Manchester needs more social housing

Sally Casey moved into her brand-new council house on the Aquarius Estate in Hulme in 1969. She and her young family had previously lived in a two-up two-down terrace in nearby Chorlton-on-Medlock that was part of a slum clearance programme. The Aquarius, an estate of two storey council houses built between the university and Princess Road, offered tenants like Sally three bedrooms, underfloor heating and an indoor toilet for the first time. As she remembers, “I thought I had reached heaven”.

I got to know Sally fifteen years later, when life on the Aquarius Estate had fallen far short of its early promise. There were high levels of crime and anti-social behaviour and the housing was being poorly managed. The underfloor heating was too expensive and only existed on the ground floor, so that the bedrooms went unheated. Mould had become an issue. 

Most people in Manchester have heard of the Crescents. But they were just one of five large estates in Hulme, plus 10 tower blocks and a series of low-rise estates. From the mid 1980s to around 1992, my partner Hélène and I lived in a maisonette on the 5^th floor of the Hulme 3 estate that loomed over Aquarius. Sally’s husband Jimmy was our caretaker. 

By the late '80s I was working as a planner for the council and Hulme was part of my patch. Sally and a group of other women on the estate had set up the Aquarius Tenants Association and were challenging the council to fix the heating and a host of other problems on the estate. As the local planning officer I regularly attended their meetings. The response from much of the council to their ongoing concerns could at best be described as unresponsive. 

I met up with Sally again recently, now an MBE for her services to the community. She and I are members of the Manchester Social Housing Commission, which brings together tenants, housing providers, politicians and other experts to make the case for social housing in Manchester.