Poplar Town Hall: ‘a worthy workshop for the worker’s welfare’

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1930s, Poplar

If you walk along the Bow Road in London’s East End, maybe towards the new Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, you’ll come across a building that, even in its present neglected state, looks as if it has a story to tell – a story of a different age and values and a time of collective aspiration.  This is the new Poplar Town Hall, officially opened in December 1938.

Poplar holds a hallowed place in Labour folklore as the venue of the Great Rates Revolt of 1921 when the Labour council refused to levy a cross-London precept on the rates in protest at the unfair burden that fell upon poor city boroughs.  Thirty councillors – including the sainted George Lansbury and six women – went to prison. But ‘Poplarism’ won the day.

That story should be read elsewhere but, whilst this was the high point of Poplar’s radicalism, the council retained its cutting edge for some years to come.  That cutting edge is best seen concretely in the new Town Hall, described by its architect, a long-standing Labour member of the London County Council, George Culpin, as ‘the first town hall in this country to be erected in the modern style.’

Poplar Town Hall, 1938

Today, the building is listed but beleaguered – its functions lost and not replaced when Poplar Metropolitan Borough Council was swallowed up by the new Tower Hamlets authority in 1965.  But it retains its power to impress and a lingering echo of the ideals which inspired it.

Poplar Town Hall (c) Reading Tom used under the Creative Commons licence. The sculptural panels shown below can be seen above the main entrance on the corner. The attic storey is a poor later addition.

The building was funded by a loan from the Ministry of Health and London County Council (LCC) – on the grounds that a consolidation of services would aid efficiency –  at a time of deep and long-lasting economic recession when contemporary sensibilities precluded any show of extravagance.  But if such was the necessity, it was necessity made virtue by Poplar’s Labour councillors.

Countering criticisms of the new Town Hall’s austere design, Alderman Key responded:

[If] the building were in reality a super factory transferred from Slough or the Great West Road … what of it? In so far as a factory was a place where worthily by the work of man’s head and hands the desires of his heart could be made living and fruitful that was what they wanted … this should have been a veritable palace of the people had not Poplar been so poor, but here it is, a worthy workshop for the worker’s welfare.

An unconscious echo perhaps of Herbert Morrison’s remark of the same era in which he proclaimed the LCC a ‘machine [which] works with precision, good sense and humanity.’  Labour councils could not rest on their compassion but had also to convince a still sceptical electorate of their competence and professionalism. Municipal dreams were grounded in harsh realities and Labour’s exercise of power had to marry principle with practical politics.

The building was constructed along clean Art Deco lines with minimal embellishment.  As the programme of the opening ceremony states that ‘it was the particular wish of the Council that the building’ be a place ‘where business could be efficiently and economically conducted.’

Yet more prosaically, it added that ‘in view of the smoke-laden atmosphere, dirt-collecting ornament has been avoided.’

But the sweeping lines of the construction and the use made of its awkward corner site remain striking and care was taken to provide decorative features and interior fittings which were modern, functional and true to the Council’s mission.

In the Civic Suite, ‘the Council Chamber, the heart of the Borough’ received ‘very special attention’ with its ‘flat floor with movable seating, walls flush panelled with Birdseye Maple, long, dignified windows and window curtains designed with sailing ships appropriate to Poplar.’ The Chamber was demolished in the 1990s.

Council Chamber

A mural in the Mayor’s Parlour (a room now altered beyond recognition with the mural supposedly placed in storage) represented the principal buildings of the borough.

Mayor’s Parlour with mural

The Municipal Offices, where civic grandeur was not required, were notable for their ‘lightness and a straightforwardness of planning…Simplicity has been the keynote.’

The Town Hall’s other principal element was an Assembly Hall with accommodation for 1,200.  ‘Meetings, musical and dramatic performances, dances and future “talkies” [were] all provided for,’ states the programme – a reminder of how broadly it was intended that the building serve local people.  This was demolished in the 1990s.

Concert Hall

Externally, the outstanding features are the main entrance mosaic celebrating the borough’s docklands industry and five bas-relief panels, both the work of David Evans.

Poplar Town Hall mosaic (c) Diamond Geezer

The panels depicted some of the tradesmen – apparently drawn from life in the first instance – engaged in the construction of the building: a carpenter, an engineer, a welder and two builders, all with the tools of their trade.  The steel girders in the background reflect again the modernist ethos of the overall design.

Any socialist realist echoes here were not accidental.  As Alderman Key stated:

I believe that the future welfare of the common people is bound up with the development of a social conscience which will see not only in the work of high and mighty but in the labours of road menders and sweepers, social builders and engineers, miners and sailors.

That is an aspiration which, for all the revolutionary social changes which have occurred since the bleak, class-ridden and poverty-struck days of the thirties, remains unfulfilled.  George Lansbury, who performed the official opening of the new building, would have been disappointed.

The Town Hall, in its lingering glory and in its sad decline, remains a monument to those hopes

Sources:

Metropolitan Borough of Poplar, Programme of the Ceremony of Opening the New Town Hall;  British Listed Buildings, Former Poplar Town Hall (Bow House); Jeremy Haslam, Poplar Town Hall sculptures.  My thanks to Diamond Geezer (and his excellent Flickr site) for the Docklands mosaic image.  Read his blog too.

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Bermondsey’s Health Education Campaign: ‘There is no wealth but life’

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1920s, 1930s, Bermondsey

The claim that Bermondsey might ‘be entitled in a few years to be regarded as one of Britain’s health resorts’ might seem pretty far-fetched. That claim made in 1928 – when the borough was one of London’s poorest and, in the words of the same speaker, ‘one huge slum’ – seems ludicrous.

Bermondsey: aerial view, 1926

But that was the ambition of Bermondsey’s new Labour council and its pioneering officials. And that was the goal of Alfred Salter – constituency MP, borough councillor and popular local GP – who articulated the dream.

Salter, with the indispensable support and industry of his wife Ada, was the driving force behind what became known as Bermondsey’s Revolution. He and his Labour colleagues believed ‘with Ruskin that “there is no wealth but life.”’

The means to defend, extend and enhance life that the Council mobilised were varied.  We’ll look at those too but this entry focuses on one area in which Bermondsey can claim to be unique – the design and scope of what was called (unashamedly in those days) its propaganda for health.

The campaign began in 1924 with a report by the borough’s then Medical Officer of Health, Dr King Brown, unpromisingly entitled, ‘Education of the Public in Hygiene’.   Behind the bureaucratese lay a missionary zeal shared with the Council leadership to improve working-class lives and conditions so systematically undermined by ‘Capitalism and Landlordism’.

The Council embraced the report and King Brown’s successor, Donald Connan, pioneered a breadth and range of public health education unequalled in the country.  The knowledge that so much ill health was preventable – even in the cruel circumstances prevailing in Bermondsey – fuelled the campaign.

TB, rickets, rheumatism, heart disease, venereal disease, diabetes and a range of infectious and industrial diseases were targeted.   Improved lighting and ventilation in homes were encouraged.   Self-help measures around diet and personal cleanliness were powerfully advocated.

The first school lecture was given in February 1925.  There were 440 further by 1933.  School certificates in hygiene were first awarded in 1930 and extended to a practical and written Diploma in Home Nursing in 1933.

Talks were given to any and every local group or organisation that would take them and leaflets produced on a range of subjects – 30 different pamphlets were in circulation before the war.  ‘Electric signs’ and advertisements were also employed.

But ‘from the start it was recognised,’ states Dr Connan, ‘that the scheme could not be complete without street preaching and, to conform with the general plan, this had to be illustrated by lantern slides and films’.

The campaign’s intention to reach local people and the inventiveness of that approach is best seen in the ‘cinemotor’ vans that the council designed and built to show films in the streets and open spaces.  Three customised vehicles were in use by 1939, taking their electricity supply from street lamps modified for the purpose.  (There is an imagination at work here rooted in realities which couldn’t be more prosaic yet more pressing.)

As the programme developed and its resources grew, a successful pattern emerged.   Dr Connan recounts: ‘Our usual procedure with an audience is to give a short talk illustrated by lantern slides, then show a film, invite discussion, and finally give a pamphlet on the same subject’.

What his formal language doesn’t capture is the excitement that these shows could generate at a time when so much of life was lived on the streets.  Naturally children were the most enthusiastic – shouting out or singing the captions to the slides and silent movies – but they helped to gather a crowd and in the end as many as 100 to 250 people might gather to watch.

The shows took place generally in the spring and autumn as the films couldn’t be seen in the brighter days of summer.  Not that the British weather always cooperated: in 1927 only 19 outdoors showings were possible; in the warmer, drier year of 1930, there were 70.

Most films were made and shot in the borough – adding to the sense of local identity and pride that the Council promoted so successfully, crafted and created by council employees, notably Connan himself, Mr Bush, the Chief Administrative Officer and Mr Lumley, its Technical Officer and Radiographer.  (These unsung heroes of municipalism deserve their name-check.) The Direct Labour Department made the sets.   Sound was added as the talkies arrived.

By 1938, the Council had a catalogue of 33 films of which 20 had been made by the borough.  When the scheme ended, a total of 30 films had been produced locally of which 16 survive.

Some advertised the public health services and achievements of the council.  Others such as Where There’s Life, There’s Soap (1933) and The Empty Bed (a stark warning of the risks of not immunising against diphtheria, made in 1937) conveyed straightforward advice on healthy living and disease prevention.

If the films were didactic, they were generally gently so – advisory rather than admonishing.  The 1930 film, Oppin, was unusual in being more direct in its criticism of the exploitative conditions prevailing in the Kent hop fields where many East Enders traditionally worked in the late summer.

If – to modern eyes – they appear guileless, that was deliberate.  For Connan:

The success of the films depends upon the plot which must be devised in such a way as to ensure a simple continuity of ideas throughout. The principle followed in preparing the pictures has been to make them self-explanatory…To enforce the lesson the greatest care has been given to subtitles. These must be simple and accurate, and while conveying a considerable amount of information, they must be concise and pointed.

If this seems patronising, remember that Bermondsey’s revolution was proudly home-grown and, literally in this case, won in the streets.  Its architects – whether middle-class Christian socialists such as the Salters, dedicated professionals such as Donald Connan or the working-class rank and file of Bermondsey Labour Party – wanted life and a fuller life for their people.

By the late thirties, they could look back on a record of solid achievement – a quantifiable improvement in all the key indices of health and a more intangible, qualitative shift in Bermondsey’s sense of itself and the expectations of its people.

There were wider social changes in this period, of course, but the advocacy of reforming local councils and the practical measures they implemented were a part of that change.

By 1935, Connan could already look back on one notable improvement in people’s circumstances.  He began by noting ‘a high degree of personal cleanliness is almost universal’.  But he went on to say that:

Possibly the most striking change is that which has taken place in the clothing of women and girls. Examples of medieval armour formerly worn are now rarely to be seen, and silk and artificial silk garments are almost as common in Wolseley Buildings [a Bermondsey tenement block] as they are reported to be in Berkeley Square.

Perhaps the Council’s film, Health and Clothing, made in 1928, played its own small part in this.

Sources:

The original images used here and much supporting archival information will be found in the Southwark Local History Library which anyone interested in learning more of Bermondsey’s past should visit. 

A major source for further information of Bermondsey’s public health campaigning is the Wellcome Trust’s online exhibition Here Comes Good Health!   You can view some of the films there and see additional photography.   Images above are taken from their site under the Creative Commons attribution.

Fenner Brockway’s Bermondsey Story: the Life of Alfred Salter (1949) is the best text on ‘Bermondsey’s Revolution’.  D.M. Connan, A History of the Public Health Department in Bermondsey (1935) provides the insider’s view and the direct quotes above. See also Bullman, Hegarty and Hill, The Secret History of our Streets (2012) for additional information on Bermondsey history.

Elizabeth Lebas’ book, Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema, 1920-1980 (2011) contains a chapter – ‘When Every Street Became a Cinema’ – on Bermondsey.

A Plan for Plymouth: ‘our first great welfare-state city’

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1940s, 1950s

The Plymouth Blitz, concentrated in seven devastating German air raids over March and April 1941, left Plymouth reportedly the most heavily damaged city in the country and destroyed its medieval centre.

In this bleakest period of the war when much energy was focused on sheer survival, Plymouth City Council looked to the future. Plymouth would be rebuilt but not merely rebuilt – it would be re-imagined: redesigned and reconstructed as a city for a new era in which rational planning served the needs of the common people.

On 1 September 1941 the City Council agreed that a Redevelopment Plan be prepared. That plan – A Plan for Plymouth – was prepared by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the leading town planner of the day, in conjunction with the City Engineer James Paton Watson.  It was ready by September 1943 and approved by the Council in the following year.

In foreground, Paton Watson, Abercrombie, Lord Mayor Lord Astor and Town Clerk Colin Campbell (1944)

J.D.M. Harvey illustrated the completed plan.

Derry’s Cross

The railway station

So far, so good but history is awash with abandoned blueprints and failed ideas. Plymouth made good on these aspirations.  Firstly, it lobbied Parliament – in conjunction with many other local councils – for the comprehensive planning and compulsory purchase powers vital to large-scale projects enshrined in the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act.

And then it acted. It was the first British city to begin reconstruction in April 1947; the first new buildings opened in 1951.

Abercrombie’s plan was visionary, owing most to the designs of New Delhi and Canberra and the 19th century Beaux-Arts ideals which shaped Washington DC and Paris. The city centre itself would be divided into functional precincts reflecting varied urban roles including retail, offices, culture and civic government.

This was planning on a grand scale but the larger vision was also influenced by more modest indigenous strains, not least the garden city movement which sought to separate homes from industry and recreation from commerce. The Plan envisaged suburbs formed into ‘neighbourhood units,’ each with a centre incorporating schools, a church, a library, swimming pool, cinema and other community facilities. These principles gave humanity to the cold term of functionalism sometimes used to characterise such post-war planning.

However, it was the design of the city centre which was most radical. The war had destroyed old street patterns already strained by modern demands. They were replaced by an orderly grid centred on one grand axis running north-south from the railway station to the grand open space of the Hoe surrounded by a ring road connecting the major transit arteries. To Professor Jeremy Gould this was (1):

an egalitarian grid, spacious, airy, uncomplicated, accessible and gapingly open to all – the very model in stone, brick, glass and metal of the post-war welfare edifice.

The execution of the plan used some of the foremost architects of the day – such as Thomas Tait (who designed the new Dingles department store) and William Crabtree (who had previously designed the Peter Jones and John Lewis stores in London). They were employed by private developers but worked within the controlling vision of the City Architect and Engineer who designated width, height, form and materials. And the city retained the freehold.

Time and the judgment of altered aesthetics are not always kind to plans of such ambition and scale. There may appear some merit to the criticism of those who have complained subsequently of a certain cold uniformity; there is more so to those who note neglect and decline. To Gould, what is needed now ‘above all is a little love’ and this blog at least will give a little love to the vision and original execution of the Plan for Plymouth.

The architects certainly were not so naive as to ignore the potential missteps inherent in such planning. In fact, street elevations were ‘composed en masse as a series of highly contrived symmetries and asymmetries, with major to minor rhythms.’ (2) Corners and terminations were equally carefully contrived to please the eye.  The images below show the real aesthetic quality of Plymouth’s streetscapes – a far cry from the brutalist label sometimes attached.

Pearl Assurance (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Derry’s Cross (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City. The western section contained the offices of the new nationalised industries.

The white Portland stone which faces many of the city centre buildings is criticised for its dullness but was originally envisaged as a neutral background to highly coloured shop fronts, displays and signs. Some buildings were built – in deliberate contrast – of red and brown brick. There is beautiful detailing too, not fussy and often overlooked, which challenges those who have accused the design of blandness.

Dingles (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Martins Bank (c) Plymouth: 20th Century City

Whilst slower, more organic – messier – growth might have given a more comfortable and ‘human’ feel to the Plan, Plymouth didn’t have this option. Instead the council chose boldly not only to face but to embrace the future and create a new city (3):

Plymouth represented the architecture of the future – clean, bright, democratic and, most of all, optimistic.

Much of the architecture remains stunning and captures still the optimism of the era.

National Provincial Bank (c) Plymouth Man. Bronze doorways, granite-clad columns and a Venetian glass façade – a fitting termination to Royal Parade.

Pearl Assurance House (c) Plymouth Man. Part of the grand gateway to Armada Square from Royal Parade and the Great Square in front of the Civic Centre.

Civic Centre and Council House (c) Plymouth Man. 14 stories high, lavishly finished, the Civic Centre ‘expresses the aspirations of a confident authority at the height of its powers’.

Dingles (c) Wikimedia Commons. Thomas Tait, the architect, also designed the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In the affluent fifties and sixties, such optimism may have seen well-placed. 50,000 worked in the dockyards, Plymouth was doing well. Now that number is just 2,500 and the city has fallen on harder times. The future envisaged in the 1940s didn’t quite materialise and the city is having to reinvent itself once more.

That, in a sense, is true of the city centre too. Straitened finances combined with an antipathy towards the modernist architecture of the post-war period led to serious decline. But Plymouth is resilient and that is changing. A new generation is overseeing a ‘scale of regeneration’ claimed as ‘second only to the post-war regeneration period’.(4)

The Coop in its heyday. The only store to occupy a whole block of the Abercrombie Plan.  The underside of the canopy was originally painted bright yellow whilst the interior contained a domed banking hall and a stage for dance bands in the cafeteria.

The Coop lives on but there was a time when up to 25 per cent of the adult population were members.

The Coop building in 2011 (c) Steve Cadman Twentieth Century Society.

As is the way, the transformation envisaged in what the Council has named ‘A Vision for Plymouth’ will depend far more on tourism and culture than traditional staples but it will, at least, both respect and revive Plymouth’s heritage as ‘the twentieth century city’ –  ‘the greatest built example of post-war British planning and architecture’ (5)

There are more listed fifties’ buildings in Plymouth than anywhere other than London. Jeremy Gould and the Architecture Centre Devon and Cornwall are fighting for it despite recent funding cuts. English Heritage is defending it as a city ‘as representative of its time as Bath and York.’ (6)

This is great. But the task for all is to ensure that the label Twentieth Century City is not an epitaph to the past but a call to the future which captures the dynamism and idealism of former generations and gives momentum to the present.

PS I’ve written a second post on the Plan for Plymouth which includes additional detail and illustrations from the Plan itself.

Sources:

(1) Quoted in ‘Plymouth: a pearl on the seashore,’ The Independent, 21 February, 2010

(2) Jeremy Gould and the Institute for Historic Building Conservation, ‘The architecture of the plan for Plymouth’, September 2006.

(3) and (4)  Plymouth: Twentieth Century City, Heritage Trail Buildings Guide

(5) Plymouth City Council, A Vision for Plymouth

(6) Simon Thurley speaking at the launch of Jeremy Gould’s book, Plymouth: Vision of a Modern City, 8 June 2011

The essential online source is Plymouth: Twentieth Century City.  My grateful thanks to the Architecture Centre Devon and Cornwall for making available the text and photos of this site and their hard-copy Heritage Trail Buildings Guide. Visit the city and support their efforts.

The online Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History contains information on A Plan for Plymouth and much else beside.

A wonderful documentary film on the Plan, The Way We Live (1946) is available on YouTube.  Its director, Jill Craigie, met Michael Foot, MP for Plymouth Devonport, whilst shooting the film and they married three years later.

Commentary and stills from the film and the images of the original artwork included above can be found at cyberheritage.co.uk.

My thanks to Plymouth Man for allowing use of some of the images to be found in his informative and well-illustrated celebration of postwar Plymouth on Flickr.

Other contemporary images above are taken with permission from Simon Cadman’s Twentieth Century Society Flickr page on Plymouth.

The Becontree Estate: ‘built in England where the most revolutionary social changes can take place, and people in general do not realise that they have occurred’

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1920s, 1930s, Barking and Dagenham, Cottage suburbs, LCC

As you walk through the Becontree Estate, it seems pretty boring.  It’s not beautiful, it’s not ugly.  At best, it’s pleasant; at worst, humdrum. It seems stolid and worthy, not visionary.  But take another look. The scale of its ambition was breath-taking and it was, in its understated British way, revolutionary.

Housing surrounding Becontree Avenue, Becontree, from the south-west, 1928; EPW024286 © http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/

Becontree, for all its surface modesty, does merit superlatives. As Terence Young, its first chronicler, noted back in 1934 (1):

If the Becontree Estate were situated in the United States, articles and news reels would have been circulated containing references to the speed at which a new town of 120,000 people had been built.  The work of the firm of contractors would have been shown as an excellent example of the American business ideal of Service to the Community.  If it had happened in Vienna, the Labour and left Liberal Press would have boosted it as an example of what municipal socialism could accomplish…If it had been built in Russia, Soviet propaganda would have emphasised the planning aspect…

But Becontree was planned and built in England where the most revolutionary social changes can take place, and people in general do not realise that they have occurred.

The Becontree Estate was conceived in the brief post-Great War coupling of hope and fear.  Homes fit for heroes and the concern those very heroes might succumb to Bolshevism in 1919 persuaded the Government to approve a London County Council scheme to build 29,000 new homes for some 145,000 London residents. Of those, 24,000 houses were to be built on 3,000 acres of market gardens, cottages and country lanes beyond London’s eastern borders in Essex.

This, by the way, was a local authority controlled by Tories (in the guise of the London Municipal Reform party).  The belief that working people should be decently housed and that the responsibility for this lay – for better or worse, depending on one’s politics – primarily with the state ran deep at this time.

The original scheme included churches, shops, no less than 25 schools and a new civic centre.  The planners recognised that the flat site lacked, in their words, ‘attractive natural features’ but believed 600 acres of open space and parkland and a carefully-designed and tree-lined streetscape would create a pleasing environment.

The Estate in 1924

Shiny drawing-board visions are rarely fully realised and Government spending cuts slowed and curtailed this one but the planned target of homes was met in 1934.  Becontree was proclaimed – and remains by most measures – the world’s largest council estate.

Do we celebrate this?  Developments like Becontree are now deeply unfashionable and much maligned.  Beginning with Young and Wilmott’s critique of ‘Greenleigh’ and culminating in Lyndsey Hanley’s recent attack, out-of-town estates have come to bear the weight of the world’s lament for a vanished – and much romanticised –world of working-class community.(2)

So much so that it’s easy to forget what these estates have meant to so many of their tenants.  One early resident recalls her mother’s feelings towards Becontree:

As far as my Mum was concerned, it was heaven with the gates off.

A tenant who came to the Estate in the early 1950s says simply:

I fell in love with this area the moment I saw it.  The road outside – Heathway – was just a lane, and there was open countryside on the other side. It’s all been built on now, but I still feel the same about Becontree and always will

And if that’s a little anecdotal and tinged with nostalgia, a survey in 1947 found 85 per cent of tenants liked their houses and 63 per cent liked the neighbourhood.   Simple amenities – ‘cupboards, the stove and everything’ – could make a council house seem like ‘a palace’ (3).

A re-created front parlour – at the Valence House Museum

This was an upwardly mobile working-class generation with shared aspirations whose climb was collective.  The Estate’s Tenants’ Handbook makes uncomfortable reading now for those to whom it represents heavy-handed social control:

4. The tenant shall keep the front garden of the premises in neat and cultivated condition…

 

8. The tenant shall clean the windows of the premises at least once every week. 

 

16. The tenant shall be responsible for the orderly conduct of his children on any part of the Estate, for any nuisance or annoyance they may cause to other tenants or to members of the public; for any damage to or defacement of any building, wall, fence, gate, or any other property of the Council, and shall replay to the Council the cost of making goods any such damage or defacement. 

 

19. The tenancy may be determined [terminated] by the Council at any time by seven days’ notice in writing. 

 

On breach by the tenant of any of these conditions the tenancy may be summarily determined by the Council at any time.

 

And we shouldn’t sugar-coat the paternalism here.  There was a clear intention to encourage respectable living  – pubs were restricted and the virtuous domesticity of gardening heavily promoted.  But, remember, this was not, on the whole,  a respectability which sat uneasily with the aspirations and characteristics of the vast majority of Becontree’s  new inhabitants.

Prizes were awarded annually to the best-kept gardens

Those inhabitants were not generally, in Young’s awkward phrasing, ‘slum people’.  In 1934, 95 per cent of the adult male population were ‘employees’; 80 per cent were manual workers – a large majority working in manufacturing or transport and communications, a majority defined as ‘skilled’.  You needed to be both respectable and – in working-class terms – relatively affluent to live on the Estate.

The other striking feature of the Estate – particularly in its early days – was the preponderance of young married couples with school-age children.  Half the population was under 18 at the time of Young’s social survey and the average age just 23.

There was thus an undeniable social homogeneity.  This has frequently been contrasted with a sentimentalised vision of the bustle and colour of an old East End left behind and was compounded, for critics, by the architectural uniformity of the Estate – the dead hand of municipalism as it is often perceived.

There’s no doubt also that there was a bleakness to the Estate in its early days.   ‘The first tenants were pioneers, colonists in an area which had no urban facilities’ (Young again) and shops, schools and community facilities of all sorts were in short supply.  The civic centre was never built and the Estate was horribly divided between three local district councils before the Municipal Borough of Dagenham was formed in 1938.

The Estate fell far short of what might have been, short even of the original ambitions of those who planned it. But those planners and the LCC did provide houses with all the amenities of the day; they did provide gardens, open space and tree-lined roads.  They actually did build 91 different types of house in a conscious attempt to inject variety…though those houses did still look a little alike and some early residents still got lost (4):

I went for a walk and when I came back, all the houses looked alike. I was in a terrible state – in tears. The workmen said ‘What’s the matter, ducks?’ I said, ‘I can’t find my house’.

In the end, she found her house as hundreds of thousands of others have found a house – and a home – in the Becontree Estate.  Nowadays, its appearance is much altered – in good ways and bad.  Right to buy and owner occupation have long since eroded the besetting homogeneity of the Estate.  Cars are everywhere, often in those previously lovingly tended front gardens. And the trees have grown.

Much of the estate looks as suburban now as it does municipal (not a bad thing) and it all – to this observer – looks pleasant and cared-for.  Its early planners might have settled for that and perhaps we should too.

Sources:

(1) Terence Young, Becontree and Dagenham: a report made for the Pilgrim Trust (1934), p23

(2) In Family and Kinship in East London (1957), Michael Young and Peter Young painted a bleak picture of life in the postwar Debden estate.  Lyndsey Hanley’s Estates (2007) excoriates the Chelmsley Wood estate of her childhood.

(3) Robert Homes, A Township Complete in Itself (1997)

(4) Christopher Middleton, ‘A Cultural Feast in Corned Beef City‘, Daily Telegraph, 14 September 2002

See also: Becontree Estate saw East End ‘reborn’, Barking and Dagenham Post, 9 November 2011 and the Valence House Museum; London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Local Studies Information Sheet, No. 16.  Do visit the Valence House Museum – in the heart of the estate – for an excellent social history of the area.

The Latchmere Estate, Battersea: ‘happy healthy homes for sober and industrious workmen’

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Battersea, Pre-1914

The Latchmere Estate, opened in August 1903, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour – by the Council’s own workforce.  It remains a superb exemplar of the practical idealism of Labour’s first generation of municipal reformers.

For those Labour pioneers, the case for direct labour was obvious: it safeguarded workers’ pay and conditions, it respected trades union rights and – as importantly – it guaranteed better value and higher quality than any that could be delivered by private interest.

The Battersea Trades and Labour Council thought direct labour vital: as ‘necessary to the well-being of the community’ as ‘municipal housing, electric light, libraries, baths and…many other things.’

Those arguments had peculiar power at a time when jerry-building private contractors dominated the housing market but they may seem as relevant today when privatisation is thought of by many as a panacea, when we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

At the turn of the last century Battersea had become the ‘Municipal Mecca’ – a bastion of left-wing politics which reflected the powerful local presence and radicalism of the Progressive Alliance. The Alliance had already secured a majority in the pre-reform Vestry in 1894 but it came into its own when metropolitan borough councils were created in 1900. In the first elections for the new Battersea council, Progressives won 37 seats against 17 for their Conservative opponents. John Burns, former union leader and campaigning socialist, now a leading independent Progressive, was the local MP.

Good quality and affordably priced housing was central to the progressive vision. An area of allotments on the former Latchmere Common had long been identified as potential building land but it took the perseverance of Burns and others to secure acts of parliament in 1899 and 1900 which finally granted the right to build.

The Council acted quickly. A design competition, attracting 58 entries, took place in 1901 and building began shortly after. The Estate, a mix of houses and tenements, was attractively designed and built – unapologetically – to high specifications.  As the Mayor explained:

The dwellings were novel of their kind, containing as they did what had once been regarded as luxuries, such as baths, combined ranges and electric light. Not many working men had such accommodation in which to bring up their families, but the Battersea Borough Council had come to the conclusion that such accommodation was an absolute necessity.

The provision of electric lighting was particularly controversial. There were those who did ‘not see why the working people of Battersea should be allowed electric light at all: it [was] a luxury…which should be confined to the well-to-do’.(1)  The Council’s pragmatic response was that the scheme was self-supporting.

That electricity was supplied from the Council’s own generating station whilst the Estate’s water supply came from an artesian well sunk by the Council which served the adjacent Latchmere Baths.  Sidney Webb’s satirical account of the ‘individualist councillor’ who walked ‘along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water…’, penned in 1890, was becoming reality.(2)

315 dwellings were provided in total: 28 five-room houses, one four-room house, 70 houses each with two three-room tenements with bath scullery and 73 houses each with two four-room tenements with bath scullery. Each tenement had its own entrance and its own back garden (with stairway access in the case of first-floor tenements). Of 11 acres, three were preserved as open space.

Odger Street

Burns Road

The Estate was granted Conservation Area status in 1974.  In planner-speak, it is the houses’ good quality stock brick and decorative red band courses, their window quoins and entrance canopies with moulded brackets and Welsh slate roofs capped with red terracotta ridge tiles which merit attention.(3)

And, no doubt, the early tenants appreciated the sturdy build and good-looking design of the Estate. They were surely equally pleased by the new and cutting-edge Cornes and Haighton’s combined range, copper and bath that each home contained.

Cornes and Haighton combined range and boiler living room side

Cornes and Haighton combined range and boiler scullery side

The floor plan shows the siting of the range and generous accommodation of the dwellings

There were absences too which were as important. John Burns, a fierce temperance advocate, who formally opened the new estate, expressed his pleasure that it ‘would not be tainted by an off-licence or degraded by a beer-shop.’ It was for him – as it was probably for the large majority of the respectable new tenants – a ‘sanitary oasis in a wilderness of jerry-built houses’.

Indeed, Burns went further:

The home was the centre of health, the cradle of character. If they wanted to arrest drinking, and stop the decay of physique, they should multiply colonies like this estate all over London and the United Kingdom

Burns’ sentiments were a conscious reflection of the National Efficiency arguments of the day. These, in the light of recruitment concerns during the Boer War and fear of rising German competition, combined patriotic alarm at the poor physique of the British lower orders and genuine concern for working-class living conditions with – from both left and right and with no obvious differentiating logic – a repugnance at a working-class lifestyle too often tainted by alcohol and unredeemed by self-help.

It was, in contrast, exactly the slightly better-off and definitely more ‘respectable’ – sometimes rather self-consciously so, it might be admitted – working class who populated both the local labour movement and the Latchmere Estate itself. Indeed, as Sean Creighton demonstrates in his long list of working-class activists who settled in the Estate , there was a very close correspondence between the two. It was this self-improving working class – aided perhaps (whisper it) by a certain favouritism in allocations policy – that found in the early municipal housing schemes their natural home.

There are those now – with the awful knowledge of where precisely these eugenicist currents led later in the century – who condemn the judgmental sanctimony and loose talk of racial health of earlier progressivism. We will be less anachronistic and more humble: is our free use of the word ‘chav’ any different?

And we’ll remember just how radical and how brave in many respects this early labour movement was. Battersea itself was a centre of anti-war sentiment, fiercely critical of the imperial overreach and pretensions of the recent Boer War. This was evidenced in the naming of Joubert Street after General Joubert, a commander of the Boer forces. (Other streets in the Estate were named after Burns himself, local labour leaders and – in celebration of the movement’s aspirations – Freedom and Reform.) The politics of the so-called ‘loony left’ councils which invoked so frequently the name of Mandela look rather safe by comparison.

As a footnote here, it can also be recorded that the Latchmere ward elected John Archer, a black man from Liverpool, as its councillor in 1906 and that Archer became – in 1913 – the first black mayor in London.

Ultimately, we can only share John Burns’ ‘delight that one of his ideals of his early days had been realised, the securing of happy, healthy homes for sober and industrious workmen.’ Moreover, as he stated of the Latchmere Estate:

The land has a communal origin, the streets bear democratic names; the whole plan, history and achievement is redolent of the common victory of the common people.

Sources:

(1) James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country, 1905

(2) Sidney Webb, Socialism in England, London, 1890, pp115-116

(3) Metropolitan Borough Council of Wandsworth, Latchmere Estate Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy, 2007

Other quotations and much of the detail of this essay are taken from Sean Creighton’s excellent history of the Estate.

The photographs of Burns Road and Odger Street are the copyright of Derek Harper and are licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons licence.