A Housing History of Barrow-in-Furness, part II from 1918: ‘Ours must be a slumless city’

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1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

We left Barrow last week just as its first public housing was under construction. These were homes – though not all justified the term – built by the Ministry of Munitions to house Barrow’s huge armaments workforce just as, it turned out, the First World War was drawing to its bloody conclusion.  In 1917, the town’s Medical Officer of Health (echoing the Council’s official line), had argued that ‘the only solution for gross overcrowding is a scheme for the provision of houses carried out by the Ministry of Munitions’.  By April 1918, the Council’s Health Committee had concluded that ‘it is the duty of local authorities to carry through a programme of housing for the working classes’. Much had changed and this post will deal largely with the council housebuilding programme that ensued, albeit in faltering fashion. (1)

Firstly, however, there was the problem of the two Ministry of Munitions schemes launched in October 1917.  The Roosegate development of semi-permanent housing was built by the Ministry itself; 200 bungalows (of the 500 originally projected) were completed in 1918 – to almost universal obloquy. As one Barrow resident recalled, ‘they were one-roomed and two-roomed houses. It was just simply a box with a lid on’. Locals called the scheme ‘China Town’. In June 1920, the Health Committee warned of the ‘intolerable condition’ of its streets; by March the next year, the Committee described the housing as a ‘a threat to the health of residents’. Its closure was announced in July 1925. (2)

Holcroft Hill, Abbotsmead Estate

The second Ministry scheme at Abbotsmead comprised permanent housing, built by the Council under Ministry contract to designs provided by the latter.  The estate’s layout was better though the houses themselves were criticised for their small rooms and poor build quality.  A bigger problem was the proposed rent levels, initially set at an exorbitant 17s a week (85p) by the Ministry with the Council considering even reduced rents of 10-12s (50-60p) too high. The scheme was abandoned by war’s end with around half of the proposed 500 houses completed. Hopes that the Council might purchase the homes in peacetime were thwarted by cost; most by the mid-1920s had been sold to sitting tenants.

Romney Road, Devonshire Estate

Despite acknowledging in March 1919 that ‘the provision of housing [was] one of its most pressing needs’ and despite the combination of generosity and compulsion offered by the 1919 Housing Act, the Council was slow to respond.  However, belatedly in April 1920, it agreed proposals to build in 113 homes on Devonshire Road and 44 on Walney Island. Both schemes were largely completed in 1921.  

Local as well as national politics had shifted. Labour gained its first majority on the Council in 1920 and would govern again between 1928 and 1931 and 1934 to 1938.  An average turnout of 69 percent through the interwar period, peaking at 81 percent in 1925, shows how fiercely contested these municipal elections were. (3)

However, through much of this period, economics loomed larger than politics. With military orders withdrawn and facing unprecedentedly harsh international trading conditions, Barrow’s traditional industrial mainstays were decimated. By 1922, 60 percent of its shipbuilding workforce and half of its engineering workers were unemployed – 44 percent of its insured workforce overall. Vickers’ workforce fell from 23,000 in July 1918 to a low point of just over 3700 in 1923.  Wage cuts forced a bitter engineering strike in the town in May 1922.

The new housing crisis was manifest in rent arrears and evictions, the latter sometimes fiercely contested as when 20 police officers were sent with bailiffs to enforce evictions in Vickerstown (where 800 tenants had been laid off and rent arrears approached £7000) in February 1922. In the 1920s, the Council’s preoccupation lay with collecting rents – reduced in 1924 from the already low levels of 7s 6s to 5s (37½ to 25p) weekly – rather than building anew.

A second major slump hit Barrow with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 when at peak in 1931 some 7500 of the locally insured workforce was jobless. There was little female employment in the town to offset mass male unemployment. Rearmament in the later 1930s would restore the town’s fortunes whilst other of its former large employers in railway and locomotive building and metal founding closed permanently.

Flats on Thrums Street, Roosegate Estate

The Labour-controlled Council was able to commence one small building scheme in 1931 on land purchased from the Ministry of Munitions’ failed Roosegate development: 56 flats for elderly people on Thrums Street, followed by an adjacent scheme of 116 semi-detached houses finally completed in 1948.

The national shift towards slum clearance signified by the 1930 Housing Act and, in Barrow’s case more particularly, the 1935 Housing Act provided greater scope for the Council. Some 6384 homes were inspected under the surveys required by the latter legislation and just over half found ‘not in all respects fit for human habitation’ between 1935 and 1937. Applying overcrowding criteria, 887 homes accommodating 5475 persons were found overcrowded in 1937, equating to 6 percent of the town’s housing stock. Twenty-seven clearance areas were declared.

Barrow also suffered unusually from what might be kindly called ‘informal housing’ – shacks and tents predominantly on Walney Island’s western shore.  Some of these were occupied by young people evading the household income provisions of the means test and the Council proceeded cautiously but 28 huts at Biggar Bank on Walney Island were cleared by 1939.

The biggest scalp, however, were the Scotch Flats in Hindpool discussed in last week’s post – tenement buildings dating to 1871 which were among the first of Barrow’s company housing. After two public enquiries, the Ministry of Health agreed the inspector’s decision to demolish in 1939 though – with war intervening – they were to survive till 1956.

Brook Street, Risedale Estate

From a low point of some 66,000 in 1931, Barrow’s population had increased to around 75,000 by 1940. Population pressures and increased finances encouraged the Council to embark on larger building projects in the later 1930s. The Risedale Estate was commenced in 1936; its 148 new homes were completed in 1948.

Vulcan Road, the Vulcan Estate

The Vulcan Estate, built on the site of the former Vulcan Ironworks in Salthouse, was built between 1936 and 1937 as a slum clearance estate to house those displaced from the Strand Clearance Area. Its relatively plain housing may reflect those origins.

Mardale Grove, Greengate South

Land a short distance to the north was purchased for the Greengate Estate, North and South, in 1937 but, with contracts for 180 houses and 54 flats not agreed till the summer of 1939, little progress was made before the war – just 18 houses in Greengate South were completed by February 1940.

The Barrow Blitz: Exmouth Street, May 1941

Some of those were damaged in the Barrow Blitz, two sustained bombing raids on 14-16 April and 3-10 May 1941. Ironically, the town’s heavy industry was relatively unaffected but some 83 civilians died and over 10,000 homes damaged. In Barrow, as elsewhere, the desire to build bigger and better in the post-war world was expressed as conflict raged.

Unsurprisingly, the Ministry of Health rejected immediate plans for rebuilding proposed by the Council as early as 1943 but the Borough Surveyor prepared further plans for Greengate South and a new estate of 900 homes in Newbarns – part of a vision announced by the mayor, Councillor GD Haswell, in November that year to create a ‘new post-war Barrow’.  The Newbarns scheme was approved in May 1944.

The Council’s Barrow Development Committee, tasked with overseeing peacetime reconstruction, was clear on the ‘paramount necessity of suitably housing our people’:

The social benefits to health, education, family life and ‘moral well-being’ are of course ample justification for the provision of houses adequate in number, properly designed and located with ample accommodation. But even from an economic point of view ample and suitable accommodation is a valuable asset. The fact that we have the necessary labour to offer is enhanced in value greatly if we can show it is properly and suitably housed. Ours must be a slumless city.

As that ambition took shape, the town was allocated 400 temporary prefabs to help meet the immediate housing crisis in November 1944. Many of these Tarran concrete bungalows were erected in Tummerhill on Walney Island, replaced from 1956 by permanent housing; others dotted around the town survived longer. Permanent prefabs – in this case around 200 steel-framed British Iron and Steel Federation houses – were built by Laings on Park Road, and north of Chester Street and Bradford Street on the Ormsgill Estate. They were replaced in the mid-1970s as the estate continued to grow.

Middle Field, Ormsgill Estate

Chester Place, Ormsgill Estate

Earlier plans for the Greengate estates were completed in the late 1940s but Barrow’s new hopes were placed in the Newbarns Estate, planned to comprise some 800 homes housing around 3000. Post-war planning ideas around ‘neighbourhood units’ were reflected in the provision made for new churches, schools and recreation facilities though the promised tennis courts and recreation centre were never built.

Kendal Croft, Newbarns Estate

Middle Hill, Newbarns Estate

Building continued apace with the Abbotsmead Estate completed in the mid-1950s and what was promoted as ‘a new town at Walney’ of over 2700 homes in the north of the island approved in 1953 where building continued into the 1960s.  Some 2600 council homes were built between 1945 and 1961.

Later council housing in the south of Walney Island at Cote Ley Crescent

For Barrow, the era of large-scale council housebuilding was over by the late-1960s; new schemes were smaller and largely infill, including the Cartmel and Grange Crescent flats in the centre of town and bungalows and flats principally for older residents around Cotswold Crescent on the former site of the Griffin Chilled Steel Works. A scheme of 79 houses and flats on and around Exmouth Street in 1985 marked an adaptive return to more traditional terraced forms.

Cartmel Crescent

At peak, in the early 1980s, the Council owned around 5500 homes in the borough. Currently, it owns and manages just over 2500 homes with a much smaller number run by housing associations. Around 10 percent of households live in social rented homes, a surprisingly low figure – below the national average – for a town dubbed the most working-class in England (an admittedly inexact judgement apparently reflecting its prevalence of chip shops, workingmen’s clubs and trade union offices). That may reflect the early tradition of working-class owner occupation referenced last week, the amount of company housing since transferred to private ownership and council housebuilding programmes constrained by economic downturn. (5)

‘The Spirit of Barrow’ by Chris Kelly was unveiled in 2005

The town continues to be marked by its industrial history and the ups and downs of the local economy. Vickers, now BAE Systems (that is a considerable simplification of a complex history), was sustained by nuclear submarine orders into the 1990s but now employs only around 5000 workers from 14,000 in the 1980s.  The pre-pandemic unemployment rate stood at around 4 percent, a fall from recent figures but above the national average. Earlier this year, the town was reported as having suffered the largest population fall of any area in England – around 6.8 percent between 2001 and 2019 to the present figure of around 67,000. (6)

Elsewhere, Barrow is often described as being at the end of the longest cul-de-sac in England due to its location at the tip of the Furness peninsula, 33 miles off the nearest motorway and 33 miles back.  The fact that this ‘western industrial periphery’ had briefly been ‘a major Bessemer iron and steel centre of Europe and the world’ tells you something of its impressive and turbulent economic history. (7)

The view from Walney Bridge

Give Barrow a visit – it has some proud municipal heritage and a unique housing history; it’s a hardworking town working hard to adapt to changing circumstance as it has throughout its lifespan. And that ‘remote’ location is actually pretty special.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Bryn Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built (Hougenai Press, 1985). Much of the information here and particularly that on later council housing, which is little documented elsewhere, is drawn from this invaluable source by Barrow’s leading historian.

(2) Quotations drawn from Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Working-Class Housing in Barrow and Lancaster 1880-1930’ Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol 127, 1978 and Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built

(3) Sam Davies and Bob Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919-1938: A Comparative Analysis (Routledge, 2016). The unemployment figures which follow are drawn from the same source.

(4) Quoted in Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built

(5) On the town’s working-class character see Caroline Evans, ‘Barrow, Capital of Blue-Collar Britain’, The Guardian, 5 October 2008

(6) Eleanor Ovens, ‘Barrow named as having biggest population drop in England’, The News, 20 June 2020

(7) The quote is drawn from John Duncan Marshall and John K Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester University Press, 1981)

Book Review: Michael Romyn, London’s Aylesbury Estate – An Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Regeneration, Southwark

Michael Romyn, London’s Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the Concrete Jungle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

The estate was like a shiny new penny. It was lovely. It was really lovely. It’s hard for me to paint a picture for you but it was a beautiful place to live … The community side of it, you know? I mean you knew all the neighbours … You know you would never have got that sort of community in a row of houses as you did with the landings …

Robert Banks is talking about Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate. For many readers, his words might come as a shock and, to be honest, I’m tempted just to leave it there as a simple corrective to the unreasoned obloquy that the estate has suffered. As Michael Romyn writes in the introduction to his essential new book, ‘a reputation is usually earned; in the Aylesbury’s case it was born’.  Even on the day of its official opening by Anthony Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Planning in October 1970, it was described by one local Tory councillor as a ‘concrete jungle … not fit for people to live in’. That might have come as a shock to the new tenants who felt ‘it was like moving into a palace’.

The estate was born in the laudable post-war ambition to clear the slums and in the 1960s’ fashion for large-scale, modernist solutions to housing need. It comprised 2700 homes in all, housing a population of almost 10,000 at peak, in 16 four- to fourteen-storey so-called ‘snake blocks’ (including what was allegedly the largest single housing block in Europe). Designed by Southwark Council’s Department of Architecture and Planning, it was built by Laing using the Jespersen large panel system of prefabricated construction. The estate’s regeneration – in practice, its demolition and replacement – has been planned since 1998.

Old against new, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

Romyn’s book offers essentially another form of deconstruction, not of the estate itself, but of the myths and meanings that have become attached to it. Robert Banks provides one of the 31 past and present residents’ testimonies that lie at the heart of this thoroughly researched book. That residents’ voice shouldn’t be an unusual means of understanding the actual lived experience of council tenants – who find themselves and their homes so frequently misrepresented and maligned in the media and wider commentary – but, sadly, it is. In the case of the Aylesbury, it is all the more vital as no estate has been so unfairly vilified.

Wendover block under construction, 1969 (Courtesy of the John Laing Photographic Collection)

We should begin, I suppose, with that ‘reputation’: the estate portrayed as a ‘concrete jungle’ (indeed, almost its archetype), a scene of crime and disorder. Romyn quotes Sir Kenneth Newman, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who in 1983 described London’s council estates more generally as ‘symbolic locations’ where:

unemployed youths – often black youths – congregate; where the sale and purchase of drugs, the exchange of stolen property and illegal drinking and gaming is not unknown … they equate closely to the criminal rookeries of Dickensian London.

We’ll leave aside for the moment the unconscious (?) racism of his comment and note its surprisingly conscious myth-making: estates, such as the Aylesbury, were imagined rather than analysed, just as, in fact, Victorian elites fearfully mythologised the slum quarters of their own large cities. (1)

As Romyn writes:

Simplified, fetishized, objectified, and finally commodified, council estates rendered in this way, were imaginary constructs, their meaning defined not by their histories or inhabitants, but by external agencies of control (politicians, police, the media, etc).

Newman avoided the word ‘gangs’ but Romyn reminds us how readily the stigmatising term was applied to very largely innocuous groups of young people, particularly those of colour, simply hanging out on their home turf. That so many of the estate’s population were young – in 1971, 37 percent of its 9000 population was under 16 – was, as he notes, an objective factor in such problems as did exist.

Balconies, sunlight, saplings and lawns, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

If this sounds dismissive of those problems, it should be said that Romyn is scrupulous in assessing the evidence. He notes, for example, that in 1999 around 40 percent of estate residents expressed fears for their personal safety. It’s a disturbing figure but it was roughly in line with the proportions in Southwark and London more widely.

Romyn contends that what really marked the estate out was:

its physical attributes – the brawny slabs … the circuitous geography of elevated walkways. Immediately expressive of the ‘gritty’ inner city, the estate distilled many of the fears and fantasies of urban life embedded in the popular imagination. 

These, of course, were also grist to the mill of the ‘Defensible Space’ theorists who posited that elements of ‘design disadvantage’ – the illegibility of public/private space, multi-storey accommodation, shared entranceways  and those walkways – were the cause of crime and antisocial behaviour.  These, I hope, largely discredited ideas had become by the 1990s the ‘common sense’ of planners and politicians alike and featured heavily in the writings of the media commentariat.

Aylesbury landing, July 1976 (Courtesy of John David Hulchanski, University of Toronto)

But while lurid headlines and alarmist reports filled column inches, actual crime rates on the estate and the incidence of anti-social behaviour were similar to those of surrounding areas; the estate wasn’t an idyll (though many growing up in the era remember it fondly) but it was essentially normal.  Romyn quotes Susan Smith who has suggested ‘fear of crime may be better seen as an articulation of inequality and powerlessness so often experienced as part of urban life. So too can it mask deeper anxieties about changes to the social order …’. Media representations of, as one report labelled it, this ‘concrete den of crime’ were, as Romyn argues, ‘wildly disproportionate, and wanton, too, in that they stoked and projected an unearned notoriety’. (2)  

East Street Market, c.1970 (Courtesy of the South London Press)

Moving to the question of ‘community’, a leitmotif of planning since 1945, Aylesbury might again surprise those who have criticised it so freely.  Romyn charts, particularly in the estate’s early years, a neighbourliness and localism centred around the East Street market and nearby pubs and shops – in fact, a connectedness with the neighbourhood in direct contradiction to conventional wisdom surrounding estates and their supposed isolation.  An active tenants’ association, a range of community activities, informal cleaning rotas of common areas and so on complete the picture.

Changing demographics could fray this community cohesion. The arrival of larger numbers of ‘problem families’ – at times described as ‘rough’ by more established residents – under homelessness legislation sometimes led to tensions and difficulties. But Romyn reminds us, again with personal testimony, how life-changing for the families themselves this move could be. Linda Smith, who moved to the estate with her two young children in 1990 via a women’s refuge and bed and breakfast accommodation, recalls how, ‘in [her] time of need along came Southwark’. I don’t need to say how necessary it is that these services are properly funded and resourced and how vital social housing is to that.  

WACAT’s (the Walworth and Aylesbury Community Arts Trust) women’s dance group, 1982 (Courtesy of Su Braden/WACAT, Annual Report, 1982)

Race became another complicating factor for this initially very largely ‘white’ estate as black and minority residents moved in. But this necessary transition seems to have been negotiated well for the most part; the tenants association remained fairly old school but new grassroots community organisations emerged and made a vital contribution to Aylesbury’s life and vitality.

All this in an era of real and growing hardship. The data is profuse. As traditional employment declined and joblessness rose, by 1975 the average household income in Southwark was £1000 below the UK mean; by 1985, half its households were on Housing Benefit. By the late 1990s, Faraday Ward (largely comprising the estate) was the third most deprived ward in Southwark and among the fifth most deprived in England; half its children were on free school meals (compared to 16 percent nationally).

This wasn’t the time to cut public spending and services but the relentless Thatcherite urge to ‘balance the budget’ imposed swingeing central government cuts to housing grants and allocations. On the Aylesbury (as elsewhere), routine maintenance was cut and internal redecoration halted; caretakers were reduced and then removed completely in 1990; cleaning staff were reduced and then lost to Compulsory Competitive Tendering in 1991.

The real quality of Romyn’s book, however, is that it is not a polemic (and is all the more plausible for that). He acknowledges the inefficiencies of some of the Council’s services, its Direct Labour organisation, for example. He recognises the improvements achieved through new, more devolved forms of housing management. But the sense of an estate not failing but failed by others is palpable.

For all that, when in 1999 Southwark Council commissioned a ‘mutual aid’ survey of the estate, it found that 90 percent of residents knew and helped neighbours; 20 percent were helped by a relative living on estate and 35 percent had friends and relatives living nearby. This suggests a resilience and community challenging the dystopian stereotypes repeated most famously by Tony Blair in his first public speech after New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 on the estate itself.

Tony Blair visits the Aylesbury Estate, 2 June 1997

We might, nevertheless, see the £56.2m awarded to the Aylesbury two years later as part of a New Deal for Communities regeneration package as an attempt to right past wrongs. In practice, it was for most residents a poisoned chalice which threatened established and generally well-liked homes and it came cloaked in a moralising language that insulted them and their community. This ‘moral underclass discourse’:

pointed to imputed deficiencies in the values and behaviour of those who were supposedly excluded – ‘an underclass of people cut off from society’s’ mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose’ according to Blair.

The apparently benign goal of ‘mixed and sustainable communities’ was expressed more crudely by Southwark’s Director of Regeneration, the suitably villainously-named Fred Manson:

We need a wider range of people living in the borough … [council housing] generates people on low incomes coming in and that leads to poor school performances, middle-class people stay away.

We’re trying to move people from a benefit-dependency culture to an enterprise culture. If you have 25 to 30 percent of the population in need, things can still work reasonably well. But above 30, it becomes pathological.

Local Labour politicians might, one hopes, have known better but the motion of censure for this intemperate and abusive language came from Tory councillors. The residents’ own response came in December 2001 when, in a 76 percent turnout, they voted by 73 percent to reject the transfer of their homes to the Faraday Housing Association (formed for the purpose) which would oversee the regeneration process. Fears of increased rents, reduced security of tenure, smaller homes and gentrification all played their part.

Tenants and campaigners, including Aysen Dennis, Margot Lindsay, Victoria Biden, and Piers Corbyn, celebrate the stock transfer ballot result, 2001

Since then, regeneration has rumbled on. It has had some beneficial effects. Increased spending and support for education, for example, increased the proportion of local students gaining five GCSEs at Grade C or above from a shocking 16 percent in 1999 to 68 percent – just below the national average – in 2008.  That this was achieved before any part of the estate was demolished testifies to the benefits of direct public investment and the fallacy that clearance was required.

A small part of the estate was demolished in 2010, existing blocks replaced as is the fashion with mixed tenure homes in a more traditional streetscape. Most of the estate remains though it and its community have been scarred by the interminable process and continued threat of regeneration.

Whilst thoroughly readable, London’s Aylesbury Estate is an academic book – with an excellent apparatus of references and bibliographies – and it comes unfortunately at a hefty academic price. For anyone concerned to truly understand the estate and its history, however, I recommend it as the definitive text.

Aylesbury Estate, 1971 (Courtesy of the South London Press)

I’ll conclude with some conclusions that I think apply not only to the Aylesbury but to estates more generally. The first is that we should eschew simplifications and embrace complexity. Actual residents, for the most part, experienced the estate very differently from its media portrayals.  Many didn’t even experience it as an ‘estate’ at all – they knew their corner of it and generally got on with their immediate neighbours. Some were fearful of crime and an unfortunate few experienced it but another interviewee recalls that he ‘didn’t come across anything anti-social in all [his] time there’. Many remember – and continue to experience – neighbourliness; conversely, some rather liked the anonymity the estate could offer.

Secondly, we must reject the idea of estates as alien. As Romyn argues:

Council estates are just homes after all. For most residents, they are not media props or architectural crimes or political rationales, but places of family, tradition, ritual and refuge …

Let’s allow the Aylesbury Estate to be simply – and positively – ordinary:

For all that was exceptional about the estate, and for all the mystification it endured, the Aylesbury, in the eyes of its residents, was mostly normal, unremarkable; a place of routine and refuge, of rest and recreation, of family and familiarity.

Thirdly, we might wish those residents for once to be not the object of other people’s stories but the subject of their own.

Publication and purchase details can be found on the publisher’s website.

Notes

I’m grateful for permission to use the images above which are drawn from the book.

(1) This is argued by Dominic Severs in ‘Rookeries and No-Go Estates: St Giles and Broadwater Farm, or middle-class fear of “non-street” housing’, Journal of Architecture, vol 15, no 4, August 2010

(2) The reference here is Susan J Smith, ‘Social Relations, neighbourhood structure and the fear of crime in Britain’ in David Evans and David Herbert (eds), The Geography of Crime (Routledge, 1989)

I wrote about the Aylesbury Estate myself in two blog posts back in 2014. I’d revise some of my language and analysis back then in the light of my own further research and certainly with the benefit of Michael Romyn’s book but they might still serve as a useful guide to the overall history.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

Robert Tarran

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

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

Tarran houses in Park Lane dating to 1932

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

Quarry Hill © Leeds Library and Information Service

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

Ad advert from the Hull Daily Mail, 1 May 1944

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

Phase 3 of the Southwood Estate

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

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

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

Thomas Williams, later Baron Williams of Barnburgh; public domain

1960s permanent council housing replacing Hawksley bungalows

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

Bacon Garth Estate, the Parkway

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

1949 Agricultural workers’ houses, Bacon Garth Estate

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

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

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

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

Small Builders’ Scheme, looking towards Cottingham

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

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

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

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

The Garth

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Council Housing in Greenock, Part III after 1945: the ‘Hong Kong of the Clyde Coast’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

As last week’s post illustrated, Greenock’s housing problems were among the most severe in the country and exacerbated by severe wartime bombing. Besides a housing shortage, housing conditions remained dire; in 1951 over one-third of the town’s homes shared an outside toilet and 45 percent lacked a fixed bath.  Britain may have won the war but ‘winning the peace’ required unprecedented action to tackle the housing crisis.

Prefabs, Thom Street and Old Inverkip Road, 1971

In Greenock, as elsewhere, one response took the form of temporary prefabs with perhaps around 300 erected across the town. Those imported from the United States were soon found wanting as ‘not suitable for the Greenock climate’ – ‘the latest complaint is of swollen floorboards through damp’. British Arcon and Uni-Seco models were apparently more successful. (1)

‘Swedish Houses’ on Cedar Crescent

Another import, the ‘Swedish Houses’ – permanent prefabs assembled from flat-pack timber kits – were more successful. Forty-two pairs were built on Mallard Crescent, more along around Cedar Crescent and Fir Road in the Gibshill district; 3500 in Scotland as a whole. The steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation Houses), of which around 40,000 were built across the UK, feature in significant numbers in the South Maukinhill district of Greenock. Both survive to provide good homes to the present, the BISF houses in Greenock thoroughly renovated from 2006.

Stills taken from Greenock Plans Ahead (1947)

In the post-war re-imagining of a better Britain, the proposals of Frank Mears, who had been appointed planning consultant to the Burgh in 1940 – enshrined in Greenock: Portal of the Clyde published in 1947 – received considerable publicity. A documentary film entitled Greenock Plans Ahead, directed by Hamilton Tait, was commissioned to accompany an exhibition in the Municipal Buildings. (2)

Housing in the Kip Valley including the Cowdenknowes and Cornhaddock schemes

Mears aimed to capitalise on the town’s strategic location on the Firth of Clyde and address the deficiency of open space in the lower town identified by the Clyde Valley planning survey carried out under the auspices of Sir Patrick Abercrombie. He proposed lower density redevelopment, zoned industrial areas and, most strikingly, a ‘federal Garden City’ on American Parkway lines formed of new neighbourhoods dotted along the Kip Valley.

Larkfield housing scheme © Thomas Nugent and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Whilst that vision may seem unfamiliar to current residents, major post-war housing developments in Penny Fern, Branchton and Larkfield to the south-west of the town owe something to Mears’ thinking (though the A78 hardly lives up to a Parkway billing).  Such large-scale developments – 690 homes were agreed for the Penny Fern estate in 1950 – also reflected the availability of building land in the area.

The Council completed its 1000^th post-war house in 1950 – an impressive record in an era of genuine austerity. Additional housing – 564 houses in Pennyfern and Larkfield – was built by the Scottish Special Housing Association (SSHA). (The SSHA was originally set up in 1937 to provide employment and housing in Scotland’s most depressed districts. Its remit was later extended to cover the whole of Scotland when it became, in effect, a government housing agency operating within the Scottish Development Department.)  By 1960, 5000 new post-war homes had been built in Greenock. (3)

Council flats on The Vennel as envisaged by Frank Mears

A major redevelopment of the town centre proposing 600 homes in six-storey blocks and some 150 shops proposed in 1960 was implemented from 1968.

An undated postcard marking Greenock’s redeveloped town centre

If low-rise suburbia was the predominant form of 1950s council housing, high-rise seemed the flavour of the 1960s. Whilst that popular perception was not always accurate, it was true for Greenock where shortage of land, a difficult hilly terrain and pressing housing need combined to impel high-rise as an apparently unavoidable solution to building at density. Some 32 multi-storey blocks were constructed in the town between 1962 and 1975. Some dubbed Greenock the ‘Hong Kong of the Clyde Coast’.

Grieve Road tower blocks, 1983 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Three 16-storey blocks on Grieve Road were the first approved, followed by lower blocks in Upper Bow Farm and Cartsdyke in 1964 and 1965. In the latter year, the Burgh also bet big on system-built construction, approving the 15-storey Ravenscraig and Rankin Courts and six further blocks of 16- and 15-storeys in the comprehensive development area of Belleville Street. All were constructed using the Bison system, a rapid construction method using pre-cast concrete panels. (4)

This image taken by Eugene Jean Méhat in the mid-1960s captures the Belville Street area under construction, including ‘The Stilts’ centre-image. © Inverclyde Libraries, McLean Museum and Inverclyde Archives

A contemporary image of ‘The Stilts’ on Belville Street

Greenock’s steep terrain forced some innovative and daring design solutions to the creation of high-density housing, as seen in what are now dubbed ‘The Stilts’ and in the lower-rise blocks cut into the hillside further along Belville Street. Not all were to stand the test of time.

Teviot, Ettrick and Duns Place, Belville Street, 1983 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Ambition peaked in 1970 with the approval of Lynedoch and Antigua Courts, 18 storeys high, and Regent Court, another 18-storey block, system-built using the Camus system of large panel construction.  The final high-rise block approved was the 16-storey Kilblain Tower, approved in 1975 by Inverclyde District Council, the larger successor authority to Greenock Burgh created that year.

The Belville Street area in 1989

In that respect, Greenock had challenged the marked shift against high-rise construction that was apparent from the later 1960s, marked symbolically by the partial collapse (and loss of life) of the Ronan Point tower block in east London in 1968 but given political weight by growing concerns at the cost of multi-storey building and questions over the housing density it achieved.

Octavia Court demolition, February 2011

Subsequently, Greenock has followed trends across the UK in demolishing much of its high-rise; the first to come down – in 2002 – were the first built, those 16-storey blocks on Grieve Road.  Currently, 13 remain. That fall from grace has been spectacular; literally so with the demolition by explosives of Octavia Court in February 2011 and the removal between 2013 and 2015 of the six tower blocks that once dominated Belville Street.

Broomhill Court, before and after renovation

It’s also a fall that will confirm many prejudices though, as ever, the fuller story is more complicated.  The tower blocks initially provided good homes for many – Broomhill Court (which survives) can provide a template. According to a local housing manager, ‘back in the 60s, you had to wait seven years to get a flat here’ but later, in the words of journalist Dani Garavelli, the picture darkened: (5)

From the 80s onwards … there was little investment. Families started to move away, often to bought properties elsewhere in the town. The fabric of the buildings degenerated along with their reputation. By 2012, anti-social behaviour was rife. Two-thirds of the flats in Broomhill Court – the most troubled of its three 15-storey tower blocks – were empty and residents were wary of walking around at night.

Design and construction flaws could certainly play their part (though it may be significant that in Greenock two of the eight Bison-built blocks and the Camus system block remain) but the overall story is of accreting ‘failure’: poor maintenance, a hard-to-let status that increasingly confined such buildings to more troubled tenants, problems of anti-social behaviour, and thus a spiral of decline.

The Broomhill heritage mural by local artist Jim Strachan, completed in 2018

Broomhill Court’s continuing story allows a different ending: a £26m regeneration project begun in 2014 which saw selective demolition of some lower-rise blocks and major renovation work, resident participation and substantial environmental upgrades (including a neighbourhood art project) that have restored place and community. One current resident commented:

A few people asked why I was moving to Broomhill, which had a reputation, but I couldn’t have afforded to buy a two-bedroom house in the private sector. My flat was needing done up, but once the regeneration started, I got the feel of the place. There’s a real sense of community here. I would never move. Never.

As Garavelli concludes, ‘the fortunes of social housing have risen and fallen … buffeted on the shifting winds of design trends and ideological orthodoxy’. But its necessity – and the need for investment that properly meets that necessity – remains unchanged.

Broomhill Court and Cartsdyke Court (renamed Cartsdyke Apartments) both now provide secure and independent living for the over-60s, part of River Clyde Homes’ ‘Silver Lining’ stock: a reflection of Greenock’s changing demographics and a reminder that high-rise flats can provide desirable homes for many.

Cartsdyke Court

In this final chapter (to date), Greenock illustrates another shift – towards what we must now call ‘social housing’. In 2007, Greenock Burgh’s housing stock was transferred to River Clyde Homes (RCH), an example of the ‘large-scale voluntary transfer’ that was forced on many councils barred politically from accessing the capital required for new investment (a restriction that did not apply to housing associations).  It currently owns and manages a little over 5800 homes. As a not-for-profit, locally based membership organisation, RCH represents a model that has sadly been increasingly marginalised as housing associations have merged and become more commercially minded.   

In the interests of full disclosure, I should acknowledge I was a guest speaker at RCH’s 2018 staff Christmas Party (they may have enjoyed the comic more) and I’m very grateful for the hospitality shown me on the day. That’s not even a footnote in Greenock’s housing history but I hope I’ve done some justice to its story in these posts. A £17 million pound investment programme announced by RCH in 2018 and a £10 million programme announced last year – upgrading homes and improving energy efficiency –  remind us that this story continues and that social housing continues to provide much needed homes and to yet higher standards. (6)

Notes

My thanks to Keith Moore, Communications Manager at River Clyde Homes, for his support and friendship in providing resources and images and casting a critical eye over my copy.  Any errors that remain – which I’m happy to correct – are my responsibility.

The McLean Museum and Art Gallery has a very extensive collection of archive images of Greenock which can be viewed online.

Additional thanks to Thomas Nugent for photographing Greenock so assiduously and allowing his photographs (uploaded here to Geograph Britain and Ireland) to be reproduced.

Sources

(1) ‘No More U.S. Prefabs for Us, Says Greenock’, Daily Record, 15 December 1945

(2) The film, Greenock Plans Ahead, can be viewed on YouTube.  For more on Mears, read Graeme Purves, Frank Mears – a Pioneer of Scottish Planning (October 2014). See also Graeme Purves, Greenock Plans Ahead (September 2016)

(3) Joy Monteith, Old Greenock (Stenlake Publishing, 2004)

(4) See the comprehensive records of the University of Edinburgh’s Tower Block project.

(5) Dani Garavelli, ‘Insight: Why Scotland must invest more in social housing’, The Scotsman, 25 August 2019

(6) ‘River Clyde Homes outlines £17m investment plans‘, Scottish Housing News, 4 April 2018 and ‘Improving Lives and Places‘, River Clyde Homes, 8 May 2019

Council Housing in Oxford, Part II after 1945: ‘a Sense of Space and Freshness’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

Last week’s post looked at Oxford’s interwar council housing programme. Currently, the city is judged Britain’s least affordable city for housing; an average house price of £460,000 is over twelve times local average annual earnings. (1)  We’ll come back to Oxford’s present-day housing crisis later in the post but at the end of the Second World War that crisis was a national one. A 1945 White Paper estimated that the country needed 750,000 new homes immediately and some 500,000 to replace existing slums. In Oxford, the council house waiting list stood 5000-strong.

New signage on the Barton Estate, 2017

One of the solutions touted for our contemporary housing shortfall is MMC – Modern Methods of Construction. The term is essentially a bit of conscious rebranding as there is certainly nothing new in the idea that prefabrication offers a practical means of building quickly. Back in 1945, one response was a programme of temporary prefabs. Of the 156,623 erected nationally, some 150 were built in Headington and 62 on Lambourne Road in Rose Hill. (2) These boxy but actually rather high-tech bungalows had an expected life-span of ten years – though many were to last much longer.

But there was also a large-scale effort – instigated by the Burt Committee (properly the Interdepartmental Committee on House Construction) as early as 1942 – to build permanent prefabricated homes and these featured heavily in Oxford’s early construction.

‘Howard houses’ on Brampton Road in the Barton Estate, 2017

The Barton Estate (the site of the Headington prefabs) was begun on a small-scale in 1937 – just 54 council homes added to an existing hamlet of six to eight cottages and two pubs. It took off after 1945, expanding to over 1000 new homes by 1950. A large number of these were permanent prefabs, mostly BISF houses (British Iron and Streel Federation houses: steel-framed with characteristic steel cladding on the upper floor) and Howard houses (named after the civil engineering company that promoted them, of light-steel frame and asbestos cladding). Both were designed by renowned architect and planner Sir Frederick Gibberd.

An early image of the Barton Estate taken from JM Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood (1956)

The rush to build provided an initially unpromising environment documented in a social survey by the sociologist JM Mogey published in 1956 and based on an Oxford Pilot Social Survey begun in 1950: (3)

First impressions of Barton are rarely favourable: areas left in their original state for later erection of public buildings, or for lawns, tennis courts, bowling greens and so on are covered with tough bunchy grasses and criss-crossed with many muddy paths. The place is almost bare of trees: the dominant colour is asbestos grey. The painted doors, the steel upper storeys of houses painted in dull brick-red or pale buff, do little to relieve this grey tint which is picked up and echoed by cement and plaster, by garden posts and by cement roadways.

The photograph used by Mogey in his book seems to illustrate this well (though in this case the houses shown appear to be another form of permanent prefab, the Orlit house, designed by émigré Czech architect Ervin Katona and built of precast reinforced concrete). A less grey-scale photograph might have shown them to better advantage.

Burchester Avenue, Barton Estate

Mogey himself acknowledged that ‘second impressions [were] more encouraging’:

Although many house exteriors look drab and neglected, the gardens are on the whole well cultivated … Bright curtains in the windows, flowers in the gardens, a sense of space and freshness begin to counteract the uniformity revealed at first glance.

The thrust of Mogey’s survey, however, was to assess the social impact of the new estate and contrast it with the more traditional and ‘close-knit’ inner-city community of St Ebbes from which at least some of the new residents were drawn.

At first glance, his analysis seems to reflect and reinforce some of the arguments – one might say clichés – that characterised sociological thinking of the day, epitomised in the writing of Willmott and Young in Family and Kinship in East London, published in 1957. (Much of this has been effectively debunked by Jon Lawrence in his recently published book, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England, reviewed in an earlier post).

New Barton residents lamented that ‘we stay in more than we used to’ and that ‘we never see anyone now, we feel very isolated on the estate’.  Mogey himself commented ‘in Barton everything is new and there is no neighbourlihood’ (sic).

Underhill Circus shops, Barton Estate

But the bigger picture was more complex and, in many ways, more positive, In Barton, there were fewer families ‘in which relations between husband and wife show disagreement’, more families expressed ‘loving attitudes towards their own children’, in more families ‘husband and wife help each routinely in domestic tasks’.  The ‘central change’, Mogey concluded, ‘may be interpreted as the emergence on the housing estate of a family-centred society instead of a neighbourhood-centred society’.

But even that conclusion might depend on your definition of ‘neighbourhood’. In Barton far more people belonged to a local voluntary association or trade union, more people reported themselves as having friends, and there was greater acceptance of next-door neighbours (though, in contrast to the romanticised views of community of Willmott and Young, ‘generally people in both estates kept themselves to themselves and were suspicious of people who were too “neighbourly”’).  As Stefan Ramsden found in Beverley, what might have been viewed as ‘increasing “privatism”’ was, in fact, ‘a more expansive sociability’.

Forsaking a crude environmental determinism, these findings might say more about the contrast between the type of people that had moved to the new estate and those who had stayed put. One final finding stands out: more people were critical of their homes in Barton than in St Ebbes. That might superficially – and surprisingly – reflect dislike of the new council homes but deeper analysis suggests it reflected greater ambition and expectation on the part of Barton’s residents.

This was an aspirational working class that wanted better for themselves and for their children.  Jon Lawrence has argued for this period that ‘for the first time, the vast majority of working people believed that it was their birthright to enjoy a decent standard of living “from cradle to grave”’. That Labour achieved its first majority on Oxford City Council in 1958 might bear this out.

Rose Hill, three miles to the south-east of the city centre, was the second of Oxford’s early post-war estates, begun in 1946 and growing to contain 690 houses on completion. It too contained a significant number of prefabricated homes – Orlit, Howard and the timber-framed Minox houses. Rose Hill’s 153 Orlit houses (designated as defective by the 1984 Housing Defects Act) in council ownership were demolished from 2005. The 131 council-owned BISF houses on the Barton Estate were thoroughly renovated after 2008.

An unrenovated BISF house stands next to a refurbished council home on Wilcote Road in the Barton Estate, 2017

The quest for suitable permanent housing in Oxford was hampered by a lack of available land (much was built upon, around a quarter was liable to flooding) and constrained by the creation in 1956 of the country’s first Green Belt outside London.  A 1949 Council report concluded that the only option open to it was to develop sites straddling the boundary or beyond it – between Cowley and Headington; beyond Cowley; towards Garsington; and around Littlemore. (4)

Wood Farm estate under construction, 1953 (EAW049095) © Britain from Above

The building of 510 council homes at Wood Farm on the eastern fringe of the city began in 1953. The attraction of prefabricated building remained, however, and many of the houses were of the Laing Easiform type, constructed of in-situ poured concrete. Laing’s 30,000th Easiform house was opened on the Wood Farm Estate in May 1953 by Ernest Marples MP, a junior housing minister, with Sir John Laing and a host of civic dignitaries in attendance.

Planning permission for Oxford’s largest estate, Blackbird Leys (in the far south beyond the ring road), initially projected to contain 2800 homes, was granted in the same year. I’ve written about the estate in a previous post.

Plowman Tower, 1985 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

As the move towards high-rise took off in the late-1950s, Blackbird Leys would feature the city’s first two tower blocks – two fifteen-storey blocks, completed in 1964.  Two more, of similar height, were approved in 1965: Foresters Tower on the Wood Farm Estate and Plowman Tower on the Northway Estate, a predominantly low-rise estate to the north, commenced in 1951.

Cllr Olive Gibbs

In general, however, Oxford eschewed high-rise and in 1965 the City anticipated the move towards housing renewal (rather than clearance and new build) that would be formalised in government policy three years later when it scrapped plans to redevelop the inner-city Jericho area. Labour councillor (and sometime chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the mid-1960s), Olive Gibbs, played a leading role. Jericho, apart from featuring in Morse, is now a highly-desirable area for young professionals with two-bed homes selling for upwards of £800,000.

Tile Hill Close, the Laurels

For those, then and now, who couldn’t afford such prices, Oxford continued to build council homes. The 260-home Town Furze Estate, near Wood Farm, and the 150-home Laurels, off London Road on the site of the former Headington Union workhouse, were both initially approved in the late 1950s.

Meanwhile pressures on land were forcing the Council to consider building further afield, in Bicester or Abingdon for example. But the one small scheme to materialise was a joint venture with Bullingdon Rural District District Council in the late 1960s in Berinsfield, seven miles to the south-east of Oxford. Berinsfield, built on a former airbase, claims – with its first new permanent housing begun in 1958 – to be ‘the first English village to be built on virgin land for over two hundred years’. (5)

By 1981, 29 percent of Oxford households lived in social rent housing, 52 percent in owner occupied homes and 16 percent in the private rental sector. By 2011, those figures stood at 21 percent, 47 percent and 28 percent respectively. (The latter figure is now said to have reached 33 percent.) Such has been the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s housing counter-revolution. Beyond the obvious impact of Right to Buy, perhaps the most notable features are the failure of Thatcher’s fantasy of owner occupation for all and the rise of private rental housing.

Private rental housing, Gipsy Lane Estate

Many former council homes lost to Right to Buy are now in the private rental sector; nationally the figure is around 40 percent. In Oxford, an estimated one-third of homes on the Gipsy Lane Estate are now Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). Visually, this is starkly apparent in the large number of poorly maintained houses and estate’s scrappy overall appearance. A 2014 survey found 13 percent of the city’s private rented homes in a state of disrepair. The Council is currently proposing to extend its licensing scheme for HMO landlords to all 20,000 private rented homes in Oxford with increased powers to fine rogue landlords. (6)

Laurel Farm Close

Surprisingly, the City did build some new social rent homes in the 1980s in necessarily small but attractive, high-quality developments designed by the City Architect’s Department: 23 council houses in Laurel Farm Close, 54 in Mattock Close and 29 flats in North Place.

By the new century, it was clear, however, that Oxford’s growth and relative prosperity made newbuild on a far larger scale imperative; a 2011 Council report estimated 28,000 new homes were needed. One outcome has been Barton Park, on the north-eastern edge of the city just across the A40. It’s a mixed development scheme and a public-private partnership (between Oxford City Council and Grosvenor Developments Ltd) as – with local authorities precluded financially from large-scale construction themselves – is the way nowadays. Construction began in May 2015

A visualisation of the new Barton Park development

The scheme’s Design and Access Statement promises ‘a garden suburb designed for the 21st century; a perfect blend of high-quality urban living that is in harmony with its natural surroundings’. Practically, we can be relatively glad – in these straitened times – that 354 of the 885 new homes planned will be let at social rent, owned and managed by Oxford City Housing Limited, the wholly owned private company set up by the Council to deliver its social housing programme. (7)

It’s a far cry from the decisive state action and huge public investment directed towards the post-war housing crisis. As I write, the Conservative government is promoting planning reform as the means to boost housebuilding. In reality, the private sector has an inbuilt reluctance to build at the scale currently required for fear that market prices – and profits – would fall. Oxford’s history reminds us of the sometimes imperfect but overwhelmingly beneficent and necessary role of the local and national state in building homes for all that need them.

Note

It used to be said that you could always tell the council homes sold under Right to Buy as they had been obviously ‘improved’ (often to the detriment of the cohesion and attractiveness of the estate as a whole). That’s true today but the roles are reversed as Oxford illustrates well. Nowadays, it is the council homes which have been improved – properly modernised and renovated – and Right to Buy homes often unmodernised as their owner occupiers or subsequent buy-to-let landlords are unable or unwilling to pay for renovation. With apologies to the residents who live there, Gipsy Lane is by some way the scruffiest ‘council estate’ I’ve seen – mainly because very few of its homes are now in council ownership and large swathes in the hands of private landlords.

Sources

Much of the detail on individual estates in Headington is drawn from the well-researched and informative local history website, Headington History and this page on the area’s newer estates.

(1) Lloyds Bank, ‘UK’s most and least affordable cities revealed’, 2 February 2019

(2) Prefab Museum, Map

(3) JM Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford (Oxford University Press, 1956)

(4) On land availability, see CJ Day, Modern Oxford: a History of the City from 1771 (Reprinted from the Victoria County History of Oxford by Oxford County Libraries, 1983); on the 1949 proposals, see Alan Crosby, ‘Housing and Urban Renewal: Oxford 1918-1985’ in Kate Tiller and Giles Darkes (eds), An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire Record Society, ORS vol 67, 2010)

(5) Oxfordshire Villages, Berinsfield

(6) On Gipsy Lane, see Headington Neighbourhood Plan, Character Assessment: 8. Gipsy Lane Estate (ND); on the Council’s policies towards the private rental sector, see Oxford City Council, ‘Biggest Change to Private Rented Accommodation in a Decade’, 20th January 2020

(7) The first quotation is drawn from Mick Jaggard and Bob Price, ‘Active place-making – the Barton Park joint venture’, Town and Country Planning, vol 84, no 6, 2015 June/July; other details from David Lynch, ‘Eight new council houses rented out at Barton Park’, Oxford Daily Mail, 10 June 2020.

Kirkby, Liverpool, Part I: ‘a tremendous achievement’?

Tags

1950s, 1960s, Kirkby

For those of a certain age, Kirkby is probably most associated with Z Cars, a BBC police drama that first aired in 1962.  The programme was set in the fictitious ‘Newtown’ but the town bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Kirkby, described by Troy Kennedy Martin, one of the show’s screenwriters, as: (1)

one of the black spots of England, an overspill New Town from the slums of Liverpool, where 50,000 displaced and truculent Merseysiders carry out a continuous war against authority and where crime and adolescent terror incubate.

Kirkby was not an officially designated New Town – though it was sometimes given the name and bore some superficial resemblance to that post-war Government programme – and, as you read on, you can judge for yourself how far it deserved Martin’s caustic characterisation. This post, at least, will attempt a balanced verdict but it’s fair to say that execution fell some way short of ambition.

The cover of the booklet published to celebrate the official opening of Kirkby’s 10,000th new home.

Kirkby’s origins lay in the late 1920s as it became clear to Liverpool’s politicians that the city needed to move away from its dependence on the docks and allied employment. The City Council developed two new industrial estates in response, one at Speke (along with its associated satellite town), the other at Aintree.

‘The Kirkby Industrial Estate around Newstet Road, 1952’ © Britain from Above, EAW046998. This image shows the estate in its early years very much reflecting its Ordnance Factory origins.

A third was planned at Kirkby, six miles north-west of the city centre, but shelved due to the war. In the event the war would give its own boost to such planning when the Kirkby Ordnance Factory was established in 1938 as the UK prepared for conflict. It grew at peak to comprise around 1000 buildings and employ a (mainly female) workforce of some 23,000.

Ordnance Factory housing with sloping roofs on Spinney Close © David Long and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Government built around 200 houses too for key workers, principally designed by Arthur W Kenyon – standard family homes but distinguished in some cases (such as those on Spinney Close) by their modernist-style sloping roofs and, in most, by flat roofs. As Kenyon recalled, the latter ‘were dictated by war emergency; timber was not available for sloping roofs’. He did, however, provide each home with a brick shed large enough to ‘satisfy the shed addict’. The homes were transferred to the local authority after the war and those on the Park Estate near the station now have pitched roofs (2)

The Ordnance Factory closed in March 1946; its land acquired by the Council to form the new Kirkby Industrial Estate, intended as the employment hub of the major housing development to follow.  In conjunction with the local planning authority, Lancashire County Council, and the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, the Council moved quickly to finalise its proposals and a Town Map covering 2800 acres (including the trading estate) was approved in July 1949.

Town Map, as featured in Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement (1961)

The plan provided for three roughly equal neighbourhoods – anodynely named Southdene, Westvale and Northwood – grouped around a town centre with open ground between the westerly and south-easterly neighbourhoods occupied by schools and playing fields. Whiston Rural District Council, in whose land the scheme lay, gave planning approval for Southdene, the first element in the proposals, in November and preparatory work began early in the following year.

The Mayor of Liverpool, Alderman Albert Morrow, officially opens the first house in Southdene in 1952

The first housing contract– with the locally based Unit Construction Company – for 647 homes was signed in March 1952 and, at a rate of three per week, 116 had been completed by December.

Further contracts with Unit Construction brought the 1000th house in October 1953, the 5000th in 1956 and the 10,000th in September 1961, the latter marked in an opening ceremony attended by Henry Brook, Minister of Housing and Local Government, and Liverpool’s Lord Mayor. The occasion seemed to merit a little justifiable hype: (3)

The completion of ten thousand dwellings on a single estate for a single authority by a single firm of contractors, accomplished in a remarkably short period of nine years, is by any standards a tremendous achievement.

In the longer term, that achievement might be questioned but at the time numbers counted. A 1955 housing survey of the city revealed that of near 205,000 homes in Liverpool, 61,247 were unfit and only suitable for demolition and a further 61,247 required extensive repair or demolition – in total, some 43 percent of total housing stock. (4)

New housing in Southdene

Peak housing production in Kirkby – 1700 homes completed in the year – was reached in 1957 and the town’s population was projected to reach 74,000 by 1971.  All this leads to the obvious question: what was the quality of the environment and infrastructure provided in this breakneck expansion? (5)

This 1951 plan of part of Southdene (the bottom right of the Town Map above) shows Bradbury’s curving streetscapes as well as – with its combined primary school and community centre and nursery school – some of the efforts made to include community facilities.

Ronald Bradbury, having previously held a similar position in Glasgow, was appointed Liverpool’s City Architect and Director of Housing, aged 40, in 1946. He moved away from the more formal Beaux-Arts designs of his illustrious predecessor Lancelot Keay, making Kirkby’s overall layout ‘informal by founding it on existing roads, contours and natural features’. (6)

Hargate Walk, Northwood

The housing, in the town’s early years, was almost wholly low-rise, generally undistinguished but pleasant and functional and, of course, in terms of space and facilities, vastly better than the slum housing from which most new residents had moved. Bradbury himself provided a precise summary in the 1961 commemorative brochure: of the 10,000 homes built to date, some 5817 were two- to four-bed, two-storey houses; 1197 were one-bed flats for elderly people placed in two-storey blocks; 2166 were two- and three-bed flats in three-storey blocks.; and 688 were three-bed maisonettes in four-storey blocks. (7)

Maisonettes on Moss Lawn Road, Southdene

Four eleven-storey blocks of one- and two-bed flats in Gaywood Green approved in 1961 marked the beginnings of high-rise development in Kirkby. Fourteen tower blocks had been erected by 1967: two further 11-storey blocks at Cherrywood Heights and eight 15-storey blocks at Kirkby Northwood.  In the mid- to late-sixties, three 15-storey blocks were added at Quarry Green Heights and two, more modest seven-storey blocks at Whitefield Square.

Mercer Heights blocks, Mercer Avenue, Westvale, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Quarry Green Heights, Northwood, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

As a result of Kirkby’s suburban setting and plentiful land, this was, by Liverpool standards (by 1981 half of the city’s council homes were flats), a relatively small incursion. All the blocks in Kirkby were built – you guessed it – by the Unit Construction Company but, although the firm became the UK licensee of the French Camus form of system building in 1962, those in Kirkby seem to have been constructed of in-situ reinforced concrete frames with brick and concrete panel infilling. (8)

Whitefield Square, Westvale, 1987 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh

Liverpool Builds, the Corporation’s celebratory account of its housing programme published in 1967, also emphasised the 914 homes built for owner occupation in the town on ‘three very substantial areas of ground set aside by the Housing Committee for that purpose as part of its policy of housing diversification on the estate’. That ‘mixed community’ was not, however, the reality or certainly not the reputation of Kirkby.

It was not a New Town in the sense that it was developed by a Development Corporation with full resources and powers to do so but the Council aspired to create something similar, as Bradbury claimed: (9)

From the outset the Liverpool City Council was fully alive to the fact that Kirkby was not merely a new housing estate but that they were creating a “new town” which must have all the essential facilities and amenities such an entity required.

Doctor’s surgery, Brook Hey Drive, Northwood

Health facilities and new schools were built, of course – 32 schools and twelve doctors’ surgeries and three dental clinics by 1965. The Town Map also set aside sites for 15 churches and chapels across the new town in addition to the nineteenth-century St Chad’s parish church retained centrally. Places of worship were always an apparent planning priority but post-war local government managed also to largely shed its aversion to the demon drink: at Kirkby, the Council planned twelve public houses plus a central residential hotel. Lancashire County Council provided a library, courts and the emergency services.  A privately developed shopping centre and three neighbourhood retail centres completed the ensemble.

That infrastructure and an allegedly growing ‘civic consciousness’ ensured that the Kirkby parish of the Whiston Rural District was created an Urban District in 1958. The Council’s Civic Centre, designed by Jackson and Edmonds, was completed in 1969. Later, in 1974, Kirkby was absorbed into the new Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council which, in turn, became a part of the Liverpool City Region in 2014.

The Tenterhook with Ranshaw Court to the rear, Tower Hill © John Wakefield

It was Kirkby Urban District Council which was responsible for the last extensive phase of the town’s housing development: the Tower Hill district, north of the Liverpool-Manchester Victoria railway line, built from the late 1960s and intended to house some 10,000 second generation residents. Its homes were mostly low-rise terraced housing and maisonettes but included a number of seven-storey maisonette blocks. The latter, built by Unit and in this case using the Camus system, were poorly constructed and soon revealed multiple flaws. Demolition of seven was agreed as early as 1980.

Ranshaw Court demolition, February 1989

That might come to seem portentous but in 1961, its principal planner, Liverpool’s City Architect and Director of Housing, Ronald Bradbury, could claim proudly and perhaps justifiably that: (10)

Kirby is now a well-established and thriving community but it is not possible … in print to convey the spirit of Kirkby or the enthusiasm which has gone into its creation … There has been created in a remarkably short period a feeling of “belonging” and pride in the New Kirkby.

Of course, the true test of such assertion lay in the sentiments of the town’s new residents and in its longer-term evolution. Alan Martin, now 65, arrived in Kirby from inner-city Liverpool in 1957: (11)

Living in a terrace house in Walton, it was a chance to have a brand new council house and a fresh start. I’ve got very little memories of not living in Kirkby as a kid. Everything was being built in front of us, like the fire station, the market, the police station. It was a great place to be. There were buildings sites and there were also open spaces. It was an adventure for most kids

Jeff Morris, 66, recalls arriving in Kirkby from Everton in 1958:

It was good. My mum and dad thought this was the great new world that came but they did have some doubts when they moved in and had talks about moving back to Liverpool. But when St Kevin’s school opened my dad went to go see it and saw all science labs and facilities. He knew if we stayed we’d get a good education.

Sociological studies of the time largely echo such sentiments. NH Rankin’s ‘Social adjustment in a North-West New Town’, published in 1963, found that 40 percent of new residents were pleased to move to Kirkby from their inner-city slum clearance properties and 22 percent had wanted to move but not necessarily to Kirkby. It was true, however, that a large number – 29 percent – had not wished to move to the new town. (12)

Delaware Crescent, Westvale

Interestingly, after relocation, around three-quarters wished to stay. The big plus was, of course, the new homes and few missed the allegedly close-knit community of the slum quarters lionised by some contemporary sociologists: Rankin found that ‘the influence of the close-knit matrilocal lifestyle is of lesser importance than the attainment of better housing’. Nevertheless, a significant proportion did want to move away – flats were particularly unpopular – and over half of households, in Rankin’s words, ‘expressed some reservation about the “kinds of people” they preferred to mix with in Kirkby’.

Kennelwood Avenue, Northwood

This latter concern was echoed in another early survey by a resident (‘a machinists’ wife with two daughters’) who declared that ‘they should have put the roughs in flats and the respectable ones in houses to look after gardens’. John Barron Mays, like Rankin a Liverpool University academic, also published his research in 1963.

Mays was caustic regarding the town’s situation and overall design: (13)

On the drearily flat, wet plain of South-West Lancashire, it repeats many of the less pleasing features of similar developments elsewhere. There are the usual long avenues of similar houses, some taller buildings and blocks but little architectural elegance. An atmosphere of organised anonymity prevails throughout its length and breadth; a new, raw, hardly-lived-in place, unsoftened by time and unrelieved by local colour.

His further commentary, based on resident testimony, was gentler but marked by its faint praise. He found in general ‘a reluctant acceptance by residents of their new situation’. Certainly most ‘did not seem to be unduly isolated’; only 29 percent found their Kirkby neighbours less friendly than those of the inner city. Many disliked living in multi-storey blocks of flats even while, at this stage, most blocks only reached four storeys. ‘For the majority of ex-inner city slumdwellers the new estate is desirable or at least adequate’. ‘In the end’, Mays hoped, ‘the long trek from the dingy, cramped back-streets of central Liverpool [would be] a step toward a happier and fuller life’.

We’ll assess that judgement in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: 1955-1974. Competition, Volume 1; Volume 5 (Oxford University Press, 1995)

(2) Quoted in Finn Jensen, Modernist Semis and Terraces in England (Routledge, 2016)

(3) Ronald Bradbury, Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement (Unit Construction Company, 1961)

(4) Ronald Bradbury, ‘Post-War Housing in Liverpool’, The Town Planning Review, Vol 27, No. 3 October 1956

(5) ‘Kirkby as Proposed New Town’, Liverpool Echo, 25 September 1957

(6) Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Joseph Sharples, Lancashire: Liverpool and the Southwest (Yale University Press, 2006)

(7) Bradbury Kirkby: the Story of a Great Achievement

(8) Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Towers for the Welfare State (The Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, 2017) and the Tower Block UK website of the University of Edinburgh.

(9) Bradbury, ‘Post-War Housing in Liverpool’

(10) Ronald Bradbury, ‘Development at Kirkby by The City of Liverpool’, Official Architecture and Planning, vol 24, no 10, November 1961

(11) Quoted in Jess Molyneux, ‘Kirkby’s transformation from sleepy rural town to “the great new world”’, Liverpool Echo, 26 April 2020

(12) Quoted in Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester University Press, 1998)

(13) Mays’ analysis, ‘New Hope in Newtown’, appeared in New Society, 22 August 1963. It is quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62, Book 2 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014)

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

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1950s, 1960s, Gleadless Valley

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

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

Today, we’ll give that scheme its due.

An early, undated, view of the estate

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

An OpenStreetMap of the estate created by Gregory Deryckère

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

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

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

Lewis Womersley, pictured at Park Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thenceforth:

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

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

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

Spotswood Mount: patio housing and the Holy Cross Church

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

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

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

Sloped terraced housing, Ironside Drive

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

Maisonette blocks on Ironstone Road

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

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

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

Three-storey flats off Blackstock Road

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

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

Terraced housing on Gleadless Road

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

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

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

What had happened?

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

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

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

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

Flats on Ironside Road

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

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

Maisonette blocks on Spotswood Drive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can this century rediscover some of that ambition and vision?

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Council Housing in Portsmouth, Part II from 1945: Suburbs and High-Rise

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

As we saw in last week’s post, Portsmouth entered what were hoped to be the sunny uplands of the post-war era with high ambitions. In 1945, the City Council owned and managed around 3300 council homes but some 11,000 families were on its waiting list.  In total, the council estimated that the city needed some 32,000 new homes within five years – to replace some 17,000 judged unfit or affected by re-planning as well as 15,000 required for ‘general needs’. As was typical across the country, however, the housing crisis at first dictated a crisis response in the form of temporary prefabricated housing. (1)

Nissen huts and duck pond, Leigh Park

Temporary buildings to rehouse a bombed-out population had been erected in the Fraser Road area as early as 1941.  Portsmouth, as a significant naval base, was also able to press Services’ Nissen huts into operation as it did in in Bedhampton and Leigh Park. Those on the Stockheath Camp formed Leigh Park’s first classrooms till replaced by permanent buildings in 1950. Additionally, around 700 more conventional temporary prefabs were constructed across the city. (2)

Peterborough Road, Wymering

The Council’s first permanent new post-war housing was occupied in July 1946; 54 houses built on Peterborough Road, Wymering.  And its 2000^th new home was completed in Wymering in November 1947. This was an exceptional speed of building at the time; Portsmouth’s rate of construction placed it eighth among the 1469 local authorities in England and Wales.

Paulsgrove Housing Estate, 1948, showing Maunder’s curving streetscapes and a large number of temporary prefabs at the top of the image. EAW020629, Britain from Above © Historic England

A large number of these homes were built on land within the city borders at Paulsgrove to the west of Wymering and begun in 1946.  The new estate was originally envisaged by City Planning Officer FAC Maunder as a self-contained community with a mix of private and council homes and a full range of shopping and social facilities.

BISF houses on Elkstone Road, Paulsgrove

Many of the estate’s new homes were of the permanent prefabricated type that it was anticipated would solve the housing crisis (they also drew additional subsidy). In Paulsgrove, around 1000 steel-framed and steel-clad British Iron and Steel Federation Houses (BISF) were built alongside smaller numbers of Howard (steel-framed and clad with asbestos panels) and Easiform houses (constructed of in-situ poured concrete).

Thirlmere House, Paulsgrove

But the Conservative Council’s preference for a mixed tenure scheme in Paulsgrove proved unfeasible as did, apparently, those promises of community infrastructure. The estate’s first shops (in temporary Nissen huts) weren’t opened till 1949; its community centre not till 1963. Inadequate bus services were also criticised.  As around half the estate’s population – reaching 10,000 by 1951 – were under 15, social problems emerged though individual homes, with front and back gardens and generous space standards, were popular. (3)

Bramdean Avenue, Leigh Park, 1949

Similar deficiencies appeared at Leigh Park, envisaged as the Council’s showpiece and originally planned to house 25,000 people in over 7000 homes. Construction work began in 1947 and the first residents moved into homes on Bramdean Avenue in 1949. At the same time, it appeared the larger project might be aborted. Max Lock had been appointed by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning to prepare a district plan which the Ministry hoped might overcome the hostility of neighbouring local authorities to the Leigh Park scheme. Lock concluded that further expansion should be halted; that it was, essentially, a large, single-class, overspill suburb, rather than a new town.  Fortunately for the city, the Ministry ignored this rather accurate critique and in 1951 gave permission to Portsmouth to expand the scheme to 9000 homes.

Park Parade, Leigh Park, opened in 1955 and is shown here in the 1960s

Whilst Leigh Park grew to a population of over 40,000 by the early 1970s, its early development was slow – the first permanent shops appeared in 1952 and permanent schools and places of worship from the mid-1950s. Many of the earliest residents – very much the pioneers – welcomed their new homes and green surroundings: (4)

My first impression of Leigh Park was that the freshness and the openness was like being set free. That was wonderful, the fresh air was marvellous. To us it was paradise.

But for others it was a difficult move:

It was a lonely life really … The air was nice and all that. I felt a bit depressed though, coming up from Portsmouth. But we had to settle, well, I wasn’t used to the countryside that’s what it seemed to me, coming out here.

And, for nearly all in the earliest years, there were the practical difficulties of unfinished roads and lack of pavements: ‘you would have to wear your wellingtons in Leigh Park and take your decent shoes in a bag on the bus’.  In the mid-1950s, some 70 percent of local workers travelled more than four miles to work; 14 percent worked at the Portsmouth Dockyard. Local employment was created in a small industrial estate from this time but the cinema, civic centre and swimming pool promised never materialised and the estate has coped with many problems as it has matured. (4)

The Warren, Leigh Park, pictured in 1967 © Portsmouth City Council, A Tale of One City

Later housing in the Warren, pictured in 1970 © Portsmouth City Council, A Tale of One City

Politically, Leigh Park suffered as a Portsmouth estate situated in Havant which lacked political representation on the City Council though active tenants’ groups made up this deficiency in part.  Some criticised the politics of the Council itself. Though it promoted a large-scale council housebuilding programme, the Council’s Conservative complexion was made clear in a number of respects.

It favoured, for example, ‘mixed development’.  It had originally hoped that both Portsdown and Leigh Park might be joint public-private ventures. Post-war restrictions made that impossible but the Council was unusual in building a number of council homes for ‘higher income groups’. These, maintained on a separate register, apparently proved popular.

It was also an early proponent of Right to Buy, instituting the policy for its own council homes in 1952.  The policy was paused in 1961 – by which time some 643 houses had been sold off – following the complaint of the Housing Director that the Council was losing many of its best homes but resumed in 1967.

The Council also pursued a policy of ‘economic’ rents in the hope of making the Housing Revenue Account self-supporting.  Rent rises averaging 20 percent in 1965 prompted two protest marches, the latter involving some 20,000 people.  A subsequent survey found Portsmouth’s average weekly rent of £2.58 a quarter higher than the national average and the highest outside Greater London. (5)

Clearance and new build to the north of Lake Road in this undated photograph. I believe it shows the Nelson Road high-rise towards the top left, built in the early 1960s.

Nationally, as the immediate post-war housing crisis was receding by the mid-1950s, attention was turned again to slum clearance.  In 1957, the Council identified some 7000 homes in the city for demolition. In the same year, the application of Portsmouth for a significant boundary extension – it shared with many urban authorities of the time a fear of population loss and rate revenue reduction – was rejected by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Portsmouth’s policy, pursued to some degree since the 1930s and formalised in 1962, of rehousing displaced residents in central areas added pressure to build at greater density in the inner city, as did the reluctance of some residents to move to the distant council suburbs on the mainland.

Darwin House, Australia Close, today

View of Nickleby House, Pickwick House, and Blackwood House from Wingfield Street, 1984 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The city’s first multi-storey blocks – the eight-storey Darwin House in Australia Close and the eight-storey Brisbane House and seven-storey Blackwood House on London Road – had been built in the early 1950s.

High-rise was fully embraced with the agreement to build the twelve-storey Pickwick House nearby in 1960. City Architect Frank Mellor was an early proponent of high-rise and drew the attention of the Council to the ‘many people who are being rehoused … that want to stay in Portsmouth’. The argument of Housing Committee chair Frank Miles that ‘a diminishing population would adversely affect the Government block grant to Portsmouth’ and the attractions of the high-rise subsidy instituted in 1956 (which provided a higher grant the taller the building) completed the case. (6)

Sarah Robinson House (to the left) and Handsworth House (approved 1966)

From then on, Portsmouth built high on a large scale.  Millgate House, a twenty-storey block on Butcher Street, was approved in 1962; twenty-one storey Sarah Robinson House, on Queen Street in 1964; and 24-storey Ladywood House, off Winston Churchill Avenue, in 1966 – all constructed by Wimpey. Other high-rise blocks are dotted around the city.

Leamington and Horatia Houses today, de-cladded and awaiting demolition

But problems were soon to emerge in the high-rise and system-building drive that characterised the 1960s. Following the partial collapse of Ronan Point in east London in May 1968, eight similar Large Panel System-built blocks in Portsmouth were strengthened and their gas supplies removed.  Among these were Leamington and Horatia Houses.  More recently, the Grenfell disaster has added new and desperate concerns.  Leamington and Horatia Houses have since had their later Grenfell-style cladding removed but a surveyor’s report has found the buildings structurally unsound.  Their residents are being rehoused prior to the blocks’ demolition.

Portsdown Park, 1984 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

That, in the end, was also the sad denouement of Portsmouth’s last great innovative housing venture, Portsdown Park – a ‘mixed-rise’ scheme (blocks ranged from 17 to six storeys) of 520 homes built between 1968 and 1975. Designed, after a national architectural competition, by Theakston and Duell, problems developed early on despite – or perhaps because of – its striking design.* 

Portsdown Park, 1984 © Tower Block, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Serious water penetration and condensation issues affected almost half the tenants: ‘condensation ran down the walls and dripped from light sockets, carpets became like wet sponges and clothes left inside wardrobes became mouldy’, according to one account.  The estate’s overall layout, walkways and underground car parks and lack of facilities were also criticised and serious problems of antisocial behaviour developed. By 1984, the Council felt there was little option but demolition.  The Cosham Heights estate stands in its place. (7)

Wilmcote House today, renovated to Passivehaus standards

In 1981, around 22 percent of Portsmouth’s population lived in some 25,000 council homes. By 2015, those numbers had reduced to 10 percent and some 10,250 council homes – a further 5000 homes were located in Havant and 6000 rented from housing associations.  Right to Buy has had the major impact – over 12,200 houses and 1800 flats were sold to tenants between 1980 and 2011; the near cessation of new build to the present has compounded the problem.  The Council has been criticised for its inaction in recent years but currently claims to be building around 200 new social rent homes.  In one innovative departure, Wilmcote House, a Bison Large Panel System block completed in 1968, has recently been retrofitted to Passivhaus standards. (8)

Alexander McKee House, some of Portsmouth’s newest council housing

Whilst there is no doubt that promise sometimes exceeded fulfilment, Portsmouth City Council’s housebuilding programme has made a vital contribution towards providing decent and affordable homes in one of the poorest cities in South-east England (currently around 22 percent of the city’s children live in poverty, the proportion reaches 40 percent in Charles Dickens Ward).  The lessons of the past – both positive and negative – remind us that decent and affordable social housing is as vital today as it was when our story began in 1912.

Note

* My thanks to Mark Swenarton for pointing me to this reference in his book Cook’s Camden: the Making of Modern Housing (Lund Humphries, 2018).  The design competition organised for the Portsdown development attracted 91 entries and was of national significance. A number of teams from the Architectural Association submitted low-rise proposals but found low-rise and stepped schemes ruled out by the assessors. A special protest issue of the Architectural Association Journal in March 1966 featured three proposed low-rise schemes for Portsdown and marked an important moment in the shift towards the low-rise, high-density design that became influential from this point. 

Sources

(1) See Tatsuya Tsubaki, Post-war Reconstruction and the Questions of Popular Housing Provision, 1939-1951, PhD thesis in Social History, University of Warwick, 1993, and JA Cook, Policy Implementation in Housing: A Study of the Experience of Portsmouth and Derby, 1945-74, PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 1985

(2) For full details of adapted naval bases, see Robert W Hind, The Naval Camps of Bedhampton and Leigh Park (Spring Arts and Heritage Centre and Leigh Park Community Centre, 2017)

(3) See Tsubaki, Post-war Reconstruction and the Questions of Popular Housing Provision and also Tim Lambert, A Brief History of Council Housing in Portsmouth

(4) Ralph Cousins, The Early Years of the Leigh Park Housing Estate (Havant Borough History Booklet No 69, 2016)

(5) JA Cook, Policy Implementation in Housing: A Study of the Experience of Portsmouth and Derby

(6) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993). For the subsidy argument, see R Windle (ed), City of Portsmouth Records of the Corporation, 1966-74 (1978)

(7) The quotation comes from Strong Island, ‘Portsdown Park’. See also, Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

(8) See Portsmouth City Council, A History of Council Housing in Portsmouth (2011) and Portsmouth City Council, Shaping the future of housing: A strategic plan for Portsmouth (ND)

Alt-Erlaa, Vienna: ‘the World’s Best Council Housing?’

Tags

1960s, 1970s

We left Vienna in last week’s post in 1934 when its 66,000 municipal homes housed around one in ten of the city’s population.  Currently, 25 percent of Viennese citizens live in one or other of the city’s 1800 municipal housing schemes and, in total, 62 percent live in social housing. These may seem extraordinary numbers but more important than the mere numbers is a commitment to quality and inclusivity that makes Vienna’s social housing amongst the most popular in the world. Alt-Erlaa, which we’ll come on to, is one of its contemporary showpieces.

Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa glimpsed from its U-Bahn station

Politics and money make that possible so it’s right to begin with those. As the city’s logo proclaims, ‘Vienna is different’. With a population of 1.9 million, it is Austria’s sole metropolitan area and one of the country’s nine Bundesländer (provinces).  Austria’s federal constitution devolves considerable powers to its provinces, not least in housing policy, and Vienna – largely under the control of the Austrian Social Democratic Party since World War II (the party currently governs in coalition with the Greens) – has pursued an ambitious housing programme since 1947.

Nationally, social housing (here the term covers both social rented housing and subsidised homes for purchase) is financed by a fixed, earmarked portion of income tax and corporation tax as well as housing contributions paid directly by all employees. Nationally, Conservative politicians have favoured subsidised owner occupation whilst Social Democrats have supported social rental homes in various forms.  In 2018, Vienna was allocated around €450 million to spend on housing – around £405 million at the time. (1) 

Right to Buy legislation affecting parts of the social housing stock was passed nationally in the mid-1990s but has been resisted by provincial governments and had little impact. In Vienna, some 8000 formerly social rent homes have been bought privately but the loss has been made up by new construction.

In comparison to the UK, Vienna – and Austria – remains a renters’ paradise. Rent controls imposed under 1917 Tenancy Act remain largely in effect to the present. All social renters benefit from indefinite tenancies as do the two-thirds of private renters in Austria whose homes were built before 1945. Liberalising reforms affecting new tenants enacted in 1994 have weakened private sector rent controls and introduced fixed-term tenancies. Their effect has been to create a far more dualised system than hitherto, favouring those – in both public and private sectors – with long-established tenancies against those increasingly reliant on the market. (2)

Social rents vary widely according to length of tenure and the size and nature of the home but on average tenants pay under a third of their income on rents, generally less, with, of course, additional financial support for those in need. A recent calculation estimates that in Vienna tenants pay on average 21 percent of their income on a one-bed flat compared to 49 percent in London. (3)

Crucially, this relative affordability is not a pretext for confining social rent housing to the poorest. Income thresholds for eligibility are set at around €46,500 for a single person and €69,000 for a couple (about £42,000 and £62,000 respectively).  In the words of housing spokesperson Christiane Daxböck:

Vienna has always said that it doesn’t want ghettos. Today, there is not one area where you wouldn’t dare to go. There’s a social balance throughout the districts, and a high quality of life, peace and security. The reason for that is mostly found in social housing.

To Kathrin Gaál, Vienna’s lead councillor for housing, ‘what makes Vienna unique is that you cannot tell how much someone earns simply by looking at their home address’. (4)

Since 2004, the municipality’s social housing construction programme has been outsourced to housing associations and cooperatives.  Fortunately, this long-established and well-regulated sector has a good record in delivering decent and affordable housing (though rents are slightly higher than in municipal equivalents) over many years.

One such, GESIBA, was jointly founded in 1921 by the Austrian government, Vienna City Council and the Association for Settlement and Allotment Gardening. At that time, over 30,000 families were squatting public and private land on the city fringes in a series of so-called ‘wild settlements’ and the Gemeinnützige Siedlungs- und Bauaktiengesellschaft to give it its full name –  a Public Utility Settlement and Building Material Institute – was charged with providing cooperative and settler associations with cheap building materials. It went on to build 5000 family homes in the 1920s and, since the revival of social housing after 1945, it has become one of the largest non-profit housing providers in the country, managing around 22,000 homes. (5)

Alt-Erlaa aerial view

Its most prestigious scheme is Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa – a housing estate, more properly a satellite town lying six miles south-west of Vienna’s city centre, built between 1973 and 1986.  With 3172 homes and a population of 10,000, it is Austria’s largest social housing complex. It is also, without doubt, its most striking and, in my eyes at least, one of its most attractive.   To George Clarke, architect and housing campaigner, it is ‘humane caring design of the highest order’. (6)

Harry Glück (1925-2016)

Alt-Erlaa was the brainchild of architect Harry Glück. To a visitor, his sweeping vision is seen firstly and most obviously in the 70-metre, 27-storey-high cascading, terraced blocks that dominate the scheme.  The first twelve storeys have broad balconies and large plant troughs, providing a greenery and privacy that soften an architecture that might otherwise seem overpowering. (7)

Glück’s design concept rested on the ‘stacked family home’ and 65 percent of the apartments have at least three bedrooms though the 35 different floor plans across the scheme provide for a wide variety of housing needs.  The single-aspect nature of the design leaves natural light short on the corridor side but seems to work in context.

But Glück went further in his ideal of ‘building for the lower classes with the quality the rich people are fond of: close to nature and water’.  Alt-Erlaa is situated amongst winding paths and landscaped parkland – quiet and a little bare when we visited on a cold but sunny day in early February – but a green and pleasant environment. Fittingly, the parkland bears his name. (8)

There are six children’s playgrounds within the park but naturally, in a scheme built in the proud tradition of Red Vienna, the social infrastructure extends much further. There are two nurseries, a children’s day care centre, a sports hall and tennis courts, a church, three schools, a youth centre, a multipurpose hall, two health centres as well as a local shopping centre.The headline feature which almost does justify one of George Clarke’s interviewees describing the complex as a ‘five-star hotel’ are the saunas, solariums and swimming pools on top of each of the main housing blocks. Unsurprisingly, the scheme enjoys a 93 percent favourability rating amongst its residents and there is currently a five-year waiting list for apartments.It’s all a reminder of what progressive policies, proper public investment and idealistic and intelligent design and planning can achieve.  And a symbol of all that public housing can and should be.

Notes

For some fine photographs of the estate and particularly its community life, see Zara Pfeifer, Du, meine konkrete Utopie (text in English)

For a good film essay on the history of Vienna’s social housing, see Angelika Fitz and Michael Rieper, How to Live in Vienna (2013) with English subtitles.

Sources

(1) Wolfgang Förster, ‘The Vienna Model of Social Housing’, Conference Proceedings: Partnerships for Affordable Rental Housing, University of Calgary, November 15-17, 2018

(2) For a full and critical examination of the currently complex housing situation in Vienna, see Justin Kadi, ‘Recommodifying Housing in Formerly “Red” Vienna?‘, Housing, Theory and Society, vol 32, no 3, 2015

(3) See Adam Forrest, ‘Vienna’s Affordable Housing Paradise’, Huffington Post, 19 July 2018 and Jonny Ball, ‘Housing as a basic human right: The Vienna model of social housing’, New Statesman, 3 September 2019

(4) The first quotation is drawn from Denise Hruby, ‘Why rich people in Austria want to live in housing projects’, GlobalPost, 26 October, 2015; the second from Forrest, ‘Vienna’s Affordable Housing Paradise’

(5) Nadja Traxler-Gerlich, ‘Gesiba – ein Baustein Wiens’, Wiener Zeitung, 7 January 2002

(6) George Clarke, ‘Does Vienna Have the World’s Best Council Housing? Swimming Pools, Private TV Channels and More’: a YouTube excerpt from episode 2 of the Channel 4 documentary series George Clarke’s Council House Scandal originally shown on 8 August 2019.

(7) You’ll find plenty of posts and images of Alt-Erlaa on the internet.  My details here are drawn from Coronare Modestus Faust, ‘Alt-Erlaa: Architecture That Serves A Social Purpose – Social Housing That Looks & Feels Like Luxury Housing’, Faustian Urge, 26 August 2016; Architectuul, ‘Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa’; and Robert W Park, ‘A Walk Around Alt-Erlaa, Vienna’, Intrivia, April 30, 2018

(8) This quote comes from Stefano Boeri Architetti, ‘Wohnpark Alterlaa | Harry Glück’

 

Book Review: Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Community

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

A myth of ‘community’ became a dominant motif of post-war planning, significant both for the partial truth it contained and the ‘truth’ it created. Planners, taking their cue from the sociologists of the day, criticised the sterility of the interwar cottage suburbs. They hoped through the creation of ‘neighbourhood units’ and the provision of more community facilities to foster the intimacy and sociability believed to be a feature of the slum areas from which many of the new council tenants were being displaced. Later, after the 1960s era of high-rise and mass public housing, council estates were held peculiarly responsible for the anomie and social breakdown widely decried by media pundits and social commentators. The reality, as ever, was far more complicated.

We are fortunate, therefore, to have this new book by Jon Lawrence, an historian at the University of Exeter, to provide an informed and nuanced guide to the debate. The book, in his words:

challenges many of preconceptions about community and individualism in recent English history … It seeks to overturn simplistic assumptions about the ‘decline of community’ since the Second World War.

Lawrence’s method is to re-examine the surviving field notes from ten major social science studies conducted between 1947 and 2008. In doing so, he does indeed challenge much of the conventional wisdom that has surrounded discussions of community since 1945. What follows is not a comprehensive review – the book is a richly detailed and wide-ranging survey – but rather an analysis of his account and conclusions where they touch upon themes and issues raised in my own study of council housing.

Green Street, Bethnal Green

The Holy Grail of sociological research and planning was working-class community, never more so than in the early post-war years. Lawrence looks at Raymond Firth’s study of Bermondsey and the more well-known research of Michael Young on Bethnal Green. For both and particularly for Young (a co-author of Labour’s 1945 General Election manifesto), a clearly political agenda was in play.  They went, Lawrence argues:

in search of ‘community’ – or, to be more specific, in search of the community spirit they believed had animated people’s defiant response to the Blitz and had underwritten Labour’s decisive electoral breakthrough.

In this context, Young’s published work – written in conjunction with Peter Wilmott – made much of the matrilocal kinship networks held to sustain family and community life in the East End. But, of these, Lawrence comments mildly, ‘one struggles to find supporting evidence in either his field-notes or in Firth’s’. (1)

Lawrence, using Young’s research data, found married daughters resentful of their mother’s role or neglectful of their duties towards it and mothers themselves equally keen to be shorn of their supposed family responsibilities. There were countervailing examples too, of course, but there was little overall to sustain Young’s argument.

New housing at Little Hulton on the Worsley Estate

Tellingly, when Barry Cullingworth came to study Salford’s new and distant council suburb in Worsley in the late 1950s, he found: (2)

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.

Young’s defence of an imagined traditional working-class community was matched by his active disdain for the new ‘out of county’ council estates many former slum-dwellers were moving to. He praised the East End’s ‘sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries’, contrasting it positively to, a later case-study, the ‘drawn-out roads and spacious open ground’ of the London County Council’s new Debden Estate in Essex.  The latter, he argued, represented a shift from ‘a people-centred to a house-centred existence … relations are window-to-window not face-to-face’.

The Debden Estate under construction, 1950 © Britain from Above, eaw031776

Lawrence finds instead a ‘fierce culture of domestic privacy’ common among working-class households in both districts – a desire to resist intrusion into the home.  And, in relation to the migration to the new council estates, he notes, many ‘wanted the chance to withdraw from forced sociability – to socialize instead on their own terms, with the family and friends of their choosing’.

This finding is echoed by Stefan Ramsden’s work on Beverley. He found: (3)

The decline in older-style neighbourhood sociability and mutuality was compensated by new forms, frequently conducted between relatives and friends who did not live on the same street but were scattered across the town.

What some decried as ‘increasing “privatism”’, Ramsden concludes, was, in fact, ‘a more expansive sociability’.

Lawrence identifies another change in the early post-war years:

For the first time, the vast majority of working people believed that it was their birthright to enjoy a decent standard of living ‘from cradle to grave’.

The enhanced role of the state in ensuring just that was nowhere better seen than in the programme of New Towns and expanded towns that developed in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Lewis Silkin, Labour’s Minister of Town and Country Planning, addressing a town hall meeting in 1946 in the first designated New Town, Stevenage, proclaimed they were ‘building for the new way of life’. In 1959 the town came under the critical eye of Raphael Samuel, then working as a researcher for Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies.

Stevenage

This was an era of rising living standards for the many, not (just) the few. But some middle-class socialists worried that all this affluence might be corrupting; that, in particular, working-class people might start voting Conservative.  After a third consecutive Conservative election victory in 1959, this concern had some apparent validity and it was the focus of John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s study of Luton in 1961-62.

Writing of Stevenage in 1963, two New Town advocates may have unwittingly encouraged such fears: (4)

The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.

In fact (and further supported practically by Labour election victories in 1964 and 1966), the evidence gathered from the social surveys was heartening.  Of Stevenage, Lawrence concludes that it was:

striking how many people displayed a strong sense of being part of a shared project of self-improvement and self-making as residents of the new town … [At] least in Stevenage, people’s ambition to ‘better’ themselves … was intertwined with an awareness that this was also a collective endeavour.

Residents understood post-war prosperity as ‘something that was at last to be shared by “people like us”. Its ethos was as much communal as individualist.’

Broad Walk, Harlow, in the mid-1950s when it became know as ‘Pram Town’

Later recollections of another New Town, Harlow, though possibly suffused with nostalgia, seem to attest to the same feeling. The journalist Jason Cowley remembers Harlow as ‘a vibrant place, with utopian yearnings’; another recalls the town he left in 1971 as one marked by ‘youthful energy, enthusiasm, and social sharing’. ‘I guess the Great Dream was still alive and thriving’, he concludes ruefully.

Marymead, Broadwater, Stevenage

In their early decades, most New Towns residents lived in social housing built by the Development Corporations. This was, in effect, council housing built for ‘general needs’, the classless vision upheld in Labour’s 1949 Housing Act (albeit one overturned by Conservative legislation in 1954).  Gary Younge, another journalist brought up in a New Town, remembers that there ‘was no sense of incongruity in Stevenage between being a young professional and living in social housing’.  Lawrence notes more broadly the lack of stigma attached to living in council housing in the 1950s.

But this was changing. By the early 1960s, a majority of workers both in Luton and Cambridge (another subject of study) owned their own homes and many more wanted to.  Their collectivist attitudes notwithstanding, many Stevenage residents also expressed support for a Right to Buy their Corporation homes.

Before any of the widely publicised (and usually exaggerated) problems of council estates in the 1970s and beyond, a significant psychological shift had taken place in popular attitudes towards council housing.  It came to be seen as inferior to home ownership.  Stefan Ramsden noted this in the comment of one estate resident in Beverley: ‘I think because you got a stigma with it … you were seen to be a lower class of people if you were in a council house’.

Attitudes towards new council homes more generally were positive though there seems a widespread dislike of flats. ‘You don’t get privacy in flats; everyone knows all your business’ and ‘they mix you up with all sorts’, according to two Bethnal Green residents in Young’s study. In Stevenage too, the Development Corporation found incomers expressing ‘their desire to get away from communal staircases, balconies or landings, and to have a house with its own front door’.  It’s a reminder of that desire for privacy already noted.

A Harlow kitchen as featured in the town’s publicity material.

Almost unanimously, of course, people were grateful for the cleanliness, conveniences and comfort of their new council homes. Those carrying out the surveys could sometimes fail to properly appreciate this step change in working-class life. In summarising the words of one new resident settling into life as Debden, Michael Young, seems almost disdainful :

There was the usual stuff about more shops, better bus services, greater privacy, value of garden, improvement in children’s health and in particular the advantage of a new house was stressed.

On that matter of health, as an aside (though it should hardly qualify as such), at the South Oxhey Estate (another of the LCC’s out-of-county estates, in Hertfordshire), 55 percent of new tenants had initially been re-housed on health grounds.  In Harlow New Town, the mortality rate of newborns in 1964 stood at 5.5 per 1000 compared to the national average of 12.3.  Some people literally owe their lives to this ‘social engineering’.

In comparison, the acquisition of new stuff – televisions, washing machines, furniture and the like – might seem trivial. It was sometimes seen as corrosive. Some of the social survey interviewers seem to have wanted their working-class respondents to emulate their own more Bohemian life-styles. Raph Samuel lamented the purchase of new (not second-hand) furniture by one Stevenage household as a ‘pattern of mass media-imposed misery’.  Some decried these improved living standards as embourgeoisement, a belief that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values. We, I hope, will see it simply as poor people getting less poor.

Barnham Cross, Thetford

As for the friendliness (or otherwise) of the new estates compared to the former slum quarters, the story is naturally mixed but a significant proportion of new residents – probably a preponderance – describe them as more sociable. In the expanded town of Thetford in Norfolk (another destination of some Bethnal Green residents), some residents believed that ‘there was a much friendlier atmosphere than in London and that one got to know one’s neighbours better than in a big city’. (5)

One disgruntled resident even compared the large overspill estate of Houghton Regis near Luton to, irony of ironies, ‘a chunk of Bethnal Green on a bright evening, with kids committing hopscotch and vandalism and grannies leaning over the garden-gates or sitting on the step’.  (That children might be thought guilty of ‘committing hopscotch’ perhaps tells us more about the interviewee than the estate.)

Lawrence goes on to discuss later social surveys conducted in the north-east and Sheppey in changed and generally harsher circumstances. There’s much of interest here too – on occupational cultures, gender relations and social attitudes – but I’ll stick to my housing brief and draw this post to a conclusion.

Lawrence’s conclusion from the early post-war social surveys can stand more widely: what they revealed was a ‘remarkable diversity of lifestyles and attitudes’ – a diversity, he argues, that ‘exposes the absurdity of imagining that there was ever such thing as a single “working-class culture” or “working-class community”’.

We might, therefore, ask why middle-class professionals took such interest in this alien territory. Ostensibly, it reflects a laudable concern for the less well-off. But it could also be seen, by more caustic observers at least, as an extension of the elite anxiety that has seen the working class as a fit subject (‘subject’ being the operative word) for study and improvement since Victorian times.

There were sometimes more clearly political agenda at play too as we’ve seen. Here perhaps it reflects one of the foundational myths of left-wing politics – that working-class people should think and behave in a certain (i.e. broadly left-wing, communitarian) way. The agonised debate over the last general election and the fall of Labour’s supposed ‘Red Wall’ of working-class constituencies reflects this too with many on the Left seeking to blame malign external forces rather than examine Labour’s own political failings or contend with the complexity of the actually existing working class.

Lawrence’s conclusion (written well before the election) makes its own more thoughtful contribution to this debate. He argues, rightly I think, that:

that any new politics of community has to enhance, rather than erode, the personal autonomy and independence that the majority of people have fought hard to secure for themselves and their families.

But, in a challenge to the alienated and self-centred atomisation this could represent, he also argues that this new politics ‘needs to re-focus on promoting the aspects of public life and culture that are open to all’ (art galleries, libraries, museums, leisure venues, etc.) in ways that ‘help us facilitate social connection and promote a general sense of living in an interconnected, shared social environment’.

Given the purpose of this blog and my book, I could hardly disagree with that though a small part of me wonders if it isn’t a (cautiously expressed) continuation of the improving, rational recreation agenda promoted by middle-class professionals in earlier times. At any rate, it’s a great book which you should read and assess yourself. For a hardback book with academic heft, it’s fairly reasonably priced and, hopefully, there will be a paperback edition in the near future. Or better still, borrow it from a library!

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Notes

(1)  Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

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

(3) Stefan Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

(4) Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis (1963)

(5) Rotary Club of Thetford, Norfolk, ‘Thetford Town Expansion: Report on Social Survey’ (March 1964); DG/TD/2/95, London Metropolitan Archives