The Estate Generation

Cheetham Hill in the early 1960s was rows and rows of Victorian terraces packed tight together. Two-up, two-downs with outside toilets and back yards where the washing hung between walls you could touch with both arms outstretched. Streets so narrow that if someone opened their front door on one side, you could practically shake hands with the woman doing the same thing opposite. They were cramped and cold and damp and nobody who lived in them would have called them comfortable. But they were something else too. They were a community. Everyone knew everyone. Doors were left open. Kids played in the street because there was nowhere else to play. If your mum needed a cup of sugar she didn't go to the shops, she went next door. And if your dad was out of work, which plenty of dads were, the neighbours didn't judge because half of them were in the same boat. I don't remember any of it. I was two when we left. But I've heard the stories enough times to know what was lost when the bulldozers came. They came for the terraces across the whole of Manchester and Salford in the 1960s, and they didn't stop until they'd flattened entire postcodes. The politicians called it slum clearance. The planners called it urban renewal. The people who lived in those streets had a different word for it, though most of them were too stunned to say it out loud at the time. What it was, plainly and simply, was the destruction of working-class communities that had existed for a hundred years, carried out by people who'd never lived in one. The logic was straightforward enough on paper. The terraces were old. Many of them lacked indoor plumbing. Some were genuinely unfit for habitation. The post-war housing drive had promised a new Britain, and that new Britain didn't have room for outside toilets and tin baths in front of the fire. So the councils drew lines on maps, served compulsory purchase orders, and moved thousands of families out of streets they'd lived in for generations and into brand new council estates on the edges of the city. Our family went from William Street to Rainsough Brow, a new estate perched on the hill between Prestwich and Kersal. New houses. Indoor bathroom. Central heating. Gardens. By every measurable standard, it was an improvement. And in many ways it was. My mum didn't miss the outside toilet. Nobody missed the damp. But something was missing, and it took a generation to understand what it was. Some of the new estates got it right, or close enough. Rainsough Brow had two pubs at the bottom, The Plough and The Staff of Life, and a row of shops at the top: a butcher, a hardware shop, Mr Southwood's newsagent that everyone called the paper shop, a greengrocer, and a Spar. More importantly, the council had the sense to move people from the same part of Cheetham Hill together, so families who'd been neighbours on the old terraces were neighbours again on the new estate. The community didn't die. It transplanted. People already knew each other. They looked out for each other the same way they always had, just with indoor plumbing and a bit more space between the walls. Not every estate was that lucky. Across Salford, the old streets around Regent Road were coming down. My Auntie Jean and her family were moved from there to Little Hulton, out on the western edge, miles from anywhere. Hulme's terraces were replaced by the Hulme Crescents, those brutalist deck-access monstrosities that were falling apart before the concrete had properly set. Collyhurst families were shipped out to Hattersley on the far side of Tameside. Where Rainsough had pubs and shops and familiar faces, these new developments had nothing. Communities that had been walking distance from the city centre found themselves stranded in places that didn't even have a decent bus service, surrounded by strangers.