From tin baths to maisonettes, how the town entered a new era

With new housing estates being built on the outskirts of our city it is a reminder of the housing boom that began to take shape seventy years ago when the great slum clearance programme got underway

- writes Keith Johnson.

During the post war period Preston, like many a town in Lancashire, embarked on a slum clearance programme that had the effect of making areas look like they had been bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. It did mean the sweeping away of endless rows of terraced houses on cobbled streets like Higford Street, off New Hall Lane, where I was brought up. Homes that had flagged floors, coal fires and outside toilets. Where a tin bath was brought out when it was bath time and the private landlord came on pay day for the few shillings rent that was due. Inevitably, the bulldozers demolished those properties and places, leaving cherished memories lingering on.

The Government originally introduced a Slum Clearance Act in 1930 but it had little impact in Preston, although in 1934 in the Marsh Lane district over 60 dwellings were considered unfit for habitation and demolished and in Kirkham Street, off Fylde Road, where tall UCLan buildings now stand, 16 houses and 11 cellar dwellings, the former homes of handloom weavers, were knocked down with the residents mainly rehoused in the Inkerman Street area.