The Hulme Crescents, Manchester: a ‘British Bantustan’

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1960s, 1970s, Regeneration

In 1971, the Hulme Crescents were thought to represent the best of modern social housing as we saw in last week’s post.  The planning principles which inspired them were intended not only to provide decent housing but to honour and foster community.  The construction techniques which built them had seemed to promise mass housing on a scale and at a pace which would finally eradicate the scourge of the slums.

If only briefly, this excitement was felt by residents as well as politicians and planners: (1)

I went for a walk with my granddad before the Crescents started to get bad. And they were wonderful places. Full of really new ideas and loads of hope for the people living in them. People talked to each other. And I can remember laugher with a family that lived in them. They asked me and my granddad in for a cup of tea. Showed us round the strange way the flats were designed. But the flat was so clean and nice and they were so proud of it. Then suddenly, about 1972 I think it was, things started to go wrong.

What did go wrong?

First and foremost, the Crescents’ system-built engineering was a disaster.  The blocks were erected too quickly and their construction inadequately supervised.  Reinforcing bolts and ties were missing; problems of condensation emerged from poor insulation and ventilation; vermin spread rapidly through the estate’s ducting. (2)

Whose fault was that?  Local authorities – pressured by central government and driven by their own ambitions to build big and build fast – can certainly take some blame. The Government’s National Building Agency, which promoted industrialised building but failed to provide any effective oversight, is also responsible.

But arguably it is the cartel of construction companies which dominated system-built housing in the sixties and early seventies which is most culpable.  The construction industry sold products unfit for purpose and failed to meet even their own standards of quality control. (3)

The collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 was an early indicator of this looming disaster and had its own impact on the Crescents.  Plans for gas-fired central heating were jettisoned in favour of a system of underfloor heating.  After the 1973 oil crisis, when fuel prices rose six-fold, this became prohibitively expensive for the estate’s new residents.

View between Robert Adam Crescent and William Kent Crescent (to left) 1976 © Visual Resources at MMU

There were also foreseeable design flaws.  The dense street layout which had previously connected Hulme to itself and the city was abandoned; the busy main thoroughfare, Stretford Road, closed.  Two large highways, the Mancunian Way and the Princess Parkway, enclosed and isolated the estate.  The open space between the Crescents – intended as an amenity – was largely just that and lacked form and function.  It came to feel rather desolate. (4)

In 1974 a five-year old child died after falling from a top-floor balcony and matters came to a head.  643 residents signed a petition asking to be moved.  A 1975 survey revealed that an overwhelming 96 per cent of Crescent-dwellers wanted to leave the estate.  The Council agreed no family should be required to live above the ground floor in any of its deck-access homes.

At the same time, vandalism and crime were rife – a litany, familiar from the other council estate badlands of the day, of muggings and break-ins, graffiti and destruction, compounded by the Housing Department’s failure to adequately maintain and supervise the estate.

There’s no denying that in the case of the Hulme Crescents there were inherent design flaws which contributed to social breakdown on the estate.  But there is also a bigger picture which is often neglected in their story.

The majority of former Hulme residents had, in fact, been rehoused in out-of-town estates.  Given its early problems and deteriorating reputation, the Crescents rapidly became hard-to-let.  As was typical in such circumstances, ‘problem families’ and vulnerable tenants – who had little choice in where they might be housed – came disproportionately to be settled there.

A 1973 survey showed the estate to be the most deprived in Manchester.  The 1978 World in Action report – a searing exposé of what it described as ‘a British Bantustan’ – estimated 60 per cent of residents were in receipt of benefit. (5)

This was a reality that would have challenged any form of housing – as we’ve seen where similar circumstances affected suburban estates such as Blackbird Leys in Oxford or Norris Green in Liverpool.  But the Hulme Crescents offered a perfect storm of disadvantage.  They were ripe for political action.

Campaigning groups – a mix of housing activists and local residents – began to spring up.  Manchester and Salford Housing Action was established in 1973.  The Hulme Tenants’ Association and Hulme People’s Rights Group were active by the mid-seventies, the latter provided offices on the estate by the City Council who came to regret the opportunity offered to their political opponents. These groups skilfully made use of a media far less deferential than it had been – in reporting city planners’ visions – in the 1960s.(6)

© http://www.exhulme.co.uk

The Council still hoped something might be salvaged from the Crescents. In 1978, it proposed housing single people and students in the estate and suggested the blocks be subdivided.

The latter never occurred but the removal of families was achieved by 1980.  An anarchic free-for-all developed that created ‘Planet Hulme’. This was ‘a Modernist utopia decaying, gone crumbled and decadent’; a creative, Bohemian enclave. But it, despite Owen Hatherley’s celebration of its vibrant subculture, went bad too and became – at least to the few ‘ordinary’ residents that remained and certainly to more conventional citizens – a frightening place: anarchic in the most pejorative sense of the term. (7)

The case for the Crescents’ demolition came to be seen as overwhelming as political attitudes shifted too.  A Labour left emerged, critical of what it regarded as the paternalism of traditional Labour local government and committed – it claimed – to promoting genuine participation.   This new left controlled the City Council by the early eighties.

For Peter Shapely, a rising ideology of consumerism which transcended party politics – and certainly underlay it – was more important.  At any rate, the design and planning process which would build the new Hulme was a very different animal to that which operated in the sixties.

In 1988 it looked as if Hulme would form the testing-ground for the Thatcher government’s Housing Action Trusts.  Tenant resistance to this bureaucratic and top-down initiative blocked the attempt to impose a Trust on Hulme and established the principle of a tenant ballot in future HAT proposals.

The outcome for the Crescents was the Hulme Study – a generously-funded joint initiative of government, council and residents to study the estate’s future. It didn’t produce much more than a report but a marker of participation had been set down.

This wasn’t immediately obvious in what became the transforming moment of the estate – the City Council-led bid for City Challenge funding in 1992.  But the essence of the new approach was the buzz-word ‘partnership’ and a complex nexus of central and local government, private investors, construction companies, housing associations and tenants came together to form the new Hulme.

Hulme Regeneration Ltd took the lead – a joint company comprising the Council’s Hulme Subcommittee and development company AMEC. The subcommittee itself included Hulme Community Homes – another three-way partnership of housing department, housing associations and tenants.  And then there was the Hulme Tenant Participation Project – an autonomous body funded by City Challenge and Housing Corporation.

This was all as complex and strife-ridden as it sounds but the tenants did in the end wield significant influence and in key respects came – alongside some new planning wisdom and in opposition to other – to determine the key elements of the new estate. (8)

As to that, you can take the short version or the long.  Tony Hughes, a caretaker for the North British Housing Group – which was one of the key players in the new Hulme –states simply, ‘We wanted more houses than flats, gardens, lots of greenery and safe areas for children’ (9)

The long version is contained in the 40 page Guide to Development in Hulme published by Hulme Regeneration Ltd in 1994. (10)  It’s an essential primer to what has been called New Urbanism – the attempt to ‘create a new neighbourhood with the “feel” of a more traditional urban community’.

To summarise some key aspects, the guidelines stressed permeability – busy streets which encouraged through movement.  This was a principle which challenged both some of the negative characteristics of the former estate – for one, the very sense of an ‘estate’ isolated from the wider city – as well as some favourite tropes of twentieth century town planners, notably the cul-de-sac.

It sought to tackle head-on some of the most problematic elements of the Crescents as they had evolved – the no-go zones and ‘escape routes’ which encouraged crime and vandalism – and replace them with the ‘natural surveillance’ of streets:

Streets will once again provide both a means of communication and transport, and – together with well-defined squares and civic spaces – a self-supervised area of public contact and interaction.

Much more could be said of the key themes outlined – the call for ‘landmarks, vistas and focal points’ and the demand for ‘a clear definition of public and private space’ most notably – but the measure lies in the new Hulme that actually emerged.

Warde Street

Old York Street

The Crescents were finally demolished in 1994, replaced – for the most part – by a pretty conventional streetscape of red-brick terraces (‘Barratt rabbit hutches’ in Hatherley’s words) and functional low-rise flats. The architectural exception is the small Homes for Change development – a product of the ‘alternative Hulme’ of the eighties which chose to build a little oasis of deck-access Brutalism.

Homes for Change, Chichester Road

The goal of mixed tenure has been achieved.  In 2002 there was a mix of 42 per cent public sector housing, 22 per cent housing association and 36 per cent private.  Now, as Manchester City Council has comprehensively embraced the world of ALMOs and not-for-profit housing providers and divested itself of direct responsibility for housing, the proportion of housing association properties is much higher. (11)

Tellingly, the 2006 evaluation of Hulme’s regeneration notes that the ‘quality of private housing and its maintenance has been problematical, while the quality of public sector and housing association dwellings appears to have been much higher’.

Stretford Road

Housing type doesn’t magically transform social and economic realities.  The same report described relatively high levels of crime – though falling – and unemployment levels of 17 per cent – five or six times above the national average though still a significant fall from the 30 per cent previously reported.  Still, those wishing to move from Hulme had fallen by 63 per cent and the redevelopment as a whole was a success.

It’s been a lengthy analysis but it’s hard – in a balanced way – to summarise the Hulme story briefly.  This was – there can be no doubt – a social housing disaster.  Design flaws met structural failings and were compounded by a downward spiral of social breakdown.

There were high ideals and positive principles expressed in the creation of the Crescents.  Incompetence – some of it wilful in terms of the actual construction – undercut any good these might have done.

The considered conclusions of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have merit – and certainly the benefit of hindsight: (12)

Re-development in Hulme during the 1960s was imposed as the product of political ideology and architectural fashion and local people were not involved in the assessment of needs. Positive features contributing to social cohesion, continuity and a sense of identity were lost.

But then Municipal Dreams have never been shaped in a vacuum and have always been constrained by the social and economic circumstances of the day and the limitations – rather than the malevolence – of the political actors which brought them into being.

Sources

(1) From the Guestbook of the eXHuLME Website – a great resource on the history of old Hulme and the Hulme estate.

(2) John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, 2000

(3) This is described in Adam Curtis’ 1984 BBC documentary ‘Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster’

(4) Ted Kitchen, People, Politics, Policies and Plans: The City Planning Process in Contemporary Britain (1997)

(5) World in Action, ‘There’s No Place Like Hulme’, 10 April, 1978

(6) Peter Shapely, ‘Tenants Arise! Consumerism, Tenants and the Challenge to Council Authority in Manchester, 1968-92’, Social History, Vol. 31, No. 1, February, 2006

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

(8) All this is best outlined and in greater detail by Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(9) Quoted in Laurette Ziemer, ‘Social Climbing: Estates are Transformed’, Daily Mirror, 23 June 2001

(10) Hulme Regeneration Limited, Rebuilding the City. A Guide to Development in Hulme, June 1994

(11) Lesley Mackay, Evaluation of the Regeneration of Hulme, Manchester, VivaCity 2020, February 2006 and Tony Gilmour, ‘Revolution? Transforming Social Housing in the Manchester City Region’, ENHR 2009 Prague Conference ‘Changing Housing Markets: Integration and Segmentation’

(12) Joseph Rowntree Foundation, ‘Lessons from Hulme’, September 1994

Images, where credited, are taken from the Flikr set on Hulme’s redevelopment posted by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Visual Resources Centre.

The Hulme Crescents, Manchester: bringing ‘a touch of eighteenth century grace and dignity’ to municipal building

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1960s, 1970s, Regeneration

In 1978 the chair of Manchester City Council’s Housing Committee described the Hulme Crescents development as an ‘absolute disaster – it shouldn’t have been planned, it shouldn’t have been built’. (1)   By that time, the estate was already a byword for the failure – worse, the inhumanity – of sixties’ mass public housing. That reputation has lingered long after the demolition of the Crescents in 1994.

This won’t be a revisionist piece but let’s at least look a little more closely at what went wrong.

The Crescents

As we saw when we looked at the city’s early municipal housing in Ancoats, Manchester was the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution.  Hulme was also the home of many of those first industrial workers.  In 1914, a Special Committee of the City Council reported a population of 63,177 living there in just 13,137 homes, 11,506 of which lacked baths or any laundry facilities.

Hulme in the 1930s

In 1934, the area was designated for slum clearance – the largest such area in Britain.  But little was done before the outbreak of the Second World War and it was the war itself which would accelerate demands, expectations and plans for change.  A City Council report in 1942 declared 68,837 houses in Manchester were unfit for human habitation; a total of 76,272 new homes would be required to meet long-term needs.

That cause was taken up in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan, scathing in its condemnation of ‘the meanness and squalor of Hulme’ and Manchester’s other industrial suburbs – ‘the drab streets, the dilapidated shops, the sordid public houses, the dingy schools, the sulphurous and sunless atmosphere’.

Radical action was needed – and promised.  But the city was clear that flats and high-rise were not the answer: (2)

It would be a profound sociological mistake to force upon the British public, in defiance of its own widely expressed preference for separate houses with private gardens, a way of life that fundamentally out of keeping with its traditions, instincts and opportunities’

Manchester’s model was its own Wythenshawe Estate – a spacious out-of-town suburb built on garden city principles, begun in 1927.  The Council proposed 40,000 new homes in similar schemes.  But neighbouring authorities – in particular, affluent Cheshire – feared this urban incursion and the uncouth incomers they felt it would bring and were far from cooperative.

Slum clearance began again in Manchester in 1954 but the programme – aiming to demolish 7500 houses a year – faltered as the rate of new-build dried up to little over 1000 a year by the end of the decade.

A similar picture existed at national level.  Council house completions had fallen to half the 229,000 peak achieved in 1953.  But the sense of urgency persisted.  Around 1m slums remained and just 30,000 were being cleared each year.  A Conservative government committed in its White Paper of 1963 to building 350,000 new homes annually.  It was outbid the following year by the incoming Labour administration’s promise of 500,000.

Stills taken from Adam Curtis’ 1984 BBC documentary ‘Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster’

Such ambition demanded new methods and ideas.  Low density suburban estates hadn’t delivered the numbers and were, in any case, unpopular with some tenants and hamstrung by planning restrictions.  Industrialised and system-building methods seemed to offer a solution.

The Ministry of Public Building and Works took specific responsibility for promoting: (3)

the use of new and rapid methods of construction, standardising the use and production of building components to the greatest possible extent, and securing the widespread dissemination of the best modern practices.

The Conservative Government expected 25 per cent of local authority housing output to be constructed using industrialised methods, a proportion raised by Labour to 40 per cent .  Councils which ‘seemed to be co-operating were “rewarded” in terms of enhanced capital allocations, speeding approvals, etc.’

That pressure, those dynamics – local and national – came together to create the Hulme Crescents.

Hulme redevelopment mid-1960s © Visual Resources at MMU

In 1962, the City Council announced a five-stage programme to build some 10,000 new homes over a ten-year period.  At peak, 4000 homes would be cleared and built each year.   It began relatively modestly – 248 maisonettes, flats and houses to be built at a cost of £1m.  It grew in 1964 as rebuilding commenced with 5000 new homes and Manchester’s first high-rise – a series of thirteen-storey tower blocks.

Hulme under construction

It culminated in its final stage, Hulme V, unveiled in October 1965, with what the then chair of the Housing Committee, Eric Mellor, claimed would be ‘one of the finest schemes in Europe’ – four deck-access six-storey crescent blocks – 924 homes in all – at a cost of over £3.8m.

This wasn’t cheap but it reflected what the Council felt to be the ambition of the development.  In design terms, it had been promised: (4)

a high quality of finish, both internally and externally…obtained because structural components, fittings and services will be manufactured and supervised under factory conditions and not subjected to climatic and other hazards of an open site.

In planning terms, this was to be ‘an urban environment on a city scale’ in a form which would promote ‘greater choice of friends among neighbours’ and ‘easy contact’ for elderly people ‘with the passing world’.

Clopton Walk and the Crescents 1972 © Visual Resources at MMU

And Manchester felt it had been true – in part at least and as far as circumstances allowed – to its earlier ideals in creating inner-city ‘streets in the sky’ which would foster a community atmosphere akin to the terraced housing that had been cleared.

The Manchester Evening News was gushing in its praise: (5)

(Of) all redevelopment schemes that will rejuvenate the Britain of tomorrow, Manchester’s plan for Hulme stands out boldly. For it is unique. Here is a fascinating concept which should make proud not only the planners but the citizens. That the design for a thousand maisonettes in long curved terraces will give a touch of eighteenth century grace and dignity to municipal housing is welcome indeed. But above all the plan is realistic… Thank goodness someone has been using both imagination and common sense in planning homes.

This was an echo of the rhetoric and vision of the scheme’s designers, Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley – Wilson had been the chief architect of Cumbernauld New Town and Womersley responsible, as City Architect, for the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield: (6)

We feel that the analogy we have made with Georgian London and Bath is entirely valid. By the use of similar shapes and proportions, large-scale building groups and open spaces, and, above all, by skilful landscaping and extensive tree planting, it is our endeavour to achieve, at Hulme, a solution to the problems of twentieth-century living which would be the equivalent in quality of that reached for the requirements of eighteenth-century Bloomsbury and Bath.

The Crescents were named after the four major architects of Georgian Bath, Charles Barry, John Nash, Robert Adam and William Kent.

Charles Barry Crescent, 1972 © Visual Resources at MMU

Construction began in 1969 and was completed – using those state-of-the-art system-building methods of the day – rapidly.  The topping out ceremony for the Crescents took place on 14 July 1971 and early reactions were positive.

I’ve spent some time on all this background and many of you will be more interested in the unfolding disaster which followed.  Still, it seems to me to be important to understand the context and, yes, the ideals which shaped the estate. This context doesn’t excuse the mistakes that were made but it should, at least, help us move beyond the simple desire to blame and condemn.

So what did go wrong?  We’ll examine that in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Councillor Allan Roberts, interviewed in ‘There’s No Place like Hulme’, World in Action, 10 April 1978.

(2) Rowland Nicholas, The City of Manchester Plan (1945)

(3) Geoffrey Rippon, MP, Minister of Public Building and Works, quoted in AMA, ‘Defects in Housing Part 2: Industrialised and System Built Dwellings of the 1960s and 1970s’ (1984).  The quotes and detail which follow also come from this source.

(4) The architects’ report quoted in Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings (2011)

(5) Much of the detail above and contemporary quotations are drawn from Peter Shapely, ‘The press and the system built developments of inner-city Manchester, 1960s-1980s’, Manchester Region History Review, 2004, and the same author’s, ‘Social Housing in Post-war Manchester: Change and Continuity’ (April 2013)

(6) Quoted in Ed Glinert, The Manchester Compendium: A Street-by-Street History of England’s Greatest Industrial City (2008)

Images, where credited, are taken from the Flikr set on Hulme’s redevelopment posted by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Visual Resources Centre.

Municipal Housing in Manchester before 1914: tackling ‘the Unwholesome Dwellings and Surroundings of the People’

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Pre-1914

Manchester has been described as the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution and if you lived in Ancoats it was, indeed, pretty shocking.  Ancoats was the world’s first industrial suburb – factories and workshops cheek by jowl with mean terraces of back-to-back working-class housing and courts.

Ancoats in the 1870s

In 1889, a report by Dr John Thresh on 36 acres lying off Oldham Rd detailed 25 streets, many less than 17ft wide, and housing, mostly over 70 years old.  The area contained over 50 courts; one third of houses were back-to-back.   A death rate of over 80 per 1000 led to his dry statistical conclusion that ‘3000 to 4000 people [were] dying annually here in Manchester from remediable causes’. (1)

The City Council declared it an ‘Unhealthy Area’ and determined to clear and rebuild.  A total of 1250 people were displaced and 239 dwellings demolished.

Manchester City Council had been established in 1838.  Its first efforts to tackle slum housing came under the terms of a local Police Act in 1844 – the upper classes who dominated local government then viewed the problem as one, primarily, of public order – which banned the construction of new back-to-backs, opened up some of the worst courts and stipulated the provision of more WCs.

In 1867, the Manchester Waterworks and Improvement Act went further by giving the Corporation power to declare individual properties unfit and enforce improvement. One year later the city appointed its first Medical Officer of Health, John Leigh.

Leigh’s efforts to improve working-class housing were strengthened in 1885 when the Council set up an Unhealthy Dwellings Committee to tackle the problem of the courts. The clearance on Oldham Road followed.

Victoria Square Dwellings © manchesterhistory.net/

In its place, the City Council erected its first municipal housing.  Firstly, and most imposingly, came the Victoria Square Dwellings (unofficially known as the Labourers’ Dwellings or colloquially as just ‘the Dwellings’).  Completed in 1894, from a design by Henry Spalding who had built similar blocks for the London County Council, the Dwellings comprised 237 double tenements and 48 single – 522 rooms in all, built to accommodate 825 persons.

The building was a five-storey, red-brick quadrangle, plain but for its front façade – with a ground floor of shops – which boasted Queen Anne detailing of terracotta, oriel windows and gables.  A contemporary description states: (1)

Each tenement is provided with a well-ventilated food store and coal locker; dust shoots are provided in convenient positions in the back wall; one WC  and sink is provided for every two dwellings, which is a disadvantage; and automatic or ‘penny-in-the-slot ‘ gas meters are supplied to each dwelling.

Communal laundry facilities and drying rooms were provided in each of the corner towers.

Victoria Square Dwellings quadrangle with ‘very wide balconies convenient for playgrounds’ according to Thompson © Copyright English Heritage

A similar 135-room, five-storey block, Granville Place, was built in Pollard Street though it was even more austere in design.

As a result of their relatively high rents (Thompson describes Victoria Square as being ‘occupied by a good class of tenants’), neither block was fully occupied in their early years.  Stung by this failure, the City Council would build only one other block before 1914 – a 64-tenement building on Rochdale Road, opened in 1904.  (2)

The Pollard Street block has since been demolished but the Victoria Square Dwellings survive and may be, as claimed, the oldest municipal housing still in occupation.  By 1931, a local housing group concluded that, ‘though much below modern standards’, the tenements were: (3)

amongst the best in Manchester. The tenants we saw were respectable working people; where they had adequate accommodation they appeared happy, and many had lived there for periods extending up to thirty years.

By the 1970s, as standards became yet more demanding, demolition was proposed but, since receiving Grade II listing in 1988, the flats have been extensively refurbished and converted into old people’s dwellings, managed by Northward Housing. It’s an attractive redesign, featuring 163 modern one- and two-bed flats, and good use of a venerable but problematic building. (4)

Sanitary (Anita) Street with Victoria Square Dwellings to rear

Despite the initial unpopularity of the blocks, the Council had not yet given up on tenements and a series of so-called ‘tenement houses’ were constructed in the same area, largely completed by 1897. The most beguiling of these is the Sanitary Street development – two rows of two-storey tenement terraces, either side of a 36 feet-wide thoroughfare, with two ground-floor and two first-floor tenements sharing a common entrance.

This was basic accommodation but each flat possessed its own sink and WC (though not yet a bath or hot water) and a shared backyard.  The street – renamed Anita Street in the sixties when ‘Sanitary’ became less a badge of honour and more a taint of municipalism – remains solid and attractive housing, though much renovated of course.

The Oldham Road area with the Victoria Square Dwellings to left. Sanitary Street forms the two centre rows of terraces with George Leigh Street to the rear.

Similar accommodation was provided in two other schemes in Chester Street and Pott Street.

Chester Street two-storey tenements

Caroline Street (off Pott Street) three-storey tenements

But the Council’s most ambitious early scheme of tenement housing was George Leigh Street where 18 two-storey five-room cottages were built.  These featured a third, attic, bedroom, allowing for the first time that girls and boys might sleep separately.

George Leigh Street

By 1899, the City Council claimed to have spent around £300,000 on working-class housing but debate was raging over what form that housing should take.  That year the Council organised a three-day conference on ‘Sanitary Reform and Progress’.  Some councillors were critical of the Dwellings and suggested that separate houses were: (5)

more in keeping with an Englishman’s idea of home that he should have a cottage to himself, and not occupy a portion of block dwelling rooms.

The reformers won out, aided by the economics at play.  Land in inner Manchester was expensive – with a consequent impact on rents in schemes intended as self-supporting.  At Oldham Road, the Council had paid over £5 a square yard; in the city’s newly-acquired suburbs, it could be bought for a little over 3p a square yard.

In 1904 the Council bought 238 acres on the new city boundary at Blackley for the sum of £35,643.  It planned to build 203 two-bed and three-bed cottages, generally in short terraces but also including an experimental development of 22 semi-detached homes.  Of the total, 171 included a bathroom.

The Council also set aside – as a further means of improving working-class health – 50 acres for allotments and would build a municipal tramway along Victoria Avenue to get the estate’s new inhabitants to work. Rents were set at between 6s 4d (31p) and 7s (35p) a week. (6)

Victoria Avenue, Blackley

Walton Road, Blackley

In 1910, progressive Liberal members of the Corporation even proposed a £400,000 garden city development but that would be blocked and it took a new politics formed by the First World War to launch the Council on its most ambitious out-of-town development – in Wythenshawe – in 1926.

By 1914, an influential progressive politics existed in Manchester – the home of the Manchester Guardian, after all – which combined with a powerful civic pride. These were exemplified by TH Marr, the secretary of the wonderfully-named Citizens’ Association for the Improvement of the Unwholesome Dwellings and Surroundings of the People. (7)

Marr himself would be commissioned in 1906 to direct what was in many ways the Council’s most effective intervention into working-class housing.  Up to 1906 around 500 houses were being reconditioned each year; after 1906 that figure rose to 2000.  At this time, the Corporation paid £15 per house to owners of back-to-back homes who converted them to through houses.

By 1914 most of Manchester’s back-to-backs and courts had been cleared or renovated – the Council had demolished 27,000 slums and merged around 3000. (8)  This was a record that placed it well ahead of most other industrial cities.

Ashton House

It’s worth mentioning one other manifestation of city pride. Ashton House, on Corporation Street, was the first purpose-built lodging house designed for women, opened in 1901.  City Architect HR Price created an arts and crafts building of genuine quality, both in design and materials, housing in separate cubicles 222 of Manchester’s poorest inhabitants.  It remains a monument to early social reform though, now Grade II listed, it is currently providing hotel and hostel accommodation to visitors to Manchester.

Much of the city’s early municipal housing was, by current standards, basic but this is a record of growing ambition and earnest endeavour.  By 1914, a Manchester principle – the construction of houses rather than high-rise flats or tenements – had been established that would hold good for all but a brief period in the sixties when the ambitious redevelopment of Hulme was undertaken.  That didn’t turn out so well and will be the subject of a future post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Jacqueline Roberts, ‘”A densely populated and unlovely tract”: The Residential Development of Ancoats‘, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. VII, 1993

(2) Quotation from W Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903) and additional detail from John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History (2000)

(3) Hulme Housing Association Re-housing Sub-Committee Preliminary Report, included in GA Wheale, Citizen Participation in the Rehabilitation of Housing in Moss Side East, Manchester, University of Manchester PhD, 1979

(4) Kim Wiltshire, ‘Victoria Square: a History’ (2008)

(5) Cited in Peter Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture (2007)

(6) W Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903) and Housing Up-To-Date (1907)

(7) Marr’s book, published in 1904, Housing Conditions in Salford and Manchester, contains a searing description of contemporary slum housing in the region and a rousing call to action.

(8) Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture

(9) English Heritage, Ashton House

Early photographs are taken from Thompson, The Housing Handbook.

The Wythenshawe Estate, Manchester: ‘the world of the future’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Back in 2007, the Wythenshawe Estate became the poster child for ‘Broken Britain’.  David Cameron had visited the estate to make his call to ‘hug a hoodie’. But whatever love Cameron was offering didn’t appear to be reciprocated.

It was ironic that Wythenshawe should be singled out in this way, tragic that the ideals and vision which had built the estate had been so signally eclipsed.

Lest we forget, the story begins with a level of overcrowding and human misery that is – thankfully – almost unimaginable in Britain today. In 1935, Manchester’s Medical Officer of Health condemned 30,000 (of a total of 80,000) inner-city homes as unfit for human habitation; 7000 families were living in single rooms.

In contrast, it was the garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard which provided the other major element in Wythenshawe’s genesis. Howard and his followers advocated a utopian ideal of economically self-sufficient communities, cottage dwellings in parkland surroundings – the polar opposite of the Broken Britain of that day.   

In Manchester, these currents coalesced in the drive and vision of three people: Labour alderman WT Jackson and then Liberal husband and wife team, Ernest and Shena Simon.

Jackson rejected the modernism that attracted some as a solution to the slum problem: ‘We are not emulating Vienna and I have not been there…In general we favour the cottage type of dwelling’.  For Ernest Simon ‘the tendency of country conditions [was] to preserve life…the tendency of town conditions [was] to depress vitality’.  The solution they envisaged lay in large-scale development of agricultural land to the south of Manchester beyond the city boundaries.

Simon purchased Wythenshawe Hall and 250 acres of land in 1926. He donated them to the city, directing only that they ‘be used solely for the public good’.

Jackson for his part persuaded the city to buy 2500 acres of surrounding farmland in the same year and secured the incorporation of the future estate within city boundaries – against horrified opposition from Cheshire locals – in 1931 by private act of parliament.

The beginnings of development, late 1920s

Jackson visited the garden city showpiece of Letchworth in 1927 and brought in Barry Parker – its co-designer – as planner of the new Wythenshawe Estate.  Building began the same year.  Parker was given sole control of the project in 1931.  Parker built on the garden city ideal by adding two new features.

One was the parkway – a concept borrowed from the more motorised America of the day – intended to smooth transit but, more importantly, to prevent ribbon development and preserve open space. The scenic route Parker created – the Princess Parkway – is now the M56.  Perhaps not quite what he had in mind.

His second innovation was neighbourhood units set around green spaces and tree-lined roads with, in this instance, Wythenshawe Hall and Park preserved at their centre.  This principle has been better honoured – some 30 areas of park and woodland remain.

Parker’s plan for the new estate

Development was rapid. By 1939, the estate boasted a population of 40,000 and some 8145 dwellings, now described waspishly in Pevsner as ‘conventional, Quakerishly undecorated’.  Parker was a Quaker so this plain and simple approach  reflected his ideals but it fulfilled more strongly Shena Simon’s wish that the estate have a ‘cottagey’ feel.  

Wythenshawe housing in the early 1930s

If the housing was modest, the ambition which underlay the project wasn’t.  For Shena Simon, the estate was the ‘boldest [scheme] that any municipality has yet embarked upon’. To the local Cooperative Women’s Guild, it was nothing less than (1):

the world of the future – a world where men and women workers shall be decently housed and served, where the health and safety of little children are of paramount importance, and where work and leisure may be enjoyed to the full.

This future world was a place in which ‘every working mother [would enjoy] a clean, well-planned home which will be her palace’.  If this seems a stereotyped view of a woman’s role today, let’s note their rider: these were homes ‘so well and wisely planned that [a mother’s] labour will be lightened and her strength and intelligence reserved for wider interests’.

Who got to enjoy this brave new world?  Rents were typically between 13s and 15s a week (65 to 75p) at a time when the average working wage stood at around £3. Ernest Simon calculated this was just affordable – provided there was a ‘willingness of the wage earner to be content with a very small amount of pocket money, and competent and economical management on the part of the housewife’.

In reality, the estate was principally confined to the better-off working class as this oral testimony suggests (2):

Not everyone could get a house in Wythenshawe. Before we got one an official from the Town Hall wanted to know all about us…We had to prove we were good tenants. We…heard that some people were from the slums but we never met any of them.

Despite – more probably because of – this exclusivity, there was great pride in the estate. Local activists were committed to making ‘Wythenshawe worthy of the time and money spend on it’. A ‘Wythenshawe ethos’ grew which enjoined a ‘common bond’ predicated less on shared recreation than on notions of self-improvement.

As with Becontree (see my previous posting on that London County Council estate), gardening was a particular locus of this and the annual flower and vegetable show an important event in the local calendar.

Piper Hill Avenue, Northenden 2012 © Gene Hunt, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence

Yew Tree Lane, Northenden 2012 © Gene Hunt, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence

Many residents also spoke favourably of a world where people weren’t forever popping round for a chat or – worse still – on the cadge, ‘where people kept themselves to themselves’. All this has upset some later commentators who see in it some corruption of working-class community and ideals.   But maybe we shouldn’t pay too much heed to this liberal academic nostalgia for a world they never knew and tend now to romanticise.

That there was a shift – to a more privatised and domesticated focus on family and home – is undeniable.  But I see it less an example of malign social engineering or embourgeoisification, more as an opportunity working people desired and acted upon, one that – in key ways – they created.

Practically, as so often, execution failed to fully match conception. Shops, community facilities and employment followed belatedly on housing and population growth.  There was an incomplete and dormitory feel to the estate in its early decades though the Second World War and 1947 Town and Country Planning Act were to give a boost to further ambitious growth. New industrial zones were completed in 1950s.  Higher density housing was planned and built. The population grew to 100,000.

Postwar plans for houses and three-storey flats © Pagan555

Aerial view, 1940s © Pagan555

The shopping centre – confusingly called the Civic Centre – was finished in the 1960s.  An actual civic centre – the Wythenshawe Forum incorporating leisure centre, library, theatre and meeting rooms – was finally opened in 1971.

Proposed public buildings in the new civic centre envisaged in the 1940s © Pagan555

Wythenshawe Civic Centre – the flats at the top were demolished in 2007 and replaced with a local authority ‘services hub’ © Wikimedia Commons

By the turn of the century the Wythenshawe infrastructure was largely in place. So what went wrong? In the aftermath of the hoodie affair, a New York Times journalist, visiting the ‘endless housing project’ of Wythenshawe (’pronounced WITH-en-shah’ she added helpfully), noted bleakly ‘the absent fathers, the mothers on welfare, the drugs, the arrests, the incarcerations, the wearying inevitability of it all’. (3)

And it’s true that levels of deprivation on the estate were significantly higher than the Manchester average, twice as high as the national average. In 2000 Benchill was named the most deprived council ward in England.

This doesn’t seem to me to reflect some original sin in the conception or design of council estates.  Rather it speaks of crushing realities that would hobble the ideals and potential of any community. Criticisms of estates as single-class and socially isolated have merit but they lack historical perspective – specifically an understanding of the ‘respectable’ and aspirational foundations of social housing and the massive demographic shift that has hit it since the 1980s.

Council estates, which were once a symbol – a site, in fact – of upward mobility, now represent downward mobility or social stasis; this reflecting not some moral failing on the part of social housing’s poorer tenants but the hard fact of economic changes that have all but destroyed traditional working-class livelihoods.

The new Woodhouse Park Lifestyle Centre opened in 2006 © Copyright Anthony O’Neil, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

However, this depressing perspective should not be the final word. There has been huge investment in Wythenshawe in recent years.  The shopping centre was substantially renovated between 1999 and 2002. (In a sign of the times an Asda store with multi-storey car park replaced the old Coop.)  £18m has been spent on the Wythenshawe Forum to modernise and extend its facilities which now include additionally an adult learning centre, nursery, café and health centre.

A lot has been done by central and local government and community organisations and activists to shift realities and – perhaps almost as importantly – perceptions.  There’s no need to sugar-coat here: significant and real problems remain but the estate deserves to be more than a caricature. And the ideals which inspired it should be valued, maintained and fulfilled.

Sources:

(1) This and most of the foregoing quotes are taken from Andrew Davies, Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880-1939 (1992)

(2) Quoted in John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, an Architectural History (2000)

(3) Sarah Lyell, ‘How the Poor Measure Poverty in Britain…‘. New York Times, 10 March 2007

Pagan555’s Wythenshawe images can be found in his Flikr photostream and are used with his permission.

Andrew Davies, cited above, offers an excellent social history of the estate.

Articles by David Ward and Owen Hatherley in The Guardian provide some contemporary views and this article by Mark Hughes in The Independent will update you on the young man greeting Mr Cameron in the opening image.