Municipal Dreams goes to Liverpool, part II

Last week’s post followed my walk exploring the housing history of Liverpool with Ronnie Hughes.  We had a long, gloriously sunny Bank Holiday weekend in the city and lots more to do so what follows is a little more eclectic but, naturally, it remains firmly municipal.

In fact, later in the same day, I took time to time to visit what must be – alongside Eldon Grove – the most spectacular symbol of Liverpool’s housing history, St Andrew’s Gardens (or the Bullring to locals).  I’ll let a couple of pictures do the talking first.

St Andrew’s Gardens (The Bullring)

Impressed?  St Andrew’s Gardens, designed by John Hughes, was built by the Corporation between 1932 and 1935, the first of a stunning series of multi-storey tenement blocks (inspired by the cutting-edge public housing of Berlin and Vienna) built under the visionary leadership of City Architect and Director of Housing Lancelot Keay.

This, mark you, is a remnant of the original scheme and other similar grand blocks such as Gerard Gardens have been completely demolished.  To gain some sense of the scale and ambition of the latter, your best bet is to visit the Museum of Liverpool to admire the model constructed by Ged Fagan.

Gerard Gardens model, Museum of Liverpool

Just to the left of the model you’ll see a couple of original artefacts from the building – The Builder and The Architect: two reliefs by local sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith, commissioned by Keay to adorn its exterior.

The Builder and the Architect, formerly Gerard Garden now in the Museum of Liverpool

I’ve written in an earlier post about Liverpool’s unequalled interwar multi-storey housing. Now you just have St Andrew’s Gardens as a reminder of what was achieved – and it is student housing.  There are currently about 50,000 plus HE students in Liverpool and the city has bet big on their presence as a contribution to the local economy.  It had better hope that particular bubble doesn’t burst.

Back at St Andrew’s Gardens, you’ll see to the rear a more modern artwork depicting local people and their lives, created by Broadbent Studio in conjunction with the St Andrew’s Community Association and the Riverside Housing Association.  It was unveiled by the Queen in 1999.  It contains a biblical quotation from First Corinthians: ‘The eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet I have no need of you’.  I’ll take that as a tribute to the value of the lives and labour of the ‘ordinary’ people who once lived in the Bullring.

‘The Bullring’ artwork

On this day, the Queen was earning her pittance too, popping over the road to unveil what must be one of the most incongruously-placed plaques in the country at 19 Bronte Street. All this was to mark the area’s ‘regeneration’.

19 Bronte Street

It all creates a strange mix (but Liverpool is a city of clashing contrasts) as the new build here in Gill Street and the older, 1960s (?) housing nearby in Dansie Street illustrates. Obviously Frederick Gibberd’s Metropolitan Cathedral is a looming presence too.

Gill Street

Dansie Street

OK, now for some unashamed tourism but you can’t visit Liverpool without ‘doing’ the Mersey and the Beatles…and, with eyes to see, there’s plenty of significant municipal history in those too.

Wikipedia probably isn’t the most reliable source but it claims the first Mersey Tunnel (the Queensway or Birkenhead Tunnel), opened in 1933, as the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken by a local authority. Its construction was driven (with the County Borough of Birkenhead in tow) by the Corporation of Liverpool and one of the most ambitious City Engineers in the country, John Brodie.  We’ll give credit too to the consulting engineer, Sir Basil Mott and the architect Herbert James Rowse who designed the most visually striking elements of the tunnel, its ventilation shafts.  Here’s the one on the Birkenhead side.

Ventilation shaft, Queensway Tunnel

The Kingsway Tunnel (to Wallasey) was opened – by the Queen again! – in 1971.  I won’t force a municipal connection here – it was built by civil engineers Edmund Nuttall Limited but I know that the fans of Brutalism who follow this blog really like the ventilation shafts of this one too.  To the left here in Seacombe is Mersey Court, a council block built in the mid-60s.

Ventilation shaft, Kingsway Tunnel

Just to the north, you’ll get the best view of the magnificent Wallasey Town Hall, designed by Briggs, Wolstenholme & Thornely – free Neo-Grecian in a Beaux Art tradition according to its Grade II listing.  Begun in 1914, it was used as a military hospital during the war and was finally opened for municipal purposes in 1920.

Wallasey Town Hall

Travelling from the Seacombe to the Woodside Pier Head, the latter gives you a glimpse of Birkenhead Town Hall, opened in 1882 from a design by local architect Christopher Ellison. You’ll need to walk to the Georgian and Victorian Hamilton Square to see its Grade II* grandeur properly. It was used as municipal offices to the early 1990s and I visited it later when it was the Wirral Museum.  Now it’s closed and awaiting a new role. I hope something fitting is secured.

Woodside Pier Head with the former Birkenhead Town Hall to the rear

Back to Liverpool and the waterside view of Liverpool’s crowning glory, not municipal but unmissable – the Three Graces: the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building.  They’re maybe the reason that my wife’s ancestors thought that the ticket they’d bought to New York was genuine.  In the end, they made a good life in Liverpool. Towards the right of this picture taken from the Museum of Liverpool, you’ll see the ventilation shaft of the Liverpool end of the Queensway Tunnel, not looking a bit out of place.

The ‘Three Graces’

Liverpool 8, Toxteth, famous for the riots of 1981, may still evoke very different images of the city. In fact, the taxi-driver who dropped us off in the district asked if we were sure that’s where we wanted to be – ‘they’re tough as old boots round here’ was his parting shot. That was undeserved, unfair to its poorer residents (he didn’t mean it kindly) and ignorant of just what a mix the area contains – some of Liverpool’s finest Victorian housing, some of its humblest, and a couple of wonderful municipal parks.

We alighted in Granby Street and walked down to what is now known as the Granby Four Streets area.  I won’t begin to try to tell its story here – from good, solid Victorian housing to economic decline and dereliction, to the point when it seemed likely to be cleared as part of New Labour’s ill-judged Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder Programme, to the residents’ fight-back and the formation in 2011 of the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. Ronnie Hughes has been intimately involved with much of this and you should read his A Sense of Place blog to learn more.

Renovated homes in Cairns Street

Awaiting renovation in Ducie Street

Now some of its houses have been beautifully renovated (with more to come) and famously the creative reconstruction work of the Assemble arts collective won it the Turner Prize in 2015.

The houses are next to Princes Park, designed by Joseph Paxton and James Pennethorne and opened as a private park in 1842 (Pennethorne also designed Victoria Park in East London) and acquired by Liverpool Corporation in 1918.  There are some fine houses, formerly belonging to Liverpool’s well-to-do, nearby too though most of the terrace below in Belvidere Road has been converted to flats and is social rented.  These juxtapositions are strong in Liverpool.

Belvidere Road

A short walk brought us to this house in Ullet Road, once the home of John Brodie. Is he the only municipal engineer to get a blue plaque?  As the brains behind the Queensway Tunnel, the designer of the UK’s first ring road, its first intercity highway and – apparently his proudest achievement – the inventor of goal nets in football, he deserves one.

The former home of City Engineer, John Brodie, on Ullet Road

Down Linnet Lane at the edge of Sefton Park, you’ll see some dignified post-war council housing, notably Bloomfield Green, a scheme for elderly people which won a Civic Trust award in 1960.

Bloomfield Green

The 231 acre, Grade I-listed, Sefton Park was opened by the Corporation ‘for the health and enjoyment of the townspeople’ in 1872.  This stunning photograph (from the Yo! Liverpool forum and used with permission) shows the beauty of the park and its urban setting.  You’ll see some surviving, now refurbished, council tower blocks in Croxteth, built from the late 1950s around the perimeter.

Sefton Park (c) YO! Liverpool

That it was still providing for the ‘health and enjoyment’ of local people was obvious from the crowds in and around its most celebrated feature, the Palm House, opened in 1896, rescued from dereliction in the 1990s, and more recently more fully restored.

I’ve written more than intended and I haven’t even started on the housing history of the four lads from Liverpool who forever changed the world of popular music.  That will be a bonus post coming soon.

Notes

I’ve added a few additional contemporary images of St Andrew’s Gardens and some historic images of other multi-storey flats schemes on my Tumblr page here.

For some lovely images of the St Andrew’s community in 1967 take a look at this page from the Streets of Liverpool website.

Municipal Dreams goes to Liverpool, part I

Tags

1960s, 1980s, Pre-1914, Regeneration

This post is  a little different – a little more personal, a little more wide-ranging…but then that’s what Liverpool can do to you.  It’s my wife’s home town (she’s asked me to point out that it’s actually a city with, as they’ll tell you, a cathedral to spare) and a long weekend last month was an opportunity to meet old friends (and new ones), to enjoy the city’s amazing architecture and setting and, of course, in my case, to explore its unique housing history and a few other municipal dreams.

On Saturday morning, we were lucky enough to be given a guided walk through north Liverpool by someone who probably knows the past and present of Liverpool’s housing as well as anyone.  Ronnie Hughes writes the fine A Sense of Place blog and he took us from Anfield to Everton Park to…well, we’ll save the best for later.

Ronnie’s blog post on the walk tells the story better than I can, with a lot more images, so I’ll be selective here.  From Anfield and the new stand – and the blight it has inflicted on the nearby terraces for years – through streets of sturdy Victorian housing and mostly generic new build (and some striving too hard for effect), we came to Everton Library on St Domingo Road.

Everton Library

Designed in 1896 by Thomas Shelmerdine, Liverpool Corporation’s Architect and Surveyor, a visually stunning red brick confection of Arts and Crafts and Jacobean, it looks beleaguered now and unloved. It’s Grade II listed and various plans have been floated and grants promised but, as yet, it’s awaiting rescue and a new role.  For the moment, let’s take it as a monument to a time when libraries and their cultural purpose were truly valued.

Everton Library entrance

Down the road and across, we reached Everton Park – a new park created in the 1980s on the dust and debris of housing dreams gone (or thought to have gone) awry.  Now it gives you one of the best views of Liverpool city centre you’ll find; once it housed many of its people.

From Everton Park

You’ll need to look closely to see that history now but sometimes a single image can tell a big story.

View 146

At the back here, you’ll see two tower blocks called View 146 of privately-owned apartments (we’d call them flats elsewhere, of course, but these are private). Once they were known as  Brynford Heights and Millburn Heights, council blocks built in the sixties. Then Liverpool, the flats even more so, fell on hard times and the flats were sold in the 1980s to a private company which promptly did a deal with the Home Office to rehouse ayslum seekers. A hunger strike protesting against the appalling condition of the flats forced their closure and their revamp. (1)

There are circumstances which we as a community don’t control – though there are many we shouldn’t be persuaded to think ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ – but just think how thoughtfully-applied public investment might have supported not victimised the diverse people who lived in these blocks.

Look at the picture again and you’ll see a small paved square, centre-left.  This was The Braddocks (named after the formidable wife and husband team, Bessie and Jack, who dominated Liverpool politics in the post-war period) – another block of council housing. Down Netherfield Road, you come across another remnant – the entrance to what was formerly Netherfield Heights, a large slab block of council flats.

Netherfield Road

All these were demolished in the 1980s – tumultuous times for a city gripped by economic decline and political turmoil and when broader currents decided that high-rise council housing had failed.  In Liverpool, where the population had fallen from a peak of 846,000 in the 1930s to 500,000 in the 1980s (it’s now around 466,000), the case for mass council housing had come to seem even harder to make.  Here’s Netherfield Heights (on the left) as they were in the 1980s in a photograph by Dave Sinclair. (2)

High-rise council housing in north Liverpool in the 1980s (c) Dave Sinclair and used with permission

The three ages of Everton – nineteenth-century, 1960s and contemporary are well illustrated in the model of the district in the Museum of Liverpool- from Victorian terraces to 1960s’ clearance and high-rise to the contemporary, very altered, streetscape and green (and not so green) space.

Everton streetscapes, Museum of Liverpool

The right-hand image shows the impact of the massive house-building programme of the Militant-controlled council in the 1980s – a huge achievement in many ways as Thatcherism sounded council housing’s death knell elsewhere though not to everybody’s taste.

Here’s an example – Mazzini Close, just off Roscommon Street.  It’s trim and neat suburban-style housing and people got – what many wanted – their own front door and front and back gardens.  To critics such as Owen Hatherley – an advocate of the confident urbanism which Liverpool had practised in the 1930s – they just look ‘utterly wrong’, an undignified imitation of suburbia in a city centre setting. (3)

Mazzini Close

From here, a few more steps and we came to, for me, the Holy Grail of this particular walk, Eldon Grove: the finest council housing built by the Corporation of Liverpool before 1914 and still – though desperately neglected and sadly derelict – a powerful, masterly presence.

Eldon Grove today

Here’s how it looked in the original architect’s drawings (you can find this one in the library of Harvard University) and below in its heyday as a home – complete with gardens and bandstand – for some of the poorest of Liverpool.

Imaging Department (c) President and Fellows of Harvard College

Eldon Grove in its heyday

It’s Grade II listed but in an age when we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing its rescue depends on being made to pay. Ronnie has charted the recent plans to save it which, for the time being, seem have fallen through.  It must be saved – to me it’s as valuable a piece of heritage as Buckingham Palace but the real beauty of Eldon Grove, of course, is that it can still serve its original purpose as housing for the people.

Ironically, immediately adjacent, are terraces of sturdy council housing in Bevington Street and Summer Seat doing just that.  The gable ends of Summer Seat, inscribed 1911, show they were built at about the same time as Eldon Grove.

Bevington Street

Summer Seat

We walked on past the entrance to the Kingsway Tunnel – the second Mersey Tunnel, opened in 1971 – and through streets familiar to me by name as the site of yet more pre-First World War Corporation housing.  The tunnel itself marked the final nail in the coffin of another of Liverpool’s grandest early schemes, the Victoria Square Dwellings – a five-storey quadrangle of some 270 flats – opened in 1885.

 

Victoria Square Dwellings

The first image shows them, as planned in 1885.  That immediately above shows the remnant of the scheme, when just two blocks remained, in 1966.

For all that grandeur, the bulk of Liverpool’s council housing before 1914 comprised modest two-storey terraced housing and three-storey tenements.  Liverpool had built the first council housing in the country in the country – St Martin’s Cottages, not far away in Ashfield Street – in 1869.  (They were demolished in 1977.)  By 1914, it had built 2747 flats and houses, a record of council house-building unequaled outside London. The Hornby Street scheme, for example, was made up of 23 blocks of 445 dwellings, accommodating 2476 in all. You can read all about this proud record in greater detail in my earlier post on Liverpool’s pioneering council housing.

Hornby Street court, prior to demolition and rebuilding

Hornby Street pre-1914 council housing

Similar housing was built around the turn of the century in Arley Street, Gildarts Gardens, Dryden, Kempston, Fontenoy, Kew, Newsham and Adlington Streets. Now most of that housing and some of those streets have gone. What you see instead are Militant-era streets and closes of two-storey houses, ‘even bungalows for God’s sake’, to Owen Hatherley’s chagrin.

Gildart’s Gardens, pre-1914 council housing

Gildart’s Gardens today

Fontenoy Street today

By now we were close to the centre and a quick walk took us to the Municipal Buildings in Dale Street, designed by John Weightman and ER Robson, completed in 1866, and the parting of our ways. My thanks to Ronnie who had been a great guide and mentor on the rich history you’ve just seen.

The Municipal Buildings, Liverpool

Down the road lies the Town Hall, built between 1749 and 1754 to a design by John Wood the Elder – the political and ceremonial headquarters of the  Corporation, Grade 1 listed and described by Pevsner as ‘probably the grandest such suite of civic rooms in the country…a powerful demonstration of the wealth of Liverpool at the opening of the C19’. (4)

Liverpool Town Hall

That wealth, amidst massive poverty, would endure for some time and it was those extremes which both enabled and compelled – alongside more self-serving motives, no doubt – the Tory administration which governed Liverpool to 1955 to build housing at such scale and such ambition.  Labour, right and left, Liberal and Liberal Democrat councils have run Liverpool since but each has continued to grapple with the central issue of housing and each has reflected the circumstances and the fashions of their time.

We’ll follow that story in Part II of this post next week.  I’ve post a few more images of Eldon Grove on my Tumblr site.

Sources

(1) ‘Sold for 10p, the tower block where a flat fetches £250,000’, Liverpool Echo, 15 January 2004

(2) Dave Sinclair was a photographer for Militant at this time.  You’ll find this and many other powerful images of this phase of Liverpool history in his volume Liverpool in the 1980s (Amberley Publishing, 2014).  Ronnie’s post of the same name has more images from the time.

(3) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), p336

(4) Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Joseph Sharples, Lancashire: Liverpool and the Southwest (2006), p291