Housing in the 1960s

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In the 1960s, the majority of houses in Caldmore were rented from private landlords. Most properties were built during the mid to late nineteenth century.

Ordnance Survey Map of 1887 - please click for a larger version

They were terraced but not identical, as various architects and builders had taken on small developments along the same street. A typical development would be of 3 to 8 properties with a shared yard

Witness

Mr B. recalls moving to Victor Street as a child in 1944,
‘Each of the developments in Victor Street were built in blocks of four and all by different people at different times… I would say 90% were rented; those that weren’t were the larger properties in the street… We had three shops in the street of general stores that were built in between the terraced houses’.

 

Small terraced shops, with the family living behind and over the shop, were interspersed between houses. Public houses, clubs and industries were on street corners. In the 1960s homes, industry and retail were not yet separate and many men and women lived near their place of work.

Most houses fronted directly onto the pavement with two rooms downstairs, a ‘best’ room at the front, and a living room and sometimes a small kitchen or scullery. Some properties had a ‘wash-house’ or ‘brew-house’ in the yard.

Witness

Mrs B. grew up in Lort’s Buildings in Spout Lane from the 1930s to the 1950s where some washhouses were shared,

 

‘There were 11 houses built in an ‘L’-shape, some of them had their own sculleries but 6 of the houses had to share washhouses which were across the yard, they shared 4 wash-houses … they had brown Belfast sinks in for the cold water tap and a boiler with a fireplace underneath, to do the weekly wash’.

 

Many houses, including 29 Victor Street, still did not have an inside toilet or a bathroom. Some families had made a covered area between the toilet and the scullery but for others a visit to the toilet involved a walk through the yard to the bottom of the garden.

Houses either side of the ‘entry’ (passage way between houses) tended to be larger upstairs as the front or back bedroom extended over the passage.

Building Plan for Oxford Street, 1886 - please click for a larger version

The houses were heated with open fires or grates in the ‘best’ room and living room. A fire would not be lit upstairs unless someone was unwell.

Cold water was from the tap in the kitchen or scullery. Water for washing was heated in a boiler in the scullery or in a back boiler in the fireplace. Clothes were dried on a clothes-horse in front of the fire or on the line in the yard. For families without a bathroom the tin bath was stored in the yard and then put in front of the living room fire on bath night. Hot water was valuable and several family members would bathe in succession using the same water. Families without a tin bath had a stand-up wash at the kitchen sink.

Despite the housing deprivations, post-war Caldmore was a community with a village atmosphere that centred around Caldmore Green. The area was so well supplied with shops that residents did not need to go into Walsall centre.

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