'The women would come to the door with metal buckets to ask for water and the men would whittle clothes pegs and come and sell them'
When Helen Bouchami’s mother first stepped into her new home on Convent Crescent, Grange Park, she danced in the living room.Bouchami was just two years old when her parents received the keys to their council house in August 1948. Her father, Harold Palmer, reckoned he had worn out two pairs of shoes traipsing to the Town Hall to try and secure it.
A few minor developments emerged in Blackpool but many families continued to live in overcrowded houses, basements, lean-tos and caravans. In 1926 the vicar of Blackpool, Canon Little, visited a “colony of caravan dwellers tucked away a discreet distance” from tourists where 1,146 people, including 400 children, were living. He described one dwelling as a hut with an old sack for a door, housing a family of nine and costing 12 shillings a week.
“The women would come to the door with metal buckets to ask for water and the men would whittle clothes pegs and come and sell them,” she says. “I imagine they’d been there for decades.” Despite the modern conveniences life was semi-rural for the first children living on the estate – a huge baby boom cohort who all played out together in the lanes, on the fields and in the streets where the freshly poured concrete was marked by horses’ hooves.
“Mum had this little book and she’d make a list up and take it to the van and then the delivery boy, with a cage on the front of his bike, would bring our box of groceries. Everything was packaged in twists of paper, not in plastic,” she says. “There was also a fish and chip shop and a general store. When that first opened you queued up with your list whilst the owners walked around putting it all together for you.”
Like Shoesmith’s, Kvist’s father had been a petty officer during the war, in the Fleet Air Arm, but was also a joiner – very handy to know on the estate and very employable. When she was 13 the building firm he worked for gave him the opportunity to build his own home in the middle-class village of Thornton, four miles north of Grange Park.
A “hardcore of tenants” were involved in crime, drugs and disorder and were “taking control of the neighbourhood”. The estate had become a major demand for police resources and reports of crime, nuisance and disorder were considerably higher than anywhere else in Blackpool. Grange Park achieved notoriety and was in a spiral of decline.
Enacting the right to buy scheme, Thatcher’s government allowed council tenants to buy their properties with huge discounts from the public purse. Popular with tenants, it fulfilled a Conservative ideology of creating a home-owning democracy, while diminishing the powers of local authorities and winning the working-class vote. It also fuelled a 40-year housing crisis.
The 1997 New Labour government perpetuated some of the problems too, by transferring huge amounts of housing stock from councils to housing associations, which it viewed as “a much better, more flexible way of managing social housing”, says Boughton. But Tony Blair’s government did introduce the Decent Homes Standard in 2000, which ultimately improved council housing and council estates.
After a year on the housing list, Crompton’s rent is affordable – she’s saving £200 per month and she’s hoping to save on her energy bills since the new houses are fitted with heat pumps. A lifelong Blackpool resident, 20 years ago she says she wouldn’t have wanted to live on Grange Park but it seems like a good place to live now.
“If you ask people, all they want is a chippy or a takeaway and shops. Aldi is only a 15-minute walk away but you can’t do that with big bags of shopping.” “When people sit down together they just chat and are able to solve each other’s problems. People still have issues but they talk them through and sort them out together. It’s not a violent place and it’s not a scary place. It’s a great place to live.”
Underwood, who used to help run a youth club on the estate, describes her own childhood as poor, despite her father working as a bricklayer. Her mum used to hate taking handouts but she could always rely on her neighbours for support. In the decades since her childhood, however, she’s had some terrible neighbours.
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