The lived experience of post-war multi-storey council housing: reassessing Sheffield’s Park Hill and Manchester’s Hulme

This thesis explores the lived experience of multi-storey council housing through a case study analysis of two post-war estates: Park Hill in Sheffield and Hulme in Manchester. It uses local government documents, press coverage, and oral history to shed light on the intersections between the perspectives of tenants, policymakers, and the press, to argue for a relational approach to understanding lived experience. In so doing, it provides a framework for the study of multi-storey council housing that acknowledges, but is not confined by, the trajectory of its ‘rise and fall’. Offering a bridge between the existing dichotomy of state-led and grassroots accounts, the thesis shows the extent to which personal narratives of multi-storey council housing are entwined with its political and cultural construction.

Park Hill and Hulme have each come to symbolise aspects of the ‘rise and fall’ of post-war multi-storey council housing. According to this historical framework, a period of early success rapidly gave way to one of failure, characterised by material, social and economic decline. The thesis offers a more complex account, using local case studies to unpick broader histories of multi-storey council housing. It borrows from work into multi-storey council housing undertaken from an urban studies, geographic and sociological perspective to highlight the specificities of the architectural design, management, and cultural reception that shaped the multi-storey environment, as well as the effects of these factors upon everyday life. It is divided into four chapters that analyse housing policy, cultural representations, tenants’ socio-spatial practices and tenants’ social identity, but the focuses of each are interrelated. The thesis views tenants as agents of their own narratives, contending that this recognition involves the incorporation of their testimonies into existing historical accounts told from a range of perspectives, rather than their use to tell separate, ‘alternative’ histories of multi-storey living.