Carpenders Park and South Oxhey: a Tale of Two Estates, Part 2

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s 1990s 2000s, 2010s, LCC

I’m pleased to feature the second of two guest posts by Dr Jill Stewart. Jill has worked in housing for over 30 years. She has written previously for Municipal Dreams about the earliest environmental health practitioners before 1914 and after the First World War. This is my review of one of Jill’s books, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health.

You can follow Jill on Twitter @Jill_L_Stewart and see more of her work on her personal website, Housing, Health, Creativity. 

Last week we looked at some of the history of Carpenders Park and South Oxhey and this week we return. We focus here on some of the challenges faced by the new residents with the new location, the lack of facilities initially, gradual provision of other things to do. We also look at some of the literature, art and health research helping us gain a greater understanding of the estates.

Location, location, location?

The then new South Oxhey estate of the 1940s was not initially quite a new utopia for everyone and it looked physically very different from what many had known before. House building had taken priority over the infrastructure or places of work, shopping or leisure facilities, or even ideas about identity. Initially there were no pavements, roads or many shops and even in 1949 mobile vans were pictured making food deliveries. There were totem pole-like road signs pointing in the general direction of the new streets. (1)

Early on, this created a peculiar and displaced community of new residents with nothing much to do there and relatively long distances to travel for jobs. It was very different than redeveloping a bombed site that would at least have enjoyed some aspects of urban living in a relatively familiar environment, despite the ongoing post-war chaos. Building was slow, with holdups on materials and labour.

There has been much interest in how this relocation made people feel. Many of course welcomed the vastly better housing conditions on offer and some memories are shared on the Our Oxhey website. (2) However, relocation and an initial lack of other amenities in this brand-new place were to prove challenging. Sociological studies were still then something for the future and it was to be several years before Willmott and Young’s 1957 study on Family and Kinship in East London (3) reported that policy makers did not always take into account the nuances of more informal private worlds and relationships in maintaining health and wellbeing. Later, in 1974, Alison Ravetz also reflected on the lack of foresight of housing reformers on breaking up and dispersing communities elsewhere. Whilst South Oxhey was not an area clearance redevelopment plan as such, the consequences of ‘redistribution of populations’ would have been similar. (4)

This theme of displacement and sense of belonging has also been explored in literature. One resident of South Oxhey in the 1960s, Professor John Schad, published his novel, The Late Walter Benjamin. (5). He talks of a ‘Promised Land’ or ‘Cockney Utopia’. This novel is a great historical document in itself, in this ‘unlikely’ near-Watford setting, complete with LCC documents, early photographs of the estate, press cuttings and interviews with original residents. It tells of some of the difficulties facing those who were uprooted from London communities and their then new, relatively isolated and quiet environment without very much to do. His play Nowhere Near London is an adaptation of The Late Walter Benjamin, exploring life on the estate in the late 1940s, in which the main characters are ‘unsure if life on the estate is heaven or hell’. There is also reference to the mass ‘invasion’ of working-class Londoners, housed all together on the edge of Watford (6).

Iris Jones Simantel’s autobiography reveals more about the estate and what it meant to her. Her family had lived at the Becontree estate and in 1947 were offered the opportunity by the LCC to move to a then new estate, South Oxhey. Simantel tells us about the early residents of the estate, and how it made them feel. She comments on the LCC’s ‘enormous undertaking’ and the excitement the new aspirational housing estate created, but also of the loss of kinship links, some choosing to move back into London, and the ‘posh people’ over the other side of the railway at Carpenders Park. She recalls a conversation with her father: (7)  

‘Maybe a move like this’ll be good for us,’ said Dad. ‘We ain’t never gonna improve our lot if we stay here.’ He was talking about living conditions, and the social class system that existed in England at the time … I was excited about moving such a long distance, into a brand new house, but sad about leaving Nan and Grandad. I would miss them, and I knew Mum would, too.

This very real physical separation by the railway comes up in another novel, later a TV series, by the author Leslie Thomas, who himself lived at Carpenders Park. In his 1974 The Tropic of Ruislip, he refers to: (8)  

The frontier-line of the railway and beyond that to the council estate where the terrace houses lay like long grey ships. There were no garages over there but the trees in the street freely canopied, in season, the lines of cars outside the houses; the churches, the shops and the schools, except the primary schools, were beyond the embankment on the wrong side of the tracks.

One of his characters describes the residents (p.133-4): 

‘ … aah those are evacuated cockneys’ she said. ‘They’re different … They’ll live on each other just as they did when they were in London. They know, by instinct, how to keep the fire burning. Their doors are always open, neighbours in and out, fights and all-pals-together.

Studies into health at South Oxhey

In line with academic and wider concerns about such completely new developments, health effects were further examined. As the estate bedded down, tensions with the existing communities eased and the estate was gradually provided with more amenities. By the 1960s Jeffery’s socio-medical study explored out-of-town estates like South Oxhey, which presented very different health issues than densely packed, urban areas. Jeffery asked residents what they felt about their then still relatively new estate but also tested health improvements such as mental health, the physical growth of children and other objective measures. Jeffery’s work found that the residents were disappointed with the lack of amenities initially but enjoyed the space, fresh air and cleanliness, which was very different to their previous housing (9).

With concern over NHS prescription costs rising, Jefferys’ other research with the Public Health Team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine explored the how a ‘working-class’ community was using health services (10). This was presumably also at South Oxhey, with the anonymised description of its location at an LCC estate in SE Hertfordshire. The paper tells us that by 1954 there were 17,000 residents, mainly young couples with children, with a substantially less than average population aged over 45. It reported that two out of three male tenants were in skilled manual, routine clerical, and shop assistant jobs and there were fewer than ten per cent of households with a tenant in a non-manual occupation.

Interviews conducted with tenants concerned health and type of medicines taken and whether doctor or self-prescribed. There was mention of medication for ‘nerves’ or anxiety amongst mothers. One table presented in this paper also reveals conditions for which different types of medicines were taken by adults and children, some of which may have been housing related, but it is not clear if this is related to previous living accommodation. Notably, many categories relate to respiratory disease such as tuberculosis, asthma, colds and bronchitis but also mental disorder, nerves, worry and depression. It is not of course possible to categorise these as specifically housing related by empirical evidence, as they may be related to wider socio-economic or other medical factors and could have resulted from earlier housing conditions, leading to rehousing at South Oxhey. Overall the findings indicated that the new environment seemed beneficial.

This is of little surprise as South Oxhey provided a very pleasant layout, with generally good housing, low-rise flats and infills being added over time. Whilst it catered overall for families, there was also provision for older people and smaller bungalows/bedsit type accommodation attached to some houses, and also in designated streets. Clitheroe Gardens had a warden, the Clitheroe Club being one local community group, with a level walk a few minutes to the St Andrews shopping precinct. Some of these have presumably now been brought and converted to two-storey ‘houses’.

Larger houses on the estate

Two-three bedroom houses

Terraced housing

Two bedroom houses

Sheltered housing for older people

Corner housing for older people, now converted

Two estates together

Eventually, South Oxhey was fairly well served with amenities, also enjoyed by many residents of Carpenders Park. There were Watford Rural Parish Offices, a library, a police station, health clinic, dentist, community centres and sports centre (now a large leisure centre). There were originally five public houses, now only the Dick Whittington remains. The other public houses, The Grape Vine, The Jet and The Pheasant (later The Ox) have been demolished and replaced with housing, quite densely packed in some cases and The Pavilion is currently boarded up.

The Dick Whittington public house

The library continues to occupy the same position as it has for many years adjacent to the then St Andrew’s shopping precinct that remained a central focus of the estate for decades.

St Andrews shopping precinct pictured in 2013

Street art

The St Andrew’s precinct was at one point thriving and served both estates, known locally as the ‘big shops’. It had many ‘anchor’ shops there, including Sainsburys, Woolworths, Co-op, Boots, a sports shop, pet shop, post office, butchers, fresh fish shop, two fruit and vegetable shops, fish and chip shop, and so on. There was a regular market. (11) There are also other parades of shops on Little Oxhey Lane, Prestwick Road and Hayling Road, also with flats above.

Over time, out of town shopping venues became more popular and some of the national chains of shops started to pull out from the St Andrews shopping precinct. The artist Angela Edmonds has published her photographs of the St Andrews shopping precinct in her book PRECINCT (12) which reflects on a place of discontinuity and its change. She refers to this in her website: ‘The original St Andrews Precinct could be seen as a model of the optimism and cultural multiplicity of its period and its subsequent demise perhaps owes as much to its allowed neglect as it does to the urgent need for more housing. Yet it has remained the heart of the Estate for the local community.’

Much of the estate remained as council housing (pictured below) until the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 which was to challenge the very foundations of the post-war housing consensus and promoting ‘personal responsibility’, as the welfare state was rolled back, favouring individual and private ownership and the language of the market place with tenants as ‘customers’. The Right to Buy was pushed, and with much good housing stock, much of South Oxhey’s housing was purchased by then new owner-occupiers. Some was later rented privately, in the ironies of this policy, back to the very people who would once have been council tenants, and at greater cost.

New challenges were soon identified, such as problems with some of the more experimental prefabricated housing, to become colloquially known as ‘concrete cancer’. Many of course by this time had been purchased under the Right to Buy policy, without knowledge of this defect. The Housing Defects Act 1984 served as: ‘An Act to make provision in connection with defective dwellings disposed of by public sector authorities; and to provide for certain provisions in agreements between building societies to be disregarded for the purposes of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1976.’ It allowed the Secretary of State to designate defective dwellings by design or construction and to provide assistance to reinstate some categories of defective housing (see for example 13). As ownership was by now mixed, renovation works were completed at different stages according to different budgets and specifications. This meant that enveloping schemes were less likely, so works to terraces were incomplete and irregular in renovation.

All change again

The South Oxhey estate transferred from the LCC to the Greater London Council (GLC) and later to Three Rivers District Council. By 2007 some 70 per cent of the council houses were sold to tenants and the remaining council houses were transferred to Thrive Housing Association in 2018 (14). This transfer to the private sector has continued with the current redevelopment of the St Andrews precinct area.

The Precinct just before demolition

By 2012 Three Rivers District Council proposed complete redevelopment of the precinct. There were 130 flats above shops but many residents and shop keepers were opposed to this. After some setbacks, the Council joined forces with Countryside Properties to redevelop central South Oxhey, replacing the precinct with 514 new homes, retail and public space (15). Photographs of this are included here and the new blocks tower over the existing estate, highly visible on the skyline from Carpenders Park too. At the time of writing (summer 2022) the precinct has been completely demolished and the new and densely packed and higher flats dominate the surrounding area, out of keeping with the character of what went before and proving costly for earlier residents although the extent of displacement is unclear.

2018 onwards – demolition of first part of existing St Andrews precinct and flats 2020 preparing for demolition on the 2^nd phase

Around 2020 with the second part of the precinct boarded up and awaiting demolition

Original flats with green spaces, new flats in background without green spaces

Help to Buy: backed by HM Government

The new flats where the precinct once stood

Writing this, one cannot help but reflect on what an incredible vision those post war housing planners had, and the optimism to follow this through into reality. Whilst there were issues with the new estate, it has provided a secure and pleasant living environment on the very edge of London, with good transport links. It’s a great shame there is no current such vision and commitment in social housing and therefore no surprise about the current housing crisis. Just imagine what could be created with that post war vision and resource now.

References

(1) Our Oxhey, ‘Mobile Shop’, Shopping in South Oxhey in 1949

(2) Our Oxhey, ‘Early Memories of South Oxhey’

(3) Young, M. and Willmot, P., (1957), Family and Kinship in East London (Routledge, Abingdon). Later historians have criticised their methodology and conclusions; see, for example, Municipal Dreams, Book Review: Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England

(4) Ravetz, A. (1974), Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill (Croom Helm, London)

(5) Schad, J. (2012), The Late Walter Benjamin (London: Continuum International Publishing Group)

(6) Michael Knowles, ‘History of South Oxhey to be brought to life in a new stage production’, Watford Observer, 16 June 2016

(7) Jones Simantel, I. (2012), Far from the East End, (Penguin, London), p.142

(8) Thomas, L. (1974), Tropic of Ruislip (Mandarin Paperbacks, London), p.13

(9) Jefferys, M. (1964), ‘Londoners in Hertfordshire: the South Oxhey Estate’, in Ruth Glass et al, London: Aspects of Change, Centre for Urban Studies Report No. 3 (MacGibbon & Kee, London)

(10) Jefferys, M. Bortherston, J.H.F and Cartwright, A. (1960), ‘Consumption of medicines on a working-class housing estate’, British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine, 14, pp.64-76

(11) Our Oxhey, ‘Find a Bargain: Oxhey Market in Bridlington Road’

(12) Edmonds, A. (2016), PRECINCT

(13) Defective Housing Act Explained – Non-Standard House Construction – Information & Resource Centre (nonstandardhouse.com)

(14) Three Rivers Council, South Oxhey Initiative

(15) Wikipedia, South Oxhey

Other sources

For more photographs of Carpenders Park, South Oxhey and the London Loop see Council Housing on the London Loop, Part II, Section 14: Moor Park to Hatch End

Stewart, J. (2016) Housing and Hope

Stewart, J. (2018) Two Estates, Two Novels

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am grateful to John Boughton as always for his guidance, advice and insight.

I am grateful to:

Hertfordshire Library services (staff at Oxhey Library in particular) who have been most helpful, originally Beverly Small back in in 2013 and more recently in responding to my various enquiries about these two estates.

Hertfordshire Archive and Library Service

Three Rivers Museum of Local History

London Housing by Peter Moro and Partners

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s

I’m pleased to feature today a new guest post by Dr Alistair Fair. Alistair is a Reader in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh and a specialist in post-1919 architecture in Britain. He first discovered the work of the architectural practice Peter Moro and Partners when writing a history of British theatre architecture between the 1940s and 1980s (published in 2018 as Modern Playhouses, and recently re-issued in paperback). He has since written a book specifically about Peter Moro and Partners, which was published in September 2021. His current work includes a collaborative study of Scotland’s new towns, and an investigation of ideas of ‘community’ in twentieth-century Britain. You can follow him on Twitter @AlistairFair

Peter Moro and Partners was a small but well-regarded London-based architectural practice which was active between the 1950s and the 1980s. Its work, which was almost entirely for public-sector clients, included several notable estates in London. Their design demonstrates well the growing search, during the 1960s and 1970s, for innovative ‘high density, low rise’ estate layouts.

Peter Moro shown holding a model of Plymouth’s Theatre Royal in the late 1970s © Collection of Andrzej Blonski

Peter Moro was a German refugee who came to Britain in the mid 1930s. He initially worked with Berthold Lubetkin’s pioneering Modernist practice, Tecton, on projects including the Highpoint 2 flats in north London. A move into independent practice led to the co-design of a very well-received large house on the Sussex coast, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Then, at the end of the 1940s, Moro was head-hunted to join the design team working on the Royal Festival Hall in London; his work involved overseeing the detailed design of the interiors. Moro was thus well-placed to become a specialist in theatre design, just as Britain experienced a building boom in subsidised regional theatre-building. (1)

Thirza Street/Barnardo Gardens © Elain Harwood

Moro’s involvement in the Festival Hall did not simply establish him as a theatre specialist, however. It also led to further work for the London County Council (LCC) and the subsequent Greater London Council (GLC). These jobs included several housing estates. The largest was at Thirza Street, Shadwell, to the north of Cable Street. Now known as the Barnardo Gardens estate, it was completed between 1967 and 1972 and replaced a patchwork of housing condemned as unfit. The site was bisected by a railway line, with the architects proposing 130 flats in two U-shaped groups of buildings. Low-rise blocks were set around the perimeter, with a single fourteen-storey tower adding a vertical accent. The southern (Cable Street) frontage included a public house and clubroom as well as flats for the elderly. At the centre of the estate was a play area, set on a podium above garages and parking. The buildings were originally largely faced in red brick, though the concrete floor slabs were left on show, with the deliberate choice of an aggregate-rich concrete mix adding texture. Bridges between the low-rise buildings were also made of concrete, their large eight-sided openings adopting a shape which appeared in many designs by Moro and his colleagues from the mid-1960s onwards. The raised podium was removed early in the 2000s, while the central and southern parts of the estate have been remodelled.

In 1967, a perspective drawing of the Thirza Street development was shown at the Royal Academy, where it caught the eye of Hans Peter ‘Felix’ Trenton, architect for the newly created London Borough of Southwark. Over the course of the next fifteen years, Peter Moro and Partners designed several estates for the borough. Much of this work was overseen by Moro’s partner in practice, Michael Mellish, with important contributions from numerous other colleagues.

The London Borough of Southwark was created as part of the reorganisation of the capital’s local government in 1964, bringing together three former Metropolitan Boroughs: Bermondsey, Camberwell, and Southwark. In 1966, the new authority reported that housing conditions were such that 2000 new homes were needed in the borough each year until 1981. When it came to the design of these homes, the former borough of Camberwell had already rejected the typical 1950s inner London strategy of housing design, namely picturesque ‘mixed developments’ of towers, maisonettes, and houses. Instead, the Aylesbury estate (1963-67) was more uniformly medium-rise, and this approach was rolled out across Southwark in the late 1960s.

This move reflects a contemporary shift away from high-rise housing. It partly was the result of increasing unease with ‘mixed development’; also important was growing criticism of isolated tall blocks. These debates led during the late 1950s and 1960s to a number of key projects elsewhere, such as Lillington Gardens in Pimlico (Darbourne and Darke, 1961-71), and the Brunswick Centre, Bloomsbury (Patrick Hodgkinson from a scheme with Leslie Martin, 1961-72). In addition, the subsidy regime introduced by the 1956 Housing Act, which had favoured tall buildings, was abandoned at the end of the 1960s in favour of new cost ‘yardsticks’, and this, too, prompted particular interest in so-called ‘high density, low rise’ layouts. The examples designed by Neave Brown and colleagues for the London Borough of Camden are particularly well known, not least thanks to the research of the historian Mark Swenarton, but there are notable examples elsewhere in London – particularly in Lewisham and Southwark.

An early example in Southwark was Neylan and Ungless’ Limes Walk development in Peckham (1964-66), with two long terraces facing a pedestrian walkway. Reflecting growing interest in ‘vernacular’ detailing, Southwark’s developments increasingly featured brick elevations and tiled roofs, among them the Setchell Road development by Neylan and Ungless (1971-78), where a dense mixture of flats and houses is arranged around courtyards and pathways. Within this context, the estates designed by Peter Moro and Partners tended in terms of their design towards the rational rather than the picturesque or neo-historical. The need for high densities with a wide dwelling mix – from small flats to family dwellings – led to intricate, innovative and well-considered cross-sections. A key aim was the maximum possible amount of private open space, in the form of gardens or terraces.

An early scheme was at 76-78 Montpelier Road, Peckham (1969-74), a small brick-clad block sympathetic to the scale of the adjacent terraces. A 1976 guide to recent London buildings by Charles McKean and Tom Jestico thought it contextual without being imitative, ‘skilfully designed and well built’, noting how ‘well-chosen materials’ plus careful detailing had made ‘a very small stairway into a pleasant space’. (2)

Hamilton Square section, drawn by Nick Mols

It was followed by two larger estates. At Coxson Place, Bermondsey (1969-75), flats and maisonettes were built alongside new premises for the Downside Settlement (a boys’ club). The housing was arranged in two parallel blocks, separated by walkways on two levels, with a complex mixture of house types melded together into a building of deceptively simple appearance. A similar arrangement was used at Hamilton Square, close to Guy’s Hospital (1969-73). Flats and maisonettes are arranged in two bands of buildings, between which is a landscaped podium above garages and parking. The impression externally is of a cascade of brick-faced terraces and balconies, stepping up through the site. As at Coxson Place, the arrangement of the dwellings is complex, and the product of much thought. The larger flats and maisonettes have several levels and half-levels, with some stepping across the open walkways to reach their own terraces. The Architects’ Journal praised the design: ‘the architects have performed a small miracle in achieving an exceptionally high density within a maximum four storeys, each dwelling planned to Parker Morris standards and each with the bonus of a respectable private outside space. (3)

Pomeroy Street © Elain Harwood

Less complex in layout but demonstrating many of the same ideas is a development at Pomeroy Street, Peckham (1974-78), which combined a linear block of flats and maisonettes on the street-facing front with terraced housing in the gardens to the rear. The design was contextual in its brick, and its scale, with the length of the block intended ‘to re-establish the linear form of Pomeroy Street’ whilst being broken up by gables and balconies intended to identify each dwelling and to ‘give a variety of views […] which conventional terrace housing often lacks’. (4) Writing in Building Design, John McKean praised the scheme’s combination of humane atmosphere and urban scale.

Rowcross Street © Alistair Fair

There were other projects in the borough. Earl Road/Rowcross Street (Wessex House, 1971-74) echoes James Stirling’s 1960s designs in its bright red brickwork and angled geometries. Brimmington Central (Blanch Close), meanwhile, was completed in 1981, with flats and houses plus a small parade of shops which Moro’s team developed from Southwark’s own in-house designs. A final larger development, the Pasley Estate, Kennington, was begun in 1975 and completed in 1982. Deliberately picturesque, its brick-clad, low-rise blocks of housing snake around and through the site, being crowned with pitched roofs.

Pasley Estate © Elain Harwood

Things seemed to be on a roll, but, by the late 1970s, inflation and recession were challenging the economic (and political) assumptions of the previous thirty years. The introduction of the nationwide ‘Right to Buy’ policy in 1980 further affected the landscape of council housing. The result was a sudden reduction in the numbers of new council houses being constructed. That year, the Illustrated London News commented that it was ‘sad and strange that, having taken two decades to discover the kind of municipal housing its citizens like and want, Southwark now finds itself without the cash to build them’. (5)

Within this body of work, the contribution of Peter Moro and Partners is notable. The Buildings of England volume for south London not only highlights the quality of Southwark’s 1970s housing in general, but the contributions of Moro’s office in particular. (6) These projects demonstrate well not only the ways in which local authorities and their designers in 1970s London sought to provide excellent new housing of often innovative form, but also the evolving nature of the ‘welfare state’ project and its architecture during a decade that is all too easily written off as a period of crisis and decline.

To buy a copy of Peter Moro and Partners for £21, use code LUP30 at the publisher’s website.

References

(1) For more on this, see e.g. Alistair Fair, Modern Playhouses: an architectural history of Britain’s new theatres (Oxford, 2018).

(2) Charles McKean and Tom Jestico, Guide to Modern Buildings in London, 1965-75 (London: RIBA, 1976), p. 58.

(3) Hamilton Square Redevelopment’, Architects’ Journal, vol. 157, no. 9 (9 May 1973), pp. 1116-17.

(4) ‘Queens Road Development’, 9 February 1979, typescript by Michael Mellish. RIBA, MoP/1.

(5) Tony Aldous, ‘New Housing Solutions in Southwark’, Illustrated London News, October 1980, p. 26.

(6) Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, London 2: South (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 562.

Council Housing in Llandudno, Part II Post-1945

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Llandudno

I’m very pleased to feature the second post by Matthew Evans which brings the story of Llandudno’s council housing up to date. Matthew, the principal author, works in communications within local government and has been assisted in research and writing by his father, Philip Evans, who has been a councillor on Aberconwy Borough and subsequently Conwy County Borough councils since 1976 and was twice Mayor of Llandudno, in 1983/4 and 2006/7. Many of the details of council minutes, personal details and recollections in this piece come from him. Most photographs (unless otherwise credited) have been kindly taken by the author’s sister, Kimberley Evans.

We left the story of Llandudno’s council housing in the last post on the eve of the Second World War, when the town had built substantial numbers of properties in several different parts of the town. But despite this activity, the pressures of the war and its aftermath would spur the building of large numbers of new houses as the town entered the post-war era.

The post-war era

The immediate years following World War Two, like elsewhere in the country, saw a housing shortage in Llandudno. Unlike many other areas this was not linked to bombing, as only a single recorded bomb fell on Llandudno during the war, on the side of one of the hills overlooking the town. But it was the safety of its location on the west coast of Britain that caused the town to become overcrowded. Unlike many similar seaside resorts on the south coast, whose populations declined to escape the bombing, numbers of people living in Llandudno increased significantly.

The town was chosen as the site of the Coast Artillery School, which was evacuated from Shoeburyness to Llandudno during the war. It was also the home of the Inland Revenue throughout the war (Colwyn Bay next door was home to the Ministry of Food), which meant an influx of 4000 civil servants into the town, alongside refugees from the war in Europe. James Callaghan, future prime minister, was the entertainments officer for this new contingent.

A Home Guard parade in Llandudno. The officer giving the salute is Captain Frank Billham who worked in the Inland Revenue at the Imperial Hotel. Image used with the kind permission of the Home Front Museum, Llandudno.

The diversity of people working or finding refuge in Llandudno is shown by the fact that Jewish services at the synagogue in the town attracted, on occasion, 400 attendees during the war. (1) At the end of the conflict, this increased population did not reduce immediately. The Inland Revenue only moved slowly back to London and a number of the demobbed soldiers had married into local families.

In today’s world, where the Government is keen to be seen to ‘level-up’ and move civil service posts out of London, such as to Treasury North in Darlington, it is interesting to consider how having well paid professional jobs remain in resort towns like Colwyn Bay and Llandudno might have helped diversify the local economies in a more sustainable way in the decades when many declined after the war. 

An example of the housing situation in the immediate post-war was related by an old friend of the family called Betty Mylett, who grew up in Llandudno and had obtained work with the Inland Revenue during the war. Her job was relocated to London after the war and she lodged for a time in Harrow, but couldn’t settle and returned home in the late 1940s. She married and she and her husband firstly lived in what had been a large private family home in Upper Craig y Don – in what is still today a very comfortable and quiet area of Llandudno. However, in an illustration of living conditions at the time, their accommodation consisted of one room in a house occupied by over 20 other adults – a situation that could be multiplied throughout the town. Furthermore, at least ten families squatted in various abandoned buildings on the western slopes of the Great Orme’s Head at the site of the Coast Artillery School, which had relocated back to Essex. A further five families occupied Nissen huts used formerly by the RAF Police on the summit of the Great Orme.

The ‘squatters’ were mainly ex-servicemen who had been unable to find accommodation for their families on returning from active duty.  Two of the men who lived at the Coast Artillery School site, George Williams and Eric Quiney, subsequently served as members of Llandudno Urban District Council (UDC) and were prominent on the Housing Committee.

Conditions were very spartan, with no real utilities or services and the buildings were in wind-swept locations. The families were eventually re-housed or temporarily placed in Arcon MkV pre-fabs erected at Maesdu in 1945, which lasted until around 1964. But the UDC, in much the same way as had been seen in 1919, got to work straightaway on building new housing. As a stopgap, aside from the prefabs, the authorities also adapted ex-army buildings. In 1949, there was an attempt to bring some regularity to the squatting at the Coast Artillery School site – known even today locally as The Gunsites. Four dwellings there were adapted on a temporary basis for £227.10.

In April 1949, the Welsh Board of Health were asked for approval for the UDC to adapt ‘hutments’ at Waterloo Camp, Conway Road to house families occupying hutments at the rear of the Nevill Hydro Hotel so that the hotel could be de-requisitioned from use by the Inland Revenue.

But more permanent housing was badly needed. In 1946, four houses were built on Cwm Road and in 1947 in the West Shore area of Llandudno, the UDC constructed the Dolydd and Denness Place developments. In 1949, outside the main urban area of the town, in its large rural hinterland, Cae Rhos, Llanrhos (then part of Llandudno, now part of Conwy), four agricultural workers’ dwellings were built by Peter T Griffiths, a local contractor for £6271.7.7. Also in 1949, eight houses were erected for agricultural workers in Waun Road, Glanwydden.

Rural council housing in Glanwydden

Denness Place, built 1947

These were small estates of less than 50 houses each and a larger number of families in need of new housing eventually found accommodation on the Tre Creuddyn Estate. This was the first large scale post-war housing estate, built between 1948 and 1952 – with further flats and bungalows built at Canol Creuddyn in 1955. The houses are a mix of two storey terraced family homes, with four-storey single houses and flats facing Conway Road on the main approach into the town. They were far higher density than the pre-war houses and very well situated for tenants working in the town’s main industries, being only a five minutes’ walk to the seafront, shops and railway station and areas of light industry.

Ffordd Dewi, Tre Creuddyn Estate © John Boughton

Ffordd Gwynedd, Tre Creuddyn Estate © John Boughton

The names of the roads were all in Welsh, marking a move towards recognising the local culture and national language more overtly in the area, in roads like Ffordd Las, Ffordd Gwynedd and Ffordd Dwyfor (where ‘Ffordd’ means Road). Incidentally, the use of these names and the subsequent connotation with council estates caused local controversies, and when names beginning ‘Ffordd’ were proposed for private developments nearby there were objections from purchasers and the suffix ‘Road’ was used instead. For example, it later took several months to name the nearby – and private – Powys Road, Elan Road and Harlech Road because the matter was batted around the Council and a petition was received not to use the fully Welsh form.   

The homes on the Tre Creuddyn estate were built by a number of local builders, to a common design. For example, records show one block of four houses was built by a consortium of Wm Jones & Son, Griffith Roberts, David Davies & Son, and John Owen for £5,117.3.5. The same group built one block of four flats for £3,371.12.11. Likely each builder specialised in one aspect of the building. One block of six houses was built for £7,227.8.10 by Thomas Idwal Jones of Llandudno and one further block of four flats for £3,371.12.11 by McNeill & Co of Llandudno.

Some of the builders were prominent locally – Griffith Roberts was a former chairman of UDC; David Davies was the longest serving member of the UDC; and Thomas Jones’ firm is still going and the oldest building firm in Llandudno.

The groundworks for the development – roads, pavements and sewers – were done by local builder Frank Tyldesley. The UDC itself put in street lighting and water mains. During the post-war years, because of the housing developments, the UDC employed an in-house architect – a Mr C N Bancroft ARIBA. He was born 1912 at Stockport and died in 1990 in Penmaenmawr.    

Ffordd Dwyfor on the Tre Creuddyn Estate. The house with the palm trees was my mum’s house, which they moved into in 1957.

A personal example of the impact of these new estates after the war is my own mother’s family. My mother was born in 1947 in an old miner’s cottage near the summit of the Great Orme; part of a row called Pant-y-Ffridd. The houses were extremely isolated and situated high above the town. I doubt if anyone who lived there owned a car, so all people either walked up or hitched a ride on the Great Orme Tram which still takes tourists to the top of the Orme. The provision of utilities would have been as sparse as the options for transport. My grandmother, Nanna Breeze mentioned in the previous post, had moved to Llandudno, alone, at 14 in 1928 from Horsehay, Dawley in Shropshire where her father was an Iron Founder at the Horsehay Ironworks (now part of the new town of Telford) to work as a Chambermaid.

This was taken on the occasion of eldest daughter Christina’s wedding in July 1957 and is taken outside number 26 Cwm Place where the Breeze family was living at the time. Pictured are eldest son, Eric, Christina, and father, Eric senior. My grandmother, Dorothy Sybil is standing in the doorway left, with youngest daughter Eileen poking her head round dressed as a bridesmaid.

But by the time my mother was born she was working in Llandudno General Hospital, down the mountain and on the other side of the town, as a cook. She had to make the journey to the hospital twice a day for her shifts and then back to look after the children, of whom there were five by that point (her husband was still serving in Germany after the war). The family was moved firstly down to King’s Road – the estate first developed after the First World War mentioned above – and then to Cwm Place, and then in 1957 onto the Tre Creuddyn Estate, living there in two different houses until around 1970. I know my grandmother was very grateful for a modern house, nearer work and on far more forgiving terrain. It made a huge difference to her and her family’s standard of living.      

As an aside – at the same time my mum’s family were living on the Tre Creuddyn estate, the Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall and his family were living in Cwm Place and the Liverpool and Chelsea footballer Joey Jones was growing up in Ffordd Las, just around the corner. 

1960s/1970s

As Llandudno moved into the 1960s, flats became more popular as opposed to the single-family homes that had been built up until that point. In 1964, the UDC built Ffordd yr Orsedd (named after the Gorsedd Bardic Circle of the National Eisteddfod of Wales which took place the previous year in Llandudno) and Ffordd Elisabeth – named after the Queen, but with spelling changed to conform to Welsh. This was a development of terraces of family homes and four of blocks with three radiating wings of flats on each floor.

Ffordd Elisabeth, built 1964

Much of the council’s housing activity during this time was overseen by Glyn Roberts (known locally, as is common in Wales, by his job – thus he was always known to all as ‘Glyn Sanitary’). Glyn was a long-serving council employee and a locally born man, who joined the UDC just before WW2. He trained as a Health Inspector with the UDC by day release attendance course at Warrington. He also took a keen interest in meteorology and looked after Llandudno’s weather station, reporting readings daily to the Met Office. For his endeavours, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.

By reorganisation in 1974 he was Deputy Chief Public Health Inspector and Housing Manager. He transferred to Aberconwy Borough Council in 1974 as Principal Housing Officer, in which role he reported to the Director of Environmental Health & Housing, Idris Griffiths, who had also been his Chief at Llandudno UDC.  The author’s father remembers Glyn as a well-known local character who brought to his work a common-sense approach and practical attitude. He also recalls Glyn had an excellent working relationship with the Councillors and was highly regarded for his legendry, encyclopaedic knowledge of the Llandudno tenants, their history and family connections.  He worked as Principal Housing Officer until he was 65 in 1986 – although he could have retired at 60.  To celebrate his long service to Llandudno’s housing management, the Mayor presented him with a plaque of the town’s armorial bearings on his retirement.

In 1965/67 further building took place. Lon Cymru, Lon Gwalia, and Llys Gwylan were constructed alongside the main road into town and showed a move in architectural style influenced by the Radburn movement, with orange brick and slate-hung houses and maisonettes overlooking pathways and off-road green spaces. These homes were designed by S Powell Bowen ARIBA of Colwyn Bay, who in 1970 established the Bowen Dann Davies Partnership (BDD) with Frank Dann and Bill Davies and the practice designed many developments for local authorities across North Wales. The practice established a strong reputation for its housing work, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of its developments were award winners. (2)

This is the estate I knew best as a child. In 1986, we moved from Jubilee Street, a classic street of terraced two-up-two-downs next to the railway station in Llandudno, to a larger three-bedroom house that had previously been part of a small row of police houses. These were built in 1950 in a similar style to the local council housing by the Police Authority to house police constables and their families. Many of these were being sold off countrywide at the same period in time as the Right to Buy took hold in council housing. Our new house backed directly onto one of the Lon Cymru estate playgrounds, which led in turn directly onto another green patch and then yet another, all overlooked by houses. This meant that we could play safely with all the children on the estate without crossing any roads, which exemplifies one of the original perceived benefits of the Radburn style. These attractive houses are still highly sought-after by people today, one former resident being the photographer of all images on this post – my sister, whose first house after leaving the family home was five minutes’ walk away on the estate.

Lon Cymru, built 1965-67 © John Boughton

Llys Gwylan, built 1965-67

Moving into 1970, 38 flats in five blocks were built for aged persons at St Andrew’s Avenue in the centre of the town. The architect of these was H. Vincent Morris, C.Eng, ARICS, ARIBA, MIMunE, Surveyor and Architect to Llandudno UDC. A few years later came Parc Bodnant, Llandudno’s 1970s social housing showcase. This large estate of several hundred flats and houses was designed in-house under Leslie Miller, who had joined the successor to Llandudno UDC, Aberconwy Borough Council, from Cheshire County Council at reorganisation in 1974. Parc Bodnant continued the Radburn influence of housing from the late 60s, but in a different style. The housing was brown brick with white and black render and comprised both four storey blocks and terraces facing each other on narrow paths and walkways. It was higher density than the Lon Cymru estate of a few years previously and where the earlier one was sited on mainly flat and gently sloping land, Parc Bodnant was built on a steep slope emphasising the height of the block and terracing of the houses. It was an innovative design and was initially popular with residents and experts, even winning a Welsh regional housing award.

Parc Bodnant © John Boughton

But despite having been highly regarded when first built, the Parc Bodnant estate had become unpopular by the late 1980s and 1990s, acquiring a reputation for anti-social behaviour among some residents though – as is often the case – this was only a minority of tenants. The initial residents of the estate when built were carefully selected families or mature couples, who had been living in flats and who had been on the transfer list for some years because of the slow turn-over in houses.

Over a period of about 15 years, the demographic make-up of the estate gradually changed and several of the original features, such as soft landscaping, became subject to vandalism. This, in turn, led to many of the original tenants wanting transfers out of the estate. The design and layout, with many secluded paths, much concrete surfacing and the stark black and while painted detailing, also eventually proved unpopular. This was compounded by the location of the estate, far from the town centre and on an exposed site backing onto open land leading up to Cwm Mountain. It also directly overlooked the town gasworks and gasometer, an abandoned brickworks, the site of the old town dump, and a scrapyard. The steeply sloping site meaning many residents had a clear view of all of this industry. All but the scrapyard are now completely redeveloped, with a post office sorting office, light industrial units and the town’s redeveloped secondary school now covering the other sites.   

In recent years, the estate itself has seen much investment, with soft landscaping and re-rendering and repainting giving the estate a more welcoming, positive and popular image than previously. (3)

Various housing styles in Parc Bodnant, notice the re-rendering on the flats and recent landscaping works undertaken © John Boughton

The Present Day

As with council properties across the UK, many homes in Llandudno were sold under the Right to Buy, which was eventually abolished in Wales in January 2019. The sales of large numbers of homes, especially on what had been the more popular estates, has severely depleted the stock of socially rented properties. The housing in the Tudno ward of Llandudno – the electoral division containing the bulk of the former council estates in the town south of the railway line – is now only 35 percent socially rented as opposed to 51 percent owner occupied. Until the Right to Buy and increasing private development from the early 80s, the housing in this area was overwhelmingly socially rented, bar one relatively small section. The employment base in the area has remained fundamentally the same as ever, with 21 percent working in wholesale and retail, 17 percent in health and social work, and 16 percent in accommodation and food services according to the last census. (4)

The building of social housing did not totally stop, however. North Wales Housing Association built Cwrt W M Hughes on the main approach into town in 1989, named after one time Llandudno resident William Morris Hughes, Labor Prime Minister of Australia 1916-23. In 1993, McInroy Close was built at Parc Bodnant as an infill development.

The first large scale social housing development after the 1970s was the building in 1996/7 of Lloyd George Close, Attlee Close, and Churchill Close. These were Housing Association developments built largely on the site of 1960s blocks of three-storey flats, which had declined in the intervening years and whose residents preferred to be housed in single-family houses, rather than flats.

Attlee Close, built in the late 1990s

Llwyn Rhianedd, built 2015

The current local authority, Conwy County Borough, transferred its remaining 3,800 homes to an independent not-for-profit Registered Social Landlord in 2008. This new body is called Cartrefi Conwy (Welsh for ‘Conwy Homes’) and it has plans to develop 1,000 homes in the coming years. (5)

Recent developments on brownfield sites include Llwyn Rhianedd, completed in 2015 on the Tre Cwm estate, consisting of four two-bedroom properties and five three-bedroom properties; 16 two-bed flats in the centre of the town in Gloddaeth Street completed last year; and the building of new sheltered housing for the elderly in Abbey Road and redevelopment of outdated elderly people’s flats in Trinity Avenue.

The latest social housing in Llandudno, built in Gloddaeth Street, 2020

These developments, aimed at a range of single people, families and retired persons continue a proud tradition of building quality homes for people in Llandudno that dates back more than a hundred years, to the very earliest decades of modern social housing provision in the UK. This history of progressive action demonstrates that the delivery of good standards of housing for working people was as much of a consideration in what many might consider a conservative seaside resort as it was in the larger cities, and Llandudno can be rightly proud of its record.   

You can find Matthew Evans on Twitter @MattEvans170

References

(1) Nathan Abrams, ‘Chlandidneh’: The Jewish History of the Queen of Welsh Resorts‘

(2) CADW listing details for 5, 7, 9, 11 & 15 Pen y Bryn Road 

(3) You can see examples of the work undertaken on the consulting engineer’s website

(4) Conwy County Borough Council’s ward profiles 2020: Tudno (pdf)

(5) For further information, see the website of Cartrefi Conwy

High-Rise in Bristol, Part II from 1960

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

We left Bristol last week in 1958 as slum clearance was in full swing and just as the Council announced plans to demolish a further 24,500 homes by the end of the century. By this point, however, such wholesale clearances – extended to areas of less severe housing deprivation – were arousing fierce opposition and that would have unintended consequences.

As local opposition mobilised, particularly among owner occupiers, the Labour MP for Bristol South, William Wilkins, raised concerns in a 1959 House of Commons adjournment debate, focusing on the issue of Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs). In Bristol, he cited 11 orders awaiting ministerial approval comprising 839 ‘pink’ properties (officially classified as unfit) and 453 ‘grey’ properties (capable of rehabilitation), of which 527 were owner-occupied. He cited local discontent and asked whether the Conservative Government felt that ‘they should abandon their slum clearance programme not only in Bristol but throughout the country’. (1) In this, Wilkins was some way ahead of of his time.

Croydon House (left) and Lansdown Court – two tower blocks that were built in Easton

In 1959, a candidate of the Easton Homes Defence Association, formed to opposed demolitions, was victorious in local elections. In 1960, the Citizen Party (the local Conservatives in all but name) – which had been fanning the flames of local protest – secured an overall majority on the City Council.

The new administration set about reversing Labour policies by promoting private development on suburban estates and withdrawing the CPOs. But they encountered unexpected opposition when they met Henry Brooke, the Conservative Minister of Housing and Local Government. Brooke emphasised that he was: (2)

extremely anxious that slum clearance should go on and go on fast. I should be anxious that large numbers of houses which are represented by the Medical Officer of Health were being turned down by the City Council. I should be beginning to wonder whether, in fact, slum clearance was going on as fast as it should be.

The political arms race at Westminster between Labour and Conservative Parties to build housing at pace and scale clearly took precedence over such local difficulties and the Bristol delegation returned home chastened. Central slum clearance proceeded and, ironically, in an attempt to make up the shortfall created by the axing of the Council’s suburban housebuilding programme, the construction of high flats in central areas was accelerated. In 1962, the proportion of high-rise approvals reached 99 percent. In the short term, the Council demolished 1300 more homes than it built between 1961-62, a fact contributing to Labour’s victory in the 1963 local elections.

Patterson House (top) and Proctor House, Redcliffe, built by Tersons in 1963

This new phase of high-rise construction saw a shift in its locally predominant form – from slab block to point block. The former were criticised for their narrow access balconies which were not at all the ‘streets in the sky’ being pioneered in some deck-access developments of the day. Bristol was also becoming more typical in its reliance on a number of major contractors; Laing, Wimpey and Tersons won the bulk of local contracts.

What Bristol escaped, though seemingly more by happenstance, was the move to system-building. Bristol had been urged down this route in 1962 by Evelyn Sharp, the powerful Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), and local councillors visited Denmark and France to see such methods in operation. But the Council was unwilling to offer the size of contract that the big builders wanted and the City Architect (now Albert Clarke) proved an awkward negotiating partner so interest waned.

Moorfields House (left) and Baynton House

The 13-storey Kingsmarsh House and 11-storey Moorfields House and Baynton House in Lawrence Hill were completed in the mid-1960s. Other point blocks were built just to the north in Easton in the later 1960s, including Croydon House, Twinnell House and Lansdowne Court at 17 storeys.

Hartcliffe shopping centre and tower blocks, c1964 (Bristol Housing Report 1959-1964; Bristol Reference Library, B14100)

Into the mid-1960s, the Council also built high-rise in some of its suburban estates – three 14-storey blocks on Culverwell Road, Withywood (since demolished) and three eleven storey blocks on Hareclive Road, Hartcliffe, which remain. The usual case for suburban high-rise was mixed development – a variety of housing forms intended to serve a range of housing needs and to provide point and contrast in otherwise rather monotonous low-rise estates. In Bristol, it may also have reflected the Council’s need to build at scale when other options had closed or been closed.

Armada House, Kingsdown

Carolina House, Kingsdown

The most interesting and controversial multi-storey schemes, however, occurred in Kingsdown. The Kingsdown I (Lower Kingsdown) redevelopment was underway by 1965, comprising six six- and fourteen-storey slab blocks. Carolina House was officially opened in October 1967. This large-scale incursion into an area of previously dense and intimate housing – some would say picturesque – was contentious but criticisms ramped up when it came to the Council’s plans for the upper slopes, Kingsdown II.

Here the original proposal for three linked 17-storey blocks was fiercely opposed by an increasingly active Bristol Civic Society backed by the Royal Fine Art Commission. (The Commission was authorised to draw government attention to any development which ‘in its opinion affected amenities of a national or public character’.) The MHLG rejected the scheme and also sharply criticised the Council’s somewhat half-hearted revised scheme for four eight-storey blocks. When the Citizen Party won a majority on the Council in 1967, the scheme was scrapped and the land sold to private developers. The High Kingsdown scheme which emerged – a courtyard development designed by Anthony Mackay of Whicheloe, Macfarlane and Towning Hill – is widely praised. (3)

Northfield House

Geoffrey Palmer, the leader of the new Citizen administration, declared in December 1967 that ‘apart from a few projects in hand, Bristol will build no more multi-storey flats’. Northfield House, in Bedminster, begun in 1969 was the Council’s last major high-rise scheme and – at 18 storeys – its tallest.

Whatever the local dynamics, in this Bristol was also reflecting national trends. Patrick Dunleavy emphasises the extent to which Bristol – like other local authorities – was heavily influenced by central government pressure, notably in the drive to clear the slums and build high in the early 1960s and in the reversal of that policy in 1967.

They heyday of high-rise – notwithstanding those projects in the pipeline – was over. The collapse of the system-built Ronan Point block in Newham in May 1968 is always taken as the major cause. In fact, alarm at the disproportionate expense of high-rise construction and a growing realisation that it didn’t rehouse at density (or that high density could be achieved better) were already making rehabilitation of older properties a preferred option of central government.

Granville Street and Eccleston House, Barton Hill

By 1971, there were 66 council estates in Bristol containing some 43,000 homes which housed just under a third of its 427,000 population. Within the total, there were 55 high blocks (of ten storeys or more) in the city forming around 14 percent of its total housing stock – a proportion higher than that in Manchester and Sheffield, for example, and the highest among what Dunleavy calls the free-standing county boroughs (a status it would lose in 1974 before becoming a unitary authority again in 1996).  

This had been a frantic period of housing construction. Bristol had both followed and bucked the trends – pursuing the same path to higher-rise building as most of the larger cities but doing so in a local form, certainly in earlier years, and avoiding the pressures towards system building. Its slabs and blocks have generally survived – with the exception of some on the suburban estates – and seem to have stood the test of time better than many.

Sources

The website of the Tower Block UK Project provides detail on high-rise public housing in Bristol and nationally.  

(1) House of Commons, Adjournment Debate on Slum Clearance, 13 May 1959

(2) Quoted in Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The Politics of High-Rise Housing in Britain: Local Communities Tackle Mass Housing’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1978. Dunleavey’s research provides much of the detail that follows.  

(3) A full account of the episode and description of the High Kingsdown scheme is provided by Elain Harwood in this online document.

London’s Modernist Maisonettes: ‘Going Upstairs to Bed’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s

I’m very pleased to feature this new guest post and some fine photography by Thaddeus Zupančič. Thaddeus is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He has lived in London since 1991. For the first 14 years he worked as a radio producer with the BBC World Service. On his Instagram account @notreallyobsessive he is now about one third through his project, London Modernism 1946-1981, which documents modernist council estates in the capital. He is also a volunteer with The Twentieth Century Society and manages its Instagram account @c20society.

On Sunday, 23 January 1955, Margaret Willis, a sociologist in the Planning Division of the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, gave a broadcast on the BBC Home Service programme Home for the Day.

Her bosses thought the broadcast, in which she ‘would informally talk about her work at County Hall’, was ‘in the interest of the Council’ and therefore recommended that ‘under Staff Regulation 112’ she should be allowed to retain the fee (‘probably 8 guineas’).  

The eight-minute talk was titled My Job. Willis explained that a sociologist is a ‘sort of liaison officer between people like you, the housewives, and the Council’s technical men and women who make the plans in the drawing office’. She was, though, mostly talking about the scarcity of land in ‘the centre of our cities’ and how planners and architects ‘realise how important gardens are to many people and they are doing their best to provide them’. One of their ideas, she explained, was to build ‘a compromise between a house and a flat, it’s a four-storey building like a house on top of a house’. The main benefit of these buildings was the attached gardens, but there was also something else: ‘People prefer this type of building to a flat because they like going upstairs to bed.’ (1)

Such ‘houses on top of houses’ – known as maisonettes because of their split-level plan – were not a complete novelty. On the Devons Estate in Bromley-by-Bow, for instance, there are four low-rises which look like terrace houses with separate flats on the top of them, basically ‘flats on the top of houses’. It is an unexciting, but useful Neo-Georgian pastiche. Pevsner is more damning: the estate, opened in 1949, is ‘entirely in the LCC’s pre-war manner, but with all the drabness of post-war austerity’. (2)

Brett Manor, Hackney, by Edward Mills for the Manor Charitable Trustees, 1947-8

The first modernist maisonette block in London was Brett Manor in Brett Road, Hackney, built in 1947-8. It was designed by Edward Mills for the Manor Charitable Trustees (Mills used the same Arup box frame as Tecton did at Spa Green Estate, which was completed in 1950).

Brett Manor was swiftly followed by Powell & Moya’s Bauhausian low-rise blocks at Churchill Gardens in Pimlico (designed from 1946, built in 1947-51), which were the first modernist maisonettes built by any London council, in this case Westminster.  

Winchfield House, Alton West, Roehampton, by the LCC Architect’s Department; designed in 1952-3, built in 1955-8

Margaret Willis’s employer was not far behind. Already in the early 1950s, as Elain Harwood points out, a group at the LCC Architect’s Department, worked on ‘an efficient maisonette plan, which they then cast into ten-storey slabs, built at Bentham Road, Hackney, at Loughborough Junction, Lambeth, and, most impressively, the Alton West Estate, Roehampton.’ (3) (The Gascoyne Estate in Hackney was built in 1952-4; the Loughborough Estate in 1956-8; and the Alton West Estate in 1955-8.)

The LCC dotted various iterations of these Corbusian slabs on stilts all around the central London metropolitan boroughs, including Southwark (Symington House in 1957, and Prospect House in 1962); Bermondsey (Chilton Grove in 1959); Lambeth (Wimborne House in 1959, Waylett House and Duffell House in 1963); Bethnal Green (Westhope House and Kinsham House in 1956, Yates House and Johnson House in 1957, Orion House in 1962); Stepney (Raynham House and Gouldman House in 1958, Withy House in 1959, Troon House in 1961 and Butler House in 1962); Poplar (Storey House in 1958 and Thornfield House in 1960); Westminster (the towers of the Maida Vale Estate in 1961 and Torridon House, albeit designed in 1959 only completed in 1969); and Islington (Muriel Street in 1964).

Westhope House, Hereford Estate, Bethnal Green, by the LCC Architect’s Department, 1956

Private practices working for the LCC were also designing maisonette slabs and blocks for them, the most impressive being the Ricardo Street Scheme at the Lansbury Estate in Poplar by Geoffrey Jellicoe (for the Festival of Britain’s Exhibition of Architecture, 1951); the Cordelia Street Scheme on the same estate by Norman & Dawbarn (1963); and the Fulbourne Estate slab and block by Stillman & Eastwick-Field (1958-9) in Whitechapel.    

Maisonettes, regardless of the type of building in which they were incorporated, were an integral part of mixed developments, ‘the dominant ideology for housing i n the 1950s’ (4).

There was, though – as it is explained in the oddly self-flagellating GLC book Home Sweet Home – a problem with maisonette slabs: their ‘mass was too dominating, and problems of overshadowing and inflexibility of orientation led to planning difficulties which limited its use in high-density areas’. (5) A far greater potential, continues the book, was offered by the point block with its ‘non-directional shape and quick-moving shadow’.

After the success of Draper House on the Draper Estate in Elephant and Castle (completed 1962), the ‘tall blocks of maisonettes’ (6) became almost as ubiquitous as the slabs, most successfully in the case of the six 21-storey blocks on the Warwick Estate in Westminster (completed in 1966), though the medium-rise maisonettes on this estate are just as compelling.

Argosy House and, at back, Aragon Tower and Daubeney Tower, Pepys Estate, by the LCC Architect’s Department and, after 1965, GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; designed from 1963, opened in 1966, completed in 1973

Even taller, at 24 storeys, were the blocks of maisonettes of the cross-over ‘scissors’ type on the Pepys Estate (designed from 1963, completed in 1973) in Deptford and the 26-storey Maydew House on the Abbeyfield Estate (1965-8) in Southwark. The ‘scissors’ type was first tested for the LCC’s Lincoln Estate blocks in Poplar (1959-62), but ‘later discontinued owing to the high cost of its complex construction’. (7) The construction was indeed complex, with central corridors placed at a half level, ‘providing entrances to flats that ran the width of the block above or below, ‘crossing’ to give each other a dual aspect’. (8) They also provided a maximum of through light and ventilation. Even better than the 24-storey blocks on the Pepys Estate are the eight-storey ‘scissors’ maisonettes, a ‘strong, unifying element of the scheme’. (9)

‘Houses, flats and maisonettes’ was a mantra not only for the LCC, but also for London’s metropolitan boroughs and the City.

Golden Lane Estate, City of London, by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon for the Corporation of London; design won in competition in 1952, built to revised designs in 1954-6

The best examples of the latter are the Golden Lane Estate by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon for the City (which consists of various blocks of flats and six blocks of maisonettes plus a community centre, swimming pool and a tennis court, 1954-6); and Denys Lasdun’s part of the Greenways Estate for Bethnal Green Borough Council (the two inventive eight-storey cluster towers with 24 maisonettes each and the three low-rise blocks with another 50 maisonettes, 1955-8) as well as his Keeling House (for the same council, completed in 1959, originally comprising 56 maisonettes and eight studio flats).

Trevelyan House, Greenways Estate, by Denys Lasdun of Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun for Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council; designed in 1952-3, built in 1955-8

Equally busy were Skinner, Bailey & Lubetkin (the post-Tecton maisonettes on the Dorset Estate, 1951-7, and the Cranbrook Estate, 1955-65, both for Bethnal Green, and the Tabard Garden Estate Extension in Southwark, 1964-5, for the LCC); Frederic Gibberd (Kingsgate Estate, 1958-61, for Hackney); George, Trew & Dunn (Winstanley Estate, 1964-6, for Battersea); Clifford Culpin & Partners (Edgecombe Hall Estate, 1957-63, for Wandsworth); and Co-operative Planning (St John’s Estate, 1963, for Poplar).  

Jim Griffiths House, Clem Attlee Court, by J. Pritchard Lovell; Fulham’s Borough Architect and Director of Housing; 1957

So too were the borough architects of those metropolitan and municipal councils that already had them – most notably Camberwell’s F.O. Hayes (Sceaux Gardens, 1957-60; and the Astley Estate, 1957-9); Fulham’s Borough Architect and Director of Housing J. Pritchard Lovell (Clem Attlee Court, 1957); Willesden’s T.N. l’Anson (the 1963 blocks in the South Kilburn Redevelopment Area with maisonettes on the top of flats); and T.A. Wilkinson at Edmonton (Cumberland House and Graham House on Goodwin Road, 1962). Only five out of the twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs had their own borough architects (of whom four were also directors of housing). Just as busy were the borough engineers and surveyors, for instance W.J. Rankin at Poplar (the first phase of the St John’s Estate, 1956; the Alfred Estate, 1959-60; and the Aberfeldy Estate, 1962-3).

Lakanal, Sceaux Gardens, by F.O. Hayes, Borough Architect, H.C. Connell, A.W. Butler and H.P. Trenton of the Camberwell Borough Architect’s Department, 1957-60

Graham House, Goodwin Road, by the Edmonton Architect’s Department under T.A. Wilkinson, 1962-3. On the right: Walbrook House by the Enfield Borough Architect and Planning Officer’s Department under Wilkinson, 1967-8

The reorganisation of London’s local government in 1965 saw the creation of the new Greater London Council and 32 new London borough councils (plus the City) which then became responsible for a substantially larger part of housing projects and planning than before.

More importantly, the London Government Act of 1963 introduced – in s.74(1) – the statutory post of ‘an architect for the borough’ (10) in each one of them and, ‘as the case may be’, the City.

The most celebrated of them was Sydney Cook, who established Camden’s architect’s department. Cook recruited some of the best young talent – including Peter Tábori, Bill Forrest, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth – but the ‘first and foremost among those who joined Camden from the cutting edge of London’s architectural culture was Neave Brown’. (11)

Dunboyne Road Estate, Gospel Oak, by Neave Brown of the Camden Architect’s Department under Sydney Cook; designed in 1966-7, built in 1971-7

Brown designed two of the most remarkable post-1965 council estates in London: the Dunboyne Road Estate (a mixture of three- and two-bed maisonettes and one-bed flats; designed from 1966 and built in 1971-7); and the Rowley Way part of the Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate (block B, for instance, comprises four storeys of two- and three-bed maisonettes), built in 1972-8.

Tangmere, Broadwater Farm Estate, by C.E. Jacob, Borough Architect, and Alan Weitzel, Deputy Borough Architect of the Haringey Department of Architecture; designed from 1966, built in 1967-72

Cook’s competitor for Camden’s job was the housing architect of Hampstead, C.E. Jacob. He was later appointed borough architect of Haringey and as soon as his new Department of Architecture was set up, he designed, with his deputy Alan Weitzel, the Broadwater Farm Estate (1967-72) and its centrepiece, Tangmere, a maisonette ziggurat.

Henry Wise House, Lillington Gardens Estate, by Darbourne & Darke for Westminster City Council; design won in competition in 1961, detailed and built in 1964-7

Westminster balanced work of its own new Department of Architecture and Planning under F.G. West – such as the Brunel Estate in Westbourne Park, 1970-4 – with schemes by private practices, for instance Darbourne & Darke’s epochal Lillington Gardens Estate (designed in 1961, built in 1964-72, with some of the best maisonettes in town); the scheme won numerous awards, starting with an Award for Good Design in Housing in 1969.

Spring Gardens, Highbury New Park, by the Islington Architecture Department under Alf Head, Borough Architect, 1968-70

In the period of 1968-1980, the most Awards for Good Design in Housing – sponsored by the Secretary of State for the Environment in collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects – was received by Islington, ‘more than any other local authority in the country’. (12) Islington’s Architecture Department was run by Alf Head, who complemented its own projects – for example the Spring Gardens (1968-70) maisonettes and flats in Highbury – with commissions from private practices, very often Darbourne & Darke.

Borough architects in south London were just as active, particularly F.O. Hayes at Southwark, who continued his old Camberwell job, and Ted Hollamby at Lambeth.

Dawson Heights, Dulwich, by Kate Macintosh of the Southwark Department of Architecture & Planning under F.O. Hayes; 1966-72

Southwark’s largest projects were the stupendous Heygate Estate (now demolished) and the Aylesbury Estate (demolition underway), but the Department of Architecture and Planning designed other estates too, such as the Four Squares Estate in Bermondsey (most of its 691 homes are maisonettes). The most triumphant, though, was Kate Macintosh’s all-maisonette estate Dawson Heights (1966-72) in Dulwich. She described it as a ‘Chinese puzzle of differing types to be assembled in various combinations’ (13) and it still works perfectly well.

The building programme in the neighbouring Lambeth was very extensive too – and Hollamby was as good at recruiting talented architects as Cook given that one of his first appointments was George Finch, who already made his name at the LCC with the Chicksand Estate in Whitechapel.

Holland Rise House, Stockwell, by George Finch of the Lambeth Architect’s Department under Ted Hollamby; 1967

Finch’s eight almost identical 22-storey maisonette towers, system-built by Wates – the first completed was Holland Rise House in Stockwell in 1967 – are as intelligent as they are generous; and his stunning Lambeth Towers in Kennington Lane (designed in 1964-5, completed in 1971) are maisonettes, incorporated in a freestyle, sinuous brutalist block.

Binsey Walk, Thamesmead, by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; designed from 1966, built in 1968-9 (demolished)

The last great hurrah of mixed development was Thamesmead, ‘basically a working-class Barbican’ (14), the heroic estate by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design, the successor to the LCC Architect’s Department. The two architecturally most intriguing structures – Coralline Walk and Binsey Walk, both now demolished – were linear maisonette blocks built in 1967-8; and more maisonettes were included in the later stages of the development, Parkview (1969-79) and The Moorings (1971-7).

The most seductive of all other GLC maisonette blocks remains Perronet House (1967-70) in Elephant and Castle, which won a commendation in the 1971 Awards for Good Design in Housing.

And it was not only the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design: pretty much all private practices commissioned by the GLC also designed maisonettes, including the Smithsons (their Robin Hood Gardens, 1968-72, mostly consisted of large maisonettes); Ernő Goldfinger (Trellick Tower, 1972, as well as Balfron Tower, 1967, Carradale House, 1967-8, and a 1972 Burcham Street block on the Brownfield Estate); Trevor Dannatt (Norwood House on the Galloway Estate, 1969); and Architects Co-Partnership (Ethelred Estate, Lambeth, 1964-75).

Benhill Grounds, Brunswick Road, Sutton, by the Sutton Architect’s Department under Peter Hirst, 1978-9

The last two estates featuring predominantly maisonettes were Benhill Grounds by the Sutton Architect’s Department under Peter Hirst (1978-9), and the GLC’s Ferry Lane Estate (1977-81) in Tottenham Hale. That these two schemes should have been the last – mostly because of the 1980 Housing Act and its consequences  – is a shame, because maisonettes are arguably the greatest housing gift that modernist architects bequeathed to London. They were – and rightfully remain – popular ‘because they gave greater privacy and the sensation of being in a house’. (15) Not to mention the fact that Londoners like going upstairs to bed …  

A version of this article was previously published in Issue 5 of Journal of Civic Architecture (2020).  

Sources

(1) Margaret Willis, ‘My Job’ transcript for a BBC broadcast, 23 January 1955; Report by the Clerk of the Council, 12 January 1955, London Metropolitan Archives

(2) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England – London 5: East, (Yale University Press, 2005)

(3) Elain Harwood, London County Council Architects, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(4) Elain Harwood, Obituary of George Finch, The Guardian, 27 February 2013

(5) Judith Lever, Home Sweet Home (Academy Editions/GLC, 1976)

(6) GLC Architecture 1965/70 (GLC, 1971)

(7) Lever, Home Sweet Home

(8) Elain Harwood, Space Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-1975 (Yale University Press, 2015)

(9) GLC Architecture 1965/70

(10) London Government Act 1963, Part IX

(11) Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden (Lund Humphries, 2017)

(12) Awards for Good Design in Housing 1980, Report from the Housing Committee, Islington London Borough Council, 4 December 1980

(13) Kate Macintosh, Utopia London, directed by Tom Cordell, 2010

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

(15) Elain Harwood, Space Hope and Brutalism

Gleadless Valley Remembered

Tags

1960, 1970s, Gleadless Valley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Front cover of ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gleadless Valley School, photographed in 1994 © Picture Sheffield

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

Hemsworth Library, Blackstock Road © Picture Sheffield

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

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

St Anthony’s Church

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

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

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

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

keithmarriott58@gmail.com

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

Tags

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.

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.