The villages that were told they had no future

By Joe Cannon

When Peter Laurence, now working for Focus on the North East, moved from Oxfordshire to Waterhouses in 2006 he kept noticing wide paths through the woods between the village and Esh Winning. There were kerb stones on either side of the tracks, and an isolated lamp-post at one corner. And in the undergrowth, there were the ruins of walls that later turned out to be the remains of a school.

He was walking through two-thirds of Waterhouses. Parts of the village had been demolished during the 1970s, and the County Council planted trees on its remains. Nothing was ever built in its place. Peter began to grasp the full impact of what had happened after speaking to local residents: after coming to Durham University the policy went on to become the subject of his Archaeology dissertation. Waterhouses had been one of many villages in County Durham that had the moniker of ‘Category D’ imposed on them.

Waterhouses had been one of many villages in County Durham that had the moniker of ‘Category D’ imposed on them

In 1951, following the economic devastation of the Second World War, Durham County Council published a development plan sorting the county’s settlements into four grades. Categories A through C allotted enough financial investment to allow them to grow on one end and to survive on the other. Category D meant no further investment. As existing housing stock in Category D settlements was used up, the people in them would be rehoused elsewhere and the village would be allowed to vanish. By 1964 this policy turned to active demolition, with around 141 settlements – in population, a tenth of the county, admitted County Council chief planner Richard Atkinson in a contemporary interview with Thames TV.

On paper it was not malicious. Coal, the primary industry for many of the D villages, was already understood to be unsustainable for the ftuure by the 1950s. Housing had been constructed around industrial centres in a slapdash manner: as long as the residents had a roof and an outhouse it was permissible. Durham County Council was operating on the understanding that it was clearing slums, and many people were moved into better houses than they left.

Many D villages were built entirely around a colliery or an ironworks, where locals had worked in much the same way as their ancestors

But the imposition of Category D in this way was, however, not something the residents of the county had asked for. Many D villages were built entirely around a colliery or an ironworks, where locals had worked in much the same way as their ancestors, and effectively reliant on them. “When the council knocked on and said that everything you have known for the last three generations is going to no longer exist,” says Morgan Davies, a member of staff at the University, whose family came from several of the villages, “you can understand the response.”

His mother’s parents grew up in Langley Moor, two miles from the centre of Durham. They were newlyweds in the mid-1960s when they were told their terrace would be coming down. They went from there to Ushaw Moor, also Category D, and ended in Brandon. His father’s parents went from Easington to South Hetton, both D, and then to Spennymoor, a B village at the time.

Before Category D Langley Moor had five churches, a cinema and “umpteen pubs and inns”. Houses ran the length of what is now the A690. Opposite the small Tesco there is a stretch of grass where terraces once stood.

The plan reads coldly about all of it. After all, the writers did not expect their plans to be read by the people they were about. The settlements around Langley Moor were to be reduced to a “broad straggle” of houses along the A690, because the Council planners had deemed the local housing stock as “inconvenient living systems” that could handicap future developments. Of Langley Moor itself it anticipated that most of the slums would be cleared before 1981, terraces elsewhere were to be absorbed by larger “urban units”, and almost all of nearby Brandon Colliery was expected to come down.

In practice most of the D villages survived – only three were demolished, such as Marsden, later the subject of a documentary featuring the poet Simon Armitage. In others housing stock was removed and not replaced, leaving strange scars of grass in settlements across the county. Residents organised in groups like CROVAC to protest against the policy, and the Council quietly abandoned the policy in 1977. But the county generally did not get the twenty-six years of investment that the policy posited. Littleburn colliery had already closed in 1950, putting three villages’ worth of men out of work before the policy even began. Davies’ grandfather was fortunate enough to be employed at Bear Park until 1985. Most were not, and what followed was the run of closures that ended with the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85 and left pit villages without pits.

It’s easy to see then why, if you ask people in these places why things are as they are, almost nobody blames Category D. They point to Margaret Thatcher, the North-South divide and the pit closures. They point out that for a long period the North East was the most deprived region in the country, and when the pits closed nothing replaced what went. There is still resentment under the surface. Davies’ grandfather will not discuss Thatcher because of how much anguish remains in the county about the closures.

The policy has been folded into a larger story about what happened to the North East, surviving mainly as a distinct memory among the older generations who were alive when it happened

The policy has been folded into a larger story about what happened to the North East, surviving mainly as a distinct memory among the older generations who were alive when it happened. Cultural material produced since, like documentaries and stage plays, have done little to bring it back into view. It is not taught in schools in the county where it happened, neither at GCSE or A-Level. Davies, who has been researching the policy with a view to writing a book, believes the council has had little interest in talking about it. “Unless you sit down and read the plan yourself,” he says, there is very little way into finding out more.

The university, sitting in the middle of all this but often culturally apart, has done no better. Davies works there, and found only a handful of colleagues who could say what a D village was. Laurence encountered the same thing: a few mature students knew, younger ones from elsewhere in the country had no idea, and the subject got a lecture and a field trip. He is blunt about why. “Because they are young and not from Durham,” he says, adding that this applies to most of the staff as well.

This paper is no exception. Palatinate existed for every year the policy ran, and for many of those years it was overwhelmingly dominated by sport before phasing into political coverage. Despite this, there are only two passing references to Category D: in 1964, as part of a broader piece on the developing world. In March 1969, at the height of national coverage, the paper gave a full page spread to County Durham and mentioned Category D once among a list of the county’s problems. The same period found room for a large feature on the then-ongoing renovations of Ramside Hall.

Langley Moor is a twenty-minute walk from the colleges. Many students rent houses there and live side-by-side with local residents who remember what urban planners tried to do seventy-five years ago. The grass opposite the supermarket is only grass, but it has very nearly outlasted both the memory of the policy and the council that wrote it.

Image: Peter Laurence – kerb stones at Waterhouses