Lambeth’s interwar cottage estates: the ‘character of a sleepy garden village’

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1920s, Cottage suburbs, Lambeth

The Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth formed in 1900 was a strange hybrid – stretching seven miles north to south but little over two and a half miles across at its widest point, encompassing industrial and poor working-class districts to the north and leafy middle-class suburbs to the south.  This duality found reflection in the Borough’s politics and housing policies.  But it did create some of the finest council housing of its time.

In terms of party politics, the Borough followed a London pattern in the interwar period.  Labour briefly controlled the Council in an alliance with the Liberal Party from 1919 to 1922 but, wiped out in 1922, it would not hold power again until 1937.  The Conservative Party governed in the interim.

In social terms, in 1925, Lambeth’s Medical Officer of Health stated ‘the well-known fact that there are practically no so-called “slum areas” (in the usual acceptance of the term) in the Borough’. (1)

This might have surprised Frank Briant, the radical Liberal MP for Lambeth North, who just six years earlier had described ‘almost unbelievable congestion’ in the Borough.  He continued: (2)

I know of basement rooms in which people regularly sleep which are only 6 ft high and their ceilings less than a foot above ground level. The only admittance for light and air is through a low grating which it is impossible to keep always open owing to the dirt and wet getting in.

And as late as 1938 some 5600 homes with inhabited underground rooms remained.

But the Medical Officer of Health’s statement was perhaps true in the narrow sense that there were few courts or back-to-backs in Lambeth.   Rather, as Briant described in his constituency, there was a large number of houses, built in more prosperous times, ‘formerly rented by single families…now let out as tenements’.  According to the 1931 Census, over two thirds of Lambeth families lived in multiple occupation; over one third lived three families to a home. (3)

In the 1920s, the ruling Conservative Party pursued what it was proud to call the ‘Lambeth Policy’ – a policy of reconditioning rather than slum clearance.  Between 1920 and 1925, some 2966 inspections resulted in just 107 demolitions; in the vast majority of cases the Council’s housing inspectors specified and then enforced repairs.

But Lambeth did build – in its own suburbs to the south, on a small scale but impressively.  Its 1920s schemes reflected the spirit of the 1918 Tudor Walters Report and the design ideals of the immediate post-war period and its pledge of ‘homes for heroes’.

St Louis Road, St Louis Estate

The Borough’s St Louis Estate in West Norwood was completed in 1923 – a mix of cottages and two-storey flats.  The homes were modest – though the flats’ porticoes and windows add a little grandeur – but careful attention was paid to contemporary town planning principles in their arrangement and landscaping.

St Louis Road, St Louis Estate

The Holderness Estate in Norwood completed two years later took these principles further.  Tree-lined avenues and the green open space at its heart complemented the ‘steeply-pitched tiled roofs and overhanging eaves, tile quoins and country cottage elevations’ of its housing.  According to Edmund Bird, the ‘general character of the estate is one of a sleepy garden village’. (4)

Tivoli Road, Holderness Estate

Furneaux Avenue, Holderness Estate

The Bloomfield Estate would be the finest of the Borough’s interwar estates.  The Council had acquired 18.5 acres of land in Norwood belonging to the late Sir Alfred Tritton in 1924.  It proposed building 318 dwellings on the land at a density of 17 per acre. (5)   A tender of £55,316 to build the first 86 houses was accepted from private contractors Higgs in October that year. The relatively high amount was agreed by the Ministry of Health in view of the difficulties of the site. (6)

Durning Road, Bloomfield Estate

The Estate was finished in 1927, the planners having made imaginative use of its hilly terrain as can be seen in the ‘village green’ on Durning Road.  Garden City ideals are also apparent in the cul-de-sacs of Gibbs Square and Close, in the overall greenery of the Estate – in September 1927, the Housing Committee agreed to spend £270 on trees for Bloomfield – and the arts and crafts references in the timber porches of some of the homes and other detailing.

Gibbs Square, Bloomfield Estate

Roman Rise, Bloomfield Estate

In planning and architectural terms, there is genuine quality to Lambeth’s working-class garden suburbs of this time.  Still, as a corrective to the view that construction failings belong only to the era of modern system-building, it’s worth recording that a severe snap of cold weather in March 1929 led to 325 of 535 homes on the three Lambeth estates suffering burst pipes. The Bloomfield Estate Tenants’ Association complained that roofs weren’t boarded, nor cistern and water pipes lagged.

That cost-cutting notwithstanding, this was expensive housing.  The Bloomfield Estate had cost £234,931 to build, £195,888 on the housing alone.  Such expenditure was inevitably reflected in the rents and therefore in the housing’s affordability.

Floor plan of three-bed home (taken from Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’, Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, March 1931)

In 1925, as the Council came to determine allocations for the new Bloomfield Estate, it estimated that prospective tenants would likely require an income of £4 a week to afford its rents.  Of 3500 then on the Council waiting list, only around 500 qualified. In north Lambeth – where housing needs were most pressing – the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement reckoned the average wage of ‘a family man’ into the 1930s to be around £3 a week.  In 1929, with rents set at between 20s 11d (£1.05) and 23s 7d (£1.18) a week, wages on the Bloomfield Estate were said to average between £3 and £4 a week.  Not surprisingly, around one third of tenants were in arrears.

The Housing Committee examined these arrears carefully.  In the case of Mr HW Bryant – unable to pay the rent through unemployment and sickness in the family – it was the Council’s own Relieving Officer who requested he be allowed to pay off the deficit at 4s (20p) a week:

if this family (which consists of nine persons in all) is ejected they, having no alternative accommodation, will have to be admitted to the Guardians’ Institution and…the Guardians already have chargeable a large number of children residue of families admitted in like circumstances.

The bureaucratic language reminds us that the shadow of the workhouse still lay heavily over the working class into the 1920s.

For all Lambeth’s genuine achievements in the housing field in the postwar period – and despite the parallel efforts of the London County Council in the borough – there was still clearly much to do.  By 1929 the number of ‘live’ cases on the waiting list had risen to 4000 and the problem of providing affordable housing for the borough’s poorest and most overcrowded residents remained pressing.

We’ll examine Lambeth’s changing policies in that regard in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1848-1972: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth, 1925

(2) Quoted in ‘Lambeth Slums’, The Times, 10 May 1919

(3) Cited in Social Services in North Lambeth and Kennington.  A Study from Lady Margaret Hall Settlement (1939)

(4) Edmund Bird and Fiona Price, Lambeth Architecture, 1914-1939 (2012) and Edmund Bird, Survey of Historic Housing Estates of the 1920s and 1930s in the London Borough of Lambeth, London Borough of Lambeth Conservation and Urban Design Team (July 2003)

(5) ‘Lambeth Housing Scheme’, The Times, 5 March 1924

(6) This detail and that which follows is extracted from the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes held in the Lambeth Archives.

My thanks to the staff of the Lambeth Archives in the Minet Library for their advice and help in accessing some of the sources listed above.

The Cranbrook Estate, Bethnal Green: ‘the struggle for a better tomorrow’

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1950s, 1960s, Bethnal Green, Lubetkin, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

The realisation that behind this stupendous tour de force lies only the domestic intricacies of municipal housing risks turning the whole display into an absurd melodrama, a folie de grandeur.

These are the words of John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin’s friend and biographer, in describing the architect’s last major work, the Cranbrook Estate in Bethnal Green. (1)

To be honest, the passer-by on Roman Road might be forgiven for seeing rather more ‘municipal’ than ‘grandeur’ with a quick glance but, in conception and design, the Cranbrook Estate deserves closer attention.  It remains a monument to post-war ambitions to house the people and a testimony, in particular, to the vision of the tiny borough of Bethnal Green.

Bethnal Green covered a little over a square mile.   And that – despite their proximity – was probably its only resemblance to the City of London. Bethnal Green was a working-class borough with a population in 1955 of around 54,000 – half that of 1931.   All thirty seats of the Council had been held by Labour since 1934 and would remain so till the abolition of the borough in 1965.

That falling population reflected the deliberate slum clearance of the 1930s and the Luftwaffe’s unofficial efforts during the London Blitz.  A total of 3120 houses had been destroyed in the war; thousands more were damaged.  Housing was a pressing issue. (2)

The first priority was to repair those houses capable of repair.  By 1953 this was largely complete and the London County Council and Metropolitan Borough Council refocused their efforts on slum clearance.  Both had already built homes in the borough too – the LCC over 800 by 1951, Bethnal Green 643 by 1953.

The Borough used private architects to design its housing and built by a mix of contractor and direct labour.  Pevsner comments on the ‘more sympathetic detailing’ of the Borough’s housing compared to that of the LCC. (3)  But the height of the Council’s ambition came with the Cranbrook Estate started in 1955.

In that year, Bethnal Green appointed Messrs Skinner, Bailey and Lubetkin as architects (a regrouped version of the Tecton Group which had designed the Spa Green Estate in Finsbury before the war) and approved the first stage of the scheme.  The Council also stipulated in draconian but necessary terms – given their intentions – that no applicants on the waiting list would be granted any of the new-build homes; it would all go to those living in areas to be cleared.

Cranbrook Street – which gave the Estate its name – before clearance

A year later, Bethnal Green Council  declared 17 acres of decayed Victorian terraces, workshops and one large factory a clearance area.  Compulsory purchase was agreed by the government in 1957.  A total of 1032 people in the clearance areas and a further 624 in adjacent streets would be displaced. (4)

Construction began shortly after.  The first units – Holman House, a five-storey block of 48 flats over a frontage of 12 shops, Tate House, 14 old people’s bungalows and Stubbs House, a two-storey block of old people’s dwellings – were officially opened by the mayor in March 1963. (5)  The Estate as a whole was officially opened in January 1965 and completed in 1966.

The blocks are named after Bethnal Green’s twin towns and boroughs

The new Estate – in plain numbers – comprised two fifteen-storey blocks of 60 homes each, two thirteen-storey blocks of 52 homes each, two eleven-storey blocks of 44 homes each and five four-storey blocks of 28 homes.  With ancillary dwellings, there were 529 new homes in total – 43 bedsitter flats, 115 one-bedroom flats, 271 two-bedroom flats and 100 three-bed flats.  This is one and half times the size of le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.

But the numbers alone don’t tell the story – the genius of Cranbrook lay in its overall design.  This was Lubetkin’s vision – very much his: (7)

I always had the impression that he was the boss. We all used to come, all the mums, and meet him and he’d say: “How’s things working?” He’d come in and have a biscuit and a cup of tea and he’d say that no matter what flat he went into, his décor went with the furniture. He was very proud that everything went together.

He’d come up to London each month, his ‘sketchbook bulging with plans’.  In overall terms, the Estate was, according to John Allan, his ‘most ambitious achievement in urban orchestration, an essay in controlled complexity’.

The ensemble of six towers and five medium-rise blocks were arranged geometrically, set along two diagonal axes – pedestrian walkways which echoed the earlier street pattern.  The buildings progressively reduced in height from 15 storeys to 13 to 11 in the towers to five in the block of flats and shops on Roman Road, then to four in the series of maisonettes and to two, and finally – in a conscious diminuendo – to one storey in the old people’s bungalows on the Estate’s perimeter.

In James Meek’s words, the blocks were spaced apart and so angled that one face would always catch the sun and shadows cast would ‘rotate like the spokes of a wheel’.

The remains of Lubetkin’s trompe l’loeil

In the original design, one of the avenues was to lead directly at its north-western corner into Victoria Park but the Council couldn’t  purchase the intervening land.  Instead, Lubetkin designed an elaborate trompe l’oeil – a tapering ramp and series of diminishing hoops to give the illusion of distant vista.  This survives in vestigial form but is now looking rather forlorn.

There have been other changes too.  Some of the élan of Lutbetkin’s original design has been lost.  Those diagonal axes became a figure of eight.  The tower blocks  now have blank steel shutters erected across the deep openings which originally scored their façades; the green concrete bosses and glass beads which studded the façades have been replaced by aluminium boxes; white pipework scars their exterior.  Parts of it are clearly in need of refurbishment.  The passer-by might be forgiven for seeing the Estate as a little more ordinary than it actually is.

But Cranbrook must ultimately be judged as living space rather than architecture.  And, in these terms, it seems to have worked well.  Doreen Kendall, one of the original residents of the Estate and still living there:

loved it. I absolutely adored it. We had central heating so we didn’t need to light a fire any more. My husband thought we’d moved into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.

And writing in 1993, one commentator concluded that Cranbrook ‘seems unaffected by the ills that beset other inner-city estates’. (8)  Perhaps this reflected the Estate’s demography.  Kendall, then chair of the tenants’ association, stated:

We’re a very close community. We all came out of the same clearance areas.  Children have grown up together and inter-married; some of them still live here

Others too have very positive memories: (9)

I have to say I loved growing up there and have very fond memories of playing out with friends and certainly always felt safe! Our flat was spacious – my bedroom now in a four bed house is about half the size of the bedroom I had in Offenbach House.

More recently, when one resident spoke of their fear of crime on the Estate, others were quick to defend the safety and friendliness of Cranbrook – though a few knew of particular ‘problem families’ who did cause trouble.

And that brings our story pretty much up-to-date.  The Estate is now managed by Tower Hamlets Homes, an ‘arms-length management organisation’ of Tower Hamlets Council.  That, however, was a close-run thing.  In 2005 it was proposed to transfer ownership to the Swan Housing Association but a campaign by Defend Council Housing and then local MP George Galloway secured a 72 per cent tenant vote in opposition.

The campaign against ‘privatisation’ as it was described by opponents was hard-fought.  The Council claimed it could not fund necessary repairs and refurbishment if the Estate remained in Council hands; Mr Galloway claimed that housing associations existed ‘for their own corporate reasons and their own corporate benefits’.  That was unfair but the result of the vote did reflect tenants’ fears about rents and tenancy conditions under new ownership and a sense that Council control offered more democratic influence over the management of their homes. (10)

In this context, Lubetkin’s disillusion with municipal design – which came to a head with the rejection of his plans for Peterlee – seems disingenuous.  Ultimately, council housing has been less about ‘grand designs’ than about providing decent homes for ordinary people.

But Lutbekin was an idealist – an ‘artist engineer’ who believed in the power of technology and design to transform and improve people’s lives.  And his lament for a time when the state and architects and planners shared a common vision of a better world and their power to create it retains its power: (11)

We came to feel that the symbolic value of modern architecture, which had been the basis of all its hopes and expectations, was steadily evaporating – not only because of bureaucracy’s effects in “clipping one’s wings” – but also because the public themselves became more and more disillusioned with any idea that art or architecture could lift them up or foreshadow a brighter future.  Instead of looking at architecture as the backdrop for a great drama – the struggle for a better tomorrow – they began to see only the regulations, housing lists, points system, etc., and so only expect “accommodation”. It was this slide of public opinion – perhaps even more than the tedium of bureaucracy that finally disarmed the exercise as far as I was concerned. It made all our efforts seem so hollow

Sources

(1) John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin. Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (1992)

(2) David Donnison, ‘Ch. 5 Slum clearance begins again in Bethnal Green’ in Donnison and Chapman, Social Policy and Administration (1965)

(3) Quoted in TFT Baker (ed), ‘Bethnal Green: Building and Social Conditions after 1945’, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11: Stepney, Bethnal Green (1998)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, The Redevelopment of the Cranbrook Street Area (1960)

(5) Bethnal Green Civic News, no 2, April 1963

(6) Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, Programme of the Official Opening of the Cranbrook Estate by the Rt Hon Lord Beswick, 30 January 1963

(7) Resident Doreen Kendall quoted in James Meek, ‘Where will we live?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 1, 9 January 2014

(8) Deborah Singmaster, Architects Journal, 15 December 1993

(9) See the comments on LoveLondoncouncilhousing, ‘Cranbrook Estate’, posted September 3, 2009, and read the blog for more photos and analysis.

(10) Mark Leftly, ‘Charm offensive’, Building.co.uk, issue 48, 2005

(11) Lubetkin quoted in John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin

I’m grateful as always to the helpful staff of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library for their help in accessing their excellent resources.

The Mackworth Estate, Derby: ‘a residential neighbourhood in full accordance with contemporary town planning principles’

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1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs

The Mackworth Estate in Derby is a good example of the more ambitious of the new suburban council estates built after World War Two.  Its story – from founding vision to flawed fulfilment – tells us much about the evolution of social housing in the last seventy years.

Henley Green

Derby, an industrial town with a proud railway and engineering heritage, had a strong tradition of council house construction.  The Borough Council had announced plans for 1000 council homes in 1919 – the first 16 completed were in Victory Road, more followed in Stenson Road.   In the 1930s, new housing estates were developed beyond the city centre in Chaddesden, Sinfin and Old Normanton.  By 1940, the Council had built over 7000 homes. (1)

Derby’s earliest council housing on Victory Road

Labour won control of the council in 1928 and regained power in 1934. It would retain control until boundary changes in 1968.  It was, then, this Labour-controlled council and its ambitious Chair of Housing, Alderman Flint, which would attempt to enact a social democratic vision of housing in the new Britain of the welfare state.

The first priority, however, was to tackle the immediate housing crisis.  In May 1946, the Council ordered 150 ‘Trusteel’ prefabricated homes (steel frame construction with brick cladding).  With one of these homes taking just 21 days to erect, the Council was pleased with the quick fix but saw it as very much a temporary solution. (2)

Mackworth Estate aerial view

The planning of the Mackworth Estate began in 1948. It was an unusually ambitious scheme in straitened times but Derby, with its plentiful land, strategic industries and energetic Housing Committee, was well-placed to receive a sympathetic hearing from the Ministry of Health and Housing.  The plan was approved and construction began in 1950.

Mayfair Crescent

The Estate, built on 450 acres of undeveloped land on the western outskirts of the borough, was envisaged as ‘a residential neighbourhood in full accordance with contemporary town planning principles’.  Its design: (3)

would provide from the outset not only for dwellings but for schools, local shops, churches, and other buildings and, of course, recreational and ornamental open space. Thus it was planned that the day-to-day needs of the residents, the adults and the children, should be met within the neighbourhood, incidentally providing occasions for stimulating community life and feeling.

Behind the stilted bureaucratese, we see here post-war planning at its most far-reaching.  The housing was cosily domestic, evolving from the earlier principles and practice of the Garden City movement and municipal ‘cottage estates’.  This reflected the possibility of the Borough’s green-field site but also, for the most part, the wishes of would-be council tenants.

Beyond this was the intention to create – that post-war planning mantra – the neighbourhood unit.  The Lansbury Estate in Poplar, a Festival of Britain site and exact contemporary of Mackworth, was an exemplar.  And beyond this lay the ideal of a community which met the range of human needs – physical, psychological, intellectual, moral – and which would, in fact, extend human potential.  There’s nothing more prosaic than a council estate, is there?  But remember this spirit of ’45, this gentle, British utopia.

So, to practice.  In all, some 3000 homes were planned – 203 private residences, 286 private leasehold and 2507 council.  Of these, 2250 were houses – 593 two-bed, 1642 three-bed and five four-bed, mostly semi-detached – and just 152 were low-rise flats.

Whilst the Labour council would have preferred to build itself, this was not possible in a development on this scale.  Wimpey were appointed the main contractor.  Wates would also contribute. About 500 homes on the Estate were built by direct labour after 1952.

The homes had coal fires with back boilers for hot water (plus electrical immersions) but were more innovative in their through lounges.  These were generally ‘felt to be a great improvement’ on the stuffy parlours of the better working-class homes previously. (4)

Another innovation was the use of Wimpey’s ‘No Fines’ system-building for a number of the Estate’s houses – perhaps over 500 in all.  These were constructed from concrete with no fine aggregates (hence the name) cast in situ.  The homes – large numbers were built across Britain at this time – have been criticised for their rather austere appearance but were structurally sound and have generally lasted well.  Those on the Mackworth and Breadsall Estates in Derby were subject to a £6.3m refurbishment in 2003, chiefly to improve insulation and renew windows and doors.

Prince Charles Avenue

The ‘spinal road’ of Prince Charles Avenue bisected the Estate and contained its main services – a shopping centre, secondary schools and churches.  Other roads, arranged in sweeping curves and frequent culs-de sac, were free of through traffic.   Forty acres of open space were included; the Estate is also adjacent to Derby’s 207 acre Markeaton Park.  A current resident observes: (5)

Most visitors to the estate are still impressed by the greenery found there and, also, the feeling of spaciousness…not always found in other residential areas of the city.

The first homes were occupied – in Enfield Road in 1951 – as streets and paving were still being completed.  Of necessity, primary schools came early – Brackensdale School for 850 in 1953 and the similarly-sized Reigate School in 1955.  A school intended as a girls’ secondary modern was pressed into service as a junior school in 1957.

Enfield Road

This reflected the Estate’s demography which comprised, overwhelmingly, young families.  While just 11 mothers attended the first infant welfare clinics in one of the Estate’s surgeries in 1955, attendance had risen to over 4000 by 1955.

Other community facilities followed more slowly.  A small parade of shops opened in Humbleton Drive in 1954 and plans for the main district centre were announced the same year.  The Council – working closely with the locally influential Cooperative movement – promised 26 shops, a supermarket, health centre, cinema and pub. The smaller, finished scheme was formally opened in April 1959.

St Francis Church and ‘the ‘the old black hut’ used as a community hall

To the Council, housing took priority and money was short for other facilities.  The promised community centre wasn’t built and as the Townswomen’s Guild recalls:

Without the Church Halls and the goodwill of the authorities in opening them up to allow who wished to use their facilities social life on the estate would have been very restricted.

The Guild itself was founded in 1955 and a number of other groups and activities – more or less closely attached to the churches – catered for women and children.  Apart from the British Legion, popular among the many ex-servicemen of the Estate, there appeared to be a ‘scant group life for the menfolk’ but four pubs were built which the Guild commented somewhat sardonically ‘obviously provide most men with the companionship that the majority of ladies find elsewhere’.

A Derby trolleybus at the Morden Green terminus in the Mackworth Estate, October 1966 © Wikimedia Commons

The Corporation’s trolleybus system had been extended into the Estate in 1952 and gave easy access to the town centre so it never felt particularly isolated despite its suburban setting.  (The trolleybuses ran until September 1967.)

The Borough Council (Derby became a city in 1977) continued to build.  Its 10,000^th home was opened in 1965 – in the council’s first high-rise development, Rivermead House.  At peak – in 1981 – the Council owned 24,476 homes.

Rivermead House © Eamon Curry; licensed for reuse

By 2008, that number had fallen to a little over 13,700.  A majority of the Mackworth Estate’s 3200 homes are now owner-occupied, the first homes being sold to residents by the incoming Conservative council in 1968. Still, a significant proportion of social housing – managed since 2002 by Derby Homes – remains.

The Estate has evolved, of course, and could not be immune to the wider social changes of recent decades. For a while from the 1990s the Estate acquired a reputation for drugs and crime and the nickname ‘Smackworth’ – though the latter really owed as much to rhyme as reason.   A neighbourhood crime prevention group was formed in 2003 and by 2009 the burglary rate in Mackworth has been cut in half and total crime cut by a sixth. (6)

The crime prevention group meanwhile developed into an energetic community association with a busy programme of activities for local youngsters and ongoing plans to open that long-promised community centre for the Estate.

Now while the Estate is one of the poorer areas of Derby and parts are among the fifth most deprived nationally, unemployment is around the average.  Anti-social behaviour remains a concern for many residents but almost three-quarters of residents think ‘their neighbourhood is a place where people get on well’ and rates of community involvement are above the Derby average.  (7)

New library

Meanwhile, the Estate continues to develop.  A library – also pencilled in on original plans – was finally opened in March 2010.  In March 2012 a community allotment scheme was opened.  In October 2013, funding for a major refurbishment of the District Centre was announced.

Greenwich Drive © Peter Barr and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons licence

So Mackworth seems to be doing pretty well and the environment of the Estate – its generous open spaces, well-tended gardens and quality of housing – stands still as a testimony to the planning vision of the post-war Council.

Mackworth was never a Utopia and, even if the Council had been able to fund its founding vision for the Estate, it probably wouldn’t have become one.  But the Townswomen’s Guild which – if they don’t mind me saying – grew old with the Estate concluded in 1980 that ‘there seems little likelihood of a mass exodus from this pleasant estate as residents retire’.

That was modest praise but if Mackworth has provided a decent and affordable home for many people over many years it has served its primary purpose.

Sources

(1) John Newbould, ‘Revolution in Housing’, Derby Evening Telegraph, 17 May 2010

(2) JA Cook, Policy Implementation in Housing: A Study of the Experience of Portsmouth and Derby, 1945-74, University of Nottingham PhD thesis, 1985, and Michael Stratton and Barrie Trinder, Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology (2000)

(3) County Borough of Derby, The Mackworth Estate (1959)

(4) Mackworth Townswomen’s Guild, Mackworth Estate Jubilee, A Social History (1980)

(5) Denis Hardwick in ‘Estate boasts half a century of community spirit and great hidden talents’, Derby Evening Telegraph, 29 October 2007

(6) Shaun Jepson,   ‘How we have won back our streets’, Derby Evening Telegraph, 19 March 2009

(8) Derby City Council, Mackworth Profile, 2011/2012

The website of the Mackworth Estate Community Association gives a fuller picture of the current estate and the association’s range of activities.

Early Municipal Housing in Swansea: breaking ‘the thrall of dreary terracing’

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Cottage suburbs, Pre-1914

By 1914 Swansea was in the vanguard of council house building and design. The First World War initially dealt a blow to its ambitions but earlier progress left the council well-placed to capitalise on the post-war drive for ‘Homes for Heroes’ and the improved standards set.

Swansea was once a fashionable seaside resort but, come the Industrial Revolution, the town’s  proximity to coal resources and its port facilities (allowing the easy import of ores) led to it becoming one of the largest metal-smelting centres in the world.  No longer ‘the Brighton of Wales’, it was known as ‘Copperopolis’.

Copperopolis

Swansea’s population grew from a little over 6000 in 1801 to 94,500 by the end of the century and increased by a further 20,000 in the decade that followed. In 1852, 900 of the town’s 3500 homes were two-room court cottages, in-fills behind existing street frontages.  Cholera erupted in 1832 and 1849.

The Swansea Urban Sanitary Authority, spurred by a further cholera outbreak in 1866, was one of the very few local bodies to take advantage of the 1875 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act.  Its 1876 Swansea Improvement Scheme cleared five streets and nine courts in the central Greenhill area to create the Alexandra Road approach to the main railway station.  A public library and privately-built houses replaced the slums. (1)  The County Borough, created in 1889, would go further in building workers’ housing.

Liberals, broadly progressive but representative of Swansea’s industrial elite, dominated the early council.  The competition of a growing socialist and labour movement provided the incentive and principles for more radical housing reform.  By 1906, there were eight Independent Labour councillors (of 40 in total) on the Borough Council.  The 1913 municipal elections returned a near equilibrium with Conservatives holding 13 seats and Liberals and Labour twelve each (there were three independents).

The Council’s intentions were marked by the creation of a Housing Department in 1902 and an Estates Department in 1904.  Still, its initial efforts were cautious – confined to infill housing, fitting in with existing speculative building and looking, at first glance, similar to it.

There was, however, a significant difference.  Private building was generally ‘tunnelback’ – one room wide with a rear annexe which maximised housing density and builders’ profits but restricted light and air to residents.  The council houses, of superior red brick, were purposely built without this rear projection. (2)

Colbourne Terrace

In 1905, small-scale building took place at Waun Wen and Colbourne Terrace and the initial success of the scheme led the council to plan an estate of 142 houses in the surrounding Baptist Well area.  Labour activists celebrated the role of William Morris, the Labour chair of the Housing Committee. The struggle to build – ‘a battle royal between the monied classes and the Labour elements’ as Morris described it – would be renewed when the Council came to consider far more ambitious plans for a ‘garden city’ estate. (3)

But Labour was not the only reforming force.  Local architect CT Ruthen was a Liberal councillor.  He and a colleague had attended the annual conference of the National Housing and Town Planning Council in December 1906 where they met one of the leading contemporary advocates of housing and planning reform, Raymond Unwin.  Unwin would become closely associated with subsequent developments in Swansea and Ruthen himself – later Sir Charles Ruthen – would become President of the Society of Architects and President of the Institute of Structural Engineers as well as Director-General of Housing to the Ministry of Health.

Spurred by the example of the housing reform movement, the Council determined to organise its own exhibition of model working-class dwellings.  A joint committee was formed – with members of neighbouring local authorities and including trade union representatives from the local trades council – and a site chosen:  Mayhill, on Corporation land, with stunning views of Swansea Bay.

The view from Nicander Parade

The layout of the exhibition site reflected Unwin’s influence.  He had visited Swansea and urged the importance of closes and culs-de-sac to ‘break the thrall of dreary terracing’. (4)

The South Wales Cottage Exhibition opened in September 1910.  Twenty-nine houses were built – 21 on Llewellyn Circle and Nicander Parade designed by private architects; eight designed and built by Swansea County Borough Council on Tan y Marian Road.  They came in a variety – in pairs, threes and fours; some of stone, some of brick; some rendered or faced with slate; often with arts and craft touches of gables and hipped roofs, porches and bay windows.

Among the architect prize winners in a high-calibre field were ECP Monson (whose later work we have seen in Bethnal Green), Ruthen himself and the partnership of George Pepler and EG Allen.

Exhibition cottages on Llewellyn Circle

The Council was perhaps more impressed by its own efforts.  Its eight houses – built by direct labour – came in at £300 less than the lowest tender and encouraged the Council both in its general preference for direct labour and its immediate ambitions to build 100 more houses on the Mayhill site.

Swansea Borough Council-built houses on Tan Y Marian Road

In the event, these were not completed but the Council’s aspirations were marked by the appointment of a Borough Architect, Ernest Morgan, in 1911 and by the cooperation of Raymond Unwin and Borough Surveyor, George Bell, in the design of the new Townhill Estate (adjacent to Mayhill) in 1912.  The plan was celebrated in Ewart Culpin’s book, The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date published the following year:

In November 1912 local architect HG Portsmouth was approached to design a scheme of 300 houses.  A back and forth ensued – the Council rejected plans for houses with less than three bedrooms (not encouraged by the Local Government Board at the time) and regretfully turned down proposals for semi-detached dwellings as too expensive. They compromised on terraces of six but increased the total to be built to 500.

In October 1913 Morgan presented the Housing Committee with a revised plan for 500 homes ‘closely adhering to the design of Mr Unwin’.  The Committee resolved to build six immediately by direct labour and these were completed in July 1914.  In the same month, the Council applied for a loan of £101,990 from the Local Government Board (LGB) to build 500 houses.

1914 council housing on Islwyn Road

In 1914, Swansea’s record on housing and its future promise stood proud. A total of 321 municipal houses had been built – mostly in the improved terraces discussed above but with model housing on garden suburb lines to come.  The LGB had approved a loan for 300 homes with an in principle agreement for more.  In June, councillors were considering a European tour to acquaint themselves with the latest ideas in town planning which would take them to Prague, Budapest, Leipzig and Vienna later in the year.

By September, all those cities lay in enemy territory.  Worse was to follow.  While the preparatory works for the Townhill Estate were completed – against a backdrop of wartime labour shortages – in 1915, in March the LGB cancelled its loan.  A deputation from the Council visited Whitehall to plead for reconsideration but to no avail.

Two years later, however, the mood had shifted.  As industrial unrest increased, as the housing shortage grew more pressing, and as thoughts turned to the necessary tasks of post-war reconstruction, the government looked to housing once more.  In July, the Local Government Board’s Circular 86/1917, ‘Housing after the War’, committed:

substantial financial assistance from public funds to those local authorities who are prepared to carry through without delay at the conclusion of the War, a programme of housing for the working classes approved by the LGB.

In Swansea, housing shortages were particularly serious as the town’s population had grown by 12,000 during the war itself.  Fortunately, Swansea’s earlier planning now paid off.  In September 1917, the Borough Architect forwarded a plan for 500 homes to the Local Government Board.   Given that the LGB received firm proposals for only 42,000 homes nationally at this time, Swansea had placed itself in the very forefront of post-war building.

The Townhill Estate that emerged after 1919 adhered closely to Unwin’s design and the 1913 plan – its characteristic blocks of six are a good indication of this – and as its historian Nigel Robins states:

The first ‘Homes for Heroes’ in Swansea were largely designed before the war had properly started.  They were acceptable in the spirit of improvement of 1919 because they were of such high standard

A total of 425 houses were built at Townhill under Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act.  By 1939, the Borough had built some 4000 new homes.  This latter housing was plainer in design but well-proportioned and equipped.  The current City Council owns and manages a little over 13,000 homes.  The Labour Party itself would become the largest party on the Council in 1927 and secure a majority – which it held until 1976 – in 1933.

Swansea offers a fine case-study of early council housing – both in its ideals and design and the political and economic pressures that brought it into being.  The borough takes justifiable pride in these early achievements and was fortunate in the calibre of councillors and officers whose values and drive made these possible.  This is a drive, these are values – to house the people, well and affordably – that we need to harness and liberate once more.

Sources

(1) Stephen Hughes, Copperopolis: Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea (2008) and William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903)

(2) Nigel Alan Robins, Homes for Heroes.  Early Twentieth Century Council Housing in the County Borough of Swansea, City of Swansea (1992)

(3) Quoted in Thomas John McCarry, Labour and Society in Swansea, 1887-1918, University of Wales PhD, 1986

(4) The Unwin quote is from Robins; other detail taken from City and County of Swansea, The 100th anniversary of the South Wales Cottage Exhibition

The photographs of the early Townhill Estate are taken from the Swansea City Council video, The Building of the Townhill Estate