Spring on the Ermine

A change of scene - the Ermine East Estate, Lincoln - see: http://www.heritageconnectlincoln.com/character-area/ermine-east-estate/36/overview

Einsturzende Alt Sozialwohnung

At the moment, the BBC Radio 2 presenter, Jeremy Vine, is promoting a project that invites people to celebrate their particular part of the United Kingdom. The project is called 'I love where I live'. The trailer for this is interesting in how it invites us to produce a one-minute love letter to our town, place or village, and even - quote -  your 'crumbling council estate' - unquote. As Charlie Brown often said - *Sigh*

A crumbling council estate

The motorcade sped on

Jackie Onassis Walk

I've been reading the minute books of the Gainsborough Urban District Council from 1962 to 1965, tracing the development of the Middlefield Lane estate, and was amused to find that a Housing Committee meeting in December 1963 considered calling the estate 'The Kennedy Estate' as a tribute to JFK after his assassination. The committee decided however that ‘no action be taken on this suggestion but that the use of the late President’s name be borne in mind when the naming of future recreation grounds or housing estates is under consideration'. It would always be a bit of a stretch - from Dallas to a half completed council estate in rural Lincolnshire - but those were the times, it seems, the energy, the faith ...

Open Channel D

By the park that used to be on the Middlefield Lane estate - captured below in my post Where did your heart go? - there is this small triangle of land. 

In the 60s this land was fenced off, and on that square of concrete was an electricity sub-station that hummed quietly to itself all day. As a kid, the fence appeared to be magic: no matter how much all the kids around there grew, the fence always remained too high to climb over. Within this compound, there was also a tall steel mast that soared some sixty feet up into the air. 

The mast is gone now, but back then it was adorned with a tangled mess of H-shaped TV aerials, in a time when the 405 lines were still alive. This was the estate’s communal television aerial, another little piece of post-war, modern, municipal benevolence on an estate where only a few tenants had their own aerial fitted to their chimney. This communal aerial transmitted my first eye-popping taste of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I used to stand outside the sub-station, pick up the big padlock on the compound gate and imagine that the back of the padlock could slide away to reveal a secret key-pad. I'd pretend to punch in a five-digit number and stand by as both the gate and sub-station door simultaneously clicked open. I'd walk through the door, and straight into a secret lift that took me underground into the Lincolnshire H.Q. of U.N.C.L.E. At the reception desk I'd pick up my identity badge – No.6 for Napoleon Solo of course – which could invisibly attach itself to my jumper, next to my Milky Bar Kid badge. A childish imagination perhaps, circumscribed by a very adult environment, but those times, and those everyday spaces helped to create my identity - new spaces and new things, from the strange and very modern mast that loomed over the estate, to Solo's pen that opened Channel D. It was the future then, full of promise. Where did it go?

A new estate just like the old estate, only NEW!

This is 'John Jenkinson Close' which is on or - rather - within the Middlefield Lane estate. Unlike the rest of the estate which was completed in 1965, John Jenkinson Close was built in early 2009 by the local social housing company that is now responsible for Gainsborough's former council housing. The close consists of 21 sheltered housing bungalows that are part-rented, part-shared ownership. So far so reasonable, but JJ Close raises a number of questions and problems in relation to the estate's history and its continuing survival and preservation. Here's the Close from further behind where I was standing above:

This shows some of the original flats in the foreground with the new development ahead - and what is, to all intents and purposes, a new, half-hearted, gated/fenced community, segregated from the 60s Modernist housing that remains. The rural historian, Jeanette Neeson, once referred to the eighteenth century parliamentary enclosures that enclosed and privatised England's common land as having 'a terrible and instructive visibility'. The same can be said for these fences here, which are clearly meant to 'instructively' demarcate the nice new bungalows from the nasty old council flats beyond.

But what used to be there before John Jenkinson Close was built? Well, this:

This was 'The Precinct', a Modernist block of shops with some nicely recessed, balconied maisonette flats above. For a remote Lincolnshire market town, this building was adventurous and impressive in its time - as a child it always reminded me of Marineville. The flats that are now segregated from the new-build bungalows can be seen here in their original setting to the left of the shops. I have a whole load of stories about these shops that will have to wait until another time, but I do want to briefly consider the original landscape planning around here. This is The Precinct on a 1975 map ... 

... within what is a plain but clearly ambitious example of council estate landscape planning that is akin to a baroque country-house landscape garden in scale and geometry, with the Precinct set centrally within the estate as its focal point, and with green avenues reaching outwards from it: the ‘Parades’ either side and ‘The Green’ ahead. 

Gerry Anderson's beautifully designed 21st Century world was made manifest in The Precinct, but they are aberrations now, a strange, lost, parallel alternative to what we have in the real 21st century. On Wednesday the 18th of October 2000, a meeting of the West Lindsey District Council Planning Services Committee granted consent to demolish The Precinct. The minutes of that meeting noted that the application to demolish was made by the social housing group responsible for John Jenkinson Close, who stated that The Precinct and its flats had "a long history of low demand, serious vandalism and unlettability [sic] and, in view of the declining condition of The Precinct in recent years the applicant considers it important to look to replace such buildings with higher quality and more appropriate accommodation."

These minutes give us an insight into the attitudes of those who had spent the previous 20 to 30 years running down the estate they’d created: "In view of the applicants’ wish to carry out a proactive role in regenerating and redeveloping the area, it is considered that this demolition work is appropriate and acceptable and helps to open up the centre of this residential area, creating a more pleasant and less enclosed environment."

I’m at a loss as to understand how the apparently ‘enclosed environment’ of The Precinct and its environs needed ‘opening up’. By the 21st century however, places like these had come to be perceived as ‘enclosed’ not only because the type of Modernist planning involved here had been discredited, but also because it was now negatively equated with the ‘communal’ and the ‘sociable’. From a corporatised council’s point of view such qualities are now viewed as dangerously progressive and backwardly ‘socialist’ - whereas the ‘opening up’ of the area was clearly understood to create a more ‘appropriate’ spatial environment of individualistic self-determination. 

And so The Precinct was demolished to make way for a development that turned out to actively reinforce the notion of an 'enclosed environment' rather than to open up what used to be, in any case, the open-plan centrepiece of the estate. In the 1960s even an ordinary market town like Gainsborough could have its own exciting and progressive Modernist structure in a carefully designed landscape, but not any longer. There is a particular lack of vision in John Jenkinson Close that has created nothing other than a dull, bland subtopia. 

Over the hedge 2

Occasionally, I do manage to get out and about and beyond the deeply internalised musings that can be found here, thanks to many kind people who ask me to talk about my work. A couple of weeks ago, I went along to the annual show of work presented by the staff from the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, in the Bonington Gallery. It ends on the 10 February so go and see if you can, if only for Jonathan Gillies' 'In Orbit', a fab, sound based animation which "reimagines place as a stellar abstraction" but which also has some lovely swoony electronic sounds from a 1960s/70s Italian electronic arts collective, the magnificently named Gruppo Nuove Proposte Sonore. As part of this exhibition's events, I participated in a live and informal panel discussion on preoccupations with place and the role it plays in our different practices. Others who took part were Kate Genever and Steve Pool, artists who have recently spent time working in Parsons Cross, a council estate in Sheffield, the photographer Katja Hock who has been documenting decaying ex-Nato bases and housing in Germany, and the aforementioned Andy Lock, who convened it all. A lot was said about the differences between our practices, and our different approaches to a common subject, and all to a small but very select audience of about 10 people - all I remember saying is that the younger members of the audience should go and 'download' 'Sugar Sugar' by The Archies, a lovely, soulful and joyous pop song (handclaps are always the key here) that I will defend to the hilt with anyone who cares to slag it off.

In May, I shall be at the University of Derby, taking part in the 'Affective Landscapes' conference, giving a paper entitled ‘Places in which I forgot things: memory, identity and the English Council Estate in the paintings of George Shaw'. People seem strangely reluctant to get their head around Shaw's work (which is more complex than we think) and this paper offers a few tentative perspectives on what might make Shaw tick.

Later on, in June, more of my dubious pop references crop up in a paper called 'Sharing horizons that are new to us: planning, freedom and growing up on a 1960s English council estate' which will make a contribution to the 'Geographies of Enthusiasm' session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Edinburgh. A taster for this can be found on the admirable 'Conserving the Twentieth Century' website.

Over the hedge

Above is an excellent photograph by Andy Lock, a photographer who has recently been making studies of the Stocking Farm estate in Leicester. You can view his work on his website here   

There's a great deal of the slightly strange, sharp-edged quality of the post-WW2 architectural photographs by Eric de Mare in Andy's photo, but I also like this for two other reasons - one is that it's a quite typical image of the council estate landscape, somehow refracted through the very English surrealism of the paintings of David Inshaw, and tempered with a good dose of sunny Sachlichkeit. 

The other reason is that it shows a privet hedge. If and when I get some research money to do my deep archaeological/phenomenological study of the Middlefield Lane estate (the AHRC Connected Communities strand of funding has just turned me down, so here's another council estate community that won't get connected quite yet) I will look at the continuing existence of the privet hedge there. Here's one by the gate to the back garden of one of the houses on Priory Close:

And very neat and compact and naturally defensive it is. This hedge must now be forty six years old. I have fond memories of being told off as a kid for deliberately diving into them (or was I pushed?), and of the sweet, heady scent of the small creamy white flower buds that more often than not did not come into flower at all. I know that the privet is viewed as being dull and 'suburban' but they do make a difference across a council estate, they soften things, especially in contrast to the mish-mash of fences that the post-Right to Buy world has admitted. But I've been led astray in relation to what I really wanted to write about, which will now turn up in the next post.