The Hartcliffe Estate, Bristol, 1944-1958: a Tale of Conflict and Betrayal

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1940s, 1950s

I’m very pleased to feature this new guest post by Paul Smith. Paul is the Chief Executive of Elim Housing Association and prior to that he was the Cabinet Member for Housing at Bristol City Council. Paul grew up on the Hartcliffe estate and was a tenant there himself. He was elected as the councillor there in 1988 and served for 11 years. During this period he started researching the history of the area coming across the original plans which were very different from what was finally built. Paul has worked in housing for over 30 years in a variety of roles but rarely finds that his degree in Astrophysics comes in useful. Paul is a Chartered Member of the CIH (more useful than astrophysics) and a Fellow of the RSA.

In 1943, Bristol City Council started thinking about the reconstruction of the city once the war was over. In January of that year a report identified the need for 30,000 new homes and there was an acceptance that not all of these homes could be accommodated inside the existing city boundary. Talks began with both Somerset and Gloucestershire to secure extensions of the city to access developable land. One potential location was the farmland between the southern city boundary and the sprawling Dundry Hill.

A new estate could be built on the basis of a garden city model which was described in a book published by the local company J S Fry and written by the City Archivist, English City: the Story of Bristol (1945). Fry’s said they published the book as ‘We felt we should like to make some contribution to the rebirth of our city’. In reality, the book was a council document covering the history of the city but also focused on how it would be rebuilt. It described building:

self-contained districts called ‘Neighbourhood units’, each with its own amenities, including a shopping centre, clinic, school and churches, cinema and recreation grounds. Factories should be built in or near the ‘Neighbourhood’.

An illustration from English City: the Story of Bristol

The new estate on the Dundry Slopes was to be built to this model. However, there were things which needed to be sorted out. The first was the boundary. Bristol Council was worried about the chaotic distribution of services, with Somerset County Council responsible for the police, public halls and community centres, education, health services, welfare services, children’s care, libraries and food and drug inspection; Long Ashton Rural District Council would have street lighting, street cleansing, refuse disposal and highways while Bristol would be running the housing itself and the fire service.

The County Council wasn’t keen either, based in Taunton, over 40 miles away down the A38. The County stated in a letter to Bristol:

This undertaking will involve the County Council in vast expenditure in respect of an area of the County which the Boundary Commission have already indicated should be added to Bristol and may have the effect of disorganizing the basis of County Council administration.

In 1949 Bristol gained the land from Somerset but in doing so had to relinquish its interest in expanding to the north and the east into Gloucestershire.

The next challenge came over the name. The good people of Dundry village did not want their name used to describe the new council estate. When Bristol proposed ‘New Dundry’, old Dundry complained that this would confuse the post office. The name settled on was Hartcliffe, ‘the army on the hill’, taking the name of the medieval Hundred of Hartcliffe which covered the area. Later there was also an argument about the street names. There was a proposal to the council that they be named after Battle of Britain pilots. This was defeated in a vote in favour of the established Bristol practice of using names which had a historical link to the area. The streets were named after taxpayers in the old Hundred.

An aerial view of the estate in the 1950s

The plans for the estate were ambitious, matching the neighbourhood plan. Hartcliffe was to have 3100 homes, three junior schools, a secondary school, six nurseries, three churches, six pubs, a cinema, a library, a health centre, five youth and scout/guide centres, a community centre, swimming pool, cricket pavilion and a public café.

The first blow to the plans came within just six months of their approval by the council. In May 1950, the Citizen Party (a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) was elected, ousting the Labour Party. In June 1951, the Housing Committee met and approved a lower standard for council houses. They would be smaller and cheaper and for the rest of that decade most council homes were built of pre-reinforced concrete, many of them the Easiform houses built by John Laing.

There was even a discussion about replacing a downstairs internal door with curtains; this was rejected because ‘the cost to the housewife would be more than in providing the doors’. This followed only eight years after the Bristol Post (13^th June 1943) reported that ‘Standard must be Higher [for] New Homes for men who return from the forces’. Then it was noted:

Men returning from the war with revolutionary ideas of what the position should be would not be content to wait long for houses. They should plan for a higher standard of housing on a 15 year programme.

By 1951 the discussion had turned to rents and taxes. Conservative councillor K Brown, chair of the Housing Committee, stated:

If you build a cheaper house it is bound to make it easier for the tenant. You must build houses which can be let to them at a rent they can pay. It either means an increase in rents of their houses or an increase in the city rates.

This was not the view of the outgoing chair Alderman Gill who said ‘he felt there ought to be no skimping of the necessities’. It wasn’t until over 30 years later that the defects in these cheaper houses were identified and legislated for leaving many councils, not just Bristol, having to spend many millions on rebuilding these ‘cheaper homes’ starting with those sold under the Right to Buy.

At the same time, the main road into the estate was downgraded from a dual to a single carriageway as government grant declined and, to save money on bridges, the stream running down the middle of the estate was filled in.

Bristol Evening Post, 4 June 1951

The Lord Mayor of Bristol, Alderman Harry Crook, delivering a speech at the ceremonial opening of the 5000th Easiform house to be completed in Bristol at the Hartcliffe Estate © Historic England Archive. John Laing Photographic Collection  jlp01_08_043919

The building of the estate proceeded at pace in the early and mid-1950s. Many who moved there were displaced from inner-city areas destroyed by the Luftwaffe or by the council. Slums were cleared and residents moved from the heart of the city to the new estate six miles to the south. Early residents recall that the area had a stigma as soon as it was built. In Looking Back on Bristol: Hartcliffe People Remember (Bristol Broadsides, 1978), Jean Carey recalled, ‘this was the trouble in the beginning. Everybody sort of said Hartcliffe and turned their noses up; “We’re not going up there to live”‘.

People moving in soon found that the facilities promised were lost. Firstly, they were aware that the estate was built without pavements or side roads being completed. The area was a sea of mud, deliveries were only made to the main roads, shops and pubs only followed several years later leaving residents to wade out of the estate to access services.

Easiform housing on Luckley Avenue

The cinema, the swimming pool, the cricket pavilion, were never built, the library was completed over 20 years late, other facilities were scaled back – one nursery not six, three youth clubs not five, four pubs not six and the main shopping centre was also scaled back. Promises were broken and the estate became an outpost of the city, a sadly denuded version of the original vision.

Hartcliffe in 2019, Bristol lies to the rear © Wikimedia Commons, Paul Cli

High-Rise in Bristol, Part II from 1960

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

We left Bristol last week in 1958 as slum clearance was in full swing and just as the Council announced plans to demolish a further 24,500 homes by the end of the century. By this point, however, such wholesale clearances – extended to areas of less severe housing deprivation – were arousing fierce opposition and that would have unintended consequences.

As local opposition mobilised, particularly among owner occupiers, the Labour MP for Bristol South, William Wilkins, raised concerns in a 1959 House of Commons adjournment debate, focusing on the issue of Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs). In Bristol, he cited 11 orders awaiting ministerial approval comprising 839 ‘pink’ properties (officially classified as unfit) and 453 ‘grey’ properties (capable of rehabilitation), of which 527 were owner-occupied. He cited local discontent and asked whether the Conservative Government felt that ‘they should abandon their slum clearance programme not only in Bristol but throughout the country’. (1) In this, Wilkins was some way ahead of of his time.

Croydon House (left) and Lansdown Court – two tower blocks that were built in Easton

In 1959, a candidate of the Easton Homes Defence Association, formed to opposed demolitions, was victorious in local elections. In 1960, the Citizen Party (the local Conservatives in all but name) – which had been fanning the flames of local protest – secured an overall majority on the City Council.

The new administration set about reversing Labour policies by promoting private development on suburban estates and withdrawing the CPOs. But they encountered unexpected opposition when they met Henry Brooke, the Conservative Minister of Housing and Local Government. Brooke emphasised that he was: (2)

extremely anxious that slum clearance should go on and go on fast. I should be anxious that large numbers of houses which are represented by the Medical Officer of Health were being turned down by the City Council. I should be beginning to wonder whether, in fact, slum clearance was going on as fast as it should be.

The political arms race at Westminster between Labour and Conservative Parties to build housing at pace and scale clearly took precedence over such local difficulties and the Bristol delegation returned home chastened. Central slum clearance proceeded and, ironically, in an attempt to make up the shortfall created by the axing of the Council’s suburban housebuilding programme, the construction of high flats in central areas was accelerated. In 1962, the proportion of high-rise approvals reached 99 percent. In the short term, the Council demolished 1300 more homes than it built between 1961-62, a fact contributing to Labour’s victory in the 1963 local elections.

Patterson House (top) and Proctor House, Redcliffe, built by Tersons in 1963

This new phase of high-rise construction saw a shift in its locally predominant form – from slab block to point block. The former were criticised for their narrow access balconies which were not at all the ‘streets in the sky’ being pioneered in some deck-access developments of the day. Bristol was also becoming more typical in its reliance on a number of major contractors; Laing, Wimpey and Tersons won the bulk of local contracts.

What Bristol escaped, though seemingly more by happenstance, was the move to system-building. Bristol had been urged down this route in 1962 by Evelyn Sharp, the powerful Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), and local councillors visited Denmark and France to see such methods in operation. But the Council was unwilling to offer the size of contract that the big builders wanted and the City Architect (now Albert Clarke) proved an awkward negotiating partner so interest waned.

Moorfields House (left) and Baynton House

The 13-storey Kingsmarsh House and 11-storey Moorfields House and Baynton House in Lawrence Hill were completed in the mid-1960s. Other point blocks were built just to the north in Easton in the later 1960s, including Croydon House, Twinnell House and Lansdowne Court at 17 storeys.

Hartcliffe shopping centre and tower blocks, c1964 (Bristol Housing Report 1959-1964; Bristol Reference Library, B14100)

Into the mid-1960s, the Council also built high-rise in some of its suburban estates – three 14-storey blocks on Culverwell Road, Withywood (since demolished) and three eleven storey blocks on Hareclive Road, Hartcliffe, which remain. The usual case for suburban high-rise was mixed development – a variety of housing forms intended to serve a range of housing needs and to provide point and contrast in otherwise rather monotonous low-rise estates. In Bristol, it may also have reflected the Council’s need to build at scale when other options had closed or been closed.

Armada House, Kingsdown

Carolina House, Kingsdown

The most interesting and controversial multi-storey schemes, however, occurred in Kingsdown. The Kingsdown I (Lower Kingsdown) redevelopment was underway by 1965, comprising six six- and fourteen-storey slab blocks. Carolina House was officially opened in October 1967. This large-scale incursion into an area of previously dense and intimate housing – some would say picturesque – was contentious but criticisms ramped up when it came to the Council’s plans for the upper slopes, Kingsdown II.

Here the original proposal for three linked 17-storey blocks was fiercely opposed by an increasingly active Bristol Civic Society backed by the Royal Fine Art Commission. (The Commission was authorised to draw government attention to any development which ‘in its opinion affected amenities of a national or public character’.) The MHLG rejected the scheme and also sharply criticised the Council’s somewhat half-hearted revised scheme for four eight-storey blocks. When the Citizen Party won a majority on the Council in 1967, the scheme was scrapped and the land sold to private developers. The High Kingsdown scheme which emerged – a courtyard development designed by Anthony Mackay of Whicheloe, Macfarlane and Towning Hill – is widely praised. (3)

Northfield House

Geoffrey Palmer, the leader of the new Citizen administration, declared in December 1967 that ‘apart from a few projects in hand, Bristol will build no more multi-storey flats’. Northfield House, in Bedminster, begun in 1969 was the Council’s last major high-rise scheme and – at 18 storeys – its tallest.

Whatever the local dynamics, in this Bristol was also reflecting national trends. Patrick Dunleavy emphasises the extent to which Bristol – like other local authorities – was heavily influenced by central government pressure, notably in the drive to clear the slums and build high in the early 1960s and in the reversal of that policy in 1967.

They heyday of high-rise – notwithstanding those projects in the pipeline – was over. The collapse of the system-built Ronan Point block in Newham in May 1968 is always taken as the major cause. In fact, alarm at the disproportionate expense of high-rise construction and a growing realisation that it didn’t rehouse at density (or that high density could be achieved better) were already making rehabilitation of older properties a preferred option of central government.

Granville Street and Eccleston House, Barton Hill

By 1971, there were 66 council estates in Bristol containing some 43,000 homes which housed just under a third of its 427,000 population. Within the total, there were 55 high blocks (of ten storeys or more) in the city forming around 14 percent of its total housing stock – a proportion higher than that in Manchester and Sheffield, for example, and the highest among what Dunleavy calls the free-standing county boroughs (a status it would lose in 1974 before becoming a unitary authority again in 1996).  

This had been a frantic period of housing construction. Bristol had both followed and bucked the trends – pursuing the same path to higher-rise building as most of the larger cities but doing so in a local form, certainly in earlier years, and avoiding the pressures towards system building. Its slabs and blocks have generally survived – with the exception of some on the suburban estates – and seem to have stood the test of time better than many.

Sources

The website of the Tower Block UK Project provides detail on high-rise public housing in Bristol and nationally.  

(1) House of Commons, Adjournment Debate on Slum Clearance, 13 May 1959

(2) Quoted in Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The Politics of High-Rise Housing in Britain: Local Communities Tackle Mass Housing’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1978. Dunleavey’s research provides much of the detail that follows.  

(3) A full account of the episode and description of the High Kingsdown scheme is provided by Elain Harwood in this online document.

High-Rise in Bristol, Part I to 1960

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s

Bristol had been transformed by council housing between the wars, as discussed in this earlier post. The City Council built over 15,000 new council homes, principally on nine new suburban estates. Together, they formed around 40 percent of the city’s new housing. It would be transformed again in the post-war period – new peripheral estates appeared but, most strikingly and obviously in the central areas, there were also the high-rise blocks which will form the central focus of this post.

There had been modest forays into multi-storey housing before the Second World War. Three-storey flats had been built to rehouse those displaced by a slum clearance scheme in Eugene Street in 1923 at Lawford’s Gate in Old Market and Eugene Street itself. A speech by Sir Hilton Young, Minister of Health and Housing, in Bristol in 1934 probably boosted local efforts. He urged that those displaced by slum clearance – in full swing as a result of legislative and policy changes in the decade – be rehoused centrally (near their places of work) and in flats; he counselled a somewhat sceptical audience to ‘go and look at what can be done in the way of tenement dwellings for wage-earners according to modern standards’. (1) Four-storey flats were built in Hotwell Road, Kingsland Road and Champion Square (St Pauls) in the mid- to late-1930s.

The Kingsland Road flats, St Philips, photographed in 1950 (Bristol Record Office 40307/1/35)

Around 3200 homes were destroyed in Bristol by aerial bombing during the Second World War but raised post-war expectations and a baby boom added their own urgency to renewed slum clearance and rehousing efforts after it. The first, unauthorised, response was a squatting movement which spread like wildfire across the UK; by October 1946, an estimated 1038 camps had been commandeered as emergency housing by almost 40,000 activists. In Bristol, squatters occupied a military base named White City near the Bristol City football ground. Local supporters were keen to stress their respectability: (2)

Their action was unusual, unconstitutional, but let no one think they are ruffians. They are ordinary people, they shave every day, eat at tables, go off to earn their own living.

Squatters at the White City camp. August 1946 (photo courtesy of the Bristol Radical History Group website)

The Labour-controlled Council itself was initially hostile – elsewhere some were positively helpful – but a prominent Labour member of the Housing Committee, Harry Hennessy, supported the action and urged those taking part to: ‘Sit tight. Carry on. Take no notice of rumours. The police cannot touch you’. Some of the army huts were acquired temporarily as council housing and most of the squatters had been permanently rehoused by 1950.

The temporary prefab programme, inaugurated in 1944, was an official state response and around 2700 of these temporary bungalows were erected in the city – the largest numbers (around 150) at a site in Ashton Dell and 127 in the suburb of Horfield.

Bristol Lord Mayor, Alderman Harry Crook, presents the key of the 5000th Easiform home to its new tenants (1955 Bristol Housing Report; Bristol Reference Library, B14100)

The city also went big on permanent prefabrication – the various systems that it was hoped might provide a speedy and cost-effective method of solving the post-war housing crisis. By March 1955, Bristol had built 16,704 permanent houses since war’s end; of these 10,892 were non-traditional – including 5415 Easiform homes made of in situ poured concrete and 1712 Cornish units of concrete post and panel construction. Less common systems nationally such as Unity (precast concrete and steel frame) and Woolaway (another form of concrete post and panel construction) were also built at scale. (3)

Traditional housing on Gatehouse Avenue, Hartcliffe (Bristol Housing Report 1959-1964; Bristol Reference Library, B14100)

It was these suburbs that provided the bulk of the city’s early post-war housebuilding. The Lawrence Weston, Henbury and Lockleaze Estates to the north were approved soon after the war; Withywood and Hartcliffe to the south started construction in the early 1950s.

The Council’s 1951 Development Plan reflected the thinking of the day in its emphasis on the neighbourhood units held to promote community on new council estates. But it marked also a renewed intention to redevelop central areas; it was estimated that there were 10,000 houses in Bristol unfit for human habitation and a further 25,000 that were substandard. The Plan envisaged 19,000 new homes by 1957 of which 10,000 would be flats.

It had been argued since the 1930s, as we saw, that inner-city slum clearance required multi-storey replacement – displaced residents needed to be near their place of work and flats were held to achieve a necessary higher population density. In the 1950s, the case was strengthened by what many councils perceived as a shortage of suitable land for housing (a ‘land trap’, as it was described contemporarily), created by new zoning regulations and green belts pushing peripheral suburbs inconveniently distant. Some councils were also loath to move their ratepayers and voters into neighbouring districts.

In this respect, Bristol, aided by a boundary extension into Somerset in 1951, was relatively well off but the perception of land shortage was a powerful one that influenced decision-making at the time. Patrick Dunleavy, the chief chronicler of Bristol’s multi-storey development, considers the 1956 high flats subsidy (which paid a higher amount the higher the scheme) another significant influence on Bristol councillors’ choice to build tall.

The Redcliffe Redevelopment Area (Bristol Housing Report 1959-1964; Bristol Reference Library, B14100)

Heavily-bombed Redcliffe, immediately to the east of the city centre, was one of the earliest areas selected for redevelopment when in July 1945 the City Council agreed proposals to redevelop the district as ‘a housing area for key workers’. Detailed plans for what Alderman Charles Gill, the powerful chair of the Housing Committee, called a ‘tremendous and interesting project’, were approved in December 1949. (4)  

Images of Redcliffe newbuild taken from Cleave Barr, Public Authority Housing (1958)

Although reaching only a modest six storeys, this was an early showpiece scheme for the Council, planned to accommodate some 2500 residents in a mix of 775 one- to three-bed homes. ‘An outstanding contribution [was] the bold decision to provide a central-heating and hot-water system for all dwellings’, according to AW Cleave Barr – a district heating system, located in Canynge House, which ‘influenced the form of the scheme in the direction of a few very large blocks of flats and maisonettes, as opposed to a mixed development of flats and houses’. (5) A communal laundry, nursery and doctors’ surgery were also included.

Waring House

Higher blocks, including the 13-storey Waring House, were completed in the area in 1960. A three-bed flat in the scheme could be rented for about £3.20 which included hot water, laundry and heating. (If you watched the 2020 BBC2 series A House Through Time on no. 10 Guinea Street, you will have seen the development at the end of the road.)

Barton Hill, to the east of the city centre, was another area targeted for redevelopment and controversy over the plans anticipated later difficulties. It was undeniably an area of old and inadequate housing but many of the residents – who felt themselves part of a respectable working-class community – resented the slum label and disliked the multi-storey alternative.

According to Hilda Jennings’ account of a public meeting called to discuss the plans in 1953 (Jennings was the warden of a university settlement in the district): (6)

Opposition to building in multi-storey flats was general; when one official, after expounding their convenience and the necessity for them, agreed that he himself lived, in a ‘nice little house’, the whole audience chanted ‘That’s what we want. A nice little house in a nice little garden, with a nice little fence around it’.

But, apparently, council officials were heard more sympathetically ‘when they claimed that the only alternative to building upwards was moving out to the overspill area’. In any case, the plans went ahead

Barton House

Actual clearance and reconstruction took far longer. Barton House was completed in 1958; at 15 storeys, then the tallest block outside London. Two eleven-storey blocks (Phoenix and Eccleston Houses) were completed in 1961; four more fifteen-storey blocks (Longlands, Harwood, Corbett and Beaufort Houses) the following year. (Most of the present colour schemes date to a general refurbishment programme carried out in the 1990s.)

Phoenix House, Barton Hill

Longlands House, Barton Hill

These were the balcony-access slab blocks, designed by City Architect, J Nelson Meredith, that Bristol favoured at the time. The blocks here, as elsewhere in the city, were, for all their prominence, placed individually so there were few dense concentrations of high-rise housing and no attempt to emulate the Zeilenbau schemes (arranged on a north-south axis to maximise sunlight) found elsewhere. (7)

Tyndall House

John Cozens House

Lower-rise blocks of six-storeys apiece in idiosyncratic Bristol-style – Tyndall House and John Cozens House – in the St Jude’s Redevelopment Area were begun in 1957. Two ten-storey blocks (since demolished) were built on the peripheral Lawrence Weston estate.

Winton House and Rockingham House, Lawrence Weston, photographed on a grey day in 1988 © Tower Block Project and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Overall, the share of high-rise in housing schemes approved by the City Council increased from eight percent to nearly 30 between 1954 and 1957. In 1958, the Housing Committee sanctioned a 12-year clearance programme that included plans to demolish half the houses in Easton ward and some 24,500 houses in total by 2001. (8)

These plans would prove more controversial and the political shift they helped bring about locally would have major consequences for how high-rise developed in Bristol in the 1960s. Those topics will feature in next week’s post.

Sources

The website of the Tower Block UK Project provides detail on high-rise public housing in Bristol and nationally.  

(1) ‘Minister’s Speech on Housing’, Western Daily Press, 14 July 1934

(2) This and the succeeding quotation are drawn from Howard Webber, ‘A Domestic Rebellion: The Squatters’ Movement of 1946’. You can read more of Hennessy’s support for the squatting movement in this interview with Alderman Wally Jenkins recorded by Bristol Museums.

(3) The detail is drawn from the 1955 Bristol Housing Report featured in Bristol Festival of Ideas, Mel Kelly, Bristol Housing Reports: 1955-1959. A complete breakdown of surviving non-traditional housing in Bristol is supplied in response to this Freedom of Information request made in 2016.

(4) ‘Redcliff Hill Flats Plan to House Port Key Workers Goes Forward’, Western Daily Press, 20 December 1949

(5) AW Cleave Barr, Public Authority Housing (BT Batsford, 1958)

(6) Hilda Jennings wrote an account of the episode in her 1962 book, Societies in the Making. The quotation from it is drawn from Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The Politics of High-Rise Housing in Britain: Local Communities Tackle Mass Housing’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1978.

(7) Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers for the Welfare State (The Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017).

(8) Dunleavy, ‘The Politics of High-Rise Housing in Britain’.

The Knowle West Estate, Bristol: ‘the difficulties in rehousing the slum population’

Tags

1930s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

If a single estate can be taken to encapsulate the social, political and planning history of council housing in this country it is probably Knowle West in Bristol.  You’ll find in it all the hopes and dreams, all the good intentions and unintended consequences, that have marked the complex story of council housing over the last hundred years or so.  And you’ll find families and communities that have lived this story in all its complexity.

Broad Walk, Knowle © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

To begin with, let’s cast our eyes a little wider.  In the interwar period, the Bedminster and Knowle Estate was the largest of Bristol’s interwar council schemes.  Building began in 1920. By 1939 the estate as a whole comprised over 6000 council homes and a population of some 28,000.

As we saw in last week’s post, this was the product of three phases of council house building – that of 1919 to 1921 when the government was briefly committed to building high-quality ‘homes for heroes’; the legislation of 1923 and, more particularly, 1924 which set lower housing standards but also lower rents; and the turning point of 1930 when the government committed itself to the rehousing of the slum population.

The geographical and social implications of this were stark, as the sociologists Rosamond Jevons and John Madge noted: (1)

The composition of the population and the physical structure of the estate reflect…the evolution of housing policy since the first world war. From east to west, the estate falls into three main social zones. At Knowle Park are the expensive 1919 and 1923 Act houses…and the more prosperous tenants. Next comes a wide band of [1924] Act houses at somewhat lower rents. Filwood Park, at the western end, contains large numbers of slum clearance houses. It was on this estate that the first houses were built under the 1930 Act, and to which families from the oldest and worst slums were moved.

To begin with, there were problems of adjustment to the new estates that were broadly shared.  This was a population moving overwhelmingly from the inner cities, from densely packed housing which forced or fostered – depending on your perspective – a sociability and intimacy that could not be replicated on the new suburban estates.

This was particularly apparent in Bristol’s interwar estates, built at low density along Garden City lines to the town planning ideals of the day.  It was exactly the qualities of the estates – houses which were semi-detached or set in short terraces and dispersed amidst open spaces and greenery – which enforced the break with previous life-styles.

Newquay Road, Knowle West © Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

The houses themselves – all with gardens, all with their own bathrooms and WCs, nearly all (even the smaller non-parlour homes typical of later building) with more space than residents had previously enjoyed – reinforced this.  The sociability of the streets and pubs was a characteristic – however much it has been romanticised subsequently – of poverty, of homes from which people needed escape.

Still, it was certainly the case that it was hard to sustain community life in any form in the new estates.  The Council prioritised housing – both as the most obvious necessity to its tenants and because government subsidies covered housing but not community facilities.

‘Filwood Park, Bristol, from the north-east, 1933 – Britain from Above’ © English Heritage http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EPW041483

In Filwood Park (which would be renamed Knowle West), 3000 families had settled by 1935 and they had to make do with just ten shops (three from the local Coop), a temporary Anglican church and institute and a Baptist chapel.  To be fair, this deficit of community institutions was rectified rapidly.  In 1938, to serve a population of around 12,000, there were four places of worship and a number of voluntary organisations had moved into the area, including the Bristol University Settlement, the ‘Corner Cottage Club’ and an Unemployed Welfare Association.

‘The Filwood Social Centre and surrounding streets, Filwood Park, 1947 – Britain from Above’ © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EAW011968

The impressive Filwood Social Centre – with dance hall, gymnasium, meeting rooms, canteen, skittle alley, workshop and reading room – opened in the same year.  There were no doubt others who took more pleasure in the opening of the Broadway Cinema, also in 1938.  It was supported by a £7000 loan from the City Council and it’s a useful indicator of local issues which we’ll examine later that the Council stipulated that there be a separate doorway to the rear of the cinema, with its own pay box – ‘to enable the lower class of patrons to use the back entrance’. (2)

Filwood Broadway © Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

This was a working-class community and increasingly one – as the rehousing of the slum population took effect – of the less well-off working class.  The social survey of Jevons and Madge in 1937 revealed that 61.5 per cent of the heads of household belonged to the semi-skilled and unskilled workforce.  Around one in five were skilled workers; under one in ten held any kind of middle-class employment.

This is a picture strengthened by those who, in the later 1930s, were moving out:

The tenants who had left…proved to belong very largely to the better-off class on the estates.  No less than a third were skilled manual workers…Blackcoated workers, never very strong on the estates, showed the strongest tendency to leave.

And this brings us to one of the stark social realities of the enlarged Knowle Estate. As we saw in Norris Green, Liverpool, there were sharp tensions between the earlier, better-off residents and those who were moving in from the clearance areas:

The families displaced from the slums were, so to speak, the second wave of colonists on the new estates.  They were thus superimposed upon communities which had already become relatively established; the effect undoubtedly proved disturbing to the older tenants.  By the outbreak of the war the prevailing tone of some estates was set, through the force of numbers, by the least skilled and poorest tenants. Where this had occurred…it had become very difficult to secure co-operation between the different classes of tenants.

When Jevons and Madge questioned those who had left the Estate, they had moved ostensibly to better themselves, often to buy their own property.  But closer questioning revealed ‘dislike of the estate as such, and particularly dislike of neighbours.  The population was said to be too mixed’.  Jevons and Madge didn’t pull their punches in describing what we would now label as anti-social behaviour:

One objection was the difficulty of bringing up children decently when those of the neighbours are completely uncontrolled and have quite different and often unmentionable standards of behaviour and language.  Noise, quarrelling of adults, dirt, breakages, gossiping and prying were among the complaints.

As we saw in Blackbird Leys, Oxford, this was a characterisation that could come to apply to the estate as a whole.  Knowle had become identified with Knowle West (Filwood Park) – the slum dwellers’ area.

The Council shared this concern.  AW Smith, the Council officer in charge of housing, argued in 1930 that: (3)

one of the difficulties in rehousing the slum population was the mental attitude of many people who had resigned themselves to squalid surroundings, an attitude which could be expressed in the phrase ‘Here I am and here I remain’.  It was not enough to rehouse those people; new interests had to be aroused in them, and facilities provided for social intercourse.

But in the same year, he reported that the new tenants weren’t in fact storing coal in their baths: ‘contrary to the prophecies of pessimists, picture rails are used, and baths are not misused’. (4)  By the later 1930s, social workers testified to:

a marked improvement which has taken place in cleanliness of the houses and in clothes; the better housing environment has undoubtedly had a great educational effect upon the population.  A disgustingly dirty house is now uncommon.

There’s a lingering Victorianism here – middle-class attitudes which held that it was the improvidence of the poor rather than the objective reality of poverty that was to blame for social problems. The reality was harsher.

The Bristol Social Survey of 1937 found that one in three of council tenants were scraping along just above the poverty line (and clearly vulnerable to any personal or economic downturn in their fortunes); 16 per cent were officially below the poverty line.  When it looked at the children, 43 per cent were found to be in families just above the poverty line and a full 28 per cent living below it.

Poorer families tended to have more children – which, no doubt, seemed an indication of the improvidence often decried – and tended, as it happened, to live in the smaller, cheaper, houses.  The attempt to rectify this anomaly seemed fraught with difficulty: ‘Houses now let at higher rents tend to be in the more exclusive parts of the estates; the allocation of these houses to poorer and larger families would certainly encourage some of the older residents to leave’.

Broad Walk shops © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The reality was that it was more expensive to live on the estates than it was in inner-city privately rented accommodation.  Rents were higher in any case but on top of this came additional costs in heating and furnishing the new, larger homes, travel to work costs, and increased food bills as local shops sold more dearly.

In Filwood Park/Knowle West in the later thirties, one in four of the men were unemployed or dependent on casual labour, leading almost half of the area’s children to be living officially below the poverty line.

In this context, there’s a peculiarly tone-deaf quality to complaints that ‘there was often no proper mid-day meal’, that ‘children were given a slice of bread or a penny to buy chips’, that ‘tinned foods of all kinds figured prominently in the family menus’.

The Second World War intervened before Jevons and Madge could publish their report and their final observations reflect its impact:

It cannot be denied that many mothers are feckless over housekeeping; the absence of husbands, with the encouragement to wives to undertake part-time war work during the war, will not have improved matters.

That understanding of gender relations and women’s work is perhaps not one that we would share nowadays.

The war failed to improve matters in other respects too.  Bristol was heavily bombed; 5000 houses were either destroyed or badly damaged. In 1946 the waiting list for council housing stood at an unprecedented 26,000.

Bristol built – mostly in a generation of new estates developed on the city fringes but also, for the first time, in major inner city sites such as Redcliffe.  There was less scope for the growth of the interwar estates but in the 1960s the Inns Court area was developed on the eastern fringe of Knowle West. (5)

Inns Court © Copyright Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new Inns Court was a radical departure from the Garden City principles of the rest of Knowle but it’s a good example of a later wave of town planning thinking.  Radburn estates were well-intentioned – they were meant to create viable and distinct neighbourhoods, breaking away from a traditional street layout and creating a more pedestrian-friendly, intimate environment by providing a feeder road (Inn Courts Drive here) and a series of cul-de-sacs.

Inns Court, the media portrayal: Bristol Post, 12 June 2013

By 2009, Bristol City planners had concluded that the reverse had occurred: (6)

The layout has resulted in a physical environment that contributes to isolation rather than facilitating community interaction and linkages across adjacent neighbourhoods. The system of cul-de-sacs also causes poor legibility and permeability of the area.

The design had ‘failed to provide a safe and well-overlooked environment’.

The Council proposed to demolish around 1000 homes but, as so often when redevelopment schemes are mooted, the residents themselves were opposed and failed to recognise the criticisms being levelled against their homes and neighbourhood.  The chair of the local residents’ association questioned the plan: (7)

I don’t see there is any necessity for demolishing our homes. When they were built, we were told they would last for 100 years but now they are talking about taking them down. I have lived here for more than 30 years. My wife and I are happy here. We brought up our family here. If they demolished the estate and rebuilt it, it would devastate the community.

The scheme has since been dropped.

But regeneration proposals live on and the problems of Knowle West are real. A 2007 survey concluded – in words which could have been applied to many other estates across the country: (8)

High levels of poverty…in the area with limited local facilities and geographical isolation. Educational attainment is poor and there are high levels of burglary and vandalism. The availability of work is limited and people lack the right skills. There is poor health, isolation and high levels of teenage pregnancies…Local residents identify bullying, crime, drug use, poor environment, transport and dumped cars as local priorities.

Filwood and Inns Court were ranked among the five per cent most deprived areas in the country.  In Filwood, numbers on Incapacity Benefit were double those of Bristol as a whole. In 2010, a Bristol City Council survey revealed – in the new jargon of planning and sociology – that over one third of people in Filwood ward and over half the children were ‘income deprived’. (9)

Knowle West shops awaiting redevelopment © Weirdoldhattie and made available in Wikimedia Commons

The wider Knowle Estate presented a different picture and conformed for the most part to the Bristol average but the original sin of a local housing neighbourhood built to house the poorest of the community lived on.  Little seemed to have changed since Jevons and Madge’s pioneering report of the 1930s.

Daventry Road, Knowle West © Jezhotwells and made available in Wikimedia Commons

At the time of writing, a ‘Regeneration Framework’ is in place for Knowle West intended to address the full range of issues facing the estate.  Working in partnership with local people, its aim is ‘a community full of confidence and pride, skilled and healthy, living in a thriving Bristol neighbourhood that is green and well-connected and low in living costs.’ (10)  It’s hard to argue with that.

The broader lesson is that local government remains, in the words of Winifred Holtby and in the language of her day: (11)

the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment.

It hasn’t always got it right and the story of Knowle West is a reminder of the complexity of the endeavour and the unintended consequences of the best-intentioned of municipal reform.   But local councils and those maligned stalwarts of local democracy – our councillors – will continue to write that story and many will be seeking to transform municipal dreams into the concrete reality of a better world.

Sources

(1) Rosamond Jevons and John Madge, Housing Estates. A Study of Bristol Corporation Policy and Practice between the Wars (1946)

(2) This detail – and much more – is supplied in the Flikr photostream of local historian Paul Townsend.

(3) Quoted in ‘Slums and Town Planning’, The Times, October 18, 1930

(4) Quoted in Madge Dresser, Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-1930 In MJ Daunton (ed), Councillors and Tenants: local authority housing in English cities, 1919-1939 (1984)

(5) Peter Malpass and Jennie Walmsley, 100 Years of Council Housing in Bristol, UWE, Bristol (2005)

(6) Bristol City Council, Knowle West Regeneration Framework Baseline Briefing (2009)

(7) ‘Facelift designs are not so grand, say Bristol residents’, This is Bristol, October 6 2010

(8) Lin Whitfield Consultancy, The Local Voluntary and Community Sector, Its Impact and Funding Issues: A Study of Knowle West, Bristol (August 2007)

(9) Bristol City Council, Deprivation in Bristol 2010

(10) For details of community involvement in the current regeneration and the full range of local events and activities, see the Knowledge website

(11) Winifred Holtby, South Riding (1936)

My thanks to the various local photographers acknowledged above who have made their images available for republication.

Bristol’s Interwar Council Housing: ‘a surprising beauty’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Council housing transformed Bristol between the wars.  Some 15,000 council homes were built, principally in nine new suburban estates.  Forty per cent of new homes in the city in this period were council homes.  Designed according to the finest planning principles of the day, they represented not just new buildings but radically altered lives.

Woodcote Road, Hillfields Park, c1930 © Paul Townsend and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Despite these later efforts, Bristol had come slowly to the necessity of council housing.  Before 1914, the Corporation had built just 72 tenement homes – and these mainly to replace homes demolished in road improvement schemes.  Constructed in Fox Road, Chapel Street, Braggs Lane, Millpond Avenue and Fishponds Road, the only survivors of this period are tenements in Mina Road, St Werburghs. (1)

Mina Road tenements, built 1906

But even before 1914, a wind of change was apparent.  Though a proposal to build a 400-home estate in Bedminster was defeated by a Liberal and Conservative majority on the council, council officials themselves were suggesting that: (2)

as regards the housing of the poorest of the poor, the most practical solution would be for the work to be taken in hand by the Local Authority, aided by grants from the National Exchequer.

As so often, it took a war to make ideas once seen as radical not only practicable but necessary.  By 1917 – as housing pressures grew, labour unrest magnified, and post-war expectations heightened – the Coalition Government itself was committing to a massive housing programme on just these lines.

In 1918, the City Council purchased 700 acres of land in sizeable chunks across the city outskirts – notably Bedminster, Fishponds, Sea Mills, Speedwell and Horfield – in anticipation.  Another packet of land was bought close to the port of Avonmouth in Shirehampton.

Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act gave the power and money to act and it was Addison himself who cut the first sod on the Council’s first post-war estate in June 1919.  ‘Addison’s Oak’ survives in Sea Mills Square.  The minister articulated the new ambitions. (3)

They did not want houses built in dismal streets. Until they had houses with air about them, so long would they have to spend enormous sums annually on sickness…They wanted big production and they were prepared to pay big prices.

And Bristol’s new estates were designed to fulfil these aspirations.  The first four estates – Hillfields to the east, Sea Mills to the north-west, Knowle to the south and Shirehampton – were garden suburbs, taking their inspiration from Garden City ideals and characterised by low housing density (sometimes under 12 an acres), curving streetscapes and abundant greenery.

‘Sea Mills Garden Suburb’, 1927 © English Heritage http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EPW019266

St Edyth’s Road, Sea Mills © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Sea Mills, in 1981 one of the first council estates in the country to be designated a conservation area, was the jewel in the crown and conforms very closely to designs outlined by Raymond Unwin in his path-breaking pamphlets, Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (1912). That it could move John Betjeman to such eloquence in 1937 says something for its quality: (4)

a surprising beauty showing off in the evening sunlight; and vistas of trees and fields and pleasant cottages that that magic estate has managed to create.

Trym Side, Sea Mills © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In other respects, the new estates fell some way short of Garden City ideals.  They would always be suburbs, not the self-sufficient communities that Ebenezer Howard had originally envisaged, and they lacked in their early years many basic social amenities.  In 1920 the Council’s Housing Extension and Town Planning Committee had stated baldly that it was concentrating on ‘housing first, then town planning’ – public facilities would come later.  (5)

This, of course, was a common failing, repeated in many of the council estates we’ve studied.  It would mark too Bristol’s later schemes and reflects the financial pressures on local councils, desperate to build but cash-strapped.

Beechen Drive, Hillfields

The houses themselves were expensive – as Addison had suggested they would be, coming in at around £1089 each.  The first was opened in Beechen Drive, Hillfields, marked by a plaque:

Architecturally, they were generally rather plain red-brick, municipal ‘neo-Georgian’, two-storey houses, semi-detached or in short terraces of four. Some were cement-rendered or washed cream or white.

The Council also experimented with system-building.  Some 250 Dorman Long steel-frame and concrete houses were built on the Sea Mills Estate.  Though they were cheaper, at £800, to build, higher maintenance costs led the scheme to be dropped.

Across Bristol as a whole some 16 design types were employed over the years but such minor variations probably did little to counter an overall blandness: ‘The uniformity of materials and elevations is not relieved by any variety of colour. The ubiquitous privet hedge does little to conceal this uniformity’. (6)

Still, for their new tenants their facilities were far superior to any they had previously known. All the houses had a bathroom and WC (though hot water was generally supplied by a copper in the scullery and pumped to the bathroom by hand).  Most – 96 per cent of Bristol Corporation’s interwar homes – were three-bedroom.  And on the early estates a high proportion of homes – 70 per cent on the Hillfields Estate – had a parlour.

In the event, the 1919 Act was something of a false dawn.  While the drive to build would remain through most of the interwar period, council housing standards would fall as government finances tightened.  Addison’s scheme was brought to a close in 1921 when Bristol had completed just 1189 of the 5000 houses planned.

Politically in this period Bristol was run by a Conservative-Liberal alliance which in 1925 was formalised as the Citizens’ Party though its Liberal element would grow progressively weaker.  Labour was emerging as a strong opposition and in 1924 its leader, the redoubtable Frank Sheppard, became chair of the Housing Committee.  First elected to the council in 1893, Sheppard served – for all but a brief spell – until his death, aged 93, in 1956.  Labour would hold power only briefly before the Second World War, in 1937.

Housing Acts in 1923 under Neville Chamberlain and, more generously, in 1924 under Labour’s John Wheatley offered new financial terms and allowed a further 9000 homes to be built over the next decade.  These were generally smaller, non-parlour, homes but their overall look and design of houses echoed those of their predecessors.  The exception was another foray into system building in Horfield and Sea Mills Estates where 1100 ‘Parkinson’ pre-cast reinforced concrete houses were built.  These have been subject to demolition or substantial refurbishment in recent years. (7)

These later homes were for the most part cheaper to rent.  To avoid conflict between tenants, houses under the 1924 Act were built separately on the Bedminster and Horfield Estates where they let at 7s 6d (36p), two shillings (10p) less than comparable homes on Sea Mills, Hillfields or Knowle.

Salcombe Road, Knowle © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The still relatively high rents, however, continued to skew council housing to a generally better-off segment of the working class, excluding many of those in most urgent need of new homes. And of 1100 tenants who gave up their tenancies in 1928, a high proportion cited their inability to afford council homes.  Their expense was exacerbated in many cases by their distance from places of work and travel costs incurred.

Lawford’s Gate

Still, the need to both clear slums and rehouse slum dwellers was clear and it was taken up by the Council in 1923.  In Eugene Street, just north of the city centre, 88 dwellings contained 112 families and a total of 508 people.  Unusually, the Council built three-storey flats in another central area, Lawford’s Gate to rehouse those displaced.

These were mostly three-room flats lacking separate bathrooms so it remained pretty basic – though more sanitary – accommodation.

Birkin Street, Dings. The image shows the estate after a Home Zone initiative completed in 2005

In 1929, another slum clearance took place in the Dings area of Bristol.  Some of the families were relocated to the new St Anne’s Estate but subsequently 60 two-storey houses were built in the area. The Prince of Wales visited it in 1934.

Before then, in 1930, it was central government which would launch a radical shift in housing policy.  Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act prioritised the clearance of slum areas and required the rehousing of their residents. It would have a major effect on Bristol’s housing schemes of the 1930s.

Greystoke Avenue, Southmead © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Council had already purchased 700 acres of land in 1929 to allow further building – on land adjacent to the Bedminster and Knowle Estate and, to the north, land in Southmead. The Southmead Estate to the north of the city was begun under the 1924 Act but would expand in the 1930s to rehouse principally those from inner-city clearance areas.

The next phase of growth in the gigantic Bedminster and Knowle Estate would take place in Filwood Park (later Knowle West) and this would also come to accommodate primarily former slum dwellers.

By 1939, Bedminster and Knowle had a population of around 28,000.  Three other estates had populations of over 2000. All this was – benign and well-intentioned – social engineering on a grand scale. And it would not be without its difficulties.  Next week’s post will examine the fascinating and complex history of Knowle West.

Sources

(1) Peter Malpass and Jennie Walmsley, 100 Years of Council Housing in Bristol, UWE, Bristol (2005)

(2) Quoted in Madge Dresser, ‘Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-30’ in M.J. Daunton, Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in England, 1919-1939 (1984)

(3) Addison addressing a public meeting in Bristol reported in ‘Housing and Health’, The Times, June 5, 1919

(4) Quoted in Bristol City Council, Sea Mills Character Appraisal and Management Proposals (2010)

(5) Quoted in Madge Dresser, ‘Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-30’

(6) Rosamond Jevons and John Madge, Housing Estates. A Study of Bristol Corporation Policy and Practice between the Wars (1946)

(7) Bristol City Council, The PRC Programme

The three books referenced above provide the bulk of the detail for this account as a whole.

My thanks to Phil Jaggery and Paul Townsend for making some of their images available under Creative Commons licence