Interview: Ken

Ken and his wife, Sheila, were one of the first couples to move into the West Point housing estate in Allesley Village. In this interview, Ken remembers his reaction to the new style of homes in West Point, and his experience of moving into a new house on the estate with his wife – an environment that embodied this young couple’s idea of a bright new future.

Interviewer: Sheila’s [Your wife’s] Mum and Dad were living in Allesley and you were not. What was your impression of Allesley then?

Respondent: It was lovely, it was far more upmarket. I’d lived in Stoke Heath, I was still living in Stoke Heath which was fortunate because there was lots of open space but it was a working class area.

Interviewer: What kind of house did your parents have?

Respondent: It was a mid terraced Council house, pleasant enough, happy enough, didn’t know any better really.

Interviewer: How did Allesley feel in comparison?

Respondent: As I said to you previously, we had an outside loo and when I went to Sheila’s house after a while, to go into their bathroom was unbelievable luxury, it really was and I thought this girl’s got a few bob. I knew her Dad was a buyer at Alvis and they had two cars which was quite something in those days. The village itself was quaint, it felt comfortable and later when we saw West Point, we thought how modern and it was certainly different to other estates in Coventry at that time.

Interviewer: Could you say a bit about that difference?

Respondent: Yes, it felt cleaner, fresher, more attractive. It certainly was a star as far as I could see on the property being offered in the area in those days. Allesley Park was very ordinary I thought and I thought one day I’d love to live there. When we moved in there, we saw the estate was more or less finished when we moved in but we walked through it every day to go to my wife’s Mum and Dad’s to get as much free food and drink as we could because her Dad always had whisky, which I liked. We always liked the south side of Coventry, we’ve never lived anywhere else. Our three properties have been West Point, a place just off Eastern Green and now on Woodridge. So we’ve always liked this area and it was always convenient for Birmingham airport and before I had a car, always the Midland road into Birmingham where a lot of the functions I attended were held.

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Interviewer: You describe seeing West Point from its inception. Can you remember when it was fields, the whole of the estate?

Respondent: Yes, just about. When we moved in, there was no bypass. The Birmingham road was a very busy road and that was our back garden, the fields at the back of the estate because we would sit and read and maybe take a drink down there. I think that lasted for three or four years before the bypass was built, 1964/5.

Interviewer: Can you remember hearing anybody in the village talk negatively about the arrival of the new estate and the imposition of such a big area of housing on what had been quite a small village?

Respondent: I think the Council houses must’ve been there before that. I don’t think I heard …

Interviewer: So Sheila’s Mum and Dad never went, “Oh, a new housing estate”?

Respondent: No, they’d moved into this new house on Browns Lane anyway so they’d hardly be in a position to criticise. I don’t think that worried them at all.

Interviewer: When you viewed the show house of the Austin Smith Lord award winning bungalows, did you go specifically to view the show house or were you just on a promenade through the estate?

Respondent: We’d seen them being built and obviously we were inquisitive so we did make a point of going to see that because there was a lot of publicity about the way forward and this is the future. I can’t remember if there were other show houses or not. They were open certainly, the four ultra modern houses. There was a show home there and it did excite us but we realised it was pie in the sky at that time.

Interviewer: Can you still remember turning the corner off the main High Street and encountering those four houses?

Respondent: As I say, not so much just those four but the whole area, the whole estate looked so bright and modern and forward looking, I thought this is the future, this is lovely.

Interviewer: And when you went into the open plan bungalow, what was your first impression, can you remember?

Respondent: Space, light and how lovely it would be to live there but it was a dream. There was never any realistic ambition to own one at that stage, I couldn’t see us being ever able to afford that.

Interviewer: Can you say anything else about why it felt like a dream?

Respondent: After Coventry in the Forties and Fifties which was fairly dowdy, I don’t think it had ever been a very grand city. There were pockets of very pleasant areas, ie the Kenilworth Road and Earlsdon but it just felt like a shaft of light really. We were going somewhere because prospects looked good and they were going to build a new road and our ambition was to live in a nice home, have a car and a nice garden. Difficult to pin it really because it’s so long ago.

Interviewer: Do you think the estate somehow then embodied you and Sheila’s idea of this bright new future?

Respondent: Yes, I think so, definitely. I’d not seen anything like it before, it was original, especially in Coventry. It did stand out like a beacon really, the whole estate because it was open plan which I don’t think anywhere else had been open plan. There were no hedges, no fences and it was bright and colourful, ideal place to live.

Interviewer: The show house, when you walked into it you described that it felt very spacious and light, was there anything else about its layout that struck you as being different to the kind of house you’d been used to living in or that other people you knew lived in?

Respondent: Oh yes, it had gone away from the front room idea. The open plan did attract us to a point, although now we’ve gone full circle and it’s no longer an open plan although we’re fairly bright and airy where we are now. It hadn’t been done before. I’d seen a few pictures in magazines of California or places like that and the Bauhaus thing in Germany and I thought we’re catching up and maybe this is the future. With hindsight, when we had children, I would’ve thought probably it did have its faults because of privacy. That would be my one criticism, especially when you’re newly married, you have other activities and if you’ve got two or three children … I think privacy was the only thing I could perhaps criticise.

Interviewer: Did you have any thoughts at the time about the kitchen being in the middle of the house?

Respondent: No, I thought the whole layout was lovely. At that time, we weren’t thinking of a family so we really couldn’t give a constructive criticism. We just thought it would be a nice place to live.

Interviewer: I remember you saying you loved the furniture that was in the show house.

Respondent: Yes, it was bright. We’d been brought up with fairly dowdy furnishings that had probably been nearly always dark brown. It was light, it was colourful and the lines of the furniture we liked. When we did move into a maisonette within our budget we tried to buy furniture that carried on that theme.

Interviewer: Where did you go to buy that furniture?

Respondent: I’m not sure if we got it from Rackhams or Heals, Sheila would remember better than me. We didn’t buy it locally. Whether we’d seen it when we’d been to London on a trip because you could go on the train for 19/- which was less than a pound for a day trip in those days so we often went up to London. I know we went to Heals on the Tottenham Court Road because that was really the centre of modern design, as far as we knew anyway. Whether we bought from Heals or Rackhams, Sheila would remember that, I can’t remember.

Interviewer: Can you remember after you saw the show house whether you talked to anybody else about it and what you said?

Respondent: We said to all our friends, lovely house but we’d never be able to afford that. Go and have a look at it by all means and I think a lot of them did go and have a view of it. None of our friends moved there because they were probably in similar circumstances to us so they would have budgets.

Interviewer: Did viewing the house change the way you thought about what a house could be?

Respondent: Oh yes. We were used to a front room, back room, kitchen and bedrooms which were really just places to sleep, not as a way of life. Instead of existing, it would become more of an experience rather than just going through the front door, making a cup of tea and going to bed. It was a place worth coming back to certainly.

Interviewer: Did you find afterwards that the houses you lived in could fulfil that same expectation that a house would be not just something to exist in but an experience?

Respondent: Yes, we always wanted it to have what we wanted it to have and I remember when we moved to a house, I’d travelled quite a bit and there were always showers in hotels. Nobody had a shower so whilst it was being built, we had a big airing cupboard which I told the builder to change into a shower cubicle. And I think we were probably one of the first, certainly of our group, that had a shower.

Interviewer: What date was that?

Respondent: We moved there in 1968. It was because I’d travelled and every hotel had a shower cubicle which was so convenient and so lovely.

Interviewer: When it came to buying your second house and that’s when you had enough money to actually buy a house this time, what did you then look for?

Respondent: We looked for a family home because a maisonette was never going to be a family home. We had a car, we wanted a driveway, we wanted a garden we could enjoy and we wanted three bedrooms and we wanted to keep to the south side of Coventry which we did.

Interviewer: Was the idea of it being new still important to you?

Respondent: Yes it was. Again, I didn’t have time to DIY so we never looked at second-hand houses as far as I can recall.

Interviewer: Did it ever occur to you that you could’ve commissioned an architect to design something specially for you?

Respondent: I thought that might’ve been out of our reach, it probably was still out of our reach.

Interviewer: But did you think of it?

Respondent: No. There was never anyone in the background. My Mum and Dad would not have had any idea of that world. Sheila’s Mum and Dad did live in a slightly different world, in fact quite an affluent world really. But I don’t think they would’ve even thought of that.

Interviewer: Can you remember when you viewed the show house, were other people viewing the show house and were other people on the estate viewing the estate at the same time you came to look at it?

Respondent: Oh yes, and the general consensus was exciting and what a lovely place to live.

Interviewer: Can you remember when you were in the Austin Smith Lord bungalow show house hearing anybody say negative things and what they might’ve been?

Respondent: No, I think we were excited to look at it ourselves. We weren’t interested in other people’s views.

Interviewer: You then went on to live in a maisonette that was designed by McLeans. Can you remember McLeans as a company issuing things like magazines to you as the home owner because you were the first home owner, weren’t you?

Respondent: We were the first owner. No, you showed us the magazine. I don’t recall ever seeing any publicity and I don’t really recall any follow up from the builder, which certainly when we moved to this house and to the old house, we did have a six months maintenance call, 12 months maintenance call. No, we had no contact as far as I can recall.

Interviewer: Being one of the first people to live on the estate, we might call you the pioneers, did you feel that sense of being pioneers?

Respondent: No, I think we felt fortunate that we lived in such a nice, exciting place to live which was convenient for work, for play. Not pioneers, no.

Interviewer: You talked about that sense of excitement. What was that excitement about?

Respondent: It was new, it was fresh, it was bright, it was colourful and from what we’d been used to, sweeping away the old and this is perhaps a criticism that’s levelled now at Coventry especially, after the War people wanted a new fresh start. They were open to new ideas and they wanted clean comfortable lives.

Interviewer: Because all of the estate was being populated at the same time with a lot of people buying their first properties, how much of a community with other people was there?

Respondent: We didn’t, to be honest, because we both worked. I worked six days a week and my wife worked five and most of our time was spent with our existing friends and relatives. So we did not really take part in anything in Allesley.

Interviewer: Were you aware that there was activity on West Point estate, that people were forming new relationships?

Respondent: No. We said hello but no.

Interviewer: What kind of professions were the people from who were living on the estate?

Respondent: I know most of the people had cars. I felt it was probably middle class, people with good jobs.

Interviewer: For me really, at that time for you what would middle class professions have been?

Respondent: They certainly would be doctors, lawyers, estate agents. I never thought of engineers which I should’ve done really as middle class. But the white collar, it was certainly a differential in those days with blue collar and white collar.

Interviewer: Did you think West Point very consciously was presenting itself for white collar workers?

Respondent: White collar, I would say, yes.

Interviewer: Did that turn out to be true, the perception of it being white collar, was it your experience that it actually was white collar?

Respondent: I don’t really know because except for the immediate neighbours, we never got to know anyone. But people certainly appeared to be well dressed, they appeared to have nice cars but some of them must’ve worked in factories I would think.

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