Post-war steel estate

Kelsthorpe

The next town out

Kelsthorpe is the next town out, and the first thing you notice is the houses. They are BISF houses, the steel-framed semis that went up after the war when the country needed homes in a hurry: rendered ground floors, the upper storey clad in sheeting, timber slats on some of them, and on some of the roofs the asbestos tiles that everybody has been meaning to do something about.

There are four roads, named by somebody with a sweet tooth and a long memory: Bisto Road, Brylcreem Close, Ovaltine Crescent and Spangles Close. They meet at proper T-junctions, the closes end in turning heads, and the estate opens onto the main road through wide bellmouths.

Forty-nine buildings make a hundred homes, and every one of them is a house you can walk into: front door, hall and stairs, every inside door on its hinges, and the furniture of whoever lives there. The front gardens have privet and low brick walls, the back ones have close-board fences stepping down the slope, and every house has a green bin and a brown one out front.

The cladding comes in cream, grey, blue, sage and white, the front doors in white, grey, green, black, navy and red, and nearly every house has its own outside store on the end. Most are family homes, a good few are let out room by room, and the rest stand furnished between tenants, waiting for somebody to move in.

A hundred and one street lamps light the place at night. Thirty telegraph poles carry a wire to every house, and the wires move when the wind gets up. The greens have two benches each and a litter bin, and the trees are old enough to have watched the houses go up.

Not all hundred are lived in. At 6 Ovaltine Crescent, 61 Bisto Road and 13 Brylcreem Close the windows are behind steel screens, the glass is broken, the rooms are thick with dust and the yards have gone over to weeds and rubbish.

It is quieter than Radworth and further from everything, which, depending on who you ask, is either the point or the problem.

If you came looking for a British council estate game, Kelsthorpe is drawn from a real estate of these houses, built from the original plan drawings right down to the slats. We are not saying which one.

• 100 walk-in homes
• 4 roads
• 101 street lamps
• Built after the war