The Manor Estate, Sheffield: ‘the worst estate in Britain’?

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

In 1995, after a local school had been destroyed in an arson attack, the MP Roy Hattersley (a former chair of Sheffield’s Housing Committee in the sixties) dubbed the Manor Estate ‘the worst estate in Britain’ –quite a comedown for an estate which had once been one of Sheffield’s showpieces.  The truth, as ever, was more complex but the reality of decline on the now troubled estate was undeniable.

The Estate in the sixties (?): the image shows that the open layout of the estate could be bleak in its exposed setting

For those that moved to the greenfield estate from the slums in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a very different story: (1)

It were great – corn fields and then there were a farm further over and horses – we used to play with horses and run around fields with horses and there were a brook – we used to go paddling down in the brook

By gum, it were like a palace – all the young’uns, they really enjoyed it, beautiful garden, plenty of room in t’ back

One long-term resident, born on the Estate in 1923, remembers his mother ‘always said that our house was a “Shangri-la” compared to where she lived before’.

View of the Manor Estate, with thanks to the JR James Archives

Back then, moving to the Estate was seen as a clear step-up and there were those (as we saw in the Watling Estate in London) who believed that the new council estates heralded a new (and superior) England. The Warden of the Estate’s Community Centre, an idealistic young Cambridge graduate, published the first edition of an estate journal, The Manor and Woodthorpe Review, in 1934.  It would be: (2)

an organ of propaganda for disseminating knowledge – not highbrow stuff but the kind of thing about which every intelligent human wants to know – what his neighbours are doing at home and abroad…a useful tool for helping the Association in its work and developing the cultural and educational life of the people.

And it heralded, he believed, ‘a new age, both in life on the Estate and in journalism’.

This, it turned out, was a little over-optimistic.  The Review folded after twelve issues and the Community Centre’s more didactic ventures proved unpopular.  The Warden’s attempt to force a more serious and self-improving tone by removing the Centre’s billiard and card tables and rebranding the recreation space as a reading and debating room created further rancour and division.

Windy House Lane, Manor Estate (from the JR James Archives)

The Estate’s tenants were confident enough of their own decency and respectability to resist such heavy-handed attempts to impose middle-class norms of behaviour. In fact, one of the virtues of Estate life was precisely its domesticity.  This might entail a rejection of the old (and unwanted) intimacies of slum life too as this exchange between a new arrival and the person next door suggests:

‘Oi, do you neighbour?’, he was asked.

‘No, no thank you I don’t neighbour, love.’ [And, in an aside to the interviewer, he added], ‘I’m not wearing that, no chance, no thank you’.

It was precisely such boundaries – such policed and self-policing respectability – that seemed lost by the 1980s.  A single Daily Mirror article from 2007 can stand for the grand narrative of all that was said to have gone wrong with council housing and its community – once the taxi driver had been persuaded to take the intrepid reporter to the badlands of Manor. (3)

One 67 year-old resident explained she couldn’t ‘take it anymore’.  She went on:

My nerves are shot to pieces and I’m right low. My doctor’s given me Valium to calm me down and help me sleep…The place is overrun by thugs. Recently they shot at my cat with a paint gun. One lad called me a miserable old c***. Days later my windows were smashed.

Across the road, a ‘single mum’ was ‘smoking a cigarette and drinking beer, while two of her four children play in the street with a Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy and a large Alsatian’.  For her the only problem with Manor was ‘mardy old biddies who forget what it’s like to be young and complain all the time’.

Of course, another ‘single mum’ might have been interviewed and a very different story told but the reality of crime and decline was real enough as was the context – the collapse of the local economy.

Hastilar Road South © Stephen McKay and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Between 1979 and 1983, Sheffield lost an average of 1000 jobs a month; 21,000 jobs were lost in the steel industry alone.  Ten years later a survey of Manor found adult unemployment reaching almost 30 per cent – 50 per cent on some streets.  A quarter of the unemployed had been jobless for ten years or more. (4)  This was a community which had had its heart ripped out.

Compare that to the interwar period: ‘Everybody worked that I knew. There were very few people who didn’t have a job back then’.

Wulfric Road, Manor Estate © Richard Vince and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Estate itself had grown old and some of its housing was obsolescent.  Parts of the Estate became hard to let and, typically, it was the most vulnerable and troubled families (those with both a right to council housing and a pressing need which obviated choice) who would be placed there.  To older established residents, the process was clear (and the contrast to those earlier aspirational residents for whom council housing was a step-up is telling):

We seem to have people been brought on to the estate with poverty, with problems until the whole place is like a ghetto.

This trend continued into the nineties.  By 1991 the percentage of Manor households with children and no economically active member had increased from 7 per cent to over 25 per cent in ten years. (5)

But local residents protested that beyond the lurid headlines and attention-grabbing news stories, things were different:

….underneath all that there are very genuine people

It’s got a bad name from people who don’t know it, you got to live here to know it.  It’s just cos houses look rough from outside – it don’t mean people are rough inside.

Regeneration is – for good reason – a dirty word among many housing activists now but there’s no doubt that (short of a revival of Sheffield’s traditional industrial economy) something needed to be done to improve the Estate and the lives of its community.  In practice, the Manor has been a laboratory for the gamut of initiatives which have attempted to revive our troubled council estates.

The Manor Estate

An Urban Programme scheme operated in the 1980s. At the same time 1682 homes were demolished  and some 500 built new. Many of the cleared homes were suffering serious structural defects and said to be beyond economic repair.(6) A loss of 1000 affordable homes might, in another context, seem indefensible but the Estate’s population had fallen by a third in the 1980s.  Some of the new houses were built for sale and by 2003 over a third of the Estate’s homes were owner-occupied.

New build on Fairfax Road, Manor © Neil Theasby and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Manor Employment Project, which ran on the Estate between 1981 and 1987, was an attempt to provide local employment and training.  Well-meaning, small-scale, it had some positive impact but provided very little permanent employment and suffered numerous conflicts and tensions.  It was notable for empowering some of the women on the Estate, many of their menfolk were redundant and perhaps felt redundant in some profounder sense too.

Cleared social housing at Manor Top © Martin Speck and made available under a Creative Commons licence

A second wave of ‘regeneration’ occurred after 2002 with the creation of New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders Programme.  This came to Sheffield in 2005 with all the pizazz and jargon of its type – its intention to: (7)

To build and support sustainable communities and successful neighbourhoods where the quality and choice of housing underpins a buoyant economy and an improved way of life

Laudable objectives perhaps but to be achieved by the contemporarily favoured means – improved housing through selective demolition, refurbishment and new build, support for community resources, and greater housing diversity through mixed tenure and a wider range of housing types. To critics, it was ‘little more than a programme of class cleansing’ and, in other cases (notably that of the Welsh Streets in Liverpool), the demolition of sound homes and threat to existing communities was fiercely opposed. (8)

New build on Wulfric Road

The context for this was what was taken to have been the failure of the traditional council estate model.  We might note that it had succeeded well enough in better times and that it had failed only when comparable economic circumstances would have devastated any community. We might question also the fashionable critique of ‘mono-class’ communities which only seems to find working-class communities objectionable.

Still, this is the world we live in and something needed to change.  In 2007 the council housing stock of Manor was transferred to a new Registered Social Landlord, Pennine Housing 2000.  Around £15m was found to invest in Decent Homes and improve the environment of the Estate.

By 2012, the press could find an alternative narrative for it: (9)

While many people perceive Sheffield’s biggest council estate to be a hotbed of unemployment, teenage mothers and anti-social behaviour, to those who live and work there it’s a homely haven.

Money – investment in infrastructure and community to speak in the technocratic terms anyone involved in housing must now employ – makes a difference and the Manor seems a more optimistic and better regarded place than it was in recent years. Of course, council housing – housing as it does (now more than ever) among the poorest of our society is hardly immune from this country’s broader economic difficulties.  And that makes its role all the more vital.

PS Do read the comments below for some additional information and updates.

Sources

(1) Channel Four, On the Manor (1986 documentary)

(2) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: the History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(3) Julie McCaffrey, ‘This is our Manor’, Daily Mirror, 27 April 2007

(4) Sallie Westwood, John Williams (eds), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories (2003)

(5) Cathy Dean, ‘From consultation to delegation: economic regeneration on a housing estate’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, vol 9, 1995

(5) Matt Weaver, ‘Room for us all’, The Guardian, Wednesday 18 June 2003

(6) See comment by Cllr Howard Knight.

(7) Sheffield City Council, Wybourn, Arbourthorne, Manor Park Master Plan (2005)

(8) The quote is from Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010).  To learn more of the Welsh Streets campaign, visit their excellent website.

(8) Rachael Clegg, ‘Welcome to the Modern Manor, Sheffield’, The Star, 31 July 2012

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Sheffield’s Interwar Council Estates: ‘the pampered pets of the Corporation’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Sheffield built around 28,000 council homes between the wars.  It would also become, in 1926, the first major city to be run by the Labour Party.  Labour’s criticism of the council’s penny-pinching and cautious housing programme was a major factor in jettisoning it to power.  Its subsequent housing programme has arguably been key to its maintenance of power for all but two one-year spells since.

In 1919, however, even the Citizens’ Alliance – the anti-Labour coalition which governed until 1926 – was swept up in the patriotic fervour and political imperative to do something for the ordinary men and women who had sacrificed so much in the Great War.

It commissioned Patrick Abercrombie to draw up a Civic Survey and Plan with the specific brief to formulate a strategy which separated industry and housing.  His 1924 report – which Abercrombie described as the foundation of his later work – recommended zoning of factories and homes and the creation of new satellite towns within a green belt.  Little of this was implemented but Sheffield did construct a number of large cottage suburbs.

The Manor Estate Housing Scheme, 1919

The Manor Estate was the largest of these, built between two and three miles from the city centre, on 470 acres of land purchased from the lord of the manor, the Duke of Norfolk, in 1919. Of this, 350 acres was set aside for 3754 houses – solid two and three bedroom houses with generous gardens, 70 acres for playing fields and 37 acres for public buildings. Construction began in 1923 and some 2697 homes built in the 1920s. (1)

Construction of Manor Estate, 1927 © http://www.britainfromabove EPW018971

The overall design approved in 1921 – a geometrical layout of intersecting circles – owed something to contemporary garden city principles but has been criticised for paying ‘little regard to Sheffield’s natural contours’; the general effect, it has been said, is ‘bleak’. (2)

The Manor in its early years. Stills taken from Channel Four, On the Manor (1986 documentary)

The anti-Labour coalition also showed some early initiative in beginning a large slum clearance programme just a mile south-east of the city centre in what would become the Wybourn Estate.   The Coalition’s drive for economy, however, marked the Estate – tenants were required to pay 2 shillings a week if they wanted hot water and electricity not supplied as standard.

Wybourn © Chris Downer and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Labour was critical of this parsimony and the estates’ lack of community facilities.  On the Manor Estate, for example, there were 3000 school-age children on the Estate and school places (in wooden huts) for just 232 in 1926.  It was critical, too, of the expense of these homes built by private contractors and their poor workmanship.   After 1926 the Council’s Direct Labour Organisation would build most of Sheffield’s new council homes.

The Wisewood Estate © Wikimedia Commons

One of the first estates commenced by the new Labour administration was Wisewood built on farmland in the Loxley valley to the north-west of the city.  Some 901 homes were built here between 1928 and 1931 at an approximate cost of £400,000.

Houses on the Wisewood Estate

The Estate became known as the ‘Buttons Estate’ because so many of the new residents wore uniforms at work – a reminder (as in the Dover House Estate in Putney, known as ‘Uniform Town’) that many of the first council house dwellers belonged to the better-off working class employed in the public services.

However, in Sheffield as elsewhere, greater emphasis was placed on clearing the slums and rehousing slum-dwellers in the 1930s. In Sheffield, 24,374 houses were demolished under clearance and demolition orders by 1938 and – at 44 per cent – its rate of replacement of these homes was the highest in the country.

Parson Cross © Wikimedia Commons

By 1932, there were almost 3600 homes on the Manor Estate and it boasted, by 1939, a population of almost 16,000.  The Council also built a series of massive new housing estates around the city’s fringes – at Parson Cross (where 5362 houses were built), Shiregreen (4472) Shirecliffe (1274) and Arbourthorne (2832).

Wordsworth Crescent, Parson Cross © Terry Robinson and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In some spirit of economy and in the attempt, more significantly, to make these homes affordable to a less affluent working class, the Council reduced the number of larger three bedroom and parlour homes on these later estates.  But it maintained high standards and resisted the charge made by the Ministry of Health that it was exceeding minimum requirements.  It admitted doing so in providing both gas and electricity to homes but refused to reduce its specifications on the grounds that ‘immediate saving would be offset by later cost of repairs’. (3)

Longley Avenue West, Shirecliffe © Neil Theasby and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Council was ahead of the game also in providing community facilities on the estates.  The Manor Community Centre opened in 1933 was the first built by any local authority and in 1938 the Council announced plans for a programme of centres on the new estates at a cost of £120,000.  This moved Alderman Jackson of the anti-Labour opposition to describe the Sheffield’s council tenants as ‘the pampered pets of the Corporation’.

The manifesto celebrating six years of Labour rule in Sheffield placed heavy emphasis on the Party’s achievements in housing

More objective social research gives the lie to such a statement.  Several social surveys were carried out on the Wybourn Estate in the early thirties.  In Wybourn, with a poorer population than some, it was found that 35 per cent of one-time tenants had moved back to the inner-city, chiefly as a result of the relatively high rents charged on council estates – two thirds of interviewees had paid rents of less than 7s before moving whereas a three bedroom council house in 1931 cost 10s 6d to rent.  Just over seven per cent of residents were paying over a third of their wages in rental costs.  (4)

Back then: (5)

There was little help from social services, but your neighbours helped as best they could. If you couldn’t pay, you just had to move to somewhere you could afford.

If ability to pay wasn’t a sufficient check on tenants’ respectability, there also the ‘man who came round and checked you were maintaining your garden properly and if you hadn’t then the council would take some sort of action’.

Although overcrowding was a far greater problem in the inner-city slums where over half the homes exceeded standards, it was a problem too in Wybourn where some larger families had opted to live in smaller and cheaper two-bedroom homes and others had – contrary to regulations – taken in lodgers.  Twelve per cent of homes were overcrowded on the Estate.

Interwar housing on the Manor Estate. The narrow deep windows are a feature of much of Sheffield’s municipal housing in this period. © Keith Pitchforth and made available under a Creative Commons licence

For all that, most respondents praised their new environs and believed them healthier and one tenant described their relocation from Attercliffe to the Manor as moving to their ‘mansion on the circle’. (6)  There are some, knowing Manor’s more recent reputation, that would find that surprising.  We’ll tell that story next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Site Planning of Housing Schemes’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 8, No. 3/4 (Dec., 1920),

(2) Ruth Harman, John Minnis, Sheffield (2004)

(3) Timothy James Willis, The Politics and Ideology of Local Authority Health Care in Sheffield, 1918-1948, Sheffield Hallam University PhD, 2009

(4) Sheffield Social Survey Committee, A Report on Unemployment in Sheffield (prepared by ADK Owen) (1932) and Sheffield Social Survey Committee, A Survey of the Standard of Living in Sheffield (prepared by ADK Owen) (1933)

(5) Rachael Clegg, ‘Peace of mind and happiness on Sheffield’s Manor’, The Star, 20 July 2012

(6) A long-term resident of the Estate quoted in John Flint, David Robinson (eds), Community Cohesion in Crisis? New Dimensions of Diversity and Difference (2008)

The Flower Estate, Sheffield: ‘dainty villas for well-paid artisans’

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Cottage suburbs, Pre-1914

The Flower Estate in Sheffield doesn’t get the attention it deserves but it was a pioneering attempt by a progressive council to create good quality and healthy housing for its working population. And it illustrates how difficult this could be too.

Such housing was desperately needed in Sheffield.  The town’s industrial workforce had expanded massively in the nineteenth century and housing conditions were correspondingly poor.  In 1891, Sheffield’s Medical Officer of Health concluded:(1)

it would be hard to find in any town poorer conditions of property and worse surroundings than are to be found in these central areas of Sheffield…In order to deal with the worst areas nothing less than radical measures will really avail. No mere abatement of the nuisances, so far as is possible under the existing conditions, will suffice.

Such complaints and pleas were legion as the full social impact of the Industrial Revolution became clear but there were rarely either the political means or will to address them.

At length, the means had been supplied, at least in part.  The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes empowered local authorities not only to improve or clear slum housing but to build anew where necessary.

However, few councils took advantage of the legislation in its early years.  The London County Council – as we’ve seen at Millbank and the White Hart Lane Estate – was one exception.  Sheffield was another.

The key to both lay in their radical and ambitious politics.  Sheffield had a proud tradition of working-class organisation and politics but the growth of heavy industry and the trades unionism that went with it by the end of the century now gave this a new cast – I’d say proletarian and collectivist if it didn’t frighten the horses.

By 1893, the Sheffield Trades Council – the federal body represent the city’s unions – was demanding a ‘forward Municipal policy, embracing improvements in working class housing, more libraries and parks and the municipalisation of monopolies’.  And the city’s dominant Liberal Party knew it had to change with the times if it were to retain its influence.

A penumbra of socialists was also active in Sheffield. One, Edward Carpenter, was notorious,  He was none too concerned with mainstream politics but he influenced many, including Raymond Unwin – then working to design miners’ housing close by in north Derbyshire – and Alfred Barton, a local member of the Independent Labour Party, elected to the council in 1907.

Unwin reminds us of the intellectual climate among housing progressives of the day.  Philanthropic industrialists were building model workers’ estates at Port Sunlight and Bournville and Ebenezer Howard was promoting garden cities. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker – who would go on to design the Wythenshawe Estate – were appointed architects to Letchworth Garden City, intended to embody Howard’s ideals, in 1903.

One year earlier, Unwin’s Fabian tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, illustrated by Parker, had provided the ideal for these new workers’ homes.

Quadrangle homes from Cottage Homes and Common Sense

Far more prosaically but of equal practical import, Sheffield had taken its tramways into municipal ownership in 1896 and completed the city’s network by 1913.  The value of this – and the workmen’s fares which accompanied it – was recognised by the Medical Officer of Health who asserted that ‘the new and most excellent tramway facilities will do more to relieve the congestion in the central districts than anything else’.

Nevertheless, early Council attempts to deal with the local housing crisis had proved unsatisfactory.  The expense of the first had led to the building of high-rent tenement blocks which some considered little improvement on what they replaced.  The second – a piecemeal scheme making use of the council’s powers to force landlords to improve their properties – proved too slow and cumbersome.

Both were inner city schemes and their failure led the Council to embrace as necessity the ideal of suburban building.  In 1900 the Health Committee paid £9100 for an area of  greenfield upland at High Wincobank – to the north-east of the then city but close to Firth Park’s tramways and Sheffield’s east end steelworks.

Class A design by Houfton

The Council organised a national competition to design the workers’ cottages to be built on the estate.  The winner was Percy Houfton, a Chesterfield architect, who produced two designs. Both avoided rear projections – seen as restricting fresh air and light – and included upstairs bathrooms and downstairs inside toilets.  Class A houses were double-fronted, Class B houses single-fronted and suitable for terracing.

Class B design by Houfton

The designs were austere with none of the Arts and Craft touches typically favoured by the pioneers of improved workers’  housing but internally they exceeded the ideals of Unwin and Parker.  They were expensive, however.   Rents ranged from 7s 3d (36p) or 6s 6d (32.5p) per week for a three-bedroom house to 7s (35p) for a superior two-bedroom house.

This was a level of rent that led the Garden City Journal to conclude:

the standard of comfort aimed at is beyond the reach of the labourer, for this class the provision of housing remains unsolved.

Houfton’s plan of the double-fronted Class A design

The Council drew the same conclusion. Local architect HL Paterson was commissioned to design cottages to be rented at 5s (30p) a week.  These may have been more affordable to local workers but they were smaller and lacked bathrooms.  Twenty were built.

Heather Avenue single fronted, HL Paterson

Despite this pragmatism, the Council remained ambitious.  Having sent delegations to two Letchworth conferences in 1905, they hosted their own event in Sheffield, the Yorkshire and North Midland Cottage Exhibition in 1907.

In the event, it was the exhibition site’s layout which gathered most notice – the plan of William Alexander Harvey and Arthur McKewan, who had worked together at Bournville, praised for its innovative and picturesque quality, particularly its offset of corner buildings and incorporation of smaller greens and recreation areas within the larger design.

The 1907 site plan designed by Harvey and McKewan. The original Corporation estate can be seen to the bottom right.

The 42 model homes were less innovative but they incorporated many of Unwin’s ideals.  One of the most attractive homes – though not a competition winner – was again the design of Harvey and McKewan.  As the exhibition catalogue describes: (2)  

The aspect of the various rooms have been carefully considered and the whole of the rooms would have sunshine during some part of the day. The coals, WCs, etc. have been kept under the main roof as far as possible, so as to avoid any unsightly projections at the back…A folding bath is provided in each scullery and an Ideal boiler for hot water is also provided.

Harvey and McKewan’s exhibition entry in 1909. Image s2611 reproduced with permission of Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information.© Sheffield City Council Housing Department

The houses today at the corner of Primrose Avenue and Jessamine Road

In general, the exhibition entries were criticised for their rather unimaginative design and poor internal fittings and the Council’s decision to purchase the 42 houses was criticised by urban planners such as the young Patrick Abercrombie who hated their incoherent jumble of styles.(3)

Myrtle Cottages, Primrose Avenue, designed by HL Paterson

Houses in Primrose Avenue by Pepler and Allen

Local Conservatives made a more telling point regarding the £8,391 purchase price. They complained that their necessarily high rents ensured that the Council was merely ‘providing dainty villas for already well-paid artisans’. This charge would be a major factor in the Liberals’ loss of power in 1908.

The Conservatives were to suffer their own housing fiascos and the Liberals duly returned to office in 1911.  They resumed the development of the Flower Estate but the new cheaper houses were smaller and of much lower quality.  Alderman Bailey reflected what had become a conventional view that ‘there was no hope of building houses on the Wincobank estate within the reach of ordinary working men’.

Ironically, the First World War would revise that view. In its aftermath the will and the means would be found again to fulfil at least some of the ideals of the Flower Estate.  The pre-war estate totalled just some 230 homes.   In the interwar period, Sheffield would expand its housing programme massively – as would many other municipalities.  The housing designs and estate layouts pioneered in High Wincobank would prove a major influence.

The Flower Estate itself was completed in 1923.  Stubbins and Brushes estates, begun in the interwar period, to the west in Firth Park both reflect garden city ideals as does the larger Manor Estate.

What all of these estates have in common, including the Flower Estate, is a narrative arc. The estates were founded with a practical idealism which seemed vindicated in their early years.  Strong communities formed and, though the estates weren’t perfect, there was a general recognition that this was housing and an environment of far higher quality than working people had ever previously enjoyed.

And then from the 1970s these estates became the badlands – blighted areas of high-crime and social breakdown.

For anyone charting this trajectory, this response from the Sheffield Forum to the question ‘Flower Estate, what went on?’ is word perfect:(4)

I grew up on the Flower Estate and it did get really rough and tough in the late 70’s and 80’s. According to my parents (my mom lived on there from being a child) the estate was a nice place to live with a good community spirit until the slum clearances of the late 60s and 70s came along. This brought in a lot of problem families which were normally large in numbers.

Someone else comments on the Estate’s heyday, ‘it was a good estate back then.  Everyone looked out for each other, you could leave your doors unlocked…’.

What apparently changed were the new residents and the problems they brought.  At this point, apparently, it became:

easy to get a house [on the Estate] because no-one else wanted to live there.  Before long it was full of undesirable tenants and families…Break-ins were daily, assaults and muggings regular, plus the drug dealing…

Perceptions define reality and none of this needs rebuttal, just context and some caution.

The context lies in economics – the collapse of Sheffield’s local economy and a massive rise in unemployment – and politics – housing legislation which had the effect of increasingly confining council housing to the most vulnerable or troubled.  In combination, they altered the Estate’s demographics and ethos.

Even in 2005, in a period of relative prosperity, over one third of households in Flower were claiming Income Support, double the average in Sheffield.  And the 3000 residents of the Estate would die, on average, six years earlier than even their more affluent local counterparts. By this time, incidentally, 42 per cent of houses were owner occupied.(5)

The caution is simply a reminder of ‘the number of decent folk’ that continued to live on the Estate and the lives lived quietly away from the headlines of crime and social breakdown.

New housing on Hyacinth Road

In the event, the problems were considered so severe and some of the housing in such a bad state – though not the model housing described above – that large parts of the estate were razed.  As is the modern way, a collaboration between private developers, the City Council and local housing associations is rebuilding – ‘affordable’ homes though very little of it for rent as far as I can see.

And within this nexus is a community.  The Flower Estate Community Association was formed in the worse days of the 1980s, run, in its words, by a ‘few women, who have basically worked very hard and along the way have gained a wealth of experience and strong friendships’.(6)  There are a battery of initiatives now and the Association is one of a number of local groups ensuring that the jargon of community regeneration has a meaning for the people who are sometimes treated as its subjects.

Its chair is optimistic:(7)

Some houses have been demolished, others refurbished and we see the new houses progressing each day. We are a nice small estate and it is getting better all the time. We are very proud. We have lovely people here and a thriving community centre

So that’s the Flower Estate.  Judging by the response to the Forum question referred to above – there were 141 posts – there are a lot of people who know the Flower far better than me and care about the Estate deeply.  I’ve learnt a bit about its history but Municipal Dreams aren’t abstract and I’d be pleased to hear how things are working out.

Sources:

(1) Rupert Hebblethwaite, ‘The Municipal Housing Programme in Sheffield before 1914’, Architectural History, Vol. 30, (1987). Much of the historical detail and some of the quotes which follow also come from this source.

(2) Official Illustrated Catalogue, Yorkshire and North Midland Cottage Exhibition, quoted by Picture Sheffield.

(3) Patrick Abercrombie, ‘Modern Town Planning in England: A Comparative Review of “Garden City” Schemes in England’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Apr., 1910)

(4) Sheffield Forum, Flower Estate, what went on?

(5) Flower Neighbourhood Profile, 2005/06

(6) From the Flower Estate Community Association History.  You’ll find much more about the Association’s hard work and struggles over the years here.

(7) Wincobank Estate Arts Project 2008, press release, October 2008

A special thank you to Picture Sheffield for allowing use of the historic image above.

More information and illustrations can be found on the Looking at Buildings pages on the Estate.

The Park Hill Estate, Sheffield: ‘Streets in the sky’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, Brutalism, Multi-storey

You either like or loathe the Park Hill flats. For one thing, they’re hard to ignore – if you arrive by train, you’ll see them immediately, lowering above the steep hill just behind the station. Then there’s their Brutalist look. It’s an ugly term but by strict dictionary definition – a stark style of functionalist architecture characterised by the use of steel and concrete in massive blocks – Park Hill conforms exactly.

© Wikimedia Commons

For all that, much of the Park Hill story is familiar: desperate need, high ambition, official acclaim, sorry decline – from hero to zero like many of the social housing developments we’ve looked at. But Park Hill’s story deserves a closer look and some revision.

The area of Park Hill was: (1)

a close-packed mass of insanitary back-to-back slums and other unfit housing…mingled with outworn, industrial buildings and begrimed with the smoke of the railway and city centre.

Much of the housing had been condemned as unfit for human habitation before the Second World War and slum clearance attempts had begun. But after the war, the City Council decided a bigger and bolder solution was needed. Their model was to be le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation development in Marseilles, completed in 1952.

Sheffield’s own version of these ‘streets in the sky’ was designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith under the guidance of J Lewis Womersley, Sheffield’s City Architect. Construction began in 1957 and was completed in 1961.  The estate was officially opened in June that year by Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Leader of the Opposition.

© Copyright Dave Hudson, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

There were 996 flats, housing around 3000 people, (2):

so planned as to give each household privacy and quiet despite the essentially communal nature of the project. . . Each dwelling, irrespective of size, is provided with a large sheltered balcony where small children can play in the open air, where a pram can be put out and on which an occasional meal can be taken.

The flats fronted on to the 3 metre-wide street decks which are one of the best-known features of the estate, wide enough for a milk float and friendly enough to allow easy socialising with neighbours.

Externally, the blocks harnessed the steeply sloping site, maintaining a flat roof line but ranging from four storeys high at the top of Park Hill to 13 at the lower end.

The 32 acre site also contained four pubs, 42 shops (including ‘the best fish and chip shop in Sheffield’ according to many), a community centre, social clubs, a health centre, dentists and nursery and primary schools. Grenville Squires – a caretaker on the estate for 26 years, one of a team of twelve – says it ‘was like a medieval village; you didn’t have to leave.’ (3)

And far more than many other developments, there were strong attempts to maintain and develop a community feel. Those decks were ‘allegedly the product of close study of working-class life by [the architects] who sought to reproduce the safe and sociable streets of yore without the danger and din of traffic’. (4) Old neighbours were housed next to each other, former street names were re-used, even the cobbles of the terraced streets were used to pave the pathways down to the station and city centre. 

Municipalism’s vocabulary rarely soars. Alderman DW Gascoigne, Public Works Committee deputy chair and leader of the City Council, stated simply: ‘A squalid area has been transformed into an area where human beings can live in dignity.’ (5)

Less than forty years later, ‘dignity’ was the last word that many would have associated with Park Hill. Concrete fared less well in the colder, wetter climate of Yorkshire than in Marseilles. People complained about the lifts not working and problems with noise. The Garchey refuse disposal system – ‘from sink to incinerator’ – broke down frequently and certainly couldn’t cope with disposable nappies.

© Wikimedia Commons

More significantly, the estate had acquired an evil reputation – those ‘streets in the sky’ were now said to be the perfect getaway route for local muggers. The estate was seen as ugly and criminal – ‘a cloud of bad breath hanging over Sheffield’ and a terrible symbol of the city for those visitors by rail.

Brutalism never seemed better named and had the flats not been controversially Grade II* listed in 1998 they would perhaps have been demolished.

Park Hill was taken by many to be another nail in the coffin of social housing and its grander architectural ambitions.

Let’s examine this view. Firstly, the simple but too often forgotten point needs to be made that it represented far better housing than any the vast majority of its tenants had ever known (6):

It was luxury. Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night, when it’s all lit up.

Then there’s the possibly apocryphal remark that is often quoted of one satisfied resident: ‘You think I live in council housing.  I’ve got a penthouse.'(7)

© Wikimedia Commons

Secondly, nearly all speak of a tight-knit and supportive community. Often these views held even as Park Hill was being designated the Sheffield badlands (8):

Everybody seemed to get on with their neighbours and there was a strong bond between families and the friends I made there I regarded as friends for life.

I lived there most of my life. No one who didn’t live there, can say anything bad about it at all. We all stuck together and looked after each other and felt safe.

Such comments are readily dismissed as rosy-hued nostalgia. But shouldn’t the views of actual residents be privileged over the urban myth and moral panic of much of what passes for social commentary in relation to working-class communities – from Victorian times to the present?

More objectively, the estate’s resident sociologist – there really was one – reported outstanding success and ‘an exceptionally vigorous tenants’ association’ in the estate’s early years.

But the fact of later decline is undeniable. What changed?

© Wikimedia Commons

We can blame the council (or, more sympathetically, the tightness of local authority budgets) for poor maintenance.

Some tenants also blame the council for its allocations policy: ‘They gave anyone who wanted one a flat’; ‘problem people’ were concentrated in the estate rather than being ‘spread around the council housing stock’.

With greater distance, maybe we see here the impact of the political and economic whirlwind that ravaged Sheffield in the 1980s – and the reasons why Mrs Thatcher’s demise may be less lamented in Sheffield than elsewhere.

Labour’s well-meaning 1977 Homeless Persons Act placed strict duties on local councils to house some of society’s most vulnerable people. But it was followed by Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy and virtual ban on the building of new council housing.

Then came the decimation of the local economy. A sixth of the local workforce – some 40,000 people – lost their jobs as the local steel industry collapsed. Unemployment in the city as a whole reached 15 per cent in 1984.

One resident recalls Park Hill as ‘a marvellous place to live’ into the late 70s, a time when ‘everybody seemed to work…a thriving community’. The contrast is obvious.

So let’s not blame the design. Ivor Smith, one of the original architects, rejects the label ‘Brutalist’ (or, at least, its connotations): ‘We didn’t think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys’. Asked if he would have done anything differently, he said the flats should have had windows onto the decks – ‘a street has windows at street level’ – but cost-saving at the time had ruled this out. (9)

And let’s not condemn those practical dreamers who believed in society’s duty to house all its people well and built housing on a massive scale to do it.

The Park Hill story is not finished. In 2003, the Council outlined a new vision for the estate as a ‘vibrant, mixed tenure estate with owner occupation, rented and affordable for sale properties with high quality retail and commercial premises’. Park Hill, they hoped, would become ‘a fashionable city centre address’.(10) Urban Splash were appointed developers in the following year.

At this point, alarm bells may be ringing. A process of gentrification, involving the further marginalisation of social housing, is plain. The Council has stipulated that one third of the 900 new flats will be ‘affordable’ but, of these, two-thirds – just 200 – will be for social rent. The price of the flats for sale is generally higher than former residents can afford.

Could things have been done differently? I’m not close enough to know and it’s obvious that we live in a very different world – for good and ill – than the one inhabited and imagined by those earlier municipal reformers. It is private money and privatised aspirations that are creating the new Park Hill.

Old and new: refurbished flats to the right © Keith Pitchforth, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Urban Splash are good self-publicists and there is certainly a buzz around Park Hill and a flair in its refurbishment that will provide the estate with a new lease of life.

But I’ll leave the final word to someone who loved the estate in its former heyday, Grenville Squires (11):

She’s lovely. She’s my mistress, the only lady who’s fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she’s got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.

Sources:

(1) ‘Sheffield Replanned’, 1945, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(2) JL Womersley, City Architect, 1955, quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(3) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(4) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture. The History of a Social Experiment (2001)

(5) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

(6) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(7) Quoted in BBC South Yorkshire, Park Hill, 2007, as are most of the following quotes from tenants.

(8) Quoted in Rowan Moore, ‘Park Hill estate, Sheffield – review‘, The Observer, 21 August 2011.

(9) Quoted in Rachel Cooke, ‘How I leant to love the streets in the sky‘, The Observer, 23 November 2008.

(10) Sheffield City Council, Park Hill, 2003.

(11) Quoted in The Open University, Park Hill, Sheffield: continuity and change.

Owen Hatherley provides a very critical perspective on Park Hill’s renovation in ‘Regeneration?: what’s happening in Park Hill is class cleansing‘, The Guardian, 28 September 2011.

Edward Platt, ‘Multi-million-pound make-over for Sheffield’s notorious Park Hill Estate‘, The Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2012, is more positive.

There are good blog postings on Park Hill.  Single Aspect‘s blog on social housing is well worth following and has an entry on Urban Splash’s renovation. Sid Fletcher writes with passion on Park Hill in a guest post on Wondrous Places. The Wookie has images of Park Hill shortly before the renovation.

Urban Splash have a large site on their Park Hill project with some background information – and full details of properties for sale if you’re interested.