Common People

by Kit de Waal

  I can see that there is a certain irony in adorning council estates like Worsley Mesnes with the names of grand versifiers of our mother tongue. The juxtaposition is too keen, too absurd surely, between the heady grandeur of Paradise Lost and the proletarian homeliness of Milton Grove. But compared to the first houses I had known, my two grannies’ little terraces and cottages in Haydock and Poolstock, full of love and shadow, heavy with the relics of dead granddads and antimacassars and the occasional puff of soot, this new brutalist estate, thrown up on the last great wave of sixties expansive council-house development, was gorgeous. In his book Raw Concrete, Barnabas Calder said of brutalism – stark, tough, primitive – that it was ‘widely seen as the architectural style of the welfare state – a cheap way of building quickly, on a large scale, for housing, hospitals, comprehensive schools and massive university expansion’. This implies the cost-conscious, the purpose-built, the merely functional. But to me, who’d come into a world of coal fires and larders, and houses built in the Edwardian era, my new home was not brutal but clean. It was stark, elegant, the future. I hadn’t a clue who Le Corbusier or Ernő Goldfinger were, but they had an architectural ally in the ten-year-old me, who loved having his own room and squares of grass to kick about on, and underpasses and arcades and balconies to run free on. I didn’t regard Eliot Drive as a Waste Land. I didn’t think Milton Grove was Paradise Lost. I thought it was paradise.

  In the photographic archive of the Wigan World website, there’s a picture taken in 1985 by one Alan Dalgleish from the fifteenth floor of Masefield House. This was the tower block we lived in briefly before moving to a more ‘normal’ life in the sprawling estate below. Amongst the more homely, touching pics of long-dead darts teams from the Bold Hotel and old ‘Walking Day’ parades, this image is straight from a Joy Division album sleeve or a Factory Records poster; streaks of light from cars below smudge and blur along bleak, nocturnal strasse that look more like East Germany than west Lancashire. Alan clearly saw the artistic potential in this moody study of alienation by night (photographed using a ten-second exposure from a 35 mm Nikon SLR camera fixed on a tripod, notes Alan). And I see, too, the chilly dystopian vibe the shot intends to evoke. But looking at it now, I also think, there’s the Fine Fare minimart with Apocalypse Now! painted in disturbingly huge letters on the wall and there’s the house where Brownie got off with the girl from the chip shop and Quinny set fire to his pubic hair. It works well as a symbol of a depersonalised urban aesthetic, but it was also home. It was my domain, from the giant substation at Westwood to the slag heaps of Goose Green. They were good times to be working class. We had jobs, we had power, joy, fun, even seasons in the sun… in Blackpool and Butlin’s Skegness, in Torremolinos and Famagusta if you’d put in the overtime.

  When we dropped like nervous fledglings from our briefly held eyrie in Masefield House – my mum didn’t like the heights or the clanking, ghostly lift – we found a ground nest in Fisher Close. It was home to me from the age of about eight when we left my nan’s on Poolstock Lane to leaving for college aged eighteen. By the way, if you’re feeling embarrassed about your woeful lack of knowledge of the great British poet Thingy Fisher, don’t be. For some reason, on my new corner of the estate, just where it abuts the Red Pond and the railway line, the nomenclature changes to commemorate local aldermen and councillors: Fisher Close, Baucher Road, Tyrer Avenue. Even as a child, this struck me as fatuous and pumped up, and it still does. I wonder if any of these grandees ever took a stroll, in waistcoat with fob watch, to admire their names on the signage and find them liberally augmented with stylised male genitalia and WAFC Rules.

  Worsley Mesnes. The second word is pronounced in a curious and vaguely francophone way (‘Manes’), making it sound like the fiefdom of a feudal lord in the Domesday Book or a Norman baronet. Before modern expansion and development, before about 1965, even when my estate was built to house Wigan’s growing working population and to take them from the dark, huddled back-to-backs of Miry Lane, this area, a mile and a half south-west of Wigan town centre, was farmland, scrub and coal mines. It belonged to the recusant Catholic Downes family of Wardley Hall, still the seat of the Bishop of Salford. Wardley Hall was in Worsley, much nearer to Manchester, which perhaps explains my estate’s name. Though I wouldn’t have known it then, and indeed wouldn’t know it now if I hadn’t read two definitive books on the subject – John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams and Lynsey Hanley’s Estates – my sprawling estate was part of the last wave of large-scale social housing development.

  Of all the five ‘giant evils’ (squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease) that Beveridge had identified in his famous report on the state of the nation that led to the creation of the Welfare State, and that the incoming 1945 Labour government pledged to defeat, none was as immediately fearsome and grave as ‘squalor’. Britain’s housing situation had been patchy, impoverished and squalid for many even before the Luftwaffe had wreaked havoc on our towns and cities. Now the situation was even more dire and pressing, and ‘winning the peace’ meant building a great many ‘homes for heroes’. Tellingly, in the post-war Labour administration, the departments for housing and health were combined; decent housing was not just a matter of ‘lifestyle’, it was a crucial battleground for public health for the many.

  Social housing was as much a part of Aneurin Bevan’s crusading zeal as the fledgling National Health Service was. Bevan, Minister for Health from 1945 to 1951, felt that council housing should be so good that people of all incomes would want to live in it and the very need for private housing would melt away. Speaking to the Commons in 1949, Bevan said, ‘These new estates should not just be for the poor. It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should be drawn from all sections of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.’

  It’s a beautiful May evening in 2018 and I’m sitting in the front room of my mum and dad’s flat on the outskirts of the old and much changed Worsley Mesnes estate. I’m tucking into my mum’s home-made chips with her slow-cooked steak and onions from a tray on my lap and we are watching a teatime TV quiz show. (There is no point telling working-class mums that you ‘had a nice lunch’ or ‘will grab something light’ later. They will not let you sit in the house without eating; food equals love in houses where hugs and kisses are still awkward currency.) The TV show is Pointless rather than Blockbusters, but otherwise this is a scenario you could have found me very much part of most teatimes in the mid-1980s. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

  But they do change. My auntie Mollie has just died in a home for dementia patients and the family is phoning around, trying to establish funeral arrangements. I end up chatting with my uncle John and auntie Kathleen, the Westhoughton branch of the family (Westhoughton is about four miles from Wigan, but when I was a child, this staggering relocation was discussed as if Uncle John had moved to Anchorage or Ulaanbaatar). Kathleen, now in her early eighties, has had a fall and broken her hip. She says that she’s ‘been a bit low but your Uncle John’s been marvellous’. They praise a snazzy overcoat I wore on a recent TV show, and before I go, Uncle John says, ‘Don’t forget to send me tha’ new book, lad.’ Because of all this, I feel oddly emotional even before I set out to tour the estate I grew up in, this time for a new book (‘Not another!’), and my loins are girded against the tidal Proustian rush that I am fully expecting to knock me off my feet this golden evening.

  A broad, grey river of Tarmac winds like an asphalt Amazon through my old urban jungle. Long and winding, it curves from west to east, and back in the 1970s, I navigated it daily. It was the limits of the known world, and I was Magellan in shorts and a snake belt. You could take it and follow it from its sourc
e in Poolstock to where it met the sea at Newtown, as long as by sea you mean the A49, Warrington Road. The poetry falls down quickly here, and the road is called, prosaically, Worsley Mesnes Drive. But it is not long before things become more highfalutin, more literary, as I stroll down Eliot Drive and Huxley Close (T. H. or Aldous, I’m not sure, more likely the latter, as it was a Brave New World here in 1965).

  Shakespeare Grove, Blake Close, Longfellow Close. Here is where the tower blocks – Dryden, Thackeray and Masefield – once loomed until they were pulled down in a wave of demolition and ‘improvement’ in the early eighties. This is when Alan Dalgleish’s picture was taken and when the area was semi-affectionately nicknamed Beirut. Now there are small, neat houses; each has a car, and rather smart cars in a few cases. It isn’t St Albans or Wells. But neither is it the feral swamp of underprivilege that you might fear and that the TV commissioning editors love to demonise. On its nicer, newer fringe, now tower-less, it is essentially a homely suburban estate, with Previas and Focuses and satellite dishes tilted to catch the warm, golden honey of the evening sun.

  I have never been to Radburn, New Jersey. But if I did, I’d feel at home. It was designed and built in 1929 as ‘a town for the motor age’; cars were kept away from the house fronts of the tidy, squat Besser-block houses, which face each other across shared spaces and communal areas. The style became hugely influential across certain areas of the world, especially Canada, which is why I now realise my part of Worsley Mesnes was sometimes referred to as ‘the Canadian houses’, which again made me feel pioneering and exotic. There were Dutch houses too, characterised by their flat roofs, perhaps for clog dancing or the rolling of cheeses. Thus my mum would talk of workmates who ‘lived in the Canadian houses’ or the council ‘doing work on the Dutch houses’ and again I would feel that I had been liberated from the sooty Lancashire of my grannies’ houses, all Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Kes, and moved into a stateless international sphere, a world citizen – no, an interplanetary citizen, more Space 1999 and silver wigs than Coronation Street and curlers.

  There was an idealistic impulse to the Radburn idea: Walt Disney was a big fan, modelling much of EPCOT and Disneyland on Radburn lines. ‘Children going to and from schools and playgrounds will use these paths, always completely safe and separated from the automobile’ was part of the Radburn ideal that was exported to the world. Clusters of houses in closes and groves were linked by pedestrianised zones, grassed areas, walkways and entries. The result, in a sense, albeit in a fairly odd sense, is reminiscent of Venice without the canals and palazzos.

  Like Venice too, Worsley Mesnes was an easy place to get lost unless you were a denizen of its ginnels, corners and walkways. Far away from passing traffic and cop cars, those alleys were also ideal hidden venues for various illicit and nefarious activities, some more innocent than others. Radburn developments were felt by some to isolate communities from the flow of normal town or city life and to encourage insularity, problem behaviour and crime. In the Sydney suburb of Villawood, even the architect who designed the Radburn-style project there said, ‘Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong… It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell.’

  Unlike its more famed counterparts in Hull, and the Meadows in Nottingham, Worsley Mesnes doesn’t get into many of the histories of planning or the architectural treatises, but it is classic Radburn. And it was certainly not hell if you were an adolescent lad. The original 1920s poster for Radburn shows smiling kids on bikes or clutching football helmets with the slogan Radburn; Safe For Children. I don’t know about safe, but what with Anne Thomas, nocturnal street football on electric-lit concourses and all the cans of red-hot ash being lobbed around, it was certainly thrilling.

  There are some pop songs that I loathe for their stance or meaning rather than any musical shortcomings. Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ is one, a horrible attempt to drag a woman (thought to be modelled on Sophia Loren) down by a weak, petty man who cannot bear that she has become a star and doesn’t hang out with him any more. But apparently, with the certainty exhibited by most jerks, he knows where she goes to when she’s alone in her bed, and challenges her to go and forget him, adding creepily that he knows she still bears the scars, presumably of her early-life poverty and their dalliance. Yeah, right. She is just so over you, actually, and she isn’t ‘your lovely’ either.

  Equally hateful is ‘Little Boxes’ by Pete Seeger, a hit in 1963 and written by his friend Malvina Reynolds. The target in this rotten little song is the people of Daly City, California, a modern suburban estate. Pete sneers at Daly City’s inhabitants, their taste, their attitudes and their opinions, which somehow he seems to have divined from a distance. But mainly he hates them for their houses. Unlike Pete, who presumably lived in a tepee, these saps live in the titular Little Boxes, which were all made out of something called ticky tacky and looked identical, exhibiting none of the daring defiance of convention that Pete put into his beard and little hat. Well, that’s your opinion and you are entitled to it, but then again not everyone fancies growing a beard and wearing a little cap, singing dreary songs round a campfire, telling people what to think, Pete, you old blowhard. Tom Lehrer, a satirist who picked more deserving targets, said that it was ‘the most sanctimonious song ever written’. I’m inclined to agree.

  In common with all people with taste, no one listened to Pete Seeger on my estate. Not when I lived there. Depending on our age, we listened to Motown, Black Sabbath, T. Rex, Glen Campbell, Northern Soul, David Essex and Can. Unlike Pete, Malvina and their unlikely ally Margaret Thatcher, we had no issue with living in similar houses, living collectively cheek by jowl. They were not little boxes. They were fine little houses. Not as large or well constructed as the ones that Bevan decreed after the Second World War, but clean, modern and interesting. People could still show their individuality in their little gardens, with their décor, and in how they lived. They did not think having a different-coloured door than their neighbours was a privilege worth dismantling a decent social housing structure and system for. My mates all lived in them, and I knew their layouts as I knew mine, as they were largely identical. (This was handy at darkened parties.)

  I once spoke to Irvine Welsh about this. We both grew up little mischief-makers on council estates, he in Edinburgh, me in Wigan, and now we sat like the Four Yorkshiremen, reminiscing about our childhoods over a bottle of very drinkable red at a literary festival. ‘All your mates lived in the same kind of house. I mean, some people were richer than others, some cleverer, some cleaner. But you get that anywhere. It didn’t occur to us that we had to live in a bigger house in order to prove ourselves. We liked living in the same way. We had more important things to do with our lives than fret about moving up the property ladder.’

  Away with Pete and Malvina’s smug, creepy ‘Little Boxes’, then. There’s a far better song by the Australian band Triffids, called ‘Hometown Farewell Kiss’. It’s not exactly a hymn of praise to estate living. In fact, it’s about a crazed arsonist returning to his old stamping ground, bent on fiery revenge, but it is about knowing a particular patch so well it is seared into the memory, into the muscles and the senses, knowing every corner, every back road, knowing where to turn.

  Even after all these decades, I still know where to turn, guided by old desire-lines grooved into the heart. I turn at where the Crooked Wheel once stood, a purpose-built estate pub that geometrically resembled its picturesque, Constable-ish name, but only when seen from the highest storeys of Thackeray, Dryden or Masefield Houses, and even then only with keen eyes and a dreamy imagination that could overlook the pigeon shit and security rows of jagged bottles. It’s gone now, not burned down, just swept away when Beirut began to smarten up – which it definitely did – in the eighties.

  So the Crooked Wheel has gone, but one of the two chip shops on the estate is still there, and a few cu
stomers are queuing for their ‘chippy teas’, still perhaps the ultimate working-class comfort food despite the arrival of Nando’s and Maccy D’s. I remember that when I was a very small boy, some people would arrive with bowls from home to collect their chips in, thus ensuring a larger portion. We never did this, as it was thought slightly common and needy, I fancy, but even the detail feels more reminiscent of wartime than the era of Blake’s 7 and Brian Clough. The old world gave way to the new slowly, and old habits die hard, and maybe somewhere in the North, someone is standing in a chippy queue with a white porcelain mixing bowl in one hand, and an iPhone 9 hooked up to the cloud in the other.

  I stroll down Eliot Drive, hoping that the other chip shop is still there. This was the one I’d walk to from my nana’s in Poolstock during the school holidays, fetching chips, steak pudding and curry sauce (‘small fish, little batter’ for Nana) to eat in front of Crown Court or The Sullivans. The woman who would serve these to me had green eyes, freckles and red hair, was, I guess, about thirty, and engendered the same slightly painful, confused feelings in me that Agnetha from Abba did. I wonder if she noticed. Maybe all eleven-year-old boys look that tense and awkward, especially when being asked if they ‘want a mambo with that, sweetheart’. But not only is she gone, so is the chip shop, which makes me a little sad, even though I’m not hungry.

  ‘What are you looking for, love?’

  The voice comes from a woman of indeterminate age leaning in her doorway. She is chatting to her neighbour, of equally mysterious age, who leans on his. They are both tattooed but whereas once that would have been the mark of the ageing Teddy boy, the ex-squaddie or naval rating, or perhaps the extremely lively and free-spirited woman, now it means nothing. I imagine the Duchess of Cambridge has a tattoo, and possibly the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is as classless and empty of significance as liking Bake Off or the World Cup or sending out for pizza.