Clay Cross Council: ‘doing our job – and that’s to help the working class, the cream of the nation’

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1960s, 1970s

Last week’s post looked at the history of Clay Cross – its longer-term politics as well as the commitment to working-class interests and record of practical achievement of its new Labour council elected in 1963.  This post examines how housing and rents became central to that struggle and why its 1972 Rents Rebellion has been such a unique episode in Labour and local government history.

David Skinner, a still from the 1974 ITV documentary Confrontation at Clay Cross

Before 1979, housing was seen as local government’s most important role and here Clay Cross acted boldly. The Council had been quietly buying up the town’s substandard houses for some time, demolishing them or making them fit for purpose as appropriate. By 1971, over 550 slums had been cleared, 95 per cent of the total.

In July 1972, they went further by determining to buy every privately rented home in the area.  As Councillor Arthur Wellon stated: (1)

On this Council we like to think of ourselves as basic Socialists. We regard housing here as a social service, not as something the private sector can profit from.

Two hundred homes were transferred from the National Coal Board that year.  The Urban District, with a population a little under 10,000, had 1340 council homes, housing around half its population.

Post-war housing in Bestwood Park

At this point, the Council’s rents – at £1 12s including rates – were the lowest in the country.  Arrears were not pursued through the courts but by a personal visit from the chair and vice-chair of the Housing Committee.  Often they found tenants not claiming the benefits to which they were entitled and the policy proved effective as well as humane.

The ultimate test of these principles came with the passing of the Conservative Government’s Housing Finance Act in July 1972.  At a time when unemployment in the town stood at around 20 per cent, the legislation required the Council to raise rents by £1 a week.  In September, the Council formally resolved to reject all provisions of the new law.

That stance was overwhelmingly endorsed by local voters in the Council elections which followed and backed up by a rent strike called in 1973 supported by 84 per cent of tenants.  When Mr Skillington – the hapless Housing Commissioner sent in by Whitehall to collect the increased rents – arrived from Henley-on-Thames he faced complete non-cooperation, refused office space and staff.  He withdrew a few months later having failed to collect a penny of the increase.

But the law pursued its course more inexorably.  In July 1973, the courts found Clay Cross’s eleven councillors– Arthur Wellon, Charlie Bunting, Graham Smith, Eileen Wholey, George Goodfellow, Terry Asher, David Nuttall, David Percival, Roy Booker, David Skinner and Graham Skinner; working men and women, good trades unionists – guilty of ‘negligence and misconduct’ and they were fined a total of £6,985 plus £2,000 costs.

When the High Court rejected their final appeal in 1974, Charlie Bunting spoke for them all: (2)

We have one judge, not those three in there; that’s our conscience and our conscience is clear.

The eleven were disqualified from office and personally surcharged and new elections ordered. In the by-elections which followed in February, 1974, a 71.5 per cent turn-out returned ten of a ‘second eleven’ of Labour candidates pledged to pursue resistance; the other lost by just two votes.

Clay Cross Urban District Council, however, had just four weeks to run; it was abolished in 1974 – not through some proto-Thatcherite spite but by the general reorganisation of local government which took place that year.  The Housing Finance Act was implemented by North East Derbyshire District Council though Clay Cross itself continued to resist. [Please also read the comment below added by the former clerk of the Clay Cross Parish Council – the only council officer directly affected – who was fined and dismissed for his part in the struggle.]

Of 46 councils initially refusing to implement the Act, Clay Cross had been the only one to maintain its opposition to the bitter end – as Graham Skinner says, ultimately ‘a futile gesture’ but a necessary one.

In answer to the question ‘why Clay Cross?’, I hope I have provided some answers here. This was a distinct and close-knit town; some outsiders even call it isolated though I’m sure that’s not a local perception.  Its mining and manufacturing heritage runs deep – a history of hardship and resistance, of trades unionism and working-class politics rooted deep in its community.

From this – and through the ideals and activism of its elected members – emerged a council understood not as a distant, administrative body but as the heart and (in the very best sense) vanguard of its community: (3)

The men and women who were elected to serve on the council were not remote figures who did what the bureaucrats told them to do, but representatives of the working people of the town who kept faith with their electors. It was as simple as that.

All this, of course, is hard to replicate: unusual enough then and another world now as, from the 80s, we have witnessed working-class communities up and down the country ravaged by de-industrialisation and mass unemployment and the collateral damage these have wrought.

The days of steady, secure employment and strong trade unions forthright in its defence seem distant; the possibility of work and politics as proud and progressive badges of local identity long gone; a simple respect for working people (and for those, through no fault of their own, without work) as the backbone of our nation disappeared, sometimes derided.

And, to prevent this becoming a pointless exercise in sepia-tinted nostalgia, let’s acknowledge positive changes too – more people better educated, new opportunities and higher living standards for some (even as many of those advances have ground to a halt in recent years).

Marx Court, Clay Cross, housing for older people, opened by North East Derbyshire District Council in 1982: a nod to a radical past?

At any rate, Clay Cross will be hard to repeat. But it does hold lessons.  I don’t knock councillors, nor am I cynical about the energy and good intentions they generally bring to their work but Labour councils have become too willing to work with the contemporary grain of neo-liberal politics, scrapping within its interstices to wrest such small progressive victories as it allows.

This is seen most powerfully in the housing field where a proud council housing legacy is being squandered and ‘regeneration’ has become a tool to destroy communities in order to build ‘affordable’ homes which are nothing of the kind.

There remains a lesson from Clay Cross, not of an old politics but of a renewed politics where politicians are not technocratic figures managing the agenda of the day but true representatives of their communities spearheading a politics from below – a politics of, from and for the extraordinary ‘ordinary’ people who constitute the mass of our country.

Let’s leave the last word with Charlie Bunting again: (4)

I don’t think for one bloody minute we are heroes.  I think we are doing our job – and that’s to help the working class, the cream of the nation.

 Sources

(1) Michael Ewing, ‘The Home Truths: a Special Investigation into Housing’, Daily Mirror, 6 July 1972

(2) David Skinner and Julia Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross (1974)

(3) Skinner and Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross

(4) Paula James and Jill Evans, ‘Working-class Rebels with a Cause’, Daily Mirror, 3 December 1973

The 1974 ITV documentary Confrontation at Clay Cross is on YouTube.

For  more on the Clay Cross Rents Rebellion, the best source is the book by David Skinner and Julia Langdon.  Online accounts can be found on the Dronfield Blather blog and, from a more revolutionary perspective, ‘How Clay Cross Fought the Tories‘ on the website of the Socialist Party.

Neil Barnett, ‘Local Government and the local state; from crisis to crisis’, a paper for the panel Austerity, the Local State and Public Services at the PSA Annual Conference, 2013 also tackles the question of why Clay Cross’s resistance has proved so unique.

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Clay Cross Council: ‘an expression of the will of the people’

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1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Pre-1914

Clay Cross takes its place – alongside Poplar – as a hallowed place in the Labour pantheon: a site of struggle and resistance, a town where a Labour-led council fought valiantly for its people, whose socialism was less an abstract ideal than part of its living fabric.  All that came to a head in the famous 1972 Rents Rebellion.  But it was rooted in a history, community and politics of much longer vintage. This post will look at that at that longer story and try to answer the question why there, why then – and, by extension, why not here and why not now.

In the early nineteenth century Clay Cross was little more than a hamlet at a crossroads.  A cross stood at the intersection of Clay Lane and Thanet Street and from that it is said to have derived its name.  But its history begins in 1837 when George Stephenson drove a tunnel under the village and discovered iron and steel in the process.  Stephenson set up a company to exploit its potential which, after his death in 1848, became the Clay Cross Company.

Clay Cross works, 1929

The population of Clay Cross itself had tripled – to 1478 by 1841.  It was a company town and the Clay Cross Company was said to be a paternalistic employer, generous even – its workers’ housing comprised four rooms rather than the two which were typical.

In the mining industry, that paternalism didn’t amount to much.  In November 1882, an explosion of firedamp in the town’s Parkhouse No. 7 pit killed 45 men and boys.  An inquest jury, comprised of the local middle classes, found no negligence on the part of the Company but recommended that safety lamps be used in future.  It naturally also expressed its ‘deep sympathy with all the bereaved ones who had suffered in this calamity’.

Sympathy, however, was in short supply during the Great Lock-out of 1893 when local miners – resisting a 25 per cent wage cut – were laid off for nine months. Nor was it evident in 1910 when John Renshaw led the colliers of Parkhouse in a 14-week strike against the pittance paid for abnormal work.  Renshaw was dismissed; his comrades bought him a hawker’s cart so he could somehow continue to make a living.

James Haslam, commemorated in Chesterfield

Politically, resistance was also stirring. Labour representatives held a majority on the Clay Cross Urban District Council from its formation in 1894 to 1906. James Haslam, Clay Cross-born in 1842 and Secretary of the Derbyshire Miners’ Association, was elected as the local MP in 1906 and became its Labour MP when the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain affiliated to the party in 1909.  In 1919, John Renshaw, now described as a greengrocer, was elected a Labour councillor.  There was much to do.

Although, by 1919, some of the worst slums had been demolished, some back-to-backs knocked through, a small municipal scheme had been built in Broadleys, of 1800 houses in the town only 130 had baths and only 500 had WCs. (2)  The Council responded by purchasing an additional five acres of land for a £57,000 scheme to extend its Broadleys estate.

Early housing in Broadleys

Rents proved to be controversial, however.  The Ministry of Health demanded rents of 14s, 11s 6d and 9s (exclusive of rates) which the Council criticised as excessive.  In 1922, exactly fifty years before its much more famous rents protest and at a time when miners’ wages were being cut once more, the Council voted unanimously to reduce them. (3)

How Clay Cross miners survived during the nine-month coal strike four years later can only be guessed – their strike pay was exhausted after ten weeks – but poignant evidence is provided below in the image of Brannigan’s Jazz Band: twenty local miners, who toured the district in fancy dress raising money from well-wishers. (4)

Brannigan’s Jazz Band, 1926 © Fionn Taylor and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In 1931, plans for 16 new council houses on land at Clay Lane were announced.  Against those who were critical of such expenditure at a time of austerity, Councillor Renshaw made the essential ethical case for council housing (in the language of his day), as true now as it was then: (4)

If Capitalism has found some easier and better method of investing money other than building houses, then it must devolve itself upon the State and local authorities to provide them and give the working classes that share of comfort which should be theirs by right in a Christian country.

Moreover, because the financial case is just as strong, the Council pointed out that the houses, costing £300 17s to build (‘a great credit to the surveyor and the clerk’), would cost the ratepayer nothing and could be let at an inclusive rent of just 8s 6d. (5)

Council houses on Holmgate Road

As slum clearance took off in the mid-1930s, 63 houses were demolished under the 1930 Housing Act, displacing 229 people, and 14 houses built in Holmgate Road for some of those displaced.  One year later, in 1936, plans were announced for the construction of 64 houses and 14 bungalows for elderly people on the newly-acquired Angel Fields site.

Houses and bungalows on The Crescent, the Angel Estate

Thirty new houses would be built on the Estate after 1945 and by 1950 the Council had completed 290 new homes in all.  Much very poor property remained – Elbow Row was a terrace of one-up, one-down houses with ‘blind backs’,  ‘improved’ in 1960 by the Clay Cross Company by the addition of a single-brick lean-to at the rear. (6)  It was demolished in 1973 at the height of the Council’s ambition and radicalism.

This later chapter begins in 1960 when Dennis Skinner (brought up in a council semi on Meadow Lane, Holmgate) was elected to the Council.  Local Labour, it is said, had grown moribund in the 1950s when Skinner and others, less celebrated, revived the party.  Three years later, in 1963, Labour took all eleven seats on the Council and it would win every contest thereafter until 1974.

Dennis Skinner with brothers David and Graham (all Clay Cross councillors) and Gary and their parents © Daily Mirror, 1974

Crucially, although tribal voting can be conservative and established councils with a monopoly of power complacent, this Labour success was active and politicised, rooted in its community.  In the words of David Skinner:  (7)

The council as a unit was strong because it had developed its policies as an expression of the will of the people it served.  It knew those policies were right because of the growing political awareness in the town, because it was clear that people had learned to care what happened there, because  –  unlike in many local authority areas – between 65 and 75 per cent of them bothered to turn out and vote whenever there were elections.

This wasn’t the stuff of revolution.  For example, three ‘Darby and Joan Clubs’ were opened in the 1960s for the town’s senior citizens who were also (alongside those with disabilities) given free bus travel in 1971 and free TV licences in 1973.

When Margaret Thatcher abolished free school milk in 1973, the Council kept supplying its primary school children through a penny rate and the diversion of an increased chairman’s allowance.  It ran playgroups too and provided (with some help from the Sports Council) a brand-new Olympic-sized swimming pool to replace the near-obsolete one at the Miners’ Welfare and a pitch-and-putt course on a former slag heap.

The Victoria Buildings, former council offices in the High Street © Alan Heardman and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The opening of new council offices in an old building, a former hotel, on the town’s High Street was a deliberate symbol of the Council’s place at the heart of its community.  When Dennis Skinner performed the opening ceremony in July 1965 he declared that the public ‘will be the openers of the new offices. If public service is presented properly, the people will take an interest.’ (8)  And they did.

We’ll follow this story to its climax in the famous rents rebellion of 1972 in next week’s post and attempt to understand why Clay Cross has been so unique and distinct in its resistance to unjust laws and a hostile politics.

Sources

(1) Fionn Taylor, Parkhouse No. 7

(2) ‘Clay Cross Housing. Prospects in an Old Mining Town’’, Derbyshire Courier, 1 February 1919

(3) Derbyshire Courier, 11 February 1922

(4) John Renshaw, letter to Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, 19 March 1932

(5) ‘£300 Houses at Clay Cross’, Nottingham Evening Post, 8 June 1932

(6) Cliff Williams, Clay Cross and the Clay Cross Company (2005)

(7) David Skinner and Julia Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross (1974)

(8) Dennis Skinner, Sailing Close to the Wind: Reminiscences (2014)

The Mile Cross Estate, Norwich: ‘providing adequate living accommodation for all’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Norwich, contrary to the county town image that some may have of it (though that too was true), was a densely-settled, industrial city which came under Labour control in 1933.  The Council built over 7500 houses in the 1920s and 30s (twice the number of new private homes built in the same period) and rehoused some 30,000 people – almost a quarter of the population.  Mile Cross was the finest of its new estates.

The Cathedral from the castle battlements, 1933 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

It was an old city.  When HV Morton visited in 1927, he arrived (1)

knowing nothing about the city except that it has always made money, that it was once the third city in England, that when its weaving trade went north after the coalfields, Norwich just put on a flinty face and learned how to make women’s shoes.

Around 15 per cent of the workforce, men and women, manufactured shoes in the 1920s but with unemployment peaking at 20 per cent in 1933 and never falling below 10 per cent before the war, making money wasn’t always so easy. And away from the castle and cathedral were slums – around 4000 homes, housing over 10,000 of the city’s working class in 1919: (2)

small dwellings in scattered areas spread over the city, mostly within the old city walls. Many…are timber-framed, and therefore difficult to condemn as regards structural stability, but…they are lacking in light and air, and are damp, and deficient as regards sanitation.

But as James Bullough (the City Engineer), continued, ‘for the first time the public conscience had been awakened to the necessity of providing adequate living accommodation for all’ and the City Council determined to build 1200 new houses, 300 of these on 102 acres of farmland and brickfield purchased for £10,600 just west of the Aylsham Road – the future Mile Cross Estate.

Appleyard Crescent, Mile Cross, 1928 EPW021219 © http://www.britainfromabove

Not only that but the Corporation appointed SD Adshead (the leading contemporary figure in council house design and layout whose work we have seen in Stepney and Brighton) as consultant.  Adshead himself appointed four well-known local architects – Stanley Wearing, George Skipper, AF Scott and SJ Livock – to design some of the new homes and planned the new scheme as a community from the outset, with schools, churches, shops, pubs and community centres.  It would, naturally, be a garden suburb and with its fresh air and open space complemented by public allotments and parks.

Suckling Avenue © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

The first sixty houses were built by direct labour – at a cost of £690 each – after the Council had baulked at the high prices quoted by private builders and the first phase of development took place along the grand axial boulevard of Suckling Avenue.  Here and on Losinga Crescent (all the streets were named after historical worthies of the county) were the so-called ‘Architects’ houses’. (3)

Wearing, Adshead’s chief collaborator, wrote in the Architects’ Journal of the ‘abundance of good early 19th century work in Norwich’: a style, he argued, which leant ‘itself to a simple and dignified treatment for work of this nature’.  This is the neo-Georgian which typified much council house design of the period but in Norwich its good quality redbrick construction and pantile roofing give it a local, vernacular feel which is atypical.

Losinga Crescent four-bed home (with replacement windows)

At the other extreme were the 184 standard plan ‘Dorlonco’ houses erected in this first phase.  These were steel-framed homes developed by Adshead, Patrick Abercrombie and Stanley Ramsey in conjunction with the Dorman Long Company in Redcar, designed to be built on a mass scale but adaptable with a range of skins to suit local preferences.  Here in Mile Cross, they reflected the double-fronted neo-Georgian style of the estate’s other early homes but are marked out by their lower-quality brick and slate roofs.

A Dorlonco house on Bolingbroke Road

The Estate was extended in the later twenties, to a design by Bullough, to the south around a second axis formed by the pedestrian footway of The Lane and Burgess Road.  There was a deliberate attempt to use, both here and on the other Norwich estates, a range of design – a contrast to the terraces and bye-law housing of the pre-war period:

Over fifty types of houses have been planned, giving variety in accommodation and design, which has prevented the Corporation housing estates from becoming stereotyped in monotonous rows of dwellings, a contrast to the dreary view of similarly designed dwellings of pre-war days presenting a wearisome drabness all too familiar to us all over the whole country.

You’ll see this in the range of building materials employed at Mile Cross although most of the 148 concrete block houses and six all-steel houses have since been demolished.  There was some effort to incorporate the arts and crafts aesthetic of the time in the use of low eaves, roughcast rendering, hanging tiles and mock timber framing but in Norfolk they do different and, as the Norwich conservationists point out, this was a vernacular derived from Kent and Sussex rather than East Anglia.

Mile Cross Library © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

Alongside all this, community facilities followed relatively quickly – the first infants’ school in 1926 (and primary and secondary schools in due order), the Drayton Road shops in 1928, the local library in 1931 and the striking St Catherine’s Church in 1936.

The one-acre (grade II listed) Mile Cross Gardens, designed by Adshead and executed by the estimable City Parks Superintendent Captain Sandys-Winsch, were opened in 1929, their construction – and particularly their concrete shelters – used to give work to the city’s unemployed.

By 1932, the Mile Cross Estate comprised around 1400 council homes, two-fifths of the city’s total. (4)  The city had been eighth among county boroughs in its rate of construction under the 1924 Housing Act and would open its 5000^th council home in 1935. Large estates also grew in Earlham and Lakenham.

By this time, greater attention was being given to slum clearance. In the city centre areas of Pitt Street and Coslany Street, 3238 houses were cleared displacing a population of some 9873. (5)  The Housing Committee gave its attention to attention to the construction of flats ‘on Continental lines’.   The three-storey flats on Barrack Street were erected in 1936.

Bargate Court, Barrack Street, in 1938 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

The city, a Labour stronghold from 1933 to 2000, would continue to be on the ball – a prodigious and innovative builder of housing for its people.

In the early days, as was typical, these Corporation tenants were vetted for their ability to pay. The first tenants included a few shoe operatives but also clerks, engine drivers and teachers. But the Council also stated it would give preference to ex-servicemen (or their widows) and those for whom the ’physical and moral welfare of the applicant’s family [was] being endangered under existing conditions’.   The latter would be increasingly favoured as slum clearance took off.

Mile Cross shops © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

One long-term resident of Mile Cross moved to the estate from an inner-city slum when her brother contracted pneumonia: (6)

I can remember my mother saying she was the envy of her sisters because she had a bathroom. It led off the kitchen and the kitchen and bathroom had concrete floors which my mother, I can remember her doing it with red cardinal polish and that used to look quite nice, and a rug in front of her seat.

Another recalls the bath of his new Mile Cross home – ‘a luxury’ even if the bath was in the kitchen and the ‘kitchens weren’t plastered or nothing’.

Looking back, then, these are modest homes but the city’s acceptance of ‘the necessity of providing adequate living accommodation for all’ and seeking to do so, where possible, in some style was impressive.

Mile Cross Details, © Norwich City Council, Mile Cross Conservation Area Appraisal

When Morton visited canary-breeding was the working-class hobby of the day and the local football team played at a ground called The Nest.  The Canaries are still going strong – one badge of local identity, and another is council housing.  At peak, around half the population lived in council housing and, despite the failure of the City Council’s attempts to resist Right to Buy in the 1980s, the proportion remains high.  We’ll come back to Norwich – it’s close to my heart.

Sources

(1) HV Morton, In Search of England (1927)

(2) James S Bullough (Norwich City Engineer), ‘The Housing Problem’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol 53, January 1932

(3) Norwich City Council, Mile Cross Conservation Area Appraisal (Number 12, June 2009).  Much of the detail on the Estate is drawn from this excellent source.

(4) JJ McLean, ‘A Fine City, Fit for Heroes?’ The Rise of Municipal Housing in Norwich, 1900-1939. An Historical Perspective (ND).  Other detail on the city’s interwar housing is also drawn from this valuable account.

(5) Alan Armstrong, ‘Population 1700-1950’ in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds) Norwich Since 1550 (2004)

(6) Quoted in Sarah Housden (ed), Norwich Memories (2009)

As credited, a number of the images above are taken with permission from the collection of photographs taken by George Plunkett between 1931 and 2006.  If you’re interested in Norwich (and Norfolk) past and present, do visit the wonderful website put together by his son.

The Raffles Estate, Carlisle: ‘I was a lucky girl’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

I was born on the 25^th May 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edge of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.

Those are the first words of Margaret Forster’s memoir, My Life in Houses. (1) Raffles wasn’t the best council estate in Carlisle but it was built well – a garden suburb, designed by City Surveyor Percy Dalton, with plentiful green space, curving streetscapes, a variety of housing forms and just 12 homes to the acre.

Raffles Estate under construction, 1932 © Britain from Above, EPW040213

Heysham Park, opened next to the new estate in August 1934, added to that greenery and amenity with its paddling pool and miniature golf course.  A new church – St Barnabas; ‘like a glistening white palace’ in Forster’s words – added some surprising exoticism.

It is not so surprising then that a new council estate might be an opportunity for a sight-seeing visit as Hunter Davies recalls: (2)

When they were nearing completion, young families would walk round Raffles on Sunday afternoon to admire the new houses and all the greenery and the new shops.

All this describes an Estate which by 1994 was dubbed one of the worst in the country – part of a ‘No-Go Britain’ plagued by car theft, youth gangs and street violence.  The article continued, with an indecent relish, to quote a local resident: ‘If you’ve got a problem in Raffles, get a shotgun’. (3)

What happened?

Carlisle’s finest estate, as we saw last week, was probably Longsowerby, begun under the generous provisions and high standards of the 1919 Housing Act. Construction of the Raffles Estate started in 1926. It became the city’s largest interwar estate with 1518 homes by 1939, 1200 built under Wheatley’s 1924 Act when Carlisle built more council homes than any town of its size in the country.

Heysham Park, 2009 © BBC Cumbria

St Barnabas Church, ‘a glistening white palace’

All – apart from 24 purpose-built homes for the elderly built at Partridge Place after 1936 – were two- and three-bedroom houses.  Nearly all – a mark of the economy measures now in force – were non-parlour.  All had bathrooms, of course, when only one in five of Carlisle’s homes enjoyed such luxury but one unwelcome innovation were toilets accessed from the back-door – not quite outside toilets as they remained part of the main fabric of the house but the inconvenience was understandably resented.

Homes for elderly people, Partridge Place

The Estate was regarded as ‘a good place to live’ for those fortunate enough to be granted tenancies and, by the later 1930s, that was a representative cross-section of the local working class.  Its proximity to Caldewgate and the Carr’s biscuit works was a bonus to many though, in fact, around four per cent of heads of households were white-collar and shop employees.  A further 20 per cent were skilled manual workers but almost two-fifths were classified as semi-skilled and unskilled and – a sign of depressed times in 1936 – one-fifth were unemployed. While Carlisle as a whole would continue to be run by an anti-socialist alliance through the interwar period, Raffles was regarded as a Labour stronghold by 1930. (4)

Original council homes on Dalton Avenue

One of Hunter Davies’ interviewees remembers the Estate in the 1950s as ‘a safe, pleasant and happy place’ – somewhere you left the door unlocked when you went off to Silloth (Carlisle’s seaside) for the day and a neighbour would bring in the washing if it rained.

But for Margaret Forster, something had changed; it ‘was no longer spoken of in garden-city terms but as an estate getting rougher all the time for reasons no-one understood’.  Some roads had come to appear run-down; there was ‘a good deal of alcoholism which led to fights in some streets’. The Estate had acquired a reputation which tarred all its people, not just its ‘problem families’ and miscreants. (5)

Original council homes on Balfour Road

The disagreement is perhaps more apparent than real – a product of emphasis and intent rather than anything more substantive (and the Estate’s later decline was certainly real enough).  But Forster was growing disenchanted.  A bright girl who had passed her eleven plus, she recalls (honestly and slightly ashamedly) a snobbery which resented her modest council home and aspired to the middle-class life-style of her friends across the Orton Road.  Her house:

looked like a child’s drawing, and a child who had no talent for drawing.  It was crude in shape, even I could see that without knowing anything about architecture.  There were no distinguishing features – well, of course, there weren’t, the council’s money wouldn’t run to anything fancy.  The front door, like all the other houses on the estate, was painted a dismal shade of green, not fern green, not forest green, but a withered-cabbage green.

In this, there are echoes of Lynsey Hanley and her own experience of the very different Chelmsley Wood estate.  Hanley’s book Estates rightly gets a good press but it’s marked by a personal alienation – the sensitive Guardian-reading teenager disliked by her peers – which comes pretty close to replicating a demonisation of ‘chavs’ her thoughtful portrayal of the travails of social housing should avoid.

Houses on the corner of Orton Road and Dalton Avenue where Margaret Forster was brought up

Forster’s own criticism of her childhood home also seems a little harsh.  These maligned council houses look pretty good – solid, well-built, generously proportioned – when compared to the rabbit-hutch mass housing of today’s private developments. But she captures a shift – a changing perception of council housing from something looked up to to something looked down upon.

It’s hard to know what else would have changed at this time.  More ‘problem families’; more ‘problem families’ behaving badly?  Possibly but the pre-war demographics of Raffles were pretty mixed.  Nor are the alcoholism and domestic violence which Forster notes issues confined to the working class or council estates. No doubt similar phenomena existed in the posh houses but more discreetly or, to use the jargon, in a less problematised way.

Still, this fine-spun analysis becomes pretty irrelevant down the line.  A 2000 survey revealed Raffles to be the most stigmatised area of Carlisle – its most unpopular estate by far, rejected by fully three-quarters of local residents as a possible place to live. (6)

There was a wider context too:

Council housing is seen as a viable option by fewer and fewer Carlisle residents…The continuing flow of Carlisle tenants, both actual and potential, to the owner occupied sector will result in the sector emerging as a tenure of last resort – especially for the very young, the very old and the disadvantaged…Overall demand for council housing is likely to decline in future years and this will result in the growing over-supply.

At this point on the Estate itself, the void rate stood at around 30 per cent.

Boarded up homes on the Estate, 2006 © News and Star

A household survey conducted in the following year allows us a look beyond the media condemnations and popular denigrations.  Two thirds of Estate households were in receipt of some form of state benefit, for almost one third this was Income Support.  One in five respondents existed on a total annual income below £5000.  Twenty-five per cent of households were made up of single adults, 13 per cent were single-parent families. Twenty-eight per cent of the Estate’s population were children under 16.  Burglary rates were said to be five times the national average.

I don’t use the phrase myself but I guess this would come close to other people’s definition of a ‘sink estate’.  Let’s just say this is a large concentration of our fellow citizens living in poverty and let’s assume that many had other, less readily quantifiable, problems too.  So, yes, the Raffles community was in a bad way – while still the majority lived good and decent lives, of course.

Raffles Avenue showing landscaping and clearance

There were serious attempts to improve matters.  Between 1987 and 1995 Raffles received £16m of Estate Action Programme funding, mostly spent on measures to physically improve the Estate – traffic calming, landscaping, window replacements and so on.  In the following three years, £3m of Single Regeneration Budget funding went on employment and training initiatives.

All this, in the plaintive words of those that would regenerate the Estate, had created ‘no material change in the prosperity and stability of Raffles’.  If you took an unfashionably socialist position on this, you wouldn’t be surprised that such palliative measures had failed. The next steps, however, were more radical.

In 1999, the Raffles Area Report ‘set out a four-year programme of decanting, demolition and redevelopment’ which would reduce the number of council homes, ‘create opportunities for tenure diversification’ and allow for the Estate’s physical redesign.  Almost half the council houses on the estate – 642 – were to be demolished.

The other contemporary elements of this rejection of council housing and its legacy followed.  In 2002, the City Council established a Project Team with its preferred regeneration partners – the Riverside Group (a housing association), the Lovell Group (a private sector development company) and Ainsley Gommon Architects.  In July, Carlisle council tenants played their part – albeit by a rather narrow 52 per cent majority – by voting to accept the transfer of 7000 council homes to the Riverside Group’s local incarnation, the newly-formed Carlisle Housing Association.

The Raffles Vision was born and much has happened since. (7)

From this distance, perhaps this is best viewed in the changing tenor of local press headlines.  The News and Star headed a 2003 article on the regeneration of Raffles, ‘£100,000 for a New Home as Rundown Estate Goes Posh’.  By 2006, it was proclaiming Raffles ‘The Trendy New Place to Live’.  In 2013, The Cumberland News stated that the £30m investment had left ‘Carlisle Estate’s Bad Old Days in Past’. (8)

‘Regenerating Raffles’, Carlisle Focus, Spring 2004

The apparent hype seems largely justified.  Kath Queen, a Raffles resident for nearly 40 years and a leading light in the Estate’s Living Well Trust, believes it ‘has got better – by a long way…It’s created a different kind of community’.  Ken Swales said: (9)

I’ve lived here 45 years and love it. People don’t know what they’ve got in Raffles sometimes. It’s nice now. At one time you couldn’t leave your house, but it hasn’t half quietened down.

This anecdotal evidence is backed up by the statistics: overall crime down by 13 per cent, criminal damage almost halved and car theft reduced by 70 per cent.

New development on Brookside © Graham Robson and made available under a Creative Commons licence

There’s no denying a success here and one which comes directly from the regeneration playbook – clearance of unpopular council homes, the introduction of mixed tenure with a range of owner occupied, social rented and ‘affordable’ homes, a diversity of housing type, and £3m spent to bring former council properties up to Decent Homes Standard.

By 2014, 500 council houses had been demolished, some 262 new properties built.  Of these, just 49 were for affordable rent with 58 more in the pipeline.  And here’s the kicker: in 2011, Carlisle City Council identified a net annual shortfall of 708 affordable homes over the next five years. (10)

New detached home on Thomlinson Avenue

For all the success, there’s an Alice in Wonderland logic here which those in power in all parties have come to accept.  Yes, as that earlier, 2000, report suggested, council housing had become unpopular and ‘residual’ – seemingly confined to those who could aspire to nothing better. ‘Demolish them; build the homes that people want’ was a natural response.

And yet now what people want – and need – are genuinely affordable homes: the type of home that was cleared and the ones we’ve demolished up and down the country. Imagine £30m spent on building high-quality council houses; imagine a world where those homes weren’t residual but belonged to a mixed community to which people were proud to belong. Or, don’t imagine but remember – recall the Raffles Estate in its heyday.

People will say that these are different times but I’m an historian and take a longer view.  It is the property owning democracy of Thatcher (accepted by New Labour) that has come to appear transient, chimerical.  What remains – or should remain – is the duty of the state to decently house its people.  And to many there is once more a compelling logic that that duty is best fulfilled by building council homes.  Raffles provides a microcosm of all this.

Sources

(1) Margaret Forster, My Life in Houses (2014)

(2) Hunter Davies, The Biscuit Girls (2014)

(3) ‘No-Go Britain: Where, What, Why’, The Independent, 17 April 1994

(4) Jean Turnbull, ‘Housing Tenure and Social Structure: The Impact of Inter-War Housing Change on Carlisle, 1917-1939’, University of Lancaster PhD, 1991

(5) Margaret Foster, Hidden Lives. A Family Memoir (1995) and My Life in Houses

(6) Sheffield Hallam, ‘The Dynamics of Local Housing Demand’ (2000) quoted in ‘Raffles Vision Draft Final Report’ (2003)

(7) Carlisle City Council, ‘Raffles Regeneration’, Carlisle Focus Spring 2004

(8) Julian Whittle, ‘£100,000 for a New Home As Rundown Estate Goes Posh’, News and Star, 8 October 2003; Deborah Kuiper, ‘Raffles: The Trendy New Place to Live’, News and Star, 14 September 2006; Chris Story, ‘ £30m Investment Leaves Carlisle Estate’s Bad Old Days In Past’, The Cumberland News, 6 September 2013

(9) ‘Raffles: From Riots to Show Homes In 10 Years’, The Cumberland News, 6 September 2013

(10) Riverside, ‘Work starts on £5 million affordable housing scheme Raffles’, 16 June 2014

Some images above are taken from a BBC Cumbria post on the Raffles Estate which contains additional images and detail.

Carlisle’s Interwar Council Housing: ‘careful housekeeping…good and progressive government’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Carlisle claimed to have built more council housing for its size than any town in England in the interwar period.  This was an anti-Socialist council, committed (in its own words) to ‘careful housekeeping’ but also to ‘good and progressive government for the city’.  That, in this period, meant building housing and the Council took pride in the quality as well as the quantity of the houses it built. (1)

Ferguson Road, Longsowerby

Before 1914, the Corporation had built just 40 council homes – tenements provided in connection with a 1900 clearance scheme.  In 1917, it committed to constructing 600 for immediate needs and planned another 1500 for those living in unfit housing.  The scale of need was unquestionable – almost 15 per cent of the city’s homes were back-to-back; over 10 per cent were one- or two-room tenements. (2)

When that survey of housing need took place, Carlisle’s population included an additional 3000 munitions workers employed at the nearby Gretna Green works.  They provide a fine illustration of the power and reach of the state in a time of total war – an overall workforce of 15,000 creating the weapons of war and, from July 1916, pubs and breweries in the district under state ownership – a wartime expedient to keep local munitions workers at work free from undue distraction that somehow survived through to 1971.

In this context, a more benevolent expression of state power – the construction of homes – and its embrace by a conservative council might surprise us less though, of course, it wasn’t universally welcomed.  One Carlisle councillor blamed the working class for the housing shortage as ‘they would not allow landlords to charge economic rents’.

‘Ferguson Road and environs, 1932’: the Longsowerby Estate © www.britainfromabove.org.uk EPW040212

Nevertheless, the Corporation acted quickly to acquire land for building in May 1919 for the Longsowerby Estate, a mile to the south-west of the city centre, and plans for 225 houses were submitted in 1920.  In the event, only 98 houses were completed under the Addison Act but the estate would grow to contain 330 homes before the next war.

Coney Street, the Currock Estate

A small start was also made on the Currock Estate, just to the east, in 1921 – 40 homes built under Addison but, with progressive extensions, reaching a total of 1234 by 1939.

Of the 308 houses completed by 1923, all had ‘fixed baths’ (when only one in five of the city’s homes did).  Over half also had parlours but the tide was turning against such perceived extravagance.  Percy Dalton, Carlisle’s City Surveyor, was anxious to build to high and contemporary ‘garden city’ standards, but he allowed himself a sardonic view of the respectable working-class’s desire for a front-room sanctum: (3)

Whilst feeling that the ideal house should have a parlour, which should be properly used, and not regarded as a museum for stuffed birds, or a handy place to store gramophones and bicycles in, it must be realised that a roomy living room is the first essential for the home.

Future schemes would largely do without therefore despite the complaint of the Labour councillor who thought that ‘the working class had as much right to a parlour as anyone’.

Dalton also pointed to an unusual innovation in the later homes – an external washhouse: the ‘advantage of this, in keeping all steam out of the house, will be easily realised’.    But he kept quiet about a less popular aspect of this adapatation – the fact that the WC was also accessed from the back door.  It was not technically an outside toilet as it remained part of the main fabric of the house but the inconvenience was widely resented. The Corporation made a small concession to complainants by providing an additional outside door where homes were next to bus stops!

For these reasons perhaps, Longsowerby remained the most prestigious of Carlisle’s council estates.  At the time of its building, some complained that middle-class employees were taking tenancies at the expense of the poorer working classes, a fact seemingly borne out by Jean Turnbull’s research which shows 12 per cent of heads of household on the Estate in 1936 were white-collar workers (compared to no more than five per cent on any of the other estates).

Osborne Avenue, Wigton Road Estate

The small Wigton Road Estate, just to the west of the city centre, was begun under 1923 legislation but Carlisle’s building programme really took off after John Wheatley’s 1924 Housing Act under which the Council built more houses – at 45 per 1000 of its population – than any other county borough in the country. (4)

Marks Avenue, Raffles Estate

The Raffles Estate was begun on a 98 acre greenfield site in 1926 and – at over 1500 homes – would be the largest in the city by 1939.  Raffles has its own stories and story-tellers and we’ll look at the troubled history of the Estate in greater detail next week.

The Botcherby Estate – 544 houses on completion in 1933 – was built on 117 acres of land purchased in 1927 on the eastern periphery of Carlisle.  It soon became the most unpopular estate in the city mainly as a result of its inconvenient location.  Adversity bred a strong tenants’ association, active in the later 1930s in campaigning for improved bus services, better pedestrian access and local schools.

Holywell Crescent, the Botcherby Estate © Alexander P Kapp and made available under a Creative Commons licence

There were empty homes on the Estate at this time and requests for transfer to estates closer to the centre and employment on the western side of the city.  The small Fusehill Estate (renamed Vasey Crescent), built under the slum clearance legislation of 1930, was purposefully located close to the city centre.

Vasey Crescent

But Petterill Bank, designed for those displaced by slum clearance after 1935 was also located on the eastern fringe of Carlisle and similarly unpopular.  Perhaps because of its distance, it was the only estate provided with shopping facilities from the outset and it contained a larger number of four- and five-bedroom houses, in order to house larger families from the inner-city.

Welsh Road, Petterill Bank

In fact, Carlisle’s efforts to clear the slums – particularly the notorious Caldewgate district of the city – had begun early, in the 1920s and it had rehoused 525 families before 1935.  At around 75 per cent of those displaced this was a creditable record but in general council housing remained disproportionately the prerogative of the better-off working class.

In Carlisle, in particular, a good many council tenants – 42 per cent – were employed on the railways. Railway workers, particularly those in the higher grades, were a labour aristocracy at the time and, as the industry was the city’s largest employer, the figure is not altogether surprising.  But it remains highly disproportionate – in 1919 only around 13 per cent of the local workforce worked in the industry.  One tenant later recalled that railway workers were ‘like freemasons’ and almost always got council housing if they wanted it.

Labour councillors may have kept quiet about that particular unfairness but they were quick to accuse the Council of favouritism in its allocation procedures in its alleged preference for those who could pay reliably over those in greatest need.  In 1931 – and we might savour this as a symbol of very different times – it was said some new tenants had previously been owner-occupiers and some had sold homes in order to move into council accommodation.

Margaret Creighton Gardens

One other aspect of Carlisle’s interwar record deserves notice – the Council took justified pride in its housing for elderly people, particularly in the first and best of its purpose-built schemes, Margaret Creighton Gardens, opened in 1931.  Attractively designed and landscaped, the one-bed homes were also well-equipped and came at an all-inclusive rent of just 4s 4d a week.  One home in the development was allocated to a live-in nurse who enjoyed ‘free use of a telephone’.  It was a highly popular development and, to Percy Dalton, its ‘best recommendation’ was ‘the evident happiness and contentment of the old people’. (5)

The Corporation built 4702 houses in the interwar period and by 1939 around 27 per cent of occupied homes in Carlisle were Council-rented.  In the 1950s that proportion would reach 60 per cent and already some of the hopes and dreams of earlier years were a little faded. We’ll explore that story and the rise and fall of the Raffles Estate next week.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Jean Turnbull, ‘Housing Tenure and Social Structure: The Impact of Inter-War Housing Change on Carlisle, 1917-1939’, University of Lancaster PhD, 1991.  Other detail and analysis which follow are drawn from this very informative source.

(2) ‘Carlisle Housing Scheme’, Yorkshire Post, October 6 1917

(3) Percy Dalton, Deputy City Surveyor, ‘Some Aspects of Housing in Carlisle’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, November 1923; vol. 44, no. 11

(4) John H Jennings, Geographical Implications of the Municipal Housing Programme in England and Wales, 1919-1939’, Urban Studies 1971 vol 8, no 2: pp121-138

(5) Percy Dalton, City Surveyor and Water Engineer, ‘Recent Improvements in Carlisle’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, February 1935; vol. 56, no. 2