St Cuthbert's Village II

     I now want to skip over the Pennines to Manchester and this BBC documentary, from 1974, about the redevelopment of the city on the 1960s.  Erroneously, the notes to this video claim it is the infamous Hulme Crescents; it is actually the Coverdale Estate, nicknamed 'Fort Ardwick' by the disgruntled residents.  It was designed by Manchester Corporation Architects Department, in collaboration with Bison Concrete Northern Ltd.  It was constructed, like St Cuthbert's Village, using prefabricated concrete slabs - the 'Bison Concrete Wall-frame System'.  The estate consisted of flats, maisonettes and houses.  As with the other two estates mentioned in this post, its failure was precipitous, and the film presents a churlish council struggling to keep up with the effects of its redevelopment policy, including apportioning blame to its own tenants.  'Fort Ardwick' was finally demolished in 1992

     The local MP Gerald Kaufmann said of it,

     'The scale of the buildings is often daunting. I have in mind Fort Beswick and Fort Ardwick in my own constituency. The design is frequently all too forbidding. That is why the two estates are called "Forts". "I am on the Fort", constituents tell me. Such developments are often unsightly. The approaches are not attractively landscaped and are often strewn with litter and debris.

     'Refuse disposal is too often haphazard and infrequent, and this can lead to the proliferation of insects and vermin which are already fostered by design defects. There was a penetrating article recently in The Guardian pointing this out. The caretaker service often is insufficient to meet the needs, where the service exists at all. Too many developments in my own constituency and that of my hon. Friend have no caretaker service."

     'The despair of some tenants can be summed up in a remark made to me by a lady who lives on Coverdale Crescent, more commonly known as "Fort Ardwick", which is now perhaps the best known deck access development in Britain. A few weeks ago, on one of my visits to see the estate, I had a long discussion with a number of the residents. One of them said to me, "If Labour wins the election, it ought to do two things: abolish the House of Lords, and demolish Fort Ardwick."

  

     We underestimate the complete dislocation that working class people suffered as a result of these schemes.   By the end of the 60s the Post-War vision of the New Jerusalem began to crumble and few years later it seemed that Modernism was itself defeated.  For some on the left, including perhaps the director of Get Carter, Mike Hodges, it caused a cognitive dissonance.  The failure of such estates as St Cuthbert's Village, really wasn't the result of corruption, but an intellectual failure.  I think, that in some respects, it caused the breaking of the social contract.