The World’s End Estate, Chelsea: ‘Village style living in the heart of London’

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1960s, 1970s, Chelsea, Multi-storey

The World’s End Estate was built at the end of the great boom in high-rise housing in the sixties.  And it got a bad press. Today it stands as one of the most impressive of the high-rise, high density developments of its time and maybe one of the most likeable.

The scheme was conceived by the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea in 1963 who commissioned its original design from the architect Eric Lyons. It was seen through, after 1965, by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  Both, as befits this generally affluent area, were Conservative-controlled but this at a time when the local state still exercised responsibility for the proper housing of working people.

Eric Lyons had made his name with his architectural practice Span, building, it’s been said, to meet the ‘Outer Suburban dream for those enjoying the good life’. (1)  This was a far cry from most social housing of the 60s.  But the ideals of Span – ‘community as the goal, shared landscape as the means, and modern, controlled design as the expression’ – would find expression in World’s End.(2)

When Chelsea announced its plan, it was proclaimed ‘village style living in the heart of London’.(3)  If so, it was a very densely-settled village.  Lyons’ plans projected a housing density of 250 people per acre.  This was far above the London County Council’s limit of 136 people per acre and the LCC rejected the plan.

Luna Street on the site of the current estate, prior to demolition

Kensington and Chelsea refused to back down – a lower density, they argued, could not rehouse all those cleared from the 11 acres of run-down terraced housing it replaced.  After a public enquiry, and vindicated by the high quality of the proposed scheme, ministerial approval for a 750 unit development was granted in 1966.

A £5.6m tender was accepted in 1969 and construction began the same year.  The first residents moved in in 1975 and the scheme as a whole was completed in 1977.  Building had been slowed by a twelve-week national building strike in 1972 – fought against ‘the lump’ (the casual employment of subcontracted construction workers without benefits or employment rights) but complicated here by labour shortages and the difficulty of agreeing wage rates.

The contractors, Cubitts, withdrew from the contract – complaining it had become financially punitive. Bovis took over with a tender £1.1m higher. And the finished scheme – with all ancillary works – came in at £15m.  It was alleged that this equated to an economic cost rent per flat of £2600 a year though actual rents (exclusive of rates and central heating) were set at between £8 and £20 a week.

But the Estate itself deserves our attention. It comprises those 750 homes and a population of around 2500 living in seven high-rise tower blocks of between 18 and 21 storeys joined by nine four-storey walkway blocks in a figure of eight.

The high-rise blocks contain about half the Estate’s flats and all its two-bed dwellings – typically four flats to a floor with three-bedroom duplex units located at the top of each.  The rest of the flats – a mix of bedsits, one-bed, three-bed and four-bed units – are clustered along the low-rise walkways.

The dry descriptive detail does scant justice to the Estate’s appearance.  There’s the Thames-side setting, of course, and the spectacular views from the higher flats.   Then there’s the interestingly irregular lay-out and the polygonal design of the tower blocks.

Berenger Tower viewed from Chelsea Reach Tower

The latter, with those duplex units projecting from the top, prompt real enthusiasm from current architectural commentators: (4)

What we have at World’s End is the extraordinary efflorescence at the summits of the towers, where the flats are cantilevered out and piled up into an irregular skyline of great romantic appeal.

And the Estate as a whole is finished with a brown-brick cladding, concealing its pre-cast concrete construction, which adds a warmth to the construction and, so they say, an echo of the terraced housing it replaced.

While Lyons’ original layout largely stood, the ‘architectural expression’ of the finished design was principally down to his partnership with HT Cadbury-Brown. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown was a Modernist disciple of Erno Goldfinger but he is described as balancing ‘the best of Modern movement ideals…with a firm commitment to “the community” – with a wit, warmth and rich humanity’. (5)

That, however, was not the perception of those early critics of the World’s End Estate we noted.  According to a contemporary article in the Architects’ Journal, ‘as a “nice place to live in” it fails’:  (6)

the internal courts have an air, not of modern domesticity, but of castle yards…No longer visibly a ‘home’ the dwelling is sunk within an abstract super-image. This may be impressive but to the home-maker it is not the point…Let us hope that it marks the end of this particular road.

Another account noted that ‘despite the efforts made to reduce the sense of alienation with the building, one still has to report a significant degree of vandalism in and around the lifts’.  The lifts and lift areas were ‘not defensible’.(7)

This built on the emerging theory of ‘defensible space’, critical of open-access high-rise development and the anti-social behaviour which allegedly followed, pioneered by US architect Oscar Newman and popularised in the following decade by Alice Coleman.

There were four caretakers in the Estate in those days. Now there are two but there is a concierge and those common areas are resident-only.  Still, the view is that the problems of the early years lay far more in the demographics of the Estate – the large number of families with teenage children – than in any obvious design flaw. (8)

If there was any validity to those early criticisms then, they seem far less justified now.  The Estate, unusually perhaps, has aged well. It seems both an attractive landmark and a good place to live – popular, by most accounts, with its residents. Those ‘castle yards’ look green and pleasant.

Those residents have evolved.  Many have grown older with the Estate.  There are fewer youngsters now – just 350 out of population of 2500 – and it’s a quiet place to live.

Patterns of occupancy have evolved too.  As a Conservative authority, Kensington and Chelsea was happy to sell off its properties before Right to Buy but, with the added impact of the latter, some 178 are now leasehold.  Of these, 70 per cent are owner-occupied, most by their original tenants; the rest are sublet.

Still, 550 homes of the 750 – almost three quarters of the total – are rented from the council. While the Council retains the freehold, the Estate itself is managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation.  There’s also a Residents’ Association with about 200 members.

As a final reminder of the current complexity of social housing, some of the sold-off flats are back as social housing, having been purchased by local housing associations. (9)

The Estate isn’t listed yet, generally to the relief of residents as it means necessary renovations can be carried out more cheaply – though it also allowed the Council to fit some very out-of-keeping front doors.

Whistler Walk and one of those new front doors

Despite that, take a look at the World’s End Estate, by the Thames at the unfashionable end of King’s Road. It’s one of the most successful high-rise, high density council housing schemes of its era.

The view eastwards from Chelsea Reach Tower

I’ll leave the last word to current occupants: (10)

35 years on however and despite many changes by the Council, both wise and unwise, the core design envisioned by Eric Lyons remains in place: seven tower blocks interlinked by ‘streets in the sky’ providing 750 ample-sized and comfortable homes with access to decent local facilities to over 2500 residents, many of whom have come to love and cherish the estate.

Sources

(1) Kenneth Allison, Architects and Architecture of London, 2008

(2) Dominic Casciani, ‘A House Like No Other’, BBC News Online, 9 November 2006

(3) ‘Community Estate in Chelsea’. The Times, October 10, 1963

(4) James Dunnet, ‘World’s End: the pride of Eric Lyons’, BD Magazine, November 2008

(5) Diana Rowntree, HT Cadbury-Brown obituary, The Guardian, July 13 2009

(6) Quoted in James Dunnet, ‘World’s End: the pride of Eric Lyons’

(7) Henry Herzberg, Housing at World’s End, Chelsea: Appraisal, Architects’ Journal, April 20 1977

(8) The view of former long-term resident of the Estate offered at London Open House 2013

(9) The data and information from London Open House 2013

(10) Factsheet for London Open House 2013 available from worlds-end.org.uk – the website of the World’s End Residents’ Association.

Read the Love London Council Housing post At the World’s End for some better pictures and more opinions on the Estate.

The Lenin Estate, Bethnal Green: ‘Luxury Flats for Socialists’

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1920s, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets

We know what the Daily Mail thinks of Marxists.  It held the same opinion in the 1920s. So, when Bethnal Green Borough Council decided in 1927 to name its new housing scheme the Lenin Estate, it was – almost literally – like a red rag to a bull (or red bull to a rag, if you want to be clever).

In reality, it’s a complex and, in some ways, rather sad story.

Labour first took control of Bethnal Green Borough Council in 1919, returning 24 councillors to the Liberals’ six.  The Party’s ‘uncrowned king’, according to the local press, was Joe Vaughan who would be Bethnal Green’s mayor for the three succeeding years.  As a member of the British Socialist Party and, from 1920, its successor organisation the British Communist Party, he was proclaimed by The Call ‘the only openly-avowed Bolshevik Mayor’ in the country.

But at a time of fluid politics on the left and when there was very widespread sympathy for the Soviet Union in Labour ranks, he was far from being the only Communist in the Bethnal Green labour movement.

The national Labour Party consistently rejected Communist Party affiliation but individual Communists could join the party and would, in any case, be frequently selected as delegates of affiliated trade unions.  This ‘Broad Left’ was particularly strong in Bethnal Green.  In a generally bad year for Labour, it held on to power in the Council in 1922 by the skin of its teeth.

By the time of the next local elections in 1925, it was, however, an increasingly fragile coalition.  Nationally, Labour had barred individual Communists from membership.  Locally, if local press accounts are to be believed, rival groups of ‘Communists’ and ‘Moderates’ had published competing manifestos.

Still, some kind of joint slate was engineered for the November municipal elections and local ‘Labour’ actually slightly increased its narrow majority.  Of its 17 councillors, it was said 12 were Labour and 5 Communist.  One of the latter, Joe Vaughan, was a leading figure in the National Left-Wing Movement founded in December to oppose Communist expulsions.  The national Labour Party expelled the Bethnal Green constituency party the following year for its continuing Communist links.

To disinterested observers, all these left-wing squabbles will seem far removed from the more pressing issue of the people’s housing.  But constructive politics did continue.

The commemorative tablet marking the beginning of the Lenin Estate – the Parmiter Street scheme as it was then known – was unveiled in September 1926, the Communist chairman of the Housing Committee, Councillor William Paddock, absent through illness.

The name of the Estate was agreed by 14 votes to 10 at a heated Council meeting in July 1927. To Joe Vaughan: (1)

It would record the appreciation of members of the Council and their recognition of the great work he had done on behalf of the workers of the world…the children would be asking ‘Who is Lenin?’ and their parents, if they were honest, would be compelled to tell them what Lenin did for the downtrodden peasants of Russia.

To the Labour mayor, Alderman CW Hovell, on the other hand, it was:

an insult to the memory of men in the Labour movement who had passed to ignore them in favour of Lenin. He might have been all right in Russia but he was not, in his opinion, right for England.

A voice from the gallery called on Hovell to ‘Give up that chain!’ This was presumably a reference to his mayoral regalia rather than those chains which Marxists held to bind the workers of the world but, if not, it was a good pun.

A loan of £28,704 from the LCC financed the scheme – 32 two-bed and three-bed tenements in a handsome four-storey yellow-brick block designed by architect ECP Monson.  Even the politically hostile Bethnal Green News concluded the block was ‘magnificently constructed’ – though it gave credit for this to ‘Mr William Sims, the enterprising Stepney builder, who secured the contract’. (2)

Frontage on Cambridge Heath Road

But the high quality of the accommodation did not meet universal approval.  The Evening News claimed that the estate was nicknamed ‘Buckingham Palace’ and suggested, solicitously, that ‘some of the tenants find it difficult to furnish the large rooms…The living room on the average requires 20 square yards of linoleum’.(3)

The new residents included a carman and his wife with nine children, the eldest of whom was just 14, and a hawker and his wife with six children. The newspaper went on to describe the Estate’s tenants as ‘typical Bethnal Greenites’ – ‘undersized people with oversized families’.

They were grateful for their new homes, however, whatever the paper thought:

It is all so beautiful we don’t know where we are.  You should see the place we left.

Sound-proofed floors and roofs, inbuilt ‘artistic dresser-cabinets’ and a ‘water heating system specially designed for rapid service’ must indeed have been a massive improvement on their previous accommodation.

Side view, Parmiter Street

The Daily Mail, under the lurid headline ‘Lenin Flats De Luxe.  East End Very Angry’, pointed out that the flats had cost £800 each to build compared to the £500 cost of comparable LCC homes.  It was shocked too by the ‘free light’ the tenants received. (4)  In fact, there was a flat rate charge of between 1s 3d and 1s 5d (6p and 7p) for electricity included in rents of 18s 3d (91p) weekly for a two-bedroom flat and 21s 3d (£1.06) for a three-bed.

Internal quadrangle

The name and quality of the flats were not the only points of controversy.  It was unfortunate, perhaps, that one of their first tenants was Councillor Paddock.  The appearance of favouritism was not dispelled by the circumstances of his selection.

The Council stated officially that 1235 applications had been received for the 32 flats.(5)  At the meeting of the Housing Committee to select the first tenants, it was alleged, of 19 applicants, that 15 were people occupying one room and of those only two had fewer than three children.  Only one applicant had three rooms and just two children. (6) That would be Councillor Paddock.

Paddock’s disingenuous statement to the press that his ‘name was on the waiting list and when my turn came I appeared before the housing committee, of which I am chairman, in the ordinary way’ seems, to put it kindly, to contain its own contradiction.

But there’s more. The Daily Mail also claimed that Councillor Paddock had stated no Jews would be granted tenancies in the new estate – at a time when they formed about 12 per cent of the local population and were among its poorest.  Others on the Council denied any policy of the sort but the attention given to the claim suggests it had some plausibility.

And then, conversely, there was the charge – backed by a sworn statement – that five Jewish residents of the borough had been persuaded to pay sums of money ranging from £5 to £3 10s ‘to a person or persons not unconnected with the Borough Council’ for the promise of a tenancy. (7)

Daily Mirror, 25 August 1927

Not surprisingly, not unreasonably, the press had a field day.  The Council promised an independent inquiry into all the allegations to be conducted, it hoped, by the Ministry of Health and Housing.  But the Ministry declined to become involved.

The Council regretted the decision and the delay which, it said, ‘must inevitably militate against the success of any inquiry that might now be undertaken’.  Moreover, it lamented the fact that it lacked the necessary statutory authority to conduct its own independent inquiry.

The conclusion?  ‘We are unable to suggest a course of action which will give effect to the very strong desire of the Council to take further action in this matter’.(8)  One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief and, with this, the matter was kicked into some very long grass.  I can tell you no more, I’m afraid, about the rights and wrongs of the matter and the individuals, if any, involved.

Except that some form of rough justice did pursue Councillor Paddock.  In September 1927 he was expelled from the Labour-Communist group on the Council and then from the Communist Party itself – ‘for acting contrary to the interests of the working class’.

At the same time, Paddock tried to resign from the Council but couldn’t afford the 5s (30p) fee required.  One month later, the matter was taken out of his hands.  He informed the Council he was in receipt of poor relief – this disqualified him automatically from Council membership.

The sense of a life unravelling becomes definitive in December when Paddock was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for stealing funds from the Christmas Club of which he was secretary, trustee ‘and everything else’. (9)

And then there’s politics.  The Communist Party’s Minority Movement – intended initially to radicalise unions from within – began to shift to a more sectarian stance. And in the summer of 1928, the international Communist movement moved towards a radical ‘Class against Class’ policy which denounced the Labour Party as ‘social fascists’.  In Bethnal Green, local tensions no doubt added to the animus – on both sides.

In the borough council elections of November 1928, Communists attacked Labour followers as ‘scabs of the worst kind’ and promised to ‘fight them tooth and nail’.  Bethnal Green Labour, for its part, stood ‘loyally by the policy of the national Labour Party’ and ‘refused to accept the dictates of the Minority Movement which is governed by foreign political organisations which’, it added, in case there were any doubt, ‘means Russia’. (10)

In the event, Liberals took all 30 seats.   Labour congratulated itself on ‘putting the Communists at the bottom…the Communist Party will be wiped out and we will be in the position of a real proper Labour Party’. (11)  Five years later, the Labour Party did, in fact, achieve its own clean sweep of the Council.  The Communist presence  in the borough remained strong and militant but it would never again exercise power.

As for the Lenin Estate, amongst the first actions of the incoming Liberal administration was to rename it the Cambridge Heath Estate.  It remains a fine building but it’s been sold off and now it’s called Cambridge Court.  A ‘delightful two bedroom apartment offering high ceilings, stripped floor boards, bespoke storage and off street parking’ can be yours ‘in this highly sought after and fashionable location’ for £369,000 according to estate agents.

Just sometimes – only sometimes – all that political noise and effort seems like so much ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Sources

(1) This and succeeding quotes taken from ‘Honouring a Bolshevist.  BG Housing Estate to be named after Lenin’, Hackney Gazette, 25 July 1927

(2) ‘Bethnal Green’s Lenin Estate’, Bethnal Green News, 27 August 1927

(3) ‘Worries of Lenin Estate Life’, Evening News, 25 August1927

(4) Daily Mail, 25 August 1927

(5) Report of Housing Committee, 15 September 1926

(6) Hackney Gazette, 27 September 1927

(7) Bethnal Green News, 24 September 1927

(8) Report of Law and General Purposes Committee, 7 February 1928, received by the full Council 16 February 1928

(9) Daily Express, 21 December 1927

(10) Eastern Post, 27 October 1928

(11) Eastern Post, 10 November 1928

My thanks to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and its excellent resources.

The Metropolitan Water Board: taking on ‘the Water Lords’

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

In August, the Macquarie Group – the Australian-led investment bank which acquired Thames Water in 2006 – proposed a levy on each of the utility’s 14 million customers to meet the costs of bad debts and infrastructure projects.

To say this was controversial is something of an understatement. Even the Daily Mail weighed in – ‘£1.7billion profit in five years … but Thames Water still puts £29 levy on EVERY customer to cover extra costs’.(1)  In more measured, but equally damning, terms, a former head of Ofwat pointed out that that shareholder dividends – funded by debt – running at 20 to 30 per cent a year meant not only that privatised companies were running short of investment capital but that they paid no corporation tax.(2)

Of course, private ownership of water supply has always been controversial. As far back as 1875, Joseph Chamberlain, speaking in support of the measure that would municipalise Birmingham’s water supply, asserted: (3)

It seems to me absolutely certain that what Professor Simon called ‘the power of life and death’ should not be in the hands of a commercial company, but should be entrusted only to the representatives of the people.  I think the supply of water should not be directly or indirectly dependent on the profits of a private association.

In fact, in the Victorian hey-day of high capitalism, this argument had been largely accepted.  By 1900, of the major English towns, only London, Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead and Portsmouth still had privately-owned water supplies.

Ironically, London’s water had once been provided publicly – by the Corporation of the City of London.  But in 1609 the private New River Company was licensed to create a new supply.  This was an enterprise founded with royal support and money – James I would take half the profits.  The 40-mile channel running from Hertfordshire springs to a reservoir in Islington – the so-called New River – was opened 400 years ago.

Other private undertakings followed.  Parliament had originally left their boundaries deliberately vague in the hope this would promote competition but the companies soon established their separate territories.  Parliament’s intentions were thwarted: (4)

The supply of water to London practically became a lucrative and, in the eyes of many, a dangerous monopoly.

Sound familiar?

London came again to public ownership late in the game and tortuously.  At the end of the nineteenth century, its water was still provided by ten separate undertakings.  But dependence on private profit and the goodwill of private enterprise came to seem increasingly anomalous as the metropolis grew.

An 1832 cartoon by George Cruikshank. It shows John Edwards, owner of the Southwark Water Company, posing as Neptune.

The Metropolis Water Act 1852 set standards of water purity for the first time.  A Royal Commission of 1869 even recommended public ownership but the resultant act merely imposed tighter safeguards.

But times were changing.  The London County Council, established in 1889, was a proudly Progressive authority, ambitious to extend its reach and committed – at least in its Fabian members – to ‘gas and water socialism’: municipal ownership of utilities.

This was more than dogma.  The private companies were under no statutory obligation to supply water and they lacked the means – or, more accurately, the will – to supply upper-storey dwellings.  Nor did they guarantee supplies. In 1891 only 57 per cent of homes connected to the mains enjoyed a constant supply. Moreover, droughts led to severe water shortages, particularly in East London, in 1895, 1896 and 1898.

All this at a time when Londoners paid £2m a year for water which cost, it was claimed, just £900,000 to supply – the difference went on ‘lavish pay and pensions to all the superior employés and handsome fees to directors’ and shareholders’ dividends.(5)

The LCC promoted a series of bills seeking the power to take over the private suppliers but a formidable coalition opposed these efforts.  Neighbouring local councils – of a different politics but jealous also of their autonomy – resisted any attempt by London to extend its powers.  After 1895, a Conservative government was equally resistant.

At this point municipal dreams took off. Both Birmingham and Liverpool had already secured supplies – under municipal control – from Wales.  London looked to the same.  To Sidney Webb, ‘an aqueduct from the Welsh hills’ would make ‘the “water lords” see their polluted supply obsolete.’(6)

For Webb, the scheme had the added advantage of employing direct labour.  He praised the Birmingham example in which dams, reservoirs, tunnels and ‘workmen’s dwellings to accommodate a thousand people’ were being built, ‘all without the intervention of a contractor’.

The LCC’s Chief Engineer, Alexander Binnie, was commissioned to draw up plans. He envisaged seven new reservoirs in Wales and 16ft by 11ft aqueducts, 150 miles long, which transported 200m gallons of water daily to two new reservoirs outside London – all at a total cost of £38.8m.  At the time Britain spent just £28.5m annually on its Royal Navy.  It was a bold scheme.

The Conservative government bought time by appointing a new Royal Commission to investigate whether these plans should be sanctioned.  And the companies mobilised.  They promoted a rival scheme involving new reservoirs around Staines on London’s western borders and they lobbied. ‘The County Council has been captured by the labour party, and a good deal of their administrative work is done on political lines,’ they claimed – with some truth, of course, though, in reality, it was just a different sort of politics.

Webb had foreseen this in earlier struggles:

During the next few months the battle will be fought in the committee-room of the House of Commons against all the forensic talent and expert energy which wealth can enrol in defence of monopoly rights.  But water companies have been beaten before and may, in a democratic Parliament, be beaten again.

He was right in the former, mistaken in the latter.  Parliament rejected both LCC control and its Welsh scheme. Still, even in this hostile terrain, private ownership of water supply was deemed unsustainable.

The 1902 Metropolis Water Act set up the Metropolitan Water Board.  Eight existing private companies – plus the water undertakings of Tottenham and Enfield Urban District Councils – were taken over, with £30m compensation paid to the shareholders.  Henceforth, London’s water would be provided by a public utility with an indirectly-elected board comprising 67 members from all the affected local authorities.

The LCC, with 14 members, and the London boroughs, with one representative from each of the 27 new Metropolitan Boroughs, would take the lion’s share of representation.  But the LCC condemned this ‘mere mockery of representation’.  Even the British Medical Journal ‘favoured a municipal authority directly responsible alike to the water consumer and the ratepayers’ – in practice, the LCC.(7)

‘Water London’ – the area that the new authority supplied – covered 559 square miles and a population of around 7 million.  A staff of 3463 provided over 220m gallons of water daily.

The ladies of the Metropolitan Water Board Staff Association, photographed in 1909 © Bishopsgate Institute

The Metropolitan Water Board naturally felt that an enterprise of this scale deserved headquarters of a fitting dignity. They chose, appropriately, to build them at New River Head on the site of the former New River Company offices.

The new building – ‘a modern expression of English Renaissance architecture’ – was designed by Herbert Austen Hall.  Construction began in 1915 but was halted by the First World War. The completed offices opened in 1920 at a cost of £324,205.

The building on Rosebery Avenue remains impressive but its most striking feature is the Oak Room, formerly the boardroom of the New River Company and dating from 1693, transferred by the MWB to its new HQ   – ‘one of the most remarkable specimens of a late Renaissance room in England’ and the chief reason for the building’s current grade II* listing.

The Oak Room, 2013

This was retained for ceremonial purposes, a new boardroom to house the much larger board along with press and public was included elsewhere.

The New Boardroom © Bishopsgate Institute

But maybe the heart and sinew of the HQ actually lies in the Rental Ledger Hall.  Seen below, it looks stately but it was a once a functional space, full of clerks and desks with a large curved front counter for the public at its entrance.

The Rental Ledger Hall, 2013

A few steps away to the north is a more spectacular building which better captures the technocratic ideals of the Metropolitan Water Board.  The New River Head Research Building, designed in Modern Movement style by John Murray Easton, opened in 1938. It’s a bold embodiment of a belief that progress and the people’s welfare are best served by forward-looking public bodies working for the common good.

That ideal remained though the form of public ownership would be remodelled – firstly, with the creation of the Greater London Council in 1965 and a reconstituted board and, more radically, in 1973 with the creation of ten new water authorities nationwide based on river basins and catchment areas.  Thames Water, with a Board of 60 indirectly-elected local authority members, covered an area from Wiltshire and the Cotswolds to the Thames Estuary.

This was still a recognition that the rational organisation of national assets lay best in public hands.  And then the world changed. Mrs Thatcher privatised water supply in 1989 and Thames Water became Thames Water Utilities Limited.

The new company moved its head offices to Reading in 1992 and its New River Head HQ was converted into luxury flats.  The Research Building followed – another luxury development of 35 flats – in 1998.

But companies as well as flats can be bought and sold. Thames Water was acquired by the German utility company RWE in 2001.  They, in turn, sold off Thames Water’s British operations to Macquarie five years later.

Of course, a regulatory framework remains. Ofwat exists to protect consumer interests. But, to many, the arguments for public ownership of water supply remain as potent today as they were when the Fabians campaigned against the ‘water lords’ of the Victorian era.

Sources

(1) Sean Poulter, Daily Mail, 12 August 2013

(2) Oliver Wright, ‘Water companies told to stop siphoning off cash to foreign owners’, The Independent, 17 July 2013

(3) Quoted in CM Knowles, Municipal Water, Fabian Tract 81, February 1898

(4) Metropolitan Water Board, The Water Supply of London, 1937

(5) Sidney Webb, London’s Water Tribute, Fabian Tract 34, revised edition January 1898

(6) Quoted in John Broich, London. Water and the Making of the Modern City, 2013. Other detail and some quotations which follow are also taken from this source.

(7) British Medical Journal, ‘The London Water Act’, January 3 1903

The English Heritage listings have much more information on the architecture and design of the MWB New River Head Headquarters and Research Building.

My thanks to the helpful staff of the Bishopsgate Institute for access to their early pamphlets on London water and the MWB and for permission to use the images above.

Municipal Housing in Liverpool before 1914: the ‘first council houses in Europe’

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Pre-1914

Liverpool and its politics are different and it was Liverpool’s Tories who, in 1869, built the first council housing in Europe.  In fact, the Council’s sanitary reforms and house-building programme led the country before the First World War.

One reason for this was simply the scale of the problem in the crowded port city.  Liverpool grew massively in the nineteenth century – its population increased fourfold (to 333,600) in the forty years to 1841 alone.  Incomers – often immigrants from Ireland – were forced to move into crowded courts and back-to-backs. In 1843 William Henry Duncan, a local physician, estimated half the working-class population were living in cellars.(1)

The city’s 1842 Sanitary Act was an early, modest, attempt to improve conditions.  It allowed magistrates to order landlords to clean any ‘filthy or unwholesome’ house they owned and set up a Council Health Committee.

Burlington Court, ND (from liverpoolpicturebook.com)

Four years later, the Liverpool Sanitary Act – ‘the first piece of comprehensive health legislation passed in England’ – made the Council responsible for drainage, paving, sewerage and cleaning.(2)  It also appointed a Council Medical Officer of Health – another first.

Dr Duncan

This would be Dr Duncan.  His zeal ensured that over 5000 cellar dwellings were declared unfit for human habitation and closed in 1847 alone; another 10,000 were registered, some were cleaned at the owner’s expense.(3)

For all this, progress was slow.  In 1864 it was estimated that about one fifth of the population lived in insanitary conditions – 22,000 homes, in courts, back to back, side to side, with WCs perhaps for every 12.(4)  A further Sanitary Act of the same year strengthened enforcement.

But the problem was not only of enforcement but of housing supply.  The Council hoped initially that private developers would fill the gap.  It even instructed the City Engineer to draw up a model scheme in the vain hope that a private builder might develop it.  Finally, the Council resolved to build itself.  It held a competition, awarded the prize and then built another scheme – one which broke the Corporation’s own bye-laws regarding the spacing and height of buildings.

St Martin’s Cottages photographed in 1944

This was the inglorious origin of the St Martin’s Cottages, completed in 1869 in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall – the first council housing to be built in England.  The ‘cottages’ were tenements – 146 flats and maisonettes in two four-storey blocks, brick-built with open staircases and separate WCs placed on the half-landings.  The result was so bleak that even the trade magazine The Builder concluded that those who built for the poor should ‘mix a little philanthropy with their per-centage calculations’.

Refurbished over the years, the Cottages survived to 1977 but all that remains today to mark this pioneering scheme is a commemorative plaque unveiled in 2001.  One resident, born in the flats in 1909 recalls: (5)

The flats were very basic, just bedrooms and a living room with another bedroom off the ‘back-kitchen’ which was just a sink’s width and 6ft long. There was no room for a cooker, just a hob on the living room table and a coal fire and oven for cooking.

In the evenings we had gas lamps. There was no bathroom but there was a toilet halfway between our floor and the one above, but each family had its own, which was something.

And it was a start.  The Council’s ambitions were boosted when Sir Arthur Forwood became chair of the Health Committee in 1876.  Forwood was ‘a resolute champion of the union and empire, monarchy and church’ and an advocate of ‘council housing…public utilities and transport’.  Such was Tory Democracy.(6)

Forwood’s Insanitary Property Committee, established in 1883, gave teeth to the 1864 Act and cleared a notorious area of slum housing in Nash Grove but what to do with those displaced?  The Council still hoped that private enterprise might step up to the challenge but speculative building profits lay in the suburbs.  Once more, the Council undertook to build itself on a plan devised by then City Engineer, Clement Dunscombe.

Victoria Square Dwellings

To one American observer, the finished Victoria Square Dwellings were ‘a palatial structure’ – ‘the halls and stairways of the building are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements perfect’.  A large central courtyard provided greenery and a playground for children.(7)

Victoria Square Dwellings in 1944 with air raid shelters in courtyard

The whole, built of Liverpool grey common bricks and pressed reds for window reveals with terra cotta detailing for doorways and dormers, five storeys including an attic floor set in a mansard roof, comprised 270 dwellings and housed over 1000.  Sir Richard Cross, then Conservative Home Secretary, opened the development in 1885.

Victoria Square Dwellings in 1966

Don’t look for the Dwellings now.  They were partly destroyed by bombing in 1941 and, despite modernisation in the fifties – when electrics and hot water were provided – the original four blocks were reduced to two in 1961.  What remained was finally demolished in the late sixties to make way for the Wallasey Tunnel.

Juvenal Street

At the time, however, the scheme marked the Council’s acceptance that private builders would not provide housing for the poorer working-class and its own efforts grew.  Another development followed in 1890 – adjacent to the Victoria Square Dwellings in Juvenal Street – of 371 municipal tenements.

By 1893 the Council had demolished 4126 insanitary houses and built 1061 new homes housing 5310.  But there was a problem – it was estimated that the displaced population equalled 10,000. There was: (8)

more than a suspicion that the remedy was getting worse than the disease. The people displaced went into other houses—they went into single rooms in large houses which had occupied a good position in the city at one time, they went into cellars, and it is almost certain some went into the workhouse.

After much controversy, it was agreed in 1896 that all Council dwellings should be reserved exclusively to those who had been displaced – a policy which required that their rents be reduced to affordable levels.

Gildarts Gardens

Dryden Street

New construction continued.  Schemes in Arley Street and Gildarts Gardens added 122 new houses in 1897.  More followed in Dryden Street (1901) and Kempston, Fontenoy, Kew and Newsham Streets (1902).

Drawings of some of the later developments give us a different picture of the solid but basic housing the Corporation was building in the years preceding the First World War.  Here’s Adlington Street built in 1903:

And Hornby Street – 23 blocks of 445 dwellings, accommodating 2,476 – built in the same year.   This development also included a ‘keeper’s house’, seven shops and a children’s playground:

A Council record tells us who lived there.  In one section of 309 families, 99 heads of household were dock labourers, 59 ships’ stokers, 50 general labourers, 28 mill labourers, 44 carters and 11 hawkers.  At least 18 households were headed by single women listed as charwomen.

This was the Liverpool working class in the city’s port hey-day.  This was not, as was typical of most council housing into the interwar period, an artisan or better-paid labour elite.  A 1907 Council report concluded that several thousand families in Liverpool subsisted on less than 10s (50p) a week, a greater number on less than 15s (75p) a week.  Council rents ranged from 1s 9d (9p) for a one-room tenement to 5s 3d (26p) for a four-bed flat: (9)

These rents are as high as the tenants can afford and approximate very nearly to the rents paid by them in their former insanitary habitations.

The Council continued to innovate.  The Eldon Street Labourers’ Concrete Dwellings built in 1905 were, as the name implies, an early attempt to build with prefabricated concrete – from clinker slabs from the Council’s waste furnace.

And Eldon Grove, three-storey blocks with bay windows, half-timbered gables and balconies, internal toilets and running hot water with open space and a bandstand to the front, opened in 1912 represents the very best of the Council’s pre-war building.

Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Two-storey terraces were built in Bevington Street and Summer Seat at the same time. And these latter developments survive – Eldon Grove barely.  Listed Grade II in 1985, it awaits refurbishment once it can turn a profit.

Eldon Grove © Nigel Cox, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Bevington Street © Nigel Cox, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

By 1914, Liverpool had built 2747 flats and houses at a cost, since 1864, of £1.16m.  Of those 22,000 insanitary houses identified fifty years earlier, 2771 remained.  Death rates of 60 per thousand had fallen to 28 in the redeveloped areas.

But to advocates of the programme, it was the ‘improvement in the habits of the people’ which was almost more remarkable: (10)

There is a higher moral tone, a stronger regard for self-respect, and, above all, a greater love of home is evident in the people residing in the Corporation dwellings.

In one area of slums, it was said that 202 cases of criminal drunkenness in 1894 had been reduced to four in 1912 after clearance and rehousing:  ‘Wherever we go the Head Constable tells us his difficulties as regards crime are rapidly disappearing’.

Mr Turton concluded that so long as people needed to live near their work – particularly pressing in the casual employment black spot of Liverpool, ‘it is as yet impossible to do what we would all like to do, namely, take these people into the outskirts’.  That would be the project of the interwar years and the subject of a future post.

Liverpool’s unparalleled early efforts in sanitary reform and municipal house-building are neglected.  They don’t fit a conventional narrative.  Reforming, sectarian, imperialist Tories don’t make easy contemporary heroes.  The paternalistic ethos and ‘improving’ tone of Victorian reform sits uncomfortably now.  And these early schemes were superseded, not least in Liverpool where restless redevelopment has recast the city across the decades with little regard to history.

But they remain a remarkable testimony to the indispensable role of local government – once universally accepted – in raising the conditions of the people.

Sources

(1) WH Duncan, The Physical Causes of the High Mortality Rate in Liverpool, 1843

(2) Eric Midwinter, Social Administration in Lancashire, 1830-1860, 1969

(3) Victoria History, A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 4, 1911

(4) FT Turton, Deputy Surveyor, Liverpool Exhibition of Housing and Town Planning: transactions of conference, 1914

(5) Quoted in Adam Powell, ‘All this and an inside loo’, Daily Mail, November 9 2001.

(6) Philip Waller, ‘Forwood, Sir Arthur Bower, first baronet (1836–1898)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

(7) BO Flower, ‘Society’s Exiles’, The Arena, Volume 4, No. 19, June 1891

(8) FT Turton, Deputy Surveyor, Liverpool Exhibition of Housing and Town Planning: transactions of conference, 1914

(9) City of Liverpool, Description of Labourers’ Dwellings, August 9, 1907

(10) FT Turton, Deputy Surveyor, Liverpool Exhibition of Housing and Town Planning: transactions of conference, 1914

The Walworth Clinic, Southwark: ‘the Health of the People is the Highest Law’

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1930s, Southwark

‘Salus populi suprema est lex’. Cicero said it fourteen centuries earlier but Southwark Borough Council translated the phrase into English and bricks and mortar and placed it proudly above the entrance of the new Walworth Clinic opened in 1937.

The state, by then, had come to recognise some responsibility for the welfare of its citizens but this had been a tortuous and piecemeal process.  Regularly employed male workers might enjoy National Insurance or trade union and Friendly Society benefits.  The poorest were stigmatised still by their dependence on charity or the Poor Law and its vestiges.

In 1929 the Local Government Act turned over remaining Poor Law services to the counties and boroughs.  It was an opportunity for progressive councils to build on functions already acquired – in maternal and infant welfare and tuberculosis care and prevention – to develop comprehensive healthcare programmes for their population. In this way, they would prefigure the National Health Service created in 1948.

Local health centres – such as those already examined in Finsbury, Bermondsey and Woolwich – were an important element of this programme and would be models for primary healthcare in the new post-1948 service. 

Walworth in 1946 from http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk. Image EAW000645 © English Heritage

Southwark first came under Labour control in 1919 when the Party swept to victory in local elections across the country. In the same year, the Maternity and Child Welfare Act was passed.  The new Council took up the cause, investing, for example, in a municipal store to supply cost-price or free milk and medicines to expectant mothers.

Southwark Labour lost power in 1922. The Municipal Reformers – antagonistic towards anything that smacked of ‘municipal socialism’ and jealous guardians of the ratepayer’s purse – scaled down these efforts.

But 1934 saw Labour back in power and committed to further reform. A Public Health and Sanitary Committee was established, a ‘complete investigation of the public health problems of the borough’ set under way.  The Medical Office of Health, William Stott, was asked to specify the premises he needed to deliver local health services.

The Centre illustrated in 1937 with white stone parapets now disappeared © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The result? Three years later, Southwark was ‘the first borough to have the whole of its health services in one building’ – a building which Councillor Gillian, the chair of the Committee, claimed ‘beats Harley Street’.(1)

The Council took the view, Gillian stated,  that :(2)

Cllr AJ Gillian

when the health of the people, and particularly the poorer classes of the population, is involved, only the best equipment and the most modern scientific devices would suffice.

The Walworth Clinic, built at a cost of £50,000, would be  in form and content a practical fulfilment of these principles.

The building itself, designed by Percy Smart, still has a strong presence on Walworth Road.  Architecturally, according to English Heritage who listed it Grade II in 2010, it’s notable for its ‘strong massing, brick elevations, and jazzy details…a hybrid of Modern Movement and Art Deco styles’.

The Lancet was complimentary: (4)

The borough council have wisely decided that the building shall have a pleasing appearance and by the brightness of its interior give a cheery welcome, so that the inhabitants may be encouraged to make full use of an institution devoted to the improvement of their health.

Statuary group as shown in the opening programme © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Easily missed but powerful when viewed is the statuary group, by an unknown sculptor, at the top of the building. A woman and three children of varying ages, the figures are both allegorical (the woman is holding the healing rod of the Greek god Aesculapius) and recognisably ‘real’ with their modern hairstyles and the child’s doll. These were: (3)

designed to symbolise the functions of the new building with relation to family health – motherhood, various stages of childhood and the spirit of healing.

But if these externals were important – and they were for the combination of dignity and accessibility they offered to the priority of the people’s health – you can feel from the contemporary descriptions that it’s the facilities and equipment that really excited the professionals.

The Centre today

The side and rear of the building from Larcom Street

Southwark, in the best form of one-upmanship, listed its innovations – the ‘first maternity department in the country to have an illuminated colposcope’ (you can look it up), the first to install an X-Ray department, and the only borough to have a ‘complete full-time chemical and bacteriological laboratory’.  The building was air-conditioned too.

Artificial Sunlight and Radiant Heat Clinic © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

X-Ray Clinic © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The Centre, the Council stated, marked ‘a further great step’ towards its goal – ‘the betterment of the health of the people of Southwark generally’.

That meant administrative offices and qualified personnel (including a ‘Lady Sanitary Inspector’ and ‘Lady Assistant Medical Officers’) too as well as the vital front-line services – a dispensary, a TB clinic and solarium, a dental clinic, regular maternity and child welfare clinics, of course, and a weekly clinic for women over 45 ‘subject to illness and disease peculiar to this age period’.

The basement contained a ‘Tuberculosis Handicraft Centre’ where unemployed TB sufferers could learn craft skills which might lead to employment or might, at least, provide a useful hobby.

Rheumatic clinics and breast-feeding clinics were planned for the future.

And the Centre was only part of a programme which the Council understood quite clearly as a comprehensive assault on poverty and its causes. When rats overran one part of Southwark, the Council built a new sewerage system, costing £70,000. Opened just three months after the health centre, it too aimed to raise ‘the health of the people’.

Whereas Southwark once had the highest death rate in London and one sixth of its houses had been declared unfit for human habitation, Councillor Gillian could assert in 1937 that: (5)

This two-fold evil was being resolutely dealt with …Slums were being cleared, overcrowding was being overcome by new housing plans and Southwark was now one of the healthiest boroughs of London.

Over seventy-years later, the Elephant and Castle down the road is being redeveloped again and the centre itself looks slightly forlorn. There’s still an NHS clinic on the Larcom Street side but, as the signs in the contemporary photograph indicate, the building is to be let as office space. It’s a sad decline for a building which started with such bold and practical ideals.

In fact, the Walworth Clinic was a model superseded by the NHS a little over ten years after its opening.  There were plans for local health centres – based on these London examples – in the original NHS blueprint but the 162 envisaged, serving population centres of 20,000, were implemented only sporadically .

There was a loss here of democratic initiative, impetus and control that might have served the NHS well.  No-one would wish a return to the haphazard localism of the pre-NHS era but reforming and ambitious councils represented and practised the ideal of a community’s responsibility to safeguard and support its sick and vulnerable. The Walworth Clinic reminds us of that.

Sources

(1) Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 17 September 1937 and South London Press, 1 October 1937, respectively

(2) Programme of the Opening of the New Health Services Department by the Worshipful Mayor of Southwark (Cllr CJ Mills) on Saturday September 25th 1937

(3) Programme of the Opening of the New Health Services Department…

(4) The Lancet , October 2 1937

(5) The Times, September 27 1937

Other detail and analysis comes from Esyllt Jones, ‘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.

The historic images come from the superb collection of photographs held by the Southwark Local History Library and Archive and are used with their permission.