Noble Street estate 40 years ago
THE FLATS IN JUNE, 1977 – THEY WERE BULLDOZED A YEAR LATER
WE stop off at Noble Street flats in Newcastle’s West End.
Our main image was taken on this day 40 years ago.
1977 was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and she would arrive in the region as part of her UK tour just weeks later.
In the pop charts, Lucille by Kenny Rogers was at number one; Star Wars was a new smash hit at the cinema; and the Wimbledon tennis championships were underway with British player Virginia Wade eventually being crowned women’s champion.
As for Noble Street flats, they were approaching the end of their short lifespan.
Built in the late1950s, the functional blocks were an architect’s vision of a housing utopia - but by 1978 the bulldozers were reducing them to rubble.
The flats in Elswick were nicknamed ‘Alcatatraz’ (after the infamous American prison) by the folk who lived there.
They were multistorey tenements which had replaced Victorian back-to-backs considered as slums.
But after just a couple of decades, our picture shows Noble Street flats already in a state of disrepair.
This was a gritty, urban landscape that was common across the inner cities and towns of the UK at the time.
Early on there had been high hopes.
In July, 1961, the Chronicle ran a story telling of a landscaping scheme aiming to improve the new Noble Street area.
An artist’s impression showed how it might become a haven for youngsters living in the flats. Three children’s playgrounds would be incorporated into the scheme.
A major feature of the work would be the presence of trees and, to prevent vandalism, they would be 20-feet high when planted, instead of the normal saplings.
But only 17 years later, the run-down flats were being demolished after being blighted by social problems, vandalism, and high crime rates for years.
The social experiment which had forced people to live on top of each other in what amounted to a concrete warren of stairwells and alleyways had failed.
Years later, however, a number of readers contacted us after we ran a retrospective feature on the estate
One wrote: “I spent my first years in Noble Street flats and found them to be the best times that I’ve ever had.”
Another wrote: “I was brought up there, and they were the best days of my life.”
And a third reader said: “I know that most people will say you never forget your childhood, but living in Noble Street in the 1970s was magic.
“When you look back now you can honestly say that the place was a bit shambolic but, to myself, as a five-year-old, it was great.
“Kids like myself, and there was quite a few of us, could play out together and have no fears of the kind of things that you hear or read of today.
“The day my family moved to Blakelaw in the summer of 1976 hurt me.”
Finally, if you’re wondering what those large brick cylinders are in our 1977 image, Newcastle historian Steve Ellwood tells us they were ventilation shafts for Elswick Colliery which had closed in the 1940s.