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 R e c o n s t ru c t i n g P u b l i c H ou s i n g
Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Reconstructing Public Housing
Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives
Reconstructing Public Housing

Matthew Thompson
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

L I V ER POOL U N I V ER SI T Y PR ES S

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 First published 2020 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU

Copyright © 2020 Matthew Thompson

The right of Matthew Thompson to be identified as the author of this book

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Contents
Contents

List of Figures ix
List of Abbreviations x
Acknowledgements xi

Prologue xv

Part I Introduction
1 Introducing Collective Housing Alternatives 3
Why Collective Housing Alternatives? 9
Articulating Our Housing Commons 14
Bringing the State Back In 21
2 Why Liverpool of All Places? 27
A City of Radicals and Reformists 29
A City on (the) Edge? 34
A City Playing the Urban Regeneration Game 36
Structure of the Book 39
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Part II The Housing Question

3 Revisiting the Housing Question 45
Nouns and Verbs: On the Nature of Value 48
Exploitation and Alienation: On the Contradictions of Capitalism 50
Ends and Means: The Point Is to Change It! 55

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 vi Reconstructing Public Housing

4 Liverpool’s Co-operative Revolution 60

Rehabilitating Housing in a SNAP 65
You Hold the Pen, We’ll Tell You What to Draw! 76
Competition: The Counterintuitive Component of Cooperativism 85
5 Liberal Compromises: Diluting the Cooperative Revolution? 89
You Can Have Any House You Like So Long as It’s a
New-Build Co-op 92
Utalitarianism (Utilitarian plus Totalitarian): On Form
Following Function 97
Contradictions of Choice: Defensive Urbanism or (Extra)Ordinary
Sub-urbanism? 99
6 Municipalisation: A Militant Response to the Housing Question 103
A Tory–Liberal Plot: The Gravedigger of Municipal Housing? 107
Defensible Principles and (Policy) Design Disadvantagement 110
Keeping the Cooperative Spirit Alive: The Movement Migrates to
Knowsley 114

Part III The Neighbourhood Question

7 Locating the Neighbourhood Question 123
Liverpool’s Second Blitz 124
How to Make Water Flow Uphill 128
Can Collective Housing Save the City? 135
8 The Eldonians: From Parish Politics to Global Exemplar 140
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Militant Tactics, Boss Politics, Tribal Loyalties,

Friends in High Places 144
We Do It Better Together: Towards a
Self-Regenerating Community 147
Eldonia: An Independent Micro-State? 151

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Contents vii

9 Cooperative by Name If Not by Nature 158

Singing the Post-Development Blues:
On Revolutionaries Retiring 160
Third Sector Empire-Building 161
The Story So Far: How Self-Regenerating, Really? 167

Part IV The Urban Question

10 Grappling with the Urban Question 177
Weapons Wielded against Enclosure of the Commons 178
Grounding Capitalism in the Land Question 185
Housing Market Renewal, Neo-Haussmannisation
and the New Urban Enclosures 189
11 Growing Granby from the Grassroots: A (Plant) Potted History 201
Living through Hell: On the Violence of Managed Decline 208
Putting the T into CLT; Finishing the Work that SNAP Started 213
From Success to Failure: A Great British Property Scandal 228
12 Technocratic Experiment or Experimental Utopia? 232
Dereliction-by-Design and Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer 237
Homebaked: Brick by Brick, Loaf by Loaf, We Build Ourselves 242
Seeing Liverpool’s Housing History
through a Bifocal Verb–Noun Lens 251

Part V Conclusion
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

13 Reconstructing Public Housing (History) 263

In, Against and Beyond Public Housing 268
How to Answer the Housing, Neighbourhood
and Urban Questions? 275
Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House 285

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 viii Reconstructing Public Housing

14 On (Myth) Making History 289

From Heroic Event to Boring Bureaucratic Process 294
The Myth of Liverpool Exceptionalism 300
Recipes for Revolution: From Cultivating Local Delicacies
to Sourcing Essential Ingredients 303
15 Building a Bureaucracy from Below 311
Dormant, Not Defunct: Self-Funding the Next Co-Op Spring 313
Realising Municipal Dreams 318
Recoding the DNA of Collective Alternatives 323

Epilogue: Translating Between Inward, Upward and

Outward Languages 327
Artificial Hells, Social Practice and Artistic Spectacle:
Who (or What) Is All This For? 335
Bibliography 345
Index 363
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Figures

1 Dilapidated dwellings and neighbourhood abandonment in

Liverpool 8 in 2015. 38
2 “Utalitarian” community architecture of the Weller Street Co-op. 84
3 Typical Eldonian Village streetscape, overshadowed by the world’s
largest brick warehouse at Stanley Dock. 100
4 Subverting “target hardening” with artistic symbols of hope. 211
5 Granby Street Market relocated to Ducie Street during Cairns
Street renovation, 2015. 217
6 Dereliction by design: irreverent Scouse wit on display in Anfield. 240
All figures are photographs taken by the author.
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

ix

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Abbreviations
Abbreviations

CDP Community Development Project

CDS Co-operative Development Services (Liverpool agency)
CIC Community Interest Company
CLT Community Land Trust
CPO Compulsory Purchase Order
EGL Eldonian Group Ltd
HAG Housing Association Grant
HMR Housing Market Renewal
KTP Knowledge Transfer Partnership
LHT Liverpool Housing Trust
LIFE Lead–Influence–Follow–Exit (Council policy for Housing
Associations)
MHOS Mutual Home Ownership Society
MIH Merseyside Improved Houses
NDC New Deal for Communities
NWHS North West Housing Services (formerly CDS)
RIBA Royal Institute of British Architects
SNAP Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

URBED Urbanism Environment Design (planning consultancy)

URS Urban Regeneration Strategy (Council policy programme)
ZOO Zone of Opportunity

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the people of Liverpool, past
and present. It is a story about their history—albeit one strand in a colourful
tapestry—woven out of oral testimony and multiple personal reflections. A
large part of the narrative has been composed through conversations with
numerous insightful participants who each, in one way or another, helped
make history in Liverpool. They include Jane Corbett, Chris Davies, John
Earnshaw, Juliet Edgar, George Evans, Ed Gommon, Bill Halsall, Jackie
Harris, George Howarth, Richard Kemp, Eleanor Lee, Rob MacDonald,
Tony McGann, Erika Rushton, Max Steinberg, Bill Taylor and many others
who wish to remain anonymous. I am especially indebted to Paul Lusk, whose
first-hand account of the co-op movement helped frame my own, for guiding
me, step by step, through the potted history of cooperative development on
Merseyside. To Jack McBane, for his hospitality and enthusiasm for my project,
in many ways extending his own on the Eldonians, who he worked so closely
with to construct and materialise their vision. To Jonathan Brown (of Share
the City and SAVE Britain’s Heritage) who introduced me to Liverpool’s
urbanism and its controversial politics of housing regeneration through his
excellent tours. And also to (the late) Des McConaghy, former director of the
Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project (and the first person I interviewed for
my doctoral research upon which this book is broadly based) for his take on
the early period of experimentation in Granby.
I would especially like to thank Ronnie Hughes, Granby’s own unofficial
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

urban historian and photojournalist, who has been a brilliant help in

piecing together the history since SNAP. And Gemma Jerome, a Terrace 21
cooperator and Granby CLT collaborator, who first introduced me to the
neighbourhood and its emerging CLT campaign. Likewise, her Terrace 21
comrade, Marianne Heaslip, has generously imparted critical insights into both
Granby and Homebaked. To Ronnie, Gemma and Marianne, I am grateful for
the dialogue we have continued on and off over the years since we first met in
2013. More recently, the Homebaked collective have been a real inspiration
to me. I would like to thank them all for their warm welcome in bringing
me into the fold for an all too brief period in 2017 and 2018, when I served
as a participant-observer on the CLT board. Alongside Angela McKay, Sue
Humphreys, Ralph Bullivant, Peter Colby, Andrew Beattie, Sam Jones, Paul
xi

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 xii Reconstructing Public Housing

Kelly, Sally Anne-Watkiss and (the late) Cal Starr, Britt Jurgensen in particular
has been an amazing critical friend in helping me get the narrative right, as
someone so passionately committed to crafting and realising Homebaked’s
collective vision. In (re)constructing Liverpool’s hidden history of collective
housing alternatives, I have drawn upon, and been influenced by, the testimony
of all these participant-contributors. What follows, however, is not a direct,
unmediated representation of their views but wholly my own, distinct take
on events, one triangulated with multiple secondary sources and alternative
analyses and refracted through a theoretical lens that I feel illuminates this
history most clearly—a necessarily partial interpretation which, no doubt,
will be seen in a different light by others.
Writing this book has been a long, meandering journey that began back
in 2011 when I started my PhD at the University of Manchester. I am forever
grateful to Graham Haughton and Ste Hincks for showing me the way—in
equal measure encouraging and challenging in their tireless (and tirelessly
entertaining) supervision. I want to thank Graham for introducing me to
the work of Colin Ward (Graham’s own unique brand of radicalism is not
unlike Ward’s: modest, respectable, scholarly). And Ste (born and bred on
Merseyside) for persuading me to study the history of collective housing alter-
natives in Liverpool rather than in Manchester or London. Neil McInroy and
Alex Lord, too, my third and fourth supervisors, for bringing fresh perspec-
tives and making connections. Manchester’s PhD programme and cohort
within the geography, planning, international development and architecture
departments—and politics, too—was a hotbed of radical intellectual activity;
the extraordinary richness of which I have only come to appreciate since
moving on to pastures not quite so green. In reading groups and seminars—
often degenerating into long, ale-fuelled sessions at Sandbar—I made so many
friends and comrades whose energies have, each in their own way, fed into
the conception and writing of this book (not least Abby Gilbert, Ben Sessions,
Craig Thomas, Chris Foster, Dan Slade, Esther Meininghaus, Gareth Price-
Thomas, Gemma Sou, Jess Hope, Jon Las Heras, Nadim Mirshak, Natalie
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

Langford, Paul James, Phil Horn, Purnima Purohit, Rachel Alexander, Roisin
Read, Sally Cawood, Sam Hayes, Shamel Azmeh, Simon Chin-Yee, Soma
Laha, Tomas Maltby and, through association, Charlie Winstanley and Dale
Lately). The Urban Rights Reading Group organised by Melanie Lombard
was really constructive. Through working (and playing) with the OpenSpace
collective—Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, Lazaros Karaliotas, Ioanna
Tantanasi, Nadim Mirshak and Caglar Koksal—and organising a number of
critical urban studies events together, I was introduced to Andy Merrifield
and Japhy Wilson, whose work on Henri Lefebvre and the production of
space has been a major inspiration. Andy’s passion in articulating a Lefebvrean
perspective on the city, and on his home town of Liverpool, has been a guiding
light throughout. My interest in Marxist and critical urbanism was first piqued

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Acknowledgements xiii

whilst studying for a Masters in Urban Planning at UCL—particularly by

Michael Edwards’ enlivening teaching and a reading group on David Harvey’s
Limits to Capital convened by Louis Moreno. Whilst at UCL, my knowledge of
community land trusts, which were to become the main subject of my PhD,
was initiated through conversations with fellow students, Daniel Fitzpatrick
and Dan Durrant especially.
My understanding of CLTs has been honed over the years not only through
engaged research in Liverpool but also discussion at conferences and other
events with a number of practitioners and scholars, not least Tom Moore,
whose pioneering efforts at bringing together a network of CLT researchers
from the across the UK has been instrumental to the development of my
own research. Catherine Harrington and Tom Chance at the National CLT
Network, as well as action-researcher Tom Archer, have each helped me get to
grips with the complex policy landscape and technicalities of CLTs. Similarly,
David Rodgers (formerly CDS Cooperatives) was a fount of wisdom on co-ops;
Hugh Ellis (Town and Country Planning Association) on utopian planning
alternatives; and David Ireland (World Habitat) on self-help housing and
bringing empty homes back into use. I owe an intellectual debt to countless
scholars and theorists of capitalism, cooperativism, housing and the commons
who have helped me see many of the conceptual connections I make in what
follows—too many to list here but whose names can be gleaned from glancing
at the bibliography.
Many of the theoretical arguments I make in the book were first tested
out at various academic conferences through dialogue with comrades I met
along the way, not least Michele Vianello, Hamish Kallin and Jessie Brennan.
Conferences proving particularly formative include the 9th International
Social Innovation Research Conference in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017, the
7th International Conference of Critical Geography in Ramallah, Palestine,
in 2015 and the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP)
Young Academics Network conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2014.
Melissa García Lamarca and Philipp Horn were frequent fellow travellers
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

from Manchester to such conferences and astute critical friends in shaping

my arguments. At an AESOP PhD workshop in Belfast in 2013, Ben Davy
pushed me to develop my ideas further. Since first meeting her at the 2013
RGS-IBG conference in London, Antonia Layard has always been really
supportive. David Mullins was particularly encouraging when I first met
him at the Housing Studies Association Conference in York in 2012; I thank
David, and also Quintin Bradley, for such generous critical feedback as peer
reviewers of the first draft submitted to Liverpool University Press (LUP).
I am grateful to Alison Welsby, my editor at LUP, for her encouragement
and patience with continual deadline extension requests; and for backing
this book to be made open access online as part of a demonstration project
in open access academic publishing funded by the University of Liverpool

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 xiv Reconstructing Public Housing

Library. I can only hope the finished product lives up to these expectations
placed in it.
I would like to thank Alan Southern for all his support and sage advice
over an exciting, if rather unstable and precarious period marked by informal
short-term postdoctoral contracts during which he has been my mentor as well
as comrade. So too Pete North, who had the unenviable task of examining
my PhD thesis in 2015 and who has since provided great guidance, particu-
larly in our recent work together, with Alan and others such as Vicky Nowak
and Helen Heap, on researching and cultivating the social and solidarity
economy in Liverpool and beyond. The planning academics at Liverpool
University—particularly Alex Lord, Olivier Sykes, John Sturzaker and Bertie
Dockerill—invited me to give a number of guest lectures around 2016 and
then welcomed me as one of their own while I was writing up the book, or
trying to. I would also like to thank Len Gibbs for putting his faith in me,
inviting me onto the board of EPIC Housing Association (Empowering People,
Inspiring Communities) in Stoke-on-Trent in 2016. My few years there volun-
teering as a board member taught me a great deal about the practical and
policy challenges—and ethical dilemmas—facing community-based housing
associations in this difficult era of commercialisation and ratcheting austerity.
This book has been (almost) completely rewritten and reconstituted from
its embryonic form as my PhD thesis. I am grateful to my good friends Will
Wheeler and George Hoare for reading and reviewing in great depth the
new introductory and concluding parts which has certainly sharpened up my
analysis; and to Matt Ingleby for coming up with the title, amongst other
imaginative alternatives. I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for providing
the financial support enabling me to dedicate much of my time to writing and
editing during the first year of my early career fellowship. The majority of
the writing, however, took place while I was unemployed, between postdocs,
living back in my home town with my mum and dad, Chris and Brian, over
the summer of 2018—long, productive days bookended by beautiful bike rides
into the South Downs or runs on Bognor beach. Being unemployed has never
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

been so much fun; but it was only because of mum and dad that this was made
possible. I am grateful for all their love and support over the years. Finally,
none of this would ever have seen the light of day were it not for Abby—she
is an unstoppable force of ruthless critique and joyful inspiration. Doubtless
I could not have remained so energised about the radical potential residing in
the everyday life of collective housing activism were it not for Abby’s loving
spirit and unwavering faith in the actual as well as the possible.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Prologue
Prologue

In 2015, a long-neglected neighbourhood on the south side of inner-city

Liverpool, Granby, was thrust into the media spotlight when a small resident-
led experiment to bring empty homes back into community use, the Granby
Four Streets Community Land Trust, became the first ever architectural
or housing project in the Turner Prize’s controversy-punctuated history to
be nominated for and indeed win Britain’s coveted national art award. The
community land trust (CLT) and their architects Assemble were up against the
usual (dis)array of avant-garde nominees and were bemused to be shortlisted
by the judges for a prize that recognises cutting-edge interventions in the
visual and material arts—not so much architecture, and certainly not so-called
‘community architecture’ associated with vernacular housing (and for many
decades derided by the architecture establishment). What had regenerating
housing in a self-consciously amateur ‘do-it-together’ approach that decentred
the role of the architect and, by the same token, foregrounded residents as
the collective ‘artist’ got to do with art? Thus ensued a debate in the national
press about the function of art and the merits of an award that continually
sought to push the boundaries—beyond breaking point for many critics—of
the very concept it celebrates. Some commentators rolled their eyes; others
pointed to the way in which these four streets, saved from demolition by
their few remaining inhabitants (the majority having been forced out years
ago by urban decline and state-led demolition threats), had been turned into
a work of art through spontaneous acts of guerrilla gardening, street planting
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

and wall murals. Tricky questions were raised over the changing role of art
in society; over why the prize had been awarded to Assemble rather than the
residents who had been working hard to transform the streets for years before
the trendy architectural collective arrived on the scene from London; and why
it had been left to citizens and artists—however (re)defined—to regenerate
public space and renovate housing, much of it ex-council and now owned by
housing associations, more obviously the responsibility of the state.
When the news broke of Granby Four Streets’ Turner Prize victory, I was
fortunate enough to have been observing the project for a number of years as
part of my doctoral research. I was based nearby in Manchester at the time
and, in seeking to study alternative approaches to public housing and urban
regeneration, I had been seduced by Liverpool’s rich history of cooperative
xv

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 xvi Reconstructing Public Housing

housing as well as the city’s two CLT campaigns, Granby Four Streets and
Homebaked. Both projects were pioneering in their application of the CLT
model—originally developed out of the American Civil Rights movement
and imported to Britain in the 1990s to tackle rural affordability issues—to
an urban context suffering disinvestment and decline. They aimed to demon-
strate how housing and neighbourhood governance could be done differently,
more imaginatively and democratically, by drawing people together around a
common project of breathing life back into urban spaces long left to rot by
public authorities and private landlords alike.
My involvement with Granby was only ever very partial. I was an outsider
looking in—and there were many of us. Those community activists that I
met in the early days of my research were understandably reticent to give me
much of their time. They complained of ‘researcher fatigue’—referring to the
growing number of students, researchers and journalists who were each asking
for a little of their time. It soon adds up of course. Trying to find the extra
time and energy outside of their day jobs and family and personal lives to give
to the CLT campaign, let alone deal with research requests, was challenging to
say the least. I intended to make my approach as participatory and reciprocal
as I could; in return for access and information, I wanted to get involved and
offer up my skills in whatever way might be helpful. An opportunity arose to
do just that when Assemble asked me to write a short reflective piece on the
theoretical and historical background of the CLT model as a chapter in the
catalogue they were putting together to present to the Turner Prize judges at
the exhibition of the nominations in Glasgow.1 I was incredibly honoured to be
invited to play a part, however small; that was where my formal involvement
began and ended.
By 2016, having defended my dissertation, I moved to Liverpool and found
myself getting more involved with Homebaked as part of new research I was
undertaking on the city region’s social economy at the University of Liverpool.
I was invited onto the CLT board as a participant-observer and so I began
working closely with activists, residents and other board members on how
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

to turn their vision for a revitalised local high street of community-owned

enterprise and housing into a reality. Witnessing at first hand the travails of a
small community project to bring creative ideas to fruition, I was impressed
by the energy and commitment invested but so too exasperated by the barriers
imposed by policy and bureaucracy at various levels and the sheer complexity
of coordinating so many actors and interests towards a common goal. It was an
insight into a slow collective learning process—a steep curve no doubt scaled
by countless others before Homebaked and many others still to come. There
was a sense among activists that they were reinventing the wheel; that surely
all this had been done before and it was merely a matter of finding out how.

1 “What Exactly is a CLT?”, in Assemble, eds, Granby Workshop Catalogue 2015, pp. 56–59.

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 Prologue xvii

That was one impetus for writing this book. I wanted to show how similar
things had been done in the not too distant past, in the same city, often in the
very same street, by other collective housing movements that shared so much, if
not their name, with Liverpool’s budding community land trust movement. In
the 1970s, fuelled by tenant protests over poor conditions and the displacement
entailed by the council’s ‘slum clearance programme’, one of the largest and
most imaginative housing co-operative movements in Britain if not Europe was
born—Liverpool’s so-called ‘Co-op Spring’2 or ‘Co-operative Revolution’.3
With unprecedented levels of resident participation and democratic decision-
making in all aspects of housing, the new-build co-op movement was heralded
at the time as a possible—but ultimately unworkable—paradigm shift towards
Public Housing 2.0. Nonetheless, some 50 housing co-ops can still be found
across Merseyside to this day—a not insignificant sum for a British city. This
book aims to bring the historical development of Liverpool’s co-op movement
into conversation with the presently unfolding CLT campaigns through tracing
historical, geographical and conceptual connections.
In excavating Liverpool’s role in Britain’s ‘hidden history’4 of housing
co-ops, I found other important experiments that seem to have been largely
forgotten or else overlooked by activists and policymakers as well as scholars.
The co-ops came out of a time in which voluntary associations were beginning
to vie with municipal authorities in the provision of public housing and the
governance of neighbourhoods. Liverpool proved especially fertile ground to
grow housing associations and, as I dug deeper, it seemed to me that these
associations had grown out of a radical era of activism against council-led
demolition of inner-city ‘slums’ in the 1960s and 1970s—an era in which the
homelessness charity Shelter was founded and which experimented with an
innovative approach to rehabilitate rather than demolish run-down housing
in Granby called the Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project or, quite simply,
SNAP. In the policy switch SNAP initiated, Liverpool City Council supported
the growth of old and new housing associations, which took on municipal
stock precisely in order to rehabilitate it, helping develop the city’s burgeoning
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

co-operative movement. SNAP also saved from demolition the four streets
that would later become the site of Granby CLT. In the intervening years, as
society has been reshaped by the tightening grip of neoliberalism, these same
housing associations have become bureaucratic behemoths with large-scale
for-profit development arms and instrumental roles in the latest round of
clearance and redevelopment that has in turn provoked new waves of housing

2 José Ospina, Housing Ourselves (Hilary Shipman Ltd, 1987).

3 CDS, Building Democracy: Housing Cooperatives on Merseyside. Update ’94 (Cooperative
Development Services (Liverpool) Ltd, 1994).
4 Johnston Birchall, “The Hidden History of Co-operative Housing in Britain”, Department
of Government Working Papers 17 (1991).

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
 xviii Reconstructing Public Housing

activism, leading to the contemporary CLT movement, which includes several

failed campaigns as well as the two success stories. This book, then, is also
about how collective housing activism has influenced the direction of neigh-
bourhood renewal policy and demonstrated a more sensitive way of doing
urban regeneration as an alternative to the large-scale redevelopments that all
too often befall our cities.
In reconstructing Liverpool’s history of collective housing alternatives,
it became clear that the movements came in waves and that the force of
these waves was heightened by the swell created by the last. Historical waves
deposited resources for activists of the future to salvage from the beached
wreckage of past struggles and use afresh. Local cultural practices of cooper-
ation and community organising developed by the co-op movement provided
just such a depository of stored energy and practical wisdom for contemporary
CLT campaigns. Collective memory of cooperative campaigning implanted
in place the seeds that would eventually flower when the climatic conditions
were once again favourable. After a long dormancy, from the 1980s through
to the 2000s, collective housing was reactivated when Granby and Homebaked
CLTs were established in 2011—the year in which ‘the political’ erupted
back onto the world stage after decades of neoliberal inertia and techno-
cratic tinkering with redoubled force in global urban occupations; the year of
dreaming dangerously, as Slavoj Žižek has put it.5 The critical geographer Don
Mitchell goes so far as to position the embryonic Liverpool CLT movement
alongside the ‘movements of the squares’, as part of a radical tradition of
anti-capitalist struggle and experimentation that had its last pivotal moment
in the events around May 1968. “Homebaked Community Land Trust and
Co-operative Bakery Anfield”, writes Mitchell, “are just as thrilling as the
example of the neighbourhood park forums that developed across Turkey
after Taksim Square was cleared out. They show that urban space can be
collectively taken and collectively remade, that use can dominate exchange,
that our fate is not necessarily a fate written by the tendency towards abstract
space in capitalism”.6 Whilst Homebaked and Granby CLTs are clearly not so
Copyright © 2020. Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

dramatic or disruptive events as, say, Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring,
they nonetheless seem to reignite the political possibilities and creative trans-
formation latent in Liverpool’s own ‘Co-op Spring’, its housing cooperative
revolution in the 1970s. The co-op and CLT movements are each the product
of particular openings in the ideological fabric that wraps our world with a
veneer of stability and certainty, but which blinds us from seeing political
alternatives. These movements represent two such alternatives—what I call
collective housing alternatives—to the bipolar status quo, the public–private,

5 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Verso Books, 2012).

6 Don Mitchell, “Taking Space”, Stages: Liverpool Biennial #2, Homebaked: A Perfect
Recipe (2014).

Thompson, Matthew. Reconstructing Public Housing : Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives, Liverpool University
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