Harlow: ‘Sculpture Town’

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Harlow

Last week’s post looked at the ideals which generated Harlow New Town’s unique programme of public art works and its early years.  Frederick Gibberd, Harlow’s architect-planner, had envisaged its civic centre as ‘home to the finest works of art’ – both a homage to the past and its Renaissance glories and a mark of the cultured urbanism aspired to in England’s new Elizabethan age.

This is a record of my visit last year, an eclectic mix therefore, rather than a comprehensive record – a sympathetic attempt to see and understand the works in situ and in the context of the mission Gibberd proclaimed.

By the early sixties, Harlow town centre – Gibberd’s broadly conceived civic centre – was taking off. FE McWilliam’s Portrait Figure­, stands in West Walk, bought by the Harlow Art Trust in 1957 after featuring in the London County Council’s open-air sculpture exhibition that year. It’s a portrayal of the sculptor Elisabeth Frink when McWilliam’s student at the Chelsea School of Art.

FE McWilliam, Eve (1956)

Another female figure of much greater vintage was acquired in 1960.  Auguste Rodin’s Eve (part of an unfinished duo – Rodin died before completing Adam) can be found in the Water Gardens rather awkwardly placed just in front of Five Guys – a burger chain, nothing more laddish.

Auguste Rodin, Eve (1882)

Not too far away is Ralph Brown’s Meat Porters, commissioned by the Trust from the artist (persuaded to change its original and appropriate name, Figures with a Carcass) and placed in the recently completed Market Square in 1961: ‘a focus of views in two kinds of civic space, a square and a street…and a pivot between them’.  There’s also something fitting, though far less high-minded, about its current backdrop.  It’s another striking work which seems to have a happy association with Harlow childhoods.

Ralph Brown, Meat Porters 1959)

Gibberd’s Civic Square – his Florentine piazza – and its complement, the Water Gardens, were completed in 1963.  I’ll confess to missing one of the latter’s most striking elements, William Mitchell’s Seven Reliefs/Mosaics which served as fountain heads for the Garden’s elongated water features – my apologies to the redoubtable artist who, born 1925, remains alive and kicking.  That perhaps is a commentary on the now truncated form of this space.  Despite Grade II listing and a vigorous campaign by the Twentieth Century Society, Lady Pat Gibberd and others, new values took priority and, if you Google ‘Harlow Water Gardens’ now you’re more likely to be directed to the ‘300,000 sq ft of retail space and a 70,000 sq ft new town hall’ completed in 2004.

The front page of this early brochure on Harlow shows the Water Gardens and Mitchell’s reliefs in their original form and place. The first Town Hall stands to the rear.

Also easily missed is a work entitled Returning from Work placed at the entrance of Harlow’s Central Library, ‘assumed’ by the Harlow Art Trust to be by Carl Heinz Müller and purchased in 1963.

Carl Heinz Muller, Returning from Work (date unknown)

The New Town was taking off and its now bustling centre received another notable sculpture, Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, bronze-cast in a Swiss foundry and placed in Broad Walk in 1966.  It’s reminiscent in form of another of Chadwick’s works, The Watchers, placed by the LCC in the Alton Estate in the same year.

Lynn Chadwick, Trigon (1961)

Back in the Water Gardens, Elisabeth Frink’s Boar, though small, is a more eye-catching work.  It was Frink’s first commission, in 1957, the result of a visit by the then Patricia Fox-Edwards to the artist’s 1952 exhibition at the Chelsea School of Art.  Originally made of concrete, it was first placed in Bush Fair, the second of Harlow’s neighbourhoods to be completed, but weathering and vandalism caused it to be recast in bronze and relocated in its present position in 1970. (1)  By 1973, the Harlow Art Trust had installed 27 sculptural works on public sites across the town.

Elisabeth Frink, Boar (1957) in its original location

Boar, recast in 1970, in its current location

Leon Underwood’s clenched fist is Not in Anger.  The original Portland stone version was sculpted in 1925 and can now be seen at the Gibberd Garden designed by Gibberd himself in his later years and surrounding the home, a few miles from Harlow, which he occupied until his death in 1984. The cast bronze version was purchased by the Trust in 1979 and now has a place in The Stow neighbourhood centre.

Leon Underwood, Not in Anger (1975)

Another re-sited work is Echo by Lithuanian-born Antanas Bradzys placed, in 1970, within the Staple Tye shopping centre and moved to an adjacent nearby when the centre was redeveloped.

Antanas Bradzys, Echo (1970)

Three other works by Bradzys feature in Harlow; the largest and the one most remarked upon by residents for its location and visibility is Solo Flight (1982), commissioned by the Harvey Centre and located in the shopping mall until replaced by a lift.  It now occupies a striking position on First Avenue across from the St Mary-at-Latton church though it’s more likely to be noticed by passing traffic than walkers-by.

Antanas Bradzys, Solo Flight (1982)

Since this is a blog dedicated to celebrating the work of local government and unfairly maligned local councillors I’m pleased to record that it’s been dedicated in its new site to the memory of Sonia Anderson, a Labour councillor in Harlow for 41 years and onetime trustee of the Harlow Art Trust:  a champion of ‘social causes, the arts and education’, who died in 1998.  She had arrived in England, courtesy of the Red Cross, a refugee from Nazism of German Communist parents.  To her grandson, she taught ‘the importance of a broad education, reading and the arts…to see past people’s foibles and stand by what you believe in’. (2)  In this, she seems to personify the very best of what Harlow stood for.

Westgate, a rather depressed corner of Harlow town centre, might seem to represent some loss of that vision but it still houses Still Life by Fred Watson, his first major commission in 1985.  Its books surely represent a more elevated of their purpose than the premises just behind.

Fred Watson, Still Life (1985-86)

Anthony Hawken’s Iceni, 1995, a tribute to the Celtic tribe, stands outside a smaller terrace of shops in Colt Hatch, incongruous perhaps but in a good way – a significant artwork placed in the midst of an unremarkable suburban setting.

Anthony Hawken, Iceni (1995)

Shenzhou by Simon Packard is one of the most recent additions to the Harlow scene, commissioned by the Harlow Heath Centres Trust in 2008 and prominently located in the new Addison House Health Centre.  Perhaps that much-visited site, as much as its arresting form and fabric, accounts for the attention it has received, not all of it complimentary.  ‘It looks like it’s done out of tinfoil’, according to one observer. (3)

Simon Packard, Shenzhou (2008)

And finally on my way back to the station I noticed Butterfly, made by Madeline Allen for Barratt Homes in 2008 and sited off Fifth Avenue in a modern housing development.

Madeline Allen, Butterfly (2008)

I went to look at the housing – you can find my earlier blogs on the early years of the New Town and its later development by following the links – but I came away glad to have seen such an array of public art, sometimes for its incongruity but more often for its quality and presence. It was good to see the civic realm – it seems an antiquated phrase nowadays – so prized; pleasing to see Harlow continuing to attempt to live up to its founding values from that era when a post-war Labour government sought to ‘assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation’.

Gwen Dymond, Harlow (1968) – a celebration by a local artist of some of the town’s major landmarks

In Lucy Lippard’s words, ‘public art is accessible art of any kind that cares about/challenges/involves and consults for or with whom it is made’. (4)  Has Harlow’s collection lived up those ideals?   The evidence seems mixed.  Clare Healey found just under half of her local respondents thinking that its public art made the town ‘a distinctive place to live’, a little under a third believing it had added to their sense of identity. But then again, almost half wanted more public art.

Typically, her sample liked most those works to which they connected personally on some level – Family Group, Meat Porters and Still Life were singled out in this way and ‘it became clear that residents had trouble relating to the more modem and abstract pieces in Harlow’.  That, I suppose, is a tribute to the gentle humanism which typified earlier post-war works.

All that might seem a limited response to the idealistic vision outlined by Frederick Gibberd on the town’s inception but that ‘taken-for-grantedness’ might be taken as natural as Harlow and the other New Towns become more ‘ordinary’ places.  Familiarity – the fact that these varied works become so easily part of the unremarked day-to-day background of busy lives – breeds, if not contempt, a certain casual disregard.  I dare say the citizens of Florence pass by Michelangelo’s David (or at least its current replica) outside the Palazzo della Signoria on a daily basis without so much as a glance.

 

As a visitor, I remain impressed by the range and quality of Harlow’s artworks and grateful for their placement amidst shops and streets and houses.  For Gibberd the ‘purpose of the sculpture [was] not to decorate the town.  It [was] not a form of costume jewellery’. Rather it was: (5)

To be enjoyed for its own sake as visual art, and to add interest and visual diversity to the urban spaces in which it is set.

In those terms, certainly, Harlow’s efforts have succeeded. ‘Sculpture Town’ may be a bit of touristic rebranding but Harlow deserves the accolade

Sources

(1) Historic England, Wild Boar Sculpture

(2) Cole Henley, ‘Phenomenal People: who’s your inspiring woman?’ (March 2012)

(3) Quoted in Clare Healey, ‘Is Public Art a Waste of Space? An Investigation into Residents’ Attitudes to Public Art in Harlow’, MSc in the Built Environment, University of London, 2008

(4) Quoted in Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1997)

(5) Quoted in the Historic England exhibition, ‘Out There: Our Post-War Public Art’, Somerset House, February-April 2016. The exhibition is currently showing, free entry, at Bessie Surtees House, Newcastle upon Tyne

Details of the artworks are taken from Harlow Arts Trust, Sculpture in Harlow (2005)

The Speke Estate, Liverpool II: ‘Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate’

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1980s, 2000s, Regeneration

Last week’s post left Speke, in the 1960s, a thriving community. It would be easy now to focus on its decline and later troubles, to lapse into the language of ‘failure’ that has been affixed so readily to it and other council estates with its implication of some Original Sin, some fatal flaw of conception and planning but, in fact, the Estate has been a good home to many people over time.

The McCartney family were early residents.  Paul spent his early years in 72 Western Avenue and then at 12 Ardwick Road in Speke. The Harrisons lived in a tiny terraced house with outside toilet in Wavertree until, in 1950, they and George moved to a brand new council house at 25 Upton Green, Speke.  (You can read more about the childhood homes of the Beatles in an earlier blog post.)

George Harrison at 25 Upton Green, Speke

Their success story could hardly be typical but plenty of others look back to these years fondly.  You’ll find many of these recollections on the community forums but I’ll begin with one example – from ‘Gillian’ who thought she had better write something or else risk collapsing in ‘floods of sentimental tears’: (1)

My family moved to Speke 1950; from what they had moved from this was luxury. My sister Agnes told me about everything being new, hot running water, toilets inside, the only downside to this paradise was for a while was it was a building site, very, very muddy. In time things changed but it was very much a community, groups and activities were formed. OK, there wasn’t enough schools but other arrangements were made.

She remembers spending time at what passed for the local beach on the Mersey shoreline at Oglet. She recalls her own childhood home, a small block of flats ‘with their three floors of landings and stairs [which] had been brushed and scrubbed and neatly finished off with whiter than white edges and front doorsteps’.

Central Avenue

Another correspondent, resident in Speke for over forty years describes it as ‘a great place to live in the 60s and some of the early 70s’.  But, in a common refrain, he’d ‘seen it change over the years’: (2)

It used to be a lovely place to live…

I lived by the Park when I was younger and it was a lovely park.  There were bowling greens, tennis courts, the lads could play football.

It was a good area for employment when I was younger…

You won’t miss the elegiac tone in those comments, something more than a typical nostalgia for younger days. Those comments contain their own codas: ‘a lovely place to live…Yes, about ten or fifteen years ago’; ‘a good area for employment…and now there is nothing’.

Ardwick Road

Speke did suffer from the outset from its location some seven miles from the city centre. The 45-minute bus ride wasn’t too much of an issue so long as the Estate was, as planned, relatively ‘self-contained’ and economically self-sufficient but that isolation – that sense of ‘an enclave surrounded entirely by the barrier of roads, fields, the airport runway and the River Mersey’ later proved a problem.

‘Dunlop Rubber Co, Works and Environs, Speke, 1952’ EAW047310, Britain from Above (c) Historic England

The major problem, though, was the collapse of a once vibrant local economy.  Between 1978 and 1985, Liverpool as a whole lost 40,000 jobs but Speke was particularly hard hit.  British Leyland had opened its Speke Number Two Plant in 1970. Industrial relations were poor and the TR7 unsuccessful. The closure of the plant and 3000 redundancies were announced in 1978.  Dunlop announced the closure of its Speke factory with the loss of 2400 jobs in 1979.

Eddie Loyden, the local Labour MP, estimated 8000 jobs lost in his constituency in two years: (3)

If one recalls the dream of the post-war period that Merseyside would develop alternative industries to deal with the decline in the docks, in transport and in warehousing, upon which the city had depended for so long, one can see the serious problem on Merseyside.

Loyden would lose his seat to the Conservatives in 1979 and the first attempt to revive Speke’s fortunes was signature Thatcherism – the creation of the Speke Enterprise Zone in 1981. Enterprise Zones offered tax breaks and infrastructure incentives to private companies to relocate to areas of high unemployment.

In Speke, however, the (more or less) free market failed to work its magic – not a single company opened in the Speke Airport Enterprise Zone. As one later observer noted: (4)

Even with the tax incentives nobody wanted to come here – the place still looked awful, still felt awful, still performed really poorly…The area was extremely unwell, almost terminally ill, and the [Enterprise Zone] was like a couple of paracetamol.

The creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation in 1981 was a small boost but, in Speke, nothing much happened until the formation of the Speke Garston Development Corporation in 1996, a joint initiative between the North West Development Agency and Liverpool City Council benefiting from some £14m government funding. (5)

Economic regeneration efforts have continued. Liverpool Vision – an economic development company (the first Urban Regeneration Company established in England) – was established in 1999 and from 2008 has funded the redevelopment of Speke’s district centre. The arrival of Morrisons, Iceland and TK Maxx, alongside smaller retailers, mark the retail successes now taken as an essential marker of economic well-being.

The new Speke Centre

Overall, it’s reckoned that 20,000 jobs have been created locally by the late 2000s though many of these were in the new biopharmaceutical and biomanufacturing sectors – skilled employment in an area where, only a few years earlier, 43 per cent of people had classified themselves as unskilled. (6) The success of Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood plant just across Speke Boulevard, with its workforce of around 4200, is a welcome boost to more traditional working-class employment in the area – a further £130m extension was announced in January this year. (7)  Printing firms Prinovis and Communisis are also providing good jobs to local people. (8)

In reality, none of this is easy. It’s true that earlier and more direct interventions by the local and national state created substantial employment in Speke’s early years (boosted by the war and post-war prosperity) into the 1970s. But, despite the vigorous efforts of the local labour movement to retain jobs, globalisation (abetted by neoliberalism) has taken its toll on this generation of industry and has created an unemployed working class ill-fitted to the new high-tech industries.  Call centres – aided by the perceived friendliness of the Scouse accent – sprang up in Speke in the 1990s and, no doubt, more zero-hours, unskilled jobs have been created since. (9)

Central Avenue

Meanwhile, an estate which had once catered for a disproportionately (and relatively) affluent Liverpool working-class – those in work who could be reliably expected to pay above-average council rents – was now one of the poorest areas of the city, indeed of the country.  In 2000 it was the judged the second most deprived ward in England; only Benchill in Wythenshawe fared worse.  In 2002, average household income was £5000 below the city average.  Those statistics reflected the high unemployment in Speke (in 2001 over 8 per cent of the ‘economically active’ were unemployed compared to the national average of 3.4 per cent) and the high level of sickness and disability (almost 17 per cent; over three times the national average).

All Saints Road

This was an indication of both the economic tsunami which had befallen Speke in particular and the more general transition of council housing since the 1970s to housing for the least well-off of our society.  In Speke itself around 46 per cent of homes remained social rented but that term denotes another shift – from ‘Corpy’ houses to housing association, largely the result of a large-scale voluntary transfer of stock from the Council to South Liverpool Housing in 1999.

Urban regeneration (as opposed to economic) has affected Speke too.  As the population fell and unsightly voids rose, some housing was ‘tinned up’ and then demolished (which added its own sense of blight for a period) in the late 1980s, some unpopular maisonette blocks were ‘top-downed’, and some new housing built.  The scheme announced by South Liverpool Homes in 2012 offers a cameo of this new world – 110 ‘residential units’ in all: 66 for ‘affordable rent’, 16 for shared ownership and 28 for private sale. (10)  In this case, it is perhaps not so far from the founding vision of Speke as a township ‘planned to accommodate all classes of the community’.

New South Liverpool Housing scheme (artist’s impression)

The difficulties of social engineering through housing design and tenure are well illustrated by the story of the Dymchurch Estate, built earlier on the western edge of Speke to accommodate predominantly older people.  The Estate’s closed court, Radburn-style layout proved unpopular and its homes were increasingly allocated to young and transient single people: ‘the flats became notorious for drug abuse and giro drops’. (11)

For a time Dymchurch was judged locally to the worst part of Speke (the Liverpool Housing Trust has led later regeneration efforts) but the Estate’s residents had become to a more generalised stigmatisation – the taxi-drivers who would refuse to drive to the area were typically the most visible element of this.  Paddy Ashdown, then Liberal Democrat leader, visited in 1998 (presumably he didn’t need a taxi) and likened Speke to Sarajevo, then in the throes of civil war.

That was a gross caricature as one resident commented: (12)

Speke is not Sarajevo; Speke is quite a nice estate. The only problem is that you have people, who come flying in here, there and everywhere who actually don’t live on the estate, nor can they see the potential of what is going to happen over the next few years.

And indeed much has happened since then.  I won’t privilege my own flying visit over the knowledge and experience of local residents who I invite to add their own impressions but the Estate looked fine to me, its housing in good nick, not visibly depressed and with very little evidence of vandalism and anti-social behaviour and certainly none out of the ordinary.  New schools, a new library, a revived shopping centre look to have lifted the Estate and, of course, it continues to offer decent homes to many.

The story of Speke continues. The story to date is, unavoidably perhaps, of high ambition only partially or perhaps briefly fulfilled – a reminder that we need an economy that works for people as much as those people need good, affordable housing.

Sources

(1) This quote from 2012 and the following from 2014 are from the Speke Guestbook.

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

(3) Eddie Loyden, House of Commons Debate, Dunlop Plant, Speke (Closure), 26 March 1979

(4) Rob Monaghan (Liverpool Vison) quoted in London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Enterprise Zones: Only One Piece of the Economic Regeneration Puzzle (July 2012)

(5) Thomas Ellerton, Exploring the impact of New Labour urban regeneration policy at the local scale: the implications of an approach to ‘joining-up’ on the coordination of urban regeneration, University of Sheffield PhD thesis (April 2014)

(6) Pavan Mehta, The Impact of Urban Regeneration on Local Housing Markets – A Case Study of Liverpool (ND)

(7) Alistair Houghton, ‘Jaguar Land Rover Extending Halewood in £130m Investment‘, Liverpool Echo, 30 January 2017

(8) My thanks to Kenn Taylor whose comment above pointed me to this positive detail.

(9) Linda Grant, ‘Calm Yourself Down’, The Guardian, 10 July 1999

(10) Homes and Communities Agency, Speke Regeneration Liverpool (November 2013)

(11) Liverpool Housing Trust quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

(12) Quoted in David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’

The White City Estate, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone’

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1990s, 2000s, Hammersmith, Regeneration

Last week’s post examined the origins of the White City Estate at a time when the state’s role in providing decent homes for working-class people was firmly embedded.  Those ideals remained – and can be seen in the further development of the Estate – long into the post-war era but from the 1970s there were some who argued council housing caused rather than alleviated poverty. The Estate would become a site of this struggle and even today – as its ongoing regeneration continues – it’s a symbol of how far contemporary ideas around the form and character of social housing have shifted from the earlier model pioneered by the London County Council (LCC).

‘Air view of the White City Estate, Hammersmith’ from The County of London Plan (1943) – showing the Estate as completed by 1939

Originally, the intention remained to improve the design and facilities of council estates. Hammersmith Park, built on the site of the Japanese Garden created for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, was reopened for the benefit of White City residents with added tennis courts and playground in 1954.  More recently, it has become a mark of our changing values when, in 2013, the then Conservative-controlled Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham proposed to lease half the park to Play Football, a private company intending to let pay-to-play facilities.  Some form of compromise appears to have been reached but one which will, nevertheless, see free public facilities hived off to the private sector. (1)  Given the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets, the incentive – hard-pressed councils might argue the necessity – to monetise community assets will continue. (2)

Malabar Court

While the White City Estate was substantially complete by the early fifties, the neighbourhood shows the continuing attempts to modernise and adapt council housing to changing times.  Malabar Court (at the corner of India Way and Commonwealth Avenue) was designed by Neil Moffett and Partners as sheltered housing for elderly people and opened in 1966. A ‘pile of ascending hexagons’, Pevsner thought it a ‘welcome respite’ to what he considered the dull uniformity of the rest of the Estate. (3)

White City Close

The small White City Close (or Wood Lane) Estate, east of White City just north of Television Centre, shows how far thinking around council house design had evolved by the 1970s.  In a conscious reaction to the high-rise boom of the 1960s and overbearing scale of some earlier local authority schemes, White City Close was designed as a compact series of two- to four-storey brown-brick terraces enclosing landscaped footways and courts.  Designed by John Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke and opened in 1978, it’s a little echo of their earlier and successful Lillington Gardens Estate designed for Westminster City Council and their far more troubled (and since largely demolished) Marquess Estate built by Islington in the late seventies.

In 1981, ownership and management of the White City Estate was transferred to Hammersmith and Fulham Council from the Greater London Council but by the 1990s the Estate and its community had fallen on hard times.  In 1996, the Council (under Labour control from 1986 to 2006) successfully applied for an £8m grant from the Government’s Single Regeneration Budget to revive the Estate.

Commonwealth Avenue

Environmental improvements, housing upgrades and a renovated health centre followed but, if subsequent reports are to be believed, much remained to be done.  According to the Evening Standard in 2004, the Estate was ‘a blighted area where nobody wants to live’.  The rest is a masterclass in the demonising journalism which has so influenced perceptions of council estates in recent decades: (4)

When a man in a suit parks outside Canberra Primary School’s double-height wire fence, he cannot punch in the keypad security code and slip through the school’s fortified gates quickly enough.  Three blonde, pony-tailed girls pushing baby buggies display a similar heads-down, no looking left or right attitude, as they walk between the estate’s redbrick, five-storey blocks of flats. Nobody lingers on White City’s streets. Only a shuffling, middle-aged Asian man wants to chat, offering me a cigarette from an empty Marlboro packet.  “You live here?” he asks as I edge away. ‘No, just having a walk.’

One feels for the friendly (though ‘shuffling’) Asian man.  One wonders if the three young women with babies took such a hostile view of this stranger as she apparently took of them.  But, if you want to paint a picture of depressing anomie, the journalist had pressed all the right buttons.  Was it simply her brief or was she herself a product of how so many who didn’t live in council housing had been conditioned to understand it?

Champlain House

Five years later (and with, to be fair, some evidence of renewal taking place), rather more seasoned observers took a different view.  The Estate appeared – in contrast to earlier reports – ‘to be well provided for in terms of community facilities and amenities’ and ‘well maintained with evidence of repairs and maintenance work underway as well as new building’. (5)

Residents’ views were mixed.  Most would not recommend the Estate to others; some definitively (‘Not at all. Nothing to like about it’) but many rather more equivocally, as if reflecting how outsiders perceived the Estate as much as than their own experience:

It depends on what you’re looking for – for people who’ve got nowhere else to go it’s okay and they are upgrading it a lot, they are really doing a lot of work to it…

I love it. It’s where I know, I’ve seen it over the years. It’s my home…

I’ve been here twelve years so I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone, particularly if they want a house or need more space than these flats.

In general, the Estate’s actual residents ‘offered quite a balanced view’ of the Estate; some praising its quietness and convenience, many agreeing that young people in particular were poorly served.

Hard data provides another perspective.  By 2009, in terms of household income, White City was ‘among the most deprived areas of the whole country’, parts of it in the bottom five per cent nationally.  Three years later, another set of statistics gives chapter and verse.  Across the wider White City area, 29 per cent of households were single adults and 15 per cent lone parent with dependent children.  Members of ethnic minorities (mainly Black African, Somalian and Eritrean, and Black Caribbean) were also disproportionately represented, forming 46 per cent of the total.  Twenty-eight per cent of the population were under 18. (6)

Hudson Close

The point, of course, is not that these groups are the ‘problem’ but that they are the groups most likely to suffer problems.  To some extent, there was a continuity here; some had seen the Estate as ‘blighted’ from the outset by the large proportion of former slum dwellers who made up its first residents. Then most were probably in employment.  In 2012, 29 per cent of the Estate’s working-age residents received Income Support, Job Seekers Allowance or Employment and Support Allowance or Incapacity Benefits.

This reflected, of course, the residualisation of council housing that has occurred since the 1970s – the fact that it is increasingly confined to those with the most pressing and urgent needs.  This, in a sense, was an issue recognised by Stephen Greenhalgh who led Hammersmith and Fulham’s Conservative Council from 2006 to 2012: (7)

Social housing was meant to help lift people out of the slums. Instead many social housing estates have become the very ghettos of multiple social deprivation that they were supposed to replace.

‘Ghettos’ isn’t a very nice word but we might see some truth in this statement. Greenhalgh’s starting point, however, was that social housing was now ‘welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement predominate’.

The view of Greenhalgh and Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform. Question the labels and ignore the arrows.

There are two difficulties with this. Firstly, straightforwardly, it caricatures estates and their communities. On the White City Estate (where 74 per cent of occupants remained council tenants), local Labour councillor Jean Campbell articulated some of the anger and insult felt by local residents: (8)

My community on the White City Estate is a vibrant one. My neighbours include people working in health care, people working as police officers or people who are simply doing their best to bring up their kids and look after their families.

Secondly, it reverses cause and effect. Council housing is no longer seen as a response to social problems – the ‘safety net’ that even its minimalist advocates recognise – but one of their causes.  In one leap, Greenhalgh moves from correlation – the reality that many poorer people do live in council housing (for all the reasons of public policy that this blog has charted and because, fundamentally, they have been failed by the free market) – to causation.

To do so, of course, suits a free market agenda ideologically opposed to state intervention in all its forms which is seen in his astonishing solution to these alleged difficulties.  Greenhalgh recommended that social housing rents should rise to market levels and that a single form of (so-called) Assured Tenancy – assured for six months – should operate across private and public rental sectors.  Documents secured by Hammersmith’s Labour MP Andy Slaughter under Freedom of Information legislation revealing a 2009 meeting between Greenhalgh, Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps (then shadow Ministers of Communities and Local Government and Housing respectively) show the influence of this radical thinking upon the incoming Conservative government. (9)

Unsurprisingly when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s 2011 Localism Act gave social landlords the right to introduce fixed-term tenancies, Hammersmith and Fulham were among to signal their acceptance of the offer, proposing five year tenancies for most but as little as two years for others, especially those under 25. It wanted, apparently, ‘to incentivise residents to make the most of the their lives’.  That actual tenants ‘better able to predict their housing future…reported being better placed to manage other challenges in their life’ (including employment) was not considered. (10)

Whilst the hard-core radicalism of that agenda has not yet been implemented, it was previewed in 2012 when the plans of Hammersmith and Fulham Council to relocate 500 of the Borough’s homeless families on benefits to the Midlands – to move them to rented accommodation elsewhere rather than prioritise them for local council housing. Tory Hammersmith wanted to favour ‘wealth creators’ rather than the ‘workless and dependent on benefits…not making a contribution that could help drive economic growth’. (11)

This was linked to a voluntary and accelerated programme of selling off council homes by Hammersmith and Fulham: of 256 homes sold between April 2011 and December 2013, 46 went through Right to Buy and 210 were sold at auction, mostly through Savills. (12)  The phrase ‘social cleansing’ might be overused but here it seems justified.

A surprise victory by the Labour Party in the 2014 Borough elections – the Party gained 11 seats and took control of the Council – has put paid to the most far-reaching and ideologically-driven of these proposals but they exist, of course, on a spectrum and ‘regeneration’ – in Hammersmith and across London – continues to be controversial and, in many cases, a threat to established communities. (13)

This view towards central London shows BBC Television Centre to bottom left and the Westfield shopping centre under construction

There should be nothing controversial in desiring and assisting the economic uplift of an area.  The White City Opportunity Area was first mooted in 2004 and has received broad cross-party support since then.  The project’s initial ‘Framework for Development’, produced jointly with the Greater London Authority, contains the laudable ambitions of most such documents: (14)

By the end of the decade, the White City Opportunity Area will have been transformed into a thriving new, mixed use urban quarter of the highest quality, with a strong sense of place and local identity shared with the surrounding community…The area will be recognised as an exemplar of sustainable urban development, successfully combining strategic and local aspirations.

It was also clear that in housing terms, ‘social rented accommodation should predominate and there should be affordable key worker housing’.

In later iterations, the emphasis has shifted to ‘affordable’ housing and most of you reading this will know that that is a very shifty term indeed – Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Mayor of London defined it as 80 per cent of market rates.  In 2013, the broad goal was ‘to increase housing choice’ in ‘White City West’ (including the Estate) and to ‘enable estate renewal and seek a mixed and balanced community’. (15)  If Greenhalgh represents the most extreme position, a broad critique of mono-tenure council estates has achieved wider political agreement.

An artist’s impression of the Westfield Centre and new housing

Back in 2004, it was projected optimistically that the regeneration of the White City area – the BBC Media Village, the Westfield shopping centre (opened in 2008 and currently being extended), the ongoing development of a new Imperial College campus, and more – might create 11,000 new jobs.  Training schemes for young people were part of the package.

Typically, these were concentrated in the retail sector whilst the London Development Agency promoted a scheme ‘to train the estate’s 30 per cent unemployed to fill hospital jobs such as receptionists, ward clerks and security guards’. Mark Billington, Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s head of employment initiatives, was quoted as saying ‘Life is easier if employers tell us exactly what the skills they need are, and what type of people they want’. (16)

You can draw your own conclusions here but, given that almost one in three of the White City Estate’s working-age residents remained jobless eight years later, the impact has been less than hoped.  One wonders too how many of these relatively unskilled and non-unionised jobs are on zero-hours contracts.

Welcome to the new world. The White City Estate was born into an era of full employment where secure and decent homes were viewed as the necessary accompaniment to secure jobs. Now it seems that insecurity is seen as the necessary corrective to some perceived failure of personal enterprise and the market must rule.

Sources

(1) The Shepherds’ Bush Blog, ‘Reprieve For Hammersmith Park?’, 28 March 2014

(2) This is well documented in Tom Crewe, ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, London Review of Books, 15 December 2016

(3) Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 3: North West (1991)

(4) Susan Gray, ‘Great White Hope; What hope is there for a blighted area where nobody wants to live?’, Evening Standard, 22 March 2004

(5) Laura Lane and Anne Power (LSE Housing and Communities), Low income housing estates: a report to Hammersmith United Charities on supporting communities, preventing social exclusion and tackling need in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (September 2009)

(6) White City Neighbourhood Budget Pilot Project produced for London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham prepared by NHS North West London and Research by Design Ltd (2012)

(7) Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform (Localis, 2009)

(8) ShepherdsBushW12.com, ‘Council Plotting to Get Rid of the Poor’, MP claims housing plans are ‘Shirley Porteresque’, 9 July 2009

(9) ‘Not Decent! The Evolution of Radical Tory Social Housing Policy: Full extracts from documents supplied by Hammersmith & Fulham Council in response to an FoI request from Andrew Slaughter MP’.  These documents can be found on the website of the site of West Ken and Gibbs Green – a Hammersmith and Fulham residents’ group fighting proposals to demolish their own Earls Court estate.

(10) Hammersmith quotation and residents’ views from D Robinson and A Walshaw, ‘Security of Tenure in Social Housing in England’, Social Policy and Society, vol 13 no. 1, January 2014. The damaging effects of insecurity of tenure are also discussed in John Bone, ‘Neo-Liberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK‘, Sociological Research Online, vol 19, issue 4, 2014

(11) Randeep Ramesh, ‘Tory borough plans to move homeless away from London’, The Guardian, Wednesday 2 May 2012

(12) Dave Hill, ‘The great Hammersmith and Fulham council house sell off‘, The Guardian, 19 May 2014

(13) In Hammersmith, this is particularly true of the Earls Court scheme (mentioned in footnote 9) which has been extensively charted by Dave Hill in the Guardian.

(14) Hammersmith and Fulham Council, White City Opportunity Area: A Framework for Development (adopted 2004)

(15) Greater London Authority, Opportunity Area Planning Framework: Second Public Consultation, June 2013

(16) Susan Gray, ‘Great White Hope’

The Pendleton Estate, Salford II: ‘a distinctive neighbourhood with a strong identity’

Tags

2000s, Regeneration

You’ll find more on the Pendleton Estate at the current exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester which showcases the work and archives of long-term residents John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming.

Last week’s post examined what can only be judged in social and economic terms the failure of the Ellor Street comprehensive redevelopment of the 1960s.  As a further round of regeneration took off in the 2000s, new priorities and methods – and perhaps changed values – were in evidence.

Bronte, Madison and Fitzwarren Courts with clearance to the foreground

When Ellor Street and surrounds were first comprehensively redeveloped fifty years ago, it was understood that responsibility lay with the state or, to use a language less currently tarnished, with the tools of democracy.  One of those tools was cheap finance – grants provided directly by central government and backed by the assets of local government. From 1979, however, under both Thatcher and New Labour, there was a belief that the private sector offered resources and capital that the state lacked – although no-one ever argued that the latter was in any way cheaper money.

There were other changes too.  Once council housing had seemed the necessary (if not unchallenged) solution to the housing needs of the working class.   Now reliance was placed to a far greater extent on the market.  This, at least, was the rationale of the Labour Government’s 2002 Pathfinder Housing Market Renewal programme: a plan to demolish generally structurally sound – sometimes neglected but rarely slum – housing in order to build smaller numbers of new homes and revive local housing markets.  Much of central Salford was covered in the scheme.

Chimney Pot Park, Urban Splash

In Pendleton itself, the major intervention – well-known to planners and architects – occurred in an area of Edwardian terraced housing adjacent to Chimney Pot (or Langworthy) Park; the very same illustrated as an example of Edwardian bye-law housing in the first post of this series).   A joint venture between Urban Splash, English Partnerships, Salford City Council and the Northwest Regional Development Agency was agreed in 2003.  The first phase of the so-called ‘upside-down houses’ was completed in 2007,  remodelled with bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor, and living rooms and kitchens above where a new roof terrace spans the former back alley to create garaging and, on top, a communal deck.

Chimney Pot Park showing deck and parking to left with Salford Precinct and blocks to rear

It’s attractive enough though it all seemed, despite the architectural acclaim the scheme has received, a little sterile when I walked through.  ‘Achingly fashionable’, in the words of one report, the scheme was designed for ‘a new community of urban pioneers’ and ‘aspirational young couples’. (1) But, at an initial sale price of £120,000 (judged three times what might count as ‘affordable’ in local terms at the time), it had little relevance to the lives of those who once lived there or those that live in the social housing nearby. Urban Splash themselves pulled out of the project in 2014, replaced by the Great Places Housing Association. (2)

Pendleton Together’s masterplan for the current redevelopment

Still, in 2008, 93 per cent of Pendleton’s housing stock was council-owned.  In the next phase of regeneration, the ‘target position’ – outlined in the ‘Benefits Realisation Plan’ behind ‘Creating a New Pendleton’ in July 2009 – was to create ‘a mixed tenure residential area’.  The language is as telling as the detail. (3)

The vehicle for this shift – which would raise 1253 council properties to Decent Homes Standard, oversee the demolition of 860 homes including those in four multi-storey blocks, and ‘deliver a minimum of 460 units for affordable rent, circa 950 units for market sale and a minimum of 25 units for shared ownership’ – announced in 2013 was a Private Finance Initiative scheme.

I’ll quote from a contemporary report to illustrate the nature of the high finance involved. You might understand it better or differently but, to me, it’s an act of mystification; an example of the smoke and mirrors which currently reward capital at the expense of social need: (4)

Investec Bank arranged the bond issue on behalf of joint venture FHW Dalmore, with £71.7 million of Class A senior secured notes at 5.414 per cent and £10.9 million of Class B junior secured notes at 8.35 per cent.  The two-tranche approach sees subordinated B loan notes offering protection to A note investors, with the debt on-lent to the borrower as a single loan at a blended margin, and a standard project finance covenant package.

Pendleton Together, charged with delivering the scheme, was a consortium comprising, amongst others, the housing association Together Housing Group, ‘building and regeneration specialist’ Keepmoat, architects and planners Lathams, and Salford City Council.  Its vision is outlined in what is – and I don’t mean this quite as cynically as it sounds – a masterpiece of the type, a glossy brochure called An Ideal for Living.

For a total investment of some £650m, the Ideal envisaged: (5)

a distinctive neighbourhood with a strong identity…it will be a celebration of everything that is good about urban living. It will be an area of opportunity where anyone can make something of their life, set up a business and live happily, healthily and safely.

These are worthy enough aims although the idea that we should aspire to setting a business seems a far more sinister marker than intended – a sign of how far we have moved from the idea of dignified and secure employment, how easily we accept the current statistical lie of ‘self-employment’. The detailed agenda is  admirable: as well as improved housing, 10 hectares of ‘quality public space’, 500 new jobs, training for 3200, ‘healthy lifestyle classes and programmes’, a city farm and so on.  All this is accompanied by the new buzzwords – ‘secure by design’, placemaking’ and ‘people streets’. (‘Some would say’, the brochure pronounces, ‘that the 1963 Comprehensive Development Plan for the place was designed by a road traffic engineer. We think they are right.’)

Salix Court with the refurbished Sycamore Court to rear

Alongside this were other, linked initiatives. Some Salford council housing stock had been transferred to City West in 2008. A new stock transfer of 8500 homes from Salford Council to the arms-length management organisation Salix Homes was voted through by tenants in November 2014 – though almost 40 per cent of those who voted rejected the proposal. By writing off an existing £65.1m debt, the new registered social landlord was released to access new funds – a prerequisite (not available to the council) to the expenditure of £22m on modernising 2000 homes across the city in 2015. (5)

Salford City Council’s report, Shaping Housing in Salford 2020; a Housing Strategy for Salford, published in November 2015, confirms that ‘private sector investment in the city will continue to provide a vital role in delivering housing development’ and – in an understandable and perhaps necessary display of civic boosterism – proclaims the success of other local regeneration initiatives, notably MediaCityUK [sic] in the new Salford Quays.

‘New Pendleton by night’ as envisaged by Pendleton Together

Salford may still be, it admits, the 18th most deprived local authority in the country, but we have moved a long way from the politics of the 1980s when Hackney, as a form of political mobilisation, proclaimed itself. ‘Britain’s poorest borough’.  The report asserts that ‘Salford’s population and economy is growing, employment is rising and the social and cultural life in the city is thriving’. (6)

Thorn Court

There have been improvements. The flat I stayed in in Thorn Court at the top end of Broadwalk was modern and well-equipped.  Thorn Court and most of the adjacent blocks have been refurbished, albeit reclad in the now de rigueur dayglow style.

Mango Place with Magnolia Court to rear

There are new bright, shiny blocks too and suburban-style housing to please the new traditionalists. Of the original three slab blocks of the Ellor Street redevelopment, one had been demolished and those which remain now house students from nearby Salford University.  Social housing across Salford has been updated and modernised.

Clearance underway off Churchill Way

In the meantime, in the midst of the Pendleton regeneration, things are a mess.  There are swathes of wasteland where homes have been demolished, barren open spaces still very far from the parkland envisaged, and down-at-heel or redundant community buildings untouched by the new Salford apparently emerging. There’s an alienating mix of contemporary refurb and the unreconstructed past exacerbated by the drawn-out process and blight of actually existing regeneration as it is experienced beyond the pages of the glossy planning brochures.

Pear Tree Close where one resident remains, having refused to accept the level of compensation offered by the Council

St Paul’s Church, occupying a central position on the Broadwalk, still caters devotedly to those left behind by all this change.  The question remains – as it does for all such regeneration schemes (and I will acknowledge their generally good intentions here) – how far the plethora of training schemes and lifestyle programmes can address the intractable realities of non-existent or insecure and low-paid employment and simple, plain poverty.

Broadwalk with the closed Flemish Weavers pub in the foreground and Spruce Court to the rear

Nor is it controversial now to question Private Finance Initiatives as a vehicle for – what should be, at least – public investment.  The method’s convoluted and protracted deal-making, the additional expense incurred catering for all the special interests involved, the high cost of borrowing have been widely criticised as have – although the Salford example doesn’t seem especially egregious in this regard – the long and disruptive delays in implementation.  It’s been ‘an extreme form of contractualisation’, proven, in particular, ‘to be far more complicated and expensive to apply to the social housing sector’. (7)

In all, as Stuart Hodkinson has concluded, rather mildly in the circumstances:

The PFI experience…calls into question one of the underlying principles behind the modernisation of social housing—that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector in providing housing services.

And that’s a good place to finish.  Clearly, this extended Salford case-study demonstrates that the national and local state didn’t get everything right in its own rehousing programmes.  There have been errors  and inadequacies in process and implementation which have treated its citizens poorly.  Having learnt from those mistakes but with an awareness now of our contemporary failures, it’s hard not to see public finance and democratic procedures as offering the most cost-efficient and accountable solution to our current housing crisis.  Beyond that, the lesson from Salford – and other left-behind communities – is that we owe a communal duty to all those who have not benefited from our nation’s affluence.  In this, decent and affordable housing is but one component.

Sources

(1) Phil Griffin, ‘On the Terraces’, Special issue. Housing Building design, BD magazine supplement no. 8, June 15 2007

(2) ‘Urban Splash Chimney Pot Park Housing Scheme Eyesore Slated by Salford Councillor’, Salford Star, 17 June 2014

(3) Creating a New Pendleton Benefits Realisation Plan (July 2009)

(4) Luke Cross, ‘Together closes Salford PFI with £82.6m two-tranche bond’, Social Housing, 4 October 2013

(5) Pendleton Together, An Ideal for Living (ND)

(5) Pete Apps, ‘Salford tenants vote for stock transfer’, Inside Housing, 4 November 2014 and Neal Keeling, ‘Modernising 2,000 homes to cost £22m: Investment follows vote to transfer ownership of housing’, Manchester Evening News, 9 February 2015

(6) Salford City Council, Shaping Housing in Salford 2020; a Housing Strategy for Salford (November 2014)

(7) Stuart Hodkinson, ‘The Private Finance Initiative in English Council Housing Regeneration: A Privatisation too Far?’, Housing Studies, vol 26, no 6, 2011

The Pendleton Estate I: ‘A Salford of the Space Age’ or ‘Concrete Wasteland’?

Tags

1960s, 2000s, Regeneration

You’ll find more on the Pendleton Estate at the current exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester which showcases the work and archives of long-term residents John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming.

We left the people of Ellor Street last week facing the brave new world of comprehensive redevelopment in the early sixties with mixed feelings.  One reporter noted ‘a sense of uneasiness around…in many cases hidden by a joke or a resolution to face the new life’. (1)  Six years later, the scheme (with its ‘tree-lined open spaces, a community centre and a health centre all segregated from traffic’) well underway, another reporter – or perhaps the same one – described the residents’ embrace of their new surroundings.  He described the new Pendleton as ‘A Salford of the Space Age’.  ‘Small wonder’, he continued: (2)

that many Ellor Street folk have fought shy of moving to overspill areas or other parts of the City, and have waited eagerly for the chance of being rehoused here – if they leave their present homes.

Given the visionary idealism of the Report on the Plan which outlined the principles of the redevelopment scheme and the optimism which surrounded it both in Salford Borough Council and the local press, perhaps these hopes were understandable.

‘View of flexi-maisonette area from service road to the south’ from The Report on the Plan

It’s true that some of the rehoused residents had wanted houses rather than high-rise flats but the amenities of their new homes soon won them over:

We really wanted a house but these new flats are so nice and well-designed that I would not change for a house.  I like the underfloor heating, the nice living room, and bright bedrooms, we used to pay 16 shillings a week rent and now it is 44 shillings and 10 pence and well worth it.

This was the era – a brief one, in fact – in which high-rise took off.  A few years earlier, back in 1956, only 6 per cent of homes nationally had been provided in flats of over five storeys.  Ten years later, as the new Pendleton took shape, that proportion had risen to (and peaked at) 26 per cent.  Avoiding the obloquy that hindsight has visited on such high-rise construction, there seemed, at the time, many compelling reasons for this shift.

Ellor Street and Unwin Street under redevelopment (c) University of Salford and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The mass slum clearances of the period and the apparent requirement to build replacement housing at density in inner-city areas, compounded by new restrictions on greenfield construction and dislike of sprawling suburban estates, provided one causal bundle.  Salford, like many other inner-city authorities, also resented losing population and rateable income to beyond-border overspill.

There were less tangible but equally potent ideological currents too – a new concern for urbanism and a sense that high-rise represented the future, modernity in a new Britain sloughing off the obsolescence which seemingly characterised so much of its housing and townscapes.  The Report on the Plan claimed that the scheme represented ‘an unparalleled opportunity for Salford to think today what other cities would think tomorrow’.  In the end, the judgments of tomorrow would be far less positive but that’s to jump ahead. The Ellor Street redevelopment almost uniquely captures many of the hopes and ambitions of the period.

A contemporary view of John Lester and Eddie Colman Courts (Walter Greenwood Court was demolished in 2001)

The original plans had been devised within Salford, a council, according to Glendinning and Muthesius, ‘dominated by its formidable City Engineer, G Alexander McWilliam, and by its equally entrenched direct labour organisation’.  Three 15-storey slab blocks – Walter Greenwood, Eddie Colman and John Lester Courts, designed in-house – had already been started. (3)

Eight-storey flats at Salford as featured in Trussed Concrete Review, no 10, 1955

These and Salford’s earlier high-rise efforts – such as the Truscon flats in Kersal Moor – were judged drab and uninspiring by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but it had little local power in this era of jealous municipalism.  Salford, however, wasn’t one of the big beasts of local government and here the Ministry – playing cannily on the Borough’s fears of loss of status – secured some influence.

Salford agreed, at the Ministry’s suggestion, to the appointment of former LCC Chief Architect and Robert Matthew and former LCC Senior Planner Percy Johnson-Marshall as architect-planners for the entire scheme.  The Architectural Research Unit of Edinburgh University, where both were now based, were to be executive architects for significant elements of it. The Ministry, for its part and against the preferences of the Edinburgh team responsible for detailed design, insisted on five 17-storey point blocks and prefabricated construction as central government sought to boost new methods of industrialised building – another contemporary manifestation of self-conscious modernity and seen as a necessary means of completing the rehousing revolution of the time. (4)

Thorn Court and Spruce Court (in the foreground) before refurbishment and Broad Street, the A6

In housing terms and in sheer numbers, this was a success.  Salford completions increased from 30 in 1962 to 1468 in 1966; into the early seventies it built more housing per capita than any other English city, even Birmingham undergoing its own high-rise revolution. (5)  The civic centre – a much vaunted element of the original planning – didn’t materialise and the shopping centre never took off as any kind of regional hub.

Peter Hook, invited to celebrate the demolition of one of the three 14-storey ‘Orchards’ tower blocks in 2013 (c) Manchester Evening News

On this occasion, there don’t seem to have been any particular problems arising from system-building but there were early criticisms of the housing. Peter Hook (‘Hooky’ of Joy Division and New Order) was no fan: (6)

All my friends moved to Ellor Street, which was all high-rise 70’s flats and a new shopping precinct all built out of concrete. It was rotten, horrible; like a concrete wasteland. And that was when it opened.

Nigel Pivaro (back in the day Terry Duckworth in Coronation Street – set in Salford, of course; now a respected journalist) speaks for many in decrying what was lost: (7)

the demise of the traditional street, the corner shop and small local pub…In short, a whole way of life ceased to exist and the way Salfordians interacted with their neighbours and the world around them changed dramatically.

‘Old institutions…were simply never properly replaced,’ he concluded; ‘what has replaced the old order is not only bland and characterless but actually has never been put back at all’.

New blocks  – probably John Lester and Eddie Colman Courts – under construction in the early 1960s. St Paul’s Church in the centre on the new Broadwalk remains a mainstay of the present community (c) University of Salford and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In this, he echoed the bleak reportage of an ITN news story on Salford high-rise, broadcast in 1988: (8)

Society has broken down in some of Salford’s tower blocks. Civic squalor has become a breeding ground for crime. Muggings, burglaries and firebombs are a brutal fact of daily life. Here thousands live in fear of losing their property, even their lives.

One tower block, it was claimed, had suffered twenty arson attacks in a single year.

The former Paddock pub (now a hostel) – one of the very few old buildings retained in the original redevelopment – with the unmodernised Albion Towers to the rear

The judgment between the competing narratives – bright-eyed modernity and its early welcome and the dislocation and loss it is subsequently held to have caused – seems pretty clear but there’s really no simple ‘truth’ here.  There are issues of timing and perspective. There is nostalgia both for the old and the old ‘new’. It seems to me that the romanticisation of the slums should be criticised just as much as we now attack the naivety (or worse) of planners.  And there are unexplored counterfactuals and neglected contexts.  Could slum clearance and redevelopment have been done differently, better? Very likely but we can’t re-write the wider history which has devastated our traditional working-class communities since the 1960s.

In 2007, Pendleton was rated the twelfth most deprived area in the country.  Some 41 per cent of its 18 to 24 year olds lacked any educational qualification (compared to the national average of 29 per cent); 48 per cent of adults were economically active (nationally, the figure stood at 63 per cent). (9)

A contemporary view of Salford Precinct and the Briar Hill Court  block of flats

In 2011, when riots broke out around the Salford Precinct (intended as the great show-piece of the Ellor Street redevelopment), the area was described as the third worst area in the country for child poverty, and the seventh for unemployment.  In the high-end stores of central Manchester, people: (10)

made off with £2,000 guitars, plasma TVs, and designer clothes from Liam Gallagher’s Pretty Green boutique, in the neglected Salford Precinct they were taking tins of food from Lidl and second-hand televisions from Cash Converters.

‘People who have got nothing wanted to show that they have nothing,’ said one of those involved. Behind this lay something both more diffuse – a resentment of local gentrification and the marginalisation it highlighted – and hostility towards the police as its enforcers.  The riots were, according to one study, a ‘response, albeit lacking in a formal political articulation, to perceived injustices that relate to poverty, exclusion and oppressive policing’.  David Cameron and others condemned them as ‘criminality, pure and simple’. (11)

Brydon Court: where the police amassed in a show of force and the riots began

Alice Coleman argued that there was no excuse for such behaviour – after all, there had been no riots in the poverty-stricken interwar period so graphically portrayed by Walter Greenwood in Salford – though Love on the Dole portrays a brutal police attack on a peaceful protest of the unemployed against the new Means Test.  But perhaps people brought up in a post-war period which undertook to despatch such poverty, in an era of rampant consumerism (for some) of which the Salford Precinct had once been both symbol and promise, had higher expectations and a sharper sense of grievance.

At any rate, the time was ripe for new regeneration initiatives.  These, however, would reflect very changed times.  We’ll examine them in next week’s post.

Sources        

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

(2) Salford City Reporter, April 1965, quoted in Tony Flynn, ‘50 years ago: ‘Space-age’ Salford high-rise dream comes true’, 8 April, 2015. The following quotation is drawn from the same source.

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

(4) Soledad Garcia Ferrari, Miles Glendinning, Paul Jenkins and Jessica Taylor ‘Putting the User First? A Pioneering Scottish Experiment in architectural research’, Architectural Heritage, Volume 19, Issue 1

(5) Figures from Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block and EW Cooney, ‘High Flats in Local Authority Housing in England and Wales since 1945’, in Anthony Sutcliffe, Multi-Storey Living. The British Working-Class Experience (1974)

(6) Quoted in Pendleton Together, An Ideal for Living

(7) Nigel Pivaro, ‘Salford Street Loss’, Salford Star, 14 May 2010

(8) ITN, Salford Flats (1988)

(9) Cited in Luc Vrolijks and Maarten Königs, Urban Futures for Pendleton, linking city branding to urban regeneration, 43rd ISOCARP Congress 2007

(10) Helen Clifton and Eric Allison, ‘Manchester and Salford: a tale of two riots’, The Guardian, 6 December 2011

(11) Bob Jeffery and Waqas Tufail, ‘“The riots were where the police were”: Deconstructing the Pendleton Riot’, Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive

The Five Estates, Peckham, Part III: Back to the Future

Tags

1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

‘After 10 years and £60m investment, five estates in Peckham, south London, have finally been transformed from pits of urban blight into shining examples of regeneration.’  So wrote one housing journalist in 2004. (1)

Cator Street – the new face of the Five Estates

In fact, as we saw in the first post of this series, the Five Estates hadn’t always been the pits and, in total, their regeneration cost something in the order of £290m.  Last week, I looked at what had ‘gone wrong’ with (or ‘on’ – there’s a significant distinction there) the estates to justify such expenditure.  This week I’ll examine and assess the thinking which underlay regeneration and the convoluted, troubled form it took.

It was said that £16m had been spent to improve the North Peckham Estate by the mid-1980s.  But already, there were many who felt that such palliative measures – chiefly tackling problems of security by adding bars to ground-floor windows and providing new front doors – were inadequate.  Some, allegedly tenants amongst them, felt that complete demolition was the ‘ideal solution’ but at the time that was judged both too expensive and – with 24,000 on the Southwark waiting list for housing – impracticable. (2)

Alice Coleman, the guru of design disadvantagement who had investigated Southwark’s multi-storey estates, lived up to her mantra that ‘two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful’ by proposing that all but the lower two floors of the blocks be removed. She was upset that this apparently simple solution to the estate’s problems was rejected as more expensive than demolition and as adding to housing shortage. (3)

This plan shows areas improved under the Estate Action programme

The first serious attempt to tackle the problems of the North Peckham Estate in particular was the North Peckham Project established in 1985 – a joint venture of councillors, officers and tenants formed to agree a bid to the Department of Environment.  This bore fruit in the Estate Action programme begun in 1987.

This programme saw the refurbishment of around 1200 homes across the wider area.  On the Willowbrook Estate, for example, a relatively untroubled and mainly low-rise estate of four-storey maisonette blocks, £350,000 was spent on renovations, asbestos removal and a new entry phone system.  The twelve-storey Tonbridge House point block was demolished in a later wave of Estate Action improvements after 1992.

A contemporary image of Shurland Gardens (with added pitched roof) on the former Willowbrook Estate

But the big idea and the focus of the bulk of the £40m pledged by central government was the radical remodelling of the North Peckham Estate – basically an attempt to rectify what were now widely accepted as the design flaws of the original plan.  The second-storey walkways would go, new ground floor entrances to flats would be created with front and rear gardens where feasible, and access points to the estate would be reduced.  All this, of course, was an attempt to create the ‘defensible space’ that the previous estate had lacked.

Gated entrance to new development

The five-storey parking blocks (to which few now dared to entrust their vehicles) were to be adapted – one converted into neighbourhood offices, others into workshops and a training centre. Rolf Rothermel (of Rothermel Cooke, the architects with the new design brief) was keen to get cars – so assiduously removed in the original scheme – back on the estate, given the residents’ unofficial attempts to do just that: ‘people will do anything to park their cars reasonably near their homes, although this has meant driving through bollards or over landscaped areas up till now’. (4)

Lynbrook Grove

If these plans had some significant local support, the next – from a Conservative government decidedly hostile to local authorities (especially Labour ones) and their management of housing – did not.  In 1988 the North Peckham and Gloucester Grove Estates were together designated one of six pilot Housing Action Trusts.  The Trusts were private consortia set up to take over and regenerate council housing in designated areas – their relatively generous funding (money denied to the local authorities’ own efforts) was in a sense both carrot and stick in this attempt to take the ‘council’ out of ‘council housing’.

Tenants, however, were suspicious of the initiative, fearing loss of council management would lead to increased rents and reduced security of tenure.  At a packed meeting of North Peckham tenants in November 1988, fears were expressed, against the assurances offered by Housing Minister David Trippier in attendance, that rents might rise fivefold. (5)  That might have been exaggerated but the higher rents of properties managed by Housing Associations (the likely successor bodies) and the planned replacement of secure tenancies with assured were real enough. Opposition in Manchester’s Hulme Estate established the principle of tenant ballots and when, in October 1990, Southwark tenants got their chance to vote, they voted decisively – by a margin of over 60 per cent – to reject the proposal.

This left the ball back in Southwark’s court but, without anything like the resources needed to finance the major changes still felt necessary, it was forced again to play the system and seek central government funds under the rules of what was, by the mid-1990s, the new game in town – the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB).

The Peckham Partnership’s area of operation

Critically, SRB was predicated on bringing in outside capital through partnerships with private developers and housing associations.  The Peckham Partnership formed in 1994 was a consortium (comprising Southwark Council, tenant representatives, Countryside Properties plc, the Laing Group, a number of housing associations and other interested bodies) to prepare just such a bid.

There were a number of implications to this approach.  Firstly, the Partnership had a clear interest in accentuating and homogenising the negative.  Some pretty bleak statistics could be justified (and I used some in last week’s post) but there was a need, in Luna Glücksberg’s words, ‘to make the area look as desperate, needy and dilapidated as possible’.  As a local councillor recalled, ‘It wasn’t as if the area was all a sink estate…when you read the big document, you’d imagine this area was sort of beyond repair, sinking, sinking’. (6)

Secondly, because of that private sector and housing association involvement, this was a strategy, that placed a premium on redevelopment – in which new houses could be built for sale and shared ownership – rather than refurbishment.  To Graham Towers, the implications were clear: (7)

Despite good evidence of the success of the comprehensive improvement schemes and despite the very much higher costs, large parts of [the North Peckham Estate] were scheduled for demolition. The decision was arbitrary and so was its implementation. Selective redevelopment might have been justified by social and environmental objectives. What was actually done was simply to demolish a swathe of housing blocks – the dividing line between new and old cut straight through the middle of each estate.

A contemporary image of St George’s Way with flats for private sale and rental

It’s true, however, that redevelopment also chimed with the wisdom of the day.  There was a growing belief that mono-tenure estates were problematic in themselves (though, strangely, this is never a criticism made of the middle-class suburbs).  Pollard Thomas & Edwards were the architects selected to oversee the new scheme and Steve Chance, one of its directors, was clear on their goals: (8)

The intention was to have a mixed tenure neighbourhood and make it possible for people to want to buy private property in an area that was not popular. We are not trying to build a new estate, we are trying to build a bit of ordinary London.

(I’ll leave you to decode what the words ‘popular’ and ‘ordinary’ actually mean in that statement.)

This was a philosophy Southwark embraced in its ongoing redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate too –  the Council was, in the words of Catherine Bates (one of the Borough’s planning officers), ‘determined to break down the estate concept’.

The successful Peckham Partnership bid secured £60m SRB funding to add to the £47m contributed by the Borough, £37m from other public sources and £79.6m from private sources. It committed almost £180m to housing, £12.1m to ‘health, culture and sport’, £10.8m to education and some £9.7m to ‘enterprise’. (9)  This was, commendably, an holistic strategy, which recognised that the estates’ troubles were as embedded in hard social and economic realities as they were in any design characteristics.

I’ll focus on housing and here the plans were radical.  The number of homes on the Five Estates as a whole would be reduced from 4532 to 3694. Some 1854 new homes would be built, 70 per cent with gardens. And tenure would be diversified, from 99 per cent council-rented to 60 per cent – in precise numbers from 4314 council-rented homes to 2154 council-rented, 915 housing association and 625 owner-occupied.

Tilbury Close

The numbers can be confusing but the thrust was clear. The big idea, in design terms, was to return to a more traditional streetscape and more suburban style of architecture. The stated aim of the Peckham Partnership was to ‘provide family houses and a neighbourhood environment which encourages study, work, leisure and healthy living’.  The architect Will Alsop praised the new build’s ‘more traditional type of architecture with pitched roofs’ and a circulation around its buildings which felt ‘much safer and…more embracing’. (10)

Cronin Street

To Pollard Thomas & Edwards, the previous renovations, which involved the removal of walkways and partial demolitions but had left the basic layout of North Peckham intact, had been inadequate: the ‘homes themselves were fine, it was the bits in between that were disastrous’.  The new scheme, they claimed, would create a legible street pattern and a link between the shops and amenities of Peckham High Street and Burgess Park.

This was ‘back to the future’ with a vengeance, echoing all the tropes of the contemporary ‘defensible space’ movement which emphasised the ‘natural surveillance’ of the streets and the need to increase private space and reduce twilight zones of semi-public space.

The other big idea was mixed tenure and, more implicitly, social diversity.  Estates were held to have failed as estates: owner occupiers would bring capital into the area – social capital, if you will, which might raise educational standards and overall aspirations and just plain capital (money, in other words) that would improve an area’s amenities and retail. The Five Estates weren’t then an obvious site of gentrification but the potential was thought to exist.

Galleria Court, Sumner Road – a private development near to Burgess Park

Let’s critique all this. Firstly, the always over-extended process of ‘regeneration’ disrupts the lives of those who are its subjects.  As Anne Power observed of North Peckham, ‘whole children’s lives have been spent with the bulldozer’ –something which also sent the psychological ‘signal that the community is not good enough because they are knocking it down’.  Mike Rahman, a tenants’ representative, stated the project had turned the area into a ‘war zone’. (11)

Secondly, the process was experienced as top-down, the much-vaunted ‘consultation’ a sham, certainly in its earlier stages when the original masterplan emerged without tenant input (some modifications followed).  Besides, most tenants wanted to retain the council as landlord for the reasons touched on earlier and the promised ‘right of return’ was impossible to fulfil given that bedsits and one-bed flats were not replaced and given the overall reduction of council-rented homes. (12)

 

A contemporary image of Willsbridge, Gloucester Grove Estate

After ten years, the North Peckham and Camden Estates had been completely demolished, as had the older and more conventional tenement blocks of the Sumner Estate. Willowbrook had been largely and comprehensively refurbished in earlier phases of renovation. It is now self-managed by a Tenant Management Organisation. Gloucester Grove, though it retains its earlier and striking form, has also been completely refurbished.

Physically, Gloucester Grove is the one part of the Five Estates area to retain some of the built bravura of that earlier, now derided, phase of council house construction.  What’s replaced the rest – save for the odd hold-out – is a generic mix of terraced, two-storey housing and medium-rise blocks of flats and maisonettes in the slightly tarty style now favoured.

Kelly Avenue

It’s all pleasant enough in a low-key kind of way and – let’s be honest here – it almost certainly provides homes and an environment that are preferred by most of its residents. A Southwark survey in 2002 claimed 83 per cent of residents felt their quality of life had improved since moving. As someone who has defended the ‘pleasantness’ of the much criticised cottage estates, it doesn’t behove me to be too snooty about this later iteration.

What could be seen as the ‘official’ view is best expressed in this 2004 article in the trade press: (12)

After 10 years and £60m investment, five estates in Peckham, south London, have finally been transformed from pits of urban blight into shining examples of regeneration…Its trademark post-war high-rises were home to shocking levels of poverty and crime that were well above the national average. If you had told the residents that in a decade’s time, some houses in the area would be worth more than £300,000, they would have laughed you out of town.

Other than to question why the official measure of an area’s worth must always be the sale price of its property, there’s nothing much superficially to reject of this assessment.  But I hope – if you’ve managed to read all of this extended analysis – you’ll see a more complex truth emerging.

For one, not all the estates were ‘blighted’ and none from the outset.  What mattered most in their subsequent decline – more than any inherent architectural flaws – was the maelstrom of social (not design) disadvantage that shattered their community in the 1980s.  If the estates ‘failed’, they failed because we failed them. The historical truth is that council estates succeeded as flourishing and, in their way, mixed communities when their residents had decent and secure employment. It’s that simple.

As that traditional economy declined and as, additionally, council housing became increasingly confined to the most precarious of the new precariat, it was inevitable that the ‘respectability’ of estate communities would be eroded.  Their difficulties were a distillation of those suffered by those on the margins of the new economy. Design issues were triggered when these wider socio-economic factors come into play.

Most estates still provided good homes and good communities but, for some, by this point, ‘regeneration’ and the investment it released became a necessity.  The problem is that regeneration is too often a top-down process and is always, more than is necessary, a disruptive one.  It has also, almost uniformly, led to a loss of council housing and the diminution of tenants’ rights. The dependence on private capital to part-finance it makes this inevitable; the policy choice behind this isn’t and should be fought.

The irony of regeneration, here in the Five Estates and elsewhere, is that it seeks to reinvent architecturally a world that we lost through the political choices and economic dynamics accepted since the 1970s.

Sources

(1) Vikki Miller, ‘Peckham Rise’, Housing Today, 8 October 2004

(2) Dick Mortimer (coordinator of North Peckham Project) ‘Breaking the high-rise spiral of decline: one authority’s campaign of refurbishment’, Municipal Journal, 15 May 1987

(3) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’, The Dulwich Society Journal, Summer 2008.

(4) ‘Walkways to go in five year plan’, Architects’ Journal, vol 187, no 3, January 20 1988

(5) Debra Isaac, ‘Rent Fears for the Tenants’, The Times, November 14 1988

(6) Luna Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the Estates’, PhD in Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, January 2013

(7) Graham Towers, Shelter in Not Enough. Transforming multi-storey housing (Policy Press, 2000)

(8) Matt Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’, Building Design, December 15 2000, pp16-19

(9) Peckham Partnership, A Bid for Single Regeneration Budget Funding (September 1994)

(10) Robert Booth, ‘Damiola: could better design have saved his life?’, Architects’ Journal, vol 212, December 7 2000

(11) Both quoted in Weaver, ‘Dangerous Structures?’

(12) Discussed in Glücksberg, ‘Wasting the Inner-City’

(13) Vikki Miller, ‘Peckham Rise’

The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields II: ‘decent people living on a decent estate’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week’s post looked at the origins of the Meadow Well Estate and concluded these weren’t an adequate explanation either of its long-term stigma or the 1991 riots.  This week’s examines what followed.

If Meadow Well became the classic ‘problem estate’, this wasn’t apparent until the 1970s.  It had, however, been long neglected.  Belatedly, a £5.3m programme of modernisation began in 1971 which saw some general upgrading and the conversion of some of the Estate’s flats into self-contained houses. By 1974, the proportion of flats on the Estate stood at 74 per cent, down from the 84 per cent of the original design.

However well-meaning, the improvements exacerbated the problem of overcrowding on the Estate – eleven per cent of households were assessed overcrowded (compared to a Tynemouth average of two per cent) and large families predominated on the Estate, as they had from the outset.  In 1971, 35 per cent of its population were children, 14 years old or younger. When looking at the Brandon Estate in Southwark, this preponderance of youngsters (in fact, a slightly lower proportion) was held by some to be in itself a sufficient explanation of the Estate’s problems. (1)

Meadow Well also suffered severe social disadvantage – or let’s just call it poverty. Almost 60 per cent of heads of household were classified unskilled or semi-skilled, twice the Tynemouth average; male unemployment stood at 19 per cent, almost three times the North Tyneside average.  These figures would deteriorate as deindustrialisation hit the North-East with particular force in the 1980s. By 1991, it was said that on some streets four fifths of residents lacked work; youth unemployment rocketed.

At the same time, spending cuts – imposed by a Conservative government which deemed the Metropolitan Borough of North Tyneside (formed in 1974) to have overspent – hit the Estate hard.  The youth centre – burnt down during the riots, its destruction taken as a mark of their mindless violence – had been closed for ten months to save money; that perhaps a mark of another form of mindless violence.  The adjacent Royal Quays development, billed as a commercial revitalisation of the area, offered little to local residents other than a symbol of exclusion.

Avon Avenue

To Beatrix Campbell, Meadow Well was ‘one of the demonised domains of the North East.  It was a thrown-away place, imagined akin to Botany Bay, a place to which folks had been transported’.  Joe Caffrey, a local community worker described a ‘feeling of abandonment…people do believe, they genuinely believe, they’ve been abandoned by government, by local government, by the police and by other agencies’. (2)

In this context, crime rose.  In the words of Andy Dumble, a Meadow Well youth worker, there was:

No hope, no future – the opportunities to make it ain’t there, you’ve got to struggle really hard and the rewards are relatively small and young’uns can see that and they weigh it up against all the moral rules and that and they think, yeah, break it.

In the years preceding the riots, crime rates on the Estate were said to be the highest in the country.  Across its range, this criminality – from harassment and vandalism to burglary, car-jacking and ram-raiding – had its reasons, even its reason.  To some, it was a conscious kicking against the pricks; to others, it was part of a street culture led by older youngsters who were role models in the absence of others; to others still, it was a more or less legitimate way of getting by, earning some kind of living.

This was part of the anger felt when two young men of the Estate were killed in a stolen car during a police pursuit in September 1991, the trigger of the riots; they were going about their business.  But it exploded in the context of a deep antipathy felt towards – and allegedly reciprocated by – the police.  Nancy Peters captured the latter: ‘They class us as rubbish, the police did at one time…we were called everything’.  ‘Pigsville’, the name for the Estate at the local police station, was perhaps the least of it. (3)

To a young local male, the rioting was:

inevitable because of the harassment and the way the police were doing things – they weren’t going about it legally, they were doing it by their law, not the land’s law.

Of course, there’s an irony there and this liberal understanding of causes and dynamics might be viewed as too understanding by many of the Estate’s law-abiding residents, always the majority.

Nancy Peters opening the Mag House community centre

The women, in particular, were always found in the forefront of efforts to defend and serve the community.  Mass unemployment meant, in the words of Beatrix Campbell, that for men ‘their licensed means of episodic escape – waged work – was withdrawn. They were stuck at home.  The lads, on the other hand, stuck to the streets’.  Her conclusion?

Crime and coercion are sustained by men. Solidarity and self-help are sustained by women.  It is as stark as that.

Campbell’s feminist analysis is powerful but, for all her acknowledgement of context, there seems a slippage in her writing here – it becomes reductive and what stands as description slides into too simple explanation.  The women of the Estate were often more sympathetic: the men, they said, were ‘in a deep depression…they’ve sunk into a hole’; the kids gone wrong? – ‘who knows how those kids feel…to kick against this world, to feel so angry, so bitter’.

Beyond this, Campbell – whose study also examined Scotswood in Newcastle, the Ely Estate in Cardiff and Oxford’s Blackbird Leys Estate where riots took place at the same time – also concluded that estates themselves had become part of the problem:

Estates were once the ordinary manifestation of modernity. The agency was the municipality and mass housing was the form in which later modernism rearranged the landscape of most British cities.  Those were the days when working-class homesteads dominated the housing market, before and after the Second World War, when estate cultures held the rough and respectable in eternal and exhilarating tension. But those days were to disappear with the ascent of Thatcherism and the decline of public housing as popular housing.

In this perspective, the nature of estates (their separation and distinctness), while to some degree a result of the more recent economic and political shifts she describes, was also a cause of their problems.

The fact of ‘residualisation’ – that, after the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and Right to Buy’s diminution of stock, council housing became increasingly allocated to our most vulnerable citizens – gives some credibility to this charge but it’s too sweeping and does scant justice to internal complexities and the decent ‘ordinariness’ of most estates and most communities. (4)

It captured a moment, though, and it reflected (and reinforced) a popular and media narrative which has powerfully shaped housing policy ever since, most malignantly under the present Conservative government.

We should get back to Meadow Well.  Whatever the analysis of their causes, the riots did at least persuade those in power that ‘something should be done’. There had been earlier interventions on the Estate.  A Home Office Community Development Project ran between 1972 and 1977. The Cedarwood Trust – still doing good work – was a pastoral organisation established by local people, the Church of England and North Tyneside Council in 1980.

Renovated housing, Amble Close

Big money came in after 1991 in the shape, firstly, of the North Tyneside City Challenge project running from 1992 to 1998 which received £37.5m of central government funding, spent mainly on Meadow Well and the former pit village of Percy Main.  The Meadow Well Single Regeneration Budget board supervised local regeneration expenditure between 1995 and 2000 – an estimated £15m from central government, £11m from other public funds and £11.6m from private sources.

Typically, much of this was spent on reconfiguring the Estate.  There was improved landscaping and fencing to enhance the environment and develop ‘defensible space’ – and CCTV, of course.  There was a successful attempt to improve police-community relations by bringing sympathetic officers onto the Estate.

New housing in Oakham Gardens

And, though in Meadow Well the decision was taken to preserve the existing council housing, there was the usual attempt to socially engineer the Estate through changing its mix of housing tenure.  By 2000, around 750 homes had been demolished with new houses built for sale or rent – around 170 privately-owned homes and 370 housing association. (5)

Carole Bell

More meaningfully, there were the doughty efforts of local community leaders – nearly all female – to provide services and restore pride in the Estate.  Carole Bell, who suffered initial hostility and harassment through her cooperation with local authorities, was a mainstay of Meadow Well Connected founded in 1994 – a comprehensive community facility at the heart of the Estate. (6) Nancy Peters was feisty and indefatigable in its defence. Both women were awarded MBEs, proving perhaps that the honours system isn’t irredeemably corrupt.

Perceptions were slow to change and the memory of the 1991 riots and Estate’s earlier stigma linger on.  Last week’s post noted how an early (and unfair) ‘labelling’ of the Estate had contributed to its negative image before the Second World War.  Recent research confirms how how powerfully ‘stigma’ remains a creation of key opinion-formers in the local economy and media irrespective of realities on the ground in Meadow Well and elsewhere. (7)

Nor, as their protagonists would be the first to admit, can the many worthwhile initiatives described alter the harsh economic realities which still shape local lives.  The Chirton ward, containing Meadow Well, is among the 5 per cent most deprived in the country; around one in six adults are unemployed and – in today’s economy –many suffer irregular or precarious (and always low paid) employment.

Messages from Meadow Well, Northern Architecture, 2014

We started this two-part post with Carole Bell’s wish that her community be thought of as ‘decent people living on a decent estate’.   I’m sure that’s true, just as I’m certain that – despite all the good work that’s been done – the Estate continues to suffer unacceptable levels of poverty and exclusion.   In this context, we should question less the design or concept of council estates but rather a society which tolerates such inequality in its midst.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the last some of his fine images of the Estate taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  You can see more of Steve’s work online here.

(1) North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP), North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing (1977). Documents from the North Tyneside CDP can be downloaded from the website of Purdue University, Indianapolis. The full collection of CDP records are held by the Tyne and Wear Archives.

(2) Beatrix Campbell, Goliath. Britain’s Dangerous Places (1993) and Joe Caffrey interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992.  Residents’ comments which follow are drawn from the latter source.

(3) Roger Graef, Jane Jacobs Public Lecture, London School of Economics: ‘Risk, Community and Safety’, 10 February 2005

(4) Campbell’s analysis is discussed in Chris Brook, Gerry Mooney, Steve Pile, Unruly Cities?: Order/Disorder (2006)

(5) Jo Dean and Annette Hastings, Challenging images. Housing estates, stigma and regeneration. The Policy Press and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2000

(6) See Sonia Sharma, ‘Meadow Well community stalwart Carole retires’, Chronicle Live, 29 August 2012 and the website of Meadow Well Connected for further information.

(7) Annette Hastings, ‘Stigma and social housing estates: Beyond pathological explanations’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2003

Canley Today: “Not a Reassuring Neighbourhood”

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs

In this guest post, Dr Ruth Cherrington brings her story of the Canley Estate in Coventry up-to-date, following earlier posts on the origins of the Estate and the growth of its community.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

Introduction

At the end of the previous posting, we left Canley residents busy shaping their community and social spaces.

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it started but some streets began to look unsightly from the early 1960s. Rather than growing flowers in the front gardens some tenants instead piled up rubbish and discarded furniture. There were instances of anti-social behaviour, though that term was not used back then: ‘problem family’ was the expression used instead. Canley residents would have been quick to name the streets that were ‘rough’ as distinct from ‘respectable’.

As time went on, other factors contributed to a more general decline. Social divisions were exacerbated by developments experienced by council tenants across the country along with Canley-specific ones. The focus here will be how the estate fared as social, economic and political changes presented difficult challenges.

Changes and Challenges

The Right to Buy Act, which became law in the early years 80s, had far-reaching consequences as council tenants who met certain criteria could buy their homes at discounted prices. Not everyone agreed with selling off council housing, preferring to rent and looking critically at those who bought. The take-up of this offer started to change Canley, as it did elsewhere.

A street of steel houses in Canley, 2016

Some newly-purchased houses showed the tenant-turned-owner’s desire to distinguish themselves from their council neighbours. Doors, even whole houses, were painted different colours. Some built garages onto the side, added a conservatory at the back, changed the windows and put statues outside.

These were visible expressions of the differentiation amongst the Canley residents that were not previously possible. Some viewed these stamps of individuality as out of place and ‘showing off’. We will return to the implications of private ownership later on.

Another major challenge was the troubled state of British car manufacturing. The Standard Motor Company, part of British Leyland by the 1970s, had long been a major employer.

‘Standard Motor Company Canley Road Works and environs’, 1946 (c) Britain from Above, EAW0000142

Short-time working and lay-offs had become common along with strikes during which management and trade unions blamed each other for the problems. The Canley plant was affected by what happened at others such as Speke, Liverpool. Families suffered when strikes became protracted. Hard times affected local shops, pubs and the working men’s club. The days of the affluent car worker when everyone had a steady job and income looked numbered.

A monument to the works, unveiled in 2000

After Sir Michael Edwardes took control at British Leyland in 1977, rationalisation gathered pace, bringing job losses and the eventual closure of three plants, including Canley. This was a major disaster as Canley had to some extent been built to house car workers. Thousands were directly or indirectly affected as many local businesses relied on the ‘Standard’.

Several generations of Canley men had worked there. Boys leaving school would take up apprenticeships and expected a job for life. This all ended suddenly in 1980 when the factory closed. Existing jobs and those for future generations disappeared along with expectations, ambitions and self-respect on the part of those made redundant. The Canley estate was bound to suffer from then on.

Herald Lodge sheltered accommodation, standing on the site of the former Herald Pub next to the Standard Triumph Motor factory (Photo: Robin Booker)

The last major manufacturing plant to close was Massey Ferguson tractor factory in Banner Lane, Tile Hill. Unemployment in the Canley area increased and school leavers found little on offer in the 1980s. By the 1990s Canley had become an area of social deprivation. Younger residents left if they could. Those who stayed had too much time and not enough money on their hands, never a good combination.

An alternative source of employment, though often low-skilled and low paid work, came from nearby Warwick University, right on Canley’s border. Opened in 1965, originally just outside the City’s boundaries, the fact that it took the name Warwick not Coventry, was and still is seen as a slight by locals. Its proximity to Canley didn’t bring it any closer to the experience of most of the estate’s residents outside of offering work. Warwick University employed some of those made redundant but could not absorb the growing numbers thrown out of work.

An almost symbiotic relationship developed with this University, whose star had risen as manufacturing industry declined. The University sent in two different types of visitors: sociological researchers on the one hand and student tenants on the other. Canley became a convenient case study of industrial decline and social deprivation for the former and a convenient source of housing for the latter, as well as a supplier of local labour.

Shops on Prior Deram Walk and the playing fields (c) Wikimedia Commons

This is where we pick up on the impact of council house sales. Some residents who had bought went on to sell up once the statutory period was over and landlords were quick to seize the opportunities. The private rental sector grew alongside a diminishing council sector with fewer residential homes and more temporary accommodation. In one Warwick University study, Canley residents stated they felt pushed out by the foreign students.(1)

I’ve lived here for 34 years in the immediate area and there are a lot of students. I will leave as soon as I can.

It is pertinent that in the Wikipedia article about Canley, one of its key features is that ‘the area is home to a large number of students attending the nearby University of Warwick’. There are some signs outside several pre-war, redbrick homes along Charter Avenue only in Chinese, advertising accommodation. It’s obvious their market is for Chinese compatriots but such practices fuel dislike for foreign students in general among Canley residents:

Foreigners – loads of Chinese in the last five years buying houses and renting them to students.

The majority of Canley residents (around 90 per cent) are white. When former residential homes are sold and effectively turned into student dormitories, divisions widen.

Warwick University researchers have documented feelings of isolation with levels of community cohesion levels dipping sharply over the past few decades. Residents feel ignored, unheard by government representatives at local and national levels:(2)

Policy was seen in the context of political correctness, which had become a pejorative term meaning beneficial treatment to anyone who was not white working-class.

There was a growing separation between private owners, council tenants and student renters.

Anti-social behaviour also rose as well as the perception of it: drugs, burglaries and vandalism were part of this. Canley had moved from being a pleasant estate to ‘not a reassuring neighbourhood’. (3)

Regeneration: Plans and Reality

In the mid-2000s regeneration was put on the agenda and plans presented to Canley residents. Glossy pamphlets were distributed detailing the options, with the benefits to be derived from each such as the use of some land for new housing in return for better facilities and a community hub. In one option, the ends of several streets of steel houses were designated for ‘street realignment’.

The meaning of this was unclear until residents who would be affected made enquiries. Street alignment actually meant demolition of some houses, including the one I grew up in, in order to free up the space for denser housing. The generous gardens would be lost and built upon.

On finding this out, some residents were motivated into action with claims the council were trying to hoodwink them, that they were being treated as fools. Protests about this and other aspects of regeneration led to that option being removed.

The derelict Canley Primary School, 2006. Shortly after these photos were taken, it was burnt down in an arson attack

A master plan was agreed in 2007 that visualised new housing where the former Charter Primary school used to be on Charter Avenue. A new school had been built more on Mitchell Avenue, more central than the ‘old’ Charter Primary. More housing was planned elsewhere, a community building, and improved transport and retail facilities. Moreover, the money raised from selling land in Canley was intended to be reinvested in the area.

Current Situation

Some changes have resulted such as widened pavements along Charter Avenue, with an integrated cycle lane. Some locals see that as being more for the university students. Some new housing is being built, mostly in-fill. What was once a very large grass verge between steel houses on Howcotte Green and the railway line is now the nearly completed Cromwell Gardens. Forty-four homes have been crammed onto this one green space.

Cromwell Gardens: 44 new homes on a former piece of grass between Howcotte Green and the railway line

Another in-fill area is where a doctor’s surgery once stood on Kele Road. A dozen new homes stand nearly complete there now. More in-fill is planned around Canley.

Nearly complete new homes om Kele Road, where a doctor’s surgery used to be (and before that the old Charter Primary School)

New homes, however, have not so far brought plans for improved bus services and other facilities. Residents complain about the poor bus service, seen as the worst in the City, which adds to feelings of isolation. Whilst two bus services come up and down Charter Avenue, as they have done for decades, they do not both run all day, every day. The 18a via Cannon Park shopping centre finishes early evening and doesn’t run on Sunday.

Those wishing to shop outside those times have to walk. It’s over a mile from the steel houses to Cannon Park, the Phantom Coach pub and to the Cemetery where many locals have relatives buried.

Canley Cemetery, Charter: the final resting place for many Canley residents (Photo: Robin Booker)

There was discussion by residents in one study about the importance of pubs and clubs as places of community interaction. That was when Canley had three pubs and the Canley Social Club, but since then the Dolphin Pub in Sheriff Avenue has closed down: it is now a building site for housing. The Canley Social Club in Marler has also closed.

Even in 2003 these were not regarded as vibrant places but as failing institutions that illustrated Canley’s problems. The lack of money to spend was one reason for their decline along with the smoking ban but also the declining percentage of ‘Canley kids’ who had grown up there or moved in when they were younger. Student renters rarely used these once thriving social centres.

The loss of the Canley Social Club is a very visual representation of the decline of the ‘old’ Canley. Established in 1950 as a humble social centre by local residents, the Club expanded across the decades with no shortage of members and activities provided for them when employment was high and there was money to spare.

By the late 1980s, the once luxurious concert room and lounge were less than half empty and severely underused. It began to look shabby and unloved, just as did the estate more generally. There were attempts to revive it including lottery funding that transformed it into a Sports and Social club but its future was decided when no buyers could be found in 2013. One night, members were in there enjoying themselves. The next morning it was locked and boarded up.(4)

Canley Social Club burnt down, August 2013

After suffering several arson attacks, it was finally destroyed by fire in August 2013 and demolished in April 2015.

Canley Social Club being demolished, April 2015

The site will now be sold for housing with nothing to replace this former social venue with its bowling green, football pitch and five-a-side all-weather space along with its lounge, small bar and concert room. Locals complain about the lack of social facilities, just as the early residents did in the 1940s.

The ageing ‘Canley kids’ lament the loss of the Club, of the pride of former residents, the loss of the old sense of community when most people had a job and a salary. There will come a time when hardly anyone remembers the early days of the estate, with its model housing and green spaces. Many of the latter are now designated for in-fill housing and these will bring not only different types of residents but perhaps more divisions and less cohesion.

If it started out as an estate ‘in parts’ and it looks more patchy today than ever before. The future may well see the trend for putting a bit of new housing here, a bit there, increase. Canley may become an estate ‘in bits’.

Sources

(1) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Harris Beider, Community Cohesion: the views of white working class communities, Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Coventry University (2011), p42

(2) Beider, p56

(3) Victoria Nash with Ian Christie, Making Sense of Community, IPPR, London (2003), p13

(4) See my YouTube video, Canley Social Club in Pictures

See also David Jarvis, Nigel Berkeley and Kevin Broughton, ‘Evidencing the impact of community engagement in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Canley, Coventry’, Community Development Journal (2011)

 

The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, Part 2: Failed Post-War Visions?

Tags

1960s, 2000s, Regeneration

I’m pleased to feature this guest post by Gerry Mooney of The Open University in Scotland, a follow-up to last week’s post on the historical context of Glasgow’s post-war housing. You’ll find additional details of Gerry’s work and writings at the end of the post. 

Introduction

Glasgow Corporation entered the post-1945 era with a vision of a radically different Glasgow. This was to be reflected, not least, in the built environment of the city and in its housing. Informed by municipal socialistic values, Glasgow constructed greater numbers of public sector high rise housing developments than any other city in Western Europe in the post-1945 era.

Carmunnock Road, Castlemilk, 1956. To the southern boundary of Glasgow, Castlemilk was one of the four large outer estates built in the post-1945 era.

Attempting to address historic problems of slum and overcrowded housing, by far the worst in the UK, the city embarked on a large-scale programme of high rise developments.  Together with a massive programme of low rise housing estate development across the city, and the construction of four large ‘peripheral’ housing estates on the city’s outer-edges (in Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok), by the 1980s Glasgow Council was the largest public sector landlord in Western Europe with over 186,000 houses under its control. 63 per cent of the population of the city living in publicly rented housing, in what was widely termed ‘corporation housing’!

A map of Glasgow showing the principal locations mentioned in the text

The development at Red Road, located in the Balornock and Barmulloch area, approximately 4 miles north east from Glasgow’s City Centre, was to become the most iconic of Glasgow’s post-War housing developments. Few council estates (or ‘schemes’ as they are generally referred to in Scotland) have been so often in the limelight and for so long, even if much of that was for negative reasons. (1) They were the highest public sector tower blocks in Europe at the time of opening in 1971 (2).

The Red Road Flats under construction in the 1950s

Built between 1964 and 1969, the eight towers, which ranged from 28-31 storeys, were to house almost 4700 people. At almost 300 feet high, the views from the upper floors of the blocks extended well beyond Glasgow to the mountains of Argyll to the West, Stirlingshire to the north and almost through to Edinburgh in the East. The blocks were readily visible to people arriving in Glasgow from the North and from the East by train or car and for the past 40 years or so have dominated the skyline of the city.

The Red Road Flats, an image said to be from 1967

For their new tenants, the Red Road Flats, together with Glasgow’s other council housing developments, represented a vast improvement on the slum housing which they had lived in previously. It was the views that attracted people, but the hot and cold running water, inside toilet and bathroom, that they had more than one bedroom and a separate kitchen, all of which were generally absent from the older nineteenth century tenements. (3) These flats were symbolic of an era in which state provision of affordable housing to rent was highly desirable and when there was considerable political investment by mainly Labour-controlled local authorities.

The Red Road Flats, undated but probably from the late 1960s

However, the architecture and construction of the blocks, steel-framed concrete slabs (the only Glasgow high-rises built in this way) in a style since then referred to as ‘Modernist Brutalism’ (4), was the subject of early complaints, reflected in difficult to heat and draughty houses. It wasn’t too long before the Red Road became not a hallmark of Glasgow’s advance in public sector housing design but a symbol of poorly constructed and hard to let council housing.

From being one of the solutions to Glasgow’s post-1945 housing crisis, the Red Road development (and other high-rise estates in the city) came to be regarded as places of decline – and of failure. To be housed in the Red Road also came to be a sign of personal failure on the part of tenants who had little other option than to take a house in the flats. ‘The Red Road’ – no other term was required – became a byword and symbol of poverty, social problems, alienation and exclusion.

In its last few years, the Red Road has been used to house students and more recently asylum seekers who have come to Glasgow as part of the UK Government’s ‘dispersal’ programme.  This has seen the city take in more refugees that any other city outside London.

An image from the first phase of demolition in 2012

Increasingly Glasgow’s high rise blocks have come to be regarded by the Glasgow Housing Agency, the body that took over the city’s public sector housing under stock transfer in 2003, as a burden with many of the high-rises lined up for demolition. In recent years this has come to be a frequent occurrence as demolition is advanced as the latest solution to Glasgow’s housing problems. The first two of the Red Road blocks were demolished in June 2012, the rest came down this month.

Back in early 2014, it had been announced that the remaining Red Road Flats would be blown-up as part of the Opening Ceremony of the Twentieth Commonwealth Games, being held in the city in July and August.  This demolition was to be beamed live to huge screens a few miles away at Celtic Park. For the City Council and Commonwealth Games leaders, such demolition signified the ‘brave new world’ that Glasgow was allegedly to enter.  In the words of the leader of the Labour-controlled Glasgow Council, it would be be ‘symbolic of a changing Glasgow’. (5)

However, within days the decision had already attracted considerable opposition from community activists, artists, politicians, and a petition started within hours of the news attracted well over 17,000 signatures in less than a week. It caused a furore that went well beyond Glasgow. Scottish and UK newspapers carried the story as did local TV and radio stations and the BBC online news site.  Various social media sites were heavily populated with Red Road commentary and stories. On April 13 – only a week after the initial proposals to demolish were made public – the Commonwealth Games organisers announced that they were abandoning their plans amid concerns relating to ‘safety and security’

Concluding Thoughts

There is so much more that could be written about the Red Road Flats. Few council estates have had so much attention, reflected in countless art works, photographic exhibitions, a film and a novel and they have appeared in many documentaries and on television dramas. (6)

A burnt-out car and children at play, Red Road Flats, 1969. Here we can see the new high rise blocks with older tenements in the foreground to the right. The lack of amenities meant that children had to be innovative in how they played, as here with a burnt-out car.

At a surface level, the demolition of the Red Road Flats exemplified the argument that Glasgow’s extensive post-war investment in poorly designed and built high-rise council housing was a strategic social and economic blunder. But there was a deeper level to the symbolism of the demolition of Red Road.  It somehow manages to cue to a wide audience that it is waste of time and money to try and provide council housing for working-class people. It always ends up in failure.

Such views are not difficult to find today. As we approach the last episode in the half century life of the Red Road Flats, stigmatising and negative images and accounts of social housing – and of social housing tenants – flourish far and wide. (7) But it is not social housing that has failed in Glasgow – or elsewhere.  Not is it social housing tenants who have failed.  Many of the people rehoused were given little opportunity other than to accept a home to rent in a badly designed block of flats.  These flats were often built in the fastest time possible without due attention to facilities and amenities – and certainly without the level of provision that tenants in JG Ballard’s High-Rise enjoyed. 

The remaining Red Road Flats awaiting demolition in October 2015 © Hilary Mooney

The demolition of the Red Road Flats in October 2015 is also a demolition of an important part of working class history in Glasgow. It sweeps away a sense of the past, of key aspects of working class Glasgow folklore, as was the case with the demolition of the tenements beforehand. While it is important to recognise the problems that plagued the Red Road, we should acknowledge that it was home for many Glaswegian families and for people newly arrived and seeking refuge from wars and persecution overseas. Much more could have been done for all these tenants and for the Red Road area more generally.

An earlier image of slum clearance and redevelopment in Hutchesontown

This latest round of demolitions has strong echoes of the past: the slum clearances of the 1930s and of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The historic legacy of the massive changes that took place in the geography and built environment of post 1945 Glasgow under ‘comprehensive redevelopment’,  the wonderfully evocative term used by politicians and planners to describe what was little more than widespread demolition, continues to shape contemporary Glasgow. As the political elite and city planners see in the latest phase of demolition a new Glasgow of the future, we should not forget that we have been here before, as this 2006 statement from the City Council reminds us:

The skyline of Glasgow is set to be radically transformed, as swatches of high-rise tower blocks make way for thousands of new homes across the city. Glasgow is enjoying a real renaissance. We’re delivering on better housing and we have regained our sense of ambition. This is an announcement that looks to the future and we are determined we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Arguably no British city has been subjected to so many visions of bright housing and urban future as Glasgow. While some of the historic problems of overcrowding have been addressed and new houses built, enormous problems remain in the lack of good quality, affordable social housing to rent for countless numbers of people.

Sources

(1) Referring to council housing estates as schemes in Scotland derives from the process by which new housing plans – or schemes for new housing – were prepared by local authorities and submitted for approval by the Scottish Home and Health Department in the 1930s and throughout the post-1945 era.

(2) The Red Road Flats have all too often been referred to as the highest municipal housing blocks in Europe. However, they weren’t even the highest blocks in Glasgow. That honour – such as it is, belonged to the ‘Gallowgate Twins’ – two blocks of   located in the Helenvale and Bluevale area of Dennistoun, a largely tenement district in the inner east end of Glasgow. Built between 1967 and 1966, they reached 31 storeys and contained 348 flats. They were demolished floor by floor during 2015.

Photographer Chris Leslie has done fantastic work in capturing the demise of Glasgow’s high rise flats – including the Gallowgate Twins and the Red Road Flats.  His multimedia project, The Glasgow Renaissance, offers images and footage of a rapidly changing skyline.

(3) See personal histories and stories at: http://www.redroadflats.org.uk

(4) See John Grindrod (2014) Concretopia, Brecon: Old Street Publishing and Owen Hatherley (2010) A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, London: Verso.

(5) Gerry Mooney, ‘Red Road flats saga is a reminder that attitudes to council housing are vile’, The Conversation, April 17 2014

(6) Gerry Mooney, ‘Red Road flats saga is a reminder that attitudes to council housing are vile’, The Conversation, April 17 2014

(7) See the comments made by Guardian readers in response to the article by Owen Duffy, ‘End of the Red Road: Residents Mourn Glasgow’s High Rise Dream Gone Wrong’, The Guardian, August 18 2015

(8) Chris Leslie, ‘Disappearing Glasgow: documenting the demolition of a city’s troubled past’, The Guardian, April 22 2015

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the The Open University in Scotland, his academic profile here.  For additional information and writings, see his OU OpenLearn page. He has also written for The Conversation and you’ll find his dedicated pages here.  Follow Gerry on Twitter at @gerrymooney60.

The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester II: ‘a victory for the people’

Tags

1990s, 2000s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

Last week we looked at the pre-war origins and development of the Saffron Lane Estate.  Today, we look at how the Estate has changed since 1945. It’s a good illustration of how council housing has evolved in recent years but also a tribute to the strength and resilience of its residents.

Homes on Southfields Drive

Leicester, with its light industries and consumer-based trades was never immune to economic downturns but had fared well in comparison to areas of traditional heavy industry.  In 1936, the League of Nations Bureau of Statistics identified Leicester as the second richest city in Europe and from the mid-50s the local economy grew and diversified again even as its established focus on textiles and shoe manufacture declined.

As late as 1993, 29 per cent of Saffron’s workers were skilled craft workers and 17 per cent were unskilled.  Just seven years later, only 12 per cent were classified as skilled and the numbers in unskilled occupations had doubled.  Ten per cent now worked for agencies, rising to one in three of those under thirty.  As unemployment rose, the consequences of this rise of insecure, unskilled employment were exacerbated.  (1)

Saffron Lane

By 2007, Leicester was ranked as the 20th most deprived local authority region in the country and parts of the Saffron Lane Estate as among the 5 per cent most deprived of all areas in the country.

Leicester’s (relatively) prosperous working-class had declined and on council estates up and down the country this change was amplified by the changing nature of council housing.  Once (as at the time of the Estate’s founding) it was reserved for those who could pay; increasingly – as needs-based assessment took over in the 1970s and the housing stock was drastically diminished through Right to Buy in the 1980s – it was allocated to those who (through no fault of their own) couldn’t.

Still, a 2003 survey suggested that the Estate remained popular with most of its residents. Sixty-nine per cent professed a strong attachment to the area; 76 per cent didn’t want to move.  This, no doubt, reflected the stability of the community – almost four fifths had lived on the Estate for over ten years. While Leicester is among the UK’s most diverse communities, the Saffron remained a ‘white island’ – 92 per cent of its population were white British.  Almost one third of residents felt their British nationality their key identity.  (2)

One young woman who lived in a council house on the Saffron Lane Estate in the seventies might seem typical of some of its new realities – married at 18, three children by 22 and a single mother by the time she was 25, working in a series of low-paid, dead-end jobs.  She liked writing though and completed her first book in 1975.  It did well, this Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But, for Sue Townsend, it never was just history and never one she forgot: (3)

I’m a child of the municipal. Everything good had this word carved above its grand entrance. In Leicester, where I was born and still live, there were municipal libraries, majestic solid buildings with beautiful entrances, windows and doors, oak furniture and bookshelves. Then there were municipal baths, which had a swimming pool and what were called slipper baths…There were municipal parks, which were delightful places in which to take the air.

The Saffron Lane Estate’s library wouldn’t have been her local as a child (she was brought up in a post-war prefab to the south) but must surely have resonated.  The Southfields Library and Infant Welfare Clinic, opened in 1939, was an extraordinary and eye-catching building. Inspired by Stockholm’s Central Library or possibly Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove tube station, designed by Leicester architects Symington Prince and Pyke, it’s a Moderne masterpiece, constructed of reinforced concrete with red brick cladding, now Grade II listed.

Southfields Library. The Leicester City coat of arms shown above can be seen above the main entrance. © Ned Trifle and made available through a Creative Commons Licence

Less reverentially, locals called it – for obvious reasons – the Pork Pie Library and that’s its official name now too.  (It’s nice to see as well that it’s located on Attlee Way.)  A major refurbishment last year has brought a theatre area at the rear back into use, a computer suite has been installed for adult education and a new kitchen will served a lunch club. It’s good to see a community landmark still giving community value. (4)

Other things came and went (or almost went) on the Estate.  The Saffron Lane Sports Centre north of the Estate was opened in 1967 and was the first in England to have a synthetic surface running track.  It came close to closure in 2001 but received a £1.4 million refurbishment from the City Council in 2006 and remains well used.

Saffron lane velodrome

The velodrome, opened in 1968 and once the national stadium, was demolished in 2009 – derelict through a combination of its open-air design and years of neglect.  It’s now a site for new social and affordable housing.

These changes mark the effort that has gone into regenerating (no scare quotes this time) the Estate and supporting its community in recent years.  The Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council was established jointly by community leaders and the City Council in 1976.  It currently manages three projects – the Saffron Resource Centre providing a range of advice and aid, Saffcare providing day-care services for elderly people and Saffron Acres. The latter took over 12 acres of disused allotments in 2006; its latest venture, employing and training young people, is to sell – via the Central England Coop – its own plum jam and apple chutneys. (5)

The Neighbourhood Council has moved into the housing field too. In 2014, it acquired (for the nominal sum of £1 from the City Council), thirteen acres of land destined to form what’s claimed as ‘Europe’s biggest eco-housing project’.  Four one-bedroom flats, 23 two-bedroom houses, 20 three-bedroom houses and three four-bedroom houses – all built to sustainable Passivhaus standards – will be built and managed by the East Midlands Housing Group to house those currently on the council housing waiting list. The Homes and Communities Agency has provided £1.5m funding.

An artist’s impression of the new ‘eco-homes’ being developed jointly by the Saffron Lane Neighbourhood Council and the East Midlands Housing Group

Times have changed.  Many, though not those currently in power nationally, would like them to change again but, for the time being, as Leicester’s mayor Sir Peter Soulsby acknowledged: (6)

At one time the council would have built council houses but we can’t anymore because there just isn’t the cash or the powers to do it. So what we are doing is using our assets and our buildings much more creatively and enabling community groups to do it.

What about those Boot houses we read about last week though?  There were quite early problems with damp and deterioration but they survived.  By the 1980s, however, they were showing serious structural problems caused by the corrosion of metal reinforcements in the concrete frames and the use of clinker in the concrete.

An undated photograph of Boot houses on the Estate showing signs of deterioration

In 1983, the City Council took the decision to replace them, ‘one down, one up’.  Five hundred had been replaced by 1989 when money ran out.  At this point, the Council looked to a private developer who proposed replacing the 500 Boot houses remaining with 800 new homes.  This was a threat to an existing community and treasured environment that the Estate’s residents found unacceptable – they voted by 86 per cent to support an extension of the Council’s existing phased scheme even though it might mean in some cases a wait of 27 years for replacement housing.

New build on Broughton Road

At the same time, the Saffron Boot Housing Action Group was formed to speed things up.  Another solution was devised in this era when the very notion of council construction had become taboo:  a 50/50 partnership with a local housing association was offered.  Tenants wanted to stay with the Council and stuck out.  In the end, a 65/35 council/housing association split was agreed. (7)

Arthur Chimes

When the last of the 972 remaining Boots homes was demolished in June 1997, Arthur Chimes of the Housing Action Group, could declare it – that rare thing – ‘a victory for the people’.

In its own way, the Saffron Lane Estate has been that too.

Sources

(1) Leicester City Council, ‘Local Employment Issues in Saffron and Eyres Monsell’, Strategic Planning and Regeneration Scrutiny Committee, 19 February 2004

(2) Asaf Hussain, Tim Haq, Bill Law, Integrated Cities: Exploring the Cultural Development of Leicester (2003)

(3) Sue Townsend, ‘My Heartlands’, The Observer, 24 April 2005

(4) English Heritage listing details and Dan J Martin, ‘Leicester’s Pork Pie Library to close for four months’, Leicester Mercury, November 12, 2014

(5) For full details on the range of activities, go the website of the Saffron Resource Centre.

(6) Laurna Robertson, ‘Land deal for country’s largest affordable Passivhaus scheme’, Inside Housing, 2 May 2014 and BBC News, Leicester, ‘Leicester’s eco-homes build is “Europe’s biggest” project’, 30 April 2014

(7) Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998)