I'm finishing off a paper about my childhood on the Middlefield Lane Estate, that I shall be giving next week within a session on the geographies of enthusiasm, at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in Edinburgh. This is my mood music for the moment - the lovely and rather sad 'There is a happy land' from Bowie's very first album released in 1967.
- Ian Waites
- In May 1964, my family moved into this two-bedroomed council house on the Middlefield Lane estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. It was brand new, and had a very 'Contemporary' turquoise front door with a kind of parabolic concrete canopy over it. It had Formica kitchen 'tops', a TV aerial socket, and a 'picture-window’. The estate was one product of local and central government policy to provide new housing for working-class families, and it was characterized by Modernist ideas in architecture and planning. As such, it was very much for the moment, rather than for posterity. Posterity however has not been kind to this estate, which has been subject to a process of ‘planned neglect’, driven by strident critiques of Modernism, and by waning state policy and social support. The purpose of this blog is to help reverse that situation. It will chronicle my research and thinking on the history of this very provincial piece of post war planning and architecture, and on the English post war council estate in general. In 1979, nearly half the British population lived in local authority housing. To me, it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.
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