The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (36 page)
Authors: Edward Hollis
S
OME PEOPLE CAN
still remember what the Crescents were supposed to have been like. A visitor to a Web site funereally named “exHulme” posts a message signed “Caroline.” She writes:
I was four when we moved there. My family moved to Hulme because Broughton in Salford was being cleared.
We were promised from what I have been told by my mam “a bright new future in the new deck access flats.” At first and I have to say for the first few years we lived there they were lovely flats to live in . . . I remember watching what I thought was really posh the man over the way cleaning ’is Avenger, and thinking
cur that’s posh
. He did that every Sunday. We made friends easy and it did seem like a real community . . . we had shops, and a wash house. Cos in those days it was dead posh to have a washing machine. I watched the Crescents of Robert Adam and John Nash go up . . . and like I say for the first few years things were lovely we had every facility we could ask for . . . they were wonderful places. Full of really new ideas and loads of hope for the people living in them. People talked to each other. And I can remember laughter with a family that lived in them. They asked me and my grandad in for a cup of tea. Showed us round the strange way the flats were designed. But the flat was so clean and nice and they were so proud of it.
But when people started to live in them, the Crescents started to lose a little of their shine. Caroline continues:
Then suddenly about 1972 I think it was things started to go wrong. And like I say people started to move out. I remember walking over to the shops with my mam, and running across the green in front of the crescent cos there were strange people hanging about in the stairwells of the crescent. But it was all there, parks in front of the flats, shops and the lot. But it all went so wrong, don’t know how but it did. As the crescents started to get bad, the badness started to come.
The badness: it began with damp patches on the wall. In the winter of 1971, some tenants had started complaining about condensation in their flats, dark blotches disfiguring their bright modern wallpapers. The architects and the housing officers came to see the damage and roundly berated the tenants for not opening their windows
while they cooked or dried their clothes. The tenants opened the windows and put up with the icy drafts, but the dampness didn’t go away.
In 1973, the oil crisis precipitated a massive rise in the costs of power. The Crescents were heated by electricity, so the people who lived in them were particularly badly affected; in some cases heating bills rocketed to five hundred pounds a quarter. Many tenants simply disconnected themselves from the electrical supply. They saw out the dark winter in their modern flats by old-fashioned candlelight, warming themselves around paraffin heaters. At least the gloom concealed the stains.
But these were just the technical difficulties. There were management problems as well. The Crescents had been designed to rehouse a particularly deprived portion of the citizens of Manchester: 70 percent of the residents had come there as a result of slum clearance elsewhere, and 30 percent of them were on welfare benefits provided by the city council. The rent they owed was paid to the city by the city itself, and as their proportion increased—within two years, 44 percent of the residents of the Crescents were on benefits—the city’s income diminished accordingly. And on this ever-shrinking budget, the city fathers had to somehow manage the maintenance of two miles of building: replacing the lights, cleaning the walkways, clearing away the rubbish that fluttered along the concrete decks and littered the grass. They were unprepared to handle even the basic upkeep, let alone the plagues of rats and cockroaches that seemed to spread along the Crescents like wildfire.
And these were just the management problems. There were serious design flaws to deal with, too. As in Sheffield’s Park Hill, all the flats in the Crescents were accessed by great decks, which stretched, in total, for several miles; and these “streets in the sky” proved to be just as sociable as the architects had hoped. Kids loved to run along their length, pushing on doorbells and running away when someone answered. They loved to climb up on the balustrades, peering over the edge to sniff the air that lay beyond. The way the balustrades were detailed just seemed to invite it, with plenty of footholds and big fat ledges to lean on. It was only a matter of time before someone fell off them. He was a little boy of four: one year older than the Crescents themselves.
That was the last straw. In 1975, the families of the Hulme Crescents presented a petition to the Housing Committee of the city of Manchester. They were scared for their children, and their demands were clear.
A list to be drawn up of all the families who want to be rehoused.
“Why should we have to pay to live here in these dangerous prisons?” the petition asked, and it proclaimed emphatically, “Rehousing must start
now
.”
The Housing Committee agreed with them. The families moved out, and the Crescents were left empty, ready for single tenants, couples without children, and students to move in. One of them recalls: “The day I moved in was 11th Dec. 1981, and there was deep snow everywhere—unusual for Manchester at any time. As we tiptoed around the crescents the vibe was awesome—monolithic magnificence—a complete void. I don’t think even seeing the pyramids for the first time could compare.”
A complete void the Crescents had indeed become. So few people actually wanted to live in Hulme that the city started giving the flats away. Well, not exactly giving, as Karen recalls on the exHulme site.
Moved to Hulme in 1982 and lived on each of the crescents . . . moving regularly with
the
shopping trolley that everyone used, a mains fuse and a wire to get round the meter and my Yale lock. Seemed very normal back then—choose a flat and move. It went wrong one time though when it seemed I had picked the same flat as two guys who proceeded to try and kill me with a hammer.
All you had to do was break into an empty apartment and lock yourself in for a while. You wouldn’t need to bother with rent or landlords: by the time the authorities found out about you, you would have moved on. That was the difference between the new tenants and the families that had moved out, you see: there was nothing to tie them down.
After the first inhabitants of the Crescents had left, the Manchester city council had installed steel gates at regular intervals along the access decks to the flats. These gates could only be opened by security codes—codes that the tenants knew, the housing officers soon forgot, and the police never found out. The council being the council, it took them some time to realize they had locked themselves out. There was no way they could keep up with the new residents, who started, in the absence of any visible authority, to invent a society all their own. They were young, shiftless, feckless, and free; they didn’t have families and jobs and possessions. The laws of property were suspended in Hulme; nothing belonged to anybody, and everything belonged to everybody. Everything was stolen, scammed, joyridden, totaled, and given away. They told one another that it was exactly what Engels had prophesied.
The Hulmans of Hulme did whatever they wanted. The accepted modes of behavior didn’t just break down in the Crescents: they were rejected wholesale, spat on and told to fuck off. Karen recalls a
déjeuner sur l’herbe
.
