Ian Jack (Snobbery, ignorance and the traducing of tenement life, 8 October) is right to suggest that, as with most housing, it’s not the construction that’s at fault but the management – and the lack of family planning. If the 19th-century Scottish tenements hadn’t been overcrowded they would have been good, solid homes; inconvenient by our standards – lugging coal upstairs, shared privies – but better than much of what people had had in the countryside before moving into the new industrial cities. John Cleese and anyone who doubts this should visit the Glasgow tenement house belonging to the National Trust, which shows the dignity that was possible on a low income.
There is one thing the Scottish tenements could teach designers of housing now: the drying green. A close of houses would have one or more fixed set of lines for drying clothes. Even at the humblest level, the posts would be cast iron with decorative finials, often a pineapple. Now people in flats are obliged to use tumble dryers – energy intensive and, recently, potentially dangerous – or else to dry clothes on tiny balconies where that isn’t actually banned.
A lovely example of the drying green moving south – and of very good planning provision – was in the Ossulston Street estate in St Pancras, London, in the 1930s, where Father Basil Jellicoe with the London county council believed that poor people should still have beauty: some of the fantastical finials from those posts survive in the basement of the British Library alongside.
Judith Martin
Winchester, Hampshire
• In a 1949 photo of my four-year-old brother in the back court of our Glasgow dockside tenement, his shining white socks were the only things not grim and grey.
But what lives on for me are memories of warmth, community spirit and humour. Halloween, when we had to “do a turn” in neighbours’ “single ends” and “but and bens” for a handful of nuts and an orange; Hogmanay with ships toot-tooting Happy New Year from the nearby Clyde; Easter bonnets and parades … so many happy memories.
Crushing poverty, absolutely. And it is to this country’s shame that we have so many food banks in existence today; young people cannot afford to buy or indeed rent a home; the NHS under threat; work and pay conditions under threat. Not in 1949, but 2016.
Pat Ferguson
Nottingham
• Further to your correspondent Joyce Blackledge’s sensible suggestion that councils requisition empty houses as they did after the first world war (Letters, 8 October), is there such a need for more housing to be built in the south, as is so often mooted? In London, ridiculously expensive foreign-owned property lies empty, while Liverpool council is offering houses for £1. The government could curb exploitation in the capital and encourage more businesses to move north to even out the housing demand.
Jennifer McClean
Sheffield
• Giles Fraser might be right in considering the Heygate estate, for all its design faults, an example of a “thick community” (Loose canon, 7 October). I lived in his parish, in a council estate off East Street Market, from 1943 until 1971. I remember my parents taking me across bombsites and slum areas to the Trocadero cinema at the Elephant and Castle, so when the council built the Heygate it was considered a godsend. Finished in 1974, in its heyday the estate housed more than 3,000 people.
That was progress, and now further progress is resulting in luxury apartments being built privately. Giles shouldn’t be too hard on the new tenants. How does he know that they constitute a “thin community”? Some may even join his congregation. I’m sure Southwark council has done its best for the Heygate tenants. It’s market forces that have done for his thick community. The price of the average home in London is now just over half a million.
Dave Shonfield
London
• Giles Fraser says Labour moved its HQ from Walworth Road, in his current parish, to Millbank in 1997, and from then on began to lose touch with the communities it was set up to serve. In fact a short (18-month) lease on Millbank Tower was taken in November 1995 for use as a campaign HQ for the forthcoming general election. Prior to five-year fixed terms, the governing party could go to the country whenever it pleased, and Labour wanted to be ready whenever John Major fired the starting gun.
Labour HQ remained at Walworth Road until early 1998, when the national executive committee decided that a party in government needed an HQ in SW1, not SE17. It was a practical decision, and in fact the cost per square foot at Millbank was hardly any more than the party had paid at Walworth Road.
When the landlord tripled the rent in 2002, Labour moved out of Millbank, and relocated half its head office to Tyneside. So much for losing touch with the communities we serve, Comrade Fraser – maybe more a retreat to our heartlands?
Jackie Robinson
Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear
