Early Municipal Housing in Birmingham and the ‘prejudice against flats’, Part 2

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1920s, 1930s

As we saw last week, Birmingham – for all the radicalism and showmanship of Joseph Chamberlain – had come slowly to municipal house-building.  In the interwar period, the Council – firmly under Conservative control – made up for this with a vengeance, building 51,000 dwellings by 1939.

Flats remained controversial.  As in Manchester and London, the vast majority of these new homes were in suburban estates.  The Perry Barr Estate, for example, was a greenfield site incorporated into the City of Birmingham in 1928.  Over 5000 council houses were built in three years. Other large interwar estates included Northfield and Weoley Castle to the south and Kingstanding and Erdington to the north.

Kingstanding Housing Estate, 1938. Image epw059310 from http://www.britainfromabove © English Heritage

Hurlingham Road, Kingstanding © Adrian Bailey and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

This was a period of rapid expansion and relative economic prosperity for Birmingham – even as depression hit elsewhere.  And it was therefore a principally skilled and better-off working class – many of them incomers to the city – which moved to the new estates.

4-7 Lincoln Place, Garrison Lane, pre-1914

This left the problem of the Inner Ring’s back-to-backs largely unaddressed.  Even in 1934 almost half the houses here lacked through ventilation and two-thirds shared WCs. (1)  Austen Chamberlain – Joseph’s son, Neville’s half-brother and a local MP – had earlier puzzled ‘why anyone who lives in such slums should not be a Socialist, Communist or Red Revolutionary’. (2)

The scale of the problem was intimidating enough perhaps but inaction was also fostered by the continuing conflict between those who believed flats the only realistic solution to inner-city rehousing and those who thought them too bleak and as, in any case, unacceptable to the local working class.  The minority Labour Group on the Council, for its part, remained generally opposed to flats.

By 1923 the Public Works and Town Planning Committee, as it girded itself to consideration of the slum question, had come to accept the necessity of multi-storey solutions. In this, it was supported by the City Surveyor Herbert Humphries.  But Birmingham’s Medical Officer of Health John Robertson opposed.

When a Committee proposal for an experimental block of flats went to Council in 1925, Robertson sent an unprecedented letter warning of the dangers of rickets and malnutrition in flatted developments.

Nevertheless, a modified scheme – bathrooms were added at the insistence of the Minister of Health and Housing, Neville Chamberlain and the proviso made that upper-storey flats would not be let to families with children – got the go-ahead.

Holmes Estate, late 1920s

The development on Garrison Lane (just behind Birmingham City football ground) – generally known as the Holmes Estate – comprised 180 two-bedroom flats in 30 three-storey blocks.  It looks, architecturally, quite striking with its ‘Dutch-style’ design and Mansard roofs.

But the Estate wasn’t popular – it was soon nicknamed the Barracks – and rents were high, at between 8s 0d (40p) and 8s 11d (44.5p).  Even at this level, the Council was making a loss. ‘In short, the Garrison Lane experiment was an almost total failure’. (3)

The Holmes Estate today

The flats, allowed to deteriorate badly over the years, were eventually sold to a housing association for a nominal sum in the 1990s.  Now, thoroughly refurbished, they look quite presentable.

Back in the late twenties, the Council returned to a policy of reconditioning existing properties.  But the costs were too high – even to Neville Chamberlain who sympathised with the idea in principle – and the pendulum swung back once more with the 1930 Housing Act which prioritised slum clearance.

In August 1930, the Estates and Public Works Committee sent delegations on the favoured municipal Grand Tour of the day – visiting the massive municipal housing schemes of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna.  They returned unimpressed, however, unanimously opposed to these Continental models.  Yet, paradoxically , they recommended the Council construct – again as an ‘experiment’ – ‘a model colony of flats and tenements up to a thousand dwellings’ with all amenities.

In April 1932 the Council agreed a scheme for 180 maisonettes in a 5.5 acre slum clearance site around Emily Street in Highgate.  The matter remained controversial and the plans were rejected and revised until finally building began five years later.

The St Martin’s Flats were completed in 1939 and officially opened by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in March – three large four-storey blocks containing 267 balcony-access one- to three-bedroom flats in all.

Though the design resulted from an architectural competition – won by the unfortunately-named G. Grey Wornum and Anthony C. Tripe Partnership of London – it was disliked by modernist critics and beset by problems.  At a time of skilled labour shortages, the experimental concrete cladding seemed like a good idea but, in fact, it created long-running and insoluble problems with damp.

As Phyllis Nicklin’s photographs from 1957 show, nor was the promise of ‘all amenities’ – playgrounds, gardens with seats and a bowling green were included in the original plans – fulfilled. It was a blighted neighbourhood and remained so. (4)

St. Martin’s Flats, 1957, from the Phyllis Nicklin collection

This wasn’t the ‘model’ estate that the Committee had originally proposed. To the Council, its attraction probably lay more in its relative cheapness and high density – 169.5 persons per acre.  The flats were used by working-class opponents to point to the inherent deficiencies of multi-storey living.

For all their problems, the flats – demolished in 1980 – seem to have generated a powerful community spirit and fond memories from many.  And, replacing as they did, an area of back-to-back housing with outside privies and taps, they did represent progress: (6)

I always thought [my husband] had a good upbringing there because he had hot water from an Ascot and an indoor bathroom and toilet whereas I came from the ‘Back to Backs’ in William Street, Lozells.

The St Martin’s Lane Estate was not an example to be copied but it did, if only by contrast, offer a way forward. By the late thirties, the Council – boosted in this by the appointment of Herbert Manzoni as City Surveyor in 1935 – finally came to embrace the necessity of flats.

At the end of 1937 the Council agreed a plan to clear 267 acres of slum housing in Duddeston and Nechells. One year later, the Public Works Committee proposed a five-year clearance and rehousing programme with some 1500 flats and maisonettes built in their place.

And then that locomotive of change, war, did indeed hit Birmingham like an express train.  After 1945, new dynamics and priorities, new personnel and politics, would – for a time at least – dispel the hesitancy surrounding flat construction and a very different Birmingham would be born.  But that’s another story too.

Sources

(1) JL Rushbrooke, Birmingham’s Black Spots (1934)

(2) Austen Chamberlain, letter to Ada Chamberlain 18 November 1922

(3) Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’ from Multi-Storey Living, 1974

(4) Carl Chinn, ‘Spirit of the flats will live on’, Birmingham Mail, June 23 2012 and A. G. Sheppard Fidler, ‘Post-War Housing in Birmingham’, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, April 1955

(6) Birmingham History Forum, ‘St Martin’s Flats, Highgate’ thread

The collection of 446 photographs of the late Phyllis Nicklin, a tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham, have been made available under the Creative Commons licence.

Early Municipal Housing in Birmingham and the ‘prejudice against flats’, Part 1

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Pre-1914

There is a Birmingham prejudice against flats, and it is not confined to any one class.  It springs, we believe, from something deep in the civic life.  Indeed, it is probably one expression of the independence of character which has done so much for Birmingham.

That was the Birmingham Gazette in 1930. (1)  In fact, we’ve seen similar sentiments in Bermondsey, Stevenage and beyond.   And we’ve seen flats – even some that came to be reviled by many such as Quarry Hill in Leeds and Park Hill in Sheffield – which the people who actually lived in them loved.

‘Sketches from the Condemned Localities’, 1876

As a 19^th century industrial city, Birmingham wasn’t unusual in having slum housing.  It was distinct, however, in its number of back-to-backs – some 50,000 had been built in the inner-city in the century to 1876 at which point the Council banned further construction.

2 Thomas Street, no. 9 Court

Cromwell Street, Duddeston, 1905

This was the third year of Joseph Chamberlain’s mayoralty of the city.  A Conservative government had passed the Workmen’s and Artisans’ Dwellings Act, intended to promote local authority slum clearance, one year previously.  Chamberlain, then a radical Liberal, seized the opportunity in what became known as the Birmingham Improvement Scheme.

The Council designated a central area of 93 acres – 3851 houses, 2258 built back-to-back, with a population of some 18,000 – for slum clearance under the Act.  Death rates were double and treble the national average – in Bailey Street, it was 97 per 1000 against the national average of 22.  £1.3m would be spent on purchasing and clearing insanitary properties. (2)

To Chamberlain, the logic of building flats to replace the slums being cleared seemed inexorable: (3)

The [Improvement] Committee will also no doubt erect buildings which will be in flats or storeys, much higher at all events than buildings have hitherto been built in Birmingham.  The time is coming, I believe, when that must be done, if the poor are to be housed in close proximity to their work, and for a reasonable rent.

But replacement accommodation was slow to emerge.  The 1875 Act discouraged local authority building, expecting that private developers to seize the opportunity to build.  And by 1878, when Chamberlain, now an MP, came back to the Council, he was backtracking. He spoke of a ‘misapprehension on the part of the ratepayers’ who thought the Corporation was:

going to build houses for the working classes at 7s per week…the Act did not entrust them with that duty. They were land-letters, not builders; all they had to do was to let the land to builders.

The problem, as we have seen in Liverpool, was that they were reluctant to do so when speculative building for the middle-class in the suburbs paid so much better.

Any rebuilding was delayed further by disagreement within the Council itself. Deputations to Glasgow and London in 1877 had come away opposed to flat-building.  The belief in the native prejudice against flats was strong and, in any case, councillors baulked at the cost.

In his 1878 address, Chamberlain had saved face by pointing to a Corporation scheme to build up to 180 ‘artizans’ dwellings’ in Newtown Row. In the event, the development, according to critics, took ‘the form of large and handsome shops, at a rental of about £40 per year’. (5)

So five years on, no new working-class housing had been built.  In fact, the Council began reconditioning some of the slum properties it had acquired. Local Conservatives – rather opportunistically as they certainly didn’t want to spend on rebuilding – had a field day criticising the inaction and hypocrisy of Birmingham’s Liberal Caucus.  It was even said that ‘some of these patched-up houses had been let out as brothels, and the moral Corporation had been receiving the wages of sin and iniquity’.

Chamberlain’s Improvement Scheme remained, in its way, a magnificent enterprise.  The newly-built Corporation Street – nicknamed by critics Chamberlain Boulevard – did become an impressive thoroughfare, adding to Birmingham’s civic dignity.

Corporation_Street 1899 © Wikimedia Commons

But the Scheme itself did virtually nothing to rehouse Birmingham’s slum-dwellers.  About 900 houses were pulled down – replaced by offices, a theatre, law courts and shops – and the death rate in the area fell.  As The Dart, a local journal critical of Chamberlain, commented:

Tis an excellent plan and I’ll tell you for why.
Where’s there no person living, no person can die.

Finally, the Council did build – at the north-eastern edge of the Improvement Area: 22 three-bedroom houses in Ryder Street in 1889 and 81 more in Lawrence Street in 1891.  They disappeared under Aston University in the 1970s but Phyllis Nicklin’s photographs capture them in 1968.

Terrace A, Lawrence Street from the Phyliis Nicklin collection

Terrace B, Lawrence Street from the Phyliis Nicklin collection

Further development occurred in 1894, under the terms of the 1890 Housing Act, when the Improvement Committee purchased a two-acre area of slum housing in Milk Street, Deritend for clearance.  Sixty-five homes and several workshops were demolished and the Committee secured Council approval to build 61 municipal dwellings in their place.

Milk Street,1953, from the Phyllis Nicklin collection

The yard of the Milk Street tenements, 1950s

These would be so-called ‘dual homes’ – a euphemism for balcony-access tenements arranged in four two-storey blocks.  Rents were kept low at between 3s (15p) and 5s (25p) a week.  This was to avoid a common criticism of municipal schemes that they were too expensive to those they were intended to help though even 5 shillings was a stretch for the poorest. (5)

But the results were austere and did little to popularise the idea of living in flats.  The Committee itself acknowledged ‘the plans have not met with universal favour’ but contended that: (6)

it is absolutely impossible to erect, without loss to the ratepayer, dwellings within the City suitable for the labouring classes at the rents above-mentioned, unless either upon this method or the Flat system.

The Estate was demolished in 1966.

And there municipal efforts to build housing rested.  Some 125,000 people remained in the back-to-backs and courts of Birmingham’s Inner Ring wards.  A combination of lack of will and lack of ready – and inexpensive – solution would continue to stymie action until very different circumstances prevailed after the First World War.

We’ll follow that story next week.

Sources

(1) Birmingham Gazette, 24 May 1930 quoted in Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’ from Multi-Storey Living, 1974

(2) ‘The Birmingham Improvement Scheme’, Spectator, 13 May 1876 and the City of Birmingham, A Short History of the Birmingham Improvement Scheme (1890)

(3) Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’

(4) JM Brindley, The Homes of the Working Classes and the Promises of the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain MP (1884)

(5) Carl Chinn, ‘Milking History in Birmingham’, Birmingham Mail, September 30 2006

(6) Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’

The collection of 446 photographs of the late Phyllis Nicklin, a tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham, has been made available under the Creative Commons licence.

Hackney Town Hall: ‘that great dignified centre of civic life’

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1930s, Hackney, Town Halls

When Hackney’s mayor spoke at the opening of the new Town Hall in July 1937, he expressed the hope that ‘the citizens of Hackney would look with pride and pleasure upon that great dignified centre of civic life’.  (1)

To be honest, it’s not likely that they always did – ‘dignity’ is not a word that readily characterises the storm and stress of some of the borough’s later politics.  But the Town Hall itself has stood as a worthy monument to the ideals of local government.

Time was when Hackney was a rather genteel village well beyond the grit and grime of the growing city but those days ended with the coming of the railway in 1850. When Mare Street was widened and as the tramways arrived in 1872, Hackney became an industrial and increasingly working-class suburb of London.

The 1866 Town Hall from the Illustrated London News, October 13 1866

A complicated mix of vestries and ad hoc bodies governed the area until 1900. The first Town Hall, built in 1802, was replaced by a grander building in 1866 ‘of the French-Italian style of architecture, effectively treated in Portland stone’. (2)

This was ‘a modern structure…a striking contrast to many of the quaint old buildings which surround it’ but it was, apparently, soon found wanting. (3)  And the more so as Hackney Metropolitan Borough Council was established in 1900 and as local government’s functions grew.

The new Council remained under Conservative control until – in that year of Labour triumph at the height of post-war discontent – Labour took control in 1919. But the Party lost every seat in the succeeding elections of 1922.

Thus it was a Conservative council which launched an architectural competition for a new town hall in 1934.  The winners were Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge with a design – ‘conventional but not showy’ according to Pevsner – which cost £99,870:  an Art Deco building of four storeys faced with Portland stone. (4)

Demolition of the old Town Hall and construction of the new, mid 1930s. Courtesy of Hackney Archives.

The old Town Hall was demolished and civic gardens and a war memorial constructed in front of the the new building.  That contained, traditionally, a grand entrance hall and staircase leading to that heart of local democracy, the Council Chamber.

The Council Chamber, Open House London 2013

Ground floor offices contained the sinews of local government – the offices of the Borough Engineer, Medical Officer of Health, Borough Treasurer and the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Hackney Town Hall interior. Courtesy of Hackney Archives

A second floor contained the Mayor’s Parlour and the offices of the Town Clerk.  Modernity was trumpeted in the electrical thermal storage system and ventilation provided by electrically driven fans.  There were even synchronised electronic clocks. (5)

The Assembly Hall, Open House London 2013

Perhaps more impressive to the ordinary public was the new Assembly Hall built to the rear of the building, capable of seating 600 but with provision to be divided into three sections for a variety of other uses.

Assembly Hall bar, Open House London 2013

Corridor entrance to Assembly Hall, Open House London 2013

What remain outstanding are the Art Deco décor and fittings.  Now fully restored, it is a beautiful building.  And one that did bestow a dignity and grandeur to its civic role.

This was certainly the ideal of those city fathers (mainly fathers) who inaugurated the building in 1937.  Ironically perhaps, this was now – and would remain – a Labour council. Labour had swept to power in Hackney in 1934.  They maintained control until the abolition of the old Metropolitan Borough in 1965 with a near or absolute monopoly of seats for most of the period.

The opening ceremony. July 1937 with the mayor, Alderman Butler, to the left of centre and Lord Snell to the right. Courtesy of Hackney Archives

Thus it was that a Labour mayor, Alderman Herbert W Butler, and the then Labour Leader in the House of Lords, Lord Snell – born Harry Snell, the son of agricultural workers – presided over events on that July day.

Snell was an ethical socialist and the full flavour of that now largely forgotten politics is conveyed in his opening address.  This was a building ‘devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all’. It: (6)

represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living which they would have to keep going.  It was not the property of the Mayor and the Corporation; it was the property of the people of Hackney. It was for their use and to serve their needs, and what it did would react upon every home in every street in the borough. It was a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

A 32-year old Herbert Morrison, Mayor of Hackney

At this time, Hackney’s politics might be best personified by Herbert Morrison.  Morrison had been a Labour mayor of Hackney in 1920 in that earlier phase of Labour rule.  He was now Labour leader of the London County Council but his brand of Labourism – ethical roots and bureaucratic leanings – lived on.

This politics survived and thrived in Hackney after 1945.  But, for all its qualities and genuine pedigree, it became in its time a rather ‘Establishment’ politics focused on the bastions of old-style Labour representation – on the council, in the unions and in the tenants’ associations.

Meanwhile, Hackney – and the wider world – was changing.  By the eighties, the enlarged Borough was one-third ethnic minority (that proportion is now nearer two-thirds).  Women were another ‘minority’ who – in this new world – were not a part of old Labour’s ‘natural constituency’.  And a new generation of university-educated, Marxist-influenced politicians emerged whose socialism branded old Labour as conservative, even privileged.

A New Left politics developed which properly focused on local issues of race and gender and advanced forms of ‘community development’ and decentralisation which challenged the structures of old Labour power. Its representatives took power in Hackney in 1982.

The vital question, of course was could they also deliver the bread and butter services vital to all sections of the community and which remained the staple of local government’s role as  identified by Harry Snell fifty years earlier.

That’s as sympathetic a portrayal of the splits which ravaged Hackney’s local Labour politics in the eighties and nineties as I can come up with and, of course, it’s hugely simplified.

In headline terms, these splits were played out over rate-capping and the initial refusal of Hackney’s New Left to set a rate in 1985.  The Council backed down after the Labour Group split almost fifty-fifty on the issue.  They were seen, more discreditably, in later conflicts over personnel, policies and priorities in succeeding years. (7)

Luckily, this isn’t a blog about the intricacies of recent Labour politics.  Suffice to say, a more stable, less ideologically-coloured Labour politics grew after 1997.  Whether Harry Snell was turning in his grave in the meantime, you can judge.

Back to the Town Hall and back to local government and its more traditional functions.  The Council’s new Service Centre – designed by Hopkins Architects Partnership, built at a cost of £43,733,000 and winner of a 2011 RIBA Award for architectural excellence – was opened in March 2010.

The Hackney Service Centre on Hillman Street, opened 2010

Its 15,000 square metres, arranged over five floors, house the Council’s administrative staff but, more strikingly, it acts – in the massive atrium containing the Council’s one-stop shop and public reception – as an innovative ‘focal point for the services’ of the Borough that Harry Snell might be proud of.

Sources

(1) Quoted in ‘Hackney’s New Town Hall’, Hackney Gazette, July 5 1937

(2) ‘The New Townhall, Hackney’, Illustrated London News, October 13 1866

(3) Edward Walford, Old and New London: Volume 5, 1878

(4) Elizabeth Robinson, Twentieth Century Buildings in Hackney, Hackney Society, 1999.  Full architectural details of the Grade II listed building are provided in the English Heritage listing.

(5) Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, Programme of the Opening Ceremony of the New Town Hall, 3 July 1937

(6) Quoted in ‘Hackney’s New Town Hall’, Hackney Gazette, July 5 1937

(7) For a highly critical review of these politics, see David Walker and Rebecca Smithers, ‘Borough of hate and hit squads’, The Guardian, March 19, 1999

Especial thanks to the helpful staff of Hackney Archives for access to primary sources mentioned above and for permission to use the images noted above.

All reasonable efforts have been made to ascertain the copyright situation with these photographs and documents, but please contact Hackney Archives with any queries or further information.

Stevenage New Town: ‘Building for the new way of life’

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1940s, 1950s

From the arts and crafts estates – council-built – to the huge garden suburbs of the interwar period, we’ve followed a dream.  And that dream came to fruition in Stevenage.  That is not a sneer but an elegy.

The students of planning will tell you – quite rightly – how that dream first formed in the mind of Ebenezer Howard and the garden city movement he founded.   But it dwelt powerfully in the lived reality and the political aspirations of a generation of working-class politicians who thought their people deserved better than the crowded inner-city slums.

Good housing, secure and well-paid employment and a healthy environment in which to bring up children – these were the goals: not revolutionary, modest but democratic in the deepest sense.  And there was a time when Stevenage – and the other post-war New Towns – seemed to be their fulfilment.

The facts are straightforward enough.  Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan called for a ring of new towns built beyond the green belt to house some 380,000 people who would be decanted from an overcrowded, blighted and war-damaged city.

That vision was taken up by Attlee’s new Labour government in 1945, entrusted fittingly to Lewis Silkin, a former member of the London County Council’s Town Planning and Housing and Public Health Committees, appointed to the post of Minister of Town and Country Planning. And it was, in its own way, as central to the ideal of a Welfare State as a national health service and comprehensive social security.

Planning for Stevenage New Town began early.  The old town of Stevenage, home to a population of 6000, seemed an ideal location – 30 miles north of London with excellent transport links, suitable land and a local council receptive to growth. Gordon Stephenson drafted a plan – which would be honoured in all its essentials – in the summer of 1945.

Town plan, 1955

The 1946 New Towns Act provided the apparatus to build, establishing the Development Corporations which would mastermind and implement these grandiose projects.  The eight members of the Stevenage Development Corporation – appointed by Silkin – comprised town planning luminaries, local authority representatives and a couple of businessmen.

It was described as ‘liberal, bold and less inclined to hold a business point of view, than some others’. (1)  But it was hardly democratic and Stevenage Urban District Council remained essentially a service and subservient body until the Corporation was wound up in 1980.

On 11 November 1946 Stevenage was designated the first new town. There was no hype in Silkin’s celebratory remarks, indeed there was a proud sense of a better world being born: (2)

Stevenage in a short time will become world famous.  People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we, here in this country, are building for the new way of life.

Then there was a hitch. As the first letters went out to local landowners, opposition mobilised.  A Stevenage Residents’ Protection Association was formed. It was not reassured as the men from the Ministry arrived and very far from mollified when Silkin himself visited.

‘It’s no good you jeering. It’s going to be done’, he stated, to a very hostile public meeting.  He then left – under police escort.  The protestors replaced existing town signs with the name ‘Silkingrad’, in Russian-style script lest anyone miss the point they were making.

In keeping with British tradition, however, there was no Gulag but, rather, recourse to the law.  The opponents’ case was initially upheld but rejected on appeal.  Finally, in July 1947, the House of Lords itself sanctioned the plans.

The Stevenage Master Plan which emerged, taking finished form in 1950, envisaged a town of some 60,000, dwelling in six neighbourhoods of about 10,000 each, each with their own shopping centres, primary schools and community facilities.  This ideal of created community was powerful in its day.  Even the street signs were colour-coded to help give each neighbourhood its own distinct identity.

A pedestrianised town centre – the first of its kind – would also be built and a substantial industrial zone would be sited, separated from residential areas, to the west of the main road and railway.  Some major firms– including De Havilland (later British Aerospace), Kodak and Bowaters – would locate in Stevenage.

The first houses were begun in September 1949.  By the end of 1952 1070 houses had been completed and 2367 were being built.  Ten years later, 12,377 homes had been completed, all but 1177 built by the Development Corporation.

Marymead, Broadwater

Leaves Spring, Shephall

The vast majority of these were two-storey two- and three-bedroom houses, architecturally undistinguished but solid, comfortable and, of course, of much higher quality than any the vast majority of new residents had previously enjoyed.  Some variety was achieved through the twelve plan variations employed.

Broadwater neighbourhood centre

The planners also worked hard to maintain a neighbourhood ‘feel’ with a careful range of streetscapes and designs, using curves, cul-de-sacs, ‘village greens’ and always attempting to separate people and cars.  Stevenage’s extensive system of segregated cycleways was pioneering.

Interestingly, the one attempt at ‘high rise’ – a seven-storey block of 54 flats completed in 1952 in the Stoney Hall area – was deemed a failure.  The Corporation – seemingly anticipating a view of high rise that would become common fifty years later – had envisaged these as middle-class dwellings but middle-class tenants were, as yet, thin on the ground.  Two years later, the Corporation concluded: (3)

Almost every person coming to live in a new house at Stevenage, which is after all a country town, wants at least a small patch of garden to make the country seem yet a little closer.  Discussion with representatives of the Stevenage Residents’ Federation has shown that few wish to have a flat as a home…They have expressed their desire to get away from communal staircases, balconies or landings, and to have a house with its own front door.

This brings us neatly to the sociology of the New Town.  Most of the newcomers came from London but a particularly important group in the early years were construction workers.  Those on London council house waiting lists prepared to work on the new town for at least six months were granted a Corporation house. Of the first 2000 houses completed, over a quarter went to building workers and their families.

They brought – and fought for – traditions of organisation and solidarity, successfully resisting victimisation, lay-offs and ‘the lump’ (labour-only subcontracting).  And they provided the New Town’s residents vital early leadership – in the residents’ associations and in one-off campaigns which secured a by-pass and preserved the Fairlands Valley as open space against plans for high-density housing. Six would be elected to the local council. (4)

But they were perhaps the exception.  The town planning advocates, Frederick Osborn and Arnold Whittick, welcomed the New Town’s ‘dramatic societies, art clubs, horticultural and gardening societies, political groups, sports clubs for almost every sport, numerous women’s and youth organisations’. But they acknowledged honestly that many wanted simpler pleasures and these welcomed the Locarno Ballroom opened in 1962 and the ‘American-style bowling hall’ opened the following year: (5)

The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.

This, then, was an affluent working class, enjoying domestic pleasures and rising living standards, not so much lacking class consciousness as seeming in this period not to need it.  John Goldthorpe’s work on the affluent worker was published the very same year and was based on the nearby and economically similar town of Luton.

Broom Barns, Bedwell

But Stevenage remained sociologically distinct, not least because the large majority of its inhabitants lived in council housing. ‘There was no sense of incongruity in Stevenage between being a young professional and living in social housing.’ (6)  Social housing had not yet become residual housing for those who couldn’t afford ‘better’, still less could it possibly be considered accommodation for a so-called ‘sink population’.

And the Council and the Corporation were the benign guardians of this mixed – not classless – community, providing housing, education and leisure.  At the play schemes he attended, Gary Younge recalls how, as prizes for sporting success or good behaviour, they ‘would hand out tokens for free admission to the bowling alley and the swimming pool since all were council-run’.

None of this sounds revolutionary; it doesn’t even sound like the New Jerusalem that early Labour Party activists aspired to.  But it contains an essential decency and a sense of community – nothing saccharin or pious, a simple responsibility of one for the other – that superseded the ugly exploitation which been the lot of working people hitherto.  We might wish for it again.

Right to buy came in the same year that the Development Corporation was abolished. And the eighties more broadly brought new – more competitive and individualistic – values that challenged the principles on which Stevenage New Town was built.

Clock tower with Franta Belsky’s 1974 memorial to Lewis Silkin. © Steve Cadnam, made available under the Creative Commons licence

Stevenage remains, of course – not a monument but a more ordinary town, still a good place to live for many though wrestling with problems common to all. But perhaps the idea it represented has – for the moment – died.

Sources

(1) Robert B Black, The British New Towns – A Case Study of Stevenage,  Land Economics, Vol. 27, No. 1, February  1951

(2) Quoted in Gary Younge, ‘Stevenage’, Granta, Issue 119, Spring 2012

(3) Quoted in Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis (1963)

(4) University of Westminster and the Leverhulme Trust, Construction Workers in Stevenage, 1950-1970 (2011)

(5)  Osborn and Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis

(6) Gary Younge, ‘Stevenage’