Old Byker, 1960s. Photo by Richard Batley
The Byker estate is famous worldwide for its 1970s experiments in community participation – involving local people in decisions about its new housing. This was a major break from the past. Decisions about new council housing had previously been made in Newcastle’s Civic Centre, by councillors and officers, not by people who were being rehoused.
Ralph Erskine, the architect whose practice designed Byker’s new housing, is generally celebrated as the driving force behind this new approach. In this two-part blog, we tell a less well-known origin story about the Byker redevelopment (1969-1983). It was, in fact, a group of people living and working in Byker whose action paved the way for the radical approach here. The ‘Byker Study Group’, as they called themselves, 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. The first part of this blog describes the events leading up to this action.
To set the scene, in the 1960s around 20,000 people lived in Byker, a working-class neighbourhood of terraced 19th century Tyneside flats running downhill to meet the Tyne. In 1963, the whole area was marked for redevelopment as part of the Labour council leader T. Dan Smith’s drive to improve housing. Demolition in Byker began in 1966 with the clearance of condemned housing adjacent to Shields Road to provide space for a new motorway.
As early as 1962, Reverend Clarke of the Byker Presbyterian Church had called for residents in Byker’s clearance areas to be allowed to remain living in the neighbourhood. By the end of the decade, there was backlash against the wholescale redevelopment of neighbourhoods across the country. Some of this housing, particularly high-rise housing, was intensely disliked. There was also increasing concern about the displacement of communities and top-down decision-making by local government.
Demolition. Photo by Richard Batley
Responding to this, the government set up the Skeffington Committee to examine public participation in the planning process. Their 1969 report People and Planning discussed how the public’s views could be better represented. Newcastle’s planning officer Wilfred Burns was a member of this committee and was keen to introduce these ideas in Newcastle. But there was pushback from his architect and housing colleagues. They were reluctant to engage with working class residents, who might pressurise them to find out when and where they would be rehoused. As a result, middle-class Jesmond was the only neighbourhood where participation was attempted during the 1960s. Council officials believed that Jesmond residents would understand their plans in a way that working-class people would not. This did not go the way they expected. There was public outrage over the proposed Local Plan for Jesmond, presented to Jesmond residents at meetings in 1966, and some of its most controversial features were later removed.
It was following these events in Jesmond that civic leaders in Byker got together to discuss the clearance plans. At their regular ‘Luncheon Club’ meeting, they questioned why working-class people were not being consulted on plans for their neighbourhood. Luncheon Club members Reverend John Bunker of St. Michael’s Church, who had also trained as an architect, and the Byker Community Centre warden Mr. Vlaeminke, were the strongest opponents of the plans. Frustrated with the Luncheon Club’s lack of action and believing that they could not adequately represent residents’ views, they arranged a series of talks at the Community Centre to see if they could nudge the community into action.
Between May and June 1968, three talks on ‘Byker: Past, Present and Future’ were attended by around 100 people. They 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.
Researcher Richard Batley
Batley presented the early results of his study. These showed that, contrary to his expectations, 80% of a sizeable survey of Byker residents approved of demolition and rebuilding but that 67% of residents wanted to remain living in Byker. He also found that local people were not politically engaged and that the City Council had little interest in their views. He told us in an interview in 2024: '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.’
Batley also 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. He also attended 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.
Following the talks at the Community Centre, Bunker, Vlaeminke and several others formed the Byker Study Group to try to act on behalf of residents’ interests and to make the case that Byker people should have a say in Byker’s future.
In the second part of this blog we will pick up the story again to examine their actions and successes…
Silvie Fisch and Sally Watson
This article is based on Sally Watson’s PhD research and oral history interviews undertaken by Silvie Fisch. Thanks to all those who have contributed to this research, especially Emeritus Professor Richard Batley, University of Birmingham, whose 1971 MA thesis provides an invaluable account of events in Byker during the 1960s and whose words are quoted in the article.
You can read a more extensive version of this article on the North East Heritage Library and in the journal of the North East Labour History Society (North East History: Vol 56).
