‘Local government…the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’

When I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it all righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

The words of Winifred Holtby in 1936.

I started this blog back in January to celebrate the efforts and achievements of our early municipal reformers.  I’m taking a break this week but it’s an opportunity to review what’s been covered and, if you’re new to the blog, provide a little tour of what you’ve missed.

WE Riley’s plans for the White Hart Lane Estate

There’s been a lot about housing – probably the most important sphere of municipal endeavour and the one with the largest direct impact on the masses of people.  The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act provided the initial breakthrough, seized upon by the London County Council, most famously, in Arts and Crafts-inspired developments at Millbank, Totterdown Fields and the White Hart Lane Estate but also by smaller, progressive councils such as Sheffield in the Flower Estate and Battersea in the Latchmere Estate.

The First World War gave impetus and urgency to the efforts of government to house the people, supported by Housing Acts and financial subsidies of greater or lesser generosity.  The fruits of these were seen principally in the massive new ‘garden suburbs’ such as the LCC’s Becontree and Downham and Woolwich’s Page Estate in the London outskirts and Manchester City Council’s Wythenshawe Estate, then seen as ‘the world of the future’. 

For most, working people and housing reformers, ‘a cottage home for every family’ remained the ideal, seen most clearly in Bermondsey’s small Wilson Grove Estate. More pragmatic councils in densely settled boroughs embraced tenement building such as that in Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras.

Housing architecture and thinking were generally conservative but there were some early modernist designs, inspired by Continental example – in the LCC’s Ossulston Estate, for example.  Leeds’ massive Quarry Hill scheme was an inner-city product of the first large-scale slum clearance efforts of the 1930s.

War, ‘the locomotive of history’, brought even more radical changes in housing after 1945.  The Lansbury Estate in Poplar, for all its proclaimed modernity, was something of a throwback.  Blackbird Leys in Oxford was also a postwar estate which echoed earlier suburban developments.

The Spa Green Estate, from Margaret and Alexander Potter’s Houses, 1948

But as ambitions, scale and urgency grew, council housing grew higher and denser. The Spa Green Estate in Finsbury was an early progressive vision of high-rise housing.  Park Hill – those ‘streets in the sky’ in Sheffield – represents the trend at its most far-reaching.

Resistance or backlash to high-rise on an industrial scale began in the late sixties, seen initially in Camden Council’s commitment to high-quality, low-rise housing such as that in the Alexandra Estate and Branch Hill and – in a different key – to Newcastle’s commitment to re-created community at Byker.

If housing met one of the most basic human needs, it was understood by municipal reformers as part of a wider environment which they sought to make healthier and more humane.

Bermondsey Borough Council – as in so many things – took the lead here with its vision of beautifying that inner-city borough.  Victoria Park in London’s East End is a more typical city park but a great democratic exemplar of what parks can do to improve lives and lift spirits.

Planning on a larger scale was much more a post-Second World War ideal.  The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 deserves wider notice as a truly progressive but, in the best sense, conservative measure.  Planning as a tool of benevolent social engineering has had less impact but Plymouth can be fairly described as our ‘first great welfare state city’.

Abram Games’ 1943 poster featuring the Finsbury Health Centre

All such work was in the service of a healthier life for the masses of people.  Local government – before the creation of a national health service in 1948 – was in the forefront of direct healthcare provision.  We’ve looked at Bermondsey, for whose socialist councillors there was ‘no wealth but life’, Finsbury where nothing was ‘too good for ordinary people’ and Woolwich as examples of the range and scale of this commitment.

Baths and washhouses were less striking – though ambitions could run high as seen in the Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury – but important contributors to the amelioration of working-class living conditions. ‘Healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’ were not such trivial goals.

Shoreditch Maternity and Child Welfare Centre, 1923

If healthcare measures were particularly dedicated to the raising of new generations so, of course, was education – also a scene of municipal pride and endeavour as we’ve noted in the case of the London School Board. Its schools – those ‘sermons in brick’ – were ‘beacons of the future’, harbingers of a ‘wiser, better England’.

With all this proper focus on reforms which not only improved lives but in many cases saved them, a celebration of town halls might seem a distraction but this blog celebrates local government and a reforming, progressive spirit of civic pride and local identity which is sometimes best seen in its great monuments.

Poplar Town Hall, 1938

Limehouse Town Hall is a modest early example. The Council House in Birmingham is an inspiring ‘bricks and mortar monument to the municipal gospel’ of a progressive middle class.  Poplar Town Hall – ‘a worthy workshop for the workers’ welfare’ – was a sign of changing times.

That’s a rather lengthy list but I hope it shows what we owe to local government and how vital that work remains. The blog will continue to commemorate the effort and enterprise of our local councils and municipal reformers – men and women up and down the country who dedicated their lives to elevating the condition of the people.

If you support this endeavour, please continue to read the blog, spread the word and please feel free to contribute your own ideas and your own pet projects to the continuing record.

Let’s celebrate this ‘first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’.

The Lansbury Estate, Poplar, Part 2: ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, Gibberd, Poplar

Last week, I looked at the origins of the Lansbury Estate and its early development.  I finished with the question: what did the Lansbury mean to the people who lived there?

Well, according to the survey carried out by Ruth Glass and John Westergaard, most of them loved it.  The lighterman’s wife who had moved from a Limehouse basement said: (1)

This is what I’d hoped for. I’ve waited seven years for it. We were so desperate, we would have gone almost anywhere. I’m glad we didn’t, we belong round these parts.

The woman who had moved from her mother’s home in Millwall where her family of five had lived in two rooms said simply ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury’.

This wasn’t hype.  Of the incomers, 60 per cent had shared their previous dwelling, 63 per cent had had no access to an inside toilet and 73 per cent had had no access to a bathroom or even to a fitted bath.  The 1951 census showed 72 per cent of Poplar households lacked their own bathroom.

This was the world left behind.  It didn’t mean the new residents were blindly grateful – there were complaints about lack of play space and mothers who wanted to go to work criticised the lack of nursery provision.

Elizabeth Close

In fact, work was not so much desire as necessity.  The rents (including rates) of the new homes ranged from 25s (£1.25) for three rooms to 35s (£1.75) for five rooms at the end of 1951 – at a time when two fifths of the estate’s breadwinners earned less than £7 a week.  All the tenants paid more to live in the Lansbury than their previous accommodation; two thirds paid twice as much.

There was criticism, too, that the range of accommodation provided did not meet local needs.  Over 60 per cent of Lansbury households had young children under 10 years of age but only 27 per cent of the dwellings were houses or ground floor maisonettes with gardens.

East India Dock Road

Who were the new residents?  It was said that 80 per cent of the tenants were ‘outsiders’.  And it was true that those displaced by the redevelopment were not automatically given homes in the new estate – they were moved according to waiting list dictates to new developments as accommodation became available.

But in, fact, over half of all householders in Lansbury had been living in Poplar before they moved, and another fifth had come from the East End boroughs of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch.

It was still an overwhelmingly local and working-class population. The men worked in traditional East End trades – 90 per cent of the chief wage earners were manual workers, 28 per cent worked on the docks or in ancillary trades.  Almost two thirds lived within two miles of their place of work.

Ricardo Street

For Glass and Westergaard, this was an enormous strength of the Lansbury.  They saw in the new Estate:

the neighbourliness, the local patriotism, the spirit of give and take, which are found everywhere in the East End. Families have helped one another in the business of moving in; housewives look after the children of neighbours; the Coronation was celebrated with the traditional street parties. Above all, most people in Lansbury have a great affection for their own borough and the East End; they are quite right when they say that ‘there are wonderful people in Poplar’.

In this, they anticipated the 1957 study of Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London.  This panegyric to the old East End slated the suburban estates to which many displaced residents were decanted precisely for breaking up such networks of self-help.

For all this, the neighbourhood units beloved of town planners never really developed a life of their own – people’s actual lives and affiliations were too complex to be so readily socially engineered.

With the impetus of the Festival of Britain gone, the Estate was, in any case, slow to develop.  Lansbury’s housing was due for completion by 1970. In the event, the Greater London Council added the last element to the overall scheme – on Pigott Street – in 1982.

Gibberd’s 1951 clock tower in the Chrisp Street Market

The shopping precinct, designed by Frederick Gibberd – the first pedestrianized shopping street in Britain and one of the more eye-catchingly modern elements of the overall plan – was ready for 1951 but not finally completed till the early seventies.  Bartlett Park, the Estate’s main open space, wasn’t begun until 1959.

And the Lansbury Estate came to seem almost anachronistic even as it was being begun.

In 1951, Harold Macmillan, Housing Minister in the incoming Conservative government, pronounced that the urgent need for more housing must be met by high-rise and high-density development.

The planning-led interdisciplinary team which had designed Lansbury broke up soon after the Festival and by the mid-50s new-build on the Estate comprised 11-storey point blocks.  Fitzgerald House, built in 1968 and towering above the Chrisp Street Market, is 19 storeys high.

As tower blocks rose, the docks closed – the East India Docks in 1965 and the last London docks, downstream in Beckton, in 1981. Capitalism, not the housing schemes of the old LCC, killed the traditional East End.

In the end, perhaps, the Lansbury Estate was less the first breath of a new world than the dying gasp of the old.

Initially, the pride that Glass and Westergaard reported was maintained.  According to John Jones, a long-time resident, people kept: (2)

the communal areas clean and tidy and there was a porter who looked after the external areas and kept an eye on the youngsters. And, for better or worse, the area policed itself through the local hard men or bookies’ runners and there was no great crime problem.

But by the 70s and 80s things were going downhill.  As another resident summarised, ‘The buildings began to develop problems, kids started spraying graffiti and the estate no longer felt safe’.  And then, to some, it became a no-go area.  It’s a familiar trajectory, rooted in the destructive dynamics of social transition and economic decline.

The estate sign on Kerbey Street which has escaped renewal so far

In 1997, Estate was declared a conservation area.  One year later, the Borough of Tower Hamlets set up the Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (Poplar Harca) with a brief to renew the area, particularly those council estates whose residents had voted in a controversial ballot to transfer to this new registered social landlord.

The Lansbury was one such estate and Poplar Harca has invested considerably in the estate and its people. John Jones became the Lansbury Estate’s resident director for the association.

Meanwhile, the onward march of gentrification in the East End has had its impact in the new ‘Festival Quarter’ development on Canton Street.

The Lansbury looks now as though it has stood the test of time.  Its unadventurous style came to seem far more compelling as high-rise dreams collapsed, sometimes literally.  And its houses and flats still offer good quality, attractive accommodation at more affordable prices at a time when social needs – albeit very different from those of the 1940s – are just as pressing.

We might, after all, dream of those days when we only criticised municipal housing for its lack of ambition.

Sources:

(1) John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, ‘A Profile of Lansbury’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April 1954)

(2) ‘The Lansbury Estate: Post-Festival development‘, Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(3) Quoted in John Crace, ‘Keys to the Future’, The Guardian, 11 July 2001

Hayes People History, The Lansbury Estate 1951 – It’s what Labour Councils do, is a lovely post on the furnished show flat kitted out by the London Cooperative Society.

The Love London Council Housing piece on the Estate has some additional photographs and detail.

Poplar Harca’s webpage on Lansbury details the current work and activities of the association on the Estate.

The Lansbury Estate, Poplar, Part 1: meeting ‘the needs of the people’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, Gibberd, LCC, Poplar

The 1951 Festival of Britain – born in an age of hope and austerity – was envisaged as a ‘corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future’(1).  In social democratic Britain, a key element of this future was housing for the people and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar was to be its exemplar.

Its first beneficiaries were Mr and Mrs Snoddy, their two children and pet tortoise.  They moved in to a three-bedroomed flat in Gladstone House on Valentine’s Day, 1951.

But the origins of the Estate pre-date the Festival.  The London County Council’s ambitions to rebuild and rehouse had been spectacularly demonstrated after the first world war.  The second added urgency and, in a way, opportunity – 24 per cent of Poplar’s buildings had been either destroyed or seriously damaged in the conflict.

The LCC’s County of London Plan, drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie and County Architect by JH Forshaw in 1943, intended to seize this moment and reconstruct London on rational and humane lines.

One of the Plan’s great themes was the ‘neighbourhood unit ‘, seen as a lesson ‘learnt from the urban co-operation and sturdy individualism’ of existing London communities.(2)

A feeling of neighbourliness and social responsibility is much more likely to develop where dwellings are grouped than where they are strung out in long terraces or repetitive blocks of flats.

There was also a simple belief that London’s population needed to be reduced – the LCC proposed a 42 per cent reduction in the population of Stepney and Poplar. Alfred Salter’s earlier hopes for Bermondsey were not so fanciful after all.

These ideas met in the New Town movement of the day and in the Lansbury Estate, its metropolitan counterpart.

The Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area – which gave the LCC the compulsory purchase powers it needed – was authorised by the Minister of Town and Country Planning in December 1947.  Of 11 neighbourhood units declared, the Lansbury Estate would form Neighbourhood 9 – 124 acres bounded by East India Dock Road, Burdett Road, Limehouse Cut, and the North London railway line.  One year later the LCC compulsorily purchased 37.75 acres within the Neighbourhood – around 1,000 properties in about 370 separate ownerships.

The western end of the Estate under development, 1951

To all this the Festival of Britain was essentially irrelevant.  The Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning, and Building Research was originally planned for Battersea Park but in 1948 Frederick Gibberd, architect-planner and Festival adviser, offered a new concept – ‘to take a bombed or cleared site of four to six acres as near as possible to the site of the main Exhibition [and] develop it as a cross section of a Neighbourhood’.(3)

Herbert Morrison, former leader of the LCC and the minister in charge of the Festival, seized on this idea and, for various reasons, the Poplar site was taken as ideal.

A Reconstruction Group was established within the LCC’s Town Planning Department – a multi-disciplinary team of architects, planners and surveyors and the first sociologist to be involved in such a project, Margaret Willis.

This was a planning-led project, intended to create a viable and self-sustaining community with all the shops, schools, churches and community buildings it needed.   It would include too the first modern purpose-built old people’s home in London.  Surveys of local circumstances and needs were carried out though, in practice, the public consultation was largely symbolic – plans were too far advanced to be stymied by local opinion.

In some ways, the Festival added little permanently to the Estate. It did, however, ensure a larger number of private architects contributing – Geoffrey Jellicoe, Peter Shepherd, Graham Dawbarn and Edward Armstrong – and a greater variety of styles than was typical of most LCC estates.

It also gave the scheme some urgency though it wouldn’t escape the bureaucratic hold-ups, Government economy measures and contractor shortages that were the inevitable mark of these ambitious and constrained times.

Corner of Pekin Street and Pekin Close

The first housing opened in February 1951.  The Live Architecture Exhibition and its temporary buildings opened in May, featuring the Building Research Pavilion and ‘Gremlin Grange’ –a jerry-built house in all its horror – and the Town Planning Pavilion.  The latter’s exhibits capture the ideals and priorities of the day.

The Battle for Land, The Needs of the People, How can these needs be met?  Work in Progress

There was a café too – the Rosie Lee.  And, of course, the Estate itself was named after the East End’s own favourite socialist, George Lansbury, who had died in 1940.

There were 478 new homes in the exhibition area – a fifth in six-storey blocks of flats, a third in blocks of three storeys or less, two-fifths in ‘mixed’ blocks of houses, maisonettes and flats, the rest in two-storey terraces.  No.  14 Grundy Street and no. 2 Overstone House were opened as show homes.  The 30 acre Estate as a whole – still some way from completion at the time of the Festival – would comprise 1,197 dwellings by the end of 1951.

Grundy Street

Overstone House

Sadly, the Exhibition itself was a bit of a damp squib – just 86,646 visitors made it out to the East End compared to the 8 million who attended the main Festival site on the South Bank.

Architectural opinion was also unimpressed.  The yellow stock brick and grey slates – selected to fit with established local housing – were widely seen as plain and uninspiring.

Pekin Street

JM Richards, editor of Architectural Review, described ‘the general run of the small-scale housing at Lansbury as worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’.  He felt that ‘the aridity of design from which the Lansbury housing suffers is undoubtedly due to so much having to be sacrificed for the sake of cheapness’.(3)

Irrespective of aesthetic judgements, there was truth in this.  The Architecture Exhibition had been costed at between £300,000 and £500,000 but in June 1949 its budget was cut, at Government insistence, to £240,000.  In the same year, prices had risen by 6 per cent.  The result was that standards had to be lowered – literally in the case of the ceilings in parts of the scheme (to 8 feet) as building bye-laws were waived.

But architects shouldn’t have the last word.  The sociologists Ruth Glass and John Westergaard were measured in their appraisal.  It was true that the Estate offered  ‘hardly any examples of really outstanding contemporary design: its layout and elevations reflect modesty and competence’.  There was nothing which appeared inspired by ‘flights of imagination and adventure’.  Still, they concluded:(4)

‘an environment has been created – or re-created – that is neither a pale imitation of suburban boredom, nor an apologia for city life.

And then they asked the vital question: ‘What does Lansbury mean to the people who live there?’

This question and the later life of the Estate will be examined in next week’s post.

Sources:

(1) Ian Cox, The South Bank Exhibition: A guide to the story it tells, HMSO, 1951

(2)  ‘The Lansbury Estate: Introduction and the Festival of Britain exhibition‘, Survey of London: volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(3) From the Architectural Review, December1951, quoted in the Survey of London article above.

(4) John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, ‘A Profile of Lansbury’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April 1954)

Hayes People History, The Lansbury Estate 1951 – It’s what Labour Councils do, is a lovely post on the furnished show flat kitted out by the London Cooperative Society.

The Love London Council Housing piece on the Estate has good additional photographs and detail.

The Page Estate, Eltham: ‘Results for the People not the Profiteers’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Eltham, Woolwich

I wrote about Woolwich a couple of weeks ago – its interwar health services were among the most comprehensive in the country.  But its housing programme was, if anything, more ambitious, particularly for a borough council in London where generally the County Council took the lead.

The Estate from the south-west, 1931. EPW035575 from Britain from Above, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/ © English Heritage

The Page Estate in Eltham was formally inaugurated in February 1920 by then Minister of Health, Christopher Addison.  Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act epitomised the drive of immediate post-war plans to build improved housing for working people on a massive scale.

He resigned in 1921 when the programme was axed but in 1920 he could praise Woolwich’s ambitions – ‘the largest housing scheme undertaken by any Metropolitan Borough’ – and urge that the ‘work be got on quickly’.(1)  To Woolwich’s Labour councillors, the need for pressing action was obvious.  A 1918 survey had concluded that over 2000 new homes were needed in the borough.  The Eltham scheme was designed to provide 2700.

Woolwich had identified a site one year earlier – 344 acres of land bisected by the Southern railway, served by two stations and by LCC tramways to the east and south.  Of these, 85 acres, unsuitable for building, would be set aside for open space and recreation.

Woolwich had a model of high quality working-class housing immediately adjacent in the Progress Estate. Whilst the Council’s own designs could not match this – finances were always tight for building on such scale and constant battles were fought with the Ministry of Health regarding government subsidies – the Page Estate represented an earnest attempt to implement the influential garden suburb ideals of the day.

Lynsted Gardens, 1929

Lynsted Gardens today

The Estate’s layout included large open greens and smaller greens as children’s playgrounds.  Most of the houses were semi-detached, each with front and back gardens, and all were provided with a bathroom and scullery.  Housing density was around 12 per acre which came close to garden city ideals.

The first 448 houses were built by private contractors but the Council believed it could build more cheaply and to better quality itself.  It was also quite certain that building workers’ conditions and trade union rights were better safeguarded by a Labour council. ‘Results for the People not the Profiteers’ was its slogan.

In 1923, Borough Engineer, John Sutcliffe, was appointed architect to the next stage of the programme – 60 houses to be built by direct labour. The trial was so successful that the 1618 houses which completed the Estate were all constructed by the Council.

Of these, 862 were built under Laing’s Easiform system – a form of concrete construction intended to be quicker and cheaper than traditional brick building.  Whilst some of the system-building of the day has not survived the test of time, these seem to have stood up pretty well.(2)

The smallest houses on the Estate and the most numerous – 1446 with a living room and three bedrooms – were to be let at 14/4 (71.5p).  Larger houses with a parlour and three bedrooms and a parlour and four bedrooms were let at 16/8 (83.5p) and 19/0 (95p) respectively.

In November 1929, the then Labour Minister of Health, Arthur Greenwood, formally opened the 2186^th house on 49 Kidbrooke Lane. It was a suitably festive occasion – the house itself bore ‘a gay and festive appearance’, flags streamed across the roadway.  A British Legion band provided musical accompaniment.(3)

Greenwood flattered his hosts by pointing out that the Council had built one-fifth of the total built by London’s 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils – though he added that Woolwich had building land which others lacked.  He knew also, as did local councillors, that this massive effort was not enough – 3900 applicants remained on the waiting list. Still, for the moment, the Council could take some pride in what it had achieved.

Wendover Road, 1929

Wendover Road today

This was an all-electric estate – the electricity generated and supplied by none other than Woolwich Borough Council, of course.  The Council was on hand to hire out electric cookers, irons and radiators at genuinely reasonable rates.  This was a time, remember, when Woolwich believed its Electrical Supply Department was ‘Another great health service!’ in keeping homes ‘free from dirt, dust and fumes’.

At the same time, more direct healthcare was planned by the provision of a Council health centre on the Estate, opened in February 1931.

And, in a period when progressive local councils felt that they had the duty and to some extent the power to promote the overall wellbeing of their people, the unemployed were not forgotten either.  £17,000 was secured from the Unemployment Grants Committee to employ local men without work in levelling and draining Harrow Meadow, the main open space.

Keynsham Gardens, 1929

Keynsham Gardens today

The total cost of the Estate was £1,144m, a sum including the four new LCC schools constructed.  The only thing lacking in the Estate’s early days were shops but a terrace of shops was operating by 1929.  These included a bakers, a fishmongers and a chemist but the flagship, naturally, was a branch of the locally powerful Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.(4)

When our lives are dominated by the private sector and the myth of its virtue, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for this era when working people were creating through collective means and collective power an alternative and improved world which placed their needs and rights uppermost.

And, in fact, the Council didn’t rest on its laurels.  Arthur Greenwood was back again in February 1931 and, once it was ascertained he was a union member, he was allowed to cut the first sod of the new Middle Park Estate.(5)

It comprised 1740 dwellings on its completion in 1936 at which point the Council started work on the adjacent Horn Park Estate.  This would not be finished until the 1950s.  Both were built on land purchased from the Crown Estate belonging to the former Eltham Palace.

In total, at the point at which its efforts were interrupted by war, the Council had built 4473 houses and flats – 2995 by direct labour and 1478 by contract. The figures speak for themselves.

Westhorne Avenue

Today the Estate still looks in pretty good nick – in some respects, but for the added greenery of mature vegetation, not so different from it did in the interwar period.  About 60 per cent of it is still rented from the Council.

The health centre was destroyed with some loss of life in March 1941 and not replaced.  In the 1950s, Westhorne Avenue was designated part of the new South Circular arterial road in line with Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan but – fortunately maybe –  a major upgrade was never completed.  The A2 Rochester Way Relief Road, opened in 1988, which drives through Eltham is less kind.

On 22 April 1993 Stephen Lawrence was murdered in Dickson Road on the eastern edge of the Page Estate.  I’ve thought long and hard about how to incorporate this senseless, brutal act into my analysis and have, in a way, decided not to.

SE9 – a racist identifier for some – doesn’t need any more people parachuting in and pronouncing on its racism or otherwise.

This blog celebrates the practical idealists of Woolwich’s Labour council who were building a new and better world for working people.  The struggle continues.

Sources:

(1) ‘New Houses for Eltham’, Eltham Times, February 6, 1920

(2) Collier Stevens Chartered Surveyors, ‘Laing Easi-Form Housing‘

(3) ‘Opened by the Rt Hon Arthur Greenwood’, Eltham Times, December 6 1929

(4) John Kennett, ‘Municipal Housing‘, SEnine, June 2010

(5) ‘The New Estate, Houses, Schools and Trams’, Eltham Times, 20 February 1931

My thanks to John Kennett and the Eltham Society for his help in preparing this article.

Thanks again to the Greenwich Heritage Centre and its helpful staff.  Original images above are used with permission from their collection.

Much has been written on Eltham and Stephen Lawrence’s murder.  Perhaps the most thoughtful pieces are by Darryl on his 853 blog, by Collective Invective, by Bob from Blockley, by London Masala and Chips and by Sunder Katwala.