Newport/Cannon Street area

It always amazes me seeing the tiny two up two down houses that were built in and around vast industries. There's loads of them in the ex-mining towns and villages and places shown on the film on this thread.

I suspect the people making decision in the large companies of those days wouldn't have lived in a tiny house packed together with other tiny houses. It was OK for the workers though.
 
Nero said:
It always amazes me seeing the tiny two up two down houses that were built in and around vast industries. There's loads of them in the ex-mining towns and villages and places shown on the film on this thread.

I suspect the people making decision in the large companies of those days wouldn't have lived in a tiny house packed together with other tiny houses. It was OK for the workers though.
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The ones in Middlesbrough that survived to the late 1960s tended to better quality ones with ther own backyard and own outside WC, opposed to the back to back courts of workers houses. Middlesbrough's housing boomed in the 1860s, some industrial towns and cities developed earlier and had poorer housing e.g. Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool.

Living near your work was useful when there were no affordable cars, no public transport outside normal working hours. A lot of people in iron and steel worked shifts and it was useful to have to work less than a mile to work. I know in South Bank there was no trolley buses till 1919, people could not afford cars till 1950s. My grandad wanted to move his family from South Bank for health reasons to say Marske or Saltburn (and could afford to), but in the 1940s there were few cars to buy and little or no petrol. It was a long distance to bike for a middle aged guy with his own health problems to Cargo Fleet. Sometimes he had to work all weekend about 70 hours continuosly in the works and my aunty as a 10 year old would bring him cooked meals from home into the Works. In the early 1950s some council houses were built in Normanby and they could move as the trolley bus ran that route. For the first time they could live easily more than 1 mile from Cargo Fleet. The social houses built then were not "rubbish". The house had a purpose built bathroom, but also outbuildings with outside WC, Coalhouse, Workshop. Front and back. garden.
 
I spent a day searching the rubble and wrecked house's pictured in 1972/3 ish searching for a cast iron bed bracket for my mam ( we lived on the longlands) Just me and my mate aged 13 scambling around broken glass and empty streets for hours.
It's a memory that's stuck with me all these years. It was like a bomb site. Oh, and yes we found one, no B&Q then.
 
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