Daily Blog 12/24/2012
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Fort Ardwick – Coverdale Crescent Flats
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Manchester Council embarked on the huge task of demolishing thousands of slum dwellings and replacing them with modern homes with the kind of facilities that suited the modern age. Residents of areas like Longsight, Beswick and Hulme were anxious to leave their decaying terraced houses with outside toilets and no bathrooms and exchange them for new council houses or flats. One solution to the rehousing of huge numbers of people was to create new housing estates on the fringes of the city. Within the city the solution often required accommodating large numbers of people on very small sites and as quickly as possible. One answer was tower blocks built of modular concrete systems. In Beswick and Ardwick complexes of “deck access” homes were erected using the Bison Wall Frame system. In Ardwick the estate was located on Coverdale Crescent close to Hyde Road. It was completed in 1972 and provided 500 homes for people displaced by the slum clearance program.