The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, Part 2: Failed Post-War Visions?

Tags

1960s, 2000s, Regeneration

I’m pleased to feature this guest post by Gerry Mooney of The Open University in Scotland, a follow-up to last week’s post on the historical context of Glasgow’s post-war housing. You’ll find additional details of Gerry’s work and writings at the end of the post. 

Introduction

Glasgow Corporation entered the post-1945 era with a vision of a radically different Glasgow. This was to be reflected, not least, in the built environment of the city and in its housing. Informed by municipal socialistic values, Glasgow constructed greater numbers of public sector high rise housing developments than any other city in Western Europe in the post-1945 era.

Carmunnock Road, Castlemilk, 1956. To the southern boundary of Glasgow, Castlemilk was one of the four large outer estates built in the post-1945 era.

Attempting to address historic problems of slum and overcrowded housing, by far the worst in the UK, the city embarked on a large-scale programme of high rise developments.  Together with a massive programme of low rise housing estate development across the city, and the construction of four large ‘peripheral’ housing estates on the city’s outer-edges (in Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok), by the 1980s Glasgow Council was the largest public sector landlord in Western Europe with over 186,000 houses under its control. 63 per cent of the population of the city living in publicly rented housing, in what was widely termed ‘corporation housing’!

A map of Glasgow showing the principal locations mentioned in the text

The development at Red Road, located in the Balornock and Barmulloch area, approximately 4 miles north east from Glasgow’s City Centre, was to become the most iconic of Glasgow’s post-War housing developments. Few council estates (or ‘schemes’ as they are generally referred to in Scotland) have been so often in the limelight and for so long, even if much of that was for negative reasons. (1) They were the highest public sector tower blocks in Europe at the time of opening in 1971 (2).

The Red Road Flats under construction in the 1950s

Built between 1964 and 1969, the eight towers, which ranged from 28-31 storeys, were to house almost 4700 people. At almost 300 feet high, the views from the upper floors of the blocks extended well beyond Glasgow to the mountains of Argyll to the West, Stirlingshire to the north and almost through to Edinburgh in the East. The blocks were readily visible to people arriving in Glasgow from the North and from the East by train or car and for the past 40 years or so have dominated the skyline of the city.

The Red Road Flats, an image said to be from 1967

For their new tenants, the Red Road Flats, together with Glasgow’s other council housing developments, represented a vast improvement on the slum housing which they had lived in previously. It was the views that attracted people, but the hot and cold running water, inside toilet and bathroom, that they had more than one bedroom and a separate kitchen, all of which were generally absent from the older nineteenth century tenements. (3) These flats were symbolic of an era in which state provision of affordable housing to rent was highly desirable and when there was considerable political investment by mainly Labour-controlled local authorities.

The Red Road Flats, undated but probably from the late 1960s

However, the architecture and construction of the blocks, steel-framed concrete slabs (the only Glasgow high-rises built in this way) in a style since then referred to as ‘Modernist Brutalism’ (4), was the subject of early complaints, reflected in difficult to heat and draughty houses. It wasn’t too long before the Red Road became not a hallmark of Glasgow’s advance in public sector housing design but a symbol of poorly constructed and hard to let council housing.

From being one of the solutions to Glasgow’s post-1945 housing crisis, the Red Road development (and other high-rise estates in the city) came to be regarded as places of decline – and of failure. To be housed in the Red Road also came to be a sign of personal failure on the part of tenants who had little other option than to take a house in the flats. ‘The Red Road’ – no other term was required – became a byword and symbol of poverty, social problems, alienation and exclusion.

In its last few years, the Red Road has been used to house students and more recently asylum seekers who have come to Glasgow as part of the UK Government’s ‘dispersal’ programme.  This has seen the city take in more refugees that any other city outside London.

An image from the first phase of demolition in 2012

Increasingly Glasgow’s high rise blocks have come to be regarded by the Glasgow Housing Agency, the body that took over the city’s public sector housing under stock transfer in 2003, as a burden with many of the high-rises lined up for demolition. In recent years this has come to be a frequent occurrence as demolition is advanced as the latest solution to Glasgow’s housing problems. The first two of the Red Road blocks were demolished in June 2012, the rest came down this month.

Back in early 2014, it had been announced that the remaining Red Road Flats would be blown-up as part of the Opening Ceremony of the Twentieth Commonwealth Games, being held in the city in July and August.  This demolition was to be beamed live to huge screens a few miles away at Celtic Park. For the City Council and Commonwealth Games leaders, such demolition signified the ‘brave new world’ that Glasgow was allegedly to enter.  In the words of the leader of the Labour-controlled Glasgow Council, it would be be ‘symbolic of a changing Glasgow’. (5)

However, within days the decision had already attracted considerable opposition from community activists, artists, politicians, and a petition started within hours of the news attracted well over 17,000 signatures in less than a week. It caused a furore that went well beyond Glasgow. Scottish and UK newspapers carried the story as did local TV and radio stations and the BBC online news site.  Various social media sites were heavily populated with Red Road commentary and stories. On April 13 – only a week after the initial proposals to demolish were made public – the Commonwealth Games organisers announced that they were abandoning their plans amid concerns relating to ‘safety and security’

Concluding Thoughts

There is so much more that could be written about the Red Road Flats. Few council estates have had so much attention, reflected in countless art works, photographic exhibitions, a film and a novel and they have appeared in many documentaries and on television dramas. (6)

A burnt-out car and children at play, Red Road Flats, 1969. Here we can see the new high rise blocks with older tenements in the foreground to the right. The lack of amenities meant that children had to be innovative in how they played, as here with a burnt-out car.

At a surface level, the demolition of the Red Road Flats exemplified the argument that Glasgow’s extensive post-war investment in poorly designed and built high-rise council housing was a strategic social and economic blunder. But there was a deeper level to the symbolism of the demolition of Red Road.  It somehow manages to cue to a wide audience that it is waste of time and money to try and provide council housing for working-class people. It always ends up in failure.

Such views are not difficult to find today. As we approach the last episode in the half century life of the Red Road Flats, stigmatising and negative images and accounts of social housing – and of social housing tenants – flourish far and wide. (7) But it is not social housing that has failed in Glasgow – or elsewhere.  Not is it social housing tenants who have failed.  Many of the people rehoused were given little opportunity other than to accept a home to rent in a badly designed block of flats.  These flats were often built in the fastest time possible without due attention to facilities and amenities – and certainly without the level of provision that tenants in JG Ballard’s High-Rise enjoyed. 

The remaining Red Road Flats awaiting demolition in October 2015 © Hilary Mooney

The demolition of the Red Road Flats in October 2015 is also a demolition of an important part of working class history in Glasgow. It sweeps away a sense of the past, of key aspects of working class Glasgow folklore, as was the case with the demolition of the tenements beforehand. While it is important to recognise the problems that plagued the Red Road, we should acknowledge that it was home for many Glaswegian families and for people newly arrived and seeking refuge from wars and persecution overseas. Much more could have been done for all these tenants and for the Red Road area more generally.

An earlier image of slum clearance and redevelopment in Hutchesontown

This latest round of demolitions has strong echoes of the past: the slum clearances of the 1930s and of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The historic legacy of the massive changes that took place in the geography and built environment of post 1945 Glasgow under ‘comprehensive redevelopment’,  the wonderfully evocative term used by politicians and planners to describe what was little more than widespread demolition, continues to shape contemporary Glasgow. As the political elite and city planners see in the latest phase of demolition a new Glasgow of the future, we should not forget that we have been here before, as this 2006 statement from the City Council reminds us:

The skyline of Glasgow is set to be radically transformed, as swatches of high-rise tower blocks make way for thousands of new homes across the city. Glasgow is enjoying a real renaissance. We’re delivering on better housing and we have regained our sense of ambition. This is an announcement that looks to the future and we are determined we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Arguably no British city has been subjected to so many visions of bright housing and urban future as Glasgow. While some of the historic problems of overcrowding have been addressed and new houses built, enormous problems remain in the lack of good quality, affordable social housing to rent for countless numbers of people.

Sources

(1) Referring to council housing estates as schemes in Scotland derives from the process by which new housing plans – or schemes for new housing – were prepared by local authorities and submitted for approval by the Scottish Home and Health Department in the 1930s and throughout the post-1945 era.

(2) The Red Road Flats have all too often been referred to as the highest municipal housing blocks in Europe. However, they weren’t even the highest blocks in Glasgow. That honour – such as it is, belonged to the ‘Gallowgate Twins’ – two blocks of   located in the Helenvale and Bluevale area of Dennistoun, a largely tenement district in the inner east end of Glasgow. Built between 1967 and 1966, they reached 31 storeys and contained 348 flats. They were demolished floor by floor during 2015.

Photographer Chris Leslie has done fantastic work in capturing the demise of Glasgow’s high rise flats – including the Gallowgate Twins and the Red Road Flats.  His multimedia project, The Glasgow Renaissance, offers images and footage of a rapidly changing skyline.

(3) See personal histories and stories at: http://www.redroadflats.org.uk

(4) See John Grindrod (2014) Concretopia, Brecon: Old Street Publishing and Owen Hatherley (2010) A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, London: Verso.

(5) Gerry Mooney, ‘Red Road flats saga is a reminder that attitudes to council housing are vile’, The Conversation, April 17 2014

(6) Gerry Mooney, ‘Red Road flats saga is a reminder that attitudes to council housing are vile’, The Conversation, April 17 2014

(7) See the comments made by Guardian readers in response to the article by Owen Duffy, ‘End of the Red Road: Residents Mourn Glasgow’s High Rise Dream Gone Wrong’, The Guardian, August 18 2015

(8) Chris Leslie, ‘Disappearing Glasgow: documenting the demolition of a city’s troubled past’, The Guardian, April 22 2015

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the The Open University in Scotland, his academic profile here.  For additional information and writings, see his OU OpenLearn page. He has also written for The Conversation and you’ll find his dedicated pages here.  Follow Gerry on Twitter at @gerrymooney60.

The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, Part 1: Glasgow Housing in Historical Context

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s

I’m delighted to feature this guest post by Gerry Mooney of The Open University in Scotland and its follow-up next week. You’ll find additional details of Gerry’s work and writings at the end of the post. 

Introduction

On October 9 2015, the BFI London Film Festival screened the UK première of the late JG Ballard’s 1975 novel, High-Rise. (1) The story revolves around the residents of a 40 storey tower block and the gradual deterioration in relations between them all. Elsewhere in October 2015 other high-rise tower blocks have been in the news. Two days following the London screening, a set of high-rise housing blocks in Glasgow was demolished. (2)

Demolition of the remaining Red Road flats, October 11 2015 © The Scotsman and John Devlin

At one level there appears to be little to connect the fictional account of life in a high-rise as described by Ballard and the reality of what was life for the residents of some of the highest tower blocks in Europe at the Red Road in Glasgow. Ballard’s tower block was equipped with all the necessary amenities that its residents –all middle-class professionals – would wish to have around them: swimming pools, a supermarket, school and so on.

The Red Road Flats awaiting demolition, October 2015 © Hilary Mooney

While the Red Road flats had an underground bingo hall and some limited shopping facilities nearby, the lack of amenities – particularly for younger residents – was a hallmark of what came to be regarded as a failed housing experiment. The class structure of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats was sharply distinct from that of the tower block in Ballard’s story. This was not a place for middle class professionals – but for working class Glaswegians, many of whom who had previously been living in housing that was often run down and unfit for human habitation, largely in old tenement blocks in central areas of the city.

A map of Glasgow showing the principal locations mentioned in the text

Glasgow’s Housing in Historical Context

The rationale behind the construction of the Red Road Flats, and their subsequent decline, can best be understood when placed in the context of Glasgow’s historic housing problems and patterns of industrial decline in the post-1945 era.

The 1920s Mosspark Estate in the south-west of the city: an early cottage suburb © Wikimedia Commons

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the first waves of council housing development following the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act – and subsequent housing legislation in 1924, 1930 and 1935, Glasgow Corporation built a number of housing estates across the city. In doing so a particular classed geography came to characterise the landscape of Glasgow at that time.

Moorepark housing scheme in the Govan area, photographed in the 1970s: a typical 1930s Glasgow slum clearance estate. Moorepark was widely referred to as ‘Wine Alley’, ensuring its notoriety. © Sean Damer

Each of the inter-war housing acts provided accommodation for different classes of Glaswegians with housing built under the auspices of the 1919 Act representing the best housing – for what was then the labour aristocracy of industrial Glasgow. In the 1930s, by contrast, poor quality slum clearance housing was built for a lower class of tenant – and the housing constructed to very different, and as befitted the target population – much poorer standards, even if they were better than the dilapidated tenement slums. (3)

Carnoustie Street tenements, 1930s, in what is now the long demolished Tradeston area south of the River Clyde

Despite the building efforts of Glasgow Corporation during the 1920s and 1930s, Glasgow emerged from World War Two with enormous housing problems. It was then by far the most overcrowded city in the British Isles. 44 per cent of the entire housing stock was considered to be overcrowded and, in figures which today defy belief, 1/7^th of the entire Scottish population, note Scottish population not just the population of Glasgow, lived within 3 square miles of central Glasgow.

Post-1945 Glasgow: What is to be Done?

As with other UK cities, urban and regional planning was gaining momentum, not least as a means of addressing the widespread social and economic problems that characterised many of the older industrial cities and conurbations at the time. Glasgow’s problems – and those of the Clydeside conurbation more generally – were among the worst, if not the worst, in Britain. Together with the severe overcrowding problems, many houses were unfit and/or lacked basic amenities. Poverty, unemployment, ill-health and long-term problems of economic and industrial decline were all too evident.

Sir Patrick Abercrombie (to left) and Robert Matthew, joint authors of the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan

Headed by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan of 1946 (4) called for the decentralisation of Glasgow’s population who would be rehoused in purpose built new towns and in ‘overspill’ areas. ‘Overspill’ suggests a rather technical approach to planning but this was nothing more than the large-scale social and spatial engineering of a substantial proportion of Glasgow’s population. In turn industry would be directed away from the city to these overspill districts and new inward investment from foreign companies encouraged to avoid Glasgow.

The centre of Glasgow re-imagined in the 1945 Bruce Report

The CVRP’s recommendations stood in sharp contrast to the conclusions of another major planning report of the time. Produced for the Corporation of Glasgow, The Bruce Report of 1945 (5) was the work of the Corporation’s Chief Engineer, Robert Bruce. Its proposals were very different to those that would emerge in the CVRP a few years later in that it recommended the large-scale redevelopment and rebuilding of Glasgow to enable its growing population – then approaching its 1951 peak of 1.1m – to be rehoused entirely within the existing city boundaries. This would necessitate the wholesale clearance of huge areas of central Glasgow and the development of four large housing estates on the outer edges of the city – often referred to as ‘peripheral’ or ‘outer’ estates – and numerous other smaller council estates across the city.

While the fashion of the time for lower density housing was reflected in Bruce’s proposals, it was to become evident during the late 1940s and early 1950s that Glasgow would not be able to rehouse its population within the existing confines of the city. The expansion of the city into neighbouring districts was prevented by the establishment of a green belt around Glasgow, which meant that population overspill was the only answer – or the building of new housing estates on the periphery to higher densities than had been envisaged in the Bruce Plan. This created a legacy that was to come back and haunt the city in the period to follow, and which continues to shape Glasgow’s housing estates today.

The demolition of tenements and their high-rise replacement shown in an undated photograph from Parliament Road in Townhead.

The conflict between these two competing visions of post-war Glasgow was to shape the development of the city throughout the post-war period. Each of the reports saw important proposals enacted but the overspill and new town proposals of the CVRP came to dominate the post-1945 planning of the Clydeside conurbation and within that, of course, Glasgow itself.

Hutchesontown Area B, 1961

Taken together, the Bruce Plan and CVRP led to the large-scale demolition of many working class residential districts in Glasgow – and the ‘decanting’, displacement and rehousing of upwards of 250,000 Glaswegians. Older tenemental areas were bulldozed, family and community life disrupted, and older senses of attachment and of belonging to particular places were also disrupted in the process. For Bruce this was a radical plan, a ‘surgical plan’ in his words for the renewal of Glasgow through what today may be referred to as a process of ‘creative disruption’.

From the Peripheral to the Vertical: Glasgow Embraces High-Rise

With the peripheral estates under development in the 1950s, amidst the growing awareness by Glasgow Corporation that it was to lose a substantial proportion of its population through overspill, the city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development.

In 1947 a Glasgow Corporation delegation travelled to the French city of Marseilles to see at first hand the new tower blocks designed by famous Swiss architect, Le Corbusier as part of his Cité Radieuse (Radiant City). Constructed between 1947 and 1952, this was to be a hugely influential development, not least on the visitors from Glasgow.

Moss Heights, 1953 ©The Glasgow Story (Glasgow City Archives, Photographic Series)

In 1953 Glasgow’s first ‘multi-storey’ housing was constructed at the Moss Heights, in the Cardonald area in the South West of the city. On their opening the then Chairman of Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee commented: (6)

Let the planners check that all available city land is being built on. Let them push the frontier upwards instead of outwards. Where 10 floors are planned let them build 20 instead.

The scene was thus set for Glasgow’s foray into high-rise housing and the development of these blocks over the next half century or so was to reshape the city in ways that few could have imagined at the time.  We’ll examine what followed in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Chris Hall, ‘Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level’, The Guardian, October 3 2015

(2) BBC News, ‘Glasgow’s Red Road Flats to be Demolished Later this Year’, BBC News online, August 3 2015

(3) Sean Damer, From Moorepark to Wine Alley: The Rise and Fall of a Glasgow Housing Scheme, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1989)

(4) Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H Matthew, Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946, Edinburgh: His Majesty’s Stationery Office (1949)

(5) Robert Bruce, First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Glasgow: Corporation of the City of Glasgow (1945). For more on Bruce’s proposals, see BBC 4: Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain, A Revolution in the City: The Bruce Plan for Glasgow, August 21, 2013 and ‘The Bruce Plan‘ from the bestlaidschemes.com website.

(6) From the Glasgow Evening Citizen, quoted in Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Will Glasgow Flourish?, Glasgow: GCPH, 2007: p16

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the The Open University in Scotland, his academic profile here.  For additional information and writings, see his OU OpenLearn page. He has also written for The Conversation and you’ll find his dedicated pages here.  Follow Gerry on Twitter at @gerrymooney60.

The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester II: ‘a victory for the people’

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week we looked at the pre-war origins and development of the Saffron Lane Estate.  Today, we look at how the Estate has changed since 1945. It’s a good illustration of how council housing has evolved in recent years but also a tribute to the strength and resilience of its residents.

Homes on Southfields Drive

Leicester, with its light industries and consumer-based trades was never immune to economic downturns but had fared well in comparison to areas of traditional heavy industry.  In 1936, the League of Nations Bureau of Statistics identified Leicester as the second richest city in Europe and from the mid-50s the local economy grew and diversified again even as its established focus on textiles and shoe manufacture declined.

As late as 1993, 29 per cent of Saffron’s workers were skilled craft workers and 17 per cent were unskilled.  Just seven years later, only 12 per cent were classified as skilled and the numbers in unskilled occupations had doubled.  Ten per cent now worked for agencies, rising to one in three of those under thirty.  As unemployment rose, the consequences of this rise of insecure, unskilled employment were exacerbated.  (1)

Saffron Lane

By 2007, Leicester was ranked as the 20th most deprived local authority region in the country and parts of the Saffron Lane Estate as among the 5 per cent most deprived of all areas in the country.

Leicester’s (relatively) prosperous working-class had declined and on council estates up and down the country this change was amplified by the changing nature of council housing.  Once (as at the time of the Estate’s founding) it was reserved for those who could pay; increasingly – as needs-based assessment took over in the 1970s and the housing stock was drastically diminished through Right to Buy in the 1980s – it was allocated to those who (through no fault of their own) couldn’t.

Still, a 2003 survey suggested that the Estate remained popular with most of its residents. Sixty-nine per cent professed a strong attachment to the area; 76 per cent didn’t want to move.  This, no doubt, reflected the stability of the community – almost four fifths had lived on the Estate for over ten years. While Leicester is among the UK’s most diverse communities, the Saffron remained a ‘white island’ – 92 per cent of its population were white British.  Almost one third of residents felt their British nationality their key identity.  (2)

One young woman who lived in a council house on the Saffron Lane Estate in the seventies might seem typical of some of its new realities – married at 18, three children by 22 and a single mother by the time she was 25, working in a series of low-paid, dead-end jobs.  She liked writing though and completed her first book in 1975.  It did well, this Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But, for Sue Townsend, it never was just history and never one she forgot: (3)

I’m a child of the municipal. Everything good had this word carved above its grand entrance. In Leicester, where I was born and still live, there were municipal libraries, majestic solid buildings with beautiful entrances, windows and doors, oak furniture and bookshelves. Then there were municipal baths, which had a swimming pool and what were called slipper baths…There were municipal parks, which were delightful places in which to take the air.

The Saffron Lane Estate’s library wouldn’t have been her local as a child (she was brought up in a post-war prefab to the south) but must surely have resonated.  The Southfields Library and Infant Welfare Clinic, opened in 1939, was an extraordinary and eye-catching building. Inspired by Stockholm’s Central Library or possibly Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove tube station, designed by Leicester architects Symington Prince and Pyke, it’s a Moderne masterpiece, constructed of reinforced concrete with red brick cladding, now Grade II listed.

Southfields Library. The Leicester City coat of arms shown above can be seen above the main entrance. © Ned Trifle and made available through a Creative Commons Licence

Less reverentially, locals called it – for obvious reasons – the Pork Pie Library and that’s its official name now too.  (It’s nice to see as well that it’s located on Attlee Way.)  A major refurbishment last year has brought a theatre area at the rear back into use, a computer suite has been installed for adult education and a new kitchen will serve as a lunch club. It’s good to see a community landmark still giving community value. (4)

Other things came and went (or almost went) on the Estate.  The Saffron Lane Sports Centre north of the Estate was opened in 1967 and was the first in England to have a synthetic surface running track.  It came close to closure in 2001 but received a £1.4 million refurbishment from the City Council in 2006 and remains well used.

Saffron lane velodrome

The velodrome, opened in 1968 and once the national stadium, was demolished in 2009 – derelict through a combination of its open-air design and years of neglect.  It’s now a site for new social and affordable housing.

These changes mark the effort that has gone into regenerating (no scare quotes this time) the Estate and supporting its community in recent years.  The Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council was established jointly by community leaders and the City Council in 1976.  It currently manages three projects – the Saffron Resource Centre providing a range of advice and aid, Saffcare providing day-care services for elderly people and Saffron Acres. The latter took over 12 acres of disused allotments in 2006; its latest venture, employing and training young people, is to sell – via the Central England Coop – its own plum jam and apple chutneys. (5)

The Neighbourhood Council has moved into the housing field too. In 2014, it acquired (for the nominal sum of £1 from the City Council), thirteen acres of land destined to form what’s claimed as ‘Europe’s biggest eco-housing project’.  Four one-bedroom flats, 23 two-bedroom houses, 20 three-bedroom houses and three four-bedroom houses – all built to sustainable Passivhaus standards – will be built and managed by the East Midlands Housing Group to house those currently on the council housing waiting list. The Homes and Communities Agency has provided £1.5m funding.

An artist’s impression of the new ‘eco-homes’ being developed jointly by the Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council and the East Midlands Housing Group

Times have changed.  Many, though not those currently in power nationally, would like them to change again but, for the time being, as Leicester’s mayor Sir Peter Soulsby acknowledged: (6)

At one time the council would have built council houses but we can’t anymore because there just isn’t the cash or the powers to do it. So what we are doing is using our assets and our buildings much more creatively and enabling community groups to do it.

What about those Boot houses we read about last week though?  There were quite early problems with damp and deterioration but they survived.  By the 1980s, however, they were showing serious structural problems caused by the corrosion of metal reinforcements in the concrete frames and the use of clinker in the concrete.

An undated photograph of Boot houses on the Estate showing signs of deterioration

In 1983, the City Council took the decision to replace them, ‘one down, one up’.  Five hundred had been replaced by 1989 when money ran out.  At this point, the Council looked to a private developer who proposed replacing the 500 Boot houses remaining with 800 new homes.  This was a threat to an existing community and treasured environment that the Estate’s residents found unacceptable – they voted by 86 per cent to support an extension of the Council’s existing phased scheme even though it might mean in some cases a wait of 27 years for replacement housing.

New build on Broughton Road

At the same time, the Saffron Boot Housing Action Group was formed to speed things up.  Another solution was devised in this era when the very notion of council construction had become taboo:  a 50/50 partnership with a local housing association was offered.  Tenants wanted to stay with the Council and stuck out.  In the end, a 65/35 council/housing association split was agreed. (7)

Arthur Chimes

When the last of the 972 remaining Boots homes was demolished in June 1997, Arthur Chimes of the Housing Action Group, could declare it – that rare thing – ‘a victory for the people’.

In its own way, the Saffron Lane Estate has been that too.

Sources

(1) Leicester City Council, ‘Local Employment Issues in Saffron and Eyres Monsell’, Strategic Planning and Regeneration Scrutiny Committee, 19 February 2004

(2) Asaf Hussain, Tim Haq, Bill Law, Integrated Cities: Exploring the Cultural Development of Leicester (2003)

(3) Sue Townsend, ‘My Heartlands’, The Observer, 24 April 2005

(4) English Heritage listing details and Dan J Martin, ‘Leicester’s Pork Pie Library to close for four months’, Leicester Mercury, November 12, 2014

(5) For full details on the range of activities, go the website of the Saffron Resource Centre.

(6) Laurna Robertson, ‘Land deal for country’s largest affordable Passivhaus scheme’, Inside Housing, 2 May 2014 and BBC News, Leicester, ‘Leicester’s eco-homes build is “Europe’s biggest” project’, 30 April 2014

(7) Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998)

The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester I: ‘moving into paradise’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Back in the day, some people called the Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester ‘Candletown’.  Others called it the ‘Conks Estate’ which wasn’t meant kindly.  To understand these nicknames is to uncover the rich history of the Estate – the city’s first large-scale interwar housing scheme – and its community.

Aerial view of the Saffron Lane Estate, 1927

Leicester had grown rapidly in the later nineteenth century and had, for the most part, prospered but that growth – and the exigencies of war – had led by 1919 to severe pressures on housing.  The Council estimated it needed to build 1500 homes in the next four years to satisfy demand.   In fact, the City took seven years to build just 746 new homes under the 1919 Housing Act.

The Health Committee didn’t pull its punches, expressing its ‘increasing alarm and grave concern’ at the ‘overcrowding existing in the dwelling houses in the City [and] the physical suffering and mental misery involved’. It called on the Council to take ‘extraordinary measures’. (1)  At this point, 5747 people were on the council waiting list; four out of five in shared accommodation.

Herbert Hallam

The Council was a hung council in the interwar period but with a strong and capable Labour presence for whom high-quality working-class housing was a major concern.  Labour councillor Herbert Hallam became chair of the Housing Committee in 1924 and was largely responsible for the planning and building of the Saffron Lane and Braunstone Estates

Two tranches of land to the south of the city beyond its then borders had been bought which would become what was originally called the Park Estate and then, officially, the Saffron Lane Estate.  Construction began in September 1924. Six months later, more land was acquired which would form Elston Fields – at the heart of the new Estate and its green lung. (If you’re local, you might know it better as Tick-Tock Park, named after the large clock on its former central pavilion.)

Elston Fields © Mat Fascione and made available through a Creative Commons licence

‘Tick-Tock Park’ with its original clock tower

The problem that the Committee faced, however, was that only 140 of an estimated 4500 construction workers in the city were working on council housing. The pressure to find non-traditional methods of construction using less, or less skilled, labour was intense and, fortunately, a solution was to hand.  These were the concrete houses produced by Henry Boot Limited.  The Council ordered 1500; 1000 on the Saffron Estate and 500 on the new Braunstone Estate.

Boot houses, Broughton Road

The houses weren’t cheaper than brick-built homes (coming in at around £465 each compared to the £395 of their traditional counterparts) but, to councils across the country, they promised quick results.  Around 50,000 Boot homes were erected between the wars, including those we’ve looked at already on the Norris Green Estate in Liverpool.

The preliminary layout plan of the Park (Saffron Lane) Estate

The layout of the new Estate conformed closely to the Garden Suburb ideals of the day. There was some effort too made to spruce up these Boot houses and counter the uniformity of their design – roughcast exteriors of yellow gravel, white limestone or grey granite were added and different coloured tiles and style of chimney stack and window.  Not enough, however, to satisfy one of the first residents to move in, however:  ‘when we first saw this drab concrete house surrounded in churned-up mud, my enthusiasm waned quite a lot’. (2)

The Estate in the 1930s

That churned-up mud tells another story. The first 194 homes on the Estate were occupied by December 1925; two years later, 908 parlour and 906 non-parlour homes had been completed  (500 of each were the so-called Boot homes).  Typically, the Estate’s roadways were finished later and shops, community facilities, convenient local bus services followed slowly.  Incredibly, the Estate lacked mains gas or electricity till 1929.

You might have worked out those nicknames by now – the Conks Estate was a pejorative reference to its concrete-construction houses; Candletown to its early lack of power.

Copinger Road, 1930s

For all that, ‘the Saff’ was generally popular with its new tenants.  Houses with gardens, spacious pantries and sculleries, inside bathrooms and toilets were a step-up for the vast majority.  Mrs Bright speaks for many:

When I first moved into Belton Close, I thought it was heaven because for three years we had lived in two rooms…Belton Close was like moving into paradise because we had a bath and the children could have a separate bedroom. What I couldn’t get over was that I didn’t have to go very far, other than a tap in the house, to get water. In Bonchurch Street, we used to have to walk through the house and fetch water from the next-door neighbour’s tap.

The problem – particularly as slum clearance took off in the 1930s – was that the very poorest couldn’t afford the rents.  In 1927, the rent for a three-bed parlour house, including rates, stood at 13s 10d, a non-parlour at 11s 11d at a time when the wages of an unskilled worker might be as low as £2 a week.

To get a council house in Leicester, you not only had to prove that you could afford the rent but get at least three references, one from the vicar or priest of your local church or a councillor.  A council job which guaranteed a regular wage and steady employment helped.  William Orton, a Corporation gardener, and his wife Elsie moved to Fayrhurst Road and raised a family of four in 1935 but their eldest son, Joe, escaped to RADA and the bright lights of London in 1951. Joe felt he had come from ‘the gutter’ – a sentiment which his biographer, John Lahr, helpfully explains: (3)

Orton’s ‘gutter’ was not the brutal and bustling industrial landscape of the North, but the drab monotony of a comfortable city whose council housing reflected its unimaginative mediocrity. The bleak adequacy of the Saffron Lane Estates had a deceptive violence. Fayhurst [sic] Road where Orton lived, and the narrow streets around it seemed to have been vaccinated against life…

The sameness of the architecture and expectation had its special oppressiveness. Cramped, cold and dark, the rows of sooty pebble granite homes were to Orton a grey backdrop, set-pieces for a lifetime of making do.

It’s worth unpicking this.  It’s true that Lahr is far from the only person to have criticised the alleged sterility of interwar cottage estates.  It’s clear that the very scale of their ambitions – and always the tempering constraints of economy – did foster some of the uniformity and maybe some of the dullness he identifies.  But there’s way too much writerly sensibility and effect here.

On the one hand, to Lahr real working-class lives (in those overcrowded slums of the North) were ‘brutal’ but ‘bustling’ – that love-hate relationship with the slums that middle-class writers enjoy.  But then, he gets confused and seems to apply the clichés of slum life – ‘narrow streets…cramped, cold and dark…sooty homes’ – to the spacious garden suburbs built very deliberately to provide a far better and healthier environment. It doesn’t add up.  Orton’s misfortune was not his home but an unhappy family life and, of course, a society cruelly unforgiving of his sexuality.  His home’s been demolished since but the Council, more forgiving, has placed a plaque in his honour to mark the spot.

The front and rear of a house on Hawkes Hill – hardly cramped

The new bungalows (with plaque) built on the site of Joe Orton’s former home

Most people simply didn’t feel the way that Joe Orton did:

The Saff at first was a showpiece estate. People were proud to live there. They took care of their surroundings, their houses and their children.

Indeed, one of the objects of the Saffron and Kirby Estates Tenants’ Association, formed in the late twenties, was to ‘uplift the social and civic standard of the people of these estates’.  At its most consciously improving this included (as we saw at the Watling Estate in north London) educational lectures but the thrust of the Association was more practical.  A new bus stop, a stamp machine at the local post office, better lighting on the estate weren’t life-changing but they did improve people’s day-to-day lives.

As on the Watling Estate, ideas of ‘community’ also loomed large and the Association actively promoted a range of social activities and entertainments. It boasted its own football team and, by 1938, even a swing band. The ‘Penny Popular Parties’ (attendees paid a penny and provided their own entertainment) proved a little too popular though – there were complaints that the children were too rowdy.

Saffron Lane

There were some who thought this overall respectability owed a lot to the absence of drinking establishments or even an off-licence on the Estate and several city councillors and the Medical Officer of Health were strong advocates of Temperance.  When an off-licence was opened, some Leicester citizens petitioned for its closure.  That was a little too rich for William Vickerstaff, the president of the then Saffron Lane Municipal Tenants’ Association in 1928:

There are 2014 houses on this estate with an approximate population of 10,000 including children, unless the teetotal fanatics take us all for children….If the schoolmistresses who signed that circular assert that our kiddies are or will be sent to school in any the worse condition because of the existence of a licensed house on the Estate, then we can only say that such statements resemble gross impertinence.

That too is an authentic voice of working-class respectability.

In an apparent demonstration of local democracy, the Housing Department organised a ballot on the Estate on whether its residents wanted licensed premises. It returned a narrow majority in favour but insufficient it was said as only 40 per cent had voted.  Mr Vickerstaff suggested that many didn’t vote as, had they supported the proposal but later got into difficulties with the rent, ‘the fact would be borne in mind by the authorities’. The campaign continued and would, as times changed, succeed.

There were two local workingmen’s clubs, however, though here as well things were not as simple as that might seem.  The older-established was the Aylestone and District WMC on Saffron Lane but the people who lived on the ‘Conks Estate’ were said to be ‘looked down on rather by those going to the Aylestone Club…which was a bit more skilled working class if you like.’

The Saffron Lane WMC on Duncan Road was opened in 1929 to cater more directly to the Estate.  It grew to eclipse its ‘rival’, boasting, at its peak, 3000 members and four bars though changing times and tastes have led now to talk of downsizing and even closure. (4)

That brings us to the present and the post-war story of the Estate and its people will be told next week.

Sources

(1) Health Committee minutes, May 1924 quoted in Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998). Other quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source unless otherwise specified.

(2) Bill Willbond, 70 Years of Council House Memories in Leicester (1991)

(3) John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears. A Biography of Joe Orton (1978)

(4) You can read more on the Saffron Lane WMC (and watch a poignant 2012 video on its story and its current plight) on the Club Historians website.