Hartcliffe Talk reveals the early vision ... and reality for residents
IT was supposed to be a gleaming, modern new town with a cinema, swimming pool and shops, called New Dundry. But when the first residents moved into their homes in Hartcliffe they found things were not quite as planned.
Now, 70 years on from the building of one of Bristol’s biggest suburbs, the story of the origins of Hartcliffe is to be told by one of the city’s leading lights who grew up there.
In a talk as part of the South Bristol History Festival, former housing chief Paul Smith – whose family moved there in 1964 – will explain what Hartcliffe was supposed to look like... and the reality for the first residents in the early 1950s.
His talk will show how decisions made as long ago as 1950 still have an impact on thousands of people today.
“It is going to be about the origins and planning of Hartcliffe, and in particular how what was built was different from what was promised,” said Mr Smith.
“A huge new suburb on the fields at the bottom of Dundry Slopes was first envisaged as far back as 1944. But they didn’t really get started on building anything until 1950. A lot of that had to do with the fact that, at the time, where they wanted to build wasn’t actually part of Bristol – it was in Somerset. It wasn’t until the 1949 boundary changes, which moved bits of what would become Hartcliffe and Bishopsworth into Bristol and parts of Portishead and Ham Green from Bristol into Somerset, that the city council at the time could start properly planning and building.”
An early row was about the name, he said. They wanted to call it New Dundry, but the parish council of Dundry objected, saying it would confuse postmen.
“In reality, they didn’t want a huge council estate named after the village, so the name chosen was the name of the old medieval hundred,” he added.
Mr Smith said a “very different” Hartcliffe was originally planned, with more shops in the Symes Avenue area, a cinema and swimming pool – things that were never built. There was also to be a cricket pavilion at
Hartcliffe School. However, he said he could find no record of a decision being made not to include these.
“It was just each time the plans were revised, they contained fewer things,” he added.
One big decision in June 1950 has had an impact over the decades since and came as a result of political changes. The post-war Labour Government had embarked on an ambitious house-building programme and the creation of the NHS. But in a foreshadowing of the 1951 election that saw Winston Churchill returned as a Conservative prime minister, there were changes at the city council in Bristol. A group calling itself the Citizen Party – a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives standing under a banner that was opposition to Labour – took over control.
“In 1950 they were able to say everyone should be worried about how much taxpayers’ money was being spent on everything, so one of the first things the Citizen Party did was save money by reducing the quality of new housing being built,” said Mr Smith.
The very first streets in Hartcliffe – at Teyfant, in Whitchurch Lane and Coleshill Drive – had large red brick homes. But those after June 1950 were of a poorer quality.
“Instead of brick, they were built out of concrete, and they were smaller, too,” said Mr Smith. “They soon switched over to the reinforced concrete housing, the Cornish units, a lot of which have had to be effectively rebuilt. Over time, they’ve been shown to be difficult to heat, lots of problems with damp and the cold, and almost all of them have had to be built around or clad.”
At the time, Bristol had the highest level of housebuilding Britain had ever seen, and almost all were council homes.
The post-war era was one of optimism for a better future, and the homes were supposed to be an improvement on where people were living at the time.
“A lot of the people who moved up to Hartcliffe were in private rented properties in central Bristol – so somewhere like St Phillips was an area full of streets of houses of poor quality, and the council wanted to clear them. They were almost all knocked down, cleared away for industrial estates and dual carriageways,” said Mr Smith.
Seventy years on, and people in Hartcliffe point to two issues that have continually affected the community – the isolation and distance from Bristol, and the lack of facilities.
Right from the start, the community felt abandoned. “The first street in Hartcliffe to be built was Coleshill Drive and the first petition to the council about something relating to Hartcliffe was from the people of Coleshill Drive, even before the rest of it was built,” said Mr Smith.
He added that initially people had to walk through mud because pavements had not been built. The nearest shops were in Bishopsworth, a mile or so down Whitchurch Lane, and there was no supermarket in Hartcliffe until the late 1950s.
Hartcliffe has a number of tributaries to the River Malago, and floods were common.
In the 1950s, people being moved up to Hartcliffe by the city council’s clearances of what were called ‘slums’ in places like The Dings, Bedminster, St Phillips and Easton found they were basically left to fend for themselves.
“There was quite a lot of effort to create things. People realised they weren’t going to get anything provided as was promised, so they set about doing it themselves. It created a resilience, really, a feeling that if Hartcliffe needed something it would have to come from within the community.
“So the community centre, for example, it wasn’t built by the council. There was a ‘buy a brick’ scheme and some local people formed a group, everyone in Hartcliffe paid for a brick – I think it was a pound per brick – and raised the money to get the community centre built. There was this self-help attitude.
“There were no jobs either in Hartcliffe. The industrial estates and Wills came much later. A lot of people worked down in the city centre or at Wills in Bedminster, and it was a place served by public transport – not many people up there had their own car.
“Then came the pubs and churches and eventually the shops. I remember it felt quite isolated as a child, like we were living a long way from anywhere.”
Paul Smith’s talk on the origins of Hartcliffe takes place at Hartcliffe Community Centre on Wednesday, November 30 at 6.30pm.
People realised they weren’t going to get anything provided as was promised, so they set about doing it themselves. It created a resilience
Paul Smith