Abstract

On the 27th of March 1965, the actress Pat Phoenix (a.k.a. ‘Elsie Tanner’ from ITV’s Coronation Street) came to the newly completed Middlefield Lane Estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, to formally open the first unit on a new block of shops called ‘The Precinct’. Thirty-five years after it was opened however, The Precinct was demolished, apparently because of a ‘long history of low demand, serious vandalism and unlettability’ [sic]. How did a celebrated and vibrant communal amenity end up as a case of what appears to be ‘planned neglect’? By combining aspects of architectural, social, and reminiscence history, this paper will initially consider The Precinct as an interesting example of mid-sixties provincial architectural modernism, and then in terms of the rich history of its shops and their different social and cultural functions within the life of the estate during the 60s and 70s. It will be argued that The Precinct was a model of the optimism and cultural multiplicity of those decades, and its demise a product of what Patrick Wright has described as ‘a wider dereliction in the relation between history and the present’.