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 (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 (Torridon House in 1960 and the towers of the Maida Vale Estate in 1961); and Islington (Muriel Street in 1964).

Westhope House, Hereford Estate, Bethnal Green, by Stillman & Eastwick Field for the LCC, 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 two Hereford Estate slabs by Stillman & Eastwick Field (1956) in Bethnal Green.    

Maisonettes, regardless of the type of building in which they were incorporated, were an integral part of mixed developments, ‘the dominant ideology for housing in 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); J. Pritchard Lovell (Clem Attlee Court, 1957, for Fulham); 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 for Fulham Borough Council; 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), Willesden’s T.N. l’Anson (the 1963 blocks in the South Kilburn Redevelopment Area with maisonettes on the top of flats), and Edmonton’s T.A. Wilkinson (Cumberland House and Graham House on Goodwin Road, 1962) – and the borough engineers and surveyors, for instance W.J. Rankin at Poplar (Aberfeldy Estate and the first phase of the St John’s Estate).   

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 Odhams Walk (1979-81) in Covent Garden. 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.

Kirkby, Liverpool, Part II: ‘New Jerusalem Goes Wrong’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Kirkby, Regeneration

Last week’s post looked at the origins and early development of the new town of Kirkby. Despite the ambitions and claims of its planners, some early impressions of observers were critical and the responses of some residents at least were muted, showing gratitude for better housing but a more sceptical attitude towards their new environment.

This image of Kirkby shopping centre in 1964 gives some evidence of the town’s young population © Liverpool Echo

Objectively, two things stand out. One was the age profile of the new town: in 1961, some 48 percent of the population was under 15; the England and Wales average stood at 27 percent. There were reports of serious vandalism as early as 1960 when, for example, the Liverpool Echo, reporting the departure of the local vicar to the safer environs of Southport, described the town ‘troubled by gangs of young vandals who leave a weekly trail of havoc’. (1)

We’ll come back to this issue and it seems far too crude to ascribe it simply to local demographics but it’s noteworthy that in at least two cases of allegedly vandal-ridden estates – the Brandon Estate in Lambeth and Meadowell in North Shields –  local commentators blamed their preponderance of young people. (In fact, at 30 to 35 percent, the numbers under 15 were significantly lower than at Kirkby.)

The Peacock public house, Quarryside Drive, Northwood, 2016

The second is criticism of Kirkby’s lack of facilities. We saw last week the genuine efforts to provide health and educational resources but other amenities lagged. ‘There’s nothing for teenagers’, complained one respondent to the 1961 survey of Liverpool academic John Barron Mays. Some commentators linked the town’s young population, its lack of facilities and the allegedly high levels of antisocial behaviour, as a Times report on Kirkby (‘the legendary birthplace of the BBC’s Z Cars’) did in 1965: (2)

Although half the population is under 21 no one has yet built a cinema or dance hall and, possibly for this kind of reason, the 13 and 14-years-olds are the town’s most frequent law-breakers. Shop windows are shattered with monotonous regularity, telephone kiosks are damaged at the rate of one per day and windows of unoccupied buildings are now sometimes protected by corrugated iron.

One of May’s respondents, the 32-year old wife of a brewery manager, stated she couldn’t ‘belong to a club because not an RC’ (sic). Lingering sectarianism notwithstanding, for all the promise as so often the provision of social amenities followed too slowly on the housing drive which preceded it.

Kirkby Industrial Estate, undated © Liverpool Echo

In the 1960s, employment opportunities offered a better prospect. Ronald Bradbury, Kirkby’s chief planner, claimed the Kirkby Industrial Estate was employing 12,000 by 1956, 16,000 by 1961 and 25,000 by 1967. Some of its firms such as Birds Eye, Hygena and Bendix, were the household names of Britain. Jeff Morris recalled his earlier working years in Kirkby: (3)

The industrial estate was a world of opportunity. You could leave one job and walk into another. I think it was the largest in Britain at the time, or at least in the North West.

Full employment Britain seems a foreign country where things were done differently. In the 1970s the post-war compact between state and society that guaranteed jobs and social security began to dissolve and Kirkby in particular would suffer grievously.

In 1971, Thorn Electrical, which had just bought Fisher-Bendix, announced the closure of the company’s Kirkby plant with the loss of 600 jobs. A factory occupation demanding ‘the right to work’ followed and a new owner was found to keep the factory going, for the time being at least.

Tower Hill protest, 1972. The placard on the left reads ‘Tower Hill Flat Dwellers Let’s Have Homes Not Fungus Cells’ – a reminder that this was also a protest about housing conditions.

Such local militancy, this time led by women, was displayed again in a fourteen-month rent strike, involving 3000 households at peak, led by the Tower Hill Unfair Rents Action Group – a protest against the £1 a week increase proposed by Kirkby Urban District Council as a result of the ‘fair rents’ regime of the 1972 Housing Act. (4)

But such struggles availed little against the larger forces at work. As early as 1971, Kirkby was noted as one of several problematic ‘peripheral estates’ – areas characterised by their ‘marked degree of social homogeneity’, rising unemployment and physical decline. By 1981, an unemployment rate of 22.6 percent placed it second in the country after Corby which had recently suffered the closure of its steelworks. (5)

Ranshaw Court, Tower Hill, seen in its brief heyday and demolished, 1982

Kirkby’s physical decline was seen in Tower Hill’s recently built seven-storey system-built maisonette blocks, flawed from the outset and scheduled for demolition barely ten years later. Across the town, three-storey flat blocks – disliked for their lack of space and appalling sound insulation – made up almost a quarter of its homes and suffered an annual tenant turnover of 25 percent. For some, the almost systematic destruction of these flats when empty by Kirkby youth was not mindless vandalism but justified protest. (6)

Cover and image from the Observer magazine article on Kirkby in 1979

The forces of law and order were less sympathetic. Chief Superintendent Norman Chapple, in charge of local policing, produced a lengthy report entitled ‘Kirkby New Town: an Objective Assessment of Social, Economic and Police Problems’ in 1975 which received national coverage.

Its statistics made for sobering reading: around 700 council homes were badly vandalised annually;  vandalism generally cost the town some £375,000 a year, a figure comparable, it was said, to a town ten times its size; 14,000 streetlights had been destroyed in a six-month period; an average of five telephone kiosks were vandalised daily. In all, Kirkby’s crime rate was 16 percent higher than the Knowsley and Merseyside average, itself said to be the highest in Britain, and the proportion of juvenile offenders arrested was two-thirds greater than in London. (7)

Kirkby town centre, June 1993 © John Wakefield

Chapple acknowledged the context: dissatisfaction with housing, high unemployment, an exceptionally high population of young people and a continuingly high birth rate.  And he recognised the depressing nature of the local environment:

The whole atmosphere of the town centre and the four community centre shopping precincts is marred by the fact that most shops have either bricked up their windows or covered them with permanent and unsightly metal grilles.

But he was also unsparing in his character assessment of the town’s population. He suggested that the parents of Kirkby ‘must accept a large part of the blame for the misconduct of the younger generation and hence their own squalid environment’. He observed a ‘high proportion of irresponsible or manifestly anti-social residents’. And he believed:

All endeavours to improve the general quality of life will be vain, however, unless some way can be found to improve the basically apathetic, irresponsible and anti-social attitude exhibited by a large proportion of the community.

Of course, many residents found such judgments shocking and offensive. Earlier letters to the Liverpool Echo had rejected such stigmatisation: ‘Someone tell me just where you think Kirkby people originate. We are not a separate race’, said Mrs Badcock. Joseph and Margaret McCann complained about Kirkby’s ‘undeserved bad reputation’. One ‘Contented Kirkbyite’ noted the ‘very nice respectable people and families who are a credit to Kirby’. Vandalism, most respondents commented, was not specific to Kirkby but a problem everywhere and in places with far fewer young people. (8)

James Holt Avenue, Westvale, 2016

Critical commentary easily lurched into ugly stereotyping and the latter, whatever the reality, merely added to Kirkby’s problems. From somewhere removed in time and place, it’s hard – and perhaps unnecessary – to pass judgement. The seventies seem – this an admittedly anecdotal observation from someone who lived through them – a time of cultural shift; a more troubled and less deferential era. The objective circumstances of Kirkby – poor housing in too many cases, inadequate amenities – warranted grievance. Unemployment, youth unemployment reaching 60 percent, decimated its community; the town’s population fell by 15 percent in the decade after 1971.

And there was, as Chapple noted, though unsympathetically in his case, an anti-authoritarian attitude perhaps rooted in the decades-long experience of a casualised Liverpool docks workforce of ruthless exploitation. Chapple was shocked by the apparently widespread acceptance of the theft and receiving (in police parlance) of stolen goods but ‘nicking’ – as has been noted in Glasgow too – could be viewed as a form of justifiable wealth redistribution by those at the sharp end of social inequality.

The problems and the spotlight – more empathetically in this case – remained on Kirkby in the early 1980s when the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) researched ‘outer estates in Britain’. Its report on Kirkby and Stockbridge Village (formerly Cantril Farm) – another peripheral Liverpool development – was published in 1985 and noted the ‘chronic state of disrepair’ of much of the housing and the dependence of around half Kirkby’s households on state benefits. The industrial estate’s ‘large-plant, branch-plant economy, making consumer products’ was no longer viable as globalisation impacted and the town’s unemployment rate was 50 percent higher than that of Liverpool as a whole. (9)

The new St Chad’s Health Centre

All Saints Catholic High School, opened in 2010

All this is past history and there has been significant change since. The town was ripe for the area-based regeneration initiatives that characterised government policy from the 1980s onward. Demolition and rebuild in Tower Hill were supported by a £26 million grant from the Estate Action Programme launched in 1985. By 1992, one enthusiastic report claimed the area now had a five-year waiting list of people wanting to move in. Kirkby also received money from the Single Regeneration Budget but the Council’s 1992 bid for City Challenge funding was rejected. (10)

Contrary to received wisdom, New Labour did invest quite heavily in what became known as the ‘left-behind areas’. In Kirkby the results can be seen in new schools and health centres. But secure and decently remunerated employment, given the government’s embrace of a competitive, globalised economy, was a tougher nut to crack.

As was typical, however, the regeneration strategy focused heavily on housing, clearing those areas judged particularly problematic or unpopular. The practical reality of empty and hard-to-let social rent homes in Kirkby and a declining population (from almost 60,000 in 1971 to 40,472 in 2001) made the contemporary policy preference for low-rise mixed-tenure, ‘mixed community’ development an inevitable and, in this case perhaps, justifiable, choice.

Willow Rise (in foreground) and Beech Rise, Parklands, Roughwood Drive, 2016

In 2000, land north of Shevington’s Lane was set aside for ‘a private housing area comparable in size to the original public housing estate’. By 2005, six of the eight 15-storey towers along Roughwood Drive been demolished. Redeveloped by LPC Living and rebranded Parklands, the two remaining towers were refurbished to provide ‘high-quality contemporary accommodation’ for sale whilst ‘40 new two- and three-bedroom mews-style townhouses’ replaced the others. (11)

New housing at Sycamore Drive off Roughwood Drive, 2016

In Southdene, the two eleven-storey Cherryfield Heights blocks have also been demolished. The surviving four eleven-storey blocks at Gaywood Green are now scheduled for demolition due to fire safety concerns. (12)

The almost unavoidable corollary of regeneration was so-called Large-scale Voluntary Transfer of housing stock from local authorities to housing associations – hardly voluntary as councils were denied the support needed to fund renovations and new build themselves. In 2002, Knowsley Council’s 17,000 homes were transferred to the Knowsley Housing Trust formed for the purpose.  The Council estimated this would release £270 million of new investment in housing.

Quarry Green Heights, 2016

A tower block fire in Huyton in 1991 (before transfer) was seen as ‘a warning which ultimately went unheeded’ and fire risk assessments issued by the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service in 2017 relating to the Quarry Green blocks reflected what critics saw as a generally bureaucratic and non-responsive attitude amongst a rapidly changing senior staff. The Trust was issued a non-compliance order by the Social Housing Regulator in 2018 which stated baldly that it failed to meet governance requirements. Since April 2020 it has been re-invented as the Livv Housing Group. (13)

Kirkby shopping centre, 2016

Currently, the twenty-year saga of the regeneration of Kirkby’s town centre is centre-stage with – to cut a long story short – the hopeful news that a Morrison’s superstore, a Home Bargains outlet and a drive-thru (sic) KFC will be gracing the redeveloped centre following a ground-breaking ceremony in January this year. (14)

The current moment (I write in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic) is hardly propitious to such efforts and the practical and psychological boost of a revived central shopping area will battle unequally against the objective reality of Kirkby’s continuing poverty.  In the modern jargon of multiple deprivation, as of 2018 some 34 percent of Kirkby’s population suffered income deprivation (against an English average of 15 percent) and 28 percent employment deprivation (12 percent). (15)

New private housing in Brackenhurst Green, Northwood, 2016

Despite the high hopes – and a degree of hyperbole – which accompanied its inception, Kirkby has not been an unalloyed success though, as ever, many of its residents will have experienced their homes and community far more positively than media headlines and hostile commentary would suggest. Back in 1981, when CES essayed a judgment on what had gone wrong, they concluded that no-one or nothing was directly to blame, except history: ‘the town’s main stumbling block is that “each of the main problems exacerbates the others”’. (16)

That will seem a mealy-mouthed judgement to some. Many would point to planning hubris and, more specifically, the inherent problems associated with large, mono-class peripheral estates. Others would blame poor execution – flawed housing and inadequate amenities. But neither offer sufficient explanation. The necessary context is inequality and a state and society which have in recent decades retreated from the promises of a more classless prosperity that briefly actuated our politics in the era that gave birth to the new town of Kirkby.

Notes

My thanks to John Wakefield for permission to use a couple of his powerful images of Kirkby at this time and for supplying additional detail.

Sources

(1) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62, Book 2 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014)

(2) ‘Police See Widening Gap with Public’, The Times, 3 February 1965

(3) Molyneux, ‘Kirkby’s transformation from sleepy rural town to “the great new world”

(4) These working-class struggles are described from a left-wing perspective in numerous accounts. Fisher-Bendix, for example, in libcom.org, Under new management? The Fisher-Bendix occupation and from International Socialism, Malcolm Marks, The Battle at Fisher Bendix; the Tower Hill Rent Strike in Big Flame and the Kirkby Rent Strike and ‘”Empowered working-class housewives” – Big Flame, Women and the Kirkby Rent Strike 1972-73’.

(5) Duncan Sim, ‘Urban Deprivation: Not Just the Inner City’, Area, vol 16, no 4, December 1984

(6) Mark Urbanowicz, Forms of Policing and the Politics of Law Enforcement: A Critical Analysis of Policing in a Merseyside Working Class Community, PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1985

(7) The quotations which follow are drawn from Ian Craig, ‘Kirkby – “Town in State of Crisis”’, Liverpool Echo, 2 December 1975, Peter Evans, ‘Hooliganism and theft make new town a disaster area’, The Times, 3 December 1975 and Urbanowicz, Forms of Policing and the Politics of Law Enforcement: A Critical Analysis of Policing in a Merseyside Working Class Community.

(8) Letters page, Liverpool Echo, 22 November 1972

(9) CES Paper 27, Outer Estates in Britain: Action Programmes in Kirkby and Stockbridge Village (1985)

(10) ‘The town that fought its way back’, The Times, 13 July 1992

(11) Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Supplementary Planning Document Tower Hill (Kirkby) Action Area (April 2007) and Parklands, LPC Living and ‘Rush to Buy Tower Blocks’, Liverpool Echo, 21 September 2005

(12) See the Tower Block UK website of the University of Edinburgh and Nathaniel Barker, ‘Merseyside housing association to demolish tower blocks after fire safety failings’, Inside Housing, 15 May 2019

(13) Nathaniel Barker, ‘Knowsley Housing Trust: what went wrong?’, Inside Housing 12 October 2018 and Regulator of Social Housing, Regulatory Judgement on Knowsley Housing Trust LH4343, August 2018.

(14) Chloé Vaughan, ‘Ground breaks on retail development in Kirkby’, Place NorthWest, 31 Jan 2020. The town’s Wikipedia entry contains exhaustive detail on the longer story.

(15) Knowsley Council, Kirkby Profile 2018.

(16) Quoted in Sue Woodward, ‘”Town of Apathy”: the Daily Problems of life in Kirkby’, Liverpool Echo, 19 October 1981

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

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

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

Nissen huts and duck pond, Leigh Park

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

Peterborough Road, Wymering

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

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

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

BISF houses on Elkstone Road, Paulsgrove

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

Thirlmere House, Paulsgrove

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

Bramdean Avenue, Leigh Park, 1949

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

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

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

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

But for others it was a difficult move:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darwin House, Australia Close, today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilmcote House today, renovated to Passivehaus standards

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

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

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

Note

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1960s, 1970s

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

Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa glimpsed from its U-Bahn station

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt-Erlaa aerial view

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

Harry Glück (1925-2016)

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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