Hulme: the redevelopment project that changed regeneration
The redevelopment of Hulme in Manchester kick-started a new approach to regeneration in the UK – and the careers of some of housing’s best-known figures. Martin Hilditch joins them on a step back in time with lessons for today. Photography by Andrew McCaren and Rex Features
Inside Housing is publishing a number of articles this month to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Addison Act, which paved the way for large-scale council housebuilding.
David Lunts (left), executive director of housing and land at the Greater London Authority, and Mike Gahagan, chair of Red Kite Community Housing, in conversation on a tour around Hulme
In 1978, Allan Roberts, then-chair of Manchester City Council’s Housing Committee, issued a damning assessment of a huge regeneration scheme that should have been a jewel in the city’s crown.
Speaking on ITV’s World in Action programme, Mr Roberts referred to the housing-led regeneration of Hulme, a suburb just to the south of the city centre, as “an absolute disaster – a mistake”.
“It shouldn’t have been planned and it shouldn’t have been built,” he added. Shockingly, he was speaking about homes that had been completed just eight years previously. More than 1,000 back-to-back terrace slums had been cleared as part of the regeneration and replaced with blocks of ‘deck-access’ low-rise flats. These blocks housed thousands of people, and were called the Crescents in a badly executed tribute to Bath’s famed Georgian terraces of the same name.
In fact, their quality was so bad that the council stopped housing families there in the late 1970s – properties were expensive to heat and suffered cockroach infestations.
Watch a clip from World in Action in 1978 here:
The homes presented a danger to health in other ways too, as they were riddled with asbestos. As Inside Housing revealed back in 2011, at least one former occupant, John Shiers, has since died of mesothelioma as a direct result of living there. The homes were never fully occupied and the saga stands as one of council housing’s most shameful moments.
Jump forward to today and the Crescents are long gone – they barely stood for two decades before the wrecking balls moved in.
Hulme has since undergone another metamorphosis. But while the first transformation was a rush job in the late 1960s, this time around it has been a project 30 years in the making.
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As part of a series of articles to mark 100 years of council housing, Inside Housing returned to Hulme because its successes and failures over decades have many valuable lessons for today’s policymakers and housing professionals.
The story of Hulme is also the story of modern council housing in a microcosm, from mass production of system-built blocks in the 1960s, to strategic partnerships between councils, housing associations and the private sector in the late 1980s and beyond.
Inside Housing has not travelled here alone, however.
We are in the company of some of the best-known names in housing, who earlier in their careers were key players in kick-starting the latest regeneration of Hulme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Today the old team has reunited to visit present-day Hulme to reminisce about their role in the area’s transformation and, most importantly, to pass on some tips that might inform current thinking about housing and regeneration.
The day starts off with a rather jolly feel as a coach full of housing professionals sets out from the Housing 2019 conference and exhibition to visit the vast regeneration area.
After a whistle-stop bus tour of some of the key residential and retail sites – complete with commentary from the team at local housing association One Manchester, which organised the tour – the delegates get the chance to stretch their legs.
We head to the top of a block of flats with sweeping views of the area, giving us a feel for the scale of the change there has been here. It is a transformation: the thousands of deck-access blocks long since demolished have been replaced with new homes.
The population in Hulme had dipped to just 8,931 at the time of the 2001 census, while clearance and rebuilding work was carried out – but was up to more than 16,000 by 2011.
Among Inside Housing’s companions on this tour is David Lunts, who is currently executive director of housing and land at the Greater London Authority but 30 years ago was a ward councillor for Hulme and chair of Manchester Council’s Housing Committee.
We are also joined by Mike Gahagan, chair of Red Kite Community Housing, whose past roles include director of housing at the Department for Communities and Local Government (now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government).
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, he ran the government’s City Challenge programme – and it was the £37m that Hulme received when it was awarded City Challenge status in the early 1990s that enabled the regeneration to happen.
Following Hulme’s regeneration, tower blocks and houses now sit where the Crescents once were
“This was my patch in the old days,” Mr Lunts says, gesturing at an area that is now unrecognisable from what he calls his mid-1980s “glory days”.
By the time Mr Lunts took over as chair of the Housing Committee, the problems for the Crescents were mounting, he recounts.
The decision to move families from above the first floor “meant you got a lot of hard-to-let stock left in the deck-access flats”, he explains.
“There were a lot of voids, and a lot of students and a lot of squatters moved in. So it kind of developed this quite challenging sub-culture really, where people would squat, the council didn’t know what was going on and by the early to mid-’80s there was quite a big campaign for some serious change.
The council was playing around with various ideas about what to do with the estate but it needed massive investment to make an impact.”
It was the government’s City Challenge competition, the brainchild of then-environment secretary Michael Heseltine and run by Mr Gahagan, that enabled change, Mr Lunts says.
“City Challenge was quite radical in its day because it was basically cities competing for money rather than being allocated money as of right,” Mr Lunts states.
“And, of course, it was at a time when there were big cutbacks in local government spending, so access to these funds, which were much more flexible than we had been used to, was quite important. It doesn’t sound like a lot of money now – £37.5m – but it was a catalyst.”
Hulme’s population was 8,931 while clearance and rebuilding was carried out, but was up to more than 16,000 by 2011
Mr Gahagan jumps in. “I looked after City Challenge centrally and Manchester was one of the better ones. They did have a vision, which is more or less as it has turned out, actually.”
Later, Mr Gahagan reveals more about the secret to Manchester’s success in competing for funding. For one, it got the basics right compared with “some really dreadful bids from some authorities”. But he also insists “Manchester put in a terrific bid”.
He adds: “They knew how they were going to do it, which was important. They had the people who could do it. But they also had the people in the regional [government] office. Because the £37m available in the City Challenge wouldn’t have regenerated Hulme. There was an awful lot of bending main programmes that went well beyond what was probably strictly allowed [to channel funding to the Hulme regeneration].
Alan Caddick was a project officer and development manager in Hulme from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. He is now director of housing and communities at Sandwell Council. He describes the Crescents as “an absolutely hedonistic, bohemian place – you couldn’t make it up”.
And certainly the plans to demolish were controversial at the time, too. At one point, Mr Caddick and his colleagues were forced out of their office for 10 weeks when it was occupied by protestors.
Housing professionals begin their coach tour of Hulme’s residential and retail sites
Nonetheless, looking back, Mr Caddick is convinced the regeneration was a good thing because people’s living conditions in the Crescents were so poor.
“I remember going to one property and the tenant opened the microwave and there were cockroaches in the microwave,” he says. “He opened the cooker and there were cockroaches in the cooker. You would be talking to him and there would be cockroaches walking past. It was a place that you couldn’t believe.”
These were typical conditions, Mr Caddick adds.
As mentioned, however, there had been protests about some of the regeneration. Housing co-operative Homes for Change, which has 75 homes on the estate, sprang out of some of these tensions.
Its website says it was “conceived as a lifeboat to preserve a small part of the community, not catered for elsewhere in the development” and that it “sought not to reject the past, but to build upon it by rescuing the best points of the old estate”.
Princess Road runs alongside Hulme, leading north into the centre of Manchester
John Phillips, a former Crescents dweller who has lived in a co-op flat for a quarter of a century, remembers Hulme as a great place to be if you were young – “we had festivals there and all-night raves” – but that “if you were a family with children, or pensioners, it wasn’t for you”.
He thinks Homes for Change did a great job of preserving some of the collective bohemian culture and the grand architectural dreams of the Crescents – “the council just wanted to flatten the lot and put Barratt houses everywhere”.
Nonetheless, he thinks the wider regeneration needed to happen. “Hulme is a much nicer, safer environment than it used to be,” he adds.
Completing today’s line-up is Eamonn Boylan, chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
Mr Boylan says his first experience of Hulme was back in the late 1970s, when he was at what is now the University of Manchester. A few years later, he returned to Hulme as an estate management officer in 1983. By the late 1990s he was deputy chief executive of Manchester City Council with responsibility for regeneration.
Some of the properties in Hulme
He gets straight to the point about what went wrong in Hulme: “If you wanted to design a place that was guaranteed to fail economically and socially, you couldn’t have done better than to design Hulme the way that we designed it,” he asserts.
“Not only was it entirely mono-tenure, [but] despite the appearance of density, it was incredibly low density. So the ability of the place to support and sustain any form of local economic activity was doomed even from the very beginning.”
Today Hulme is certainly a very different kettle of fish. Our tour reveals smart-looking homes, in a range of different sizes and styles, along with major new developments such as Manchester Metropolitan University’s Brooks campus, which opened five years ago.
There is a spread of tenures on the estate too, and the social homes are owned and managed by housing associations rather than the council.
All in all, it feels like a pretty ordinary snapshot of urban life – which will suit these founding figures just fine because creating a place that felt ‘ordinary’ and liveable was what they set out to do.
However, the scale of the regeneration in Hulme is breathtaking. Given it has been seen as a prototype for modern regeneration, what lessons do the senior housing figures who oversaw the change think it holds for the sector – and government?
Mr Boylan thinks having a clear, consistent vision locally is vital. But a consistent, long-term outlook from government and its agencies is also important.
From left to right: Eamonn Boylan; Mike Gahagan; David Lunts; Alan Caddick; and Dave Power, chief executive of One Manchester
“So many of our regeneration projects in this country have failed because they are short-term, opportunistic things. We thought, ‘Five years! God, that’s a long-term programme.’ Thirty years later, we are still finishing it,” he says.
Mr Lunts thinks Hulme was part of a journey in which “government started to understand” that cities “should not be taken for granted, that you have to invest in them because they are so crucial to the economy”. He also thinks Hulme points to the success local areas can have when funding allows them to take long-term views and they are able to take control of their own destinies.
“My strong view is that we still live in a massively over-centralised country, where those lessons have only been learned in part,” he concludes.
“We really do need long-term funding solutions, we need more trust in our civic leadership and we need to give cities like Manchester, and many other places that don’t always have the advantages of Manchester, frankly, the confidence and the optimism to be able to attract really good people to come and work for them to come and do these things.
“That won’t happen unless government is willing to let go of power and money.”
To read more about the act, go to: www.insidehousing.co.uk/AddisonAct
100 Years of Council Housing: we want to hear from you
To mark the 100th anniversary of the act receiving Royal Assent in July, we have a month of special activities planned, including interviews with senior council housing figures, exclusive debate and comment, and investigations into what local authorities, past and present, are doing to help provide housing.
This will signal the start of a stronger focus on local authority housing issues over the coming months on www.insidehousing.co.uk and in our weekly print and digital editions.
We want to hear from you about your local authority is doing to mark the Addison Act and about the housing issues in your area, email: editorial@insidehousing.co.uk
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100 Years of Council Housing: what Inside Housing is doing
One hundred years ago, a piece of legislation led to the birth of council housing. Gavriel Hollander introduces Inside Housing’s celebration of the centenary of the Addison Act.
It is so ingrained in our national consciousness that it is hard to imagine just how radical the idea of local authority built and funded housing must have seemed a century ago. Before World War I, almost all housing in the UK was built by private developers (albeit with some notable municipal exceptions in major cities). Given this, it is unsurprising that both quality and consistency of delivery were variable.
The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of then-prime minister David Lloyd George – provide “homes fit for heroes”.
The so-called Addison Act – the very first housing act passed in this country, named after its sponsor Dr (later Lord) Christopher Addison – received royal assent exactly 100 years ago this month.
It may never have achieved its aspiration of delivering 500,000 homes (something that may sound familiar to modern-day watchers of government housing policy) but it was the start of a movement.
New estates began to crop up across the country, built in accordance with recommendations from the Tudor Walters Report, which was produced to parliament in November 1918. This built on the ‘Garden City Principles’ and suggested a number of improvements to the standard of public housing. These included limiting the length of terraced-housing blocks, mandating a minimum number of rooms and providing indoor bathrooms.
“The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of the prime minister David Lloyd George – provide ‘homes fit for heroes’”
Although the abandonment of subsidy in 1921 and a change of government the following year curtailed the immediate growth of council-built housing, the seed had been sown.
This month Inside Housing celebrates the centenary of the Addison Act with a month-long series of articles looking at how it transformed the social fabric of the country and created the housing sector we know today.
Over the course of this month, we visit four estates, each symbolising a different era of council housebuilding. We also take a look at whether new-found financial freedom for local authorities could be the catalyst for a new generation of estates.
To kick off the series, acclaimed social historian John Boughton visits one of the first estates made possible by Lord Addison’s historic legislation: Sea Mills in Bristol. We then travel to Stevenage to look at how the damage to Britain’s inner cities during the Blitz led to the new town movement and a fresh wave of estates through the 1950s and 1960s.
Martin Hilditch, editor of Inside Housing, takes a trip to Hulme in Manchester to examine how the private and public sector had to work together in the 1980s to deliver a regeneration project, which is still thriving more than 30 years later.
Finally, we go to Nottingham and look at one council with grand ambitions to provide housing to a new generation of tenants.
There may still be myriad challenges to face when it comes to providing good-quality, genuinely affordable housing for those most in need, but without the passing of an act of parliament 100 years ago, the sector we work in today may never have come to exist. That alone is worth celebrating.
To read more about the act, go to: www.insidehousing.co.uk/AddisonAct
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