Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich: ‘an example of the almost-lost art of romantic townscape’

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1960s, 1970s, Southwark

Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights back in the Sixties when she was just 26 years old.  If she weren’t very much alive and kicking – and still fighting the cause of high quality social housing – I’d call it a worthy memorial.  It remains much more than that in any case. Beloved by architectural groupies and a striking presence on the local skyline, most importantly it has provided a decent home to many.  Of course, it’s had its ups and downs.

Ladlands and the view to the north

The estate was conceived when Britain was building council housing on a massive scale, ambitious to clear once and for all the remaining slums (and many did remain) and house all its people decently and comfortably.  The best local authority architects and Housing Departments wanted to bring design quality to this numbers game too.  In Southwark, the Borough Architect and Planner, Frank Hayes, sought to achieve excellence through in-house competition.  Kate Macintosh won the competition to design Dawson’s Heights.

Kate Macintosh, c1966 (© Utopia London)

She had studied the existing alternatives, for one the five-storey walk-up blocks ubiquitous in London and specifically Speke House in Camberwell (since demolished).  Typical of its kind, she thought it ‘institutional’ – ‘all external expression of this is my home, this is where I live was forbidden’.

She was critical too of many of the point and slab blocks being built; they were ‘unrelated to the surrounding urban grain’ and she ‘found the anonymous grid expression of the exteriors of much LCC work repellent’.  In her words, she ‘absorbed the lessons’ of the far more innovative scheme of Park Hill in Sheffield ‘but disliked the apparent flattening of the hill produced by the constant height of each meandering super-block’. (1)

Dawson’s Heights would be different, not least because of its extraordinary site – a 13.8 acre hilltop site in East Dulwich: crowned with a refuse tip and ringed by interwar houses  now compulsorily purchased but many uninhabitable in any case due to the instability of hillside London clay. (2)

These circumstances dictated the basic layout of the new scheme – two large blocks (Ladlands to the north and Bredinghurst to the south) constructed on the more stable terrain and overlooking a central communal space, formerly the dump.  The buildings still required 60-80 feet reinforced concrete cylinders foundations.  The siren call of system building was resisted and a superstructure erected of load-bearing cross-walls, of brickwork in the four-storey blocks and of reinforced concrete for all but the top four floors of the higher buildings. (3)

Bredinghurst

Turning to the more creative aspects of the design, Macintosh devised a ziggurat-style scheme which ensured that two thirds of the flats had views in both directions and all had views to the north.  The varied height of the blocks, rising to twelve storeys at their central peak, made sure that every flat received sunlight even in deepest midwinter. (4)

To the scheme’s advocates – and I think most would agree – ‘the warm brick texture’ humanised the façades and avoided a foreboding monolithic appearance while the staggering of the blocks created ‘ever changing silhouettes’ adding ‘the beauty of surprise to a relentless suburb’. (5)

The approach to Bredinghurst from Overhill Road

English Heritage, whose recommendation for listing was rejected by the Secretary of State, was effusive in its praise:

The dramatic stepped hilltop profile is a landmark in SE London, and endows the project with a striking and original massing that possesses evocative associations with ancient cities and Italian hill towns…The generous balconies with remarkable views and natural light, the warm brick finish and thoughtful planning introduce a real sense of human scale to a monumental social housing scheme.

Still, not everybody loved it.  The Pevsner volume describes the blocks with ‘their chunky bands of balconies and access galleries’ as ‘disappointing close up’. (6)

Courtyard side of Bredinghurst

The Estate was constructed between 1968 and 1972 and cost in total a little over £1.6m to build.  It was a mixed development including a range of accommodation intended to suit individuals and families in a range of life circumstances and stages. Macintosh felt that:

if large blocks were to be accepted and loved, as a new way of living, they must try to replicate the best characteristics of the terraced street; that families of different sizes and age groups should intermingle, as their needs and strengths would be diverse and complementary.

However, unlike earlier examples of this principle, all the dwellings were contained within a single complex.  In Dawson’s Heights, there were 296 homes – 112 one-bed, 75 two-bed, 81 three-bed and 28 four-bed, all split-level dual aspect maisonettes:  a ‘Chinese puzzle of differing types to be assembled in various combinations’ is how Macintosh described it.

Medium-rise, generally larger maisonettes at the south end of Ladlands

Every flat has a private balcony, an amenity Macintosh fought for at a time when Housing Minister Richard Crossman was berating local authority architects for extravagance.  She designed them to serve as fire escapes (via a removable glass panel to the neighbouring balcony) and thus justified their inclusion on safety grounds.

Of course, the best-laid plans…

There were early problems with damp and condensation in the flats.  By 1976 the Council was embarking on a second programme of repairs to rectify the issue at a cost of around £0.5m.  Two overhead walkways which had originally connected the blocks were removed in the eighties in line with the ‘designing out crime’ ideas of Alice Coleman.

By 1989 some residents were highly critical of Southwark Council’s failure to repair and maintain the Estate and they sought an alternative landlord. (7)   No doubt the issue was real but the timing was fortuitous, coming a year after the introduction of so-called ‘Tenants’ Choice’ powers in the Conservatives’ 1988 Housing Act.  The latter were intended, in the government’s words, ‘to open up the closed world of the local authority housing estates to competition and to the influence of the best housing management practices of other landlords’. (8)

Such ‘competition’ was helped here by a Housing Corporation grant of £200,000 to the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust to do the groundwork for a possible transfer but all these efforts came to naught when the Trust withdrew in 1994 having failed to receive the funding it reckoned it needed to update the Estate.

The view south-east from Bredinghurst

And then things moved again.  A tenant vote in favour of transfer to the Trust in September 1997 was followed in 1998 – presumably not coincidentally – by an award of £3.354m from the government’s Estates Renewal Challenge Fund, with the Trust finding by some means an additional £3.3m from ‘the private sector’.  The new Labour Housing Minister Hilary Armstrong called it ‘a real opportunity to tackle the problems and get the estate back on its feet’ – ‘for many years the people living on the Dawson’s Heights estate have had inadequate housing’. (9)  Quite a comedown for a showpiece development.

Money was spent on rectifying some subsidence problems around the periphery of the Estate and on installing double glazing, replacing roofs and upgrading security.  But this wasn’t to be quite the Promised Land – ‘according to residents, that is when it all started to go wrong’.  One stated that the ‘windows and roofs started leaking almost straight away…the security doors are always smashed… the estate is never cleaned and lifts are broken.’  All this and they were paying higher rents. (10)

Ladlands and landscaping

This takes us some way away from the usual accounts of Dawson’s Heights which focus on the architectural excitement of the Estate.  To me, however, it’s a useful reminder of the ‘real world’ issues – structural problems which need repair, day-to-day management and upkeep, safety – that determine the actual experience of council tenants, however prestigious the development.  And, despite the anathematising of council-run estates and the murky process which has effectively forced transfer of homes from council ownership, it reminds us that good management and tenants’ interests are not necessarily best served by loss of council control.

In fairness, the Southern Housing Group (the new incarnation of the Samuel Lewis Trust) has upped its game considerably since those earlier complaints and residents – many, probably around one in three, of them owner-occupiers now – seem generally satisfied with the management of the Estate.  Certainly it looks good and what Pevsner called the ‘drab stretch of green’ at its centre is now an attractively landscaped play area and open space.

Central open space and Ladlands

It is still the architecture which compels attention, of course.  Close-up, it’s powerful without being overpowering, retaining that intimacy and sense of individuality which Macintosh sought.  From afar it’s a commanding presence on the south London skyline. It remains a benign monument to an era when high-quality housing for the people was a proud priority.

Sources

For plans and interiors and some additional views of Dawson’s Heights, do take a look at Modernist Estates posts on the estate.

(1) Quoted in Utopia London, Dawson’s Heights

(2) James Dallaway, ‘Dawson’s Hill before Dawson’s Heights’, The Dulwich Society Newsletter, Spring 2006

(3) AJ Information Library, ‘Dawson’s Heights’, Architects’ Journal, 25 April 1973

(4) Single Aspect, ‘Dawson Heights Estate – Twentieth Century Society walk, July 2010’

(5) Twentieth Century Society, ‘Dawson’s Heights: the “Italian” hill town in Dulwich’, May 2012. The comment on the ‘changing silhouettes’ is quoted from Philip Boyle in the Docomomo newsletter, no.19, Winter 2009. The English Heritage statement which follows is also taken from this source.

(6)  Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London: South (2002)

(7) Carol Munday, secretary of DH Tenants’ and Residents’ Association quoted in Housing Corporation, Tenants’ First, no.2, Spring 1993

(8) Quoted in Policy Studies Institute, Changing Role of Local Housing Authorities: An interim assessment (1990)

(9) ‘Over £4m Funding To Benefit Southwark and Newham LBC Estates’, Local Government Chronicle, 27 February 1998

(10) Nick Triggle and Lucy Gooding, ‘We have been left up Dawson Creek’, South London Press, September 14, 2001

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The Manor Estate, Sheffield: ‘the worst estate in Britain’?

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

In 1995, after a local school had been destroyed in an arson attack, the MP Roy Hattersley (a former chair of Sheffield’s Housing Committee in the sixties) dubbed the Manor Estate ‘the worst estate in Britain’ –quite a comedown for an estate which had once been one of Sheffield’s showpieces.  The truth, as ever, was more complex but the reality of decline on the now troubled estate was undeniable.

The Estate in the sixties (?): the image shows that the open layout of the estate could be bleak in its exposed setting

For those that moved to the greenfield estate from the slums in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a very different story: (1)

It were great – corn fields and then there were a farm further over and horses – we used to play with horses and run around fields with horses and there were a brook – we used to go paddling down in the brook

By gum, it were like a palace – all the young’uns, they really enjoyed it, beautiful garden, plenty of room in t’ back

One long-term resident, born on the Estate in 1923, remembers his mother ‘always said that our house was a “Shangri-la” compared to where she lived before’.

View of the Manor Estate, with thanks to the JR James Archives

Back then, moving to the Estate was seen as a clear step-up and there were those (as we saw in the Watling Estate in London) who believed that the new council estates heralded a new (and superior) England. The Warden of the Estate’s Community Centre, an idealistic young Cambridge graduate, published the first edition of an estate journal, The Manor and Woodthorpe Review, in 1934.  It would be: (2)

an organ of propaganda for disseminating knowledge – not highbrow stuff but the kind of thing about which every intelligent human wants to know – what his neighbours are doing at home and abroad…a useful tool for helping the Association in its work and developing the cultural and educational life of the people.

And it heralded, he believed, ‘a new age, both in life on the Estate and in journalism’.

This, it turned out, was a little over-optimistic.  The Review folded after twelve issues and the Community Centre’s more didactic ventures proved unpopular.  The Warden’s attempt to force a more serious and self-improving tone by removing the Centre’s billiard and card tables and rebranding the recreation space as a reading and debating room created further rancour and division.

Windy House Lane, Manor Estate (from the JR James Archives)

The Estate’s tenants were confident enough of their own decency and respectability to resist such heavy-handed attempts to impose middle-class norms of behaviour. In fact, one of the virtues of Estate life was precisely its domesticity.  This might entail a rejection of the old (and unwanted) intimacies of slum life too as this exchange between a new arrival and the person next door suggests:

‘Oi, do you neighbour?’, he was asked.

‘No, no thank you I don’t neighbour, love.’ [And, in an aside to the interviewer, he added], ‘I’m not wearing that, no chance, no thank you’.

It was precisely such boundaries – such policed and self-policing respectability – that seemed lost by the 1980s.  A single Daily Mirror article from 2007 can stand for the grand narrative of all that was said to have gone wrong with council housing and its community – once the taxi driver had been persuaded to take the intrepid reporter to the badlands of Manor. (3)

One 67 year-old resident explained she couldn’t ‘take it anymore’.  She went on:

My nerves are shot to pieces and I’m right low. My doctor’s given me Valium to calm me down and help me sleep…The place is overrun by thugs. Recently they shot at my cat with a paint gun. One lad called me a miserable old c***. Days later my windows were smashed.

Across the road, a ‘single mum’ was ‘smoking a cigarette and drinking beer, while two of her four children play in the street with a Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy and a large Alsatian’.  For her the only problem with Manor was ‘mardy old biddies who forget what it’s like to be young and complain all the time’.

Of course, another ‘single mum’ might have been interviewed and a very different story told but the reality of crime and decline was real enough as was the context – the collapse of the local economy.

Hastilar Road South © Stephen McKay and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Between 1979 and 1983, Sheffield lost an average of 1000 jobs a month; 21,000 jobs were lost in the steel industry alone.  Ten years later a survey of Manor found adult unemployment reaching almost 30 per cent – 50 per cent on some streets.  A quarter of the unemployed had been jobless for ten years or more. (4)  This was a community which had had its heart ripped out.

Compare that to the interwar period: ‘Everybody worked that I knew. There were very few people who didn’t have a job back then’.

Wulfric Road, Manor Estate © Richard Vince and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Estate itself had grown old and some of its housing was obsolescent.  Parts of the Estate became hard to let and, typically, it was the most vulnerable and troubled families (those with both a right to council housing and a pressing need which obviated choice) who would be placed there.  To older established residents, the process was clear (and the contrast to those earlier aspirational residents for whom council housing was a step-up is telling):

We seem to have people been brought on to the estate with poverty, with problems until the whole place is like a ghetto.

This trend continued into the nineties.  By 1991 the percentage of Manor households with children and no economically active member had increased from 7 per cent to over 25 per cent in ten years. (5)

But local residents protested that beyond the lurid headlines and attention-grabbing news stories, things were different:

….underneath all that there are very genuine people

It’s got a bad name from people who don’t know it, you got to live here to know it.  It’s just cos houses look rough from outside – it don’t mean people are rough inside.

Regeneration is – for good reason – a dirty word among many housing activists now but there’s no doubt that (short of a revival of Sheffield’s traditional industrial economy) something needed to be done to improve the Estate and the lives of its community.  In practice, the Manor has been a laboratory for the gamut of initiatives which have attempted to revive our troubled council estates.

The Manor Estate

An Urban Programme scheme operated in the 1980s. At the same time 1682 homes were demolished  and some 500 built new. Many of the cleared homes were suffering serious structural defects and said to be beyond economic repair.(6) A loss of 1000 affordable homes might, in another context, seem indefensible but the Estate’s population had fallen by a third in the 1980s.  Some of the new houses were built for sale and by 2003 over a third of the Estate’s homes were owner-occupied.

New build on Fairfax Road, Manor © Neil Theasby and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Manor Employment Project, which ran on the Estate between 1981 and 1987, was an attempt to provide local employment and training.  Well-meaning, small-scale, it had some positive impact but provided very little permanent employment and suffered numerous conflicts and tensions.  It was notable for empowering some of the women on the Estate, many of their menfolk were redundant and perhaps felt redundant in some profounder sense too.

Cleared social housing at Manor Top © Martin Speck and made available under a Creative Commons licence

A second wave of ‘regeneration’ occurred after 2002 with the creation of New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders Programme.  This came to Sheffield in 2005 with all the pizazz and jargon of its type – its intention to: (7)

To build and support sustainable communities and successful neighbourhoods where the quality and choice of housing underpins a buoyant economy and an improved way of life

Laudable objectives perhaps but to be achieved by the contemporarily favoured means – improved housing through selective demolition, refurbishment and new build, support for community resources, and greater housing diversity through mixed tenure and a wider range of housing types. To critics, it was ‘little more than a programme of class cleansing’ and, in other cases (notably that of the Welsh Streets in Liverpool), the demolition of sound homes and threat to existing communities was fiercely opposed. (8)

New build on Wulfric Road

The context for this was what was taken to have been the failure of the traditional council estate model.  We might note that it had succeeded well enough in better times and that it had failed only when comparable economic circumstances would have devastated any community. We might question also the fashionable critique of ‘mono-class’ communities which only seems to find working-class communities objectionable.

Still, this is the world we live in and something needed to change.  In 2007 the council housing stock of Manor was transferred to a new Registered Social Landlord, Pennine Housing 2000.  Around £15m was found to invest in Decent Homes and improve the environment of the Estate.

By 2012, the press could find an alternative narrative for it: (9)

While many people perceive Sheffield’s biggest council estate to be a hotbed of unemployment, teenage mothers and anti-social behaviour, to those who live and work there it’s a homely haven.

Money – investment in infrastructure and community to speak in the technocratic terms anyone involved in housing must now employ – makes a difference and the Manor seems a more optimistic and better regarded place than it was in recent years. Of course, council housing – housing as it does (now more than ever) among the poorest of our society is hardly immune from this country’s broader economic difficulties.  And that makes its role all the more vital.

PS Do read the comments below for some additional information and updates.

Sources

(1) Channel Four, On the Manor (1986 documentary)

(2) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: the History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(3) Julie McCaffrey, ‘This is our Manor’, Daily Mirror, 27 April 2007

(4) Sallie Westwood, John Williams (eds), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories (2003)

(5) Cathy Dean, ‘From consultation to delegation: economic regeneration on a housing estate’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, vol 9, 1995

(5) Matt Weaver, ‘Room for us all’, The Guardian, Wednesday 18 June 2003

(6) See comment by Cllr Howard Knight.

(7) Sheffield City Council, Wybourn, Arbourthorne, Manor Park Master Plan (2005)

(8) The quote is from Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010).  To learn more of the Welsh Streets campaign, visit their excellent website.

(8) Rachael Clegg, ‘Welcome to the Modern Manor, Sheffield’, The Star, 31 July 2012

Sheffield’s Interwar Council Estates: ‘the pampered pets of the Corporation’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Sheffield built around 28,000 council homes between the wars.  It would also become, in 1926, the first major city to be run by the Labour Party.  Labour’s criticism of the council’s penny-pinching and cautious housing programme was a major factor in jettisoning it to power.  Its subsequent housing programme has arguably been key to its maintenance of power for all but two one-year spells since.

In 1919, however, even the Citizens’ Alliance – the anti-Labour coalition which governed until 1926 – was swept up in the patriotic fervour and political imperative to do something for the ordinary men and women who had sacrificed so much in the Great War.

It commissioned Patrick Abercrombie to draw up a Civic Survey and Plan with the specific brief to formulate a strategy which separated industry and housing.  His 1924 report – which Abercrombie described as the foundation of his later work – recommended zoning of factories and homes and the creation of new satellite towns within a green belt.  Little of this was implemented but Sheffield did construct a number of large cottage suburbs.

The Manor Estate Housing Scheme, 1919

The Manor Estate was the largest of these, built between two and three miles from the city centre, on 470 acres of land purchased from the lord of the manor, the Duke of Norfolk, in 1919. Of this, 350 acres was set aside for 3754 houses – solid two and three bedroom houses with generous gardens, 70 acres for playing fields and 37 acres for public buildings. Construction began in 1923 and some 2697 homes built in the 1920s. (1)

Construction of Manor Estate, 1927 © http://www.britainfromabove EPW018971

The overall design approved in 1921 – a geometrical layout of intersecting circles – owed something to contemporary garden city principles but has been criticised for paying ‘little regard to Sheffield’s natural contours’; the general effect, it has been said, is ‘bleak’. (2)

The Manor in its early years. Stills taken from Channel Four, On the Manor (1986 documentary)

The anti-Labour coalition also showed some early initiative in beginning a large slum clearance programme just a mile south-east of the city centre in what would become the Wybourn Estate.   The Coalition’s drive for economy, however, marked the Estate – tenants were required to pay 2 shillings a week if they wanted hot water and electricity not supplied as standard.

Wybourn © Chris Downer and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Labour was critical of this parsimony and the estates’ lack of community facilities.  On the Manor Estate, for example, there were 3000 school-age children on the Estate and school places (in wooden huts) for just 232 in 1926.  It was critical, too, of the expense of these homes built by private contractors and their poor workmanship.   After 1926 the Council’s Direct Labour Organisation would build most of Sheffield’s new council homes.

The Wisewood Estate © Wikimedia Commons

One of the first estates commenced by the new Labour administration was Wisewood built on farmland in the Loxley valley to the north-west of the city.  Some 901 homes were built here between 1928 and 1931 at an approximate cost of £400,000.

Houses on the Wisewood Estate

The Estate became known as the ‘Buttons Estate’ because so many of the new residents wore uniforms at work – a reminder (as in the Dover House Estate in Putney, known as ‘Uniform Town’) that many of the first council house dwellers belonged to the better-off working class employed in the public services.

However, in Sheffield as elsewhere, greater emphasis was placed on clearing the slums and rehousing slum-dwellers in the 1930s. In Sheffield, 24,374 houses were demolished under clearance and demolition orders by 1938 and – at 44 per cent – its rate of replacement of these homes was the highest in the country.

Parson Cross © Wikimedia Commons

By 1932, there were almost 3600 homes on the Manor Estate and it boasted, by 1939, a population of almost 16,000.  The Council also built a series of massive new housing estates around the city’s fringes – at Parson Cross (where 5362 houses were built), Shiregreen (4472) Shirecliffe (1274) and Arbourthorne (2832).

Wordsworth Crescent, Parson Cross © Terry Robinson and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In some spirit of economy and in the attempt, more significantly, to make these homes affordable to a less affluent working class, the Council reduced the number of larger three bedroom and parlour homes on these later estates.  But it maintained high standards and resisted the charge made by the Ministry of Health that it was exceeding minimum requirements.  It admitted doing so in providing both gas and electricity to homes but refused to reduce its specifications on the grounds that ‘immediate saving would be offset by later cost of repairs’. (3)

Longley Avenue West, Shirecliffe © Neil Theasby and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Council was ahead of the game also in providing community facilities on the estates.  The Manor Community Centre opened in 1933 was the first built by any local authority and in 1938 the Council announced plans for a programme of centres on the new estates at a cost of £120,000.  This moved Alderman Jackson of the anti-Labour opposition to describe the Sheffield’s council tenants as ‘the pampered pets of the Corporation’.

The manifesto celebrating six years of Labour rule in Sheffield placed heavy emphasis on the Party’s achievements in housing

More objective social research gives the lie to such a statement.  Several social surveys were carried out on the Wybourn Estate in the early thirties.  In Wybourn, with a poorer population than some, it was found that 35 per cent of one-time tenants had moved back to the inner-city, chiefly as a result of the relatively high rents charged on council estates – two thirds of interviewees had paid rents of less than 7s before moving whereas a three bedroom council house in 1931 cost 10s 6d to rent.  Just over seven per cent of residents were paying over a third of their wages in rental costs.  (4)

Back then: (5)

There was little help from social services, but your neighbours helped as best they could. If you couldn’t pay, you just had to move to somewhere you could afford.

If ability to pay wasn’t a sufficient check on tenants’ respectability, there also the ‘man who came round and checked you were maintaining your garden properly and if you hadn’t then the council would take some sort of action’.

Although overcrowding was a far greater problem in the inner-city slums where over half the homes exceeded standards, it was a problem too in Wybourn where some larger families had opted to live in smaller and cheaper two-bedroom homes and others had – contrary to regulations – taken in lodgers.  Twelve per cent of homes were overcrowded on the Estate.

Interwar housing on the Manor Estate. The narrow deep windows are a feature of much of Sheffield’s municipal housing in this period. © Keith Pitchforth and made available under a Creative Commons licence

For all that, most respondents praised their new environs and believed them healthier and one tenant described their relocation from Attercliffe to the Manor as moving to their ‘mansion on the circle’. (6)  There are some, knowing Manor’s more recent reputation, that would find that surprising.  We’ll tell that story next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Site Planning of Housing Schemes’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 8, No. 3/4 (Dec., 1920),

(2) Ruth Harman, John Minnis, Sheffield (2004)

(3) Timothy James Willis, The Politics and Ideology of Local Authority Health Care in Sheffield, 1918-1948, Sheffield Hallam University PhD, 2009

(4) Sheffield Social Survey Committee, A Report on Unemployment in Sheffield (prepared by ADK Owen) (1932) and Sheffield Social Survey Committee, A Survey of the Standard of Living in Sheffield (prepared by ADK Owen) (1933)

(5) Rachael Clegg, ‘Peace of mind and happiness on Sheffield’s Manor’, The Star, 20 July 2012

(6) A long-term resident of the Estate quoted in John Flint, David Robinson (eds), Community Cohesion in Crisis? New Dimensions of Diversity and Difference (2008)

The Weoley Castle Estate, Birmingham: ‘Everything that science and ingenuity can provide’

Tags

1930s, Cottage suburbs

In 1933, Neville Chamberlain opened Birmingham’s 40,000^th post-war council dwelling at 30, Hopstone Road on the Weoley Castle Estate.

Chamberlain acknowledged the cost of this ambitious building programme but he asserted: (1)

I do not think there is a ratepayer who will grudge that burden, or will be otherwise than glad to have made that contribution to enable his fellow citizens to live the lives of human beings and not of wild beasts.

These are not perhaps the values of the contemporary Conservative Party.

Castle Road ©Weoley Castle Library

The overwhelming majority of these new homes were built in Birmingham’s new cottage suburbs.  In the first flush of post-war idealism under the 1919 Housing Act, these homes were both expansive and expensive.  After housing subsidies were slashed in 1921, the majority of later homes would be smaller and non-parlour – on the Weoley Castle Estate only a little over ten per cent of homes had a parlour – but they remained, across the board, far better accommodation than any their new residents had previously enjoyed: (2)

In general the city’s estates provide good, substantial homes for the tenants; their elevations are ‘well-bred’ without the fripperies or pretentiousness that are so common in speculative building.

A contemporary map of the Estate shows the town planning principles applied to its layout.

The Weoley Castle Estate was begun in 1929 and completed in 1934.  With 2718 homes, it was one of the city’s largest. Typically, it was designed along broad ‘garden city’ lines with curving streetscapes, generous greenery and open space, and houses placed to provide variety and interest within the overall layout.  In Weoley Castle, ‘an interesting innovation’ had been to: (3)

design some of the roads with open forecourts to the houses, which not only adds to the spacious appearance of the setting of the houses but also gives the roads beautiful parkway effects.

An unnamed greenfield estate captured in the Bournville Village Trust’s ‘When We Build Again’

Plenty of tenants appreciated their new environment: (4)

We had the luck of moving to a brand new council house with a lovely garden back and front and plenty of fresh air.  We were the first tenants in the road which was Kemberworth Road, Weoley Castle. The back garden joined on to farm land where the cows used to come to the fence.

But, as we’ve seen elsewhere, these new suburban cottage estates were not without their problems, particularly in their early years as community facilities and perhaps a community ‘feel’ failed to keep pace with the scale of construction.

Stonehouse Lane. The new Weoley Castle Estate can be seen on the horizon to the left.

As the Bournville Village Trust survey concluded:

The neighbours are not so handy, or so obviously neighbours at all, since they are up trim paths and behind trim curtains.  A friendly and exhilarating quarrel in the court has become a thing of the past.  The shop and the public house are no longer just round the corner. In winter the estates are colder than their concentrated living quarters in the older districts, and not uncommonly the tenants on the wind-swept roads and shopping centres compare their new homes to Siberia.

We might suppose that there were many pleased to have left behind those ‘friendly and exhilarating’ quarrels but the practical difficulties of life in the new estates were real enough.

Castle Road, Weoley Castle 1938

With rents averaging 10s 5d on the suburban estates in 1931 and with one third of principal wage-earners working in the central wards and paying as much as two or three shillings a week in travel costs,  money – on an average wage of £2 a week – was tight.

Castle Square, Weoley Castle 1936

And, as we saw in the Watling Estate in London, there were less quantifiable pressures: (5)

Shabby clothes fit shabby streets.  The new estates are spruce and exact of their tenants something better than of old…Once it is moved from its familiar setting, the old furniture blushes for itself and soon its owner is blushing too.

So nice a house, cries Mrs X, demands nice furniture and nice window curtains too. It is at this moment that the genie appears, waving a hire-purchase form

Around one-third of Weoley Castle’s tenants came from designated slum clearance areas and almost a quarter of them moved back, finding the expense and life-style of suburban living too much to bear. When an advice bureau opened in Weoley Castle in 1934, one of its major roles was to advise tenants how to manage their hire-purchase debts.

The Weoley Castle Community Association was founded in September 1932 and seems to have been genuinely popular in these early years as it articulated the new residents’ grievances. Its newsletter, the Weoley Castle Review, enjoyed a circulation of over 1000 at peak.

One correspondent to the Review shared a common pride in the estate – ‘one of the most attractive in the country’ – but saw ‘no reason why we should be blind to the faults of the Estate and the disadvantages of living in a new area’.  The anonymous writer criticised the lack of schools and playing fields and lamented the lack of social life on the Estate but significantly he or she began with a complaint about transport.

Many of the Estate’s wage-earners worked at Austin’s Longbridge works around three miles to the south and they needed an early morning bus service. Others, for work, shopping or leisure, required a comprehensive service to the city centre, around four miles’ distant.  The latter was finally promised in 1934 after a petition presented by the Association bearing 1425 signatures.

There’s evidence also that a number of Birmingham’s estate community associations became increasingly politicised as the decade progressed.  Agitating for improved services was in itself a political act, of course, but the emergence of a Popular Front politics from the mid-thirties suggests the influence of an active (and influential beyond its numbers) left-wing strand in Birmingham’s tenants’ movement.

In February 1937, a Spanish Relief Fund in aid of the country’s beleaguered Republicans was set up in Weoley Castle.  In July 1939, the Review contained book reviews of three books on the contemporary Nazi threat, all critical of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

Meanwhile, issues far closer to home had radicalised council tenants in Weoley Castle and other Birmingham estates.  In January 1939, the Council proposed a general rent increase and a means test to assess rents in accordance with wages.  Discretionary rebates were to be offered to the poorest tenants but opponents claimed that 5000 tenants would be worse off.

From the Birmingham Evening Despatch, February 1939. The article is headlined ‘We Won’t Pay’, Chant Women Objectors.

A rent strike began and in February 5000 marched to the council in protest.  By May 1939, in what had become an increasingly tense stand-off between the Conservative council and tenants mobilised in a broad left-wing movement, it was said that 45,000 tenants had joined the rent strike.  In July, the Council capitulated. (6)

All this represents a powerful coda, perhaps a riposte, to the words of Neville Chamberlain at Weoley Castle in 1933:

When I look back at the type of house which was all that the working man could hope before the War, those great long rows of houses with their deadly monotony, haphazard in  their layout, without a garden, or a bathroom or electric light, or anything that we call an amenity – when I compare those houses with those which have been built by the Corporation, with everything that science and ingenuity can provide to make the occupants happy and comfortable, I feel we can say that we have gone a long way to carrying out those hopes which inspired us all during the War.

Menin Road and Jutland Road in Yardley Wood offer another reminder of the Great War ©Nigel Mykura and made available under a Creative Commons licence

I personally don’t doubt Chamberlain’s sincerity nor his desperate desire to avoid the bloodshed and destruction of another war but, ultimately, it was the inadequacy of his politics and its discrediting – in 1939 and more so by 1945 by which time democracy and collective power had defeated fascism – that created a post-war social democratic consensus which would build a new Britain.

A court in Pershore Street in the mid-1920s

In Birmingham where, for all its titanic efforts in the interwar period, there remained 38,777 back to backs, 51,794 homes lacking separate toilets and some 13,650 dependent on a communal tap, that New Britain was desperately needed.  And it, as we shall see, would make its own mistakes.

Postscript

Weoley Castle has had its ups and downs since then.  The Longbridge works employed 25,000 in their 1960s’ peak; 6000 when the works closed in 2005.  (A small production facility for Chinese-owned MG has reopened since.)   There is greater unemployment in the estate now, particularly among young people, significant child poverty, and also a higher number of the elderly and retired.

Over half its homes are – since Right to Buy – privately-owned.  Nearby universities and hospitals provide employment for some new resident professionals but it remains a disproportionately white working-class area.

Some see it, as the community website honestly acknowledges, as a ‘rough’ area – a perception encouraged by the bad news agenda of the media and ‘the “chav towns” image created in the wake of the demise of the Rover Group and the demoralisation that followed’.  But those who know it best have a different view: (7)

For the most part, residents enjoy living here, and tend to settle. In contrast to some other parts of the city, there is a degree of social cohesion that people really value. Weoley Castle is not a dormitory suburb – it is an unpretentious community full of decent caring people with lots of extended family groups.

Enough said.

Sources

(1) The Times, 24 October 1933

(2) Bournville Village Trust, When We Build Again (1941)

(3) Stanley Gale, Modern Housing Estates (1949)

(4) Quoted in Michael Hunkin, ‘Manors from Heaven’: the municipal housing boom and the challenge of community building on a new estate, 1929-1939 (2011).  The residents’ letter quoted later and other detail come from the same source.

(5) Bournville Village Trust, When We Build Again (1941)

(6) Graham Stevenson, Birmingham Communists in Action in the 1930s

(7) Weoley Castle Community Website: About Us

Carl Chinn’s book, Homes for the People. 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991) has provided detail and background to the above account.

My thanks to Weoley Castle Library for allowing me to use the Castle Road image above.  Other local images can be found on the Weoley Castle Gallery.