The Decline of Luke Street

Abstract

Crossley is part of Merseyside. It has its origin in the nine?teenth-century development and expansion of its docks and shipbuilding industries, and still depends to a large extent on these two activities for its livelihood. Broadly speaking, the town can be divided into three sections — the East End, the West End and the central business and shopping areas. In addition to this the post-war years have seen the development of new housing and industrial estates on the outskirts of Crossley. And beyond these new estates there now lies a sprawling middle-class residential area. The section of the town usually referred to as the West End is an area approximately one-and-one-eighth miles long (east to west) by five-eighths of a mile wide (north to south). It is partly industrial and partly residential. It contains a total of 2177 council dwellings built in the late 1920s and 1930s, which is almost 60 per cent of all the pre-war council housing in the town. Only a few council dwellings have been built in the area since 1946. The West End also contains a fairly large amount of privately-owned terraced houses built before the war.

One is forced, therefore, to the conclusion that the causes are almost entirely social in that over the years, these areas have been used to rehouse the town’s problem families, social misfits etc., and that the process … has progressively snowballed to the present state where the very names of the area are associated with all that is undesirable in modern society.

Abstract from confidential housing committee report on vacant corporation dwellings in North West section of the

West End of Crossley, July 1971