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An essay exploring the rise and fall of the notorious Hulme Crescents in south Manchester.

By 1965, Hulme, a notoriously poor and dense residential neighbourhood, identified for slum clearance in 1931, had been bulldozed and its residents moved out to new accommodation, with very little consultation and with very little idea of what was going to be put in its place. The architects, Wilson & Womersley, well versed in the ideas of Corbusier and admirers of the Unite d’Habitation, were keen to show how they could solve the problems of urban housing for northern England. The local authority, riding a political wave of centralised planning and state socialism, had the power, ambition and confidence to proceed with a radical proposal.

Hulme, just a mile and a half south from central Manchester was to be at the vanguard of Europe’s largest, prefabricated, modernist, urban housing experiment. The prevailing architectural, political, social, technical and economic ideas were about to come together in a perfect storm...