Lerwick is a town of less than ten thousand, and it’s never been much bigger. While the Shetlands have a cultural history going back five thousand years, Lerwick is a recent settlement, going back only as far as the 18th century. Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was captured between a grand road, Hillhead, and the port which was the city’s raison d’etre. But like many western cities of the period, concerns about substandard housing led to the involvement of the city council in building new homes. It was a slow start, but by the mid-1920s, 120 ‘well-built’ two storey houses had been constructed in a series of new streets, largely beyond Hillhead. The houses were arranged in blocks with a central open space and, in some cases, with small parklets at the front. They almost all had front and back gardens as well as the common areas.
The Housing Committee Minutes for Lerwick’s Town Council sees a slow morphing of those spaces reflective of postwar British aspiration. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, rarely a Committee meeting went by without requests from residents to erect either sheds, or garages for their cars. In early 1946 Mr. G. Wood applied to erect a shed in his ‘back green’. Many of the garages still evident are often in the entries to the interior spaces.
It appears that although the internal reserves of the Lerwick council houses were essentially in the classic prewar form, they were soon divided by low fences into a range of uses. Some may have had agricultural purposes, but the most common appears to be drying space, either divided into separate areas or created as common use. Alexander Wiseman and Peter McKay lived in houses backing onto each other and had ‘drying spaces’ next to each other; the Town Clerk was required to insist McKay share a clothes pole with Wiseman.
Early in the 1950s, Lerwick saw the creation of a more modern, and more creative, form of public housing. The Edinburgh-based Richard and Betty Moira created the Heddell’s Park estate in the early 1950s. A model was exhibited at the International Housing and Town Planning Conference in 1954 with Council’s approval (Council also appointed Richard Moira as one of their officials to the Scottish National Housing and Town Planning Council. Construction on the project began in 1955. It was an estate of just over 50 homes (actual estimates vary) very close to the town’s main street and of a higher density than usual for Lerwick; these may have been the town’s first real multistory apartments. Miles Glendinning writes of the ‘meticulously complicated grouping of dwellings into small, pedestrian-planned “precincts.”’
This is a detail from the site plan and housing layout held in the Shetland Council archives, dated March 1954 showing different types of open space: greens, a playground, private gardens and drying areas. It appears that this plan may record the moment it was decided to turn some of the green space into a playground (those pencil strokes imply the change in surfacing). An older photograph shows that the playground originally included the form of a boat, now largely gone.
It's on google maps at https://goo.gl/maps/8vfPzREyd17Zw9Ps5
No comments:
Post a Comment