Why the Turner Prize isn't enough to resolve a housing crisis

Abstract

What the award of the Turner Prize to a community housing project for the first time says about Britain's housing crisis - and how lessons from Liverpool's history of housing alternatives might inform urban policy

Full text

Town & Country Planning June 2016 221
The news that Granby Four Streets Community
Land Trust had won the 2015 Turner Prize was a sure
sign of how deeply the housing crisis is being felt
across Britain, not least in Liverpool.1The
unprecedented award of the national art prize to a
cutting-edge community-led housing project in
Liverpool’s Toxteth area not only reveals the
extraordinary lengths to which the art world will go
in causing controversy, breaking boundaries and
subverting its own identity, but also signifies the
vertiginous depth of the housing crisis.
Perhaps affordable housing should indeed be
considered creative genius at a time when the vast
majority of housing is not affordable to someone on
the average UK wage. But the situation in Liverpool
is not one of overheated housing markets and
prices inflating beyond the reach of all but oligarchs
and property speculators, but rather the polar
opposite: characterised by ‘housing market failure’,
where there simply is not enough demand to
sustain buoyant prices, or enough residents to
inhabit what quickly become empty homes.
But why has it been left to so-called art – rather
than the City Council, a housing association or
some publicly-funded regeneration programme –
to resolve the neighbourhood decline and housing
dereliction from which Granby, like many so many
other inner-city neighbourhoods across the North,
has suffered for decades? Part of the answer is that
this is an issue, if not unique, then very specific to
Liverpool. For this particular project – in all its
glorious contradictions – could not have emerged in
any other city but Liverpool. Turner Prize-winning
architects Assemble’s innovative hands-on and do-it-
yourself approach in Granby – where residents are
not simply ‘consulted’ but take a leading role in the
regeneration decision-making process – is the
contemporary heir of an alternative strand in
regeneration thinking with an especial affiliation
with Liverpool’s housing history.
A brief history of Liverpool housing
Liverpool has suffered a housing ‘crisis’ for at least
the last two centuries. In the early 19th century, it
revolved around material housing deprivation for the
city’s burgeoning working classes, mostly employed
on the docks and housed in slum tenements in
dense dockside neighbourhoods. In response,
Liverpool City Council was one of the first local
authorities in Europe to develop municipal housing,2
and through several waves of public intervention in
the inter-war and post-war periods much of the
material
housing deprivation was resolved.
However, as modernist municipal tenements
replaced squalid ‘back-to-back’ speculatively built
tenements, new forms of deprivation emerged. The
‘Slum Clearance Programme’ of the Labour Council
from 1955 onwards began decanting residents of
dense inner-city Liverpool out into the New Towns
and ‘overspill’ outer estates being built on the
why the turner
prize isn’t enough
to resolve a
housing crisis
Matt Thompson considers what the award of the Turner Prize to
a community housing project says about Britain’s housing crisis –
and how lessons from Liverpool’s history of housing alternatives
might inform urban policy

metropolitan periphery (in places like Kirkby and
Skelmersdale), threatening to displace and break up
tight-knit communities.
A growing number of Liverpool-based academics
and commentators lay Liverpool’s inner-city problem
– of urban deprivation, housing vacancy and
neighbourhood abandonment – at the door of public
policy mistakes made in the post-war period.3By
the mid-1970s the Slum Clearance Programme had
removed some 160,000 residents out of the urban
core, helping to carve the ensuing long-term
structural economic decline more firmly into the
city’s fabric. There was no doubt that the targeted
terraces were in dire need of improvement or even
replacing entirely – with no inside toilets, hot
running water or electricity – but disagreement
hinged on the best way to do this. Tenants resisted
attempts by the City Council – disparagingly
colloquialised as the ‘Corpy’ – to move them to
seemingly random parts of the wider city-region,
and began to organise themselves into pressure
groups to challenge displacement.
The beginnings of an alternative
In the 1970s, these community groups found an
unlikely ally in the embryonic housing association
and community development movements then
emerging across British inner cities. The 1969
Housing Act enabled councils to rehabilitate rather
than demolish dilapidated terraced streets, and the
Council invited Shelter, the newly formed
homelessness campaigning charity, to experiment
with new ideas in rehabilitation and community
participation in the Shelter Neighbourhood Action
Project – known by the snappy acronym SNAP –
operating from 1969 to 1972 in the neighbourhood
of Granby.4
SNAP’s work with Granby residents set new
precedents for participation in housing renewal;
helped save the neighbourhood from demolition;
and inspired development of the country’s first
rehabilitated housing co-ops in the early 1970s,
which gave public tenants an unprecedented level
of control over their living environments. The 1974
Housing Act laid the legislative foundations for a
generous funding regime and support infrastructure
for the development of housing associations and
co-ops to provide an alternative to Corpy-delivered
public housing. New charitable trusts and housing
associations formed in Liverpool to capitalise on the
incoming Liberal-led Council’s favourable stance
towards rehabilitation over demolition, delivered
through housing associations and co-ops in General
Improvement Areas.
One particular association, Cooperative
Development Services (CDS), became the city’s
leading co-op development agency, and set about
popularising the concept of co-ops among council
tenants searching for an alternative solution to being
222 Town & Country Planning June 2016
re-housed in Corpy properties scattered across the
city. One such community, living in and around the
Weller Streets, were particularly vocal and took the
initiative to campaign for a co-op as a means of
being kept together in good-quality housing. They
worked closely with CDS to negotiate their way
through what were complex planning, bureaucratic
and financial procedures.5
Out of the creative collision between CDS and
the Weller Street Co-op, a pioneering approach was
born. The ‘Weller Way’ entailed the rejection of top-
down technocratic management of municipal
housing in favour of a radically participatory method
which put residents in the driving seat of design,
development and management for the first time in
Liverpool’s, and indeed Britain’s, housing history.
The approach was elaborated theoretically by the
late ‘anarchist planner’ Colin Ward, with his radical
manifesto for ‘collective dweller control’.6There was
great fervour at the time, expressed by professional
participants and commentators alike, about the political
potential for new-build co-operatives to revolutionise
state-funded housing – to become ‘Public Sector
Housing 2.0’ or ‘Mark II’.7Many residents were
politicised by the opportunities presented by building
their own co-op housing under collective dweller
control and relative community autonomy. Getting
involved in the highly political campaign process –
often described as a ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ – radicalised
and empowered many members to stand for
election as Labour councillors, some of whom went
on to support the further development of co-ops.8
From decentralisation to monopolisation
However, Liverpool’s ‘co-operative revolution’
proved too short-lived for the ambitions for ‘Public
Sector Housing 2.0’ to materialise. Events in local and
national politics put paid to the further development
of the movement. Locally, the Militant-led Labour
Council of 1983-87 opposed and ‘municipalised’
co-ops on the basis that their apparent nepotistic
exclusivity flew in the face of socialist principles of
universal and egalitarian provision of municipal
housing. Nationally, the Conservative Government’s
1988 Housing Act threw out the baby (generous
funding for co-ops under the 1974 Act) with the
bathwater (stripping away the power of local
authorities to provide housing and empowering the
growing housing association sector, fuelled by
private capital and increasingly commercialised
practices, to step in and do a better job).
And in some sense this worked. The housing
associations, in Liverpool at least, seemed to do a
better job of providing effective management of social
housing than the Corpy had done with municipal
housing – for too long marred by sclerotic bureaucratic
processes, long waiting lists, poor maintenance and
repair backlogs, provoking tenant resistance in the
form of rent strikes and the push for alternatives

Town & Country Planning June 2016 223
such as co-ops.9With more professionalised and
responsive management of the public housing stock,
there followed a period of relative dormancy in
housing activism through the 1990s and early 2000s.
But with their growth and commercialisation, the
housing associations began to exhibit some of the
very same problems that had been apparent before
their promotion. At the peak of municipal housing,
the Corpy managed some 90,000 homes in
Liverpool – a figure which today covers the total
stock held nationally by just one housing association
once rooted in Liverpool (as Liverpool Improved
Homes and then Merseyside Improved Houses) but
now operating increasingly beyond the city-region
as Riverside, one of the largest associations in the
country, having all but shed its nominal ties to place.
Moreover, these big housing associations
became implicated in the next round of state-led
comprehensive urban renewal to hit inner-city
Liverpool. The controversial Housing Market
Renewal (HMR) Pathfinder programme involved the
City Council working closely with preferred delivery
partners, developers and housing associations to
clear large areas of terraced houses, now deemed
‘obsolete’ for 21st century living.10 HMR emerged
as a policy response to the ‘wicked’ problems of
decline, housing vacancy and ‘market failure’ that
were becoming increasingly visible in neighbourhoods
like Granby from the late 1990s onwards. It was in
Granby in particular that an especially problematic
impasse was reached when sustained anti-
demolition action by the Granby Residents’
Association came up against Council-led proposals
for the demolition of the last four streets left
standing in the area that were first saved by SNAP
activists and residents back in the early 1970s.11
From the policy-maker’s perspective, the problem
was that the original rehabilitation work – completed
first by SNAP and later by the housing associations
in the 1970s; designed as a sticking plaster, not an
antidote – was by the early 2000s nearing the end
of its expected lifespan. In some cases the 19th-
century terraced housing was literally falling in after
years of insufficient maintenance by private landlords.
While residents claimed that the Council, in consort
with the housing associations, was intentionally
driving the properties into the ground through a
policy of ‘managed decline’ (which some saw as a
punishment for the 1981 Toxteth riots), planners were
looking for an affordable and deliverable solution to
structural problems of economic decline manifesting
themselves in the form of physical dereliction.
All agreed that
something
needed to be done to
bring these houses back to life. The question
remained what form such action should take.
Trapped in a ZOO
A deadlock in decision-making over possible
regeneration solutions brought about by the
remaining residents’ vocal resistance to successive
redevelopment proposals in Granby pushed the
Council to adopt more extreme measures. Thus
HMR was born as a more systematic, centrally
funded and large-scale approach to address the
perceived phenomenon of dereliction, abandonment
and housing market failure – zoning off entire areas
of low-demand housing to be parcelled up either
for rehabilitation or for redevelopment by a public-
private partnership of housing associations and
developers. The idea was for one preferred
developer to work with one preferred association in
each ‘Zone of Opportunity’ so that stock could be
From the late 1990s onwards, decline, housing vacancy and ‘market failure’ were becoming increasingly visible in
neighbourhoods such as Granby
Photos: Matt Thompson

more effectively consolidated into land parcels for
demolition and rebuild. Unfortunate homeowners
within the Zones of Opportunity (given the equally
unfortunate acronym ZOO) found themselves
trapped in a spiral of negative equity.
In Granby, defiant homeowners’ property-based
motivations and collective anger over ‘managed
decline’ combined to produce a united local front
against demolition.12 Sitting down in front of
approaching bulldozers and painting scaffolding on
houses earmarked for clearance with anti-vandal
paint – an ironic gesture imputing civic vandalism –
certainly bought the protestors more time. But it was
the more everyday, incremental, proactive and creative
acts of transformation that eventually won them the
day. Behind the scenes, a group of green-fingered
residents had been engaging in ‘guerrilla gardening’
of the neglected streets and artistic rendering of the
empty houses to transform the four streets into a
green oasis, with monthly street markets bringing
the community together and attracting visitors and
vital sources of support13 (see below).
It was these acts of creative resistance that won
the community the support they needed to push for
a rehabilitation alternative to HMR – and eventually
put the residents in touch with their architects,
Assemble. After much internal debate, residents
chose to form a Community Land Trust (CLT)14 to
drive forward local desires for radical community
control of the neighbourhood. This was the closest
institutional model available that might allow residents
to own and manage the housing themselves and
provide affordable housing in perpetuity for local
people, offering the scope to become a community
body for the long-term regeneration and democratic
control of the neighbourhood, protected from future
demolition threats.
224 Town & Country Planning June 2016
In many respects, the CLT model is a modern-day
equivalent of the co-op model used in the area in
the 1970s – but one recalibrated for the new
legislative landscape, able to access grants and
utilise funding where the co-op model no longer
can. Unlike co-ops, CLTs separate the ownership of
the buildings, which are leased out to individuals or
groups, from that of the land on which they sit,
owned collectively by the trust. And in fact, working
with Granby Four Streets CLT is an eco co-op group
called Terrace 21 (‘terraced housing for the 21st
century’) – a key partner in the campaign and tenant
of CLT land.
Coming full circle
The Granby CLT vision is the contemporary heir
of SNAP and the co-op movement. The original
founder of Terrace 21 happens to live in a nearby
rehabilitated co-op house from the 1970s; and his
father was one of the notable architects involved in
pioneering the design democracy of the co-op
movement. Many of the Granby CLT activists see
their endeavour as finishing the work that SNAP
started – rehabilitating four streets which map
almost precisely onto the original SNAP boundaries,
except for a few streets to the north which have
been redeveloped in the interim.
Indeed, Assemble’s way of working bears many
parallels with SNAP: utilising local skills and
knowledge where possible for incremental do-it-
yourself change; bringing residents directly into the
planning process, encouraging mutual learning and
empowerment with new skills and confidence; and
incorporating aspects other than housing into the
regeneration process, including education, training,
jobs, environmental improvements and community
activities, which together comprise a more holistic
‘Creative resistance’ emerged in Granby, expressed through activities such as guerrilla gardening and monthly
street markets

Town & Country Planning June 2016 225
alternative to HMR’s more single-minded focus on
improving the physical condition of the housing
alone.
While HMR was conducted remotely, from the
partnership offices headquartered in central
Liverpool, Assemble architects have been living
onsite in one of the empty homes and opened up
shop in situ. Their new workshop on Granby Street,
where many of the interior features of the
rehabilitated houses are being crafted by local
volunteers out of materials reclaimed from the
houses, has provided new jobs for local people.
This echoes the original SNAP Office, one of the
first examples of an onsite office in regeneration
programmes, with professionals embedding
themselves within neighbourhoods for greater
access and collaboration with residents.
There are clearly many difficulties and tensions
that arise with such an immersive and intensive
approach – not least the painstaking attention to
detail and specificities of place, and the time-
consuming dedication to hands-on onsite
collaborative working with local residents. But there
are countless benefits too. Distinctive quality of
place is retained; history is incorporated rather than
lost; residents are included in the process of
reproducing place; new skills are learned; local jobs
are created; confidence and pride in the community
are given a boost; affordable homes are made
available to those who need them, but protected
from being sold off or consolidated into larger
unmanageable stocks through the safeguards of
community ownership built into the CLT model; and
new cultures of co-operation and participatory local
governance are instilled (and indeed institutionalised
in the democratic practices governing the CLT).
Those undertaking future redevelopment schemes
for ‘hard-to-let’ or low-demand housing could learn a
great deal from these experiments and would do
well to incorporate aspects of such approaches. Not
only would they then be more likely to avoid the
kind of controversy and opposition that dogged
HMR, but there may also be additional positive
spillover effects for more holistic and inclusive long-
term social as well as physical renewal.
Granby CLT’s recent success – with some ten
houses having been transferred from the Council,
and an overarching vision having been established
for the wider regeneration of the neighbourhood by
housing association partners – not only reveals what
is possible when the collective will to transform
urban space is backed up by the right resources, but
also shows just how big a leap is yet to be taken if
such projects are ever to replicated on any
significant scale. It took the whiff of a national art
prize for politicians to wake up and smell the
benefits of the Granby approach to regeneration,
despite its historical precedents in SNAP and the
co-op movement.
Contesting a powerful logic
Granby is not alone among CLT projects in
Liverpool that have successfully contested the logic
of property-led redevelopment deployed by HMR.
The one other notable example is Homebaked in
Anfield, which likewise has a close relationship with
the art world, being a product of Liverpool Biennial,
the city’s high-profile festival of contemporary art.15
These projects demonstrate the positive power of
art to resist destructive urban policies and enact
transformative urban change. There is much for
planners and policy-makers to learn here.
However, that it took the backing of the art world
– either through funding or accolades – to give
these projects the credibility they needed to gain
the trust of policy-makers to become viable
regeneration alternatives serves to highlight how
removed such creative approaches have become
from conventional urban policy; despite the fact that
similar perspectives were once built into national
and local state-funded programmes such as SNAP
and the new-build co-operatives.
The gap between the professional and state
support enjoyed by the 1970s co-op movement and
that for today’s CLT projects is huge. The co-ops
were supported by a market of competing
professional co-operative development agencies
dedicated to the task of providing vital technical
advice, education and skills training to new co-op
groups for the sustained growth of the movement –
crucially funded with generous grants covering full
capital and some revenue costs, until the 1974
Housing Act was superseded by the 1988 Act.16 But
today’s CLT projects are woefully reliant on ad hoc
sources of professional support, some small-scale
government grants (such as those made through
the Empty Homes Community Grants programme,
which ran from 2012 to 2015), and other wise private
philanthropic funding and artistic benefactors.
While the National CLT Network does provide
grant funding and technical advisors, which the
Liverpool CLTs are using, this is driven from the
national level, from offices in London, and lacks the
kind of locally attuned and responsive regional
presence and connection to place from which the
co-op movement benefited.
There is no reason in principle why the approach
pioneered by SNAP and developed through urban
CLTs cannot be fully incorporated into the design
of an HMR-like programme. Indeed, it was even
explored and advocated as an option for HMR
Pathfinders by sustainable urbanism consultancy
URBED.17 But in practice perhaps such artistic
interventions only ever emerge through resistance
to state and market logics?
My recent doctoral research (on which this article
draws) has revealed that the CLT idea seems to
have travelled to Liverpool via policy networks
connected to CLT advocates at URBED, eventually

finding traction in an ex-New Deal for Communities
(NDC) Partnership in Kensington, Liverpool.
Kensington NDC flirted with the CLT idea as a
potential ‘legacy vehicle’ to take on its assets for
further regeneration after the partnership was
disbanded – including multiple sites zoned for HMR.
Although this state-led experiment was ultimately
unsuccessful owing to a lack of community buy-in
(an essential pre-requisite for the development of
truly community-led housing), it hints at how HMR
could have been done differently, had the political
will and resources been present from the beginning
to embed the approach within communities, with
the necessary education, training and resources.
In our post-crash era of ‘austerity localism’,18 the
chances of seeing another round of well funded,
centrally directed large-scale regeneration
programmes like HMR are, at least in the short
term, slim to none. Yet we surely cannot pin all
our hopes of resolving the problems of inner-city
decline and deprivation on a few artist-driven
demonstration projects? There are simply not
enough trendy London-based architectural
collectives on course to rock the art world – nor
public art projects curated by Liverpool Biennial –
to go around, let alone to constitute a strategy for
systemic intervention.
Kick-starting the Granby model – to make it ‘go
viral’ across Liverpool and beyond19 – will obviously
require more than just five minutes of fame from
the Turner Prize. So how can urban policy and the
small raft of existing resources available at the local
and city-regional level be re-oriented towards
supporting the more systematic development of
projects like Granby Four Streets?
What is to be done?
What we need now is a new integrated system
of physical and socio-economic regeneration driven
by the next generation of state-funded Urban
Development Corporations (UDCs) to co-ordinate
the development of multiple localised community-
led programmes. We can take our cue from the
Merseyside Development Corporation first put in
place by Michael Heseltine in the early 1980s. This
was one of two pioneering UDCs across the
country, set up partly in response to the 1981
Toxteth riots (a symptom of a wider socio-economic
malaise gripping Liverpool), but which focused on
property-led development and pump-priming of
private sector investment.
This is where parallels with this 1980s neoliberal
experiment should end. New UDCs would need to
be much more accountable to local people.
Democratic accountability and local responsiveness
could be built into a federated structure of smaller-
scale Community Development Corporations
(CDCs) operating at an urban district scale – not
unlike the more established CDC movement in the
226 Town & Country Planning June 2016
US.20 These CDCs would have powers to distribute
funds and support services co-ordinated ultimately
by the overarching UDC, in which they would have a
stake in decision-making, with citizen representation
on the governing boards. Although appearing radical
in the current climate of austerity localism, such an
approach is in fact not all that revolutionary. SNAP’s
final recommendations suggested something similar
back in 1972: that a Task Force under the Cabinet
Office should co-ordinate a decentralised Urban
Programme of metropolitan development agencies.4
Crucial to the operation of such a system would
be the consolidation of all currently under-used
public land and assets and their transfer into UDC
ownership, through the creation of some kind of
City Region Land Bank. Empty housing, derelict
land and disused public buildings could then be
transferred over to community groups, legally
incorporated as CLTs or Community Interest
Companies (CICs), for instance, to be developed by
and for local people. These would be overseen by
CDCs and supported by professionals and experts
procured by CDCs – in a similar vein to how, in the
late 1970s, CDS worked closely with co-op groups
to co-produce new-build housing developments.
It is important that all such assets are brought
under community ownership through institutional
vehicles such as CLTs. This will ensure that the
assets remain under community and ultimately
public control; prevent the private capture of value
creation once economic recovery starts to take off;
ensure that people are involved in the decision-
making over how regeneration unfolds, with multiple
spin-off benefits in terms of socio-economic and
political empowerment; and allow for the full
recycling of any financial surpluses back into the
local area, so that regeneration eventually becomes
a self-sustaining cycle once sufficient momentum
builds. CLTs could become the nodes at the
neighbourhood scale through which CDCs allocate
funds and deliver professional support, doubling up
as community ‘anchors’ through which all other
forms of community development are organised.
Supporting the emergence and growth of
community asset transfer initiatives such as CLTs in
deprived communities suffering with empty stock
and market failures is a first step. But it must
involve the nurturing of community enterprises as
spin-offs from the rehabilitation process and the
more long-term provision of incubation spaces in
some of the empty buildings brought back to life by
CLT activity.
This is happening now in Granby: the rehabilitation
process has produced a social enterprise specialising
in the regeneration process itself, the Granby
Workshop.21 Initiated by Assemble, and starting out
with four paid employees and mostly volunteers,
Granby Workshop has created many new jobs for
local people, now with some 14 paid positions. The

Town & Country Planning June 2016 227
ultimate aim is to provide new space for community
businesses in some of the CLT-owned buildings
after the physical rehabilitation process has been
completed, acting as the beginnings of a newly
revitalised high street and a more permanent
location for the popular street market which helped
to inspire the whole process.
Although such a structure seems unlikely to be
adopted in the present political climate, the
institutional architecture is already partly in place in
Liverpool, left over from the co-operative movement,
or indeed slowly beginning to fall into place through
the move towards city-regional governance under
devolution. First, the modern incarnation of CDS is
still going strong – as North West Housing Services,
a non-profit social enterprise which manages the
professional services for the some 50 co-ops quietly
enduring across Merseyside to this day. North West
Housing Services is no longer the radical co-op
development agency it once was, but it nonetheless
has the right resources, connections and institutional
memory to potentially reinvigorate the co-operative
movement from its long dormancy and promote
new growth.
There is a growing realisation that the Merseyside
co-ops are sitting on a large surplus.22 If North West
Housing Services can bring the co-ops together to
act collectively, as they once did as CDS with the
now-disbanded Merseyside Federation of Housing
Co-ops, then these surpluses – if successfully
amalgamated into a central pot – could be used to
fund the next generation of housing co-ops, or
indeed CLTs. North West Housing Services has
recently supported Granby CLT with pro bono
professional advice and low-interest loans, but more
needs to be done to harness the untapped
resources and knowledge of the latent co-op
support infrastructure in Merseyside. The best way
to support their growth beyond a few demonstration
projects is through the establishment of an
equivalent agency such as CDS/North West
Housing Services for CLTs.
There are a whole host of organisations capable
of offering support and getting involved in the
creation of CLTs and CDCs – from North West
Housing Services to the National CLT Network. But
for this system to really take off, we need local and
city-regional government to think more creatively
about how to make the most of newly devolved
powers. Devolution presents many opportunities to
do things differently.
From May 2017, the Liverpool City Region
Combined Authority and the new elected City
Region Mayor – working alongside the Local
Enterprise Partnership – will receive greater powers
over planning, transport, skills, enterprise and
housing as part of the devolution deal.23 If we are
serious about tackling the ‘wicked’ problems of
housing market failure, neighbourhood decline and
spatially concentrated poverty, we need to radically
rethink how we approach local economic
development – to link it up more creatively with
housing, enterprise, health and education. These
seemingly detached areas of policy need to be
reconfigured to work directly for deprived
communities; incorporated as central elements in
an integrated urban policy. What we need now is a
real political commitment to back the systematic
incubation of new forms of creative social
innovation of the kind that has transformed Granby.
The rehabilitation process in Granby has produced the Granby Workshop – a social enterprise specialising in the
regeneration process itself

●
Matt Thompson is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at
the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy & Practice, University
of Liverpool, and is on a secondment with the Liverpool City
Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP). The views
expressed are personal.
Notes
1 See, for example, D. Foster: ‘Assemble’s Turner prize
win: a sign of our deeply embedded housing crisis’.
The Guardian
, 8 Dec. 2015. www.theguardian.com/
housing-network/2015/dec/08/assemble-turner-prize-
housing-crisis-toxteth; and C. Higgins: ‘Turner prize
winners Assemble: ‘Art? We’re more interested in
plumbing’’.
The Guardian
, 8 Dec. 2015.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/08/
assemble-turner-prize-architects-are-we-artists
2 See the Municipal Dreams blog, at
https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/
liverpool-first-council-houses-in-europe/
3 See, for instance: O. Sykes, J. Brown, M. Cocks,
D. Shaw and C. Couch: ‘A City Profile of Liverpool’.
Cities
, 2013, Vol. 35, Dec., 299-318; T. Lane:
Liverpool:
City of the Sea
. Liverpool University Press, 1997,
Second Edition; and
Merseyside in Crisis
. Merseyside
Socialist Research Group. Manchester Free Press, 1980
4 D. McConaghy:
Another Chance for Cities: SNAP 69-72
.
SNAP Final Report. Shelter Neighbourhood Action
Project, 1972
5 A. McDonald:
The Weller Way: The Story of the Weller
Street Housing Cooperative
. Faber & Faber, 1986
6 C. Ward:
Tenants Take Over
(Architectural Press, 1974).
This book, in particular, was influential in the
development of the Weller Streets, as evident in this
personal interview:
‘The book had a salutary effect in
Liverpool during a brief period when the Liberals
controlled the city’s housing policy. It inspired several
instances... of newly-built housing where the tenants of
old slum houses were enabled to find a site, and
commission an architect to design their own new
housing... The proudest moment of my housing
advocacy was when the Weller Street Coop chairman,
Billy Floyd, introduced me at a meeting by waving a
tattered copy of Tenants Take Over and saying: ‘Here’s
the man who wrote the Old Testament... But we built
the New Jerusalem!’
C. Ward and D. Goodway:
Talking
Anarchy
. Five Leaves Publications, 2003, pp.74-5
7
‘What’s happening now, in Liverpool, is that a new
form of public sector housing is being developed; and
it’s not just co-ops, it’s new-build co-ops. Only through
new-building do you have the opportunity to shape an
environment. And it’s going to be... a major, possibly
dominant, form of public housing in the twentieth
century. And the Weller Streets would have been the
model.’
Interview with Paul Lusk, quoted in
The Weller
Way
(see note 5, p. 208).
‘There’s a possibility here of
genuinely public housing mark 2. Instead of the state or
the Corpy being in charge and doing a miserable job, why
can’t people who don’t have educational qualifications,
don’t have often much of an employment, don’t have
the money; why can’t they nonetheless be in charge of
running their own estates?’
Interview with Liverpool
Liberal councillor as part of the author’s PhD, in 2013
8 Phil Hughes, for instance, was inspired to become a
Labour councillor through his role as treasurer of the
Weller Street Co-op, and used his new position of
power, as Chair of Housing when Labour were
re-elected in 1987, to help push through plans for the
228 Town & Country Planning June 2016
Langrove Co-op in Everton, which had up until that
point been struggling against Militant opposition to
co-ops – See ‘The Langrove Action Story’ webpage, at
http://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/case-
studies/articles/the-langrove-action-story.html
9 T. Mars: ‘Housing in Liverpool 8’.
ROOF
, 1981, Vol. 6 (5);
and A. Grosskurth: ‘Bringing back the Braddocks’.
ROOF
, 1985, Vol. 10(1), 19-23
10 D. Webb: ‘Rethinking the role of markets in urban
renewal: the Housing Market Renewal initiative in
England’.
Housing, Theory & Society
, 2010, Vol. 27 (4),
313-31; and I. Cole: ‘Housing Market Renewal and
demolition in England in the 2000s: the governance of
‘wicked problems’’.
International Journal of Housing
Policy
, 2012, Vol. 12 (3), 347-66
11 A. Merrifield: ‘Them and us: rebuilding the ruins in
Liverpool’. In
Dialectical Urbanism
. Monthly Review
Press, 2002, pp.53-73
12 T. Duffy: ‘Peaceful protest on Toxteth street forces
demolition men to down tools’.
Liverpool Echo
,
12 Jul. 2011. www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-
news/peaceful-protest-toxteth-street-forces-3369896
13 See the A Sense of Place blog, at
https://asenseofplaceblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/
granby-4-streets-telling-the-story/
14 M. Thompson: ‘Between boundaries: from commoning
and guerrilla gardening to Community Land Trust
development in Liverpool’.
Antipode
2015, Vol. 47 (4),
1021-42. Available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/10.1111/anti.12154/abstract
15 J. Van Heeswijk and B. Jurgensen: ‘Introduction’.
Stages
#
2: Homebaked: A Perfect Recipe
. Liverpool
Biennial journal, 2014. www.biennial.com/journal/
16
Building Democracy: Housing Cooperatives on
Merseyside. Update ’94
. Cooperative Development
Services (Liverpool) Ltd., 1994; D. Clapham and
K. Kintrea:
Housing Co-Operatives in Britain
. Longman,
1992; G. Towers:
Building Democracy: Community
Architecture in the Inner Cities
. Routledge, 1995
17
Werneth/Freehold Renewal
. Report for Oldham Local
Strategic Partnership and North West Development
Agency. URBED, 2004. http://urbed.coop/sites/default/
files/Oldham%20Beyond%20Werneth.pdf
18 D. Featherstone, A. Ince, D. Mackinnon, K. Strauss and
A. Cumbers: ‘Progressive localism and the construction
of political alternatives’.
Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers
, 2012, Vol. 37 (2), 177-82
19 T. Moore and D. Mullins: ‘
Scaling-Up or Going-Viral:
Comparing Self-Help Housing and Community Land Trust
Facilitation
. Working Paper 94, Third Sector Research
Centre, Mar. 2013. www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tsrc/
documents/tsrc/working-papers/working-paper-94.pdf
20 D.L. Imbroscio:
Reconstructing City Politics: Alternative
Economic Development and Urban Regimes
. SAGE
Publications, 1997
21 See the Granby Workshop website, at
www.granbyworkshop.co.uk/
22 Having long ago paid off mortgages whose repayments
were calculated on the basis of far lower ‘fair’ rents
before the higher ‘affordable’ rents kicked in after the
1988 Housing Act, the Merseyside co-ops are making
large annual surpluses which are far greater than is
required for maintenance
23 See the Liverpool City Region Devolution Agreement at
www.gov.uk/government/publications/liverpool-
devolution-deal