Internal courtyard, Brunswick St, Glasgow

These things are not necessarily that unusual in big northern European cities: interior spaces to include not only passive recreation area(s) but also rubbish removal, car parking and so on. This is one that happened to be accessible to me at my AirBnB in early October 2019. It runs the gamut, and while interesting, I wouldn't want to start documenting all of these (there must be hundreds of thousands) unless they were super unusual.

Heddell's Park Estate, Lerwick, Scotland

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 18^th century. Until the beginning of the 20^th 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 

Footdee, Aberdeen

As has been clear from the last few posts (why did I delay? Just a little matter of being locked out of the blog for forgetting the password - it will happen again) I was in Aberdeen in September, and lucky enough to get a small guided tour of some key sites of the city by my colleague Quazi Zaman. One of these places surely qualifies as one of the earliest bona fide planned environments incorporating internal reserves, with the caveat that, since it dates comprehensively from the period before the automobile, one of the key 'internal reserve' components - separation of pedestrian and car - didn't apply. Nonetheless, it has existed, and persisted, through the entire automobile era, apparently relatively intact. 

A quick trip to the Aberdeen library to look at a range of press clippings got the basic story: Footdee (pronounced 'Fittie') began construction in or around 1809 (a clipping from the Aberdeen Press and Journal dated 21 December 1968 but with its title removed in the clippings collection gives this date for the Town Council's original construction of 68 houses on 'the North Square and South Square'). The original buildings were single-storey but most of Footdee today is two-storey. The majority of the clippings were from the late 1960s-early 1970s and dealt with the problems of everyday living in a conservation area. 'The harsh days and nights of toil over nets and baits and lines are only memories to the old folk who are left,' says one article, 'recollections which are eagerly sought and taped by students of folklore who descend on the village.' This from the Evening Express 11 May, 1977. 

But why even go as far as the library. By extraordinary coincidence, the Northlink Ferries magazine Northern Lights issue 9, which was available when we boarded a... Northlink Ferry, has a story on Footdee too. Here we learn that 'Extra houses were added in 1837 and 1855' and that additional storeys were added to some others in the 1870s.

Because I didn't really fully appreciate what I was going to see when Quazi took me to Footdee, these images presented here are a bit of a jumble - there are three spaces, one of which contains a church. All spaces have an arrangement of single-story, usually wooden sheds/granny flats(?) around them, apparently the property/for the use of the people who live opposite each one. Northern Lights calls these 'outhouses' and says they were or are known as '"tarry sheds", which were added to the squares opposite each dwelling in Footdee. These were originally created using driftwood and other materials...' As you can see, these have often been decorated or otherwise augmented with a high degree of imagination and individuality. The reserves themselves are often used primarily for drying clothes (this to me tips the scale more in the direction of 'private (albeit shared private) space' than 'public space', although when we were there - a Saturday - tourists were just wandering through blithely) and some limited agriculture and passive recreation, and include things like bird feeders, etc.  

See it on google maps here. Note how close it is, and yet how far, from Torry.