Thursday, March 19, 2009

FUCKING UGLY BUILDINGS II


This is a detail from a house on Ings Road Estate in East Hull. My mum and auntie were brought up here, indeed my grandparents and uncle still live here, in the rubble of their vanishing estate, still reluctantly prospecting other places to live.. As a child, the houses here, built on the whim of social housing planners, always seemed pretty magical to me: half brick, half panelling, they seemed like exotic Swiss chalets from the perspective of a small girl who lived in a Victorian semi.

They're going... going.. gone now. The whole area used to be council estate, but the Barrett homes are encroaching, land values have had increased (Hull, with its ever-proliferating regeneration programmes was a latercomer to the property boom), and the developers have razed the estate to the ground bit-by-bit to build newer, probably even dafter-looking homes.

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