FACTORY WORKERS CAME TO BRIGG FROM AS FAR AFIELD AS SCOTLAND

 

More than 80 years divide these Brigg pictures of Woodbine Avenue (left) and Central Square (right) with some properties on East Parade and West Square also visible in the distance. We took the 'Now' view a few days ago from the same vantage point.
Initial properties on Woodbine Avenue were constructed for Brigg Urban District Council circa 1924 by a local company.
Forward-looking Brigg UDC decided to build them, with government support, to help meet a severe shortage of family housing in the town following the First World War.
This demand intensified after Brigg Sugar Factory's construction in the late 1920s when many people from as far afield as Scotland moved to Brigg to take up employment processing and refining farmers' beet.
Some of them occupied properties on Central Square and nearby. We can recall one worker who was still there in the early 1970s after retiring from the factory.
Soon dubbed 'council houses' these substantial properties were rented to tenants at a time when very few Brigg people could afford the outlay required to purchase their own properties. Mortgages were not as easy to obtain back then, particularly so for weekly-paid members of the so-called working class.
Brigg UDC took pride in providing what is now known as social housing, and we think the 1930s picture seen above may once have featured in a promotional booklet about the town.
Other brick-built council houses were built in the 1920s and 1930s on Mill Lane, Hawthorn Avenue and then the Newlands estate.
Post-war came the extensive Springbank development on the northern edge of the town - most properties being built in the 1950s, but with others added during the following decade and into the early 1970s.
Bungalows - aimed at senior residents - were also built on Preston Drive and Barnard Avenue, together with a few on Kingsway (Newlands).
Following the abolition of the UDC in 1974, Glanford Borough Council took over management and upkeep of its housing stock across the town, as well as those built in villages by Brigg Rural District Council.
This function passed to North Lincolnshire Council when it was formed in 1996, and later to 'social landlords' North Lincolnshire Homes and Ongo.
The national Right to Buy scheme, famously championed in the 1980s by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, saw many Brigg council house tenants purchasing properties they had rented for many years. Our family home on Central Square (not pictured here) was among them.
Brigg-born Dame Joan Plowright (Lady Olivier), the famous award-winning actress, lived on the square as a child before moving to Scunthorpe in the 1930s  - her father, Ernest, being a newspaper editor.
Another Central Square resident, John Rhodes, attended Brigg Grammar School in the 1940s and went on to benefit from an Oxbridge education - one of the first Brigg 'council house boys' to do so.

Decades later he wrote about his early life in the town in an interesting book called Yeller-Belly Years.
We recall seeing a picture of him playing cricket as a boy on a grass verge outside the family home on Central Square.
Having praised the UDC for its house-building, we need to mention something it failed to get right - the naming convention, which still causes difficulties for delivery drivers and visitors today as they try to locate various addresses.
Central Square faces Woodbine Avenue properties (on one side), East Parade homes (on two sides) and also a pair of semis on West Square.
With hindsight, things would have been much clearer if the homes on all four sides of Central Square, those on East Parade and the two facing properties on West Square (visible in our pictures) had all been allocated to Woodbine Avenue - odd and even numbers facing each other.
For 90 years, however, there has been 8 Central Square, 8 Woodbine Avenue, 8 East Parade and 8 West Square in close proximity.
That's just an example of one number being duplicated; there are many others in this part of the town.

Bringing things up to date, recent national press reports suggest the Government is considering a new version of the Right to Buy aimed at people who rent properties from social landlords.