Being partly a “Story So Far” for anyone newly arrived here, that was also a talk I gave at an event called “Designs for Living” organised by the Liverpool Salon.
The Story So Far
The Hughes family story begins with what might might be a myth, it being from a hundred years ago. Though the myth might also be true. Anyway it's been believed, That when my grandfather Thomas Joseph emerged late, presumed dead and with poison gas-wrecked lungs, from a prisoner of war camp in early 1919. Then answered his commanding officer's "Are you all right Hughes?' with "Yes, I just want to get home." His "Yes" thereafter taken to have been his giving up of all rights to any compensation or future pension from the army. For the rest of a life where he was never able to carry out work any more strenuous than the occasional night-watchman job in the warehouses down by the Liverpool docks. Where his family of a wife and seven children, including the two who didn’t survive, lived in dreadful rooming house squalor and poverty. And yet were not judged to be among the deserving poor a decade and a bit later when the Liverpool Corporation were deciding who would be awarded council houses on their brand new edge of the city overspill estate out at Norris Green. To the family's abiding bitterness. Barely alleviated by the compensation prize of a nearby walk up council flat. From the roof of where my own father, Joe, sat and watched the docks burn when war returned a decade later.
That's the myth and the story of how come, after our own time in shared houses, up and down a street in Walton by Everton's football ground, then at my nan's house in Bootle, Joe and Rose, my mother, moved their own little family to Maghull.
A new town, also on the northern edge of the city, that my dad would describe to me as "The Norris Green where you could buy your own house, if you were lucky enough to be able to." Which they were, in the never had it so good 1950s, barely twenty years after the Norris Green knock back. Much the same as the time between the photographs at the top of Joe and his sister Terry, and the one below of me and my brother Colin. Us two shining, I always think, with the confidence that having a safe home had brought.
And growing up from then, in a new town and the goings into colour of the 1960s, with the faith and expectations that everything would always be getting better. And it did, for us at least. As I grew into the first generation ever of the Hughes family to get a university education and be able to pretty much pick and choose the jobs I then wanted to do a the 1960s prospered into the early 70s.
I picked going and working with people who hadn't seemed to be having it so good. Later with people in need of even having a home. But at first, back to where the Hughes family had come from, for a job with the Liverpool Corporation Housing Department. Up on the hill at Everton, and down across Scotland Road to the walk ups and warehouses by the river. Where 25 or so of us had the job of managing the council housing of around 80,000 people.
Until the council housing disappeared.
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Analysis
So what happened?
For an analysis of that I want to move on from the family myth and my own story telling to the greater objectivity of the work of my friend Abi O'Connor, who's just finishing a PhD she's been letting me read, about Liverpool and what happened.
What happened was first of all the well known things: the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher and the headlines for local authorities & housing that followed; the centralisation of former local authority powers; the right to buy; council stock transfers & the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. All amounting, suggests Abi's research, and via the route of stigmatising whole places and "sink estates" together with the selling on of right to buy properties to private landlords, to acts of new enclosure and the privatisation and financialisation of what has now become a Housing Market rather than "where people live as of right and expectation."
In practice, a housing market opened up to the neoliberal, monetised, rent-gap exploitations of "If you run it down, deliberately blight a place, enclose it, transfer it, do it up as little as necessary, call flats lifestyle apartments, and bang their rents or prices up as high as you can dream them, and then a bit more, then people will still come, because people - different from the original poor ones of course who've been pushed out - even new people still have to live somewhere."
Or, as you can see out on Church Street and up Bold Street every day, live nowhere.
Liverpool, Abi suggests, was well ready for all this because Liverpool's population have always been of secondary importance to trade. Useful as a labour resource, disposable otherwise. Our housing having always been about resources and labour. Prone to enclosure and dispossession as necessary.
Much of this, as becomes clear from Abi's research interviews, done with the willing co-operation here in Liverpool of the local state, the local councillors, whatever they say in public about blaming Thatcher and the Tories (but that aspect of it's a whole collection of issues for another day).
For here, now and designing where and how people might live, what might we do?
Thoughts
Well, I don't know all on my own. And I don't even work "in" housing any more. But I do have some opinions.
First, on the usually predominant idea of simply building loads more houses, sufficient to meet the needs of the market. Which, in the current housing as market context brings us straight up against that "market" problem. Where people who can't be part of the market because they haven't got enough money are supposedly dealt with by the likes of Section 106 agreements, where developers agree to do a certain amount of social and supposedly affordable housing as a condition of their approval to develop. Except the 106 obligation is often subsequently slid out of. And why would we rely on the private market in the current context Abi's outlined anyway? Because it never has helped in the current crisis. And neither did it in nineteenth century Liverpool. A failure that first caused an exasperated local authority, Conservative controlled here then, to build the first council houses themselves.
So how about we return to full on Council Housing? Maybe even have a National Housing Service a bit like the NHS I’ve heard mentioned? After all Nye Bevan of sainted memory was the Minister for Health AND Housing when the NHS was started. And there is a clear link between good housing and good health. So I am more drawn to that, much more than continuing to rely on the private market.
But a National Housing Service? Haven't we had enough of power being increasingly centralised? And wouldn’t something National be too far away, for me, from the idea of Community-Led Housing?
Though I would like and value a national guarantee, cradle to grave, of home as of right.
Then, to move on, there's what I’m calling the "Primark & Amazon Situation." Which is that there are some aspects of globalism and neoliberalism that a lot of people have come to like, such as choice, quality, flexibility and speed of delivery. And would resist giving up, I would myself, and so would need dealing with in any future thinking.
So it's complicated, this designs for living, this imagining the future. In the middle of not just a housing crisis, but a climate crisis, an economic crisis, and how many crises all at once can we bear?
But maybe, I'm suggesting, just maybe, one answer might be that we think widely, intelligently and between us all. And organise hope.
We've done it before. Pretty much none of us alive now, but it's been done before by humans just like us. In the twenty odd years between those photographs of my dad and his sister then me and my brother. So in the space of one generation, and with World War Two in the middle of it, so at least as difficult a context as now, we'd had the Beveridge Report, hundreds of of thousands of soldiers reading it in 1942 when it came out, Rab Butler's Education Act, then the '45 Labour government, with the NHS, the housing boom and the post-war political consensus to follow. All of that. Which organised the hope and confidence I grew up in. And maybe you did too?
Earlier the same century was another organising of hope example. We had the model villages and Ebenezer Howard's garden cities ideas coalescing into town planning, that itself led into new towns and estates like Woodchurch on the Wirral and, yes, Norris Green, then Maghull, where I grew up.
So we know how to organise hope.
But hope doesn't bear cut and paste repetition. It needs the context of now worked in and then needs to be new to work. And so, I’m saying, can't be conjured up nostalgically by using all the same magic tricks, tools and methods people used before. Though we can use some of them.
Council housing, garden cities, new towns and home as a human right still sound pretty good to me. And wider conversations could probably bring up others too. As well as newer wishes like, for example, renting becoming a respected and optional choice to buying, like it is in much of Europe. Where public housing is for everyone, not the residualised last resort of the desperate. Then, how about some kind of protection in perpetuity to keep public housing away from any future right to buy disasters?
It all needs thinking about, discussing and imagining. Needs, expectations and time having changed everything, like they do. So organising hope this time, establishing it as a continuing condition, will be complicated. And could, I'll suggest, involve establishing hope as some kind of guiding principle. Like the Principle of Human Rights or a doctor's Hippocratic Oath. To do no further harm and begin designing a future our children and their children can thrive in, like so many of us did.
Let’s organise hope.
And finally: an audio link to some of this talk about hope.
This was my own contribution to a Liverpool Salon event on Saturday 18 November, 2023 at The Athenaeum in Liverpool, where the speakers were:
John Boughton (social historian, blogger; author Municipal Dreams:the Rise and Fall of Council Housing)
Ronnie Hughes (walker, reader and writer of the Liverpool blogs A Sense of Place and now Seventy.
Together with a presentation sent by Michael Owens (researcher, writer and lecturer; author Play the Game: How the Olympics came to East London)
We’d been asked to talk about “A historical perspective on Britain’s current housing crisis. From the golden age of post war planning to the decades of decline from the late 70s and 80s and focusing on the experience of Merseyside, we’ll ask what lessons might be learnt from Britain’s post-war vision for building a new, more modern and better future from the rubble of war.”
All chapters so far of “A Life: At Seventy”” listed here.
And big thanks to Abi O’Connor for inspiration and analysis on this one.