So, it’s been 100 years since those first residents began moving into their new Mile Cross Homes and here in 2023’s take on Mile Cross, we’ve been celebrating the estate’s centenary in many ways. First up was the free theatre/show by the wonderfully on-point theatre company, The Common Lot; named “The Great Estate, 100 Years of Mile Cross”, then there’s the website, (that we still need your help with), The Humap 100 years of Mile Cross (take me there!). There’s also an up-and-coming publication that I’ll be involved with, all about 100 years of Mile Cross called “The Mile Cross Miscellany”, along with the reawakening of the Mile Cross Festival, and a Mile Cross House Lantern Parade, coming in September.

As for the showpiece of the centenary celebrations, The Great Estate, 100 Years of Mile Cross? It ran for two weeks and for ten shows, and the conservative estimates (based on just those who registered their postcodes, and there were many who didn’t do that) were that it was watched by at least 3,500 people. Which to add a bit of perspective was almost 2.5% of the population of the wider area of Norwich, an astounding amount of people when you consider the rather niche subject. I say ‘niche’ but a show highlighting the importance of council housing shouldn’t be niche, nor should it’s very valid point be contentious, especially when you remember that in 1979 over half of the population of England lived in council-owned accommodation.

Going forward, and for those of you that weren’t lucky enough to have seen one of these great shows, most of the sentences you see written in bold italics are actually lines from the show. It’ll make more sense as you read on.

First up, I felt both emotional and very proud to have been a big part of the show’s creation and (for once) I’m not too modest to boast that I was partly responsible for it being created in the first place. Myself and the show’s producer, Simon Floyd, had been talking about doing something for the estate’s centenary for years now and it tied up very neatly with Floyd’s desire to do a show that tackled the issue of housing. In fact, this whole project was being planned well before covid-19 rampaged across the planet, pressing the pause button on all of our lives as it did so. Sometimes (but not very often) fate can play favourably with such things, and this momentary pause on the world actually helped us out. The timing for the show now aligned perfectly with the centenary of the first wave of new houses being built here in Mile Cross, some 100 years prior.

After watching the show (9 times!) and contemplating the results, I thought that I’d better put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write something for this website, after all it’s been an absolute age since I’ve subjected you lot to any of my ramblings. Fear not, there’s not a lack of content, it’s just that I’ve been insanely busy with the Mile Cross 100 celebrations. In fact, there’s now more content than I can wave a pointy stick at, more than enough for me to get my teeth stuck into for the foreseeable future and I’ll be cracking on with that as soon as I can, but not until I finish a piece I started writing well over a year ago. Anyway, back to that show.

A brief summary of the show’s storyline:

It’s the early 1900’s and the majority of the city’s housing is now in a real state. Most of the residents are living within the city walls, crammed into the many tiny courts and yards, which were only made worse by the 1912 floods. Sometimes it never rains but it pours, and to make matters worse, just when the poorer residents of Norwich thought that they’d hit rock bottom, the first world war arrived at their doorsteps. Fate is rarely kind and most of the city’s working age men were firstly guilt-tripped, and then when that wasn’t enough, forced (conscripted) into signing up to fight for King and Country. Many of these men never returned home, and the ones that did were quietly traumatised and now mostly out of work. To top it off, the squalid homes most of them were returning to were now also three years older and hadn’t been improved in the meantime. Then the Spanish Flu hit.

When the dust of war finally settled and the survivors began to evaluate their situations, pressure began to build on the government (who are now rightfully wary of The Russian and German Revolutions – we’re holding back the Bolshevik tide here.) to finally address the issues that had been continuously swept under the rug for far too long, before the war hit, and they now had no other choice other than to pull their fingers out, to finally start building the homes they’d been promising for decades, homes fit for heroes. Only this phrase now came with a twist, the twist being that it was actually the heroes themselves that were employed to build their own homes, along with the bridge needed to connect Mile Cross to the City and in doing so, Mile Cross dragged Norwich and it’s terrible housing stock, kicking and screaming into the future, and The Great Estate (the first of many – including the city’s other fine housing estates) was born.

The show’s story loosely follows the journey of a family who lived in the yards, survived the war and then gained employment with the corporation to build Mile Cross. This family were then offered one of the new houses (on Drayton Road) and it tracks their roller-coaster of a journey through the decades and the generations up until now, where we end up right where we started, slap bang in the middle of yet another national housing crisis. Rather brilliantly, the story is told by the house itself.

Thinking about it again now that the show has passed, never to be watched again, it makes me realise what a beautiful thing it was that we created. I’ve mentioned already that it made feel very proud to be involved with the creation of this show, but the part played by me was mainly with the history behind the story and helping our team of researchers dig in to the story of Mile Cross, which was actually based around an actual Mile Cross House and loosely based around a family that has lived in it throughout the last century. The rest I can take no credit for; the music and direction and the performers, which were supplied by the wonderful duo of Charlie Caine and Simon Floyd, along with their massive and very passionate cast and dedicated crew. In fact, the more I think about it, the creation of this show also made me feel even more proud to be from Mile Cross than I already was, which is quite a feat; however, this time, with a cast of over 50 and about 4,000 people from Norwich in tow, it began to feel as if the people of Norwich finally had my back, well those with more than two brain cells to rub together at least. You could even say that as I tried my best to hide my pride, tears (one of the shows had me blubbing like a child), and various other emotions in between behind my big camera, it had even made me puff up like a pork pie.

The show went down a storm at every venue (some more challenging than others) and it was lovely to hear (and revel in) the applause of thousands, most of which coming from people learning about the cultural and historical importance of Mile Cross for the first time, and from many who already knew, particularly those of us from or connected to this great estate. It dawned on me at the Cow Tower show that hundreds of people were laughing, smiling, cheering and even crying about the story of a Mile Cross house and it’s impact on the history and future of Norwich. It was beautifully surreal. People in the crowd dancing and singing along to a song about Mile Cross Tower blocks? You’ve got it!

However, it was a bittersweet moment that had also left me feeling angry. Angry that we’ve somehow gone full circle, and we now find ourselves back at a point in time where we need that Mile Cross moment again, now more than ever and not just here in Norwich, but in Britain as a whole. Now, I try my hardest to keep the politics out of the pieces I write on this website as best I can, but I can no longer do this.

The country is suffering, reeling from thirteen plus years of unnecessary and brutal austerity, carried along by a foaming at the mouth, dangerously biased media press who are constantly telling us to point the finger of blame at everybody but them and the people who pay for them. Remember that the worst of the print media (and their feckless gobshite, journalists) are actually operating at a financial loss, but they know exactly what they’re doing, a rare moment where power and influence is worth far more than profits. How they’ve managed to continue to get away with this ruse is frankly unfathomable. They are probably as surprised as I am that they’re still somehow getting away with it, for now, but it helps to highlight how broken our society has become of late.

The local press have been just as guilty as anybody else here too, releasing an unrelenting stream of negative headlines and bad press across their headlines and their websites about Mile Cross, sometimes even reporting crimes from other parts of the City as Mile Cross. This point was rammed home to me and our team of researchers whilst conducting our research phase of the Mile Cross 100 project when the local rag ran a headline shouting: “Mile Cross Murderer!”. It was cheap and scandalous and it conveniently and purposefully left out the fact that the murderer actually lived in the Golden Triangle and had came into our neighbourhood to brutally murder a vulnerable Mile Cross resident. It was shameless journalism and it was if they were trying to help us write this show. Their shit attempt at journalism certainly put the flames of fire into our bellies, but I’m not sure that was their intention.

I’m just trying to figure out where Mile Cross got it’s reputation… Woodcock Road, that’s where… No. It comes from journalists. Like you.

As is usually the case when these low-points in history steam-roll their way across our landscapes, Mile Cross (and the other Corporation-built housing estates such as Laken… SHHH! We don’t mention those around here!) and her faithful residents are once again under the cosh. Trickle-down economics seem to defy gravity in places like this, and that is no accident.
The older I grow, the more political I become and try as I might it becomes unavoidable, especially if you’ve grown up in a place like Norwich (and especially if you grew up in Mile Cross during the 1980’s and 1990’s), but another reason I try my best to avoid the politics on this website is because it (politics) tends to make some people angry. Angry at each other, angry at themselves, or worse still, angry at you highlighting the truth and for jump-starting their cognitive dissonance.

No matter what your political colours are (or if you’re completely apolitical) we’ve come to the point where it has become time for us to stop the in-fighting. We have to stop punching to the right, stop punching to the left and more important than that, we really need to stop punching downwards. It’s time to stop all that nonsense, gather our collective will and to start looking up. We need to focus on the real enemy here, the ones hiding in plain site, purposefully and gleefully stirring the pot and to address real problems causing this ever-increasing behemoth of a housing crisis, and the horrendously divisive culture wars surrounding it.

We’re Chavs, we’re scum… we’re all the same, we’re all teenage mums and we’re benefits scroungers, we’re council house scum and we’re work-shy loungers…

It’s time for us to admit to ourselves that there’s not just an elephant in this room, but that this particular elephant has been gorging itself on the steroids and is now bulging out of the window frames, it’s also been brazenly taking the piss out of us as it feasts. The echoes with the past a century prior have become deafening to the point that simply popping our heads into the sand to drown out the unbearable and uncomfortable noises simply doesn’t work anymore. This hideous elephant can be ignored no longer. Like I touched upon earlier, we have come almost full circle. Almost. We’re currently stuck at five to midnight, stalled at the point where the populace of yesteryear began making the un-ignorable, angry noises right up until the point where lugholes full of sand could block out the noises no more, forcing the politicians to realise that they couldn’t/can’t get away with this con any longer, coercing political will back to the right place in which it needs to be, like it or not. Just like the increasingly-angry population of Norwich had started doing back in 1921, just before the city finally created thousands of much-needed houses for the thousands of humans living in squalid conditions right here in Norwich. In the centre of Norwich, one such protest witnessed over 1200 people confronting the distress committee and demanding change. Why are we not out on the streets like our ancestors? Oh yeah, that sort of thing is now illegal, but only recently. Politics, eh? How boring…

The councils across these lands need to be allowed, encouraged and helped in to building thousands upon thousands of new homes, and if they needed a catchy tag line, just like the one dreamt up over one hundred years ago, they can have this one on me: “Homes for humans“. The slum landlords that were kicked into the long grass by the creation of the great estates such as ours here at Mile Cross are back, and like the grotesquely mutated elephant in the room mentioned above, they’re now also fatter than ever. Just like the thousands of people crammed into those courts and yards of Norwich, people have become to believe that there is no hope, but just like a century ago, there was, and there is. Now I’m not having a pop at all landlords here, but there are more than enough bad eggs out there to tarnish the reputation of all, and I’m not just referring to private landlords here, look at what happened in Grenfell back in 2017.

Just like back then a century ago, the country is sick and broken, both financially and in will, loosely held together with fine strands of jingoistic nostalgia, and again, these echoes have come back to haunt us, only, just like our increasingly-unwelcome elephant in the room, they’ve been fed fat on the steroids and cheap, sugary food.

Houses used to mean health; they now mean wealth.

Whilst being duped into wasting our time and efforts punching downwards by the government and it’s rabid pet dog, ‘The Press’ (sycophantic and plainly corrupt client journalists) who for decades now have been encouraging us to keep blaming everybody worse off than ourselves for all of our troubles, whilst we have pockets picked so brazenly, we’ve somehow sleepwalked our way right into a national housing crisis, among other things. Remember dentist appointments? Remember scurvy, rickets, and malnourishment being something from the good old days? Remember when we had more McDonalds than foodbanks? Remember supermarket shelves being stocked with a variety of affordable foods? Remember being able to put your heating on when you were chilly? I could go on…

I mentioned earlier the price of rents getting silly, particularly here in Mile Cross, but this is only going to get worse. Private Rents are increasing because of spiralling interest rates and inflation, (the previous will not cancel out the latter here, as the economy is already broken) whilst the government refuses to raise housing benefit in line with it all, leaving those struggling to get by stranded. Private renters who have little or no rights (unlike council and housing association tenants) can – and will – be kicked out on a whim and replaced with somebody willing to pay the increased prices, all powered by a chronic lack of housing and the removal of the safety net. Not forgetting the countless people who will no longer be able to afford their spiralling mortgage costs, including many who use private rents to pay for their mortgages. As a consequence, homelessness will increase quickly (possibly ten-fold unless something is done). This isn’t just a housing crisis we’re dealing with here, we’re now teetering on the precipice of a housing catastrophe, and I’m not being glib when I say that. When that cliff finally crumbles and the majority of us all fall in, the people will have no other option other than to revolt.

The people of Norwich are revolting!

There’s a tedious new trend of certain people well on their way towards the end of their property ladder journeys, saying: “it was hard back in my day too, we also used to have high interest rates back in the good old days, people just need to work hard like I did”, but it’s an awfully short-sighted, unhelpful and somewhat selfish mindset, that doesn’t take into account the difference in loan to values and the percentage of wages needed to buy a house in today’s world, and let’s not forget the impossibly high deposits currently needed to get started in the first place. These crippling deposit requirements are nigh-on impossible for anybody struggling their way through life on an average wage (or higher), especially when coupled with the cost of living crisis. Some people are having to give away almost an entire month’s wage (full-time, minimum wage) just to rent an ex-authority home privately ( and that’s just Mile Cross prices). Before you get too annoyed with those facts, no, I’m not saying that it was easy back then either, but at least there was social housing for those that couldn’t afford, or had no need or desire to own their homes. The desire to own a home seems to be an oddly, UK specific thing. Now houses mean wealth.

Who remembers optimism? Who remembers ACTUAL affordable housing? Who remembers… ‘things can only get better’?

When I left home in the mid 1990’s, it took me just three months to be offered a three-bedroomed, city centre maisonette. Admittedly, it was in a hell of a state when I moved in, but what I hadn’t fully appreciated back then was how fucking lucky we were to be offered an affordable home and so quickly. My eldest is now at the same age as I was when I flew the nest and he hasn’t a hope in hell of getting anywhere, let alone a place in such a prime location with with so much space (and all for £36.21p per week). There’s hardly any available social housing left to pick up that slack these days, not that is what Social Housing was intended for in the first place (a common misconception).

Only time will tell what unfettered capitalism might bring…

There’s a line from the show where a young Mile Cross resident states: “There’s a letting agent advertising a house on Kirkpatrick Road for a grand a month, It’s daylight robbery“. I remember having a discussion with the show’s creator whilst writing this piece where it was initially going to be £800 a month, and I said, no it’ll be closer to a grand now. I still remember his surprise to this detail: “Really?”. Yup. And in a sick twist of fate, and on the final day of the the Great Estate show in Peterson Park, I found a house just around the corner from my own home being offered for to let, partially furnished for £1,100 a month. £1,100 a month! Let me say that again: £1,100 a month to rent something that cost less than £100 a week only a couple of years ago. It’s absolutely perverse. It’s also heart-breaking.

It seems that nothing can be done in the UK at the moment if there’s no way for somebody to be trimming a big slice of profit off the top of it all, and that is becoming a massive hindrance to everyday life. You can’t make a profit on everything, and profit cannot be the only driver for innovation. What good is profit if 99% of the nation is broke, and what happens to a populace when it has been milked until there is nothing left? It’s a one way ticket to the bottom and the brakes on this particular run-away train have burned away. It doesn’t have to be like this and we should not allow it be like this. Norwich has fought this problem in the past and come out on top, and we can do it again.

Is that it then? Is that the story of Mile Cross? That it were great and now it int?

The residents here in Mile Cross do have a voice and it’s now louder than ever. We need to start projecting it upwards and to shake that complacent dust off the rafters of power. Nobody understands better than we do what is to be at the bottom of the pile, looked down upon and judged, but we know better than most people in this city how important a sense of home and a sense of belonging, connected to our locality is. We are Mile Cross and now we need everybody else to drop their pointless charades and embrace our spirit and to also be ‘a bit more Mile Cross’, and we need to let the authorities, both local and regional, know that it is now time for Mile Cross again. Homes for people. After all, building people affordable family homes that they can be proud to call home would be far cheaper than a revolution.

Mile Cross changed after the 80’s, sure it did. Didn’t everywhere?

As I watched the reactions of the thousands who came to watch the show I could see the pennies dropping for people who were obviously not from Mile Cross and it was both beautiful and profound, but I was far from being on any kind of high horse and I wasn’t immune. I’ve also done a whole load of soul-searching whilst going through the process of creating this show and its changed my opinions on many things Mile Cross that I’m not going to go into here right now.

As for the haters and the hard-of thinking that had started to get right under my skin and made me stand up all those years ago and start shouting about all things Mile Cross; well, you mocked us, you looked down on us, you sneered and you laughed, and now you’ll soon become to realise that we and where we live are just what this city and country needed a century ago, and are just what this city needs right now. We all need a ‘Mile Cross’ again to save us from the looming housing catastrophe. I’m not shouting on my own any more and nor is Mile Cross as a whole. It’s time for you to start shouting with us, not at us, before it’s too late.

This is a stark warning to all, we urgently need to start building it now, brick by brick by brick, and not just here in Norwich, we now need hundreds of Mile Crosses all over this quirky little Island we call home, or we will all suffer the consequences. After all, building homes for people will be far cheaper than a revolution and you don’t want that awful fuss here.

Thankfully Norwich has a proud history of being at the forefront of building much-needed homes for people and we are still way out in front of most in doing so. Click me to read more about Norwich building homes. Despite all the obstacles in the past, the house building ball has started rolling once more here in Norwich, albeit slowly (such as the award-winning development at Goldsmith Street). No matter how slowly, that pace is increasing and in a beautiful stroke of perfectly poetic fate, we will be getting a ‘Mile Cross again’ moment right here on our doorstep at the former Norwich City Mile Cross depot site. This massive piece of land is currently being cleared and readied in anticipation of almost two hundred new council homes, exactly 100 years after those first Mile Cross Homes began to emerge from the Hellesdon countryside (we really are now half-way to Hellesdon). Another wonderful quirk of fate also means that these much-needed new homes will rise out of the very rubble of the slum clearances of the early 1900’s (that gave birth to the first ever Mile Cross) and the demolished, war-damaged homes of the 1940’s. All of that rubble was dumped here in the river valley to make it easier to build on in the future and will now be the platform on what will be the first of many new Mile Cross moments, both here and hopefully across the country.

I could go on and on about this subject and often do if you meet me in person, but it’s time that I wrapped this piece up. For now. Thanks for reading it, and a special thanks to those of you who came along to see the show, I really hope you enjoyed what we created. I know I did. If you told me five years ago that there’d be people, singing and dancing, celebrating Mile Cross at Civic Gardens, Peterson Park, Waterloo Park and under the shadow of Cow Tower, I would have probably asked for some of whatever you were taking that day! Whatever you do, don’t forget that Mile Cross truly is The Great Estate. Here’s to many more…

Stu.