'No smackheads' and 5am lock-ins: My life as a Hulme Crescents landlady'
06.06.2023 - 19:54
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
A crumbling former pub building stands as a lonely relic of a lost estate, demolished just 20-years after it was built.
The Gamecock pub on the corner of Booth Street West and Boundary Lane in Hulme looks like many estate pubs. Its high slanted roof is perhaps the only feature that distinguishes it from the concrete conformity of other 1970s flat-roofed pubs of its ilk.
That and the fact that it's still standing, having never been repurposed. Its only function has been to serve the estate that came crashing down around it some 30-years ago.
The story of Hulme in the late 20th century is familiar to those with an interest in Manchester's social history. The late 1960s and early '70s saw the construction of concrete tower blocks to accommodate the displaced communities from the '60s slum clearances.
Some of the most notorious estates built in Manchester in the wake of the clearances were Hulme Crescents, built in 1971. The titanic U-shaped tower blocks, built to house over 13,000 people, were a key part of Manchester Corporation's brutalist solution to its housing crisis.
But monumental flaws in their design and construction saw the tower blocks abandoned just over a decade later. By the mid-to-late 80s, the authorities had virtually given up on the crumbling, desolate flats which had been taken over by squatters.
Living on the fringes of mainstream society, artists, punks, musicians, drop-outs and druggies made the crescents their home before a programme of demolition started in 1993. And as the communities left, so the estate pubs built to serve them began to shut.
Unlike many of Hulme's '70s estate pubs - The Mancunian, The Eagle and the Sir Henry Royce - The Gamecock hasn't become a victim of the bulldozer, not yet.