The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester II: ‘a victory for the people’

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1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week we looked at the pre-war origins and development of the Saffron Lane Estate.  Today, we look at how the Estate has changed since 1945. It’s a good illustration of how council housing has evolved in recent years but also a tribute to the strength and resilience of its residents.

Homes on Southfields Drive

Leicester, with its light industries and consumer-based trades was never immune to economic downturns but had fared well in comparison to areas of traditional heavy industry.  In 1936, the League of Nations Bureau of Statistics identified Leicester as the second richest city in Europe and from the mid-50s the local economy grew and diversified again even as its established focus on textiles and shoe manufacture declined.

As late as 1993, 29 per cent of Saffron’s workers were skilled craft workers and 17 per cent were unskilled.  Just seven years later, only 12 per cent were classified as skilled and the numbers in unskilled occupations had doubled.  Ten per cent now worked for agencies, rising to one in three of those under thirty.  As unemployment rose, the consequences of this rise of insecure, unskilled employment were exacerbated.  (1)

Saffron Lane

By 2007, Leicester was ranked as the 20th most deprived local authority region in the country and parts of the Saffron Lane Estate as among the 5 per cent most deprived of all areas in the country.

Leicester’s (relatively) prosperous working-class had declined and on council estates up and down the country this change was amplified by the changing nature of council housing.  Once (as at the time of the Estate’s founding) it was reserved for those who could pay; increasingly – as needs-based assessment took over in the 1970s and the housing stock was drastically diminished through Right to Buy in the 1980s – it was allocated to those who (through no fault of their own) couldn’t.

Still, a 2003 survey suggested that the Estate remained popular with most of its residents. Sixty-nine per cent professed a strong attachment to the area; 76 per cent didn’t want to move.  This, no doubt, reflected the stability of the community – almost four fifths had lived on the Estate for over ten years. While Leicester is among the UK’s most diverse communities, the Saffron remained a ‘white island’ – 92 per cent of its population were white British.  Almost one third of residents felt their British nationality their key identity.  (2)

One young woman who lived in a council house on the Saffron Lane Estate in the seventies might seem typical of some of its new realities – married at 18, three children by 22 and a single mother by the time she was 25, working in a series of low-paid, dead-end jobs.  She liked writing though and completed her first book in 1975.  It did well, this Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But, for Sue Townsend, it never was just history and never one she forgot: (3)

I’m a child of the municipal. Everything good had this word carved above its grand entrance. In Leicester, where I was born and still live, there were municipal libraries, majestic solid buildings with beautiful entrances, windows and doors, oak furniture and bookshelves. Then there were municipal baths, which had a swimming pool and what were called slipper baths…There were municipal parks, which were delightful places in which to take the air.

The Saffron Lane Estate’s library wouldn’t have been her local as a child (she was brought up in a post-war prefab to the south) but must surely have resonated.  The Southfields Library and Infant Welfare Clinic, opened in 1939, was an extraordinary and eye-catching building. Inspired by Stockholm’s Central Library or possibly Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove tube station, designed by Leicester architects Symington Prince and Pyke, it’s a Moderne masterpiece, constructed of reinforced concrete with red brick cladding, now Grade II listed.

Southfields Library. The Leicester City coat of arms shown above can be seen above the main entrance. © Ned Trifle and made available through a Creative Commons Licence

Less reverentially, locals called it – for obvious reasons – the Pork Pie Library and that’s its official name now too.  (It’s nice to see as well that it’s located on Attlee Way.)  A major refurbishment last year has brought a theatre area at the rear back into use, a computer suite has been installed for adult education and a new kitchen will serve as a lunch club. It’s good to see a community landmark still giving community value. (4)

Other things came and went (or almost went) on the Estate.  The Saffron Lane Sports Centre north of the Estate was opened in 1967 and was the first in England to have a synthetic surface running track.  It came close to closure in 2001 but received a £1.4 million refurbishment from the City Council in 2006 and remains well used.

Saffron lane velodrome

The velodrome, opened in 1968 and once the national stadium, was demolished in 2009 – derelict through a combination of its open-air design and years of neglect.  It’s now a site for new social and affordable housing.

These changes mark the effort that has gone into regenerating (no scare quotes this time) the Estate and supporting its community in recent years.  The Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council was established jointly by community leaders and the City Council in 1976.  It currently manages three projects – the Saffron Resource Centre providing a range of advice and aid, Saffcare providing day-care services for elderly people and Saffron Acres. The latter took over 12 acres of disused allotments in 2006; its latest venture, employing and training young people, is to sell – via the Central England Coop – its own plum jam and apple chutneys. (5)

The Neighbourhood Council has moved into the housing field too. In 2014, it acquired (for the nominal sum of £1 from the City Council), thirteen acres of land destined to form what’s claimed as ‘Europe’s biggest eco-housing project’.  Four one-bedroom flats, 23 two-bedroom houses, 20 three-bedroom houses and three four-bedroom houses – all built to sustainable Passivhaus standards – will be built and managed by the East Midlands Housing Group to house those currently on the council housing waiting list. The Homes and Communities Agency has provided £1.5m funding.

An artist’s impression of the new ‘eco-homes’ being developed jointly by the Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council and the East Midlands Housing Group

Times have changed.  Many, though not those currently in power nationally, would like them to change again but, for the time being, as Leicester’s mayor Sir Peter Soulsby acknowledged: (6)

At one time the council would have built council houses but we can’t anymore because there just isn’t the cash or the powers to do it. So what we are doing is using our assets and our buildings much more creatively and enabling community groups to do it.

What about those Boot houses we read about last week though?  There were quite early problems with damp and deterioration but they survived.  By the 1980s, however, they were showing serious structural problems caused by the corrosion of metal reinforcements in the concrete frames and the use of clinker in the concrete.

An undated photograph of Boot houses on the Estate showing signs of deterioration

In 1983, the City Council took the decision to replace them, ‘one down, one up’.  Five hundred had been replaced by 1989 when money ran out.  At this point, the Council looked to a private developer who proposed replacing the 500 Boot houses remaining with 800 new homes.  This was a threat to an existing community and treasured environment that the Estate’s residents found unacceptable – they voted by 86 per cent to support an extension of the Council’s existing phased scheme even though it might mean in some cases a wait of 27 years for replacement housing.

New build on Broughton Road

At the same time, the Saffron Boot Housing Action Group was formed to speed things up.  Another solution was devised in this era when the very notion of council construction had become taboo:  a 50/50 partnership with a local housing association was offered.  Tenants wanted to stay with the Council and stuck out.  In the end, a 65/35 council/housing association split was agreed. (7)

Arthur Chimes

When the last of the 972 remaining Boots homes was demolished in June 1997, Arthur Chimes of the Housing Action Group, could declare it – that rare thing – ‘a victory for the people’.

In its own way, the Saffron Lane Estate has been that too.

Sources

(1) Leicester City Council, ‘Local Employment Issues in Saffron and Eyres Monsell’, Strategic Planning and Regeneration Scrutiny Committee, 19 February 2004

(2) Asaf Hussain, Tim Haq, Bill Law, Integrated Cities: Exploring the Cultural Development of Leicester (2003)

(3) Sue Townsend, ‘My Heartlands’, The Observer, 24 April 2005

(4) English Heritage listing details and Dan J Martin, ‘Leicester’s Pork Pie Library to close for four months’, Leicester Mercury, November 12, 2014

(5) For full details on the range of activities, go the website of the Saffron Resource Centre.

(6) Laurna Robertson, ‘Land deal for country’s largest affordable Passivhaus scheme’, Inside Housing, 2 May 2014 and BBC News, Leicester, ‘Leicester’s eco-homes build is “Europe’s biggest” project’, 30 April 2014

(7) Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998)

The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester I: ‘moving into paradise’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Back in the day, some people called the Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester ‘Candletown’.  Others called it the ‘Conks Estate’ which wasn’t meant kindly.  To understand these nicknames is to uncover the rich history of the Estate – the city’s first large-scale interwar housing scheme – and its community.

Aerial view of the Saffron Lane Estate, 1927

Leicester had grown rapidly in the later nineteenth century and had, for the most part, prospered but that growth – and the exigencies of war – had led by 1919 to severe pressures on housing.  The Council estimated it needed to build 1500 homes in the next four years to satisfy demand.   In fact, the City took seven years to build just 746 new homes under the 1919 Housing Act.

The Health Committee didn’t pull its punches, expressing its ‘increasing alarm and grave concern’ at the ‘overcrowding existing in the dwelling houses in the City [and] the physical suffering and mental misery involved’. It called on the Council to take ‘extraordinary measures’. (1)  At this point, 5747 people were on the council waiting list; four out of five in shared accommodation.

Herbert Hallam

The Council was a hung council in the interwar period but with a strong and capable Labour presence for whom high-quality working-class housing was a major concern.  Labour councillor Herbert Hallam became chair of the Housing Committee in 1924 and was largely responsible for the planning and building of the Saffron Lane and Braunstone Estates

Two tranches of land to the south of the city beyond its then borders had been bought which would become what was originally called the Park Estate and then, officially, the Saffron Lane Estate.  Construction began in September 1924. Six months later, more land was acquired which would form Elston Fields – at the heart of the new Estate and its green lung. (If you’re local, you might know it better as Tick-Tock Park, named after the large clock on its former central pavilion.)

Elston Fields © Mat Fascione and made available through a Creative Commons licence

‘Tick-Tock Park’ with its original clock tower

The problem that the Committee faced, however, was that only 140 of an estimated 4500 construction workers in the city were working on council housing. The pressure to find non-traditional methods of construction using less, or less skilled, labour was intense and, fortunately, a solution was to hand.  These were the concrete houses produced by Henry Boot Limited.  The Council ordered 1500; 1000 on the Saffron Estate and 500 on the new Braunstone Estate.

Boot houses, Broughton Road

The houses weren’t cheaper than brick-built homes (coming in at around £465 each compared to the £395 of their traditional counterparts) but, to councils across the country, they promised quick results.  Around 50,000 Boot homes were erected between the wars, including those we’ve looked at already on the Norris Green Estate in Liverpool.

The preliminary layout plan of the Park (Saffron Lane) Estate

The layout of the new Estate conformed closely to the Garden Suburb ideals of the day. There was some effort too made to spruce up these Boot houses and counter the uniformity of their design – roughcast exteriors of yellow gravel, white limestone or grey granite were added and different coloured tiles and style of chimney stack and window.  Not enough, however, to satisfy one of the first residents to move in, however:  ‘when we first saw this drab concrete house surrounded in churned-up mud, my enthusiasm waned quite a lot’. (2)

The Estate in the 1930s

That churned-up mud tells another story. The first 194 homes on the Estate were occupied by December 1925; two years later, 908 parlour and 906 non-parlour homes had been completed  (500 of each were the so-called Boot homes).  Typically, the Estate’s roadways were finished later and shops, community facilities, convenient local bus services followed slowly.  Incredibly, the Estate lacked mains gas or electricity till 1929.

You might have worked out those nicknames by now – the Conks Estate was a pejorative reference to its concrete-construction houses; Candletown to its early lack of power.

Copinger Road, 1930s

For all that, ‘the Saff’ was generally popular with its new tenants.  Houses with gardens, spacious pantries and sculleries, inside bathrooms and toilets were a step-up for the vast majority.  Mrs Bright speaks for many:

When I first moved into Belton Close, I thought it was heaven because for three years we had lived in two rooms…Belton Close was like moving into paradise because we had a bath and the children could have a separate bedroom. What I couldn’t get over was that I didn’t have to go very far, other than a tap in the house, to get water. In Bonchurch Street, we used to have to walk through the house and fetch water from the next-door neighbour’s tap.

The problem – particularly as slum clearance took off in the 1930s – was that the very poorest couldn’t afford the rents.  In 1927, the rent for a three-bed parlour house, including rates, stood at 13s 10d, a non-parlour at 11s 11d at a time when the wages of an unskilled worker might be as low as £2 a week.

To get a council house in Leicester, you not only had to prove that you could afford the rent but get at least three references, one from the vicar or priest of your local church or a councillor.  A council job which guaranteed a regular wage and steady employment helped.  William Orton, a Corporation gardener, and his wife Elsie moved to Fayrhurst Road and raised a family of four in 1935 but their eldest son, Joe, escaped to RADA and the bright lights of London in 1951. Joe felt he had come from ‘the gutter’ – a sentiment which his biographer, John Lahr, helpfully explains: (3)

Orton’s ‘gutter’ was not the brutal and bustling industrial landscape of the North, but the drab monotony of a comfortable city whose council housing reflected its unimaginative mediocrity. The bleak adequacy of the Saffron Lane Estates had a deceptive violence. Fayhurst [sic] Road where Orton lived, and the narrow streets around it seemed to have been vaccinated against life…

The sameness of the architecture and expectation had its special oppressiveness. Cramped, cold and dark, the rows of sooty pebble granite homes were to Orton a grey backdrop, set-pieces for a lifetime of making do.

It’s worth unpicking this.  It’s true that Lahr is far from the only person to have criticised the alleged sterility of interwar cottage estates.  It’s clear that the very scale of their ambitions – and always the tempering constraints of economy – did foster some of the uniformity and maybe some of the dullness he identifies.  But there’s way too much writerly sensibility and effect here.

On the one hand, to Lahr real working-class lives (in those overcrowded slums of the North) were ‘brutal’ but ‘bustling’ – that love-hate relationship with the slums that middle-class writers enjoy.  But then, he gets confused and seems to apply the clichés of slum life – ‘narrow streets…cramped, cold and dark…sooty homes’ – to the spacious garden suburbs built very deliberately to provide a far better and healthier environment. It doesn’t add up.  Orton’s misfortune was not his home but an unhappy family life and, of course, a society cruelly unforgiving of his sexuality.  His home’s been demolished since but the Council, more forgiving, has placed a plaque in his honour to mark the spot.

The front and rear of a house on Hawkes Hill – hardly cramped

The new bungalows (with plaque) built on the site of Joe Orton’s former home

Most people simply didn’t feel the way that Joe Orton did:

The Saff at first was a showpiece estate. People were proud to live there. They took care of their surroundings, their houses and their children.

Indeed, one of the objects of the Saffron and Kirby Estates Tenants’ Association, formed in the late twenties, was to ‘uplift the social and civic standard of the people of these estates’.  At its most consciously improving this included (as we saw at the Watling Estate in north London) educational lectures but the thrust of the Association was more practical.  A new bus stop, a stamp machine at the local post office, better lighting on the estate weren’t life-changing but they did improve people’s day-to-day lives.

As on the Watling Estate, ideas of ‘community’ also loomed large and the Association actively promoted a range of social activities and entertainments. It boasted its own football team and, by 1938, even a swing band. The ‘Penny Popular Parties’ (attendees paid a penny and provided their own entertainment) proved a little too popular though – there were complaints that the children were too rowdy.

Saffron Lane

There were some who thought this overall respectability owed a lot to the absence of drinking establishments or even an off-licence on the Estate and several city councillors and the Medical Officer of Health were strong advocates of Temperance.  When an off-licence was opened, some Leicester citizens petitioned for its closure.  That was a little too rich for William Vickerstaff, the president of the then Saffron Lane Municipal Tenants’ Association in 1928:

There are 2014 houses on this estate with an approximate population of 10,000 including children, unless the teetotal fanatics take us all for children….If the schoolmistresses who signed that circular assert that our kiddies are or will be sent to school in any the worse condition because of the existence of a licensed house on the Estate, then we can only say that such statements resemble gross impertinence.

That too is an authentic voice of working-class respectability.

In an apparent demonstration of local democracy, the Housing Department organised a ballot on the Estate on whether its residents wanted licensed premises. It returned a narrow majority in favour but insufficient it was said as only 40 per cent had voted.  Mr Vickerstaff suggested that many didn’t vote as, had they supported the proposal but later got into difficulties with the rent, ‘the fact would be borne in mind by the authorities’. The campaign continued and would, as times changed, succeed.

There were two local workingmen’s clubs, however, though here as well things were not as simple as that might seem.  The older-established was the Aylestone and District WMC on Saffron Lane but the people who lived on the ‘Conks Estate’ were said to be ‘looked down on rather by those going to the Aylestone Club…which was a bit more skilled working class if you like.’

The Saffron Lane WMC on Duncan Road was opened in 1929 to cater more directly to the Estate.  It grew to eclipse its ‘rival’, boasting, at its peak, 3000 members and four bars though changing times and tastes have led now to talk of downsizing and even closure. (4)

That brings us to the present and the post-war story of the Estate and its people will be told next week.

Sources

(1) Health Committee minutes, May 1924 quoted in Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998). Other quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source unless otherwise specified.

(2) Bill Willbond, 70 Years of Council House Memories in Leicester (1991)

(3) John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears. A Biography of Joe Orton (1978)

(4) You can read more on the Saffron Lane WMC (and watch a poignant 2012 video on its story and its current plight) on the Club Historians website.