State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In the autumn of 1972, two young researchers arrived on the Monmouth council estate in Islington, north London, to begin a project on working-class youth culture. What they found could hardly have been more remote from the leafy suburbs of Betjeman’s Metro-Land: a low-rise GLC housing complex trapped between two busy main roads, first occupied in 1960 but never properly finished, a ‘twilight zone with high rates of delinquency, mental breakdown and suicide’. Just a short bus ride from the West End, the estate’s 1,200 maisonettes offered a ‘familiar contrast between the private trappings of affluence – colour TVs, kitchen units, and fitted carpets – and public squalor – halls and stairways strewn with garbage and covered with graffiti, lifts that don’t work and telephone boxes smashed up’. Many children were drawn into criminality before they had even reached double figures; led by a manic 13-year-old, one gang had occupied a disused local pub, using it to store their booty from robberies and raids, but reserving one room for ‘shitting and pissing’. Between the Monmouth youngsters and their neighbours on the Denby council estate, which was dominated by widowed pensioners and black immigrant families, there was a long history of tension. In particular, Irish and black teenagers hated each other; the Irish often complained that the ‘jungle bunnies’ would ‘turn you over’ for money if they caught a white boy on his own. And when a group of well-meaning social workers and squatters tried to turn the pub into a youth centre, with a disco as the centrepiece, their dreams were quickly shattered. The disco soon succumbed to endemic racial violence, and when a kaftan-wearing hippy tried to organize hand-holding ‘encounter sessions’ to dissipate the tension, the teenagers beat him up so badly he ended up in hospital. It would have been funny if it were not so sad: by the time the researchers left in 1974, all they could foresee for the children of the estate was violence, racism and unemployment.47

  Like so many of the council estates planned and built in the 1940s and 1950s, the Monmouth estate had originally been a symbol of modernity and opportunity, the embodiment of the reforming spirit that was going to turn Britain into the New Jerusalem. The transformation in the estates’ image, however, was astonishingly quick: by the early 1970s, writes one historian, they had already become symbols of ‘dependence on state benefits, of a morass of indebtedness to the council and the moneylender, of isolation from neighbour and kin and society at large’. Once they had been praised for their bold appearance and modern amenities; now they were ‘feared for their violence, their vandalism, their inhuman scale and their dog-eat-dog collective life’. Visiting Blackburn in the summer of 1969, Jeremy Seabrook found ‘empty sweeping vistas of disfigured concrete, neglected grass verges and uncontrolled privet hedges … crumbling kerbstones, blocked drainpipes that stain the walls with a rust-coloured overflow … extinguished street lights, overflowing dented dustbins’. They were as ‘impermanent as refugee camps’, he thought, inviting ‘violence and negation’. The mood of their inhabitants was a ‘sullen and passive indifference’: in the ill-stocked, threadbare shops, he watched women queuing with ‘dirty aprons and draggled dresses’ poking out from beneath their coats, their children dressed in outsize Fair Isle sweaters and cracked plastic jackets, ‘the uniform of jumble sales and charity’.48

  This picture, of course, was far from universal. Even in the early 1980s, when the estates seemed to have reached rock bottom, there were pockets of success, from grass-roots youth associations, day-care centres, summer festivals and food cooperatives to surveys showing that some estates were genuinely happy, welcoming places. On one Hammersmith estate in the late 1970s, for example, kinship and community had not disappeared; indeed, 77 per cent of tenants had relatives living nearby and 62 per cent felt they could rely on their neighbours in the event of an emergency. Yet other London estates were deeply miserable and troubled places, the inevitable problems of poverty, welfare dependency and lack of opportunities exacerbated by their grim concrete architecture. And as working-class white families moved out to suburbs and New Towns, so the poverty of the estates acquired a racial dimension. By the mid-1970s, black and Asian families were beginning to dominate crumbling pre-war estates like White City, Kingsmead, Kennington Park and Kingslake. Even on the new system-built concrete Holly Street estate in Dalston, more than 75 per cent of new arrivals were black by 1977. Only six years old, Holly Street had once been a symbol of the technological optimism of the late 1960s, its four twenty-storey towers housing more than 1,000 families. Yet by the end of the decade it was a byword for water leaks, vermin infestation, vandalism, muggings and racial violence. In a single week in 1980, there were twenty-one separate break-ins. The corridors were a ‘thieves’ highway’, one visitor wrote, while at the corners of the blocks were ‘dark passages, blind alleys, gloomy staircases’. By now the fear of mugging was so great that if people went out at night they ‘stick to the lit areas and walk hurriedly’. Many compared it with the worst estates of New York or Chicago; it was certainly a long way from the New Jerusalem.49

  The plight of Holly Street makes an appropriate metaphor for what happened to much of inner-city London in the 1970s. With the capital’s decline as a working port – thanks not only to changing trade and export patterns, but also to the extraordinary intransigence of London’s dockers, whose introverted, clannish politics were notorious even among other trade unions, and made modernization impossible – its manufacturing base collapsed. In everything from the car and engineering industries to furniture-making, vehicle parts and even sweet-making, factories closed and jobs were wiped off the map. Between 1966 and 1974 alone, the capital’s manufacturing workforce fell from 1.29 million to 940,000, and it fell even further and faster during the late 1970s and 1980s. As an industrial city, London was ceasing to exist. And as middle-class and skilled working-class workers moved out to the New Towns and suburbs of Hertfordshire, Essex, Surrey and Kent, so the city’s character radically changed. By 1981, the population of inner London had fallen by a staggering 26 per cent in just twenty years; at 2.35 million, it was barely half the figure in 1901. The turnover was astonishing: two-thirds of the people living in Islington in 1961 had moved out by 1971, and more followed in the next ten years. Formerly respectable working-class districts were increasingly dominated by immigrants, tower blocks and unskilled poor workers, as well as a smattering of young middle-class bohemians in the vanguard of the gentrification craze. And in areas like Islington, the contours of the city’s future were already being sketched in draft: on the one hand, the affluent young, well-educated and well-paid, with an insatiable appetite for commerce and entertainment; on the other, the people of the towers, often shut out from jobs and opportunities, and condemned to lives of crime and dependency.50

  As early as the mid-1970s, therefore, there was already a sense of two Londons emerging, side-by-side: the city of the gentrifiers, and the city of the council estates. But what struck most visitors at the time was the capital’s sheer seediness: the dirty, run-down, dilapidated streets, the sense of mistrust and disappointment that hung in the air like a fog. The terrible Moorgate tube disaster of February 1975, when a Northern Line commuter train smashed into a bricked-up tunnel, killing forty-three passengers, was a freak accident blamed on driver error; but the very fact that it was never properly explained somehow seemed a symbol of the deteriorating quality of life in the capital. ‘You feel in this city that despair is washing the walls and is eating into hearts of people,’ recorded Kenneth Williams in 1971, ‘and so the music gets noisier, the dancing more frenetic & fragmented, the conversations more wry and ruefully cynical … and the confrontations more & more stalemate’. Six years later, a Thames Television survey found that ‘more than half the people living in London would like to move out because they do not like the neighbourhood’. The heart of the West End, the journalist Clive Irving told American readers, had become ‘a semiderelict slum’, blighted by ‘tacky porno shops, skin movies, pinball arcades, and toxic hamburger joints’, while ‘behind neon façades the buildings are flaking
and unkempt’. Even the 30-year-old writer Jonathan Raban, a newcomer to the capital, was struck by the physical decay of his Notting Hill neighbourhood. With its transient population of West Indian youngsters, unkempt hippies and struggling young mothers, it might be picturesque in the sun, he wrote, but ‘on dull days one notices the litter, the scabby paint, the stretches of torn wire netting, and the faint smell of joss-sticks competing with the sickly sweet odour of rising damp and rotting plaster’.51

  London’s fictional image reflected a similar sense of decay and decline. ‘Rat City’, the Art Attacks called it in their punk-rock single of 1979; ‘It’s so shitty.’ Perhaps they were inspired by one of the most successful contemporary visions of London, James Herbert’s bestseller The Rats (1974), the book that effectively reinvented the British horror genre. Here, London is a city eaten away from within by giant, feral rats, which hunt down people in packs, becoming so bold that they take over a tube station, a school, a cinema. And the book’s teacher hero knows who to blame: ‘the councils that took the working class from their slums and put them in tall, remote concrete towers,’ the ‘same councils’ that tolerated ‘the filth that could produce vermin such as the black rats’. This was an extreme example, admittedly, but few other depictions of the city would have gone down well with its tourist board. As early as July 1971, when John Schlesinger’s film Sunday, Bloody Sunday reached the cinemas, it was clear that the carefree fantasies of Swinging London, supposedly ‘the most exciting city in the world’, had long since evaporated. Here, London is a sad, haunted city of drug addicts, harassed homosexuals and looming economic collapse, setting the tone for the decade to come. ‘Up-ended dustbins and capsized vegetable barrows are being sick all over the pavement; rubbish bags slump like tramps against shop windows; rabid pigeons, too fat to fly, squawk among the filth,’ the narrator observes in Martin Amis’s novel Success, published seven years later. Turning into Queensway, past the ‘great continents of Middle-Eastern immigrant workers’ and the ‘shock-haired nig-nog’ selling orange juice from a fridge, he looks in vain for a sign saying ‘English Spoken Here’. And when the heroine revisits her old respectable working-class neighbourhood in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Middle Ground (1980), she finds it ‘derelict, abandoned’, its unfinished tower blocks ‘raw, ugly, gigantic in scale’, a ‘wilderness of flyovers and underpasses and unfinished supports’, a ‘no man’s land’ in the aftermath of war.52

  What happened to London in the 1970s was by no means unusual. As skilled working-class and lower-middle-class families moved out of Birmingham inner-city districts like Sparkbrook and Small Heath, the brick terraced streets attracted a new population of students, squatters and immigrants. In Whalley Range, Manchester, where middle-class families were disappearing to the Cheshire suburbs, their old Victorian villas were converted into single-occupancy flats, often becoming shabby student bedsits. And then there was Liverpool, which the planner Lionel Brett, Viscount Esher, called ‘the locus classicus of the collapse of the inner city: the loss of the go-ahead young; the consequent shrinking of the tax base, yet no diminution of the number of under-privileged needing multiple support, of young children, of the impoverished old; the loss of jobs within reach of the centre; and above all the failed, frightening environment’. Only the success of the city’s leading football team, twice European champions in the 1970s, represented a point of pride. But when, just weeks after Liverpool’s second European Cup victory, the city’s industrial development officer reported that it had suffered ‘an unprecedented level of plant closures and redundancies’, it was a reminder of what really mattered.

  Later, the Thatcher governments would take much of the blame for Liverpool’s woes. But, as in so many other areas, the rot had set in well before then. There was already a sense, a reporter wrote in June 1978, that ‘Britain had decided simply to write Liverpool off’. Crippled by strikes, the docks were in deep decline, while the new Kirkby housing estates were a ‘planning catastrophe on a very large scale’, with mugging, vandalism and arson endemic, and their inhabitants mocked as ‘drunken, semi-literate idlers who beat their wives’ and ‘marauding mobs of mini-muggers’. And across the city, the rule for calculating unemployment was simple: take the national figure, and double it. To get the figure for Kirkby, double the figure for Liverpool; to get the figure for Toxteth, the inner-city district where most black immigrants lived, treble it. The unemployment rate among young black men, The Times reported sadly, was ‘getting on for 50 percent, four times the city average, and eight times the national’.53

  What was really strangling Liverpool was not union militancy or government indifference, but the inexorable logic of economic history, the same thing that afflicted once-prosperous Northern mill towns like Bradford, Oldham and Nelson, or West Midlands engineering towns like Dudley and Wolverhampton. In Bradford, for example, some 50,000 people had been working in textiles in 1964, a third of the town’s workforce; by 1974, however, the equivalent figure was almost down to 25,000, and it continued to fall afterwards. Bradford’s Manningham district, where the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe used to drink in the early 1970s, had once been a handsome middle-class Victorian neighbourhood; by Sutcliffe’s time, however, it was fast becoming one of the worst inner-city slums in the North of England, a wilderness of sex shops, betting shops, seedy drinking clubs and decrepit workers’ cafés. Customers who followed the ‘Toilet’ signs in the Lahore restaurant would ‘find themselves stumbling across a piece of waste ground where half a dozen cats were fighting each other over a hen’s head’, while at the corner, prostitutes solicited in the darkness. ‘Chapels and mills are suddenly exposed by demolition, marooned in a tangle of convolvulus and mallow like the carcasses of huge extinct saurians,’ wrote Jeremy Seabrook of Blackburn, though he could have been talking about any one of dozens of Northern industrial towns. The well-to-do had long since moved out to what he dismissively called their ‘joyless Arcadia of inflated Wendy-houses’; meanwhile, ‘the centre of the town is left increasingly to the poor, the old and the immigrants’.54

  ‘Left-over people’, the former Animals keyboardist Alan Price called them in his album Between Today and Yesterday (1974), a collection of songs built around the experience of growing up in working-class Jarrow. The institutions that had once given texture and meaning to industrial working-class life – the factory, the chapel, the council estate, even the pub and the football club – seemed to be in deep, unstoppable decline. The very landscape was changing: terraced streets ripped down and replaced with monolithic concrete blocks; mill chimneys and colliery engine houses crashing down in clouds of dust; pubs and chapels converted into carpet showrooms or flats for ambitious gentrifiers. When Terry Collier, back from five years in West Germany, tours his old haunts in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, he is horrified by the transformation of the Newcastle he loved. Standing on top of a new multi-storey car park, he reels in shock when his friend Bob tells him that this was the site of the old Go-Go rock club. ‘The Go-Go?’ he exclaims. ‘Gone?’ The Roxy, too, where he used to sink the pints and ogle the girls, has disappeared, demolished to make way for a new civic centre. Only Eric’s fish-and-chip shop remains, a forlorn relic of the old world, alone in a wasteland of building sites and tower blocks. ‘None of our memories is intact,’ Terry says sadly.55

  Even working-class political culture, which had given life to the Labour Party and still found expression in strikes, marches and local meetings, seemed ‘narrower, more introverted and more brittle’, as local branches fell under the sway of middle-class teachers, lecturers and social workers – who in turn adopted what the Labour MP and political historian David Marquand called ‘an explosive mixture of pseudo-proletarianism, insular populism and mostly shallow neo-marxism’, like some grotesque parody of genuine working-class values. Behind the misleading arithmetic of the electoral system, Labour’s vote was steadily shrinking: from 48 per cent in 1966, it fell to 43 per cent in 1970, 37 per cent in both February 1974 a
nd 1979, and a mere 28 per cent in 1983, when its anti-modernization, even reactionary rhetoric was shrillest. Marquand thought it was trapped in the past, ‘a product of the age of steam, hobbling arthritically into the age of the computer’, appealing above all to ‘the casualties of change rather than to the pacemakers, to declining areas rather than to advancing ones’. When the BBC made a documentary on Harold Wilson and his senior colleagues in 1971 and called it Yesterday’s Men, they provoked the biggest row between the Corporation and the Labour Party that anybody could remember. In the long run, however, the title was more fitting than any of them realized.56

  But it would be a misleading portrait of Britain that focused entirely on decline, decay and disappointment. Change brought prosperity as well as poverty: in East Anglia, for example, the growth of agri-business, the opening of the M11 motorway and the development of a new economy based on technology and computers brought unparalleled growth to old market towns such as Norwich and Ipswich. In Cambridge, the nation’s first science park opened in 1970 and proved a sensational success, hosting 25 technology firms by 1980 and more than 1,000 by the end of the century. Further east was an even more compelling success story: Felixstowe, already on its way to becoming the nation’s busiest container port, its workforce drawn from former agricultural labourers, its rapid growth a deterrent to the labour disputes that crippled London and Liverpool. And even the capital had its boom areas, most notably Croydon, the epicentre of the new vogue for suburban office blocks. By 1970, it was already the tenth biggest town in the country, with a big new shopping centre, a multi-storey car park and more than fifty office buildings taller than nine storeys. ‘Mini-Manhattan’, observers called it, and its rise seemed relentless; by the end of the decade, East Croydon station was reckoned the busiest outside central London.57