The short but fearsome days of ‘Alcatraz’
ONE of Tyneside’s most notorious housing estates, Noble Street flats in Newcastle’s West End, was in the news 45 years ago.
It was 1977, and the estate had developed a reputation over its 20-year existence as a haven for crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour.
Newcastle’s director of housing, John Gray was reported to have said that bulldozing the “infamous housing ghetto was the only conclusion possible.”
Councillors could not agree on the immediate demolition of 434 homes in Noble Street - and nearby Norwich Place - and the estate received a temporary stay of execution, but by the end of the following year the place would be razed to the ground.
The Evening Chronicle, on June 22, 1977, carried a scathing assessment of the troubled estate, nicknamed ‘Alcatraz’ after the American prison by residents, and where there were “great social and policing problems”.
Under a headline ‘the city’s island jungle’, it was reported that “a good proportion of the tenants of Noble Street were perfectly normal law-abiding citizens”. They had the misfortune, however, to live in an area which “had all the social evils. Vandalism was rife, the crime rate was sky-high, and it was difficult to police”.
The report pointed out that many of the flats were deserted, boarded-up, and vandalised. People were scared to go out alone at night for fear of gangs, and packs of dogs roamed the estate.
There were few lights in the tenement corridors and stairwells, and there were no gardens for children to play in. Public phone boxes had all been destroyed by vandals so people couldn’t ring the police, creating an ‘island effect’.
One resident told us: “The flats were nice but they started to go downhill in the mid 1960s. Some of the people here were great, but when they started putting problem families in, things really got worse.”
The Elswick housing estate, which sat off Scotswood Road, had been built between 1956 and 1958 at a cut-price £500,000 on the site of recently-demolished Victorian-era slum housing.
But by 1964, there were reports of old folk on the estate frightened to leave their homes because of the large number of burglaries, some in daylight. One 73-year-old had been burgled three times in as many weeks.
In 1971, it was being described as “the worst post war estate in Britain and probably in Europe” with “a large number of problem families on the estate”, “a high degree of unemployment”, “undesirable housing”, and with “people on Noble Street feel a great stigma”.
And by the mid-1970s, councillors were desperately urging the council to commit to rehousing all 1,500 residents within three years. It wasn’t until 1978 that run-down Noble Street flats would be demolished, little more than two decades after opening.
But years after the people had moved out and the flats had come down, The Chronicle received letters from former residents in support of life in Noble Street.