‘The people that lived here, the people that moved in were the people who originally lived here in the terraced houses,’ explained Margaret. ‘It was like a community, you know, and they moved out of the houses and into the flats and everyone knew everybody.’
Margaret and Ken were so taken with her parents’ flat that in 1963 Ken applied to become caretaker in one of the original two 12-storey blocks, Haughton Court. After being chosen by a panel including T. Dan Smith himself (a fact that, as we talked, came as a surprise to Margaret), the all-consuming task he’d signed up for became quickly apparent.
‘The second night we were in there was a party on the third floor I think it was, a lad’s birthday party,’ said Ken. ‘We were in bed, and the noise from the party, oh! Now, I thought, I’m the caretaker, you’re disturbing the other tenants you know, the noise. And she says, “You’d better go and see.” So I had pyjamas on, I put my dressing gown on and up the stairs I went to the house with the party, knocked on the door. A lad comes to the door, and I says, “Could you keep the noise down, you might be disturbing the other tenants.”’ Ken made a face. ‘“Nah, we’ve asked the other tenants, he says, and they’re all okay about it.” He says, “Come on in anyway.”’
‘I didn’t know whether they’d beaten him up or what happened to him,’ said Margaret, ‘and he was having a drink!’ Ken still enjoyed the outrage in her voice 48 years on. As we talked, Margaret began to act more and more as his spokesperson. ‘He got on with all the tenants. They used to knock on the door, if they’d locked theirselves out, could he help them get in? And of course you had to keep all the ground floor clean. And the lifts. There was a lift at either end. At nighttime you’d go to bed, ten, half past ten, and then you’d get woken up when they’d come home from the pubs, because they were drunk and they wanted to talk, or they’d locked theirselves out or something like that.’
‘It finished me, didn’t it?’ said Ken.
‘’Cos he was on call 24 hours! Being a tenant was fine, but being a caretaker, well, you had a lot of tenants, and there’s was always somebody wanting something doing, you know.’ Margaret stopped and pointed at one of the ground floor flats in Haughton Court, its windows now hidden behind rusting metal grilles. ‘That far corner there, that was ours.’ It must have been strange for them to be looking at their old home over 40 years later, now so derelict and defunct. They seemed remarkably matter-of-fact about it all.
‘The problem with that one,’ said Ken, ‘is, they’re near the lift. Every time they went up they had to come down again automatically.’
‘The door opened and shut, opened and shut.’
‘Lying in bed you’d hear the lift coming down and then the doors, opening and shutting. You were just lying in bed, couldn’t get to sleep.’
It’s hard for us now to imagine the shock of moving to a flat high up in one of these brand new building types for those who had only ever known life in small terraced houses. As in the Gorbals, one group found high-rise life particularly challenging. In 1972 the Newcastle Evening Chronicle reported on the plight of young housewives trying to bring up small children on the estate. Shirley Meehan, mother of three children under six, lived on the top floor of one of the blocks: ‘The flats are pleasant, and the view, if you avoid looking at the riverbanks, is beautiful. But there is nothing for the children.’ Fellow resident Florence Douglas, living on the eleventh floor with two young children, also found the set-up far from ideal: ‘I would prefer some kind of play centre for them. They cannot run around the corridors because they make too much noise.’13 Along with their other duties, caretakers like Ken did their best to keep an eye out on behalf of these mothers (‘the kids, if they were playing downstairs, they weren’t supposed to be in the lifts by themselves. So they were forever ringing the doorbell, can you take us up home?’) but negotiating rules in experimental dwellings was a difficult business.
Some local authorities, most notably the LCC, employed sociologists to report on the effect of their work and the lives of those housed in the new projects, but for most councils the focus was on quantity rather than quality: they needed to lift families out of squalor, and fast. They simply didn’t have the time, the resources or the foresight to evaluate the effect of this massive shift in domestic life on residents. Emphasis was placed firmly on the delivery of units. Physical needs were catered for, and the psychological effects were assumed to be positive.
Yet despite the progress made at places like Cruddas Park, the drive to eradicate the slums of Newcastle was far from over. ‘One in 12 homes unfit on Tyneside’,14 was the headline in the local paper when in 1969 a survey by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government pinpointed that 69,000 homes on Tyneside still had no inside toilet, 45,000 no fixed bath and 71,000 no washbasin. Remarkably, these results were seen as a triumph, as they were significantly better than those of many local authorities. Dan Smith’s crusade seemed to be paying off, and commentators were keen to give him full credit: ‘Scotswood Road? Barren, broken Scotswood Road? A wave of Smith’s wand and the long, black festering scar was gone,’ reported Northern Life.15 1969 was also the year that the 10 brightly panelled point blocks, where Margaret’s father was still caretaker, were joined by the prosaically titled Cruddas Park House, a slim and tough-looking 23-storey concrete slab that sat on top of the estate’s much-needed new parade of shops, library and rent office. After her husband died, Margaret’s mother remarried and moved into this new building, onto the thirteenth floor.
At 23 storeys, Cruddas Park House towers over the rest of the estate. © Jim Pickett
‘She married a Chelsea Pensioner,’ Margaret said, somewhat unexpectedly. They were left in no doubt of this because he dressed up in his uniform to meet the family. I didn’t ask how he ended up there. ‘She liked living here, she loved it, didn’t she, Ken?’ Ken duly nodded. Margaret then revealed a further connection to Cruddas Park House: ‘My brother lives on the top floor.’ I think I could have guessed his verdict: ‘He loves it.’ It wasn’t just Margaret’s family who’d enjoyed living here. Ann Malding, one of the original nineteenth-floor residents of Cruddas Park House, was interviewed in 1977 about her thoughts on the flat. When not chasing pigeons from her balcony it was the neighbourliness that she most enjoyed:
‘We all know each other and everyone is willing to give a helping hand if they are in difficulties. I couldn’t wish for better. There aren’t many children in the block so it’s nice and quiet. … I always wanted a home that was centrally heated and when the council offered me this flat I was really thrilled.’16
‘You can get a good look over Newcastle from up there,’ said Ken approvingly as we peered through the drizzle at the rough concrete panels. This from a man who used to enjoy climbing about on the roof of Haughton Court 13 storeys up to repair the lift, or hanging from the outside of the building to clean the curtain of glass that formed the stairwell windows.
Yet there was one member of Margaret’s family who didn’t enjoy tower block life at all: her father, caretaker of The Willows, was afraid of heights. It was a good job that Ken was on hand to crawl out of those fifteenth-floor windows with his bucket and squeegee. ‘I used to clamber over the rail, hook my belt onto that rail and then come out and do the ones I could reach,’ he remembered cheerfully, ‘and then move on to the next floor and work my way down.’ It may not have suited everyone, but some people were perfectly adapted for high-rise living.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, in a benign version of the Cold War arms race, the various opposing political and architectural factions continually boasted of their ideological supremacy, manufacturing prowess and technological superiority. As Labour and the Tories announced ever-greater targets for housing completions per year, the country entered an era that might be termed mutually assured construction.
In 1962, following the collapse of SuperMac’s late fifties ‘economic miracle’, Keith Joseph, chairman of construction titans Bovis, was promoted to Minister for Housi
ng and Local Government in Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ reshuffle. The new minister lost no time in pledging to build 400,000 council houses a year – 100,000 more than Macmillan himself had promised in 1951. As Joseph knew, something dramatic would have to be done to speed up the process of house building in order to make good on this promise. That something would be system building, a method that, in the words of Concrete Quarterly, had been ‘well tried, and proved, in France, in Scandinavia, and in other countries’.17
As with the programmes pioneered by the Temporary Housing Act, and the Hills and CLASP systems for building schools, the new housing drive would depend upon the manufacture of large prefabricated components. These would not only speed up the construction of everything from bungalows to tower blocks, but would also, it was envisaged, cut the cost of building high flats. Many of the systems used in Britain were, as noted by Concrete Quarterly, either French or Scandinavian in origin: Camus, Sectra and Tracoba from France, and Skarne, Jespersen and Larsen Nielsen from Sweden and Denmark. They were rapidly adopted by building firms such as John Laing, Crudens and Taylor Woodrow-Anglian. The advantage of these systems over fifties’ building methods was that, rather than the builders having to invent large besoke concrete components on site, as they had with Park Hill, contractors could build factories where entire walls or floors could be built for a number of different buildings and then shipped out to construction sites around the country. It was estimated that 2,000 ‘units’ – or individual homes – would have to be produced to make any one system economically viable, and by the mid-sixties it looked likely that the government would approve 50 different systems for local councils to use in their housing drive. ‘Nobody can doubt the absolute necessity for getting much of our building work off the site and into the factory’ trumpeted a Concrete Quarterly editorial in 1965. ‘Speed, economy, decent working conditions, precision building, modular coordination – these are only some of the reasons why precast concrete has a splendid future in front of it.’18
By 1964 a new regional drive, supported by central government, was underway to clear slums and build new homes. Keith Joseph was confident it was going to do the trick: ‘We now have offices in Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle to help local authorities accelerate their clearance programme. This means stepping up house production both by rationalisation of traditional building methods and by making use of industrial systems.’19 But Joseph was unable to see through this vision: the new Conservative leader Alec Douglas-Home’s beleaguered government limped to election defeat in 1964 off the back of that quintessential sixties sex scandal, the Profumo affair, and Labour found themselves in government for the first time since the dismantling of the Festival of Britain.
Richard Crossman was Joseph’s replacement in the new technocratic government, and under him the system building drive continued apace. ‘What is happening now is the beginning of major changes in the whole process of building and commissioning buildings, which will accelerate now through to the end of the century,’ claimed A. W. Cleeve Barr, chief architect of Crossman’s newly created National Building Agency. ‘In a decade or so there will be far fewer men than at present working on building sites, and they will be producing a much greater volume of building, in very much shorter construction periods … In housing the better systems are 30 to 40 percent more productive in terms of man-hours per house than the better traditional builders, and these are twice as productive as the average house builder’.20
This would have been all well and good if local authorities had banded together as they had with the CLASP system for schools, so that components could be standardised and manufactured, and designs approved en masse. But despite the urging of Dame Evelyn Sharp at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government for councils to imitate the school programme, local authorities continued to insist on bespoke designs for their houses and flats, so that true standardisation across local authorities was never achieved by any of the major players. George Bowie, Crudens’ first company architect, expressed the firm’s frustrations with local councils:
‘There never was a standard block! No authority ever came and looked at anything we did and said, “Can we have three of those?” There were always ifs and buts!’ … ‘“We do like it, but we’d like the following things, only tiny wee things, like a slightly bigger kitchen and different windows, Mr Bowie – and can we have a clothes drying area inside the block, and a play area on the ground floor?” – and so on and so on!’21
Despite the failure of local authorities to embrace the full advantages of prefabrication (or, put another way, their steadfastness in insisting on regional variation) the competition for the lucrative new contracts inspired a band of enterprising smaller companies to design their own systems. Kenneth Campbell, the principal housing officer of the LCC was unimpressed: ‘Why, to be extremely rude, are so many firms now leaping on the bandwagon which they have watched pass them for some considerable time?’22 The answer, of course, was money. With politicians and professional bodies advocating the adoption of building systems, it was clear that this was where growth was going to come from. ‘A dynamic new local industry can be developed in the north-east,’ announced Dan Smith in 1961, ‘combining research into component design and production, factory component and frame production.’23
I met up with John Matthews, former chief buyer for building contractors Stanley Miller, in the café of Newcastle’s gleaming new Central Library, to find out more about the systems building rush. John brought with him some terrific photos and documents going back to the early part of the twentieth century, which he had rescued from the receivers when the company went bust in 1991. A gentle bear of a man, John was full of boyish enthusiasm for the history of the company he once worked for. In the prewar period, Stanley Miller had overseen large civic building projects, such as Newcastle’s art deco Paramount Cinema. By the early sixties they had begun constructing council flats using Britain’s most widespread building system, Bison wall frame units, manufactured by the seductively named Concrete Ltd. But they were keen to free themselves from reliance on the Bison system. John Matthews described the company at that time:
‘Very forward looking … everybody knew that the Labour government at that time was trying to increase the amount of social housing – the likes of Harold Wilson were going around flying the red flag if you like. They did some research and they came up with MWM.’ Miller, Wise and Mouchel, or MWM, was a system they developed with Douglass Wise and Partners (architects) and Mouchel and Partners (structural engineers) to capitalise on the demand for this new way of building.
It was at this point that John enthusiastically embarked upon an attempt to explain to me how MWM tower blocks were built. ‘You have what’s called a table,’ he said, ‘which forms your floor and the roof of each pod, if you like. Now the crane is adapted to lift the table into here,’ he pointed to an old black and white photo of a Stanley Miller high-rise under construction, where workmen were toiling at the base as a tower crane hauled another slab into place above them, ‘and the table is on jacks. The reinforcement is poured in.’ The table itself was pre-greased with release oil, ‘so the concrete doesn’t stick’.
‘It sounds like the construction of one of those very elaborate cakes on The Great British Bake Off,’ I remarked.
‘Yes!’ agreed John rather to my surprise. ‘The concrete had to be ready mixed and then taken up by tower crane to pour into the moulds. And then that would be struck, the jacks would be lowered – just tapped slightly – and then the crane would come in and lift the table out, leaving the floor cast. Obviously the verticals are done in a similar manner. And you literally go up like that.’ He made it all sound very easy. I looked back at the photo: the builders looked so small, apparently fearless as they crawled all over the huge tower they were constructing. ‘You’d be topping out and finishing out at the bottom. Very, very quick: that’s why it became so cheap to do, because as soon as you put a few storeys up you were puttin
g the windows, the panels on the bottom, and you were in the flats doing the second fix. So you could be halfway up the building with the flats almost ready to occupy when the rest was being built, cos it was all watertight. It’s all good stuff!’
John beamed at me, proud of Stanley Miller’s achievement – and with good reason. For this relatively small firm to have created such a successful system was an impressive feat: both technically and financially audacious. Other contractors produced specialised units for the likes of Stanley Miller, ready to be slotted into their blocks. John particularly remembers the company who used to deliver entire staircases for their buildings: ‘General Concrete Products, who used to be in Gateshead – we spent millions with them. They came with a stairflight, a landing, with little anchor rings cast in for the crane.’ This was more Duplo than Lego: a world where people could deliver huge precast chunks of a building on a lorry ready to be clicked into place.
Stanley Miller even turned their attention to developing their own finishes for the tower blocks they erected. One promotional document John showed me stated that for one tower block ‘the gable modelling was designed by a sculptor after careful study of weather pattern-staining.’ The accompanying photo showed a sheer rough concrete wall at the end of a slab block, its surface undulating like a sand dune rippled by a passing snake. It was not only out in the field that Stanley Miller embraced innovation. Back in 1959 an editorial for Concrete Quarterly had painted what at the time might have seemed a fanciful portrait of the engineers’ office of the future: ‘In recent years the phrase “electronic brain” or, more accurately, “electronic digital computer”, has been increasingly used in scientific circles…. Within the past year or 18 months civil and structural engineers have become interested in the possibilities of these machines in their own work.’24 John vividly remembered the first computer system he saw:
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