Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras: ‘giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had’

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1920s, Camden, St Pancras

You’ll find Aldenham House and Wolcot House on a side road behind Euston station.  There’s nothing particularly striking about them at first glance – it’s the railways that dominate.  Back in the twenties, railways occupied about 16 per cent of the  built area of the Borough of St Pancras and almost one fifth of its male workforce worked in transport. 

Somers Town, 1936: Euston is centre left, the estate just above that. EPW046683 http://www.britainfromabove.org, © English Heritage

They would have been among the better-off working class but the district had pockets of severe poverty too. The 1921 census showed 11,000 people living more than three to a room in St Pancras.  In Somers Town, Little Clarendon Street (shaded black at centre-left in Booth’s map below) had been described by Charles Booth in his Survey of London in 1898 as:

a narrow thoroughfare of bad repute – the worst spot in the immediate neighbourhood and a good many prostitutes and amateurish thieves are living here. The local name for the street is ‘Little Hell’.

Little Clarendon Street was renamed Wolcot Street but its older designation, Little Hell, stuck.  In 1921, its 91 houses, now 120 years old, were described as ‘very dilapidated, neglected, insanitary, verminous and dangerous’ and scheduled for demolition by the council.

That council had been won by Labour in 1919 and in the immediate post-war years St Pancras was in the forefront of local authority building efforts.  Its largest scheme, the Brookfield Estate, was completed in 1922 and comprised some 205 flats, maisonettes and cottages.  But its rents – running from 19s 9d (99p) to 29s 3d (£1.46) – were said to be unaffordable to poorer local residents.

In 1922, reflecting national trends, St Pancras Labour lost 22 seats.  It would not regain power until 1945 and a new era of politics. The Municipal Reformers (the Conservative Party by any other name) took over.  Housing efforts slowed but the Aldenham and Wolcot House scheme was completed and it is arguable that the political complexion of the council lent an interesting cast to its completion.

Aldenham House from the corner of Eversholt Street

In total, the new development comprised four blocks – a fifth would be added later – providing 88 tenements: 24 two-room, 56 three-room and 8 four-room.  The blocks were placed, according to the scheme’s architect, AJ Thomas, ‘in such a manner as to admit the greatest amount of sunshine, with a free and open circulation of air and ample playing ground for children’.

Courtyard between Wolcot House and Aldenham House

They were constructed of London stock brick with red brick axed arches and quoins to windows and angles, blue Staffordshire plinths and artificial Portland stone bands, key stones and copings.  Boxed sash windows, described as ‘of the Queen Anne character’, were said to give the whole a ‘general effect of dignified domestic dwellings’.

Wolcot House, side view

Internally the kitchens were large.  They had to be as they accommodated ‘a larder, fitted dresser, gas stove, gas copper, bath and cover table, and a ten-inch deep sink with tile skirting’.  A central hall contained a separate WC and small coal bunker.  Living rooms contained a ‘convertible stove’ which could be used either as an open fire or a supplementary means of cooking and hot water supply.

Mr Thomas went on:

The scheme of decoration has been influenced by the desire to create cheerfulness and encourage cleanliness, all wood floors being stained creosote on the surface against vermin and decay.  The floors can be polished and easily kept clean, and the staining economises use of linoleum.

Stained creosote floors don’t sound particularly cheering but if they helped the housewives of the day keep their homes clean perhaps that was a sufficient reason to be cheerful.

Wolcot House, courtyard view

This is perhaps typical, though not advanced, municipal housing of the period. Some Labour activists inveighed against ‘barracks-like’ tenement blocks (see my earlier piece on the Wilson Grove Estate in Bermondsey) but in inner London –  where space was at a premium – they were generally seen as unavoidable.

A more interesting and unusual aspect of the scheme was the Council’s expressed desire to rehouse all those displaced by the area’s slum clearance. Alderman Collins, the chair of the Health Committee responsible for the development, stated:

in no instance in the Metropolitan area had the possibility of actual rehousing be carried out with such intensity of purpose; the actual persons unhoused had been provided for in every case, a result of which the Borough Council was most proud.

A few tenants, not accommodated on the estate itself, were provided houses on the London County Council schemes in Becontree, Downham and Burnt Oak.

In what might have been a not unjustified dig at his Labour opponents, he went on:

the Council believed that with perseverance and courage it would achieve something in giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had.  Borough Councils had built houses for the respectable, they attracted the nice people, and the people for whom the houses were intended never got there; but in this instance those who had lived in the old houses were now living in the new – a genuine transition.

We might pause here and note that characterisation.  It was the case that early council housing did overwhelmingly cater for the ‘nice people’ – the respectable working-class with, for the most part, steady if unspectacular incomes.  A council tenancy was seen as a sign of upward mobility, it might even promote a certain snobbery.  If we deprecate the latter, we might nonetheless embrace the idea of social housing as aspirational, as something more than a safety-net to catch a so-called ‘sink’ population.

Old and new signage

The commitment to rehouse poorer tenants, nevertheless, provided a challenge to the Council:

Wolcot Street tenants are not the class of tenant usually chosen for the Council’s flats, and hence the need for special consideration in surmounting the difficulties.  It must not be supposed that the tenants are bad; they are very hard-working people, struggling to make ends meet and accustomed to paying low rentals.

In fact, the rents – ranging from 13s 8d (69p) for two-roomed to 18s 8d (94p) for three-roomed tenements – were not that low and it was assumed rent collection would present difficulties.  The Council resorted to special measures – they appointed two ‘lady surveyors’, Mrs Irene Barclay and Miss Evelyn Perry.

Mrs Barclay, courtesy of the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, had been the first women in Britain to qualify as a chartered surveyor and would be a significant figure in social housing through her pioneering surveys and active involvement in local housing associations.

We must assume the choice of these two women represented a belief in a ‘woman’s touch’. The Council professed itself:

fully conscious that the experiment would necessitate patience and help on their part.  There could be no magic, for they realised how slow progress is when changes of so radical a nature were made in the lives of people who seemed to be content for so many years with the misery of their surroundings.

In a world where strong women were making their name in ‘caring’ roles in the domestic sphere – frequently as councillors with a special interest in infant welfare and the health of the mother, for example – we should overlook the peculiar mix of paternalism and sexism here.

Original signage on Wolcot House

The scheme was officially opened by Princess Mary, the daughter of the reigning monarch George V, on 25 July 1928. The local press reported how the new tenants ‘crowded the windows and balconies, and, by the display of flags and cheering, showed their loyalty and added to the general interest and enthusiasm’.

We should assume there was a genuine pride and patriotism on display here.  The tenants organised a whip-round to purchase their own bouquet for their distinguished visitor and a ballot was held to determine who would have the honour of presenting it – Mr and Mrs Crapper of no. 14 and Mr and Mrs Tippett of no. 18 were the lucky ones.

Naturally, the local great and the good were in attendance too.  The Metropolitan Police Band provided musical entertainment.  And Alderman Collins got to make the speech from which I have quoted extensively above.

 Sources

The detail and quotations above are taken from the programme published by St Pancras Borough Council to mark the ‘Official Opening of Aldenham House and Wolcot House, Somers Town, by HRH the Princess Mary, 25 July 1928’.

My thanks to Camden Local History Library for their help in locating this and other sources.

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The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden: ‘a magical moment for English housing’

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1960s, 1970s, Camden

In the sixties, London was swinging and Harold Wilson had promised a new Britain forged in the ‘white heat’ of a technological revolution.  That may have been hype but something of it resonates when you look at Camden’s Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate – Alexandra Road or even Rowley Way to its friends.  There was hope in the air and Camden was well placed to capture it.

The Metropolitan Borough of Camden was formed in 1964 and comprised the former boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras – respectively intellectual, wealthy and radical. It was also the third richest borough in London in terms of rateable value.(1)  Add the politics of a young  and ambitious Labour council, for whom ‘the main aim was more housing – beginning and end’ and conscious of its flagship role, and that made for some of the most exciting council housing of modern times.(2)

Rowley Way in the 1970s © Martin Charles

The Council found in Sydney Cook, Borough Architect, and the team he recruited people with the vision and ideological drive to match its ambitions.  Cook rejected the system-building then in vogue as the means to build as much as cheaply as possible – ‘I’ll use standardised plans if you can find me a standardised site,’ he said.(3)  And he rejected high-rise, particularly the tower blocks set in open landscape popular at the time.

In Neave Brown, the architect of Alexandra Road, he found an ally. Brown wanted to: (4)

build low, to fill the site, to geometrically define open space, to integrate.  And to return to housing the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.

For non-architects, this was a call to return to the traditional values of terraced housing – not necessarily working-class housing, the Royal Crescent in Bath was another role model – in which each dwelling had a front door to the street and its own open space with a view of the sky.

Alexandra Road in its heyday

Before the development, Alexandra Road was an area of some 600 decaying Victorian villas, scheduled for demolition.  Residents mounted fierce opposition to a commercial redevelopment plan which projected three fourteen-storey high tower blocks.  The developer  withdrew and the Council purchased the 13.5 acres for social housing purposes in 1966.

The basic design of the finished estate was determined in 1968 but met resolute opposition from Camden’s Planning Department which believed a low-rise development could not achieve the population density required.  The policy brief stipulated 136 persons per acre, Planning asked for 150, Brown won the day by promising 210 – a figure higher than most high-rise schemes achieve.

The Council (under Conservative control from 1968 to 1971) approved the scheme in April 1969 and planning permission was granted the following year.  One last hurdle was overcome when a 1972 public enquiry approved the pedestrianisation of the road against objections from Westminster residents.

A final budget was set at £7.15m.  Building began in 1972, the first residents moved in in 1978 and the estate as a whole was completed in 1979.  But not before myriad difficulties involving the 175 contractors, a layer of soft clay causing huge problems with foundations and a massive burst water main.  Construction costs were also raised by the shortages of materials and labour.  The overall price of the scheme ballooned to £20.9m – though this did include significant additional works in the provision of a youth club and play centre, for example.

Rowley Way today

Not surprisingly, the eventual expense of the development and its high maintenance costs were widely criticised. Ken Livingstone, who became chair of Camden’s Housing Committee in 1978 and no friend to those now regarded as Camden Labour’s old guard, set up a public enquiry to investigate.  It criticised the Council’s project management procedures.  Others blamed excessive architects’ fees.  A less blameworthy factor is simply the quality and ambition of the estate’s design.

Architect’s drawing of the estate

There are excellent architectural descriptions of the estate which I won’t attempt to match here but in brief it comprises two parallel pedestrianised streets and three, 300 metre-long, terraces.  The largest of these, seven storeys high, backs on to the West Coast mainline, and is built ziggurat-style, high at the rear, to block the noise of passing trains.

The rear of the seven-storey Rowley Way block

Two other four-storey blocks, run parallel, and between them is a four acre park.

Four-storey block, Rowley Way

Ainsworth Way: the rear of the four-storey block skirting the park

The estate as a whole is constructed of site-cast board-marked white, unpainted reinforced concrete with black-stained timber joinery.  But any starkness here was to be offset by profuse greenery and the estate has managed this pretty well, leading one critic to describe Alexandra Road – he argued the vegetation was being used to hide the architects’ mistakes – as the ‘hanging gardens of Camden’.(5)

Rowley Way

Internally, the two-storey dwellings have bedrooms on the lower floor and living rooms on the upper. Each living room has an external balcony with fully glazed sliding doors.  Sliding walls allow the interior space to be subdivided.

In all, 520 dwellings were provided, housing some 1660 people.  Now the key question.  Beyond the architectural hype, what has been the experience of the estate’s residents?

The park in 1983, Rowley Way to right

To begin with, it was positive.  The Council feared the estate would be unpopular but 137 of the first 278 prospective tenants accepted tenancies and they were said to be impressed by the ceramic-tiled kitchens, huge picture windows and sliding wall partitions – and by the central heating hidden inside the walls.  Some dubbed it the Costa del Alexandra and one early resident at least didn’t begrudge her £23.50 a week rent – ‘It’s just like being on the Riviera’, she said.(6)

As severe teething problems developed, chiefly with the heating system, that comment came to seem ironic.  Each heated wall served two flats and residents complained about extremes of heat.  One particularly vituperative article in the Camden Tenant was headlined ‘How to rent a sauna bath and a freezer at the same time’.  It went on to complain about crumbling concrete, railway noise and insect infestation and concluded ‘all in all, this estate represents a disaster of the first magnitude and I for one will be moving.'(7)

The heating problems were admitted and hard to fix with the Council eventually agreeing to pay half the affected tenants’ heating bills till the matter was resolved.  The difficulties with concrete in the British climate are more intractable and were exacerbated in the 1980s by the Council’s poor maintenance of what was always understood as a construction that would need some looking after.  Current views of the concrete are mixed, ranging from ‘I think it’s quite brave and brutal’ to ‘it just looks dull’.(8)

Some weathered concrete on an unforgiving grey day

By the late eighties, the estate had also come to be viewed as unsafe – the incidence of both reported and unreported crime said to be significantly higher than in surrounding streets and estates.  A contemporary survey placed blame on the ‘complex design and layout of the estate’.  But, in hindsight, it seems as realistic to look at wider social problems as any particular issues with the estate itself.(9)

In 1989 tenant disgruntlement with Camden’s management led to their vote to place the day-to-day management of the estate in the hands of the South Hampstead Housing Cooperative.  An £8m refurbishment project was awarded to a firm of private architects.  In the event, the contract was taken over by the Council and completed by in-house architects and the estate as a whole returned to Council management in 2005.

In 1994, well before the thirty years normally required before a building may be listed, the estate was listed Grade II* to ensure any refurbishment matched original specifications.  It was described by Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, as ‘one of the most distinguished groups of buildings in England since the Second World War’.

Architecturally, despite the weathering, the estate remains impressive – a worthy site of pilgrimage for students of modern architecture, some of whom wax lyrical. For the modernist architect John Winter:(9)

Between the system building spree of the sixties and the late seventies slide into folksiness there was a magical moment for English housing when eminently habitable places of clarity and calm were designed and built…Camden has contributed richly to this scene.

Residents’ views remain mixed.  Some liken it to Alcatraz.  One resident describes it more imaginatively as ‘an enormous concrete crocodile that has been in an accident’.  On the other hand, there’s the resident who claims, with a little poetic licence, that they ‘live in a penthouse apartment in a Grade II-listed building in St Johns Wood’.(10)  For others, it is simply home and it is described overwhelmingly as a friendly, neighbourly estate. 

Keeping our feet on the ground, it’s hard not to admire the enterprise and idealism of those responsible for Alexandra Road.  It couldn’t happen now and according to Neave Brown it only happened then because of:(11)

the youthfulness and energy of the people involved, and also because the various figures of authority in the Council were relatively young and inexperienced.

There’s a pleasure in remembering that this vision was committed to public sector housing, so often underfunded, so often marginalised, that makes it easy to forgive some of the missteps and extravagance along the way.  As of 2012, only 18 per cent of the estate’s flats were leasehold so the estate remains social housing in the truest sense.

Martin Pawley, writing with prescience in 1990, compared Alexandra Road to:

an epic silent film. It suffers from having been released into a different world to that in which it was conceived…set on the very cusp of the change from socialism to the me-generation.

Sources

(1) David Kohn, Quality and Quantity, BDOnline, November 5 2010

(2) Cllr Enid Wistrich quoted in Mark Swenarton, ‘Reforming the Welfare State: Camden 1965-73’, Footprint Journal (Delft Architecture Theory Journal), 9, Autumn 2011

(3) Cook quoted in Fabian Watkinson, The Most Expensive Council Housing in the World, Twentieth Century Society (June 2001)

(4) Andrew Freer, ’Alexandra Road: the last great social housing project’, AA Files, 30, Autumn 1995

(4a) Reyner Banham, quoted in the above.

(5) Hampstead and Highgate Express, 20 January 1978

(6) Camden Tenant, Summer 1982

(7) Residents’ quotes taken from the film One Below The Queen: Rowley Way Speaks for Itself

(8) Unit for Architectural Studies, University College London, April, 1992 ‘A High Quality and Secure Environment? – An appraisal of the pattern of public space in the Ainsworth and Alexandra Road Housing Estate’, cited in Alexandra Road Park Conservation Management Plan, July 2012

(9) Quoted in Fabian Watkinson, The Most Expensive Council Housing in the World, Twentieth Century Society (June 2001)

(10) Quoted in Camden New Journal, ‘Film…a candid look at Neave Brown’s iconic Swiss Cottage housing estate’, 27 May 2010

(11) Quoted in Andrew Freer,’ Alexandra Road: the last great social housing project’, AA Files, 30, Autumn 1995

(12) Martin Pawley, ‘Living on the Edge of Time’, The Guardian, 2 April 1990

Check out Single Aspect’s blog entry on Alexandra Road too for additional references.

Thanks too to the Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, the home of much of the material cited above, and its helpful staff.

The London School Board: ‘No equally powerful body will exist in England, if power is measured by influence for good or evil over masses of human beings.’

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Pre-1914

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the architecture of the London School Board. The Board provided elementary schooling for London’s children after 1870 until 1904.  Today I want to look more at what went on inside those schools.

The headquarters of the London School Board on Victoria Embankment, 1873: since demolished

The first elections to the London Board took place in November 1870.  These were the first large-scale polls to be conducted by secret ballot and women were permitted to stand and to vote – as property-holders – on the same terms of men. 

Garrett Anderson

Davies

Two women were elected – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the physician, and Emily Davies, founder of Girton. In all, 29 women served during its lifetime.

One working man was returned – Benjamin Lucraft, a former Chartist and one-time chair of the First International, elected in Finsbury. 

If we focus on these harbingers of change, we should acknowledge that the white, upper-class males who dominated the Board were – in their own terms – a pretty impressive bunch.  They included, as the Board’s first chairman, Lord Lawrence, a recent Viceroy of India, and the Conservative  MP WH Smith (yes, that one) and the Liberal Samuel Morley. 

The prestige accorded the Board was a sign of the significance given to its mission.  As The Times thundered: (1)

No equally powerful body will exist in England outside Parliament, if power is measured by influence for good or evil over masses of human beings.

The 1870 election results established the broad division between Progressives and conservative members allied with the established Church which was to typify the Board.  Religious controversy – between these advocating non-denominational Christian teaching and those favouring official Anglican doctrine – would dog the Board but we’ll focus here on its overall politics which were, for the most part, broadly Progressive.

The London Board’s choice of curriculum made this clear early on.  The government’s Board of Education had issued a curriculum focused narrowly on the Three R’s and would fund locally only those elements included in this Educational Code. 

Conversely, the London Board adopted ‘a liberal standard of education…from the beginning’.  It opted to teach beyond the Code and its curriculum – devised by the biologist TH Huxley, then a Board member, and adopted in 1871 – included: (3)

morality and religion, reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, elementary physical science , English history, elementary social economy, drawing, singing, mensuration [geometry] (in boys’ schools), needlework (in girls’ schools) and physical exercises.

Additional ‘discretionary subjects’ including algebra, geometry and domestic science (for girls) were recommended where resources allowed.

Mixed maths class, Cable Street School

Mixed nature class, Cable Street School

Initially, this programme of studies was little more than ‘a confession of faith’, obviously overambitious given the unschooled nature of the system’s early students.  But it laid down the benchmark of what should be taught.  After ten years of operations, it was said the practice began to approximate to the ideal.

Further evidence of the Board’s ambition to extend working-class education came, after 1887, in its development of higher grade schools.  These were local centres teaching higher level studies – effectively embryonic secondary schools.  When in 1900 the state Board of Education belatedly proposed grants for higher grade schools, the London Board applied on behalf of 79 schools under its control. 

Standard VII science class, Cable Street School

But the Board of Education’s vision was far more modest than that of the London School Board.  The former proposed a competitive entrance examination at 11 and a definite end to schooling at 15. Whereas the London system held the promise of an educational ladder to the highest levels for all, the national government chose to introduce the class-based and selective system which would blight English education for decades.

We might expect the teaching to be old-fashioned but even the Board’s pedagogy seems progressive for its time.  Hugh Philpott asserted:

It is real education – the drawing out of the child’s intelligence – not mere cramming for which the Board School stands.  The  wooden ways of teaching – the arithmetic by rule of thumb, the history that consists in learning strings of dates, the geography lesson that is a mere matter of memorising – all these have passed into the limbo of things superannuated and discredited.

Whether Mr Gove’s new History curriculum is an advance on this, you can judge.

The London Board also deplored the ‘payment by results’ method of early state funding.  Philpott again:

When every child was a potential earner of so many shillings for his teacher, it is not surprising if the teacher’s main concern was to see that the child earned those shillings…The teacher was not paid to educate but to cram; therefore he crammed.

Perhaps the London Board would also have deplored the ‘teaching to the test’ which results from today’s focus on league tables and exam results.

In other respects, of course, we look back at a traditional system. Corporal punishment was permitted.  But even it – occasional horror stories notwithstanding – was strictly regulated and ‘its frequent use [viewed] as a mark of incompetency on the part of the teacher’.

Attitudes towards gender were also traditional.  Boys did woodwork and metalwork, girls did domestic science, laundry and needlework.  Lucraft feared that girls were being trained up to solve the middle classes’ ‘domestic servant problem’.  The Board denied this and it did, at least, take girls’ schooling seriously.

Of course, this was not overall ‘teaching as a subversive activity’ (the title of a key text in my own teacher training).  The system was designed to improve the morals and manners of a class believed inadequately socialised and feared by some as potentially dangerous.

The Liberal MP, Robert Lowe, advocating the 1870 Act which established school boards, stated: (4)

The lower classes should be educated to discharge the duties cast upon them. They should also be educated that they may appreciate and defer to a higher culture when they meet it.

In more down-to-earth fashion, a School Board officer observed that ‘as the arab class come under kind and firm discipline, they acquire in time the habits of punctuality and regularity’.  The same source went on to claim ‘it is undoubted that a good, all-round, popular education will, in the long run, reduce the public outlay in prisons, poorhouses, and the like’. (6)  

Old Castle Street School

Site of first London Board School, Old Castle Street, Whitechapel

Not an objectionable goal, of course, and such new-found working-class ‘respectability’ wasn’t only an aspiration of the elites.  George Potter, a trades unionist and School Board member for nine years from 1873, argued: (7)

The children who go back to the slums from the Board Schools are themselves accomplishing more than Acts of Parliament, missions, and philanthropic crusades can ever hope to do.  Already the young race of mother, the girls who have had the benefit of the Education Act, are tidy in their persons, clean in their homes and decent in their language.

And if all this seems a little too close to inculcating conformity and deference, don’t forget those opponents of the Board who condemned this ‘over-education’ of the working classes and the ‘extravagant’ expenditure it entailed.   Even the great educator Matthew Arnold criticised the London Board’s spending, pointing out that London spent 53s 5d (£2.67) a year per pupil compared to the national average of 35s 3d (£1.76).

By the early 1900s, education was also becoming linked to the ‘national efficiency’ arguments of the day.  These were rooted in fear of rising German competition and concerns – both nationalistic and philanthropic – about the poor moral and physical condition of the working class.  Schooling was seen as a vital means of ‘making the most of the capacities of the whole population…as truly part of our national resources as our iron and coal’.(8)

In this context, the Fabian socialist, Sydney Webb could assert that the 500 schools built by the London Board:

erected at a cost of fourteen millions sterling, constitute by far the greatest of our municipal assets.

Without the bombast, we could choose to agree.

Sources

(1) The Times, 29 November 1870, quoted in Stuart Maclure, A History of Education in London 1870-1990 (1990)

(2) School Board for London, Thirty Years of Hard Labour. The London School Board and its Work

(3) Hugh B Philpott, London at School. The Story of the School Board, 1870-1904 (1904)

(4) Quoted in Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (1994)

(5) Quoted in The London School Board Policy Defence Committee, Statement made by Sir Charles Reed [chairman of London School Board], 27 September 1876

(6) School Board for London, Thirty Years of Hard Labour. The London School Board and its Work, ND

(7) George Potter, The London School Board and the Coming Election (ND abt 1888)

(8) Sidney Webb, London Education (1904), quoted in Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London (1994)

Contemporary pamphlets relating to the Board were found in the George Howell collection of the Bishopsgate Institute.  My thanks to them for their assistance.

I’m grateful also to Philip and Harold Mernick for making their extensive collection of London School Board memorabilia (and much else) available online. Images of medals and certificates are taken from this site.

The Cable Street School photographs are taken from the very informative historical pages of the St George in the East Church website.  They date from 1908 – four years after the abolition of the London Board but too good to miss.

The Millbank Estate, Westminster: ‘a stirring memorial to the committed endeavours of local government to improve the quality of Londoners’ housing’

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LCC, Pre-1914, Westminster

If you’re visiting Tate Britain take a little time to walk just to the north and have a look at the Millbank Estate.  It represents another aspect of Britain’s artistic heritage – the impact of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century – and it speaks, moreover, of a vital moment in our social and political history.

The Millbank Penitentiary in the 1860s

The Millbank Penitentiary occupied the present site of the gallery and estate from 1816 to 1890.  This was the first national prison, designed supposedly on ‘model’ lines.  In practice, it was beset with problems and scheduled for closure by 1885 when a Royal Commission recommended that 11 acres of its land be set aside for housing.  This area was acquired in 1896 by the new London County Council (LCC).

The LCC had been established in 1889, replacing a variety of local ad hoc bodies and the rather inert Metropolitan Board of Works.  Just one year later, the Housing of the Working Classes Act gave the Council the power not only to clear slum areas but to build municipal housing for displaced residents. It happened that the first elections to the new body had returned a reforming majority ambitious to use its new-found powers.  Progressives, a largely Liberal grouping which also included some labour leaders and Fabians such as Sydney Webb, formed a majority on the Council till 1907.

In 1893 a new department was established in the LCC’s Architects’ Department, a branch dedicated to the Housing of the Working Classes.  It possessed a permanent staff of eight, of whom most had drawn inspiration from the design classes of the Architects’ Association and the influence of William Morris, Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and WR Lethaby.

Lethaby outlined his philosophy of design in Art and Workmanship in 1913:

Most simply and generally art may be thought of as the well-doing of what needs doing…

If I were asked for some simple test by which we might hope to know a work of art when we saw one I should suggest something like this: Every work of art shows that it was made by an human being for an human being.  Art is the humanity put into workmanship, the rest is slavery.

The opportunity, then, was not only to build accommodation for the working class but to do so with some style – with an eye to aesthetics and beauty.  This was a reaction to not only the slums in which most working people lived but against also the barracks-like starkness of the philanthropic Peabody Estates which had represented the largest attempt to rehouse the poor of London to date.

Erasmus Street © Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new estate, largely designed by R Minton Taylor, was intended  to accommodate 4330 people, in principle mainly those displaced by the redevelopment of Clare Market in Holborn.  It represented an advance on the LCC’s first housing scheme, the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, as none of the new tenements were to share both a WC and a scullery and the large majority were self-contained.

The design itself was a little plainer than the Boundary Estate but any uniformity of appearance was offset by variations of window placement and rooflines and by the disposition of the blocks to each other and around generous courtyard space and tree-lined streets.

The blocks are generally five storey with the ground storey in dark brick punctuated by some impressive doorways.

The upper storeys are medium red brick with stone dressing.  The dormers, gables and rendered brickwork of the top storey offer more visual interest and clearly show the influence of both the Arts and Crafts movement and the Queen Anne style discussed in relation to contemporary London schools in last week’s post.

Hogarth House – all the blocks are named after British artists – was the first to be finished in 1899: 54 tenements,  24 entirely self-contained and 30 self-contained with private, detached WCs  It is now Grade II* listed.  The estate as a whole was completed by 1902.

It was widely praised in the architectural press, the Architect’s Review concluding that (1):

there is a reasonableness and picturesqueness of disposition as well as a certain simple refinement of treatment about these dwellings which is very pleasant.

But with rents ranging from 7s to 13s (35p to 65p) a week for two and three-roomed flats, the Estate was generally beyond the reach of the unskilled working class for whom it was nominally intended.  This, of course, was the prevailing problem of the new council housing and would remain so for some time to come.

The Turner Buildings were severely damaged by German bombs in May 1941 (and some 25 killed) but the Estate has generally worn well.   Now the Estate comprises 561 flats of which around half are council tenancies and half leasehold.

The estate agents will tell you that a ‘well-presented one-bedroom property with contemporary furnishing located on the first floor of this established, secure development’ can be had for £450,000.  A three-bedroom flat is available for rent at £600 per week.  The pressures on affordable housing in London, and social housing in particular, are obvious.  Meanwhile, Westminster City Council spent over £2m in a nine-month period in 2012 housing homeless families in three- and four-star hotels.(2)

The Estate is managed on behalf of Westminster City Council by the Millbank Estate Management Organisation (MEMO), ‘run by and for the residents’.  The Estate looks well cared for though there were mutterings about enforced ‘gentrification’ when MEMO recently attempted to remove clothing line poles that had been in use for 70 years. (3)

For Susan Beattie, however, Millbank remains (4):

a stirring memorial, not only to the Housing branch, but to Victorian social conscience and to the committed endeavours of local government to improve the quality of Londoners’ lives.

Given the money spent on housing some of our poorest and most vulnerable families in bed and breakfast accommodation, we might wish for a return to such Victorian values.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work, 1893-1914

(2) Karl Mercer, BBC News, ‘Homeless Westminster Families in Four Star Hotels‘, BBC News Online, 7 February 2013

(3) Mark Blunden, ‘Residents get shirty in battle to save their washing lines‘, Evening Standard, 20 May 2013.

(4) Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work, 1893-1914

Other detail for this post is taken from City of Westminster, Millbank Conservation Area Audit, ND