Dampwalls & Cockroaches
The Student In 1970's Liverpool
.jpg "Entwhistle Heights in 1979")
Steve Milsom was amongst the first cohort of students undertaking a four year BSc Applied Biology at the former Liverpool Polytechnic when it formed in 1970. Steve describes the earthy side to student life nearly 40 years ago and a life without the benefit of university-run student halls.
My first accommodation as a student away North Somerset cost £2.50 (or two pounds ten shillings) a week. This entitled me to a half share of a room in a Victorian house in Tuebrook ‘furnished’ on the landing with a few greasy pans, a single electric hob and a concrete sink as our ‘cooking facilities’. By the second term, I had decided an independent life was not for me and I moved into lodgings in upmarket Childwall. This move had the distinct advantage of a daily breakfast and an evening meal, although I still shudder at the delights of the ‘nutritious stews’ myself and fellow biology student Philip had to endure, comprising the bony ‘scrag ends’ of whatever poor herbivore had been left behind at the butcher’s shop that day!
I remember feeling regret that I was not attending a campus-based university and did not have the support and comradeship that halls of residence might have provided. The former Polytechnic had been established from an agglomeration of buildings throughout central Liverpool but lacked student accommodation. A noticeable contrast to the accomodation provided currently for first year LJMU students in seventeen locations spanning three Liverpool areas. How much different might student life have been for me in that environment?
After my first degree I undertook my PhD at the Polytechnic, funded generously on a four year research grant by NERC. I either lived in rooms or in shared houses with fellow biological sciences students and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I remember the large shared flat above a butcher’s shop in Anfield which afforded cheap meat; the house off Smithdown Road where ten of us from ‘Applied Biology’ lived in harmony, playing football in the lounge and drinking into the small hours in Sefton Park cemetery; and a dodgy Toxteth tenement where a devoted mother and daughter in their 80’s and 60’s plied their evening trade….
By the mid 1970’s I was well established in a PhD and my accommodation in Liverpool got more exotic. Personal favourites included flats above a car salesroom in central Liverpool, which hosted outrageous fancy dress parties and a flat on the edge of Toxteth next to the magnificent neo-gothic Anglican Cathedral, where we watched the final ‘topping out’ ceremony and the completion of seventy five years building work.
And lastly, my final home in Liverpool before taking up my current employment in Swindon – the ‘magnificent’ Entwistle Heights (pictured and now sadly demolished), a twenty one storey council block of heavily cockroach infected flats just beyond the university campus off Crown Street. My one bedroom flat was on the fourteenth floor and faced the River Mersey. It was so peaceful. Seagulls glided past on updrafts two or three floors below me. On very foggy days the top of the fog bank finished below my windows and in the distance I could see the St John’s Tower and the two cathedrals thrusting up into the blue sky, apparently unsupported by the structures beneath them.
I soon learned to stamp hard on the floor on entering the flat, so the multitudes of cockroaches would go and hide although it was embarrassing in the lecture theatre when the occasional creature would crawl out of my briefcase!
Finally to the conclusion of my nine year episode in Liverpool. Did I really lose out during my student education by not having supportive first year accommodation? Hindsight after all these years would suggest not; it helped me to grow up rather quickly. The 1970 cohort of BSc Applied Biology students numbered just forty-eight people and we were a close group. The long periods of industrial placements distributed us widely around the UK, but in groups we usually negotiated flat or house shares on our returns to Liverpool, and I am still in touch with several former student friends after all these years.
Finally, having reviewed this article I realise that I must have been very food-fixated as a student, but I guess that is a universal consequence of student life!
Steve Milsom BSc (CNAA) PhD (CNNA)
Liverpool Polytechnic 1970 – 1979
Do you have any thoughts on accommodation during your time in Liverpool? Share your memories with us at feedback@ljmu.ac.uk
