Poverty in Europe in the 60s-70s. There was nothing like this in the USSR – Newsland

On moderation Deferred

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In the 60s and 70s, British photographer Nick Hedges spent three years traveling around England and Scotland documenting the lives of families living in terrible, catastrophic poverty. These pictures were first presented to the world at an exhibition called “Make Life Worth Living” and had the effect of a bomb exploding. It is very difficult to believe that millions of Englishmen, citizens of one of the most developed and powerful countries in the world, lived in such terrible, inhuman conditions just 40 years ago. And looking at some of these pictures without shuddering seems simply impossible! Until recently, they were banned from public viewing. It turns out that such bans existed in the West as well. This is how the working class lived en masse, below all poverty lines. Not all of it, of course, but most of it. In the late 60s, about 3 million people lived in such inhuman conditions, a huge number for England.

I want to emphasize that the families shown in the photo below are not alcoholics, not drunkards, not declassed migrants, but families of ordinary English people from the working class, living in large cities of England (families are sometimes mixed). Many had neither gas nor heating, they could not even afford to put glass in the windows.

Birmingham. There is no bathroom or hot water in the flat. Children sleep covered with old coats and fight for a place on the mattress so as not to end up on the springs at night. Incidentally, central heating in Britain and bathrooms/showers in houses and flats only began to appear in the 70s. Before that, the housing stock was simply not adapted to such “delicacies”. Up until the 70s, people often washed only once a week, and daily hygiene was limited to wiping the body with a damp sponge. Even if there was a bathroom in the house, washing every day was quite an expensive pleasure. Only in the 60s did the mass construction of cheap municipal housing begin, the quality of such houses is even worse than the Khrushchev-era buildings, but compared to the slums, it was a breakthrough for the working class and the influx of migrants, which began around this time.

1956. A child sleeps in a Liverpool slum. 88,000 of these homes were considered uninhabitable.1957. Used shoe vendors on the streets of Liverpool.Liverpool, 1969

What’s most interesting is that the photos lay in archives all this time, it was forbidden to publish them, the authorities allegedly cited the violation of the privacy of those captured in the photo. Well, yes, of course, the people who lived with rats would be very upset about the violation of their privacy.

London, East End, 1969Birmingham, 1970Manchester. 1971Liverpool, 1969. Three generations of a family live in one rented basement room.Manchester, 60sSheffield, 1969. A woman and her five children live in a house without electricity, gas, hot water or amenities. She cooked her meals in a fireplace.Birmingham, 1969Glasgow, 1970.

The family lives in a leaky room, with puddles of rainwater in the room. Hordes of rats, 16 were counted onceBirmingham, 1969Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands In 1936, a family with eleven children was thrown out of their home because of its dilapidated condition. They found shelter in an old barn with a leaky roof.France. Paris.Glasgow, 1971. View of apartment buildings inside courtyards.Glasgow, 1970. A child in a damp flat in a semi-derelict block of flatsBradford, 1970Liverpool, 1969. Mother and daughter in their basement apartment.Liverpool, 1969. Basement kitchen in a block of flats.Newcastle, 1971. A family in the slum where she lives.Newcastle, 1972. The housewife in the kitchen.Manchester, 1970. Children play in a wrecked car on the street.London, 1972. A makeshift kitchen on the stairs of a house in Brixton.

France, suburbs of Paris:

After World War II, France needed to be built up and populated, and the country desperately needed workers. Much of the working class had been wiped out during the war. So the government decided to encourage large-scale immigration of Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and North Africans, who provided cheap labor for the construction and automobile industries. This influx of immigrants added to the local population that had no housing due to the destruction of the war and the total poverty. The only solution was to house all these people in barracks near the big cities. The slums grew and consisted of large areas of barracks made of planks, without water, with narrow streets that turned into mud after the rain.

Classic: John Lennon in McCartney’s kitchen: