CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 17 URBAN HOUSING JOHN PERRY Saving DH Lawrence’s birthplace The restoration of the novelist’s birthplace in Eastwood and the rehabilitation of historic miners’ housing were achievements of 1960s and 1970s area improvement legislation. DH Lawrence’s relationship with the small, hilltop town he grew up in, Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, was always ambivalent. Its rural surroundings were ‘the country of my heart’ and featured in his novels. But the streets of miners’ cottages close to the town centre, where his family lived, were ‘sordid and hideous’, even though later generations might view them as worthy of preservation. He freely used Eastwood characters in his writing; to many locals, he was ‘that mucky man’ who had left the town and later, becoming famous, rubbished its reputation. One, allegedly the model for the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, threatened to ‘wring his neck’ if he ever came across him. In the early 1970s, when Eastwood was hardly more beguiling as a town than it had been in Lawrence’s day, the local council had begun to demolish the remaining miners’ terraces, known as ‘The Squares’ or ‘The Buildings’, slowly rehousing the retired colliers still living there. There was a snag: in one corner stood 8a Victoria Street, the house where Lawrence was born in 1885, which had been listed as a DH Lawrence’s birthplace, photographed in 2007 (Photo: PJ Marriott, Wikimedia) DH Lawrence in 1912
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