Netherley

NG: At the newsagent’s, I would buy Letraset action transfers, favouring those that depicted dinosaurs or, for some reason, El Cid’s battles. Such fun, calculating the scenarios, the control over the landscape, a positioning of paper and a quick scribble with a pencil and there it was, your idea of how things should be. There were abstruse skills to be developed; by hybridizing the kits, and with careful and selective partial rubbing of the figures on the transfer sheet, you could make a man’s legs stick out of a tyrannosaur’s roaring mouth.

Once, I took twenty pence into the newsagent’s and attempted to buy four transfer kits; it was explained to me that, with each one costing twelve pence, I couldn’t even afford two. But I don’t want two, I said; I want four.

Why do I remember this incident? In such detail? The electric lights reflecting yellowly off the saleslady’s lacquered hair. Her growing amused exasperation at my inability to grasp the maths. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t afford two because I wanted to buy four. I think, in the end, she put four pence of her own money into the till so that I could take home two.

PF: My family moved to Netherley at the beginning of the 1970s, part of a great wave of rehousing. I’d been born near the city centre of Liverpool and spent my earliest years living in Wavertree, in a terrace that backed on to the railway at Edge Hill. Both my parents’ families lived in the streets close by. Then there were compulsory purchase orders and we were being shipped out to Netherley. Because they had four kids, a house was allocated to my parents (with a garden to follow), and I remember going with my mother to pick up the keys from a Portakabin. I ran through the new house, claiming ‘my room’ out of its echoey blank spaces, and am mugged again by its newness whenever I pass a building site nearly forty years later: the smells of raw timber, putty, wet cement and industrial adhesive transport me right back.

I can remember seeing all the old bits of furniture being carried from vans into these new, boxy flats and houses: dark-wood wardrobes and chests of drawers, sideboards, bow-fronted cabinets, radiograms, goose-neck lamps and mangles. Over the next few years, the back fields and lanes became littered with them, and the bonfires of those first autumns burned high.

But we’d carried our stories out here with us, too, and these proved more durable than the furniture we brought and the room dividers and fake-fire surrounds and white goods our parents went into debt for. They must have missed having an open fire. The houses had central heating, which meant a dull metal grille at ankle height in the living room, but soon anyone who could lay bricks and point found work building a fireplace for somebody. These become more ambitious as the decade wore on, room-length ranges with huge chimney breasts high as the ceiling, like something out of The High Chaparral or a Hammer horror, depending on the signature style of the brickie, and at their centre a fascia of plastic coals and logs.

NG: The urgent need for new housing resulted in a lack of municipal development, and on the Netherley estates there was a ten-year gap between the first wave of residents and the completion of the main shopping and leisure facilities. The few local shops that did exist often added a scarcity-value surcharge on to their goods, and public transport services were often substandard, reducing many lives to stultifying cycles of work and sleep.

Added to these problems was the quality of the housing itself: the Netherley high-rises were built cheaply, with linking decks between blocks saving on the number of lifts and staircases, making the project imposing and repetitive. The blocks were generally declared a mistake even before they were completed; the cluster of mid-rises quickly became known as Alcatraz. There was damp. Vermin. Poor systems of waste disposal and drainage. Concrete walkways and underpasses that seemed light and open in the airy offices of the planners proved dehumanizing and atomizing in hard practice. A poll revealed that, within the space of a decade, four out of five tenants desperately wanted to leave.

PF: In the 1980s, the estate achieved notoriety, a byword in the city for poverty, crime, addiction and squalor. In fact, its reputation attracted wider attention: Beryl Bainbridge visited in 1983 on the Merseyside leg of her English Journey: Or the Road to Milton Keynes in Priestley’s footsteps. If the Russians could see ‘the infamous Netherly Estate [sic]’, she wrote, ‘the Eastern bloc would send food parcels and donations’. Magnum photographers Peter Marlow and Martin Parr produced images of dereliction and abandonment, ruined swing parks with climbing-frame ships emerging from the valley mist like the Fata Morgana, the deserted landings of flats barely a decade old. If they’d visited just a few years earlier or stayed longer, though, they’d have discovered a different place.