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Hartcliffe’s hidden history explored in new book
On a recent afternoon, Bristol’s former cabinet member for housing was wearing a shirt with a Magic Eye-style repeating design featuring hundreds of homes.
It shows low-rise high-density, the counterpart according to many people to high-rise developments, explained Paul Smith, now the chief executive of charitable social landlord Elim Housing.
Smith is the author of a new book, Hartcliffe Betrayed, a book three decades in the making about the history of the area of south Bristol in which he grew up and lived in for more than 30 years.
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Hartcliffe was planned from 1943 in order to provide new houses on what was then the rolling fields of north Somerset and was originally going to be called ‘New Dundry’ until the residents of ‘old’ Dundry complained.
Smith has always had an interest in history and first started looking into the history of Hartcliffe when he was first elected as a councillor in 1988.
At this time, the city’s archives were kept in the attic space at what was then the Council House.
Huge rolls of paper were located for Smith, one of which showed the first plan drawn for the entire estate, including for what was meant to be a swimming pool, sports facilities and a cinema.
Smith wrote a few things for the community magazine “and then life got in the way” until late 2022 when now leader of the council, Tony Dyer, who also grew up in Hartcliffe, contacted Smith to ask him to give a talk on the history of the area as part of a Bristol Radical History Group’s South Bristol History Festival.
This prompted Smith to revisit his research from three decades ago and begin turning his findings into a book.
Paul Smith, as his shirt reminds us, is an advocate of low-rise high-density housing – photo: Martin Booth
“The thing you’ll find about people who grew up in Hartcliffe is they really associate strongly with the area,” said Smith as we spoke at the Watershed.
“It’s an area where people identify with. It’s not that you identify amorphously with Bristol, you also identify very much with that community…
“In Hartcliffe, when you said, ‘I’m going into town,’ you meant you’re going to Bedminster most of the time.
“If we weren’t buying stuff in Symes Avenue, it tended to be you’d go to East Street in Bedminster and go to the shops there. You didn’t go into the centre of Bristol much.”
Smith said that he has always thought history is important “because it gives you an idea of what how you’ve got to where you are”.
But Smith never thought of publishing anything himself until he read John Boughton’s book, Municipal Dreams, the history of social housing in the UK
Several so-called ‘memory books’ have been written about Hartcliffe, but ever the housing wonk, Smith wanted to put his own book into a social policy context, taking himself out of the story, albeit with a few first-person recollections.
“It’s interesting that from the memories – and I’ve weaved those memories into the story – is people said, ‘we don’t want it to be another Knowle West’, this is in 1950…
“Up until I’d done this research, I’d always had this view that Bristol just expanded at various times in its history.
“Whereas what this shows is actually Bristol surrendered some of the city to be able to take an area for new housing.”
The original plans for Hartcliffe were for it to have 3,100 homes, three junior schools, a secondary school, six nurseries, three churches, six pubs, a cinema, a library, a health centre, five youth and Scout/Guide centres, a community centre, a swimming pool, a cricket pavilion and a public cafe – photo: Bristol Archives
In its infancy, Hartcliffe was grandly described in the Western Daily Press as “a garden city”.
“It was never described as a garden city by the council, it was built under under those garden city principles but what was built was a housing estate,” Smith explained.
“What I’ve tried to do, is talk about the social policy in the planning around estates generally of the time and then use Hartcliffe as a case study.
“What happened to Hartcliffe happened to hundreds of estates built in the 50s across the country…
“There was massive ambition after the war to build a sort of new Britain. There wasn’t the talk like you got after the First World War of ‘homes for heroes’ in in the same way, but the intention was very similar to how people talk about the 15-minute neighbourhood now.”
But a Labour government that envisaged that council housing would be for the middle classes as well as the working classes resulting in mixed communities, gave way to a Conservative government that felt that council housing should be for the poor and everybody else should be an owner-occupier.
So the dream of a mixed community was never envisaged and in the 50s, new rules meant that councils were not allowed to build anything apart from housing and shops, meaning that libraries, swimming pools and the like were not built because the resources were targeted at the things that were deemed as essential: housing.
And by the time they got to thinking about those ‘extras’, there was no money available.
Paul Smith’s book, Hartcliffe Betrayed, has the sub-heading: ‘the fading of a post-war dream’
“Even at the time when the estate was built, some people felt they were being sent out of the city almost like a punishment,” said Smith.
“They were living somewhere like St Philip’s and they had to go out, as I think the phrase was used, ‘onto the prairie’, like pioneers.
“But people who did move out there got a house, a garden and when I post things about the 50s on the Hartcliffe Facebook groups, people talk about what a wonderful place it was to grow up, how much they loved living there…
“If you actually go back to the records, and to what people were saying at the time, it was mixed. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. They got moved out there.
“The houses were built but there were no shops to start with so people had to walk across muddy fields to Bishopsworth to go to the shops.
“There wasn’t a bus service when the first people moved in so again, they had to walk across those fields to get to the bus service in Headley Park or in Bishopsworth.
“Some people felt like they were being expelled from the city.”
Smith thinks that Hartcliffe’s heyday was in the 60s and 70s – a period he hopes to cover in a second book – after which it began a period of steady decline.
“It had a big community that were coming together, they were sort of all in the same boat, there was a sense of common experience, that people supported each other and worked together.
“But in the book, you’ll read about the problems like they can’t sustain a committee on the community association, they put on fundraising events to build a community centre and they lose money. So even the community stuff in the 50s was a real struggle.
“The sort of things that changed was industrial decline. Although people in Hartcliffe didn’t work in Hartcliffe on the whole – they would work in Avonmouth or maybe the tobacco factories in Bedminster or in town – there was quite a lot of work.
“Then as you go through that period of deindustrialisation in the late 70s and 80s, that really hits the area hard in rising youth unemployment
“You also got the position where lots of younger people are leaving the estate to find their futures and careers and all the rest of it. And the population is falling.
“Because at its peak, there was probably about 16,000 to 18,000 people living there, and half of those were children.
“It was full of nuclear families of two parents and two kids. So as those kids grew up and moved out, the parents were left behind in the houses, the population fell, that hit the shops, that hit the pubs because there are fewer people using things, things like the bank closed.
“And so if people wanted to go to a bank, they had to go into Bedminster, well if I’m going into Bedminster for the bank, I might as well do my shopping there, so you get that spiral of decline.”
But that’s all for another book for Smith, who hopes to look into Hartcliffe’s history into the 1990s as well as planning another tome about the building of Knowle West and 1930s’ slum clearances across Bristol.
“If this book goes well, I will be starting to work on those other publications,” he said. “But I have a day job as well so it will take a while.”
To buy Hartcliffe Betrayed, published by the Bristol Radical History Group, visit www.brh.org.uk/site/pamphleteer/hartcliffe-betrayed
Main photo: Martin Booth
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