A Housing History of the Beatles: Three ‘working-class heroes’ and John

It’s a ‘long and winding road that leads to your door’: my final post inspired by a recent visit to Liverpool looks at the early homes of the city’s favourite sons. (1)  We took the Magical Mystery Tour of Beatles’ venues on the final day of our stay.  It hardly needs justification – they really did change popular culture for ever – but the tour itself offered unexpected insights into some significant social and housing history.

Pier Head, 1962

As tour guide Jay Johnson (the brother of Holly, of Frankie Goes to Hollywood) pointed out, what became obvious as the tour progressed from inner-city to suburbs was that Ringo, George and Paul were working class and John was clearly, if a little embarrassedly, middle class.  We began in central Liverpool with Ringo Starr who was probably the most working-class of the Fab Four or, at least, the group member from the poorest background.

Ringo Starr’s first home, Madryn Street, prior to planned demolition

Ringo was born in 1940 in 9 Madryn Street in the so-called Welsh Streets of the Dingle district.  When his parents separated, he moved, aged three, with his mother, to a cheaper house at 10 Admiral Grove, a few yards away.  He lived there twenty years. His mother worked as a cleaner and later as a barmaid in the local Empress pub.

Ringo Starr outside no 10 Admiral Grove with mother Elsie and stepfather Harry

Admiral Grove (c) John Lord and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Welsh Streets, a 21-acre estate of the 1870s, less than a mile from the city centre and close to Princes Park, were so named from the fact that they were designed by Welsh-born architect Richard Owens who gave the streets mostly  Welsh names and employed his fellow-countrymen to build them.  These were mostly humble homes and Ringo, in particular, had a hard childhood, not helped by two bouts of life-threatening illness.

If to Beatles’ fans the Welsh Streets have been put on the map by Ringo, to anyone interested in housing they’re well known as one of the most egregious victims of the Labour Government’s misguided 2002 Pathfinder Housing Market Renewal programme. This was a plan to demolish generally structurally sound – sometimes neglected but rarely slum – housing in order to build smaller numbers of new homes and revive local housing markets.  Up to 400,000 homes in the Midlands and the North were affected; against residents’ wishes, 400 homes on the Welsh Streets were earmarked for demolition.

Veolas Street, before and after (from the Welsh Streets website)

Powis Street (c) John S Turner and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Although the area has been systematically blighted since then, a long-running campaign has resisted clearance and fought to defend local housing and a local community.  The plans were initially revised to safeguard the Beatles heritage of no. 9 and last year Communities Secretary Eric Pickles rejected the proposals wholesale.  Now alternative regeneration plans are being discussed. (2)

12 Arnold Grove

Albert Grove, the identical street adjacent to Arnold Grove (but without the crowds of sightseers)

George Harrison was born three years after Ringo in Wavertree, around three miles to the west.  No. 12 Arnold Grove was another small working-class terraced house.  Harrison remembered it as very small – with rooms ten foot square, a basic kitchen comprising an iron stove in the backroom, and a backyard with ‘a one-foot wide flower bed, a toilet, a dustbin fitted to the back wall [and] a little hen house where we kept cockerels’. Four children were brought up in this tiny home.

The prevalence of unfit housing at this time has been lost in the subsequent narrative critical of the council housing which largely replaced it but, according to the 1951 Census, over one in five households nationally either shared a WC (this total included outside toilets) or lacked one completely and 45 per cent of households lacked a fixed bath. For all our later romanticisation of the nineteenth-century terraces, the great wave of slum clearance and post-war council house building which followed were long overdue.  In January 1950, the Harrisons moved to a brand new council house in 25 Upton Green, Speke, six miles to the south.

George Harrison in Upton Green, Speke

The Speke Estate, begun in the late 1930s, was among the most ambitious of the Liverpool Corporation’s housing schemes; it was, in intent, almost a new town prefiguring, in spirit at least, the New Towns of 1946.  As The Times reported in 1937, the ‘Speke satellite town’ was (like its successors) ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’; in this way, ‘avoiding that segregation of one class which was now widely recognised as a deterrent to social progress’. In 1949, Stanley Gale described the scheme, revived after a wartime hiatus, as ‘unique among housing estates developed by local authorities’. (3)

Plan of the Speke Estate

Of its 2209 acres, 626 acres were allocated to factories (11 built by the Corporation itself), 430 to Liverpool’s airport (now, of course, the John Lennon Airport), 626 to housing, and 710 to open space.  Of the planned 6000 homes, there were a few ‘cottage flats’ for the elderly and larger flats for families but most were two to four-bed homes, including ‘294 large houses with garage and four bedrooms for professional men, managers, etc.’. George’s father was a bus conductor and his mother a shop assistant so naturally the family didn’t qualify for one of the posh houses.

For Lancelot Keay, Liverpool’s City Architect and Housing Manager and the scheme’s driving force, Speke was about far more than shelter and work. He also wanted planners to: (4)

endeavour to bring back a greater measure of gaiety into the lives of ordinary people. They should have the opportunity of enjoying all those excitements and pleasantries of life which are too often reserved for those in the higher-income levels.

And to that end, a ‘central community building…with dance hall, concert hall and restaurant’ was provided ‘for the pleasures as well as the adult education of the people’.

Keay – whose discourse (for all his commitment to the people’s pleasure) retained a self-improving tone – surely hadn’t anticipated, and probably wouldn’t have approved, the rock and roll craze that captured George in the mid-50s.  At any rate, the Quarrymen and the Beatles played elsewhere.

Nor could Keay have anticipated the devastating industrial decline that affected Liverpool, and Speke with particular force, from the 1970s.  Between 1978 and 1985, Liverpool as a whole lost 40,000 jobs; the closure of the British Leyland Standard Triumph works and Dunlops in Speke contributed over 6000 of this total.

South Parade, Speke, in 2007, showing the later decline of the estate (c) Sue Adair and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It became, if you could, a place to avoid – ‘Beirut’ to some – and one of the poorest areas of Merseyside.  The Harrisons moved out in the early 1960s.  The residents who remained remembered it then as ‘a lovely place to live…we used to have tennis courts and everything – bowling greens’ and, critically, ‘good employment…and now we seem to be the forgotten people’. (5)  In 2000, Speke was the second most deprived ward in England and Wales.  From the 1981 Enterprise Zone onwards, there have been concerted efforts to revive the promise of Speke, too many to detail.  I didn’t visit but I hope people who live there can tell me it’s doing better.

72 Western Avenue (c) Liverpool Echo

12 Ardwick Road

The McCartneys were another early Speke family, living at 72 Western Avenue and then at 12 Ardwick Road.  Paul passed his 11 plus – another class marker of the time – and one year later he met George Harrison on the bus from Speke to their grammar school, the Liverpool Institute in the city centre.

In 1955, there was another shift upwards for the family, significantly to another council home but this at 20 Forthlin Road in the leafy suburb of Allerton.  His mother, a midwife, needed access to the phone which their new home afforded though, tragically, she was to die just one year later.

Forthlin Road, fans outside no. 20

Though not unreasonably described as ‘extremely modest’ by Historic England who listed it Grade II in 2012, this is a good council house, built, in 1949, just as Nye Bevan was insisting that council housing be built to the highest standards. (6)  Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, kitchen with a small extension to the rear which still contained an outside toilet.  Upstairs, you’ll find – and you can see all this as the home was purchased by the National Trust in 1995 – three bedrooms and a bathroom with toilet.  This was a comfortable family home in an unashamedly suburban setting.  Further down the road, there are some three-storey council flats placed around a large open green.

Forthlin Road flats

Other than its cultural association (around one hundred Beatles songs were composed within its walls), all this is profoundly unremarkable unless you take time to consider that it symbolises in some ways the best of an era when the state built on a massive scale to decently house its people.  The McCartneys lived there till 1965.

John Lennon lived about twenty minutes away at 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton. This was a semi-detached house, built in the 1930s, with all the accoutrements that the middle class required to differentiate it from the plainer Corporation housing of the working class.  To begin with, it had a name (‘Mendips’) not a number, and then there are the large bay windows and front porch with their leaded, stained glass.  The internal layout, apart from the ‘morning room’ which complemented the two ‘reception rooms’ on the ground floor isn’t too dissimilar from Paul’s home but there’s no mistaking that, socially, this was a distinct notch above. (7)

‘Mendips’, Menlove Avenue (c) Havaska and made available though Wikimedia Commons

Yoko Ono bought the house in 2002 and donated it to the National Trust and it too, as of 2012, is Grade II listed by Historic England. John lived there with his Aunt Mimi from 1946 to the early sixties, in the final years sleeping with his wife Cynthia who he married in 1962 in the dining room adapted as their bedroom.

He’d met Paul five years earlier when the Quarrymen played a set at the St Peter’s Church garden fête in Woolton.  Aunt Mimi didn’t approve of John’s musical interests and famously remarked ‘the guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it’.  She berated his strengthening Scouse accent too as he became more famous but John was matter-of-fact: ‘That’s show business, they want me to speak more Liverpool’.

According to Paul, she was also ‘very aware that John’s friends were lower class’. Conversely, Paul’s father, Jim, disapproved of John, believing that he would get his son ‘into trouble’. (8)  You can play with the class sensibilities there – Mimi as a Hyacinth Bucket of her time and Jim as an authentic voice of working-class respectability.

John with Aunt Mimi

Mimi could be stern but she was the dominant maternal figure in John’s life and the two stayed close – he phoned her weekly – till John’s death in 1980.  For all his relative privilege, John had had a difficult childhood. His father was absent; his mother, Julia, apparently unable to care for him properly.

Mimi, her childless sister, took charge and Julia – who had nonetheless stayed close to John and inspired his musical tastes – was tragically killed crossing Menlove Avenue in July 1958.  John was devastated and the anger he felt fuelled the bad boy behaviour which alarmed Jim McCartney.

John understood that he was no ‘working-class hero’.  He described his childhood home and all it signified in an interview in 1980: (9)

After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around…not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden. They didn’t have anything like that.

For all that, the lyrics of the song he wrote in 1970 capture important truths about the class system and the cruelties it imposes:

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working-class hero is something to be
A working-class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working-class hero is something to be
A working-class hero is something to be

I’d like to think, though, that the council homes – unheroic, quietly decent – the state provided to George and Paul testify to another possibility: a society and culture that values and nurtures all its people.

Sources

(1) My first post was based principally on a walk through the city’s housing history with Ronnie Hughes of the fine A Sense of Place blog.  The second was a more eclectic pick of housing and municipal history discovered over the days which followed.

(2) BBC Liverpool, ‘Welsh Streets regeneration go ahead in Liverpool as council drops appeal’, 15 December 2015.  See also the website of the Welsh Streets campaign and the Report on the Welsh Streets Public Enquiry (pdf) from SAVE Britain’s Heritage.

(3) ‘Estate for all classes’, The Times, 17 September 1937, p7 and Stanley Gale, Modern Housing Estates (1949), pp230-232

(4) LH Keay, ‘Post-war Housing’, RIBA Journal, vol 53, no 7, May 1946

(5) Quoted in Ronaldo Munck, Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective (2003)

(6) Historic England listing details, 20 Forthlin Road

(7) Historic England listing details, ‘Mendips’, 251 Menlove Avenue

(8) Wikipedia, John Lennon

(9) Interview with David Sheff, Playboy, January 1981

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Early Council Housing in Exeter: ‘decent houses for the working class’

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1920s, 1930s, Devon, Pre-1914

Labour increased its majority on the council in May this year but before 1945 Exeter was a conservative and mostly Conservative city. That, nevertheless, it was in the forefront of early town planning efforts before the First World War and built some 2200 council homes between the wars is proof that many in all parties believed in the duty of the state and local government to ensure decent housing for the working class.

Back in 1907, though, it was a Liberal administration which erected the city’s first council housing – on Isca Road, a by-product of slum clearance on nearby Alphington Road. The 49 plain two-storey, two-bed, red-brick terraced houses with gardens to the rear cost £149 each to build. A petition from tenants saw weekly rents reduced from 5s to 4s 9d; just enough, it was calculated, to repay construction costs. (1)

Isca Road

Floor plans of the Isca Road houses from W Thompson, Housing Up-to-Date (1907)

Though the Conservatives gained a majority on the Council in 1908 they kept for twenty-five years, a reforming politics still held sway, led by the chair of the Town Planning Committee, Alderman FJ Widgery and the Town Clerk, Hubert Lloyd Parry.  The Council hosted a regional town planning conference in 1912 and approved plans for further slum clearance and building in the years before the war.

In the event, a scheme for new housing in Pinces Garden was dropped in October 1914 due to high costs and in the mistaken anticipation of ‘prices falling within the near future’. (2) Perhaps they expected the war to be over by Christmas.  The war was to last much longer but it did in the end redouble the drive to build.

The Local Government Board’s Circular 86/1917, ‘Housing after the War’, promising ‘substantial financial assistance’ to councils ‘prepared to carry through without delay at the conclusion of the War, a programme of housing for the working classes’, marked that shift.  In Exeter, where the Town Clerk in response reported that there were ‘at present practically no vacant houses suitable for the working classes and in all respects fit for human habitation’, the need was urgent. (3)

Buddle Lane, Buddle Lane Estate

The Council responded swiftly, buying land for housing on Buddle Lane in July 1918 and, in December, endorsing plans to build 300 homes.  A deputation from the Trades and Labour Council protested that such plans fell far short of what was needed. It wanted 1000 new homes and demanded, in a sign of the times and its expectations, that the new houses: (4)

should comprise two living rooms, a scullery in which the cooking could be carried out, a bathroom and three bedrooms [and] should be built away from the centre of the City with the provision of ample garden space [at rents] within the means of the labourer as well as the skilled mechanic.

Their case was backed by the City’s Medical Officer of Health. He reported 106 families displaced through proposed slum clearance schemes, some 600 back-to-back houses in the city and around 500 on which repair orders ‘should be served’. One thousand new homes ‘would not be excessive’, he concluded. The Council accepted the case, amended its plans and purchased additional land for building near Polsloe Bridge.

Pinces Gardens

The 27 houses at Pinces Gardens proposed before the War, were completed rapidly and the white-rendered homes with their imposing doorways set around a substantial green remain among the most attractive of the Council’s early schemes.

A further 161 houses on the Polsloe Estate and the first thirty homes by Buddle Lane were also completed under the generous terms of the 1919 Housing Act. At a price – reflecting inflation and shortages of materials and labour – approaching £900 each, the new houses demonstrated the cost of the Council’s earlier decision to delay their construction.

Widgery Road, Polsloe Estate in the 1930s

Bennett Square, Polsloe Estate

Higher costs in the mid-1920s may also have reflected a ‘builders’ ring’ – a conspiracy of local contractors – to maintain their profits. The Exeter Master Builders’ Federation submitted a joint tender in November 1923 for the construction of 45 houses and the Council was informed that brick was three times more expensive than before the war.  One councillor, however, alleged discussions within the Federation where ‘in a whisper it was suggested that it might be got cheaper but that no mention must go outside’.  The Federation protested its innocence of any wrong-doing but the Ministry of Health stated such joint tendering practices – accepted as necessary in the immediate post-war period – were no longer approved. (5)

Laing ‘Easiform’ concrete houses, Buddle Lane Estate in the 1930s

Even without any dirty dealing, shortages compelled Exeter (like many other authorities) to investigate alternative, non-traditional, means of construction and a contract was agreed with Laings in 1926 for the building of 154 Easiform concrete homes on the Buddle Lane Estate. Despite long-running problems with their steel reinforcements, these homes survived many decades. One hundred were rebuilt in the 1990s; currently there are plans to demolish and rebuild the remaining 20. (6)

‘Housing off Burnthouse Lane and environs from the north-east, 1933’, EPW04117, Britain from Above (c) Historic England

Traditional building methods dominated in the Council’s major interwar schemes to the south-east of the city in Burnthouse Lane, commenced in 1928, and northerly extensions in Wonford and St Loye’s from the mid-thirties. The city’s 2000^th interwar home was opened by the Minister of Housing, Sir Kingsley Wood, at no. 10 Lethbridge Road in St Loye’s in March 1937. (7)

Burnthouse Lane in the 1930s

Milton Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

City Architect, John Bennett, oversaw their design and construction.  The layout along Burnthouse Lane was a very geometric expression of garden suburb ideals which were more sensitively applied in the St Loye’s Estate which followed. Miss Barber, an early resident, complained that: (8)

the tedious straight main line [of Burnthouse Lane] and the parallel Hawthorn, Chestnut, and Briar Crescents, suggest that the planners had very little imagination and little eye for anything more pleasant.

Recent attempts to make the area more pedestrian-friendly have brightened it but left it looking a little cluttered.

Hawthorn Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

In both estates, the houses, almost all in semi-detached pairs, are individually attractive – with a distinct Exeter house-style of patterned red and darker brick – but they’re repeated with such little variation that the whole suffers from that council estate uniformity criticised after the war. The 1948 Committee on the Appearance of Council Estates, for example, later slammed ‘the depressing appearance’ of some estates which resulted from their ‘monotony in design and layout, and the repetition of the same architectural unit in dull, straight rows or in severe geometrical road patterns’.

Hoker Road, St Loye’s Estate

Typically also, other facilities followed rather slowly on the housing and – in language often repeated of these early suburban council estates – Miss Barber remembers that:

Burnthouse Lane for a long time while in the process of developing had almost nothing except houses and fields, so cold and bleak people said, especially in winter, it was just like Siberia.

The Paul Street area was one of three areas ‘represented’ for slum clearance in 1919

Inner-city Exeter (the connotations are not inappropriate) suffered other problems. In the 1932 municipal elections, Labour activists in Trinity Ward (south of the cathedral) claimed ‘housing conditions in that part of the city…were a disgrace’.  One house, they stated, was occupied by 14 families each paying 5s a week rent.  They continued: (9)

There were rack-renters in Exeter and they would have to go. These miserable hovels would have to be pulled down and decent houses provided for the working class – the class that produced the wealth of the nation.

Labour won that contest and became the largest single party in 1945 though still – for the time being – excluded from power by the more or less formal Conservative-Liberal coalition that had operated since 1919.

Labour was at pains to claim credit for recent rehousing efforts but, in fairness, there were others, notably Councillor Shirley Steele-Perkins (a local doctor and the son and brother of two Exeter Medical Officers of Health), who also made the case: (10)

In the clearance area the population was 410 to the acre, by which it would be seen the congestion that was going on…in one case a man, his wife and five children were living in one room…Was that a condition which the Council should tolerate?…

I think I have shown you that if the time is ripe for us to put these people into houses where they can live a decent life and the children have a decent chance of being brought up in healthy surroundings, we should take every advantage of it.

With such sentiments in Exeter, slum clearance efforts, also encouraged by central government in the 1930s, continued but the question of the form of housing to replace them remained, particularly for the lower-paid working class who needed to be near central places of employment.

Preston Street flats, front and rear

A small three-storey tenement block of twelve homes (since demolished) had been built in Coombe Street in 1924 and a Housing Subcommittee was set up in January 1932 to investigate the viability of flats in the inner-city.  In Exeter, where schemes had of necessity to be small, there were no economies of scale and no savings to be made but some rather bijou two-storey flats (some surviving) were built to the west of Fore Street. In all, of those 2200 interwar council homes, just 44 were flats.

Walking those same streets now, of course, much has changed, not least as a result of the bombing raids which devastated central Exeter in May 1942. Some 1500 homes were destroyed, another 2700 severely damaged; 161 people lost their lives.  Post-war Exeter faced new problems of rebuilding but the success, failure and aborted hopes of that ‘Exeter Phoenix’ form another story. (11)

The narrative of interwar Exeter is less dramatic but it’s a reminder of a time when our duty to provide decent homes for those who needed them was widely accepted across the political spectrum. Those efforts were imperfect, the results unspectacular perhaps, but they provided good, secure and affordable homes for many.

Sources

(1) Alderman W Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (1907) and Exeter City Council, Workmen’s Dwellings Committee minutes, March 13 1907

(2) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, May 26 1914

(3) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, October 23 1917

(4) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, May 7 1919

(5) ‘Building Rings and Housing’, The Times, November 30 1923; the Federation’s response came in a letter from EC Lea (president of the Exeter Master Builders’ Federation) in The Times, December 3 1923; and the Ministry of Health’s comment in The Times, December 3 1923

(6) ‘Rebuilding plan for old Exeter council homes’, Exeter Express and Echo, February 24 2016

(7) City of Exeter, ‘Housing. Opening of 2000^th Post-War Municipal House by Right Honourable Sir Kingsley Wood, 9 March 1937’

(8) Miss K Barber, ‘The Development of Burnthouse Lane’ (1990). Unpublished manuscript in the Devon Archives and Local Studies Service.  You’ll find more detail on the early Burnthouse Lane Estate on the Exeter Memories website.

(9) Quoted in Bob Morley, Sam Davies, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–1938: A Comparative Analysis: Volume 4: Exeter – Hull (2013)

(10) Steele-Perkins, June 1932, quoted in Julia Frances Neville, Explaining Variations in Municipal Hospital Provision in the 1930s: A Study of Councils in the Far South West, PhD in Politics, University of Exeter, 2009

(11) Catherine Flinn, ‘“Exeter Phoenix”: Politics and the Rebuilding of a Blitzed City’, Southern History, vol 30, 2008