Municipal Greenwich, Part II

We began our municipal trail in Greenwich last week although we halted at some pre-municipal social provision, the alms-houses of Queen Elizabeth College on Greenwich High Road.  Walk on a little further along the High Road and look to your right.

West Greenwich House

Here is West Greenwich House, now a local community centre but formerly, until 1939, the Metropolitan Borough’s Town Hall. It started life, in 1877, as offices for the District Board of Works – what passed for local government in the capital until the establishment of the LCC in 1889 and the 28 metropolitan boroughs in 1900. It was designed by local architect William Wallen and, although only ‘thinly Italianate’, once looked a little grander with a clock tower, dome and portico. The photograph below captures some of that shattered glory after a V1 bombing raid on 12 July 1944. (1)

West Greenwich House, July 1944. With thanks to Blitzwalkers.

Maitland Close Estate

It faces the Maitland Close Estate which I can’t tell you much about.  It’s a post-war Greenwich estate, I think – with earlier and plainer three-storey blocks around Maitland Close itself and higher, more stylish blocks lined along the High Road.  But if anyone knows more, do let me know.

The former Greenwich Police Station

To finish off, we’ll cut through the estate, heading back to Greenwich South Street. Head north on the latter before taking a right-hand turn along predominantly Georgian Circus Street.  At the end you reach Royal Hill and, facing you, the rear of Swanne House, a 1960s’ block of flats formerly owned by the Metropolitan Police.  It was linked to Greenwich Police Station next door fronting Burney Street, a solid modernist building of the same era now emptied and on the market.   Borough Hall and the former Town Hall lie directly opposite.

Royal Hill: Swanne House (to left) and the Royal Hill School

Looking the other way, at the top of the hill you’ll see the imposing bulk of the Royal Hill School, designed for the London School Board by its chief architect TJ Bailey and completed in 1899. (2) It’s representative of around 400 built by the Board between its foundation in 1870 and 1904 when its functions were taken over by, who else?, the LCC.  To Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (in the person of Sherlock Holmes) they were ‘Lighthouses…Beacons of the future!’, presaging ‘the wiser, better England of the future’.  It’s served a range of educational roles over the years but it’s currently a campus of the James Woolf Primary School.

Gloucester Circus, south (c) Chris Whippett and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Cross over into Gloucester Circus to see, on its southern side, one of Greenwich’s showpieces – the Georgian terrace, built between 1791 and 1807 and designed by Michael Searles. It’s a shallow three-storey terrace with mansard roof, intended as one half of a grand ensemble encompassing the private gardens in the centre which remain. Searles never got to complete his grand design though plainer, though large Victorian middle-class homes were added to the north around 1840. (3)

The homes themselves, intended for large families with household staff, had declined in status by the end of the century, divided by then into tenements for poorer working-class families.  In 1975, a Borough of Greenwich housing survey designated it as Category B housing; ‘an area of continuing improvement’.  Conversely, the Council’s Meridian Estate (discussed last week) – a solid five-storey,walk-up, balcony-access tenement block – was Category A.  The survey noted that 16 of the occupants of the Circus’s self-contained flats were on the waiting list for council accommodation.  (4)

Gloucester Circus: private gardens and the Maribor Estate

We can assume that ‘improvement’ did indeed continue.  A recent agent’s listing describes it as ‘one of the most exclusive and prime locations of west Greenwich’ and a six-bed property was sold as long ago as 2012 for £2.75m.  Evidence of the area’s harder times is provided by the fact that a short terrace of the later Victorian homes is owned and managed by the Beaver Housing Society, a housing association formerly part-funded by the Borough now absorbed by the behemoth London & Quadrant.

The Maribor Estate

But all this, for us at least, is just the appetiser for the main item on our municipal menu – the Maribor Estate which occupies the north-western corner of the Circus – a Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich scheme completed in 1960.  Greenwich had built 1486 council homes between the wars, of which 1115 were houses.  By 1958, when post-war building was in full swing, the Borough had added 1576 new homes.  It’s a sign of the times and evidence of diminishing open land that of these only 133 were traditional two-storey houses. It’s another sign of the times – the priority given to the pressing need to accommodate those without homes – that into the late 1950s, some 1086 families were living in housing requisitioned by the Borough under emergency wartime and post-war legislation. (5)

Such land as was available for new build now required clearance but, in some cases, that had been achieved earlier by Nazi bombing.  The photograph below shows Burney Street after a V1 attack in June 1944. The Victorian County Court building (since demolished) stands front and centre; behind it lies the heavily damaged northern terrace of Gloucester Circus. (6)

Burney Street, June 1944, with thanks to Blitzwalkers

As redevelopment options came to be considered, it was concluded that it was ‘too costly and an extravagant use of space’ to rebuild the housing in its prior form: (7)

Proposals were discussed with the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and it was agreed that by keeping to the same scale as the existing buildings, and by carefully detailing the elevations, the new building could be brought into harmony with its neighbours.

The outcome was the attractive (to my eyes) six-storey block of flats and maisonettes you see today – yellow stock brick for the most part, with striking glazed stairways at each end and balcony access to the rear.

Maribor Estate, Burney Street frontage

‘Generous open space’ (in the words of the Council brochure) separates this block from its visually dissimilar partner on Burney Street. This is a starker block, grey rendered, intended to harmonise with the police station and planned comprehensive redevelopment of the Central Area.  The damaged or destroyed homes it replaced were ‘tall, narrow-fronted buildings of the later Victorian period with few pretensions to architectural merit’.

In all, the new estate, designed by the Borough Architect’s Department, comprised 16 bed-sitter flats, 37 two-bed maisonettes and one three-bed maisonette and they came with the mod cons now expected – ‘each kitchen has a ventilated larder, a dresser unit and a porcelain enamelled sink with drainer’, all flats were centrally heated, and a drying room with tumble dryer was provided in each block.  A Maternity and Child Welfare Centre was located in the Burney Street building.

If you’re wondering about ‘Maribor’, the estate was named after the Borough’s twin town in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (this part now Slovenia) and, in fact, it was officially opened by in June 1960 by Mr Stane Knez, President of Maribor Town Council. (I found the image above of the commemorative plaque on Twitter but couldn’t locate it when I visited the estate personally.)  A few months later, Greenwich’s mayor, Cllr HA Tatman, ‘at a gay, colourful and musical ceremony, opened a new housing estate in Maribor which has been named Greenwich’. (8) 

Soseska Greenwich, Maribor

And we’ll conclude things there.  You can find you way home in London by privatised Southeastern railways from nearby Greenwich station if you have to or take the DLR or one of the many buses run by Transport for London in the vicinity.

It had been an informal Sunday morning ramble and the mix of monuments to municipalism it threw up was diverse but each, in their way, was a testimony to the incalculable contribution local government has made to the betterment of our lives and community.

Sidney Webb commented satirically of another perambulation taken by an ‘Individualist City Councillor…along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water’ (in those halcyon days at least). That councillor concluded thus: (9)

‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what made our city what it is.’

We, better informed, might disagree.

Sources

(1) English Heritage, London’s Town Halls. The Architecture of Local Government from 1840 to the Present (1999) and Blitzwalkers, Wartime Greenwich & Woolwich (31 January 2014)

(2) Victorian Schools in London, 1870-1914, Royal Hill School, Greenwich (2011)

(3) The Greenwich Phantom, ‘Gloucester Circus’, 17 February 2017

(4) London Borough of Greenwich, Housing in West Greenwich: London Borough of Greenwich house condition survey. Report no. 3 (1975)

(5) Borough of Greenwich, The Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich Official Guide (1958)

(6) Blitzwalkers, ‘Out of the Ruins’, 12 December 2016

(7) Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich, Maribor Greenwich (ND but c1960). The following quotations and detail are also drawn from this source.

(8) There are further detail and images of the ‘Greenwich neighbourhood’ in Maribor on this webpage.

(9) Sidney Webb, Socialism in England (1899)

Municipal Greenwich and a bit of the Isle of Dogs, Part I

This blog began with a walk – just a ramble through some local streets and, with it, a realisation of just how much we owed to local government.   This post marks another walk. It wasn’t planned as an excavation of municipal heritage – the route’s a bit random and its ‘sights’ are eclectic to say the least – but, as a reminder of the breadth and depth of municipalism’s contribution to our lives, it’s probably hard to beat.

We start at the Island Gardens DLR station at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs.  Turn to your left on exit and you’ll see Millwall Park.  Poorly drained and unattractive to speculative builders, the area remained predominantly pasture land into the late nineteenth century though Millwall FC occupied a couple of sites from 1885 till their move south of the river in 1910. In 1919 the London County Council (LCC) bought the land and created a playground and park.  In 1925, they added an open-air swimming pool but that was destroyed in the Blitz and not rebuilt. (1)

‘Woman and Fish’ by Antonio Lopez Reche after Frank Dobson

At the edge of the park there’s a statue of a woman holding a fish. An adjacent plaque tells you it’s by Antonio Lopez Reche and was placed there in 2007 but it has a back-story.  It’s a replica of an artwork – ‘Woman with Fish’ – by the sculptor Frank Dobson, bought by the LCC in 1963 in the year of his death.  It was originally located on the Carpenter Estate in Stepney, part of the Council’s ‘Patronage of the Arts’ scheme which saw over 70 works of art placed in estates and schools across the capital for the pleasure and edification of working-class Londoners.  Here it is in its original setting.

‘Cleveland Estate: “Woman with Fish” sculpture by Frank Dobson’ (1962) (c) London Collage

The original provided drinking water too but it was badly vandalised in the late 1970s and removed, originally for restoration, in 1983.  Then it was destroyed.  Fortunately, we have this replica to remind us of that progressive past though its present rather isolated position and backdrop seem to speak to different values. (2)

Greenwich Power Station (to left) and the Old Royal Naval College

Wandering over to Island Gardens themselves, you get your first grand vista of the River Thames. A few of you might first notice the impressive buildings of the Old Royal Naval College immediately across the river but true municipal dreamers will be more taken by the powerful bulk of Greenwich Power Station lying just to the east.  It was designed and built by the LCC between 1902 and 1910 – an early example of a steel-frame building with a stone-clad brick cover – to provide power to the Council’s tramways.  Coal, oil and gas-fired over the years, it’s now one of the oldest operational power stations in the world and recently converted to generate low carbon power for the Tube and local homes and businesses. (3)

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

Naturally, we’ll use the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to cross the river, designed by the civil engineer Sir Alexander Binnie and constructed by John Cochrane and Co. but commissioned by the seemingly ubiquitous LCC. The 370 metre-long tunnel was opened in 1902, after a campaign by Will Crooks (docker, trade unionist, councillor and Labour MP), to provide reliable access from south of the river to workers employed on the Isle of Dogs.

Meridian Estate and Cutty Sark

Meridian Estate

As you emerge on the south bank, the first thing you’ll notice (apart from the Cutty Sark) is the Meridian Estate, a traditional LCC estate of five-storey, walk-up, balcony-access tenement blocks, begun by in 1933 with its westernmost buildings completed after the end of the Second World War.  It must now be among the best-sited estates, commanding some of the finest views, of any in the capital.   Today, riverside locations are the prerogative of the well-heeled. Back in the day, when first acquired by the Council, this was unattractive industrial land – a mix of docks and allied trades and humble terraced homes – and it was deemed good enough for working people. (4)

Greenwich Town Hall

We’ll ignore the tourist hustle and bustle of central Greenwich and walk on up along Greenwich High Road.  As you turn the corner past Hawksmoor’s St Alfrege Church, completed in 1718, you catch a first glimpse of Greenwich Town Hall or rather, initially, its 50 metre tower and look-out platform.  This was a complex designed by the architectural practice, Culpin & Son. The father Ewart was a Labour alderman and vice-chair of the LCC in the interwar period and, together with his son Clifford (chiefly responsible for the Greenwich building), he had also designed Poplar New Town Hall opened in 1938. Greenwich followed one year later.

Entrance and commemorative tablet. The mosaic is almost certainly by David Evans.

It’s a building whose form and style consciously reflects local government with a progressive agenda – the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich came under Labour control in 1934 as did in the same year the LCC itself: (5)

Avowedly modernist in its uncluttered and irregular elevations, juxtaposing verticality, through a clock tower, with the horizontality of flat-roofed, low-rise office blocks. For Pevsner in 1951, this was ‘the only town hall of any London borough to represent the style of our time adequately’

Clifford Culpin was clear on his inspiration, Willem Dudok whose Hilversum Town Hall in the Netherlands (1931) provided a model:

I was a devoted admirer of Dudok, and when I had the Greenwich building to design, I went to Hilversum and though the great man had a house full of guests, he devoted a very long day to showing me his best buildings.

The Borough Hall

Aside from the council offices and Council Chamber, the complex contains two public halls, including the principal Borough Hall, originally with seating for 534 (and 259 on the balcony) on its sprung maple dance floor.  The Council ‘hoped that the new Civic Centre will become the focus of the social life of the Borough’.  Older residents can tell me if that were ever the case. As of now, sold off in the early 1970s, the Borough Hall is occupied by registered charity Greenwich Dance (‘the home of dance in South East London’) whilst the former civic buildings (now Meridian House) house the Greenwich School of Management and some private flats.

West Greenwich Library

Immediately adjacent to the south is West Greenwich Library, built in 1905-7 and designed by HW Willis and J Anderson according to Pevsner and Sir AB Thomas by Historic England.  We’ll go with the latter’s detailed description of ‘the three-bay building, of modest baroque appearance’.  It was – as a central tablet records – ‘The gift of Andrew Carnegie Esq’; one of 660 libraries in the UK (there are 2509 worldwide) paid for by Carnegie, a Scots-born US steel magnate who dedicated $350m – some 90 per cent of his personal fortune – to philanthropic causes in the closing years of his life.

Follow the road south as it branches east on Greenwich South Street and look up above number 23.  Here there’s a plaque marking the birthplace in 1873 of Alfred Salter – doctor, Bermondsey councillor and MP and (with his wife and fellow councillor, Ada) one of the leading and most idealistic municipal reformers of his generation. (The work of the Salters and Bermondsey’s Labour council in the interwar period are extensively recorded in my earlier series of posts on Bermondsey.)

Queen Elizabeth College

Across the road is something which isn’t municipal but it worthy of note for both its architecture and social purpose.  Queen Elizabeth College is (despite its name) an example of the earliest form of social housing – alms-houses originally endowed by landowner and antiquarian William Lambarde in 1576 who entrusted their management to the Drapers Company which still runs them.  The buildings you see now fronting Greenwich High Road were built in 1818 and provide 40 self-contained one-bedroom cottages.

Lambard House, Queen Elizabeth College

Lambard House (William seems to have lost an ‘e’ somewhere along the line) on Langdale Road is an attractive extension, maintaining that mission by providing 28 further flats in 1967. (6)

We’ll walk on in next week’s post to follow this municipal trail further.

Sources

(1) For this and much more on Millwall Park, see Isle of Dogs – Past Life, Past Lives, Millwall Park (10 August 2015)

(2) Sally Williams, London Park and Gardens Trust, ‘Looking out for Art – LCC’s Patronage of the Arts’

(3) BBC News, ‘Low Carbon Plans Announced for Greenwich Power Station’, 8 January 2015

(4) Greenwich Industrial History, ‘The Old Loyal Britons, 62 Thames Street, Greenwich, SE10’ (20 August 2014)

(5) English Heritage, London’s Town Halls. The Architecture of Local Government from 1840 to the Present (1999)

(6) The Greenwich Phantom, Almshouses (3) Queen Elizabeth’s College (3 July 2008)

 

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

Tags

Gibberd

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

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

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

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

– Queen’s Gardens, Wilberforce Monument and Hull College

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

– Hull College, Frederick Gibberd

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

– William Mitchell concrete and resin panel, c1960

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

– The Guildhall

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

Wilberforce Museum

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

Municipal tram in the Streetlife Museum

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

– Tidal Surge Barrier with road and pedestrian swing bridges open

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

The Deep, Terry Farrell

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

Nelson Street public conveniences

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

– ‘Thieving Harry’s’, Fruit Market

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

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

– James Reckitt Public Library, Holderness Road

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

East Hull Baths, Holderness Road

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

Frederick I Reckitt Havens

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

– The ‘Khyber Pass’ in East Park 

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

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

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

The former National Picture Theatre blitz site

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

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

– Sidmouth Street School

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

Court housing, Sidmouth Street

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

– The Venn Building, University of Hull

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brook Chambers, Ferensway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temporary shops on Ferensway. With thanks to Catherine Flinn.

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

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

The House of Fraser store on Ferensway and Jameston Street

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

Paragon Square towards Jameson Street

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

Festival House, Jameson Street

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

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

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

Queen’s House, Chapel Street

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

Alan Boyson’s Three Ships mural

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ferens Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Square

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

An artwork purchased by the Corporation, one of many.

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

Maritime Museum, Queen Victoria Square

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Municipal Saltash: a ‘Borough Town’

Tags

1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Saltash

Municipal Dreams is on holiday but, while some of you might come down to the West Country to lie on a beach, his relentless quest for all things municipal continues. The Cornish town of Saltash on the banks of the Tamar provided surprisingly rich pickings.

Saltash from the Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge; Waterside in centre shot

Or perhaps not so surprising given its long history.  It might seem overshadowed by its bigger neighbour Plymouth nowadays but, as the locals will tell you: 

Saltash was a borough town, When Plymouth was a fuzzy down

And it’s true enough: Saltash was first incorporated in the late 12th century; its charter was confirmed by Richard II in 1382. That upstart Plymouth didn’t get its town charter till 1439.

St Nicholas and St Faith’s Church

This helps explain the longevity of Saltash’s first and most unusual piece of municipal history – the church of St Nicholas and St Faith, dating to Norman times, originally built as a chapel of ease to the nearby St Stephen’s but claimed as the ‘Corporation chapel’ – with the Corporation appointing its chaplains and deciding who got buried in the church – from the 17th century to 1881. It became the parish church of a new ecclesiastical parish coterminous with the borough in that year but the Corporation didn’t cede ownership of the building to the church authorities until 1924.  

The Guildhall

The Guildhall is a newcomer by comparison, built in 1775 as a Market House and Assembly Hall and not acquired by the Corporation until 1841. The ground-floor market area between its Tuscan colonnades was enclosed in 1910.  Grade II-listed and tastefully restored in 1999, it now provides a home for Saltash Town Council, a parish council formed when Saltash Borough Council was superseded by Caradon District Council in 1974 (itself replaced by the unitary Cornwall Council in 2009).

The Library

Cornwall County Council – which preceded the unitary authority (local government has got complicated nowadays) – built perhaps the most striking of Saltash’s local government buildings: its library.  Opened in 1963, the Library’s curved roofline sweeping up to a double-height frontage (all based, apparently, on the golden ratios of le Corbusier’s modulor system), was designed by Royston Summers of the County Architect’s Department.  To Pevsner, it’s ‘one of the most innovative of the County Architect’s post-war oeuvre’. (1)  

Two years earlier, a far larger and more unusual example of municipal enterprise had been opened – the Tamar Bridge.  Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson, constructed by Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, the bridge – with its 1100 foot central span – the longest in the UK at the time, was commissioned by Plymouth City Council and Cornwall County Council.  

The Tamar Bridge with Brunel’s rail bridge to the rear.

Although the bridge was long overdue (the idea had been first mooted in 1823 and Brunel’s adjacent Royal Albert rail bridge opened as far back as 1859), in the Austerity Britain of the post-Second World War era, the Government had concluded this particular infrastructure project was too costly and the two councils secured parliamentary approval to proceed independently. Built at a cost of £1.5m without government subsidy (paid for by user tolls), construction began in July 1959 and the first traffic crossed in October 1961. (2)   

Housing is the usual focus of this blog and was once, of course, one of the major responsibilities of local councils.  Here, after a slow start, Saltash Borough Council had a major impact, transforming the town and in part (as we shall see) in ways which some would come to regret.  

The Council took so long to prepare a scheme under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act that spending cuts (the so-called Geddes Axe of 1921) halted construction before it began. The protest of one local councillor that this was ‘a dishonourable action the part of body of men who at the election taunted the electorate by promising them houses, and then threw their promises into their faces’ availed not a jot. (3)

The need for housing remained however. A 1923 report to council recorded 29 persons living in two houses in Fore Street; ‘in one room a woman, her son and his child were living, eating, drinking, and sleeping’. (4)

Lander Road

River View

It’s not surprising then that there were 106 applications for the Council’s first scheme – 18 houses built on Lander Road.  These were originally all planned as non-parlour homes but, in an interesting insight into the attitudes towards council housing at the time: (5)

the committee thought there might be people in the town who would like a better type of house.  They thought it was their duty to cater for the requirements of the whole of the population.

They ended up building ‘eight houses of the parlour type, eight of the non-parlour type and four of the flat type with separate entrances’.

Warfelton Crescent

By 1938, when the Borough had also built the much larger Warfelton Estate to the west of the town, it was claimed the council had built a higher proportion of council homes than any other in the West Country. (6)

In 1945, however, the Council applied for 60 Tarran-type prefabricated homes to partially address what was described as the town’s ‘dire housing need’.  Sturdier, permanent housing followed until, by 1950, the Council could claim that the ‘housing problem was nearly solved’, the waiting list reduced from over 1000 to 112. (7)

Liskeard Road, Burraton Estate

A total of 195 houses had been erected – 40 of these were prefabs and 12 flats, ‘the rest three-bed traditional houses’.  The prefabs were scattered around the town, most of the new houses on an extension to the Warfelton Estate.  The new Cowdray Estate contained 32 homes and new estates were underway or projected on Liskeard Road, Warraton and Burraton East.

With wartime replacement substantially complete, by the mid-1950s – like the rest of the country – Saltash turned towards the task of slum replacement.  Its obvious target was the Waterside area, huddled along the estuary beneath Brunel’s bridge – a mixed commercial and residential district: ‘a mixture of cottages and townhouses some as early as the sixteenth century, in a variety of styles and materials’. (8)

An undated, colourised postcard of the former Tamar Street

From a contemporary perspective, you might already be imagining the redevelopment possibilities and potential attractions of the area. Pevsner had already identified its picturesque quality: 

The thrill of Saltash is the excessive contrast between the small scale and the variety of the small shapes of the fishing town along the waterside and climbing up the steep hill, and the sheer height of the granite piers of Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge. 

‘The Ferry Beach and Inn at Saltash, Cornwall’ as painted by JMW Turner in 1811. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Images of old Waterside, the Passage House Inn and the former Tamar Street at bottom. Note the archway entrance shown at top right.

But the housing and its layout were clearly, in their then state, ‘unfit for human habitation’ and ‘injurious to health’ and declared so in the Waterside Clearance Areas declared in 1956 and the compulsory purchase orders which followed. The Saltash branch of Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers also took a practical attitude and expressed its support for the demolitions. (9)

The new estate under construction, seen as repair works are taking place on the Royal Albert Bridge. The old Mission Hall to the left was demolished in 1963 and replaced by modern premises for the Saltash Boys Club.

A rearguard action by the Old Cornwall Society to preserve the Passage House Inn – the last of Saltash’s arch houses and immortalised by William Turner in 1812 – received only lukewarm support from the Ministry of Works which promised Grade II status allowing demolition so long as the need were justified. (10)  

Tamar Street and the Royal Albert Bridge from the quayside

The pub survived (without its arch) firstly as The Boatman and now, as of the summer of 2015, the Just Be Coffee Wine Lounge. In aspirational Britain and in Cornwall where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy that fits well with the new hopes for the Waterside as an amenity area to attract visitors.  The redevelopment which did occur has come to seem a lost opportunity.

The 1584 archway incorporated into 10 Tamar Street

Still, this blog celebrates earlier visions and ideals and in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s housing for the people was the great priority.  The clearance was drastic – only the three pubs survived of the area’s old buildings, one side of Tamar Street was demolished and large open areas created to the waterside.  

This fine waterfront site wasn’t treated as prime real estate for the wealthy or for commerce but as land for affordable housing for local people.  A remnant only of the area’s antiquity survives in the doorway dated 1584 incorporated into the council flat at 10 Tamar Street.  

The development, that touch notwithstanding, may seem at first sight quite plain.  Compared to the old jumble of streets and styles and ungraced by any patina of age, there’s nothing picturesque about it but then, for those that lived in its previously substandard accommodation, its ‘picturesque’ appearance was probably not their prime concern.

The Council had originally commissioned the Louis de Soissons partnership (he had been the chief architect of Welwyn Garden City) to design the new scheme but opted in the end for cheaper in-house plans drawn up by the Council’s surveyor. (11)  

Still, there is some thought given to its architecture, notably in the deliberate attempt to replicate a Cornish idiom with a varied use of granite and tile facings and light-rendered frontages.  Its clean and well-equipped modernity won’t attract tourists but must have been very welcome to new residents. 

Tamar Street: no. 10 lies at the top end; the former Passage House/Boatman Inn at the end on the right

Tudor Close

The first homes (allocated to families displaced by slum clearance) were opened in 1960 by the Conservative Minister of Housing of the day, Henry Brooke for whom Brooke Close in the scheme was named. The development as a whole was completed in 1962.

Brooke Close

More council housing was built in Saltash and much more could be written about the town’s long history.  Still, you can forgive Municipal Dreams for finding its story of municipal endeavour and achievement inspiring – a reminder what local government can achieve when empowered to serve its community.

Note

My especial thanks to the Saltash Heritage Museum and Local History Centre for their help in providing background and illustration to this post. Do visit their museum and archives.  I also enjoyed visiting Elliott’s Store run by the Tamar Preservation Society. Both are on Fore Street and both are run by hard-working local volunteers who deserve our support.

Sources

1. Peter Beacham and Nickolaus Pevsner, Cornwall, The Buildings of England (2014)
2. AJ Brown University of Bath, ‘The Tamar Bridge‘, Proceedings of Bridge Engineering Conference, 27 April 2007, University of Bath
3. ‘Saltash Finance. Housing Protest’, Western Morning News, November 10 1921
4. ‘Alleged Overcrowding’, Western Morning News,  September 12 1923
5. ‘Saltash Council’s Plans for Better Homes’, Western Morning News, March 11 1925 and Twenty New Houses for Saltash Council to Build a Better Type’, Western Morning News, April 15 1925
6. Western Morning News,  July 13 1938
7. ‘Housing Problem Near Solution’, Western Morning News, June 16 1950
8. Bridget Callard, Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey, Historic Characterisation for Regeneration: Saltash (September 2005)
9. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 28 September 1956, Cornwall County Record Office
10. AD1338/1, 1956 Correspondence re Passage House Inn, Cornwall County Record Office
11. Saltash Borough Council Housing Committee Minutes, 3 August 1956 and 28 March 1958, Cornwall County Record Office