The Norris Green Estate, Liverpool: ‘Terrible types are being given the houses nowadays’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

We left Norris Green last week in the early 1970s as one of ‘the most stable and respectable’ of Liverpool’s council estates. (1)  Some people think that paints a rather rosy picture of an already troubled estate but there’s no doubt that by the later seventies Norris Green had real problems and a terrible local reputation.  What on earth went wrong?

Norris Green, aerial view

Nationally, the role of council housing changed.  The 1977 Homeless Persons Act set a statutory duty to house certain vulnerable groups.  The 1979 Thatcher government restricted new construction of council housing and diminished the existing stock through Right to Buy.  In Norris Green, one third of the houses were purchased by tenants within five years.

Right to Buy homes in Norris Green

This suggests that the Estate remained attractive to some but council housing became residual – new tenants were increasingly those in difficulty, lacking employment or stable circumstances.  The decline of the Liverpool economy didn’t help matters as traditional employment opportunities plummeted.

A 1981 Merseyside Police survey of the Norris Green revealed that almost one third of those of working age were unemployed and three quarters of the tenants were in receipt of Housing Benefit.  Over 75 per cent of children received free school meals. It went on to identify ‘a downward spiral of deprivation and communal fragmentation with all that implies for the health, wealth and well-being of residents’. (2)

Meanwhile, there was an elderly population of long-term residents – almost one in five of the Estate’s population was over 60 – who noticed these changes: (3)

In my day the houses were given to steady respectable hard-working people who kept the property nice. Now though, the houses are given to anybody, and you can see, they are certainly not well kept. Everywhere inside the estate looks a disgrace. The houses are never painted or repaired, and the children are allowed to roam around, and do anything. Fifty years ago, mugging, vandalism, drug taking was unheard of round here, not like today.

Another commented, ‘terrible types are being given the houses nowadays. I’ll leave that subject alone if you don’t mind, it upsets me so much’.

A typical scene? Norris Green, April 2012 © Liverpool Echo

Norris Green – like many similar estates – had become (or was seen as) a ‘no-go area’ – rife with drug-dealing, gangs, car crimes and muggings. If crime was a potent factor in impoverishing its residents’ lives, fear of crime was equally so.

All this would be enough to cause problems but Norris Green’s perfect storm of disadvantage was completed by the severe physical decline of the Estate.

Residents complained of poor maintenance and slow repairs and blamed Corporation neglect, made more apparent as new owner-occupiers improved their homes purchased under Right to Buy:

These houses were well looked after years ago. Every house was decorated inside every 7 years, every 3½ years they did the downstairs, every 3½ years the upstairs. I remember mother used to go to the Works Department to choose the wallpaper. Every 5 years the outside was done and any repairs they were there. The houses are just neglected today, look, a lot are boarded up because they can’t be bothered to repair them.

A sympathetic view would suggest tight local government finances but there are those who, remembering the terrible inefficiency of the Housing Department in those days, suspect corruption.

Certainly, the Council’s housing policies were short-termist.  However grateful the original tenants had been for their new homes, those non-parlour homes with a downstairs bathroom were clearly no longer fit for purpose. In 1970-1971 a limited modernisation programme had taken place which installed prefabricated ‘Gilbury Units’ incorporating a bathroom, sink and WC – flat-roofed composite extensions containing one small window –  to the rear of 550 houses. This solution would cause problems of its own in the years to come.

Thereafter planned maintenance was scaled down and in 1983 the Militant-controlled Labour council halted improvements to the Estate completely.

The problem of the 3000 ‘Boot and Boswell’ pre-cast concrete homes could not be ignored, however.  These had been faulty from the outset.  The cheap sulphur clinker used in the manufacture of the concrete had led to cracking and shrinkage within two years of their construction and problems of damp and rust would plague these homes and make them very difficult to heat.  They were officially declared defective and unmortgageable in 1985. (4)

‘Boot Estate’ homes, © Liverpool Echo

These homes were progressively vacated and shuttered – a necessary measure but it did nothing to help the appearance or ‘feel’ of the Estate.

Belatedly, in 1983, the City Council launched an Urban Regeneration Strategy.  This, though it targeted the neighbouring Croxteth and Gillmoss Estates, did not originally address the myriad problems of Norris Green.

In 1988, after intense lobbying from the two Norris Green tenants’ associations, three of the seven neighbourhoods in the Estate were declared Priority Areas.  But only two-thirds of homes had been improved in the first area before the Strategy was abandoned and resources withdrawn.

Hillary Burrage, whose was a social worker on the Estate in this period, recalls her experiences: (5)

Here were elderly men who seemed to survive solely on Guinness, bread and marg; here were children with disability so severe that they had to live day-in, day-out in their parents’ lounge; here were old ladies who promised fervently to pray for me, simply because I was the first person they had spoken with for weeks.

Here, in fact, was a land, originally designed as the vision for the future, which, by those far-off days of the early 1970s, few knew, and almost everyone had forgotten.

This, thankfully, is not the end of the story – nor is it, of course, the entire story.  Many residents continued to value their homes and their estate, even in these hard times.  But, though regeneration can be a dirty word in the world of social housing, it was desperately needed in Norris Green.

The replacement of the Gilbury Units – a poor solution from the outset – began in 1990.  By 1997 all 550 had been replaced by brick-built extensions.

In 1993 the Council received £27m under the Government’s Estate Action Programme.  1073 council and 723 owner-occupied houses in the Sedgemoor neighbourhood of the Estate were provided with central heating and double glazing and walls and fences were upgraded.

In 1999, it was accepted that the Boot and Boswell houses should be demolished.  The first tenants were ‘decanted’ in the following year and by the summer of 2006 835 of the remaining 1509 properties had been demolished.

Meanwhile, in March 2002, two-thirds of Council tenants in Liverpool voted to transfer ownership of their homes to a new registered social landlord, Cobalt Housing.  After this, we enter the brave new world of social housing and a fragmented nexus of housing associations, property developers, ‘affordable homes’ for purchase and smaller allocations of social housing and, frankly, the picture becomes too complex to detail.

To provide a flavour only, the property developers New City Vision began Phase 1 of their Ellergreen development – a rebranding of what had become known as the Boot Estate – in 2006: 90 houses for social rent to be let by Cobalt and 104 homes for sale – ‘two and three-bedroom mews and semis, three and four-bed detached houses and a four-bedroomed, 3 storey mews property’ as they are described in modern ‘developer-speak’. (6)

Countryside Properties housing, Perilla Drive

In 2011, Inpartnership – a ‘Manchester-based niche regeneration specialist’ and their ‘development partner’ Countryside Properties began Phase 1 of a six-phase £200m scheme to redevelop a 63 acre area of Norris Green, providing initially 60 homes –  15 properties for sale on the open market, 25 social rented and 20 ‘intermediate units, otherwise known as home share offers’ through Cobalt. (7)

Broad Lane homes refurbished in 2012

In 2012, Liverpool Mutual Homes refurbished 74 homes on Broad Lane. (8)

Liverpool’s Labour mayor, Joe Anderson, claims at least that the Council – now acting as a ‘strategic partner’ in the provision of social and affordable housing – is finally addressing Norris Green’s long-running and deep-rooted problems:

This is an exciting time for Norris Green, and the days of its notoriety as ‘the Boot Estate’ are coming to an end. These new homes demonstrate our full commitment to the neighbourhood and I’m sure they will play a key role in strengthening community confidence and driving up the quality of lives.  The regeneration of Norris Green is a key strategic priority for Liverpool and the region.

In July 2013, Liverpool City Council held a Bidders’ Day for a new ‘Strategic Housing Delivery Partner’ to provide the city with 1500 new homes and bring 1000 properties back into use.

There was a time when progressive councils built themselves.  These pioneers decried the inefficiency of private contractors and deplored the profits of middlemen.  Common sense and principle alike were served by their insistence on housing built and let by the local state.  Those days have gone and social housing today exists in a miasma of partnerships and corporate interests.

Utting Avenue East, Norris Green © Sue Adair, made available under the Creative Commons licence

But beyond all the developers and schemes, there are grass-roots projects, and within these there are people trying to make a difference.  I’ll leave the last word with them: (8)

I think Norris Green is a fantastic area. There is still a lot of real community spirit left here but I do think we have got a lot of work to do now because of what’s gone on and the way it’s been reported…

I love the people in this area – everyone is dead friendly and has got a good sense of humour. If you don’t know them you can smile at them and they will smile back. It’s just a minority that cause problems.

Sources

(1) Barbara Weinberger, Liverpool Estates Survey, 1973, quoted in Richard Harris, Peter Larkham (eds), Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function (1999)

(2) Cited in Harris, Larkham (eds), Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function

(3) This and the following quotes are drawn from Madeline McKenna, The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars, University of Liverpool PhD, 1986

(4) Vinny Timmins, A Brief History of Norris Green

(5) Hillary Burrage, ‘Croxteth And Norris Green, Liverpool’, blog posting, September 6 2007

(6) BigDig Liverpool, ‘Ellergreen (Boot Estate)’, ND

(7) Details and the following quote are taken from the Homes and Communities Agency, ‘Regeneration of Norris Green Takes Significant Step Forward’, March 1 2011

(8) Stephen Cousins, ‘Broad Lane: from Estate Hell to Housing Heaven‘, Construction Manager, June 2 2013

(9) Participants in the Ellergreen Young People’s Project quoted in Paddy Shennan, ‘It’s time to focus on the positives in Norris Green’, Liverpool Echo, July 11 2012

Advertisement

The Norris Green Estate, Liverpool: ‘Living among decent people’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

The Norris Green Estate in Liverpool has been in the wars.  If you’ve read some of the press coverage over recent years, that might seem an almost literal statement but the reality is that the Estate simply represents all the hopes and fears that have been invested in social housing over the decades.  It deserves to be better understood.

Aerial view of the Norris Green Estate, 1939

In many ways, its story – if you’ve been following this blog – will seem typical.  The Estate was born in the interwar period when central and local government shared a mission to house those we must now call ‘the hard-working people’ of Britain decently.

Nowhere was this more necessary than Liverpool.  The city was the first to build council housing and its efforts before the First World War were impressive. But still, in 1919, 11,000 families – over 6 per cent of its population – lived in one-room dwellings. It was estimated conservatively that 8000 houses were needed immediately and 1000 a year thereafter to ensure a growing population adequate accommodation. (1)

In the post-war drive to build, the Conservative-controlled council (it would remain in Conservative hands until 1955) built 5508 houses under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act – more than any municipality in the country.  But the city couldn’t rest on its laurels.  In 1924, its overcrowding was three times the national average and there were 20,000 names on the council house waiting list.

In October, the City Engineer John Brodie presented plans to build 5000 new homes. Lancelot Keay was appointed his chief architectural assistant and would become a high-profile Director of Housing in 1929.

Land was purchased on the north-eastern fringe of the city – 650 acres (of which 470 lay in the neighbouring Sefton Rural District Council until incorporated into the city in 1928) which would form the new Norris Green Estate.  Building began in June 1926.

Within three years, the Estate contained a population of 25,000.  Eventually, there were some 7689 homes housing a population of over 37,000.  This was a phenomenal achievement but not without problems.

Parlour homes, Norris Green

Non-parlour homes on the Estate

All the homes – 4,724 parlour, 2,965 non-parlour – had three bedrooms.  The non-parlour had a downstairs bathroom but all benefited from electricity and hot water, front and rear gardens and woodwork painted in regulation Corporation green and cream. Most were built of unglazed brick but, to build faster and more cheaply, the Estate also featured some 3000 ‘Boot and Boswell’ pre-cast concrete homes.  We’ll return to these. (2)

Utting Avenue, Norris Green in the 1920s

The urgent rush to build left the Estate’s infrastructure severely underdeveloped for some time.  Early streets were unpaved – wooden planks acted as makeshift walkways – and the first shops didn’t open – in the Broadway – until 1929.  This gave Liverpool’s unofficial entrepreneurs ample opportunity and at one time it was estimated 150 shops were run – quite illegally – from homes on the Estate.

There was little landscaping and a great deal of uniformity in the housing.  The well-intentioned layout, which did reflect garden city ideals of circles, crescents and cul-de-sacs, only added to the confusion.  The Corporation erected four illuminated signs at the entrances to the Estate to assist those who got lost.

Utting Avenue East, Norris Green, ND

The first school didn’t open until 1929 – free bus and tram tickets were provided to get children to inner-city schools (though many stayed at home).  The first Catholic school didn’t open until 1933. More seriously, to some of the residents, there was no Catholic church until 1928, a temporary structure until a permanent building opened nine years later.  (3)

It was sinful not to build a church for the people at the same time as they built the houses. We needed communion and the confessional just as much as a roof over our heads.

The Council did its bit for morality by deciding in 1926 that no public houses would be permitted on its estates though the brewers soon built large premises on their fringes which were well used.

The Broadway

It was not all bad, however.  An infant welfare centre started in 1929, a temporary library in the same year, and the first public hall built on a council estate was opened in the Broadway in 1930.  Public baths followed in 1936 and the tramways were finally extended into the Estate in 1938.

The reality is that for nearly all the incoming tenants their new homes represented a massive improvement on what they had known before.  In this context, downstairs bathrooms and the Estate’s teething troubles were, for the most part, readily accepted. Meanwhile an active tenants’ association campaigned for improvements. ‘Everybody complained, but they didn’t really get that upset’. (4)

Who were these new tenants?  Thanks to the Corporation’s tenancy cards – and Madeline McKenna’s hard work – we know pretty precisely.  Almost 80 per cent of Norris Green’s heads of household belonged to the skilled or semi-skilled working class.

The Council wanted tenants who could pay regularly and council rents demanded a good working-class income, the more so in these suburban estates where additional travel-to-work costs were high.

But in Liverpool – a city with a large amount of casual labour and with unemployment levels reaching one third of the workforce in the 1930s – this could not be sustained.  Increasingly, Norris Green and the other estates did house a less skilled and less well-off working class, particularly in the cheaper non-parlour homes. Of course, many tenants – skilled and unskilled alike – also suffered unemployment in this period.

This shift was noticed by some existing tenants:

Norris Green had been alright but you had got some rather low types there, barrow women in shawls, that sort of thing.

Rents, utility bills, furniture and transport costs could become unsustainable and many of McKenna’s interviewees tell of the hard times and desperate economy measures of these years.  Around 40 per cent of Norris Green tenants gave up their tenancies in this period, often because they couldn’t afford them, sometimes because they missed the closer-knit communities around their former inner-city homes.

But looking back, with some nostalgia maybe, long-term Norris Green residents all testified to a friendly and sociable estate:

There is nothing I can say I didn’t like about the district, the house or the neighbours. I have always been so happy here. My next door neighbour was a lovely person. She came from Great Homer Street and when I first saw her, I thought, oh dear, what is she going to be like. She was wearing a shawl, you see, but she tried to improve herself by asking how to say certain words and I remember when she bought her first coat, she was so proud she ran in to show me. She never wore the shawl after that. Most of the neighbours were pleasant.

Shawls obviously signified ‘rough’ working-class origins and their loss was seen as a mark of ‘respectability’.  And note how clearly council estates were regarded as a vehicle of upward mobility, of benign social engineering, in fact: (7)

Our next door neighbour, Mrs Jones, they had come from Burlington Street and there were five boys and they were staunch Orange Lodge. Oh, the fights those boys used to have at first and the language but they all quietened down after a while and you know, all those boys did well, served apprenticeships. I think living among decent people pulled that type up somehow.

The tenancy agreement below (you’ll need to enlarge it) certainly shows the high standards that the Corporation expected of its tenants:

What happened next is that Norris Green ‘maintained its reputation as a settled and desired Corporation estate’.  A 1971 survey ‘identified the strength of local ties’ and concluded: (4)

Norris Green is the most stable and respectable of the study areas.  Only a small proportion of the tenants expect to move from the area, and levels of satisfaction are high.  Interest in owning is strongest in Norris Green, and levels of income, social class, and savings make it likely that a proportion of young families will leave to buy.

So what did go wrong?  That’s another story, to be told next week.

Sources

(1) This and some other detail below is taken from Madeline McKenna, ‘The Suburbanization of the Working-Class Population of Liverpool between the Wars’, Social History, Vol. 16, No. 2, May, 1991

(2) Vinny Timmins, A Brief History of Norris Green

(3) This and the four quotes which follow from long-term residents interviewed in 1981 are drawn from Madeline McKenna, The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars, University of Liverpool PhD, 1986

(4)  Barbara Weinberger, Liverpool Estates Survey, published 1973, quoted in Richard Harris, Peter Larkham (eds), Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function (1999). 

My thanks to contributors to the Yo! Liverpool forum for some of the images above.

Municipal Electricity in Shoreditch: ‘More Light, More Power’

Tags

Pre-1914, Shoreditch

If gigantic and tyrannical trusts monopolizing the production and use of electrical power are not to dominate our children as the railway companies dominate us, we must see that the community secures at the outset effective and systematic control over the new force.

This was not language – contained in a Fabian Tract of 1905 – that the good burghers of the Shoreditch Vestry would necessarily have used but their actions spoke louder than words. (1)  In 1897, Shoreditch became the first locality in the country to combine refuse disposal and electricity generation in a single municipal undertaking.

By the closing decades of the 19^th century, electricity was recognised as the fuel of the future.  Its growth and development had been largely left in private hands. But those laissez-faire Victorians weren’t quite as blind to the necessary role of the state as their modern advocates would have us believe.

The Electricity Lighting Act passed in 1882 empowered the Board of Trade to grant licences to supply electricity to both private and public organisations.  But it also gave local authorities the right to purchase private undertakings after 21 years.  It wasn’t thought that private local monopolies would necessarily act in the public interest.

Sixty-nine licences were granted in the following year of which 14 went to local authorities.  But in the years that followed, the interest of private enterprise – which felt that the 21 year period didn’t allow enough time for its investment to be recouped – waned.  An 1888 Act extended the period to 42 years.

At this point, Shoreditch began to tempt private supply companies.  Its southern portion contained a large number of warehouses and manufacturers.  Moreover, as the local press noted, ‘the exceptionally large number of public houses, amounting to 300, and the number of small shops which open at night’ made ‘the district one of the largest light consuming districts in London’. (2)

By 1891, three companies had applied for licences to supply the area.  But the Vestry – the local authority until the Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch was formed in 1900 – resented the idea of private profit made at the expense of local need.  It also had the problem of 20,000 tons of municipal refuse to deal with each year.  An innovative solution beckoned.

‘Light and power from dust’: the inscription on the power station facade

In 1892, the Board of Trade granted the Shoreditch a Provisional Licence to supply electricity and in November that year the Vestry commissioned the consulting engineer Edward Manville to conduct a feasibility study of a combined ‘dust destructor’ and electricity generating station.  He concluded the parish offered ‘a most admirable field’ for the undertaking and the Vestry moved forward, though not before receiving the endorsement of local voters in the 1894 elections.

Now, these pre-reform vestries are usually criticised for their lack of enterprise but Shoreditch was an exception. The ‘dust destructor’ and generator were to form part of a complex.

The Shoreditch Refuse Destructor and Generator Station, 2013

The generating station itself comprised a destructor house 80 feet square with a 150ft chimney, an engine house and offices. (3)  Next door, there were to be public baths and a washhouse – with hot water supplied by the station’s waste heat – and a public library and museum.

Dust destructor, 1902. With thanks to Peter Berthoud, http://www.peterberthoud.co.uk

A Technical Institute (developed on the foundation of the Vestry’s own municipal technical schools) would be opened by the London County Council just opposite. The whole scheme was estimated to cost £200,000.

This was thinking big and the Vestry took justifiable pride in it.  The Shoreditch Refuse Destructor and Generator Station was opened in Coronet Street in June 1897 with much ceremony and, appropriately, by the physicist, Lord Kelvin.  His speech suitably marked the occasion and the self-confidence of the age: (4)

The undertaking…was well worthy of the Victorian Era. It was a remarkable example of the combination of scientific knowledge and forethought with mechanical and engineering skill and courage.

He went on to praise the Vestry – ‘the premier body to undertake a large work like that they had just seen’ – a lesson amplified by the second speaker, James Stuart, also a scientist and educator and at this time Liberal MP for Hoxton:

Shoreditch had a population of working men, working women, small shopkeepers, and those persons who could not be said to be possess a great deal of wealth…the undertaking was therefore all the more praiseworthy.

And, it was, in fact an example for others to emulate.  By 1900 six similar stations had been opened in the country; by 1905, 40.  In 1905, 15 of London’s 28 Metropolitan Boroughs were supplying their own electricity. (5)

The Nile Street tenements were the first council housing to be lit by electricity in 1899. This interwar building replaced the original block. 

Nor did Shoreditch rest on its laurels.  In 1899, the workmen’s dwellings in Nile Street, built by the Vestry in partnership with the LCC, became the first municipal housing to be lit by electricity.  Lord Rosebery opened the flats and declared Shoreditch ‘one of our model vestries’.  He was then taken to view the generating station and associated complex to confirm his view. (6)

For this reason, the Vestry’s adopted motto ‘More Power, More Light’ seems peculiarly appropriate and it was happily embraced by the new Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch on its foundation.

Shoreditch remained a progressive authority though its politics evolved.  Labour took power briefly between 1919 and 1922 and then more firmly (excepting the cataclysm of 1931) from 1925 until 1965 when the borough was absorbed into the new Borough of Hackney.

From small beginnings – the undertaking had just 151 customers when it opened – Shoreditch’s electricity supply expanded.  Such was the demand that a second generating station was opened in 1902 at Whiston Street (now Whiston Road) in Haggerston but this was fired by coal supplied by the adjacent Regent’s Canal – Shoreditch didn’t have enough rubbish to satisfy demand.

A modern replica of the Vestry’s first electric lamp standard

The Vestry’s original coat of arms

By 1924 all 43 miles of the borough’s streets were cabled. (6)  As we’ve seen in interwar Woolwich, electricity was seen as the fuel of the future – clean and labour-saving – and the Labour Council was keen to extend its benefits.

The Borough’s Electricity Department initiated a Rental Wiring Scheme in 1926.  Its aim was to ‘make it possible for every householder in the Council’s area of supply to have electricity for lighting purposes’.  There was no upfront cost – consumers paid an additional 1.5d per unit on electricity supplied.  For this, they received: (8)

A first-class installation, complete with lamps and shades…fixed in each house by the Department’s own staff, and where there are several tenants, separate slot meters are fixed for each tenant, if desired. The installations are kept in good order by the Electricity Department.

By 1933, almost 33,000 installations had been provided.

Electricity Showrooms, 1933. With thanks to Peter Berthoud, http://www.peterberthoud.co.uk

The Borough also opened Electricity Showrooms on Hoxton Street  in 1929 – ‘a piece of modern commercial architecture of which the Borough may be proud’ and one that looks good today in its modern incarnation as a bar which pays due respect – externally, at least – to the building’s origins (9)

Electricity Showrooms, 2013

This was the heyday of the Borough’s provision.  In truth, as demand grew, municipal electricity supply’s days were numbered.  In 1927, the Central Electricity Board was established to create a national grid (Shoreditch had backed the wrong horse in opting for DC) and the era of large-scale generation in London was heralded by the opening of Battersea Power Station in 1933.

Regulation operations ceased in 1940 though Shoreditch enjoyed a brief swansong during the Second World War when small-scale generation offered a back-up should the larger stations be knocked out by bombing and during the coal crisis of 1947.

Attlee’s Labour Government nationalised electricity in 1948.  The Central Electricity Generating Board carried out further rationalisation and established a nationwide AC system.

The building lived on as a municipal depot until 1994 when it was converted to a circus training school.  Now, the old generating hall contains a gymnasium with additional training space being located in the former combustion house.

In its modern incarnation, the building lives on as a worthy monument to an era when public utilities were run for the public good rather than private profit.  Shoreditch Vestry would no doubt look at the modern-day ‘Big Six’ with as much disdain as we present-day consumers do.

Sources

(1) SG Hobson, Public Control of Electric Power and Transit, Fabian Tract 119 (1905)

(2) ‘Municipal Triumphs at Shoreditch’, Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, 30 June 1897

(3) Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, Shoreditch Refuse Destructor and Generator Station, Coronet Street, London N1

(4) ‘Municipal Triumphs at Shoreditch’

(5) Percy Ashley, ‘The Water, Gas, and Electric Light Supply of London’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 27, January 1906

(6) David Owen, The Government of Victorian London, 1855-1889. The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (1982)

(7) Christopher Derrett, ‘More Light, More Power: Electricity Generation and Waste Disposal in Shoreditch, 1897-2009’, Hackney History, vol 15, 2009

(8) Quoted in Peter Berthoud, Discovering London – The Old Electricity Showrooms Shoreditch

(9) Official Guide to the Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, 1930

The Circus Space website has details on the current occupant and some interior photographs.