The Brandon Estate, Southwark II: ‘It was going to be paradise’

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, LCC, Southwark

The Brandon Estate was a concrete expression of the London County Council’s desire to build a better world.  It’s telling that, in these more cynical or simply more jaded times, I hesitated in writing that sentence but it’s fact, not hyperbole, however much the expression may jar.  Last week’s post looked at the ideals and design principles behind that aspiration; this week’s looks at how it all played out in practice.

An early image of the Estate from the south-west

To begin with, all was well.  The Architects’ Journal concluded the scheme was:  (1)

an important essay by the LCC to create a community in the true sense of the word rather than a mere housing estate. The diversification of design, although it has sometimes degenerated into inconsistency, reflects the provision for a wide variety of social activities…This is a positive attempt to overcome a major failure of much inter-war housing in the London area.

The Estate’s Civic Trust award plaque on the wall of ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom

Even John Betjeman – admittedly most taken by the rehabilitation of the Victorian terraces – thought the Estate ‘attractive, habitable by modern standards, and probably the beginning of a general raising of the self-respect of the neighbourhood’.  (2)

More importantly, its early residents liked it. Ethel Frampton, reminiscing after 40 years of living on Brandon, remembered ‘vividly being asked, how do you like living on a showcase estate. My answer then was, I love it.’ (3)

All this is a tribute to the design of the Estate and a commentary on the slum conditions most had moved from.  As ‘Mrs Bedford’, a 77 year old widow, told Tony Parker in 1983: (4)

I couldn’t say I have any complaints about living on the estate at all. I never had had.  When I think about the conditions we had to live in when I was a kid, well those days will never come back again and a good thing too. People complain and you sometimes hear them talking about the good old days and that sort of rubbish.  All I can say is that they must have forgotten what the good old days were like because for the ordinary class of working people there was nothing good about them at all.

Another resident, who had moved into an 11^th floor flat in one of the towers, remembers:

it was all very, very smart, somewhere really good, somewhere you were proud to live.  Do you remember those what they used to call ‘garden cities’ before the war, Letchworth, Welwyn and those places?  Well that’s the nearest to it in atmosphere I mean, it was like them. All very well kept and peaceful, with a sort of rural air about it; hardly like being in a city at all.

Most often, it was simply the size of their homes that most struck new residents – ‘It was massive, it looked like bloody Buckingham Palace compared to what we were living in’.  This was, as intended, high quality accommodation.

Flats on Lorrimore Road

But beyond this, there was a community.  In one block of low-rise flats at least, they were ‘nearly all local people, all got moved in here together from the same streets when our houses were pulled down’ and ‘Joan Kirby’ describes singsongs along the balcony for someone’s birthday and landings cleaned for weddings and funerals when visitors would be coming.

Maisonettes on Lorrimore Road

There was a broader truth to this if the oral history is to be trusted; this from ‘Bert Weir’, a caretaker in one of the towers:

When they first built it twenty years ago or more it was going to be paradise, wasn’t it?  For the people who were coming to live here, I mean. They’d all been living in slums and places like that, and here was this marvellous modern new housing estate which was going to give them a wonderful new life. It’s true, in those early days there was a great sense of community among the people who came to live on [Brandon].  They all knew they had all come here to have a new start in life. They all knew the sort of background they’d come from and what sort of background everyone else had come from and it gave them a big feeling of all being in the same boat. It was a fresh start for everyone.

I make no apologies for quoting extensively from Tony Parker’s important book.  Most of what we know about council estates and their people comes from the concerned middle class; sometimes well-meaning sociologists, often a politically hostile commentariat.   In People of Providence, Parker allows them to speak for themselves.

If there’s an element of nostalgia in these recollections, comments on the later estate make less comfortable reading. For the fact is that much of this early shine had rubbed off by the 1970s.  As early as 1975, Neil McIntosh could write that ‘although the Brandon is a “show estate” it is also in some senses a problem estate’ with levels of juvenile crime and vandalism that rated it ‘among the worst estates’. (5)

Fleming Road and towers

By the end of the decade, Brandon was subject to an equal onslaught from the local press as its headlines made clear: ‘Vandal-hit estate goes to war’, ‘Corridors of Fear’, ‘It’s revolting! Slum estate tenants in new protest’. (6)

What happened?  According to one of those articles, the Brandon Estate was simply – even as a panoply of security measures was being taken – ‘a monument to the dogged determination of the vandal’ but this is to look at the symptom rather than the cause.

Others blamed the Greater London Council’s removal of resident caretakers in 1971 but, in fact, those caretakers were already beleaguered – lacking the authority and means to tackle vandalism and removed for their own safety.

For Parker’s older interviewees, one explanation was simply ‘new people’ coming in.  They could and would – as we’ll see – express this more pungently but, for the time being we might accept that an earlier community and perhaps a shared ethos were dissolving.

Walters House

To Alice Coleman, the explanation was straightforward – ‘design disadvantage’ was the (more or less) technical term she applied; what she meant was council estate high-rise caused juvenile delinquency.  It really was that simple: ‘two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful’.  ‘Defensible space’ was one solution; in the later 1980s, one of her intrepid team:  (7)

lived on the Brandon Estate and persuaded the tenants to use a small fund to fence in one of the blocks. The result was magical. Ground-floor tenants who had boarded up their windows and lived in artificial light to avoid the high risk of being burgled, felt safe enough to take the boards down and let daylight in.

If only it really were that simple.  Now is not the time to critique Coleman yet again (though the article from which the quotation is drawn is hubristic even by her standards) but her refusal to engage with socio-economic factors, her lack of curiosity about change over time and her wilful ignorance of similar problems of antisocial behaviour in a range of housing environments should be enough to invalidate her position.

Molesworth House

Still, to be clear, council tenants are entitled to be – and feel – safe so, of course, it made sense to install entryphone systems and beef up general security as the GLC and latterly Southwark Council have attempted to do.

There was another equally simplistic explanation to hand: ‘Enoch was right’. (8)  A number of Parker’s interviewees associated the decline of the Estate with the arrival on it of (in their words) ‘coloureds’.  We could dismiss this as white, working-class racism and move on but (apart from the fact that easy phrase lets the middle class off the hook) it’s more useful to look at the dynamics of what happened.

Moreton House

A second wave of slum clearance and rehousing in Southwark coincided with a change in council housing allocations policy from a system favouring established local residency to one prioritising needs.  In this context, a black population which had hitherto been confined to low quality privately rented housing became eligible for council housing.  In the competition for a scarce resource, what was ‘fair’ and progressive in policy terms – those in greatest need or those now being displaced being given housing – could be perceived as ‘unfair’ by those who felt they had longer-established claims. (9)

One of Parker’s interviewees described the Estate’s newcomers in stark terms: ‘Every one of them are all problem families…and all blacks, or nearly all of them’.  This was racism but it was not racism based on some primal antagonism between white and black (as I believe later history has demonstrated) but a conflict in which race was the cipher. For long-term white residents confronting a decline in the Estate, it was easy to confuse correlation with causation but, in reality, most of the newer black residents were equally victims of the criminal behaviour of young people of varying ethnicity.

Eglington Court

A final explanation rests on those youth demographics.  For the Southwark Community Development Group in 1975 the reason for the prevalence of vandalism on Brandon was ‘not hard to find’ – 27 per cent of the Estate’s population were aged between 5 and 16. This was almost ten per cent above the Borough average.

Is this sufficient an explanation – a kind of updated version of ‘boys will be boys’?  Surely not but in a context where traditional structures of authority were in decline perhaps it does represent a significant component of one.

Trevelyan House

Meanwhile, embrace the complexity.  Parker also talked to ‘Ian’, a young lad in his early teens (white as it happens) who artlessly describes the favourite pastimes of he and his ‘gang’ of mates – stealing milk bottles, ‘bombing’ people by dropping bottles from balconies, petty theft, ‘tagging’ buildings, and so on.  He had also embraced a school scheme which saw him helping out elderly residents with their shopping and odd jobs:

One old lady said to me when I did something in her house that she used to think children nowadays were all bad but it had made her change her mind.

Little did she know.  How little any of us really know.

All this is to accentuate the negative.  It dwells on a particularly dysfunctional period for the country as a whole, the strains and stresses of which were far from being confined to the Brandon Estate.  In reality, as Parker’s introduction is at pains to make clear the reality was ‘mixed’. More recently, the biggest controversy has been Southwark Council’s needless and insensitive programme to replace functional wooden window frames with uPVC which was eventually overturned (for the leaseholders at least) in the courts. (10)

Shopping precinct and ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom (now library). The Civic Trust award is to the bottom right of the building.

Life’s too messy for the Estate to have ever fulfilled all the hopes placed in it in 1961 but an estate described as ‘perfect’ and the ‘closest to heaven I’ll ever get’ can’t be all bad, can it?  It’s had money spent on it – a significant refurbishment programme in the 1980s and a £1m repair programme in the early 1990s – but really this is little more than routine maintenance.

It has survived the worst of its social problems; with hindsight, a phase that afflicted estates of all kinds across the country (for which I’ve yet to see definitive explanation). It has been the only Southwark estate to escape major regeneration and it remains popular with the vast majority of its residents who value both the quality of their homes and environment.

The Brandon Estate has stood the test of time, a tribute to the vision of the Council and architects who planned it and, if it hasn’t created a better world – a tall order, it has certainly created a better life for many thousands of its people.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(2) John Betjeman, ‘Making the Best of Brick’, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1959

(3) The Brandon 1 TARA [Tenants’ and Residents’] Newsletter, July 2005

(4) Tony Parker, People of Providence. A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants (1983).  ‘Providence’ is the name Parker applied to the Estate to preserve its anonymity.  His interviewees are also anonymised though personal details are accurate.

(5) Neil McIntosh, Southwark Community Development Group, Housing for the Poor? Council Housing in Southwark, 1925-1975 (July 1975)

(6) These headlines are drawn from articles in the Mercury, 3 August 1978; South London Press, 12 March 1980; and Mercury, 28 May 1981 respectively found in the news cuttings files of the Southwark Local History Library and Archives.

(7) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’ (2008)

(8) The quotation appears at least twice in People of Providence.  It’s a reference to the then Conservative British politician Enoch Powell whose ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968 foretold social breakdown and violence resulting from ethnic minority immigration.

(9) This is argued in far greater detail by Harold Carter in ‘Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945-1995’, The London Journal, vol 33, No 2, July 2008

(10) Euan Denholm, ‘Million Pound Window Fiasco in Walworth’, Southwark News, 27 January 2005

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The Brandon Estate, Southwark I: ‘New and dramatic’

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1950s, 1960s, LCC, Mixed Development, Southwark

The Brandon Estate in Southwark is ‘one of the most novel’ of the London County Council’s housing schemes. (1)  There’s a lot to talk about – its visual presence, path-breaking high-rise, pioneering mixed development and, conversely, an early rehabilitation of Victorian terraces. Then there’s maybe the more familiar tale of descent – from ‘showpiece’ to ‘problem estate’.

Pointing to the future, an early image of the Estate from Lorrimore Square

To begin with, the Estate was intended as a statement – part of the LCC’s attempt to regenerate ‘the decaying and lifeless south bank of the Thames’.  This had begun in 1911 with County Hall, now shamefully debased (a metaphor for our times) into a tacky tourist attraction.  It was developed, in a grander post-45 vision, with the Festival of Britain and its legacy.  The LCC proclaimed: (2)

the slim white towers of the LCC’s  Brandon Estate at Kennington Oval have added a new and dramatic feature to the South London skyline…the 20^th century South London Panorama is at last beginning to rival the older glory of the scene across the river.

All this replaced, in the words of the Council, ‘a depressing area of dingy 19^th century terrace houses interspersed with bomb sites’, acquired by the LCC in 1952.  The housing was overcrowded, lacking basic amenities and in poor repair but it was ‘for the most part structurally sound’.  In another age, these might have become the des res’s of a gentrifying middle class; in social democratic Britain, 182 of these houses were converted into 328 self-contained council-owned flats and maisonettes which formed around one quarter of the new estate.

Rehabilitated Victorian terraces on Lorrimore Square

Facing new build on Lorrimore Square. The wooden figure is the adapted remains of another artwork provided for the Estate – William Mitchell’s 14 ft totem pole originally equipped with chains for children to climb on

These are best seen in Lorrimore Square, retained from an existing but substantially adapted street pattern at the western end of the Estate.  One side of the square is formed of substantial three-storey Victorian terraces and two sides of equivalent modern homes.  The other is occupied by the new St Paul’s Church, a modernist Grade II-listed building of reinforced concrete designed by Woodroffe Buchanan & Coulter in 1959-1960 to replace one destroyed by wartime bombing.

The rehabilitation drive is rightly associated with the later 1960s’ disenchantment with estate design but it had been prefigured in a neglected clause of Nye Bevan’s 1949 Housing Act which provided 75 per cent Exchequer grants to councils for the purchase of homes for improvement or conversion.  More famously, that Act declared a classless vision of council housing by removing the stipulation it be considered solely working-class accommodation.  Different times and a lost alternative history.

Forsyth Gardens, on the Estate’s main artery Cook’s Road, was a new square lined with brick-faced four-storey maisonettes designed by Gregory Jones, intended to maintain, in Pevsner’s words, this ‘revival of Georgian town planning traditions’. (3)

The original LCC plan for the Estate

Rehabilitation and the retention of an existing streetscape will please contemporary critics but the latter was the cause of some anguish at the time when the principle of separating cars and pedestrians was very much the governing wisdom.

The Council lamented that it had been ‘impossible to provide an ideally comprehensive system of independent footpaths’ but concluded that: (4)

by closing certain roads, through traffic had been canalised in Cook’s Road and every effort has been made to cater imaginatively for the pedestrian…a third of the inhabitants will in fact have uninterrupted pedestrian access to shops and open space.

Apparently, this wasn’t enough for early residents, two-thirds of whom wanted less traffic, and the author of the Architects’ Journal review of the Estate urged the closure of Cook’s Road too. You can make up your own mind of the rights and wrongs here but it’s a reminder at least that later judgments should be humble.

Napier House from Cook’s Road. You can see Hollaway’s decorative mural at the top of the block but the Canterbury Arms pub sign is missing.

Further east, the Estate assumes its more striking and daringly modernist form.   Across Cook’s Road lies the ten-storey Napier Tower, a gateway to the Estate’s pedestrianised shopping precinct, and beyond that its signature six 18-storey point blocks carefully set in a new extension to Kennington Park.   In 1957, these were the highest blocks the LCC had built.

The six 18-storey point blocks

If you visit the Estate, you’ll see that these towers are not some alien and overpowering presence in the terrain but fit, as the architects intended, comfortably into their landscape.  Their mix of bush hammered (providing texture) and precast finishes, pattern of strong horizontals and range of solid and glazed balconies gave, it was said, ‘a more humane scale and greater architectural sophistication than earlier points’. (5)

The high-rise development at the Estate’s eastern end was necessary to achieve the required density of 137 persons per acre – in total, the completed Estate would house a population of 3800, 600 more than had lived in the area prior to redevelopment.

The key principle of the Estate, designed by an LCC Architect’s Department team headed by Ted Hollamby, was ‘mixed development’.  This was the coming idea of the mid-1950s, promoting the ideal of a range of housing forms intended to break both the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – public and private – and provide housing appropriate to a range of people and households in different life stages.  It also licensed the idea of building high at a time when it was not envisaged that tower blocks would house young families.

Bungalows for old people on Lorrimore Road

Family houses on Greig Terrace

Brandon is the acme of the mixed development idea in a number of ways.  It’s seen, most obviously, in its: (6)

range of building types designed to cater for as many tastes and requirements as possible – bungalows for old people, two-storey houses and maisonettes for families who want gardens (and one person in three on this new estate will have a garden), together with flats ranging in height from three storeys to the 18 storey tower blocks.

But it’s there too in the variety of external materials used – ‘the list would read like a building exhibition catalogue of cladding materials’ according to one somewhat sceptical observer.  He went on to criticise ‘an exaggerated fear of monotony, reflected in some strangely inconsistent and unprincipled detailing and a wilfully random choice of finishes’.  But ultimately he was won over by: (7)

a conscious attempt to embody something of the visual intricacy and complexity which characterise, and attract us, in the organic and slow-grown parts of our older cities.  It succeeds in this, to a greater extent than most recently planned environments built in one piece.

This attention to a humane environment was seen also in other details of the Estate.  It included, for example, a number of small and secluded courtyard spaces – to the apparent consternation of the Housing Manager who foresaw ‘immorality in all sheltered corners’.  In this, of course, Alice Coleman would prove a worthy successor.

This early photograph of the Precinct also shows Hollaway’s ‘Hairy Mammoth’ and Canterbury Arms pub sign

It was seen as well in the artworks and decorative elements which adorned the Estate, notably the work of Anthony Hollaway and Lynn Easthope, employed by the LCC’s Housing Committee ‘as consultants for decorative treatment on housing estates’. Hollaway’s ‘hairy mammoth’ (marking the discovery of a fossilised mammoth tooth during site excavation) on the exterior wall of the club room survives as does his decorative frieze at the top of Napier Tower but the illuminated sign created for the Estate pub, the Canterbury Arms, and the broken tile mosaic in the precinct commemorating the Chartist meeting in 1848 on Kennington Common and other elements have been lost.

Cornish House with Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 to the foreground

All this art came at a cost of £3215 which included Hollaway’s £1760 annual fee.  He was rather resentful of the £8000 spent on the Estate’s masterpiece, Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 (donated at cost price by the artist), located in front of the Cornish House. (8)

All this is important as an indication of the care, attention and money (around £3.6m) that Hollamby and the LCC invested in the Brandon Estate, intended as a showpiece and not just another anonymous council estate.  But the Estate stands or falls as a home for its people and, in this too, standards were high.

Children at play on the Estate, 1976

Firstly, it was designed as a community.  Apart from the shopping precinct and club room already mentioned, there was a doctor’s surgery, a library, a housing area office and nine play spaces for toddlers and four playgrounds for older children.

The six point blocks contained 64 two-bedroom flats with all the modern conveniences to be expected in public housing – a bathroom and separate toilet, an electric drying cupboard, a linen cupboard and broom cupboard plus warm air central heating (from a central boiler room) and constant hot water.  Each flat also benefited from a full-length private balcony at its front and a second, smaller, balcony in front of the kitchen windows.

Living room of tower block flat

This image of the kitchen-diner also shows the Weatherfoil hot air heating system

At the top of each of the point blocks were four bed-sitter penthouses with private patios. The Housing Manager, moral antennae twitching, insisted that these be let to either all men or all women in any one block.  One observer described these as ‘the only genuine metropolitan penthouses’ she knew ‘to be had for £4 a week with heating thrown in’.

Living room of penthouse flat

It was with understandable pride, therefore, that the Estate was formally opened in December 1960 by Mrs Florence Cayford, chair of the LCC, as she ceremonially handed over the keys of no 62 on the 16^th floor of Cornish House to Mr and Mrs O’Brien.

Mr and Mrs O’Brien receive their keys from the mayor of Southwark in front of Cornish House

Another  early resident was Mr Lawrence Fenton – an accountant of a music publishing firm and perhaps a quiet embodiment of Nye Bevan’s classless vision of council housing, the 30 year-old chair of the Estate’s tenants association and a leading light of its cine club.  In the following year, the Estate was given a Civic Trust award for its design excellence. (9)

What could possibly go wrong?  We’ll follow up in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism, English Architecture, 1945-1975 (2015)

(2) This and the preceding quotation are drawn from London County Council, Brandon Estate Southwark (ND)

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South (1983)

(4) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(5) ‘LCC Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architecture and Building News, 3 January 1957

(6) ‘First of the “high altitude” tenants gets his key’, South London Observer, 21 January 1960

(7) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library

(8) Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’ and ‘Current condition of LCC Patronage artworks’

(9) ‘Brandon Estate Clubs Get Off to Photo-Start’, South London Press, 23 December 1960. You can see some of the efforts of the Cine Club and much of the early life of the Estate on YouTube.

Book Review – ‘Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses’

Chris Matthews, Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses (Nottingham City Homes, 2015)

It’s a pleasure to see this fine account of Nottingham’s council housing history.  It’s a story well worth telling and one – in Nottingham and elsewhere – that this blog has sought to share.  Above all, it is a people’s history, a history of homes and communities but it encompasses high (and low) politics too, architecture and planning and much, much else: a history of concern to anyone interested in the fabric – in the broadest sense – of our society.

If all that reads like a shameless plug for this blog, it is also a very definite recommendation for Chris Matthews’ new book.  It’s a warts and all history, recording the highs and lows of Nottingham’s council housing and Nottingham City Homes is to be congratulated for commissioning a serious and well-researched account.  There’s a place – a very proper place at a time when social housing’s past is traduced and its future near written off – for a more straightforwardly celebratory history but this is a book which anyone interested in a nuanced understanding of our housing history should read.

Chris Matthews provides a thorough chronological account which I won’t attempt to replicate in this brief review – the illustrations alone (over 120 carefully selected and well reproduced black and white and colour images) tell a compelling story.  But I will pull out a few of the themes which struck me in my reading of it.

Victoria Dwellings, now the Victoria Park View Flats under private ownership

We’ll begin with the need for – the absolute necessity of – council housing.  In this, Nottingham was a comparatively slow starter despite a problem of slum housing which was – as a result of the Corporation’s failure to expand into the open land enclosing the city’s historic core – amongst the worst in the country.  Early efforts, notably the Victoria Buildings on Bath Street completed in 1876 (and second only to Liverpool), were not followed through and it was the large peripheral cottage suburbs built in the 1930s which constituted the city’s first serious attempt to rehouse its slum dwellers.

Narrow Marsh, 1919

Council plans for the redevelopment of the Red Lion Street area of Narrow March, 1920s (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

What is more easily forgotten is the persistence of unfit housing.  As late as 1951, 43 per cent of Nottingham homes lacked a bathroom.  Into the 1960s, in the long neglected St Ann’s area most houses lacked an inside toilet and bath; 53 per cent had no proper hot water supply.  All this provides a context for the mass housing programmes of this later period which we are quick to condemn – for their undoubted deficiencies – but so little understand.

St Ann’s, an image taken from the City Council’s 1970 redevelopment brochure ‘St Ann’s: Renewal in Progress’ (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

New housing in St Ann’s © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It follows, therefore, that these new homes were embraced by their residents: ‘the sheer luxury of four bedroomed houses with an inside flush toilet…a really big bath’ as a tenant of the interwar Broxtowe estate recalls.  But even high-rise dwellings, later condemned (literally so and demolished in many cases), were welcomed.   One new tenant of the maligned Hyson Green flats describes ‘an indoor bathroom, beautiful kitchen. It was paradise, absolutely paradise’.  Marcia Watson, a young black woman (now a city councillor) remembers:

High rise was popular then. People weren’t fussy back then. The view was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.  I loved it…for me, moving in and living there, it was the first home of my own.

Council homes were important for providing a disadvantaged minority community with their first decent homes and a step up, as they did for so many others.  Matthews argues, rightly, that council housing provided the ‘biggest collective leap in living standards in British history’.

It was good to see this quoted – and hopefully sincerely endorsed – by prime minister Theresa May no less in her keynote speech on social housing made to the National Housing Federation in September 2018. The speech was taken to herald a sea change in contemporary Conservative attitudes towards both the past value and present necessity of social housing.  We’ll wait and see.

This looks like a 1950s development but the privet hedges and greenery are in keeping with Howitt’s ideals © SK53 and made available through a Creative Commons licence

We might take those sanitary essentials celebrated by Marcia Watson for granted now (though too many can’t) but the quality of much council housing is striking too, how much could be done ‘by the steady and consistent exercise of careful thought and skilled imagination’.  That was Raymond Unwin, no less, praising Nottingham’s interwar council housing, recognised – thanks to the visionary leadership of City Architect TC Howitt – as some of the best in the country.

In fact, most Nottingham council homes – even in the 1960s – were solid, well-built terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses which, though sometimes lacking the aesthetic of Howitt’s work, continued to provide decent family homes for many who could not afford or did not wish to buy.  It’s an irony that some of the very best council housing up and down the country was built in the 1970s when, with lessons learnt from recent mistakes, low- and medium-rise, predominantly brick-built estates were erected.  Nottingham built more council housing in the 1970s than in any previous decade.

Osier Road, the Meadows

The Meadows scheme was built with such intent, its Radburn-style cul-de-sacs and greens incorporating the planning ideals of the day by their separation of cars and people.  Those ideals are now held to have ‘failed’ and there are proposals to restore a more traditional streetscape to the estate.  You can take this as an emblem of planning hubris or, more properly in my view, as a reminder of how transitory the ‘common sense’ of one age can seem to another.  Posterity should perhaps be a little more humble and not quite so condescending.

This brings us, inescapably, to the politics of council housing.  There has in the past been – these seem now like halcyon days – a broad consensus on the topic.  William Crane, a Conservative and building trades businessman, was chair of the Housing Committee from 1919 to 1957, surviving several changes of administration and building over 17,000 council homes in the interwar period when Nottingham was among the most prolific builders of council housing in the country.

Edenhall Gardens, Clifton Estate © Alan Murray-Rust and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Then there is the politics of the post-war period when Labour and Conservative governments vied to build the most houses with council housing as a central element of the mix. The Clifton Estate, a scheme of over 6000 homes housing 30,000 built to the south of the city between 1951 and 1958, encapsulates some of these ideals, not least in its focus on neighbourhood.  Planning ideals are not always fulfilled, particularly in local authority building where they nearly always conflict with budgetary constraints, but still the Estate’s early isolation, expense and lack of facilities probably didn’t merit its description (in a 1958 ITV documentary) as ‘Hell on Earth’ and certainly didn’t do so in the longer term.

The house-building ‘arms race’ came to a head in the 1960s when high-rise and system building were seen as the modern means to build on a mass scale and rid the country, once and for all, of the scourge of its slums.

The refurbished Woodlands group of high-rise blocks in Radford © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Here Nottingham provides some salutary lessons.  The city embraced these methods, these ambitions and, yes, these ideals.  High-rise and deck access developments were adopted; major contractors, notably Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow, employed to build their off-the-peg schemes across the city.  Matthews is candid in acknowledging the defects of these estates whilst rightly noting the legislative and economic changes which were also afflicting disproportionately the communities which lived in council homes. Equally honestly, he addresses the dissatisfaction with the council as landlord in this period, particularly in relation to repairs. The combination was stigmatising – ‘no longer was renting a council house aspirational’.

A part of the Hyson Green scheme prior to demolition

Beginning with the deck-access Balloon Woods Estate (a Yorkshire Development Scheme completed in 1969) in 1984, with point blocks at Basford and deck-access at Hyson Green following shortly after, many of the troubled developments of the later 60s and early 70s have been demolished.  Low-rise traditional housing has mostly taken its place.  Others have been thoroughly refurbished through Estate Action programmes and suchlike.  One hundred per cent of current stock now meets Decent Homes standards.

Tony Crosland as Sec of State opening Nottingham’s 50,000th council house in The Meadows with Chair of Housing, Cllr Bert Littlewood, 1976 (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

By 1981, almost half of Nottingham’s people lived in council homes; some 50,000 had been built in preceding years.  But the bomb had dropped. In fact, a Conservative-led administration in Nottingham had sold off 1635 homes to existing tenants by 1977 (for more detail on this, do read the comment by Dan Lucas below) but the Right to Buy enacted by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1981 would see 20,761 homes lost to the Council in the next quarter-century. The Labour chair of the Housing Committee in the 1990s describes its role as simply ‘trying to hold the fort’.  There was as the title to chapter 6 declares a ‘Right to Buy but no Right to Build’.

Nevertheless, a lot – in terms of the demolitions and rebuilding noted above – was achieved.  The Decent Homes programme was a positive ‘Blairite’ achievement though marked by an unwonted antipathy towards local government.  The latter led – a necessity if central funding for improvements was to be secured – to the creation of a new arm’s-length management organisation in 2005.

An impression of some of the new council housing to be built, in Radford

Nottingham City Homes would be one of the largest ALMOs in the country, managing 28,000 homes.  After a troubled start, it seems justifiably proud of its recent achievements, not least a building programme of 400 new homes to be completed by 2017.  Indeed, as Matthews argues, the commissioning of this history itself marks a ‘renewed confidence in Nottingham’s council housing’.

It’s desperately sad that this – in broader terms – is not a confidence shared by the current government, driven by an ideological hatred of social housing and a fantasy of owner occupation for all – though even that, perhaps, is to give it too much credit. The reality is that this government is willing to consign our less affluent citizens to an increasingly marginalised and diminished social housing sector and the tender mercies of private landlordism.

That makes this honest, intelligent and informative account of Nottingham’s council housing all the more important.  As Chris Matthews concludes:

The history shows that, alongside other tenures, council housing can and does transform lives, providing a solution to a wide range of housing problems.

Buy the book, spread that message.

Notes

This webpage provides full details on how and where to purchase the book.

My thanks to Dan Lucas, Strategy and Research Manager for Nottingham City Homes and a key contributor to the book, for providing some of the images used in this post.

Alex Ball, a Labour Councillor for Nottingham City Council with responsibilities for Housing and Regeneration in the city, contributed an earlier guest post to the blog: Nottingham’s Early Council Housing: ‘Nothing like this had been seen before in the city’

The Canley Estate, Coventry: Building the Community

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs

My thanks to Dr Ruth Cherrington for this follow-up post to her contribution on the origins of the Canley Estate last week. Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

Moving to Canley

My parents moved to Canley in December 1948 having been allocated a brand new three-bed British Iron and Steel Federation council house there.  We looked at these so-called ‘steel houses’ and the early development of the Estate in last week’s post.

They left behind their shared lodgings in the older district of Foleshill, with its emissions from the local gas works and back-to-backs. But they also left behind close family and friends.

What did they bring with them? A few belongings, three small children and another one very much on the way: mum was eight months pregnant. They also brought with them working class values and way of life.

At first, mum thought it was ‘lovely’ to see the boys enjoying the relatively spacious house and garden (though just mud at this point) nearby after the former crowded conditions. She wasn’t so happy about field mice also running around but they soon left. My parents stayed for the rest of their lives.

Garden of BISF House, Canley. Author (holding toy) with brother, auntie and friends, circa 1960 (R.Cherrington)

But my mother felt isolated. Hearing the trains on the nearby railway line was a relief: she felt ‘there was some life in the place after all, it wasn’t just a dead end.’ But it did feel like that at first.

Many women on new estates up and down the country felt the same. It was quite an expedition for mum to visit her own mother with four bus journeys needed there and back and four children in tow. Canley buses terminated in the ‘bottom’ part of Canley back then, which made it even more of a trek.

My grandmother visited as often as possible as did my dad’s mum. Their help was welcome as babies arrived, right down to the seventh, myself. Mum lost her mother when I was only six. I clearly remember her anguished cry of grief when told the news. It was a huge loss to her on so many levels.

Housing was the priority and the rest, it was thought, would come later. Homes had been built quickly but people need more than a roof over their heads in order to lead full lives.

Street Life

The town planners designed the estate to promote sociability. But did it? A group of researchers led by Leo Kuper in the early 1950s studied a part of Canley they called ‘Braydon’.  They found typical conflicts and friendships as families settled into the new estate.

The thin walls of the BISF houses through which you could hear what was going on next door and vice versa were disliked. There were complaints about the ‘back’ door actually being a side door opening out towards your neighbour’s. You could see over to their side of the fence and, if the door was open, into their house.

As time went by, people put up high fences to block this intrusive view. The new houses were seen as lacking privacy and perhaps disappointing in that respect. People didn’t want ‘strangers’ knowing their business. Some families appeared as ‘stuck up’ and distanced themselves from others. Perhaps they saw themselves as socially above the majority of working class tenants.

My mother was friendly with some of our neighbours but not with others. Some helped her out with the kids though they had their own and gave her some support.

Some life-long friendships were formed from a very early age amongst the children. Many made playthings such as trolleys from what they could find or ‘scrounge’ which they then shared.

Children of Hayton Green. Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Commemorative Photo, June 1952. (R.Cherrington)

Mostly kids played together on the street, in each other’s houses and gardens and boys often formed ‘gangs’. They would be off into the woods or down the brook as often as possible. But what did the adults do?

Pubs and the Canley Social Club

My father was typical in returning to former watering holes back in Foleshill in the early years. Many men maintained links with mates, pubs and communities elsewhere as there was little on offer in Canley. The Phantom Coach, at the bottom of Charter Avenue, was never destined to become a ‘local’.

An older pub from the city centre, The Dolphin, moved to a green wooden hut in Sheriff Avenue in 1941. Whilst being a bit closer for men on our part of the estate, it was not as appealing as the well-established pubs they were used to. Dolphin regulars were more likely to be those in the immediate vicinity.

A new pub was built in our end of Canley in 1951– The Half Sovereign. Surely this would be the local that men had been waiting for?

The Sovereign Pub (formerly the Half Sovereign). Photo R. Brooker

Yes and no. By this time a social club had been established which was already very popular and had boosted a sense of community in Canley. The new pub had to compete with the Canley Social Club, which was right opposite our house.

Coventry is a good case study of clubs and community building and the Canley Social illustrates this well. The Council was quite radical in the early redevelopment of the inner city and the outlying estates, deeming it necessary to provide sites for residents to establish their own clubs. Seeing these as potential community centres, they allocated five plots of land on new estates.

The Council went further, taking a ‘Coventry City Bill’ through Parliament to allow the financial arrangements for these new clubs to be obtained through city funds.

Canley men wasted no time in setting up a club on the Marler Road plot. The first proposal was submitted on 16^th December 1948, the month my parents moved to Canley. The Council approved this the following July. This drawing was the basis of the club as it developed with a billiards room, a hall for concerts and bar.

Money and building materials were scarce but enthusiasm in plentiful supply with locals keen to have their own club to use and run. An application in October 1949 was approved for a ‘temporary structure’ to be erected which was to be made permanent no more than ten years later.

Canley Club winning bagatelle team, circa 1960. Author’s father centre seated with cup.(R. Cherrington)

Canley Social Club’s founder members bought and put up themselves ex-Ministry of Defence wooden huts. The small club was open for business in 1950 and my father was an early member. It was the much-needed social venue for estate residents, somewhere to come together, make friends and experience the type of communal life they had left behind.

The wooden hut served us all well during its lifetime before being replaced by brick buildings in the late 1950s. Locals recall a warm atmosphere with a lot going on for families, from boxing lessons for boys to bagatelle for the men. There were ‘free and easy’ concerts, ‘housey housey’ and children’s parties, all self-managed.

Children’s Christmas Party, Canley Social Club (R.Cherrington)

Canley Social Club 40th Anniversary commemorative glass (R. Cherrington)

We looked forward to nights out over the club, the Christmas parties and annual coach trip to the seaside. For many, this was the only time they would visit the sea.

Canley researcher Leo Kuper saw the club’s potential and was correct in thinking that it would be more popular than the purpose-built community centre in Prior Deram Walk.

As well as out-performing the community centre, the Club was up and running before there was a church on the estate.

What was their role in community building?

Canley Churches

Canley was described as a ‘godless’ place with no church before 1952 when Canley Methodist Chapel opened in Prior Deram Walk. In 1955, St. Stephen’s C of E church opened, ‘our’ side of Mitchell Avenue.

When he consecrated St. Stephen’s, the Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Neville Gordon, described it as ‘a new outpost from which Christian witness would spread’. He said ‘there were a mass of souls around the church in very great need of God’s mercy and truth’. They had lost contact with the Church when they moved to the district and had been ‘drifting aimlessly’.  He urged the congregation to pray not only for themselves but the whole community.

It may have been the hard experiences of the Depression closely followed by the battering of war rather than the move to Canley that had caused some of my parent’s generation to become ‘lost souls’.  Family, work, having a good time at weekends and keeping out of debt were the main preoccupations. Religion was mostly about the rituals of christenings, weddings and funerals.

St. Stephens Church, Canley. (Photo R. Brooker)

Those active in the congregation developed their own small community. Some of them were also club-goers but not all and in this sense there were distinctions between where people’s allegiances lay.

After years of being ‘godless’, Canley now had two churches. Then another came along, next to the Half Sovereign Pub. Its origins date back to 1950 when a group of young evangelical Christians decided to hold children’s services on a patch of open grassland on the newly built estate. These meetings proved so popular that a regular Sunday school was opened in the nearby Charter Primary School.

More regular services were started and planning began for a permanent church building but there was no suitable site available. Divine intervention perhaps came to their rescue as the brewery that owned The Half Sovereign were returning to the Council a plot of land they didn’t need. It was the very same patch of land where the open-air meetings had been held. This was purchased and the Gospel Hall opened in 1956.

Canley Evangelical Church today, with front extension and original building to the back. (R. Brooker)

Children enjoyed Sunday School there because they saw and made friends and could win prizes such as chocolate and books. Harry Hollingsworth lived in nearby Mitchell Avenue and was an early Sunday School leader. He remembered ‘the tremendous sense of community in the early days – a sense of oneness’.

Wednesday night’s ‘Happy Hour’ saw lively young audiences. We enjoyed singing the songs and learning about the Bible in a more interesting way than at school. When asked to find certain passages in the Bible, the first person to do so would shout ‘got it!’ and win a prize.

In some ways, it was like going to the club with these communal activities and experiences, which we remembered fondly for years afterwards. Another reason for sending children was so that busy mothers could have a few hours respite from their domestic chores.

Shopping

Shops are also community venues and places where people can meet. We had the ‘little shops’ consisting of a newsagent, Post Office and hardware store, chemist, grocery and a greengrocery.

The ‘Little’ shops on Charter Avenue today (R. Cherrington)

At Prior Deram Walk were the ‘big shops’ with a few more options including a Co-Op. Whenever we were sent there, mum always reminded us to collect the ‘divi’ stamps.

Other traders regularly did the rounds. Fifty years ago there were doorstep deliveries without the internet. There was the milkman, baker, coal merchant, Corona pop delivery and ‘Snowball’ laundry service. The ‘green van’ came round the estate selling fruit and veg. People complained about higher prices but these mobile traders saved a trek to the shops or town. Convenience, it seems, always has its price.

Few people had cars, especially women, in the 1950s. Going down the local shops or even to the ‘green van’ on the street could be a small gathering, a time and place for a bit of a chat. Even such short meetings helped increase sociability and sense of community on the estate.

To Summarise…

Canley did develop as a community, perhaps several given the divides of the pre-war ‘bottom’ end and post-war ‘top’ end of steel houses. There were those whose social lives were centred around the Club whilst others were more ‘churchy’. It became a place to call home as time went on with more amenities, services and schools. Gardens bloomed, as did friendships, courtships and marriages. There were the teething troubles of any new estate and later on the deep problems caused by industrial decline and social change. That part of the Canley story will be told another time.