The Flower Estate, Sheffield: ‘dainty villas for well-paid artisans’

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Cottage suburbs, Pre-1914

The Flower Estate in Sheffield doesn’t get the attention it deserves but it was a pioneering attempt by a progressive council to create good quality and healthy housing for its working population. And it illustrates how difficult this could be too.

Such housing was desperately needed in Sheffield.  The town’s industrial workforce had expanded massively in the nineteenth century and housing conditions were correspondingly poor.  In 1891, Sheffield’s Medical Officer of Health concluded:(1)

it would be hard to find in any town poorer conditions of property and worse surroundings than are to be found in these central areas of Sheffield…In order to deal with the worst areas nothing less than radical measures will really avail. No mere abatement of the nuisances, so far as is possible under the existing conditions, will suffice.

Such complaints and pleas were legion as the full social impact of the Industrial Revolution became clear but there were rarely either the political means or will to address them.

At length, the means had been supplied, at least in part.  The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes empowered local authorities not only to improve or clear slum housing but to build anew where necessary.

However, few councils took advantage of the legislation in its early years.  The London County Council – as we’ve seen at Millbank and the White Hart Lane Estate – was one exception.  Sheffield was another.

The key to both lay in their radical and ambitious politics.  Sheffield had a proud tradition of working-class organisation and politics but the growth of heavy industry and the trades unionism that went with it by the end of the century now gave this a new cast – I’d say proletarian and collectivist if it didn’t frighten the horses.

By 1893, the Sheffield Trades Council – the federal body represent the city’s unions – was demanding a ‘forward Municipal policy, embracing improvements in working class housing, more libraries and parks and the municipalisation of monopolies’.  And the city’s dominant Liberal Party knew it had to change with the times if it were to retain its influence.

A penumbra of socialists was also active in Sheffield. One, Edward Carpenter, was notorious,  He was none too concerned with mainstream politics but he influenced many, including Raymond Unwin – then working to design miners’ housing close by in north Derbyshire – and Alfred Barton, a local member of the Independent Labour Party, elected to the council in 1907.

Unwin reminds us of the intellectual climate among housing progressives of the day.  Philanthropic industrialists were building model workers’ estates at Port Sunlight and Bournville and Ebenezer Howard was promoting garden cities. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker – who would go on to design the Wythenshawe Estate – were appointed architects to Letchworth Garden City, intended to embody Howard’s ideals, in 1903.

One year earlier, Unwin’s Fabian tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, illustrated by Parker, had provided the ideal for these new workers’ homes.

Quadrangle homes from Cottage Homes and Common Sense

Far more prosaically but of equal practical import, Sheffield had taken its tramways into municipal ownership in 1896 and completed the city’s network by 1913.  The value of this – and the workmen’s fares which accompanied it – was recognised by the Medical Officer of Health who asserted that ‘the new and most excellent tramway facilities will do more to relieve the congestion in the central districts than anything else’.

Nevertheless, early Council attempts to deal with the local housing crisis had proved unsatisfactory.  The expense of the first had led to the building of high-rent tenement blocks which some considered little improvement on what they replaced.  The second – a piecemeal scheme making use of the council’s powers to force landlords to improve their properties – proved too slow and cumbersome.

Both were inner city schemes and their failure led the Council to embrace as necessity the ideal of suburban building.  In 1900 the Health Committee paid £9100 for an area of  greenfield upland at High Wincobank – to the north-east of the then city but close to Firth Park’s tramways and Sheffield’s east end steelworks.

Class A design by Houfton

The Council organised a national competition to design the workers’ cottages to be built on the estate.  The winner was Percy Houfton, a Chesterfield architect, who produced two designs. Both avoided rear projections – seen as restricting fresh air and light – and included upstairs bathrooms and downstairs inside toilets.  Class A houses were double-fronted, Class B houses single-fronted and suitable for terracing.

Class B design by Houfton

The designs were austere with none of the Arts and Craft touches typically favoured by the pioneers of improved workers’  housing but internally they exceeded the ideals of Unwin and Parker.  They were expensive, however.   Rents ranged from 7s 3d (36p) or 6s 6d (32.5p) per week for a three-bedroom house to 7s (35p) for a superior two-bedroom house.

This was a level of rent that led the Garden City Journal to conclude:

the standard of comfort aimed at is beyond the reach of the labourer, for this class the provision of housing remains unsolved.

Houfton’s plan of the double-fronted Class A design

The Council drew the same conclusion. Local architect HL Paterson was commissioned to design cottages to be rented at 5s (30p) a week.  These may have been more affordable to local workers but they were smaller and lacked bathrooms.  Twenty were built.

Heather Avenue single fronted, HL Paterson

Despite this pragmatism, the Council remained ambitious.  Having sent delegations to two Letchworth conferences in 1905, they hosted their own event in Sheffield, the Yorkshire and North Midland Cottage Exhibition in 1907.

In the event, it was the exhibition site’s layout which gathered most notice – the plan of William Alexander Harvey and Arthur McKewan, who had worked together at Bournville, praised for its innovative and picturesque quality, particularly its offset of corner buildings and incorporation of smaller greens and recreation areas within the larger design.

The 1907 site plan designed by Harvey and McKewan. The original Corporation estate can be seen to the bottom right.

The 42 model homes were less innovative but they incorporated many of Unwin’s ideals.  One of the most attractive homes – though not a competition winner – was again the design of Harvey and McKewan.  As the exhibition catalogue describes: (2)  

The aspect of the various rooms have been carefully considered and the whole of the rooms would have sunshine during some part of the day. The coals, WCs, etc. have been kept under the main roof as far as possible, so as to avoid any unsightly projections at the back…A folding bath is provided in each scullery and an Ideal boiler for hot water is also provided.

Harvey and McKewan’s exhibition entry in 1909. Image s2611 reproduced with permission of Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information.© Sheffield City Council Housing Department

The houses today at the corner of Primrose Avenue and Jessamine Road

In general, the exhibition entries were criticised for their rather unimaginative design and poor internal fittings and the Council’s decision to purchase the 42 houses was criticised by urban planners such as the young Patrick Abercrombie who hated their incoherent jumble of styles.(3)

Myrtle Cottages, Primrose Avenue, designed by HL Paterson

Houses in Primrose Avenue by Pepler and Allen

Local Conservatives made a more telling point regarding the £8,391 purchase price. They complained that their necessarily high rents ensured that the Council was merely ‘providing dainty villas for already well-paid artisans’. This charge would be a major factor in the Liberals’ loss of power in 1908.

The Conservatives were to suffer their own housing fiascos and the Liberals duly returned to office in 1911.  They resumed the development of the Flower Estate but the new cheaper houses were smaller and of much lower quality.  Alderman Bailey reflected what had become a conventional view that ‘there was no hope of building houses on the Wincobank estate within the reach of ordinary working men’.

Ironically, the First World War would revise that view. In its aftermath the will and the means would be found again to fulfil at least some of the ideals of the Flower Estate.  The pre-war estate totalled just some 230 homes.   In the interwar period, Sheffield would expand its housing programme massively – as would many other municipalities.  The housing designs and estate layouts pioneered in High Wincobank would prove a major influence.

The Flower Estate itself was completed in 1923.  Stubbins and Brushes estates, begun in the interwar period, to the west in Firth Park both reflect garden city ideals as does the larger Manor Estate.

What all of these estates have in common, including the Flower Estate, is a narrative arc. The estates were founded with a practical idealism which seemed vindicated in their early years.  Strong communities formed and, though the estates weren’t perfect, there was a general recognition that this was housing and an environment of far higher quality than working people had ever previously enjoyed.

And then from the 1970s these estates became the badlands – blighted areas of high-crime and social breakdown.

For anyone charting this trajectory, this response from the Sheffield Forum to the question ‘Flower Estate, what went on?’ is word perfect:(4)

I grew up on the Flower Estate and it did get really rough and tough in the late 70’s and 80’s. According to my parents (my mom lived on there from being a child) the estate was a nice place to live with a good community spirit until the slum clearances of the late 60s and 70s came along. This brought in a lot of problem families which were normally large in numbers.

Someone else comments on the Estate’s heyday, ‘it was a good estate back then.  Everyone looked out for each other, you could leave your doors unlocked…’.

What apparently changed were the new residents and the problems they brought.  At this point, apparently, it became:

easy to get a house [on the Estate] because no-one else wanted to live there.  Before long it was full of undesirable tenants and families…Break-ins were daily, assaults and muggings regular, plus the drug dealing…

Perceptions define reality and none of this needs rebuttal, just context and some caution.

The context lies in economics – the collapse of Sheffield’s local economy and a massive rise in unemployment – and politics – housing legislation which had the effect of increasingly confining council housing to the most vulnerable or troubled.  In combination, they altered the Estate’s demographics and ethos.

Even in 2005, in a period of relative prosperity, over one third of households in Flower were claiming Income Support, double the average in Sheffield.  And the 3000 residents of the Estate would die, on average, six years earlier than even their more affluent local counterparts. By this time, incidentally, 42 per cent of houses were owner occupied.(5)

The caution is simply a reminder of ‘the number of decent folk’ that continued to live on the Estate and the lives lived quietly away from the headlines of crime and social breakdown.

New housing on Hyacinth Road

In the event, the problems were considered so severe and some of the housing in such a bad state – though not the model housing described above – that large parts of the estate were razed.  As is the modern way, a collaboration between private developers, the City Council and local housing associations is rebuilding – ‘affordable’ homes though very little of it for rent as far as I can see.

And within this nexus is a community.  The Flower Estate Community Association was formed in the worse days of the 1980s, run, in its words, by a ‘few women, who have basically worked very hard and along the way have gained a wealth of experience and strong friendships’.(6)  There are a battery of initiatives now and the Association is one of a number of local groups ensuring that the jargon of community regeneration has a meaning for the people who are sometimes treated as its subjects.

Its chair is optimistic:(7)

Some houses have been demolished, others refurbished and we see the new houses progressing each day. We are a nice small estate and it is getting better all the time. We are very proud. We have lovely people here and a thriving community centre

So that’s the Flower Estate.  Judging by the response to the Forum question referred to above – there were 141 posts – there are a lot of people who know the Flower far better than me and care about the Estate deeply.  I’ve learnt a bit about its history but Municipal Dreams aren’t abstract and I’d be pleased to hear how things are working out.

Sources:

(1) Rupert Hebblethwaite, ‘The Municipal Housing Programme in Sheffield before 1914’, Architectural History, Vol. 30, (1987). Much of the historical detail and some of the quotes which follow also come from this source.

(2) Official Illustrated Catalogue, Yorkshire and North Midland Cottage Exhibition, quoted by Picture Sheffield.

(3) Patrick Abercrombie, ‘Modern Town Planning in England: A Comparative Review of “Garden City” Schemes in England’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Apr., 1910)

(4) Sheffield Forum, Flower Estate, what went on?

(5) Flower Neighbourhood Profile, 2005/06

(6) From the Flower Estate Community Association History.  You’ll find much more about the Association’s hard work and struggles over the years here.

(7) Wincobank Estate Arts Project 2008, press release, October 2008

A special thank you to Picture Sheffield for allowing use of the historic image above.

More information and illustrations can be found on the Looking at Buildings pages on the Estate.

Woolwich’s Interwar Health Centres: ‘monuments to man’s achievement and to his folly’

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1920s, 1930s, Woolwich

This isn’t a party political blog but if you’re looking at Woolwich an understanding of the history and role of the local Labour Party is essential.

November 1919 Election flyer

The town – as many still preferred to call it – was home to a skilled and highly-organised working class.  Its Labour Party was the first in the country to enrol individual members and it was the largest local party in the country – averaging between 4000-5000 members – for most of the interwar period.

This was a relatively affluent working class and one with generally moderate politics.  You won’t come across the soaring socialist rhetoric that was a feature of Bermondsey politics, say.  What you will find is a solid commitment to fair wages and proper recognition of trade union rights and a practical concern for those essentials of decent living – health and housing.  We’ll look at the former today.

Woolwich Town Hall, opened by Will Crooks MP in 1906

Labour had first won control of the Borough Council in 1903, winning 25 of the 36 seats. One of its first actions was to establish a milk depot to supply sterilised milk at affordable prices to nursing mothers unable to breast-feed. By 1908, the depot was serving 328 infants – 12 per cent of the Borough’s total.   But Labour had lost control in 1906 and the cost of the scheme – and its taint of ‘municipal trading’ – led to its closure by local Conservatives.(1)

After this false start, the interwar period would see Labour secure its hold on local power – excepting a three-year blip from 1931 – and implement a comprehensive health programme for the Borough.

The environment would be improved by providing good quality housing and open space.  Ill-health would be curtailed by education from health visitors, classes and exhibitions. Sickness would be treated by health professionals working as a team.  And all would occur within a democratic framework mobilising individual self-help and supplying collective means.(2)

They didn’t bother much with jargon then but if we were to apply our own this was an impressively holistic approach and, indeed, the very model of joined-up government.

There’s much to say but we’ll focus on just a few elements here.

The Council’s first health visitor – primarily concerned with expectant and nursing mothers and their children – had been appointed in 1906.  By 1935, 97 per cent of infants under one year were visited by a much expanded team.(3)

From 1925, the Council ran a Health Exhibition in the Town Hall in conjunction with an annual Health Week.  The first was attended by 25,551 people; in the two succeeding years, some 10,000 attended the week’s lectures and talks.(4)  I’ll try not to overwhelm you with figures but they are a beguiling indicator of solid achievement and were, naturally, much touted by the Woolwich powers that be.

Accompanying brochures and later handbooks advertised the full range of Council services.  In 1937, the Library notice promoted ‘Healthy Minds – A mind biased and cluttered with half-truths is as useless as an unhealthy body’.

The advert for the Council’s in-house electricity supply department proclaimed: ‘Another great health service! A clean home, free from dirt, dust and fumes is a great asset to good health’.

I told you it was an holistic approach.

In bricks and mortar terms, the flagships of the Council’s agenda were its health centres.  In 1915, one infant welfare centre was operating; by 1935 there were eight.  These were initially regular clinics convening in ad hoc premises but the Council increasingly moved to build comprehensively-equipped and dedicated buildings.

The Eltham Health Centre on Westhorne Avenue, sited in the midst of the Council’s massive Eltham housing estate, was the first of these.  Opened by Arthur Greenwood, the Labour Minister of Health, in February 1931, this was the first infant welfare centre to also incorporate the London County Council’s schools medical service on its premises – allowing children to be monitored and treated from birth through to 14.

The Centre housed GPs’ and dental clinics, weighing rooms, a dispensary and a lecture room seating 120. To Greenwood, it was all a ‘wonderful temple’:(5)

a very beautiful building and it appealed to him because it was a source of health work. To him politics was concerned with the day-to-day life of men, women and children.

Miss Crout, chair of the Health Committee, urged local mothers to use it.  (Mabel Crout had first been elected to the council in 1919. She would serve over fifty years – as councillor and alderman – in  total.)

Typically for Woolwich, the Centre was a triumph of direct labour – designed, by Borough Engineer, J Sutton in collaboration with Medical Officer of Health, Dr Macmillan, and built by council employees at a cost of £5500.

The maternity and infant welfare centre in Plumstead was enlarged and expanded in the following year and Woolwich’s second purpose-built centre was opened in Market Street in January 1939.

Market Street Health Centre architect’s drawing

In the Council’s circumspect words, this was: (6)

A solid building in keeping with its predecessors, yet thoroughly modern and up-to-date in its planning…one which is eminently suitable for the ever-increasing health services of a metropolitan borough.

The Health Centre today

Woolwich wasn’t flashy.   Architecturally, there’s no comparison with the modernist Finsbury Health Centre of the same period.  The Centre was an in-house enterprise, designed once more by the Borough Engineer and built, at a cost of £18,066, by direct labour.

With the exception of the six consultants, its staff were council employees too.  It’s a lengthy list but worth giving as a flavour of the range of the Centre’s provision: five part-time medical officers, four assistant medical officers, an anaesthetist, six part-time vaccination officers, three part-time dental officers, a  part-time public analyst, 17 sanitary inspectors, 12 health visitors, three TB visitors, 16 clerks and a dispenser.

Main entrance

The building itself incorporated maternity and infant welfare services alongside the LCC’s schools medical service.  Additionally it housed orthopaedic and electro-therapy rooms.  Whilst infant life and mothers’ welfare were the overwhelming focus of the municipal medical provision of the day, the latter – alongside a chiropody clinic – also catered for adult males.

Ground floor plan

The Centre contained one new feature: air raid shelters – two 3ft 6in wide trenches constructed of reinforced concrete entered, in sad juxtaposition, from the pram sheds.  This and the date puts the comments of Lord Horder, the leading physician who opened the building, into context:(7)

If such a magnificent centre had been provided in any other country than this the propaganda minister and his satellites would see to it that the world knew what was being done…Woolwich now had the last word in health centres.  What they were doing in Woolwich would make the pomp of dictators look ridiculous.

Councillor Darby added that the centre was ‘a monument to man’s achievement and to his folly’:

While they marvelled at man’s ingenuity, they should ponder on the grim necessity of the concrete trenches which formed the air raid shelters. He expressed the hope they would not be needed…

But they were.  Woolwich – a military and armaments centre – suffered heavily in the war.  In fact, the Market Street Health Centre survived; that in Eltham was destroyed by bombing in 1941 and not rebuilt.

But in the meantime the centres and Woolwich’s wider health efforts had saved lives.  By the 1930s, infant mortality rates had halved – from 106 per 1000 in 1918 to 42 per 1000 in 1930.  Neo-natal deaths (within four weeks of birth) fell from 109 per 1000 to 44 in the same period.  Such rates were falling generally in the interwar period but detailed analysis supports the common-sense view that Woolwich’s generous provision made a difference.(8)

The Labour administration could justly conclude:(9)

the result of all this work, organised scientifically to proceed with regularity through the year, is that Woolwich can now claim, despite its great industrial areas, to be one of the healthiest boroughs in the kingdom.

Woolwich – as you would expect given its defence connections – was a patriotic borough but it is fitting that it chose to commemorate the death of the monarch in 1936 by issuing a pamphlet on The Care of the Mother and Child during the Reign of King George V.  

For the council, the preservation and betterment of life, and particularly that of its most vulnerable citizens, was its central concern.

Sources:

(1) Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London (1996)

(2) As Esyllt Jones argues in ‘Nothing Too Good for the People’: Local Labour and London’s Interwar Health Centre Movement, Social History of Medicine, vol 25, no.1, February 2012

(3) Data from Marks, Metropolitan Maternity

(4) Woolwich Labour Party, Twelve Years of Labour Administration, 1919-1931 (1931)

(5) Eltham Times, 20 February 1931

(6) Programme marking the opening of the Central Health Centre, Market Street, 14 January 1939 by Rt Hon Lord Horder

(7) Quoted in the Kentish Independent, 15 January 1939

(8) As concluded by Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity, p124

(9) Woolwich Labour Party, Twelve Years of Labour Administration, 1919-1931 (1931)

Original images above are from the wonderful local history collection of the Greenwich Heritage Centre and are used with their permission.  A big thank you to the helpful staff of the Centre.

The White Hart Lane Estate, Tottenham: ‘Houses, the very best of their kind’

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1920s, Cottage suburbs, Haringey, LCC, Pre-1914

The White Hart Lane Estate – or Tower Gardens as it’s known more properly – is in an unfashionable part of London and doesn’t get the attention it deserves.  But it was the London County Council’s first ‘garden suburb’ and the first estate to be built beyond London’s then boundaries.  It’s a fine example of council housing influenced by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements. And it’s big and ambitious – a reminder of a time when local councils could dream themselves of housing the people.

Corner of Risley Avenue and Balliol Road

At the turn of the last century, Tottenham was emerging as a working-class suburb – served by rail and trams whose workmen’s fares made it feasible for at least the better-off working class to move out of central London.

The estate itself was built on a green field site: 177 acres of land purchased by the LCC in April 1901 for £90,225 – the first product of the 1900 Housing Act which allowed the council to buy land beyond its borders.

The LCC’s plans also benefited from a £10,000 donation from Sir Samuel Montagu.  A pious Jewish philanthropist and banker, Montagu had been Liberal MP for Whitechapel from 1885 to 1900.  He stipulated that his grant support the rehousing of the working-class residents of Whitechapel ‘without distinction of race or creed’, intending thereby that the housing needs of the Jewish residents of his former constituency would be justly met.   The Tower Gardens title officially allocated to the estate and its first open space derives from this Tower Hamlets connection.

By 1915, at which point further development was halted by the war, 963 homes had been completed on the 40 acres of the site lying predominantly between Risley Avenue and Tower Gardens Road.

WE Riley’s plan of the pre-First World War estate

Their chief architect was WE Riley, head of the LCC Architects’ Department.  Riley was a member of the Art Workers Guild – a group strongly influenced by William Morris’s Arts and Crafts ideals.  The houses themselves were modest – solid two-storey, brick-built homes, a mix of parlour and non-parlour homes, most but not all with bathrooms, some with outside toilets.

Riley himself described these council cottages as ‘brick boxes with very little else’ but he was defending himself against charges of extravagance – the houses in Tottenham had cost £240 14s (£240 70p) on average against an average £225 on the contemporary LCC development at Totterdown Fields in Tooting.(1)

In fact, he made considerable efforts to inject Arts and Crafts ideals and detail into the estate as can be seen in the gables, dormers, sash windows, chimneys, steeply pitched roofs and porches which adorn the houses in a deliberately wide array of form, varying from street to street.

Architect’s drawing for the Waltheof Avenue side of Lordship Lane

There was also some attempt to reflect the Garden City principles being advocated by Ebenezer Howard and his followers.  Howard’s ideals were not met in the housing density and grid-like street pattern of the estate but its southern section, subsidised by Montagu’s donation, did enjoy larger plots and its terraces were set back further from the road. 

The two acres of Tower Gardens were intended as a form of village green, adapted for tennis and bowls and surrounded by raised terraces and flower gardens.  Tree planting also gave some of the roads a more pastoral feel.

Tower Gardens East Terrace

Houses on the Risley Avenue and Awlfield Avenue junction: a ‘butterfly junction’ of the type pioneered in Letchworth Garden City

A terrace of four houses on Awlfield Avenue given a mansion appearance

Certainly, James Cornes, an early advocate of municipal endeavours, could conclude, in rhetoric reflecting the National Efficiency concerns of the day, that:(2)

When these estates are complete, with such beauty of design and such well-equipped houses, they will form a veritable picture and become a valuable asset to the Empire…It is not too much to say that these houses will do much to stimulate and create a healthy physique; those who secure them will get houses the very best of their kind, and such as any working man would be content to settle down in happily.

Cornes could not then envisage the profound physical harm and unhappiness visited upon working men by the First World War.  But the war itself would be a major stimulus to the next phase of the White Hart Lane Estate’s history.

The need either to reward the British population for its wartime patriotism or appease its righteous anger led to the much increased housing efforts of the interwar period.  The LCC’s major contribution lay in planning and building eight new garden suburbs (see entries on Downham and Becontree) but it also extended the White Hart Lane Estate.

G Topham Forrest’s 1920 plan for the postwar estate

Building resumed in 1920 and continued in successive phases through to the later 1930s.  A further 987 houses and, for the first time, some 279 flats were built post-war.  The estate in 1939 comprised 2229 dwellings for a population of 9719.(3)

A section of the post-war Roundway development

The later development, masterminded by G Topham Forrest, was plainer and more standardised in design but lower in density and with better facilities, reflecting higher post-war standards.  Waltheof Gardens provided tennis courts and a green central axis; four areas of allotments were also included.

Topham Square © Steve Cadnam and made available through the Creative Commons licence

The 72 flats in the three-storey Topham Square scheme were built to rehouse those displaced by the slum clearance of Ware Street in Shoreditch. A smaller extension of 29 three-room cottage homes was built between 1933 and 1934 for those displaced by the Provost Street school clearance in Shoreditch.

And in the midst of all these houses were people and a community.  If you’re read some previous pieces, you’ll know by now that this was a predominantly better-off and ‘respectable’ working-class community.  Rents were relatively high, running from 11/6 (57.5p) for a four-room non-parlour house to 14/3 (71p) for a five-room home in 1927.

Those rents did not include rates which were not compounded – that is they were paid directly by tenants to local councils.  This small detail would be sufficient to make the estate unaffordable to many of the poorer working class. Those displaced slum dwellers were noted as an exception.

An active tenants’ association – the White Hart Lane Estate Welfare Association, founded in 1919 – was vociferous in complaining about this and other hardships.  For instance, it was the custom in the 1920s in many areas that dustmen would not only empty bins but disinfect them.  Not so in Tottenham.  The secretary of the Welfare Association replied to one complainant, sardonically but not perhaps without a touch of pride, that:(4)

With regard to disinfecting dustbins, perhaps [Tottenham Urban District Council] expect us to scrub them, or perhaps they realise that in a well-bred community such as ours, disinfectant should not be necessary.

Later complaints focused on the lack of electricity supply which came belatedly to the estate in contrast to some of the LCC’s showpiece interwar developments – only introduced in 1932 and then initially as a pilot scheme.

The Association also complained about the lack of a community hall – they were forced to make use of local school facilities – but were repeatedly told by the LCC that the estate was too small to enjoy such provision.

There’s a fashionable view on the right that council tenants are a passive, serf-like population.  This activism of the White Hart Lane Estate’s residents and their expectations – based on rights and responsibilities, not entitlement – is a sharp corrective to such prejudice.

As is the active self-help and community life promoted by the Association – whist drives, dances, football, cricket, bowls, netball, tennis, cycling and swimming sections as well as annual sports days and flower shows.  The savings and loan club had 800 members and paid out £18,000 at Christmas in 1938.(5)

The LCC, by the way, continued to hope that none of that hard-earned cash would find its way into the pockets of local publicans – there were no public houses on the Estate and as late as 1933 the LCC’s policy was to object to any licence for the sale of alcohol within a quarter of a mile of the Estate. No objection was raised, however, to alcohol sales at the LCC’s own Tottenham Lido which opened just opposite the Estate on Lordship Lane in 1937.

The Welfare Association remained active into the 1960s and since then new groups have emerged – the Tower Gardens Estate Conservation Committee and the Tower Gardens Residents Association in the 80s and Tower Gardens Residents’ Network into the 2000s.  The Friends of Lordship Lane Recreation Ground currently maintain a very busy programme.

Awlfield Avenue with Broadwater Farm looming in the background

In 1978, most of the area within the Roundway and Lordship Lane – that built before 1915 – was declared a conservation area.  Nowadays, the Estate looks well cared-for – though the Gardens themselves could do with a little love – and seems to have escaped the blight that afflicted many council developments from the 1980s.  Broadwater Farm lies not far away, just south of the Lordship Lane Rec.

The White Hart Lane Estate looks a good place to live and remains a tribute to the ideals which built it and the people who have sustained it.

Sources

(1) Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC Housing Architects and their Work, 1893-1914 (1980)

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

(3) Report to the LCC Housing Committee, 23 June 1939

(4) White Hart Lane Estate Welfare Association, Newsletter, October 1927

(5) Friends of Lordship Recreation Ground, History of the Tower Gardens Estate

Thanks to the Internal Reserves blog for the early image of Tower Gardens above and WE Riley’s plan.  And to Steve Cadnam for making available his photographs of the Estate on Flickr.  The early aerial view is from the London Transport Museum collection, copyright unknown.

Haringey Council, The Tower Gardens Estate Repairs and Conservation Guide (November 1997) provides additional information and images as does their website Tower Gardens – Tottenham’s Garden Suburb.

Original sources referenced above were found in the London Metropolitan Archives.

Victoria Park, East London: ‘the People’s Park’

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LCC, Pre-1914

Victoria Park in east London, a park inaugurated under royal patronage in 1840, hardly seems to qualify as a municipal dream.  But it has a proud democratic history – it’s earned its nickname, the People’s Park – and has flourished under municipal patronage for many years. It deserves its place.

Still, let’s begin by exploring those early years and the involvement of the Great and the Good.  The first annual report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 1839 contained an appendix by William Farr:(1)

A park in the East End of London would probably diminish the annual deaths by several thousands…and add several years to the lives of the entire population.  The poorer classes would be benefited by these measures, and the poor rates reduced.

His words sparked a response.  George Frederick Young, a shipbuilder and MP for Tynemouth but with local connections, called a public meeting to call for a park in June 1840.  Within weeks a petition of some 30,000 signatures in support and a very obsequious letter were sent to Queen Victoria.  Her apparent sympathy caused the government to act.

The 1841 plan for Victoria Park

An act of parliament to create a Royal Park was passed in 1841 and land procured – making use of the existing open space of Bonner’s Fields and a further expanse of brick fields, market gardens, gravel pits and farmland.  James Pennethorne, the architect of the Office of the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, was commissioned to design the new park.

By the mid-40s, as construction and planting continued, the park was open.  There was no official ceremony, ‘no feast of oratory and ceremonial to gladden the hearts of the East Enders.  They just took the park over in 1845 and used it’.(2)  The first victory for the people.

The sandpit, from Living London (1901) © The Encyclopaedia of Victorian London

In other respects too, popular action brought response.  There was no bathing pool provided and local youths were in the habit of bathing – naked! – in the adjacent Regent’s Canal.  Attempts to police such shocking behaviour were unavailing and within a few years a pool was provided in the park itself.

The upper classes professed themselves pleased with the effects of the park on local manners:(3)

…much good has been produced in this way I can most confidently state. Many a man whom I was accustomed to see passing the Sunday in utter idleness, smoking at his door in his shirt sleeves, unwashed and unshaven, now dresses himself as neatly and cleanly as he is able, and with his wife or children is seen walking in the park on the Sunday evening.

Whether Mr Alston, the author of this letter to the Times in 1847, showed the same equanimity in the following year – the year the Chartists delivered their third petition to parliament calling for universal manhood suffrage – is doubtful.  The authorities certainly didn’t.  A ‘monster meeting’ in the park on June 12 was to be a prelude to a mass march on parliament. Force of numbers was to prevail where reason and justice had failed.

This smelt of revolution and the government took all necessary measures.  The meeting was declared illegal and 1600 foot police, 100 mounted police, 500 recalled police pensioners and the cavalry of the 1st Life Guards were stationed in and around the park.  That show of force and the English weather – a terrific thunderstorm dispersed the few stragglers who had ignored the Chartists’ decision to cancel the meeting – prevailed. M’Douall, the Chartist leader, observed no incidents that day ‘except dreadful hooting and groaning at the mounted police’.(4)

If the British working classes never ever seemed quite so threatening again, their interest in reform remained and the park became a renowned venue for socialist meetings.  An attempt to ban public meetings in the park without written permission in 1862 was simply unenforceable as was a later attempt in 1888 prohibiting collections.  A rough democracy was in action.

William Morris

A roll call of an alternative ‘Great and Good’ spoke – Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett…and William Morris who declared the park ‘rather a pretty place with water (dirty though) and lots of trees’.  He complained that his pitch was ‘made noisy by other meetings, also a band not far off’ but, as up to 300 to 400 might attend these meetings, it was necessary to persevere.(5)

It’s true that fascist meetings were held in the park in the thirties but fascism has never gone uncontested.  The British Union of Fascists’ march through the Jewish East End in October 1936 which had Victoria Park as its destination was halted in Cable Street.  Rock Against Racism’s first gig was held in the park in April 1978, attended by a crowd of 80,000.

Still, let’s not forget that the park’s first function has always been as an escape from struggle and the daily grind.  The East End’s greatest socialist, George Lansbury, recalled how ‘we Lansbury children loved Victoria Park and enjoyed every minute we spent there’.  In fact, they were convinced that the pagoda in the park was inhabited by real Chinamen who came out at night to feed the swans and geese on the boating pool.

The pagoda Lansbury remembers, erected in 1875, was demolished in 1956. Another feature of the Park was the Victoria Fountain, donated by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1862 at a cost of £6000.

The Burdett-Coutts Fountain: the fencing has since been removed

The most popular amenity, however, and one that can be credited to municipalism since the park was taken over by the London County Council in 1892, was the swimming baths opened in 1936, 200 feet long with room for up to a thousand.  

London Labour Party leaflet, late 1930s. The image is of Victoria Park lido.

Herbert Morrison, the Labour leader of the LCC since 1934, declared ‘this is more than a swimming pool, it is East London’s own lido’.  Dick Coppock, trades unionist chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, declared the pool:

as good as anything around London owned privately and let out to bathers at twice the price…We shall bring the seaside to East London. Why this is as good as Margate.

It was part of a three-year ‘Labour Plan of Health for London’ – ‘a London with fields right round it, with more parks and playgrounds and swimming pools than any other city in the world’.(6) 

Sadly, it closed permanently in 1989 and hasn’t been replaced.  But the pagoda has.  A major, lottery-funded, £12m refurbishment of the park was unveiled by the Mayor of Tower Hamlets in May 2012.  The borough took over responsibility for the park in 1986 after the abolition of the Greater London Council, initially with Hackney but solely since 1994.  He declared it the borough’s ‘jewel in the crown’.(7)

Today the park looks good.  The fountain too has been restored. Boats have returned to the West Lake, fish to the East.  A new community facility and café have been opened and a large adventure playground and ‘wheelpark’ (for skateboarders and BMX riders) for youngsters.

The author of this 1872 ballad to the park might not have envisaged all this but he surely wouldn’t  have objected too much.

The Park is called the People’s Park

And all the walks are theirs

And strolling through the flowery paths

They breathe exotic airs,

South Kensington, let it remain

Among the Upper Ten.

East London, with useful things,

Be left with working men.

 

The rich should ponder on the fact

Tis labour has built it up

A mountain of prodigious wealth

And filled the golden cup.

And surely workers who have toiled

Are worthy to behold

Some portion of the treasures won

And ribs of shining gold.

 

‘Vicky Park’ is, in every sense, ‘owned’ by the people.  Strangely that was true even in its days as a Royal Park – it is still technically Crown land – under the improving management of the upper classes.  It is truer today in municipal hands.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park. A Study in the History of East London (1976)

(2) Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park. A Study in the History of East London (1976)

(3) Letter to the Times, 7 September, 1847, quoted in The Dictionary of Victorian London

(4) Quoted in David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848 (2002)

(5) Quoted in Rosemary Taylor, ‘The City of Dreadful Delight: William Morris in the East End of London‘

(6) A London Labour Party leaflet included in Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Untravelling Britain (1999)

(7) Quoted in the Victoria Park Project Newsletter, October 2012

The Branch Hill Estate, Camden: ‘the most expensive council housing in the world’

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1960s, 1970s, Camden

We were in Camden a few weeks ago – looking at the Alexandra Road estate – to visit that ‘magical moment for English housing’ when the local council was building some of the finest social housing of modern times.

We’re back to take a look at another of its most celebrated projects – the Branch Hill Estate (now Spedan Close) in Hampstead.  First, a warning.  If you go looking for it, it’s hard to find – buried in woodland, in a western section of the famous Heath, down two unmarked lanes – and hard to photograph.  But it’s worth the effort.

Aerial view © Google Earth, Blue Sky Media 2013

Camden Borough Council was formed in 1964, an amalgamation of the former St Pancras, Holborn and Hampstead Borough Councils.  Labour won 34 seats in the first elections for the new borough – 27 from St Pancras and 7 from Hampstead.  Aldermanic seats gave it an overall majority of 42 councillors over the Conservatives’ 28.

So far as the politics of the new Council were concerned: (1)

The general outlook was ‘left of centre’ and a radical activist view pervaded.  The councillors were determined to pursue policies which would further the development of the services transferred from the LCC, promote the physical redevelopment of the Borough and increase the amount of council housing.  The rising level of Council expenditure and of the rates was a secondary consideration to these aims.

That became evident in the development of Branch Hill.

Most of this radicalism came from St Pancras where, a few years earlier, they’d been flying the Red Flag over the Town Hall.  St Pancras had also built proportionately more council houses than any other council in the country in the post-war era and Camden Labour’s 1964 manifesto had pledged to continue ‘this effective housing policy…at rents you can afford’.

It was a young Council too – almost a third of the councillors were under 40 – conscious of its role in the progressive vanguard of London Labour politics.

One major element of the new Council’s housing policy lay in ‘buying any housing they could lay their hands on (some outside the borough)’ on the reasonable grounds that large-scale construction had little impact on council waiting lists when so many needed to be rehoused as a result of the redevelopment itself.  It was also envisaged as a means of halting – or at least slowing – gentrification. Between January 1973 and September 1974, the Council bought 3850 properties.(2)

Soon after completion

But the Council is remembered today for its flagship housing schemes, of which Branch Hill was one – a deliberate statement that council housing and council tenants should not be ghettoised.  Where better than the leafy surrounds of Hampstead to put this principle into practice?

The lower terrace

But such idealism came at a price in Hampstead.  In 1964 the Council paid £464,000 to buy an Edwardian mansion and its grounds off Branch Hill Road on the western edge of the Heath.  The house would become a care home; its land was earmarked for council housing.

The property came with a restrictive covenant stipulating that new buildings must be semi-detached and of no more than two storeys.  It says something for the vision of the Council’s Architects’ Department that they avoided constructing a little piece of suburbia.

The view of the back of the estate from the care home terrace

In fact, the architects, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, schooled by their work with Neave Brown on the Alexandra Road Estate, and guided by Borough Architect Sidney Cook, came up with a scheme that some have likened to an Italian hill town.

That vision had first to survive some difficult politics.  The Conservative administration that ran Camden between 1968 and 1971 intended to sell the land for private development.  When the incoming Labour administration recaptured it for housing, the then Conservative government refused loan support.  The Council began building anyway and were rewarded by a change of government – and financial backing – when Labour won nationally in 1974.

The finished development comprised 21 pairs of two-storey houses in three rows, 20 five-person, 14 six-person and 8 four-person.  These were semi-detached in name only.  In fact, there are essentially three terraces, punctuated with a grid of walkways, built one above the other on the site’s steep slope.

The fabric reflects what had become Camden’s house style – external walls of board marked and smooth white concrete and dark-stained timber joinery, with the addition of red-brick paving for the walkways.

Also in keeping with the Camden style were the gardens and courtyards each house enjoyed.  But the solution was daring – garden patios were built on the roofs of the houses below and accessed from the living room by a bridge.  These were proper gardens, incidentally, with topsoil that allowed planting. A spiral staircase also leads down to a smaller courtyard area at the front of the house.

Reflecting this and to ensure light and views for each property, a split-level kitchen/dining/living room is on the upper floor with a main bedroom to the rear, children’s bedrooms below.  The accommodation conformed to Parker Morris standards but sliding partitions between the main bedroom and living room on the upper floor and between two small bedrooms on the lower floor allowed larger spaces and greater flow.

Underground car park at rear and air vents, also listed.

The estate was completed in 1978 and the first tenants moved in, it was said, ‘without fanfare’ – a choice on the part of the Council which probably reflected the degree of unwanted publicity the scheme had already attracted.

The Hampstead and Highgate Express had earlier concluded: (3)

These are the most expensive council houses in England, to their defenders an act of political faith, to critics socialism gone mad.

And, at over £72,000 each – well over the cost of contemporary private-sector equivalents – they probably were the most expensive council housing ever.  This expenditure reflects the high price of the site, additional works required to cope with difficult soil conditions and the spiralling costs of materials and labour as shortages of both emerged in the mid-seventies.  Building costs generally had escalated threefold in the period.

But principally, of course, it reflects the Council’s determination and the idealism of its architects to provide high-quality social housing.  To critics, this was naturally a provocation.  As one wrote: (4)

this bright young architect’s vision realised is now notorious and a favourite target for politicians and furious ratepayers … conceived as a social time-bomb it is an economic nonsense … it is financially irresponsible, a slap in the eye to the affluent neighbours whose view has been transformed.

Camden’s Tory leader was careful to wish the new tenants well but added that he opposed ‘the blind dogma and appalling waste which caused these houses to be built in the first place’.(5)  Camden Conservatives had earlier criticised the high rents of the new houses which, they argued, ‘made nonsense of Labour’s stated aspiration of “letting ordinary average people live in Hampstead”’.  For its part, Labour blamed the rising costs on building delays caused by the Conservatives’ desire to sell off the land.(6)

The rents were high.  A new tenant of one of the smaller properties paid £31.20 a week, albeit including £9.82 rates and £5.55 heating.  A tenant of a four-bed property paid £37.50 but she received a rent rebate: (7)

If I had to pay the full rent I don’t suppose it would be worth it…The lounge and the dining room and roof garden compensate for the absolutely minute bedrooms”

Which brings us to the crucial question: what did residents think of the estate?

To some extent, they voted with their feet.  Fifteen of the first completed houses were taken on first offer and those early tenants spoke highly of the estate, despite its expense and, in some respects, its inconvenience – there was quite a walk to the nearest shops and public transport.

It is just wonderful here, it is so peaceful. I think it is jolly good value, it is worth it to be up here…

This is something that the everyday person could not think to afford.

The set of sloping steps designed to give access to prams was universally criticised as ‘lethal’ but it has survived.

As has the estate itself, grade II listed in 2010, and with some style – a tribute to its architects and the council which backed them: (8)

I suspect lesser or wiser designers would not have got this far … a matter for reflection for all those that want to do the thing that is right rather than what the unthinking system tells them to do.

Of course, the system may not only be unthinking, it is often crushing.  We remember again that ‘magical moment’ that Camden enjoyed when relative affluence, political will and architectural vision combined to create ‘some of the highest quality council accommodation in the country’.(9)

Sources

(1) Enid Wistrich, Local Government Reorganisation: the First Years of Camden (1972)

(2) Paul Watt, ‘Camden council tenants’ housing experiences and attitudes in the 1990s’. Paper presented to the Mobilising London Housing Histories: the provision of homes since 1850 Conference, 28 June 2013

(3) ‘The Branch Bears Fruit’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 7 October 1977

(4) Quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

(5) Quoted in ‘Branch Hill Bouquets’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 12 May 1978

(6) ‘Tories to blame’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 11 June 1976

(7) Quoted in ‘Branch Hill Bouquets’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 12 May 1978

(8) Official Architecture and Planning, January 1972, quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

(9) The Architects’ Journal , vol 167, 31 May 1978, quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

Modern Architecture London has additional photographs and plans.

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

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