Power to all people? The 1960s fight for Byker
- Sally Watson & Silvie Fisch
- Apr 24
- 8 min read
Byker is a monument of community-driven design - still influencing and still standing as a listed landmark. Sally Watson & Silvie Fisch draw on their passion and meticulous research to provide us an insight into the grassroots fight for the area through the 1960s, from terraced 'slums' to a vision from the ground up.
The Byker housing development (constructed 1969-1983) in Newcastle upon Tyne is internationally renowned for its pioneering practices in community participation. It represented a significant move away from the top-down comprehensive redevelopment practices of the 1950s and 1960s. These had transformed neighbourhoods with little input from local people.
Its style also represented a major break with the modernist architectural orthodoxy of the time and its innovative design principles have inspired numerous socially inclusive and community-focused housing projects globally and consequently influenced the community architecture movement.
The main name associated with the estate’s redevelopment remains that of its leading architect, Ralph Erskine. But while he achieved lasting fame, he actually arrived quite late on the scene. In contrast, faced with the demolition of the old ‘slum’ area, the people who initiated the action that subsequently led to a change in approach remain largely unnoticed. It was the ‘Byker Study Group’, comprising local civic leaders and residents, who lobbied Newcastle City Council with their demands for people to be allowed to stay in Byker and for them to be involved in plans for its redevelopment.
Approximately 20,000 people lived in Byker in the late 1960s, mostly in steep terraces of 19th century Tyneside flats running downhill to meet the Tyne. A small area of Byker’s working class housing had already been condemned as unfit and earmarked for redevelopment in 1953. By 1963, the whole area was included in the aspirational housing clearance programme of the Labour Council Leader T. Dan Smith and his City Planning Officer Wilfred Burns. Demolition in Byker began in 1966, with the condemned housing adjacent to Shields Road being cleared to provide space for a planned future motorway.
But by the end of the decade, a general shift in attitudes based on the experiences of slum clearance had emerged. In particular, the dispersal of local communities drew widespread criticism. This was a period of progressive change, and the many reforms under Harold Wilson’s Labour government included such areas as community participation and housing. Wilfred Burns himself was influential in promoting housing improvement policies and had a keen interest in participation. In 1969, the Skeffington Committee, of which Burns was an enthusiastic member, would produce their report ‘People and Planning’, examining how the public’s views could be better represented.
When the Planning Department under Burns proposed participation for working class neighbourhoods slated for redevelopment or revitalisation, other senior officers, such as the Housing Architect and Housing Officer pushed back on this forcibly. Consequently, middle class Jesmond was the only neighbourhood where this was attempted during the 1960s.
Council officials believed, misguidedly as it would turn out, that middle class residents would understand their plans in a way that working class people would not. There was also a reluctance to engage with working class residents who would want to know when and where they would be rehoused, information that officers felt they would not necessarily be in a position to disseminate.
Meanwhile, a local clergyman in Byker, the Reverend Clarke of the Presbyterian Church, had called as early as 1962 for residents of housing proposed for clearance to be allowed to stay in Byker. But it was only after Council officers held meetings with Jesmond residents in 1966 to seek their views on the Local Plan for Jesmond that a small group of local civic leaders came together to demand the same for Byker. In 1967, a regular ‘Luncheon Club’ meeting between church leaders and social workers in Byker was founded, an initiative prompted by the Newcastle Council of Churches. This offered an opportunity to debate the future of Byker and its people.
One clergyman who had strong views on the proposed clearance was the Reverend John Bunker of St. Michael’s Church. He had trained as an architect at Northern Polytechnic in London before moving up north. Here, he introduced the idea of adapting the traditional church layout to bring the people and the priest together around the altar. This ‘facing the people’ rite went on to become a convention of North East churches. Bunker was worried about the community in Byker being destroyed alongside the housing. He found an ally in the Byker Community Centre warden Mr. Vlaeminke, who felt that the Luncheon Club could not adequately represent the views of local people.
Frustrated that the Luncheon Club were not doing more to halt or influence the clearance programme and in an attempt to stir the local community into action, the Reverend Bunker and Mr. Vlaeminke arranged a series of talks at the Community Centre, formerly St Michael’s church hall, titled ‘Byker: Past, Present and Future’. Between May and June 1968, around 100 people attended these talks, which were delivered by Jim Elliott, a ‘local historian’, representatives of the City Council’s Planning, Housing and Housing Architects departments and researcher Richard Batley, who was conducting a study on slum clearance and community in Byker.
Richard Batley had experienced slum clearance first-hand in Birmingham between 1962 and 1965, before he went to Pakistan to volunteer for the UN Development programme in 1965-1966 and became acquainted with the many new ideas around slum and squatter settlements which were emerging internationally. As a research assistant in Gateshead, he was involved in a larger study on participation and local government, and, by his own choice, conducted his own local study ‘Byker: A Study of Communication between Planners and the Public in an area affected by Slum Clearance’. He remembers: ‘Newcastle at that point was behind the curve. There was a lot of resistance to any idea that the public, particularly the poor public, had any right to comment on what planners were doing.’
Contrary to expectation (and recurring nostalgic opinions), Batley found that in Byker 80% of the sizeable survey of residents approved of demolition and rebuilding but that 67% of residents wanted to remain living in Byker. However, members of the working men’s clubs and local churches had not engaged with the Council on the plans for redevelopment.
Batley suggests ‘It wasn’t their sort of language perhaps. (…) Byker was a very strong community by all objective measurements, but without any self-belief, I suppose, in their capacity to influence the wider world.’
In response, following the talks at the Community Centre, Bunker, Vlaeminke and others formed the Byker Study Group to try to act on behalf of residents’ interests during the clearance, which had already begun. Batley remembers Bunker as an ‘untypical Vicar, very ordinary, articulate but not posh, and well able to connect with people’. Jim Elliott, according to Batley was also a ‘key person’ in this group. Poor health had resulted in Elliott attending a special school and then the trade union-supported Fircroft College in Birmingham. From there he made it into Ruskin College, Oxford and eventually ended up teaching in Brisbane, at the University of Queensland. Batley remembers that ‘He was one of the very few, let’s say who broke out of Byker. (…) He was one of these multigenerational residents’. Indeed, his mother continued to live in Byker where she died as a centenarian.
Through their connections, the group were aware of local concerns and made it their mission to take on a mediatory role between residents and, as Batley describes it, ‘a domineering city council which knew all the answers for these people and didn’t like to be told that they didn’t know everything’. They hoped that after an initial period of outside leadership, residents would come to manage this group.
They wrote a letter to Newcastle City Council with three demands:
1) Information be supplied periodically and on a regular basis to the residents of Byker by those officials and elected representatives who have the most complete knowledge on the state of the plans for clearance and rebuilding in the Byker area.
2) Building and clearance be so planned as to make it possible for a high proportion of those now living in Byker to continue to do so.
3) Provision be made for the consultation of local groups and organisations on the plans intended for the redevelopment of the area, and the Byker Study Group be considered as one of the groups to be consulted.
Their letter was greeted with a twenty-five minute uproar in a full council meeting on 4th July 1968. There was a strong view across the board that the group should not have made this representation and that they should have gone through the councillors. Representatives of each party accused Mr. Vlaeminke, who was a public official, of secret affiliation to the other. And the general view was that the Community Centre should not have become ‘politically involved’.
But soon the anger settled down and Richard Batley was called in by the Leader of the Council, Arthur Grey, and the Principal City Officer, Frank Harris, to give an account of their activities and intentions. The next Study Group meeting was attended by the Byker councillors (two Labour and one Conservative), and it was agreed that more information on the plans should be provided to residents. Senior officers also gave further commitments to public consultation. The new City Planning Officer, Kenneth Galley, who had replaced Wilfred Burns earlier that year, promised that: ‘We will come to you with ideas which are not crystallised. Knock them on the head and throw them out of the window’. This change in heart was no doubt influenced by a relatively new Conservative administration, which included a local councillor in Byker, wanting to show that they would do things differently.
A year passed and there were still no public discussions. Meanwhile, the architect Ralph Erskine was working on a housing scheme for Killingworth in August 1968, when contractor Stanley Miller introduced him to Arthur Grey. By November that year, Erskine had submitted a reappraisal of the redevelopment. In this reappraisal, he expressed his aim to pay ‘special attention to the needs of special groups - small children, teenagers, old people, invalids, etc.’ His appointment was eventually confirmed by the Housing Committee in July 1969.
When the brochure created by Erskine and Newcastle City Council was eventually published in February 1969, it contained many features of the earlier plans. But it did recognise that ‘a strong community spirit exists among the 20,000 residents and there is a clear desire on their part to continue to live in an area where they have their roots, and to take part in replanning Byker’. The Study Group’s demands had without doubt been crucial in persuading the new Conservative administration to adopt a different approach, albeit one that remained top-down.
Erskine proposed founding an office in Byker that would ‘form the base for a team, consisting of a sociologist/social anthropologist, working with local contacts, and a community development officer with a supporting team’. Vernon Gracie was appointed to run the Newcastle office and by September 1970 he had a team of three staff, based in a former funeral parlour on Brinkburn Street. Their ways of working have been recorded elsewhere but are nicely epitomised by architect Bengt Ahlqvist’s recollection that ‘The former mourning room housed an attractive object: one of only four telephones in Byker at the time. So, we had people sitting around the walls, moving towards the telephone, making their calls and then out again. And that was a very effective way of getting in touch with the local people.’
The outcome of this participation is another story, but it is pertinent to note that while council estates in Britain face widespread demolition, Byker is now Grade II* listed. After many ups and downs and continued challenges, it is still standing strong.
This article is based on archival research and interviews conducted by Dr Sally Watson and Silvie Fisch. Thanks to all those who have supported and contributed to this research, with particular mention to Emeritus Professor Richard Batley, University of Birmingham, whose 1971 MA thesis provides an invaluable account of events in Byker during the 1960s.
Dr Sally Watson is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape at Newcastle University.
Her recently completed PhD examines the development and experience of postwar housing in Newcastle, with a focus on landscape design, children and play.
Silvie Fisch is an Associate Researcher at the Oral History Collective at Newcastle University and Director of Northern Cultural Projects, a Community Interest Company that strives to promote inclusivity, social and historical justice, and community empowerment through history, heritage, and cultural initiatives. She is an Activist and involved in the Mutual Aid Movement.
Silvie and Sally are currently developing a Community Archive in Byker.
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