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NOT QUITE SHANGRI-LA

In the summer of 1938, a woman from the housing department visited our flat in Marine Terrace Mews to find out if we were suitable tenants for a council house in Whitehawk.

Her report must have been favourable and my mother was delighted by the prospect of a house with a garden. Her recurring, but never to be realised dream, had always been a cottage in the country with hollyhocks and wallflowers and surrounded by fields of cows and sheep, but in the Mews she had to be satisfied with window boxes.

"It's right on the edge of the Downs" she declared joyfully, which sounded idyllic, but the reality was somewhat different.

Just over the garden fence was a smallholding which was periodically manured with rotting fish and a little further still in Sheepcote Valley, was the municipal dump. She liked to call the smallholding a 'farm' and often provided the hard-working girls with cups of tea and was sometimes rewarded with a cabbage lobbed over the fence.

Number ten Marine Terrace Mews certainly wasn't a slum, but I suppose our move was part of the big migration from the less salubrious parts of Brighton to the new council estates of Moulsecoomb, Whitehawk and Manor Farm. Between 1920 and 1939 there was a vast - and long overdue clearance - from the Carlton Hill district where living conditions were certainly as bad as any slum in London or the North.

These dwellings had been Jerry-built at the beginning of the 19th century, with little or no regard to fresh water, sewage disposal and essential living space. Such is the perversity or unpredictability of human nature, however, that many slum dwellers resented or resisted the move to the new estates. A community spirit had evolved in their wretchedness in which they could complain about conditions and experience a togetherness which suffering confers and this was lost when they were transferred to Whitehawk or Moulsecoomb.

There were certain conditions to be met in housing slum dwellers in the new estates. "Dirty" families, or otherwise undesirable because of bug infestation, families consisting of a woman with or without children who is "apparently leading an immoral life", families which would be over- crowded even in a council house, couples or single persons for whom it would be uneconomical to provide a larger house and families already owing the Corporation Ł20 or more in rent, were excluded.

What happened to them is not clear, for it is highly improbably that they were left where they were. Perhaps, as today, there were bedsits and other sub-standard units for these unfortunates.

That council houses were a vast improvement on the wretched tenements of the Carlton Hill district is beyond question. A bathroom to some would have been an undreamed of luxury and a backgarden - paradise.

But there were drawbacks. Whitehawk, for example, had only four shops: a chemist, butcher, greengrocer and newsagent/confectioner, while the Carlton Hill district and others like it in a more central position of Brighton, were served by corner shops, pubs, fish and chip shops and the main shopping areas were only a walk away.

The bus service to Whitehawk was adequate, but not exactly frequent and to shop in St James's Street required a bus from the top of the estate, or you took a tram - later a trolley bus - from the top of Elm Grove to London Road.

In some Whitehawk houses you heated a copper for bath water; in ours you pulled out the damper on the kitchen stove and let the fire roar up the chimney. Even this last method was not entirely efficient and we usually used the scullery copper.

The position of the bathroom and lavatory was badly planned. It would have been better to house the loo in a backyard extension - as in Victorian working-class dwellings - adjoining the kitchen is hardly hygienic. When internal alterations were made in the 70s, the lavatory was, in fact, shifted upstairs.

We did feel marginalised at Whitehawk. The estate was sited in a valley beyond the town proper, as though the City Fathers had successfully dealt with a social problem, felt smugly satisfied with their success and could now wash their hands of it.

This is probably quite unfair, but I for one always felt a second-class citizen. I remember a remark of a boy in my class, when he heard of my move to Whitehawk: "Cor - that's worse than Moulsecoomb" he exclaimed.

When I was interviewed for the post of office boy at Griffith, Smith, Wade and Riley and the senior partner, Smith, asked exactly where Wiston Road was, I never revealed it was on the Whitehawk estate. I think I said 'East Brighton.'

"Oh - near Bristol Gate, you mean?" asked Smith, which I thought was near enough.

My most embarrassing moment came when I invited another King Alfred cadet home to tea. When we reached the other end of the tunnel under the racecourse, there lay the estate below us. "What a warren!" exclaimed my friend, not of course realising that my home was in that warren. My mortification was acute, as no doubt was his, when we reached Wiston Road and he realised I was an occupant of that warren.

When I had obtained my commission and had reached Arundel Road on the number three bus, the conductor politely informed me that I ought to change here for another bus, taking me to Roedean which was then commandeered by the Royal Navy. I can't remember in what frame of mind I told him that I did, in fact, live in Whitehawk.

I never included the name of the estate on my letter-headings, preferring instead Brighton 7. Was all this pure snobbery, incurable inferiority complex, or merely a natural desire for betterment?

by Maurice Packham