Bright, Breezy, Bracing Bridlington: Part 2

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1950s, Bridlington

I’m very pleased to feature the second of two new guest posts from Peter Claxton recounting Bridlington Borough Council’s significant council housing programme and its vigorous efforts to promote the town as a seaside resort. (Peter has contributed earlier posts on the history of council housing in Cottingham.) He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century with particular emphasis on public health and housing.

…they were the best houses the Corporation had ever built, surpassing those in other parts of the town. (1)

In my previous blog I examined the varying fortunes of the two diverse parts of Bridlington, The Quay and Old Town during the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century; a period that witnessed the start of municipal provision of housing for the working classes and support for the burgeoning leisure market. In this follow-up blog, I pick up the story as the demands placed upon the borough council by both the ‘local populace’ and ‘leisure interests’ intensify.

The actions of Bridlington Borough council during the 1920s mimicked those of many other seaside authorities. Bournemouth, Folkestone, and Southend had spent £171,000, £96,000, and £135,000 respectively on seafront attractions. (2) North of the harbour, new colonnade shelters and a wide deck promenade provided seating for 3000 people, as well as cover in the unlikely event of an inclement day by the North Sea. Nearby the new Beaconsfield tennis courts catered for the sportier type. However, further development of the north shore – as detailed in the Bridlington Corporation Act, 1920 – was scaled-back and attention switched to the south shore.

Beaconsfield tennis courts and colonnade shelters (EPW023156) ©Britain from Above

South of the harbour, 1926 witnessed the opening of the art deco New Royal Spa Hall, built at a cost of £50,000. Sadly, the pleasures derived from visiting this attraction were short-lived. Also, the golf course was now in municipal hands and work had already started on a new sea wall south of the Spa. Completed in 1928, it was named after the Princess Mary.

New Spa Royal Hall 1926 (EPW023157) ©Britain from Above

Yet not everyone benefited from the new attractions and rising visitor numbers. One disillusioned council tenant questioned how: (3)

The town expects to get any rates when all the people who are staying here are in camps. There are many like myself who depend solely on visitors.  

Although the change in the ‘holidaying habits’ of visitors affected many of the town’s residents financially, they also presented a new opportunity for the council. It quickly sought to accommodate campers on a purpose-built site south of the town. (4)

Committed to build on foundations recently laid, a lecture at the Spa Theatre by J.W. Mawson titled ‘Town Planning and the Future of British and Continental Health Resorts’ offered the council a way forward. (5) His father T. H. Mawson – once referred to as the Capability Brown of Empire – was a leading landscape architect and town planner. One-time president of the Town Planning Institute, he was offered the position of visiting lecturer following the founding of a chair in civic design at Liverpool University by Lord Leverhulme. 

Engaged to formulate both a statutory town planning scheme and a comprehensive development plan for the town and sea front, neither came to fruition. Inter-authority wrangling over apportioning costs relating to the town planning scheme and the radical nature of the proposed town and seafront redevelopment scuppered the council’s ambitions. Fortuitously, the council engaged the services of a bright young architect, Percy Maurice Newton.

Previously employed by the Corporation of Hull, Newton’s work at Bridlington – initially in the surveyor’s department – did much to secure the town’s position as a leading east coast resort. In the Old Town during the 1930s, his work included housing off South Back Lane, Marton Road and Baptist Place. Of the latter, a council member noted, ‘truly practical houses always were beautiful, and he thought those houses came as near to that category as any in Bridlington.’ (6)

Baptist Place

South Back Lane

Bridlington, 1938. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Of the 3000 houses built in Bridlington between the wars, 635 were by the council. Yet Newton’s influence on ‘civic improvement’ was to be seen in more than just housing. And in 1930 the opportunity to display his talent presented itself. A new town hall – to replace the harbourside one lost to fire – was proposed and would be strategically positioned between the two parts of the town. Built in the late Wren style, (7) by local firm Smallwood & Sons, the £34,000 build did not place a significant financial burden on local ratepayers. Support from the Unemployment Grants Committee at Westminster reduced the debt to £12,950. (8) Complete with council chamber, offices and ballroom, the building boasted a fan-assisted ducted heating system and rubber surfaced walkways to aid noise reduction.

Bridlington Town Hall

But in January 1932 as the build was nearing completion, disaster struck the town. The 1926 New Spa Hall was also lost to fire. Newton was tasked with designing a replacement and the ambitious target of ‘opening for the season’ was set. Taking direct responsibility for the ‘build phase’, Newton ensured that the Spa Hall, built in 52 days, was ready for visitors by the end of July. His health suffered, and in response, an indebted council financed an ocean cruise holiday to aid his recuperation.

1932 Spa Royal Hall (EPW039058) © Britain from Above

Away from the seafront, Newton also designed a new Senior Elementary School. (9) Eventually catering for 800 children, the first phase of the St George’s School accommodated 400 boys and opened in 1935. The girl’s department followed in 1938. (10)

By the mid-1930s, the dated Grand Pavilion on the north shore was finally demolished. Newton’s 1937 replacement – regarded by some as his most aesthetically pleasing work – was built on the Victoria Terrace Gardens. It was later described as ‘visually … the most successful International Modern style building in East Yorkshire, [and] very much a symbol of a modern forward-looking resort.’ (11)

The new Grand Pavilion, photographed by R. Hartley

Bridlington, 1950. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Across the road from the new town hall, the Newton designed Corporation Electricity showrooms opened in 1939. It was destroyed by enemy action in 1941 and later rebuilt. The municipal power station had closed in 1935 following the town’s connection to the National Grid.

With permission from Bridlington Local Studies Library

Seasonal visitor numbers increased significantly between the wars. With a resident population of around 20,000 during the 1930s, it was estimated that 60,000 visitors were in the town on August Bank Holiday 1935. (12) This was scant solace for the residents. Even the local fishing industry was in decline during this period.

Post 1945, the Corporation moved decisively in an attempt to alleviate the town’s two perennial problems, ‘winter unemployment’ and ‘lack of good housing’. To the south-west of the town a small industrial estate – for light industry – was built, and by the end of the decade, further industrial development would take place at Carnaby, on a former RAF airfield just to the south of the town. Yet in 1951, the town still had 13 per cent of males and 45 per cent of females employed in personal services compared to 4.5 and 20 per cent nationally. (13)

Attracting new industry to a seaside town often proved difficult. The possibility of a tannery – classified as a special industry – being established on the industrial estate was one such example. Deemed that it would have an adverse effect on the town’s major industry, leisure, the County Planning Officer remarked: (14)

A large proportion of the holidaymakers that come to Bridlington are desirous of leaving behind them such things as ‘special industries’ and would cease to come. If such were the case we might be left with a prosperous industrial estate but a decadent health resort.  

There was after all, the title of ‘King of watering places’ to take into consideration.           

With almost 1300 families requiring rehousing, the council compulsory purchased 86 acres of the Bessingby Estate. The award-winning West Hill estate designed by Clifford E. Culpin, welcomed its first tenants in 1949. (15) Close to 800 homes would eventually be built on the West Hill site; almost two thirds of the council’s post-war provision.

Proposed West Hill Estate site (EAW013984) © Britain from Above

Bridlington, 1950. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

West Hill Estate

As the council worked its way through its rehousing programme dark clouds were gathering. The well-established holidaying habits of the town’s loyal seasonal clientele were changing. Coach and rail travel still dominated through the 1950s, but when the axe fell on branch lines in the mid-1960s, Bridlington lost its direct link to both South and West Yorkshire. The motor car gave families the flexibility and freedom to choose alternative destinations. For some, sun, sand, and sangria beckoned.

By 1972 the council had completed its housing provision. Just over 1800 homes had been built by the local authority since 1913. But as with the demise of the Old Town 100 years earlier, Bridlington, yet again, had to re-evaluate its future. Local government re-organisations would come and go, borough status would be lost, and absorption into the area of the East Riding of Yorkshire Council would take place.

Today, many visitors are day trippers, others are owners of mobile homes or static caravans. The ubiquitous guest house still prevails, and the town continually seeks to find new ways to promote itself. Just as the words of a certain James Coates had 200 years earlier. (16)

Peers, knights, and squires, and dames repair

To bathe, and drink, and take the air.

Such situation on the coast,

Such air, such water, none can boast.

References

(1) Bridlington Local Studies Library, Annals 55

(2) Seafront regeneration briefing document, East Riding Archives, BOBR/2/15/4/518

(3) D. Neave, Port, Resort and Market Town: A history of Bridlington (Hull Academic Press, 2000 

(4) Hull Daily Mail, 26 April 1933

(5) Hull Daily Mail, 16 February 1927

(6) Annals55

(7) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An introduction to its History and Buildings (Smith Settle Ltd., 2000)

(8) Hull Daily Mail, 10 May 1932

(9.) Hull Daily Mail, 18 March 1931

(10)  Hull Daily Mail, 16 May 1938

(11)  Neave, Port Resort

(12)  Neave, Bridlington

(13)  K. L. Mayoh, Comparative study of the Resorts on the Coast of Holderness. unpublished M.A., University of Hull, 1961.

(14)  Hull Daily Mail, 1 March 1950

(15)  Neave, Bridlington

(16)  J. Coates, Bridlington Quay, 1813.

Bright, Breezy, Bracing Bridlington: Part 1

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Bridlington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two new guest posts from Peter Claxton recounting Bridlington Borough Council’s significant council housing programme and its vigorous efforts to promote the town as a seaside resort. (Peter has contributed earlier posts on the history of council housing in Cottingham.) He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century with particular emphasis on public health and housing.

Bridlington in winter is a silent place, where cats and landladies’ husbands walk gently down the middle of the street.

T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – in his observations on 1930s ‘out of season’ Bridlington, highlighted a problem that beset – and still does to this day – many of our seaside resorts, the lack of year-round employment. (1) Twenty years earlier when the borough council first contemplated the provision of housing, the Medical Officer of Health laid bare the problem to be faced: (2)

The Corporation will have to be very careful in tackling this question in the future. As Bridlington is a seaside resort the majority of the working classes do not desire workmen’s houses but larger ones, so that their income may be largely increased by taking in visitors.

The task was further complicated by the fact that Bridlington was a town divided, as the old Local Board had noted: (3)

The Old Town is mostly residential and takes the bulk of the labouring classes, whilst The Quay is chiefly occupied by lodging houses and private residences.

Bridlington 1849-50, National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

The arrival of the railway in 1846 came to represent more than just a delineation on a map, it influenced the fortunes of each part of the town. Bridlington Quay was no longer a ‘harbour of refuge’ for the coastal trade or the port through which much of the East Riding’s agricultural produce – predominantly malt – was shipped. And as a result, the Old Town to the north-west slipped into an interminable decline. Within a decade of the railway’s arrival the 600-year-old market was in a state of atrophy. The residences and offices of solicitors, bankers and merchants, intrinsic elements of a former vibrant agrarian economy, were by the end of the nineteenth century, but marcescent reminders of its former standing as a market town. Attestation to the area’s demise was further evidenced by a plethora of insanitary working-class dwellings.

Conversely , as a late nineteenth-century trade directory noted: (4)

Bridlington Quay a mean and insignificant village at the commencement of the present century, [is] now a small but handsome town and seaside resort, with all the comforts and conveniences which [a] luxurious age demands …

The Alexandra Hotel (built 1866), North Bay, 1928 (EPW023341) ©Britain from Above

The Quay, to the south-east of the railway, was the new face of Bridlington, offering entertainment for those that came ‘for the day’ or ‘stayed a week.’ It was, ‘the seaside resort nearest to most of the great centres of population of the West Riding.’ (5) It also attracted the commuter and by 1921, more than 2,800 Bridlington residents worked in Hull or the West Riding, with many residing in villa style houses that populated the new roads close to the seafront. (6)

Cardigan Road

As such, the work of the district council – declared a borough in 1899 – differed at each side of the railway, and by the outbreak of war in 1914, it had erected new housing in the Old Town, and at The Quay, entered the world of entertainment and leisure.

Poster c1913, © Science Museum made available under a Creative Commons licence

Following a visit to Joseph Rowntree’s model village of New Earswick in 1913, it was suggested at a council meeting that: (7)

Rowntree’s cottages in York, they were no doubt excellent in many ways but they could not be erected by the council at anything like the price … Garden Cities – they were not always suitable or satisfactory or cheap.

Words that clearly identified the problems to be faced by the borough council. There was no local benefactor ready to fund provision; agricultural wages were depressed, and other forms of employment predominantly seasonal. These issues would be reflected in the design and size of properties erected. Maximum weekly rents were to be in the region of five shillings (25p) per week, in fact the council hoped that smaller properties might be let at less than four shillings (20p).

Also, there were members on the council associated with the building trade, evidently nervous of the possibility of stepping away from traditional methods of construction. Letchworth was cited as an example, where as well as standard brick construction, alternative build techniques had been introduced. It was noted that ‘many were becoming cracked and [were] generally too-well ventilated.’ (8)

By 1914, the council had built 35 terraced houses – with ten allocated to employees working at the town’s power station – and twelve bungalows. Yet it suffered criticism regarding rents and in particular, the bijou nature of the bungalows for ‘old couples and widows.’ At 300 foot super the three-roomed dwellings were exceedingly small. As a councillor insensitively questioned, ‘How on earth was a fat woman to turn in a scullery such as was proposed …’ (9)

With the town’s sleeping population often quadrupling during the summer months, the sub-letting of rooms became an imperative for many families. (10) The council signalled acceptance of the practice confirming: (11)

[It] had no objection to the taking in of visitors. If they could make a little money that way it would help to pay their rents.

This was a perennial problem for both council and tenants. The council saw the wisdom in building smaller houses, thereby reducing the risk of unpaid rents during the winter months. Tenants were keen on larger properties to augment their income during the summer.

Watson’s Balk (Avenue)

Marton Road

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Ashville Street – council employee housing

Portland Place – council employee housing

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Indeed, there were opportunities galore for those with spare room to let. The privately built New Spa south of the harbour attracted 80,000 visitors within a month of opening in 1896. (12)

© East Riding Archives – made available under a Creative Commons licence

The council responded to the lack of amenities on the North Shore in 1904, erecting a glass and iron Floral Pavilion adjacent to the bandstand on the Royal Princes Parade.

The Floral Pavilion and Bandstand – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Two years later it built the Grand Pavilion at the north end of the Royal Princes Parade. With a seating capacity for 2000, it was in the popular ‘oriental end of pier’ style favoured at many seaside resorts.

The Grand Pavilion – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Everything of course changed in August 1914. A provincial weekly publication summed up the town’s plight perfectly: (13)

But the place had a strangely deserted appearance, where it was usual to see thousands, there were only hundreds. You may write to half-a-dozen boarding houses, and find that any one of them can spare you a room or rooms…  

The town’s Medical Officer of Health’s comments were far more revealing: (14)

Owing to the outbreak of war in August the season proved a failure, … there is no doubt that many spinsters and widows, who rely upon their income and livelihood to come from visitors, are on the verge of starvation.

In 1919, the council’s intentions were made clear when it purchased the 1907 Spa Theatre and Opera House, as well as the original 1896 Spa. The future of the town and its residents, rested with the development and promotion of the resort.

Spa Theatre and Opera House

North-west of the railway, municipal attention turned once more to the town’s permanent residents. But the vagaries of employment in both agriculture and leisure remained. The local Master Builders’ Association continued its crusade for larger properties: (15)

What is needed in a seaside resort is a house of a rather larger type, with sufficient accommodation to enable tenants to augment their income by taking visitors during the season.  

The council’s vision of the way forward, was however, diametrically opposed to that of local builders. There were to be no lavish plans for an inordinate number of large council houses each with spare rooms to rent out. A perceptible change in the ‘holidaying habits’ of those that came to stay for a week  had been noted. Visitors were starting to choose, ‘… camp sites for cheaper holidays free from the irksome rules of boarding houses.’ (16) The age of the tent, converted railway carriages or buses, ex-army huts or wooden bungalows had arrived. (17).

A photograph taken by R. Hartley in the 1930s

In tandem with private provision, house building gradually brought the two parts of the town together. Following a modest build of twelve houses in 1921 on the aptly named Borough Road, construction of the Postill estate began two years later. By the middle of the decade the council had erected approximately 200 properties.

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Borough Road

Postill Estate

Postill Estate

Sadly, an attempt to promote home ownership during the 1920s failed to gain traction. A proposed ‘purchase out of rent’ scheme attracted a mere six inquiries and was swiftly shelved by the council. (18) At the same time, a briefing document regarding the regeneration of the seafront reiterated: (19)

Apart from the fishing industry there are no established industries in the Borough which is purely a health and pleasure resort for the large industrial populations …

The document informed that visitor numbers arriving by train ‘during the season’ had risen from 216,000 in 1922, to 320,000 by 1925, (20) and the town had to move with the times. Visitors were now seeking, ‘… music and entertainments as evidenced by the popular craze for dancing.’ (21) It would take a substantial amount of money, approximately £100,000, and the council was convinced that this was the way forward.

Disappointingly, no matter how busy the seafront was during the summer, it could never sustain the whole town through the winter months. But, as we shall see in a follow-up blog, efforts to increase year-round employment proved contentious. And when ambitious plans for the regeneration of the seafront failed to come to fruition, a subsequent appointment by the council proved fortuitous.

References

(1) R. Knowles and P. Clabburn, Cats and Landladies’ Husbands: T.E. Lawrence in Bridlington (The Fleece Press, 1995)

(2) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1911, wellcomecollection.org

(3) District of Bridlington Local Board & Urban Sanitary Authority Report for 1893, wellcomecollection.org

(4) T. Bulmer & Cos., Directory of East Yorkshire, 1892

(5) D. Neave, Port, Resort and Market Town: A History of Bridlington (Hull Academic Press, 2000)

(6) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction to its History and Buildings (Smith Settle Ltd., 2000)

(7) ‘The Housing Problem’, Bridlington Free Press, 31 January 1913

(8) ibid

(9) ‘12 Cottages to be built’, BFP, 20 March 1913

(10) Neave, Port Resort

(11) ’Visitors and Workmen’s Houses’, BFP, 26 September 1913

(12) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An introduction

(13) ibid

(14) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1914

(15) ‘Boarding-Houses Preferred’, BFP, 1 March 1920

(16) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction

(17) ibid

(18) ‘Purchase out of rent scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 28 April 1927

19. Seafront regeneration briefing document, East Riding Archives, BOBR/2/15/4/518

(20) ibid

(21) ibid

Cottingham’s Council Housing, Part II from 1930: New Forms of Housing Provision

Tags

1930, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Cottingham

I’m very pleased to feature the second post from Peter Claxton on Cottingham. Peter rekindled his love of history at university following his retirement having spent 40 years working in IT. He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. He is currently researching the contentious relationship between private interests and public improvements with regards to health and housing in Kingston upon Hull between 1854 and 1914.

In my previous blog I reviewed the first ‘tentative steps’ made by the Cottingham Urban District Council (UDC) regarding the provision of council housing between 1921 and 1930. In this follow-up blog, I pick up the story in the early 1930s and examine the efforts of the local authority through to the 1960s. It was a time, when for a brief period, provision was undertaken by someone with a national reputation, the village witnesses the creation of the ubiquitous council estate and the local authority ‘strayed away’ from the standard tendering process.

In 1932 with land remaining on the Southwood Estate, for some unexplained reason – possibly hoping to sell yet again at a favourable price – the council purchased land on the north side of the village to erect a further 18 houses. At 1/7d per square yard, it was in fact double the price paid in 1919. Superficial areas were now reduced to 760 and 630 feet super for the three- and two-bedroomed houses. Building again under the 1924 Act, with guidance from TC Slack, Surveyor to the Council, the Park Lane contract was awarded to Robert Greenwood Tarran who at the time was planning his own and subsequently ill-fated garden suburb just to the east of Cottingham.

Robert Tarran

Tarran enjoyed considerable success during the 1930s and 40s, and was known to adopt, when necessary, a somewhat cavalier approach to both business and civic duties. He later became the city’s Sheriff, welcoming the King and Queen to Hull in August 1941 following the heavy bombing raids in May. As Chief Air-Raid Warden, he instigated a personal crusade assisting many of the citizens to ‘trek’ out of Hull each evening to escape the ever-present threat of air-raids. Press exposure and concerns over morale ensured that the early evening movement of citizens out to the countryside, was eventually, placed on a more formal footing.

An advert for Tarran houses in the Hull Daily Mail, 23 August 1934

Tarran houses in Park Lane dating to 1932

Tarran frequently attracted both criticism and publicity in the press. None more so than his company’s involvement as a contractor for the Leeds City Council on the futuristic Quarry Hill flats. Suffice to say that the acrimonious relationships between the parties involved with the build – relating primarily to the pre-fabrication of the blocks with which to cloak the building’s steelwork – extended the project considerably.

Quarry Hill © Leeds Library and Information Service

Yet for Tarran overcoming the on-site casting difficulties proved to be of immense value during the post-war push for prefabricated housing. Under the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, 1944, Tarran Industries manufactured in excess of 19,000 homes. After exhibiting a pre-fabricated house at the Tate in London, he erected, under the public’s gaze, his ‘Experimental House’ close to his works in Hull. The four-day process attracted more than 6000 visitors; a tactic he had previously employed in the city during the 1930s when his company built a pair of wooden ‘Cedar Houses’. A benefit of such a house, according to one of the first residents, was that you could ‘hang a picture without swearing.’ When it came to large-scale speedy production, to some, Tarran was the ‘Henry Ford’ of housing! (1)

Ad advert from the Hull Daily Mail, 1 May 1944

By the middle of the 1930s the council completed the Southwood Estate building 20 dwellings a mix of two and three-bedroomed non-parlour houses under the 1933 Housing Act. It was however a swan-song for the Cottingham UDC, as a reorganisation of local authority areas in March 1935 – the second in seven years – resulted in its demise. The same fate befell the adjacent Hessle UDC, with the provision of housing becoming the responsibility of the newly formed and much larger Haltemprice UDC. In Cottingham between 1918 and 1939, seven percent (86) of the houses had been by local authority provision.

Phase 3 of the Southwood Estate

The post-war push for housing was manifest in the immediacy of the actions taken by the Haltemprice UDC. A swift yet temporary measure was the requisitioning of numerous large houses, becoming ‘makeshift’ accommodation for multiple occupancy. On a similar tack, former Ministry of Defence Nissen and Maycrete huts in the district were acquired and converted into temporary housing. One such site close to Cottingham had previously served as a National Services Hostel housing refugees from the Netherlands.

The shortage of accommodation was further tempered by the allocation of 30 AW Hawksley prefabricated aluminium bungalows, the first one completed was opened by Mr Thomas Williams, Minister of Agriculture Fisheries and Food. in 1949. It is interesting to note that with a unit price of approximately £1450, taking a £600 subsidy plus Exchequer grant into account, at just over £2 per foot super, the temporary aluminium bungalows were close to twice the target build price of conventional permanent housing.

AW Hawksley Aluminium Bungalows in Letchworth © Simon Trew and made available by a Creative Commons licence

Thomas Williams, later Baron Williams of Barnburgh; public domain

1960s permanent council housing replacing Hawksley bungalows

The provision of permanent local authority housing from 1946 onwards was achieved in a number of ways, represented today in the form of the Bacon Garth Estate plus a number of smaller ad hoc developments around the village. The post-war estate is now the usual mix of privately owned properties purchased under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, and those that remain within the remit of the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council. Irrespective of the modifications made to many of those properties now privately owned, the estate continues to confirm central government’s post-war intentions of equitable housing for the masses.

Bacon Garth Estate, the Parkway

The construction of the estate at the southern edge of the village, continued on an ‘as the needs dictate’ basis for more than 20 years, and now reflects the changing form of local authority provision. In 1946 the Ministry of Health requested that a minimum of four designs be adopted to avoid monotony and further insisted that a maximum build price of 22/3d per foot super be negotiated, the achievement of which regularly exacerbated the relationships between local authority, contractors and ministry. On one occasion an additional 2d per foot super was deemed unacceptable. Still with a preponderance of agricultural workers in the area – following instructions from the Ministry of Health – a number of horticulturalists were the first to be allocated permanent houses.

1949 Agricultural workers’ houses, Bacon Garth Estate

As an alternative to the standard practice of closed tenders – with contracts invariably awarded to the company with the cheapest quote – used during each phase of construction of the estate, to something a little less formal, the results could be markedly different. On several occasions the council used the Small Builders’ Scheme (SBS), the origins of which were based around a submission to the Ministry of Health by the building trade. Comprising of two parts, the first enabled local authorities to employ a builder to erect houses on his own plot(s) of land and purchase upon completion. The second part empowered councils to provide the land on which properties could be constructed on its behalf.

Using both options, the Haltemprice UDC acquired small clusters of properties around the village. Catering for the building of dwellings of a minimum 900 foot super, at prices that did not exceed those in tenders for comparable properties, there was also flexibility over design. Thus with options to negotiate a build price prior to construction, or purchase price post-construction, councils were well-positioned to procure limited numbers of houses that mirrored private provision. I suspect that today, there are very few, if any Cottingham residents mindful of the origins of these small assemblages.

A good example of the SBS is in evidence at the Hull-Cottingham boundary. Across three phases 52 houses were built along one of the arterial roads from Hull into Cottingham. A variety of designs successfully avoided the monotony so often the case along our main roads. 

Hull Road Cottingham, built 1948 under the Small Builders’ Scheme

Small Builders’ Scheme, looking towards Cottingham

When the opportunity arose in 1947, the council purchased 20 houses close to the centre of the village on the newly built Westfield Estate. And in so doing created an enclave of local authority housing amid those offered for sale. But as the saying goes, ‘beauty is only skin deep’, and one can only hazard a guess as to whether or not the internal finish of houses purchased under the SBS always matched their external appearance.

An incident on the Westfield Estate suggests that sometimes this might not be the case. The baths in all 20 houses were found to be defective and had to be replaced by the council. On this occasion, purchasing post-construction, proved problematical. Efforts to maximise profit margins was often reflected in the internal finish of houses built for sale compared to those built for local authorities through the tendering process and subject to scrutiny during the build cycle.

Westfield Close, built under the Small Builders’ Scheme in 1947

However, by way of comparison, some of the early Bacon Garth Estate houses clearly lacked kerb appeal. Fortunately, they bear little resemblance to the rest of the estate. One wonders what the architect involved with these houses was thinking of when he sat at his desk and came up with the following!

The Garth

However, they did benefit internally from a ‘woman’s touch’. Co-opted lady members were asked to advise on the types of fittings necessary to make the houses more homely. Sadly, the opportunity offered to the ladies was somewhat restricted as they were denied complete freedom to express their opinions regarding ‘all matters domestic’. Oddly, cooking ranges remained the remit of male committee members. A Yorkist type range – Wilsons & Mathiesons or equal not weighing less than 4.5 cwt – had to be fitted!

An advert for Wilsons and Mathiesons Ltd Yorkist range, 1938 © Grace’s Guide

Unusually, when the first estate houses were built, the decision was taken not to erect fencing and gates to the front gardens. It was thought prudent to retain direct responsibility for the appearance of the house-fronts rather than rely on residents whose horticultural ambitions, based on previous experiences, appeared to fall well-short of the council’s expectations.

The provision of local authority housing in Cottingham continued well in to the 1960s. From those rather utilitarian dwellings of the interwar period, to a variety of post-1945 styles that catered for and reflected the needs of differing family sizes and age range. The village was spared any pre-cast ‘bolt and hope’ concrete tower blocks, the medieval church clock tower remaining the tallest structure. Those that fancied living in the clouds could gaze wistfully across the fields to the high-rise developments on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate. All now reduced to hardcore and probably finding a second use as foundations for garage floors.

Yes of course the provision of approximately 500 houses over four decades pales into insignificance when compared to the provision in many of our towns and cities during the twentieth century. But spare a thought for those small urban and rural district councils with limited human resources that were suddenly thrust into the roles of both builder and landlord a hundred years ago. What stories are still to be told?

Sources

(1) ‘Here’s a Real Housebuilder’, Daily Mirror, 25 January 1943  

Cottingham’s Council Housing, Part I to 1930: ‘Simple and Harmonious as a Whole’

Tags

1920s, Cottingham

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two posts from Peter Claxton on housing in the village of Cottingham just north of Hull. Peter rekindled his love of history at university following his retirement having spent 40 years working in IT. He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. He is currently researching the contentious relationship between private interests and public improvements with regards to health and housing in Kingston upon Hull between 1854 and 1914.

Much has been written about the provision of local authority housing in our towns and cities but we should not overlook the fact that of the 1806 local authorities questioned by the Local Government Board in 1918 regarding their housing requirements, many were small urban or lightly populated rural district councils. (1) 

With a population of 5133 in 1921, Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was one such urban district council (UDC). Today, in part, it butts up to the city of Kingston upon Hull, but at the start of the nineteenth century with just 1927 residents it was one of a number of satellite villages that semi-circled the then port town.

Cottingham, circa 1905

Situated just five miles to the northwest of Hull, by the end of the eighteenth century it had acquired a reputation as an ideal place for the ‘well-heeled’ to relocate to and in so doing build their grand houses and lay-out ornamental gardens.

Elmtree House, built around 1820

Newgate House, built in the late 19th/early 19th century

The arrival of the railway in 1846 accelerated this process, with a number of villas and terraces built to house the emerging middle class. Yet there was a problem for all those that relocated. Keen as they were to escape the pervasive smells of Hull’s multifarious processing industries, distance offered them no such guarantee.

With market gardening Cottingham’s primary economic activity – there were 71 nurserymen in and around the village just before WW1 supplying the markets of both Hull and Leeds – the  daily transhipment of night soil from Hull to the fields around the village ensured that no matter how wealthy or upwardly mobile the incomers were, they could never completely leave their pasts behind them!

Low agricultural wages stifled the ambitions of many village residents, yet the desire for improved housing, just like the inhabitants of its much larger neighbour clearly existed. The reduced number made it of no less importance, it was simply a matter of scale. The village was unaccustomed to change, and in general, the UDC – set up under the 1894 Local Government Act consisted of just 12 members – busied itself approving the erection of private dwellings, undertaking nuisance control measures, tarring the roads and maintaining the street lighting.

As elsewhere, following cessation of hostilities in 1918, there was evidence of change. The laying out of new streets extended the built-up area far beyond the village’s traditional nucleus. (2) And as with the vacating of large properties in Hull during the nineteenth century in favour of Cottingham, the same fate now befell a number of those former imposing residences in the village. The vacant properties complete with their large gardens together with numerous unworked smallholdings in and around the village became ideal plots for local builders. Between 1918 and 1939, 1237 houses were built in Cottingham by 95 builders.

In 1918 when it came to the crunch, Cottingham UDC like so many other local authorities, had no experience of building or renting out houses. Enthusiasm could only achieve so much, which in the case of Cottingham, amounted to the purchase of 9.5 acres in April 1919 of the Westfield Estate at the fashionable west end of the village from Archdeacon J Malet Lambert. Viewed by many as a local philanthropist, he also had something of chequered past.

He was however a former and influential member of the Hull & District Sanitary Association, that had continually questioned the efficacy of Hull’s Local Board of Health, pressing for improvements to housing and sanitation within the Borough. So effective were its methods that a Local Government Board enquiry took place in 1888, subsequently making a number of recommendations for the sanitary improvement of the town.(3) Yet Malet Lambert’s philanthropy had limitations, originally offered £125 per acre, he refused to settle for anything less than £200. (4)

Purchasing a piece of land is one thing, populating it with houses is a different matter entirely. The appointment of Hull architect Harry Andrews on a project-only basis was a sound first move by the council. The first phase was for the provision of a modest 50 houses, yet this relatively small number, would in no way be the guarantee to a trouble-free build. Tenders approaching £10,000 for street works and sewerage had an immediate impact on the project. To reduce the civil costs the architect modified the lay-out of the houses positioning them all adjacent to the main road. Costs were trimmed but so was the number of houses, now down to 36. Built by Hull firm Holliday & Barker, they took the form of a single meandering row of 18 pairs of semi-detached houses.

Yet according to a local newspaper, the 12 parlour and 24 non-parlour three bedroomed houses were reported to be: (5)

One of the finest sites in the district, it has been developed to allow the erection of 98 houses, only 16 of which will have a northerly aspect … while somewhat severe in appearance in conformity with the Ministry of Health’s instructions, are exceedingly simple and harmonious as a whole …

Simple and severe certainly, but in no way were they harmonious, not according to many of the locals whose abhorrence towards the stark appearance of the dwellings, had two weeks earlier, prompted an irksome response from a council member who retorted: (6)

There was a most extraordinary and widespread misconception in Cottingham … The people seem to think the council were entirely responsible for the architecture of the houses which had been put up, and for the quality of materials used. This was not so. They had been entirely over-ruled by the authorities at Leeds.

The Southwood Estate, featured in the Hull Daily Mail, 27 October 1921

This was a direct reference to the Leeds-based Regional Housing Commissioner of the Ministry of Health and Housing who held sway over all matters relating to the provision of local authority housing in Yorkshire under the terms of the Housing & Town Planning Act, 1919.

First impressions clearly mattered, and for some of the class-conscious residents at the west end of the village, their dissatisfaction was all too apparent. The first ‘council houses’ were not detached from the village as in many large conurbations where those re-housed would be beyond the tram terminus or omnibus service, and therefore out of sight and out of mind. This was simply an extension to the western end of the village and therefore contiguous to existing properties. Snobocracy appeared to be alive and well in Cottingham and the neighbours were clearly not happy!

Southwood Villa © Bernard Sharp and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Southwood Hall © George Robinson and made available through a Creative Commons licence

No one in the village could question the need for additional housing, it was simply a matter of predetermined expectations. Inside each house the council had dutifully considered the needs of the soon-to-be tenants. All featured hot and cold water, cupboards, a space for a cycle or perambulator and the fitting of a tiled fireplace, and not just a cast iron mantlepiece. The metal window frames – cheaper and more readily available than wooden ones at the time – included a pivot mechanism on the upstairs frames that facilitated easy cleaning of the glazing. In addition the parlour houses had a window to the side to throw light over the shoulder of anyone sitting reading by the fire.

Yet these features did little to assuage the feelings of the neighbours, whose distain was based solely on the external appearance of the dwellings. Through the use of poor-quality commons and their box-like appearance, the houses were deemed to be an incongruous addition to the village. In an attempt to mollify dissenting voices, the council adopted a course of action which at the time was an earnest attempt to remedy the situation. The solution to the dilemma was to hide the brickwork. Each house was to be covered with a roughcast and colour-washed white with Tungaline paint.

An advert for William Jacks & Co Paints © The Priya Paul Collection, Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

And to further improve matters, the exteriors were to be enhanced by the tasteful application of a contrasting dark brown gloss paint to the woodwork!

Southwood Estate houses facing south

Southwood Estate houses facing east

For a time, all was well until the gradual and increasing appearance of brown blemishes to the white-washed walls. To the council’s horror, it was discovered that ironstone chippings constituted part of the roughcast mix and rust had started to leech through to the surface resulting in the mottled finish.

Continuing evidence of rusting

Yet again with good intentions and financial ramifications, the council attempted to remedy the situation by the removal and re-application of the roughcast. Unfortunately the remedial work was not carried out to an exacting standard and the problem is visible to this day. Recently applied external insulation masks the rusting on those properties still part of the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council housing portfolio.

The generous proportions of the ‘Addison Houses’ and high build costs were reflected in the weekly rents. Many early tenants were employed in local agriculture, and at the time of construction, the first cut of what by 1923 amounted to an overall 35 percent reduction in agricultural wages had taken place. (7)  With wages reduced to 24 shillings per week by 1923 there was little wonder that many tenants fell into rent arrears within the first 12 months of occupancy. An appeal to the Ministry of Health secured a reduction of 1/6d per week for each type of house. But with weekly rents of 11/6d or 9/6d excluding rates, it was still necessary for distraint warrants to be issued against persistent defaulters.(8)

High maintenance costs and difficulties with the collection of rents impaired the council’s judgement regarding further housing provision. Finding the whole experience exceedingly troublesome, it had within a matter of 18 months placed on record that an offer for the remaining land it held lay on the table. At 2/6d per square yard (£605 per acre) some three times the price paid in 1919, it proved too tempting an offer. Parcels of land were duly sold to private developers including the North Eastern Railway Cottage Homes. For the remainder of the decade, the council restricted activity to the authorisation of subsidies to private builders under the terms of the 1923 Housing Act. By the end of the decade, 30 ‘subsidy houses’ had been built in the village.

Reticence towards further provision was of course futile. At the start of the 1930s, a modest 12 houses were built on one of the remaining parcels of land. Gone were the generous terms offered in 1919, replaced by the more circumspect grants of the 1924 Housing Act. With a long memory and a Yorkshireman’s vice-like grip of the purse strings, the council did not repeat the mistakes of old. Tucked away behind the rusting white-washed ribbon development, variations in design improved the prospect of the new houses. Yet again commons were the order of the day but thankfully, the temptation to apply a roughcast finish had been resisted.

Phase 2 facing the NER Railway Cottage Homes

NER Cottage Homes

For the council – with still a little land in reserve – it was now a time for reflection. Builders were ‘ramping-up’ private provision locally and those who had ‘Dunroamin’ settled down at ‘Mon Repos’ and ‘Chez Nous’. (9) But, as a follow-up blog will suggest, even in a relatively quiet village things never stay the same for very long.

Sources

(1) Stephen Merrett, State Housing in Britain (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Cottingham UDC was one of the 400 authorities that had replied to the LGB by December 1918

(2) KJ Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars: the example of Cottingham’, East Yorkshire Local History Society, Bulletin, No. 55, Winter 1996/7

(3) During this period the town was often referred to (in print) as ‘Squalid Hull’.

(4)  From the minutes of Cottingham UDC, 2 April 1919, East Riding Archives

(5) ‘Cottingham Housing Scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 27 October 1921  

(6) ‘Cottingham’s New Houses’, Hull Daily Mail, 13 October 1921

(7) Martin Pugh, We Danced all Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (Bodley Head, 2008)

(8) ‘Cottingham Council Houses, Distraint Warrants Issued for Unpaid Rents’, Hull Daily Mail, 9 August 1923   

(9) Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars …’

Gleadless Valley Estate, Sheffield: ‘Symbol of an emerging city’

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1950s, 1960s

Lewis Womersley, having made his reputation in Northampton, was appointed City Architect for Sheffield City Council in February 1953. Many of you of will know his most celebrated project Park Hill but some say his: (1)

supreme, but often overlooked, achievement … is the Gleadless Valley Estate which combined urban housing types and the natural landscape so effectively that it still looks stunning, especially on a bright winter’s day.

Today, we’ll give that scheme its due.

An early, undated, view of the estate

The context, in this steel city, was firstly the appalling housing conditions created by the rapid urbanisation of the Industrial Revolution. Hitler was to add his own contribution: the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940 killed almost 700 and damaged some 82,000 homes, over half the city’s housing stock. As the city looked to rebuilding, its 1952 Development Plan estimated the need to replace 20,000 unfit homes and build a further 15,000 to cater for the natural increase of population.

An OpenStreetMap of the estate created by Gregory Deryckère

Adding to the difficulties of the task were Sheffield’s hilly terrain and restricted borders. An attempt to extend the city’s boundaries in 1953 was rejected; Sheffield had to rely on its own resources. It bought land either side of the Meers Brook – the Gleadless Valley – lying two to three miles south-east of the city centre: ‘a beauty spot considered too steep and north-facing for development in the 1930s but purchased in desperation in 1952-53’. (2)

Elsewhere in the city, the Council looked to high-rise. In 1949, a deputation from the Housing Committee had visited multi-storey schemes in Copenhagen and Stockholm and concluded that these offered both a necessary and attractive way of solving some of the city’s housing problems. By the mid-1950s, density zones of 70 persons per acres had been agreed for greenfield sites, 100-120 for inner-city slum clearance areas and 200 for ‘one great project’ in the city centre. The latter would become Park Hill (and, less grandly, the Hyde Park flats). The Gleadless Valley would be, in its own way, another great project. (4)

The Gleadless Valley offered a rare opportunity for innovative and exciting design and layout but it required a strong council and enterprising Architect’s Department to harness it.  The leadership of the Council came principally in the form of two strong Housing Committee chairs, Councillors Albert Smith and Harold Lambert, who were prepared and able to give Womersley his head.

Lewis Womersley, pictured at Park Hill

Womersley himself – variously described as ‘domineering’ and ‘a no-nonsense Yorkshireman’ – added his own impetus and style. But, despite that powerful persona, Womersley’s key contribution – in an echo of the pluralism of the London County Council Architect’s Department of the day – was to give his team freedom and latitude to develop their own ideas and designs. By 1963 (just before Womersley’s departure for private practice), Sheffield’s Architect’s Department comprised a staff of over 200, of whom 80 were architectural. (5)

Firstly, Gleadless was part of a grand design encompassing the entire city: ‘Sheffield’s situation at the centre of a landscape of hills and slopes was to be visually integrated, united, through public housing’. Harold Lambert believed that: (6)

The careful exploitation of this topography – the building up of hill-top architectural compositions – is gradually producing something of the fascination of the Italian hill towns. It is stimulating; it is exciting!

Callow Mount, photographed in 1984 © Tower Block, the University of Edinburgh

Morland, Leighton and Raeburn, in the Herdings, photographed in 1987 © Tower Block, the University of Edinburgh

Tower blocks were placed at high points in the city to act as landmarks – in Netherthorpe east of the city centre, Burngreave to the north, and Norfolk Park to the south-east. Additionally, two complexes of point blocks were built in prominent points at either end of the Gleadless Valley scheme: six towers at Callow Mount (one of fifteen storeys and five of thirteen) at the top and three thirteen-storey blocks one mile to the south in the Herdings district. Here, as elsewhere, Womersley applied his favourite maxim from the eighteenth-century landscape architect, Capability Brown, to ‘flood the valleys, plant the tops’.

The re-clad towers of Callow Mount with cluster blocks in the foreground

When it came to the valley – ‘a piece of impeccable English pastoral landscape, everybody’s favourite summer-evening stroll out of south Sheffield’ – finesse was applied. The Council first carried out an aerial survey and slope analysis; gradients averaged one in eight, it was said. The planners concluded that the topography divided ‘the development naturally into three neighbourhoods’ – Hemsworth, Herdings and Rollestone – with each, reflecting the community thinking of the day, planned to have its own schools and shopping centre. (7)

Sloped terraces in Hemsworth with the Oaks Water Tower to the rear

Thenceforth:

The natural characteristics of each area have formed the basis for house design and layout. Much research work was carried out in designing house types suitable for the steep slopes, sometimes leading to unconventional solutions.

Here the genius of Womersley’s approach came into its own. Teams of architects were established with specific briefs – some for two-storey homes, some for maisonettes, some for housing for elderly and so on – but the overall vision was to create a truly mixed development with forms appropriate to the landscape in the various areas of the estate. (8)

The estate as a whole, built between 1955 and 1966, would comprise 4451 homes (2387 houses, 1115 flats and 949 maisonettes), housing a population of around 17,200. Of 450 acres in total, housing occupied 267 acres (including ten acres set aside for private housing), and schools, shops and community facilities took up 22 acres. Some 161 acres of the estate were preserved as parkland and woods. Whilst the housing itself reached the prescribed density of some 70 persons per acre, the plentiful open space reduced the overall density to 39 per acre. But, beyond the numbers, its exceptional quality lies in both its vistas and its detail.

Spotswood Mount: patio housing and the Holy Cross Church

The vistas – better seen in person – can speak for themselves. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the detail. To begin with some of the most remarkable and innovative designs, there are the patio houses, seen dramatically on Spotswood Mount below Holy Cross Church (itself a striking design by Braddock & Martin-Smith completed in 1965). These three-bed, two-storey homes are carefully stacked up the steep hill leading to the church, their first-floor living rooms giving sweeping views across the valley.

An ‘Upside-Down’ house on Grindlow Drive, front and rear

The ‘Upside-Down’ houses dotted around the estate were also designed to both exploit and fit their hilly siting and, as the name implies, are constructed with entrances and living rooms on the upper floor and bedrooms on the lower. Again, they provide stunning views.

Sloped terraced housing, Ironside Drive

Sloped terraces of more conventional two-storey homes were another means of coping with the terrain. Three-storey cluster blocks of flats, adapted to the contours, were yet another adaptation. Less attractive – not least through the greying pebbledash that encases them – are the six-storey blocks along Blackstock and Ironside Roads. The (economising) innovation here was the bridged entrance at second-floor level which avoided the need for lifts.

Maisonette blocks on Ironstone Road

In the words of an admiring Lionel Esher, architect, planner and RIBA president in the mid-sixties: (9)

the architects used every kind of ingenious hill-climbing or adjustable dwelling capable of being entered at any level, with results that are both entertaining and economical.

Higher density housing on flatter land was provided in the four-storey maisonette blocks (concentrated particularly along the Gleadless Road in Rollestone) and three-story blocks of flats elsewhere. And then there are the two-storey houses familiar across the country – the key was always variety and ‘fit’.

Three-storey flats off Blackstock Road

It was, in all, a stupendous achievement and the estate became a Sheffield showpiece, celebrated in the City Council’s report Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, published (in English, French and Russian) in 1962 and, ten years later, still shown to official visitors as ‘a symbol of an emerging city’. More importantly, it was popular with tenants who thought they were ‘privileged’ to live there and believed it ‘the finest estate in the city’. Beyond the decent homes and facilities, residents praised ‘the attractive surroundings, greenery and open views’. (9)

Esher, writing in 1981, thought it ‘one of the prettiest suburbs in England and undoubtedly a powerful agent in the embourgeoisement of the Yorkshire working man – whatever one may think of that’. It seems astonishing therefore that some, however unfairly, were describing Gleadless as a ‘sink estate’ not too long after.

Terraced housing on Gleadless Road

Symbolically, the estate’s later fall was marked by the decision in 2013 of Sainsbury’s, following Tesco, to ban home deliveries to the area. More objectively, recent data place areas of the Gleadless Valley among the five percent most deprived in the country. High rates of crime and antisocial behaviour were also reported.

Whatever the figures and the always complex, more mixed reality on the ground, views of the estate – though sometimes from those who knew it least – were damning: (10)

The perception of the estate in local and national media is as one of the worst places to live … In the Sheffield urban folklore, Gleadless Valley is synonymous with deprivation, anti-social behaviour and crime.

What had happened?

Well, for one, there was mass unemployment. For Sheffield as a whole, the unemployment rate in the 1960s stood at 2 percent; by 1984, it had reached 16 percent. Between 1979 and 1983, Sheffield lost an average of 1000 jobs a month; 21,000 jobs were lost in the steel industry alone.  Working communities – in every sense – stopped working.

The current headline rate of joblessness in the city is, of course, much lower but such data take little account of the numbers working in low-paid and precarious employment. The testimony of one Gleadless Valley resident captured the shift: (11)

There aren’t many jobs round here, so no-one has got much money. That’s just the way it is. My dad used to work in a steel mill and when I was at school my work experience was done in a steel mill. If the jobs were there … I would have gone into the same work as my dad. That’s what people always did but those jobs have gone now.

Instead, Jack Clithero was working eleven hours a week at £8.50 an hour in ‘the chippy round the corner’.

Flats on Ironside Road

For those in work and receiving benefits and those who were unemployed, the impact of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’s welfare reforms from 2010 was also devastating. Cuts to Housing Benefit, disability benefits, the impact of the Bedroom Tax and so on were estimated to have reduced the average annual income of working-age adults in Gleadless Valley by £570 – equating, beyond their personal impact, to an £8.8 million hit to the local economy. (12)

There have been other social changes. The growth of smaller households means that the estate, designed for an average approaching four persons per home, is – at 55 percent of its maximum occupancy level – significantly under-occupied. As a result of Right to Buy, just 50 percent of homes are now social rented, 38 percent owner-occupied and 12 percent privately rented. (13)

Maisonette blocks on Spotswood Drive

If all this takes us some way from the architecture and design of the estate, that’s no accident. Of course, there has been some obsolescence. The six-storey maisonette blocks haven’t stood up particularly well. Ground floor garaging in some of the larger maisonette blocks – designed in the car-friendly, affluent sixties – is underutilised and may be adapted.

The now ‘Twin Towers’ of Herdings glimpsed from Ironside Road

The tower blocks were renovated between 1998 and 2011. Their colourful new cladding (thankfully found fire-resistant) makes a visual impact that perhaps even Harold Lambert wouldn’t have anticipated. One tower – Raeburn Place in the Herdings – was demolished in 1996, not through any structural failing but because it was found to have been built on a fault. Flats in Handbank House on Callow Mount are now reserved for elderly people.

In general, the estate escaped large-scale regeneration in its earlier iterations but in 2017 it was allocated £515,000 from the Government’s Estate Regeneration Programme. Resident consultations have followed and various ideas floated. There is a case for new and more diverse housing in Gleadless Valley, for the remodelling of some existing housing and for better use of some of its open space. Residents were clear, however, that they didn’t want the estate sold off to a private developer and it’s a sign of Sheffield’s continuing municipal ambition that it will take the lead role in the thirty-year programme to follow.

Gleadless Valley is not a failed estate, merely an estate that has grown older in a changing world. As Owen Hatherley has argued, ‘even the tweediest anti-Modernist would have to apply industrial strength blinkers to see this place as harsh or inhuman’.  He describes it as an example of the English picturesque – ‘the aesthetic at its most stunning’.

A Times article in 1969 was similarly extravagant in its praise: (15)

Gleadless Valley has the fragmented quality of a village. Here the footpaths wander through rough grass, sidle past back doors, lead under the main road and suddenly emerge in the shopping centre … It is a casual, slightly shaggy environment on which the planners have used the lightest of touches … Gleadless Valley is touched with the English genius for country things: it is a place for children, for family life …

Some of those judgements would later be contested but the estate remains a powerful fulfilment of the political and architectural ideals which inspired it. It remains, quite simply, in its layout and design, one of the outstanding council housing schemes of the last century.

Can this century rediscover some of that ambition and vision?

Sources

(1) Ruth Harman, John Minnis, Roger H. Harper, Sheffield, (Yale University Press, 2004)

(2) Elain Harwood, Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945-1975 (Yale University Press, 2014)

(3) Another, more extensive, visit to continental Europe followed in 1954. The ensuing report, ‘Multi-Storey Housing in Some European Countries: Report of the City of Sheffield Housing Deputation’, approved by the Housing Committee in March 1955, concluded that members were ‘satisfied that housing development in the form of well-designed multi-storey flats can provide living standards which are in every way adequate as an alternative to two-storey housing’.

(4) Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (Allen Lane, 1981)

(5) The characterisations of Womersley’s personality come from Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State: An Architectural History of British Multi-Storey Housing 1945-1970  (Scottish Centre of Conservation Studies, 2017) and Esher respectively.  Details of the Architect’s Department are drawn from FE Pearce Edwards, JL Womersley and W George Davies, ‘The Work of the Sheffield City Architect’s Department’, Official Architecture and Planning, Vol 26, No. 7 (July 1963)

(6) The preceding quotation comes from Muthesius and Glendinning, Towers of the Welfare State. The words of Harold Lambert come from his foreword to Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, published by the Housing Development Committee of the Corporation of Sheffield in April 1962.

(7) The Corporation of Sheffield, Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield. The quotation which follows is drawn from the same source.

(8) For a map and typology of the estate’s varied housing, see Urbed, Gleadless Valley Masterplan Public Consultation Boards, pp1-7

(9) The first quote, from the Morning Telegraph, 21 June 1972, and the following are drawn from Barry Goodchild, ‘Local Authority Flats: A Study in Area Management and Design’, The Town Planning Review, vol 58, no 3, July 1987

(10) See Manor, Arbourthorne and Gleadless Housing Market Profile (ND but the data is drawn from the early 2010s). The quotation comes from Reform, Gleadless Valley (ND), uploaded by Sid Fletcher of TowerBlockMetal who has also written fully and informatively on the estate.

(11) Jack Clithero, ‘I thought I’d follow my dad into the steel mill but those days are gone: My Wigan Pier Story’, Daily Mirror, 26 February 2018

(12) Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill, The Impact of Welfare Reform on Communities and Households in Sheffield (Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social, November 2014)

(13) See Urbed, Gleadless Valley Masterplan Public Consultation Boards, pp1-7

(14) Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (Verso, 2010)

(15) Gordon Aspland, ‘Achievements in Bulk Housing’, The Times, 10 November 1969

Orchard Park, Hull, Part II: ‘It’s never had it better than now’

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration, Yorkshire

We left Orchard Park in Hull in last week’s post in a bad way, in some ways a typical peripheral estate with what by now seemed the usual problems but in other respects an example writ large in terms of its poor quality design and level of social disadvantage.  A further element was introduced by what appeared to be rising problems of criminality and antisocial behaviour.  In this week’s post, we’ll examine the ongoing attempts to revive and improve such increasingly stigmatised estates for which Orchard Park was a significant test-bed.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It certainly qualified as a hard-to-let estate, a phenomenon identified by the Labour government of James Callaghan in 1978 and then targeted in the Priority Estates Programme (PEP) inherited by the Conservative government which succeeded.  Its emphasis was on modelling systems of local management and repair and promoting tenant participation.  A growing assumption was also that particular housing forms encouraged crime.

A retrospective Home Office study of three PEP estates (two in Tower Hamlets, London, and the other the Orchard Park Estate) concluded that while all ‘had high crime rates and adverse design’, Orchard Park ‘had a greater level of disorderliness, associated with youth in particular, which fostered a greater sense of insecurity amongst residents, particularly women’. (1)

A worthy entrant for the gardening competition? © Charlie Baker and used with permission

All this played into the mix of changes carried out in Orchard Park in PEP-related activity from 1986 to 1992.  A local estate office was established to deal with repairs, caretaking and lettings. Neighbourhood Management Committees were set up in 1989; various security and environmental initiatives ensued.  A Gardening Competition for residents inaugurated in 1993 takes us back to the domestic respectability promoted by similar such competitions in the cottage suburbs since the 1920s. (2)

There was also some attempt to use the lettings policies in supporting established residents and engineering a more socially beneficial mix of new tenants. The Home Office report captures the contradictions and limitations of such a policy in the face of the intractable realities governing council housing allocations in a period of growing shortage and increased hardship.

Lingcourt, Orchard Park

The report concluded that ‘Territoriality, social cohesion and “empowerment” increased among the residents of the houses’.  Among new tenants, the single mothers, generally provided houses (rather than flats), seem to have complemented the more established residents living disproportionately in the estate’s low-rise homes and contributed to their relative low turnover and ‘respectability’.

At the same time, the combination of a declining economy, homelessness legislation and the shortage of council housing stock ensured that:

a greater number of young poor people and those discharged from institutional care were coming on to the estates. Their arrival at a time of high unemployment and into conditions of poverty created a destabilising influence, swelled the numbers of vulnerable tenants and encouraged more disorderly activities and lifestyles.

These new tenants were housed disproportionately in high-rise flats and:

Despite a programme of improvement to the security of the tower blocks, and better management of the estate as a whole, the newcomers – that is the young, childless poor – displaced many of the previous, elderly residents and attracted crime to themselves, both as perpetrators and victims, concentrating crime in their part of the estate.

It’s all a reminder that council estates are disproportionately required to bear the burden of social and economic problems beyond their purview or, as I would argue, that estates are a victim of societal failings but not their cause.

Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

The Home Office report (found, appropriately, on the National Police College website) focused on crime prevention and the various attempts to ‘design out’ crime.  It epitomised a critique and prescription for troubled council estates which became mainstream from the mid-eighties, aimed at, in its words:

1. Creating better dwelling security and more ‘defensible space’

2. Halting a spiral of deterioration … [by] reducing ‘signs of disorder’ and fear of crime

3. Investing in the estate so that resident’s will develop a positive view and thus a greater stake in their community …

4. Increasing informal community control over crime both through increased surveillance and supervision by residents and housing officials and facilitating the development of a set of norms and expectations against offending on the estate.

That’s a pretty good summary of the ‘design disadvantagement’, ‘defensible space’ theories that were popularised in the UK (and simplified) by Alice Coleman in the mid-1980s though, in Orchard Park (its high-rise blocks notwithstanding), it was applied not to modernist, multi-storey housing but to a generally low-rise estate.

Knightscourt © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Another, perhaps not altogether disinterested, account celebrates the design modifications implemented across the estate. (3)

Monotonous, unkept [sic] pathways in front of terraced houses were transformed by creating fenced off private yards for each household. A programme of colourful redecoration to external areas did much to brighten the estate’s formerly drab façade.

And ‘attractive tiled canopies were erected around the entrances’ of the three Mildane high-rise blocks, ‘creating a pleasing appearance, as well as giving protection from falling objects’.

At the same time, entryphone systems were installed and CCTV within lifts and ground floor communal areas, the latter at the time apparently accessible to view by tenants on a dedicated TV channel through a communal aerial, bringing a whole new level to our obsession with crime drama on the box.

The article concludes that offences committed by non-residents ‘virtually ceased’ and that the ‘few cases of theft and vandalism’ that persisted were attributable to ‘a minority of residents’.  The changes clearly represented an improvement and there’s no need to sneer at sensible crime reduction initiatives which reduced its prevalence and meaningful environmental improvements even if the overall argument seems a little overstated.   Generally, things were looking up; the chair of the Danes Management Committee concluded ‘The estate is a cleaner, happier place. Repairs are done quickly, the local office is run efficiently.’ (4)

Nevertheless, Orchard Park remained a ‘problem estate’ into the 2000s even as, of course, it continued to provide a decent home to most of its residents.   Of those homes, Right to Buy having wrought its changes even in this apparently unpromising terrain, only around 68 percent were social rented by 2011 with now nine percent let by private landlords.

‘Tinned up’ homes in Feldane Orchard Park © Charlie Baker and used with permission

It remained an unpopular estate to outsiders; when some choice existed between 2001 and 2003, the vacancy rate stood at 26 percent and the average re-letting period at 322 days, three times worse than any other Hull estate. Fifty-two percent of OP residents were satisfied with their neighbourhood against an average of 72 percent city-wide. (5)

Ribycourt

When the urban design consultancy Urbed worked with Gateway Pathfinder to create (in their words) ‘an engagement and capacity building programme for tenants and residents’ in Orchard Park, the vision of some seemed modest at first glance though the attitudinal shift they wanted might have been life-changing for some: (6)

My vision for Orchard Park is that it comes in line with all the other communities in Hull and it’s not singled out, when my son is eighteen and goes for a job he isn’t discriminated against because his postcode is HU6.

The veteran local Labour councillor Terry Geraghty articulated a similar ambition:

We need to get away from the idea of Orchard Park being on its own; we are all one community and we need to break down those barriers. The image the area has is not deserved, 90% of the people that live here are incredibly hard working people and we need to get the information to those in business that just because someone lives in Orchard Park it doesn’t mean they are any less capable of doing the jobs that everyone else in Hull can do …

At the time, unemployment among the economically active was at 27 percent on the estate, compared to 12 percent in Hull as a whole and six percent nationally.  The Estate was among the five percent most deprived in the country; the Danes, tainted by its original design and construction flaws, was in the worst one percent. Meanwhile, for all the previously lauded design modifications, the Estate suffered the highest crime rate in Hull. (7)

Martin Crookston, an advocate for the cottage suburbs and their revival, concluded uncharacteristically that:

Orchard Park, created at the tail-end of the long years of estate-building, and at the outer edge of its city as that city started to run out of economic steam, was probably always an estate ‘too far’ – at the problem rather than potential end of the corporation suburb spectrum.

He counselled ‘radical change’.

High-rise and clearance © Charlie Baker and used with permission

In many ways, the Council has acted on that advice.   The first three of the high-rise blocks to be demolished went in 2002, including ironically two of the Mildane blocks improved by those ‘attractive tiled canopies’ back in the eighties.  The twenty-two storey Vernon House in Homethorpe was demolished in 2004.  In 2008, the council began planning the clearance of the remaining seven.

This obvious, apparently radical change wasn’t universally welcomed.  With little in the first instance to replace them, one local resident feared it as a sign of ‘managed decline’.  An elderly resident of one of the tower blocks, confounding stereotypes, lamented their loss: (8)

I like the flats as they are, I don’t want them changed at all. I leave my door open most of the day but I lock it at teatime … We’ve got beautiful views, you must admit, you get away from everybody, you don’t answer the door if you don’t want to. I would miss my view, I would never go and live in a house and look across at somebody’s back yard.

She suggested they reserve her block for those aged over 55, a solution to tower block living adopted in two of the estate’s towers.

Highcourt demolition, March 2015 © Keith Jackson

Despite initial stays of execution for Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe blocks in 2012 (such was the housing shortage), demolitions continued.  Twenty-storey Highcourt, was demolished in March 2015. Residents’ comments capture the mixed feelings of the event: (9)

I was a young girl living in north Hull when this block of flats was built. I remember the new building being celebrated because there was a houses shortage at the time but now it’s demolition is being celebrated.

For another, it was an eyesore but he’d miss it on his morning walk.  The last of Orchard Park’s high-rise blocks went with the demolition of the Gorthorpe flats in 2016.

Meanwhile, Orchard Park and Hull more widely was subject to the initiatives governing housing policy and finance nationally.  The Housing Market Renewal or Pathfinder programme laudably aimed to ‘provide lasting solutions for communities blighted by derelict homes through investment and innovation’; its chosen means – which seemed to focus on the demolition of sometimes decent housing and market-led solutions – were far more controversial.

The Hull and East Riding Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder (or Hull Gateway) was established in 2005 but plans to tackle the Thorpes in Orchard Park came to nought and the initiative as a whole was defunded in 2010. (10)

The cover of Hull’s PFI document, August 2010

The Council also entertained hopes that the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), introduced by John Major but significantly expanded under New Labour, might enable the sweeping changes many nevertheless thought necessary.  The title of the 2008 bid document, The Transformation of Orchard Park – Shaping the Place, Creating a Fruitful Future, captures those hopes; its 16 sections and 29 appendices reflect their breadth; and the price tag – at £142m – suggests the extent of the work deemed necessary. (11)

In summary, the proposals envisaged the demolition of 752 council houses, 255 privately owned houses, and 33 council bungalows and their replacement with 1020 new homes in the private sector and 680 new homes for social renting. This was a net gain of 660 homes but the figure conceals a net loss of 105 social rented homes.

Courtpark Road

It’s worth pausing – amidst the money talk and statistics – to examine what’s going on here and how powerfully it symbolises the policies and presumptions of the era.  Firstly, we have the dependence on private capital – the minimisation of state investment reflecting both a callow political fear of public spending (better understood as investment) and an unquestioning belief in the efficiency and ultimate beneficence of the market.

Secondly, perhaps less controversially still, there is the belief in so-called mixed communities (ignoring the fact that estates already accommodate a mixed community) and mixed tenure.  It marks a moment when council estates as such were deemed to have failed socially and economically.  For all the specific design shortcomings of Orchard Park, we might think it the victim of social and economic failure rather than its agent.  And we should certainly question why all these contemporary ‘fixes’ to long-term housing problems seemingly require the loss of desperately needed social rented homes.

The Orchard Park PFI was awarded £156m in July 2009.  In one of the first substantive acts of the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, all new PFI schemes (including Orchard Park) were cancelled in November 2010.  Given the huge and ongoing expense of the PFI programme and its complexity and troubled implementation, that might seem a relief but it left Hull still scrabbling for finance and dependent on partnerships with private developers or housing associations which could access capital.

New homes being built in Homethorpe © Humberbusiness.com

Nevertheless, some of that has borne fruit in the construction of new homes in the Danepark area and a recently completed scheme in association with Wates and the Riverside Group housing association at Homethorpe creating 52 new homes for rent including 16 one-bed council flats. A major refurbishment programme providing external cladding to the 1668 ‘No Fines’ homes in Orchard Park began in 2016.  The Harrison Park extra care apartments for those who need to assisted living are some of the finest in the country.

The Orchard Centre

The £14m Orchard Centre (a local council hub and health centre) opened on the southern fringe of the estate in 2009. A new community park and multi-use games area has opened.  Remodelling of the run-down shopping centre has made that a more attractive space.

How to conclude? What to conclude?  If you want an illustration of the power of selective narratives, let’s look at two recent press reports.   A March 2018 report in the local press recounts three recent stabbings and residents’ fears that violence on the estate was ‘getting out of hand’.   A few months earlier, another report had been headlined ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now’. Mrs Gray moved with her husband to their terrace house in Cladshaw in 1966 and has lived there ever since: (12)

I know some people have bad things to say about Orchard Park but we have had no trouble and we brought up our children here.

Let’s finish with that – not because Orchard Park has been untroubled or without failings, some of which could have been foreseen and forestalled with greater investment and better design, but because it reminds us it’s been a home to many thousands, usually a good one and, hopefully, an improving one.

Sources

My thanks to Charlie Baker for permission to use images contained in his report for Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006). You can find more of his evocative photography on his website.

My thanks also to Tim Morton for providing the 1993 PEP report referenced and Keith Jacobs for supplying photographs of the demolition of Highcourt.

(1) Housing, Community and Crime: the Impact of the Priority Estates Project (Home Office Research Study 131, 1993)

(2) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(3) Roy Carter, ‘Designing Crime Out of the Urban Environment’, Orchard Park Case Study, Architect and Surveyor, vol 64, no 9, October 1989

(4) ‘Orchard Park, Hull’ (Priority Estates Project, 1993)

(5) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2016)

(6) Quoted in Charlie Baker, Urbed, Orchard Park (September 2006)

(7) Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? 

(8) Angus Young, ‘Orchard Park’s Gorthorpe and Kinthorpe tower blocks to be demolished after Hull City Council U-turn’, Hull Daily Mail, May 2, 2014

(9)Quoted in Claire Carter, ‘Gone in Eight Seconds’, Daily Mail, 9 March 2015

(10) The Urban Rim website Gateway Pathfinder provides full details.

(11) The Urban Rim website also provides a full chronological account of the Orchard Park PFI.

(12) Phil Winter, ‘’”Orchard Park violence is getting out of hand”: Fear as estate sees three stabbings in under a month’ Hull Daily Mail, 21 March 2018 and Kevin Shoesmith, ‘We’ve lived on Orchard Park for 50 years – and it’s never had it better than now‘, Hull Daily Mail, 30 September 2017

Council Housing in Beverley: ‘Top notch in them days’

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1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

If you visit Beverley, you’ll likely go to see the Gothic minster – the finest parish church in the land – and its beautifully conserved town centre.  It’s dubbed the Georgian Quarter now, a bit of tourist branding which in this case is fully justified.  But there’s an alternative history – of a small industrial town with an important working-class presence. And that, in the twentieth century, meant council housing, lots of it.

Beverley market place, c1900s (c) East Riding Archives

This post, naturally, focuses on the latter.  It tells the story of Beverley’s council estates and the people who lived on them which, for once, are unusually well recorded.  Next week’s post looks at the working-class community that the new housing spawned.

Grovehill shipyard, 1950 (c) East Riding Archives

In the nineteenth century, Beverley, administrative and commercial capital of Yorkshire’s largely rural East Riding, had the industries typical of a town with its large agricultural hinterland. Surprisingly perhaps, from 1901 with the establishment of the Cook, Welton and Gemmell yard, a significant steel shipbuilding industry developed, at Grovehill on the River Hull to the east of the town. The company employed around 650 men into the 1950s until the yard closed down in 1976 with 180 redundancies. (1)

Factory workers, Armstrongs, 1940s (c) East Riding Archives

By 1937, however, the town’s largest employer, was the Armstrong shock absorber works on Eastgate.  In the 1960s, the factory employed around 2000; it too closed in the 1970s. Together with Hodgson’s Tannery and other smaller works, Beverley – for all its county town ambience – had the largest industrial working class in the East Riding outside Hull.

For all this industry, Beverley remained a small town.  Before the First World War, its population stood at a little over 13,000 and it grew only slowly to 15,500 by 1951.  Nor did it suffer, in scale or concentration, the problems of working-class slum housing that affected Britain’s larger industrial towns.

Butcher Row, 1912 (c) East Riding Archives

A 1901 survey enumerated 3046 inhabited houses and 3095 households in the town; an average of 4.3 persons per house.  In Beverley, the problem was not expanses of jerry-built Victorian terraces but infill – cottages in small clusters built in courts, backyards and alleys off the main streets of the historic centre: (2)

There were some examples of gross overcrowding, but not many: 191 houses had fewer than five rooms and more than five occupants. In the years 1901-14 the medical officer of health condemned an average of eight houses annually, but there was no policy of replacement. Pressure on housing was not seen as a major problem.

Ostensibly, not much had altered by 1919 when, of 2923 houses in the town designated ‘working-class’, 39 were classified ‘dilapidated’ (21 were empty), 115 suffered ‘marked’ overcrowding and 33 were occupied by more than one family.  This was hardly a housing crisis – except for those families affected – but the wider context had changed significantly.

That survey was a product of the 1919 Housing Act, itself a consequence of the First World War.  Housing was now at the top of the political agenda and ‘homes for heroes’ were intended both as a reward for working-class sacrifice in the war and as a sop to any revolutionary sentiments the working class might, in these turbulent times, harbour.

Crucially, the Act required that councils not only assess local housing needs but act on them.  Beverley Corporation was a largely Conservative authority at this time – the first official Labour candidates weren’t elected until 1951 – but it acted quickly on these new imperatives.

Concrete houses on Warton Avenue, Grovehill Estate

In 1920, the Council bought land on Grovehill Road (literally on the wrong side of the tracks – to the east of the Hull-Scarborough railway line) to build its first council homes.  By 1923, 88 concrete houses had been built on Neville Avenue, Warton Avenue and Routh Avenue; the use of concrete a reflection of post-war shortages of building materials and skilled labour.  A further 78 houses, conventionally brick-built, were added under the 1924 Housing Act on Schofield Avenue and Hotham Square.

By contemporary standards, these new homes were far from luxurious as one resident who moved into a house on Routh Avenue in 1942 recalls: (3)

Gas lights, the toilet and coalhouse in an outside lobby, the bath in a tiny room at the end of the kitchen. My mother used to stipple her walls, put borders around. [A neighbour’s] weren’t plastered, they were painted brick, dark brown at the bottom and cream at the top.

But they were, in nearly all cases, far superior to the privately-rented housing from which their residents moved.  In 1926, as the Corporation contemplated further land purchases and building, the mayor, Robert Harding Wood (a master butcher), reported: (4)

He was receiving a number of letters every day as well as personal visits asking for houses. Some of those who came to see him were living under conditions which were a disgrace to civilisation.

Bartlett Avenue and Champney Road

In the event, the Corporation purchased the town centre estate of the late Admiral Walker for £10,000. The big house served as municipal offices from 1930 until local government reorganisation in 1996 but an 8.5 acre portion of the land was dedicated to new council housing – some 119 houses principally along Champney Road and Central Avenue.

By 1930, the Council had built some 285 houses, a sizeable total for a town of its size, but fresh impetus to construction was provided by Labour’s 1930 Housing Act with its particular focus on slum clearance.  Despite the fact that only about half Beverley’s homes had water closets in 1934 (not until the later 1950s did all its houses enjoy this basic amenity), the Council’s clearance efforts were hindered in 1933 when 14 owners of condemned housing appealed successfully against demolition.

Riding Fields Square, Cherry Tree Estate

Nevertheless, 126 houses were built between 1931 and 1933 on land to the west of the existing Grovehill Estate off Cherry Tree Lane. A further 128 houses were added in the last years of the decade but the outbreak of war prevented further construction on a new site, purchased in 1938, off Goth’s Lane to the north. The new houses were reserved to those who had been displaced by the Council’s slum clearance programme.

Greenwood Avenue, Cherry Tree Estate

Amongst the new streets – Hodgson Avenue, Thompson Avenue and Riding Fields Square – it’s nice to see a Greenwood Avenue named after Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Health and Housing who had overseen the 1930 legislation.  Greenwood’s real recognition, however, comes in the memory of a resident who moved into a new home on Greenwood Avenue in 1940:

It was lovely really, top notch in them days. They had a toilet and bathroom, good heavens, a bathroom – we’d been used to bathing in a tub in front of the fire.

He moved again, in 1949, to a house on Thompson Avenue: ‘It was a bigger house, more modern…It had a proper living room and a kitchen and a dining room, and three bedrooms’.

Beverley, in sharp contrast to nearby Hull, was relatively unscathed by wartime bombing but its housing needs remained pressing in the post-war period. The town was allocated 75 prefabs at the end of 1944, sited – after some delay – off Goth’s Lane but by the following year around 900 remained on the waiting list. (5)

Larger and longer-term solutions were needed and these were announced by the Council in February 1946. On 130 acres of land, adjacent to the existing estates to the east, it planned: (6)

a modern estate of 800 houses with park and recreational sites, community centre, health centre, branch library, sub-post office, licensed house and shopping centre.

In addition, ten acres would be set aside to the East Riding Education Committee for two new schools and land was allocated for a park and recreational space, next to shops, in the middle of the new estate.

All this reflected the planning ideals of the post-war era – the ambition to create neighbourhood – and was a conscious corrective to what many now saw as the failure of pre-war estates to provide the facilities needed to promote community.  Locally, one correspondent to the Beverley Guardian in June 1945 had noted problems caused by moving people from central areas onto estates without community provision: ‘Where this is not done it is unfair for anyone to speak disparagingly of corporation house tenants’. (7)

Prince’s Gardens, 1954, designated for slum clearance (c) East Riding Archives

Beverley reflected too the new thrust which dominated housing policy from the 1950s as immediate pressures for reconstruction eased – the desire to eradicate, for once and for all, the slum conditions in which so many still lived. A 1952 survey by the Council’s Medical Officer of Health slated 511 houses for immediate demolition and some 719 for later clearance.

Wilbert Court

Around 20 to 40 houses – mostly in the yards and alleys off the town centre’s main streets – were demolished annually in the fifties as new housing became available.  Beverley even ventured into the multi-storey living now becoming more typical though, in this case, it was just a single five- and six-storey block built nearer the centre on Wilbert Lane. Some three-storey blocks of flats and maisonettes were also built in the newer developments as it was increasingly realised that the two-storey family home staple of interwar construction failed to meet the range of contemporary housing needs.

By 1964, 1332 council homes had been built in Beverley since the war and in all council housing made up around one quarter of the town’s housing stock.  These were good homes too – a new resident on Coltman Avenue recalls:

These houses seemed very luxurious, a living room and separate dining room and well fitted kitchen, a spacious hall and three bedrooms with an upstairs bathroom.

On Burden Road, houses featured another innovation – the through lounge recommended by the Dudley Committee in its wide-ranging report on housing design and layout issued in 1944.

Coltman Avenue, Goth’s Lane Estate. The image captures a little of the initially more open-plan nature of the newer schemes.

There was a self-conscious but modest modernism to the new estates and, in some way, a deliberately more ‘democratic’ feel.  (Ian Waites has captured this well in his writing on the Middlefield Estate in Gainsborough, a Lincolnshire town bearing close comparison to Beverley.) They were characterised by more open space and wider, curving roads – a contrast to the more boxy, rectangular forms which marked earlier schemes.

Bernard Walling, who moved into a house on Sigston Road in 1966, remembers it as:

very open plan, no hedges, no walls, no fences, there was small kerbstones at the pavement edge of the gardens and that idea was in those days – the whole of the estate was open plan…

That, as we’ll see, has changed over the years.  There’s far more what Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman would later call ‘defensible space’ now – enclosed, privatised areas fenced off as front gardens, hard standing for cars and the like – but the road and others around it retain something of this original form and ethos.

In next week’s post, we’ll take this exploration of working-class community and its changing forms further.

Sources

My thanks to the East Riding Archives and Local Studies service for making the older photographs credited available on a Creative Commons licence.  You can find other historic photographs of Beverley and the surrounding area on their Flickr page.

(1) Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, Cook, Welton and Gemmell

(2) AP Baggs, LM Brown, GCF Forster, I Hall, RE Horrox, GHR Kent and D Neave, A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 6, the Borough and Liberties of Beverley, ‘Political and Social History, 1835-1918’

(3) East Riding of Yorkshire Council, ‘I thought I’d never find town’: A history of council housing on Beverley’s Riding Fields (2006). Other direct quotations from residents are taken from the same source.

(4) ‘A Beverley Estate. Town Council’s New Building Site’, Hull Daily Mail, 13 April 1926

(5) ‘Beverley Council and Temporary Houses’, Hull Daily Mail, 19 July 1945. For waiting list figures, see ‘Ex-Serviceman in Council House’, Yorkshire Post, 20 November 1946

(6) ‘New Housing Estate for Beverley. A Community Centre’, Hull Daily Mail, 25 February 1946

(7) Quoted in Stefan Ramsden, Working-Class Community in the Era of Affluence: Sociability and Identity in a Yorkshire Town, 1945-1980, University of Hull PhD thesis (2011).  See also Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

Bradford’s Pre-1914 Council Housing: a ‘victory in one of the earliest of conflicts between property and life’

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Pre-1914

According to JB Priestley, a proud native of the city, ‘Bradford was considered the most progressive place in the United Kingdom’ before the First World War. (1)  He referred to the vibrant cultural life of the town as much as its politics but we’ll concentrate on the latter and, in particular, the struggle to build decent housing for its working people.

A Bradford slum, in the early 1900s

Bradford, capital of the UK’s woollen industry, was then one of Britain’s great industrial centres – a place where ‘wealth accumulates and men decay’ in the words of one critical local politician. (2)  Around seventy-five per cent of its housing was back-to-back and in the three poorest wards of the city the infant mortality rate reached 179 per 1000, twice the rate of the city as a whole. Fenner Brockway observed trenchantly that: (3)

these black areas were not only a prison to the spirit they were a slaughterhouse for their bodies…Herod, in the form of slum landlords and building speculators, massacred more infants in Bradford than he did in Bethlehem.

For his part, Priestley wondered why ‘those industrial workers, exiled from the sun and the fields, condemned to live their time between houses like barracks and factories like fortresses’ were not ‘sluts and brutes’. But he insisted that, despite such conditions, they were ‘yet among the salt of the earth…decent and kind, humorous and helpful’.

If that was a romantic view of the lives and characters such circumstances spawned, it might at least be applied to Bradford’s great socialist leader, FW (‘Fred’) Jowett, described by the ever-quotable Priestley as ‘a figure compact of truth and integrity, utterly without pretence, and with the shining simplicity that belongs to the pure in heart’.  Jowett and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) founded in the city in 1893 led the campaign for better housing.

That politics was born initially in industrial struggle.  A tradition of progressive and, to some degree, cross-class Lib-Lab (Liberal-Labour) politics was broken by the great Manningham Lockout, instigated when the mill-owner Samuel Cunliffe Lister (in other contexts remembered as a paternalistic benefactor of the city) insisted, just before Christmas 1890, on a 30 per cent wage cut for his workers.   The bitter dispute lasted 19 weeks until Lister’s workforce was forced back to work under the new terms and conditions.

An early image of Manningham Mills (c) Esther M Zimmer Lederberg Memorial Website

The Liberal Council tried to ban rallies and meetings in support of those locked out; the intervention of the Durham Light Infantry caused a full-blown riot.  As the futility of relying on the goodwill of the Bradford’s middle-class employers became clear to many of the local working class, Jowett led the political fight-back.  He was a founder member of the Bradford Labour Union in May 1891 and later the same year of the Bradford Labour Church – a deliberate break with the nonconformist chapels patronised by the local middle classes which set itself the task of nothing less than the ‘the realisation of the Kingdom of Heaven in this Life by the establishment of a state of society founded upon Justice and Love to thy neighbour’. (4)

A modern mural (on the Priestley Theatre) celebrating the founding of the ILP in Bradford

Jowett was elected, aged just 18, to the Council in 1892 where he would serve fifteen years until first elected as one of the city’s MPs in 1906.  From 1906 the Bradford ILP held the balance of power and, at its pre-war peak in 1913, the Party polled 43 per cent of the vote and returned 20 councillors (29 Liberals and 34 Conservatives made up the remainder).

Jowett’s campaign for better housing began inauspiciously – his motion to the Sanitary Committee in 1894 that the Council take action to build housing under Part III of the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act received just five votes – and would be stubbornly resisted for some years.  His first success was in persuading a sympathetic Medical Officer of Health, Dr Arnold Evans, to represent some of worst of local housing – in the Longlands district – as unfit for human habitation in 1898 but the Housing Committee’s proposal to clear the area was rejected by full Council.  Jowett persevered; a revised scheme was initially accepted by the Council the following year until that decision was rescinded by a newly elected Council (with a strengthened Tory presence) two months later.  Finally, in 1901 the scheme was given the go-ahead.

An early image of Faxfleet Street

The Longlands clearance scheme covered a little under five acres – about the size of two football pitches – and contained 254 dwelling houses, 10 lodging houses, two public houses, 16 lock-up shops, a bakehouse, a storeroom and some 1350 people.  The homes, according to Evans, were ‘in a dilapidated state…old…the vast majority built back to back; the population, according to Brockway, ‘mostly wretchedly poor Irish folk with large families’. The death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis was – at 7.4 per thousand – almost five times the city average. (5)

FEP Edwards

The first replacement housing built to accommodate those displaced, designed by City Architect FEP Edwards and completed in 1904, was in Faxfleet Street at some two miles’ distance but accessible by (municipally-owned) tramway. (6)   Sixty-six houses, each with a living room, scullery (complete with washing copper and bath), front and back bedrooms and an attic. These were, of course, ‘through’ houses, set back five feet from the footpath and with small backyards containing a WC, coal store and ash bin.

These images show the interior of the new Faxfleet Street houses – the respectable working-class homes envisaged by housing reformers (7)

The houses cost £247 each to build with rents set at the lowest level possible to both repay within sixty years the 3.25 per cent loan which financed them and be affordable to those who needed them.  To housing reformers, the scheme furnished important proof that ‘”through” houses can be provided in Yorkshire at low rentals and can be made self-supporting’. (8)  Twenty-three further Corporation houses would be built in the area before 1914.

Later pre-1914 council housing on Draughton Street

The local Labour movement celebrated this success in the municipal elections which followed. One ILP candidate, JH Palin of the Tramwaymen’s Society, declared ‘some of the men in their society were tenants of the Faxfleet-street property, and the only fault that could be found was a little shrinking of the woodwork’; ‘where, said Mr Jowett, can you get houses like those at 5s 6d a week clear of rates within a like distance of the Town Hall?’ (9)

Chain Street tenements

Such houses represented the ideal for most Labour politicians of the day but inner-city conditions dictated other solutions.  In the cleared Longlands district itself, the Council erected tenement blocks based on models pioneered in Liverpool – the major pioneer of municipal tenement housing outside London – and Manchester. The first were five three-storeyed blocks, completed in 1909, erected on Chain Street and Longlands Place, each with a living room, scullery, one or two bedrooms and a WC and coal store on the rear balcony.  A second phase of two-storeyed tenements was completed in 1912 in Chain Street and Roundhill Place.

A contemporary image showing the recently refurbished two-storey tenements on Chain Street

Some years later, it could be claimed that these undeniably modest homes could ‘compare very favourably with the best in England constructed for the occupation of the poor and needy’: their interiors presented ‘quite a cheerful and comfortable appearance’, it was said, and the tenants took ‘a keen interest in their homes’. (10)

Looking back in 1946, Brockway was familiar with the higher standards of later years; he admitted:

They are not comparable architecturally with the blocks of modern flats constructed by municipalities today but they are well-built, clean, healthy, and must have seemed palatial to those Irish families removed from cellars and vermin-infested rooms more than forty years ago.  To housing reformers they symbolise victory in one of the earliest of conflicts between property and life.

Several blocks were pulled down in the 1960s as Bradford built new roads to accommodate the increased traffic of a more affluent era but – though remaining blocks were refurbished and extended in the 1970s – such affluence itself had long departed by the turn of the century.  The area had become a haunt of sex workers and drug addicts; the homes were seen as ‘squalid hovels’ and the local press alleged that locals called the blocks ‘Death Row’. (11) In more measured terms, the City Council described the Chain Street area as suffering from ‘multiple problems including crime, the fear of crime, low income levels and higher than average levels of unemployment’. (12)

As one element of major plans to revive a city hit hard by deindustrialisation, a much needed £1.26m regeneration has ensued, supported by the Council, the Homes and Communities Agency and led, on the ground, by Incommunities, a social housing provider formed after a stock transfer of Bradford council housing in 2003.  Initially, 36 flats have been converted into 16 family-size homes. Thirty-two houses will replace a demolished 1925 tenement block; ten for sale, twelve let at market rents and ten at social rent. (13)  It’s the modern way – tenure mix and public investment part-financed by private profit.  Typically, there is a loss of social housing.

A contemporary image of Chain Street with new housing to the fore and the refurbished three-storey tenements at the rear left

In contemporary terms, an ambitious local council probably had little choice but to proceed in this way.  Jowett would be disappointed to see the beneficent power of the state so subordinated to the laws of the very free market against which he had campaigned but he would surely be impressed by the quality of this new working-class housing. There’s no doubt that the appearance and ‘feel’ of the area is much improved and, as part of a package which includes a new linear park and rejuvenated town centre, I hope it helps Bradford which has changed greatly from the prosperous city which Priestley described.

Jowett himself served in the first Labour government in 1924 but his principled socialism and consistent pacifism was too left-wing for the second.  He stood for the ILP (which had broken from the Labour Party) in 1931 and 1935 but, despite the affection his home city retained for him, was not re-elected.  He died aged 80 in 1944.   The houses on Faxfleet Street and the tenements on Chain Street remain both a monument to his practical idealism and a symbol of changed times.

Sources

(1) Priestley, Preface to Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years. The Life of Jowett of Bradford (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1946)

(2) The words of a Liberal reformer and later chairman of Health Committee in Report of an Address delivered to Bradford City Council on October 9^th 1917 by Mr EJ Smith on Housing Reform

(3) Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years

(4) Quoted in David Jones, Bradford (Ryburn Publishing, Halifax, 1990)

(5) W Arnold Evans (Medical Officer of Health), ‘The Operation of the Housing of the Working Classes Act in Bradford’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, no 23, 1902

(6) FEP Edwards was Bradford City Architect between 1903 and 1908, the second (outside London and after Hull) to be appointed in the country. He is cited as the scheme’s architect in James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country (Batsford, London, 1905) though an English Heritage report names W Williamson.

(7) These images are taken from Lucy Caffyn, Supplementary Series 9: Worker’s Housing in West Yorkshire, 1750-1920 (West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, HMSO, 1986)

(8) Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country

(9) ‘Bradford Municipal Campaign. Councillor Jowett defends the Faxfleet Houses’, The Leeds and Yorkshire Mercury, October 13, 1904

(10) Frank White (Superintendent and Chief Sanitary Inspector) in ‘Discussion on Town Planning and Improvement Areas at Sessional Meeting held at Bradford, February 5th, 1926’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, vol XLVI, no 11, April 1926

(11) Kathie Griffiths, ‘Bradford “Death Row” flats transformed into “little palaces”’, Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 4 July 2013

(12) Bradford Metropolitan District Council, Report of the Director of Regeneration and Culture to the meeting of Executive to be held on Friday 11 November 2011. Subject: AH1 Option Appraisal for the Regeneration of Sites around Chain Street, Goitside

(13) Homes and Communities Agency, ‘From “Death Row” to Family Homes’, Press release, 22 April 2014

The image of City Architect Edwards is from Bradford Timeline on Flickr and made available under this Creative Commons licence.

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

Tags

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Yorkshire

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)