Tales from the tower

Bristol’s enduring post-war tower blocks pierce the skyline from virtually every vantage point in the city. Louis Emanuel and Pamela Parkes spend a day finding out what life is like inside. Photos by Mike Lloyd.

“It’s not a very nice one,” 79-year-old Mollie Smart says, leaning forward gently as she begins to tell the story behind her most vivid memory of the last 50 years living at the top of one of the city’s biggest council tower block estates.

She was helping her mum, she explains, who’d had a fall when the doorbell went and she opened it to her neighbour, Les.

“When I looked out, there was a man right outside my front door hanging on with his fingertips – he’d climbed over the railing. We grabbed at the man’s hands and we didn’t know what to do, we were shouting out, and then a young chap from another block came running over and we managed to haul him back.”

Mollie breathes out and settles back into her sofa, the back of which is topped with a neat row of dog-shaped cushions. “Well, we just couldn’t believe it,” she says.

“What did you wanna do that for?’ I said to him, ‘frightening everybody like that’. So I said, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ and Les said to him, ‘Do you want a fag?’.”

It turned out the man hanging from the ninth floor was a patient in the adjacent General Hospital, where Mollie worked – as did many of the people who lived here in the early years.

The hospital is now mostly a building site being converted into luxury flats selling for as much as £800,000 (the conversion also happens to have a Michelin star restaurant at the bottom).

As the area changes at an alarming rate around them, the council blocks on Redcliff Hill – like the dozens of other post-war towers built in the same period – remain jutting into Bristol’s skyline as a constant reminders; islands of experimental close-quarters living; communities within communities.

Mollie’s story is just one of many told during a day spent knocking on doors and bumping into residents walking dogs down the corridors or pushing shopping trolleys of washing into the mirrored lifts.

Waring House, Francombe House and Underdown House form a U-shape looking onto a shared courtyard. The blocks sit on the corner of Redcliff Hill and Commercial Road.

Waring House opened in 1960, made up of 79 three-bed flats, which went for 64 shillings and 4 pence to rent (roughly £3.20) per week including hot water, laundry and heating.

The complex, which has 187 flats in total, was built for “key workers” (including staff at the hospital) in the city centre in a wave of modernist projects which also included the Barton Hill flats and Dove Street in Kingsdown.

The blocks here replaced a historic almshouse destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. The bombing also destroyed shops in the Redcliffe area and so a parade of new ones were added at the bottom.

Directly above those shops sits the three-bedroom maisonette of Adrian Harris, 67, and his wife. Over a cup of tea, looking back at his early days in the block 30-odd years ago, he says the community spirit was always strong.

“I mean, it was illegal, according to the council, to have a barbeque on the veranda,” he says with a smile. “But we used to have a charcoal one on a stand – no damage or anything,” he adds, from behind his yellowing moustache.

“We used to have little parties to see who could cook the most on their barbeques. I even had hanging baskets on the wall outside, until the council said I had to take it down because it was a health and safety risk,” he says, shaking his head.

Down on the playground in the courtyard below where the children’s laughter echoes around the blocks, Melissa Biggs, 32, a mother of two tells similar stories of community spirit which lives on in the younger generations.

“We all arrange to go out on a particular day and we all chip in. It’s just how you get close, it’s a bonding session, you know. You all go out – Weston, Weymouth, wherever – and you have a nice laugh,” she says, reeling away in giggles.

On the first floor of Underdown House, on Guinea Street in view of the playground, Diane Rowlands, 65, who moved in with her mum and sister in 1980, says the happiest day on the estate is the children’s festival.

“We normally have it in September, when the children from all the different groups come out and we book acts and things and they all join in,” she says. “We have little barbecues down there, the children play in the courts and have their little football tournaments.”

But it’s not all happy stories. Diane, like every other person interviewed during the day, says the sense of community cohesion has undoubtedly withered over the years.

Like many, she moved from a council property in Hartcliffe to be closer to her work as a secretary for a trade union. But over recent years she has witnessed an increasing flow of new tenants from foreign countries – most significantly a huge swathe of refugees from war-torn Somalia – which she fears has led the block struggling for cohesion. The changes have hit the estate’s tenants groups hardest.

“Of course, as the flats changed over and more of the ethnic groups came in, they had their own groups and so on,” Diane says. “So we got smaller, but we still managed to keep it going. It’s not a lot different really when you get to know the people though.

“The children still play outside, they’ve had that football court put up for them since they’ve been here and I still get on really well with the neighbours.”

Sitting in her bottom floor flat, in plain view of the gently ebbing and swirling brown tide creeping down the New Cut, 81-year-old Vera Marks agrees that recent years have seen the most dramatic changes.

“There are certain days of the week you can smell all the foods being cooked for the week, and you do hear in the lift all different languages that you don’t understand,” she says.

“But then I always speak to all the children, and they always answer me, so they know English already because they go to the school just up on the hill and across the road.”

But not all residents are so reasonable about the changes. Many, who didn’t want to be named, had stronger views, some inappropriate to print.

On the sixth floor of Underdown House lives Somali-born Faduma Yusseff, 40, who has lived with her husband and their son since he was born 12 years ago.

In her living room she explains that she has been on the receiving end of an alarming rise in racist incidents over recent years.

“It’s never been like this before. When you’re younger, you don’t notice if someone says to you something racist. You don’t care, you just go away. But then when you get older, especially when you’ve got children…”

But she adds: “There’s a lot of nice people, a lot of nice people, here. There’s a lot of nice people to say hello and you say hello back.”

Anecdotal stories of high numbers of new families speaks volumes of the council’s current housing crisis (around 10,000 people are on the social housing waiting list).

It is a crisis that sits in a context of council cuts all around. Some residents argue that these are visible in the broken panes of glass and rusted railings around the block.

But Diane, who has lived in council homes of one sort or another all her life, doesn’t have a bad word to say about the authority as a landlord. She can see, however, that since the post-war golden age, social housing has changed in Bristol, and in turn changes the people and communities that live here.

“There’s definitely not the same opportunity like we had all our life. When we were little, there were brand new, big council houses up at Hartcliffe. Nowadays there’s so many people who need housing, and there’s just not enough being built.”

Down in the laundry room, adhering to her strict time slot, Roxanne Davis, 26, pulls her clothes from the dryer. Growing up in one of the tower blocks of Barton Hill, she was no stranger to council estates when she moved here two years ago.

“Everything’s the same, just a different area,” she smiles. “You’ve got to adjust to it, though. “It’s easy for someone who has lived in blocks all their lives. But for someone to come from having a back garden and having a lot of space, it’s hard.”

Outside in the courtyard playpark – newly refurbished, by the way – one of Mel’s children bounces on the sunken trampoline while her mum cradles Roxanne’s baby as she finishes her laundry.

Looking back at the 15 years she has spent in the block, she says: “It was a bit daunting when I first got here because I was a spring chicken and I’d just had my first baby. It was all new to me, and it was a case of making friends with everyone. As time went by, you get to know the neighbours; I got to know they were alright.

“Especially on my landing, I’ve known them so long now. In some ways we have each other’s backs, and all the kids play together. If your kids not on the landing, they just text you and let you know they’re along, two doors down. It is alright living here.”

Read more: Is it finally time for Bristol to face its past?