wouldn’t change this for anything.
You can’t know our relief when we moved in.
At last, something I can take a pride in.
I have a garden now and we catch the sun all day in the front room – no need for candles in the daylight now.
Just over a year later, the paper returned to the estate and focused on how the work of ‘the magnificent new schools’ had resulted in a significant improvement in youthful behaviour, in spite of class sizes averaging around 40. ‘How can they talk of us as the hooligan schools!’ declared one head teacher. ‘We have children here of all types and I say they are a perfectly wonderful lot. The parents are splendid, helping us in every way they can to do the most for their children.’ The report itself optimistically identified ‘a growing community spirit’ on the estate generally; and it predicted that ‘the association of the words “Paulsgrove” and “hooligan” ’ would soon become ‘totally obsolete’.
The outwards migration could also be from villages as well as cities and towns. Such was the case for the family of Lorna Stockton (the future literary critic Lorna Sage), whose remarkable autobiography,
Bad Blood
(2000), relates how her parents in about 1951 moved into a brand-new council semi half a mile ‘up the lane’ from Hanmer, a Flintshire village just inside the Welsh border. It was a house, complete with open-plan living room, ‘designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert’. For her grandmother from south Wales, after years of living a proud but discontented life in the local vicarage, ‘the raw council estate, where cows wandered over the unfenced garden plots on their way to the fields and
the neighbours could see in
, was Hanmer squared, essence of Hanmer, and she scorned it with a passion’. It was an unprepossessing estate of about a dozen houses – ‘built on a flattened field at the top of a windy rise’ – and the nine-year-old Lorna, who had also lived at the much more spacious vicarage, ‘refused to feel at home there’ and spent as much time as possible ‘wandering the fields and footpaths in squelching wellies’. Indeed, the whole experience seems to have been a mismatch – ‘unlike the other houses, ours didn’t have net curtains, an act of impropriety which showed from the start that we didn’t know how to behave in our new life’ – and not even the arrival of a new three-piece suite could compensate for what Sage unsentimentally records as a (probably far from unique) ‘case of emotional claustrophobia’.11
One new, much-publicised council estate had no country fields anywhere near.12 This was the Lansbury estate in the bombed-out East End, named after the legendary inter-war Labour politician George Lansbury and serving during 1951, in its incomplete early development, as the ‘Live Architecture Exhibition’ for the Festival of Britain. ‘Here at Poplar you may catch a glimpse of that future London which is to arise from blitzed ruins and from the slums and chaotic planning of the past,’ declared a Festival brochure with typical confidence and forward-lookingness. John Summerson, visiting the estate in June, identified some key elements:
The general idea is the redevelopment of a ‘neighbourhood’ as envisaged in the Abercrombie-Forshaw plan of 1943. The old street-pattern is wiped out and a new pattern, with fewer streets, imposed; houses and flats are loosely and agreeably mixed, there is fluent adequacy of open space, and churches and schools are well sited . . . The completed dwellings include three-storey blocks of flats and a longish row of small houses. . . The market place or shopping centre, designed by Mr Frederick Gibberd, is a challenging departure. No traffic enters it and the shops are recessed under the buildings, arcade-wise . . .
Chrisp Street market (London’s first pedestrianised shopping centre),
You can’t know our relief when we moved in.
At last, something I can take a pride in.
I have a garden now and we catch the sun all day in the front room – no need for candles in the daylight now.
Just over a year later, the paper returned to the estate and focused on how the work of ‘the magnificent new schools’ had resulted in a significant improvement in youthful behaviour, in spite of class sizes averaging around 40. ‘How can they talk of us as the hooligan schools!’ declared one head teacher. ‘We have children here of all types and I say they are a perfectly wonderful lot. The parents are splendid, helping us in every way they can to do the most for their children.’ The report itself optimistically identified ‘a growing community spirit’ on the estate generally; and it predicted that ‘the association of the words “Paulsgrove” and “hooligan” ’ would soon become ‘totally obsolete’.
The outwards migration could also be from villages as well as cities and towns. Such was the case for the family of Lorna Stockton (the future literary critic Lorna Sage), whose remarkable autobiography,
Bad Blood
(2000), relates how her parents in about 1951 moved into a brand-new council semi half a mile ‘up the lane’ from Hanmer, a Flintshire village just inside the Welsh border. It was a house, complete with open-plan living room, ‘designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert’. For her grandmother from south Wales, after years of living a proud but discontented life in the local vicarage, ‘the raw council estate, where cows wandered over the unfenced garden plots on their way to the fields and
the neighbours could see in
, was Hanmer squared, essence of Hanmer, and she scorned it with a passion’. It was an unprepossessing estate of about a dozen houses – ‘built on a flattened field at the top of a windy rise’ – and the nine-year-old Lorna, who had also lived at the much more spacious vicarage, ‘refused to feel at home there’ and spent as much time as possible ‘wandering the fields and footpaths in squelching wellies’. Indeed, the whole experience seems to have been a mismatch – ‘unlike the other houses, ours didn’t have net curtains, an act of impropriety which showed from the start that we didn’t know how to behave in our new life’ – and not even the arrival of a new three-piece suite could compensate for what Sage unsentimentally records as a (probably far from unique) ‘case of emotional claustrophobia’.11
One new, much-publicised council estate had no country fields anywhere near.12 This was the Lansbury estate in the bombed-out East End, named after the legendary inter-war Labour politician George Lansbury and serving during 1951, in its incomplete early development, as the ‘Live Architecture Exhibition’ for the Festival of Britain. ‘Here at Poplar you may catch a glimpse of that future London which is to arise from blitzed ruins and from the slums and chaotic planning of the past,’ declared a Festival brochure with typical confidence and forward-lookingness. John Summerson, visiting the estate in June, identified some key elements:
The general idea is the redevelopment of a ‘neighbourhood’ as envisaged in the Abercrombie-Forshaw plan of 1943. The old street-pattern is wiped out and a new pattern, with fewer streets, imposed; houses and flats are loosely and agreeably mixed, there is fluent adequacy of open space, and churches and schools are well sited . . . The completed dwellings include three-storey blocks of flats and a longish row of small houses. . . The market place or shopping centre, designed by Mr Frederick Gibberd, is a challenging departure. No traffic enters it and the shops are recessed under the buildings, arcade-wise . . .
Chrisp Street market (London’s first pedestrianised shopping centre),
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