complete with clock tower, was indeed designed as Lansbury’s heartbeat – though revealingly, when Gibberd offered to design new stalls for the traders, they told him they preferred to carry on with their untidy, shabby old ones.
The verdict of most critics was at best lukewarm (‘not overwhelmingly impressive’, reckoned Summerson overall, ‘worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’, thought J. M. Richards), while only 87,000 people visited the site during the Festival’s five months. But as usual, most of those (mainly drawn from Poplar itself) who moved in to the new houses and flats were pleased to be doing so. ‘Our new place is just a housewife’s dream,’ Mrs Alice Snoddy told the press in February 1951 after her family (husband Albert a welder, she a part-time paper-sorter, two young children, one mother-in-law) had been the first to be given keys, in this case to a ground-floor flat. ‘There are fitted cupboards and one to air clothes in, a stainless-steel sink, hot water tanks. It’s the sort of home to be proud of.’ During 1952 two well-disposed sociologists, John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, interviewed several hundred of those who had moved in. ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury,’ was the heartfelt assertion of a lorry driver’s wife; ‘I can’t stop laughing to myself – I’m so happy,’ confessed a housewife who with her husband and two children had been living in one room in a condemned house in Stepney. Equally predictably there were complaints – the new market’s layout was too congested (‘you can’t take a pram round’) as well as discouraging to those wanting to have an initial recce before buying anything, there were too few facilities for mothers with small children, the kitchens were too small for eating in, the rents were on the high side. But overall, ‘the view that Lansbury offers a fundamentally satisfactory environment is shared by most of the people within and around the new neighbourhood’. Mrs Snoddy herself was settling in for the long haul. Three decades on, in the mid-1980s, she told the BBC that when she first saw her flat, ‘I can’t say I was all that keen on it, I would have preferred to have gone and lived in a house.’ But by 2001 she was happy to concede to the
Guardian
that ‘once other people from Poplar began to move on to the estate, I soon began to adjust’, adding, ‘I must have adjusted rather well as I’m still here 50 years later.’13
On almost all the new council estates, severe financial constraints – sometimes allied to a lack of imagination and drive – resulted in a damaging absence of those accompanying facilities that might have made the ideal of a complete neighbourhood unit closer to reality. In March 1952, for example, when Glasgow Corporation’s Sub-Committee on Sites and Buildings heard an application from Pollok Estate Tenants’ Association ‘requesting the erection of a hut or hall for the use of the tenants of the flats for aged persons at Kempsthorn Crescent as a recreational centre’, it was compelled to refuse it; at the same meeting there was a similar response to an application ‘for an area of ground at Drumchapel for the purpose of erecting a cinema in the new Drumchapel township’. The sociologist Charles Madge published that year a striking audit of community facilities on 100 post-war housing estates:
Facility
Number planned
Number built
Day nursery
13
0
Nursery school
46
1
Infant welfare clinic
24
6
Infant play space
22
2
Open playground
52
14
Health centre
33
0
Community centre
50
4
Branch library
46
11
On all estates, whether built before or since the war, there was also the problem of maintaining facilities. ‘What we really want is a supervisor on the lines of a park ranger, whose full-time job it would be to patrol the flats and find the culprits,’ declared a tenant in October 1951 after it emerged that
The verdict of most critics was at best lukewarm (‘not overwhelmingly impressive’, reckoned Summerson overall, ‘worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’, thought J. M. Richards), while only 87,000 people visited the site during the Festival’s five months. But as usual, most of those (mainly drawn from Poplar itself) who moved in to the new houses and flats were pleased to be doing so. ‘Our new place is just a housewife’s dream,’ Mrs Alice Snoddy told the press in February 1951 after her family (husband Albert a welder, she a part-time paper-sorter, two young children, one mother-in-law) had been the first to be given keys, in this case to a ground-floor flat. ‘There are fitted cupboards and one to air clothes in, a stainless-steel sink, hot water tanks. It’s the sort of home to be proud of.’ During 1952 two well-disposed sociologists, John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, interviewed several hundred of those who had moved in. ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury,’ was the heartfelt assertion of a lorry driver’s wife; ‘I can’t stop laughing to myself – I’m so happy,’ confessed a housewife who with her husband and two children had been living in one room in a condemned house in Stepney. Equally predictably there were complaints – the new market’s layout was too congested (‘you can’t take a pram round’) as well as discouraging to those wanting to have an initial recce before buying anything, there were too few facilities for mothers with small children, the kitchens were too small for eating in, the rents were on the high side. But overall, ‘the view that Lansbury offers a fundamentally satisfactory environment is shared by most of the people within and around the new neighbourhood’. Mrs Snoddy herself was settling in for the long haul. Three decades on, in the mid-1980s, she told the BBC that when she first saw her flat, ‘I can’t say I was all that keen on it, I would have preferred to have gone and lived in a house.’ But by 2001 she was happy to concede to the
Guardian
that ‘once other people from Poplar began to move on to the estate, I soon began to adjust’, adding, ‘I must have adjusted rather well as I’m still here 50 years later.’13
On almost all the new council estates, severe financial constraints – sometimes allied to a lack of imagination and drive – resulted in a damaging absence of those accompanying facilities that might have made the ideal of a complete neighbourhood unit closer to reality. In March 1952, for example, when Glasgow Corporation’s Sub-Committee on Sites and Buildings heard an application from Pollok Estate Tenants’ Association ‘requesting the erection of a hut or hall for the use of the tenants of the flats for aged persons at Kempsthorn Crescent as a recreational centre’, it was compelled to refuse it; at the same meeting there was a similar response to an application ‘for an area of ground at Drumchapel for the purpose of erecting a cinema in the new Drumchapel township’. The sociologist Charles Madge published that year a striking audit of community facilities on 100 post-war housing estates:
Facility
Number planned
Number built
Day nursery
13
0
Nursery school
46
1
Infant welfare clinic
24
6
Infant play space
22
2
Open playground
52
14
Health centre
33
0
Community centre
50
4
Branch library
46
11
On all estates, whether built before or since the war, there was also the problem of maintaining facilities. ‘What we really want is a supervisor on the lines of a park ranger, whose full-time job it would be to patrol the flats and find the culprits,’ declared a tenant in October 1951 after it emerged that
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