Reconstructing Public Housing Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives Reconstructing Public Housing Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives Reconstructing Public Housing Matthew Thompson LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Matthew Thompson The right of Matthew Thompson to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-108-2 paperback eISBN 978-1-78962-740-4 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Contents Contents List of Figures ix List of Abbreviations x Acknowledgements xi Prologue xv Part I Introduction 1 Introducing Collective Housing Alternatives 3 Why Collective Housing Alternatives? 9 Articulating Our Housing Commons 14 Bringing the State Back In 21 2 Why Liverpool of All Places? 27 A City of Radicals and Reformists 29 A City on (the) Edge? 34 A City Playing the Urban Regeneration Game 36 Structure of the Book 39 Part II The Housing Question 3 Revisiting the Housing Question 45 Nouns and Verbs: On the Nature of Value 48 Exploitation and Alienation: On the Contradictions of Capitalism 50 Ends and Means: The Point Is to Change It! 55 vi Reconstructing Public Housing 4 Liverpool’s Co-operative Revolution 60 Rehabilitating Housing in a SNAP 65 You Hold the Pen, We’ll Tell You What to Draw! 76 Competition: The Counterintuitive Component of Cooperativism 85 5 Liberal Compromises: Diluting the Cooperative Revolution? 89 You Can Have Any House You Like So Long as It’s a New-Build Co-op 92 Utalitarianism (Utilitarian plus Totalitarian): On Form Following Function 97 Contradictions of Choice: Defensive Urbanism or (Extra)Ordinary Sub-urbanism? 99 6 Municipalisation: A Militant Response to the Housing Question 103 A Tory–Liberal Plot: The Gravedigger of Municipal Housing? 107 Defensible Principles and (Policy) Design Disadvantagement 110 Keeping the Cooperative Spirit Alive: The Movement Migrates to Knowsley 114 Part III The Neighbourhood Question 7 Locating the Neighbourhood Question 123 Liverpool’s Second Blitz 124 How to Make Water Flow Uphill 128 Can Collective Housing Save the City? 135 8 The Eldonians: From Parish Politics to Global Exemplar 140 Militant Tactics, Boss Politics, Tribal Loyalties, Friends in High Places 144 We Do It Better Together: Towards a Self-Regenerating Community 147 Eldonia: An Independent Micro-State? 151 Contents vii 9 Cooperative by Name If Not by Nature 158 Singing the Post-Development Blues: On Revolutionaries Retiring 160 Third Sector Empire-Building 161 The Story So Far: How Self-Regenerating, Really? 167 Part IV The Urban Question 10 Grappling with the Urban Question 177 Weapons Wielded against Enclosure of the Commons 178 Grounding Capitalism in the Land Question 185 Housing Market Renewal, Neo-Haussmannisation and the New Urban Enclosures 189 11 Growing Granby from the Grassroots: A (Plant) Potted History 201 Living through Hell: On the Violence of Managed Decline 208 Putting the T into CLT; Finishing the Work that SNAP Started 213 From Success to Failure: A Great British Property Scandal 228 12 Technocratic Experiment or Experimental Utopia? 232 Dereliction-by-Design and Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer 237 Homebaked: Brick by Brick, Loaf by Loaf, We Build Ourselves 242 Seeing Liverpool’s Housing History through a Bifocal Verb–Noun Lens 251 Part V Conclusion 13 Reconstructing Public Housing (History) 263 In, Against and Beyond Public Housing 268 How to Answer the Housing, Neighbourhood and Urban Questions? 275 Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House 285 viii Reconstructing Public Housing 14 On (Myth) Making History 289 From Heroic Event to Boring Bureaucratic Process 294 The Myth of Liverpool Exceptionalism 300 Recipes for Revolution: From Cultivating Local Delicacies to Sourcing Essential Ingredients 303 15 Building a Bureaucracy from Below 311 Dormant, Not Defunct: Self-Funding the Next Co-Op Spring 313 Realising Municipal Dreams 318 Recoding the DNA of Collective Alternatives 323 Epilogue: Translating Between Inward, Upward and Outward Languages 327 Artificial Hells, Social Practice and Artistic Spectacle: Who (or What) Is All This For? 335 Bibliography 345 Index 363 Figures 1 Dilapidated dwellings and neighbourhood abandonment in Liverpool 8 in 2015. 38 2 “Utalitarian” community architecture of the Weller Street Co-op. 84 3 Typical Eldonian Village streetscape, overshadowed by the world’s largest brick warehouse at Stanley Dock. 100 4 Subverting “target hardening” with artistic symbols of hope. 211 5 Granby Street Market relocated to Ducie Street during Cairns Street renovation, 2015. 217 6 Dereliction by design: irreverent Scouse wit on display in Anfield. 240 All figures are photographs taken by the author. ix Abbreviations Abbreviations CDP Community Development Project CDS Co-operative Development Services (Liverpool agency) CIC Community Interest Company CLT Community Land Trust CPO Compulsory Purchase Order EGL Eldonian Group Ltd HAG Housing Association Grant HMR Housing Market Renewal KTP Knowledge Transfer Partnership LHT Liverpool Housing Trust LIFE Lead–Influence–Follow–Exit (Council policy for Housing Associations) MHOS Mutual Home Ownership Society MIH Merseyside Improved Houses NDC New Deal for Communities NWHS North West Housing Services (formerly CDS) RIBA Royal Institute of British Architects SNAP Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project URBED Urbanism Environment Design (planning consultancy) URS Urban Regeneration Strategy (Council policy programme) ZOO Zone of Opportunity x Acknowledgements Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the people of Liverpool, past and present. It is a story about their history—albeit one strand in a colourful tapestry—woven out of oral testimony and multiple personal reflections. A large part of the narrative has been composed through conversations with numerous insightful participants who each, in one way or another, helped make history in Liverpool. They include Jane Corbett, Chris Davies, John Earnshaw, Juliet Edgar, George Evans, Ed Gommon, Bill Halsall, Jackie Harris, George Howarth, Richard Kemp, Eleanor Lee, Rob MacDonald, Tony McGann, Erika Rushton, Max Steinberg, Bill Taylor and many others who wish to remain anonymous. I am especially indebted to Paul Lusk, whose first-hand account of the co-op movement helped frame my own, for guiding me, step by step, through the potted history of cooperative development on Merseyside. To Jack McBane, for his hospitality and enthusiasm for my project, in many ways extending his own on the Eldonians, who he worked so closely with to construct and materialise their vision. To Jonathan Brown (of Share the City and SAVE Britain’s Heritage) who introduced me to Liverpool’s urbanism and its controversial politics of housing regeneration through his excellent tours. And also to (the late) Des McConaghy, former director of the Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project (and the first person I interviewed for my doctoral research upon which this book is broadly based) for his take on the early period of experimentation in Granby. I would especially like to thank Ronnie Hughes, Granby’s own unofficial urban historian and photojournalist, who has been a brilliant help in piecing together the history since SNAP. And Gemma Jerome, a Terrace 21 cooperator and Granby CLT collaborator, who first introduced me to the neighbourhood and its emerging CLT campaign. Likewise, her Terrace 21 comrade, Marianne Heaslip, has generously imparted critical insights into both Granby and Homebaked. To Ronnie, Gemma and Marianne, I am grateful for the dialogue we have continued on and off over the years since we first met in 2013. More recently, the Homebaked collective have been a real inspiration to me. I would like to thank them all for their warm welcome in bringing me into the fold for an all too brief period in 2017 and 2018, when I served as a participant-observer on the CLT board. Alongside Angela McKay, Sue Humphreys, Ralph Bullivant, Peter Colby, Andrew Beattie, Sam Jones, Paul xi xii Reconstructing Public Housing Kelly, Sally Anne-Watkiss and (the late) Cal Starr, Britt Jurgensen in particular has been an amazing critical friend in helping me get the narrative right, as someone so passionately committed to crafting and realising Homebaked’s collective vision. In (re)constructing Liverpool’s hidden history of collective housing alternatives, I have drawn upon, and been influenced by, the testimony of all these participant-contributors. What follows, however, is not a direct, unmediated representation of their views but wholly my own, distinct take on events, one triangulated with multiple secondary sources and alternative analyses and refracted through a theoretical lens that I feel illuminates this history most clearly—a necessarily partial interpretation which, no doubt, will be seen in a different light by others. Writing this book has been a long, meandering journey that began back in 2011 when I started my PhD at the University of Manchester. I am forever grateful to Graham Haughton and Ste Hincks for showing me the way—in equal measure encouraging and challenging in their tireless (and tirelessly entertaining) supervision. I want to thank Graham for introducing me to the work of Colin Ward (Graham’s own unique brand of radicalism is not unlike Ward’s: modest, respectable, scholarly). And Ste (born and bred on Merseyside) for persuading me to study the history of collective housing alter- natives in Liverpool rather than in Manchester or London. Neil McInroy and Alex Lord, too, my third and fourth supervisors, for bringing fresh perspec- tives and making connections.