Leeds, 1934 – Rent rebates and a tenants’ strike: ‘The whole system…turning round’

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1930s

This post is a bit different from the others. It’s about a man and a plan, maybe actually about the ‘best laid plans’ – the sort that ‘gang aft agley’. The man was the Reverend Charles Jenkinson. His plan was to rehouse the slum dwellers of Leeds. It ended with the first rent strike directed against a local authority and a Labour-controlled one at that.

Charles Jenkinson was born in 1887, the son of a London docker. He left school at 14 but his native intelligence and the diligence that characterised his life secured him work as a bookkeeper. He was also a chorister and Sunday school teacher at St Stephen’s, Poplar – and a socialist: a member of the Church Socialist League and, from 1908, the Independent Labour Party.

These strands coalesced in 1909 when Conrad Noel – the notorious ‘Red Vicar’ – was appointed to office in Thaxted, Essex.  Noel was a prominent Christian Socialist.  Jenkinson became his lay secretary.

Jenkinson helped organise farmworkers’ trade unions and acted as a Labour local election agent.  He was a conscientious objector to the First World War but served as an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps whilst somehow studying Latin and Greek in his spare time.  A law degree at Cambridge followed – all, as he stated, ‘that my wits might be sharpened to help me wage a more successful battle against the devil in man’.(1)

He then took holy orders and was ordained curate in Barking in 1923.  But Jenkinson’s zeal demanded a tougher challenge.  Having requested ‘the hardest parish in the country’, he was appointed vicar of Holbeck in Leeds in 1927.

Bear with me. Jenkinson has his blue plaque now but these stories should be remembered.

The plaque to Jenkinson unveiled February 2012

In 1914, there were 78,000 back-to-back houses in Leeds – 71 per cent of the housing stock. The worst of these – 35,000 – were built in long rows or enclosed courts and 14,000 had just two rooms. Holbeck was among the poorest areas and an insult to Jenkinson’s humanity and ideals.

Leeds back-to-backs: these survived into the 1950s. 18,000 remain

By 1930, Leeds had built 7000 council houses but very little had been done to clear the slums and the new council house rents were too high for slum-dwellers. According to the local Medical Officer of Health, Dr Jervis:

For all the thousands of new houses erected the slum population has not diminished by so much as one family.

Jenkinson was elected a Labour councillor in 1930 and immediately pushed for drastic action.  Housing became the major issue of local politics and Labour’s radicalism, driven by Jenkinson’s passion, secured it a majority in 1933.

We’ve examined one major element of that housing programme – the Quarry Hill flats – in another post.  The question here is ‘could Leeds rehouse its poorest inhabitants?’  This was something which social housing to date had manifestly failed to do.

Jenkinson grasped this. In 1931, he had written, the ‘Slum Problem can only be solved by the creation of houses for the present slum population at rents which that population can pay’. In 1934, and now with power to act as chair of the Housing Committee, he stated as simple principle that:

Every family will be offered the dwelling appropriate to its needs …at whatever rent it can afford to pay if it cannot pay the proper rent of the accommodation.

In the early thirties, the average weekly rent of Leeds council housing stood at 8s 2d (41p) – the rent on a three-bedroom parlour house could be as high as 12s 6d (62.5p).  In contrast, back-to-back rents were generally below 5s (25p).  Moreover, it had been Council policy, prior to Labour’s victory, that no family on public assistance be granted the tenancy of a council dwelling larger than a two-bedroom flat.

New housing on the Middleton Estate © Leeds Library and Information Service: the type of housing typically out of reach of the slum dwellers.

Jenkinson’s solution to the conundrum was the Differential Rent Scheme: the most comprehensive scheme of rent rebates in the country.  Anyone with a weekly income below that calculated necessary by the BMA’s Committee on Nutrition to meet essential needs would pay no rent.  Leeds – uniquely – did not set a minimum rent payable by all.  Jenkinson stated baldly:

We shall not begin to talk about rent until there is sufficient money in the household to provide that family with the necessities of life.

Conversely, those who could pay the full economic rent were expected to do so.

Translated from policy to practicalities, the scheme – which affected 5750 tenants – required wide-ranging means testing and increased officialdom. Weekly incomes had to be submitted to council scrutiny in the tenants’ ‘Grey Book‘; 28 additional rent collectors had to be employed.  Such intrusive means testing had unavoidable echoes of the reviled Public Assistance Committees so active in this period of the Great Depression.

It also meant, of course, that a significant minority of council tenants would pay increased rents, sometimes by as much as 5 shillings a week.

To T.H. Gilberthorpe, president of the Leeds Federation of Municipal Tenants Associations, ‘The whole system [seemed] to be turning round.’  More affluent working-class tenants felt their aspiration and respectability affronted.  As one spokesman stated:

Are we then unsuitable tenants? Definitely no! Do we not bear ample witness to the good judgement of those who selected us to occupy these houses? The average corporation tenant is a credit to the community… It may be that the fact that we are corporation tenants has enabled us to get good jobs

The Federation carried out a door to door ballot of nine of the city’s eleven estates.  Of a total of 2,284 returned ballots, 1,667 voted against differential rents.

The scheme had caused immense division.  Financially, there were clear winners and losers and differential rents set better-off tenants against the worse-off.  One opponent complained of the ‘constant bickering and…general feeling of unneighbourliness’ which had resulted.

In the event only some 400 to 500 tenants withheld rent. And when the Council responded firmly – sending out notices to quit by registered mail – the resistance collapsed. The ‘strike’ lasted barely two weeks. A later legal challenge to the scheme also failed.

But Labour paid a heavier political price. It lost control of the Council in 1935 and did not win a majority again until 1945. Jenkinson himself lost his seat in 1936 and did not return to the council until 1943.

What had his zeal – many talked of high-handedness and intolerance – achieved? A record of rehousing slum-dwellers unequalled in the country: 10,000 back to backs were demolished in four years and the brief Labour administration built 9,000 new homes.  Of displaced slum-dwellers, 85 per cent were rehoused in council accommodation.

The Gipton Estate begun in 1935

More revolutionary than the bricks and mortar were the finances.  By October 1935, over one third of tenants paid no more than 5 shillings a week rent – the same amount as paid by those in even the worst back-to-backs.  Eleven per cent of tenants paid no rent at all.  Only 41 per cent of tenants paid the full economic rent. 

For Jenkinson, this must have seemed to fulfil a central tenet of his socialist principles: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.  

Practically, it tackled and solved one of the most serious deficiencies of early council housing – a level of rents unaffordable to those who needed it most. He had rehoused the slum dwellers.

The most graphic demonstration of this revolution was the decanting of his own Holbeck congregation: Jenkinson became the vicar of a new church in the new council estate of Belle Isle. His old church and the slums that surrounded it were demolished.

St John and St Barnabas, Belle Isle. Jenkinson’s new church, built 1938.

On the other hand, the real context of the scheme was not some socialist ideal but actually existing capitalism.  Differential rents were, in practice, a form of welfare provision.

Labour – and Jenkinson specifically – remained committed to the notion that council housing would serve general needs.  Jenkinson wrote later that:(2)

it is extremely undesirable that there should be any confinement of local authorities…For important sociological reasons they should be allowed to extend their housing activities over the widest possible range.

But his focus on rehousing the poorest and the means employed did create a dynamic in social housing – the potential, at least, that it would come to be seen as housing of last resort for the least well-off.  The ideal of the council estate as a mixed community had been eroded – as it would be far more drastically from the 1980s.  The interwar reality of council estates as a site of upward mobility for the ‘respectable’ working class was weakened.

Could it have been different?  Even to ask the question seems somehow to imply that Labour reformers could have ignored the poor.  Maybe the easiest thing to say is simply that there were no good options. Where resources were scarce, Jenkinson’s determination to do the bold, right thing for the poorest inevitably impacted on those just a little up the ladder.

We wrestle with dilemma today as Charles Jenkinson and his Labour colleagues did in the 1930s.

Sources:

(1) Stephen Savage, biography of Jenkinson, Forward Plus, Summer 2012.  

(2) Jenkinson, Our Housing Objective (1943), quoted in JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (1993)

Robert Finnigan’s chapter on Leeds in M.J. Daunton, Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in England, 1919-1939 is very useful.

Quintin Bradley’s The birth of the council tenants movement: a study of the 1934 Leeds rent strike provides a thoroughly researched and powerful perspective on the strike and its context. Several details and quotes above are taken from this source.

Leodis – the photographic archive of the Leeds Library and Information Service – provides many further images and much supporting detail.

A full biography of Jenkinson by Howard Hagger Hammerton, This Turbulent Priest, was published in 1952.

Postscript:

In 1947, Jenkinson became leader of the Leeds Labour Group as well as a member of the national government’s Central Housing Advisory Committee. In October 1948 he was appointed chairman of the Stevenage New Town Development Corporation. He died nine months later of inoperable cancer.

The Differential Rent Scheme was maintained by the incoming Conservative administration with few modifications.

The Byker Estate, Newcastle: ‘groundbreaking design and a pioneering model of public participation’

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1970s, Multi-storey

The Byker Estate is unusual for a municipal housing development – it’s been critically acclaimed.  When English Heritage awarded Byker its Grade II* listing in 2007, they praised both its ‘groundbreaking design…influential across Europe… and pioneering model of public participation’.  The estate’s main element, the Byker Wall, is  – like it or loathe it – an outstanding piece of modern architecture.  The conception and design of the estate as a whole was shaped by unprecedented community consultation.  

Northumberland Terrace, part of the Byker Wall © Andrew Curtis

Byker was taken to represent a dramatic break with the aesthetic and ethic that had dominated the social housing of the sixties.  It rejected the architectural brutalism of much of the local authority housing of the day.  And it seemed to challenge the local government paternalism which underlay this.  The truth is a little more complicated as we’ll see but, after all, dreams wouldn’t really be dreams if they ever came completely true.

In the early 1960s, 17,000 people lived in Byker.  It was an area of terraced housing, back yards and back alleys, outside toilets and coal sheds.  A lot of the homes were ‘Tyneside flats’ – single storey flats upstairs and downstairs in two-storey terraces.

This was a traditional, tight-knit working-class community beautifully captured in the images of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. But it was a community facing existential threat – by 1963, the whole area was scheduled for redevelopment. In fact, Newcastle’s Chief Planning Officer, Wilfred Burns, working closely with then council leader T Dan Smith, planned to demolish a quarter of the city’s entire housing stock in twenty years.

Kendal Street ©Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, courtesy Amber/L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

Tyneside flats in Clydesdale Road, 1971. The twin entrances are to top and ground floor flats ©Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, courtesy Amber/L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

Whether Byker’s housing, suitably renovated, could or should have been preserved is a moot point but by 1968 (when both Burns and Smith had moved on), something radical had happened. Byker’s residents wanted to be rehoused where they lived and with their neighbours and Newcastle City Council agreed.

Their agreement was signalled by the appointment of Ralph Erskine, an architect and planner whose commitment to people-centred design was rooted in his parents’ Fabianism, his own Quakerism, and Swedish social democracy. Erskine’s vision – accepted by the Council in November 1968 – was for ‘ a complete and integrated environment for living in the widest possible sense’.  This, he went on, would involve considering ‘the wishes of the people of all ages and many tastes’ with the intention (1):

…to maintain, as far as possible, valued traditions and characteristics of the neighbourhood itself…The main concern will be for those who are already resident in Byker, and the need to rehouse them without breaking family ties and other valued associations or patterns of life.

The principle of consultation was fulfilled in two main ways – through a pilot scheme involving 46 households working with architects in the design of their future homes and, more significantly, by shop-front offices in the middle of redevelopment to which residents could drop in. (They did – in large numbers – though often to raise concerns that the architects themselves were powerless to deal with.)

How real and effective this consultation process actually was is open to question. One critical observer concluded that ‘the real power to decide what should be done, and when, lay outside the community, in the Civic Centre’.(2)  Perhaps this was inevitable given the constraints of finance and law and the politics of competing priorities.

A clearer-cut and more objective criticism lies in the failure to fulfil the first object of the scheme – the preservation of the Byker community. A population of 12,000 in 1968 was reduced to around 4400 in 1979. Of new homes, only about half went to locals. Years of planning blight, long delays in construction, a slow pace of demolition and the sheer disruption of redevelopment had forced around 5000 households out of the area.

St Lawrence church and Byker Crescent © Andrew Curtis and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

But there is still much to praise.  Older buildings important to the community were preserved, new ones built and community organisations supported. Corner shops (enjoying subsidised rents) and the retention of local employment in an existing industrial area added to the estate’s identity and vitality.

Gardens behind the Byker Wall © Andrew Curtis

Careful landscaping which separated cars and people, plentiful open space and greenery all added to the attractiveness of the estate. The sale of subsidised plants and practical advice offered to support their own horticultural efforts added to the pride that many early residents felt in the estate.

And then there’s the architecture.  Most people agree that Byker looks good and probably everyone can agree that it at least looks interesting. There is variety, colour, detail and a regard for human scale, values and needs which combine to make the estate an example of social housing at its best.

Aerial view with Byker Wall at top © Google Earth

Technically, the famous Byker Wall provides a one and a half mile long perimeter barrier to North Sea winds and the noise and pollution of adjacent major roads.  But there’s nothing austere about this block of 620 maisonettes – it rises and falls (from three storeys to twelve) and its textured and coloured façades of brick, wood and plastic, balconies and planters provide endless visual interest.

Dunn Terrace, Byker Wall © Andrew Curtis

There were lessons learnt here from earlier mistakes such as those which marred the Quarry Hill development in Leeds.  (There’s an earlier post on that pre-war scheme.)

The rest of the estate comprised areas of high-density low-level housing, each distinctive and bright and with a sensitive mix of small private gardens and larger communal spaces.

The estate – 200 acres, 1800 homes, a population of 9500 – was completed in 1982. How has it fared?

The build quality was poor and major refurbishment has been necessary. This has been costly (the more so now given the estate’s listed status) and ongoing.

Most significantly, the community has changed.  This is not principally the result of some malign social engineering in the scheme itself.  Much more it results from social and economic shifts that have damaged working-class communities – and social housing in particular – across the country.

As traditional local industries – notably the shipbuilding staple of Tyneside – declined in the 1980s, unemployment on the estate reached 30 per cent. It remained three times the national average (at almost 12 per cent) in the early 2000s. Unsurprisingly, levels of deprivation and complaints of antisocial behaviour rose accordingly.

The estate’s demographics were further affected by right to buy and the shrinking stock of social housing.  As Sarah Glynn has observed (3):

The increasing residualisation of social housing as a minimally-maintained safety net for those who could not afford anything else meant that estates such as Byker became ghettos for many of those failed by society.

All this has led current residents to entertain very varied perspectives on the estate.  There are those who think it ‘absolutely terrible’ and ‘a hole’ and those who have commented more in sadness than anger on the estate’s apparent decline: ‘It was a lovely place to live. Now it’s changing. People don’t feel safe anymore.’

Many are far more positive both on the quality of their homes and the strength of their community and we’ll leave the last word to one person who simply stated that Byker ‘had its fair share of good and bad, like any other area’. (4) There’s no headline there but it’s a corrective to both the exaggerated praise and extravagant criticism the estate has endured over the years.

And this picture is changing. There has been considerable investment in both the fabric and social environment of Byker and, generally, there seems a more optimistic feel to the estate and its future. In July 2012, the Byker Community Trust – a registered social landlord with four tenant representatives and two from the council on its thirteen-strong board – took over the running of the estate.  As you will have noticed, I don’t think local councils are the devil’s spawn but there does seem to be a consensus that this represents a positive fresh start.

Brinkburn Street. The Shipley Road Baths (built in 1907) were reopened as a climbing centre in 2008 © Andrew Curtis

So it’s a mixed picture. There is certainly much to celebrate in Byker – the vision which inspired it, the daring and decency of its overall design, even a continuing record of community involvement, flawed though it has been.

The failings and shortfalls are undeniable too.  Some of these may have been avoidable but reflect an eternal reality of investment never quite matching aspiration.  Others seem to have resulted from intractable social dynamics – though, in this case, we shouldn’t forget the political choices which helped forge these apparent inevitabilities.

Let’s applaud the ambition and much of the execution and let’s support those whose dream it was – and is – to create decent, good quality and attractive housing for ordinary people.

Sources

(1) and (2) Peter Malpass, ‘The Other Side of the Wall‘, Architect’s Journal, 9 May 1979

(3) Sarah Glynn, ‘Good Homes: lessons in successful public housing from Newcastle’s Byker Estate‘, November 2011.  This is an important article for anyone interested in Byker and in the fortunes of social housing in general.

(4) Residents’ views are taken from BBC Tyne, ‘The Byker Redevelopment‘, 2007, and Sebastian deFreitas and Michael Gow, ‘The Byker Wall Redevelopment‘, 2010

A big thank you to Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen for allowing use of her images.  More can be found at Amber Online.  She has published books on Byker and its community in 1983 and 2009.

Andrew Curtis’s photographs are taken from geograph and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence.  My thanks to him for sharing them.

Limehouse Town Hall: ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’

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Pre-1914, Town Halls

The eastern end of Commercial Road is pretty shabby.  It’s easy to overlook the Limehouse Town Hall.   It’s not the grandest municipal edifice in any case but give it some attention – it captures the dreams of our early city fathers. And its former grandeur, colourful history and present disrepair tell a story which charts those fraying dreams over many years.

Plans for a new building that would reflect the status and aspirations of Limehouse local government were first mooted in 1875.  The Limehouse Vestry – the closest the area came then to a local council and responsible for local drainage, paving, street repairs, lighting and the removal of nuisances – wanted a permanent home.  

That home was planned as a building to ‘dignify the proceedings’ of the Vestry board: ‘something more than four walls and a roof’ – it was to be ‘a structure that from an architectural point of view shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It was also envisaged as a venue – much needed by a rapidly growing local population – for large public meetings and events of all kinds. 

Six years and some £10,000 later, the hall was opened: ‘a substantial rectangular structure, of Italian style, with a bold open portico carried on polished granite columns [with] facades of white Suffolk brick and Portland stone with bold round arched windows’.

An early coloured photograph of the Vestry Hall. The tower of St Anne’s, Limehouse, lies to the rear

A gathering of some 200, representative of the local great and good, greeted the occasion and local Liberal MP, James Bryce, commended:

…the erection of a building, so worthy of corporate and municipal purposes, so complete in its various appointments…

The local newspaper reported both the ‘cheers and some slight hissing’ which greeted his remarks, the dissent probably reflecting an electorate not wholly convinced of the value of all that expense.  Other accounts describe tables, writing stands, hat stands, even the boxes to contain lavatory paper made of mahogany, chairs covered in morocco leather, Persian rugs on the main ground floors and a rosewood grand piano gracing the main assembly hall.

Cast iron railings and balustrades which remain and elaborate gas light fittings which survive in modified form complete the picture of local pride and ornate Victoriana.  Ratepayer ‘economists’ might quibble but there was a dignity conferred here on a poor East End community

Entrance © Wikimedia Commons

The main staircase

This original gaslight would have had a circle of burners whose light reflected off the convex centre. Heat escaped through the metal grill

What is certain is that the hall – taken over by Stepney Borough Council in 1900 – was well used over many years.   Local people attended balls and concerts in numbers straining even the modest health and safety regulations of the era. ‘Cinematograph’ showings were held into the 1920s.

Limehouse Town Hall, c1910

In a district known for its fierce partisanship, politics loomed large too.  Gladstone was received with plaudits and unemployed protests in 1888.  The radical MP Charles Bradlaugh spoke the following year.

Clement Attlee, a one-time mayor of Stepney and a Limehouse MP from 1922 to 1950, visited frequently.  He survived even the crisis election of 1931 and a particularly rowdy Town Hall meeting which saw the Conservative candidate greeted with boos and a rendering of The Red Flag from ‘malcontents in the gallery’.  But there was a ‘hostile element’ for Attlee too that year and his majority fell to just 551 (or 2.4 per cent); in 1945 it would be 6780, 68 per cent.

1923 election address

The heyday of the Town Hall as an administrative centre, however, was relatively short.   An infant welfare centre replaced the vestry hall and committee room on the ground floor before 1931.  A doctor’s surgery followed.

The building – alongside much of  the rest of this docklands area – was badly damaged in the Blitz.  It was reopened in 1950 by no less a person than then Prime Minister Attlee.

Attlee’s government had done much – through the best of motives – to deprive local authorities of many of their more significant powers in health, welfare and the utilities but in this setting he expressed his wish to ‘prevent overmuch centralisation’.  ‘We want a real live active Borough with a sense of its individuality,’ he went on and added, ‘there is no more individual borough in London than Stepney’.

There would be no great revival in the Town Hall’s fortunes, however.  By 1975 it was essentially redundant and became, through the auspices of Stepney’s successor authority Tower Hamlets, the site of the new National Museum of Labour History.

Harold Wilson

Another Labour PM, Harold Wilson, performed the opening honours and it was again fitting that his arrival was met by 400 protesters demanding loudly, among a range of causes, the saving of Poplar Hospital, justice for George Davis and the freeing of the Shrewsbury Two.  (If you’re so young that the latter references mean nothing, you can Google George Davis and also be surprised to learn that Ricky Tomlinson – one half of the Shrewsbury Two but much better known now for his role in The Royle Family – had a previous incarnation as a militant trade unionist.)

I visited the Museum myself in those days and, to be honest, it seemed – before the heritage industry took off and Lottery funding kicked in – a rather moribund and literally mildewed place: a labour of love but struggling.  The Liberal Democrats won control of Tower Hamlets in 1986 and withdrew support – though financially the demise of the Greater London Council in the same year was a greater blow.  The Museum closed and has since reopened more grandly in Manchester.

Decentralisation was one part of the new and controversial Liberal Democratic administration’s platform and from 1987 the Town Hall became the Wapping Neighbourhood Centre.  When Labour regained power in 1994,  this ended and the building endured a number of short-life roles – at one time a shelter for homeless people, at another a young person’s training centre – until in 2004 it was taken over by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust.

Open Day 2012: awaiting renovation

The Trust – which aims to redevelop the building ‘to bring it back into full and sustainable community use’ – has worked hard both to commemorate its past and revive its future.  Important repairs have been completed; future phases will modernise and adapt the building to secure and expand its current use as a community venue for musical, drama and arts events of all types.  Give it your support.

And that is the uncompleted story of Limehouse Town Hall – not the most imposing building but impressive nonetheless; playing no decisive part in history but a witness to local dramas speaking of striking political and social change; and – through many vicissitudes – a part of its community for one hundred and thirty years and for some years to come.

Sources:

A big thank you to the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust who provided me with a wealth of information and resources on the Town Hall after my visit during London’s Open House weekend in September 2012.  Most of the quotations above come from contemporary newspaper reports. The website of the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust will tell you much of the building’s past, present and anticipated future.