The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead II: ‘Not a mere assemblage of houses’

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s

Last week’s post looked at the controversy surrounding rival plans – one a more traditional cottage suburb submitted by Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson, the other an ostensibly more visionary re-imagining of community life proposed by the architect Sir Charles Reilly – for Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate.  The former had been preferred by the Conservative majority on the Council and they had appointed the Liverpool architect Herbert James Rowse to ‘to draw up designs for the houses to be erected on the estate’. (1)

This plaque is placed at the main entrance to the estate on the side wall of a house on Ackers Road

To general surprise, Rowse, perhaps unwilling to work within the confines of a scheme suggested by the Borough Engineer, perhaps seeking some third way compromise, returned to the drawing board and, in January 1945, submitted an entirely new scheme.  Labour pressed for reconsideration of Reilly’s plans but in March 1945, the Council – dividing again on party lines – endorsed those of Rowse. Building of the estate, after a twenty-year gestation, finally began in 1946.

Rowse’s 1945 plan from Architecture and Building News, 1950

Whilst he eschewed the social engineering proposed by Reilly, Rowse’s own proposals reflected the spirit and ambition of the time: (2)

The Woodchurch Estate is not a mere assemblage of houses placed on a plot ground in the maximum possible density and monotonous regularity of layout and pattern, after the manner of the vast unplanned and uncontrolled suburban development of the inter-war years: it is the architectural setting of a fully developed sociological conception of a community of people living within a defined neighbourhood, having a conscious identity of its own and equipped for the maximum possibilities of the full intercourse of such a community. The comprehensive character of this project makes it of outstanding interest.

For Rowse, the fulfilment of these promises lay in the layout, facilities and housing forms of his new estate.

The overall plan was ‘developed on the basis of the natural topographical features of the site’ with:

Every effort … made in the planning of the Estate to provide prospects of the attractive rural surroundings from every possible point and to allow the maximum amount of rural character to permeate the estate by means of planted green closes, forecourts, quadrangles, recreation spaces and allotment gardens.

Broad parkways divided the estate whilst a central square provided ‘for the social life of the community’ with shops, baths and assembly hall, community centre, cinema, library and clinic:

In contrast to the familiar monotony of streets or their suburban counterpart, the estate will present varied internal prospects of groupings of terraces and small blocks amidst trees and green spaces, having the general character of a contemporary version of the traditional English village scene.

For the 2500 houses of the estate, Rowse proposed brick of ‘good, common quality’ with ‘architectural interest … achieved by the application of lime-wash, pigmented in a range of quiet tones of yellow, blue, pink and grey, alternating with white’.  His interest extended to their interiors – those of the first homes completed being ‘decorated in warm ivory shade on the walls and a pale shade of blue on the ceilings’.  Criticism of this colour scheme led to a uniform white being applied externally by the early 1950s.

Rowse’s illustrations of Woodchurch housing from Architecture and Building News, 1950

The estate’s early housing reflects Rowse’s ambitions though, on a cold January day such as when I visited, those broad parkways can seem rather bleak.

Shops on Hoole Road © Rept0n1x and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Rowse’s supervision of the scheme was superseded by that of new Borough Architect TA Brittain in 1952 who, in Pevsner’s astringent words, ‘continued building to inferior standards of design’.  The volume dislikes the estate’s early neo-Georgian-style shopfronts but reserves its greatest disdain for the Hoole Road shops, once planned as a centrepiece of Rowse’s central parkway. (3)

This early image closely resembles the 1000th house on the estate, opened in 1953

The estate’s 1000^th home, no. 84 Common Field Road, was officially opened by local MP Percy Collick in 1953 – a gabled, tile-hung, arts and crafts-inspired design, clearly a legacy of Rowse’s tenure.

Early photographs of the estate

Later housing was plainer but the biggest departure from Rowse’s founding vision were the two 14-storey tower blocks – Grasswood Gardens and Ferny Brow Gardens – built in 1960 on New Hey Road; the architect, ironically was HJ Rowse. (4)  By the end of the decade, three 14-storey blocks were added, built by Wimpey – Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, at the Upton end of the estate.

Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, photographed in 1987 from the Tower Block website

Typically, for all the preceding rhetoric, even the most basic community facilities were slow to appear: the first shops in 1953, a health clinic in 1954, and the first local library (at first housed in the new secondary modern school) in 1959. A community centre followed in 1965.

St Michael and All Angels, January 2019

Church congregations met in private houses or local halls until the Methodist church opened in 1958 and the Roman Catholic St Michaels and All Angels in 1965. The latter was worth waiting for, at least with an impressive modernist design (by Richard O’Mahony), planned liturgically – in Vatican II style – to focus attention on the central altar and – in landscape terms – to provide a fitting climax to New Hey and Home Farm Roads.

 

Home Farm Road, January 2019

All this, however, was some way away from the promises of Rowse, let alone Reilly, and that post-war vision of planned community.  Later academic studies of the estate allow us to examine the community which did emerge. They present a mixed picture, both reflecting and challenging standard interpretations.

The new residents were predominantly young families. A points system determined priority, favouring ex-servicemen, established residency and size of family. Additional points were awarded to those living in unfit accommodation. They were also judged by their ability to pay the rent though this was often a struggle: an average rent for a three-bed home amounted to £1.40 whilst local wages ranged from £3.50 for an unskilled male worker to £5 and above for semi-skilled and skilled workers. In the struggle to make ends meets, cookers were often bought from the Gas Board and furniture from Sturla’s department store on the ‘never-never’ (hire purchase). (5)

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

In support of the Wilmott and Young narrative of ‘missing mum’ (or, more academically, missing inner-city matrilocal kinship networks), there were the many young women who trekked back on an almost daily basis from this peripheral estate to their parents. Some walked, some struggled with their Silver Cross prams (‘normally second-hand, mind’) on an inadequate bus service. One young mother with school-age children cycled to the Mount Estate – where her parents now lived – every day at 10am, having got up at 6am to clean the house and prepare evening meals. (5)

But there were others pleased to place some distance between themselves and family:

One male interviewee explained how he and his wife were glad to get away from his mother-in-law because ‘she was jealous of my wife’ and he described how the friction caused by the situation had put a strain on other family relationships.

As for community – or, more properly, neighbourliness – that was found informally, often in the revival of established friendships:

There was a knock at the door. When I went to the door there was [name] standin’ there with a tray an’ a pot of tea. We just couldn’t believe it when we saw each other’s faces. We’d lived in adjacent roads up near Bidston, had been good friends … childhood friends for many years … before the war an’ she was my next-door neighbour! I couldn’t believe it, it was like bein’ with family

Given that many people moved to Woodchurch at the same time from similar areas of central Birkenhead, these connections are not surprising, and, in due course, family links might also be resurrected as parents or siblings also moved to the estate.

Home Farm Road, January 2019

The much vaunted ‘spirit of a New Britain’ (discussed in last week’s post) seems absent but perhaps lived on in attenuated form:

It wasn’t just the fact that we were all from Birkenhead, we’d all been through more or less the same experiences … been in the same kind of housing … lost loved ones or our homes during the war. We were just glad to be alive an’ we weren’t goin’ to shut the door on a neighbour who needed a hand … where we came from it wasn’t the done thing.

But few came to look on the community centre as a centre of social life, still less civic engagement as had been hoped by post-war planners: a ‘number of the interviewees recalled that they only went there for Bingo “on a Tuesday night” or “when someone was havin’ a “do”.

In the end, ‘community’ developed very largely without the benign assistance of planners and politicians and, with hindsight, the would-be social engineering of the latter, however idealistic in motive, appears mechanistic in practice.  Real lives were led domestically, within the interstices of home, family and friendship, with little reference to formal institutions and with little desire to think or act more politically or civically.

New Hey Road, January 2019

Meanwhile, older traditions of heavy-handed council paternalism lived on – though typically enforced by women housing  officers raised on the Octavia Hill tradition.  Miss Crook was clearly the local exemplar:

I mean, everyone I’ve spoken to about it remembers the way she used to check the beds – the sheets, the blankets an’ that – she’d run her fingers over surfaces to check for dust, an’ the look on her face if she found any! It was like ‘Not dusted today then, dear?’ … Well, she did congratulate me on the standard of cleanliness, but by the time she’d finished doin’ her rounds I was ready to explode. But we just had to put up an’ shut up. Y’didn’t argue with authority at that time.

Respectability and responsible tenancy were thus rigorously policed in these early years.

For all that, Woodchurch, in some eyes, developed a bad reputation.  As early as 1952, a local newspaper article was headlined ‘Vandalism Sweeps Woodchurch Estate. £500 damage to bulldozer’. (The combination of many young children living on what were, in effect, huge building sites made such reports quite common across the country, in fact.)

Home Farm Road, January 2019

But as estates, such as Woodchurch, grew older, perceptions of them changed.  Press reports of crime on the estate in 1969 led the police to come to its defence: ‘The incidence of crime and disturbances on the estate is no more serious than in several other areas of the town … isolated incidents had been taken out of context’. (7)

By the 1980s, however, as unemployment and, in particular, youth unemployment rocketed, there were real problems.  Woodchurch (and even more notoriously, Birkenhead’s Ford Estate) became known as centres of heroin addiction: by 1983, it was claimed nine percent of 16-24 year-olds on the estates were taking the drug. ‘Woodyboy’ recalls the era: (8)

By the time my year finished our ‘O’ levels at Woody High in ’83 we well and truly knew what was going on around us. It seemed like everyone’s big brother or sister was a smackhead. They were the kids we remembered from primary school who were only a few years older. We knew kids in our year that had tried mushies or were into glue, but this was a whole different ball game.

The estate also became associated with wider problems of gang violence and antisocial behaviour.

Three ages of housing with Brackendale House to the rear, January 2019

From this time, there have been concerted efforts to raise the estate.  In Birkenhead, tower blocks were seen as one cause of this new social malaise and the new Borough of Wirral (formed in 1974) had been the first in Europe to demolish some of its blocks – beginning with the central Oak and Eldon Gardens towers in 1979. On the Woodchurch Estate, the two New Hey Road blocks were converted to housing for elderly people and renamed in 1984.  Now, only one – Brackendale – remains.  Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens have also been demolished.

Today, the worst social problems of Woodchurch are over and, to this outsider, the estate looked generally well-maintained and cared for, and attractive in its older parts where Rowse’s vision was more fully implemented.  It’s a council estate which means in modern Britain it houses disproportionately a poorer population and unemployment levels remain high. Four areas of the estate are among the ten percent most deprived in the country. (9)

There are some who would blame council housing for that. For me, it’s a manifestation of what has been done to council housing and its community.  Whilst the Woodchurch Estate itself was one small part of the ‘New Britain’ to emerge after 1945, a wider element of that promise was full employment and reduced inequality. That is a promise betrayed and we have asked council estates and their residents to carry the burden of that betrayal.

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

One early resident of the estate recalls it:

as being as good as any private housing … people didn’t realise it was a council estate … it was peaceful too in the early days. It was a good place to live and a good place to bring up the children.

That, I’m sure, remains true for many today.

Sources

Kenn Taylor, who was raised on the estate, has also written interestingly on its history and significance in The Memory of a Hope.

(1) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013.

(2) HJ Rowse, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Architect: H. J. Rowse’, Architect and Building News, October 14, 1950. The quotations which follow are drawn from this source.

(3) Nikolaus Pevsner, Edward Hubbard, Cheshire (1978)

(4) Tower Block (University of Edinburgh), Woodchurch: Contract 23

(5) Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft’

(6) As argued in Young and Wilmott,  Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Woodchurch analysis drawn from Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The quotations and later detail are drawn from Taylor, as is the following quotation.

(7) ‘Police Speak Up For Woodchurch Estate’, Liverpool Echo, 23 July 1969

(8) SevenStreets, ‘Smack City: Thirty Years of Hurt’ (ND, c2013). The statistic is drawn from the article; the testimony from comments below.

(9) Wirral Council Public Health Intelligence Team, Indices of Multiple Deprivation for Wirral 2015 (November 2015)

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The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead I: ‘Repercussions over the Empire’

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1920s, 1940s

If you’re not from Merseyside, you probably haven’t heard of Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate but in 1944 it featured in a Picture Post article which, it was claimed, ‘had repercussions over the Empire’. (1)  That might have been an exaggeration but for a time conflicting ideas around the estate’s design dominated not only local politics but generated fierce debate in wider planning and political circles.  This post examines that controversy.

First, some background because there had been little previously to suggest that Birkenhead would merit such prominence in housing policy.  Unlike its neighbour Liverpool (which had built the first council housing in the country and pursued grandiose housing schemes in the interwar period), Birkenhead’s housing efforts had been modest.

It had grown as a docks and shipbuilding town from the early nineteenth century; from around 200 inhabitants in 1820 to 77,435 when incorporated as a borough in 1877.  Eleven years later and 22,000 inhabitants larger, it became a County Borough.

The Dock Cottages

That rapid growth had created appalling housing conditions for Birkenhead’s working-class population. The Queen’s Buildings (better known locally as the ‘Dock Cottages’ or just the ‘Blocks’), constructed in 1846 and financed by the major local employer John Laird, had been one early effort to ameliorate such conditions – 350 dwellings in four-storey blocks; built to the ‘Scotch’ plan (Laird hailed from Greenock) and claimed to be the first multi-storey tenements in England. Despite their compact design and dense layout, the flats themselves – equipped with a cold-water supply, gas burner, two iron bedsteads and a WC – were advanced for their day.

The 1917 plans for the Gilbrook Estate

The later council, for its part, proceeded more cautiously, clearing some 388 unfit houses but building just 18 cottages and 88 tenements to replace them by 1910. (2)  Its first major housebuilding scheme – the Gilbrook Estate in Prenton, north Birkenhead – was planned in 1917 but completed, to modified design, after the war.  The Council also purchased and renovated the Dock Cottages to let as council housing in the 1920s.

Vaughan Street, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019. (It was snowing!)

Arkle Road, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019

The ideological preferences of the Conservative-controlled council –  or perhaps an early version of the current preference for ‘mixed communities’ – were shown by the development of the Tranmere Hall Estate in the 1920s where, unusually, 400 of the homes were built for sale, available for purchase from the Council under the advantageous terms offered by the Small Dwellings Act.

When it came to the purchase of an area of farmland in the centre of the Wirral peninsula beyond the then boundaries of the Borough – what would become the Woodchurch Estate – in 1926, the Council was even more ambitious. There was a suggestion that the area could be developed along Garden City lines (though without self-governance) with land sold to developers on a leasehold basis and revenues accruing to the local authority.  Meanwhile, the Council approached one of the most prominent architects and planners of the day, TH Mawson, a lecturer at Liverpool’s prestigious School of Civic Design, elected president of the Town Planning Institute in 1923.

Mawson’s first recommendations were made in 1927; a more complete illustrated and typewritten report in 1929. He promised: (3)

a scheme that shall be of benefit … to posterity – aesthetically, hygienically, practically and in every way … the nicest and most tasteful of its kind in the Kingdom.

It was a plan explicitly referencing the arts and crafts ideals of William Morris and Raymond Unwin and the principles of the 1918 Tudor Walters Report.  Mawson talked of wide grass verges and tree-lined streets, even the ‘somewhat unusual step’ of planting roses instead of trees along some of the best streets. As to the housing itself, it reflected the usual reality of a ‘mixed community’ – large houses for the wealthy, lesser versions for the middle class, and small, terraced homes (at council rent) for the working class though he suggested the latter be built around ‘little town squares’ to avoid monotony.

I could write more but the formal adoption of Mawson’s plans was deferred and then, at some point in the mid-1930s, quietly abandoned. That controversy I teased you with is yet to come though the ideas raised here around ‘community’ would be central to later discussion.

Elsewhere, planning continued.  By 1939, land for what became the Mount Estate in Prenton had been purchased and Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson drew up plans for a garden suburb of some 502 homes.  War would delay their implementation but the Corporation had built around 4500 council homes by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Birkenhead suffered heavily from that war; 2079 houses were destroyed by bombing and 26,000 seriously damaged. Some 3464 people lost their lives.  But planning for better tomorrow began early. In 1944, Bertie Robinson unveiled new plans for the Woodchurch Estate. At around the same time, the Council appointed Professor Charles Reilly as a planning consultant with a brief to produce an outline plan for post-war Birkenhead as a whole. Reilly had been Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool from 1904 to his retirement in 1933; a charismatic figure, better known as an influential educator than as practitioner.

Robinson’s 1944 plan for the Estate

Robinson published details of his scheme in The Builder in November 1944. He first described the site in the Fender Valley: 457 acres of which the large municipally-owned Arrowe Park, containing golf course, bowling greens and football pitches, would be retained and the ‘attractive suburb’ of Upton conserved. So far as the residential areas were concerned, he proposed ‘a garden city for the purpose of housing on the basis of a neighbourhood unit’. (4)

A model of Robinson’s Woodchurch proposals from The Builder

In terms of layout, he planned two 100-foot boulevards in the form of a cross in a central square – these had given, he claimed, ‘the scheme the title of the “Green Cross”’ – and a 60-foot boulevard from which the estate’s service roads would radiate. These should be laid out on ‘attractive lines with grass verges, shrubs, trees and gradual curves’.  There would be little encouragement to traffic ‘other than that serving the estate itself’.

The estate as a whole was conceived as containing 2540 homes, serving a population of around 10,800 – a range of two, three, four and five-bedroom houses ‘suitable for north or south aspect’ built in ‘blocks of two, up to terraces of eight’ and set back to ‘varying building lines’.

With a central and two subsidiary shopping areas and provision for 156 shops in all, a public hall and community centre, 22.5 acres of allotments, ten schools and a ‘Young People’s College’, and plentiful open space, it was an ambitious and considered scheme which reflected contemporary planning ideas around community-focused design to improve on the widely criticised form and character of the interwar cottage suburbs.

Sir Charles Reilly, a 1943 portrait by Howard Coster © National Portrait Gallery and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Enter Reilly. He described: (5)

not liking very much the look of this layout which was on ordinary garden suburb lines … I suggested to the Borough Engineer that we should make a new layout plan together.

Less emolliently, in an article in the left-wing journal Tribune, he called Robinson’s scheme ‘a damn bad plan’. When Robinson rejected his offer to collaborate, Reilly, in his own words, ‘explained the ideas I thought would be welcomed everywhere and told him he would make his name by it if he did’.

Reilly’s Greens, as envisaged in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Reilly’s uninvited intervention and the spat, at least on Reilly’s side, which developed then became a much larger controversy. In essence, as they were further developed, Reilly’s alternative plans contained one big idea – the greens around which housing would be grouped.  He explained them in an April 1944 report in the Birkenhead News:

The motives of the scheme are the English Village Green and the small squares of the country town, where children can play and neighbours see one another and retain the friendliness of the little streets and slums. With pairs of semi-detached houses on the curved roads of the Garden Suburb type of plan this friendliness … turns to suburban snobbishness through not seeing and knowing one’s neighbours. The houses look away from one another and the people too.

Later, he expanded his attack on suburbia:

Why was there such a contempt with novelists for suburbia? It was because it bred a narrowness of outlook, in which the team spirit was not developed.  It lacked the intellectual development which came from sharpening one’s wits … allowing everyone to play with his own toy castle had produced an anti-social spirit.

In this, Reilly, of course, reflected much of the inverted snobbery directed towards the suburbs then and now.

He also articulated an architect’s disdain for tradespeople as represented here by the poor Borough Engineer:

Without being in any way personal, as an architect, I feel the layout of houses for human habitation is not in the first place an engineer’s job. The engineer’s training in steel construction in drains and such like inhuman things does not fit him for it. It is not humane enough. The architect however, is always thinking in terms of human lives. He, I suggest, should do the planning and the engineer keep him straight on the mechanical side.

Robinson kept his own counsel through all this though he had written thoughtfully – admittedly in measured bureaucratic tones – on housing in an article for a professional journal in 1936. (5)

However, beyond the interpersonal disputes, there were planning ideas. Reilly himself described his concept for communal greens as ‘a semi-new planning principle’. It owed much to Unwin’s quadrangles and had similarities to the bowling greens of nearby Port Sunlight.  His general critique of suburbia and, in particular, the Corporation suburbia of peripheral council estates, was certainly highly topical and gained traction from the publication in May 1944 of the government-sponsored Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings which was similarly critical.

And beyond the planning talk, there was politics – a politics writ large by wartime conditions and post-war aspirations. At its simplest, this was party politics, and in Birkenhead the debate over the contending plans split along purely political lines.  The ruling Conservative Party favoured Robinson’s scheme and the insurgent Labour opposition favoured and campaigned powerfully for what had now become known as the Reilly Plan.

Here, it elided easily with the wider issue of housing shortage; by July 1945, there were 2300 on Birkenhead’s council housing waiting list and, it was said, 150 fresh applications weekly. The debate over Woodchurch was, crudely, a useful local wedge issue.

Central area as depicted in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

But it was much more than this. It spoke too to what was really a unique moment in British history – a time when passionate debate around a new, more modern and better Britain to emerge in peacetime conditions dominated.  Speaking at the annual Labour Conference in December 1944, Harold Laski declared that ‘for Socialists the war was each day more fully an ideological war’. The sacrifice it demanded of those who fought: (7)

can be justified in one way only. It will be justified by the degree in which the Socialist commonwealth becomes the inheritance of the civilisation we are seeking to reshape.

That conference went on to pass a resolution that ‘the community basis of town planning, as illustrated by Professor Sir Charles Reilly’s plan for Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead, would best serve post-war housing needs’.

In the Picture Post article referred to, Caradoc Williams, secretary of Birkenhead Trades Council, declared his own support for the Reilly Plan with the spirit, if not the rhetoric, of Laski:

I believe it is in accordance with the community spirit developed during the war. Public opinion here wants a progressive plan. After all, the men out there are fighting for decent homes, not only for houses.

Mary Mercer, a former Labour councillor, saw ‘a spirit in the Reilly Plan … the spirit of the New Britain’. Birkenhead Tories less so.

For Councillor Guy Williams:

The whole idea of Professor Reilly’s Plan is to foster community spirit. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. But if a man doesn’t feel community-minded, he should thank God for a 5-ft hedge around his house.

For Lawrence Wolfe, who must have read this article, there could not have been a clearer expression of the ‘isolationist way of life’ he believed so damaging to the British psyche and society. It was Wolfe who, in 1945, most passionately advocated The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (as his book was titled). (8)

For him, it was a panacea to all psychological and social ills. The book provides a greatly expanded and highly prescriptive exposition of Reilly’s plans including the proposal that the Community Centre provide ‘a Restaurant and Meals Service’, supplying meals in large containers to nursery schools and ‘in small thermos containers’ to individuals. Wolfe went on to address contemporary concerns about the birth rate and sexual behaviour: ‘Under the Reilly Plan early marriage is easy and normal’; ‘sexual immorality outside marriage also diminishes’; venereal disease declines; and the birth rate would rise.

‘Single green with cricket match in progress’ from Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Wolfe went on, at his most fanciful, to evoke not only a New Britain but a Merry England:

In the village green world dancing is not confined to special times and places. People dance when they feel like it – and they often do. Impromptu merry-making would look crazy in the middle of an isolationist street; on the green it looks perfectly natural and the passer-by, far from being tolerantly amused or even scandalised, is more likely to join in.

Reilly’s introduction to the book rather disarmingly notes:

the many implications [Wolfe] has found in the plan which, I confess, I did not fully see when I drew it … he, I am glad to say, discerns many further advantages in what I thought was merely a natural expression of neighbourliness.

The reality is that this was very much Wolfe’s vision, the Reilly Plan his chosen vehicle, but the 71-year-old Reilly, ever the keen publicist of his own ideas and role, was happy to go along with it.

For all the storm and stress, the Council – dividing on party lines – had endorsed Robinson’s scheme in February 1944. A proposal from Labour leader Charles McVey for an inquiry into the rival proposals was defeated in July.

That, however, was not quite the end of the Reilly Greens. The idea was taken up enthusiastically, with Reilly’s active participation, in the Black Country boroughs of Bilston and Dudley. Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, no less, commended it in his major speech introducing the second reading of the New Towns Bill in May 1946: ‘the experiment was about to be tried in Bilston…and he would watch it with interest’. (9)  In the end, the concept was applied in much diluted form. (10)  Reilly himself died in February 1948.

Back in Birkenhead, in March 1945, the Council approved final plans for the Woodchurch Estate – not Reilly’s, nor Robinson’s, but new proposals drawn up by the Liverpool architect Herbert J Rowse.  Next week’s post examines this story and the longer story of the Woodchurch Estate that emerged from this extraordinary episode.

Sources

(1) Maurice Edelman, ‘Planning Post-War Britain: the Example of Birkenhead’, Picture Post, 8 July 1944

(2) William Thompson, Municipal Housing in England and Wales (1910)

(3) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013. Following detail is also drawn from this source.

(4) B Robinson, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Planner: B. Robinson, Borough Engineer’, The Builder, November 24, 1944

(5) Quoted in Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The following quotation is drawn from the same source.

(6) B Robinson, ‘Some Snags in Housing Schemes’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, vol 57, no 1, 1936

(7) ‘Labour Policy’, The Times, December 12 1944

(8) Lawrence Woolf, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (Nicholson and Watson, 1945). The author’s name is a nom-de-plume and, despite speculation, very little is known about him.

(9) ‘House of Commons’ The Times , May 9 1946

(10) This episode is discussed fully in Peter J. Larkham, New suburbs and UK post-war reconstruction: the fate of Charles Reilly’s “greens”, Birmingham: University of Central England, School of Planning and Housing, 2004,  and in Peter Richmond, Marketing Modernisms: The Architectural and Cultural Consequence of Sir Charles Reilly, University of Liverpool PhD, 1997.

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)

The Speke Estate, Liverpool: a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

Speke, lying just over seven miles south-east of Liverpool’s city centre, wasn’t planned as just another large council estate.  The Corporation envisaged it as a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’. (1)  At times, the reach of that ambition must have seemed close to fulfilment but by the 1980s some called it – and not in a good way – ‘Beirut’ or, a few years later as civil war raged in the former Yugoslavia, ‘Sarajevo’. (2)  That was never fair and much has changed since.  This post looks at the longer history, the hopes and the fears and the more complex story of the community’s ups and downs.

‘Housing Estate, Speke’

Liverpool – a securely (though idiosyncratically) Conservative authority until 1956 – built over 42,000 council homes in the interwar period, most in large cottage suburbs such as Norris Green, some famously in imposing ‘Continental-style’ tenement blocks.  The Speke Estate represented another strand in this ambitious agenda, providing not just housing but employment as the Corporation sought far-sightedly to shift the city from its dependence on precarious and low-waged dock labour.

The keystone of this approach lay in the 1926 Liverpool Corporation Act which empowered the council to develop industrial estates and parallel housing developments. The Corporation bought the Speke estate – the local gentry family had died out in 1921 and the land had been placed in trust –for £200,000 in 1928.   Then in the neighbouring Rural District of Whiston, the area was formally incorporated into the County Borough of Liverpool in 1932.

Speke Airport’s original terminal building, built 1937-40 to the designs of EH Bloomfield of Liverpool Corporation Land Stewards and Surveyors Office (c) Dave Wood and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Speke Airport, operational from 1930, was the first fruit of this new venture – one of 35 municipal airports opened between 1929 and 1937.  Near at hand lay the Speke Industrial Estate, the first factory completed in 1934.  By 1939, 28 factories were built or under construction, eleven of these provided directly by the Corporation which also advanced over £300,000 in loans to encourage firms to locate in the new estate.  Some 7000 jobs had been provided, most – as war loomed – in the government airframe factory. (3)

A contemporary image of Little Heath Road

Factories needed workers.  At the same time, Liverpool citizens living in the city’s many slums needed decent homes.  In 1935, the Corporation had committed itself to an eight-year programme clearing 15,692 slums and the construction, within five years, of some 5000 new homes.  The Corporation’s transfer of 650 acres of land in Speke to the Housing Committee in April 1936 was central to these plans.

By 1939, 1631 homes had been completed on the Estate although demand was much higher. Companies drawn to the industrial estate by the lure of local housing for its workforce complained about slow progress and the failure of the Corporation to fulfil its side of the bargain; Rootes alone claimed it needed 1285 homes for its workers. (4)  This urgency led to Speke’s early housing being built without subsidy under the 1925 Housing Act.

Lancelot Keay

Just over 50 per cent of this housing were parlour homes, a high percentage in these straitened times and an indication of the prestige of the Speke scheme and the commitment of Speke’s mastermind Lancelot Keay, Liverpool’s dynamic Director of Housing, to high-quality housing.  Even the non-parlour homes were – at 750 square feet – relatively spacious and included upstairs bathrooms. (5)  The rents – reaching 18s 6d (92.5p) for a three-bed parlour home in 1939 – were relatively high and, although some 88 per cent of heads of household were classed as skilled or semi-skilled, there were reports of a high turnover of former central slum dwellers who had moved to the Estate. (6)

These homes were, in the fashion of the day, laid out on ‘Garden City’ lines though, in this case, the lines themselves were rather pronounced.  The existing village of Speke housed around 400; its parish church was judged ‘not of such importance as to be made the focal point of the new development’.

A 1936 proposal for the layout of Speke, later modified, drawn from Keay’s 1936 Report to the Housing Committee

Furthermore, the ‘absence of any natural features, the levels of the grounds, and the regularity of the boundaries,…all tended to suggest a formal layout and the consequent need of a central spacious boulevard and one main cross-road’. (6)  Western Avenue running north-south and Central Avenue east-west continue to mark that original plan with the Estate’s basic grid broken up by the cul-de-sac ways and closes which nodded towards Ebenezer Howard’s more bucolic ideals.

A post-war layout scheme, from Gale. Modern Housing Estates (1948)

Typically, for all community ideals proclaimed at the Estate’s inception, other facilities were slow to follow.  In 1941, tenants were complaining that only three shops had been provided though they had been resident for two years.  (7)

The war had naturally hindered further construction though the important military role of the airport and industrial estate no doubt played its part in the permission granted to build an additional 367 houses during the war itself.  Post-war efforts were dedicated – in the words of Labour’s 1945 election poster, to winning the peace. The attempt to fulfil Speke’s founding ideals was redoubled.

In 1949 Stanley Gale described Speke as ‘unique among housing estates developed by local authorities’.  Although it was not yet a ‘self-contained community’ as planned, its 29 factories were reported to employ some 11,000 workers; the completion of the Estate’s 6000 homes confidently projected.

Greyhound Farm Road, Speke (later the home of the actor Leonard Rossiter)

It’s worth looking at the detail of the latter: that total was made up of over 5143 two- to four-bed family homes with living room and dining room (the change of terminology from ‘parlour’ was itself telling of new times), 250 cottage flats for the elderly, 92 single person flats, and 221 two- to four-bed flats for families with living room and dining room.

This was the ‘mixed development’ – a larger range of housing types to accommodate people in different life stages and circumstances (though, as yet, without high-rise) – which became standard in the post-war years.  In Speke, there was an important added element to reflect that original intent to ‘accommodate all classes of the community’ – 294 large houses with garages and four bedrooms for ‘professional men, managers, etc.’. (8)

‘Houses with garages’, Speke

Here Speke had anticipated the ethos of the New Towns programme launched in 1946 and reflected the vision which Aneurin Bevan – who argued council housing shouldn’t be just for the poor – outlined eloquently in 1949.  Bevan insisted that the ‘segregation of the different income groups [was] a wholly evil thing’, creating ‘castrated communities’, and his new Housing Act removed the stipulation that it be specified as working-class housing.

Gerneth Road, Speke

Lancelot Keay, who considered Speke his last major project, echoed these ideals and hoped, in 1946, to oversee the scheme’s completion – ‘a projected community of about 30,000 persons with all the buildings that will be necessary and with houses for all those who may desire to share in the life of that community’ – in three years. (9)  In a period of such genuine austerity that was over-optimistic.  Keay retired in 1948.  The Estate was completed in the late 1950s with those 6000 homes and a population (its peak population as it happened) of around 25,000.

But Keay understood that Speke’s new community required more than just good housing.  It was, he said:

most essential that we should endeavour to bring back a greater measure of gaiety into the lives of ordinary people.  They should have the opportunity of enjoying all those excitements and pleasantries of life which are too often reserved for those in the higher-income levels. It is for this reason that a central community building will provide, with its dance hall, concert hall and restaurant, for the pleasures as well as the adult education of the people.

The phrasing remains a little patrician, a little ‘improving’ although there’s no mistaking the good intent.  That good intent, however, was slow to be fulfilled.  Keay’s successor as Director of Housing, Ronald Bradbury lamented three years into his term (he served till 1970) that it had ‘not been possible as yet, owing to present conditions, to erect the Civic libraries, departmental stores, swimming baths, hotels, etc., for which sites have been reserved’.  (10)

Austin Rawlinson Swimming Baths, c1965

Speke Central Library, c1965

The new Austin Rawlinson Swimming Bath and Civic Laundry (named after a local swimming Olympian and national coach) and Speke Central Library weren’t opened till 1965.

We’ll leave Speke in its heyday – a place with decent housing, facilities and, most importantly – always the economic underpinning of working-class prosperity – good jobs. Next week’s post will examine its later more troubled history and recent attempts to revive the Estate conceived with such high hopes.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing Progress at Liverpool: Estate for all classes’, The Times, 17 September 1937

(2) David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’ in Ronaldo Munck (ed), Reinventing the City?: Liverpool in Comparative Perspective  (2003)

(3) Stephen V. Ward, ‘Local industrial promotion and development policies 1899-1940’, Local Economy, vol. 5, no. 2, August 1990

(4) Madeline McKenna, The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars, University of Liverpool PhD, 1986

(5) Colin G Pooley and Sandra Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945, University of Lancaster, Resource Paper for the Centre for North West Regional Studies (1984)

(6) City of Liverpool Housing Committee, Speke Estate: Report of the Director of Housing on a Proposal for the Building of a Self-Contained Community Unit, 21 October 1936

(7) Pooley and Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945

(8) Stanley Gale, Modern Housing Estates (London, 1949)

(9) LH Keay, ‘Post-war Housing’, RIBA Journal, vol 53, no 7, May 1946

(10) Ronald Bradbury, ‘The Technique of Municipal Housing in England: with Particular Reference to Liverpool’, The Town Planning Review, vol 22, no 1, April 1951

Most of the earlier black and white images are drawn from Liverpool Corporation, Liverpool Builds 1945-1965 (1967)

The Ellor Street Redevelopment Area, Salford: ‘No Hanky Park, no more’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

In early October, I was invited by John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming to visit the Pendleton Estate in Salford, one a number of people who have visited.  We were asked to provide a response to the experience and an impression of the estate.  These will feature, along with the archive of documentation accumulated by John and Jane during their long years of residency in the estate, in an exhibition at the People’s History Museum running from 29 October 2016 to 15 January 2017.

The post which follows represents what might be called a prehistory of the estate – looking at the housing it replaced, the ideas behind the huge redevelopment which took place in the sixties, and the questions of community raised by each. 

…streets, mazes, jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together, two rooms above and two below; in some cases, only one room alow and aloft; public houses by the score where forgetfulness lurks in a mug; pawnshops by the dozen where you can raise the wind to buy forgetfulness; churches, chapels and unpretentious mission halls where God is praised; nude, black patches of land, “crofts”, as they are called, waterlogged, sterile, bleak and chill.

Walter Greenwood cast an unsparing eye on the Salford he grew up in and knew so well. (1) He was brought up on Ellor Street in Pendleton, the only son of a master hairdresser and educated at the local Langworthy Road Primary School.  His schooling ended aged thirteen; he’d worked outside school hours as a pawnbroker’s clerk twelve months previously and would go on to experience a range of other menial jobs as well as periods of unemployment before writing Love on the Dole, published in 1933.

56 Ellor Street, Greenwood’s birthplace, shown empty and derelict in the 1960s (c) WGC4-4-2, Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

The book’s protagonist, Harry Hardcastle, unwisely forsakes his ‘soft’ office job as just such a pawnbroker’s clerk to become as an apprentice at ‘Marlowe’s’, a local engineering works – man’s work to Harry but after seven years, his time served, Harry is laid off just as the men preceding him had been as the Great Depression hit.  The props – a living wage (just) and the dignity of work – which might have made his harsh environs endurable are removed and the squalor of the mean slum terraces and abject lives they spawned exact their toll.

Greenwood wasn’t writing for effect and his novel – working men and women and those without work are its heroes – is a world away from the poverty porn which disfigures contemporary attitudes towards the poor.

Concerned middle-class observers such as the Manchester Social Service Group of the [Christian] Auxiliary Movement echoed his description of local conditions: (2)

Tall factory buildings pollute the air with smoke and block out sunshine and light, so that many householders have to burn gas all day.  Not a single house has a garden and all are grimy with soot.  There is no recreation ground, although small vacant plots, dusty, often littered with refuse, and absolutely devoid of grass, are sometimes used for this purpose.

The corner of Florin Street and Douglas Street in the 1960s (c) WCG4-4-3, Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

They surveyed the Chapel Street/Blackfriars Road area of Salford two miles east of Hanky Park (nicknamed after the main local thoroughfare, Hankinson Street) where Greenwood set Love on the Dole.  Of some 500 houses, only four had baths and all, or very nearly all, needless to say, shared (outside) toilets.  On the other hand:

As is found in other poor districts, the shops catering for wants rather than needs are surprisingly numerous. The section first mentioned contains six public houses, five supper bars, and five shops selling sweets and tobacco.

Our modern-day critics might make something of that wasteful spending on fripperies but one senses here something more sympathetic – a realisation that hard lives needed something softer to make them bearable.

The E Griffiths Hughes Chemical Works, the Adelphi Iron Works and environs, Salford, 1934 (c) Historical England EPW045058

Local government provided a more bureaucratic but more statistically telling account of local living conditions thirteen years later.  In the 50,500-odd homes of the County Borough of Salford (it had, of course, its more salubrious middle-class suburbs), over half lacked hot water; almost one in five were judged ‘totally unfit and scheduled for early demolition’, one in ten ‘other unfit homes’ were slated for later demolition.  Of the rest, 24,500 were substandard – too good for demolition but still, nevertheless, falling ‘below reasonably fit standard’.  JE Blease, a Salford sanitary inspector, pointed out that these obsolescent terraces were the late Victorian byelaw housing ‘heralded with pride’ for their sanitary improvements ‘by building surveyors some sixty years ago as an approach to the artisan’s utopia’. (3)

We’ve arrived at 1943 in a world at war – a war which made those redundant working-class male bodies of the thirties valuable once more, either in military service or on the home front in war production.  We can be cynical about a society which places a premium on human lives which it is otherwise busy destroying but there were, during this second world war, other more humane and progressive forces at play.

In this context, the first film version of Love on the Dole in 1941 might initially seem surprising.  What more searing indictment of Britain’s class-ridden and socially unjust society could there be?  For this reason, the censors were initially reluctant to authorise its production (they deemed it ‘a very sordid story in a very sordid surrounding’) and yet the director John Baxter, was, for his part, determined that the film should ‘not be a star-vehicle because it should represent ordinary people’. (4)  (Deborah Kerr who played Harry’s sister, Sally, would make her name later.)

There was a significant shift, however. John Harris notes a ‘doughty, optimistic dialogue that was not in the novel’ and the film (unlike the book) ends on a positive note with the parting words of Harry’s mother:

One day we’ll all be wanted. The men who’ve forgotten how to work, and the young ‘uns who’ve never had a job. There must be no Hanky Park, no more.

Greenwood must surely have approved.  Some of his early mentors had been working-class activists and much of the novel had been written at Ashfield Labour Club in Salford. Greenwood himself was briefly – he wasn’t cut out for active politics himself – a Labour councillor.  In a later interview, he stated his novel’s purpose in showing ‘what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth’.

In this 1941 iteration, Love on the Dole was an emphatic ‘never again’ – both a demand and, implicitly, a promise of a better post-war world.

Again, the rhetoric of local government was drier but its planners believed their craft and vision central to this new world and saw planning, humane and rational, as the very antithesis of the destructive anarchy wrought by the free market.

In February 1942 Salford’s City Engineer, W Albert Walker, emphasised that the ‘central concern’ of town planning was ‘the health, happiness and well-being of the people’. ‘The very starkness in which we have now seen the defects’, he continued, ‘may arouse new interest with a fresh determination that prevailing conditions must be improved’. (5)

The Beveridge Report, a 1943 best-seller

Nationally, the Beveridge Report published ten months after Walker’s Salford speech promised to slay the five ‘Giant Evils’ – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness – which so straitened the lives of the Salford working class Greenwood portrayed. The Report sold 630,000 copies.  Many obviously shared Mrs Hardcastle’s hopes for the future.

But if all this was a revolution, it was a very British one.  Beveridge himself emphasised that his great scheme of social security was ‘first and foremost, a plan of insurance – of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence level’ (though, crucially, without the Means Test which scarred the family lives of Greenwood’s protagonists).

In housing (the ‘Squalor’ that Beveridge attacked), there were similarly pragmatic proposals.  Mr Blease suggested that much of the borough’s terraced housing could be reconditioned.  However, his helpful sixteen point checklist of required improvements – covering roofs and guttering, windows and doors and much else beyond the now bare essentials of baths and toilets – suggested the difficulty.  ‘The desired up-grading of substandard houses will not be accomplished by philanthropic enthusiasm on the part of landlords’, he commented mildly; nor could it be funded under existing local government powers.

An illustration of bye-law housing drawn from JE Blease, ‘The Unfit House’.  This area is now the site of Urban Splash’s radical redesign of these traditional terraces.

Labour’s 1949 Housing Act did, in fact, allow local authorities to acquire homes for improvement or conversion with 75 per cent Exchequer grants but this was not yet the approach prioritised by central or local government.

City Engineer Walker spoke to higher ambitions: for ‘large agglomerations…there must be satellite towns. When a central area is re-developed, there must be a reduction in density’.  He was far more sceptical about high-rise construction:

There appears to be no reason or excuse for blocks of flats in the average town of one hundred thousand population or under. There is an attraction about erecting a large block of buildings. They look compact and tidy. The proportion of the site built up may be kept low. But how will they be classed in, say, forty years? In the large urban aggregations to which reference has been made, flats will no doubt find a place, but they are only the next best thing to good houses.

We’ll just let those comments stand.  To many, they might seem an almost uncannily prescient anticipation of a debate that had erupted fiercely in the four decades which Walker prescribed.

At first, Salford followed Walker’s advice with the creation of a large overspill estate in the then Urban District of Worsley some eight miles to the west of Salford’s historic centre.  Inaugurated in 1949, the Salford-Worsley scheme had, by 1959, relocated almost 10,000 (of a projected 17,000) Salfordians.  In the fifties, the Borough proposed moving almost a quarter of its population (40,000 of 178,000) to greenfield sites beyond its borders. (6)

Overspill housing in Little Hulton, part of the Worsley scheme (c) Eccles and District Local History Society, www.hultonhistory.btck.co.uk/Memories/Salfordoverspill

Such a shift was not without problems for those involved.  The new council rents were, on average, three times higher than those paid previously.  Seven in ten of the estate’s workforce commuted – one and half hours there and back – back to Salford for work.  And then, according to the planner JB Cullingworth, there were added expenses caused by a new ‘social necessity to “keep up appearances”’.

Ten per cent of families returned to Salford; in Cullingworth’s survey, three-quarters would have returned if only they ‘could obtain accommodation in Salford which was of “the Worsley standard”’.   There lay the rub, of course:

Over a quarter of the families have moved from shared and overcrowded houses; a further third had previously lived in damp and obsolescent accommodation. Their present living conditions form a most striking and welcome contrast.

So most settled and, in time, a new community would develop. It would, however, be a very different community from that described by Greenwood.  Cullingworth, in a single sentence, captures the shift which some contemporary observers decried: ‘The intimate life of the slums has given way to the more reserved, home-centred life of the typical middle-class suburb’.

Writing of the new out-of-county estates of the London County Council, Peter Willmott and Michael Young lamented the loss of ‘the sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries’ that had made up the old East End and mourned, in particular, the break-up of the matriarchal kinship networks they held to have previously sustained community life. (7)  They’ve been criticised since for a selective use of evidence and a much romanticised view of slum living.

Greenwood is a corrective here and Cullingworth himself offered a far more sardonic take:

Separation from ‘Mum’ has not been the hardship which some sociologists have led us to expect; on the contrary it has often allowed a more harmonious relationship to be established. The possession of a house in which pride can be taken has resulted in a closer and more intimate family life: activities are now centred on the home, the garden and the television set.

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this was an escape from the pub to be celebrated, not the escape to it required by previously inhospitable home conditions.

The charge – it was usually a lament or criticism – of embourgeoisement (the view that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values) is a more interesting one.   For all the practical difficulties, Cullingworth found that the ‘majority of families were thrilled with their new way of life’.  Perhaps, therefore, we should recast this argument.

A image of the new affluence: the new Salford shopping precinct as imaged in the Report on the Plan

Are we really saying that as soon as the working class achieve decent living standards that they have thereby become middle-class?  Sometimes it seems that way; sometimes it seems that some left-wing commentators would prefer the working class to be ‘poor but happy’ (or even unhappy if that better maintained a purer and more militant proletarian politics).  Let’s just scrap the labels which seem to affix too readily essentialist class attributes to certain modes of living.  Besides the definitive study of the so-called ‘affluent worker’ found that, despite their more ‘privatised’ home life, their working lives remained distinct and harder and their politics largely unaltered. (8)

Still, there was truth in Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s statement in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.  This was an era of full employment and rising living standards. It seemed a tectonic shift; Love on the Dole was an historic record, a reminder of a lost world, one not to be repeated.

The new world was represented in the redevelopment of the Ellor Street area first approved by the Municipal Borough in 1960.  In the words of Albert Jones, the chair of the Council’s Planning and Development Committee, ‘we may be thirty years late but we are trying now to obliterate Hanky Park as it was known and propose to make the area something of which we can be proud’. (9)

The bare bones of the plan were to clear 89 acres of land in which, according to Jones, ‘three thousand families lived in slum conditions as bad as any to be found in the country’. (10)  But the form of redevelopment was peculiar to its time.

In March 1961, the Council commissioned Sir Robert Matthew, formerly Chief Architect to the London County Council and now Professor of Architecture at Edinburgh University, to act as consultant.  His plan, prepared in collaboration with architect-planner Percy Johnson-Marshall, director of the University’s Housing Research Unit, envisaged something far more sweeping than the mere replacement of substandard housing.

The project was seen ‘strategically as a vital part of the regeneration of the industrial north of England’; its aim ‘to recreate within the Greater Manchester Region a city centre which will make for a high standard of environment in terms of living, shopping and civic affairs, using the latest techniques of planning and development to fit the new centre for the motor age’. (11)

Matthews continued, in the Report on the Plan which would form the template of the finished project:

The basic idea of the scheme is to provide a beautiful and spacious environment with large and continuous pedestrian space over a large area so that the citizens of the new Salford may drive off efficiently to work or else walk down a new parkway right into one of Europe’s finest shopping centres without having to cross any roads.

Much of the proposal therefore features what was planned as a combined Civic and Shopping Centre – the former containing a new town hall, library, and museum and art gallery as well as what was billed as a ‘contemporary Trafalgar Square’ for the borough; the latter, 400,000 square feet of retail space as well as parking for 2070 cars.  The adjacent A6 was to be brought up to motorway standard to aid traffic flow.

‘View looking eastward along the main pedestrian way’ (Broadwalk from the shopping precinct) as envisaged in The Report on the Plan

Practically, this spoke to Colin Buchanan’s influential report, Traffic in Towns, published in 1963. It was designed to manage the problems caused by increased car ownership and enhance the quality of urban life – there were 10.5 million vehicles registered in Britain at the time but the figure was expected to almost double by the end of the decade.  It was the report’s support for urban motorways, however, which, as implemented, blighted a number of city centres that have secured its hold in the popular imagination.

Ideologically, the plan reflected the sense that a modern and prosperous Britain was emerging, one whose promise extended to a working class, more securely employed and better-off than ever before. In this context, Hanky Park did, indeed, seem a remnant of a benighted past.

A 1961 concept model of the new estate

‘Forward to the City Beautiful!’ proclaimed one Salford newspaper headline of 1961 and the plan was claimed by its boosters as vital to the borough’s renaissance.  One Salford councillor asserted that ‘our future as a city stands or falls by Ellor Street’ – the redevelopment would ‘add 2800 families to our population, revitalise our trade, and give our rateable value its first boost since the war’.

There, of course, was represented another aspect of the scheme’s appeal. Salford, like other similarly placed towns and cities, had turned against the large-scale decanting of its population to distant and beyond-border estates.  The latter had, as we’ve seen, its practical problems for the new suburbanites but there was a fear too that the local authorities themselves were – literally and metaphorically – diminished by the loss of population the policy created.

Aerial view of the Ellor Street Redevelopment Area, c.1964 (c) Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

The new housing, therefore, wasn’t – though it is discussed in the concluding section of the Report on the Plan – exactly an afterthought but it was covered rather summarily.  ‘Immediate housing requirements have been met by siting three 15 storey blocks on the north-west corner of the site’, it stated. For the rest, it proposed mainly eight-storey maisonette blocks, some four-storey, eight unit blocks providing family houses and, rather casually, three twenty-two storey point blocks and other 16-storey blocks which would ‘give emphasis and continuity to the visual sequence of the development’.

This was, to say the least, a sharp break from the two-storey terraces which had dominated previously and a clear contrast with the more cautious approach suggested by that wartime generation of planners discussed earlier.  But it reflected the wisdom of the age that assumed high-rise construction offered a quick and easy means to provide both the new housing and urban density required by the new wave of slum clearance.

The Ellor Street redevelopment Stage 8 (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1984)

By some accounts, the residents of Ellor Street and surrounds, those who would inhabit the brave new world created by the planners and politicians, were less sure of the solutions proposed.  One local journalist observed: (12)

It is a district of people whose roots are firmly embedded in the hard ground, and there is every sign that they are not going to take kindly to the sudden upheaval.  There was a sense of uneasiness around, which is in many cases hidden by a joke or a resolution to face the new life – the sort of resolution one reaches when facing a visit to the dentist to have that worrying tooth removed.

It seems the stoicism deployed to survive the hardships of the thirties was required once more to cope with the benefits bestowed by modern affluence.  We’ll see how all this played out in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933)

(2) Manchester Social Service Group of the Auxiliary Movement, No. 9 Report on a Survey of Housing Conditions in the Salford Area (Manchester, Sherratt and Hughes, 1930)

(3) JE Blease (Sanitary Inspector, Salford), ‘The Unfit House’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol. 66, January 1946, pp11-18

(4) The British Board of Film Classification is quoted in John Harris, ‘Rereading: Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood’, The Guardian, 7 August 2010, and John Baxter in Chris Hopkins, ‘Why Love on the Dole stands the test of time’, 20 January, 2016

(5) W Albert Walker, ‘Post-War Housing Development’, Read at a Sessional Meeting held at Salford on February 14th, 1942; The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol 62, April 1942, pp75-84

(6) JB Cullingworth, ‘Overspill in South East Lancashire: The Salford-Worsley Scheme’, The Town Planning Review, vol. 30, no. 3, October, 1959, pp189-206

(7) Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Kinship in East London (Routledge, 2013; first published 1957), p97

(8) John H Goldthorpe, David Lockwood et al., ‘The Affluent Worker and the Thesis of Embourgeoisement: Some Preliminary Research Findings’, Sociology, vol. 1 no. 1, January 1967, pp11-31

(9) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain, 1957-62, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p397

(10) Cllr Albert Jones, Foreword, in Robert Matthew and Percy Johnson-Marshall, Report on the Plan (Edinburgh: Bella Vista, 1963), p1

(11) Matthew and Johnson-Marshall, Report on the Plan p6. The quotation which follows comes from p7.

(12) Salford City Reporter, 3 April 1959 quoted in Kynaston, Modernity Britain, p289

Harlow New Town: ‘Too good to be true’?

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Gibberd, Harlow

Harlow got a mixed press in the 1950s.  To some, it was ‘Pram Town’, a tribute to the preponderance of young families who had moved there and perhaps, by extension, to the new life that this New Town heralded.  To others, it was little more than an urban prairie, one which left an unfortunate pedestrian ‘with a feeling of hopelessness in face of a terrifying eternity of wideness’. (1)  Let’s look more sympathetically at the ideals which inspired it and, with the benefit of distance, at its successes and failures.

The Market Square during a royal visit, November 1957

Harlow, like Stevenage and the six other New Towns located around the periphery of London, was born in the confluence of two powerful currents.  The first, the belief in planning – that society and the economy should be rationally organised to benefit all – had emerged as the inhumanity of Victorian capitalism became manifest and was most idealistically expressed in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, an early inspiration for the New Towns. Its reach and ambition grew when the very model of free market economics seemed in terminal crisis as the Great Depression hit in the 1930s.

Mark Hall North under construction, early 1950s

The second was Social Democracy, taking planning as its keynote but rooted in the working-class politics and more broadly shared ideals of fairness and equality which triumphed – too briefly perhaps – in Labour’s landslide 1945 election victory.  Leah Manning won the Epping constituency for Labour in 1945 (she lost the seat in 1950) and it’s a sign of the confidence of this new dawn that she believed even the benighted dwellers of village Essex would welcome the New Town to be built, in her constituency, amongst them: (2)

I did not find people pleading and crying that they would be turned out of their shops, theirs houses and farms, but a great mass of people who looked forward to the day when a new town would arise in this very ill-served town educationally, culturally and industrially…

In fact, there was some local opposition.  A Harlow and District Defence Association was established but, fiercely attacked by the local Labour Party which criticised the self-interest of ‘those who live in comfortable homes and very large houses’, it made little impact. (3)

The board of the Harlow Development Corporation

Naturally, for all that, in Britain, this was a conservative revolution, waged by civil servants, fought out in committee rooms and offices rather than the streets and barricades, but it remains important to mark the moment and register the ambition. Sir Ernest Gowers, the first chairman of the Harlow Development Corporation, the government quango set up to build the New Town, wrote of the first, 1949, Master Plan that: (4)

Some who read these pages at this time may feel almost as if they had wandered into fairyland, that it is too good to be true, that such things can have no relation to the present bleak and troubled days.

The reality, he asserted, was that ‘what is sketched here is a practical and urgent task’; the task was to reduce the population of London – Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan  had suggested by 0.5m – and house those removed in decent and healthy surroundings.

New housing under construction

Construction began in 1949, the first 120 homes were built in Old Harlow – one of the small villages and hamlets that made up this rural, predominantly greenfield 6100 acre site with an existing population of just 4500.  These were allocated to the Development Corporation staff and contractors who would oversee the project.  By 1961, Harlow’s population stood at over 61,000.

There was a certain excitement in the process which makes the dependence on private developers in the faltering new wave of supposed ‘garden cities’ such as Ebbsfleet look pretty shabby.  Lady Russell (wife of Bertrand), one of the Development Corporation boards’s first members, describes how its members: (5)

often had the feeling that we were playing at towns.  It was wonderfully exhilarating. Most of us were having the chance to put into practice ideals we had held all our lives, but never really expected to see carried out.

Development Corporation staff, Eric Adams stands at the centre of the front row

Eric Adams, the Corporation’s first General Manager, is described arriving at the station with some of his staff, declaiming, ‘it’s all ours, it’s all ours’.

But Harlow’s presiding genius, almost a City Father in the truest sense of the term, was Frederick Gibberd. Gibberd is perhaps a slightly overlooked figure now – a member of the Modern Architecture Research (MARS) Group in the 1930s but disdained by some of his erstwhile modernist colleagues for his wholehearted embrace of the Scandinavian-inspired New Humanist style which – through his influence – held dominant sway in this immediate post-war period (manifest in his work in the Lansbury Estate and some of Hackney’s schemes).

An early image of one of Harlow’s ‘green wedges’

The first priority for Gibberd was to ‘make the maximum possible use of existing character, genius locii’; in Harlow this meant exploiting what was held to be to be the most favourable landscape of any of the New Towns by use of four ‘green wedges’ reaching to the town centre and plentiful open space:

Every possible use must be made of existing buildings, villages, trees and place-names to give a feeling of continuity with the past…I remembered my own youth in Coventry and Birmingham where it was a whole day’s excursion to get to the country…I didn’t want any of these children to grow up without having seen a cow.

Another key element of the plan – this central to post-war planning ideals – was the emphasis on neighbourhoods. Gibberd planned three neighbourhood centres or ‘clusters’ around what Sylvia Crowe – the landscape architect employed as a consultant – described as the ‘central massif’ of the town centre itself.  But he refined the idea further with eighteen sub-centres each with a small group of shops, a pub and ‘common room’ to serve as a focal point for their immediate communities.

The plan of the Mark Hall neighbourhood

These ideas are best seen in the first of the neighbourhoods to be completed, Mark Hall North whose neighbourhood centre, The Stow, was opened in 1954.  Nettleswell and Great Parndon followed.  Other areas were set aside for industry.

An early image of The Stow taken from the Moot Hall

The Stow today

In terms of housing, Gibberd was clear that ‘the majority of the people want a two-storey house with a private garden’ (which had also the benefit of being ‘the cheapest form of dwelling’).  As an apostle of ‘mixed development’, however, he believed that around 20 to 30 per cent of homes should be flats and, in fact, he fought – against the opposition of the Development Corporation – to build the country’s first point block.  The Lawn, at nine storeys with 36 flats, would be a tiny prefiguring of what was to come. (For other examples and images of Harlow high-rise, check out my Tumblr post.)

The Lawn

If you walk Harlow, which I (perhaps mistakenly) did, most of it is undeniably – some would say, boringly – suburban with a range of two-storey, mainly terraced housing and maisonettes which is practically a pattern book for the homes which dominated Corporation suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s. (Devotees can see examples in this Tumblr post.) However, a closer look and particular schemes can excite architectural enthusiasts and Gibberd made a point of commissioning a number of modern movement architects to design elements of the New Town’s housing.

Foldcroft

Tendring Road towards Coppice Hatch

The Chantry, built in the early fifties, was designed by the husband and wife team, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, also responsible for the Tany’s Dell scheme. It’s a restrained composition (‘flat fronts of coloured render and shallow monopitch roofs – all very Swedish’ according to Pevsner) but it makes good use of its location and its arched section gives an attractively framed view of  Mark Hall’s St Mary-at-Latton Church. (6)

The Chantry

The Chantry looking toward St Mary-at-Latton church

Northbrooks in Little Parndon, completed in 1957, was the work of Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya (the architects of the Churchill Gardens Estate).  It’s a mixed scheme, mostly two-storey houses with maisonette blocks striving for greater effect.

Northbrooks maisonettes

HT Cadbury Brown (the architect of the World’s End Estate), designed housing and a junior school at Cooks Spinney; FRS Yorke housing at Ladyshot – ‘all variations on denser arrangements of two-storey stock brick terraces and proving the inherent difficulty of avoiding monotony over a large area’, Pevsner comments rather damningly.

Housing in Cooks Spinney

By far the most architecturally exciting scheme is Bishopsfield and Charter Cross, the result of a competition won by Michael Neylan (who collaborated with Bill Ungless in the subsequent scheme) in 1961. A striking podium provided the roof for an underground car park (100 per cent parking provided – a sign of the times) and a pedestrian concourse ringed by flats.  Fingers of patio housing, separated by narrow lanes which earned the scheme its later nickname, The Kasbah, run down the hill to the rear.  (7)

The Bishopsfield podium

Charter Cross looking toward the podium, ‘The Kasbah’

Such tokens – and, to be fair, they take some finding – did little to appease the critics. Perhaps Harlow was unfortunate to have been selected for a site visit in 1951 from the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM).  At any rate, JM Richards was excoriating in a follow-up article for the Architectural Review describing what he believed was the ‘Failure of the New Towns’. The neighbourhoods lacked ‘the urban qualities required of them’ – ‘judging by results so far achieved, most of the new towns themselves are little more than housing estates’. (8)

Terraced housing in Mark Hall, 1950s

Gordon Cullen, in the same issue, was more colourful in his criticism:

It is as though the drive to the country has been undertaken by people all studiously avoiding each other and pretending that they are alone. The result is a paradox, the paradox of concentrated isolation, the direct antithesis of towniness, which results from the social impulse…[The] results are deplorable – foot-sore housewives, cycle-weary workers, never-ending characterless streets, the depressing feeling of being a provincial or suburbanite in an environment that doesn’t belong to a town or country…

Gibberd fought back, decrying what he saw as the ‘confusion between the word ‘new’ and novelty. Because the towns are new many people are disappointed that they are not novel’. In response, he asserted an English urbanism which: (9)

prefers segregation of home and work, which enjoys open-air exercise, which has an innate love of nature, which makes use of motor transport and which, although demanding privacy for the individual family, likes some measure of community life.

From Abercrombie Way looking towards Third Avenue

Later, he was more astringent: (10)

It has been suggested that a correct aesthetic and architectural solution would, in the end, have been the correct social one – in other words, that people should have been given what they ought to have wanted.

It would have been fun to surround the town centre with a dozen or so tower blocks, as at Vällingby the new Stockholm satellite, but it was perhaps more important to encourage development of human personality and the English way of life.  The process was started by giving people more freedom, not less.

There’s probably no compromise judgment to be reached between these two competing visions; the one celebrating a contemporary urbanism, the other a more conservative suburban lifestyle.  The argument continues to play out among architects and planners although, as population rises, ‘densification’ is very much the current flavour.  Somewhere in the middle stood the new residents of Harlow, most of whom seem to have embraced the new town and a few who surely missed the ‘towniness’ of their former homes.

‘Pram Town’

A great many of Harlow’s new residents would know nothing of the latter.  In 1957, almost one in five of the population was below school age, two in five under 15.  The Daily Mirror headline of the 1950s which dubbed Harlow ‘Pram Town’ was more than justified as the image illustrates.

In next week’s post we look at what these new residents of Harlow (and their parents) made of the town and how it has fared since.

Sources

(1) Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Town’, Architectural Review, July 1953

(2) Quoted from a wall panel in the Museum of Harlow.

(3) Leaflets from both sides can be seen in the Museum of Harlow.

(4) Frederick Gibberd, Harlow New Town. A Plan Prepared for Harlow Development Corporation (Second edition, 1952; HDC, Harlow) which includes Gowers August 1947 foreword.  Gowers was the mandarin par excellence (though best known now for authoring Plain Words). He was succeeded as chair by the even less revolutionary figure of RR Costain of the construction group.

(5) Quoted in Monica Furlong, ‘Harlow: New Town’, The Spectator, 29 September 1960. Quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(6) James Bentley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex (2004), p457

(7) Ian Colquhoun, RIBA Book of British Housing (2nd edition, 2008), pp172-73

(8) JM Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953

(9) Quoted in ‘Design Problems in New Towns. Result of Building “for all classes”’, The Times, 6 February 1962

(10) Frederick Gibberd, ‘The Architecture of New Towns’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 106, No. 5021, April 1958

The image of Leah Manning is the copyright of the National Portrait Gallery and is used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.

Post-War Housing in Hackney: ‘Far removed from the pre-war conception of “council flats”‘

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Gibberd, Hackney, Multi-storey

The drive towards high-rise housing which began in the late 1950s is often crudely represented as evidence of the inhumanity of architects and planners and the megalomania of their local authority enablers. Leaving aside, for the time being, the question of just how misguided this trend was, the reasons for it were far more complex. A single borough can tell much of the story.

In 1948, Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council declared it would build no new housing above three storeys in height and, true to its word, in the early 1950s it built some of the most celebrated low-rise housing in the country.  Yet by the middle of the decade it was approving fifteen-storey tower blocks. What happened?

The more limited ambitions of pre-war construction provide a prologue. The Council had completed 2147 council homes by 1940, over two-thirds built in the previous five years as the drive to clear the slums and alleviate overcrowding took off.  These were overwhelmingly the five-storey tenement blocks of a form, with minor variations, ubiquitous across the capital.

Banister House

Shacklewell House

The 160-flat Banister House in Homerton, designed by Hackney’s preferred architects, Messrs Josephs, was opened in 1935; the three block Shacklewell House, six storeys with its mansard roof, the year after. Similar blocks followed – Nisbet House in Homerton and Hindle House in Shacklewell – and the Council received special dispensation to complete Wren’s Park House and Wigan House, in Clapton, during the War in 1940.  These are all solid homes but only Wren’s Park House (another Josephs design), with the Moderne balconies then in vogue, might claim any architectural distinction. (1)

Wren’s Park House

Much of this work of reconstruction was nullified by the War; around 4000 Hackney homes were destroyed by enemy action, a further 3180 severely damaged. Understandably in 1945, as Henry Goodrich, the Council’s Labour leader, stated, ‘the people of this country were looking more anxiously at the housing question than anything else connected with post-war plans’. (2)

To cope with the immediate crisis, the Council erected 450 prefab Uni-Seco bungalows and requisitioned empty properties across the Borough – 3800 by 1950. (3)  But the Borough’s ambition to build lastingly and better in the post-war era was shown when it asked RIBA to suggest six practices to undertake its housing design work.  In the event, the star names, Frederick Gibberd and Graham Dawbarn, figures of national significance in post-war public housing, weren’t on this original list but came from onward recommendation.

Mayfield Close

Hackney’s first post-war housing was completed in Mayfield Close in Dalston in 1947 – brick-built blocks, three-storeys high as the Council had prescribed.  But circumstances and fashion determined more imaginative solutions.  In 1948, the housing waiting list stood at 12,157.  A breakdown of applicants showed that one third required only one bedroom. (4)

The reality of diverse needs and the aspiration to build mixed communities was one incentive to move beyond the uniform two- and three-bed homes which had dominated council house-building to date.  Another was the opportunity provided to design more architecturally interesting and visually appealing schemes. Gibberd was clear that ‘buildings with quite different formal qualities such as blocks of flats, maisonettes and bungalows are needed to provide “contrast” and “variety” in the “composition” of an area’. (5)

Somerford Grove: early images of top-left and clockwise block of flats and terraced of flatted houses, old people’s bungalows, flats and houses and terraced two-storey houses

The result would be, in the words of GL Downing, Hackney’s Borough Surveyor:

more interesting and open lay-outs…and, with attention paid to landscape gardening, schemes far removed from the general pre-war conception of ‘council flats’.

This ‘mixed development’ ideal came to fine fruition in Gibberd’s Somerford Grove Estate, completed in 1949.  It was based, firstly, on what he called the ‘precinctual theory’.  The area’s through road was closed and replaced by a series of interconnected squares ‘throughout which the pedestrian receives priority’.  It was elaborated in a ‘series of closes, each with its own character’.  But it rested on a range of building types to meet a diverse community’s varied needs: three-storey blocks of two- and three-bed flats, single bed and bedsitter flats, two-storey blocks of two-bedded flatted houses with small private gardens, two-storey three-bed terraced houses and private gardens, and a terrace of single-storey bungalows for the elderly. (6)

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

In terms of design, additional variety and warmth was provided by the use of a range of surface treatments: in Gibberd’s description, pale pink and putty coloured walls for the flatted houses, alternating warm brick and rendered walls on the terraced houses, dark red and blue bricks for the old people’s housing.

Somerford Grove: contemporary view

This was the so-called New Humanism, taking its inspiration from Scandinavian social housing and reflecting too the model provided by the showpiece Festival of Britain Lansbury Estate on which Gibberd had also worked.  It’s unsurprising, then, that the Somerford Grove Estate received an Award for Merit from the Festival of Britain’s architectural committee.

It was all, according to The Times, ‘encouraging proof that even dense housing need not be inhuman’. (7)

Graham Dawbarn had also worked on the Lansbury Estate.   On Sandringham Road, the Housing Committee accepted his arguments that taller housing would be occupied by households without children and would add interest to the overall design.  It allowed a fourth storey but this was not yet the thin end of the wedge.  The three-storey maximum was reasserted at Norman and Dawbarn’s Wilton Estate.  This also showed characteristic Scandinavian and Festival of Britain features, notably in its cantilevered cast concrete projecting balconies, coloured facing panels and careful landscaping. (8)

Wilton Estate

All this seems to make Hackney’s rapid and comprehensive embrace of high-rise  all the more surprising and yet, in reality, the pressures and incentives to do so were very considerable.

As RIBA’s 1955 symposium on tall flats had concluded: (9)

the high cost of land, the encroachment of buildings on agricultural land and – too often – the featureless spread of housing estates beyond the confines of their cities are compelling a growing number of authorities to consider the contribution that the building of high flats can make to their housing and reconstruction programme.

Five years later, Hackney itself drew attention to the ‘lack of building sites and the ever increasing cost of site purchase [which] left the Council with no alternative but to build higher’.

Many other factors came into play too, particularly the rising number of households and the increase in smaller households – a function of both increased life expectancy and rising divorce rates.  Slum clearance (reducing density), higher space standards and improved community facilities on council estates, and land zoning also reduced the area available for building.  All this at a time when the private rented sector was in serious decline.  The 1956 Housing Subsidies Act – which offered higher subsidies the higher councils built – was therefore both cause and consequence of the drive towards high-rise housing.

The Beckers: eleven-story point block

The Beckers: four-storey maisonettes with community hall and tower to rear

In Hackney, an influx of younger councillors, replacing a more traditionalist ‘old guard’ in 1953, eased the transition.  Gibberd’s design for The Beckers on Rectory Road, which included two eleven-storey tower blocks of one-bed flats and bedsitters, was approved in mid-1955.  In other respects, it remained true to mixed development ideals with its low-rise block of two-bed flats and terrace of three-bed houses. That Scandi influence remains too, seen here in the landscaping and external treatments of coloured panelling and cream rendering.  (10)

The Beckers: elevation and plan

The Trelawney Estate on Paragon Road in central Hackney, designed with less architectural finesse by Ernest Joseph and including two fifteen-storey towers, was approved later that year as a direct result of the subsidies legislation then going through parliament.  Unexpected costs had made the impending subsidy regime more attractive and overcame the Housing Committee’s initial preference for lower blocks. Most of this large estate was completed in the early 1960s.

A Halesowen councillor who viewed the estate thought the scheme ‘made his own authority, which thought it was progressive, look like a snail which had lost its way’. (11) His words capture the more intangible dynamics which would also fuel the sixties’ drive to high-rise – the desire to impress, emulate or surpass.

Trelawney Estate

By January 1961, Hackney had built 4000 homes since the war – an achievement marked in the official opening of the Morland and Fields Estates to the west of London Fields. By now, one third of Hackney schemes were being designed in-house; this last by the Borough’s Chief Assistant Architect, RH Harrison. In another sign of confident municipalism, two-thirds of the Borough’s housing was now constructed by the Council’s direct labour department. (12)

The Morland Estate: gardens and community hall, twelve-storey tower to rear

The Morland Estate: maisonette block

Hackney, then, had come a long way from the modest yet exacting vision of council housing it had laid out in 1945 but it’s hard to see any great betrayal in the shift towards increased size and height that had occurred by the early 1960s. The desire to house the people well was consistent but, in the end, the very scale of that ambition, alongside the practical and financial pressures which have always shaped council housing fashions, seemed to compel high-rise solutions.  The new Borough of Hackney (incorporating Shoreditch and Stoke Newington), created in 1965, would build far more tower blocks and would, latterly, demolish many but that is another story.

Note

I’ve added additional images of Somerford Grove, the Wilton Estate and The Beckers to my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) More details on slum clearance and rebuilding can be found in the volumes of the Survey of London: Hackney: Homerton and Hackney Wick, Hackney: Shacklewell, and Hackney: Clapton.

(2) Quoted in Michael Passmore, ‘From High Hopes to Tall Flats: The Changing Shape of Hackney’s Housing 1945-1960’, Hackney History, vol 15, 2009

(3) The Metropolitan Borough of Hackney Official Guide, 1950

(4) George LA Downing, Borough Engineer and Surveyor and Director of Housing Development, Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘Some Aspects of Housing in a Metropolitan Borough’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1949; vol. 69, no. 5

(5) Quoted in Harriet Atkinson and Mary Banham, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (2012)

(6) Frederick Gibberd, ‘Housing at Hackney’, Architectural Review, vol 106, No 633, September 1949

(7) ‘Mixed Housing at Hackney’, The Times, September 6, 1949

(8) Love Local Landmarks: Hackney’s Locally Listed Buildings, 1-99 Wilton Estate, Lansdowne Drive, E8

(9) This, the following quotation and the analysis which follows are drawn from Peter Foynes, ‘The Rise of High-Rise: Post-war Housing in Hackney’, Hackney History, vol 1, 1995

(10) FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd, Modern Flats, The Architectural Press, London (1958)

(11) Quoted in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(12) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, ‘The Official Opening of the 4000th Post-War Dwelling, Morland Estate, Lansdowne Drive, 21 January 1961’ (Hackney Archives)

 

 

A Brief History of Council Housing in Wandsworth, Part II: 1945 to the present

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, GLC, LCC, Wandsworth

Last week’s post took this history up to 1939 by which time the Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth had built 2842 council homes and Battersea a little over 1000.  London County Council estates added to the total but much of this work was undone by the wave of flying bomb attacks between June 1944 and March 1945 which hit the district hard. In the aftermath of war, the immediate focus was on temporary housing for those made homeless.  In the longer term, Wandsworth would feature some of the most celebrated and a few of the most notorious council estates in the capital.

A Portal prefab and wooden hutment (neither of these is a Wandsworth example)

To cope with the immediate crisis, almost 1500 Portal prefabs had been erected in the Borough and 257 wooden hutments by 1947.  Less well known is the extensive use of requisition powers made in this period – unoccupied homes taken over by the local council under emergency powers granted by government.  As late as 1953, 3700 homes (housing around 6400 people) were taken over and let by the Council. It wasn’t until 1960 that all these homes were returned to their owners or otherwise disposed of.

The changed politics of post-1945 Britain also affected Wandsworth.  A tiny (sometimes non-existent minority) in the interwar period, Labour took control of the Council in 1945, only to lose power four years later and not regain it until 1962.  Battersea remained securely Labour.  In practice, and in contrast to the far more divided politics of the 1970s and beyond, it was probably the broad political consensus behind the construction of council housing in this period which was most significant.

Eight-storey blocks on the Wendelsworth Estate

Housing for older people on the Wendelsworth Estate

It was, however, a Labour council and a Labour Housing Minister – Aneurin Bevan – who opened Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council’s first permanent post-war scheme, the Wendelsworth Estate in April 1949.  (And just to prove that party politics were far from dead, the ceremony was boycotted by Conservative councillors who viewed it, perhaps rightly in view of its timing, as an election stunt.)

Wandsworth Borough arms on the Wendelsworth Estate

Wendelsworth shows something of the ambition of these times.  It comprised 448 flats and 16 houses and, in the attempt to cater for a broader cross-section of the population beyond the families which council housing had principally accommodated to date, 21 homes for elderly people and a hostel for 120 single women.  A nursery school and community centre were also provided, reflecting the neighbourhood ideals to the fore in this early post-war period.

As notable was a conscious attempt to provide attractive accommodation: (1)

the dreary brown-tiled entrance halls which have characterised many of the earlier municipal blocks have been abandoned by the architect, and part of the walls are covered with a bright green material…As for the flats themselves – they are delightful.  The passage of the flat I inspected was very bright because of the admirable glass door to the living room.  Housewives, I am sure, will welcome the door which connects the kitchen and the dining room and the excellently planned kitchen itself.

Oatlands Court

The Estate – its tallest blocks were eight storeys high – also included lifts, always considered too expensive for working-class accommodation in pre-war years.  These, of course, were the essential precursor to high-rise and the LCC built its very first point block in Southfields.  At just eleven storeys, Oatlands Court qualified for Ian Nairn’s praise – ‘compact, not too tall, immediately lucid’ with ‘charm and humanity and, above all, modesty’.(2)  In design terms, the T-shaped block, one flat in each arm, provided its residents with considerable quiet and privacy.

Fitzhugh Estate

The modern design detailing of the original Fitzhugh Estate

The Estate today

Encouraged by this early success, the LCC built between 1953 and 1955 a larger and more sculptural scheme in the Fitzhugh Estate where Oliver Cox of the LCC Architects Department designed five eleven-storey blocks carefully arranged to fit and exploit an existing greenfield setting.

An early image of one of the Ackroydon Estate’s eleven-storey point blocks

At this stage – in the early 1950s – high-rise was seen as the best means of providing the ‘mixed development’ schemes (with a range of housing types to both create greater visual interest and cater for a wider range of population than earlier, more uniform, estates) then coming into vogue.  The Ackroydon Estate to the west of Wandsworth borough in Wimbledon Parkside, built between 1950 and 1953, is a fine early example – according to one early resident, ‘the finest estate in London, and anybody here will tell you so’. (3)

Mixed development on the Ackroydon Estate

The bare numbers give a good idea of just how ‘mixed’ the development was – 16 houses, 106 maisonettes in four-storey walk-up blocks and 314 flats in a range of three, five, eight and eleven storey blocks.  But the real success of the Estate was in the disposition of its dwellings and its landscaping which followed upon ‘a complete survey of the site including the position, size and condition of all trees, landscape and garden features’. (4)

The Alton Estate: East to the bottom of the image, West at the top

This was said to be a triumph for ‘the Swedish boys’ – that is those within the LCC Architects Department who looked to the ‘softer’, more humane social housing of the Scandinavian welfare states as their model.  Their grand set piece is, of course, Alton East constructed in the early 1950s – a mix of low-rise two-storey terraces and four-storey maisonettes and eleven-storey point blocks: 744 dwellings overall whose effect, according to Pevsner, was one of ‘picturesque informality’.

An early image of Alton East

Those are words that might have horrified the followers of le Corbusier who designed the later Alton West Estate which embodied a more consciously monumental and uncompromisingly modernist aesthetic designed to make dramatic use of its parkland setting. Here, though low-rise homes also feature, it is the 15 eleven-storey point blocks and the five ten-storey slab blocks which dominate.

The classic image of Alton West

The Alton Estate (you can choose your sides between East and West) reflects the soaring ambitions of its day and does so with a quality and panache that later mass housing almost uniformly failed to achieve.  By the 1960s, high-rise had become more of an expedient and less of a tool – a situation created, in financial terms, by the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act (which awarded higher grants the higher you built) and, politically, by a housing drive supported by both major parties determined to build on a scale that would replace the country’s remaining slum housing – there was still a great deal of it – for once and for all.

As Conservative and Labour competed to promise the most new homes – Conservatives committed to 350,000 a year in 1963 but were outbid by a Labour opposition promising 500,000 in the following year, the consequence was a reliance on system building as the necessary means to deliver such numbers.  At this point our story becomes more sombre.

Here we return to the boroughs and specifically Battersea.  The Winstanley Road area had long been earmarked for clearance and over a ten year period from 1956 a new estate emerged.  The first phase was modest three-storey; the second comprised 547 homes in blocks of varying heights, the tallest rising to 18 storeys. Still, these towers were built conventionally of in-situ concrete but later lower blocks were system-built by Wates.(5)

A contemporary image of the refurbished Winstanley Estate

Despite a RIBA medal for good design in 1967, design flaws rapidly emerged with deficient vents and doors, faulty lifts and internal condensation.  There were social problems too as the Estate became plagued with vandalism. Plans for the regeneration of the Estate have been in motion since 2013 with the residents’ ‘preferred option’ favouring comprehensive rebuilding at a cost of around £100m.  The Estate is allegedly one of the hundred on David Cameron’s hit list of so-called ‘sink estates’ announced this month. Given the timing and finances just mentioned, you can judge for yourself the significance of Cameron’s announcement.

The garage, grime and hip hop collective, So Solid Crew, were formed on the Estate and member Jason Phillips remembers Winstanley as ‘our playground, even guys from neighbouring estates would head down there’. ‘Hopefully,’ he continues, ‘the development will bring some new working-class people to the area’.(6)  Given Wandsworth’s Council’s record and the current Government’s definition of ‘affordability’ that, sadly, seems unlikely.

York Road Estate point block  (c) Stephen Richards and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The York Road Estate – over 600 flats in three eight-storey slab blocks and three 16-storey towers – begun by Battersea and completed by the new Wandsworth Borough Council was also system-built. A 2010 refurbishment which included re-cladding, new windows, rewiring, CCTV upgrades and landscaping to address the range of its problems cost £6.4m.

The refurbished Doddington Estate

The Doddington Estate, inaugurated by Battersea but again completed between 1967 and 1971 by Wandsworth, was built by Laings using a Jespersen system. At its worst, 400 of its 970 flats lost heating and two plumbers were kept on permanent standby to deal with problems.  By 1983, due to problems of crime and anti-social behavior, it had been dubbed by a sensationalist local press as ‘the Estate of Terror’.  Between 1986 and 1993, £17m was spent on a renewal programme which also included the removal of crime-ridden underground car parks and elevated walkways.

The refurbished Doddington Estate

Daringly, though with questionable politics, the Conservative-led Wandsworth Council aspired in 1987 to create a place where ‘a middle class couple can come back to late at night and buy some pâté and a bottle of wine’.  The second element of their programme was a scheme of ‘homesteading’ whereby flats were sold at rock-bottom prices with the onus on new owner-occupiers to carry out necessity internal repairs.

Sporle Court, Winstanley Estate

This was a very different politics to that which had inspired Sidney Sporle, chair of Battersea Metropolitan Borough’s Housing Committee, who had been the initial driving force behind these grandiose schemes.  Some might see Wandsworth’s modern politics as a form of corruption or, at least, betrayal but Sporle’s corruption was clear-cut – he was gaoled for four years in 1971 for taking bribes from contractors.  His links with T Dan Smith and John Poulson capture the febrile, money-charged ambitions of the day.

Sporle, however, looking back in 1976, preferred to recall the ideals of the new housing: (7)

Sidney Sporle

It was heaven to them. Now they have a separate kitchen, separate toilets. It was unheard of in the old days there. You went down the end of the garden…People were fighting to get in them. They were luxury flats – then… In the old houses there were four to five families to a house.  Some houses didn’t even have a bloody roof.  The kids had no room to play there either. But they didn’t vandalise the place.

He acknowledged, though, that the taller blocks might have been a mistake:

If I had to do it all over again I would not go over five storeys…There’s a new generation now, and those at the top of tower blocks – they don’t seem nearer to God, but further away.

But, ultimately, his parting shot? ‘Life is too short for regrets mate’.

If all this will seem to many an appropriate death knell to the hopes placed in social housing, it is not the end of the story.  After the mistakes of the 1960s, much of the best council housing was built in the 1970s, just as Wandsworth’s new Conservative council and the Thatcher government elected in 1979 were about to perform its last rites.  By 1978, the Borough owned around 28,000 homes, housing around a third of its population.  Of these, 40 per cent had been sold off by 1990.

Kambala Estate

The Kambala Estate in Battersea, a modest scheme of low-rise brick-built houses and flats, was built between 1976 and 1979.

Maysoule Estate

The Maysoule Estate, tucked away and easily overlooked just to the west of Clapham Junction, designed by Phippen, Randall & Parkes for Wandsworth Council, was completed at the same time.  To the authors of the London Survey, it: (8)

demonstrates the quiet intelligence and decency which were sometimes attained shortly before the public housing programmes came to a halt.

Perhaps, after all the sound and fury, that slightly elegiac note provides a fitting point at which to end this brief survey of Wandsworth’s council housing – a repository of dreams, ideals and ambitions but, above all and however flawed, an attempt to meet the housing needs of ordinary people with a drive and on a scale that we might wish to emulate today.

This map shows the location of all the estates mentioned in this week’s post and the last.

Sources

(1) ‘Brighter Council Flats’, Wandsworth Borough News, 25 Feb, 1949, included with a range of sources and other detail in the history page of the Wendelsworth Residents Association website.

(2) Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (originally published 1966, republished 2014)

(3) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 (2013)

(4) Boris Ford, Cambridge Cultural History of Britain: Volume 9, Modern Britain (1992)

(5) Simon Hogg, Labour councillor for Latchmere Ward which covers Winstanley, has published a fascinating collection of photos and recollections of the Estate here: Why Was the Winstanley Estate Built?. His set of photographs of the Estate also provide a deliberate corrective to the usual negative images deployed.

(6) Quoted in Mark Blunden, ‘London housing estate where So Solid Crew formed set for demolition‘, Evening Standard, 20 February 2014

(7) Tony Cohen, ‘Up the Junction in a Tower Block Is No Family Life’, South London Press, 10 November 1976.  The architecture and politics of this era of Battersea council housing are dealt with in greater detail by the Survey of London, Battersea: (Draft) Introduction (2013)

(8) Survey of London, Battersea; Ch 9 (draft) West of Plough Lane (2013)

The Canley Estate, Coventry: Building the Community

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs

My thanks to Dr Ruth Cherrington for this follow-up post to her contribution on the origins of the Canley Estate last week. Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

Moving to Canley

My parents moved to Canley in December 1948 having been allocated a brand new three-bed British Iron and Steel Federation council house there.  We looked at these so-called ‘steel houses’ and the early development of the Estate in last week’s post.

They left behind their shared lodgings in the older district of Foleshill, with its emissions from the local gas works and back-to-backs. But they also left behind close family and friends.

What did they bring with them? A few belongings, three small children and another one very much on the way: mum was eight months pregnant. They also brought with them working class values and way of life.

At first, mum thought it was ‘lovely’ to see the boys enjoying the relatively spacious house and garden (though just mud at this point) nearby after the former crowded conditions. She wasn’t so happy about field mice also running around but they soon left. My parents stayed for the rest of their lives.

Garden of BISF House, Canley. Author (holding toy) with brother, auntie and friends, circa 1960 (R.Cherrington)

But my mother felt isolated. Hearing the trains on the nearby railway line was a relief: she felt ‘there was some life in the place after all, it wasn’t just a dead end.’ But it did feel like that at first.

Many women on new estates up and down the country felt the same. It was quite an expedition for mum to visit her own mother with four bus journeys needed there and back and four children in tow. Canley buses terminated in the ‘bottom’ part of Canley back then, which made it even more of a trek.

My grandmother visited as often as possible as did my dad’s mum. Their help was welcome as babies arrived, right down to the seventh, myself. Mum lost her mother when I was only six. I clearly remember her anguished cry of grief when told the news. It was a huge loss to her on so many levels.

Housing was the priority and the rest, it was thought, would come later. Homes had been built quickly but people need more than a roof over their heads in order to lead full lives.

Street Life

The town planners designed the estate to promote sociability. But did it? A group of researchers led by Leo Kuper in the early 1950s studied a part of Canley they called ‘Braydon’.  They found typical conflicts and friendships as families settled into the new estate.

The thin walls of the BISF houses through which you could hear what was going on next door and vice versa were disliked. There were complaints about the ‘back’ door actually being a side door opening out towards your neighbour’s. You could see over to their side of the fence and, if the door was open, into their house.

As time went by, people put up high fences to block this intrusive view. The new houses were seen as lacking privacy and perhaps disappointing in that respect. People didn’t want ‘strangers’ knowing their business. Some families appeared as ‘stuck up’ and distanced themselves from others. Perhaps they saw themselves as socially above the majority of working class tenants.

My mother was friendly with some of our neighbours but not with others. Some helped her out with the kids though they had their own and gave her some support.

Some life-long friendships were formed from a very early age amongst the children. Many made playthings such as trolleys from what they could find or ‘scrounge’ which they then shared.

Children of Hayton Green. Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Commemorative Photo, June 1952. (R.Cherrington)

Mostly kids played together on the street, in each other’s houses and gardens and boys often formed ‘gangs’. They would be off into the woods or down the brook as often as possible. But what did the adults do?

Pubs and the Canley Social Club

My father was typical in returning to former watering holes back in Foleshill in the early years. Many men maintained links with mates, pubs and communities elsewhere as there was little on offer in Canley. The Phantom Coach, at the bottom of Charter Avenue, was never destined to become a ‘local’.

An older pub from the city centre, The Dolphin, moved to a green wooden hut in Sheriff Avenue in 1941. Whilst being a bit closer for men on our part of the estate, it was not as appealing as the well-established pubs they were used to. Dolphin regulars were more likely to be those in the immediate vicinity.

A new pub was built in our end of Canley in 1951– The Half Sovereign. Surely this would be the local that men had been waiting for?

The Sovereign Pub (formerly the Half Sovereign). Photo R. Brooker

Yes and no. By this time a social club had been established which was already very popular and had boosted a sense of community in Canley. The new pub had to compete with the Canley Social Club, which was right opposite our house.

Coventry is a good case study of clubs and community building and the Canley Social illustrates this well. The Council was quite radical in the early redevelopment of the inner city and the outlying estates, deeming it necessary to provide sites for residents to establish their own clubs. Seeing these as potential community centres, they allocated five plots of land on new estates.

The Council went further, taking a ‘Coventry City Bill’ through Parliament to allow the financial arrangements for these new clubs to be obtained through city funds.

Canley men wasted no time in setting up a club on the Marler Road plot. The first proposal was submitted on 16^th December 1948, the month my parents moved to Canley. The Council approved this the following July. This drawing was the basis of the club as it developed with a billiards room, a hall for concerts and bar.

Money and building materials were scarce but enthusiasm in plentiful supply with locals keen to have their own club to use and run. An application in October 1949 was approved for a ‘temporary structure’ to be erected which was to be made permanent no more than ten years later.

Canley Club winning bagatelle team, circa 1960. Author’s father centre seated with cup.(R. Cherrington)

Canley Social Club’s founder members bought and put up themselves ex-Ministry of Defence wooden huts. The small club was open for business in 1950 and my father was an early member. It was the much-needed social venue for estate residents, somewhere to come together, make friends and experience the type of communal life they had left behind.

The wooden hut served us all well during its lifetime before being replaced by brick buildings in the late 1950s. Locals recall a warm atmosphere with a lot going on for families, from boxing lessons for boys to bagatelle for the men. There were ‘free and easy’ concerts, ‘housey housey’ and children’s parties, all self-managed.

Children’s Christmas Party, Canley Social Club (R.Cherrington)

Canley Social Club 40th Anniversary commemorative glass (R. Cherrington)

We looked forward to nights out over the club, the Christmas parties and annual coach trip to the seaside. For many, this was the only time they would visit the sea.

Canley researcher Leo Kuper saw the club’s potential and was correct in thinking that it would be more popular than the purpose-built community centre in Prior Deram Walk.

As well as out-performing the community centre, the Club was up and running before there was a church on the estate.

What was their role in community building?

Canley Churches

Canley was described as a ‘godless’ place with no church before 1952 when Canley Methodist Chapel opened in Prior Deram Walk. In 1955, St. Stephen’s C of E church opened, ‘our’ side of Mitchell Avenue.

When he consecrated St. Stephen’s, the Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Neville Gordon, described it as ‘a new outpost from which Christian witness would spread’. He said ‘there were a mass of souls around the church in very great need of God’s mercy and truth’. They had lost contact with the Church when they moved to the district and had been ‘drifting aimlessly’.  He urged the congregation to pray not only for themselves but the whole community.

It may have been the hard experiences of the Depression closely followed by the battering of war rather than the move to Canley that had caused some of my parent’s generation to become ‘lost souls’.  Family, work, having a good time at weekends and keeping out of debt were the main preoccupations. Religion was mostly about the rituals of christenings, weddings and funerals.

St. Stephens Church, Canley. (Photo R. Brooker)

Those active in the congregation developed their own small community. Some of them were also club-goers but not all and in this sense there were distinctions between where people’s allegiances lay.

After years of being ‘godless’, Canley now had two churches. Then another came along, next to the Half Sovereign Pub. Its origins date back to 1950 when a group of young evangelical Christians decided to hold children’s services on a patch of open grassland on the newly built estate. These meetings proved so popular that a regular Sunday school was opened in the nearby Charter Primary School.

More regular services were started and planning began for a permanent church building but there was no suitable site available. Divine intervention perhaps came to their rescue as the brewery that owned The Half Sovereign were returning to the Council a plot of land they didn’t need. It was the very same patch of land where the open-air meetings had been held. This was purchased and the Gospel Hall opened in 1956.

Canley Evangelical Church today, with front extension and original building to the back. (R. Brooker)

Children enjoyed Sunday School there because they saw and made friends and could win prizes such as chocolate and books. Harry Hollingsworth lived in nearby Mitchell Avenue and was an early Sunday School leader. He remembered ‘the tremendous sense of community in the early days – a sense of oneness’.

Wednesday night’s ‘Happy Hour’ saw lively young audiences. We enjoyed singing the songs and learning about the Bible in a more interesting way than at school. When asked to find certain passages in the Bible, the first person to do so would shout ‘got it!’ and win a prize.

In some ways, it was like going to the club with these communal activities and experiences, which we remembered fondly for years afterwards. Another reason for sending children was so that busy mothers could have a few hours respite from their domestic chores.

Shopping

Shops are also community venues and places where people can meet. We had the ‘little shops’ consisting of a newsagent, Post Office and hardware store, chemist, grocery and a greengrocery.

The ‘Little’ shops on Charter Avenue today (R. Cherrington)

At Prior Deram Walk were the ‘big shops’ with a few more options including a Co-Op. Whenever we were sent there, mum always reminded us to collect the ‘divi’ stamps.

Other traders regularly did the rounds. Fifty years ago there were doorstep deliveries without the internet. There was the milkman, baker, coal merchant, Corona pop delivery and ‘Snowball’ laundry service. The ‘green van’ came round the estate selling fruit and veg. People complained about higher prices but these mobile traders saved a trek to the shops or town. Convenience, it seems, always has its price.

Few people had cars, especially women, in the 1950s. Going down the local shops or even to the ‘green van’ on the street could be a small gathering, a time and place for a bit of a chat. Even such short meetings helped increase sociability and sense of community on the estate.

To Summarise…

Canley did develop as a community, perhaps several given the divides of the pre-war ‘bottom’ end and post-war ‘top’ end of steel houses. There were those whose social lives were centred around the Club whilst others were more ‘churchy’. It became a place to call home as time went on with more amenities, services and schools. Gardens bloomed, as did friendships, courtships and marriages. There were the teething troubles of any new estate and later on the deep problems caused by industrial decline and social change. That part of the Canley story will be told another time.

The Canley Estate, Coventry: ‘The Place Where I Grew Up’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs

I’m very pleased to feature another fine guest post (and would welcome others), this one from Dr Ruth Cherrington.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

I wasn’t sent to Coventry: I was born there. Though I left a long time ago I regularly visit family still living there and the familiar sites of the estate where we grew up: Canley. We can take ourselves out of our childhood homes, but do they ever really fade away from our own sense of attachment and place? For me, the answer is a resounding no. I’m still very much a ‘Canley kid’ at heart after all these years.

I’ve seen many changes, of course. But the constants are clearly visible such as the strong element of working class identity that remains, though now embattled in many ways. I’ve been in a good position to observe the life and times of Canley given my lifetime’s experience of this former council estate. From my recollections and observations I have compiled a two-part blog about the place where I grew up. I write about what made Canley similar to other post-war housing estates but also what made it special not only to me but also in historical terms.

 What and Where is Canley?

Canley existed long before Coventry Corporation bought 20,000 acres of the land from local landowning family, the Leighs, in 1926. It is mentioned in Medieval documents, linked to the nearby Fletchampstead, Westwood, and Stoneleigh estates. These historical aspects are important, reflected as they are in names of roads and schools but also in the attempt to design into the new estate a village feel.

The Canley we now see is largely the result of a pre-war vision of a ‘planned neighbourhood unit’ on the outskirts of Coventry. Building began in the 1930s mainly to rehouse people from city slum clearance programmes but the war halted construction. It continued with renewed haste thereafter, especially given the severe bombardment Coventry suffered. The first bombs to fall actually landed in the industrial area of Canley on August 18^th 1940.

Coventry city centre after the 14 November 1940 air raid

Then came the blitzkrieg, lasting until mid-November with three quarters of the city centre destroyed. This included the 14^th century cathedral, with only its shell remaining once the fires had died out after the single most concentrated attack on any British city during the War on the night of November 14^th, 1940. A new word was coined to describe such sustained heavy bombing – to ‘Coventrate.’

Residential areas were badly damaged such as the older district of Foleshill where my parents, still single, were living with their families. Over 41,000 homes were damaged, many destroyed completely and 550 people lost their lives. It has been said that the German bombers continued what the town planners had begun before the war – the wholesale modernisation of the city. Coventry Corporation had intended to implement grand designs for a new city centre surrounded by healthy suburban estates such as Canley.

When Coventry was the city of the future: the Precinct, 1955

The war left a scarred landscape and a severe depletion of the housing stock. Resuming the construction of Canley was part of the post-war drive to provide new homes. The pre- and post-war parts of the estate not surprisingly have a different look to them reflecting the changed contexts of the grand 1930s plans and the pressing post-war needs.

Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers’ fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45.

Canley Ford circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

Canley Ford Milk bar – a popular place for kids in the summer holidays circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

There were two woods very close to our house. Ten Shilling Wood was so named because that was how much a licence cost to shoot there in former times. Park Wood was at the top of our street though we never called it by its proper name: I’m not even sure we knew it then. To us it was the ‘top wood’ with Ten Shilling Wood being the ‘bottom’ one. Park Wood was also known as the dark woods or the bluebell wood because of the wonderful displays in springtime when we would collect huge bunches for our mothers. Both woods were remnants of the ancient Forest of Arden.

Canley has three main ‘boundaries.’ Fletchamstead (N.B. Modern spelling) and Kenpas highways, comprising part of the Coventry Bypass (A45) was one of these. This major route links Coventry to Birmingham in one direction, and ultimately to London, about 100 miles away, in the other.

There were older parts of Canley on the other side of the Bypass, however, including some pre-war council housing along Burnsall Road from the early 1930s estate construction period.

Burnsall Road, November 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

There is also Canley station, formerly Canley Gates, opened mainly for workers at the Standard Motor Works in 1940. This is on the main London to Birmingham railway line, which forms another Canley boundary. Constructed between 1833 and 1838, the railway cut through number of farmer’s fields and several small bridges and crossing points were put in place as access for the farmers and their livestock. Rather than being used to move cows between fields, it’s now a main thoroughfare from Canley to Tile Hill and beyond.

Former cattle crossing point under the London to Birmingham Railway Line at Wolfe Road, Canley (Ruth Cherrington Aug. 2006)

Charter Avenue, the main road into and out of the estate, forms the third boundary. It begins at a junction with the A45, marked conveniently by the Phantom Coach pub. This is typical of many built in the interwar years, being spacious when compared to older city centre ‘boozers’, with gardens back and front. It was intended to serve the expanding new estate as well as to pick up passing trade from thirsty travellers on the A45.

Phantom Coach Pub, Charter Avenue/A45, Canley. October 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

Moving westwards along Charter Avenue, we see all key Canley estate roads branch off to the right hand side in ribbon style development. The road is a dual carriageway as far as Mitchell Avenue, where building stopped before the war. This also represents an internal ‘border’ within Canley, marking the older from the newer part, the top from the bottom end of the estate. Charter Avenue continues as a single carriageway from there till it ends about a mile later at the junction with Cromwell Lane. This marks the edge of Canley and in the past of Coventry City’s limits.

Charter Avenue is Canley’s main road and buses to and from the city centre still pick up passengers from stops along here as they have always done.

Charter Avenue, looking towards bus stop at junction with Wolfe Road (Ruth Cherrington, 2006)

Canley’s Early Residents

Coventry was in many ways a ‘city of factory workers’ with so many engineering plants, some of them in the Canley area. It was arguably one of the most industrial cities in Europe and my own ancestors had mostly pitched up in Coventry looking for industrial work of various kinds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Canley was also to be all council housing, offering decent homes for the workers many of whom were living in overcrowded conditions in older parts of the city. Some residents were to be migrants from other areas of the country in search of work. Industrial Coventry had long been a magnet for those thrown out of jobs, whether from the mills of Lancashire, shipbuilding yards of Tyneside or collieries of South Wales. Coventry welcomed skilled and unskilled labour and Canley would count among its own resident a broad mix of people from across Britain.

The ideal was fair rent, with no family expected to live in a house too small for its size, with the council as a non-exploitative landlord. Acting upon a belief that ‘environment makes the slum dweller’, the Corporation wanted to make ‘better’ people on a new estate with a ‘healthy and pleasant environment.’

Building an Estate of ‘Happiness and Health’

An article in the Midland Daily Telegraph in 1938 (May 17^th) declared that ‘Canley Contributes to Coventry’s Happiness and Health.’ It was referring to the 150 houses already occupied in the Prior Deram Walk and Queen Margaret’s Road area. The layout of the new streets and houses led the writer to conclude that:

Canley is, without a doubt, a very healthy housing estate. It is already becoming attractive in appearance, for many of the front gardens of the first 100 houses built are a mass of colour.

Clearly the residents had been very busy in their gardens.

The good-sized gardens front and back were for the men to grow not only flowers but also vegetables and to breathe in fresh air. They were for kids to play in but there were plenty of planned green spaces as well.

The houses were mostly redbrick, semi-detached, typical of those being constructed across the country. Coventry planners aimed to avoid ‘displeasing uniformity’ by building in blocks of four, some of them being set back a few feet. Variety would promote ‘beauty and harmony.’ Different colours were used for roof tiles and also for the doors and the pebbledash. No two blocks were to be painted the same.

Inside the one, two, three and four bedroomed houses there was light and space, fitted cupboards, storage space, picture rails and kitchen ranges. The houses were the sort of suburban home middle-class couples might aspire to buy but these were not for sale.

Redbrick houses along Charter Avenue (courtesy of Robin Brooker)

Nearby this new ‘township’ was a row of shops, which were later on referred to the ‘big shops’ after the construction of the ‘little shops’ in the post-war part of Canley. There was a brand new primary school as well, named after the son of local tenant farmers, Sir Henry Parkes, who grew up in nearby Moat House Lane. He went on to become Premier of New South Wales in 1872. A statue of a kangaroo was erected in front of the school to mark this link. A small public library was also built next to the school.

Prior Deram Walk shops today (November 2015, courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The City Corporation planners were forward thinking and included small retirement bungalows in their scheme, many of which remain today for retired people. The street is nicknamed ‘Pensioner’s Row.’

Two and three bedroomed redbrick houses were built along Charter Avenue as far as Mitchell Avenue. A few houses were built just inside the new turnings intended to be fully-fledged streets but the war came and these were put on hold.

After the war, the builders, including some of prisoners of war, returned. The ideals were not to be diluted but construction had to be speeded up. The decision was taken to use a new type of house specially designed in this period: the British Iron and Steel Federation or BISF house. (1)

Row of BISF or steel houses, Charter Avenue/Marler Road junction. (R. Cherrington 2006)

Looking down Marler Road, BISF houses (R. Cherrington, 2006)

To us locals, they were simply steel houses, built around a steel frame with part of the outside cladding steel as well. They are ‘non-conventional build’ because they are not brick with slate tiled roofs. Whilst the materials may be non-conventional, they are, in fact, traditional three bed, semi-detached houses. They were also meant as permanent, not temporary homes and differed from wholly prefab houses.

View from a BISF house, looking into the garden. (R. Cherrington)

A plot of land near Prior Deram walk saw several rows of steel houses go up, around Thimbler Road and Sheriff Avenue. Some prefabricated bungalows were erected along John Rous Avenue and Mitchell Avenue thus largely finishing more quickly and cheaply the construction of Canley. The prefabs have long since been demolished and replaced with brick houses but the steel houses remain.

The prefabs were praised in a Coventry Evening Telegraph article in 1945 (October 30^th) as the ‘Coventry’ experiment. Not only had the Corporation ‘pioneered a house of novel construction and design’, but had cut through red-tape. This referred to the fact that the plumbing system contravened building by-laws, but the pressing need for housing was seen as justification.

The compact homes were described as cosy due to good insulation, with no wastage of space: much research had gone into their design and construction. Coventry’s Lord Mayor described them as being good for housewives. By easing their burden, he believed the homes made a great contribution to society and also recognised the part women played in the war. Many women had worked in ‘men’s jobs’ but in peacetime were expected to return quietly to the home and domestic roles.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s several four storey blocks of flats were built plus some maisonettes in Donegal Close and Penrosa Walk. This renewed building in streets behind the ‘little shops’ and also further up Charter Avenue was done in a thoughtful manner, with variation of style and of colours.

Flats at bottom of Donegal Close, November 2015. (Courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The aim of providing light, airy houses, large gardens and green spaces remained as Canley expanded with the view that creating a better environment would create better people. Canley was still a planned neighbour, despite the war intervening, and was a practical example of current town planning ideas and ideals.

I will consider in the next blog to what extent the blueprint of architects and planners succeeded in promoting a sense of community across the pre- and post-war built estate.

Notes

(1) You can find more images and detail on post-war British Iron and Steel Federation homes at the BISF website.