Salford Housing, 1970: Image via Getty Images

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One of the key aspects of my research is about the meaning of home. Homes are often idealised spaces: in 1933, for example, the Charity Organisation Quarterly declared that home was ‘the place where humankind can be shy, sensitive, reserved, proud.’[1] This ideal can be seen through the ambitious programmes suburbanisation and house building after the First World War that saw waves of clearance and the building of large housing estates that prioritised the semi-detached home for nuclear families. This period of housebuilding produced a significant shift in living standards as local councils invested in impressive and ambitious programmes of housing reform, such as Manchester’s Wythenshawe Estate. Madeline McKenna’s fascinating interviews with those who moved to the new council houses in the 1930s shows inhabitants recalled stark contrasts between the old housing and the new estates. Such as Miss C., who compared her two-up two-down in the Vauxhall area of Liverpool with the three-bedroomed house her family moved to located near Norris Green in 1938. Their old home, she recalled, was ‘in a terrible state, alive with those blood bugs, horrible it was. There were rats too, they were everywhere.’ Whereas her parents felt their new home ‘was marvellous after what they had come from. It was wonderful having gas, electricity, hot water and a new clean house.’[2] These testimonies are important and uncover the impact of these important public health initiatives. However, for many working-class residents, a move to the suburbs was not necessarily affordable or appealing and inner urban neighbourhoods remained central to experiences of home. These enduring experiences of home and of housing need further assessment, particularly as terraced housing remains the most common form of dwellings in Britain, at over a quarter of all housing stock, but there are also significant regional variations and the figure stands at over 40 per cent for Liverpool.[3]

Housing Programmes such as the Wythenshawe Estate in Manchester transformed living standards for working-class inhabitants who could afford to move there. Wythenshawe estate, 1940. Image: via Getty Images

The enduring importance of these high-density areas of housing in inner urban neighbourhoods and their significance as ‘homes’ emerges prominently in working-class memoirs. These perspectives are particularly important because I find that social workers, local government officials, and other public servants often read signs of criminality and deviance in their observations on housing and highlighted poor living conditions and this belief shaped their methods of intervention. William Woodruff, b. 1916, charted the extreme poverty of his childhood in Lancashire including an account of sharing a bed with brother in the same room as their parents. ‘We slept so close to our parents that we could touch them. The nearness of our bodies made us feel safe. No one noticed the lack of privacy. I accepted my parent’s lovemaking long before I understood it. It was as natural as somebody using the pisspot.’[4] This is a really helpful example that illuminates the clash between middle-class philanthropists and welfare officers and the poorer families they sought to help. Whereas the middle-class gaze would interpret such sleeping arrangements as problematic, if not to the point of suggesting there was something improper or corruptive about young boys sharing a bedroom with their parents. But for Woodruff, this arrangement was reflective of the close-knit nature of family life that was an inevitable product of the poor housing they occupied.

Working-class families could experience tough living conditions and could be judged harshly by welfare officers or representatives of the state, who particularly attributed it as a cause of juvenile delinquency: Liverpool, 1930s image via Getty images

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But poor living standards did not negate a desire for pride or protection of domestic space. Playwright and activist George Garrett described the poverty he experienced whilst unemployed in 1920s Liverpool: ‘There was never any money for furniture, so through all these struggling years it was impossible to re-gather together the makings of a presentable home as measured by working class standards…. The lack of a decent chair to offer anyone always caused much embarrassment and often neighbours were left on the doorstep for no other reason. Being on able bodied relief saved us from intruders like “heathen pieces.” Only neighbours with a similar predicament to ourselves were asked in. The bareness of our hovel was due to our pariah existence.’[5] Garrett prided himself on being allowed to choose who entered his home and was especially dedicated to preventing the parish visitor – who came to check up on families who were claiming relief – from seeing inside the house. For Garrett, this power was fundamental to being able to assert his private space as his own, particularly against the invasive and judgemental gaze of the local state. For many working-class memoirists, there was a significant stigma attached to being known to have taken poor relief or help from charities and they were kept away from the home as much as possible. For instance, interviewees who lived in 1930s Belfast emphasised that despite poverty, people very keen to help themselves and refused charity or intervention: One man recalled that the ‘The SVDP (St Vincent de Paul) Society did more harm to the people by showing themselves at people’s doors. People were humiliated when they came. Everybody knew they were SVDP.’ Whilst his wife explained: ‘people were trying to hide their poverty and they were exposing it. They always came after twelve o’clock mass and the world and their wives saw them.’[6] Working-class inhabitants had little formal power but being able to resist charities, welfare officers, or representatives of the state, who exposed their poverty, was crucial to their sense of agency and autonomy within their neighbourhoods.

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For those who could afford furniture, furnishings were carefully cared for and protected against the wear and tear of everyday life. Ken Hayter recalled that he and his brother Charlie ‘were hardly ever allowed into the parlour because “it’ was for entertaining”, Mam would insist… we wondered what all the fuss was about. It was spotlessly clean but all it had in it was an old settee, a couple of chairs and a black wooden carved table that Uncle Charlie had brought back from Africa when he came on leave from the Army.’[7] This strong sense of care and domestic pride was strongly linked to feminine identity and women were judged on their perceived strengths as housewives and homemakers, even as they faced financial hardship. Walt Palmer, Mother’s Ruin, describes his childhood in 1940s Sheffield, and how his mother made him stay outside every Saturday to allow her to clean the house thoroughly ‘Mum wasn’t cruel, just heart-broken,’ Palmer explains. ‘Sometimes we’d watch her, unobserved, through the back window as she polished the Lino on hands and knees using Mandolin Polish. She cried quietly to herself. At our age we didn’t under about poverty and, anyway, there were plenty of tears above every day.’[8] Palmer’s account provides some sense of the pressure involved for women who tried to maintain their homes in the face of poverty. We do not know if his mother cleaned as a way to find time alone, was a reflection of her frustrations and difficulties she faced, or as a way to try and remedy the miserable domestic setting she was faced with as much as she could. At the same time, the emphasis on the home may have been a reflection of the fear of judgement inhabitants felt, especially from the potential gaze of the state. Returning to Ken Hayter, he explained further that ‘Despite Mam’s insistence that the parlour was for entertaining visitors. I can’t actually remember us ever having visitors of the sort you entertained. We had plenty of aunts, uncles and neighbours coming to see us, but they went straight to the living room. The only other visitors were people like the rent collector or the cheque man and they never got past the front door, if, by rare mistake, it was opened for them.’[9] Perhaps for Hayter’s mother, having a pristine sitting room was a sign of respectability that would enable her to rebuff or protect herself from any unwelcome visitors who may look to find fault or seek intervention in carefully-protected familial domesticity.

Poor housing persisted in many towns and cities, despite programmes of housing reform. Salford 1970s: image via Getty images

Homes could also hold secrets and betray their inhabitants. Tim Brannigan, was born in Belfast in 1966 after his Catholic mother had an extra-marital affair with a Black junior doctor. Placed in an orphanage, his mother initially told her family that the baby had died to avoid her husband finding out about her affair before conspiring to retrieve Tim, telling everyone that she had adopted a child. But Tim was aware of the stress placed on his mother to keep it a secret, particularly, living in the Falls Road area of the Belfast, where there few Black children. His mother’s fear about the truth coming to light however meant that she would make Tim hide if anyone she knew of at the time of affair came to the house. Women also used their homes for criminal offences and, as I’ve shown in my academic research, in some working-class neighbourhoods the buying and selling of stolen goods by women in their homes was relatively widespread. Similarly, women in Northern Ireland could find their homes being used for Republican and paramilitary activities. As Tim Brannigan described, his mother would allow meetings related to IRA activity to take place there: ‘I was used to men and women calling to our house and leaving again with little ceremony. Sometimes they arrived, mumbled a few words but seemed quite agitated, or they whispered in the raised voice sort of way that people do when arguing in public.’[10] But this brought significant risk to the home, particularly when his mother was tricked and permitted members of the IRA to use one of the bedrooms bedroom, thinking it was for a meeting, but they used it to hide weapons.

July 1970: Armed British soldiers impose a curfew on the Falls Road in Belfast. Image via Getty images

These accounts provide a sense of the everyday fear that inhabitants living through the ‘Troubles’ in some areas of Belfast must have felt as war and terrorism could infringe on their domestic worlds. But they also reveal how women found ways to protest or demonstrate against the frightening presence of troops in homes, particularly when it involved the unpopular searches of homes and internment of men deemed to be engaging in terrorist activities. Mary Beckett’s novel Give them stones is particularly moving in describing how women were able to remonstrate against the invasive strategies of the army. It describes the Falls Road curfew in 1970: ‘The people in those wee old streets just like ours were shut in and not allowed out for any messages while the soldiers searched all the houses for guns. They didn’t find much – a few old guns from years past and they broke up the houses. We saw it on the television. I was crying, first with vexation and then with pride when a whole army of women with bread and milk came marching down from other streets further up and pushed the soldiers away, shouting at the, to go home to England and learn manners. They handed the food to besieged houses.’[11] The novel presents a really emotive image and emphasises the defiance of the local women and their sympathy towards those whose homes had been searched.

I am not convinced that the definition of home given by the Charity Organisation Quarterly in 1933 as ‘the place where humankind can be shy, sensitive, reserved, proud,’ really reflects its significance in working-class neighbourhoods. Yet it is clear that working-class men and women privileged the power and autonomy to decide who was granted entry and that poor living standards did not undermine the important sense of ‘home.’

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[1] ‘Home, Sweet Home, Chapter 1,’ Charity Organisation Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1933, p.128.

[2] Madeline McKenna, ‘The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars’, Appendix 13 Interview Number 48. (PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 1986), pp. 570-1.

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/council-tax-stock-of-properties-2021/council-tax-stock-of-properties-statistical-summary#:~:text=Figure%205%20shows%20the%20number,maisonettes%20(6.10%20million%2C%2023.2%25)

[4.] William Woodruff, The Road to Nab End: An Extraordinary Northern Childhood (London, 1999), p. 12

[5] George Garrett eds. Mike Morris, Tony Wailey and Andrew Davies, Ten Years on the Paris: The Autobiography and Letters of George Garrett (Liverpool 2017), p. 159.

[6] Ronnie Munk and Bill Rolston, with Gerry Moore, Belfast in the Thirties: An oral history (The Blackstaff Press: Belfast, 1987) p. 82

[7] Ken Hayter, Toxteth Tales: Growin’ Up in Liverpool 8 (Lancaster, 2017), p. 28.

[8] Walt Palmer, Mother’s Ruin (Yorkshire Art Circle: Castleford, 1988), p. 8.

[9] Hayter, Toxteth Tales, p. 29.

[10] Tim Brannigan, Where are you Really From? (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 2010), p. 29.

[11]  Mary Beckett, Give them stones (Bloomsbury: London, 1987), p. 121.