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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
National
Rebecca Koncienzcy

'Notorious' Birkenhead tower blocks confined to history

A block of flats was torn down when the planned "utopia" in the sky became a hub of violence and antisocial behaviour.

Oak and Eldon Gardens stood on Price Street in Birkenhead, Wirral and were built in 1958 as a prestigious development but soon turned into a "high-rise nightmare".

In September 1979, 21 years after their construction, it took just seconds to bring them down in a demolition blast watched by crowds of Wirral residents.

READ MORE: Council set for £27m of cuts to plug budget gap

A comment piece in the Liverpool ECHO in 1985 said: "It took seconds to bring them down, but it will take decades to recover from the consequences of the housing policy they represented.

"Oak and Eldon Gardens were the planners' idea of utopia. But they became a mammoth social problem of which the vandalism and graffiti were just the visible signs.

"They proved that there is a huge chasm between what looks right on the drawing board and what works out in practice.

"Ten-storeys high and built on stilts with internal corridors and flat roofs, Oak and Eldon embodied a great deal of what has been wrong with post-war housing design."

That is not to say everyone was behind the decision to rip the flats down.

In 1975, Labour and Liberal councillors looked to try and save the homes of more than 1,000 people from demolition, citing how thousands in Wirral were still living in substandard housing in the shadow of the high rises and even suggested it could be used for students of the then-Liverpool Polytechnic.

Did you live in the flats? Email your memories to rebecca.koncienzcy@reachplc.com

At the time, Wirral Council had already begun rehoming families from the buildings after it was plagued by fires and the death of a small child who fell from a top storey flat.

The then Tory council leader Malcolm Thornton called the blocks a "cancer" and after a report said it would cost £4m to refurbish the flats, the council opted for the cheaper option - £1m to level them.

But residents who spoke to the ECHO in the 1970s said they didn't want to move.

One woman, aged 32 at the time, said she was offered a house in Woodchurch but didn't want to move as her children went to school in the town centre.

With a string of confidential reports into the crime-ridden tower blocks by council chiefs and Birkenhead police boss at the time Chief Superintendent Robert Hughes, time in Oak and Eldon Gardens was running out.

And on September 30, 1979, they came crashing down into piles of rubble and dust.

Their removal was heralded as a "rejuvenation of central Birkenhead" by Wirral Council's deputy director of housing, John Agass, in 1983 who called the former block of flats a "blight".

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