Orchard Park, Hull, Part II: ‘It’s never had it better than now’

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

We left Orchard Park in Hull in last week’s post in a bad way, in some ways a typical peripheral estate with what by now seemed the usual problems but in other respects an example writ large in terms of its poor quality design and level of social disadvantage.  A further element was introduced by what appeared to be rising problems of criminality and antisocial behaviour.  In this week’s post, we’ll examine the ongoing attempts to revive and improve such increasingly stigmatised estates for which Orchard Park was a significant test-bed.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It certainly qualified as a hard-to-let estate, a phenomenon identified by the Labour government of James Callaghan in 1978 and then targeted in the Priority Estates Programme (PEP) inherited by the Conservative government which succeeded.  Its emphasis was on modelling systems of local management and repair and promoting tenant participation.  A growing assumption was also that particular housing forms encouraged crime.

A retrospective Home Office study of three PEP estates (two in Tower Hamlets, London, and the other the Orchard Park Estate) concluded that while all ‘had high crime rates and adverse design’, Orchard Park ‘had a greater level of disorderliness, associated with youth in particular, which fostered a greater sense of insecurity amongst residents, particularly women’. (1)

A worthy entrant for the gardening competition? © Charlie Baker and used with permission

All this played into the mix of changes carried out in Orchard Park in PEP-related activity from 1986 to 1992.  A local estate office was established to deal with repairs, caretaking and lettings. Neighbourhood Management Committees were set up in 1989; various security and environmental initiatives ensued.  A Gardening Competition for residents inaugurated in 1993 takes us back to the domestic respectability promoted by similar such competitions in the cottage suburbs since the 1920s. (2)

There was also some attempt to use the lettings policies in supporting established residents and engineering a more socially beneficial mix of new tenants. The Home Office report captures the contradictions and limitations of such a policy in the face of the intractable realities governing council housing allocations in a period of growing shortage and increased hardship.

Lingcourt, Orchard Park

The report concluded that ‘Territoriality, social cohesion and “empowerment” increased among the residents of the houses’.  Among new tenants, the single mothers, generally provided houses (rather than flats), seem to have complemented the more established residents living disproportionately in the estate’s low-rise homes and contributed to their relative low turnover and ‘respectability’.

At the same time, the combination of a declining economy, homelessness legislation and the shortage of council housing stock ensured that:

a greater number of young poor people and those discharged from institutional care were coming on to the estates. Their arrival at a time of high unemployment and into conditions of poverty created a destabilising influence, swelled the numbers of vulnerable tenants and encouraged more disorderly activities and lifestyles.

These new tenants were housed disproportionately in high-rise flats and:

Despite a programme of improvement to the security of the tower blocks, and better management of the estate as a whole, the newcomers – that is the young, childless poor – displaced many of the previous, elderly residents and attracted crime to themselves, both as perpetrators and victims, concentrating crime in their part of the estate.

It’s all a reminder that council estates are disproportionately required to bear the burden of social and economic problems beyond their purview or, as I would argue, that estates are a victim of societal failings but not their cause.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

The Home Office report (found, appropriately, on the National Police College website) focused on crime prevention and the various attempts to ‘design out’ crime.  It epitomised a critique and prescription for troubled council estates which became mainstream from the mid-eighties, aimed at, in its words:

1. Creating better dwelling security and more ‘defensible space’

2. Halting a spiral of deterioration … [by] reducing ‘signs of disorder’ and fear of crime

3. Investing in the estate so that resident’s will develop a positive view and thus a greater stake in their community …

4. Increasing informal community control over crime both through increased surveillance and supervision by residents and housing officials and facilitating the development of a set of norms and expectations against offending on the estate.

That’s a pretty good summary of the ‘design disadvantagement’, ‘defensible space’ theories that were popularised in the UK (and simplified) by Alice Coleman in the mid-1980s though, in Orchard Park (its high-rise blocks notwithstanding), it was applied not to modernist, multi-storey housing but to a generally low-rise estate.

Knightscourt © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Another, perhaps not altogether disinterested, account celebrates the design modifications implemented across the estate. (3)

Monotonous, unkept [sic] pathways in front of terraced houses were transformed by creating fenced off private yards for each household. A programme of colourful redecoration to external areas did much to brighten the estate’s formerly drab façade.

And ‘attractive tiled canopies were erected around the entrances’ of the three Mildane high-rise blocks, ‘creating a pleasing appearance, as well as giving protection from falling objects’.

At the same time, entryphone systems were installed and CCTV within lifts and ground floor communal areas, the latter at the time apparently accessible to view by tenants on a dedicated TV channel through a communal aerial, bringing a whole new level to our obsession with crime drama on the box.

The article concludes that offences committed by non-residents ‘virtually ceased’ and that the ‘few cases of theft and vandalism’ that persisted were attributable to ‘a minority of residents’.  The changes clearly represented an improvement and there’s no need to sneer at sensible crime reduction initiatives which reduced its prevalence and meaningful environmental improvements even if the overall argument seems a little overstated.   Generally, things were looking up; the chair of the Danes Management Committee concluded ‘The estate is a cleaner, happier place. Repairs are done quickly, the local office is run efficiently.’ (4)

Nevertheless, Orchard Park remained a ‘problem estate’ into the 2000s even as, of course, it continued to provide a decent home to most of its residents.   Of those homes, Right to Buy having wrought its changes even in this apparently unpromising terrain, only around 68 percent were social rented by 2011 with now nine percent let by private landlords.

‘Tinned up’ homes in Feldane Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It remained an unpopular estate to outsiders; when some choice existed between 2001 and 2003, the vacancy rate stood at 26 percent and the average re-letting period at 322 days, three times worse than any other Hull estate. Fifty-two percent of OP residents were satisfied with their neighbourhood against an average of 72 percent city-wide. (5)

Ribycourt

When the urban design consultancy Urbed worked with Gateway Pathfinder to create (in their words) ‘an engagement and capacity building programme for tenants and residents’ in Orchard Park, the vision of some seemed modest at first glance though the attitudinal shift they wanted might have been life-changing for some: (6)

My vision for Orchard Park is that it comes in line with all the other communities in Hull and it’s not singled out, when my son is eighteen and goes for a job he isn’t discriminated against because his postcode is HU6.

The veteran local Labour councillor Terry Geraghty articulated a similar ambition:

We need to get away from the idea of Orchard Park being on its own; we are all one community and we need to break down those barriers. The image the area has is not deserved, 90% of the people that live here are incredibly hard working people and we need to get the information to those in business that just because someone lives in Orchard Park it doesn’t mean they are any less capable of doing the jobs that everyone else in Hull can do …

At the time, unemployment among the economically active was at 27 percent on the estate, compared to 12 percent in Hull as a whole and six percent nationally.  The Estate was among the five percent most deprived in the country; the Danes, tainted by its original design and construction flaws, was in the worst one percent. Meanwhile, for all the previously lauded design modifications, the Estate suffered the highest crime rate in Hull. (7)

Martin Crookston, an advocate for the cottage suburbs and their revival, concluded uncharacteristically that:

Orchard Park, created at the tail-end of the long years of estate-building, and at the outer edge of its city as that city started to run out of economic steam, was probably always an estate ‘too far’ – at the problem rather than potential end of the corporation suburb spectrum.

He counselled ‘radical change’.

High-rise and clearance © Charlie Baker and used with permission

In many ways, the Council has acted on that advice.   The first three of the high-rise blocks to be demolished went in 2002, including ironically two of the Mildane blocks improved by those ‘attractive tiled canopies’ back in the eighties.  The twenty-two storey Vernon House in Homethorpe was demolished in 2004.  In 2008, the council began planning the clearance of the remaining seven.

This obvious, apparently radical change wasn’t universally welcomed.  With little in the first instance to replace them, one local resident feared it as a sign of ‘managed decline’.  An elderly resident of one of the tower blocks, confounding stereotypes, lamented their loss: (8)

I like the flats as they are, I don’t want them changed at all. I leave my door open most of the day but I lock it at teatime … We’ve got beautiful views, you must admit, you get away from everybody, you don’t answer the door if you don’t want to. I would miss my view, I would never go and live in a house and look across at somebody’s back yard.

She suggested they reserve her block for those aged over 55, a solution to tower block living adopted in two of the estate’s towers.

Highcourt demolition, March 2015 © Keith Jackson

Despite initial stays of execution for Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe blocks in 2012 (such was the housing shortage), demolitions continued.  Twenty-storey Highcourt, was demolished in March 2015. Residents’ comments capture the mixed feelings of the event: (9)

I was a young girl living in north Hull when this block of flats was built. I remember the new building being celebrated because there was a houses shortage at the time but now it’s demolition is being celebrated.

For another, it was an eyesore but he’d miss it on his morning walk.  The last of Orchard Park’s high-rise blocks went with the demolition of the Gorthorpe flats in 2016.

Meanwhile, Orchard Park and Hull more widely was subject to the initiatives governing housing policy and finance nationally.  The Housing Market Renewal or Pathfinder programme laudably aimed to ‘provide lasting solutions for communities blighted by derelict homes through investment and innovation’; its chosen means – which seemed to focus on the demolition of sometimes decent housing and market-led solutions – were far more controversial.

The Hull and East Riding Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder (or Hull Gateway) was established in 2005 but plans to tackle the Thorpes in Orchard Park came to nought and the initiative as a whole was defunded in 2010. (10)

The cover of Hull’s PFI document, August 2010

The Council also entertained hopes that the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), introduced by John Major but significantly expanded under New Labour, might enable the sweeping changes many nevertheless thought necessary.  The title of the 2008 bid document, The Transformation of Orchard Park – Shaping the Place, Creating a Fruitful Future, captures those hopes; its 16 sections and 29 appendices reflect their breadth; and the price tag – at £142m – suggests the extent of the work deemed necessary. (11)

In summary, the proposals envisaged the demolition of 752 council houses, 255 privately owned houses, and 33 council bungalows and their replacement with 1020 new homes in the private sector and 680 new homes for social renting. This was a net gain of 660 homes but the figure conceals a net loss of 105 social rented homes.

Courtpark Road

It’s worth pausing – amidst the money talk and statistics – to examine what’s going on here and how powerfully it symbolises the policies and presumptions of the era.  Firstly, we have the dependence on private capital – the minimisation of state investment reflecting both a callow political fear of public spending (better understood as investment) and an unquestioning belief in the efficiency and ultimate beneficence of the market.

Secondly, perhaps less controversially still, there is the belief in so-called mixed communities (ignoring the fact that estates already accommodate a mixed community) and mixed tenure.  It marks a moment when council estates as such were deemed to have failed socially and economically.  For all the specific design shortcomings of Orchard Park, we might think it the victim of social and economic failure rather than its agent.  And we should certainly question why all these contemporary ‘fixes’ to long-term housing problems seemingly require the loss of desperately needed social rented homes.

The Orchard Park PFI was awarded £156m in July 2009.  In one of the first substantive acts of the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, all new PFI schemes (including Orchard Park) were cancelled in November 2010.  Given the huge and ongoing expense of the PFI programme and its complexity and troubled implementation, that might seem a relief but it left Hull still scrabbling for finance and dependent on partnerships with private developers or housing associations which could access capital.

New homes being built in Homethorpe © Humberbusiness.com

Nevertheless, some of that has borne fruit in the construction of new homes in the Danepark area and a recently completed scheme in association with Wates and the Riverside Group housing association at Homethorpe creating 52 new homes for rent including 16 one-bed council flats. A major refurbishment programme providing external cladding to the 1668 ‘No Fines’ homes in Orchard Park began in 2016.  The Harrison Park extra care apartments for those who need to assisted living are some of the finest in the country.

The Orchard Centre

The £14m Orchard Centre (a local council hub and health centre) opened on the southern fringe of the estate in 2009. A new community park and multi-use games area has opened.  Remodelling of the run-down shopping centre has made that a more attractive space.

How to conclude? What to conclude?  If you want an illustration of the power of selective narratives, let’s look at two recent press reports.   A March 2018 report in the local press recounts three recent stabbings and residents’ fears that violence on the estate was ‘getting out of hand’.   A few months earlier, another report had been headlined ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now’. Mrs Gray moved with her husband to their terrace house in Cladshaw in 1966 and has lived there ever since: (12)

I know some people have bad things to say about Orchard Park but we have had no trouble and we brought up our children here.

Let’s finish with that – not because Orchard Park has been untroubled or without failings, some of which could have been foreseen and forestalled with greater investment and better design, but because it reminds us it’s been a home to many thousands, usually a good one and, hopefully, an improving one.

Sources

My thanks to Charlie Baker for permission to use images contained in his report for Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006). You can find more of his evocative photography on his website.

My thanks also to Tim Morton for providing the 1993 PEP report referenced and Keith Jacobs for supplying photographs of the demolition of Highcourt.

(1) Housing, Community and Crime: the Impact of the Priority Estates Project (Home Office Research Study 131, 1993)

(2) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(3) Roy Carter, ‘Designing Crime Out of the Urban Environment’, Orchard Park Case Study, Architect and Surveyor, vol 64, no 9, October 1989

(4) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(5) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2016)

(6) Quoted in Charlie Baker, Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006)

(7) Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? 

(8) Angus Young, ‘Orchard Park’s Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe tower blocks to be demolished after Hull City Council U-turn’, Hull Daily Mail, May 2, 2014

(9)Quoted in Claire Carter, ‘Gone in Eight Seconds’, Daily Mail, 9 March 2015

(10) The Urban Rim website Gateway Pathfinder provides full details.

(11) The Urban Rim website also provides a full chronological account of the Orchard Park PFI.

(12) Phil Winter, ‘’”Orchard Park violence is getting out of hand”: Fear as estate sees three stabbings in under a month’ Hull Daily Mail, 21 March 2018 and Kevin Shoesmith, ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now‘, Hull Daily Mail, 30 September 2017

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Orchard Park, Hull, Part I: ‘One of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’

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1960s, 1970s

By the early 1980s, Orchard Park in Hull was described as ‘one of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’. (1)  Anne Power was describing its relative affluence – or lack of it – but for many people her words would also reflect a judgment on the quality of the design and build of the estate.  The long story of Orchard Park might justify that – it’s a tale of good intentions, poor execution, hostile circumstance and, perhaps in the longer term, lessons learned.  In this post, we look at the apparent missteps and failings.

A contemporary map of the estate © OpenStreetMap

Hull had built some 10,700 homes before the Second World War. As a result of wartime devastation – over 1000 hours of raids destroyed 5300 homes outright in the city and damaged almost 115,000 – and the prevalence of the remaining slums, post-war ambitions were even higher.

Bransholme, with a planned population of 26,000, was the largest Hull estate (though not, as frequently claimed, the largest in Europe).  Orchard Park, with 10,000 residents, was smaller but formed a significant part of the large-scale building programme. Overall the Council built some 35,400 homes in the post-war period and housed, at peak, in 1981 some 47 percent of the city’s households.

Orchard Park under construction

Planning for Orchard Park, on open farmland on the fringes of the North Hull Estate, had begun as early as 1951 but early proposals were stymied by the conflicting interests of the various local authorities and developers involved.  The present-day estate emerged from 1963 under the aegis of City Architect David Jenkin.

Courtpark Road, the Courts

The estate takes the form of four so-called ‘villages’. The first, named ‘the Courts’, to the east of North Hull,  was completed in 1965 – 764 homes, almost all traditionally built two-storey houses with gardens front and back. It’s said to have ‘always been one of the more popular areas of the estate with a stable population’. (2)  The overall layout is a fairly crude form of Radburn with service roads and garaging provided to the rear of homes generally facing grassed open spaces.

Milldane flats from Hall Road, 2008 © Paul Glazzard and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The original intention was to complete all four phases of the estate to similar design but, with a new City Architect in place in 1964, JV Wall, Village 2 – the Danes, on the north-western corner of the estate, took a very different form.  Radburn principles – that separation of cars and people – were maintained but the homes, predominantly two-storey, three- and four-bedroom houses, were built in long and – to critical eyes – monotonous terraces: (3)

In many ways, ‘the Danes’ are similar in appearance to old terraced housing – rows and rows of high density terraces, all facing the same way. It is almost as if the design is an attempt to recreate the community feeling of the old slums.

Another distinctive aspect of the Danes was the large-scale use of Wimpey ‘No Fines’ housing, built of concrete (with no fine aggregates) cast in situ.  The upside of the method was the speed of construction; some 27 ‘shells’ were completed weekly at peak.  But there were downsides to which we’ll return.

Cladshaw, the Shaws © Charlie Baker and used with permission

Village 3, the Shaws, was begun in 1965 and finished in 1967.  This phase saw a return to traditional, brick construction, carried out by the Council’s own Direct Labour Organisation. The tried and trusted methods applied seem to have ensured this part of the estate remained popular and problem-free.

Finally in Village 4, the Thorpes, on the north-eastern fringes of Orchard Park, there were around 500 terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses and some 48 town houses plus three ten-storey towers each comprising 47 one-bed flats.

‘View of blocks on Thorpepark Road’, 1987. With thanks to the Tower Block UK

Across the estate, eleven tower blocs were erected, most of 17 to 19 storeys with two at 22 storeys, the tallest residential buildings in Hull.  The intent here, in this basic form of mixed development, was to achieve some greater housing density among the generally dispersed low-rise estate and to offer visual interest and contrast within Orchard Park’s low-lying flat terrain. (4)

In all, housebuilding was complete by 1969. In contrast, community facilities followed slowly and a promised neighbourhood centre never materialised.  A modest shopping centre finally opened in 1974.  By then, the estate was already seen as problematic.

One issue was the system-built Wimpey ‘No Fines’ housing.  As we noted, its speed of construction was impressive but a 1985 report from the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) described it as having ‘all the hallmarks of a “crash programme”’ – and not in a good way.  It had been, they continued, ‘the root of many of the estate’s problems ever since’, unsurprisingly given the issues of condensation and internal rot and mould they refer to.

The problem here – as with system-built estates with similar flaws across the country – is not only the obvious discomfort for the residents directly affected but that estates (or parts of them) become unpopular and ‘hard to let’ and come to house typically those with least choice when it came to rehousing, the more vulnerable and disadvantaged of our community.

Garages and open space, Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

The same CES report also criticised the layout of the Danes, noting the designers’ intention that each of its homes have, in effect, ‘two “front” entrances’, one linking with pedestrian routes, the other to the service areas.  This was a version of the Radburn system that existed across most of Orchard Park but, as Martin Crookston concluded, ‘so bastardised a version and so badly done, that the concept’s originators would not even recognize it’. (5)  The CES report noted a lack of privacy with pedestrian walkways up against front windows and ‘functionless “open space”, criss-crossed by informal “paths”’.

This combination of housing form and estate layout, in conjunction with the estate’s peripheral location, left Orchard Park in a parlous state.  Crookston, an advocate for the so-called cottage suburbs, is uncharacteristically critical of Orchard Park:

The overall layout has produced a lot of shapeless underused space which has no clear ‘ownership’ as well as a locality with no recognizable shape or sense of place.  A walking trip is a long plod through nothing very much, and bus stops on the main loop road … feel as though they are in the middle of nowhere … the housing itself [is] frankly unattractive – boxy little rows running off at an angle to the sweeping over-designed through-roads.

This, as he acknowledges, is a harsh judgment on a place many people call home but, superficially from an outsider’s perspective, it’s a hard one to disagree with.

Orchard Park, later aerial view

All this comes to look archetypical of a certain form of edge-of-town estate characterised by the town planner and urbanist Sir Peter Hall in a 1997 article. It first identified a number of physical problems often associated with such peripheral estates: poor housing stock, ‘an impersonal and alienating physical environment’, lack of variety in housing types and sizes, geographic isolation.  Most of these can be applied, in part at least, to Orchard Park, as can the social problems the article linked to such estates. (6)

By 1981, unemployment in Orchard Park stood at 18 percent. This was four percentage points higher than the Hull average which itself was among the highest in the country. Youth unemployment on the estate was said to reach 80 percent.  Ninety percent of tenants were on Housing Benefit, by some way the highest proportion in the city (on the adjacent North Hull Estate, by contast, the figure stood at around 40 percent).  If we take larger families and single-parent households as metrics of relative social deprivation (I mean poverty), there too Orchard Park scored highly – almost 11 percent of households had three or more dependent children.

There were other indicators too of an estate with problems, seen most powerfully, in housing terms, in the 11.3 percent annual turnover rate for the ‘No Fines’ houses which were only marginally more popular than the estate’s high-rise flats where the turnover rate reached 12 percent.

Anne Power’s description of Orchard Park as ‘one of the poorest peripheral estates in Britain’ was more than justified and its associated problems of design and form seemed almost overwhelming. What could change?  We’ll take a look in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to Charlie Baker for permission to use images contained in his report for Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006). You can find more of his evocative photography on his website.

(1) Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (1993)

(2) Outer Estates in Britain: Orchard Park Case Study (CES Paper 25, 1985)

(3) Outer Estates in Britain: Orchard Park Case Study (CES Paper 25, 1985)

(4) Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State. An Architectural History of British Multi-Storey Housing 1945-1970 (Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017)

(5) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2016)

(6) Peter Hall, ‘Regeneration Policies for Peripheral Housing Estates: Inward- and Outward-looking Approaches’, Urban Studies, Vol. 34, Nos 5-6, 1997

Municipal Dreams Goes to Hull, Part II: Civic grandeur, service and convenience

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Gibberd

We left Hull in last week’s post standing, figuratively at least, in its civic heart, Queen Victoria Square.  We’re looking at municipal Hull – the plans and promises as well as proud accomplishment.

Queen’s Gardens, which lie beyond Queen Victoria Square to the north-east, fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.  The area was once the Queen’s Docks, the first Hull docks constructed in the 1770s.  Obsolete by the interwar period, they were sold to the Corporation, infilled and opened (by Labour MP Herbert Morrison) as a park in 1935 and, as such, were a key element of the 1930s’ redesign of the city centre.   The fountain at the western end survives from that time but the Gardens as a whole were remodelled by Frederick Gibberd from the 1950s, building on the earlier Lutyens and Abercrombie vision for a new grand civic space, including assembly hall and winter gardens, which incorporated the Guildhall to the south.

– Kenneth Carter reliefs in front of former Central Police Station, Queen’s Gardens

Those larger ambitions remained unfulfilled and the Gardens remain poorly integrated into the wider cityscape – an issue addressed by a new masterplan issued in 2013 – but it’s a lovely space and walk into them to appreciate some fine past and present landscaping and public art. (1)  Amongst the latter are reliefs by Robert Adams by the pond at the eastern end and five panels by Kenneth Carter on a northern wall in front of the 1959 former Police Station, both commissioned by Gibberd (a great patron of public art as we’ve seen in Harlow).

– Queen’s Gardens, Wilberforce Monument and Hull College

What will catch your eye is the grand terminal vista of the Gardens at their eastern end.  The Wilberforce Monument (local boy William Wilberforce was the town’s MP from 1780) was erected by public subscription in 1834, just one year after the slave trade against which Wilberforce campaigned tirelessly was abolished in the British Empire, and moved to its present site in 1935.

– Hull College, Frederick Gibberd

Beyond it lies the Hull College of Technology (now Hull College), designed by Gibberd in Festival of Britain style in the 1950s, but completed in 1962.  Old Pevsner didn’t much like it – ‘run of the mill’ it thought – but the new guide is more complimentary of its ‘agreeable symmetry’.  A William Mitchell panel – depicting nautical and mathematical instruments – sits strikingly on the building’s façade.

– William Mitchell concrete and resin panel, c1960

From the College head south towards Alfred Gelder Street.  Alfred Gelder, an architect by profession, councillor and alderman for 43 years, was another of the nonconformist Liberals who left their progressive mark on the city.   The English Baroque-style Guildhall and Law Courts complex, designed by Edwin Cooper, on the street fittingly named after Gelder was begun on the latter’s initiative in 1905 and completed in 1916.  It’s a striking presence, monumental externally, lavishly decorated internally: a powerful statement of civic pride and purpose.

– The Guildhall

Facing the Guildhall on opposite sides of the road are the Maritime Buildings, a fine Edwardian office block, Grade II listed, awaiting new use and some TLC, and the former General Post Office, fully justifying its architectural descriptor, Edwardian imperial.  Buildings of their time just as their current redundancy or repurposing indicates changed times.  A Wetherspoons in the former post office building allows you to see some of its former grand interior. (2)

Wilberforce Museum

From here it’s a short walk to the heart of Hull’s Old Town (the new town of the 14^th century) and at the top end of the High Street, the city’s Museum Quarter – three excellent museums run by the council and free to enter.  Wilberforce gets due recognition in the house, now museum, where he was born and grew up.

Municipal tram in the Streetlife Museum

But a shout-out here for the excellent Streetlife Museum which offered a great combination of transport and social history – and a chance, keeping to my municipal theme, to take a photograph of a Hull Corporation tram of pre-First World War vintage.  The trams were municipalised in 1896, converted to a trolley-bus system in 1945, and finally closed in 1964.

– Tidal Surge Barrier with road and pedestrian swing bridges open

Walking further south along the River Hull, you come to some impressive infrastructure – Myton Bridge, a swing bridge carrying the A63 opened in 1980, and the Tidal Surge Barrier of the same year designed by Oliver Cox.  Cox made his name as a major figure in the housing division of the London County Council’s Architects Department so it was impressive to see the versatility displayed in this later work.

The Deep, Terry Farrell

Further on is The Deep, designed by Terry Farrell and completed in 2002 – an aquarium and major visitor attraction intended to regenerate this redundant area of former dockland. 

Nelson Street public conveniences

I should really spend more time on that bit of self-consciously showpiece architecture but we’re walking on, west along the Humber, towards Nelson Street and the now celebrated public toilets, Grade II listed (alongside the Tidal Surge Barrier and some other Hull landmarks) a few weeks ago. (3) Opened in 1926, the provision for women as well as men was innovative for the time and offers its own bit of social history as a mark of the greater independence allowed women in the interwar period. Otherwise, just enjoy the quality and beauty of the original Art Nouveau styling and fittings which survive to the present. (4)

– ‘Thieving Harry’s’, Fruit Market

Finally, on this perambulation, you can stop off for some well-earned refreshment in the revitalised Fruit Market area around the corner on the eastern side of Princess Docks. Now rebranded as an arts and cultural quarter, not so long ago it was just what it said it was as some of the surviving shopfronts and signs on Humber Street testify.  The Gibson Bishop building on the corner – once a fruit and vegetable merchant and now Thieving Harry’s café – is another fine example of 1950s’ reconstruction.

All that represents a full day’s visit but, hopefully, you’ll take time to explore the city further.  I’ll conclude with another idiosyncratic, municipally-themed, selection of other highlights.

– James Reckitt Public Library, Holderness Road

Heading east along the Holderness Road, you’ll find the James Reckitt Public Library (Reckitt was another local philanthropic Liberal industrialist), designed by Alfred Gelder and opened in 1889 as Hull’s first public library.

East Hull Baths, Holderness Road

Immediately adjacent are the more exuberant East Hull Baths, designed by Joseph H Hirst, then of the City Engineer’s Department, and opened in 1898.

Frederick I Reckitt Havens

A little under a mile further east, you reach the edge of the garden village developed before the First World War by Reckitt for the workers of his nearby works.  It’s a beautiful ensemble though now, for the most part, firmly for the more affluent middle classes.  The sweetly-named Frederick I Reckitt Havens, run by Anchor Housing, remain a not-for-profit enclave for elderly persons.

– The ‘Khyber Pass’ in East Park 

Next is East Park, originally 52 acres, now 120, designed by Borough Engineer Joseph Fox Sharp and opened by the Corporation in 1887. The Khyber Pass folly was constructed, possibly as a project for the local unemployed, between 1885 and 1888.  Not the worst reminder of Britain’s imperial past perhaps.

– Beverley Road Baths (c) Richard Croft and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Alternatively head north along the Beverley Road, there are more examples of progressive municipal endeavour – the Stepney Primary School, a Queen Anne-style building of the Hull School Board erected in 1886 and, next door, the Beverley Road Baths, designed by Joseph H Hirst, again, in 1905.

The former National Picture Theatre blitz site

Further north along Beverley Road is Britain’s last surviving Second World War Blitz site. The National Picture Theatre, a 1914 cinema, was bombed in 1941 and has remained largely undisturbed since then as an unintended memorial to wartime destruction.  There are now plans to resurrect the listed building as a formal commemoration of the era.

Pearson Park just to the west, originally the People’s Park, opened in 1862 – the city’s first public park – is a superb example of Victorian concern for working-class wellbeing and healthy recreation (even while the latter didn’t generally extend to their profit-making working lives or usually squalid homes).  The poet Philip Larkin’s home, another of the recently listed sites, is an attractive middle-class residence of the 1890s on the northern edge of the park.

– Sidmouth Street School

Larkin was famously chief librarian of Hull University which lies off Cottingham Road to the north.  If you cut across west from Beverley Road, you can take in another of the Hull Board’s fine schools, that on Sidmouth Street, erected 1912 and designed by the industrious Joseph H Hirst.

Court housing, Sidmouth Street

Across the road and on Exmouth Street nearby you’ll see some rare surviving examples of the court housing – short facing terraces built as cul-de-sacs off the main roads – which dominated much of the city’s working-class housing before the First World War.  These are later, and better built, examples from the 1880s.  One of the residents we spoke to was pleased that a couple of people up from London had ventured beyond the city centre.

– The Venn Building, University of Hull

On to the University and we’ll stretch a point here – though not too far – to make this our final example of municipal investment and innovation. The University was founded in 1925 on the back of a £250,000 donation from Thomas R Ferens and a £150,000 grant from the City Council.  There’s a lot of good architecture to be admired here but I’ll give you the Venn Building of 1928 (‘Neo-Early Georgian’ according to the experts) designed by William Forsyth to capture these interwar origins.

And that’s it. I’ve done a bit more than scratch the surface but all this is only really a taste of what Hull has to offer and a poor substitute for a visit in person.  Above all, it’s a reminder of the huge and important role that local government – as well as a broader civic culture supported by progressive actors – has played in the building and civilising of our cities.

Hull’s deserved status as the UK’s City of Culture in 2017 marks a later iteration of this same endeavour and I hope that the investment and interest it has attracted genuinely improves the lives of local residents as well as entertaining mere visitors such as myself.  I’ll end with a plea that this revival of municipal dreams is an exemplar, not a one-off – a testimony, like so much of what went before, to how a properly resourced and ambitious municipality can improve the lives of its citizens.

Sources

Much of the architectural detail in this post is drawn from the invaluable Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides, 2010) by David and Susan Neave.

(1) Hull City Council Economic Development and Regeneration Department, Masterplan Guidance, Queens Gardens, Hull (July 2013)

(2) The website British Post Office Buildings and their Architects: an Illustrated Guide has informative description and illustration on Hull’s General Post Office.

(3) For fuller detail on all the new Hull listings, take a look at the Historic England webpage.

(4) Of course, the issue of public conveniences (or present-day inconvenience) isn’t merely a matter of historic or architectural interest. The provision of public toilets was an important part of municipal service in its earlier years and the withdrawal of such provision is a major concern to many sections of the community now.  This is well dealt with, past and present, in a Hull context, in Paul Gibson’s post on Public Toilets in Hull.

Jones the Planner offers a full and more critical perspective on Hull’s post-war planning and architecture in ‘Hull: City of Culture’ (9 February 2014) and, alongside other case studies, in the book Cities of the North (2016).

 

 

Municipal Dreams in Hull, Part I: The best laid plans…

Hull, as I hope you all know, is the UK’s City of Culture for 2017.  You really don’t need an excuse to visit the city but, if that’s an incentive so much the better, because it’s worth it – Hull is one of the friendliest and most interesting places I’ve been to in a long while. What follows – touching on the city’s civic planning and an eclectic mix of some of its municipal highlights (I’ll do some housing stuff in future posts) – can only be an appetiser but I hope it will encourage you to explore the city for yourself.  This first post looks, in particular, at twentieth century plans to reconstruct the city.

Edward I and the city’s first borough charter commemorated in the Guildhall

Hull’s been a borough since 1299 and you’ll see some very early town planning in the grid-like pattern of streets off the High Street in the Old Town.  These were added to the original riverbank settlement by Edward I  who wanted the prosperous port as a base for his forays against the Scots and who renamed it formally Kingston upon Hull in the process.

The port – it was the UK’s third largest into the 1950s – and its associated industries expanded massively in the centuries which followed.  By the end of the nineteenth century, the Council – a reformed municipal corporation in 1835 and a county borough from 1888 – desired a civic presence which reflected the town’s importance and prosperity.  In the interwar period, new ambitions emerged to improve the city, a typically squalid product of breakneck Victorian-era urbanisation, as a living and working space for its broader population.  And then the Blitz – which hit Hull harder than any British city outside London – added its own necessity and aspirations to the task of post-war rebuilding.

The city centre (west-east) just before the Second World War. The newly completed Queen’s Gardens dominate the top of the image; Paragon Station is bottom centre with Jameson Street heading up. (From Lutyens and Abercrombie, Plan)

A 1943 RAF reconnaissance shot (north-south) showing city centre bomb damage (From Lutyens and Abercrombie, Plan)

Arriving by rail at Paragon Station brings you to the heart of a new Hull planned by an ambitious Corporation from the 1930s.  Then, the city centre slums which dominated the area were described by Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architectural eminence brought in to oversee the scheme, as an ‘eyesore and menace to heath…a disgrace to a progressive city’. He planned to replace the ‘irritating and unsightly jumble’ of older buildings with a neo-Georgian ensemble; the Council itself hoped that Ferensway, as the new thoroughfare was named, would take ‘its place among the famous streets of the world’.  (1)

Brook Chambers, Ferensway

To be honest, there’s not much to vindicate such hopes now but look north to the junction with Brook Street and you’ll see a vestige of them in Brook Chambers, erected in 1934.  In the event, wartime devastation – almost half the city’s central shops were destroyed – created new urgency and new opportunity to rebuild on a larger scale.

The Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan’s grand zonal reimagining of central Hull

Planning for ‘this second refounding of the great Port on the Humber’ began in 1941 and were finalised by 1944, commissioned by the Council from the two foremost town planners of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor Patrick Abercrombie. (2)  Lutyens had spent almost twenty years designing New Delhi; Abercrombie drew up influential post-war plans for London and Plymouth amongst others.  Although Lutyens died in January 1944, his imprint on the completed Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull seems strong in the grand Beaux Art scheme devised though it’s a form also favoured by Abercrombie in Plymouth.

More broadly, the Plan incorporated, in the words of Philip N Jones: (3)

the three great themes of post-war planning in Britain – inner city redevelopment; commitment to the social ideal of neighbourhood planning; and the trilogy of Containment – Green Belt – New Town.

A satellite town was planned in Burton Constable eight miles to the east with a narrow Green Belt separating the new settlement from the Hull suburbs.  Neither emerged and the new centre planned, in Abercrombie’s words, as ‘something completely new in Shopping Centres’ –  ‘a highly specialised precinct, free from traffic but adjacent to the central traffic routes’ – also took a very different form from that originally envisaged.

The sleek new shopping centre around Osborne Street envisaged in the Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan)

Abercrombie and Lutyens had hoped to create a new shopping centre centred on Osborne Street, adjacent to an expanded and re-formed civic quarter located around Queen’s Gardens. Established business interests and the prevalence of surviving buildings – despite the Blitz – stymied this vision.

The Lutyens and Abercrombie plan shows a re-sited main railway station and new shopping centre to the south-west

The alternative Chamber of Trade plan keeps a revamped shopping centre to the north. With thanks to Catherine Flinn.

The Chamber of Trade Plan – first mooted in 1947, drawn up by another eminent town planner, WR Davidge, and adopted in modified form in 1954 – was constructed on the foundations of the main existing shopping centre to the north and was seen as far less disruptive.  It incorporated ‘temporary shops’ on Ferensway which survived until 2013.

Temporary shops on Ferensway. With thanks to Catherine Flinn.

Still, something of Abercrombie’s influence remained, not least in the fact that the plan was overseen by Hull’s new planner, the grandly-named Udolphus Aylmer Coates appointed in 1948, who had been a student of Abercrombie’s at the Department of Civil Design at Liverpool University. (4)

Abercrombie himself thought that the Hull Plan was ‘probably the best report he had been connected with’ but, ironically, as Philip N Jones concludes, ‘no other wartime plan was so ignored or so apparently ineffective’. (5)

The House of Fraser store on Ferensway and Jameston Street

Nevertheless, the rebuilt streets that emerged offer an impressive testimony to the vision and design aesthetic of post-war reconstruction, most notably in the House of Fraser department store (originally Hammonds) on Ferensway and Jameson Street.  Designed by TP Bennett and Sons and opened in 1950, it’s commended by the new Pevsner for its unusual combination of 1930s and Festival of Britain architectural elements.  Like a number of businesses in the vicinity, it seems to have suffered from that later iteration of our commercial future, the indoor shopping centre, but the building itself remains, to my eyes, strikingly attractive.

Paragon Square towards Jameson Street

Across the road is a bit of more standard post-war neo-Georgian but, if you look very carefully to the bottom right of the image above, you’ll catch a glimpse of Tony, a local bus driver playing the spoons and giving a one-man band show before starting his shift. He wasn’t busking. As he told us, it was just a way of cheering people up and putting himself in a good frame of mind before work.  He gave us a brilliant introduction to Hull and its people.

Festival House, Jameson Street

Just along Jameson Street is Festival House where a tablet marks it as ‘the first permanent building to arise from the ashes of the centre of the city’ after its wartime destruction.

If you’ve just arrived, the telephone box in the centre of Jameson Street might be the first of Hull’s famous cream-coloured kiosks you’ll see.  This one looks like a Gilbert Scott’s K6 1930s’ design to me but experts can correct me.   The unusual colour (and lack of crown insignia) isn’t an affectation but a proud reminder that Hull Corporation inaugurated its own municipal telephone system in 1902 which remained free of General Post Office control and privatisation until finally sold off in 1999.  Hull’s telephone and internet services are now operated by Kingston Communications which controversially retains an effective local monopoly.

Walking on, there’s a mix of styles and ages until you come to South Street on the right where you meet Queen’s House, a huge neo-Georgian quadrangle occupying one whole block of the city centre, designed by Kenneth Wakeford and completed in 1952.

Queen’s House, Chapel Street

The photograph, of its Chapel Street frontage above, hardly does it justice but it does capture the decline of a commercial district which Abercrombie hoped would restore Hull to its pre-war eminence as a centre serving some 500,000 people.

Alan Boyson’s Three Ships mural

By this time, you will have spotted what should be one of Hull’s most proudly iconic images – Alan Boyson’s Three Ships mural, completed in 1963 and commissioned by the Co-op to celebrate Hull’s fishing heritage.  The stats are impressive enough – it’s an Italian glass mosaic of 4224 foot square slabs, each made up of 225 tiny glass cubes affixed to a 66ft x 64ft concrete screen – but what I love most is the confidence of its bravura statement of local identity.  And I love that it was commissioned by the Co-op, reminding us of a time when that organisation’s consumerism with a conscience (and its ‘divi’ for its working-class members) occupied centre-stage in the drive to build a fairer and more democratic Britain.

The mural in its earlier pomp above the flagship store of the Hull and East Riding Cooperative Society

The Co-op moved on; the premises were taken over by BHS and it went bust in 2016. The building now offers a ‘redevelopment opportunity’ but, whatever happens, please support the campaign to preserve the mural by following @BhsMuralHull on Twitter and signing the petition for listing.

The City Hall, Queen Victoria and the exit from the Gents toilets

From here, a right turn down King Edward Street takes you to the heart of civic Hull into Queen Victoria Square, created in 1903 some six years after Hull was granted city status. The 1903 statue of Victoria sits imperiously above some fine public toilets, added in 1923 and retaining their original earthenware stalls, cisterns and cubicles in the Gents.

Unless you’re desperate (and male), they probably won’t be the first thing you notice.  On your right, stands the Edwardian Baroque City Hall, designed by City Architect Joseph H Hirst, opened in 1910.  This was designed as a public hall for concerts, meetings and civic events; on the day we visited it was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University.

Ferens Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Square

Across the Square lies the Ferens Art Gallery – a ‘simple restrained classical cube of fine ashlar’ in the words of the latest Pevsner.  It was completed in 1927 following a £50,000 endowment from Thomas R Ferens, a director of Reckitt’s (one of the city’s major firms) and one-time Liberal MP for East Hull.   One of several significant benefactors to the city, Ferens was honoured after his death in 1930 in the naming of Ferensway.

An artwork purchased by the Corporation, one of many.

The early support of the Council is clear too among the many fine works on show. The Gallery, free to enter, with some good temporary exhibitions while we were there, is well worth a visit.

Maritime Museum, Queen Victoria Square

The civic triumvirate is completed by the Maritime Museum facing which was originally built in 1868-71 as the headquarters of the Hull Dock Company – a rare British building by Christopher George Wray who had made his name as an architect for the British Government in Bengal.

Both the dock offices (they became a museum in 1975) and City Hall were scheduled for demolition in the Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan as part of its creation of a new civic quarter – one reason perhaps, despite Abercrobie’s recognition that a ‘clean sheet approach’ would not be welcomed,  why the major part of the Plan went unfulfilled.

Next week’s post continues this tour of Hull, looking at other elements of post-war replanning as well as some of its major municipal accomplishments in the city centre and beyond. And, if you’re new to the blog, I’ve written on the North Hull council estate in an earlier post.

Sources:

(1) Blomfield is quoted in ‘Slums Cleared for New Cityscape’, BBC Legacies, UK History Local to You (ND). The latter quotation is from David and Susan Neave, Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides, 2010).  Much of the detail which follows is drawn from the same, invaluable, source.

(2) The quotation is from the Preamble to Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (A Brown and Sons Ltd., London and Hull, 1945)

(3) Philip N Jones, ‘“…a fairer and nobler City” – Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for the City of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, no 3, volume 13, 1998

(4) RTPI, Rebuilding Hull: the Abercrombie Plan and Beyond (1940s) (2014)

(5) The first quotation comes from Abercrombie himself.  The second and further detail comes from Jones, ‘“…a fairer and nobler City”.

For an unusual but insightful perspective on the Abercrombie Plan for Hull, listen to this track from Christopher Rowe and Ian Clark in ‘Songs for Humberside’ (1971)

My thanks to Catherine Flinn for providing some of the images specified as well as supporting detail.  Her book on post-war city centre reconstruction in Hull, Liverpool and Exeter will be published next year.

Jones the Planner offers a full and more critical perspective on Hull’s post-war planning and architecture in ‘Hull: City of Culture’ (9 February 2014) and, alongside other case studies, in the book Cities of the North (2016).

The North Hull Estate: the first Housing Action Trust

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

As we saw in last week’s post, Hull had acted energetically in building homes and clearing slums after the First World War but the impact of a second would require it to redouble its efforts.  New estates were built on its northern fringes which made the original North Hull Estate seem rather old-fashioned – a good or bad thing according to taste.

Certainly, the Estate was ageing and subject, in recent decades, to the difficult transitions that have affected much of our council housing.  This, and a conjuncture of the ambitions of politicians national and local, would combine to make the Estate the nation’s first Housing Action Trust in 1991.

King Edward Street and Prospect Street during the Blitz

The strategically vital city of Hull suffered more damage from German bombing than any other in the UK except for London – over 1000 hours of raids destroyed 5300 homes outright and damaged almost 115,000. In fact, it was estimated that only 6000 homes had emerged unscathed.(1)   Nor did suburbs such as the North Hull Estate escape this destruction – bombs not dropped on port or factories were jettisoned over outlying areas to ease the bombers’ return to base.

Over 1400 people were killed; 152,000 (around half the population) were made homeless.  The ‘opportunity’ – an inappropriate word in the circumstances – to rebuild was recognised in 1942 when the Corporation commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie to design the post-war city.  The ‘fairer and nobler city’ that their Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull envisaged was, however, only partially fulfilled: ‘not the brave new world of Coventry nor  the stodgy classicism of Plymouth, more a grittier version of Welwyn Garden City following a civic style set in the 1930s’, according to Jones the Planner (2)

Queen’s Gardens – © Jones the Planner: ‘very Welwyn’

Early efforts focused necessarily on emergency measures – by 1948, 2525 temporary homes had been created in the city and repairs and rehabilitations returned a further 2720 bomb-damaged homes to use.  North Hull was complete before the war but 111 flats and bungalows were built on the estate in the early post-war years – infill development where bombing had destroyed existing homes.

In due course, much larger building schemes – in what was seen in the 1960s as a final push to solve the problem of the slums for once and for all – would affect Hull’s northern suburbs.   In the late-sixties, the Council embarked on the construction of the Bransholme Estate on the north-east fringes of the city – not the largest council estate in Europe as sometimes claimed but, with a population of 30,000 on its completion, very large indeed and a very different animal to the garden city that Luytens and Abercrombie had earlier envisioned.

The smaller Orchard Park Estate, adjacent to North Hull, was begun at around the same time.  It was built, according to the latest town planning principles, on Radburn lines, using cul de sacs, feeder roads and walkways to separate cars and pedestrians.  Both estates would suffer problems as they matured which we’ll examine in future posts.

Greenwood Avenue and its updated streetscape

North Hull, on the other hand, was a mature estate already and enjoyed in the 1950s and 60s what was probably its heyday. Certainly residents looking back remember a safe and friendly community, a ‘good place to grow up’ and, to someone who moved to the Estate as a youngster in 1963, ‘like a village, with trees and bushes and nice houses and plenty of shops and a school’. (3)

Of course, the housing stock was ageing and its facilities increasingly old-fashioned in an era when, so it was said, ordinary people had never had it so good.  Belatedly, in 1974, a major refurbishment took place, intended, as one resident recalls, ‘to bring the area back to the glory of the old days’. ‘It worked for a while,’ she concluded, ‘but the shops never got back to what they had been before’.  The Coop closed shortly afterwards.

19th Avenue

North Hull’s reputation declined as it – and the broader local economy – fell on harder times.  As council housing allocation policies shifted in the later seventies, the Estate (in the words of one observer) was ‘used to rehouse homeless people or single mothers’.  The stigma implied is unwarranted but it marks the shift in the role of council housing – and more so of perceptions of its role and residents – characteristic of recent decades.  A 1991 survey showed 70 per cent of tenants in receipt of housing benefit and one in five of the economically active population as unemployed.  Almost one in three of residents were over 60.

Still, it was very far from being a notorious ‘problem estate’ and local residents were quick to defend it: (4)

Outsiders see North Hull as a difficult area, they concentrate on marginal matters, drugs and the like, and fail to recognise this is a stable community. Mothers live next to daughters, and nobody wanders too far…Some people see this as an indication of a lack of adventure.  I wouldn’t, I would see it as a symptom of stability.  We have a tradition of strong women on the estate, neighbourhood ties and family ties are strong.

Maybe one of those strong women was the ‘weeping female’ noted in last week’s post who had once so embarrassed poor Mr Whitby.

Inglemire Lane, North Hull © Ian S

Further repairs and refurbishment began in the mid-eighties and almost half the Estate’s homes had been improved by 1989.  Hull City Council – the landlord of around half the city’s homes by this time – was anxious to complete the job but running out of money. It needed £50-60m to complete the work but the Conservative government refused funding under the Estate Action programme. It did, however, indicate that money might be available under a new scheme it was keen to get off the ground, the Housing Action Trust (HAT).

The first attempt to launch a HAT had been rebuffed by tenant activism in the Hulme Estate in Manchester and they were anathema to most Labour-controlled authorities as they required that the council cede ownership and control of its housing to an independent corporation.  But in Hull (where Labour held 57 of 60 seats on the local council), the Government met a man who wanted to do business.

John Black, chair of the Housing Committee, was, in his own words, ‘not an idealist’ – his interest was ‘in seeking to achieve results, not some theory of government’.  The makings of a deal began in a two-hour car journey shared by John Black and deputy housing minister, David Trippier, from Blackburn to Hull in July 1989. (John Black remains a powerful and, to some, a controversial figure on Hull City Council, currently ‘Portfolio Holder for Strategic and Operational Housing.)

The area of the North Hull HAT

In March/April 1991, on a 77 per cent turn-out, 69 per cent of tenants voted in favour of a HAT – the product of an assiduous campaign in its favour by the City Council and numerous concessions which the Council had wrested from a government needing a ‘victory’ for one of its flagship policies.  In brief, Hull – uniquely – secured a £5.75m ‘dowry’ for its North Hull housing (spent on the refurbishment of other estates), Estate Action grants for projects at the Bilton Grange and Bransholme Estates and, crucially, agreement that the tenants could – if they wished – return to the council as landlord when the HAT wound up. (5)

Ironically, given the ideological intent which underlay the HAT programme, Steven Tiesdell sees the result ‘as a demonstration of loyalty to the local authority’.  To other tenants, it came down to ‘a straight issue of whether you wanted your house done up in five years or twenty years’.

Westway Avenue showing improved streetscape

North Hull thus became the first HAT. It comprised 2436 dwellings (the half not previously refurbished): 2109 council-owned and 327 owner-occupied.  Apart from mandatory structural repairs, tenants were empowered to choose from a ‘menu’ of home improvements which included such things as rear porches, french windows, wall lights and higher-quality kitchen units.  An average of £31,000 was spent per property.  Streetscapes and the local environment were improved.  There were also various programmes – familiar from later iterations of ‘regeneration’ – to raise residents’ health and ‘self-esteem’ and increase employability through training and education.

The Pavilion, Hall Road: the HAT’s former head offices and now a very generic business park

The HAT was wound up in 1999.  Though residents complained about the lengthy disruption imposed by the refurbishment programme, most seem pleased with the results.  North Hull was improved – after all, adequate resources combined with a proper respect to tenants’ wishes and interests can achieve quite a lot. But it wasn’t transformed – it wasn’t one of the ‘worst estates’ (supposedly targeted by the HAT programme) in the first place and it continues to exist in social and economic circumstances which determine the life chances of its population as they do – for good or ill – the rest of us.

Every regeneration needs a Tesco but this is insultingly bland: Hall Road © Ian S

When tenants voted for their new landlord, 48 per cent elected to return to the City Council (down from 86 per cent in 1991) and 33 per cent to join one of a range of local housing associations.  The rate of owner occupation increased from 14 per cent to 18.

First Avenue – a true fulfilment of the garden suburb ideal

So, the story of council housing in Hull continues.  We’ve moved some way from the heady days of the interwar period when cottage estates such as North Hull seemed so obvious and vital a solution to the housing needs of the people but we can learn from them and should continue to build on their legacy.

As Martin Crookston concludes in his recent study: (6)

The cottage estates were, and are, garden suburbs. The best of them already show this country’s twentieth-century architecture and planning heritage at its most appealing and successful.  Their next 100 years should be based on reinvigoration, and a celebration, of that birthright.

Sources

(1) AC Saword (Chief Sanitary Inspector and Chief Housing Inspector, Kingston upon Hull), ‘Housing – Retrospect and Prospect’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 1949, 69: 547

(2) Jones the Planner, Hull: City of Culture offers an excellent overview and insight into all that Hull offers despite – or possibly because of – this omission.

(3) Quoted in Audrey Dunne and Alec Gill, The Quadrant and Little Greenwood Communities of North Hull (2005)

(4) Quoted in Brian Lewis, New for Old. The Story of the First Housing Action Trust (1988)

(5) All this detail is taken from Steven Alan Tiesdell, The Development and Implementation of Housing Action Trust Policy, University of Nottingham PhD thesis 1999

(6) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2014)

The North Hull Estate: the ‘Queen of the Estates’ or ‘Corned Beef Island’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

There was a time when the Quadrant area of northern Hull was known as ‘the Queen of the Estates’.  Mind you, there were others, less respectfully, who called it ‘Corned Beef Island’.  It formed the kernel of what became the North Hull Estate – the largest in the city as council housing expanded massively in the interwar period.  Let’s tell its story.

Marton Grove in the Quadrant © Paul Glazzard and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Before 1914, Hull, a port city and industrial centre, had the housing problems typical of the age.  In Hull the ‘characteristic feature of housing’ was: (1)

A Hull court

the ‘terrace system’…a short blind court usually 18 to 20 feet in width running from the main street.  The narrowness of the court and the practical absence of gardens back or front make it possible to have as large a number of people per acre as is practicable without resort to tenements or back-to-back dwellings.

The Corporation did relatively little to tackle the problem of the city’s insanitary slums until its hand was forced by an outbreak of scarlet fever in 1881 and a prolonged crisis of infantile diarrhoea, peaking in 1911.

Small slum clearances took place in Great Passage Street, Jameson Street and around what became Alfred Gelder Street and led to the building of three blocks of tenements and 77 workmen’s dwellings.  But a comprehensive programme to replace privies – the cause of the ill-health – with water closets was blocked by property owners and middle-class ratepayers. (2)

It was the war, itself, which would radically alter aspirations and expectations.  The rise of the local Labour movement added pressure.  The first candidates of the local Trades and Labour Council had been elected to the council in 1902.  After the war the Labour presence grew until the Party took control of the council in 1934. By 1939, Hull had built 10,700 council homes – around 42 per cent of all new homes in the city.

Back in 1920, Hull’s Medical Officer of Health had estimated 5000 houses were needed to meet wartime arrears and another 2778 required to rehouse those currently living in the slums.  The Council made a modest start under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act – 518 houses were built, mostly in new estates on the eastern and western fringes of the city.  A smaller number were constructed on Greenwood Avenue – the beginnings of the North Hull Estate and, until incorporation in 1935, beyond the then city’s northern borders.

Greenwood Avenue © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

North Hull would continue to grow – in a series of distinct phases, creating a large and rather amorphous estate of some 4371 homes by 1939.  All, save 32 ‘cottage flats’, were self-contained houses, built in short terraces and laid out ‘on the most approved and advanced Town Planning lines’. There were efforts, too, to get away ‘from the plain type of building…Now bay-windows are being put in, together with gables to roofs, Rosemary tiles between bays, etc.’.  All this gave, it was said, ‘quite a charming appearance to the Estate’. (3)

5th Avenue © Paul Harrop and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The best housing was built under the generous Addison subsidy but rents were correspondingly high.  As one resident recalled, ‘the man of the house had to be in a good steady job to enable him to pay for it – there weren’t any unemployed’. (4)

Construction was still under way as those first tenants moved in.  In 1923, ‘the roads were not even completed and were muddy tracks. There were stacks of bricks everywhere and wooden scaffolding poles lay haphazardly across the pathways’.  The nearest shops were a mile and a half away and it was the lack of shops and the difficulty in buying fresh food which gave the area its other nickname in these early years, ‘Corned Beef Island’.  Still, travelling tradesmen arrived to make good the deficiency – the rural setting ensured fresh milk from local farms, at least – and later residents recall a bustling range of shops, anchored, as was typical on these new corporation estates, by the local Coop.

Shops on Endike Lane © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Also typical of these early estates was the tale of residents unable to locate their home amidst its rather uniform new surroundings: (5)

My mother tells me because the houses all looked the same, on the first day we reached here they found me sitting on next door’s step crying. I couldn’t find our house.

This was a youngster whose family had moved to the estate from New George Street in 1933 ‘on the back of Fred Ollet’s coal cart’.

Aerial view, 1933. Greenwood Avenue runs through the centre of the image; earlier development around the Avenues and York Road to the left

That move – and many more in the 1930s – marked a new phase of North Hull’s development.  The 1930 Housing Act prioritised slum clearance and the rehousing of those who lived in them.  Hull had anticipated this shift – the New George Street clearance had begun in the mid-twenties – but a 1930 scheme planned to demolish and replace a further 3445 houses in the next five years. Over 2000 new homes were built on the North Hull Estate in consequence.

Slum clearance off Adelaide Street and William Street, Kingston upon Hull, 1937 © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/, EPW055051

Given that council housing in Hull and elsewhere had been very largely the preserve of a better-off working class, this shift in practice raised two issues.  One was affordability.  Casual dock labourers earned around £1.80 a week in 1930; oil millers (who processed rape, flax and cottonseed in Hull) generally worked half-time and earned less than £1.20.  These men reckoned they could pay about 6s to 8s (30p to 40p) a week in rent and rates but no more. (6)  Parlour homes rented at twice this level and much council housing – even as rents declined with the later, plainer housing – was beyond the means of Hull’s poorest citizens.  Travel to work costs added to the difficulty.  As one slum-dweller informed the Hull Daily Mail: (7)

Endike Lane’s no good to me, mister, it takes all our time to pay 4/6 rent and tram and bus fares to King George Dock.

Still, given the nature of Hull’s workforce in this period – around 9000 men worked on the docks, 9000 in chemicals and oils and 5000 in the fishing industry – it was inevitable that a significant number of council tenants did work in the town’s traditional sectors.  Many of the Quadrant’s residents worked in the St Andrew’s Fish Docks and the Corporation ran special buses with wooden slatted seats to bring them back from their work in the evening; buses with upholstered seats were put back into service after 6.30 when less fragrant passengers took over.

19th Avenue © Paul Harrop

The other perceived problem – for the Council, at least – was an alleged slum mentality:  ‘The “slummy” heart cannot be altered, they say’.  Mr Whitby, the council officer who reported this widespread sentiment, went on to describe many examples of those moving from the slums who had ‘made good’ – others might have asserted their respectability in the first place, of course. Nevertheless, he advised new tenants be given ‘proper instructions on the proper way to treat the houses’ to make sure that ‘the old slums do not disappear only to give place to new ones’.

For those moving from inner-city communities, there was also the problem of the loss of a formerly close-textured community life:

We had a tenant in a slum area who did not want to leave a ‘hovel’ for a new flat because of family associations. Upon pointing out the advantages of the new house, I was accused of being without any sentiment and the lady in question shed copious tears.

For poor Mr Whitby there was ‘nothing more embarrassing than a weeping female on your hands’ but then he hadn’t the benefit of having read the later sociological works describing the powerful matriarchal support networks of traditional working-class communities. (8)  In time, as we shall see, these would be replicated on the North Hull Estate.

Dingley Close, Inglemire, off Cranbrook Avenue © Paul Glazzard and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Meanwhile, the Corporation represented a strong patriarchal presence in tenants’ lives.  Mr Whitby reported ‘periodical visits…made to the Estate with a view to suppressing irregularities’, and continued:

The wise head appreciates the fact that the Corporation are ideal landlords, he gets good value for money, security of tenure and that freedom from neighbours’ annoyances that even the house-owner cannot always be assured of.

For all its heavy-handedness, that – when some commentators are so disparaging of council housing and council tenants – is a comment we can savour.  The idea that council homes gave their earlier residents a better environment than even owner occupiers might enjoy is worth emphasising.

On the other hand, the Council – ‘ideal’ or otherwise – was a rather unimaginative landlord.  Homes on the Estate were repainted externally every five years – the windows always cream and doors either blue, maroon or green; twelve houses were painted one colour, the next twelve another. Internally, the colour scheme was always magnolia, distempered walls and brown doors, frames and skirting boards.  Kitchen walls were painted brick and remained so until a major refurbishment in the 1970s.

A Yorkist range

Other facilities sound similarly basic to modern ears but back in the day they were the ‘mod cons’ of a good home and, of course, far superior to previous conditions.  Living rooms contained a ‘Yorkist range’ (regularly black-leaded by respectable housewives) with a back boiler to heat water and an oven.

The working heart of the home, however, was the scullery with its Belfast sink, copper (a free-standing gas boiler for washing clothes) and gas cooker.  A small pantry and coal store were situated under the stairs. Three bedrooms, a bathroom and inside toilet and large gardens added to what must have seemed luxury to many.

By 1939, Hull’s scheduled slum clearance programme was largely complete but the devastation of the Blitz would cause the city’s rebuilding efforts to be redoubled in the years of peace which followed.  Decades on, in 1991, the North Hull Estate would become the first Housing Action Trust – a sad fall from grace for what had once been ‘the Queen of the Estates’.  We’ll take up those chapters of north Hull’s housing history next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Cost of Living of Working Classes’, Parliamentary Papers, 1908 quoted in Betty C Skern, Housing in Kingston upon Hull between the Wars, Kingston upon Hull City Council (1986)

(2) K. J. Allison (editor), Victoria County History, A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 1: The City of Kingston upon Hull (1969)

(3) WH Whitby (Treasurer’s Department, Hull City Council), Some Aspects of the Housing Problem. One of a series of public lectures on local government given at the Guildhall, May 7 1930

(4) Audrey Dunne and Alec Gill, The Quadrant and Little Greenwood Communities of North Hull (2005)

(5) Brian Lewis, New for Old. The Story of the First Housing Action Trust (1988)

(6) Whitby, Some Aspects of the Housing Problem

(7) Quoted in Skern, Housing in Kingston upon Hull between the Wars

(8) As argued by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London, first published in 1957.