Speke, Liverpool, Part II: Reflections on Time Spent

Tags

Speke

I’m pleased to feature another guest post from Tom, a past resident of Speke. It’s a follow-up to his earlier article, Growing up on the Speke Estate, Liverpool: a personal perspective, which, with almost 13,000 views, has been one of the most read and, in some ways, most controversial of the posts featured in this blog. The article reflects a personal experience and interpretation but seems to me an important contribution to our understanding of one of the country’s most significant ‘peripheral estates’. 

In August 2017, I submitted a posting to Municipal Dreams in response to two MD articles on the Liverpool suburb of Speke in April and May 2017.

As stated in the introduction to my posting, it was a personal perspective on my time spent growing up in Speke, from 1954 (aged 2) to 1974, giving my views on the Speke estate and what I perceived as its shortcomings. I spoke for myself alone but to judge from the volume of comments, I had resonated, not to say touched a nerve, with many current and former residents. My thanks to all who contributed.

Some agreed with my bleak analysis, but several comments took a contrary view. An increasing number of people had fond memories of Speke and disagreed with my findings. I found it no coincidence that most of those who had fond memories of Speke had lived in the more established, pre-war built part of the estate.

Aerial view showing west end of Speke, looking south c. 1970 © Liverpool Echo

The photograph above shows the first section of the estate to be built, pre-1939. Centre left are The Crescent shops, now the site of Bargain Booze. The rough land to the right is the site of the demolished, post-war ‘pre-fabs’ (temporary, wooden, pre-fabricated housing), now the site of the Dymchurch Estate.

Confusingly for a pre-estate hamlet of only ‘400 souls’, old Speke was in two locations. One part was on the site of The Crescent shops, with Speke Town proper a short way to the west, under what is now the junction of Speke Hall Avenue and Speke Boulevard, approximately Dobbies’ car park. (1)

North Central Speke (looking north) with newly constructed Ford Motor car factory top of picture. Aero films A108780 c. 1963 © Liverpool Record Office

The aerial photograph above shows the part of Speke of my teenage years in the 1960s. By the 1990s, half of what you see would no longer exist. The schools would be demolished, along with all the low-rise flats, centre left. The new Morrisons shopping precinct would replace the park and flats, top left. The road between the estate and the factory, Speke Boulevard (still referred to as Ford’s Road), eventually would be hidden behind a forest of planted bushes and trees.

The sprawling car factory of Fords (now Jaguar/Land Rover) replaced the 1950s’ farmland of my childhood years. It was in my teenage years that I found reasons to leave Speke and couldn’t wait to move out. It wasn’t the absence of childhood memories but the restricting isolation: anything I wanted to do was a bus ride away.

Perceptions differ, and I realise that some people may not have felt so isolated. My intention, then and now, is not to persuade people one way or the other but to confront what I perceived as problems in Speke’s construction: namely, Speke as a post-Second World War answer to a pre-Second World War problem.

The story of the Speke estate cannot be written without reference to the 1939-1945, Second World War: Speke’s design and planning was pre-war but its main construction was post-war. This had consequences.

Speke as a housing estate was planned and designed in the 1930s, but the full story of its origin dates back to Liverpool’s housing problems of the 1800s, if not earlier.

Figure 1. Liverpool District Total Population (2)

This one graph illustrates Liverpool’s population totals more eloquently than any page of statistics. In the century 1800 to 1900, Liverpool experienced a precipitous, seven-fold population increase, culminating in a 1930s’ peak of over 850,000 inhabitants, followed by an equally precipitous population decline to the year 2000.

The nineteenth-century growth in Liverpool was double the national average for England and Wales. The total population for England and Wales in 1801 was 8.87 million. The 1901 census gave a population of 32,526,075: approximately a three and a half-fold increase.

Liverpool’s population growth was attributable to three main factors: the Industrial Revolution, its expansion as a port to cater for the Lancashire cotton industry, and the influx of the Irish. These factors may not be exclusive but the total population figures speak for themselves.

In a post-Irish potato famine, twenty-year period from 1860 to 1880, there was a rapid population increase of 250,000 on an existing total of 400,000: an increase that inevitably would have led to severe overcrowding. This was followed in the 1890s by another thirty-year growth spurt of nearly 200,000, taking Liverpool to its peak 1931 population total of 855,688. (3)

the Irish population of Liverpool, always large, was enormously increased by the inrush of immigrants after the Potato Famine of 1845–9; over 90,000 entered the town in the first three months of 1846, and nearly 300,000 in the twelve months following July 1847. Most of these subsequently emigrated to America, but many thousands, unable to find the passage money, remained to swell the misery of Liverpool slums.  

By the 1930s, Liverpool’s housing planners were confronting the inevitable: the city population was approaching, if not already at, critical density. (4)

Behold the ‘Garden City Movement’; Sir Ebenezer Howard’s answer to overcrowded, city-centre slums. Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), published a book in 1898, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path To Reform, reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow, in which he detailed his philosophy for healthy urban living. (5)

Ebenezer Howard had no training in town planning, nor did he claim to have. His vision for urban living owed more to his Victorian sense of civic duty and the concept of philanthropic housing. The central tenet of Howard’s thinking was that city people would prefer to live surrounded by countryside and that purpose-built, self-contained satellite towns would fulfil the needs of both city and country. This ideology was influential for generations and produced Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities among others.

In 1930s’ Liverpool, the Garden City Movement found an advocate in Lancelot Keay, Liverpool Director of Housing and a knighthood for his efforts. A new development was planned for Speke, as a ‘satellite town’, ‘when complete’, for ‘22,000 people’. Old Speke, a farming community for a thousand years, would be erased from history. (6)

Figure 2. To-morrow: A Peaceful Path To Reform (1898) – Ebenezer Howard

‘Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities’ © Town and Country Planning Association

‘Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities’ is a collection of circles on a hexagonal frame depicting a ‘central city’, with a proposed population of 58,000, surrounded by six smaller circles, two of which are for lesser populations of 32,000 each. The other circles are for ‘allotments’ and unspecified, potential population centres.

Six sections of land, or ‘wards’, between the inner and outer circles, are designated as follows; ‘New Forests, Large Farms, Reservoir and Waterfall, Insane Asylum, Home for Inebriates, and Home for Waifs’. Make of that what you will.

The six smaller circles in the Howard plan were the solutions to Sir Ebenezer’s aversion to sprawling suburban metropolises. Howard reasoned that once a city had reached a given capacity, then any increase should be accommodated in self-contained satellite towns; that is, the smaller circles surrounding the larger central circle but set within their own countryside.

The origin of the Speke estate was as one such ‘self-contained satellite town’.

Speke Estate, Scheme No 1, Proposed Development, Sept 1936 © Liverpool Record Office

This September 1936 drawing authorised by Keay is the first in a series of plans, culminating in Speke’s eventual development. Speke ‘Scheme No 1’ displays all the hallmarks of a Howard ‘satellite town’. It’s not quite circular but satellite towns were never intended to be circular, that was only diagrammatic.

Speke ‘Scheme No 1’ exhibits the requisite, satellite town elements of a 50-yards wide perimeter dual carriageway with designated bus stops, and a 100-yards-wide central main boulevard with grass median. The interior is a gridiron of repeated rectangular blocks. The flat terrain of South Liverpool complemented the Howard ideal: no undue changes in elevation to interfere with the planned uniformity.

At the left of the central boulevard by the upside down ‘y’, is the pre-existing Church of All Saints, built in 1872-5. Despite its age and link to old Speke, the church was deemed, ‘not of such importance as to be made the focal point of the new development’, and subsequent plans were amended so that the church was relegated to Speke’s edge.

Speke Estate preliminary layout March 1937 © Liverpool Record Office

This ‘preliminary layout’ above, dated March 1937, six months after the September 1936 ‘Scheme No 1’ plan, veers away from the circular design and begins to approximate the finished layout of the estate. The original perimeter road has morphed into a ‘New Arterial Road’ (now known as Speke Boulevard), taking traffic away from Liverpool, on the left, to Widnes, right.

The left and middle circles on the New Arterial Road represent roundabout junctions with Speke Hall Avenue and Western Avenue respectively and locate approximately with the top two roundabouts on the September 1936 plan. The roundabouts have long gone but the junctions still exist.

The third right-hand circle on the New Arterial Road was intended as a roundabout junction with Eastern Avenue but this never materialised. Top of the page, crossing the map from east to west, is a railway line that curves up at the left-hand edge as it heads off north to Liverpool centre, seven miles away. North of the Western Avenue roundabout, a road crosses the railway line at Speke Station, a station that had closed only in 1930 and easily could have been reopened. (7)

Speke Estate preliminary layout March 1937 © Liverpool Record Office

Another preliminary layout, also from March 1937, shows the estate extending eastwards: over a mile long, and half a mile wide. From the two March 1937 plans, there are a number of features redolent of Garden City thinking which would not make it to the final August 1937 layout. The huge interior roundabouts, in Western and Eastern Avenues, joined by the equally wide Central Avenue/Central Way, would be replaced by more modest, utilitarian affairs.

Speke Estate preliminary layout Aug 1937 © Liverpool Record Office

This August 1937 layout, less than a year after the ‘Garden City’ inspired original plan, is a good approximation to the size and shape of the post-war, 1950s estate. The Western, Eastern and Central Avenues, so dominant on earlier plans, are now reduced to much more moderate scales. The New Arterial Road (Speke Boulevard) only made it as far as the middle circle, Western Avenue, and would not extend eastwards until the Fords car factory was built in the early 1960s. The Eastern Avenue connection was never built.

The pre-Second World War section of the estate, the Western Avenue end, adhered to some of the pre-estate road system and incorporated what it could of old Speke.  Post-war sections of central and eastern Speke weren’t concerned with such details: not one tree or hedgerow line remained to link the estate to old Speke’s thousand-year farming history.

The original gridiron format dominates the central section with only the far eastern end showing any deviation from rectangular sub-divisions. The large circular road system in the centre of the plan would be redesigned to form an east-west rectangle incorporating The Parade, the main shopping precinct (demolished in the early 1990s).

Below this circular system, a road runs south from the estate to a promenade on the River Mersey. This shoreline extravaganza, a grand example of pre-war Garden City idealism, didn’t make it to post-war austerity.

In 1950s’ Britain, the schoolboy mantra was that ‘England had won the war’. Germany was indeed defeated but that defeat came at a cost, and that cost was America’s involvement. The price of America’s involvement was ‘Lend Lease’, a programme in which Britain was obliged to sell off its overseas assets. At war’s end, Britain no longer had an income to rely on. ‘England’ had ‘won’ the war, but Britain was bankrupt. (8)

On the post-war Speke estate, houses were built, but everything else was on hold; schools, shops, churches, libraries, civic buildings, factories, community centres, etc.

Speke: City Architect’s Department JL Berbiers, July 1946 (Looking NW) © Liverpool Record Office

This magnificent 1946 aerial perspective drawing by JL Berbiers shows the estate as it soon would become in the 1950s. Drawn one year after the war, it is noticeable for its post-war pragmatism of (imagined) factories on the outskirts versus pre-war optimism of (absent) ludicrously wide boulevards in the interior.

The New Arterial Road/Speke Boulevard can be made out just north of the estate (above), along with two roundabout junctions. The right hand, Eastern Avenue junction was never built, leaving the left Western Avenue junction as the main entry and exit point, connecting the whole estate to Liverpool City centre and beyond.

Speke Industrial Estate and environs, 1952 (EAW047295) © Britain from Above.  Looking northwest, the Speke Estate lies to the bottom left.

Centre frame in the image above is the pre-1946 constructed Western Avenue/Speke Boulevard roundabout, with Western Avenue running to the left (south) and Speke Boulevard, a single carriageway at this time, running to the top left (west). The road running to the top right (north) is Woodend Avenue which crosses the railway line at Speke station, half a mile from the estate.

From the outset, this one junction would be the main entry and exit point for the whole estate which had a peak population of 26,000. (9)  The relocated Liverpool Airport in the 1980s took traffic westwards to the Speke Hall Avenue roundabout, just visible top left. The new shopping precinct in the 1990s gave Speke an extra access point east of Western Avenue but all the traffic from Speke converged on Speke Boulevard, the main arterial route from Liverpool to points south and east.

In Figure 2 above, Ebenezer Howard’s inclusion of Inter-Municipal Canals and Railways was quaint 19^th century utopianism but from his plans, and writings it is clear that Howard understood one aspect of urban living: transport links.

In his compulsive manner, Howard detailed distances and times travelled by various means of transport. He understood that satellite towns had to be interconnected with each other and the main central city.  ‘Satellite’ did not equate with isolated.

In the August 1937 preliminary, but eventual, layout of Speke (above), Keay approved the plan that resulted in Speke having only one main exit and entry point at Western Avenue/Speke Boulevard.

Speke Boulevard, looking west, 1950s  © www.liverpoolpicturebook.com

The photograph above shows Speke Boulevard looking west as an original single lane, viewed from the Western Avenue roundabout: Speke estate left, Evans Medical Ltd, right.

Speke Boulevard initially stopped at the Western Avenue roundabout, and wouldn’t continue eastwards until the Ford Motor car plant was built in the early 1960s: the Eastern Avenue junction was never built. Additionally, the estate, on average, is over a mile away from Speke railway station, a station that had closed only recently but would have connected Speke with Liverpool City centre. Speke’s infrastructure was lacking from the day the estate was built.

In the half-century between the 1902 reprint of Ebenezer Howard’s book and the 1950s’ construction of the Speke estate, Britain had endured two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1920s/30s.

Expectations had moved on from such adversities but the blueprint for the creation of the post-WW2 Speke estate was a remnant of nineteenth-century utopianism. Lancelot Keay had failed to adapt his housing policy to the changing anticipations of a post-war world. Keay was assumptive in thinking that nineteenth-century idealism would transpose into the twentieth century. The Speke of Keay’s approval was not a ‘self-contained satellite town’ in the countryside: it was an isolated council housing estate set in farmland.

The ‘self-contained’ requirements of employment and leisure were slow to appear, if at all. Many thousands of people needed to work and socialise on an estate that barely catered for either. Initially there weren’t even any public houses in Speke: Liverpool Corporation excluded them from the estate. Breweries had to build their pubs on the outside of the perimeter road, namely The Fox, The Pegasus and The Dove & Olive Branch. The Pegasus and The Dove & Olive Branch have since been demolished.

The cottage industries that Howard contemplated in his 1902 plans were insufficient for twentieth-century needs. An uprooted labour force, transposed from the city centre to a satellite estate with poor transport links, needed a large workforce employer in close proximity. Speke would have to wait until 1963 for the Ford Motor car plant to be built: the new factory simultaneously eradicating a quarter of the surrounding ‘countryside’.

In that same year, 1963, Harold Wilson (Prime Minister 1964-1970) gave his ‘white heat of technology’ speech, in which he warned that to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ would need to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution. (10) Speke would struggle to find its relevance in the second half of the twentieth century.  Speke’s failings were, and are, its isolation. The Speke estate was built in the wrong place.

The author of the Pevsner Architectural Guide, Lancashire: Liverpool and the Southwest’ is blunt in his assessment:

But by the 1960s it was clear that Keay’s ‘adventure’ had failed. Although he claimed Speke as a prototype New Town, in reality, it was an isolated, working-class suburb. There was no private housing, no trams (prohibited across runway approaches) [tram routes ended at Garston], the railway station never opened, and even the scaled-down shopping and public amenities were not completed until the 1960s.

The writing continues, in uncomplimentary style: ‘Speke is a vast housing estate of great monotony, so exploration is only for the committed’. (11)  

This book was published in 2006. One can only assume that the writer of such condescension was not acquainted with Speke of the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s. He would have had a fuller understanding of the term, ‘great monotony’.

Ganworth Road (looking north), April 1953 (to the left) and Central Way looking east, April 1953. © Liverpool Record Office

The photographs above of Speke’s signature low-rise blocks of flats were taken in 1953 from the same corner, looking north and east. Identical blocks of flats occupied huge swathes of central Speke. Of 6000 dwellings in Speke, 1270 were flats.(9) Built in the 1950s, virtually all the flats would be demolished by the 1980s.

Speke residents of the past thirty years or so may not realise that early Speke was as devoid of trees as the photographs above show. The ‘garden’ in Garden City was lost in construction. Speke was an island of buildings in a sea of farmland. There were pockets of woodland outside the estate but Central and Eastern Speke were barren.

I am the same age as the post-war estate, and spent the 1960s trying to equate teenage life with Speke’s impoverished isolation. Time spent has granted me every entitlement to be critical of the failings in Speke’s construction as I saw them.

Some people came to terms with Speke and happily remain there. I wish them well. I didn’t, and left. Speke and I failed to bond in my teenage years. Yes, my childhood was idyllic, playing in surrounding farms and woodland but adolescence uncovered Speke’s deficiencies.

The requirements for Speke as a ‘self-contained satellite town’ surrounded by countryside were never met: circumstances dictated otherwise. Speke defaulted to a residential island, set in a sea of encroaching industry. The farmlands surrounding Speke, ‘some of the best wheat growing land in the hundred’, (12) were replaced by factories and distribution warehouses. The need for local employment replaced the given of countryside. Garden City ideology gave way to economic necessity and the countryside succumbed to industrial development.

An isolated Speke is mutating into a Dormitory Estate, a sleepy, detached suburb for Liverpool commuters lucky enough to have found inexpensive property within the city limits. Developers have seized upon defunct school playing fields to be converted into mini-housing estates: houses and plot sizes considerably smaller than neighbouring original properties but one and a half times the asking price.

The last time I visited Speke, I flew into Manchester Airport (the runway at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport isn’t long enough for transatlantic flights), walked to the connecting railway station, and took a train to Liverpool South Parkway. At South Parkway I waited an hour for a bus to Speke (Morrisons): two of the displayed twenty-minute service simply failed to turn up. I enquired at ‘Information’, only to be told that they were a railway station and weren’t responsible for bus schedules. Some things haven’t changed in seventy years: Speke is still an end of the road housing estate with poor transport links.

The ‘New Arterial Road’, Speke Boulevard, does ‘connect’ with Speke, but it takes people past, and away from the estate. No one drives through Speke, they never did. Post-1980s, there are so many planted trees and bushes on Speke Boulevard that people driving past don’t see the estate or even know it’s there.

Figure 3. Proposed Eastern Access Transport Corridor (2018)  

Speke Estate with the airport runway, south © Liverpool John Lennon Airport Master Plan to 2050

The heavy line in the map above is Speke Boulevard, locally Ford’s Road but officially the A561. The blue line is the proposed Eastern Access Transport Corridor connecting the A561 with the airport. A to B would be a new road with the remainder a rebuild of the existing Hale Road. The blue area is Green Belt farmland.

The Eastern Access Transport Corridor map is taken from the 2017 Consultation Draft of the Liverpool John Lennon Airport Master Plan to 2050. This proposed corridor will be primarily an airport link road with the A561 but would serve a double function, alleviating the commercial traffic congestion on Speke Boulevard from the Estuary Business Park, west of the estate.

This intended airport relief road is only one of several ‘improvements’ sought for the airport by owners Peel Holdings. The Peel Holdings’ Master Plan for the airport proposes an extended runway for long-haul flights, double the passenger handling to 11 million per annum by 2050, and ‘to grow cargo throughput by 20,000–25,000 tonnes per annum over the period of the master plan’. ‘Up to 20 percent of revenue on a long-haul service can be generated from air freight.’ (13)

The Speke estate, the once-upon-a-time ‘satellite town surrounded by countryside’, is being choked by industry and losing the fight. Airport and commercial traffic pollution is replacing the ‘Garden City’ fresh air, with the remaining farmland sought for airport development by the Peel Holdings juggernaut. (14)

The Speke of my childhood, the ‘satellite town’ of the 1950s, was enclosed almost entirely in farmland. I have aged to see three-quarters of that surrounding farmland disappear to industry which leaves the question: How much of the remaining countryside, if any, will survive me?

Oglet Farmland, south of Speke © Lynne Moneypenny: Save Oglet Shore & Greenbelt

The photograph above shows farmland at Oglet, part of the last remaining countryside south of the Speke estate, squeezed in between the airport runway and the River Mersey and sought for airport expansion by owners Peel Holdings.

The question remains: How much longer does the ‘countryside’ have before it succumbs to tarmac and concrete?

tomspeke@yahoo.ca 

Note

Special thanks to the Liverpool Record Office for supplying many of the images in this post and allowing their reproduction.

Sources

(1) The Archi UK website here links to an 1894 Ordnance Survey 6 inch to 1 mile map of the Speke area. The slider top-left superimposes a current map of the same location.

(2) A Vision of Britain through Time, Liverpool District Total Population

(3) William Farrer and J Brownbill (eds), ‘Liverpool: Trade, population and geographical growth‘, in A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 4, (London, 1911)

(4) The population density, and housing shortage problems would be compounded by war time bomb damage, and the post war ‘baby boom’ population explosion.

(5) A key extract of Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow is provided on this Cornell University webpage.

(6) George Mercer, ‘Speke as a New Town: An Experimental Industrial Study’, The Town Planning Review, vol 24, no 3, October 1953

(7) Disused Stations: Speke

(8) See Professor Stephen Ambrose, ‘From War to Peace’ in The World at War (Thames TV, originally broadcast in 1974: on Lendlease at 13:51 and Britain’s cost, 17:15. [This 22-minute film is mandatory viewing for anyone wishing to understand the geo-political legacy of the Second World War, as viewed from the early 1970s.]

(9) City of Liverpool, Tenants’ Handbook, undated c1962

(10) Wilson’s speech to the 1963 Labour Party Conference in Scarborough has been re-created by Manchester’s People’s History Museum and can be viewed on this Guardian webpage.

(11) Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: Liverpool and the Southwest (Yale University Press, 2006)

(12) William Farrer and J Brownbill (eds), ‘Townships: Speke’, in A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 3 (Victoria County History, 1907)

(13) Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Master Plan to 2050, Consultation Draft June 2017

(14) Guy Shrubsole, ‘Who owns the country? The secretive companies hoarding England’s land’, The Guardian, 19 April 2019

Kirkby, Liverpool, Part II: ‘New Jerusalem Goes Wrong’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Kirkby, Regeneration

Last week’s post looked at the origins and early development of the new town of Kirkby. Despite the ambitions and claims of its planners, some early impressions of observers were critical and the responses of some residents at least were muted, showing gratitude for better housing but a more sceptical attitude towards their new environment.

This image of Kirkby shopping centre in 1964 gives some evidence of the town’s young population © Liverpool Echo

Objectively, two things stand out. One was the age profile of the new town: in 1961, some 48 percent of the population was under 15; the England and Wales average stood at 27 percent. There were reports of serious vandalism as early as 1960 when, for example, the Liverpool Echo, reporting the departure of the local vicar to the safer environs of Southport, described the town ‘troubled by gangs of young vandals who leave a weekly trail of havoc’. (1)

We’ll come back to this issue and it seems far too crude to ascribe it simply to local demographics but it’s noteworthy that in at least two cases of allegedly vandal-ridden estates – the Brandon Estate in Lambeth and Meadowell in North Shields –  local commentators blamed their preponderance of young people. (In fact, at 30 to 35 percent, the numbers under 15 were significantly lower than at Kirkby.)

The Peacock public house, Quarryside Drive, Northwood, 2016

The second is criticism of Kirkby’s lack of facilities. We saw last week the genuine efforts to provide health and educational resources but other amenities lagged. ‘There’s nothing for teenagers’, complained one respondent to the 1961 survey of Liverpool academic John Barron Mays. Some commentators linked the town’s young population, its lack of facilities and the allegedly high levels of antisocial behaviour, as a Times report on Kirkby (‘the legendary birthplace of the BBC’s Z Cars’) did in 1965: (2)

Although half the population is under 21 no one has yet built a cinema or dance hall and, possibly for this kind of reason, the 13 and 14-years-olds are the town’s most frequent law-breakers. Shop windows are shattered with monotonous regularity, telephone kiosks are damaged at the rate of one per day and windows of unoccupied buildings are now sometimes protected by corrugated iron.

One of May’s respondents, the 32-year old wife of a brewery manager, stated she couldn’t ‘belong to a club because not an RC’ (sic). Lingering sectarianism notwithstanding, for all the promise as so often the provision of social amenities followed too slowly on the housing drive which preceded it.

Kirkby Industrial Estate, undated © Liverpool Echo

In the 1960s, employment opportunities offered a better prospect. Ronald Bradbury, Kirkby’s chief planner, claimed the Kirkby Industrial Estate was employing 12,000 by 1956, 16,000 by 1961 and 25,000 by 1967. Some of its firms such as Birds Eye, Hygena and Bendix, were the household names of Britain. Jeff Morris recalled his earlier working years in Kirkby: (3)

The industrial estate was a world of opportunity. You could leave one job and walk into another. I think it was the largest in Britain at the time, or at least in the North West.

Full employment Britain seems a foreign country where things were done differently. In the 1970s the post-war compact between state and society that guaranteed jobs and social security began to dissolve and Kirkby in particular would suffer grievously.

In 1971, Thorn Electrical, which had just bought Fisher-Bendix, announced the closure of the company’s Kirkby plant with the loss of 600 jobs. A factory occupation demanding ‘the right to work’ followed and a new owner was found to keep the factory going, for the time being at least.

Tower Hill protest, 1972. The placard on the left reads ‘Tower Hill Flat Dwellers Let’s Have Homes Not Fungus Cells’ – a reminder that this was also a protest about housing conditions.

Such local militancy, this time led by women, was displayed again in a fourteen-month rent strike, involving 3000 households at peak, led by the Tower Hill Unfair Rents Action Group – a protest against the £1 a week increase proposed by Kirkby Urban District Council as a result of the ‘fair rents’ regime of the 1972 Housing Act. (4)

But such struggles availed little against the larger forces at work. As early as 1971, Kirkby was noted as one of several problematic ‘peripheral estates’ – areas characterised by their ‘marked degree of social homogeneity’, rising unemployment and physical decline. By 1981, an unemployment rate of 22.6 percent placed it second in the country after Corby which had recently suffered the closure of its steelworks. (5)

Ranshaw Court, Tower Hill, seen in its brief heyday and demolished, 1982

Kirkby’s physical decline was seen in Tower Hill’s recently built seven-storey system-built maisonette blocks, flawed from the outset and scheduled for demolition barely ten years later. Across the town, three-storey flat blocks – disliked for their lack of space and appalling sound insulation – made up almost a quarter of its homes and suffered an annual tenant turnover of 25 percent. For some, the almost systematic destruction of these flats when empty by Kirkby youth was not mindless vandalism but justified protest. (6)

Cover and image from the Observer magazine article on Kirkby in 1979

The forces of law and order were less sympathetic. Chief Superintendent Norman Chapple, in charge of local policing, produced a lengthy report entitled ‘Kirkby New Town: an Objective Assessment of Social, Economic and Police Problems’ in 1975 which received national coverage.

Its statistics made for sobering reading: around 700 council homes were badly vandalised annually;  vandalism generally cost the town some £375,000 a year, a figure comparable, it was said, to a town ten times its size; 14,000 streetlights had been destroyed in a six-month period; an average of five telephone kiosks were vandalised daily. In all, Kirkby’s crime rate was 16 percent higher than the Knowsley and Merseyside average, itself said to be the highest in Britain, and the proportion of juvenile offenders arrested was two-thirds greater than in London. (7)

Kirkby town centre, June 1993 © John Wakefield

Chapple acknowledged the context: dissatisfaction with housing, high unemployment, an exceptionally high population of young people and a continuingly high birth rate.  And he recognised the depressing nature of the local environment:

The whole atmosphere of the town centre and the four community centre shopping precincts is marred by the fact that most shops have either bricked up their windows or covered them with permanent and unsightly metal grilles.

But he was also unsparing in his character assessment of the town’s population. He suggested that the parents of Kirkby ‘must accept a large part of the blame for the misconduct of the younger generation and hence their own squalid environment’. He observed a ‘high proportion of irresponsible or manifestly anti-social residents’. And he believed:

All endeavours to improve the general quality of life will be vain, however, unless some way can be found to improve the basically apathetic, irresponsible and anti-social attitude exhibited by a large proportion of the community.

Of course, many residents found such judgments shocking and offensive. Earlier letters to the Liverpool Echo had rejected such stigmatisation: ‘Someone tell me just where you think Kirkby people originate. We are not a separate race’, said Mrs Badcock. Joseph and Margaret McCann complained about Kirkby’s ‘undeserved bad reputation’. One ‘Contented Kirkbyite’ noted the ‘very nice respectable people and families who are a credit to Kirby’. Vandalism, most respondents commented, was not specific to Kirkby but a problem everywhere and in places with far fewer young people. (8)

James Holt Avenue, Westvale, 2016

Critical commentary easily lurched into ugly stereotyping and the latter, whatever the reality, merely added to Kirkby’s problems. From somewhere removed in time and place, it’s hard – and perhaps unnecessary – to pass judgement. The seventies seem – this an admittedly anecdotal observation from someone who lived through them – a time of cultural shift; a more troubled and less deferential era. The objective circumstances of Kirkby – poor housing in too many cases, inadequate amenities – warranted grievance. Unemployment, youth unemployment reaching 60 percent, decimated its community; the town’s population fell by 15 percent in the decade after 1971.

And there was, as Chapple noted, though unsympathetically in his case, an anti-authoritarian attitude perhaps rooted in the decades-long experience of a casualised Liverpool docks workforce of ruthless exploitation. Chapple was shocked by the apparently widespread acceptance of the theft and receiving (in police parlance) of stolen goods but ‘nicking’ – as has been noted in Glasgow too – could be viewed as a form of justifiable wealth redistribution by those at the sharp end of social inequality.

The problems and the spotlight – more empathetically in this case – remained on Kirkby in the early 1980s when the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) researched ‘outer estates in Britain’. Its report on Kirkby and Stockbridge Village (formerly Cantril Farm) – another peripheral Liverpool development – was published in 1985 and noted the ‘chronic state of disrepair’ of much of the housing and the dependence of around half Kirkby’s households on state benefits. The industrial estate’s ‘large-plant, branch-plant economy, making consumer products’ was no longer viable as globalisation impacted and the town’s unemployment rate was 50 percent higher than that of Liverpool as a whole. (9)

The new St Chad’s Health Centre

All Saints Catholic High School, opened in 2010

All this is past history and there has been significant change since. The town was ripe for the area-based regeneration initiatives that characterised government policy from the 1980s onward. Demolition and rebuild in Tower Hill were supported by a £26 million grant from the Estate Action Programme launched in 1985. By 1992, one enthusiastic report claimed the area now had a five-year waiting list of people wanting to move in. Kirkby also received money from the Single Regeneration Budget but the Council’s 1992 bid for City Challenge funding was rejected. (10)

Contrary to received wisdom, New Labour did invest quite heavily in what became known as the ‘left-behind areas’. In Kirkby the results can be seen in new schools and health centres. But secure and decently remunerated employment, given the government’s embrace of a competitive, globalised economy, was a tougher nut to crack.

As was typical, however, the regeneration strategy focused heavily on housing, clearing those areas judged particularly problematic or unpopular. The practical reality of empty and hard-to-let social rent homes in Kirkby and a declining population (from almost 60,000 in 1971 to 40,472 in 2001) made the contemporary policy preference for low-rise mixed-tenure, ‘mixed community’ development an inevitable and, in this case perhaps, justifiable, choice.

Willow Rise (in foreground) and Beech Rise, Parklands, Roughwood Drive, 2016

In 2000, land north of Shevington’s Lane was set aside for ‘a private housing area comparable in size to the original public housing estate’. By 2005, six of the eight 15-storey towers along Roughwood Drive been demolished. Redeveloped by LPC Living and rebranded Parklands, the two remaining towers were refurbished to provide ‘high-quality contemporary accommodation’ for sale whilst ‘40 new two- and three-bedroom mews-style townhouses’ replaced the others. (11)

New housing at Sycamore Drive off Roughwood Drive, 2016

In Southdene, the two eleven-storey Cherryfield Heights blocks have also been demolished. The surviving four eleven-storey blocks at Gaywood Green are now scheduled for demolition due to fire safety concerns. (12)

The almost unavoidable corollary of regeneration was so-called Large-scale Voluntary Transfer of housing stock from local authorities to housing associations – hardly voluntary as councils were denied the support needed to fund renovations and new build themselves. In 2002, Knowsley Council’s 17,000 homes were transferred to the Knowsley Housing Trust formed for the purpose.  The Council estimated this would release £270 million of new investment in housing.

Quarry Green Heights, 2016

A tower block fire in Huyton in 1991 (before transfer) was seen as ‘a warning which ultimately went unheeded’ and fire risk assessments issued by the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service in 2017 relating to the Quarry Green blocks reflected what critics saw as a generally bureaucratic and non-responsive attitude amongst a rapidly changing senior staff. The Trust was issued a non-compliance order by the Social Housing Regulator in 2018 which stated baldly that it failed to meet governance requirements. Since April 2020 it has been re-invented as the Livv Housing Group. (13)

Kirkby shopping centre, 2016

Currently, the twenty-year saga of the regeneration of Kirkby’s town centre is centre-stage with – to cut a long story short – the hopeful news that a Morrison’s superstore, a Home Bargains outlet and a drive-thru (sic) KFC will be gracing the redeveloped centre following a ground-breaking ceremony in January this year. (14)

The current moment (I write in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic) is hardly propitious to such efforts and the practical and psychological boost of a revived central shopping area will battle unequally against the objective reality of Kirkby’s continuing poverty.  In the modern jargon of multiple deprivation, as of 2018 some 34 percent of Kirkby’s population suffered income deprivation (against an English average of 15 percent) and 28 percent employment deprivation (12 percent). (15)

New private housing in Brackenhurst Green, Northwood, 2016

Despite the high hopes – and a degree of hyperbole – which accompanied its inception, Kirkby has not been an unalloyed success though, as ever, many of its residents will have experienced their homes and community far more positively than media headlines and hostile commentary would suggest. Back in 1981, when CES essayed a judgment on what had gone wrong, they concluded that no-one or nothing was directly to blame, except history: ‘the town’s main stumbling block is that “each of the main problems exacerbates the others”’. (16)

That will seem a mealy-mouthed judgement to some. Many would point to planning hubris and, more specifically, the inherent problems associated with large, mono-class peripheral estates. Others would blame poor execution – flawed housing and inadequate amenities. But neither offer sufficient explanation. The necessary context is inequality and a state and society which have in recent decades retreated from the promises of a more classless prosperity that briefly actuated our politics in the era that gave birth to the new town of Kirkby.

Notes

My thanks to John Wakefield for permission to use a couple of his powerful images of Kirkby at this time and for supplying additional detail.

Sources

(1) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62, Book 2 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014)

(2) ‘Police See Widening Gap with Public’, The Times, 3 February 1965

(3) Molyneux, ‘Kirkby’s transformation from sleepy rural town to “the great new world”

(4) These working-class struggles are described from a left-wing perspective in numerous accounts. Fisher-Bendix, for example, in libcom.org, Under new management? The Fisher-Bendix occupation and from International Socialism, Malcolm Marks, The Battle at Fisher Bendix; the Tower Hill Rent Strike in Big Flame and the Kirkby Rent Strike and ‘”Empowered working-class housewives” – Big Flame, Women and the Kirkby Rent Strike 1972-73’.

(5) Duncan Sim, ‘Urban Deprivation: Not Just the Inner City’, Area, vol 16, no 4, December 1984

(6) Mark Urbanowicz, Forms of Policing and the Politics of Law Enforcement: A Critical Analysis of Policing in a Merseyside Working Class Community, PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1985

(7) The quotations which follow are drawn from Ian Craig, ‘Kirkby – “Town in State of Crisis”’, Liverpool Echo, 2 December 1975, Peter Evans, ‘Hooliganism and theft make new town a disaster area’, The Times, 3 December 1975 and Urbanowicz, Forms of Policing and the Politics of Law Enforcement: A Critical Analysis of Policing in a Merseyside Working Class Community.

(8) Letters page, Liverpool Echo, 22 November 1972

(9) CES Paper 27, Outer Estates in Britain: Action Programmes in Kirkby and Stockbridge Village (1985)

(10) ‘The town that fought its way back’, The Times, 13 July 1992

(11) Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Supplementary Planning Document Tower Hill (Kirkby) Action Area (April 2007) and Parklands, LPC Living and ‘Rush to Buy Tower Blocks’, Liverpool Echo, 21 September 2005

(12) See the Tower Block UK website of the University of Edinburgh and Nathaniel Barker, ‘Merseyside housing association to demolish tower blocks after fire safety failings’, Inside Housing, 15 May 2019

(13) Nathaniel Barker, ‘Knowsley Housing Trust: what went wrong?’, Inside Housing 12 October 2018 and Regulator of Social Housing, Regulatory Judgement on Knowsley Housing Trust LH4343, August 2018.

(14) Chloé Vaughan, ‘Ground breaks on retail development in Kirkby’, Place NorthWest, 31 Jan 2020. The town’s Wikipedia entry contains exhaustive detail on the longer story.

(15) Knowsley Council, Kirkby Profile 2018.

(16) Quoted in Sue Woodward, ‘”Town of Apathy”: the Daily Problems of life in Kirkby’, Liverpool Echo, 19 October 1981

Kirkby, Liverpool, Part I: ‘a tremendous achievement’?

Tags

1950s, 1960s, Kirkby

For those of a certain age, Kirkby is probably most associated with Z Cars, a BBC police drama that first aired in 1962.  The programme was set in the fictitious ‘Newtown’ but the town bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Kirkby, described by Troy Kennedy Martin, one of the show’s screenwriters, as: (1)

one of the black spots of England, an overspill New Town from the slums of Liverpool, where 50,000 displaced and truculent Merseysiders carry out a continuous war against authority and where crime and adolescent terror incubate.

Kirkby was not an officially designated New Town – though it was sometimes given the name and bore some superficial resemblance to that post-war Government programme – and, as you read on, you can judge for yourself how far it deserved Martin’s caustic characterisation. This post, at least, will attempt a balanced verdict but it’s fair to say that execution fell some way short of ambition.

The cover of the booklet published to celebrate the official opening of Kirkby’s 10,000th new home.

Kirkby’s origins lay in the late 1920s as it became clear to Liverpool’s politicians that the city needed to move away from its dependence on the docks and allied employment. The City Council developed two new industrial estates in response, one at Speke (along with its associated satellite town), the other at Aintree.

‘The Kirkby Industrial Estate around Newstet Road, 1952’ © Britain from Above, EAW046998. This image shows the estate in its early years very much reflecting its Ordnance Factory origins.

A third was planned at Kirkby, six miles north-west of the city centre, but shelved due to the war. In the event the war would give its own boost to such planning when the Kirkby Ordnance Factory was established in 1938 as the UK prepared for conflict. It grew at peak to comprise around 1000 buildings and employ a (mainly female) workforce of some 23,000.

Ordnance Factory housing with sloping roofs on Spinney Close © David Long and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Government built around 200 houses too for key workers, principally designed by Arthur W Kenyon – standard family homes but distinguished in some cases (such as those on Spinney Close) by their modernist-style sloping roofs and, in most, by flat roofs. As Kenyon recalled, the latter ‘were dictated by war emergency; timber was not available for sloping roofs’. He did, however, provide each home with a brick shed large enough to ‘satisfy the shed addict’. The homes were transferred to the local authority after the war and those on the Park Estate near the station now have pitched roofs (2)

The Ordnance Factory closed in March 1946; its land acquired by the Council to form the new Kirkby Industrial Estate, intended as the employment hub of the major housing development to follow.  In conjunction with the local planning authority, Lancashire County Council, and the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, the Council moved quickly to finalise its proposals and a Town Map covering 2800 acres (including the trading estate) was approved in July 1949.

Town Map, as featured in Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement (1961)

The plan provided for three roughly equal neighbourhoods – anodynely named Southdene, Westvale and Northwood – grouped around a town centre with open ground between the westerly and south-easterly neighbourhoods occupied by schools and playing fields. Whiston Rural District Council, in whose land the scheme lay, gave planning approval for Southdene, the first element in the proposals, in November and preparatory work began early in the following year.

The Mayor of Liverpool, Alderman Albert Morrow, officially opens the first house in Southdene in 1952

The first housing contract– with the locally based Unit Construction Company – for 647 homes was signed in March 1952 and, at a rate of three per week, 116 had been completed by December.

Further contracts with Unit Construction brought the 1000th house in October 1953, the 5000th in 1956 and the 10,000th in September 1961, the latter marked in an opening ceremony attended by Henry Brook, Minister of Housing and Local Government, and Liverpool’s Lord Mayor. The occasion seemed to merit a little justifiable hype: (3)

The completion of ten thousand dwellings on a single estate for a single authority by a single firm of contractors, accomplished in a remarkably short period of nine years, is by any standards a tremendous achievement.

In the longer term, that achievement might be questioned but at the time numbers counted. A 1955 housing survey of the city revealed that of near 205,000 homes in Liverpool, 61,247 were unfit and only suitable for demolition and a further 61,247 required extensive repair or demolition – in total, some 43 percent of total housing stock. (4)

New housing in Southdene

Peak housing production in Kirkby – 1700 homes completed in the year – was reached in 1957 and the town’s population was projected to reach 74,000 by 1971.  All this leads to the obvious question: what was the quality of the environment and infrastructure provided in this breakneck expansion? (5)

This 1951 plan of part of Southdene (the bottom right of the Town Map above) shows Bradbury’s curving streetscapes as well as – with its combined primary school and community centre and nursery school – some of the efforts made to include community facilities.

Ronald Bradbury, having previously held a similar position in Glasgow, was appointed Liverpool’s City Architect and Director of Housing, aged 40, in 1946. He moved away from the more formal Beaux-Arts designs of his illustrious predecessor Lancelot Keay, making Kirkby’s overall layout ‘informal by founding it on existing roads, contours and natural features’. (6)

Hargate Walk, Northwood

The housing, in the town’s early years, was almost wholly low-rise, generally undistinguished but pleasant and functional and, of course, in terms of space and facilities, vastly better than the slum housing from which most new residents had moved. Bradbury himself provided a precise summary in the 1961 commemorative brochure: of the 10,000 homes built to date, some 5817 were two- to four-bed, two-storey houses; 1197 were one-bed flats for elderly people placed in two-storey blocks; 2166 were two- and three-bed flats in three-storey blocks.; and 688 were three-bed maisonettes in four-storey blocks. (7)

Maisonettes on Moss Lawn Road, Southdene

Four eleven-storey blocks of one- and two-bed flats in Gaywood Green approved in 1961 marked the beginnings of high-rise development in Kirkby. Fourteen tower blocks had been erected by 1967: two further 11-storey blocks at Cherrywood Heights and eight 15-storey blocks at Kirkby Northwood.  In the mid- to late-sixties, three 15-storey blocks were added at Quarry Green Heights and two, more modest seven-storey blocks at Whitefield Square.

Mercer Heights blocks, Mercer Avenue, Westvale, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Quarry Green Heights, Northwood, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

As a result of Kirkby’s suburban setting and plentiful land, this was, by Liverpool standards (by 1981 half of the city’s council homes were flats), a relatively small incursion. All the blocks in Kirkby were built – you guessed it – by the Unit Construction Company but, although the firm became the UK licensee of the French Camus form of system building in 1962, those in Kirkby seem to have been constructed of in-situ reinforced concrete frames with brick and concrete panel infilling. (8)

Whitefield Square, Westvale, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Liverpool Builds, the Corporation’s celebratory account of its housing programme published in 1967, also emphasised the 914 homes built for owner occupation in the town on ‘three very substantial areas of ground set aside by the Housing Committee for that purpose as part of its policy of housing diversification on the estate’. That ‘mixed community’ was not, however, the reality or certainly not the reputation of Kirkby.

It was not a New Town in the sense that it was developed by a Development Corporation with full resources and powers to do so but the Council aspired to create something similar, as Bradbury claimed: (9)

From the outset the Liverpool City Council was fully alive to the fact that Kirkby was not merely a new housing estate but that they were creating a “new town” which must have all the essential facilities and amenities such an entity required.

Doctor’s surgery, Brook Hey Drive, Northwood

Health facilities and new schools were built, of course – 32 schools and twelve doctors’ surgeries and three dental clinics by 1965. The Town Map also set aside sites for 15 churches and chapels across the new town in addition to the nineteenth-century St Chad’s parish church retained centrally. Places of worship were always an apparent planning priority but post-war local government managed also to largely shed its aversion to the demon drink: at Kirkby, the Council planned twelve public houses plus a central residential hotel. Lancashire County Council provided a library, courts and the emergency services.  A privately developed shopping centre and three neighbourhood retail centres completed the ensemble.

That infrastructure and an allegedly growing ‘civic consciousness’ ensured that the Kirkby parish of the Whiston Rural District was created an Urban District in 1958. The Council’s Civic Centre, designed by Jackson and Edmonds, was completed in 1969. Later, in 1974, Kirkby was absorbed into the new Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council which, in turn, became a part of the Liverpool City Region in 2014.

The Tenterhook with Ranshaw Court to the rear, Tower Hill © John Wakefield

It was Kirkby Urban District Council which was responsible for the last extensive phase of the town’s housing development: the Tower Hill district, north of the Liverpool-Manchester Victoria railway line, built from the late 1960s and intended to house some 10,000 second generation residents. Its homes were mostly low-rise terraced housing and maisonettes but included a number of seven-storey maisonette blocks. The latter, built by Unit and in this case using the Camus system, were poorly constructed and soon revealed multiple flaws. Demolition of seven was agreed as early as 1980.

Ranshaw Court demolition, February 1989

That might come to seem portentous but in 1961, its principal planner, Liverpool’s City Architect and Director of Housing, Ronald Bradbury, could claim proudly and perhaps justifiably that: (10)

Kirby is now a well-established and thriving community but it is not possible … in print to convey the spirit of Kirkby or the enthusiasm which has gone into its creation … There has been created in a remarkably short period a feeling of “belonging” and pride in the New Kirkby.

Of course, the true test of such assertion lay in the sentiments of the town’s new residents and in its longer-term evolution. Alan Martin, now 65, arrived in Kirby from inner-city Liverpool in 1957: (11)

Living in a terrace house in Walton, it was a chance to have a brand new council house and a fresh start. I’ve got very little memories of not living in Kirkby as a kid. Everything was being built in front of us, like the fire station, the market, the police station. It was a great place to be. There were buildings sites and there were also open spaces. It was an adventure for most kids

Jeff Morris, 66, recalls arriving in Kirkby from Everton in 1958:

It was good. My mum and dad thought this was the great new world that came but they did have some doubts when they moved in and had talks about moving back to Liverpool. But when St Kevin’s school opened my dad went to go see it and saw all science labs and facilities. He knew if we stayed we’d get a good education.

Sociological studies of the time largely echo such sentiments. NH Rankin’s ‘Social adjustment in a North-West New Town’, published in 1963, found that 40 percent of new residents were pleased to move to Kirkby from their inner-city slum clearance properties and 22 percent had wanted to move but not necessarily to Kirkby. It was true, however, that a large number – 29 percent – had not wished to move to the new town. (12)

Delaware Crescent, Westvale

Interestingly, after relocation, around three-quarters wished to stay. The big plus was, of course, the new homes and few missed the allegedly close-knit community of the slum quarters lionised by some contemporary sociologists: Rankin found that ‘the influence of the close-knit matrilocal lifestyle is of lesser importance than the attainment of better housing’. Nevertheless, a significant proportion did want to move away – flats were particularly unpopular – and over half of households, in Rankin’s words, ‘expressed some reservation about the “kinds of people” they preferred to mix with in Kirkby’.

Kennelwood Avenue, Northwood

This latter concern was echoed in another early survey by a resident (‘a machinists’ wife with two daughters’) who declared that ‘they should have put the roughs in flats and the respectable ones in houses to look after gardens’. John Barron Mays, like Rankin a Liverpool University academic, also published his research in 1963.

Mays was caustic regarding the town’s situation and overall design: (13)

On the drearily flat, wet plain of South-West Lancashire, it repeats many of the less pleasing features of similar developments elsewhere. There are the usual long avenues of similar houses, some taller buildings and blocks but little architectural elegance. An atmosphere of organised anonymity prevails throughout its length and breadth; a new, raw, hardly-lived-in place, unsoftened by time and unrelieved by local colour.

His further commentary, based on resident testimony, was gentler but marked by its faint praise. He found in general ‘a reluctant acceptance by residents of their new situation’. Certainly most ‘did not seem to be unduly isolated’; only 29 percent found their Kirkby neighbours less friendly than those of the inner city. Many disliked living in multi-storey blocks of flats even while, at this stage, most blocks only reached four storeys. ‘For the majority of ex-inner city slumdwellers the new estate is desirable or at least adequate’. ‘In the end’, Mays hoped, ‘the long trek from the dingy, cramped back-streets of central Liverpool [would be] a step toward a happier and fuller life’.

We’ll assess that judgement in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: 1955-1974. Competition, Volume 1; Volume 5 (Oxford University Press, 1995)

(2) Quoted in Finn Jensen, Modernist Semis and Terraces in England (Routledge, 2016)

(3) Ronald Bradbury, Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement (Unit Construction Company, 1961)

(4) Ronald Bradbury, ‘Post-War Housing in Liverpool’, The Town Planning Review, Vol 27, No. 3 October 1956

(5) ‘Kirkby as Proposed New Town’, Liverpool Echo, 25 September 1957

(6) Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Joseph Sharples, Lancashire: Liverpool and the Southwest (Yale University Press, 2006)

(7) Bradbury Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement

(8) Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers for the Welfare State (The Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017) and the Tower Block UK website of the University of Edinburgh.

(9) Bradbury, ‘Post-War Housing in Liverpool’

(10) Ronald Bradbury, ‘Development at Kirkby by The City of Liverpool’, Official Architecture and Planning, vol 24, no 10, November 1961

(11) Quoted in Jess Molyneux, ‘Kirkby’s transformation from sleepy rural town to “the great new world”’, Liverpool Echo, 26 April 2020

(12) Quoted in Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester University Press, 1998)

(13) Mays’ analysis, ‘New Hope in Newtown’, appeared in New Society, 22 August 1963. It is quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62, Book 2 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014)

Growing up on the Speke Estate, Liverpool: a personal perspective

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s

One of the most important aspects of this blog has been to give voice to the experience and views of council estate residents, so often ignored, too often maligned. I’m pleased to feature today a post from Tom – in response to posts on Speke on the blog in April and May this year – who describes his own experience of growing up on the Estate and his views on the mistakes that were made in its planning and design. 

Thank you Municipal Dreams for remembering the Liverpool suburb of Speke: a forgotten part of a forgotten city.

I was born in 1951 in, now demolished, Mill Road Maternity Hospital, Liverpool. My parents lived in the Dingle, a wartime bomb-damaged part of Liverpool 8, in a one-room bedsit with an outside toilet. They registered for a new city corporation rental house. For two and a half years my mother attended council surgeries for an update on the request. In 1954 we were allocated a two-bedroom house in Speke, on the city’s southern limit.

Properties in Speke were several orders of magnitude better than accommodation most of its residents had lived in previously. Houses were well built, brick throughout, and had front and back gardens. There were indoor toilets and plumbing for hot and cold water. If you wanted hot water however, you had to light the coal fire an hour before: electric immersion heaters were some time off yet.

Growing up as a child in Speke was idyllic. We lived on the northern perimeter road opposite a farm. Childhood was exploring woodland and playing ‘hide and seek’ in wheat fields. South of Speke was more farmland, more woods and the River Mersey, three miles wide at that point. The river was too polluted to swim in, but it had a sandy shoreline and off in the distance up river, an afternoon’s walk away, Hale lighthouse. What more could a child ask for?

Alderfield Drive from Speke Boulevard, February 1972 (c) Tom Speke

Speke Town predates the City of Liverpool, and had been fertile farmland for centuries. The genesis of Speke as a Council Housing Estate dates from the 1930s when Liverpool City Planners became enamoured with the ‘Garden City’ concept as a solution to the problems of a post Industrial Revolution inner city full of overcrowded slums. Plans were made for a ‘self-contained satellite town’.

The desperate need for new housing was exacerbated by Second World War bomb damage and further hastened by the post war ‘baby boom’ population explosion. In the space of a few years (c.1938-1953), Speke mushroomed from a pre-war census of ‘400 souls’ to 25,000 people. In the process, any vestige of old Speke, or its farming history, was bulldozed off the map. Speke Town was buried under the intersection of the newly constructed Speke Boulevard and Speke Hall Avenue.

Close scrutiny of the 1952 photograph, Dunlop’s factory in an earlier post, reveals that large chunks of Speke had still to be built, specifically the central shopping area known as the Parade. From memory, I was nine or ten years old before there were any central shops to go to. There were vans driving around Speke selling groceries, a practice that lasted until the mid 1970s. I have a cine film record.

This ‘Garden City’ idealism never progressed beyond the drawing board. Houses were built and then the building stopped: schools, shops, churches and community centres, all took up to a decade to build. The promise of a ‘self-contained’ Speke went unfulfilled.

The ‘Garden City’ idealism also contained an ill-founded assumption that city people would prefer to live in the country and could be transposed en masse. The ‘self-contained satellite town’ of Speke degenerated into isolated, urban, frontier country, still within the city limits, but a bus ride away from its nearest residential city neighbour.

Rear south-west corner of Stapleton Avenue and Ganworth Road, 21 November 1973 (c) Liverpool Echo

This ‘open play area’ (above) had been left fallow since the day the flats were built, twenty years previous. Within another twenty years, all the blocks of flats would be gone.

Tenement blocks surrounding open play areas besotted Lancelot Keay, Liverpool City Council Chief Architect responsible for Speke, and a knighthood for his efforts. Watch Sir Lancelot make his case: Liverpool Tenements of the 1930s.

Lancelot Keay was a nineteenth century dinosaur trying to solve a twentieth century problem. Speke residents didn’t share his enthusiasm for living in tenement blocks. By the 1980s, just thirty odd years after they were built, low-rise blocks of flats in Speke lay abandoned and derelict awaiting demolition. Structurally they would have been good for a hundred years, but within less than two generations they were considered not fit for purpose. People didn’t want to live in them. People wanted to live in houses.

All the low-rise blocks of flats in Stapleton Avenue and Ganworth Road (photo above), East Mains, West Mains, Millwood Road, Alderwood Avenue, Central Avenue, Central Way and Conleach Road were demolished and replaced by houses with gardens. Testament that ‘tenement blocks surrounding open play areas’ was a failure.

In the mid ’70s I made a cine film record of Speke. It was an Art School rant intended to show the estate in a less than favourable light: not a difficult task. The irony is that it has become historically significant, as less than half of what was filmed still exists.

Ganworth Road looking south, October 1973 (c) Tom Speke

Above is a street view of Ganworth Road with Speke’s signature three storey blocks of flats either side. It may look odd, from a 2017 perspective, to see two children and a toddler wandering around unaccompanied, but it was nothing out of the ordinary in the 1960s and 1970s. The legacy of living in flats was that children had no back gardens to play in, and resorted to playing in the streets.

A child admires ‘Speke Castle’, 13 November 1974 (c) Liverpool Echo

This concrete eyesore, above, is a 1960s’ interpretation of a children’s play area. By 1974 it was condemned by the National Playing Fields Association as grotesquely dangerous and only fit for demolition. The low-rise blocks of flats behind (West Mains) would soon join it awaiting demolition.

The 1950s and 1960s presented a paradox for Liverpool. The ring of housing estates that surrounded the city, of which Speke was but one, were overflowing with children, yet the population of Liverpool had been in steady decline since the 1930s, and continued to decline for the rest of the century. The inner city was being rehoused further and further afield, outside of the city. The population of Liverpool went from a 1931 peak of 855,688 to a 2001 census of 439,473.  (2)

The ‘baby boom’ years were followed by a shift to smaller families. This left a problem for Speke: what to do with all the three storey ‘large family’ houses, of which there were many. After abandonment, these were reduced to two storeys.

The section of Speke in the aerial shot (below) was built in the 1950s, but I doubt if anyone younger than forty can remember it as such. Half of what you see is no more. The white roofed rectangular buildings, centre, was All Hallows Secondary School, boys and girls, now All Hallows Drive houses. The school was demolished, not enough students.

The open space two blocks above the school was Speke Park, now Morrison’s shopping precinct. The retail hub of Speke shifted from the centre to its edge to access Speke Boulevard, top right diagonal. Fords [Jaguar/Land Rover] off picture, right.

To the left of Speke Park is the ‘open play area’ behind the flats, in the top photograph. The main road in the picture, top to bottom, is Stapleton Avenue / Alder Wood Avenue which runs east-west. Just visible at bottom right of the picture is Eastern Avenue. Check Google Maps and see what little remains.

North central Speke estate, c.1963, looking west (c) Lancashire Records Office, Preston

For ‘Beatles’ cognoscenti, the street second from the bottom, on the left, is Ardwick Road, the McCartneys’ second residence in Speke (1950-1955). Half way up on the left is Upton Green, surrounded by three storey blocks of flats, and home to the Harrisons (1950-1962).

On 20^th December, 1958, on the occasion of George’s brother Harry’s wedding reception, 25 Upton Green, Speke, was the venue of a pre-Beatles Quarrymen performance with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – drummer, if any, not known. (2)

George Harrison and Paul McCartney spent most of their formative years in the Liverpool suburb of Speke (George 12 years, Paul 9 years), but you have to look hard in the plethora of biographies to find any mention of their early childhood in Speke. Phoney Beatle mania has produced two ‘Caverns’ in Mathew Street, but ‘Beatles’ tour buses don’t go anywhere near Speke.

In the early 1960s, the Ford Motor Company car plant [now Jaguar/Land Rover] replaced the farm on the northern side of Speke. Speke Boulevard, forever known to my generation as ‘Ford’s Road’, was extended to run between the car factory and the estate, for the full length of Speke and beyond. To compound Speke’s isolation, this arterial road prohibited pedestrians for five miles or so, all the way to Widnes.

Eastern Avenue bus terminus from Speke Boulevard, February 1972. The sign reads ‘Any Person found damaging this fence will be prosecuted’ (c) Tom Speke

One of the consequences of this pedestrian prohibited road was that it separated the factory from the workers arriving by bus at the Eastern Avenue bus terminus. There was an underpass 200 yards away, but for whatever reason, people insisted on making their way through the fence to cross the road. This conflict persisted for thirty odd years until the terminus relocated to Morrison’s at the new shopping precinct. Progressively stronger fences were built with ever more ingenious ways found to get through them. It would have been cheaper to build a footbridge. I viewed this perennial conflict as individual protest against imposed isolation.

When I visit Speke, the difference I find most striking between now and even up to the 1980s, is not the missing or changed dwellings, but the amount of trees there are. Driving along Speke Boulevard is like driving through woodland. Trees now obscure all the sight lines of my childhood memories. Belatedly, the city has made amends for wiping a thousand years of history off the face of the earth in Speke’s construction. I cannot see, or remember there being, a single mature tree in the 1963 aerial photograph of Speke.

The 1960s’ Speke of my teenage years was a depressingly bleak, isolated, rectangular Gulag, devoid of any sense of history or community, built to house factory fodder. By the time I was sixteen, my life’s objective was to get out of Speke. Three years later I went away to Art School, never to return. I did visit, but never lived. My Mother, give her a medal, is still there: Speke resident for 63 years and counting. (RIP Father, 2010).

Speke as a Housing Estate did have two redeeming features:

• All the properties were solidly built with brick throughout.
• The estate was built before the advent of the ubiquitous high-rise tower blocks that blighted other estates.

The failings however were legion, chief among them was that it didn’t comply with the house buyers’ mantra of ‘location, location, location’: Speke Estate was built in the wrong place. Its isolation was, and remains, its handicap.

If there are Town Planners out there who still adhere to ‘self-contained satellite town’ thinking, I will happily maroon them on the eastern edge of Speke, without a car, to experience what isolation feels like.

Speke’s contribution to town planning dogma is a nail in the coffin of the ‘Garden City’ concept. Speke was designed as a solution to a problem, but resulted in generating its own problems. Speke planners may not have anticipated the changing shift in family sizes, but they are guilty of not ensuring that Speke would become a solution.

Speke could never develop as a community because Speke was never self-contained. If you wanted to do anything, you had to find somewhere else that catered for your interest.

The founding vision of Speke as a township ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’ was as delusional as its ‘self-contained’ status. Speke, and all the other post war housing estates around Liverpool, were not communities, they were overspill.

In the absence of any community identity, people from Speke, and all the other Liverpool estates, were perceived differently. In a time of full employment, people living on estates were not accorded the ‘working class’ designation, but were thought of in the then unused demographic of ‘underclass’. Like the estates themselves geographically, people from the estates were regarded as ‘peripheral’, not part of the mainstream. You came from ‘an estate’. It didn’t matter which one, we were all tarnished with the same brush. I lived all my teenage years with this, and left at the first opportunity.

My parents tried for years to get out of Speke, but eventually resigned to staying when they were able to buy their house. My siblings left Speke, and Liverpool. I took it a stage further and emigrated.

I still talk ‘Scouse’. My accent was set in concrete by the age of six, and I have yet to find an alternative that I would want to emulate. I still follow Liverpool FC from a distance, but I could never live there again. Morrison’s precinct in Speke, and the Liverpool ONE complex, are commendable and possible turning point improvements. The irreconcilable is remembering the fifty years it took to get to there.

The Orient public house, Eastern Avenue (December 2016) and bar (November 2013) (c) Tom Speke

The Orient is the last remaining pub in Speke, and worth a visit if just to see a bar dedicated to both Liverpool and Everton football clubs. It is difficult to say how much longer The Orient can last. For decades, supermarkets in Britain, Morrison’s included, have been underpricing pubs out of existence.

Speke Estate is suffering the malaise experienced by small towns after a bypass is built. The fulcrum relocates: people leave, schools close, pubs shut, churches downsize. Speke in the 21^st century has half the population it had in the 1950s. St. Christopher’s Church (capacity 1,000) has the distinction of being built and demolished in a single lifetime. Schools are torn down as the numbers of children plummet. I had intended to show my film and photographs to the students at Parkland’s School, but it closed, only twelve years after it opened. Depending on whom you ask, it was either falling intake or falling standards. Either way, Speke no longer has a secondary school.

Speke’s fate was sealed on the drawing board: it was designed to have a bypass. No one ever goes through Speke: making a brief detour off Speke Boulevard to shop in Morrison’s doesn’t count. The problem was there from its inception. Speke, as the city planners envisioned it, never should have been built.

tomspeke@yahoo.ca

Sources

(1) A Vision of Britain through Time: Liverpool population

(2) Gratitude to the Quarrymen website for information.

 

The Speke Estate, Liverpool II: ‘Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate’

Tags

1980s, 2000s, Regeneration

Last week’s post left Speke, in the 1960s, a thriving community. It would be easy now to focus on its decline and later troubles, to lapse into the language of ‘failure’ that has been affixed so readily to it and other council estates with its implication of some Original Sin, some fatal flaw of conception and planning but, in fact, the Estate has been a good home to many people over time.

The McCartney family were early residents.  Paul spent his early years in 72 Western Avenue and then at 12 Ardwick Road in Speke. The Harrisons lived in a tiny terraced house with outside toilet in Wavertree until, in 1950, they and George moved to a brand new council house at 25 Upton Green, Speke.  (You can read more about the childhood homes of the Beatles in an earlier blog post.)

George Harrison at 25 Upton Green, Speke

Their success story could hardly be typical but plenty of others look back to these years fondly.  You’ll find many of these recollections on the community forums but I’ll begin with one example – from ‘Gillian’ who thought she had better write something or else risk collapsing in ‘floods of sentimental tears’: (1)

My family moved to Speke 1950; from what they had moved from this was luxury. My sister Agnes told me about everything being new, hot running water, toilets inside, the only downside to this paradise was for a while was it was a building site, very, very muddy. In time things changed but it was very much a community, groups and activities were formed. OK, there wasn’t enough schools but other arrangements were made.

She remembers spending time at what passed for the local beach on the Mersey shoreline at Oglet. She recalls her own childhood home, a small block of flats ‘with their three floors of landings and stairs [which] had been brushed and scrubbed and neatly finished off with whiter than white edges and front doorsteps’.

Central Avenue

Another correspondent, resident in Speke for over forty years describes it as ‘a great place to live in the 60s and some of the early 70s’.  But, in a common refrain, he’d ‘seen it change over the years’: (2)

It used to be a lovely place to live…

I lived by the Park when I was younger and it was a lovely park.  There were bowling greens, tennis courts, the lads could play football.

It was a good area for employment when I was younger…

You won’t miss the elegiac tone in those comments, something more than a typical nostalgia for younger days. Those comments contain their own codas: ‘a lovely place to live…Yes, about ten or fifteen years ago’; ‘a good area for employment…and now there is nothing’.

Ardwick Road

Speke did suffer from the outset from its location some seven miles from the city centre. The 45-minute bus ride wasn’t too much of an issue so long as the Estate was, as planned, relatively ‘self-contained’ and economically self-sufficient but that isolation – that sense of ‘an enclave surrounded entirely by the barrier of roads, fields, the airport runway and the River Mersey’ later proved a problem.

‘Dunlop Rubber Co, Works and Environs, Speke, 1952’ EAW047310, Britain from Above (c) Historic England

The major problem, though, was the collapse of a once vibrant local economy.  Between 1978 and 1985, Liverpool as a whole lost 40,000 jobs but Speke was particularly hard hit.  British Leyland had opened its Speke Number Two Plant in 1970. Industrial relations were poor and the TR7 unsuccessful. The closure of the plant and 3000 redundancies were announced in 1978.  Dunlop announced the closure of its Speke factory with the loss of 2400 jobs in 1979.

Eddie Loyden, the local Labour MP, estimated 8000 jobs lost in his constituency in two years: (3)

If one recalls the dream of the post-war period that Merseyside would develop alternative industries to deal with the decline in the docks, in transport and in warehousing, upon which the city had depended for so long, one can see the serious problem on Merseyside.

Loyden would lose his seat to the Conservatives in 1979 and the first attempt to revive Speke’s fortunes was signature Thatcherism – the creation of the Speke Enterprise Zone in 1981. Enterprise Zones offered tax breaks and infrastructure incentives to private companies to relocate to areas of high unemployment.

In Speke, however, the (more or less) free market failed to work its magic – not a single company opened in the Speke Airport Enterprise Zone. As one later observer noted: (4)

Even with the tax incentives nobody wanted to come here – the place still looked awful, still felt awful, still performed really poorly…The area was extremely unwell, almost terminally ill, and the [Enterprise Zone] was like a couple of paracetamol.

The creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation in 1981 was a small boost but, in Speke, nothing much happened until the formation of the Speke Garston Development Corporation in 1996, a joint initiative between the North West Development Agency and Liverpool City Council benefiting from some £14m government funding. (5)

Economic regeneration efforts have continued. Liverpool Vision – an economic development company (the first Urban Regeneration Company established in England) – was established in 1999 and from 2008 has funded the redevelopment of Speke’s district centre. The arrival of Morrisons, Iceland and TK Maxx, alongside smaller retailers, mark the retail successes now taken as an essential marker of economic well-being.

The new Speke Centre

Overall, it’s reckoned that 20,000 jobs have been created locally by the late 2000s though many of these were in the new biopharmaceutical and biomanufacturing sectors – skilled employment in an area where, only a few years earlier, 43 per cent of people had classified themselves as unskilled. (6) The success of Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood plant just across Speke Boulevard, with its workforce of around 4200, is a welcome boost to more traditional working-class employment in the area – a further £130m extension was announced in January this year. (7)  Printing firms Prinovis and Communisis are also providing good jobs to local people. (8)

In reality, none of this is easy. It’s true that earlier and more direct interventions by the local and national state created substantial employment in Speke’s early years (boosted by the war and post-war prosperity) into the 1970s. But, despite the vigorous efforts of the local labour movement to retain jobs, globalisation (abetted by neoliberalism) has taken its toll on this generation of industry and has created an unemployed working class ill-fitted to the new high-tech industries.  Call centres – aided by the perceived friendliness of the Scouse accent – sprang up in Speke in the 1990s and, no doubt, more zero-hours, unskilled jobs have been created since. (9)

Central Avenue

Meanwhile, an estate which had once catered for a disproportionately (and relatively) affluent Liverpool working-class – those in work who could be reliably expected to pay above-average council rents – was now one of the poorest areas of the city, indeed of the country.  In 2000 it was the judged the second most deprived ward in England; only Benchill in Wythenshawe fared worse.  In 2002, average household income was £5000 below the city average.  Those statistics reflected the high unemployment in Speke (in 2001 over 8 per cent of the ‘economically active’ were unemployed compared to the national average of 3.4 per cent) and the high level of sickness and disability (almost 17 per cent; over three times the national average).

All Saints Road

This was an indication of both the economic tsunami which had befallen Speke in particular and the more general transition of council housing since the 1970s to housing for the least well-off of our society.  In Speke itself around 46 per cent of homes remained social rented but that term denotes another shift – from ‘Corpy’ houses to housing association, largely the result of a large-scale voluntary transfer of stock from the Council to South Liverpool Housing in 1999.

Urban regeneration (as opposed to economic) has affected Speke too.  As the population fell and unsightly voids rose, some housing was ‘tinned up’ and then demolished (which added its own sense of blight for a period) in the late 1980s, some unpopular maisonette blocks were ‘top-downed’, and some new housing built.  The scheme announced by South Liverpool Homes in 2012 offers a cameo of this new world – 110 ‘residential units’ in all: 66 for ‘affordable rent’, 16 for shared ownership and 28 for private sale. (10)  In this case, it is perhaps not so far from the founding vision of Speke as a township ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’.

New South Liverpool Housing scheme (artist’s impression)

The difficulties of social engineering through housing design and tenure are well illustrated by the story of the Dymchurch Estate, built earlier on the western edge of Speke to accommodate predominantly older people.  The Estate’s closed court, Radburn-style layout proved unpopular and its homes were increasingly allocated to young and transient single people: ‘the flats became notorious for drug abuse and giro drops’. (11)

For a time Dymchurch was judged locally to the worst part of Speke (the Liverpool Housing Trust has led later regeneration efforts) but the Estate’s residents had become accustomed to a more generalised stigmatisation – the taxi-drivers who would refuse to drive to the area were typically the most visible element of this.  Paddy Ashdown, then Liberal Democrat leader, visited in 1998 (presumably he didn’t need a taxi) and likened Speke to Sarajevo, then in the throes of civil war.

That was a gross caricature as one resident commented: (12)

Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate. The only problem is that you have people, who come flying in here, there and everywhere who actually don’t live on the estate, nor can they see the potential of what is going to happen over the next few years.

And indeed much has happened since then.  I won’t privilege my own flying visit over the knowledge and experience of local residents who I invite to add their own impressions but the Estate looked fine to me, its housing in good nick, not visibly depressed and with very little evidence of vandalism and anti-social behaviour and certainly none out of the ordinary.  New schools, a new library, a revived shopping centre look to have lifted the Estate and, of course, it continues to offer decent homes to many.

The story of Speke continues. The story to date is, unavoidably perhaps, of high ambition only partially or perhaps briefly fulfilled – a reminder that we need an economy that works for people as much as those people need good, affordable housing.

Sources

(1) This quote from 2012 and the following from 2014 are from the Speke Guestbook.

(2) The following quotes are drawn from David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’ in Ronaldo Munck (ed), Reinventing the City?: Liverpool in Comparative Perspective  (2003)

(3) Eddie Loyden, House of Commons Debate, Dunlop Plant, Speke (Closure), 26 March 1979

(4) Rob Monaghan (Liverpool Vison) quoted in London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Enterprise Zones: Only One Piece of the Economic Regeneration Puzzle (July 2012)

(5) Thomas Ellerton, Exploring the impact of New Labour urban regeneration policy at the local scale: the implications of an approach to ‘joining-up’ on the coordination of urban regeneration, University of Sheffield PhD thesis (April 2014)

(6) Pavan Mehta, The Impact of Urban Regeneration on Local Housing Markets – A Case Study of Liverpool (ND)

(7) Alistair Houghton, ‘Jaguar Land Rover Extending Halewood in £130m Investment‘, Liverpool Echo, 30 January 2017

(8) My thanks to Kenn Taylor whose comment above pointed me to this positive detail.

(9) Linda Grant, ‘Calm Yourself Down’, The Guardian, 10 July 1999

(10) Homes and Communities Agency, Speke Regeneration Liverpool (November 2013)

(11) Liverpool Housing Trust quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

(12) Quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

The Speke Estate, Liverpool: a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

Speke, lying just over seven miles south-east of Liverpool’s city centre, wasn’t planned as just another large council estate.  The Corporation envisaged it as a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’. (1)  At times, the reach of that ambition must have seemed close to fulfilment but by the 1980s some called it – and not in a good way – ‘Beirut’ or, a few years later as civil war raged in the former Yugoslavia, ‘Sarajevo’. (2)  That was never fair and much has changed since.  This post looks at the longer history, the hopes and the fears and the more complex story of the community’s ups and downs.

‘Housing Estate, Speke’

Liverpool – a securely (though idiosyncratically) Conservative authority until 1956 – built over 42,000 council homes in the interwar period, most in large cottage suburbs such as Norris Green, some famously in imposing ‘Continental-style’ tenement blocks.  The Speke Estate represented another strand in this ambitious agenda, providing not just housing but employment as the Corporation sought far-sightedly to shift the city from its dependence on precarious and low-waged dock labour.

The keystone of this approach lay in the 1926 Liverpool Corporation Act which empowered the council to develop industrial estates and parallel housing developments. The Corporation bought the Speke estate – the local gentry family had died out in 1921 and the land had been placed in trust –for £200,000 in 1928.   Then in the neighbouring Rural District of Whiston, the area was formally incorporated into the County Borough of Liverpool in 1932.

Speke Airport’s original terminal building, built 1937-40 to the designs of EH Bloomfield of Liverpool Corporation Land Stewards and Surveyors Office (c) Dave Wood and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Speke Airport, operational from 1930, was the first fruit of this new venture – one of 35 municipal airports opened between 1929 and 1937.  Near at hand lay the Speke Industrial Estate, the first factory completed in 1934.  By 1939, 28 factories were built or under construction, eleven of these provided directly by the Corporation which also advanced over £300,000 in loans to encourage firms to locate in the new estate.  Some 7000 jobs had been provided, most – as war loomed – in the government airframe factory. (3)

A contemporary image of Little Heath Road

Factories needed workers.  At the same time, Liverpool citizens living in the city’s many slums needed decent homes.  In 1935, the Corporation had committed itself to an eight-year programme clearing 15,692 slums and the construction, within five years, of some 5000 new homes.  The Corporation’s transfer of 650 acres of land in Speke to the Housing Committee in April 1936 was central to these plans.

By 1939, 1631 homes had been completed on the Estate although demand was much higher. Companies drawn to the industrial estate by the lure of local housing for its workforce complained about slow progress and the failure of the Corporation to fulfil its side of the bargain; Rootes alone claimed it needed 1285 homes for its workers. (4)  This urgency led to Speke’s early housing being built without subsidy under the 1925 Housing Act.

Lancelot Keay

Just over 50 per cent of this housing were parlour homes, a high percentage in these straitened times and an indication of the prestige of the Speke scheme and the commitment of Speke’s mastermind Lancelot Keay, Liverpool’s dynamic Director of Housing, to high-quality housing.  Even the non-parlour homes were – at 750 square feet – relatively spacious and included upstairs bathrooms. (5)  The rents – reaching 18s 6d (92.5p) for a three-bed parlour home in 1939 – were relatively high and, although some 88 per cent of heads of household were classed as skilled or semi-skilled, there were reports of a high turnover of former central slum dwellers who had moved to the Estate. (6)

These homes were, in the fashion of the day, laid out on ‘Garden City’ lines though, in this case, the lines themselves were rather pronounced.  The existing village of Speke housed around 400; its parish church was judged ‘not of such importance as to be made the focal point of the new development’.

A 1936 proposal for the layout of Speke, later modified, drawn from Keay’s 1936 Report to the Housing Committee

Furthermore, the ‘absence of any natural features, the levels of the grounds, and the regularity of the boundaries,…all tended to suggest a formal layout and the consequent need of a central spacious boulevard and one main cross-road’. (6)  Western Avenue running north-south and Central Avenue east-west continue to mark that original plan with the Estate’s basic grid broken up by the cul-de-sac ways and closes which nodded towards Ebenezer Howard’s more bucolic ideals.

A post-war layout scheme, from Gale. Modern Housing Estates (1948)

Typically, for all community ideals proclaimed at the Estate’s inception, other facilities were slow to follow.  In 1941, tenants were complaining that only three shops had been provided though they had been resident for two years.  (7)

The war had naturally hindered further construction though the important military role of the airport and industrial estate no doubt played its part in the permission granted to build an additional 367 houses during the war itself.  Post-war efforts were dedicated – in the words of Labour’s 1945 election poster, to winning the peace. The attempt to fulfil Speke’s founding ideals was redoubled.

In 1949 Stanley Gale described Speke as ‘unique among housing estates developed by local authorities’.  Although it was not yet a ‘self-contained community’ as planned, its 29 factories were reported to employ some 11,000 workers; the completion of the Estate’s 6000 homes confidently projected.

Greyhound Farm Road, Speke (later the home of the actor Leonard Rossiter)

It’s worth looking at the detail of the latter: that total was made up of over 5143 two- to four-bed family homes with living room and dining room (the change of terminology from ‘parlour’ was itself telling of new times), 250 cottage flats for the elderly, 92 single person flats, and 221 two- to four-bed flats for families with living room and dining room.

This was the ‘mixed development’ – a larger range of housing types to accommodate people in different life stages and circumstances (though, as yet, without high-rise) – which became standard in the post-war years.  In Speke, there was an important added element to reflect that original intent to ‘accommodate all classes of the community’ – 294 large houses with garages and four bedrooms for ‘professional men, managers, etc.’. (8)

‘Houses with garages’, Speke

Here Speke had anticipated the ethos of the New Towns programme launched in 1946 and reflected the vision which Aneurin Bevan – who argued council housing shouldn’t be just for the poor – outlined eloquently in 1949.  Bevan insisted that the ‘segregation of the different income groups [was] a wholly evil thing’, creating ‘castrated communities’, and his new Housing Act removed the stipulation that it be specified as working-class housing.

Gerneth Road, Speke

Lancelot Keay, who considered Speke his last major project, echoed these ideals and hoped, in 1946, to oversee the scheme’s completion – ‘a projected community of about 30,000 persons with all the buildings that will be necessary and with houses for all those who may desire to share in the life of that community’ – in three years. (9)  In a period of such genuine austerity that was over-optimistic.  Keay retired in 1948.  The Estate was completed in the late 1950s with those 6000 homes and a population (its peak population as it happened) of around 25,000.

But Keay understood that Speke’s new community required more than just good housing.  It was, he said:

most essential that we should endeavour to bring back a greater measure of gaiety into the lives of ordinary people.  They should have the opportunity of enjoying all those excitements and pleasantries of life which are too often reserved for those in the higher-income levels. It is for this reason that a central community building will provide, with its dance hall, concert hall and restaurant, for the pleasures as well as the adult education of the people.

The phrasing remains a little patrician, a little ‘improving’ although there’s no mistaking the good intent.  That good intent, however, was slow to be fulfilled.  Keay’s successor as Director of Housing, Ronald Bradbury lamented three years into his term (he served till 1970) that it had ‘not been possible as yet, owing to present conditions, to erect the Civic libraries, departmental stores, swimming baths, hotels, etc., for which sites have been reserved’.  (10)

Austin Rawlinson Swimming Baths, c1965

Speke Central Library, c1965

The new Austin Rawlinson Swimming Bath and Civic Laundry (named after a local swimming Olympian and national coach) and Speke Central Library weren’t opened till 1965.

We’ll leave Speke in its heyday – a place with decent housing, facilities and, most importantly – always the economic underpinning of working-class prosperity – good jobs. Next week’s post will examine its later more troubled history and recent attempts to revive the Estate conceived with such high hopes.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing Progress at Liverpool: Estate for all classes’, The Times, 17 September 1937

(2) David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’ in Ronaldo Munck (ed), Reinventing the City?: Liverpool in Comparative Perspective  (2003)

(3) Stephen V. Ward, ‘Local industrial promotion and development policies 1899-1940’, Local Economy, vol. 5, no. 2, August 1990

(4) Madeline McKenna, The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars, University of Liverpool PhD, 1986

(5) Colin G Pooley and Sandra Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945, University of Lancaster, Resource Paper for the Centre for North West Regional Studies (1984)

(6) City of Liverpool Housing Committee, Speke Estate: Report of the Director of Housing on a Proposal for the Building of a Self-Contained Community Unit, 21 October 1936

(7) Pooley and Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945

(8) Stanley Gale, Modern Housing Estates (London, 1949)

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

(10) Ronald Bradbury, ‘The Technique of Municipal Housing in England: with Particular Reference to Liverpool’, The Town Planning Review, vol 22, no 1, April 1951

Most of the earlier black and white images are drawn from Liverpool Corporation, Liverpool Builds 1945-1965 (1967)

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

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

Pier Head, 1962

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 Arnold Grove

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

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

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

George Harrison in Upton Green, Speke

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

Plan of the Speke Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72 Western Avenue (c) Liverpool Echo

12 Ardwick Road

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

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

Forthlin Road, fans outside no. 20

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

Forthlin Road flats

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

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

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

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

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

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

John with Aunt Mimi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

(6) Historic England listing details, 20 Forthlin Road

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

(8) Wikipedia, John Lennon

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

Municipal Dreams goes to Liverpool, part II

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

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

St Andrew’s Gardens (The Bullring)

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

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

Gerard Gardens model, Museum of Liverpool

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

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

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

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

‘The Bullring’ artwork

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

19 Bronte Street

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

Gill Street

Dansie Street

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

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

Ventilation shaft, Queensway Tunnel

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

Ventilation shaft, Kingsway Tunnel

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

Wallasey Town Hall

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

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

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

The ‘Three Graces’

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

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

Renovated homes in Cairns Street

Awaiting renovation in Ducie Street

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

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

Belvidere Road

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

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

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

Bloomfield Green

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

Sefton Park (c) YO! Liverpool

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

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

Notes

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

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

Municipal Dreams goes to Liverpool, part I

Tags

1960s, 1980s, Pre-1914, Regeneration

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

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

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

Everton Library

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

Everton Library entrance

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

From Everton Park

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

View 146

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

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

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

Netherfield Road

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

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

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

Everton streetscapes, Museum of Liverpool

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

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

Mazzini Close

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

Eldon Grove today

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

Imaging Department (c) President and Fellows of Harvard College

Eldon Grove in its heyday

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

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

Bevington Street

Summer Seat

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

 

Victoria Square Dwellings

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

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

Hornby Street court, prior to demolition and rebuilding

Hornby Street pre-1914 council housing

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

Gildart’s Gardens, pre-1914 council housing

Gildart’s Gardens today

Fontenoy Street today

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

The Municipal Buildings, Liverpool

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

Liverpool Town Hall

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

Liverpool’s Interwar Multi-Storey Housing: Building an ‘A1 community in a properly planned township of flats’

Tags

1930s, Multi-storey

The alleged English antipathy to multi-storey living (the Scots are different) is well attested but Liverpool – in this and much else – is an exception.  Its Corporation embraced tenements for practical reasons, as we shall see, but also as a conscious mark of the city’s urbanity and global status.  In so doing, it created some of the most striking council housing of the interwar period though sadly very little of it remains.

Gerard Gardens

The immediate context for the drive to inner-city multi-storey accommodation was a scale of slum housing unparalleled in the country.  In 1919, 11,000 Liverpool families were living in one room – over 6 per cent of the city’s population.  The Medical Officer of Health estimated 8000 new homes were needed and Liverpool – a pioneer in municipal housing – acted quickly to build the new cottage estates that the Tudor Walters Report recommended and Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act funded.

The practical reasons for inner-city tenement building, however, were well expressed by Sir Leslie Scott, the Conservative MP for Liverpool Exchange, in the House of Commons in 1925. (1)

The position in many of our great cities, particularly in Liverpool, and particularly in my own division of Liverpool, is that it is vitally necessary that the workers should live in the centre of the city near their work. The dock labourers of Liverpool have to go every morning to the stand on the dockside for employment…They are employed, as we all know, by the half-day, and, if they are unemployed, they have to turn up again at the stand at mid-day.

Thus, as he went on to explain, long tram journeys back and forth to the new suburban council estates (such as Norris Green) were impractical.  The more cynical might see in such solicitude a desire to maintain the cheap and competitive pool of labour on which the profits of Liverpool’s global trade depended.

The Liverpool waterfront – a contemporary view

That sense of itself as a world city was important too, however, and the Liverpool townscape had a powerful presence and dignity – maybe those shtetl Jews who had bought tickets to the New World but found themselves dumped on the Liverpool waterfront weren’t as gullible as we might think.  In the interwar period, as Matthew Whitfield argues, this civic project allied with a Modernist dynamic in a shared commitment to urban scale and density and rational planning.

In this, the Corporation appointed men who shared such a vision, notably in the first instance, John Brodie, City Engineer from 1898 to 1926 and the designer of the UK’s first ring road (Queen’s Drive), its first intercity highway (the East Lancs Road) and what is said to be the country’s largest ever municipal construction project, the Mersey Tunnel. (2)  In October 1924, Brodie led a Council delegation to Amsterdam.  They went with a mission to examine the Dutch municipality’s construction of concrete cottages but returned far more impressed by the city’s grand housing schemes.

Lancelot Keay (1883-1974)

But Brodie’s most critical contribution to Liverpool’s housing history lay in his appointment in 1925 of Lancelot Keay as his chief architectural assistant.  Poached from Birmingham (where there was a firm dislike of flatted schemes),  Keay – as acting director on Brodie’s retirement and then director of housing from 1929 – became the leading municipal architect of his day and one of the most influential advocates of multi-storey solutions.

Keay undertook the apparently mandatory visit to Vienna to view its municipal housing in 1926 but he returned impressed by its scale, sure enough, but critical of the small size, poor ventilation and facilities of the flats.

A trip to the International Housing and Town Planning Congress in Berlin in 1931 was more positive:  his official report praised the ‘breadth of vision exercised in the layout of the various estates’ and their ‘modern lines’, singling out the Hufeisensiedlung designed by Bruno Taut.   Keay’s appointment in the same year of a bright young graduate from the Liverpool School of Architecture, John Hughes – already a recognised exponent of modernist-style flat design – consolidated the Council’s commitment and capability in the field.

Liverpool had already built some large multi-storey schemes of more conventional design in the suburbs in the later 1920s.  Here, along some of Brodie’s grand arterial roads (such as Mather and Muirhead Avenues), they were intended to provide a mass and impression appropriate to the new urban landscape being constructed.

In all, then, Liverpool needed little encouragement to embark on more ambitious plans to develop its central districts but it was given a leg-up by the housing legislation of the 1930s.  Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act gave financial incentives to the rehousing of slum-dwellers and to the construction of flats in central areas with high land values.

St Andrew’s Gardens, a contemporary view

Its breakthrough scheme, however, was St Andrew’s Gardens, from a design by Hughes in 1932 and completed in 1935.  Of the original large scheme, strongly reminiscent of the Hufeisensiedlung, now only one semi-circular five-storey block remains but it retains a commanding presence – its conventional walk-up design superseded by its clean, sweepingly curved lines and horizontal accents (note the windows and the banded brickwork).  The development included so-called private ‘sun balconies’ for the first time (as distinct from the balcony access galleries of traditional schemes) and benefitted from high-quality landscaping and play areas.

St Andrew’s Gardens, a contemporary view

Further legislative impetus was offered by the 1935 Housing Act which replaced ‘Clearance Areas’ (where slum housing had to be specifically represented on sanitary grounds) with more general ‘Redevelopment Areas’ which could be zoned for clearance on broader grounds such as overcrowding, poor amenities and bad layout.

It was no coincidence that Lancelot Keay had joined the Ministry of Health’s Technical Committee on Slum Re-housing one year earlier or, in the year of the Act’s passing, that Liverpool Corporation was the first in the county to apply for redevelopment powers under its provisions.

Myrtle Gardens central courtyard

The broader ambition of the Corporation and its architects was seen fully in the schemes which followed.  Gerard Gardens was part of the newly designated Central Redevelopment Area and constructed between 1935 and 1939.  Myrtle Gardens (1936-1937), Caryl Gardens (1936-1937), Warwick Gardens (1938), Sir Thomas White Gardens (1938-1940) and the Corlett Street flats (1938-1939) followed in quick succession.  All follow the same broad lines of St Andrew’s Gardens though Whitfield notes an Expressionist tendency in the Gerard Street scheme in particular, drawn from the German architect Erich Mendelsohn.  Mendelsohn had lectured at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1933 and the School was an important background influence on the design of Liverpool’s municipal housing at this time.

Gerard Gardens in decline, 1973

Keay’s ambitions ran larger than the mere provision of housing, however.  The internal facilities of the flats were relatively conventional (though improved by the insistence that a bath – and later a hand basin – be included within a designated bathroom rather than scullery) but Keay believed that their denser development allowed recreational space and the inclusion of amenities not possible in the cottage suburbs.

Writing in 1939, Keay proudly enumerated the facilities of Caryl Gardens: ‘rest gardens for aged tenants’, ‘playgrounds with a liberal supply of gymnastic equipment for both infants and juniors’, ‘a boys’ club and a girls’ club in the blocks’, ‘a gas-heated drying room (for which no charge is made)’ and, last but not least (for its recognition of the reality of the lives and deaths of Corporation tenants) , ‘a House of Rest which has been erected for the reception of the dead pending burial’.

Warwick Gardens

At nearby Warwick Gardens there was also, ‘following continental practice’ as Keay put it, a children’s meal centre and shops at the end of the blocks. (2)

Warwick Gardens children’s meal centre

The question remains who were the beneficiaries of this progress?  The rents – ranging from 3s 7d a week for bed-sitters to 10s 6d for five-bedroom flats – were lower than those on the cottage estates and the living expenses equally so.   A survey of St Andrew’s Gardens tenants shows over 60 per cent of household heads were unskilled workers and 20 per cent semi-skilled – almost a quarter employed on the docks and some 17 per cent in shipping.  Four fifths were families displaced by central slum clearance. This was authentically the poorer working class that councils up and down the country had found difficult to house affordably and Liverpool deserves credit for the achievement. (3)

When Keay asked in 1935…

Is it less possible to raise an A1 community in a properly planned township of flats than in a garden city or suburb? Is there any doubt that the rising generation in the great continental cities of Europe will not be as fit physically and morally as the children of Wythenshawe and Dagenham and Norris Green?

…he was in no doubt of the answer.  He was certain that the Council’s modern schemes would provide first-class accommodation for the Liverpool working class (though not, it should be said, without a little education for their new tenants who he believed had been adversely conditioned by slum living).

CH Reilly, who had headed the Liverpool School of Architecture, was equally positive about the architectural quality of the schemes in 1936 (and we might forgive the anti-German sentiment at that date at least): (4)

‘The Architect’, formerly at Gerard Gardens, now in the new Museum of Liverpool

We shall soon be placing Liverpool and Manchester well before Vienna for this class of work. Admittedly these buildings are not conceived nor laid out with the mathematical precision to get the maximum sun…that a German architect would strive for. He would place his thin blocks of flats marching across the town, one behind the other, like a regiment of gaunt grenadiers…Keay’s great groups, while providing an abundance of light and air, give a sense of communal life comparable to the great court of Trinity, Cambridge.

It’s an interesting prefiguring of some of the later criticisms of starker Zeilenbau schemes and an anticipation of Reilly’s own post-war attempts to create community in social housing schemes.

Gerard Gardens, 1986 © Liverpool Echo

Still, the comparison with a Cambridge quadrangle might seem a little fanciful but there are plenty who remain who will attest to the community spirit of the estates: ‘Charabanc trips would be arranged, mammoth football matches between rival squares and games such as kick the can and alallio within the confined of the square and the bonfire nights were legendary’. (5)

Now, though, only a remnant of St Andrew’s Gardens survives – and that as a student hall of residence.  The other blocks were progressively demolished from the 1980s. How to explain this apparent failure?

The straightforward point is that the estates became obsolescent – that housing standards and tenant expectations had risen and what was once state-of-the-art became old-fashioned and inadequate.  Others, however, would place greater blame, on the Council’s failure to refurbish and modernise and would point, in fact, to a deliberate policy of neglect.

Looking beyond the kind of architectural essentialism which characterises so much writing about council estates, there’s also a context here.  Council housing was increasingly allocated to the least well-off and ‘problem tenants’ to the least popular estates – with the cycle of decline and self-fulfilling failure that followed.   Liverpool itself suffered almost unprecedented economic decline from the 1970s onward.  Its population fell from 700,000 in 1945 to 460,000 in 1983.

New council housing built by the Militant-led council © Dave Sinclair/Socialist Party

The Militant-led council in power between 1983 and 1987 famously – and, in some ways, creditably – built thousands of solid brick council houses in central Liverpool, arranged in closes and cul-de-sacs and conforming to then fashionable theories of ‘defensible space’ (or ‘Alice Coleman’s walkway turd-counting’ in Owen Hatherley’s phrase).  For Hatherley, Keay’s schemes were a glorious attempt ‘in making an English city as honest about its urbanity as a Scottish or European one’.  He labels the look of their replacement as ‘utterly ridiculous’: ‘one moment you’re in Berlin, the next in Basingstoke’.

I’d be happy to hear what people from Liverpool think and especially people for whom either Keay’s flats or their more modest replacements were home.  It’s ironic, though, that it is Keay’s paternalism which envisaged a forward-looking, future-busting housing form – a vanguardist vision, you might say – and the Militant efforts which seem reactionary in comparison.

Sources

(1) Matthew Whitfield, ‘Multi-Storey Public Housing in Liverpool during the Inter-War Years’, Manchester Metropolitan University PhD, October 2010. Much of the analysis and detail which follows is drawn from this source and from Whitfield, ‘Lancelot Keay and Liverpool’s Multi-Storey Housing of the 1930s’, Twentieth Century Architecture, No. 9, Housing the Twentieth Century Nation (2008)

(2) LH Keay, ‘Redevelopment in Central Areas in Liverpool’, RIBA Journal, vol 46, no 6, 23 January 1939

(3) Colin G. Pooley, Sandra Irish, The development of corporation housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945, University of Lancaster/Centre for North West Regional Studies (Lancaster, 1984) quoted in Whitfield, Multi-Storey Public Housing in Liverpool

(4) CH Reilly ‘The Year’s Work at Home’, The Architects’ Journal, 16 January 1936 quoted in Tatsuya Tsubaki , ‘Postwar Reconstruction and the Questions of Popular Housing Provision, 1939-1951’, University of Warwick PhD, 1993

(5) Ged in the thread ‘Gardens, Tenements and Courts’ on the excellent Yo! Liverpool forum.   Nostalgia for the schemes is also powerfully represented in Paul Sudbury’s documentary film Gardens of Stone (2007) and the website Inacityliving.

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

Homes for Workers, a 1939 documentary narrated by Keay himself, gives a wonderful overview of the city’s interwar housing efforts.

Apart from the websites mentioned in (5) above, additional images and commentary on the flats can be found at Streets of Liverpool and on the website of Phil Maxwell.

For a sense of how radical the Corporation’s vision for Liverpool was in the early post-1945 period, go to Back to the Future: Liverpool 1948 from the fine A Sense of Place blog on the city.  See the same blog, for before and after images of some of the developments mentioned here and evocative images of Liverpool in the 1980s from Dave Sinclair’s new book on the subject.