THE THREE YEARS I spent at Sheffield University bequeathed me such a strong and lasting affection for the town that in the decades since I must have been back there – ooooh, let’s think – once. In the mid 1980s Sheffield was a tragic mess, shell shocked by the sudden and complete collapse of its industrial heritage, from be-all to end-all in ten years flat. I used to walk into lectures across the derelict factories and foundries that filled huge swathes of the urban landscape, even right near the centre. If walls could talk, Sheffield’s were mumbling, ‘Well, that’s great. Now what?’ All except for the massive concrete brow of Park Hill flats, staring me out from the hilltop behind the station, then letting rip with a ragged yell: ‘Fuck off, student TWAT!’
Most university cities have a bit of a town-v-gown situation, and in Sheffield’s, Park Hill doubled as Berlin Wall and killing fields. The estate’s menacing, fortified enormity was complemented by a terrifying reputation for lawless violence. Large and heavy objects – sideboards, domestic appliances, crates full of milk bottles – were heaved off the thirteenth-floor roof so regularly that the council had been obliged to paint a yellow ‘safety line’ on the footpaths beneath, six feet out from the walls. Cab drivers talked in hushed tones of stairwells blocked with drifts of rusty needles and dead dogs. Whenever the local TV news crew was sent in to cover some sordid atrocity, the reporter’s reedy gabblings were all but drowned out by the cameraman gunning their van’s engine. In three years I only twice crossed into the badlands behind Park Hill, once to get a tyre for my Morris Minor van, and once to buy some garden gnomes to decorate an ironic rockery (fuck off, student TWAT!). On both occasions I afforded the glowering fortress of doom a generously wide berth.
So I was laying a few ghosts to rest as Craig eased to a halt in one of Britain’s largest shadows. I cranked up the handbrake, bit off another soft sugared head, then walked out to discover what I’d been missing all those years ago – and what side of the Park Hill fence I now sat on. Because on one hand, it’s the biggest listed building in Europe, awarded Grade II status by English Heritage in 1997. On the other, Park Hill was the only residential structure that the British public hated badly enough to vote onto that Demolition shortlist.
Consult the original planning documentation or hear the testimonies of the first tenants, and you’ll wonder how on earth anyone could even think of tearing down this landmark icon, this giant stride in forward-thinking public housing. But stand in the gale of cold piss that howls beneath those dour concrete cliffs, as I did now, and you’ll be shaking your head for a very different reason. It’s perhaps appropriate that I saw Park Hill in a netherworld between life and death: bereft of residents, and stripped to the bare skeleton whose influential design and construction earnt it that listing.
Sketched out in the mid 1950s and completed in 1960, Park Hill was acclaimed as the world’s most ambitious inner-city development: an attempt to transplant an entire slum-zone community of 3,500 people into a single enormous building. What could possibly go wrong? Yet impressively, indeed incredibly, the planners did everything right. ‘The problem facing anyone designing a high-density project such as Park Hill,’ they wrote, ‘is to avoid creating a vast inhuman block.’ Problem? Avoid? You can almost hear the incredulous disdain of those who went on to give us Cumbernauld’s Megastructure, the Trinity Square car park and other spirit-crushing memorials to the unknown citizen. But Sheffield’s planning department somehow managed to avoid mistakes that hadn’t even been made yet: it was as if they’d been visited in their dreams by some council-block resident from the future, offering detailed and articulate insights into his plight.
Most fundamentally, they took great pains to preserve the transplanted community, and maintain an environment where its spirit could flourish. Neighbouring families were moved together into blocks named after their old roads. Every flat was spread over two floors, at least a bit like a house. Every front door opened onto a wide landing, at least a bit like a street – broad enough to play games, ride bikes, and famously broad enough for the cheery local milkman to do his rounds in a float (ingenious exploitation of the site’s steep gradients afforded him – and offered the residents – direct and more or less level access from the ground to every floor but the thirteenth). The same careful micro-management endowed continuity upon all the new services and facilities housed in the Park Hill complex. Brand-new school but same classmates and teachers; brand-new pubs but same regulars and landlords; brand-new shops but same butchers and bakers. Bingo at the social club, wide green spaces round the back and a bird’s-eye view of the Flying Scotsman pulling out of the station far below. Then of course there were the obvious lifestyle enhancements: indoor sanitation, fitted kitchens, central heating. Silent footage of early residents – plentifully available on the Yorkshire Film Archive’s splendid website – shows faces a-glow with promised-land rapture, families who still can’t believe their luck. A complementary set of clips depicts the mouldering, sub-Dickensian slumlands that in 1961 they had just vacated.
Park Hill’s front line, the hefty battlement that looks down at the city, was now a stripped-down, fenced-off building site, but I found I could freely roam the blocks and spurs behind, connected at irregular angles like a buckled swastika. Vacant council estates are not famously easy on the eye, but behind all the spot-welded shutters and spray paint, Park Hill’s original merits were plain. Those milkfloat-friendly landings really were capacious, a good 10 feet wide: proper ‘streets in the sky’, albeit now pressed into service as ‘toilets in the night’. A discreet chimney sprang from the onsite incinerator that heated every flat in Park Hill, fuelled by the estate’s own rubbish – how’s that for 1959? The grassy communal areas were expansive and bright, and in the sharp winter sun the view was sensational – especially now that the sad gaps in the skyline as I remembered it were now decorously plugged with shiny new hotels and offices, even an observation wheel. And though the whole place was as grubby as you might reasonably expect of a structure that went up when the Flying Scotsman was still chuffing out smuts, nothing had cracked or fallen off or gone mouldy. From first sketch to last brick, Park Hill was a proper job.
Throughout the 1960s, life at the estate carried on in line with the happiest expectations, all for one and one for all, homely and houseproud: online reminiscences are particularly emphatic on the regularity with which every housewife mopped her doorstep and its adjacent area of landing. And then, in just a few short years, everything went Bransholme. Men of working age had been conspicuous by their absence in those archive films, all of them away doing a shift down the spoon factory. But in the mid Seventies, Sheffield’s age-old industries tipped into the aforementioned decline, and by the time I pitched up in my Swarovski-encrusted mortarboard and ermine-trimmed gown there were no spoon factories left. The hard-working, threshold-polishing families moved away in search of jobs, or fragmented into unemployed disaffection. We’ll build you a shiny model community, and you keep it that way: this was the unwritten Park Hill contract, but it went unread and unsigned by the new tenants, largely plucked from the council’s growing list of ‘problem families’. Out with the doorstep-moppers, in with the lift-pissers. In just a few years, the estate degenerated from a one-owner, lovingly maintained pride and joy to an abandoned joyrider’s cast-off.
I’d grown accustomed to coming away from failed residential schemes feeling unalloyed pity for the residents, and the soulless, decaying chicken-coops they had been forced to call home. But the second-generation of Park Hill tenants had inherited a rather wonderful model coop, then crapped all over it and rolled eggs off the roof. I suppose these things happen when you’ve got too much time on your talons.
Stretching a hand towards Craig’s door I finally saw someone: a youngish community support officer, doing his beat. I buttonholed him and he cheerfully responded, supplying a wry rundown of the scheduled refurbishments – ‘funny-coloured’ cladding, ‘some sort of flowery meadow’ and (a dangerous flirtation with student-twat irony) a crown-green bowls club. The scheme involved passing one of Britain’s largest and most heroic public projects into private hands, which didn’t seem right, and had indeed already gone wrong: with property prices in freefall, the redevelopment was being mothballed. ‘A thousand flats at £130,000 each?’ he declared, a little wildly. ‘I don’t think so. Everyone up here still thinks of Park Hill as the Alamo.’ And with that he recalled some of the professional challenges he had faced as a semi-policeman on the estate, confirming my memories of the ‘safety line’ and describing at colourful length the fight at an estate pub that had ended with two severed ears on the floor. ‘Always been a hot-spot for us, this place, even now it’s empty,’ he said. ‘You know the kind of illegal activities people like to do when they think they can’t be seen.’ That’ll be everything but streaking, I thought, but I smiled and nodded manfully all the same. Then, in fading light, I drove away through a very different Sheffield, all swish Continental trams and Waitroses, one of which I soon found myself walking out of with two bags of winegums and a Crunchie. I was unwrapping a tube of fruit pastilles in a Nottingham petrol station when I realised what was happening to me: one heavy fix of lemon chicken, and I’d become a hopeless slave to glucose.
There was one standout reason to visit Nottingham, but I found myself reluctant to investigate the city’s long-standing record as Britain’s gunshot-wound capital. Instead I came to experience Maid Marian Way: a suitably awful name for a thoroughfare variously denounced as the fourth worst in England (by an urban-design quango), the ugliest in Britain (by listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme) and no less than the most appalling in all of Europe (by a professor of architecture at the city’s own university). By way of a preparatory bonus, as the evening rush hour droned by I found myself in the antechamber of hell itself, chewing down the last of the green ones.
Railway hotels are generally a bit horrid, and their guests generally don’t care. They arrive ground down by the dispiriting rigours of long-distance rail travel, exhausted and abused, unworthy of all that is clean or warm or comfy. And why should the proprietors make the effort? It’s not as if they’re going to get any repeat business from patrons cast into their reception area by a one-off roll of the traveller’s dice. So what if the odd especially dissatisfied customer storms out, making everyone loudly aware of his intention never to return? He wouldn’t have returned anyway, even if you’d bestrewn his pillow with complimentary sovereigns and laid on a naked string quartet to welcome him into breakfast.
The Gresham Hotel, a four-square Gothic hulk squeezed between Nottingham station and a stub of industrial canal, had evidently been in the grim and grimy game for long decades. I parked in a cobbled yard round the back, all oily puddles and steepling old warehouses, like the scene of Bill Sikes’s last stand. Opening the Gresham’s streaky glass door released that come-hither institutional scent of stale cabbage and dribble, which intensified as I walked up the two flights of stairs to reception. This revealed itself, just about, as a fortified minicab-office hunkered away in the corner of a gloomy, panelled cavern, hot as an engine room and twice as smelly.
The receptionist was a timid young African woman who apologetically asked for payment in advance (£24 plus a very ambitious £6 charge for parking), then handed over my key with a flinching don’t-blame-me quarter-smile. ‘How long has this place been a hotel?’ I asked, in genuine curiosity. It was far more convincing as an oppressive and seedily dingy snooker club.
‘Long time,’ she whispered, shaking her head slowly. ‘Long, long time.’
The journey to my room took in some very broad staircases and a succession of claustrophobic corridors, lined with bare wooden doors and laid with carpeting designed by some Victorian on a bad opium trip. Decoration was restricted to images of green stick men proceeding towards open thresholds with more than their usual urgency. Throughout this trek the ambient temperature fell steadily, and when I heaved open my door I was met by a morgue-strength chill. I gazed in wonder at the compact, ancient miseries thus revealed. ‘Just try to imagine you’re in a Bogart movie,’ read a review which uniquely tried to extract positives from the Gresham experience, though I’ve since studied Humph’s filmography and can find no mention of The Suicidal Vagrant.
The corridors had smelt like the inside of a very old wardrobe; this room smelt like the outside of a very old dog. I threw the light switch and beheld its cramped and spartan squalor: not enough room to swing a cat, though the dented, blotted woodchip walls suggested someone had given it a good go. A blue-veined sink sagged forward on its brackets, forever home to half an inch of cold Bovril. The old fireplace had been kind of blocked up with a kind of square bit of cardboard, and every pipe and wire was crudely clamped on to the wandering contours of the walls. The bedclothes – benchclothes – looked, and felt, as if they’d been stitched together from old tights. I could have made a snowman from the drifts of hairy lint piled up beneath the furniture, and someone had recently borrowed the net curtains to wipe down a locomotive. On the scarred table beneath them lay a ‘hospitality tray’ that made a mockery of a term which admittedly demands it: a single tea bag, a single sachet of coffee and of whitener, and – knock yourself out, Bogey! – two of granulated sugar. The stale-crust carpet tiles didn’t look like they’d been laid so much as pasted on both sides and tossed in from the doorway. I opened the mean little hardboard wardrobe and saw two M&S hangers swinging back at me; I plucked out one of the many angrily crumpled paper balls in the bin and found myself reading a one-night bill dated seven months previously. If my stay at Pontin’s Southport had seemed like a punishment for doing something bad, then this time I’d done something much worse, and I’d done it in 1952.
‘I stayed at this hotel on a stag do, so really there wasn’t any standards we required,’ read the Gresham’s most recent review on TripAdvisor. ‘Nevertheless this place was absolutely terrible. DO NOT STAY here unless you are going on the beer.’ The dedication with which I now heeded this gentleman’s thoughtful advice made for a rather wayward appreciation of Europe’s ugliest street. Maid Marian Way was an awful smear of shame, a stinking skidmark right across the proud face of a great city. But it was also home to some pubs, only one of which was boarded up.
Inner ring-road dual carriageway, pedestrian underpass interchange with sunken plaza, integrated multi-level parking: Maid Marian Way boasted the full set of dread phrases from the 1960s book of Great Big Urban Fuck-Ups. It announced itself, just up the road from my hotel, with a six-lane arc of traffic that snarled out from beneath four storeys of NCP’s finest. I negotiated this and found myself faced with a sweeping incline of motorway, flanked with painstakingly undistinguished concrete boxes. Nearly all bore tribute to the period rule that no structure could not be enhanced by sticking a multi-storey car park on top of it. So far, so predictably awful. I only grasped what set Maid Marian Way apart from its umpteen bumfaced brethren when I glanced down the first street that led off it. This truncated throughfare was home to a modest parade of handsome Georgian townhouses, and identified itself as Castle Gate – which I employed my Scandi-by-marriage super-powers to date to Viking times (gata being Norse for street). A floodlit section of old wall at the road’s nearby fundament indeed proved to be the outer defences of Nottingham Castle, and with a nauseous lurch of innards I suddenly grasped the enormity of what had happened here – Maid Marian Way had been driven right through the very heart of old Nottingham, with all the tender grace of Monty Python’s foot. Medieval inns and merchants’ homes, a row of Pevsner-feted almshouses, street after elegant street of eighteenth-century residences: my later research detailed the toll. A half-mile swathe of the city’s most treasured and historically significant buildings wilfully dashed away at a stroke, a go-faster stripe for a streamlined, speeding future that never came to pass.
You only had to look at what survived to realise how much history had been lost. One of the few remaining houses on Castle Gate bore a plaque in honour of Marshal Tallard, commander of the French forces defeated at Blenheim in 1704. How so? Well, the captured marshal spent six years living there under house arrest, during which time he won round the citizenry by teaching them how to bake white bread and cultivate celery, a vegetable that Britons had never previously considered edible. A thousand such wonderful tales bulldozed away. How apt it seemed that having laid waste to so much of Nottingham’s genuine heritage, the civic authorities named the ghastly ring road thus accommodated after a fairy-tale fiction: a made-up maid who the storytellers didn’t even associate with a made-up merry man until the late sixteenth century, three hundred years after neither of them were born.
The first pub I grumbled moodily into was another plucky survivor, spared from the Python foot by half a toenail, evening traffic flashing past its gabled frontage. I went down to the vaulted cellar bar and found it well populated with besuited office workers, all gamely endeavouring to enjoy a restrained after-work drink above the shrieking incoherence of the very heaviest of metal. It seemed too safe to connect this soundtrack to the buckle-belted, eyelinered barman, not that it had brought much joy into his life. His entirely blank expression didn’t even twitch when I bellowed my order for a Kola Kube vodka shot. Somewhere under that wailing wall of distortion I could just make out the squelchy chomp of a man being eaten alive by his own sweet tooth.
It wasn’t a place to linger, but for two shots and a half of cider I did anyway, suspecting that on Europe’s ugliest street this might be as good as it got. Then I went out and rather unsteadily pondered my next move. While doing so I came to note something curious: one section of Maid Marian Way was not as the others were, edged by newer glass-faced structures and conspicuously home to its only pedestrian crossing. The 1960s cement shoeboxes were set back, facing the street at oblique angles. I went out to the middle of the crossing and realised I was standing on what had been the famously horrible sunken plaza. At some point in the recent past – in 2004, as I later established – the council had filled in this blighting entity and refashioned the gigantic roundabout that girthed it as an inestimably more humane junction. How heartening, I thought. But then I gazed at the onrushing corridors of speeding metal and the great dumb blocks that hemmed them in and thought: But how futile.
When the war ended, liberated coastal cities from Bergen to Bordeaux eagerly set about demolishing the coastal defences, U-boat bunkers and other hated legacies of Nazi occupation. But very often, they found they simply couldn’t – the structures were too enormous and too heavily reinforced. They just had to learn to live with them. Without wishing to upset too many urban planners of the period, it’s the same with every British town centre redeveloped in the 1960s and early Seventies, which is to say almost all of them. The scale is just so huge. Putting these things up demanded brutal self-confidence and loads of money – and so will pulling them down, which is a shame, as these days we don’t have either.
At the time I fancied this a considered observation, but you will be glad to hear that it was my last of the evening. Thereafter my discipline, geographical and otherwise, faltered badly. First I went into a pub that was just off Maid Marian Way, and then another that wasn’t, and thus by short, sharp boozy stages proceeded to Old Market Square, an infinitely more handsome and inviting urban expanse – one whose attractions had more than once lured me down from Sheffield for a properly cosmopolitan day out. On a Monday night the in-pub vibe was inevitably muted even here: stony-faced middle-aged couples playing the slots, young men watching Sky Sports over their girlfriends’ shoulders. But with a view of grand old civic buildings and a bellyful of the sweetest happy-juice, I really didn’t mind at all. Though I started to a bit during my fifth packet of crisps, and an awful lot more when I found myself stumbling down a rain-lashed street, just me and the bellowing nutters and the world’s worst room at the end of it.