New housing in a cleared area : a study of St Mary's, Oldham / Department of the Environment.

  • Great Britain. Department of the Environment.
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: New housing in a cleared area : a study of St Mary's, Oldham / Department of the Environment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/84 (page 1)
    1 Introduction 1. Phase I of the redevelopment of St Mary’s Ward, previously one of Oldham’s central slum areas, consists of 520 dwellings at a planned density of 272 bedspaces to the hectare, constructed in the concrete 12M Jespersen system of industrialised building. The dwellings are heated by a high-pressure hot water system, part of a larger coal-fired district heating scheme. Work com- menced on the superstructure of the dwellings in January 1966, and was completed by January 1967. 2. The architects for the scheme were the Research and Develop- ment Group of the former Ministry of Housing and Local Government working in conjunction with Max Lock and Partners; the latter being appointed by the Borough Council to produce proposals for the comprehensive renewal of 120 hectares of sub-standard dwellings. The scheme under discussion was intended to be the first of ten phases of redevelopment within this 120 hectares after a survey showed that the existing houses on this site were the worst in the whole area. 3. The Development Group had two major objectives in doing this work. The first was to study the problems and effects of slum clearance and the reconstruction of a central urban area. The second was to find or develop an industrialised building system suitable for low and medium-rise dwellings for use particularly in areas with a shortage of skilled construction workers. 4. In September 1968, 18 months after the last dwelling had been occupied, an appraisal was made of tenants’ reactions to their new homes. The appraisal consisted of sociologists’ interviews with tenants who had been occupying their homes for at least nine months i.e. those who had occupied their homes during both a summer and a winter period. This resulted in 393 interview questionnaires being completed out of a total of 520 dwellings. The dwellings of 242 of those interviewed were also visited by an architect who made an assessment of the structure and recorded the way in which tenants had positioned their furniture. 5. The results of this survey and appraisal form the basis of this bulletin and therefore details of the design and construction have only been given where this is necessary for the text to be fully understood. 6. At the time this appraisal was carried out a similar exercise was undertaken by the Ministry to appraise tenants’ reactions on six other high-density estates. Comparisons have been drawn with the preliminary findings of this other survey, which is referred to throughout this bulletin as The Layout Study.* The full results of this appraisal of estates is to be published shortly by HMSO. Details of the six estates are given in Appendix A. 7. A subsidiary objective of the appraisal was to study the per- formance and efficiency of the district heating installation. As it has been affected by a number of troubles and was still not working satisfactorily at the time of going to press it has not been possible to appraise it here. Mention should also be made here of problems which have arisen on rain-penetration through windows: these have not, however, been such as to interfere with the main objectives or to affect the appraisal. It is clear that the tenants’ overall satisfaction with their dwellings and the estate was higher than in most other housing schemes studied in a similar way in spite of these troubles. * To be published (in the first quarter of 1972) by the DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT as Design Bulletin 25 The estate outside the dwelling: reactions of residents to aspects of housing layout HMSO.