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.

St Cuthbert's Village I

Apologies, for the version of this article I posted earlier, for some unknown reason an previous draft was published, and not the finished article.  Mea culpa.

     I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead.  (I really can't show you the scene in question, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.)  It serves as a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis.  It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.

     St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council, and was opened by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970.  It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council that the Prime minister should give his support in such a way.
    What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War.  Grey and hulking.  It had neither church nor green, nor school.  Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents.  There was no traditional urbanism.  It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it.  A sort of ghetto.

     The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry.  He talked of a 'village community', but all that actually meant in practice is that, like a good many architects and planners of the period, he wanted the strict segregation of pedestrians and motor vehicles.  The site was a steep slope on the south bank of the Tyne, opposite Newcastle city centre, between between Bensham Rd and Askew Rd..  The estate overlooked a rail marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that carried the East Coast Mainline into the midst of the city.  Historically, the area had been known as Windmill Hills, and before slum clearance in the mid 60s, the site had contained a dense network of terraced housing.

     The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd.  The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short).  The estate consisted of a single tower, or point, block and a dense checker board of four, six & eight storey maisonettes, everything connected by a series of aerial walkways.  It was designed to house 3,500 people. Construction began in 1967, and the cost all in, was, I believe, £3,700,000.  At the time it won a government award for 'Good Design in Housing'.

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Court and six-storey blocks
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Village
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

     However there were problems almost immediately - flats were damp and roofs leaked, and it was difficult to heat the flats.  The project limped on for some 25 years, waxing in problems both structural and social, before it was demolished.  Its fate matched that of another council estate of the period, the nearby Clasper Village.