The Low Hill Estate, Wolverhampton: ‘a popular place to live’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

We left the Low Hill Estate last week in 1939 very largely complete.  It was never a model development – it was too marked by the social and economic pressures and constraints that have always shaped council housing to be that – but, having escaped the Second World War virtually unscathed, it could face the future with some confidence.  In practice, however, by the 1970s the woes that afflicted so much of our council housing of this period had left it bloodied…but ultimately unbowed.

Fifth Avenue

It’s true that back in 1946 its then residents weren’t exactly effusive.   A contemporary survey found 69 per cent of residents thought the Estate ‘nice’ or ‘all right (no enthusiasm)’ but there were grumbles about some of the homes in which cost-saving measures had left concrete floors and unplastered kitchen walls.  More significantly, there were many – one in six – who thought the Estate ‘too mixed’.  Their complaint? –that ‘slum people should not be mixed with decent people’. (1)

Dickinson Avenue

There was a second survey in 1971 at a time, it’s worth noting, when unemployment on the Estate stood at just 4 per cent.  (Around one in three of the workforce were employed on the nearby industrial estate.)  Still, the ‘most common complaint was that the estate was “going downhill”’ or, as one resident put it, ‘some areas have become slums due to scruffy people turning the place into a pig-sty – not digging the gardens, not repairing the houses and going about looking scruffy…’.

There was also anger with the Council over the lack of repairs and poor maintenance of the Estate.  This was new; no-one had made this complaint in the 1946 survey but now 77 per cent of the sample felt the Council negligent.  Parts of the Estate had become hard to let and the survey concluded that Low Hill had: (2)

already found itself locked in a spiral whereby few people other than those in desperate need of accommodation will choose to live there and, because people in desperate need of accommodation tend to come from those sectors of the community which are looked down upon by ‘respectable’ people, their presence serves to further lower the reputation of the estate.

Another change was that there were now ‘at least 200 “coloured immigrants” on the estate’.  This was not unconnected in the specific sense that some felt – plausibly perhaps – that Wolverhampton’s new citizens were being housed disproportionately on what had now become an unpopular estate.  The tensions common in the area at the time around the arrival of new neighbours from the ethnic minorities probably added a sharper edge to this concern.

The Low Hill Community Centre, opened in 1937, currently undergoing refurbishment as part of a new ‘Community Hub’

Beyond all this, there was the usual anxiety of middle-class social commentators that the Estate was not community-minded enough.  In fact, almost two thirds of the men interviewed had been to one or other of the nine local pubs in the last month and forty per cent of the sample had close relatives living on the Estate.  This might remind us of the type of intimate working-class community that some felt had been lost in the new ‘anonymous’ council estates but it didn’t suit the more ‘improving’ types who wanted tenants to make better use of the library (only one in five did so) or the community centre (used by even fewer).

Panelite pod extensions, single- and two-storey

Practically, there was real discontent around some of the unmodernised homes of Low Hill – those still with downstairs bathrooms and outside toilets.  The Council began an improvement scheme in the early 1970s, adding ‘Panelite pods’ to the rear of some 374 properties.  Forty years later, as part of the £400m Decent Homes initiative in the borough, it was found these ‘botched extensions’ were seriously defective and unsafe; £20m was spent on rectification. (3)

Much has happened in the interim.  By 2001, Goodyear, Eveready and a number of other local works had closed and unemployment stood at around 15 per cent.  The Estate was blacklisted by insurance companies and banks: (4)

By the late 1980s three generations lives had been blighted by the scourge of unemployment and social instability. Many families lived on benefits and young people were growing up disillusioned. The condition of the homes had also deteriorated.

Low Hill, 1970s – from ‘Urban Decay Wolverhampton 1990-2000’ on SkyscraperCity.com

Many houses were empty and this sense of blight, combined with the antisocial behaviour common at the time, gave the Estate a poor reputation.

The offices of the Bushbury Estate Management Board

This was the context when, in April 1998, the Bushbury Hill Estate Management Board – a tenant management organisation – took over the day-to-day management of much of the Estate, local residents concerned by its deterioration and neglect and alarmed by a secret Council report which proposed the Estate’s demolition.

Homes on the corner of Dickinson Avenue and Annan Avenue

Subsequently, the energy of the Board coincided with a time when there was a real drive to rescue estates up and down the country from a period of prolonged decline. This is a fraught, not always benign process particularly where ‘regeneration’ has been reduced to a fashionable demand for ‘mixed communities’ and higher density.  But in Low Hill its effects seem positive.

Goodyear Avenue

The Estate has been subject to a range of initiatives, most importantly New Labour’s Decent Homes initiative already touched on but including the Cities Strategy Pathfinder scheme in 2006 (‘allowing new approaches to tackle high unemployment, social exclusion and child poverty’) and an NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust scheme to build a new primary and community care centre in Low Hill, authorised in 2007 and now open, the latter – as was the way – a PFI initiative and public/private sector partnership. (5)

Third Avenue

‘Regeneration’ also took the form of demolition – around 500 houses were rased, including Barrie Crescent and part of Keats Road on the Scotlands and Purcel and Humphries Road and parts of Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue and Broome Road in Low Hill. (6) The irony of demolishing social housing when overall need remains high is inescapable but in this case the overall context of community renewal seems genuine even if the stress on mixed tenure and social mix remains controversial to some.

The latter is best seen in the fifty new ‘eco-friendly’ homes – ‘a mix of market sale, HomeBuy direct and social rented two and three bedroom homes’ – began in 2010 in Showell Park, Low Hill, when a £3m grant from the Homes and Communities Agency was added to the Keepmoat Homes’ funding of £1.5m from the National Affordable Homes Programme and £1.2m GAP funding, not forgetting the ‘nearly £300,000…invested through the HomeBuy direct programme’ previously.  I hope you followed that. (7)

To me, this all seems far more complex and costly than it need be – public investment and municipal initiative worked well enough in the past without high finance and the private sector taking its cut.  But it does seem to have benefitted the Estate.

Meanwhile, at the coalface, the Estate Management Board has been successful in improving services and raising morale, to the extent that the Estate is now said to be ‘a popular place to live’. (8) Currently, the Board is recommending a stock transfer from Wolverhampton City Council to the Wrekin Housing Trust subject to tenant ballot.

Let’s hope it all ends happily ever after.  The Low Hill Estate tells a complex tale – a story of a national and municipal drive to decently house our people and the politics and economics that have, in practice, always made this an imperfect exercise.  I won’t pretend that I don’t prefer the simpler narrative of earlier years – the national and local state as provider and as a direct expression of collective democratic will. Personally, I think that model remains compelling but, right now, I’m happy that Low Hill will continue to provide good quality homes and necessary services to its community.

PS: Please read the comment posted below by the Bushbury Estate Management Board for a fuller and sharper view of the estate’s earlier problems and the tenants’ role in its revival.

I have also posted a further set of images on my Tumblr site to show how blighted parts of the estate were by the early 2000s.

Sources

(1) Tom Brennan, Midland City: Wolverhampton Social and Industrial Survey (1948)

(2) JP Smith, Low Hill: Study of a Wolverhampton Housing Estate, Wolverhampton Young Volunteers, 1971

(3) Express and Star, ‘£20m work starts on botched Wolverhampton council house extensions’, August 27, 2013

(4) The unemployment rate comes from NOMIS, Labour Market Profile 00CWFK: Low Hill (2001); the quotation from Bushbury Hill Estate Management Board (ND)

(5) ‘Black Country News: £5m boost for deprived areas’, Birmingham Mail, 11 August 2006 and Tony Deeley, ‘City families in £60m tonic; Windfall for health and care centres’, Birmingham Mail, August 21 2007

(6) Reanswolf, in the thread ‘Urban Decay Wolverhampton 1990-2000’ on SkyscraperCity.com

(7) Homes and Communities Agency, ‘Work starts on fifty new “eco-friendly” homes for Low Hill, Wolverhampton’, March 1 2010

The website of the Low Hill Community Association gives full information on the wide range of activities being run on the Estate.

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Wolverhampton’s Interwar Council Estates: ‘tenanted by respectable residents’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Wolverhampton was another council controlled by the Conservative Party between the wars and yet, with over 8000 council homes built in the period, it was one of the biggest providers of council housing in the country. Its largest estate, Low Hill, in particular captures well the mix of municipal pride and relative affluence that would shape this new, council-housed, working class.

Dickinson Avenue on the Low Hill Estate

Before 1914, the Corporation had built just 50 homes – rather grim so-called cottage flats; in fact tenements in an austere barracks-like building (since demolished) erected in 1903 on Birmingham Road.  The War, you don’t need to be told, changed everything and when the Government-mandated survey of housing needs in 1919 revealed an immediate demand for 5659 new homes, the Council resolved to build them all. It was reckoned that over one in five existing homes in the borough were unfit or overcrowded. (1)

The question arose who should be the tenants of the new homes.  Naturally, ex-servicemen and those in unhealthy housing were given priority but the Town Clerk was candid in his view of the difficulties of the latter:

Generally speaking, the class of tenants who inhabit overcrowded or insanitary houses is not the class to which it will be desirable to let the new houses being built, and if some method could be devised it would be desirable that these houses be tenanted by respectable residents…It might be desirable to require some evidence of character and reserve the right to refuse unsatisfactory tenants…This question, however, will probably settle itself on economic grounds since the rents of the new houses are bound to be high and the class of tenant I have in mind will usually be the least able to pay high rents.

His prejudice against slum-dwellers notwithstanding, the Town Clerk was right on the last point at least: the early post-war homes, three-bedroom parlour houses costing almost £1000 each to build, were let at an average of 14s a week including rates – a figure well beyond the reach of the poorer working class.  Meanwhile, the hope remained that the latter would ‘filter up’ into the slightly better accommodation vacated by their ‘superiors’.

Homes on the Green Lane Estate © John M and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Construction began in 1919 and the first houses in Green Lane (off Birmingham Road near the town centre) – said to be the first new council homes in the country – were opened in November 1919.  Larger-scale building took place on former farmland to the south-west of the town at Birches Barn and on Parkfield Road, a brownfield former colliery site on the border with Bilston.

Housing Estate under construction, Low Hill, from the south-west, 1927 © English Heritage http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk EPW017919

The Corporation coat of arms and date of construction can be seen on a number of Low Hill homes

By 1923 around 550 houses had been built on these estates.  This was some way short of the Council’s target but numbers took off with the Council’s purchase of 101 acres of land from the Showell Estate and a further 232 acres from the Low Hill Bushbury Estate Company, two miles north-east of the town centre, in 1924.  Construction of the Low Hill Estate began the following year.

By 1927 1892 houses, generally three-bedroom homes with parlour and scullery, had been erected.  To save money (and allow more affordable rents), some homes were built with downstairs bathrooms and outside toilets.  To speed construction, around 700 homes were of ‘non-traditional’ construction, built by MA Boswell of no-fines concrete cast in situ.  Both of these would prove to be problematic in the future as we’ll see next week.

Fifth Avenue, illustrating the rather open nature of parts of the Estate criticised by some

The planning of the Estate was subject to earlier criticism.  Whilst its layout paid lip-service to garden city principles with a typical geometrical pattern of circuses, curving streets and cul-de-sacs, it shared, according to one critic, ‘with the worst garden suburbs the attribute of being literally planned out on a drawing board with compass and ruler with no thought to the lie of the land’. (2)

Both were founder members of the Low Hill Tenants’ Association and they remind us of a time when many local councillors lived in the heart of their community. Their photographs are on the wall of the Low Hill Community Centre.

There were complaints too of the lack of community facilities on the Estate.  In fact, an active tenants’ association had acquired land for a recreation ground – which the Council had neglected – in 1928.  The Council planted trees and shrubs and turfed some open spaces to improve the appearance of the Estate.  Land was sold to a local doctor for a new surgery in the same year.  (The Park Lane Welfare Clinic would open at the southern fringe of the Estate in 1938.)

Showell Circus, the estate shops and post office are shown to the rear

The expansive Showell Circus, at the heart of the Estate, was completed at this time and has since become the first traffic island in the country to be awarded village green status.

The Bushbury Arms, November 2014

Less healthy perhaps but more welcome to some was the opening in the same year of the Bushbury Arms on Showell Circus. Extended in 1930 and with its own assembly hall and bowling green, we can forgive its owners Butler’s a little licence in their description of it as a ‘wonder’. (3)

The Bushbury Arms assembly hall, 1929 © Bev Parker

A rear view of the Bushbury Arms, taken in 1928, showing the bowling green © Bev Parker

It’s a fine example of the new-style hostelry that the brewers were building in the thirties as they sought to reach out to a wider and more respectable clientele.  (Or, rather, it was as when I visited the Estate last month, the pub had closed although there are plans to re-use the building.)

Low Hill Library shown from Showell Circus

Municipal pride and more improving diversion were ensured with the opening of 1930 of Low Hill’s library, facing the pub – almost as a reproof – across Showell Circus. The City Engineers went to town on this, designing an ‘octagon, with striking moderne horizontal lines, a classical portico and an arts and crafts entrance lobby and internal partitioning around an open-plan, light and airy interior’.  To a proud City Librarian, it was ‘a beacon light’ shining across the ‘vast estate’. (4) The Library was Grade II listed in 2004 and has been, since October 2014, part of a new ‘Community Hub’ comprising the adjacent community centre (opened in 1937) and a later nursery.

Beyond all this, and perhaps most importantly to any functioning community, there was work.  An industrial estate (a legacy of the Fallings Park Garden Suburb) had been built to the south of the Estate on Park Lane.  Eveready Batteries, Lucas Aerospace and – the largest employer with a payroll of 5500 as late as 1971 – Goodyear Tyres were among the companies established there.

Goodyear Avenue, Low Hill, named after the largest local employer

Elsewhere, construction of new council homes slowed in the later 1920s but the 1930 and 1935 Housing Acts and the Borough’s own clearance efforts placed new emphasis on rehousing slum-dwellers.   In the later thirties, new estates were developed to the north at Elston Hall and Wobaston and the Scotlands Estate was built to the north-east of Low Hill. Though it was better laid-out and its homes superior, Scotlands was poorly serviced and, housing a less well-off working class, it always suffered from a reputation as a poor relation.

Homes at the corner of Thorne Avenue and Goodyear Avenue with original concrete garden walls in place

By 1939, the Low Hill and Bushbury Estate comprised 4320 houses, over half Wolverhampton’s council housing stock.  It was one of the largest estates in the country.  We’ll look at its post-war story next week – a salutary tale of municipal dreams turned sour, of hopes dashed but reborn.

Sources

(1) This detail and some other which follows comes from George J Barnsbury’s exhaustive History of Housing in Wolverhampton, 1750 to 1975

(2) JP Smith, Low Hill: Study of a Wolverhampton Housing Estate, Wolverhampton Young Volunteers, 1971

(3) Bev Parker, W. Butler and Company Ltd, ‘Some Butler’s Pubs’

(4) The first quotation is from Alistair Black, Simon Pepper, Kaye Bagshaw, Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (2009).  There’s an excellent, fully-illustrated, description of the library in the website Wolverhampton’s Listed Buildings, Low Hill Branch Library.  The City Librarian is quoted in the official English heritage listing text.