I've just heard that Kevin Ayers has died. When I was about 16, I had a mate called Ken Woolley. He lived with his mum and dad and sister on the Park Springs estate over the by-pass from the Middlefield Lane estate. When I first went round to Ken's house, his elder sister, Wendy, was there playing Kevin Ayers' album, Shooting at the Moon, which I immediately loved. It quickly became (along with its predecessor Joy of a Toy) a favourite sound of mine as I kicked around the estate as a slightly aimless school leaver over that very hot summer of 1976. This is one of my favourite songs from the album, Red Green and You Blue, with a lovely soprano sax solo from Lol Coxhill, and Kevin's typically, er, 'relaxed' croon. R.I.P Bananamour.
- 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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