At Home with May Dowd

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

At Home with May Dowd (Central News)

Media Archive for Central England
Nechells
1983-04-22
Sound

Upgraded maisonettes in Birmingham finally make the 'happy homes' that were promised by the planners of the 1950s.

For May Dowd, her happy home was a renovated council maisonette at Nechells in Birmingham. The urban planners of the 1950s had rushed to rehouse people in tower blocks, which were soon found to have even more problems than the rows of terraces that they replaced. The block featured here, Offenham House, was no different, but with a newly fitted kitchen, double glazing and central heating the old problems of damp and noise were a thing of the past.

Tony Maycock went inside for Central News to see these improvements for himself. The bright future promised by the post-war planners is preserved in this video snapshot of 1983, with the hope that Mrs. Dowd was equally happily rehoused when the block was demolished the following decade...

Tony Maycock visits May Dowd who has moved into a newly renovated flat at Nechells in Birmingham.

Happy at Home: Living in the Midlands

A peek behind the front doors of the spaces we call 'Home'.

Famous Midlander Samuel Johnson wrote in 1750: ""To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution." Housing in the Midlands in the 1980s was in a state of flux. The tower blocks of the 1960s and 1970s were in disrepair and would start to come down by the end of the decade. The Housing Act 1980 gave council tenants the 'Right to Buy' their houses from local authorities. By 1990, 1.5 million council houses had been sold, and more people than ever owned their own homes - aspiration was in the air. This collection invites you into the living rooms of the 1980s home, to be a guest in a series of distinctive spaces, from simple prefab to luxury villa. The people you'll meet have one thing in common: their homes are places where they can be at ease and be themselves - be happy.

16 videos in this collection