Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds: ‘They didn’t get it wrong – well not for me anyway!’

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1930s, Multi-storey

Don’t go looking for the Quarry Hill flats now.  They went from showpiece to shame in their brief forty year lifespan, from shown off to shut down.  By the time they were demolished in 1978, the flats had become a byword for the failure – some would say the inhumanity – of municipalism’s more grandiose attempts to rehouse working people. But I hope I’ll challenge at least some some of that received wisdom in this piece.

That the Leeds working class needed rehousing was in no doubt. Leeds, then the fifth largest city in England, possessed 78,000 back-to-backs in 1914. And while back-to-back housing had been outlawed by national legislation in 1909, a technicality – that plans for further back-to-back housing were already in place – allowed new back-to-backs to be built in Leeds into the 1930s.

Back-to-backs, Berking Place, Leeds © Leeds Library and Information Service

Little had been done to tackle the problem in the 1920s and a 1932 Council report concluded 33,500 houses should be demolished. The inaction of the Conservative majority infuriated the Labour opposition and, in particular, its most vociferous member, the Reverend Charles Jenkinson, vicar of Holbeck and, since 1930, its Labour ward councillor too.   Labour produced a minority report which called for the clearance of 16,000 houses by 1938 and a further 30,000 by 1948.

Labour’s radicalism secured it victory in the local elections of November 1933. Jenkinson became chair of housing and proposed the clearance of 3000 houses in the first year, 5000 in the second and 5500 in each of the following four. 30,000 new homes were to be constructed – at a cost of £12 million.

Most of the new homes were to be in ‘garden suburbs’ – large estates on the fringes of the city.  Jenkinson believed, as did most Labour activists of the day, that ‘the cottage home is the best dwelling for the normal English family.’

But the need to rehouse the slum population was pressing.  Multi-storey flats seemed an inescapable solution.  Furthermore, the redevelopment of Quarry Hill – an area containing some of the worst housing in Leeds less than one mile from the city centre – tackled some of the particular problems which bedevilled the garden suburbs: their distance from the city centre and local employment, the high transportation costs that followed and, more intangibly, a loss of community that ensued.

The Director of Housing, RAH Livett, appointed by the incoming Labour administration in 1934, had pioneered a smaller flatted scheme in Manchester and was a strong advocate of flats.

Together, Jenkinson and Livett determined to create something special – and they did so.  Quarry Hill was the one interwar scheme which came close to matching the scale and ambition of the workers’ housing in Vienna that excited so many contemporary modernists and enthused local councillors who were eager for housing solutions which matched the scale of housing problems.

Quarry Hill: the planners’ vision © Leeds Library and Information Service

A delegation from Leeds had visited Vienna in 1932 and been much impressed by the Karl Marx-Hof, Red Vienna’s showpiece. It – and similar Continental projects – seemed to offer scale, economy and community: class consciousness with convenience to some; to others, simply modern housing that dignified working-class lives.

Quarry Hill in 1939, still under construction with bus station in foreground © Leeds Library and Information Service

The Quarry Hill scheme contained 938 flats, housing around 3000 people, in seven and eight-story blocks set in 36 acres of inner-city land.  It would also include a community hall, seating 520, with stage and dressing rooms, twenty shops, indoor and outdoor swimming pools and a wading pool, extensive courtyards, gardens and play areas, a nursery and communal laundry – even a mortuary.

Lupton House showing drying areas and playground © Leeds Library and Information Service

Lupton House with Kitson House at the rear, a children’s play area at the centre © Leeds Library and Information Service

The flats themselves contained a living room, scullery and bathroom and between one to five bedrooms.  Each had a balcony and a window box. China cupboards, airing cupboards, fitted wardrobes, baking ovens were included and all flats had electric lighting.  As one early tenant recalls: ‘Where I lived in Horsforth we only had an outside toilet and no bathroom so the flats seemed really posh!’

Another innovation lay in the arrangements for waste disposal.  The Garchey system, taken from France, saw domestic refuse placed in a container under the sink and flushed by waste water to a central incinerator which, it was originally planned, would heat the swimming pools.

The blocks also contained lifts – 88 in all: the first municipal scheme in the country to have them.  (The Karl Marx-Hof itself didn’t have lifts and in general interwar British flatted schemes provided larger accommodation and more mod cons than their more illustrious European counterparts.)

One of the arched entrances to the estate, through Kitson House. William Holmes, an unemployed coalminer, sits to the right © Leeds Library and Information Service

Finally, the flats were pioneering in their prefabricated method of construction.  In a further borrowing from France, they were built using the Mopin system using a light steel frame and pre-cast concrete units manufactured on site.  This eliminated the need for brickwork and plastering and would, it was thought, bring big savings in the costs of materials and skilled labour.

Building began in 1934 and the first tenants moved in in 1938.  But forty years later the entire development was bulldozed.  What went wrong?

Well, the Mopin system was a failure.  Production line jams and a shortage of the sort of skills the system did require meant production overruns and much higher costs than anticipated.  Building dragged on to 1941 and, in the long term, structural defects – corrosion in the steelwork, concrete slabs working loose – necessitated costly on-going repairs.  The waste disposal system was also riddled with problems – blockages, leaks and smells.

This was all particularly problematic as savings in construction costs were vital to finance the social facilities held vital to the scheme’s overall success.  (Normal housing subsidies would cover only basic building costs.)  The concert hall was never built and many of the other planned amenities – the swimming pools, tennis courts and nursery, for example – failed to materialise.  Few shops opened.

What emerged was a pale shadow of the original dream.  Even the window boxes were sabotaged by the harsh Yorkshire climate.

Later planning mistakes did not help.  Quarry Hill became a classic example of an ‘island estate’, geographically cut off and socially isolated. Encircling main roads and the perimeter blocks – ‘somewhat forbidding though undeniably impressive’ according to Pevsner – created a fortress-like appearance which intimidated non-residents.

The flats in 1967 © Wikimedia Commons

What is there to defend then?  The challenge to these criticisms lies most powerfully in the ‘strong attachment of many of the older residents, and their desolation when the estate was demolished’(1).  Many of the people who lived in the flats loved them (2):

I remember warmth and neighbourliness, not isolation.

The shops had one of the best fish and chip shops in Leeds. We had a washhouse second to none but most of all the comradeship between neighbours, fantastic. Quarry Hill Flats was a way of life, a community.

They didn’t get it wrong – well not for me anyway! Quarry Hill Flats – I loved them and still do!!!

Children, in particular, seemed to love the flats and the opportunities for company and play: ‘I lived there during the fifties and as a child it was glorious – millions of playmates and the longest roofs in the world to run around on.’

And that, of course, sounds like a golden past viewed through rose-tinted spectacles.  But the testimony is overwhelming and is backed up by the historical record of a tenants’ association second to none in its energy with two thirds of the residents members at peak.

For all the failures, something worked here.  People were moved from the slums and rehoused in better conditions than they had ever known or could ever have expected.  A close-knit community developed which took pride in its environs whilst fully conscious – and actively critical – of its shortfalls.

Quarry Hill photographed during its demolition 1978 (c) Alan Longbottom and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The Council took the decision to demolish the estate in 1973.  A couple of decades later the estate would surely have been listed.  More importantly, it might then have been fully renovated in ways that captured the original vision but adapted it to changing times.

Good intentions don’t excuse mistakes but the ability to put mistakes right is surely just as important.  We’re always told not to throw money at problems but social housing is forever financially constrained and sometimes it feels as if more money might just make the difference.  I don’t know if the Quarry Hill dream could have been fixed but I’ll respect the dream nonetheless. 

Sources:

(1) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: the history of a social experiment (2001)

(2) These comments from former tenants and others in the text are taken from BBC Leeds, Quarry Hill’s history

Leodis – the photographic archive of the Leeds Library and Information Service – provides many further images and much supporting detail as well as a very useful webpage dedicated to the history of the estate.

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The Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury: ‘healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’

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1930s, Finsbury

They’ve done a pretty good job with the recent £16.5m refurbishment of the Ironmonger Row Baths in Islington (Finsbury as was). The new facilities are smart and state-of-the-art but the ‘municipal’ look and feel of the exterior (which was Grade II listed in 2006) have been respected.

Times change. Now the Baths are operated by a social enterprise. There’s a privately run-spa which makes the old Turkish baths look a bit Dickensian in hindsight. But if our Municipal Dreams are to be more than mere nostalgia, perhaps these are necessary – or, at least, unavoidable – changes and it seems to me that the Baths still pay some proper regard to the ideals and intentions of the Finsbury Borough Council which opened them in 1931.

The refurbished Baths and new entrance

By then, the case for public baths and washhouses was long-established. Liverpool corporation led the way with the first publicly-funded public baths in 1828 and went one step further with the opening of a combined baths and washhouse (laundry) in 1842.

In London, an Association for Promoting Cleanliness among the Poor was founded in 1844. And Parliament passed permissive legislation empowering local vestries and corporations to use local rates to finance building in 1846 and 1852.

The stated aims of the 1846 Public Baths and Washhouses Act capture well the glorious mix of condescension and elevation that characterise Victorian social reform:

To promote the health and cleanliness of the working classes, and as a necessary consequence, improve their social condition and raise their moral tone, thereby tendering them more accessible to and better fitted to receive religious and secular training.

If we baulk at the patronage and thinly-veiled social control on display here, we should remember that these pious middle-class reformers were, for all that, on the side of the angels.

Angels, however, were thin on the ground in Finsbury. The borough council began discussing the erection of public baths within months of its creation in 1900. In 1902 plans were prepared by AWS Cross, the leading architect of the day in the field, but shelved. Five further schemes were debated in the years immediately following…and nothing happened.

By 1918, every town of over 200,000 population had either a public baths or laundry, as did every borough in London but Finsbury – one of the city’s poorest. Discussions began again in 1923 but talk was cheap, building expensive. Again the matter was shelved.

The politics of the borough were shifting however. From its inception, the council had been firmly in the hands of Conservatives, Municipal Reformers and Ratepayers – varying labels for a single politics – but the Labour Party had been gaining ground since the war. In 1928, Labour took control – narrowly (by 29 seats to 27) – and resolved to act.

The case seemed unarguable given the statistics presented by the new Baths and Washhouses Committee. Of 20,005 families in the borough, 4917 shared a single room and 7253 lived in two rooms. Of 12,000 dwellings, just 500 – only 4 per cent – had private baths.

Land was purchased and AWS Cross was commissioned once again – though now in partnership with his son, KMB Cross – to do the design. In October 1929, the Council voted to implement the Crosses’ plans using direct labour, accepting the Borough Engineer’s tender of £53,200. Labour argued ‘in this way the Council would be finding work for Finsbury unemployed, it would mean a better job’ and it would save money.

Unfortunately, the last point was not – in the strictest accounting terms – accurate. A lower private tender of £48,426 had been received. The Ratepayers’ Association (the current incarnation of the local Conservative Party) complained to the Ministry of Health of this waste of tax-payers’ money and the Ministry refused the necessary loan unless the cheapest tender were accepted.  The Labour majority was forced to back down. It’s not clear whether their face-saving stipulation that the contractors give work – at this time of severe depression – to the local unemployed was acted upon.

After all the politics, the Baths were formally opened by the Mayor of Finsbury in June 1931. The official programme of the event eschews rhetoric but then the dry detail – 18 washing compartments, five washing machines, three hydro-extractors, 30 drying horses and ironing tables with electric irons in the laundry; 40 slipper baths for men, 40 for women – meant more in practical terms.

The laundry © Islington Local History Centre

Washing troughs © Islington Local History Centre

The baths were open seven days a week, the laundry for six, with long hours and low prices that did their best to address local needs. At the height of the Great Depression, the Council provided free access to the baths to the local unemployed and pensioners.

© Islington Local History Centre

A planned second phase of building – and what leant the Baths their especial character – was completed in 1938. Full-sized and children’s swimming pools were opened…

The large pool: 100ft by 35ft with underwater floodlighting © Islington Local History Centre

The children’s pool: 50ft by 21ft © Islington Local History Centre

…and the most unusual new feature: Turkish baths containing a ‘Russian Vapour Room, three Hot Rooms and Shampoo Room’, open to men and women on alternate days at just 2/6 (12.5p).

In the official programme of the opening ceremony, the Council proclaimed its vision (1):

Believing that facilities for healthy recreation and personal cleanliness are essential for the health and well-being of our people, the Council for some years past have rigorously pursued a policy of providing modern public baths in the Borough, easy of access and within the reach of the most slender purse.

And then, in a sense, the Baths embedded themselves into the community. The Turkish Baths became one of only three public facilities in London and attracted a loyal clientèle  Into the 1960s, admission stood at 6 shillings (30p); a pot of tea could be had for a shilling and poached egg on toast for 1/4 (6.5p). They were a place for gossip or deals but above all for a little pampered relaxation in lives full of care.

The Baths in 1938 © Islington Local History Centre

Times change. Numbers attending fell, prices rose (though remained a far cry from their private spa equivalents) and the clientèle evolved. By the 1990s, one observer noted the ‘City fat cats’ and ‘more affluent Islington residents’ who populated the Baths.

The Baths shortly before their refurbishment © Nigel Cox and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The swimming pools remained a great resource for local schools and clubs and enthusiasts. And people still needed to do their laundry – a fact recognised in the modernisation and extension of the laundry in 1960 and its retention even in the new set-up. And when people did their laundry, they chatted and made friends.

The Ironmonger Row Baths were a social space – a statement which, when so much of our lives is privatised, is not as banal as it sounds.  This aspect was recognised by Islington and the architects commissioned for the refurb. So, while the facilities are ‘more pleasant, more comfortable, a bit more pampering’ now, they are not ‘too posh’ and those spaces where people gather have been retained.(2)

Still, part of you can’t help feeling that something is lost. The Spa does, nevertheless, seem pretty posh and the three young women in the sauna discussing art installations in Shoreditch light years away from the grounded realities of the hard lives of the Baths’ original patrons.

But then you give yourself a little shake and ask what precisely are you being nostalgic for – childhood rickets and a lack of indoor sanitation?  Wouldn’t those Finsbury councillors be celebrating the progress made in the lives of so many (though not all)?

In the end, I think the Ironmonger Row Baths represent what local councils can do best – address local needs in a collective fashion in changing times.

Sources:

(1) Programme for the official opening ceremony, 22 October 1938.

(2) Adam Goodfellow of Tim Ronalds Architects quoted in Plunging into History

Especial thanks to the helpful people at the Islington Local History Centre for access to relevant archives.

The Rowan Arts’ Plunging into History – Stories from Ironmonger Row Baths and Beyond project is a wonderful source which provides detail and colour and much more information on the local area and people than this brief blog entry could.

Esther Oxford, ‘Bath Time: faded grandeur…‘, The Independent, 3 August 1994, captures the Baths well before their refurbishment.  Hugh Pearman, ‘Scrubbing up nice‘, Riba Journal, is informative on the rebuild.

The amazing Victorian Turkish Baths website will tell you about Ironmonger Row and more historic and surviving Turkish baths in the UK than you could ever imagine.

The Baths and Washhouses Historical Archive is a superb and comprehensive resource on the subject more generally.  Do visit it.

The Council House, Birmingham: ‘a bricks-and-mortar monument to the municipal gospel’

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Pre-1914

For those of you who have been following my blog, this might come as a bit of a shock: no working-class politics here and, on the face of it, a ‘municipal dream’ almost extravagant in its disregard for the lives of the poorest. But I think this municipal showpiece deserves some love.

‘Municipal reformers look to Birmingham as the eyes of the faithful are turned to Mecca.’(1)  By the late 19th century, Birmingham City Council had a reputation for radicalism unequalled in the country. This reputation owed not a little to the showmanship of the city’s leading politician, Joseph Chamberlain, and the extraordinary rhetoric employed by Chamberlain and other civic leaders. But the belief in municipal enterprise and pride in municipal endeavour were real as were its achievements.

We could write about the city’s early municipalisation of gas and water or its later record of council house building and healthcare. And we will but this entry will celebrate – unfashionably – the town hall or, as it’s known in Birmingham because an earlier building had taken that name, the Council House.

A postcard from the early 1900s

The Council House today

The Council House is designed to impress and does so, though perhaps more through scale and a sort of heavy grandiosity than any great architectural merit. The building emerged from a design competition and the winner, Yeoville Thomason, through a murky process which favoured the local man. The waters were muddied further by the request that Thomason’s final plans include design elements from another entry. This might explain the rather conflicted appearance of the facade – Renaissance palace and heavy classical portico. But the building’s interest lies more in the ideas that inspired it.

Construction began in 1874 with Chamberlain himself laying the foundation stone. He graced the event with sentiments that, though he articulated them with peculiar force and eloquence, were typical of the era:

I have an abiding faith in municipal institutions, an abiding sense of the value and importance of local self-government, and I desire therefore to surround them by everything which can mark their importance, which can show the place they occupy in public estimation and respect and which can point to their great value to the community. Our corporations represent the authority of the people. Through them you obtain the full and direct expression of the popular will, and consequently any disrespect to us, anything which would depreciate us in the public estimation, necessarily degrades the principles which we represent…

It’s a lengthy quote but it repays attention. It eulogises representative government, lauds local sovereignty and enshrines the corporation – the local council – as the highest embodiment of public service and popular democracy. By extension, it justifies high public spending on municipal buildings to signal respect for self-governance and to reflect – and enhance – local patriotism.

George Dawson (1821-1876)

If that seems extravagant, remember that Chamberlain’s early mentor was George Dawson, a nonconformist minister and a man who could talk unashamedly of ‘the new corporation, the new Church’. Dawson’s exalted vision of local government is best captured in the speech he gave at the opening ceremony of a new municipal library:

…a great town exists to discharge towards the people of that town the duties that a great nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation – that the town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature.

Such ideas seem almost unthinkable today when politicians are held in almost universal obloquy and even local councillors are often thought to be self-interested egotists. Chamberlain, by contrast, thought there was ‘no nobler sphere for those who have not the opportunity of engaging in imperial politics than to take part in municipal work.’

This was the Civic Gospel – a vision of municipal service in the broadest sense: service from the brightest and the best, service to a citizenry or those who might be raised to citizenry.

The Council House was ‘a bricks-and-mortar memorial’ to this gospel and begins to seem an almost modest embodiment of such ideals.(2) But it was designed also – by force of presence and in detail – to celebrate Birmingham and Birmingham democracy.  By 1879, the date of its completion, the building had cost some £163,000.  At today’s values, that’s a cool £12m or so.  Then, to many, it seemed money well spent.

Among the most striking decorative features of the building is the mosaic (by the Venetian artist, Salviati) above the main entrance . It portrays six figures representing Science, Art, Liberty, Law, Commerce and Industry. Tellingly, they are placed around a central, enthroned figure which represents Municipality.

Above this, within the central pediment, is a set of sculptures entitled Britannia receiving the manufacturers of Birmingham. She does so in friendly fashion, awarding wreaths of laurel. (No harping on about the depredations of industrial capitalism here.)

This does, of course, lead to an alternative reading of the politics of Chamberlain and the Civic Gospel. It was a triumphantly bourgeois politics, reflecting an industrial class and a local elite at the apogee of its power and self-confidence. The term ‘corporation’ hadn’t then acquired its later meaning but there is something apposite in the latter – the council run as a business by those with the status and means to do it.

Birmingham in its industrial heyday. The Council House with museum and art gallery extension are depicted centre. The collonaded Town Hall can be seen centre right and the Chamberlain Memorial erected in 1880 bottom centre.

Chamberlain himself became a Unionist (an opponent of Irish Home Rule) and an imperialist and there wasn’t much local self-government tolerated in either of those. His son Neville Chamberlain – a Birmingham councillor and mayor (‘a good mayor of Birmingham in a lean year’ according to an unfriendly Lloyd George) and a drier, more conventionally right-wing politician – seems even more removed from the reforming vision and ideals of the Civic Gospel.

Neville Chamberlain as mayor of Birmingham, 1915

But Neville founded the country’s only municipal bank and the record of achievement of Birmingham Chamberlainism (the only word that can capture the unique admixture of local politics) was impressive. As one frustrated local Labour politician stated as late as 1930, Birmingham’s ‘civic history [was] an inspiring record of the success and practicality of social ownership even,’ he added, ‘when administered by those who do not believe in it.’

However, if Birmingham’s middle-class reformers rejected socialism or any ideology of public ownership, they embraced business-like municipal enterprise and upheld a powerful vision of both the duty and potential of local government to improve the conditions of the people.

A municipal showpiece such as the Council House might not, on first impression, seem the best embodiment of these progressive ideals. But recall Joseph Chamberlain’s words above on the dignity of municipal institutions and Dawson’s ideal of their majesty. If we can’t, in these more jaded and cynical times, quite bring ourselves to go that far, we can at least remember a time when pride in local government was common and widespread.

Sources:

(1) Frederick Dolman, Municipalities at Work, 1895

(2) Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, 2004

Asa Briggs has written the classic account but Tristram Hunt is the best recent source on Birmingham’s Municipal Gospel (as he prefers to call it.) Additional information on the architecture of the Council House can be found on the Victorian Web. My thanks to Jacqueline Banerjee of Victorian Web for allowing use of the photographs of the Council House mosaic and sculptures above.

The Ossulston Estate, St Pancras: the English Karl Marx-Hof?

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1920s, 1930s, Camden, LCC, Multi-storey, St Pancras

If you’re anywhere near the British Library, do take some time to step just to the west where you’ll see one of the most remarkable council estates of the interwar period.

The English disdain for multi-storey living is well-documented and frequently lamented, not least by those for whom ‘modern’ ideas of planning and functionalism have held sway. So the Ossulston Estate constructed between 1927 and 1931 generated much excitement and is seen, even in retrospect, as a rare – though modest – British exemplar of the daring architectural ideas pioneered in the Karl Marx-Hof of Red Vienna. The truth is a little more complex but the concept and execution remain impressive.

Not the Ossulston Estate: the Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna (built 1927-1930) (c) Wikimedia Commons

In the massive wave of building that took place after World War One when ‘homes for heroes’ were demanded and social housing was seen as the only viable means of providing sufficient, most larger-scale development took place along ‘garden suburb’ lines. The view – widely shared and strongly held within the labour movement itself – was that workers’ families needed houses and gardens.

An estimable principle and one that was powerfully resurrected after the perceived failure of much of the high-rise housing of the 1960s. But a problematic one also. Such low density housing was not cost-effective and was generally expensive to rent. It worked well for the better-off working class in stable employment but did little to tackle the mass of slum housing which remained and less to address the needs – and means – of its inhabitants. The London County Council, under the leadership of the Municipal Reform (Conservative) Party from 1907 to 1934, in particular, was criticised by many for its dilatory approach to this vital issue.

This was one context for the Ossulston Estate. Another was the peculiarities of its site – 8.8 acres but awkwardly set out in a long ribbon of land, 450 yards long by 84 wide. The LCC’s chief architect, George Topham Forrest, concluded ‘the only way, in the circumstances, the full utilisation of the land can be obtained is by building higher than the normal five storeys.’

A contemporary view of the Estate which illustrates the difficult site. (The British Library can be seen at the top of the photo.)

But such higher rise accommodation also entailed additional expenditures (on lifts, for example – only one LCC development had needed a lift to date: a block in the Tabard Street Estate). Such expenditures might be offset by higher rentals but these, of necessity, could come only from privately rented shops, offices or flats.

Topham proposed just such a mixed-use, public-private development. It was a highly unusual concept at the time but one that also appealed to the politics of the Municipal Reformers.

And that, in typically pragmatic and idiosyncratic fashion was the genesis of what might have been ‘the first comprehensive redevelopment sponsored by a local authority, as well as the first high-rise council flats’ in Britain (1). The Ossulston Estate owed less to vision than practicality and, in the event, even the modest vision of its conception was compromised. But this isn’t a sneer; if anything it’s a celebration of pragmatism at a time when ideology was about to wreak the most terrible havoc in mainland Europe.

Topham’s original 1925 design envisaged ground floor shops, first floor offices, then two floors with ‘flats of a character superior to the ordinary working-class dwellings’ with five floors of working-class accommodation above. There were no fancy ideas of social mixing here. Topham continued:

It is an essential of this idea that the superior flats should be segregated from the shops and working-class flats. Each class of property should have its own entrance and the entrances should be as remote from one another as possible.

Central heating was also to be provided. (Another practical solution to a real-world problem – the difficulties of hauling up and storing coal and disposing of ash.)

Topham altered these plans in his 1927 scheme which did reflect his study of the Viennese examples. His crucial modification was to create a broken roofline by constructing blocks of three to six storeys with two nine-storey towers interposed – ‘the best way of giving the new accommodation the greatest possible supply of light and air’. A rooftop play area calculated on some formula to provide space for 1880 children was also part of the overall plan which would accommodate some 3054 persons in 492 flats at a cost of £400,000.

Neville Chamberlain who, had history been kinder, might be remembered as a reforming Minister of Health and Housing, laid the foundation stone of the first block (named then and now Chamberlain House) on 1 February 1928.

Cecil Levita, the chairman of the LCC’s Housing Committee who also gave his name to one of the blocks, spoke of ‘a noteworthy scheme which would mark a new departure in the construction of buildings’.

In the event, the law (government subsidies were not available to mixed-use schemes) and economics (private rental incomes were judged insufficient to cross-subsidise working-class accommodation) combined to torpedo the larger ideas. Private accommodation was omitted and six-story blocks of exclusively working-class flats constructed.

Levita House

Entrance to Chamberlain House originally intended as the entry to the premium flats

The Somers Town Pub: the Estate was quite unusual for the time in incorporating public houses

Walker House begun in 1929-30

Nevertheless, the treatment – steel-frame construction, unadorned rough-cast walls, reinforced concrete balconies and an overall aesthetic – remained modernist and exciting to an emergent generation of planners impatient with the conservatism of British design and aspiration (2).

Architecturally it is pleasing. The blocks stand in the form of a huge military cross, with big squares happy in the possession of trees. Windows look out on to the central courtyards and the outer sides are lined with balconies of reinforced concrete, approximating in design to the models in Vienna which have been so greatly admired.

It was a far cry from the ‘Municipal Neo-Georgian’ then typical of most local government architecture.

The courtyard to Walker House, completed in more traditional brick in 1937

The Estate is now Grade II listed but it’s enjoyed a chequered history. Long years of neglect led to tenants’ protests against ‘inhuman living conditions’ in 1982. Camden Borough Council – which inherited the complex from the GLC in the 1980s – acknowledged serious disrepair in 2004 and a £6m scheme followed which created 44 new homes ‘from 66 cramped damp and outmoded flats in the original building’.

The Camden press release, headlined ‘Making a “slum” into family homes again’, offers a stark reminder of changing fashions, heightening expectations and the depredations of time but it’s a mark too of the continuing struggle to provide affordable, good quality homes to the less well-off.

Sources:

(1) Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’

(2) The quote is from Hugh Quigley and Ismay Goldie, Housing and Slum Clearance in London (1934).

The major source for this piece is Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’ from the London Journal, vol 7, no 1 1981. Pepper also provides a commentary to the Twentieth Century Society page on the Estate.  Some photographs have been taken with permission from Andrew Amesbury’s thoughtful and interesting blog entry on the Estate. Listed building information on Chamberlain House and Levita House is available online.

The Totterdown Fields Estate, Tooting: ‘Architectural design of a peculiarly rational and elegant kind’

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Cottage suburbs, LCC, Pre-1914, Wandsworth

Maybe it’s the funny name but people don’t think of Tooting as being somewhere to find extraordinary social history. And, to be fair, most people now would give the Totterdown Fields Estate only a passing glance – just another pleasant but somewhat anonymous early council estate at first sight.

But the Totterdown Fields Estate is special – deserving of our attention not only as the first municipal ‘garden estate’ and the forerunner of many which followed but impressive both for its design and architecture and the vision which underlay them.

The origins of the Estate lie in a combination of events and currents. The London County Council (LCC) was formed in 1889 and enjoyed – until 1907 – a solid Progressive majority. The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act empowered the LCC not only to clear slums but to replace them.

Two years later,  the LCC’s Architects’ Department established a new group dedicated to the ‘Housing of the Working Classes’. Its idealistic members, ‘excited by the socialist philosophy of William Morris and its architectural expression in the buildings of Philip Webb and the teaching of WR Lethaby’, became ‘a breeding ground for architectural design of a peculiarly rational and elegant kind.’

WR Lethaby

Morris is well-known but Lethaby is a complex figure.  He is seen in some respects as an early functionalist – he once famously said that a ‘house should be as efficient as a bicycle’.  But his belief in ‘good honest building’ and respect for its craft and appearance ensured a visually attractive and decorative quality to his designs.

Ebenezer Howard

One more date: in 1898 Ebenezer Howard launched the garden city movement with the publication of Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The Garden City Association was formed two years later. (OK, that’s two dates if you’re counting.)  These were vital influences on much of the ‘garden suburb’ council house building of the interwar period.

Before that, however, came Totterdown Fields. The LCC’s first housing development had been the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch (which I’ll cover in a future posting) but that was a tenement scheme.  LCC planners were keen to develop a cottage estate. A 39 acre site south-west of Tooting Common was identified and purchased in 1900 for £44,238.

Benefitting from a new LCC tramline reaching to the Embankment, the site was well placed to cater for working men who could afford the 3d tram fare to get to work in central London.  (The Northern Line extension would arrive in 1926 and offer additional transport connections.)

Plans were drawn up to construct 1,244 cottages in four different classes: from ‘first’ with five rooms to ‘fourth’ which comprised ground floor and first floor flats, each with three rooms.  A five room cottage with bathroom and scullery on the estate would rent at 12/6 (62.5p); the cheapest three room flats at 6/0 (30p) – rates that excluded the unskilled or irregularly employed.

In the event, the finished estate in 1911 comprised 1,229 cottages for a population of 8788 people.  Four shops were built.  (The lack of retail and community facilities and the absence of in situ employment distinguishes the ‘garden suburbs’ from Howard’s self-sufficient garden city ideal.)

Soon after completion

Okeburn Road

Derinton Road

Each cottage had a living-room; a kitchen with dresser, food cupboard and plate rack; and a scullery containing sink, copper (for washing clothes), coal bunker and, in many cases, a gas oven.  Bedrooms were supplied with wardrobes.  Many – but not all – of the cottages had baths.

Economy was a necessary watchword and was achieved through the cottages’ narrow frontages and small – 5 to 15 feet – setback from the roadways. The cottages were constructed in two-storey terraces of up to 20 units, 12 to 20 feet apart.

Nevertheless, despite these financial constraints, one contemporary commentator observed:

it is a matter for congratulation that the architectural design is pleasing and varied, and though necessarily simple, in no way commonplace, but in strong contrast to the usual type of building erected for the working classes.

The plan was a simple one – a basic grid but gently curved and with existing trees retained wherever possible and new plane trees planted to line the main thoroughfares.  Each cottage possessed front and back gardens, small but civilising.

Housing density – at 31.8 per acre – was quite high (Port Sunlight, a model for the early garden estates, had just 8 cottages per acre) but the Estate’s planners had – by necessity and choice – to steer ‘a middle course between their own well-tried and practical vernacular style and the picturesque conceits of the model villages.’

The particular delight of the Totterdown Fields Estate, however, lies in its detail. Its principal architect was Owen Fleming who, choosing on principle to live in a working-class tenement in Stepney Green, understood better than most the hard lives of the poor and believed passionately in their right to comfortable and attractive housing.

The conservationists can put this better than I can (the Estate was designated a Conservation Area in 1978) but the skill of Fleming’s design lies in both its variety and homogeneity. Arts and Craft features – heavy gables, tall Tudor-style chimneys, single and double storey bay windows, a range of door styles and porch designs – are widely employed but all in the service of a broader and coherent vision.

Specific features gave different groups of cottages distinctive identities but the detailing overall, deployed throughout the estate in varying combinations, provided unity and cohesiveness to its appearance.

As Susan Beattie has written, within tight constraints but with genuine vision and an applied idealism, Owen Fleming and the LCC’s Housing of the Working Classes group:

created a modified form of garden city that introduced thousands of working class people to a new style of life that is no less remarkable a contribution to the movement for largely having gone unrecognised within it.

This was, in a sense, ‘Freedom for Tooting’ and the respectable worthies and earnest professionals of the LCC achieved more for working people than the Tooting Popular Front ever did or ever could. 

Sources:   

Most quotations are taken from Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work, 1893-1914 – the best overall guide to the Estate and its architects.

Wandsworth Council, Totterdown Fields Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy. Most of the images above are taken from this source.

London County Council, Housing of the Working Classes, 1855-1912 (1913) provides detail and early perspective.