Gleadless Valley Remembered

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1960, 1970s, Gleadless Valley

I posted a piece on the Gleadless Valley Estate in Sheffield in May last year. Keith Marriott contacted me via email with a long and very interesting account of his own experience of growing up on the estate and his subsequent career. With his agreement and support in supplying many of the images included, I’m pleased to feature that response in this week’s post. Keith will introduce himself in the article that follows.  

I grew up on Gleadless Valley in the 1960s. My Mum and Dad, my elder sister and I moved to Raeburn Road on Gleadless Valley in 1961, when I was aged two. I know that work began on the estate in 1955, and this was one of the earliest parts of the estate to be constructed so I don’t know whether the house was new when they moved in or not.

Gleadless Valley Estate, viewed from the Herdings © Markbaby and www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk

In the 60s, there was a wide socio-economic mix on the estate – unskilled and skilled manual workers, clerical and junior management. Many of the early residents of the estate had either grown up in the terraced back-to-back housing which was demolished to make way for the Park Hill flat or had quickly moved from Park Hill, which soon became prone to vandalism and became socially stigmatised.

My mum worked as a clerk at Sheffield Town Hall in the 70s ‘Egg Box’ extension. At the time they moved to Gleadless Valley my Dad was a commercial manager for British Tar Products in the city centre. Although he had left school in 1934 aged 14, this was only his second job including his six years in the army during WWII.  He had the opportunity to go to grammar school but that was an unaffordable option for my grandparents. His company moved its offices to Manchester in 1966 so he took a job, instead, at the Orgreave coking plant and chemical works. We didn’t own a car until then but it was a necessity as the bus journey was not feasible.

My parents lived in the same house at Gleadless until they died; my Dad in 2001 and my Mum in 2015. They remained as tenants throughout. When Thatcher introduced the Right to Buy in the early 80s, they didn’t buy theirs, as many of their long-time neighbours did. They had a very risk-averse attitude to debt and were unpersuaded about the benefit of embarking on a mortgage late in their working life.

I recall there was a very narrow racial mix on the estate; I don’t recall a single black or Asian pupil at primary or secondary school, but I don’t know how far this reflected the mix across Sheffield in the 60s and 70s.

Front cover of ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

It’s about five years since I’ve visited the estate but I feel, despite a loss of architectural coherence due to the impact of the Right to Buy, it has remained fairly intact except for the loss of its schools, library and the missing third tower at Herdings. The much later Supertram terminus below the towers is a positive addition, I’d say.

Womersley’s team had designed a community centre, between the shops and the towers at Herdings with a timber gridshell hyperbolic paraboloid roof but it was sadly never built. It would have been a fabulous addition, architecturally and socially.

The Herdings shopping centre, illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

The unbuilt community hall at the Herdings, illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

The private housing built in the 1990s at the base of the towers helps to give a bit of shelter to what was a pretty exposed hilltop. It’s 700 feet above sea level and was a bleak spot where you wouldn’t linger in winter. I remember visiting elderly residents in one tower in the 60s who felt rather isolated there when they were trapped in by bad weather. On the positive side, the panoramic views were stupendous, towards the hills of the Peak District or with the whole of the city lit up below. I’ve always felt that the Herdings towers were designed to be seen as landmarks in the landscape though rather than places to view from.

The three original Herdings Towers as illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

I think it is the estate’s low-rise, low-density housing that is its strongest point rather. The architectural team for Gleadless Valley comprised eight architects (credited in the Housing Department’s 1962 book ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield 1953-1963’) who showed enormous creativity in developing housing types with their own private outdoor spaces to suit the steeply sloping terrain.

Just two examples from ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’ of the variety of homes adapted to varying terrain and household needs across the estate.

They display a wide variety of different relationships to both private and public outside space, putting a great emphasis on privacy, which is, I think, one key to its lasting appeal. The 1962 book (it’s very telling that it is printed in the same format as Le Corbusier’s L’Oeuvre Complet with text in French and Russian) states the percentage of the housing stock built on steep slopes as well as the density. The density is in sharp contrast to the way Park Hill and Hyde Park handle a similarly steeply sloped site. Here the aspiration was to allow easy access to use the open public space, whereas at Park Hill the public space is really only a visual asset.

The existing woodland has flourished especially where it was extended, particularly at its south-east boundary. Comparing the 1892-1914 OS map with the current aerial photo on Bing maps on the National Library of Scotland’s geo-referenced side by side OS maps, shows this really well.

All the infrastructure of social facilities – shops, schools, libraries, pubs – were planned and built very early as the design recognised this as fundamental to a thriving community.

Education and transport vision supports housing and health. Sheffield’s subsidised bus service was legendary throughout the 60s and 70s and well into David Blunkett’s tenure as leader of the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’. Cheap, frequent reliable buses made it possible to get anywhere in the city (except Orgreave!) out as far as Castleton in the Peak District punctually and affordably. Access to the countryside, particularly to the west of the city, was promoted as a key benefit and by the Council to be enjoyed by all. See Sheffield: Emerging City (C.R. Warman 1969).

The original Herdings, Hemsworth, Rollestone and Gleadless Valley schools are all gone now, sadly. Womersley’s department designed all these civic buildings. All very good examples of mid-century modern public buildings, carefully and thoughtfully designed; functional, practical but above all a joy to inhabit. Herdings primary school and Gleadless Valley secondary school were opened in 1961 or 62, I think.

Herdings was two-storey with the full width of the south side glazed onto a very spacious playing field. Despite their aspect, the rooms didn’t overheat, due to plentiful fully opening windows. All the ground floor classrooms had direct access to the playing field and all the upper rooms for the eldest pupils had dual aspect, so were even brighter and airier.

I don’t think it’s just ‘rose tinted glasses’ but I’d go so far as to say the education was inspirational and visionary – particularly at primary school. There was a culture designed to broaden children’s horizons. We were exposed to gramophone records of Rubinstein playing Chopin, Albert Schweitzer playing Bach during daily morning assembly and Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett during indoor lunchtimes in the hall. French was taught from seven years, the head teacher published books on French and on sex education for primary school children.

I went to secondary school in 1969, the first year Sheffield introduced comprehensive education across the city. Prior to that Gleadless Valley school had been a secondary modern school and the large majority of its intake was from the Gleadless Valley estate. It was actually located about half a mile south-west of the estate on Norton Avenue.

Gleadless Valley School, photographed in 1994 © Picture Sheffield

It comprised a three-storey main block orientated north-south again with full-width windows overlooking spacious playing fields and clerestory glazing on the top floor. General purpose classrooms facing east and labs and arts rooms facing west. A block containing assembly hall, gym, dining room and kitchen and a separate technical block were connected to the main block by fully glazed single-storey link corridors.

Hemsworth Library, Blackstock Road © Picture Sheffield

Other public buildings now lost include the original Hemsworth public library on Blackstock and one of Womersley’s gems.  It closed to much protest in 1995 and was converted into a Lloyds chemist shop. It was a long, low block with an over-sailing flat roof forming a wide entrance porch; two long sides of the rectangular box were full-height glazed with end walls in brick inside and out. Internally the fittings were purpose-made joinery and matched slatted timber ceiling; it was a sort of display cabinet for books and culture!

I went to Liverpool University to study Architecture in 1976, the first in my family to go to university and of course in those days fees and a full grant were paid by my Local Education Authority. Early in my working career as an architect I worked for Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre. The theme of the visibility and accessibility of culture was a dominant one in his practice. I worked with him on a competition entry for the new Paris Opera House in 1983 and its key design principle was egalitarianism: everyone should have as good a seat in the house as everyone else and the glazed facade displayed what was going on inside to the world outside. He believed passionately, as did his patron at the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, that Culture (with a capital C) was not just for the privileged few; he would brook no dumbing down – he thought Shakespeare and Aristophanes could and should be enjoyed by all. This was a milieu that my teachers at Herdings primary school understood and promoted.

St Anthony’s Church

The churches have survived well. St Anthony’s Catholic Church at the Norton Avenue end of Raeburn Road and the now well-known Gleadless Valley Church on Spotswood Mount both remain. The former is not one of Womersley’s but with a distinctive copper roof is rather good example of a 60s Catholic parish church. The original entrance facing Sandby Drive was a glazed end wall but has been obscured by some untidy single-storey porches and ancillary spaces. St Anthony’s retained a patch of land alongside Norton Avenue on which it intended to build a Catholic school but this was sold to a housing developer in order to pay for Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1982.

One aspect of the estate which has not proved so successful into the 21st century is the huge increase in private car ownership. The roads, including the primary bus routes, are narrow, twisty and hilly. I think perhaps the increase in private car ownership was apparent to Womersley as early as 1962, by which time his department was already designing house types at a planned estate at Middlewood on the north side of Sheffield, which had integral garages. Perhaps it had become apparent that the limited number of rentable garages in small separate courtyards on Gleadless Valley was in high demand.

Patio houses (informally called ‘Upside-Down’ houses due to the living room occupying the upper floor), illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

For me there are three outstanding achievements. Firstly, I love the ingenuity of the range of houses, maisonettes and flats to suit the hilly terrain. Secondly, Womersley’s positioning of the three tower blocks on the highest point of the estate where they can be seen from 15 miles was probably his bravest architectural move as Sheffield’s Chief Architect. Thirdly, the decision to retain and enhance the existing woodland allowed the relationship between public and private space to be both rich and usable. Gleadless Valley was a fine and humane place to grow up in the 60s and 70s. I found the relationship between its architecture and Sheffield’s topography and landscape to be an inspiring one.

keithmarriott58@gmail.com

Council Housing in Preston, Part II: ‘Changing Fashions in Planning’

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1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990s

We left Preston in last week’s post on the eve of war. The town, unlike some industrial centres, emerged relatively unscathed from the war itself but the post-war ambition to build a better Britain was fully felt – and for good reason. Half the town’s houses had been built between 1840-1890; of these, the experts reckoned, one-sixth should be demolished. Of the 5000 on the council house waiting list, 70 percent lived in overcrowded conditions.  The Council, in the words of its 1946 planning manifesto, sought to lead the way Towards a Prouder Preston. (1)

A map from the 1950s depicting Preston’s interwar and early post-war estates

In the first instance, that journey necessitated ad hoc solutions in the form of the temporary prefabs. Of the 156,000 provided across the country, 300 were allocated to Preston, constructed principally on the Grange Estate in Ribbleton. The Arcon Mark V model built, despite its ducted warm air heating, built-in cupboards and fitted kitchen (which included a refrigerator), aroused mixed feelings. ‘Concerned’, a correspondent to the Lancashire Daily Post, expressed ‘feelings of horror and disgust’ on realising that ‘far from being workmen’s temporary huts these erections were actually prefabricated dwellings to house the proud and victorious people of Preston’. (2)

Ribbleton prefabs on the corner of Yewtree Avenue and Alder Road, 1946; permanent newbuild to the rear © Preston Digital Archive and used with permission

Prospective tenants were more favourable. ‘Who’s first?’, said one; another concluded they were ‘nicer than 75 percent of the Council houses in Preston’.  The councillors’ verdict was that: (3)

though externally these houses are not beautiful, internally they have more amenities and better layout than many permanent houses. The women members were particularly impressed.

The prefabs were intended to last ten years (though in Ribbleton they survived till the early 1960s); permanent housing remained the goal. In 1946, the Council’s immediate building programme projected 702 new permanent homes – around 88 on the Farringdon Park Estate, the rest (including 250 BISF houses – a steel-framed form of permanent prefabricated construction) on the Ribbleton Hall Estate.

New post-war homes on Longridge Road, the Grange Estate, photographed in 1950

Towards a Prouder Preston had envisaged a programme of 750 new homes annually for 20 years. It had also, in a clear echo of the dominant planning ideals of the early post-war era promoting ‘neighbourhood units’ and mixed communities, criticised interwar building: (4)

Housing between the two world wars failed because most of the estates were not planned as small communities within the town, and provided for only one class of tenant and lacked many of the basic amenities that were available in the centre of the town.

The Larches Estate, the first major scheme built in the west of the borough proper, in fulfilment of those neighbourhood unit ideas, was designed as a self-contained community of 600 houses and flats with ‘bungalows and a hostel for old people, a community centre, a health clinic, library and a church’.

In Preston, such principles necessitated building beyond the Borough’s then boundaries (they were extended in 1952 and 1956) as, for example, in the Brookfield Estate where work began in 1950 on a scheme of 1200 homes for a projected population of 5000. The planned addition, in 1963, of 2500 ‘luxury dwellings’ (intended for middle-class occupation) presumably reflected that earlier commitment to mixed communities.  

The pace and ambition of post-war construction had been maintained in a second planning document, the Development Plan for the County Borough of Preston issued in 1951.  A small out-of-borough estate at Middleforth Green and a large estate of over 1000 homes at Kingsfold in Penwortham to the south followed in the early 1950s in the Urban District of Walton-le-Dale (now part of South Ribble). 

Leyland, around four miles to the south of Preston, was identified in the Plan as a major area of growth along the New Town lines favoured at the time. (This idea received partial and limited fulfilment much later in the creation in 1970 of the Central Lancashire New Town – in fact, despite the name, better understood as an Urban Development Corporation resting on collaboration between Preston, Leyland and Chorley.) 

Housing on Redcar Avenue, Ingol

The new estate at Ingol, 2.5 miles north-east of the town centre, commenced in the early 1960s, was one of the last large suburban estates to be developed.  By the mid-1950s, new housing priorities and planning dynamics were in play focusing on a renewed drive – now the major problems of post-war reconstruction had been tackled – to clear the slums.

Pleasant Street, c1958. Courtesy of Lancashire County Council’s Red Rose Collections.

In Preston, the first post-war clearance of 209 properties took place on the inaptly named Pleasant Street and Brunswick Street in the central Avenham area in 1955.  The clearance of some 350 properties north of Walker Street began in the following year.  By 1958, it was planned to clear around 6000 homes, predominantly dating from the first half of the 19^th century, in the Nile Street and Marsh Lane areas east and west of the town centre – Marsh Lane had been identified as a district of particularly poor housing as far back as the 1920s.

A local press story of 1959 captures the optimistic mood around the sweeping changes being wrought: (5)

It is one more stage in a story of progress, whereby one by one, the blackest of Preston’s black spots are vanishing to clear the way for modern, bright and roomy houses and flats.

Flats on Samuel Street

Preston’s first multi-storey scheme, opened in 1957 on Samuel Street, was a modest four- and five-storey development between an existing small council estate and earlier terraces but the circumstances of inner-city redevelopment impelled grander solutions.  York House and Lancaster House – two eleven-storey blocks designed by Lyons, Israel and Ellis in what was originally designated the Brunswick Street Redevelopment Area – were completed in 1961 east of Berwick Street in Avenham. (6)

Brunswick Street high-rise, 1987 © University of Edinburgh, Tower Block UK and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Tower blocks on Elizabeth Street, 1987 © University of Edinburgh, Tower Block UK and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Three 16-storey blocks, built by Wimpey and completed in 1962, were built in the Elizabeth Street (Moor Lane) Redevelopment Area, by which time the Council was returning to a major redevelopment of the Avenham area. The latter would result in three 12-storey blocks (Carlisle House, Richmond House and Durham House) commenced in 1963, and – the peak of the borough’s ambition – two 19-storey blocks, Kendal House and Penrith House (later renamed Sandown Court), officially opened in June 1965.   The latter, designed by the Building Design Partnership, were built using the Bison form of system-building.

Richmond House in 1987 and 2014. Left-hand image © University of Edinburgh, Tower Block UK and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Kendal House and Penrith House (Sandown Court), 1987 © University of Edinburgh, Tower Block UK and made available under a Creative Commons licence

This was a frenzied period of construction in Preston – in March 1968, the Borough celebrated its 10,000^th council home – as it was across the country as national and local government cooperated to clear the slums and build anew. That cooperation became fraught as Treasury concerns over public spending increased.

Negotiated contracts between local authorities and the few developers capable of building at the requisite scale were one Government bugbear but determined councils held some power in this context. The Preston Housing Committee, anxious to increase housing production by 50 percent, invited bids from 19 contractors for its grand Avenham redevelopment scheme. When only two responded, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) allowed Borough Surveyor and Engineer, EH Stazicker to negotiate a contract with J Turner, a local construction firm. (7)

A former architect of the MHLG discussing his ministry’s attempts to impose a cost-saving yardstick to constrain expenditure noted Preston’s: (8)

very powerful chief engineer … who built high rise everywhere. He didn’t look at this (the yardstick booklet). And he’d arrive on the doorstep one day with a tender and say ‘I want approval for this scheme, What the hell’s it all being held up for?’

In this context, when councils proceeded regardless of central government advice and when the Government itself was in the numbers game, he concluded, that ‘the administrators’ line [was] often “Well, we’ll approve this one. Just don’t let it happen again!”’

Preston Bus Station © Dr Greg and made available through a Creative Commons licence

As we’ve mentioned Stazicker, we should digress briefly to note his significant role in the creation of that Brutalist icon, Preston Bus Station, designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership and Ove Arup and Partners. Opened in 1969, it’s survived threats of demolition and is now rightly celebrated as an architectural masterpiece.

Another innovative design in Preston has not survived.  As part of the Avenham redevelopment scheme, James Stirling and James Gowan designed a low-rise development – three-storey terraces, a four-storey block of flats alongside some two-storey houses and flats for the elderly – completed in 1961. Innovation and controversy lay in their choice of form and material – ramps and deck access, sharp angular edges and hard, red brick. It was all a conscious attempt – criticised and praised in equal measure as nostalgic – to replicate some of the design qualities and street life of the terraces (with echoes of mill forms too) it replaced; a ‘realist regionalism’ in Stirling’s words. (9)

Stirling and Gowan’s scheme in Avenham

The scheme won a Good Housing award in 1963 but it never seems to have commanded much affection. Perhaps it just tried too hard whilst there were practical complaints regarding its lack of open space and bleakness. Pitched roofs which replaced the parapet edges and pyramidic forms of the original in the 1970s didn’t save it and the scheme was demolished in 1999; done for by the then fashionable theories of ‘defensible space’ and criticisms of its illegibility, lack of natural surveillance and general aesthetics.

Criticisms of some of the high-rise developments were also emerging – complaints of condensation in some of the tower blocks as early as 1965. By 1978, when Preston’s two MPs contributed to a House of Commons debate on housing, the wheel had turned full circle.  Stan Thorne noted that conditions in the tower blocks had: (10)

deteriorated noticeably in about 1970, when vandalism became rife and the behavioural problems produced the fouling of lifts, excess noise, bad neighbour relations and damage to windows and other property within the buildings.

His further complaints – regarding the lack of play space for young children, broken-down lifts, the high rents charged for unpopular homes with many seeking transfers – will seem familiar to critics of high-rise and were certainly becoming increasingly prevalent.

His Labour colleague Ronald Atkins (incidentally currently the longest-lived MP ever; he retired as a Preston City councillor in 2010 aged 92*) spoke for many when he observed:

We suffer from changing fashions in planning. In the 1950s and early 1960s planning opinion favoured high-rise flats as the answer to problems of land scarcity in town centres. These blocks today are almost universally condemned by the same planners.

He went on to argue ‘a need for consultation and a freer choice in all housing matters. Housing authorities provide better houses, but not always better communities’ and concluded that there was ‘much to be said for good old-fashioned houses to replace the old streets which are being demolished’.

I’m an advocate of council housing and a defender of well-designed and well-maintained high-rise in appropriate circumstances but it is important to acknowledge these sentiments. The assault on council housing – and multi-storey housing in particular – that emerged in the 1980s did not come merely from the clear-blue water of Thatcherism.

Preston Borough Council began to implement the new planning principles taking shape from the late 1960s which favoured the rehabilitation of terraced housing in what had been called ‘twilight areas’. From the mid-1970s, it adopted a more conservative approach with repair and renewal of older properties alongside only selective demolition and rebuilding.

The demolition of the Moor Lane towers

Conversely, some of the tower blocks were demolished – the three Moor Lane blocks were razed in 2001; Lancaster and York House in Avenham in 2005. Sandown Court had been transferred into private ownership in the early 1980s.

A privatised and renovated Sandown Court and newbuild on Oxford Street, Avenham, 2014

Alongside that assault on council housing from the 1980s came a series of regeneration initiatives, welcome for the necessary investment ploughed into estates but resting on a similar critique of their failure.  Estate Action, from 1985, saw extensive modernisation programmes implemented on four Preston estates. An Estate Management Board (taking over the ownership and management of its council homes) was formed on the Moor Nook Estate to harness and implement this programme.

Avenham came under the tender mercies of Alice Coleman’s Design Improvement Controlled Experiment (DICE) programme in 1990 – a £50 million project initiated with the direct support of Mrs Thatcher to eradicate what Coleman (the major UK guru of ‘defensible space’) saw as the ‘design disadvantages’ of multi-storey local authority housing.

In another reflection of the philosophical and financial principles now governing social housing, 1121 council homes in the Avenham area were transferred to the housing association Onward Homes in 1999. A fuller so-called Large-Scale Voluntary Transfer of Preston’s housing stock to the Community Gateway Association took place in 2005. Of the 11,610 social rent homes in Preston in 2019 (18 percent of the city’s total housing stock), none were owned and managed by the local authority (11)

Community Gateway now operates about 6500 social rent homes in the Preston area and prides itself on a model of ownership and management based (partly at least) on tenant membership and tenant democracy. It is also one of the ‘six anchor institutions’ of the ‘Preston Model’ of community wealth building pioneered by the City Council referenced in the first post.

Historically, much of Preston’s community wealth – the security and well-being of its population (social capital in its fullest sense) – was created by council housing. It will be interesting to see how far a new model operating in a much harsher climate, legislatively and financially, is able to match past achievements.  

* Ron Atkins sadly died on 31 December 2020, aged 104.

Sources

(1) Towards a Prouder Preston, prepared by the Town Planning and Development Committee, was published in September 1946. The figures drawn from it are cited in David Hunt, A History of Preston (Carnegie Publishing and Preston Borough Council, 1992)

(2) ‘Ribbleton Prefabs: Not Things of Beauty but Needed’, Lancashire Daily Post, 12 June 1946. The cutting and an image of the prefabs can be found on the Preston Digital Archive.

(3) ‘Preston’s First Pre-Fab Finds Favour’, Lancashire Daily Post, 19 July 1946. The cutting can be found on the Preston Digital Archive.

(4) Quoted in Hunt, A History of Preston

(5) An undated cutting from the Lancashire Daily Post in the Preston Digital Archive Flickr stream.

(6) For details of Preston high-rise, see the University of Edinburgh’s Tower Block website.

(7) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993)

(8) Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of High-Rise Housing in Britain: Local Communities Tackle Mass Housing, Nuffield College, University of Oxford PhD, 1978

(9) There’s a large body of writing on the scheme, notably Mark Crinson, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Stirling and Gowan’s Preston Housing’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 65, no. 2, June 2006 and ‘Village to Worktown’ scanned on this website.  Reyner Banham described it as ‘Hoggartry’ (in a reference to Richard Hoggart whose Use of Literacy was seen by some as romanticising working-class life) in a February 1962 New Statesman article entitled ‘Coronation Street, Hoggartsborough’.

(10) Local authorities (housing management): House of Commons Debate, 8 June 1978: vol 951 cc511-20

(11) Lancashire County Council, ‘Dwelling Stock by Tenure’ (May 2020)

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part II: the Post-War Housing Drive

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1940s, 1950, 1960

In last week’s post, we saw how Shrewsbury Borough Council had built homes even before 1914 and had built on a large scale after 1918. A second world war created new needs and ambitions in its aftermath. In fact, the Borough emerged from war largely unscathed – just two bombs fell on the town – but its population and significance as a manufacturing centre had grown and it faced the same housing crisis affecting most of the nation.

The local responses – driven in any case by national policy and direction – were similar too. This was seen firstly in the temporary prefab bungalows erected in the town, part of 156,623 nationwide – 50 at Harlescott (some for essential workers in the nearby Sentinel Waggon Works), 55 in Abbots Gardens, 30 in New Park Close and a smaller group for elderly people in the Old Heath Estate. (1)

BISF homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

Permanent prefabs seemed to offer another solution. The steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) House had been designed by Frederick Gibberd during the war; 50 were built on the new Crowmeole Estate from 1948. Of the 329 new homes planned for the Springfield Estate from December 1948, 150 were Wimpey No-Fines, a form of in-situ concrete construction.  Of 624 homes planned for the Meadows Farm Estate from autumn 1950, 212 were of Wates pre-reinforced concrete panel construction.

Brick-built homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

The majority of the homes, however, were traditional brick-built houses, most of conventional design, a few with a slightly more modernist aesthetic. Those built in the 1940s reflected the generous space standards of the Bevan era; those after 1951, the economising of the Macmillan era.

The occupation of disused military bases had been another – highly unofficial but practical – response to the post-war housing crisis. By October 1946 it was estimated that around 46,000 people were squatting some 1811 camps across the country. Similar direct action in Shrewsbury and vicinity came later – with reports of military buildings being occupied in 1948 in Monkmoor, Atcham and Forton amongst others – but testified to the same pressing need.

Occupation of Harlescott Camp, May 1949

The largest and best-organised local squat, however, began in May 1949 when Thomas G Ryder, local leader of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, led a group (complete with seven to eight lorries of furniture) that occupied 22 huts at RAF Harlescott. The trigger here seems to have been the belief that the buildings were about to be allocated to single Polish men working at the Sentinel factory. Ryder declared:

We are not going to allow it to become a glorified camp for Poles paid for by the British tax-payer when British families have nowhere to go.

I’ll let you determine the balance between laudable working-class activism and xenophobia in that particular episode.  Ryder himself would go on to become, in modern terminology, a ‘centrist’ leader of the Labour Group on Shrewsbury Borough Council and a senior manager at Sentinel.

Stapleton Road, Meole Brace

Construction of new housing continued apace with the commencement, in 1954, of the 500-home Meole Brace Estate on the south-eastern fringes of the borough. As other towns looked to high-rise, plentiful land and, presumably, political choice kept Shrewsbury building low.  The rather austere five-storey blocks built by Wimpey at Meole Brace seem to have represented the physical, height of its ambition.

Spring Gardens, Ditherington

As the immediate housing crisis declined, thoughts turned again to the slum clearance programme begun in the 1930s.  Between 1955 and 1959, the Council demolished 515 unfit homes – around 144 deemed individually unfit but a greater number (371) in designated clearance areas. Three-storey blocks replaced derelict housing around Ditherington Mill; passages and courts in Frankwell and the town centre were also cleared.

Ryton Close, Meole Brace

By 1956, the council housing waiting list had increased to over 1700 and the Council faced having to rehouse some 794 families from homes designated unfit. This pressure brought about the borough’s next major housing expansion – a further 143 homes on the Meole Brace Estate and a large new estate on agricultural land at Harlescott Grange. (2) By the summer of 1958, the Council had built 2382 homes since 1945 and boasted 857 underway or approved.

Ditherington and Harlescott in 1948 showing Shrewsbury’s expansion to the north © Britain from Above, eaw017470

A local press report described Harlescott as ‘Shrewsbury’s industrial suburb’, a sign of the borough’s expanding manufacturing base. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government provided additional support to housing for skilled workers and the Council agreed that 20 of its ‘bonus’ 30 houses should be allocated to Rolls-Royce employees, the company having taken over the Sentinel works in 1956. (3)

Bainbridge Green, Harlescott Grange

Housing allocations, however, were controversial. Shrewsbury came late to a points-based system and, ironically, when it did in 1954, it downgraded what had previously been the sole criterion – overcrowding.  Now points were added for waiting time and local connection as well as obvious priorities such as number of children and medical need. Localism cam to the fore again nine years later when councillors across the spectrum unsuccessfully opposed the priority given to incoming skilled workers. (4)

Housing for elderly people was prominent in later schemes. Halcroft Court, Ditherington

Smaller schemes continued in the 1970s but the great age of council housebuilding was over.  Shrewsbury itself was amalgamated with Atcham Rural District Council (itself a significant housebuilder) in 1974 and together in 1994 – after the depredations of Right to Buy – the new council owned and managed 6205 council homes. Seven hundred fewer council homes – 5593 to be precise – were transferred by large-scale voluntary transfer to Severnside Housing in 2001.

Then Shrewsbury itself disappeared, administratively at least; absorbed in 2009 into the new unitary authority of Shropshire. An active Town Council (in fact, a newly created parish council) remains. By 2011, around 16 percent of the homes in the district were social rented, a little below the national average.

Shropshire Council is an overwhelmingly Conservative body but it’s a sign of the times and the new housing crisis that its 2017 Local Plan Review concluded that ‘the market is not, and will not, build the housing needed to meet the broad future needs of communities’.  Essentially, despite a significant building programme, private developers were failing to deliver the affordable and smaller homes that many local people required. (5)

It’s an uncomfortable echo of the case made by Shrewsbury’s first socialist councillor over a century earlier: ‘if it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.’  (6)

The Council set up its own wholly-owned, private housebuilding company in February this year. It plans to build 2000 new homes, some for key workers, some for elderly people, some for younger people leaving care. Naturally today, ‘affordable homes’ and homes for sale are in the mix and it’s unclear what the proportion of social rent homes will be.  That market failure and local government intervention remind us that council housing as such – let at genuinely affordable rents – is as necessary today as it ever was when Shrewsbury’s housing efforts began. (7)

Sources

(1) WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014). Other detail and quotations in this post are also drawn from this source.

(2) ‘New Housing Estate at Shrewsbury’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 July 1956

(3) ‘Housing Tender for Shrewsbury Estate’, Birmingham Daily Post, 25 July 1958

(4) New Housing Points Scheme Proposed at Shrewsbury, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 July 1954 and ‘Allocation of houses criticised’, Birmingham Daily Post, 10 December 1963

(5) Dominic Robinson, ‘2000 homes planned as Shropshire Council to set up its own house building company’, Shropshire Star, 7 December 2018

(6) Councillor John Kent Morris quoted in ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(7) Shropshire Newsroom, ‘Building homes that people need: housing company gets Council go-ahead’, 1 March 2019