Note:  Around 1980 a  group of streets in Manchester were being pulled down. They were  named after the days of the week, the occupants rehoused in modern high rises. These were not  successful and have been superceded much more successfully by  town houses. This poem is written about their demolition.

Goodbye To Thursday Street.

Under the bulldozer the terraced streets rushed,

 A compost of decaying bricks and mortar,

 Wood-worm smattered on the ground,

 Suicide of an old home.

 

 Where once Aunt Alice with her tom-cat sat

And old men squatted on scrubbed door steps,

Watching the children play on the cobbles,

 Through pipe-smoke and cataracts,

 Hop-scotch and skipping.

 

Here blinkered horses drew milk-floats and rag’n’bone carts,

Dandelion and Burdock came in pots and

Coal-men, with strong black arms,

 Heaved  down sacks to the bunkers.

 

 There, half a room lay limp at the end of a block

The wallpaper damp and peeling,

 And a fire-place gaped

Vacantly into the abyss

 

Down they smoked and rumbled and pounded the earth,

 Then still they lay;

 No longer testimony

To a hundred spirits that lived there once.

 

Aunt Alice moved to a tower block,

On the second floor, might as well be the highest,

 As lifts like urinals, out of order, and

Arthritic knees would not bend at steps.

 

There were high rise flats on the cobble stones,

Isolated, depressed areas,

Incarcerating a dessicated community

That could not live in a concrete box.

 

 Hooligans on the rampage, cracks in the concrete,

 Graffiti scrawled walls and obsolete gardens,

Thursday Street went but Friday brought

A  graveyard for the architect.