Remembering when Stonehouse families 'caused 'chaos' in North Prospect

'Saturday nights used to be total chaos'

Plymouth’s Lord Mayor Tina Tuohy has praised the £130m regeneration of North Prospect and said it is a far cry from when “feuding families from Stonehouse" caused Saturday night "chaos" on the estate. The 89-year-old is a city councillor for Ham and moved to North Prospect nearly half a century ago.

Cllr Tuohy has a wealth of knowledge about North Prospect from living and working in the area once notorious as Swilly, as well as through connections made via her North Prospect History Project and her career as an archaeologist.

She said the area was originally created to house returning “heroes” after the First World War - and to rehouse tenants after slum-clearance in Stonehouse and Devonport.

She said: “After people had seen the homes and moved over, they used to call it ‘paradise at 12 shillings a week’. She added: “I was told that in the 1920s and 1930s it was blissful; everyone moved in very happily and lived here for 12 shillings a week.”

But she said: “Things started going a bit difficult after the Second World War, when Plymouth was blitzed and people were desperate to be housed. People were housed in North Prospect, and they were all put there with no questioning about their backgrounds.

“The families that were feuding in Stonehouse for a number of years then found themselves living on the same street. I was told by one of the history group members that Saturday nights used to be total chaos.”

Cllr Tuohy moved to Plymouth in 1970, and got married and raised her family after getting a home in North Prospect in 1978. She became a mature student at University of Exeter in 1987 and gained a PhD in archaeology.

Cllr Tuohy was once a governor at the old North Prospect Primary School, and led the North Prospect History Project with Plymouth Community Homes (PCH). She has seen the area expand and change throughout the period of regeneration, which she describes as “a tale of two cities.”

This week, the city celebrated the official end of a £130m regeneration of the area. The 12-year rebuild was the largest regeneration scheme of its kind in the South West and saw the demolition of almost 800 decrepit homes and the construction of more than 1,100 high- quality, energy-efficient replacements.

Cllr Tuohy, who was rehoused into a new property in 2012, said: “My first home was built in 1932, which was roughly the same time as the school was built.

"It was one of the later ones to be built, but it was classic in terms of what the house was like in the area: a big, three-bedroom house with a big garden, but come the end, I must say it was hard work to maintain.

“In 2012 when we were moved, I never forget when we were being shown the new house, and my husband looked out of the back window onto the neat little patio and said ‘thank goodness I will never need to cut that grass again’. I think a lot of other people felt like that too.

“By the time all the housing stock was transferred from Plymouth City Council to PCH in 2009, I was heavily involved in community work, and was a resident representative in the early meetings that created PCH. I remember sitting around a table arguing about what the name was going to be, and helped to make the decision on the logo.

“Around the time of the transfer, my husband was away, and I was asked to become one of the first board members at PCH - but my husband had returned by then, so I had to say no as I didn’t have time to do it. I did offer to be a North Prospect representative as I knew they were going to be regenerating the area, and that’s how it started for me.

“I was only in the meetings for a short while as I became a councillor in autumn 2009, and in 2010 I was put on the planning committee. The meetings could be quite lively and there were many opinions about North Prospect; this is why I started the history project.

“I asked PCH if I could start a small museum of memories where people could come and share their pictures and ideas, and they gave me a house on Cookworthy Road to allow me to do this, which is where I started the history project. We did the house up, and we decorated it to make it as close as we could to a 1920s living room; we dug up the garden to get a vegetable plot and built an Anderson shelter out the back.

“The people of North Prospect loved it, it was a place where they could get together and just be. The museum was extremely successful, and it lasted until the houses were knocked down.

“At this time I was given another house at Laurell Road which was the last house to go on that street, but unfortunately the museum didn’t move well, and people were moving on from North Prospect. There were lots of people turning up out of curiosity rather than being part of the project.”

She recalled: “I was there when the Queen visited North Prospect Primary School in 1999. I was a school governor at the time; I met the Queen and I showed her around a few of the classrooms.

“There was an elderly councillor whose mother was at the opening of the school as a child and presented flowers to the Queen Mother. The councillor then presented the Queen with a photograph of her mother handing over the flowers to the Queen Mother, which was lovely.

“It’s wonderful to see that the homes that required change in the future have now been completely regenerated” she said. “This is why a newly regenerated community with nice wide-open spaces and better homes is far more suitable for modern times. North Prospect has become lived in again, and it is just so totally different.”

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