London’s first council housing: the ‘Richmond Experiment’ and its ‘People’s Champion’

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Pre-1914, Richmond

You don’t generally look to Richmond upon Thames for political radicalism and pioneering social reform.  But look again – at a street of modest Victorian terraced housing: Manor Grove in North Sheen.  This was the first council housing in London.  It was built through the efforts of Richmond’s very own ‘People’s Champion’, William Thompson.

Of course back then Richmond was in Surrey and it had been created a municipal borough only in 1890.  That, it turned out, was an auspicious year: a young Liberal schoolmaster, William Thompson, was elected to the local council and, nationally, the Housing of the Working Classes Act was passed which allowed local councils not only to clear areas of slum housing but to build new, municipal, housing where necessary.

Then, as now, Richmond was a relatively affluent area but it too had areas of poverty and slum housing.  Existing housing supply was, in Thompson’s words, ‘insufficient in quantity and inferior in quality’ – the former led to the latter and resulted in ‘exorbitant rents…overcrowding…and the occupation of dirty hovels and unhealthy slums’. (1)

Old cottages in the Red Lion Street area

There were early attempts to tackle the problem of the slums through the improvement and closure orders allowed under the 1890 Act.  But these, at best, might lead to increased rents for paltry repairs and, at worst, to the displacement – without adequate alternative accommodation – of existing tenants.  Such enforcement was often resisted by working-class tenants as a result.

It was resisted, more powerfully, by landlords – often represented on local councils.  Thirteen members of Richmond Borough Council received notices of one sort or another relating to property they owned.  One councillor, objecting to the reappointment of a particularly conscientious Inspector of Nuisances, complained that he was ‘lamentably wanting in tact and discretion’. (2)

Such conservative interests – joined by close social and business ties – dominated in Richmond in the 1890s and it was against them that Thompson brought his radical Liberal agenda in the 1890s: (3)

 workmen’s wages, their hours of labour, the provision of workmen’s dwellings and allotments, the reform of the charities, better railway facilities, made up a progressive programme….launched on to the sea of public debate at the Gas Works Bridge, a spot now historic as the people’s forum.

Thompson’s local following among working people secured his election against the vested interests.

That Thompson succeeded in getting Council approval in 1892 for a significant scheme of municipal housing is huge testimony to his campaigning and expertise.  It reflects too the pragmatic case he was careful to build – ‘that the carrying out of the scheme will not cost the ratepayer a single penny…that there is an estimated clear margin of profit of from £13 to £25 for every year’. (4)  And it reminds us also that the better-off had an interest in a more contented workforce – though that seems to have been forgotten more recently.

The Manor Grove scheme – the ‘Richmond Experiment’ as it was known – took place on six acres of land adjacent to the London and South West Railway and close to the gasworks: a rapidly developing area of working-class housing in the borough. Sixty-two dwellings, completed in 1895, were provided – 22 six-roomed cottages, 28 four-roomed cottages, and six double tenements or cottage flats of two- and three-rooms respectively. (5)

Each dwelling had additionally a scullery and:

separate front and back garden; paved yard, with chopping block; coal store, larder, and WC; a cooking stove in the kitchen; a 75 gallon galvanised iron cistern; a nine-gallon copper in the scullery; a separate supply of water; and gas, where required, on the ‘penny in the slot’ system.

All were fitted with:

window blind rollers; hat and coat rail; wardrobe hooks; cupboards and picture hooks in sitting rooms and bedrooms; dressers, fitted with hooks, in kitchens; towel roller and shelving in scullery; meat hooks in larders; and circular galvanised iron dustbins in yards.

I hope I haven’t lost you with that detail. It just seems to me to capture both something of the life of that time and the care that Thompson and the Council brought to a scheme intended as a model of its kind.

Demand for the new homes exceeded supply and a ballot was held – confined to those either living or working in Richmond (who could afford the rent) – to allocate places.  The tenants were stated to be ‘delighted with their houses’.

Such was the scheme’s success that in 1896 the Council agreed to develop the remaining portion of the Manor Grove land.  Seventy more houses were built, completed by 1900.  In all, 132 homes were provided at a total cost of £37,812.

The residents, meanwhile, paid rents of between 5s 6d (27.5p) for the smallest homes to 7s 9d (39p) for the largest.  A Fabian Tract claimed that new six-room cottages built privately in an adjacent development were being let at between 12s 3d  and 14s (61-70p) a week. (6)  The average wages of Manor Grove’s tenants were around 25s (£1 25p).

Thompson conscientiously provides a list of their occupations. The largest number (28) were general labourers but the next largest category – at 12 – were police officers.   Then came ‘carmen and drivers’, railwaymen and gas workers.  There were also at least five female heads of household – three described as charwomen and two as widows.

The number of police officers seems disproportionate – and Thompson is at pains to emphasise their prominence reflects only numbers applying through the ballot – but they may be taken as representatives of the ‘respectable’ working class for whom this early municipal housing was intended.

In fact, as required by the Section 63 of the 1890 Act and as featured in the tenancy agreement, anyone receiving ‘any relief under the Acts relating to the relief of the Poor, other than relief granted on account only of accident or temporary illnesses’ was disqualified from tenancy – a very different view of the role of council housing to that of the present.

This was, then, unashamedly artisanal housing though Thompson believed it would benefit the poorest – by freeing up accommodation to which they might move and by providing a standard of decent housing that the private sector might emulate.

The allotments near to Manor Grove, on land purchased from the Crown in the 1890s, were another means of improving working people’s quality of life

Meanwhile, energised by this apparently unlikely success in a ‘villa district’ such as Richmond, Thompson became one of the most prominent advocates of housing reform of his day – a founding member and chair of the National Housing Reform Council, a member of the International Housing Congress, a vice-president of the Co-Partnership Tenants’ Housing Council and a member of the Garden Cities Association.

And in a series of scrupulously argued and detailed publications (which remain the best available record of early municipal endeavours), he outlined a powerful case for council housing. (6)

This is the title page of the UCLA’s copy of Municipal Housing, apparently signed by then President of the Local Government Board, John Burns

He left teaching in 1903 to act, first, as a Liberal agent and, later, as managing director of the Ruislip Manor Estate Company, intending to develop a garden city in the suburb as part of a comprehensive town planning initiative adopted by the urban district council – one of the first in the country. (7)

His political career continued – with some ups and downs.  Elected an alderman in 1897, he was removed from the bench by his fellow-councillors as too turbulent a presence two years later, only to be promptly and resoundingly re-elected to the council by the borough’s voters.  For all his zealotry, his undeniable drive and talents seem to have been finally recognised by the council in 1908 when he was elected mayor.

Thompson cancelled his inaugural banquet due to prevailing distress in the borough.  And he was presumably a driving force behind another smaller municipal housing scheme off Red Lion Street in central Richmond.  Artichoke Alley was cleared. In its place, completed in 1909, arose Victoria Place – an attractive red-brick and rendered tenement development, housing 100. (8)

Victoria Place

William Thompson died suddenly, aged just 51, in May 1914.  His funeral was attended by Liberal ministers Lloyd George and John Burns and Labour MP Keir Hardie.   But workingmen took first place in the funeral cortege.  His life – a ‘life of service’ – was memorialised by the local newspaper as: (9)

the story of an unselfish soul which strove for the good of others;  of a life shortened by often desperate work for the well-being of his fellow men…Our workmen’s dwellings, the garden city of Ruislip, houses for workers all over the country, and even abroad, stand as a memorial to his energy and devotion to the cause of others.

Sources

(1) Borough of Richmond Council minutes: William Thompson, ‘Memorandum on the Housing of the Working Classes’, October 17 1892

(2) William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903) and Borough of Richmond Council minutes, Health Committee Report to Council, 13 December 1892

(3) ‘Death of People’s Champion’, Thames Valley Times, 20 May 1914

(4) Borough of Richmond Council minutes: William Thompson, ‘Draft Scheme’, October 17 1892

(5) This detail and the quoted detail which follows are taken from Thompson, The Housing Handbook

(6) Fabian Tract No. 76, Houses for the People (Third edition, 1900)

(7) Apart from The Housing Handbook (1903), Thompson published Housing of the Working Classes (1899), Housing Up-To-Date (1907), Municipal Housing in England and Wales (1910) and What County Councils Can Do for the People (1910)

(8) The best summary record of Thompson’s life and politics is provided in George F Bartle, ‘William Thompson and “the Richmond Experiment”’, Richmond History, the Journal of the Richmond History Society, no 17, 1996

(9) Roberta Turner, ‘The Story of Council Housing in Richmond’, Richmond History, no 31, 2010

(10) ‘A Life of Service’, Richmond and Twickenham Times, 23 May 1914

My thanks to the helpful staff at the Richmond Local Studies Collection for their assistance in accessing some of the sources listed above.

Early photographs and illustrations are taken from Thompson, The Housing Handbook.

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The Excalibur Estate, Catford: ‘a working-class Blackheath’

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1940s, Lewisham, Regeneration

By 1944, 1 million British homes had been damaged or destroyed by German bombing.  Lewisham alone had lost over 1600 dwellings in the first wave of the Blitz in 1940 and would suffer heavily again as the V1s and V2s rained over London in June 1944.  There are those in the Excalibur Estate in the borough who feel they are the victims of enemy action once more.

Back in 1944, Churchill gave his ‘word that the soldiers, when they return from the war and those who have been bombed out …shall be restored to homes of their own at the earliest possible moment.’

Hector Murdoch’s homecoming, 1946

To fulfil this pledge, the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was passed, earmarking £150m for an emergency programme of temporary housing.  Aircraft factories which, in these closing days of the European war, might move to peacetime production were tasked with the construction of prefabricated homes.

The first prototype was proudly displayed at the Tate Gallery that same year and in the four that followed 156,623 of these ‘palaces of the people’ – there was no irony in that term as we shall see – were erected across the country. They were planned as temporary housing, to last ten years at the most.

In the event, over 10,000 prefab homes remained in use in London as late as 1975. Now only some 250 remain and the largest concentration – for the time being – is in the Excalibur Estate.

The Estate was built on 12 acres of the Forster Memorial Park – an important open space for the LCC’s interwar Downham Estate – which had been transformed into allotments for the wartime Dig for Victory campaign.  (The romantic Arthurian street names of the Excalibur echo those of Downham.)

A total of 187 homes were built by German and Italian prisoners of war between 1945 and 1946.  (The pre-fab St Mark’s Church was built in the 1950s to replace the wooden hut which had been used for services previously.) All the post-war prefabs followed a strict and nationwide Ministry of Works template – single-storey, detached bungalow homes, built around a central core of kitchen, toilet and bathroom with a living room and two bedrooms.

Those on the Excalibur, manufactured by Selection Engineering Company Ltd, were of the Uni-Seco design – one of the four major types built.   Kitchen/bathroom units were pre-assembled.  The rest arrived in flat kits of resin-bonded plywood or light timber framing clad in flat asbestos cement sheeting with a wood wool core. To assemble the pieces, loose timber tongue strips were inserted between components to form the joints and filled with mastic and covered with asbestos cement. Internal walls were of the same construction, with plaster board ceilings nailed to roof beams.  (1)

If all this sounds distinctly workaday, even a little Heath Robinson, think again – as Eddie O’Mahony did.  In 1946, recently demobilised, Eddie, his wife and two children were living in a bomb-hit home. They wanted a house but, offered one of Excalibur’s prefabs, they were persuaded to give it a look: (2)

We opened the door and my wife said, ‘What a lovely big hall!  We can get the pram in here’.  There was a toilet and a bathroom. I’d been used to a toilet in the garden. The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, ‘Start measuring for the lino.’

Fitted kitchens, running hot water, built-in storage and electric lighting and sockets, a detached home of some 600 square feet with gardens – this was good quality accommodation with mod cons that, as Eddie said, ‘ordinary people didn’t have’ back then. The only, near-universal, complaint was that the homes could get cold in the winter.

A 1947 image of a prefab home’s fitted kitchen, this one in Swindon

It’s true that few would find the outward appearance of the homes impressive though English Heritage notes their ‘modernist’ look – a contrast to the ‘Neo-Georgian’ favoured in much social housing of the day.  But the Estate’s network of footpaths and intimacy of scale gives it a homely and, to some, ‘holiday village’ feel.

The layout of the Estate; the Downham Estate occupies the bottom left corner

And long-term residents describe a close-knit community, brought together both by the Estate’s design and their recent shared histories: (3)

We had all walks of life here, as people were bombed out, so you had school teachers, park keepers and there was even a solicitor. Everyone got on with each other.

But this was, of course, temporary housing –a short-term solution to a housing crisis.  Somehow the Excalibur survived and its residents liked it.  Twenty-nine of the homes have been purchased under Right to Buy; the rest are still rented from Lewisham council.

But in 2005 the Council determined that the cost of bringing the Estate up to the new Decent Homes Standard would be prohibitive.  Subject to a tenants’ ballot, the Council proposed demolition and redevelopment.

Working with its preferred partner, London & Quadrant, the Council began negotiations with residents in 2007 but met with significant opposition.  Tenants acknowledged the need for updating and refurbishment but were critical of the council neglect which, they felt, had led to current problems.

Many had spent their own money on their homes: (4)

I have spent thousands on this place. ­People ask why I bother, since I’m a council tenant, but I’m proud of this place. It’s like a country village in the summer. No one overlooks you and there’s no trouble. I call this a ­working-class Blackheath

While, to its residents, the Estate was home, to heritage specialists and architectural groups such as the Twentieth Century Society it possessed unique historical value.  These interests coalesced and won a partial victory in March 2009 when six homes on Persant Road – the least altered of the prefabs – were Grade II listed.

Defenders of the Exacalibur campaigned for the Estate as a whole to be listed.  In February 2010, a letter, said to be signed by 93 per cent of residents, was sent to the Council with this request. (5)

On the other side stood the Council and Mayor of Lewisham Steve Bullock: (6)

The listing by English Heritage was perverse…These are temporary prefabricated buildings, not architectural gems…The residents of this estate have pleaded with me and other councillors to get them out of their cold, damp, asbestos-ridden homes…I promised them I would help and that is what I have been endeavouring to do.

By June 2010, it looked as though a majority agreed.  In a ballot organised by Lewisham Council, 56 per cent of residents voted for redevelopment and 44 per cent opposed.  To critics, the result smacked of Council bullying – the veiled threat that a ‘No’ vote would lead to a policy of neglect and a restricted choice of alternative accommodation if and when the time came.

Even without the negative spin, it’s fair to say that this vote – like all ballots on ‘regeneration’ – wasn’t a free choice but a choice between unsatisfactory alternatives and, for many, an attempt to minimise the disruption that such proposals inevitably bring.

In April 2011 Lewisham Council gave final approval for demolition (save for the six listed properties) and the Greater London Authority approved the planning application for the scheme in June. By the end of the year – ‘a very successful year!’ according to the L&Q team working on the redevelopment – 11 tenants had been rehoused. (7)

As of June 2013, 28 of the prefabs were standing empty.  Currently, as some tenants resist being moved, a court case looms, no rebuilding has begun and the scheme as a whole isn’t slated to be completed until 2020.

A computer generated image of the proposed redevelopment scheme

It will comprise 371 houses and flats – in the modern way, ‘a mixture of affordable homes and additional flats and houses for sale, shared ownership and equity ownership’, and, of course, a much higher density development.

Meanwhile, the redevelopment process itself and the uncertainty it has engendered has had a desperately sad effect on the Estate: (8)

The Excalibur has a strange feel today.  The community spirit has gone, there is a feeling of animosity, people look at each other through scowling eyes. The estate has split into two irrevocable camps, with very different ideas of that they want.  The idea of saving their homes with a pot of paint and green fingers has begun to disappear.  Many residents’ homes have become dilapidated and their gardens overgrown.  For the nigh on half wanting to stay they have battened down the hatches, there is a fierce resolve to defend their homes from disagreeing neighbours, rising local crime and a council wanting to demolish their homes.

While some of the residents have dug their heels in, others are keen for the saga to be resolved and others still want to move into what should, frankly, be better quality accommodation.

Visit it while you can and make your own mind up about the pros and cons of redevelopment.  It’s hard to resist the story of the ‘little man’ (and woman) standing up for their home against bureaucracy and the state (and both the Telegraph and the Mail have featured sympathetic coverage of the saga).  And it’s undeniable that the Excalibur Estate has worked when much larger and more exciting schemes have failed.

But while there’s less romance to the planners’ arguments, their case does, nevertheless, have some merit: (9)

The proposed development would provide much needed housing and affordable accommodation and would substantially improve the living conditions of the current occupiers, whilst achieving a density which utilises the sizeable piece of land more efficiently and in line with current local and national policies and guidance.

The Prefab Museum, 17 Meliot Road

Side view

The story of Britain’s post-war prefabs is celebrated in a temporary exhibition, curated by Elisabeth Blanchet, at 17 Meliot Road on the Estate until the end of May, 2014. It records the homes of the Excalibur and others, scattered around the country – from the Isle of Lewis to Bristol and the south-west and points in-between.  The largest number – around 700 – survive in the Bristol area, 300 remain in Newport, South Wales.  Thirteen have been listed along Wake Green Road in Moseley, Birmingham. (10)

Neil Kinnock was brought up in a prefab home and can have the last word:

It was a remarkable dwelling and a piece of wonderful engineering. In order to move in, my parents had to buy new furniture and a lasting impression was cleanliness and newness. And in a sense the prefabs have never lost that feeling. With our inside bathroom and our inside toilet, and our fitted kitchen with our refrigerator, this was 1948, a fitted electric stove, fold-down table, it was a place of wonder. We used to get visitors from all over the place just to come see this amazing house.

Sources

(1) Details taken from the English Heritage listing

(2) Quoted in Ros Anderson, ‘This is my home, my little castle‘, The Guardian, 28 December 2012

(3) Quoted in Sonia Zhuravlyova, ‘Lasting memories’, Inside Housing, 21 June 2013

(4) Quoted in Robert Hardman, ‘Absolutely Prefabulous: Residents of Britain’s last prefab estate battle to save homes that were built to last only ten years’, Daily Mail, 15 January 2011

(5) As stated in the website of Jim Blackender, a leader of the residents’ campaign to preserve the Estate.

(6) Quoted in Will Storr, ‘Bulldozers home in on historic prefab estate’, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2011

(7) Newsletter for the residents of the Excalibur Estate, December 2011

(8) Nick Davis, The Last Days of Excalibur, 2011

(9) Lewisham Council Planning Committee, Report on the Excalibur Estate Regeneration Area, London SE6, 21 April 2011

(10) Elisabeth Blanchet, Prefabs: Palaces for the People Education Pack.  The quotation which follows from Neil Kinnock in conversation with Elizabeth Blanchet is taken from the same source.

Elisabeth Blanchet has been the major chronicler of Britain’s prefabs so follow the link above for more information and images.  The temporary museum has a Facebook page.

Nick Davis’ Prefab Archive is another wonderful source on the Excalibur and Wake Green Estates.

Go to Jim Blackender’s blog for the perspective of a resident fighting to save the Estate.

The Hulme Crescents, Manchester: a ‘British Bantustan’

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1960s, 1970s, Regeneration

In 1971, the Hulme Crescents were thought to represent the best of modern social housing as we saw in last week’s post.  The planning principles which inspired them were intended not only to provide decent housing but to honour and foster community.  The construction techniques which built them had seemed to promise mass housing on a scale and at a pace which would finally eradicate the scourge of the slums.

If only briefly, this excitement was felt by residents as well as politicians and planners: (1)

I went for a walk with my granddad before the Crescents started to get bad. And they were wonderful places. Full of really new ideas and loads of hope for the people living in them. People talked to each other. And I can remember laugher with a family that lived in them. They asked me and my granddad in for a cup of tea. Showed us round the strange way the flats were designed. But the flat was so clean and nice and they were so proud of it. Then suddenly, about 1972 I think it was, things started to go wrong.

What did go wrong?

First and foremost, the Crescents’ system-built engineering was a disaster.  The blocks were erected too quickly and their construction inadequately supervised.  Reinforcing bolts and ties were missing; problems of condensation emerged from poor insulation and ventilation; vermin spread rapidly through the estate’s ducting. (2)

Whose fault was that?  Local authorities – pressured by central government and driven by their own ambitions to build big and build fast – can certainly take some blame. The Government’s National Building Agency, which promoted industrialised building but failed to provide any effective oversight, is also responsible.

But arguably it is the cartel of construction companies which dominated system-built housing in the sixties and early seventies which is most culpable.  The construction industry sold products unfit for purpose and failed to meet even their own standards of quality control. (3)

The collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 was an early indicator of this looming disaster and had its own impact on the Crescents.  Plans for gas-fired central heating were jettisoned in favour of a system of underfloor heating.  After the 1973 oil crisis, when fuel prices rose six-fold, this became prohibitively expensive for the estate’s new residents.

View between Robert Adam Crescent and William Kent Crescent (to left) 1976 © Visual Resources at MMU

There were also foreseeable design flaws.  The dense street layout which had previously connected Hulme to itself and the city was abandoned; the busy main thoroughfare, Stretford Road, closed.  Two large highways, the Mancunian Way and the Princess Parkway, enclosed and isolated the estate.  The open space between the Crescents – intended as an amenity – was largely just that and lacked form and function.  It came to feel rather desolate. (4)

In 1974 a five-year old child died after falling from a top-floor balcony and matters came to a head.  643 residents signed a petition asking to be moved.  A 1975 survey revealed that an overwhelming 96 per cent of Crescent-dwellers wanted to leave the estate.  The Council agreed no family should be required to live above the ground floor in any of its deck-access homes.

At the same time, vandalism and crime were rife – a litany, familiar from the other council estate badlands of the day, of muggings and break-ins, graffiti and destruction, compounded by the Housing Department’s failure to adequately maintain and supervise the estate.

There’s no denying that in the case of the Hulme Crescents there were inherent design flaws which contributed to social breakdown on the estate.  But there is also a bigger picture which is often neglected in their story.

The majority of former Hulme residents had, in fact, been rehoused in out-of-town estates.  Given its early problems and deteriorating reputation, the Crescents rapidly became hard-to-let.  As was typical in such circumstances, ‘problem families’ and vulnerable tenants – who had little choice in where they might be housed – came disproportionately to be settled there.

A 1973 survey showed the estate to be the most deprived in Manchester.  The 1978 World in Action report – a searing exposé of what it described as ‘a British Bantustan’ – estimated 60 per cent of residents were in receipt of benefit. (5)

This was a reality that would have challenged any form of housing – as we’ve seen where similar circumstances affected suburban estates such as Blackbird Leys in Oxford or Norris Green in Liverpool.  But the Hulme Crescents offered a perfect storm of disadvantage.  They were ripe for political action.

Campaigning groups – a mix of housing activists and local residents – began to spring up.  Manchester and Salford Housing Action was established in 1973.  The Hulme Tenants’ Association and Hulme People’s Rights Group were active by the mid-seventies, the latter provided offices on the estate by the City Council who came to regret the opportunity offered to their political opponents. These groups skilfully made use of a media far less deferential than it had been – in reporting city planners’ visions – in the 1960s.(6)

© http://www.exhulme.co.uk

The Council still hoped something might be salvaged from the Crescents. In 1978, it proposed housing single people and students in the estate and suggested the blocks be subdivided.

The latter never occurred but the removal of families was achieved by 1980.  An anarchic free-for-all developed that created ‘Planet Hulme’. This was ‘a Modernist utopia decaying, gone crumbled and decadent’; a creative, Bohemian enclave. But it, despite Owen Hatherley’s celebration of its vibrant subculture, went bad too and became – at least to the few ‘ordinary’ residents that remained and certainly to more conventional citizens – a frightening place: anarchic in the most pejorative sense of the term. (7)

The case for the Crescents’ demolition came to be seen as overwhelming as political attitudes shifted too.  A Labour left emerged, critical of what it regarded as the paternalism of traditional Labour local government and committed – it claimed – to promoting genuine participation.   This new left controlled the City Council by the early eighties.

For Peter Shapely, a rising ideology of consumerism which transcended party politics – and certainly underlay it – was more important.  At any rate, the design and planning process which would build the new Hulme was a very different animal to that which operated in the sixties.

In 1988 it looked as if Hulme would form the testing-ground for the Thatcher government’s Housing Action Trusts.  Tenant resistance to this bureaucratic and top-down initiative blocked the attempt to impose a Trust on Hulme and established the principle of a tenant ballot in future HAT proposals.

The outcome for the Crescents was the Hulme Study – a generously-funded joint initiative of government, council and residents to study the estate’s future. It didn’t produce much more than a report but a marker of participation had been set down.

This wasn’t immediately obvious in what became the transforming moment of the estate – the City Council-led bid for City Challenge funding in 1992.  But the essence of the new approach was the buzz-word ‘partnership’ and a complex nexus of central and local government, private investors, construction companies, housing associations and tenants came together to form the new Hulme.

Hulme Regeneration Ltd took the lead – a joint company comprising the Council’s Hulme Subcommittee and development company AMEC. The subcommittee itself included Hulme Community Homes – another three-way partnership of housing department, housing associations and tenants.  And then there was the Hulme Tenant Participation Project – an autonomous body funded by City Challenge and Housing Corporation.

This was all as complex and strife-ridden as it sounds but the tenants did in the end wield significant influence and in key respects came – alongside some new planning wisdom and in opposition to other – to determine the key elements of the new estate. (8)

As to that, you can take the short version or the long.  Tony Hughes, a caretaker for the North British Housing Group – which was one of the key players in the new Hulme –states simply, ‘We wanted more houses than flats, gardens, lots of greenery and safe areas for children’ (9)

The long version is contained in the 40 page Guide to Development in Hulme published by Hulme Regeneration Ltd in 1994. (10)  It’s an essential primer to what has been called New Urbanism – the attempt to ‘create a new neighbourhood with the “feel” of a more traditional urban community’.

To summarise some key aspects, the guidelines stressed permeability – busy streets which encouraged through movement.  This was a principle which challenged both some of the negative characteristics of the former estate – for one, the very sense of an ‘estate’ isolated from the wider city – as well as some favourite tropes of twentieth century town planners, notably the cul-de-sac.

It sought to tackle head-on some of the most problematic elements of the Crescents as they had evolved – the no-go zones and ‘escape routes’ which encouraged crime and vandalism – and replace them with the ‘natural surveillance’ of streets:

Streets will once again provide both a means of communication and transport, and – together with well-defined squares and civic spaces – a self-supervised area of public contact and interaction.

Much more could be said of the key themes outlined – the call for ‘landmarks, vistas and focal points’ and the demand for ‘a clear definition of public and private space’ most notably – but the measure lies in the new Hulme that actually emerged.

Warde Street

Old York Street

The Crescents were finally demolished in 1994, replaced – for the most part – by a pretty conventional streetscape of red-brick terraces (‘Barratt rabbit hutches’ in Hatherley’s words) and functional low-rise flats. The architectural exception is the small Homes for Change development – a product of the ‘alternative Hulme’ of the eighties which chose to build a little oasis of deck-access Brutalism.

Homes for Change, Chichester Road

The goal of mixed tenure has been achieved.  In 2002 there was a mix of 42 per cent public sector housing, 22 per cent housing association and 36 per cent private.  Now, as Manchester City Council has comprehensively embraced the world of ALMOs and not-for-profit housing providers and divested itself of direct responsibility for housing, the proportion of housing association properties is much higher. (11)

Tellingly, the 2006 evaluation of Hulme’s regeneration notes that the ‘quality of private housing and its maintenance has been problematical, while the quality of public sector and housing association dwellings appears to have been much higher’.

Stretford Road

Housing type doesn’t magically transform social and economic realities.  The same report described relatively high levels of crime – though falling – and unemployment levels of 17 per cent – five or six times above the national average though still a significant fall from the 30 per cent previously reported.  Still, those wishing to move from Hulme had fallen by 63 per cent and the redevelopment as a whole was a success.

It’s been a lengthy analysis but it’s hard – in a balanced way – to summarise the Hulme story briefly.  This was – there can be no doubt – a social housing disaster.  Design flaws met structural failings and were compounded by a downward spiral of social breakdown.

There were high ideals and positive principles expressed in the creation of the Crescents.  Incompetence – some of it wilful in terms of the actual construction – undercut any good these might have done.

The considered conclusions of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have merit – and certainly the benefit of hindsight: (12)

Re-development in Hulme during the 1960s was imposed as the product of political ideology and architectural fashion and local people were not involved in the assessment of needs. Positive features contributing to social cohesion, continuity and a sense of identity were lost.

But then Municipal Dreams have never been shaped in a vacuum and have always been constrained by the social and economic circumstances of the day and the limitations – rather than the malevolence – of the political actors which brought them into being.

Sources

(1) From the Guestbook of the eXHuLME Website – a great resource on the history of old Hulme and the Hulme estate.

(2) John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, 2000

(3) This is described in Adam Curtis’ 1984 BBC documentary ‘Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster’

(4) Ted Kitchen, People, Politics, Policies and Plans: The City Planning Process in Contemporary Britain (1997)

(5) World in Action, ‘There’s No Place Like Hulme’, 10 April, 1978

(6) Peter Shapely, ‘Tenants Arise! Consumerism, Tenants and the Challenge to Council Authority in Manchester, 1968-92’, Social History, Vol. 31, No. 1, February, 2006

(7) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010)

(8) All this is best outlined and in greater detail by Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(9) Quoted in Laurette Ziemer, ‘Social Climbing: Estates are Transformed’, Daily Mirror, 23 June 2001

(10) Hulme Regeneration Limited, Rebuilding the City. A Guide to Development in Hulme, June 1994

(11) Lesley Mackay, Evaluation of the Regeneration of Hulme, Manchester, VivaCity 2020, February 2006 and Tony Gilmour, ‘Revolution? Transforming Social Housing in the Manchester City Region’, ENHR 2009 Prague Conference ‘Changing Housing Markets: Integration and Segmentation’

(12) Joseph Rowntree Foundation, ‘Lessons from Hulme’, September 1994

Images, where credited, are taken from the Flikr set on Hulme’s redevelopment posted by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Visual Resources Centre.

The Hulme Crescents, Manchester: bringing ‘a touch of eighteenth century grace and dignity’ to municipal building

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1960s, 1970s, Regeneration

In 1978 the chair of Manchester City Council’s Housing Committee described the Hulme Crescents development as an ‘absolute disaster – it shouldn’t have been planned, it shouldn’t have been built’. (1)   By that time, the estate was already a byword for the failure – worse, the inhumanity – of sixties’ mass public housing. That reputation has lingered long after the demolition of the Crescents in 1994.

This won’t be a revisionist piece but let’s at least look a little more closely at what went wrong.

The Crescents

As we saw when we looked at the city’s early municipal housing in Ancoats, Manchester was the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution.  Hulme was also the home of many of those first industrial workers.  In 1914, a Special Committee of the City Council reported a population of 63,177 living there in just 13,137 homes, 11,506 of which lacked baths or any laundry facilities.

Hulme in the 1930s

In 1934, the area was designated for slum clearance – the largest such area in Britain.  But little was done before the outbreak of the Second World War and it was the war itself which would accelerate demands, expectations and plans for change.  A City Council report in 1942 declared 68,837 houses in Manchester were unfit for human habitation; a total of 76,272 new homes would be required to meet long-term needs.

That cause was taken up in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan, scathing in its condemnation of ‘the meanness and squalor of Hulme’ and Manchester’s other industrial suburbs – ‘the drab streets, the dilapidated shops, the sordid public houses, the dingy schools, the sulphurous and sunless atmosphere’.

Radical action was needed – and promised.  But the city was clear that flats and high-rise were not the answer: (2)

It would be a profound sociological mistake to force upon the British public, in defiance of its own widely expressed preference for separate houses with private gardens, a way of life that fundamentally out of keeping with its traditions, instincts and opportunities’

Manchester’s model was its own Wythenshawe Estate – a spacious out-of-town suburb built on garden city principles, begun in 1927.  The Council proposed 40,000 new homes in similar schemes.  But neighbouring authorities – in particular, affluent Cheshire – feared this urban incursion and the uncouth incomers they felt it would bring and were far from cooperative.

Slum clearance began again in Manchester in 1954 but the programme – aiming to demolish 7500 houses a year – faltered as the rate of new-build dried up to little over 1000 a year by the end of the decade.

A similar picture existed at national level.  Council house completions had fallen to half the 229,000 peak achieved in 1953.  But the sense of urgency persisted.  Around 1m slums remained and just 30,000 were being cleared each year.  A Conservative government committed in its White Paper of 1963 to building 350,000 new homes annually.  It was outbid the following year by the incoming Labour administration’s promise of 500,000.

Stills taken from Adam Curtis’ 1984 BBC documentary ‘Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster’

Such ambition demanded new methods and ideas.  Low density suburban estates hadn’t delivered the numbers and were, in any case, unpopular with some tenants and hamstrung by planning restrictions.  Industrialised and system-building methods seemed to offer a solution.

The Ministry of Public Building and Works took specific responsibility for promoting: (3)

the use of new and rapid methods of construction, standardising the use and production of building components to the greatest possible extent, and securing the widespread dissemination of the best modern practices.

The Conservative Government expected 25 per cent of local authority housing output to be constructed using industrialised methods, a proportion raised by Labour to 40 per cent .  Councils which ‘seemed to be co-operating were “rewarded” in terms of enhanced capital allocations, speeding approvals, etc.’

That pressure, those dynamics – local and national – came together to create the Hulme Crescents.

Hulme redevelopment mid-1960s © Visual Resources at MMU

In 1962, the City Council announced a five-stage programme to build some 10,000 new homes over a ten-year period.  At peak, 4000 homes would be cleared and built each year.   It began relatively modestly – 248 maisonettes, flats and houses to be built at a cost of £1m.  It grew in 1964 as rebuilding commenced with 5000 new homes and Manchester’s first high-rise – a series of thirteen-storey tower blocks.

Hulme under construction

It culminated in its final stage, Hulme V, unveiled in October 1965, with what the then chair of the Housing Committee, Eric Mellor, claimed would be ‘one of the finest schemes in Europe’ – four deck-access six-storey crescent blocks – 924 homes in all – at a cost of over £3.8m.

This wasn’t cheap but it reflected what the Council felt to be the ambition of the development.  In design terms, it had been promised: (4)

a high quality of finish, both internally and externally…obtained because structural components, fittings and services will be manufactured and supervised under factory conditions and not subjected to climatic and other hazards of an open site.

In planning terms, this was to be ‘an urban environment on a city scale’ in a form which would promote ‘greater choice of friends among neighbours’ and ‘easy contact’ for elderly people ‘with the passing world’.

Clopton Walk and the Crescents 1972 © Visual Resources at MMU

And Manchester felt it had been true – in part at least and as far as circumstances allowed – to its earlier ideals in creating inner-city ‘streets in the sky’ which would foster a community atmosphere akin to the terraced housing that had been cleared.

The Manchester Evening News was gushing in its praise: (5)

(Of) all redevelopment schemes that will rejuvenate the Britain of tomorrow, Manchester’s plan for Hulme stands out boldly. For it is unique. Here is a fascinating concept which should make proud not only the planners but the citizens. That the design for a thousand maisonettes in long curved terraces will give a touch of eighteenth century grace and dignity to municipal housing is welcome indeed. But above all the plan is realistic… Thank goodness someone has been using both imagination and common sense in planning homes.

This was an echo of the rhetoric and vision of the scheme’s designers, Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley – Wilson had been the chief architect of Cumbernauld New Town and Womersley responsible, as City Architect, for the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield: (6)

We feel that the analogy we have made with Georgian London and Bath is entirely valid. By the use of similar shapes and proportions, large-scale building groups and open spaces, and, above all, by skilful landscaping and extensive tree planting, it is our endeavour to achieve, at Hulme, a solution to the problems of twentieth-century living which would be the equivalent in quality of that reached for the requirements of eighteenth-century Bloomsbury and Bath.

The Crescents were named after the four major architects of Georgian Bath, Charles Barry, John Nash, Robert Adam and William Kent.

Charles Barry Crescent, 1972 © Visual Resources at MMU

Construction began in 1969 and was completed – using those state-of-the-art system-building methods of the day – rapidly.  The topping out ceremony for the Crescents took place on 14 July 1971 and early reactions were positive.

I’ve spent some time on all this background and many of you will be more interested in the unfolding disaster which followed.  Still, it seems to me to be important to understand the context and, yes, the ideals which shaped the estate. This context doesn’t excuse the mistakes that were made but it should, at least, help us move beyond the simple desire to blame and condemn.

So what did go wrong?  We’ll examine that in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Councillor Allan Roberts, interviewed in ‘There’s No Place like Hulme’, World in Action, 10 April 1978.

(2) Rowland Nicholas, The City of Manchester Plan (1945)

(3) Geoffrey Rippon, MP, Minister of Public Building and Works, quoted in AMA, ‘Defects in Housing Part 2: Industrialised and System Built Dwellings of the 1960s and 1970s’ (1984).  The quotes and detail which follow also come from this source.

(4) The architects’ report quoted in Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings (2011)

(5) Much of the detail above and contemporary quotations are drawn from Peter Shapely, ‘The press and the system built developments of inner-city Manchester, 1960s-1980s’, Manchester Region History Review, 2004, and the same author’s, ‘Social Housing in Post-war Manchester: Change and Continuity’ (April 2013)

(6) Quoted in Ed Glinert, The Manchester Compendium: A Street-by-Street History of England’s Greatest Industrial City (2008)

Images, where credited, are taken from the Flikr set on Hulme’s redevelopment posted by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Visual Resources Centre.