Hulme was the largest public housing development in Europe, encompassing 3,284 deck-access homes and capacity for over 13,000 people,[1] but was marred by serious construction and design errors.

The Crescents were described by the Architects' Journal as "Europe's worst housing stock... hideous system-built deck-access block which gave Hulme its unsavoury reputation.

"[2] The Hulme Crescents had implications for new housing in Manchester and signalled the end of the streets in the sky idea popular throughout the 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom.

The Crescents were designed by Hugh Wilson and J. L. Womersley – the latter was in charge of the delivery of Park Hill flats in Sheffield in the 1960s and the much-maligned Manchester Arndale retail development in the 1970s.

[5] Similar to the Park Hill model, the estate was to contain shops, churches and public amenities to ensure that the population could exist free from traffic.

By the use of similar shapes and proportions, large-scale building groups and open spaces, and, above all, by skilful landscaping and extensive tree planning, it is our endeavour to achieve at Hulme a solution to the problems of twentieth-century living which would be the equivalent in quality that reached the requirements of eighteenth-century Bloomsbury and Bath.

"[2] Two years after opening, Manchester City Council deemed The Crescents unsuitable for families and the housing scheme became adult-only.

Police did not patrol the upper decks despite the intention of streets in the sky and quick responses to incidents was often complicated by the scale of the estate, which totalled over a quarter of a mile of passageways.

[9] The Guardian described the development as "a morass in which design faults and tenants' revulsion at their environment have combined to produce a staggering number of maintenance demands and angry howls of neglect".

By 1984, the Crescents had become so undesired by prospective residents that Manchester City Council, which lacked sufficient funds to demolish the housing scheme, stopped charging rents entirely from tenants.

[11] In the book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), Owen Hatherley said that the sense of dereliction made The Crescents a breeding ground for creativity.

the complexity of the blocks, the noise and sense of height, the lack of a feeling of 'ownership' in the communal areas" turned out to be "perfect" for a different sort of tenant, Manchester's young bohemians, who relished the estate's air of decaying modernism.

By the early 80s, it had an art house cinema, club nights run by the soon-to-be-famous Factory Records, and even a "Hulme look" of intense youths in baggy second-hand suits.

[12] Burglaries in the estate were so frequent that resident Mick Hucknall of Simply Red slept with an axe by his bed; film critic Mark Kermode was burgled so often he had a security door fitted—it was taken off its hinges and stolen.

[14] Hulme was subsequently redeveloped at a cost of £400 million with input from residents, most of whom advocated a return to traditional forms of terraced and semi-detached housing.

Nevertheless, some former residents formed a housing co-operative, Homes for Change, whose new building purposely replicated the Hulme estate medium-rise construction and communal walkways, known as 'the decks'.