Paved with good intentions

As a schoolboy, I used to go round to my best mate Mike’s home. It was a good place: a cosy first-floor flat beneath the big, tiled, pitched roof, an anthracite stove in the kitchen. It faced onto a green and had a long garden at the back. It had a parade of shops nearby and a primary school. I didn’t know then that it was on a council estate or that the more tightly packed newer housing developments nearby were private. These were just places where people I knew lived.

Mike’s estate was (and is, for it still exists) a version of the ‘municipal dreams’ that John Boughton describes in his detailed history of social housing in the UK. Built in the late 1940s and early 1950s it is — despite being in a conservatively inclined part of the shires — a relic of the ‘Bevan housing’ of the immediate postwar years.