The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields II: ‘decent people living on a decent estate’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week’s post looked at the origins of the Meadow Well Estate and concluded these weren’t an adequate explanation either of its long-term stigma or the 1991 riots.  This week’s examines what followed.

If Meadow Well became the classic ‘problem estate’, this wasn’t apparent until the 1970s.  It had, however, been long neglected.  Belatedly, a £5.3m programme of modernisation began in 1971 which saw some general upgrading and the conversion of some of the Estate’s flats into self-contained houses. By 1974, the proportion of flats on the Estate stood at 74 per cent, down from the 84 per cent of the original design.

However well-meaning, the improvements exacerbated the problem of overcrowding on the Estate – eleven per cent of households were assessed overcrowded (compared to a Tynemouth average of two per cent) and large families predominated on the Estate, as they had from the outset.  In 1971, 35 per cent of its population were children, 14 years old or younger. When looking at the Brandon Estate in Southwark, this preponderance of youngsters (in fact, a slightly lower proportion) was held by some to be in itself a sufficient explanation of the Estate’s problems. (1)

Meadow Well also suffered severe social disadvantage – or let’s just call it poverty. Almost 60 per cent of heads of household were classified unskilled or semi-skilled, twice the Tynemouth average; male unemployment stood at 19 per cent, almost three times the North Tyneside average.  These figures would deteriorate as deindustrialisation hit the North-East with particular force in the 1980s. By 1991, it was said that on some streets four fifths of residents lacked work; youth unemployment rocketed.

At the same time, spending cuts – imposed by a Conservative government which deemed the Metropolitan Borough of North Tyneside (formed in 1974) to have overspent – hit the Estate hard.  The youth centre – burnt down during the riots, its destruction taken as a mark of their mindless violence – had been closed for ten months to save money; that perhaps a mark of another form of mindless violence.  The adjacent Royal Quays development, billed as a commercial revitalisation of the area, offered little to local residents other than a symbol of exclusion.

Avon Avenue

To Beatrix Campbell, Meadow Well was ‘one of the demonised domains of the North East.  It was a thrown-away place, imagined akin to Botany Bay, a place to which folks had been transported’.  Joe Caffrey, a local community worker described a ‘feeling of abandonment…people do believe, they genuinely believe, they’ve been abandoned by government, by local government, by the police and by other agencies’. (2)

In this context, crime rose.  In the words of Andy Dumble, a Meadow Well youth worker, there was:

No hope, no future – the opportunities to make it ain’t there, you’ve got to struggle really hard and the rewards are relatively small and young’uns can see that and they weigh it up against all the moral rules and that and they think, yeah, break it.

In the years preceding the riots, crime rates on the Estate were said to be the highest in the country.  Across its range, this criminality – from harassment and vandalism to burglary, car-jacking and ram-raiding – had its reasons, even its reason.  To some, it was a conscious kicking against the pricks; to others, it was part of a street culture led by older youngsters who were role models in the absence of others; to others still, it was a more or less legitimate way of getting by, earning some kind of living.

This was part of the anger felt when two young men of the Estate were killed in a stolen car during a police pursuit in September 1991, the trigger of the riots; they were going about their business.  But it exploded in the context of a deep antipathy felt towards – and allegedly reciprocated by – the police.  Nancy Peters captured the latter: ‘They class us as rubbish, the police did at one time…we were called everything’.  ‘Pigsville’, the name for the Estate at the local police station, was perhaps the least of it. (3)

To a young local male, the rioting was:

inevitable because of the harassment and the way the police were doing things – they weren’t going about it legally, they were doing it by their law, not the land’s law.

Of course, there’s an irony there and this liberal understanding of causes and dynamics might be viewed as too understanding by many of the Estate’s law-abiding residents, always the majority.

Nancy Peters opening the Mag House community centre

The women, in particular, were always found in the forefront of efforts to defend and serve the community.  Mass unemployment meant, in the words of Beatrix Campbell, that for men ‘their licensed means of episodic escape – waged work – was withdrawn. They were stuck at home.  The lads, on the other hand, stuck to the streets’.  Her conclusion?

Crime and coercion are sustained by men. Solidarity and self-help are sustained by women.  It is as stark as that.

Campbell’s feminist analysis is powerful but, for all her acknowledgement of context, there seems a slippage in her writing here – it becomes reductive and what stands as description slides into too simple explanation.  The women of the Estate were often more sympathetic: the men, they said, were ‘in a deep depression…they’ve sunk into a hole’; the kids gone wrong? – ‘who knows how those kids feel…to kick against this world, to feel so angry, so bitter’.

Beyond this, Campbell – whose study also examined Scotswood in Newcastle, the Ely Estate in Cardiff and Oxford’s Blackbird Leys Estate where riots took place at the same time – also concluded that estates themselves had become part of the problem:

Estates were once the ordinary manifestation of modernity. The agency was the municipality and mass housing was the form in which later modernism rearranged the landscape of most British cities.  Those were the days when working-class homesteads dominated the housing market, before and after the Second World War, when estate cultures held the rough and respectable in eternal and exhilarating tension. But those days were to disappear with the ascent of Thatcherism and the decline of public housing as popular housing.

In this perspective, the nature of estates (their separation and distinctness), while to some degree a result of the more recent economic and political shifts she describes, was also a cause of their problems.

The fact of ‘residualisation’ – that, after the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and Right to Buy’s diminution of stock, council housing became increasingly allocated to our most vulnerable citizens – gives some credibility to this charge but it’s too sweeping and does scant justice to internal complexities and the decent ‘ordinariness’ of most estates and most communities. (4)

It captured a moment, though, and it reflected (and reinforced) a popular and media narrative which has powerfully shaped housing policy ever since, most malignantly under the present Conservative government.

We should get back to Meadow Well.  Whatever the analysis of their causes, the riots did at least persuade those in power that ‘something should be done’. There had been earlier interventions on the Estate.  A Home Office Community Development Project ran between 1972 and 1977. The Cedarwood Trust – still doing good work – was a pastoral organisation established by local people, the Church of England and North Tyneside Council in 1980.

Renovated housing, Amble Close

Big money came in after 1991 in the shape, firstly, of the North Tyneside City Challenge project running from 1992 to 1998 which received £37.5m of central government funding, spent mainly on Meadow Well and the former pit village of Percy Main.  The Meadow Well Single Regeneration Budget board supervised local regeneration expenditure between 1995 and 2000 – an estimated £15m from central government, £11m from other public funds and £11.6m from private sources.

Typically, much of this was spent on reconfiguring the Estate.  There was improved landscaping and fencing to enhance the environment and develop ‘defensible space’ – and CCTV, of course.  There was a successful attempt to improve police-community relations by bringing sympathetic officers onto the Estate.

New housing in Oakham Gardens

And, though in Meadow Well the decision was taken to preserve the existing council housing, there was the usual attempt to socially engineer the Estate through changing its mix of housing tenure.  By 2000, around 750 homes had been demolished with new houses built for sale or rent – around 170 privately-owned homes and 370 housing association. (5)

Carole Bell

More meaningfully, there were the doughty efforts of local community leaders – nearly all female – to provide services and restore pride in the Estate.  Carole Bell, who suffered initial hostility and harassment through her cooperation with local authorities, was a mainstay of Meadow Well Connected founded in 1994 – a comprehensive community facility at the heart of the Estate. (6) Nancy Peters was feisty and indefatigable in its defence. Both women were awarded MBEs, proving perhaps that the honours system isn’t irredeemably corrupt.

Perceptions were slow to change and the memory of the 1991 riots and Estate’s earlier stigma linger on.  Last week’s post noted how an early (and unfair) ‘labelling’ of the Estate had contributed to its negative image before the Second World War.  Recent research confirms how how powerfully ‘stigma’ remains a creation of key opinion-formers in the local economy and media irrespective of realities on the ground in Meadow Well and elsewhere. (7)

Nor, as their protagonists would be the first to admit, can the many worthwhile initiatives described alter the harsh economic realities which still shape local lives.  The Chirton ward, containing Meadow Well, is among the 5 per cent most deprived in the country; around one in six adults are unemployed and – in today’s economy –many suffer irregular or precarious (and always low paid) employment.

Messages from Meadow Well, Northern Architecture, 2014

We started this two-part post with Carole Bell’s wish that her community be thought of as ‘decent people living on a decent estate’.   I’m sure that’s true, just as I’m certain that – despite all the good work that’s been done – the Estate continues to suffer unacceptable levels of poverty and exclusion.   In this context, we should question less the design or concept of council estates but rather a society which tolerates such inequality in its midst.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the last some of his fine images of the Estate taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  You can see more of Steve’s work online here.

(1) North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP), North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing (1977). Documents from the North Tyneside CDP can be downloaded from the website of Purdue University, Indianapolis. The full collection of CDP records are held by the Tyne and Wear Archives.

(2) Beatrix Campbell, Goliath. Britain’s Dangerous Places (1993) and Joe Caffrey interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992.  Residents’ comments which follow are drawn from the latter source.

(3) Roger Graef, Jane Jacobs Public Lecture, London School of Economics: ‘Risk, Community and Safety’, 10 February 2005

(4) Campbell’s analysis is discussed in Chris Brook, Gerry Mooney, Steve Pile, Unruly Cities?: Order/Disorder (2006)

(5) Jo Dean and Annette Hastings, Challenging images. Housing estates, stigma and regeneration. The Policy Press and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2000

(6) See Sonia Sharma, ‘Meadow Well community stalwart Carole retires’, Chronicle Live, 29 August 2012 and the website of Meadow Well Connected for further information.

(7) Annette Hastings, ‘Stigma and social housing estates: Beyond pathological explanations’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2003

Advertisements

The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields I: ‘a victim of labelling’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

‘Decent people living on a decent estate’ – that’s how Carole Bell, a Meadow Well community activist wanted people to think of the Estate in 2012.  Unfortunately for her, they were more likely to remember the riots that ripped the community apart in September 1991 and the stigma attached to the Estate before that crisis and for some years after.  There’s much that’s been written on Meadow Well before the riots and since, most seeking to explain its poor reputation and troubled history. This post will examine and assess those accounts and look at what’s happened on the Estate since then.

With apologies to Carole Bell, I’ll begin by recounting the Estate’s crisis point – those 1991 riots, sparked by the death of two young local residents, Dale Robson and Colin Atkins, killed when the stolen car they were driving careered off the road during a police pursuit. (Police claims that there was no ‘hot pursuit’ – that they were half a mile from the crash site – were disbelieved by many locals.)

The graffiti shows the version of events believed by many young people on the Estate

The protests which followed rapidly degenerated into looting and arson; emergency services attending were attacked. In all, it was said that some 400 people were involved; 37 were arrested.

Images of the riots and their aftermath

In the aftermath, the Estate became a focus of national concern – belatedly, it might be claimed – and international interest.  Much has happened and a lot has changed since but let’s examine a very specific housing history first.

Meadow Well (also called Meadowell, interchangeably as far as I can tell) was part of the County Borough of Tynemouth, formed in 1849. This was an unusually mixed borough, comprising the resort of Tynemouth, large areas of middle-class suburbia as well as the working-class and industrial district of North Shields.  While Lib-Lab politics dominated before 1914, for most of its life the Council (dissolved into the Metropolitan District of North Tyneside in 1974) was under the control of Independents and Conservatives.

That politics (and the fact that in 1912 two-thirds of councillors had interests in the private housing sector) might explain the Council’s reluctance to build before the First World War.  A housing scheme proposed on land acquired at Balkwell Farm in 1912 was opposed by Conservative councillors.  Councillor Plummer thought that to ‘put houses on the market at a rent nobody could compete with was not fair to the owners of property…The scheme was not at all fair to the middle class people’.

Ropery Banks, Clive Street, 1933

When others raised the appalling housing conditions and high death rate of the Banksides area of North Shields, Alderman Coulson, a Tory builder and landlord, blamed: (2)

the filth and dirt people live in. This is the evil, not the condition of the house. Put some of these people into Alnwick Castle and by the time they have been there one month it will be a slum.

These views are not merely of quaint historic interest, of course.  Similar views – that council housing is subsidised by the better-off (though it isn’t), that inflated market rents are somehow sacrosanct, and that council tenants are feckless – inform a lot of current thinking around social housing and its residents.

Housing on the Balkwell Estate

In 1919, however, even Tynemouth’s councillors were swept up in the national drive to build ‘homes for heroes’.  The Council determined that 1746 new council homes were required to address the Borough’s housing needs in the next three years and the Balkwell scheme was revived.  Its early phases, built under the generous terms of Addison’s 1919 Housing Act, represented deliberately high-quality working-class housing and, by the end of the 1920s, the Estate would comprise 562 two-three bedroom houses, semi-detached or in short terraces, and 100 flats.

Corner of Oswin Terrace and Balkwell Avenue, the Balkwell Estate

There was no intention that this housing be let to the Borough’s poorer residents: (3)

it would be the height of folly to leave a skilled artizan and highly worthy citizen in his present cramped and inadequate home in a dingy street, a home which he fain would leave for one better and for which he would willingly pay a higher rent, and to build houses of a type superior to it, and let them at utterly disproportionately small rents to the dwellers in slumdom.

The intention – in a filtering up theory that was common among early housing reformers – was that the homes vacated ‘would be at once occupied by persons now living in houses of a still more inferior character’.

Meanwhile, the Borough’s housing efforts rapidly faltered. In fact, only 524 homes were built by 1922, some 924 by the end of the decade.  The Council had even disbanded its Housing Committee in 1928 but it was re-established in 1930 as central government’s second interwar housing drive – slum clearance – took off.

Union Stairs, North Shields, 1933

Whether as a result of national pressure or local politics (Communist agitation was strong in the Banksides), the Council responded.  Alderman Coulson’s earlier views notwithstanding, the necessity was pressing. A 1933 enquiry into what became the Clive Street Clearance Area revealed that 48 residents occupied 17 rooms in Union Stairs, sharing a single water tap.  Liddle Street’s 405 residents enjoyed (if that’s the word) one earth privy for every 11 people.  Only two homes had piped water; none had baths. Infant mortality stood at 143 per 1000 compared to the Borough average of 83. Across the Borough, ten per cent of housing stock was declared to be slum property. (4)

Cutting the first sod on the Ridges Estate, 1932

A five-year plan drawn up in 1930 projected the construction of 850 new council homes. In 1932, the Council purchased a 135 acre greenfield site on the north-western fringes of North Shields from the Duke of Northumberland.  This was to be the Ridges Estate – the original name of Meadow Well and one by which it is still sometimes known.

The new estate contained 1961 homes. Forty of these were old people’s bungalows, 268 were self-contained houses and 1653 (84 per cent) were so-called Tyneside flats, common in the area – two-storeyed dwellings with flats top and bottom and separate ground-floor front doors, built in blocks of four.

An early image of the Estate showing wide, curved and tree-lined streets

In contrast, only around 15 per cent of the Balkwell Estate was flatted and, in real terms, it had cost twice as much to build.  The Ridges was said to be poorer quality housing built on the cheap.   These lower standards and the reputation which attended them have been described as ‘the source of all subsequent difficulties’ on the Estate and, of course, it is the design characteristics of council estates that have been claimed as a major factor in the emergence of later social problems. (5)

There is some truth in this explanation.  The Balkwell Estate remained a more popular and highly thought-of development; the stigma of Meadow Well’s poorer housing persisted.  But, in broader terms, the explanation is at best insufficient.  National legislation had mandated lower quality council housing since 1923 and more so in the 1930s as the focus turned to rehousing slum dwellers.  In this Meadow Well was not notably atypical and, to be valid, the explanation of later disorder would have to hold true for many estates across the country which manifestly it does not.

Children playing on the Estate, 1976

In practice, the layout of the Estate paid some tribute to the earlier superior cottage suburbs in its ‘Garden City’-style crescents and cul-de-sacs and it represented a good home to its new residents.  As one of these, Sarah Redpath, recalls:  (7)

When I went into that house and saw the bathroom and all that, well, I just broke down; I couldn’t help it because it was such a pleasure to know we were getting to where we were. It was marvellous.  It was a lovely place; everyone had their gardens done, no fighting, no animosity amongst anybody.

Conversely, the Estate had none of the ‘design disadvantage’ Alice Coleman cited to explain antisocial behaviour in the 1980s – high-rise blocks, anonymous walkways, lack of ‘defensible space’, and so on.  If Coleman’s monocausal account of later problems is mistaken (she really was only interested in attacking modernist design), we need to look at what else might have ‘gone wrong’ at Meadow Well.

Even this later image of the blighted Estate shows little ‘design disadvantage’

Another explanation – also used more widely to account for ‘problem estates’ – seems superficially more credible:  that the Estate was, from the outset, a ‘dumping ground’ for ‘problem tenants’.  This was, after all, the ‘rough’ working class, decanted from the poverty-stricken Banksides, and the sea-faring occupations of many male heads of household left the Estate’s womenfolk to cope alone, effectively as single mothers.

The symbol and, to outsiders, confirmation of these rough origins was the fumigation of the furniture and effects of all incoming tenants but even this needs scrutiny.  Ann Hodgson, a long-term resident of the Estate, understood the stigma of this compulsory cleansing and how others looked on it, but she welcomed it as (in literal terms) a fresh start.

Contemporary reports also describe a very different estate than the one the early stereotype would suggest – this from a reporter from the Shields Daily News in May 1934:(8)

I had a thorough walk around the Ridges estate, the sun was shining…and the atmosphere was full of optimism.  The first resident I decided to have a few words with…invited me inside the living room to have a look at the house.  The room was neatness itself with new furniture in the best of taste.

In the same year, the Borough’s Medical Officer of Health concluded that ‘the cleanliness and tidiness of the dwelling houses on the new estate more than confirms my opinion that slums are not the product of the inhabitants’.

These stills from An English Estate (1992) show a different image of Meadow Well than that which is typical

Statistical analysis also undermines the ready negative characterisation of the Estate and its people.  Only 31 per cent of its displaced slum dwellers came from the Banksides; nor were seafarers disproportionately represented on the Estate.  Even the crude measure of rent arrears – an indication of those unable or unwilling to pay – disproves the stereotype:  the arrears of Meadow Well tenants were just 0.4 per cent higher than the Tynemouth average.

From this careful analysis of fact rather than perception, Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull conclude that what the Estate did undoubtedly suffer from was labelling – an unjustified reputation generated in part by the resentment of others competing for the scarce resource of housing:

Regardless of the objective reality, a significant and influential body of opinion had already determined that the area was a ‘problem’ and was bound to be a problem because of the nature of the people who moved there and the nature of the areas they moved from.

We see some of the same dynamics in play in the Knowle West Estate in Bristol and the North Hull Estate.

If we reject the idea that Meadow Well suffered some Original Sin that would explain its later fall, we need to look more carefully at what happened to the Estate in the post-war period.  We’ll do that in next week’s post.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the next some of his fine images of the Estate taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  You can see more of Steve’s work online here.

(1) Carole Bell interviewed by Mike Proud, ITV Tyne-Tees News, ‘Community hero retires 21 years after Tyneside riots’, 3 September 2012

(2) These quotations and much of the detail which follows are drawn from North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP), North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing (1977). Documents from the North Tyneside CDP can be downloaded from the website of Purdue University, Indianapolis. The full collection of CDP records are held by the Tyne and Wear Archives.

(3) John F Smillie (Borough Surveyor, Tynemouth), ‘Some Thoughts upon Housing’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1919; no. 4. vol. 40

(4) Details drawn from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing and David A Kirby, The geography of inter-war (1919-39) residential areas on Tyneside: a study of residential growth, and the present condition and use of property, PhD, University of Durham, 1970

(5) The quotation comes from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing.  

(6) Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ in Bill Lancaster (ed), Working-Class Housing on Tyneside, 1850-1939. See also Barke and Turnbull, Meadowell: the Biography of an ‘Estate with Problems’ (1992)

(7) Interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992

(8) Quoted in Barke and Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ which also provides the statistical analysis which follows.

Canley Today: “Not a Reassuring Neighbourhood”

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs

In this guest post, Dr Ruth Cherrington brings her story of the Canley Estate in Coventry up-to-date, following earlier posts on the origins of the Estate and the growth of its community.  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.

Introduction

At the end of the previous posting, we left Canley residents busy shaping their community and social spaces.

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it started but some streets began to look unsightly from the early 1960s. Rather than growing flowers in the front gardens some tenants instead piled up rubbish and discarded furniture. There were instances of anti-social behaviour, though that term was not used back then: ‘problem family’ was the expression used instead. Canley residents would have been quick to name the streets that were ‘rough’ as distinct from ‘respectable’.

As time went on, other factors contributed to a more general decline. Social divisions were exacerbated by developments experienced by council tenants across the country along with Canley-specific ones. The focus here will be how the estate fared as social, economic and political changes presented difficult challenges.

Changes and Challenges

The Right to Buy Act, which became law in the early years 80s, had far-reaching consequences as council tenants who met certain criteria could buy their homes at discounted prices. Not everyone agreed with selling off council housing, preferring to rent and looking critically at those who bought. The take-up of this offer started to change Canley, as it did elsewhere.

A street of steel houses in Canley, 2016

Some newly-purchased houses showed the tenant-turned-owner’s desire to distinguish themselves from their council neighbours. Doors, even whole houses, were painted different colours. Some built garages onto the side, added a conservatory at the back, changed the windows and put statues outside.

These were visible expressions of the differentiation amongst the Canley residents that were not previously possible. Some viewed these stamps of individuality as out of place and ‘showing off’. We will return to the implications of private ownership later on.

Another major challenge was the troubled state of British car manufacturing. The Standard Motor Company, part of British Leyland by the 1970s, had long been a major employer.

‘Standard Motor Company Canley Road Works and environs’, 1946 (c) Britain from Above, EAW0000142

Short-time working and lay-offs had become common along with strikes during which management and trade unions blamed each other for the problems. The Canley plant was affected by what happened at others such as Speke, Liverpool. Families suffered when strikes became protracted. Hard times affected local shops, pubs and the working men’s club. The days of the affluent car worker when everyone had a steady job and income looked numbered.

A monument to the works, unveiled in 2000

After Sir Michael Edwardes took control at British Leyland in 1977, rationalisation gathered pace, bringing job losses and the eventual closure of three plants, including Canley. This was a major disaster as Canley had to some extent been built to house car workers. Thousands were directly or indirectly affected as many local businesses relied on the ‘Standard’.

Several generations of Canley men had worked there. Boys leaving school would take up apprenticeships and expected a job for life. This all ended suddenly in 1980 when the factory closed. Existing jobs and those for future generations disappeared along with expectations, ambitions and self-respect on the part of those made redundant. The Canley estate was bound to suffer from then on.

Herald Lodge sheltered accommodation, standing on the site of the former Herald Pub next to the Standard Triumph Motor factory (Photo: Robin Booker)

The last major manufacturing plant to close was Massey Ferguson tractor factory in Banner Lane, Tile Hill. Unemployment in the Canley area increased and school leavers found little on offer in the 1980s. By the 1990s Canley had become an area of social deprivation. Younger residents left if they could. Those who stayed had too much time and not enough money on their hands, never a good combination.

An alternative source of employment, though often low-skilled and low paid work, came from nearby Warwick University, right on Canley’s border. Opened in 1965, originally just outside the City’s boundaries, the fact that it took the name Warwick not Coventry, was and still is seen as a slight by locals. Its proximity to Canley didn’t bring it any closer to the experience of most of the estate’s residents outside of offering work. Warwick University employed some of those made redundant but could not absorb the growing numbers thrown out of work.

An almost symbiotic relationship developed with this University, whose star had risen as manufacturing industry declined. The University sent in two different types of visitors: sociological researchers on the one hand and student tenants on the other. Canley became a convenient case study of industrial decline and social deprivation for the former and a convenient source of housing for the latter, as well as a supplier of local labour.

Shops on Prior Deram Walk and the playing fields (c) Wikimedia Commons

This is where we pick up on the impact of council house sales. Some residents who had bought went on to sell up once the statutory period was over and landlords were quick to seize the opportunities. The private rental sector grew alongside a diminishing council sector with fewer residential homes and more temporary accommodation. In one Warwick University study, Canley residents stated they felt pushed out by the foreign students.(1)

I’ve lived here for 34 years in the immediate area and there are a lot of students. I will leave as soon as I can.

It is pertinent that in the Wikipedia article about Canley, one of its key features is that ‘the area is home to a large number of students attending the nearby University of Warwick’. There are some signs outside several pre-war, redbrick homes along Charter Avenue only in Chinese, advertising accommodation. It’s obvious their market is for Chinese compatriots but such practices fuel dislike for foreign students in general among Canley residents:

Foreigners – loads of Chinese in the last five years buying houses and renting them to students.

The majority of Canley residents (around 90 per cent) are white. When former residential homes are sold and effectively turned into student dormitories, divisions widen.

Warwick University researchers have documented feelings of isolation with levels of community cohesion levels dipping sharply over the past few decades. Residents feel ignored, unheard by government representatives at local and national levels:(2)

Policy was seen in the context of political correctness, which had become a pejorative term meaning beneficial treatment to anyone who was not white working-class.

There was a growing separation between private owners, council tenants and student renters.

Anti-social behaviour also rose as well as the perception of it: drugs, burglaries and vandalism were part of this. Canley had moved from being a pleasant estate to ‘not a reassuring neighbourhood’. (3)

Regeneration: Plans and Reality

In the mid-2000s regeneration was put on the agenda and plans presented to Canley residents. Glossy pamphlets were distributed detailing the options, with the benefits to be derived from each such as the use of some land for new housing in return for better facilities and a community hub. In one option, the ends of several streets of steel houses were designated for ‘street realignment’.

The meaning of this was unclear until residents who would be affected made enquiries. Street alignment actually meant demolition of some houses, including the one I grew up in, in order to free up the space for denser housing. The generous gardens would be lost and built upon.

On finding this out, some residents were motivated into action with claims the council were trying to hoodwink them, that they were being treated as fools. Protests about this and other aspects of regeneration led to that option being removed.

The derelict Canley Primary School, 2006. Shortly after these photos were taken, it was burnt down in an arson attack

A master plan was agreed in 2007 that visualised new housing where the former Charter Primary school used to be on Charter Avenue. A new school had been built more on Mitchell Avenue, more central than the ‘old’ Charter Primary. More housing was planned elsewhere, a community building, and improved transport and retail facilities. Moreover, the money raised from selling land in Canley was intended to be reinvested in the area.

Current Situation

Some changes have resulted such as widened pavements along Charter Avenue, with an integrated cycle lane. Some locals see that as being more for the university students. Some new housing is being built, mostly in-fill. What was once a very large grass verge between steel houses on Howcotte Green and the railway line is now the nearly completed Cromwell Gardens. Forty-four homes have been crammed onto this one green space.

Cromwell Gardens: 44 new homes on a former piece of grass between Howcotte Green and the railway line

Another in-fill area is where a doctor’s surgery once stood on Kele Road. A dozen new homes stand nearly complete there now. More in-fill is planned around Canley.

Nearly complete new homes om Kele Road, where a doctor’s surgery used to be (and before that the old Charter Primary School)

New homes, however, have not so far brought plans for improved bus services and other facilities. Residents complain about the poor bus service, seen as the worst in the City, which adds to feelings of isolation. Whilst two bus services come up and down Charter Avenue, as they have done for decades, they do not both run all day, every day. The 18a via Cannon Park shopping centre finishes early evening and doesn’t run on Sunday.

Those wishing to shop outside those times have to walk. It’s over a mile from the steel houses to Cannon Park, the Phantom Coach pub and to the Cemetery where many locals have relatives buried.

Canley Cemetery, Charter: the final resting place for many Canley residents (Photo: Robin Booker)

There was discussion by residents in one study about the importance of pubs and clubs as places of community interaction. That was when Canley had three pubs and the Canley Social Club, but since then the Dolphin Pub in Sheriff Avenue has closed down: it is now a building site for housing. The Canley Social Club in Marler has also closed.

Even in 2003 these were not regarded as vibrant places but as failing institutions that illustrated Canley’s problems. The lack of money to spend was one reason for their decline along with the smoking ban but also the declining percentage of ‘Canley kids’ who had grown up there or moved in when they were younger. Student renters rarely used these once thriving social centres.

The loss of the Canley Social Club is a very visual representation of the decline of the ‘old’ Canley. Established in 1950 as a humble social centre by local residents, the Club expanded across the decades with no shortage of members and activities provided for them when employment was high and there was money to spare.

By the late 1980s, the once luxurious concert room and lounge were less than half empty and severely underused. It began to look shabby and unloved, just as did the estate more generally. There were attempts to revive it including lottery funding that transformed it into a Sports and Social club but its future was decided when no buyers could be found in 2013. One night, members were in there enjoying themselves. The next morning it was locked and boarded up.(4)

Canley Social Club burnt down, August 2013

After suffering several arson attacks, it was finally destroyed by fire in August 2013 and demolished in April 2015.

Canley Social Club being demolished, April 2015

The site will now be sold for housing with nothing to replace this former social venue with its bowling green, football pitch and five-a-side all-weather space along with its lounge, small bar and concert room. Locals complain about the lack of social facilities, just as the early residents did in the 1940s.

The ageing ‘Canley kids’ lament the loss of the Club, of the pride of former residents, the loss of the old sense of community when most people had a job and a salary. There will come a time when hardly anyone remembers the early days of the estate, with its model housing and green spaces. Many of the latter are now designated for in-fill housing and these will bring not only different types of residents but perhaps more divisions and less cohesion.

If it started out as an estate ‘in parts’ and it looks more patchy today than ever before. The future may well see the trend for putting a bit of new housing here, a bit there, increase. Canley may become an estate ‘in bits’.

Sources

(1) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Harris Beider, Community Cohesion: the views of white working class communities, Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Coventry University (2011), p42

(2) Beider, p56

(3) Victoria Nash with Ian Christie, Making Sense of Community, IPPR, London (2003), p13

(4) See my YouTube video, Canley Social Club in Pictures

See also David Jarvis, Nigel Berkeley and Kevin Broughton, ‘Evidencing the impact of community engagement in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Canley, Coventry’, Community Development Journal (2011)