Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (93 page)

There already existed a flagship for the dream. ‘We believe we shall yet see roses growing on Quarry Hill,’ a Leeds alderman had declared in March 1938, opening the first section of an estate being built opposite the city’s bus station. ‘The Housing Committee make the bold claim for this estate that when completed, it will not only be the finest of its kind for wage-earners in this country but also in the world.’ Duly finished soon afterwards, the Quarry Hill estate comprised six-storey blocks of flats consciously modelled on the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, widely known as a paragon of working-class housing. Functioning lifts; the pioneering, French-designed Garchey automatic waste-disposal system; the revolutionary ‘Mopin system’ of prefabricated blocks of stressed steel and concrete – all were witness to a belief that municipal housing should be the best and the most modern.

But by 1949 there were clear signs of dissatisfaction. ‘Quarry Hill Flats, many of its 960 families think, is a grey elephant,’ the local press noted somewhat sardonically in September. ‘Not exactly a white elephant, for the Corporation Housing Department collects a goodly sum in rents. But untended, neglected, discouraged.’ The specific context was a recent manifesto presented to the Housing Committee by the Tenants’ Association calling for a range of improvements – especially in terms of open spaces, garden plots and playgrounds – in accordance with the bold promises made at the opening ceremony back in 1938, as well as a variety of other facilities, such as a community centre, a health centre and shops. These proposals were submitted ‘as a basis upon which a vast improvement can be made in the condition of the Estate and by which it can become a real community dwelling of which the City can be justly proud’. Later that year, the local authority did bring in dustbins after the much-vaunted Garchey system had broken down, but generally its response to the tenants’ initiative was grudging and unimaginative.
^7.

Nevertheless, it was almost certainly the case that most people living in Quarry Hill in the late 1940s and for quite a long time afterwards were broadly content to be doing so. And in general, in the tortuous, bittersweet, frequently controversial post-war story of public housing, so much would depend on
external
perceptions – perceptions often at odds with reality. Take Glasgow’s Blackhill estate. Built in the 1930s to rehouse slum-dwellers from the city’s east end, and set in a hilly area two miles north-east of the city centre, very near a gas plant and chemical works, it never remotely enjoyed flagship status. Here, the process of Glasgow-wide stigmatisation seems to have begun in early 1949, after nine residents had been fatally poisoned by illegal, homemade ‘hooch’ imbibed during Hogmanay celebrations. It quickly emerged – through a report in a local paper – that the cause was methyl alcohol, stolen by a Blackhill man from the chemical works. Thereafter, as a result of the story spreading across the city by word of mouth, the estate’s reputation was indissolubly linked with the episode. So much so that in 1950 one woman, hitherto living in an overcrowded single-end, became a tenant there only with the utmost reluctance. ‘There were bad things happening in it that we heard,’ she recalled (while still insisting on her anonymity) some 40 years later. ‘I’d heard they were running about with knives and hammers and a’ this carryon, and I said, no way am I going there.’ She went on:

We had to take it [the house] because of the room-space, and I was only in it a year when I went away on holiday and closed the house up for a fortnight. And there was nobody touched it. And that’s when I realised that it was the name it had got . . . They can all say what they like but I reared, I reared the twins here – they were only thirteen months when I came here and I could put them up beside anybody . . .

In short: ‘I came to stay and I found it was entirely different.’
^8.

The only stigma that the nation’s owner-occupiers – responsible in 1951 for some 31 per cent of the housing stock – had to endure was the almost visceral anti-suburban bias of most progressive thinkers. The popular journalist and broadcaster Godfrey Winn had this stigma in mind when, being driven by his chauffeur along the Kingston bypass in 1951, he came off at Cortlands Corner and turned into Malden Road:

In a moment, the roar of the traffic was hushed; in a moment, walking between the privet hedge that leads into the cul-de-sac, called Firgrove, I was in the very heart of suburbia, and isn’t life there considered by some to be the cemetery of all youthful drama, the burying ground of all ambition, the apotheosis, on the other hand, of all convention? And, in addition, a lonely tomb for all neighbourly and social intercourse.

So the modern school of psychiatrists are never tired of telling us, yet I can only truthfully state myself that my first reaction as I examined the two dozen houses neatly laid out in rows, each with its own well-mown patch of front lawn, its flowering lilacs and laburnums, was that I could think of many far less pleasant places in which to be buried during one’s lifetime. Further, that first external impression became only enhanced, and most agreeably so, when I searched behind the façade to meet some of the family units inhabiting this hundred-yard-long road whose houses, built between the wars, originally each cost about a thousand pounds.

Indeed, Winn found in Firgrove an almost suspiciously uniform near-blissful state of contentment, with entirely relaxed and amicable relations between the neighbours. The Peggs, living at number 20, were typical. He was a senior tax inspector who doubled as treasurer of the Green Lane Tennis Club; she was a homemaker (‘I can honestly say that I have never envied anyone anything – not even our neighbour’s show of tulips this year’); and their grown-up daughter Marion was teaching handicrafts at Wimbledon Art School and saving up for a Baby Morris. Winn joined them for supper, and afterwards there occurred the emblematic moment of his visit:

The family produced a cable that had just arrived from their son, now married and doing splendidly as an engineer, in Australia. The cable had been sent in birthday greetings to Marion, from Turramurra. Whereupon, I found myself repeating the name aloud, like a mystic invocation – Turramurra, Turramurra – as I asked the three remaining members of the family whether they were not eager to set forth on a visit to New South Wales themselves, to this far-off place with the strange and challenging name. We take the road to Turramurra.

At once the father answered as though for them all: ‘I shall be very happy to spend the rest of
my
days in Firgrove,’ he said quietly.

I can understand why now.
^9.

‘The morning’s session was dominated by the Housing question,’ noted Harold Macmillan in October 1950 during the Tory conference at the Empress Ballroom, Blackpool. ‘It is quite obvious that here is something about which everyone feels quite passionately. The delegates reflect not political but human feelings and in their demand for a target of at least 300,000 houses a year, they were really determined as well as excited.’ Against the misgivings of most of the front bench (Macmillan excepted), a highly ambitious annual target of 300,000 new houses was duly adopted – over 100,000 more than the current rate, as the Labour government struggled with the economic consequences of first devaluation and then the Korean War. Politically, it was an extremely effective way for the Tories to outflank Labour – but was it a realistic target?

‘We can do it,’ a foreman ganger, Mr C. Russell, told
Picture Post
. ‘I have faith in the present-day worker, but tax on extra work holds him back. It’s only natural when beer, cigarettes and cost of living is so high. Some tax-free incentive would do more to increase the rate of building houses than anything else I know.’ But a bricklayer, Mr G. Parlour, disagreed: ‘If raising this target means forcing the pace and putting one workman against the other, then we are against it. To us free enterprise means the pre-war system of piece-work. We won’t have that. Many targets before the war were too high for decent work.’
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The question of quality was indeed the great imponderable. Bevan had insisted on high minimum standards, including of space – an insistence that inevitably acted as a constraint on the rate of completions. With the Tories committed (initially anyway) to undertaking at least as high a proportion of public housing as Labour, one obvious way of hitting the bewitching 300,000 target would be through a slippage in those standards. Most people, though, simply wanted somewhere half-decent to live.

Meanwhile, as Labour lost the housing initiative, three clear, related trends were becoming apparent by around 1950: the decline (or at best stagnation) of classic ‘1945-style’ town planning and reconstruction; the ever-increasing vogue of the flat; and the rise of the architect and architectural modernism. Between them, these three trends would go a long way towards determining what sort of place Britain was to live in through the 1950s and beyond.

‘Well, this Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, hasn’t turned the world upside down, has it?’ the veteran town planner Sir George Pepler asked rhetorically in the summer of 1949, addressing his colleagues at the Town Planning Institute. ‘Perhaps some of us on our more irritable days, discerning the millennium as far off as ever, feel even a touch of the chill hand of despair as we struggle on.’ For most of Britain’s planners, there was by this time a shared and persistent mood of gloom: not only did the country’s continuing economic difficulties severely restrict the implementation of their plans, but so, too, did central government’s grant system for local authorities that had acquired land for city-centre redevelopment – a system sufficiently capricious that, in the words of one planning historian, it ‘made the local authorities extremely cautious when proceeding with acquisitions, because they had no guarantee that actual redevelopment would follow in the immediate future’. ‘Enthusiasm for the reconstruction of our cities and towns is not what it was’ was the blunt verdict by January 1951 of one expert, Cyril Dunn, on the government’s attitude. As for the local authorities, he saw them as being in the process of ‘drifting, sometimes complacently, into compromise schemes’.
¹¹

The planning cause was not helped by the painfully slow progress being made in the reconstruction of Britain’s blitzed provincial cities (such as Portsmouth, Southampton and Bristol), even though this was far less the fault of the planners than of central and local government, each seemingly vying to be more cautious and risk-averse than the other. The major exceptions were Plymouth and Coventry, with the latter continuing to be – as it had since the morning after the bombs rained down in November 1940 – a symbolic beacon of Britain’s postwar hopes and aspirations. There, a Labour local authority strongly committed to building a new, modern city centre, complete with a pioneering, mainly pedestrianised shopping precinct, found itself again and again being hampered by a parsimonious central government unconvinced that the local population was as fully behind the plans for Coventry’s future as the Council insisted was the case. Nevertheless, even though the outcome was more stuttering progress than the planning visionaries would have wanted, it was not quite stalemate. Crucially, the government did during 1949 at last endorse the plans for both the reconstruction of the central area and the building of a ring road. And by the final day of what had been a traumatic decade, the official local mood was one of optimism. ‘As a city and as a community we have pulled ourselves together more than in any year since the war,’ asserted the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
. ‘The visitor has to search today to find relics of bomb damage, and that cannot be said of any other city which was blitzed. The bombed houses are rebuilt. Paint has removed the post-war shabbiness of our streets.’

J. B. Priestley, visiting ‘this mining camp of the motor trade’ a few weeks earlier, had already reckoned that something remarkable was under way. Admittedly, he told his Home Service listeners, the slow rate of progress since 1940 in the city centre’s reconstruction meant that ‘even the very model’ was ‘beginning to look rather dilapidated and wistful’; yet ‘the Fathers of this city and their employees show a spirit that is heartening to the outsider’. Above all, he was struck by Coventry’s success at ‘trying to create a proud civic spirit’:

Their municipal information bureau is the best I have seen anywhere. When I first looked in, I found a queue of old-age pensioners waiting to receive the fifty free bus tickets they are given every month, to encourage them to get out and about. One old lady, wiping her shoes vigorously at the door, said to me: ‘Mustn’t dirty this nice place, y’know’. A good sign! . . . Then we had a look at one of the excellent civic restaurants they run in this city, and later at one of the community centres in the suburbs, where there was a fine list of local goings-on . . . Best of all, perhaps, is the job they are doing there to make the schoolchildren understand all the machinery of civic life.