxford has pages on the Development of Blackbird Leys and the ‘Community Troubles‘ of 1991.  The stills of ‘hotting’ and rioting above are taken from the latter.