Family Britain, 1951-1957 (101 page)

In 1956 there were two cities – both with sectarian divisions, both with apparently solid commercial and industrial bases, both larger-than-life – that were particularly on the cusp of fundamental change.

One was Glasgow, the British city with the worst housing problems. There, in varying degrees, the three not mutually exclusive solutions of dispersal beyond the city boundaries, dispersal to just inside the city boundaries and inner-city redevelopment were all being pursued. The Tory government in the 1950s designated only one New Town, and that was Cumbernauld in late 1955, some 13 miles to the north-east and specifically intended for Glasgow overspill. The choice of site owed much to the agricultural lobby’s refusal to yield the best land, which in turn resulted in a far from ideal open, hilly setting, susceptible to frequent rain and strong winds. ‘I want to see a compact urban area, with higher overall densities than have been adopted in most of the post-war schemes [ie including the existing New Towns], achieved, not by a lowering of standards, but by the use of higher blocks and the omission of much of the so-called “amenity” open space (expensive to maintain and inimical to urbanity),’ Hugh Wilson explained soon after his appointment in 1956 as chief architect and planning officer of Britain’s 15th New Town. ‘We have,’ he added, ‘an opportunity to design a “cellular” town, the houses within walking distance of the centre,’ which itself would be pedestrianised, and he clung tenaciously to the concept of Cumbernauld Hill as the focus for a tight-knit settlement that would not be too alienating for deeply urbanised Glaswegians.

Dispersal to some 4 or 5 miles out was the fate for the 130,000 or so people destined for the four giant peripheral estates, mainly comprising rows of three- and four-storey flats. Pollok to the south-west of the city was more or less completed by the mid-1950s, Drumchapel to the north-west and Castlemilk to the south-east had tenants moving in by 1955, and Easterhouse to the north-east had its first tenants arriving in October 1956. ‘The great challenge to the tenants of many of the new Glasgow housing estates is that of remoteness,’ asserted the
Glasgow Herald
two months later. ‘The men are aware of remoteness from their work; the women of remoteness from shops . . . and perhaps also remoteness from relatives and friends to whom they could formerly turn in times of trouble . . .’ There were other serious problems in what the historian Seán Damer has called these ‘windswept canyons’, including lack of facilities (especially shops, schools, entertainment and transport) and lack of open spaces. Castlemilk was typical – described by another historian, Charles Johnstone, as ‘a high-density residential area where you could not even get a haircut without travelling into the city centre’.

Yet the probability is that at this point the great majority of Castlemilk’s new residents were broadly happy to be there, at least to judge by their recollections over thirty years after arriving:

I moved from Bluevale Street in the east end in October 1955. We got to Castlemilk in the dark and there was no light on the stair. We took the furniture up the stairs by the light of a bicycle lamp. We had no gas connected and no light. We couldn’t even light a fire because the coal nest was missing! You had to depend on neighbours that day – being kind and giving you hot water and heating up your dinner. But everybody rallied round. You knew your neighbours because we all came together and moved up the same close or round about – so it didn’t feel too bad. (
Nan Tierney
)

I QUALIFIED! I had been on the housing list for twelve years. You had to come up to be at the allocation of the new houses. I wanted top flat, 2 up and I got it! I had lived ground floor before in a room and kitchen. We moved into our 3 apartment in Croftfoot Road in March 1956. My husband and family were all delighted. (
Agnes Dickson
)

We moved into our five apartment in Croftfoot Road [in 1956]. We had both a back and front garden for the very first time. I had four children and soon my back door became the meeting place for all the kids. I would make candy and tablet and my husband would have a ball for them to play with. Sitting at the front you would have a blether to folk as they passed. (
Isa Robertson
)

We moved into a flat in Glenacre Drive in 1957. In the old tenement back-courts, everything was divided by railings and there wasn’t much light because of the high tenement buildings. Here everything was so bright, clean and green. (
May Martin
)

Thoroughly unhappy were those living in the nearby private housing estates of Croftfoot and Cathcart. ‘A complaint was made that following the occupation of houses in Castlemilk numerous depredations have occurred in Croftfoot gardens,’ balefully noted the Cathcart Ward Committee in late 1955. ‘Flowers have been destroyed and coal stolen. Young children had been hawking papers on Sundays in the avenues . . .’9

As for inner-city redevelopment, the first area chosen was the highly symbolic Gorbals, specifically its Hutchesontown part. By 1954 plans were on display by Corporation architects who envisaged its transformation into a series of tower blocks – to the horror of Frederic Osborn. In
Town and Country Planning
that June he not only offered a detailed analysis of why this approach would cost far more than a predominantly low-density solution, with the unhoused to go to overspill, but pleaded with the Corporation to consider ‘family living conditions 25, 50, or 100 years ahead’. It was to no avail. ‘This time there will be no rubber-stamp semi-detacheds,’ declared a local journalist, Alastair Borthwick, in his ‘Scottish Diary’ for the
News Chronicle
. ‘The ground is too valuable. This time they will have to build upwards, monumentally. Also, the slate will be clean. The man who gets the job will be able to compose an entire town within a city.’ The following April, the Corporation finally gave its go-ahead. ‘In place of drab four-storey tenements in hollow squares,’ reported the
Glasgow Herald
, ‘there will be well-spaced housing, a striking feature of which will be towering blocks of flats of 10 storeys or more mingled with flats of the more orthodox type up to four storeys, roughly in the proportion of 50 per cent of the multi-storey type.’ Some accompanying figures took the eye: of the 26,860 people living in the area, only 10,179 would be rehoused there; the existing 444 shops would be replaced by four shopping centres containing a total of 57 shops; and 48 pubs would be reduced to nine.

Did the old Gorbals really have to go? ‘The broad streets, flanked with their uncompromising cliffs of classical tenements diminishing into the distance, have an air of dilapidated, littered grandeur . . . a sort of stricken elegance,’ wrote a visitor while it still stood. But of course, behind that faded grandeur lay many years of landlord neglect-cum-exploitation and some harsh facts: acute overcrowding (87 per cent of Hutchesontown’s flats having only one or two rooms), few facilities (only 3 per cent having baths and only 22 per cent internal WCs) and many utterly squalid back courts, often used by small firms for such occupations as grease-manufacturing and fish-curing. In short, large-scale tenement refurbishment would have taken a long time and cost a lot of money – and the mood of the moment, as faithfully recorded by Borthwick, was for something altogether new and different. That at least was the Corporation’s mood, because we simply do not know about the wishes of the residents, who as usual were not properly consulted. What we do know, from a survey conducted later in 1956 by Glasgow University’s Tom Brennan, is that some 60 per cent wanted to stay in the immediate area – a wish that, under whatever form of redevelopment, was unlikely to be fulfilled.10

The other city on the cusp of change was Liverpool. There, 1956 saw both the closure of the Overhead Railway (known locally as the docker’s umbrella) and the official opening in June of the ten-storey Cresswell Mount, dominating the Everton scene and the city’s first multi-storey dwelling block. ‘We thought deeply about whether it was going to be something that would meet our needs,’ explained Alderman David Nickson, chairman of the Housing Committee, about the whole question of going vertical. ‘As we can see today, it has proved itself very successful – something of which we can be proud.’

If Cresswell Mount represented the future, Crown Street stood for what was poised to become the past. Abercromby ward lay to its west, Smithdown and Low Hill wards to its east, and together they constituted the inner-city, largely rundown ‘Crown Street area’ that sociologists from nearby Liverpool University (with John Barron Mays to the fore) sought to investigate earlier in 1956. A mixture of crumbling Georgian mansions and quietly decaying nineteenth-century terraced streets, this predominantly working-class (mainly unskilled) area comprised ‘slum’ property already destined for clearance and ‘twilight’ property that might or might not survive. It emerged from the survey that 36 per cent did not want to leave their present dwelling, that 25 per cent did want to change residence, but still stay within the locality, and that 39 per cent, fewer than two-fifths, wanted to move elsewhere. In terms of where they might move to, whether voluntarily or otherwise, there was particularly little desire to move to Kirkby, a huge new council estate on the outskirts of Liverpool that already had a population approaching forty thousand, almost entirely overspill from Liverpool’s slums and for whom the City Architect, Ronald Bradbury, had pioneered the ten-storey blocks later used on Everton Hill. Back in 1952, soon after the start of the Kirkby development, Barbara Castle had told the local Labour Party, ‘This is your chance to build a new Jerusalem.’ But four years on the message was yet to reach Crown Street.11

Public housing was now – and would remain for the next decade or more – essentially numbers-driven, but to dip into the original reports of Mays and his colleagues is to be forcibly reminded of the primacy and variousness of individuals, with all their individual wants and circumstances:

Old woman bed-ridden – very happy – delightful relationship with grand-daughter. Pleasant, clean atmosphere. Has lived in the house since 1917. Doesn’t think the neighbourhood is anything like it used to be. The old neighbours have gone. ‘We haven’t got the same class of people. Don’t run away with the idea that I think I’m it – but in the old days the children out on a Sunday were real well put on. Many a time I’ve kept our kids in because they weren’t nice enough for Sunday. (
75-year-old widow, living with two daughters (tailoress and barmaid) and one grand-daughter
)

House is reached by steep and narrow stairs, quite unsuitable for old people. Coal has to be carried up, and rubbish down. As there is no backyard they cannot have a dustbin, so must dispose of rubbish as best they may, mainly on the living room fire. Cooking by coal range, no bathroom or hot water supply. Most courteous and informative. (
65-year old watchman in children’s playground, living with wife and niece
)

Very distressed at living next door to pub – which has, in her opinion, got out of hand since a woman licensee took over. ‘It’s got my nerves to pieces. There was a thing in the
Express
“Why don’t they have singing in Liverpool pubs?” – believe me they do!’ (
51-year-old cleaner, living with husband (warehouse porter) and two children
)

House old, damp, cramped, unhealthy and inconvenient, would like to move to an outlying estate. Cramped, untidy living room, unpleasant smell, which respondent voluntarily explained as due to the fact that the outside toilet leaks into the back kitchen. House infected by cockroaches. Corporation have been approached about this, but will charge £1 for disinfectation, and neither landlord nor tenant will pay. (
24-year-old housewife, living with husband (deliverer for wholesale newsagent) and three young relatives
)

A well cared for, clean, tidy & well furnished house; wireless, T.V., thermostatic iron, children well-dressed, clean & tidy. General feeling of comfort & well-being, distressed at having to live in relatively mean surroundings. (
29-year-old housewife, living with husband (plumber) and two small children
)

Horrifying visit. Mrs—— could only be described as a mound of decaying flesh. She was too vast to be able to move about – she was partially blind & partially deaf. Her face was covered with sores. The smell was inconceivable, although her room was reasonably clean & tidy & had recently been redecorated. She said her neighbours were very kind & always called in when passing to see if she wanted anything. (
65-year-old widow
)

‘Anywhere to get out of this area.’ Poor living conditions. There is no bath; water-supply from a tap in the yard; no back-kitchen – they cook in the bottom room; no sink. As they’re at the end of the row of houses, their water supply is poor, and all the dirt in the waste water clogs in their drain, & he has to get it out. Nevertheless, a very cheery young couple, who made me feel at home and were very friendly indeed. Can ‘pop in’ at any time. (
31-year-old builder’s labourer living with wife and four young children
)

One interview was with a 28-year-old husband (a labourer at Threlfall Brewery), his 24-year-old wife (a press hand at Meccano) and her brother, a policeman, who happened to be there. The siblings did most of the talking. ‘They were very concerned about the state of England – what had happened to all her power? England had in the past done so much for backward countries & now they wanted nothing to do with her.’ And: ‘How shameful it is that such uneducated people as B & K were heads of state – they hadn’t even troubled to learn English – our royal family always took the trouble to learn some of the language of the people they were visiting.’ And finally: ‘They thought the survey a very good idea & “very good of us to do it”! They thought it very bad that in a free country when the Corporation wanted to pull down houses they merely gave the tenants notice to quit & gave them no choice for their new home.’12

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The Real Razzle-Dazzle