The Blackbird Leys Estate, Oxford: ‘Never accepted as part of the city proper’

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1950s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs

This is the 200th post on the blog.  I’ll be participating this week in the ‘Architecture, Citizenship, Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s‘ conference at Oxford Brookes University.  For that reason, I hope you’ll forgive a repost – the first to date – of this piece on the Blackbird Leys Estate which seemed appropriate. Rosamund West, who contributed an earlier post on the blog, will be there too, speaking on ‘Replanning Communities through Architecture and Art: the post-war London County Council’. 

Blackbird Leys, situated on the south-eastern periphery of Oxford, is to all appearances a pretty ordinary, not to say humdrum, council estate.  But it’s achieved notoriety.  Some of this is typical of unloved and maligned marginal estates throughout the country but it’s loomed larger in Blackbird Leys and came to a peak in 1991 when three days of rioting followed a police crackdown on joyriding.

Cowley, 1925

Oxford’s history of town and gown disputation is well-known but the divisions within the city grew after William Morris built his first car in 1913.  From those small beginnings emerged the Morris car factory in Cowley, employing some 20,000 people by the 1970s. Oxford acquired an industrial working class and had to deal with it.

Blackbird Leys was one response.  The city’s population had grown massively in the interwar period and demand for housing was high – there were 5000 on the council waiting list in 1946 and Morris Cars were expanding.   Council planners saw the ‘final solution’ to the housing shortage in the development of large estates on the eastern and south-eastern fringes of the city.

Planning permission was granted in 1953 on 260 acres of land then occupied by a sewage works and farm in Blackbird Leys for an estate of 2800 dwellings with a projected population of 10,000.

The first residents moved in to what was still essentially a building site in 1958.  Work continued over several phases into the seventies when the original scheme was largely complete.

A further expansion took place with the development of the Greater Leys estate on adjoining land in the mid-1980s. Around 14,000 people live in the area now.

Druce Way maisonettes, 1960s

Gentian Road, 1960s

A few residents had moved from a slum clearance area in the city centre and some from temporary housing erected during the war.  Most of the men worked in the car factory and around half the population in the sixties had moved from elsewhere – from Scotland and Ireland in large numbers and from elsewhere in England – for employment.

There were tensions here already that the estate itself did little to warrant.  A local newspaper wrote that the (1):

unlit building sites, inadequate police supervision, parental apathy and the provision of a public house catering mainly for young people, has provided the perfect setting for the idle, the mischievous, and the more sinister night people.

Who were these ‘sinister night people’?  They surely weren’t as exciting as they sound but the phrase gives an early indication of the power of the media to shape perceptions and spread alarm.

Some residents surveyed in Frances Reynolds’ extensive analysis of the estate resented the former slum dwellers:

I don’t like it up here getting all the tail end. It’s a disgusting place. Putting all the backend up here won’t give people like us a chance to make this a decent place to live.

But those who saw themselves as ‘respectable’ might be equally resented by others:

from the beginning the estate was associated with ‘foreign’ workers come to get rich at the factories, with large rough families, and to a lesser extent with slum clearance. It was never accepted as part of the city proper and its reputation began the downward spiral…

From the outset, Blackbird Leys carried a stigma and many of its people felt ignored or victimised in equal measure despite the fact that it was in these early years predominantly an estate of the skilled and employed working class.

One resident recalls (2):

There was this big problem of being labelled. People were not able to get credit and hire purchase if they said they came from Blackbird Leys. Even the vicar could not get a phone in without having to pay in advance. None of us knew why. It was a brand new estate with no past as far as we were concerned. People working at the car works were among the best paid manual workers in Oxford.

That was Carole Roberts who had moved to the estate aged 14 from London when her father found work in the car factory.  She went on to become a Labour Lord Mayor of Oxford but Blackbird Leys would remain her home.

The outstanding feature of the new estate, however, was its demography.  It was built for families and in the sixties one quarter of its population was under five years of age, another quarter of school age.  There were a lot of kids on the estate and later a lot of teenagers.

As to the design of the estate, in a word, it’s unexceptional – which points to both its good and bad aspects.  It was solid, slightly ‘boxy’ housing – good accommodation in and of itself though space standards fell in later years.

Merlin Road

Field Avenue flats

Two fifteen-storey tower blocks with four two-bedroom flats on each floor were opened in 1960s. The Conservative mayor of Oxford who opened Windrush Tower in 1962 described the building as ‘modern living at its best’. But it wasn’t long before the common problems of lack of play space for younger children, lifts breaking down and vandalism of communal areas were being reported.

Evenlode Tower with Windrush Tower to rear © Wikimedia Commons

Housing density was relatively high and many complained about poor noise insulation.

According to one resident:

They put you all so close together yet it’s a big estate.  I can’t explain it. My neighbours are friendly and yet it’s not a friendly place.  I think it’s because we’re all so close together that there’s always somebody doing something to annoy you, if it’s only music, or lighting a bonfire, or mending a car, it’s because we’re all packed together.

The quote also points beyond straightforward design failings to what sociologists have termed ‘neighbourhood sensitivity’ – a reduced tolerance to the behaviour of others reflecting social differences within the community.

Blackbird Leys – despite the easy stereotype of council estates – was not homogeneous.  The divisions which existed between ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ residents, between owner occupiers (already 20 per cent by 1981) and council tenants,  and between those of different backgrounds  – though ethnicity itself was never a significant flashpoint – reduced tolerance of behaviours beyond the observer’s norm.

The estate was provided open space – particularly in the cul-de-sacs which were built in the early sixties – and later a large recreation ground but these were often not seen as ‘safe’ areas for younger children or inviting areas more generally.  A single large community centre was provided but community amenities as a whole were thin on the ground. [I have added a response to this post by a resident of Blackbird Leys in the comments below which speaks positively of both the planning of the Estate and its current community spirit.]

Each of these elements are the quite normal features and failings of estates designed in the post-war rush to build – and build economically.  But they came together in Blackbird Leys in peculiarly combustible form.  The final piece in the jigsaw came in the estate’s changing demographics.

The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act – alongside the unanticipated impact of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy legislation and the halting of council new-build – ensured that ‘vulnerable’ tenants came to form a large part of new tenancies.  This trend was strengthened by the reality that such tenants –in urgent need of housing – were far more likely to be housed in less popular estates with a more rapid turnover of occupants such as Blackbird Leys.

At the same time the eighties’ collapse of the manufacturing economy hit the estate’s economic mainstay.  By the early eighties, the proportion of male heads of household classified as ‘skilled’ had fallen from half to little over a third.  In the same period, the rate of unemployment on the estate peaked at 20 per cent and 50 per cent for those aged 16 to 19.

Statistics indicate that by this time Blackbird Leys was a ‘problem’ estate with more than its fair share of ‘problem’ families.  To select just a couple of examples, the estate contained 15 per cent of the city’s children and 30 per cent of those under social services supervision;  it contained 17 per cent of juveniles (aged 10 to 16) but 27 per cent of those prosecuted for crime.

Of course, such figures are not ‘innocent’.  Residents felt unfairly labelled and ‘picked on’ by the agencies of the state.  The estate’s reputation may also have highlighted problems which were contained or treated differently elsewhere.  Still, the sociological fine-tuning didn’t alter the lived reality of an estate seen by outsiders – and, increasingly, by its own residents – as crime-ridden and dysfunctional.  The residents’ reporting of their own experience of crime or troublesome neighbours confirms this truth even if it’s understood as a complex one.

All this came to a head in September 1991.  ‘Hotting’ – the theft of cars followed by displays of driving prowess on the estate’s streets – had become a local sport for some of Blackbird Leys’ youngsters.  A police crackdown was met by resistance when up to 150 youths stoned riot-geared police officers.

An academic analysis describing such activity as ‘carnivalesque’ is probably designed to enrage Daily Mail readers but the pleasure and meaning of it for participants – in its thrill-seeking and oppositional nature – should be understood.(3)  It was correct to blame media attention – some spoke more darkly of media incitement – for giving a distorted picture of the estate but clearly something had gone wrong.  These marginalised youth on a marginal estate were expressing something, however inchoately.

Another, very different, expression of the local community’s disaffection with the powers-that-be came in 2002 with the election of an Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) councillor, defeating Labour, for the estate.  At peak, the IWCA returned four local representatives.  The IWCA stood on an unashamedly populist platform which stressed New Labour’s abandonment of its class loyalties and called for local action against crime and drug-dealing – against those seen as ‘lumpen’ elements of the local proletariat.

All in all, this seems less a municipal dream, more a municipal nightmare. What more needs to be said?

Well, this for a start, though perhaps it comes too late to challenge all the negatives – two thirds of residents in Reynolds’ survey liked the estate and had no intention of moving.  These contented residents reported they were happy with their homes, their neighbours and neighbourhoods and local facilities.  They were also more likely to have relatives living on the estate.

Mrs Knight, 79 years old, got on well with the local children:

They’re ever so friendly. They call out Hello Nellie when I’m in the street.  They’re never any trouble.  It’s a wonderful place…

A few years later perhaps some of them were stoning the police.

Just last year, a resident who had lived on the estate for 51 years stated (4):

I love it here, even if I won the lottery I wouldn’t move. The area is peaceful, it’s lovely and all the neighbours get on with each other, it’s that community spirit.   Blackbird Leys has so many facilities for children and adults and there’s a lot to do if you are prepared to go ahead and find it.

I don’t claim that these views are representative but they do add nuance.  Council estates are not just bricks and mortar; they reflect complex human dynamics within and the impact of – often very difficult and damaging – political and economic currents without.

Blackbird Leys remains a significantly deprived area: in 2010 Northfield Brook ward was amongst the 10 per cent most deprived in the country – a long way from the ‘dreaming spires’, a marginal estate in every sense of the word.(5)

The Glow Tree which evolved out of a community arts project was unveiled outside the Blackbird Leys Community Centre in 2006.

But Blackbird Leys has always had a community which has survived its problems and battled the stereotypes.  That community exists today in its homes and streets and, semi-officially, in that complex nexus of self-help and state-sponsored regeneration which has emerged since 1997. Crime has fallen drastically, new facilities have been built, black spots eradicated – much has been done (too much according to some disgruntled Oxford residents who feel Blackbird Leys has been singled out for favourable attention) and much remains to be done.

If that seems an anodyne conclusion maybe it’s the only one that captures the past and present contradictions of the estate’s story: never the New Jerusalem, nor ever the Hell on Earth that many portrayed.

Sources:

(1) This quote and unattributed quotes that follow are taken from Frances Reynolds, The Problem Housing Estate. An account of Omega and its people (1986) – Omega was the name Reynolds gave the estate to preserve its anonymity.

(2) Quoted in ‘We’re proud of our estate‘, Oxford Mail, 27 November 1998

(3) Mike Presdee, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime (2000)

(4) Quoted in ‘Project unveils history of Blackbird Leys‘, Oxford Mail, 9 March 2012

(5) Oxford Safer Communities Partnership, The Indices of Deprivation, 2010: Oxford Results

BBC Oxford has pages on the Development of Blackbird Leys and the ‘Community Troubles‘ of 1991.  The stills of ‘hotting’ and rioting above are taken from the latter.

 

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The Grove Park Estate, Lewisham: ‘a real “Garden City”‘

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Lewisham

In 1928, Southern Railway advised ‘there is so much open country all around Grove Park that no one need fear for the present it is going to become a part of London’. (1)  This was ironic given that its book was intended to promote the growth of suburbia (and lucrative commuterdom) on London’s fringes. It was also dishonest given that London County Council’s Downham Estate – over 6000 homes when completed in 1930 – was being built just to the west of Grove Park station.

‘The London County Council Downham Estate from the south-east, 1929’ (c) Britain from Above, EPW028496  (Grove Park station is on the bridge on the right edge of the image.)

Speculative housing built for middle-class owner-occupation did spread rapidly but the remarkable feature of this area of south-east London – for the purposes of this blog at least – is its swathe of what Martin Crookston has called ‘Corporation suburbia’. It stretches west to east, almost uninterrupted, from Downham itself to Lewisham’s interwar Grove Park Estate, to the GLC’s 1960s’ Chinbrook Estate, to the LCC’s 1930s’ Mottingham Estate, and finally Woolwich Council’s Coldharbour Estate, begun in 1947.

Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham Estate (c) Rob Clayton

A brisk 45-minute, two and a half mile walk provides a potted history of a form of housing – the garden suburbs – that, by Crookston’s reckoning, accounts for around one-sixth of English homes and some 40 per cent of the country’s current socially-owned housing stock. Here this amounts to over 11,000 homes.

This post and the next will concentrate on a smaller area and two of the smaller estates – Grove Park, a fine example of interwar planning and construction, and the unsung but remarkable Chinbrook Estate, one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished estates of the 1960s.

Lewisham Metropolitan Borough Council was securely Conservative throughout the interwar period and its housing efforts were modest. There had been short-lived plans, instigated by Deptford Borough Council and in cooperation with Bermondsey, for a jointly-owned ‘garden city’ on land owned by Lord Northbrook in Lewisham. Lewisham withdrew its support in 1920 and the plans fell through. Later the land was acquired by the LCC and would form the basis of the Downham Estate. (3)

Romborough Gardens

Lewisham’s contribution to the ‘Homes for Heroes’ drive of the immediate post-war era was limited therefore but it did build a small estate of 86 houses – solid, stripped-down neo-Georgian, two-storey terraces – under the terms of the 1919 Housing Act in Romborough Way, near Lewisham Park.  The short cul-de-sac and enclosed green of Romborough Gardens forms a particularly attractive enclave.

In February 1925, the Public Health Committee, alarmed by the Medical Officer of Health’s reports of increased overcrowding in the Borough, passed on its concerns to the Housing Committee. The latter identified a 43 acre site, east of Grove Park, as suitable for building. It had been bought speculatively by a local builder from Lord Northbrook in 1923 for £3600. In July 1926 it was acquired by the Council by Compulsory Purchase Order for an arbitrated price of £8825 – almost two and a half times what Mr Durbin had paid for it three years earlier. A reminder of how land values and the market distort our housing provision and how readily private interest profits from public need.

Grove Park Estate layout (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Building on the site, undertaken by three local contractors, began in August. Eight acres were set aside as a recreation ground and 1.5 acres for allotments. A site was provided to the LCC for a new primary school; the rest was allocated to housing.  And to its credit, the Council determined to build well; to erect ‘the best possible type of house that could be provided in a municipal undertaking’ and at the largest size permitted under the 1924 Housing Act.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

It appointed the eminent architect-planner WR Davidge – an early supporter of the Garden City movement, elected President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1926 – to design the Estate. Davidge’s pedigree is first seen in the use of existing topography – an undulating terrain which added, in the words of a Council brochure, ‘a pleasing feature to the general appearance’ of the new estate’.  Moreover: (4)

In the preservation of some of the old trees on the estate and the green in Roseveare Road, and more particularly by encouraging the cultivation and upkeep of the gardens, the Council have endeavoured to ensure that the Estate shall become a real ‘Garden City’.

An annual best-kept garden competition with a victory shield and prizes provided some of that encouragement; the rent collector’s weekly visit possibly provided some discipline. As Pauline Payne, who moved onto the Estate as a child in 1939, recalls, if he spotted an untidy garden or a hedge that needed cutting, ‘you would get a polite notice reminding you of the conditions of your tenancy agreement and a certain time limit to put things right’. (5)

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Davidge also ensured that the housing was of pleasing and varied appearance – as many as six types on a single street, it was said.  With justifiable pride, it seems, the Council concluded that:

The completed estate has the merit of combining convenience in the planning of roads, spacious and well-appointed houses and harmony in the design and conception of the whole.  Roofed with red hand-made sandfaced tiles, the walls of the houses have generally been externally dressed with cement left rough from the plasterer’s float and treated with various shades of colour wash. Doorsteps, window sills and chimney stacks have been carried out in purple and red facing bricks, which blend with the colour of the roofs.

In terms of accommodation, two blocks of what the Council called ‘storey flats’ provided 32 of the Estate’s homes but the bulk were solid three-bedroom houses; 136 of the so-called Type B with parlours and 336 Type A, non-parlour.  Internal arrangements included, to modern eyes, perhaps some surprising mod cons.  Pauline Payne noted an ‘enormous walk-in airing cupboard on the landing’, cupboards under the stairs and, either side of front door, a walk-in cloakroom and a walk-in larder.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

In the first phase of construction, gas provided lighting for both housing and streets.  In the second, electricity was used – the first streets in the Borough to be lit by electricity.  In other respects, arrangements were much more of their time although still, presumably, a vast improvement to most new residents.

Pauline Payne describes ‘a large iron pot-bellied copper in the kitchen [which] provided hot water for the whole house’. The bathroom (‘absolutely freezing in winter’) was next door to the kitchen with hot water ladled by hand from copper to bath.  The toilet stood next to the back door.

Mayeswood Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

Payne’s experience was, as she recognises, perhaps exceptional.  She was an only child (she recalls families of eight and thirteen children living either side of her new home in Cobham Street) of lower middle-class parents. The family moved to the estate when their own home was bombed and her first impressions were, perhaps for that reason, underwhelming:

Upon getting the keys for our first sight of our new home was gloomy indeed as the whole house was painted chocolate brown.  For years we had to live with that colour…and even after the war the council only varied the colour to bottle green.

This was the other side of municipal housing – the dull uniformity it could sometimes impose on its residents.

Public transport was poor in those days as well and local shopping limited but she has happier memories too – Chinbrook Meadows nearby (declared a public park in 1929) were ‘a paradise for children’; the tunnel under the nearby railway another play spot.

Leafy Oak Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

By 1939, Lewisham could declare proudly that the borough was ‘notably progressive in the matter of Housing’.  In terms of numbers, the Council had provided 558 houses and 211 flats (in 1930 60 flats were built in five blocks – since demolished – along Winchfield Road in Lower Sydenham).  This was a relatively small number but, in general, the standard was high. (6)

The war which broke out in 1939 would change much.  Its destruction forced the Borough and the capital to build on unprecedented scale.  A new politics emerged too, one that – for a time at least – placed the needs of the country’s working class to the fore.  We’ll see both play out in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to the Grove Park Community Group and John King for generously supplying some of the historical information within this post.  John King’s history of the area provides more detail.

My thanks also to Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre for providing additional useful resources and for permission to reproduce some images from their collection.

(1) Southern Railway, Country Homes at London’s Door (2nd ed, 1928)

(2) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016)

(3) John King, Grove Park Revisited (2011)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham, Grove Park Housing Estate (ND – probably 1929)

(5) Pauline Payne, A Council House Kid, 1939-1957: Growing Up at Grove Park (typescript manuscript, ND, Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre)

(6) The Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham: the Official Guide of Lewisham Borough Council (1939)

Martin Crookston, ‘Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates’

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Cottage suburbs

Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016)

I’ve used Martin Crookston’s book in the library so I’m delighted there’s now a cheaper paperback edition to make it available to a wider readership.  I’m even more pleased, truth be told, to have a free review copy but I can say honestly that hasn’t affected my judgment of what I think is a very good, useful and important book on the future of council housing.

Crookston’s endeavour is to make sure it has a future and he focuses especially on the cottage estates or ‘Corporation suburbia’.  These are a neglected, frequently disdained, component of a proud council housing record – lacking the glamour and ‘iconicity’ of some architect-designed estates and blocks perhaps but representing in his opening words ‘a mammoth achievement’.

‘Mammoth’ is uncontroversial.  By Crookston’s reckoning they account for around one sixth of England’s homes and around 40 per cent of the country’s socially-owned housing stock.  The pre-1945 estates – when Garden City ideals were in vogue – are generally the more celebrated and form over a quarter of such estates but half were built in the post-war period to 1964 and one fifth later.  Taking Leicester (we’ve looked at the Saffron Lane Estate as an example), the Corporation’s twenty-three cottage estates formed about a third of the city’s suburban land and, at peak, some 43 per cent of its suburban housing.

Copinger Road on the Saffron Estate pictured in the 1930s

‘Achievement’ is contested and the book casts an unsparing but always sympathetic and humane eye on why that has come to be.  In this, Crookston avoids caricature and appreciates nuance (unlike much of what passes as commentary on council housing).

He begins with a useful typology of estates. His Type One estates are set in more prosperous regions – his two case-studies are both predominantly interwar estates covered by this blog: Tower Gardens in Haringey and the Becontree Estate in Dagenham.

The Tower Gardens Estate

The Becontree Estate

Type Two are estates located in less prosperous areas – Deckham and Carr Hill in Gateshead (interwar) and Hylton Castle in Sunderland (post-war) are discussed in detail in the book.

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate, shown under construction in 1936 and in 2015 (c) www.gatesheadhistory.com

Type Three, he designates ‘Radburnland’ – built in the post-war era when (drawing from the example of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’) planners were determined to create neighbourly enclaves and to separate cars and pedestrians by a system of cul de sacs, feeder roads and walkways.  Bromford in Birmingham and Orchard Park in Hull form the case-studies.

The Bromford Estate, Birmingham (c) Smileyface http://www.skyscrapercity.com

Gildane, Orchard Park (c) Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It’s fair to say – though many variables intervene and their relative poverty certainly doesn’t help  – that Crookston thinks these latter are generally the least successful and shares the consensus view that Radburn principles failed. Orchard Park is described with uncharacteristic sharpness as ‘unattractive housing in an unattractive environment’.  The North Hull Estate, adjacent to it, is a reminder of the finer design sensibilities of the interwar period.

But the cottage suburbs as a whole have problems and it is Crookston’s mission to understand and remedy these.  They are, perhaps, neatly if unwittingly captured by the pronoun confusion of Sir Peter Hall’s foreword. Hall points out, ‘some three million, one in six of us’ live on these estates and yet, he continues, these are ‘”council houses” on “council estates” – the places where none of us would ever dream of living’.

That unintended condescension speaks to a wider, largely reputational, issue that the cottage suburbs are unfashionable.  Some – though media misrepresentation is to blame for the sweeping stereotype many accept – have broader problems.

This is not a static picture, of course.  The estates themselves have changed significantly in recent decades, most obviously through Right to Buy.  Now around half their homes are owner-occupied but, if this (as Thatcher’s vision of a property-owning democracy presumably imagined) was intended to stabilise the estates it has, as Crookston makes clear, had the opposite effect.

This three-bed, ex-council house in Becontree is currently available for rent at £1500 a month

Becontree offers a strong illustration: social renting declined from 38 per cent to 35 per cent between 2001 and 2011 while owner occupation declined from 56 per cent to 50.  Meanwhile, private rental rose from 6 to 16 per cent.  The growth of the private rental sector on council estates is problematic in many ways; the loss of genuinely affordable housing it represents is only the most obvious. Often privately rented homes are more poorly maintained and less well equipped; almost invariably their tenants are transient.

Yet Right to Buy (predating Thatcher as Crookston reminds us – over 250,000 council homes were sold before 1979) and the growth of working-class owner occupation from the 1950s have been crucial in shaping the declining image of council housing.  Once, without doubt, an aspirational step-up, it has increasingly become seen – I know that many proud council tenants and huge numbers on council housing waiting lists will rightly baulk at the generalisation – as housing for those who can’t afford to buy ‘something better’.

The stigma – obviously far stronger in relation to some so-called ‘problem estates’ than to the many far more ‘ordinary’ council estates up and down the country – attached to council housing is something that we who defend it must address and Crookston tackles the issue head-on.

Denny Avenue on the Ryelands Estate in Lancaster

To begin with some historical perspective is vital, not as an exercise in nostalgia but as a corrective to those who would condemn the whole project and deny it any future.  Crookston’s memory of growing up in 1950s Lancashire is telling here:

What stigma there was probably attached itself to the visibly poorer and scruffier little terraced streets and – especially – back courts as yet untouched by ‘slum clearance’.  And mums on the estate were just as insistent on hankies and proper shoes (not tatty plimsolls) as any in the private semis.

There were separations, typically defined from around 16 when choices regarding employment and education and staying put or moving away were made:

However, the label of council tenant was not the key to that, or to our attitudes and experience in general.  The estate was different, but it wasn’t that different, and it wasn’t stigmatized.

As Ruth Lupton, quoted in the book, argues, ‘Four generations ago, families in social housing included almost the full social range’. (1)

Council housing in Beddau

Crookston captures a later shift in a powerful chapter on ‘Attitudes’.  Take Beddau in South Wales. As one interviewee recounts:

There is more stigma than before…The growth of cheap home ownership around Beddau drained the council housing of its mixed community. And increasing worklessness amongst an unskilled population, when the mining went, has brought a divide within the working class…Now the area is split between a public-sector-employed ‘middle class, a few industrial workers, and a swathe of workless benefit recipients without skills or cars to access the jobs which exist.

Another interviewee, raised on a Manchester estate but now an academic in the US, recalls gradations within and between estates but says of his own more ‘respectable’ estate, ‘after the Right-to-Buy period, the estate came to be occupied by what seemed to me to be more marginal families’. Crookston notes this too of Norris Green in Liverpool, a case discussed in this blog.

An aerial view of the Norris Green Estate taken in 1939

These are subjective views and from, specifically, those who ‘moved on’ and moved away, but they speak to the undeniable fact of residualisation, that council housing became increasingly confined to a poorer working class.  Crookston reports that between 1981 and 2006, the nationwide proportion of owner-occupying households in employment fell by two per cent whilst in social housing the proportion fell by 15 per cent (and 21 per cent for full-time employment).

Council housing tenants have been hit massively by the deindustrialisation of Britain overseen or engineered (take your pick) by the Conservative governments of the 1980s.

There was another factor too of which Crookston is well aware but seems to me to underplay: that the concomitant decline in council housing stock and shift to needs-based allocations – instigated by Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act but made wholesale by that decline in stock – did progressively reduce council housing to a safety net role.  Its new tenants, particularly on the less desirable estates, were typically ‘more marginal’ – those whose needs gave them priority to this increasingly scarce resource.

‘Messages from Meadow Well’, North Shields, Northern Architecture, 2014

In this context, Crookston is right to treat the prevalent reports of anti-social behaviour on estates – always dominant in outsiders’ criticisms and, to be fair, prominent in the disillusion of many residents too – with some caution as often isolated and always minority.  Now’s not the time to take on that issue – though I would add that I have yet to see a comprehensive explanation of why anti-social behaviour became such a problem from the 1970s and I’d be grateful if any readers could point me to one.  What is the case is that anti-social behaviour has dropped very markedly in recent years as each of Crookston’s case studies makes clear.

Why this is so is less clear. Perhaps the various design measures and estate management initiatives – some sensible and necessary – have had their effect.  Either way, the CCTV cameras on the Deckham Hall Estate have been switched off and the problem has declined overall.  That the perception remains owes far more, as Annette Hastings (also cited in the book) argues to the ‘pathologising’ of estates, most often by those who know them least well. (2)

Cranleigh Road, Hylton Castle (c) David Dixon and made available through a Creative Commons licence

So the task, as Crookston sees it, is to overcome this stigma and stop the cottage suburbs being a ‘lazy asset’, one which is underperforming and failing to realise its full potential.  He examines a range of options to do just this, discarding some and endorsing others.

I’m pleased that he broadly rejects the idea that estates are failing as communities. This has been a long-running charge, principally from middle-class planners and sociologists who have felt, paradoxically, that estates have either failed to replicate the supposed neighbourly intimacies of the old slum terraces or to fulfil their own middle-class notions of improving self-organisation. Generally, estate communities work in their own terms – they are not, in Crookston’s words, ‘notably socially isolated or short of the “asset” of community resources and effort’.

He does recommend – though many councils, ALMOs and housing associations already have a good record on this – a series of case-by-case measures to raise the ‘feel’ of some of these estates, many falling within the broad category of urban management.  Many local shopping centres need ‘lifting’ and the estates’ public realm can be better cared for. ‘Problem’ tenants – they certainly exist – need to be better supervised.  ‘Soft’ measures such as re-branding (too often crudely applied) can be appropriate.  You can read the book for a better and fuller understanding of his balanced appraisal of such ideas.

Who gets to do this?:

The estate communities could very likely be much more involved, and on many of them that potential may be there.  But they need the ‘Corpo’ to be there alongside them, and to be resourced accordingly.

The role of the local authority, he argues and, of course, I agree:

needs stressing in Britain in particular: a country where the democratically-elected and properly-funded municipality has been regarded, it seems, as a luxury a poor struggling nation cannot afford.

The reality is – or should be – that this is investment we cannot afford to neglect.

Playing fields, Orchard Park (c) Paul Harrop and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, he takes on more controversial issues of densification and social mix.  I think he makes a plausible case that a lot of the open space in many cottage suburbs – created well-meaningly in the low density idealism of Tudor Walters (the 1918 report which established the interwar conception of the cottage estates) and beyond – is poorly managed and under-used. There is a case for building good quality housing on some of this open space and using more intelligently that which remains.

New homes for sale on the Norris Green Estate

In terms of social mix, he favours the current mantra, tenure diversity.  That, in itself, should hardly be controversial as it reflects, as we’ve seen, a fact on the ground. It’s also worth pointing out that quite a few estates were built with homes for sale or, in some cases, larger homes for middle-class rental.  If Nye Bevan himself wanted ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’, it shouldn’t frighten us.

What this doesn’t or shouldn’t mean, as Crookston argues, is ‘gentrification’.  It is really, I would suggest, about returning estates to an earlier condition in which a broad mix of the population were proud to call them home.

That, of course, would be best achieved by a fairer and more equal society and one in which, in particular, working-class people enjoyed better-paid and more secure employment – ironically the world we thought we were winning after 1945 and have so cruelly betrayed since 1979.

Pending that meta-economic shift, Crookston’s ameliorative measures are to be welcomed and embraced and the book itself deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in council housing and the future it deserves.

Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? can be purchased in good bookshops and online or directly at reduced price from Routledge. Enter the code FLR40 at checkout to secure your discount.

Sources

(1) Quoted from Ruth Lupton et al, Growing Up in Social Housing in Britain: A Profile of Four Generations from 1946 to the Present Day (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2009)

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

Clink on the link to see the many cottage suburbs featured in this blog over the years.

The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part II: ‘a dignified low-rise estate’

Tags

1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

We left Castle Vale last week, an undoubtedly troubled estate, damaged by the construction flaws specific to much system-built housing of the sixties and beset by the social problems affecting estates across the country as a traditional working-class economy collapsed and council housing itself became increasingly allocated to the most vulnerable of our community.

Castle Vale, 2004. Compare to the similar aerial view taken in 1993 in last week’s post (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Something needed to be done but hostile central government attitudes and policy – notably Right to Buy and the deadly squeeze on new housing investment – ensured (quite deliberately) that local government was in no position to do it.  Thatcherism was hostile both to council housing and the (predominantly Labour) authorities which still managed it.  Conversely, the 1988 Housing Act had established privately managed and well-funded Housing Action Trusts (HATs) to regenerate some of the country’s ‘worst’ estates.  It’s not difficult to read the political agenda here.

The estate from one of the Farnborough Road towers in the 1960s (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Birmingham’s Director of Housing, Derek Waddington, was authorised to discreetly investigate what was happening on the North Hull Estate, the first HAT in the country.  Though some Labour councils and tenants (such as those in Hulme, Manchester) resisted this apparent privatisation of assets and homes, the pragmatic case for following suit seemed unassailable.  As Waddington describes: (1)

Eventually I had to stand in front of the Labour group and tell them the professional facts. And then I left the council chamber and they sorted out the political elements. In the end they accepted it. For this one simple reason…the Government quango gets direct gift money up front to plough in the infrastructure.

Political backing from the Council and central government and a twelve-month campaign in favour was enough to ensure that 92 per cent of tenants voted to transfer to the HAT on a turnout of 75 per cent.

The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993.  After some wrangling, it secured greater tenant representation (the management board eventually comprised four residents, three local authority representatives and five independents) and government funding of £160m.

Chivenor House and school, 1960s

The first priority was to tackle the estate’s housing problems – the 1994 Masterplan proposed demolishing seventeen of the estate’s 34 tower blocks.  In the end, it was determined that costs outweighed the benefits of refurbishing fifteen further blocks. Currently just two remain – Chivenor House (now housing for the elderly) and Topcliffe House; both were attached to schools which would also had to have been demolished.  Twenty-four system-built and flawed four-storey maisonette blocks were also cleared.  In their place, 1458 new homes have been built and 1381 refurbished.

The new housing reflected the changed sensibilities of its time.  The sheltered housing scheme, Phoenix Court, built on the site of the Centre 8 blocks won a Secured by Design award from the police.  Twenty-eight ‘Reinventing the Home’ family houses were built by the Mercian Housing Association on Cadbury Drive, designed to adapt to changing domestic needs. There are small pockets of self-build and ‘eco-homes’ too.   Some of the new build looks fashionably gaudy; most of it safely suburban.

Chivenor House today

Though, as I write, ‘regeneration’ threatens good (and sometimes expensively renovated) housing and solid communities across the country, there seems no real need here to lament the loss of these particular blocks which were clearly poorly built from the outset.  But, then as now, ‘regeneration’ is accompanied by a host of attitudes and policies which should be questioned.

For one, there was now the familiar emphasis on the importance of tenure mix.  As often as not, this is now a means of generating income in a world in which the market rules and traditional and highly cost-effective means of investment – in other words, public loans which were repaid (with the benefit of both providing genuinely affordable housing and lasting community assets) within thirty years or so – are deemed unacceptable.   But there is also the assumption that estates themselves were a flawed social model, that ‘successful’ communities require higher levels of owner occupation and injections of middle-class affluence and aspiration.

Demolition of Castle 8 blocks, 1996 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s worth pointing out that council estates were once both a site and symbol of working-class affluence and aspiration and that – before they were deliberately designated as housing of last resort – they did contain a social mix.   Furthermore, on Castle Vale itself almost one in three homes had been built for owner occupation. Still, the HAT instituted a Tenant Incentive Scheme in 1997 which offered a £10,000 grant to existing tenants to purchase their home.  By 2004, owner occupation on the estate had reached 39 per cent (from 29 per cent in the 1990s).

1997 takes us back to the New Labour era and its slogan, espoused by Tony Blair, that his government would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.  Not too many speak up for New Labour nowadays but again, in the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that criminality and antisocial behaviour were problems which hurt, disproportionately, still overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ working-class communities.

The Trees pub prior to demolition (c) Valeboy and the Birmingham History Forum

All five existing pubs – which ‘had long been dominated by drug dealers and criminals’ according to the HAT – were demolished.  The HAT (as did some local authorities) also adopted toughened tenancy regulations which eased the eviction of households considered to cause nuisance.  Members of the so-called and locally notorious Green Box Gang were evicted in 1998. Further evictions followed. Tough police action, in cooperation with ValeWatch (a joint police-HAT initiative), directed against drug dealing and gangs also followed and, of course, lots of CCTV. Although crime rates didn’t start falling until 2000, it all seems a strong fulfilment of the New Labour mantra.

Refurbished housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The great claim made by the HAT programme is that it tackled problems holistically by recognising that social, economic and physical problems were related.  Not a unique or searing insight perhaps but one that Castle Vale HAT practised at least by a concerted programme of interventions tackling, for example, employment. I won’t list the various schemes here (read No Longer Notorious, linked to below, for the HAT’s own celebration of its record) but by 2005 unemployment on the estate had fallen to 5.3 per cent – below the Birmingham average of 7.6 (though the fall in the latter suggests that the HAT can’t take all the credit). (2)

New housing (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

Health, rightly, given that life expectancy in Castle Vale was eight years below the national average, was another focus.  In fact, the estate had been an early pioneer of integrated healthcare with its doctors, midwives, social workers, and health visitors all based in the same building from the 1960s.  But a comprehensive 1992 survey paved the way for a wide-ranging set of initiatives to tackle the estate’s particular problems of alcohol and drug abuse, infant mortality, domestic violence and mental illness.  The Sanctuary, a model of one-stop multi-agency working, was opened in the heart of the estate in 1991.  Life expectancy has increased by seven years.

The Sanctuary (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

It’s hard to challenge such an apparently unalloyed good news story and why would you want to unless you’re a committed municipal curmudgeon like myself but it’s an undeniable and self-confessed fact that the HAT worked very hard on public relations.  As Angus Kennedy, Chief Executive of the HAT stated:

Image management is as important as physical improvements. If we can’t attract people to an area, then it doesn’t have a sustainable future.

Positive publicity featured in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

From 1996, Castle Vale HAT employed a full-time PR officer with an assistant and a £100,000 budget.  He or she worked well, perhaps with good material.  Positive press stories increased from 29 per cent in 1979-1981 to 93 per cent in 2000.  In 2001 the HAT began to develop its own ‘image management strategy…driven by a baseline study conducted by MORI’. (3)

It’s easy to be cynical about some of this, to think at least that all this effort could be better directed towards concrete improvements rather than communications flimflam and yet perception, if not all, has enormous impact on reputation and well-being – as many housing estates can testify.  We saw this recently when we looked at North Shields’ Meadow Well Estate.  A study of both estates demonstrated how ‘a problem reputation can reinforce or even magnify an estate’s material difficulties’.  (4)

We’ll make some allowances here then (whilst looking at some opposing views) – just imagine how council housing might have fared if it hadn’t been subject to such relentless press negativity in recent decades.

Then, of course, we lived in the era of ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ (a perception that I’d like to think might have shifted more recently).  Given that, it’s no surprise that a new shopping centre and particularly the opening of a new Sainsbury’s as its anchor in July 2000, was heralded by the Progressive Conservatism Project as having a ‘profound and important effect on morale and confidence’ in Castle Vale, previously a ‘brand desert’. (5)

Castle Vale shopping precinct, 1994 (c) Mornement, No Longer Victorious

All this allowed one journalist to gush in 2003: (6)

These once bleak streets are now lined with attractive new houses and mews flats, piazzas and courtyards, travel agents and delicatessen counters, a new football stadium and a thriving college for the performing arts.

According to Adam Mornement, ‘the forgotten wasteland populated by towers had become a dignified low-rise estate’.

Whatever the reality – and I suspect that Castle Vale remains grittier than that language implies – the whiff of gentrification is plain to see.  And not everybody embraced the changes. There was significant resistance to the HAT in its early years from the Tenants’ Forum who felt a loss of democratic control and ownership – one protest featured ‘You’ve Been Quangoed’ tee-shirts to make the point.  The HAT records this as a heeded reminder of the need to strengthen consultative processes. (7)

Looking back, a correspondent on the Birmingham History Forum regrets ‘all the green space, swallowed by the new housing, the Park Lane fields just across the railway…now an industrial complex’. (8)

For a real alternative perspective, read the anonymous (though perhaps not representative) comment on a laudatory article in a June 2013 edition of the Tyburn Mail: (9)

Let’s celebrate Castle Vale that may have needed work and tlc but ended up having everything taken away and replaced by things chosen by a certain few. Castle Vale went from a bustling busy estate to a dull and miserable former shadow of itself. Well done to the money men is all I can say – you spent little, pocketed lots, and left!

Others have criticised the quality of the refurbishment which has taken place. (9)

Still, it’s clear that most residents, old and new, have welcomed the changes and the positive improvements which have taken place.  A police officer who worked on the estate in the 1970s and 80s considers that the HAT ‘worked a miracle…the place now is a lot better than it ever was’.

The HAT was wound up in 2003.  A ballot of the HAT’s 1327 tenants that year voted by 98 per cent to transfer housing management to the Castle Vale Community Housing Association set up in 1997.  I’ll confess a sneaking admiration, though, for the 18 tenants who opted to return to Birmingham City Council control (and perhaps got better tenancy conditions as a result).

John McKenna, ‘Knight of Castlevale’, 2002 (c) Wikimedia Commons

Castle Vale is held up as the great Housing Action Trust success story and taken by many to symbolise what ‘good’ regeneration can achieve, particularly when freed from the ‘dead hand’ of local authority control.  I think you could read this post and draw that lesson.

Or you could draw another lesson.  Estimates vary but it’s probable that (to 2005) the estate’s regeneration cost £318m – £205m from public funds and £113m, ‘leveraged’ in, principally from the private sector.  Imagine if local government had that money to spend and a similar freedom to build, rebuild and act – democratically and ‘holistically’ – to defend and support its community.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003.

(2) Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(3) Alison Benjamin, ‘Putting the record straight’, Roof, November/December 2000

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

(5) Max Wind-Cowie, Civic Streets: the Big Society in Action (Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos, 2010)

(6) Helen George, ‘New Castle’, Housing (magazine of CIH), February 2003

(7) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) ‘Valeboy’, comment in Birmingham History Forum, October 21st, 2012.  The comment from the police officer below is taken from the same source.

(9) The extended comment is even more trenchant and has much more to say. See ‘Castle Vale plans Year of Celebration: 20 years of regeneration for an estate that should be proud of its democracy’, Tyburn Mail, June 17, 2013

(10) Patrick Burns, ‘Midlands: On the Vale’, BBC West Midlands, 4 March 2005

The Castle Vale Estate, Birmingham, Part I: ‘Utopia’ to ‘civic pigsty’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Cottage suburbs, Multi-storey, Regeneration

In January 2016, David Cameron promised, as part of a new ‘blitz’ on poverty, to rebuild one hundred of the worst council estates in the country – the so-called ‘sink estates’ of ‘brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals’. (1)  There were plenty of people to point out the lies (let’s put this bluntly) that lay behind this latest PR announcement but to many it would have seemed strangely familiar too – another retread (like the Right to Buy announcement of the 2015 general election) of 1980s Thatcherism.

The appointment of Michael Heseltine to head the new ‘estate regeneration advisory panel’ completed the echo.  It was Heseltine, as Secretary of State for the Environment (in John Major’s government), who announced the selection in December 1991 of one such ‘sink estate’, Castle Vale in Birmingham, as the latest candidate for an earlier iteration of Cameron’s idea, the Housing Action Trust (HAT) scheme.

Castle Vale, 1993 (c) Mornement, No Longer Notorious

The estate is usually claimed as a shining example of the success of this earlier phase of estate regeneration and it has (as we shall see) some very good publicists to make the case. Although it provided a decent home to many of its first-generation residents (generally coming from far worse accommodation in the slum clearance areas of Aston and Nechells), Castle Vale was never a showpiece estate and by the later seventies it was seen as epitomising all that was wrong with large-scale and predominantly high-rise peripheral estates of its type. The Castle Vale HAT was established in June 1993, and since then much has changed, by nearly all accounts for the better.  Let’s examine the narrative.

We’ve looked at the beginnings of this story before.   In the interwar period, Birmingham had a council house building record second to none but in 1946 over half the city’s 283,611 homes still lacked a separate bathroom and some one in ten were back-to-back.  The decision was taken (against local tradition) to build high, seen as the only way to maintain appropriate densities in the inner-city.  More surprisingly perhaps, high-rise solutions were adopted in the city’s suburbs too. Almost two-thirds of Birmingham’s 464 tower blocks came to be built along or beyond the city’s ring road, justifying the soubriquet Saucer City by which it came to be known.  Thirty-four of these blocks were built in Castle Vale.

Castle Vale construction with Councillor Matthews and members of the Housing Committee

This hadn’t been the intention.  In 1960, the Council acquired the land of the 375 acre redundant Castle Bromwich airfield.   The City Architect, AG Sheppard Fidler, drew up a plan for a Radburn-style layout (of traffic arteries and cul-de-sac feeder roads, separating cars and people) which placed neighbourhood blocks of housing, shops and offices around communal green spaces. Sheppard Fidler had been Chief Architect at Crawley and brought such New Town sensibilities to his planning.

The City Council, however, was interested in building big and bold and less concerned with the niceties.  When his plans were rejected – the last straw in a long-running battle – Sheppard Fidler resigned. A second plan, envisaging a population of 20,000 based on spines of high-rise flats along the length of the estate, was adopted instead. (2)

Farnborough Road under construction (c) Birmingham Mail

Construction began in 1964 and was largely complete by 1969.  A settlement of around 4800 homes emerged, housing at peak nearly 11,000.  Unusually for the time, around 30 per cent of homes were built for owner occupation but, of the 3400 council homes, over half were in blocks of over five storeys. (3) Seventeen of these were laid out along Farnborough Road on the estate’s periphery and eight (the so-called Centre 8) in the middle of the estate. Two local shopping centres, five schools, two churches, a swimming pool and other community facilities completed the estate.

Castle Vale, 1968 (c) Birmingham Mail

All seemed well in these early years.  Geoff Bateson’s history records ‘a growing list of thriving community activities’ and states:

Crime rates were lower than many other areas. Turnover of residents was small. People wanted to be there and wanted to stay there.

Sue Spicer moved to a flat in the Centre 8 blocks in 1969: (4)

It was a huge improvement on our house in Aston. We had an indoor toilet, and there was so much green space. Mobile butchers and grocers came to our door. It seemed like Utopia.

Castle Vale Reed Square shopping centre, 1968. From the Phyllis Nicklin collection.

Others speak of misgivings.  As new families arrived, at one point, a third of the estate’s population was under 14 and some questioned the suitability of high-rise accommodation for many. (5)  Others spoke of the isolation of the estate.  Theoretically well-connected (major roads and two railways lines joined it to the city), at six miles from the centre and separated by those same roads and railways, it could still feel distant.

Pat Smith, a health worker on the estate from the late 1960s, argued:

People felt unsettled, on the edge. Many had come from the old back-to-backs, places with strong social ties. Castle Vale was a shock to the system. The lack of safe play space and the cost of under-floor heating were major bones of contention. People were used to coal fires which were much cheaper to run. But housing was the focal point of discontent.

At looking at what went wrong, we can begin with the construction flaws that bedevilled the estate from its early years.  The decision to use a Bison Wallframe system used by local builders Bryants (with whom, shall we say, certain officers and members enjoyed a close relationship) seems quixotic and partly dependent at least on the fact that the Council had pre-ordered a large number of Wallframe components from Bison and needed somewhere to put them (though the broader contemporary support for system-building should not be forgotten). (6)

Castle Vale, faulty block being checked by ‘spidermen’ (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

Problems of water penetration though windows and faulty joints were found as early as 1967.  Some Bryants-built low-rise blocks suffered from cold bridging in roof members.  In 1974, when a London swimming pool roof built of high alumina cement collapsed, news that some of the Centre 8 blocks used the material reached residents although the Council had decided to monitor (pending major structural repairs that would be necessary in the future) rather than remediate.  Scaffolding erected around the affected blocks in 1985 remained until their demolition in 1994.

Problems with cladding (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

The combination of design and build problems and council inaction was toxic to the estate’s reputation.  It became unpopular and, as such, a place where the Council placed the most vulnerable housing applicants who lacked choice and faced immediate need.  According to one resident, Castle Vale’s ‘problems began when people were moved here who didn’t want to be here’.  Another, who moved to the estate after separating from her husband in 1991, describes it as ‘a dumping ground full of single parents, alcoholics, and the mentally ill’. (7)

Castle Vale blocks (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It’s an unsympathetic turn of phrase but it captures the emerging tensions between longer-established tenants and new people moving in, often younger and single, often with particular problems.  The number of single person households doubled after 1981, families halved.

The rest is a familiar litany of the issues which faced so-called ‘sink estates’ up and down the country by the 1980s.  Crime and fear of crime rose – by 1992 it was claimed that 41 per cent of Castle Vale’s residents were victims of crime and 55 per cent afraid to go out at night.  Some blamed elements of the estate’s design for this: the HAT succinctly summarised the prevailing ‘defensible space’ theories of the day: (8)

the physical design of the estate…means that public and private domains are ill-defined, communal areas are not overlooked or supervised, and there is an intricate maze of ill-lit alleyways, making escape from the scene of crime or vandalism very easy.

Castle Vale, 1983 (c) Birmingham Mail

To others, of course, this wasn’t theory: (9)

When we were kids we were proud to come from the Vale, it had a feared reputation. There were alleyways everywhere and we knew them like the back of our hand. You used to get cars squeezing down the narrow alleyways, trying to get away from the police.

The criminality and antisocial behaviour was real enough, I’ll only add – like a cracked record – that it didn’t just occur on estates designed like Castle Vale but it did occur on very differently laid-out estates with a similar range of social problems.

Joblessness reached 26 per cent (against a Birmingham average of 19 per cent) as local employment opportunities fell and the B35 postcode became increasingly stigmatised.  And – always, to me, the most powerful and poignant index of inequality – people died earlier:  life expectancy on the estate stood at 68 compared to the national average of 76. (10)  That scaffolding around the Centre 8 blocks was both mark and metaphor of the estate’s dissolution.

Castle Vale in the 1970s (c) Bateson, A History of Castle Vale

It was obvious something needed to be done but, as demands rose in the 1980s, the City Council found its hands increasingly tied by the public spending curbs imposed by the Conservative government’s cuts to the Housing Investment Programme.

Looking back on this time, the then local MP Robin Corbett, who would become a major supporter of the HAT, recalled: (11)

I was absolutely appalled by what I saw, an estate of tower blocks like giant battery cages. It was a civic pigsty. It was clear that Birmingham City Council didn’t have the funds to make the necessary improvements.

But central government did.  We’ll look at the story of the HAT in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Press release, ‘Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ 10 January 2016

(2) See Geoff Bateson, A History of Castle Vale (2005) and Thomas Deckker (ed) Modern City Revisited (2005)

(3) Richard Turkington, ‘Regenerating Large Housing Estates: Setting the Agenda at Castle Vale, Birmingham’, International Conference Housing in Transition, Piran, Slovenia, 3-5 September 1997 Conference Proceedings

(4) This and the quotation which follows are drawn from Adam Mornement, No Longer Notorious – the Revival of Castle Vale, 1993-2005 (Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, 2005)

(5) Carl Chinn, Homes for People: 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991)

(6) As argued in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003.

(7) Both quotations drawn from Mornement, No Longer Notorious

(8) Castle Vale Housing Action Trust, Castle Vale Masterplan Written Statement, September 1993

(9) Michael Lutwyche, Hardcore (2008)

(10) Max Wind-Cowie, Civic Streets: the Big Society in Action (Progressive Conservatism Project, Demos, 2010)

(11) Quoted in Mornement, No Longer Notorious

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

The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields I: ‘a victim of labelling’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

‘Decent people living on a decent estate’ – that’s how Carole Bell, a Meadow Well community activist wanted people to think of the Estate in 2012.  Unfortunately for her, they were more likely to remember the riots that ripped the community apart in September 1991 and the stigma attached to the Estate before that crisis and for some years after.  There’s much that’s been written on Meadow Well before the riots and since, most seeking to explain its poor reputation and troubled history. This post will examine and assess those accounts and look at what’s happened on the Estate since then.

With apologies to Carole Bell, I’ll begin by recounting the Estate’s crisis point – those 1991 riots, sparked by the death of two young local residents, Dale Robson and Colin Atkins, killed when the stolen car they were driving careered off the road during a police pursuit. (Police claims that there was no ‘hot pursuit’ – that they were half a mile from the crash site – were disbelieved by many locals.)

The graffiti shows the version of events believed by many young people on the Estate

The protests which followed rapidly degenerated into looting and arson; emergency services attending were attacked. In all, it was said that some 400 people were involved; 37 were arrested.

Images of the riots and their aftermath

In the aftermath, the Estate became a focus of national concern – belatedly, it might be claimed – and international interest.  Much has happened and a lot has changed since but let’s examine a very specific housing history first.

Meadow Well (also called Meadowell, interchangeably as far as I can tell) was part of the County Borough of Tynemouth, formed in 1849. This was an unusually mixed borough, comprising the resort of Tynemouth, large areas of middle-class suburbia as well as the working-class and industrial district of North Shields.  While Lib-Lab politics dominated before 1914, for most of its life the Council (dissolved into the Metropolitan District of North Tyneside in 1974) was under the control of Independents and Conservatives.

That politics (and the fact that in 1912 two-thirds of councillors had interests in the private housing sector) might explain the Council’s reluctance to build before the First World War.  A housing scheme proposed on land acquired at Balkwell Farm in 1912 was opposed by Conservative councillors.  Councillor Plummer thought that to ‘put houses on the market at a rent nobody could compete with was not fair to the owners of property…The scheme was not at all fair to the middle class people’.

Ropery Banks, Clive Street, 1933

When others raised the appalling housing conditions and high death rate of the Banksides area of North Shields, Alderman Coulson, a Tory builder and landlord, blamed: (2)

the filth and dirt people live in. This is the evil, not the condition of the house. Put some of these people into Alnwick Castle and by the time they have been there one month it will be a slum.

These views are not merely of quaint historic interest, of course.  Similar views – that council housing is subsidised by the better-off (though it isn’t), that inflated market rents are somehow sacrosanct, and that council tenants are feckless – inform a lot of current thinking around social housing and its residents.

Housing on the Balkwell Estate

In 1919, however, even Tynemouth’s councillors were swept up in the national drive to build ‘homes for heroes’.  The Council determined that 1746 new council homes were required to address the Borough’s housing needs in the next three years and the Balkwell scheme was revived.  Its early phases, built under the generous terms of Addison’s 1919 Housing Act, represented deliberately high-quality working-class housing and, by the end of the 1920s, the Estate would comprise 562 two-three bedroom houses, semi-detached or in short terraces, and 100 flats.

Corner of Oswin Terrace and Balkwell Avenue, the Balkwell Estate

There was no intention that this housing be let to the Borough’s poorer residents: (3)

it would be the height of folly to leave a skilled artizan and highly worthy citizen in his present cramped and inadequate home in a dingy street, a home which he fain would leave for one better and for which he would willingly pay a higher rent, and to build houses of a type superior to it, and let them at utterly disproportionately small rents to the dwellers in slumdom.

The intention – in a filtering up theory that was common among early housing reformers – was that the homes vacated ‘would be at once occupied by persons now living in houses of a still more inferior character’.

Meanwhile, the Borough’s housing efforts rapidly faltered. In fact, only 524 homes were built by 1922, some 924 by the end of the decade.  The Council had even disbanded its Housing Committee in 1928 but it was re-established in 1930 as central government’s second interwar housing drive – slum clearance – took off.

Union Stairs, North Shields, 1933

Whether as a result of national pressure or local politics (Communist agitation was strong in the Banksides), the Council responded.  Alderman Coulson’s earlier views notwithstanding, the necessity was pressing. A 1933 enquiry into what became the Clive Street Clearance Area revealed that 48 residents occupied 17 rooms in Union Stairs, sharing a single water tap.  Liddle Street’s 405 residents enjoyed (if that’s the word) one earth privy for every 11 people.  Only two homes had piped water; none had baths. Infant mortality stood at 143 per 1000 compared to the Borough average of 83. Across the Borough, ten per cent of housing stock was declared to be slum property. (4)

Cutting the first sod on the Ridges Estate, 1932

A five-year plan drawn up in 1930 projected the construction of 850 new council homes. In 1932, the Council purchased a 135 acre greenfield site on the north-western fringes of North Shields from the Duke of Northumberland.  This was to be the Ridges Estate – the original name of Meadow Well and one by which it is still sometimes known.

The new estate contained 1961 homes. Forty of these were old people’s bungalows, 268 were self-contained houses and 1653 (84 per cent) were so-called Tyneside flats, common in the area – two-storeyed dwellings with flats top and bottom and separate ground-floor front doors, built in blocks of four.

An early image of the Estate showing wide, curved and tree-lined streets

In contrast, only around 15 per cent of the Balkwell Estate was flatted and, in real terms, it had cost twice as much to build.  The Ridges was said to be poorer quality housing built on the cheap.   These lower standards and the reputation which attended them have been described as ‘the source of all subsequent difficulties’ on the Estate and, of course, it is the design characteristics of council estates that have been claimed as a major factor in the emergence of later social problems. (5)

There is some truth in this explanation.  The Balkwell Estate remained a more popular and highly thought-of development; the stigma of Meadow Well’s poorer housing persisted.  But, in broader terms, the explanation is at best insufficient.  National legislation had mandated lower quality council housing since 1923 and more so in the 1930s as the focus turned to rehousing slum dwellers.  In this Meadow Well was not notably atypical and, to be valid, the explanation of later disorder would have to hold true for many estates across the country which manifestly it does not.

Children playing on the Estate, 1976

In practice, the layout of the Estate paid some tribute to the earlier superior cottage suburbs in its ‘Garden City’-style crescents and cul-de-sacs and it represented a good home to its new residents.  As one of these, Sarah Redpath, recalls:  (7)

When I went into that house and saw the bathroom and all that, well, I just broke down; I couldn’t help it because it was such a pleasure to know we were getting to where we were. It was marvellous.  It was a lovely place; everyone had their gardens done, no fighting, no animosity amongst anybody.

Conversely, the Estate had none of the ‘design disadvantage’ Alice Coleman cited to explain antisocial behaviour in the 1980s – high-rise blocks, anonymous walkways, lack of ‘defensible space’, and so on.  If Coleman’s monocausal account of later problems is mistaken (she really was only interested in attacking modernist design), we need to look at what else might have ‘gone wrong’ at Meadow Well.

Even this later image of the blighted Estate shows little ‘design disadvantage’

Another explanation – also used more widely to account for ‘problem estates’ – seems superficially more credible:  that the Estate was, from the outset, a ‘dumping ground’ for ‘problem tenants’.  This was, after all, the ‘rough’ working class, decanted from the poverty-stricken Banksides, and the sea-faring occupations of many male heads of household left the Estate’s womenfolk to cope alone, effectively as single mothers.

The symbol and, to outsiders, confirmation of these rough origins was the fumigation of the furniture and effects of all incoming tenants but even this needs scrutiny.  Ann Hodgson, a long-term resident of the Estate, understood the stigma of this compulsory cleansing and how others looked on it, but she welcomed it as (in literal terms) a fresh start.

Contemporary reports also describe a very different estate than the one the early stereotype would suggest – this from a reporter from the Shields Daily News in May 1934:(8)

I had a thorough walk around the Ridges estate, the sun was shining…and the atmosphere was full of optimism.  The first resident I decided to have a few words with…invited me inside the living room to have a look at the house.  The room was neatness itself with new furniture in the best of taste.

In the same year, the Borough’s Medical Officer of Health concluded that ‘the cleanliness and tidiness of the dwelling houses on the new estate more than confirms my opinion that slums are not the product of the inhabitants’.

These stills from An English Estate (1992) show a different image of Meadow Well than that which is typical

Statistical analysis also undermines the ready negative characterisation of the Estate and its people.  Only 31 per cent of its displaced slum dwellers came from the Banksides; nor were seafarers disproportionately represented on the Estate.  Even the crude measure of rent arrears – an indication of those unable or unwilling to pay – disproves the stereotype:  the arrears of Meadow Well tenants were just 0.4 per cent higher than the Tynemouth average.

From this careful analysis of fact rather than perception, Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull conclude that what the Estate did undoubtedly suffer from was labelling – an unjustified reputation generated in part by the resentment of others competing for the scarce resource of housing:

Regardless of the objective reality, a significant and influential body of opinion had already determined that the area was a ‘problem’ and was bound to be a problem because of the nature of the people who moved there and the nature of the areas they moved from.

We see some of the same dynamics in play in the Knowle West Estate in Bristol and the North Hull Estate.

If we reject the idea that Meadow Well suffered some Original Sin that would explain its later fall, we need to look more carefully at what happened to the Estate in the post-war period.  We’ll do that in next week’s post.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the next 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) Carole Bell interviewed by Mike Proud, ITV Tyne-Tees News, ‘Community hero retires 21 years after Tyneside riots’, 3 September 2012

(2) These quotations and much of the detail which follows are drawn from 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.

(3) John F Smillie (Borough Surveyor, Tynemouth), ‘Some Thoughts upon Housing’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1919; no. 4. vol. 40

(4) Details drawn from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing and David A Kirby, The geography of inter-war (1919-39) residential areas on Tyneside: a study of residential growth, and the present condition and use of property, PhD, University of Durham, 1970

(5) The quotation comes from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing.  

(6) Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ in Bill Lancaster (ed), Working-Class Housing on Tyneside, 1850-1939. See also Barke and Turnbull, Meadowell: the Biography of an ‘Estate with Problems’ (1992)

(7) Interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992

(8) Quoted in Barke and Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ which also provides the statistical analysis which follows.

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 Canley Estate, Coventry: Building the Community

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs

My thanks to Dr Ruth Cherrington for this follow-up post to her contribution on the origins of the Canley Estate last week. 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.

Moving to Canley

My parents moved to Canley in December 1948 having been allocated a brand new three-bed British Iron and Steel Federation council house there.  We looked at these so-called ‘steel houses’ and the early development of the Estate in last week’s post.

They left behind their shared lodgings in the older district of Foleshill, with its emissions from the local gas works and back-to-backs. But they also left behind close family and friends.

What did they bring with them? A few belongings, three small children and another one very much on the way: mum was eight months pregnant. They also brought with them working class values and way of life.

At first, mum thought it was ‘lovely’ to see the boys enjoying the relatively spacious house and garden (though just mud at this point) nearby after the former crowded conditions. She wasn’t so happy about field mice also running around but they soon left. My parents stayed for the rest of their lives.

Garden of BISF House, Canley. Author (holding toy) with brother, auntie and friends, circa 1960 (R.Cherrington)

But my mother felt isolated. Hearing the trains on the nearby railway line was a relief: she felt ‘there was some life in the place after all, it wasn’t just a dead end.’ But it did feel like that at first.

Many women on new estates up and down the country felt the same. It was quite an expedition for mum to visit her own mother with four bus journeys needed there and back and four children in tow. Canley buses terminated in the ‘bottom’ part of Canley back then, which made it even more of a trek.

My grandmother visited as often as possible as did my dad’s mum. Their help was welcome as babies arrived, right down to the seventh, myself. Mum lost her mother when I was only six. I clearly remember her anguished cry of grief when told the news. It was a huge loss to her on so many levels.

Housing was the priority and the rest, it was thought, would come later. Homes had been built quickly but people need more than a roof over their heads in order to lead full lives.

Street Life

The town planners designed the estate to promote sociability. But did it? A group of researchers led by Leo Kuper in the early 1950s studied a part of Canley they called ‘Braydon’.  They found typical conflicts and friendships as families settled into the new estate.

The thin walls of the BISF houses through which you could hear what was going on next door and vice versa were disliked. There were complaints about the ‘back’ door actually being a side door opening out towards your neighbour’s. You could see over to their side of the fence and, if the door was open, into their house.

As time went by, people put up high fences to block this intrusive view. The new houses were seen as lacking privacy and perhaps disappointing in that respect. People didn’t want ‘strangers’ knowing their business. Some families appeared as ‘stuck up’ and distanced themselves from others. Perhaps they saw themselves as socially above the majority of working class tenants.

My mother was friendly with some of our neighbours but not with others. Some helped her out with the kids though they had their own and gave her some support.

Some life-long friendships were formed from a very early age amongst the children. Many made playthings such as trolleys from what they could find or ‘scrounge’ which they then shared.

Children of Hayton Green. Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Commemorative Photo, June 1952. (R.Cherrington)

Mostly kids played together on the street, in each other’s houses and gardens and boys often formed ‘gangs’. They would be off into the woods or down the brook as often as possible. But what did the adults do?

Pubs and the Canley Social Club

My father was typical in returning to former watering holes back in Foleshill in the early years. Many men maintained links with mates, pubs and communities elsewhere as there was little on offer in Canley. The Phantom Coach, at the bottom of Charter Avenue, was never destined to become a ‘local’.

An older pub from the city centre, The Dolphin, moved to a green wooden hut in Sheriff Avenue in 1941. Whilst being a bit closer for men on our part of the estate, it was not as appealing as the well-established pubs they were used to. Dolphin regulars were more likely to be those in the immediate vicinity.

A new pub was built in our end of Canley in 1951– The Half Sovereign. Surely this would be the local that men had been waiting for?

The Sovereign Pub (formerly the Half Sovereign). Photo R. Brooker

Yes and no. By this time a social club had been established which was already very popular and had boosted a sense of community in Canley. The new pub had to compete with the Canley Social Club, which was right opposite our house.

Coventry is a good case study of clubs and community building and the Canley Social illustrates this well. The Council was quite radical in the early redevelopment of the inner city and the outlying estates, deeming it necessary to provide sites for residents to establish their own clubs. Seeing these as potential community centres, they allocated five plots of land on new estates.

The Council went further, taking a ‘Coventry City Bill’ through Parliament to allow the financial arrangements for these new clubs to be obtained through city funds.

Canley men wasted no time in setting up a club on the Marler Road plot. The first proposal was submitted on 16^th December 1948, the month my parents moved to Canley. The Council approved this the following July. This drawing was the basis of the club as it developed with a billiards room, a hall for concerts and bar.

Money and building materials were scarce but enthusiasm in plentiful supply with locals keen to have their own club to use and run. An application in October 1949 was approved for a ‘temporary structure’ to be erected which was to be made permanent no more than ten years later.

Canley Club winning bagatelle team, circa 1960. Author’s father centre seated with cup.(R. Cherrington)

Canley Social Club’s founder members bought and put up themselves ex-Ministry of Defence wooden huts. The small club was open for business in 1950 and my father was an early member. It was the much-needed social venue for estate residents, somewhere to come together, make friends and experience the type of communal life they had left behind.

The wooden hut served us all well during its lifetime before being replaced by brick buildings in the late 1950s. Locals recall a warm atmosphere with a lot going on for families, from boxing lessons for boys to bagatelle for the men. There were ‘free and easy’ concerts, ‘housey housey’ and children’s parties, all self-managed.

Children’s Christmas Party, Canley Social Club (R.Cherrington)

Canley Social Club 40th Anniversary commemorative glass (R. Cherrington)

We looked forward to nights out over the club, the Christmas parties and annual coach trip to the seaside. For many, this was the only time they would visit the sea.

Canley researcher Leo Kuper saw the club’s potential and was correct in thinking that it would be more popular than the purpose-built community centre in Prior Deram Walk.

As well as out-performing the community centre, the Club was up and running before there was a church on the estate.

What was their role in community building?

Canley Churches

Canley was described as a ‘godless’ place with no church before 1952 when Canley Methodist Chapel opened in Prior Deram Walk. In 1955, St. Stephen’s C of E church opened, ‘our’ side of Mitchell Avenue.

When he consecrated St. Stephen’s, the Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Neville Gordon, described it as ‘a new outpost from which Christian witness would spread’. He said ‘there were a mass of souls around the church in very great need of God’s mercy and truth’. They had lost contact with the Church when they moved to the district and had been ‘drifting aimlessly’.  He urged the congregation to pray not only for themselves but the whole community.

It may have been the hard experiences of the Depression closely followed by the battering of war rather than the move to Canley that had caused some of my parent’s generation to become ‘lost souls’.  Family, work, having a good time at weekends and keeping out of debt were the main preoccupations. Religion was mostly about the rituals of christenings, weddings and funerals.

St. Stephens Church, Canley. (Photo R. Brooker)

Those active in the congregation developed their own small community. Some of them were also club-goers but not all and in this sense there were distinctions between where people’s allegiances lay.

After years of being ‘godless’, Canley now had two churches. Then another came along, next to the Half Sovereign Pub. Its origins date back to 1950 when a group of young evangelical Christians decided to hold children’s services on a patch of open grassland on the newly built estate. These meetings proved so popular that a regular Sunday school was opened in the nearby Charter Primary School.

More regular services were started and planning began for a permanent church building but there was no suitable site available. Divine intervention perhaps came to their rescue as the brewery that owned The Half Sovereign were returning to the Council a plot of land they didn’t need. It was the very same patch of land where the open-air meetings had been held. This was purchased and the Gospel Hall opened in 1956.

Canley Evangelical Church today, with front extension and original building to the back. (R. Brooker)

Children enjoyed Sunday School there because they saw and made friends and could win prizes such as chocolate and books. Harry Hollingsworth lived in nearby Mitchell Avenue and was an early Sunday School leader. He remembered ‘the tremendous sense of community in the early days – a sense of oneness’.

Wednesday night’s ‘Happy Hour’ saw lively young audiences. We enjoyed singing the songs and learning about the Bible in a more interesting way than at school. When asked to find certain passages in the Bible, the first person to do so would shout ‘got it!’ and win a prize.

In some ways, it was like going to the club with these communal activities and experiences, which we remembered fondly for years afterwards. Another reason for sending children was so that busy mothers could have a few hours respite from their domestic chores.

Shopping

Shops are also community venues and places where people can meet. We had the ‘little shops’ consisting of a newsagent, Post Office and hardware store, chemist, grocery and a greengrocery.

The ‘Little’ shops on Charter Avenue today (R. Cherrington)

At Prior Deram Walk were the ‘big shops’ with a few more options including a Co-Op. Whenever we were sent there, mum always reminded us to collect the ‘divi’ stamps.

Other traders regularly did the rounds. Fifty years ago there were doorstep deliveries without the internet. There was the milkman, baker, coal merchant, Corona pop delivery and ‘Snowball’ laundry service. The ‘green van’ came round the estate selling fruit and veg. People complained about higher prices but these mobile traders saved a trek to the shops or town. Convenience, it seems, always has its price.

Few people had cars, especially women, in the 1950s. Going down the local shops or even to the ‘green van’ on the street could be a small gathering, a time and place for a bit of a chat. Even such short meetings helped increase sociability and sense of community on the estate.

To Summarise…

Canley did develop as a community, perhaps several given the divides of the pre-war ‘bottom’ end and post-war ‘top’ end of steel houses. There were those whose social lives were centred around the Club whilst others were more ‘churchy’. It became a place to call home as time went on with more amenities, services and schools. Gardens bloomed, as did friendships, courtships and marriages. There were the teething troubles of any new estate and later on the deep problems caused by industrial decline and social change. That part of the Canley story will be told another time.

The Canley Estate, Coventry: ‘The Place Where I Grew Up’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs

I’m very pleased to feature another fine guest post (and would welcome others), this one from Dr Ruth Cherrington.  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.

I wasn’t sent to Coventry: I was born there. Though I left a long time ago I regularly visit family still living there and the familiar sites of the estate where we grew up: Canley. We can take ourselves out of our childhood homes, but do they ever really fade away from our own sense of attachment and place? For me, the answer is a resounding no. I’m still very much a ‘Canley kid’ at heart after all these years.

I’ve seen many changes, of course. But the constants are clearly visible such as the strong element of working class identity that remains, though now embattled in many ways. I’ve been in a good position to observe the life and times of Canley given my lifetime’s experience of this former council estate. From my recollections and observations I have compiled a two-part blog about the place where I grew up. I write about what made Canley similar to other post-war housing estates but also what made it special not only to me but also in historical terms.

 What and Where is Canley?

Canley existed long before Coventry Corporation bought 20,000 acres of the land from local landowning family, the Leighs, in 1926. It is mentioned in Medieval documents, linked to the nearby Fletchampstead, Westwood, and Stoneleigh estates. These historical aspects are important, reflected as they are in names of roads and schools but also in the attempt to design into the new estate a village feel.

The Canley we now see is largely the result of a pre-war vision of a ‘planned neighbourhood unit’ on the outskirts of Coventry. Building began in the 1930s mainly to rehouse people from city slum clearance programmes but the war halted construction. It continued with renewed haste thereafter, especially given the severe bombardment Coventry suffered. The first bombs to fall actually landed in the industrial area of Canley on August 18^th 1940.

Coventry city centre after the 14 November 1940 air raid

Then came the blitzkrieg, lasting until mid-November with three quarters of the city centre destroyed. This included the 14^th century cathedral, with only its shell remaining once the fires had died out after the single most concentrated attack on any British city during the War on the night of November 14^th, 1940. A new word was coined to describe such sustained heavy bombing – to ‘Coventrate.’

Residential areas were badly damaged such as the older district of Foleshill where my parents, still single, were living with their families. Over 41,000 homes were damaged, many destroyed completely and 550 people lost their lives. It has been said that the German bombers continued what the town planners had begun before the war – the wholesale modernisation of the city. Coventry Corporation had intended to implement grand designs for a new city centre surrounded by healthy suburban estates such as Canley.

When Coventry was the city of the future: the Precinct, 1955

The war left a scarred landscape and a severe depletion of the housing stock. Resuming the construction of Canley was part of the post-war drive to provide new homes. The pre- and post-war parts of the estate not surprisingly have a different look to them reflecting the changed contexts of the grand 1930s plans and the pressing post-war needs.

Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers’ fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45.

Canley Ford circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

Canley Ford Milk bar – a popular place for kids in the summer holidays circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

There were two woods very close to our house. Ten Shilling Wood was so named because that was how much a licence cost to shoot there in former times. Park Wood was at the top of our street though we never called it by its proper name: I’m not even sure we knew it then. To us it was the ‘top wood’ with Ten Shilling Wood being the ‘bottom’ one. Park Wood was also known as the dark woods or the bluebell wood because of the wonderful displays in springtime when we would collect huge bunches for our mothers. Both woods were remnants of the ancient Forest of Arden.

Canley has three main ‘boundaries.’ Fletchamstead (N.B. Modern spelling) and Kenpas highways, comprising part of the Coventry Bypass (A45) was one of these. This major route links Coventry to Birmingham in one direction, and ultimately to London, about 100 miles away, in the other.

There were older parts of Canley on the other side of the Bypass, however, including some pre-war council housing along Burnsall Road from the early 1930s estate construction period.

Burnsall Road, November 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

There is also Canley station, formerly Canley Gates, opened mainly for workers at the Standard Motor Works in 1940. This is on the main London to Birmingham railway line, which forms another Canley boundary. Constructed between 1833 and 1838, the railway cut through number of farmer’s fields and several small bridges and crossing points were put in place as access for the farmers and their livestock. Rather than being used to move cows between fields, it’s now a main thoroughfare from Canley to Tile Hill and beyond.

Former cattle crossing point under the London to Birmingham Railway Line at Wolfe Road, Canley (Ruth Cherrington Aug. 2006)

Charter Avenue, the main road into and out of the estate, forms the third boundary. It begins at a junction with the A45, marked conveniently by the Phantom Coach pub. This is typical of many built in the interwar years, being spacious when compared to older city centre ‘boozers’, with gardens back and front. It was intended to serve the expanding new estate as well as to pick up passing trade from thirsty travellers on the A45.

Phantom Coach Pub, Charter Avenue/A45, Canley. October 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

Moving westwards along Charter Avenue, we see all key Canley estate roads branch off to the right hand side in ribbon style development. The road is a dual carriageway as far as Mitchell Avenue, where building stopped before the war. This also represents an internal ‘border’ within Canley, marking the older from the newer part, the top from the bottom end of the estate. Charter Avenue continues as a single carriageway from there till it ends about a mile later at the junction with Cromwell Lane. This marks the edge of Canley and in the past of Coventry City’s limits.

Charter Avenue is Canley’s main road and buses to and from the city centre still pick up passengers from stops along here as they have always done.

Charter Avenue, looking towards bus stop at junction with Wolfe Road (Ruth Cherrington, 2006)

Canley’s Early Residents

Coventry was in many ways a ‘city of factory workers’ with so many engineering plants, some of them in the Canley area. It was arguably one of the most industrial cities in Europe and my own ancestors had mostly pitched up in Coventry looking for industrial work of various kinds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Canley was also to be all council housing, offering decent homes for the workers many of whom were living in overcrowded conditions in older parts of the city. Some residents were to be migrants from other areas of the country in search of work. Industrial Coventry had long been a magnet for those thrown out of jobs, whether from the mills of Lancashire, shipbuilding yards of Tyneside or collieries of South Wales. Coventry welcomed skilled and unskilled labour and Canley would count among its own resident a broad mix of people from across Britain.

The ideal was fair rent, with no family expected to live in a house too small for its size, with the council as a non-exploitative landlord. Acting upon a belief that ‘environment makes the slum dweller’, the Corporation wanted to make ‘better’ people on a new estate with a ‘healthy and pleasant environment.’

Building an Estate of ‘Happiness and Health’

An article in the Midland Daily Telegraph in 1938 (May 17^th) declared that ‘Canley Contributes to Coventry’s Happiness and Health.’ It was referring to the 150 houses already occupied in the Prior Deram Walk and Queen Margaret’s Road area. The layout of the new streets and houses led the writer to conclude that:

Canley is, without a doubt, a very healthy housing estate. It is already becoming attractive in appearance, for many of the front gardens of the first 100 houses built are a mass of colour.

Clearly the residents had been very busy in their gardens.

The good-sized gardens front and back were for the men to grow not only flowers but also vegetables and to breathe in fresh air. They were for kids to play in but there were plenty of planned green spaces as well.

The houses were mostly redbrick, semi-detached, typical of those being constructed across the country. Coventry planners aimed to avoid ‘displeasing uniformity’ by building in blocks of four, some of them being set back a few feet. Variety would promote ‘beauty and harmony.’ Different colours were used for roof tiles and also for the doors and the pebbledash. No two blocks were to be painted the same.

Inside the one, two, three and four bedroomed houses there was light and space, fitted cupboards, storage space, picture rails and kitchen ranges. The houses were the sort of suburban home middle-class couples might aspire to buy but these were not for sale.

Redbrick houses along Charter Avenue (courtesy of Robin Brooker)

Nearby this new ‘township’ was a row of shops, which were later on referred to the ‘big shops’ after the construction of the ‘little shops’ in the post-war part of Canley. There was a brand new primary school as well, named after the son of local tenant farmers, Sir Henry Parkes, who grew up in nearby Moat House Lane. He went on to become Premier of New South Wales in 1872. A statue of a kangaroo was erected in front of the school to mark this link. A small public library was also built next to the school.

Prior Deram Walk shops today (November 2015, courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The City Corporation planners were forward thinking and included small retirement bungalows in their scheme, many of which remain today for retired people. The street is nicknamed ‘Pensioner’s Row.’

Two and three bedroomed redbrick houses were built along Charter Avenue as far as Mitchell Avenue. A few houses were built just inside the new turnings intended to be fully-fledged streets but the war came and these were put on hold.

After the war, the builders, including some of prisoners of war, returned. The ideals were not to be diluted but construction had to be speeded up. The decision was taken to use a new type of house specially designed in this period: the British Iron and Steel Federation or BSIF house. (1)

Row of BSIF or steel houses, Charter Avenue/Marler Road junction. (R. Cherrington 2006)

Looking down Marler Road, BISF houses (R. Cherrington, 2006)

To us locals, they were simply steel houses, built around a steel frame with part of the outside cladding steel as well. They are ‘non-conventional build’ because they are not brick with slate tiled roofs. Whilst the materials may be non-conventional, they are, in fact, traditional three bed, semi-detached houses. They were also meant as permanent, not temporary homes and differed from wholly prefab houses.

View from a BISF house, looking into the garden. (R. Cherrington)

A plot of land near Prior Deram walk saw several rows of steel houses go up, around Thimbler Road and Sheriff Avenue. Some prefabricated bungalows were erected along John Rous Avenue and Mitchell Avenue thus largely finishing more quickly and cheaply the construction of Canley. The prefabs have long since been demolished and replaced with brick houses but the steel houses remain.

The prefabs were praised in a Coventry Evening Telegraph article in 1945 (October 30^th) as the ‘Coventry’ experiment. Not only had the Corporation ‘pioneered a house of novel construction and design’, but had cut through red-tape. This referred to the fact that the plumbing system contravened building by-laws, but the pressing need for housing was seen as justification.

The compact homes were described as cosy due to good insulation, with no wastage of space: much research had gone into their design and construction. Coventry’s Lord Mayor described them as being good for housewives. By easing their burden, he believed the homes made a great contribution to society and also recognised the part women played in the war. Many women had worked in ‘men’s jobs’ but in peacetime were expected to return quietly to the home and domestic roles.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s several four storey blocks of flats were built plus some maisonettes in Donegal Close and Penrosa Walk. This renewed building in streets behind the ‘little shops’ and also further up Charter Avenue was done in a thoughtful manner, with variation of style and of colours.

Flats at bottom of Donegal Close, November 2015. (Courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The aim of providing light, airy houses, large gardens and green spaces remained as Canley expanded with the view that creating a better environment would create better people. Canley was still a planned neighbour, despite the war intervening, and was a practical example of current town planning ideas and ideals.

I will consider in the next blog to what extent the blueprint of architects and planners succeeded in promoting a sense of community across the pre- and post-war built estate.

Notes

(1) You can find more images and detail on post-war British Iron and Steel Federation homes at the BISF website.