Dines Green

Location: Worcester
Lifespan: 1950s-

Estates A, B and C share a few things in common: built in the 60s and 70s, architecturally quite pioneering, consisting of a small handful of large, communal blocks and located in an urban environment. This picture of inner-city high rise is the sort of thing the word ‘estate’ tends to bring to mind, but not all estates share these features. Built in the late 1950s, Dines Green is made up of two-storey houses built literally on the edge of Worcester. The city’s administrative boundary runs right through the back gardens on Tudor Drive, which lead directly onto open countryside, reminiscent of estates such as Speke in Liverpool and Wythenshawe in Manchester – minus the airports. Given that ‘the edge of the city’ is a notion blurred by decades of piecemeal suburban development, Dines Green is one of the few places in the UK where it is possible to draw a definitive line between ‘city’ and ‘country’.

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