Bristol’s Interwar Council Housing: ‘a surprising beauty’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Council housing transformed Bristol between the wars.  Some 15,000 council homes were built, principally in nine new suburban estates.  Forty per cent of new homes in the city in this period were council homes.  Designed according to the finest planning principles of the day, they represented not just new buildings but radically altered lives.

Woodcote Road, Hillfields Park, c1930 © Paul Townsend and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Despite these later efforts, Bristol had come slowly to the necessity of council housing.  Before 1914, the Corporation had built just 72 tenement homes – and these mainly to replace homes demolished in road improvement schemes.  Constructed in Fox Road, Chapel Street, Braggs Lane, Millpond Avenue and Fishponds Road, the only survivors of this period are tenements in Mina Road, St Werburghs. (1)

Mina Road tenements, built 1906

But even before 1914, a wind of change was apparent.  Though a proposal to build a 400-home estate in Bedminster was defeated by a Liberal and Conservative majority on the council, council officials themselves were suggesting that: (2)

as regards the housing of the poorest of the poor, the most practical solution would be for the work to be taken in hand by the Local Authority, aided by grants from the National Exchequer.

As so often, it took a war to make ideas once seen as radical not only practicable but necessary.  By 1917 – as housing pressures grew, labour unrest magnified, and post-war expectations heightened – the Coalition Government itself was committing to a massive housing programme on just these lines.

In 1918, the City Council purchased 700 acres of land in sizeable chunks across the city outskirts – notably Bedminster, Fishponds, Sea Mills, Speedwell and Horfield – in anticipation.  Another packet of land was bought close to the port of Avonmouth in Shirehampton.

Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act gave the power and money to act and it was Addison himself who cut the first sod on the Council’s first post-war estate in June 1919.  ‘Addison’s Oak’ survives in Sea Mills Square.  The minister articulated the new ambitions. (3)

They did not want houses built in dismal streets. Until they had houses with air about them, so long would they have to spend enormous sums annually on sickness…They wanted big production and they were prepared to pay big prices.

And Bristol’s new estates were designed to fulfil these aspirations.  The first four estates – Hillfields to the east, Sea Mills to the north-west, Knowle to the south and Shirehampton – were garden suburbs, taking their inspiration from Garden City ideals and characterised by low housing density (sometimes under 12 an acres), curving streetscapes and abundant greenery.

‘Sea Mills Garden Suburb’, 1927 © English Heritage http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EPW019266

St Edith’s Road, Sea Mills © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Sea Mills, in 1981 one of the first council estates in the country to be designated a conservation area, was the jewel in the crown and conforms very closely to designs outlined by Raymond Unwin in his path-breaking pamphlets, Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (1912). That it could move John Betjeman to such eloquence in 1937 says something for its quality: (4)

a surprising beauty showing off in the evening sunlight; and vistas of trees and fields and pleasant cottages that that magic estate has managed to create.

Trym Side, Sea Mills © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In other respects, the new estates fell some way short of Garden City ideals.  They would always be suburbs, not the self-sufficient communities that Ebenezer Howard had originally envisaged, and they lacked in their early years many basic social amenities.  In 1920 the Council’s Housing Extension and Town Planning Committee had stated baldly that it was concentrating on ‘housing first, then town planning’ – public facilities would come later.  (5)

This, of course, was a common failing, repeated in many of the council estates we’ve studied.  It would mark too Bristol’s later schemes and reflects the financial pressures on local councils, desperate to build but cash-strapped.

Beechen Drive, Hillfields

The houses themselves were expensive – as Addison had suggested they would be, coming in at around £1089 each.  The first was opened in Beechen Drive, Hillfields, marked by a plaque:

Architecturally, they were generally rather plain red-brick, municipal ‘neo-Georgian’, two-storey houses, semi-detached or in short terraces of four. Some were cement-rendered or washed cream or white.

The Council also experimented with system-building.  Some 250 Dorman Long steel-frame and concrete houses were built on the Sea Mills Estate.  Though they were cheaper, at £800, to build, higher maintenance costs led the scheme to be dropped.

Across Bristol as a whole some 16 design types were employed over the years but such minor variations probably did little to counter an overall blandness: ‘The uniformity of materials and elevations is not relieved by any variety of colour. The ubiquitous privet hedge does little to conceal this uniformity’. (6)

Still, for their new tenants their facilities were far superior to any they had previously known. All the houses had a bathroom and WC (though hot water was generally supplied by a copper in the scullery and pumped to the bathroom by hand).  Most – 96 per cent of Bristol Corporation’s interwar homes – were three-bedroom.  And on the early estates a high proportion of homes – 70 per cent on the Hillfields Estate – had a parlour.

In the event, the 1919 Act was something of a false dawn.  While the drive to build would remain through most of the interwar period, council housing standards would fall as government finances tightened.  Addison’s scheme was brought to a close in 1921 when Bristol had completed just 1189 of the 5000 houses planned.

Politically in this period Bristol was run by a Conservative-Liberal alliance which in 1925 was formalised as the Citizens’ Party though its Liberal element would grow progressively weaker.  Labour was emerging as a strong opposition and in 1924 its leader, the redoubtable Frank Sheppard, became chair of the Housing Committee.  First elected to the council in 1893, Sheppard served – for all but a brief spell – until his death, aged 93, in 1956.  Labour would hold power only briefly before the Second World War, in 1937.

Housing Acts in 1923 under Neville Chamberlain and, more generously, in 1924 under Labour’s John Wheatley offered new financial terms and allowed a further 9000 homes to be built over the next decade.  These were generally smaller, non-parlour, homes but their overall look and design of houses echoed those of their predecessors.  The exception was another foray into system building in Horfield and Sea Mills Estates where 1100 ‘Parkinson’ pre-cast reinforced concrete houses were built.  These have been subject to demolition or substantial refurbishment in recent years. (7)

These later homes were for the most part cheaper to rent.  To avoid conflict between tenants, houses under the 1924 Act were built separately on the Bedminster and Horfield Estates where they let at 7s 6d (36p), two shillings (10p) less than comparable homes on Sea Mills, Hillfields or Knowle.

Salcombe Road, Knowle © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The still relatively high rents, however, continued to skew council housing to a generally better-off segment of the working class, excluding many of those in most urgent need of new homes. And of 1100 tenants who gave up their tenancies in 1928, a high proportion cited their inability to afford council homes.  Their expense was exacerbated in many cases by their distance from places of work and travel costs incurred.

Lawford’s Gate

Still, the need to both clear slums and rehouse slum dwellers was clear and it was taken up by the Council in 1923.  In Eugene Street, just north of the city centre, 88 dwellings contained 112 families and a total of 508 people.  Unusually, the Council built three-storey flats in another central area, Lawford’s Gate to rehouse those displaced.

These were mostly three-room flats lacking separate bathrooms so it remained pretty basic – though more sanitary – accommodation.

Birkin Street, Dings. The image shows the estate after a Home Zone initiative completed in 2005

In 1929, another slum clearance took place in the Dings area of Bristol.  Some of the families were relocated to the new St Anne’s Estate but subsequently 60 two-storey houses were built in the area. The Prince of Wales visited it in 1934.

Before then, in 1930, it was central government which would launch a radical shift in housing policy.  Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act prioritised the clearance of slum areas and required the rehousing of their residents. It would have a major effect on Bristol’s housing schemes of the 1930s.

Greystoke Avenue, Southmead © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Council had already purchased 700 acres of land in 1929 to allow further building – on land adjacent to the Bedminster and Knowle Estate and, to the north, land in Southmead. The Southmead Estate to the north of the city was begun under the 1924 Act but would expand in the 1930s to rehouse principally those from inner-city clearance areas.

The next phase of growth in the gigantic Bedminster and Knowle Estate would take place in Filwood Park (later Knowle West) and this would also come to accommodate primarily former slum dwellers.

By 1939, Bedminster and Knowle had a population of around 28,000.  Three other estates had populations of over 2000. All this was – benign and well-intentioned – social engineering on a grand scale. And it would not be without its difficulties.  Next week’s post will examine the fascinating and complex history of Knowle West.

Sources

(1) Peter Malpass and Jennie Walmsley, 100 Years of Council Housing in Bristol, UWE, Bristol (2005)

(2) Quoted in Madge Dresser, ‘Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-30’ in M.J. Daunton, Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in England, 1919-1939 (1984)

(3) Addison addressing a public meeting in Bristol reported in ‘Housing and Health’, The Times, June 5, 1919

(4) Quoted in Bristol City Council, Sea Mills Character Appraisal and Management Proposals (2010)

(5) Quoted in Madge Dresser, ‘Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-30’

(6) Rosamond Jevons and John Madge, Housing Estates. A Study of Bristol Corporation Policy and Practice between the Wars (1946)

(7) Bristol City Council, The PRC Programme

The three books referenced above provide the bulk of the detail for this account as a whole.

My thanks to Phil Jaggery and Paul Townsend for making some of their images available under Creative Commons licence

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The Churchill Gardens Estate, Westminster: ‘like moving into heaven’

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1950s, 1960s, LCC, Westminster

There are plenty of things that make the Churchill Gardens Estate in Westminster a bit special.  In 2000 the Civic Trust voted it the outstanding building scheme of the last forty years. When it was built it was the largest urban area to be built to the plans of a single firm of architects. But let’s begin with its founding inspiration.

‘Luxury flats, Pimlico’. The caption and image are taken from a Picture Post article of 1955

Churchill Gardens – the Pimlico Housing Scheme as it was originally designated – was the only major project within the visionary Abercrombie Plan for the post-war reconstruction of London to be completed.   Its scale – a 30 acre site, 1661 homes, 36 blocks, a population of some 5000 – and its design gives some indication of the ambition of post-war hopes.

Aerial view, 1960s

Charles Latham, then leader of the London County Council, acknowledged the Plan would ‘certainly cost a great deal’: (1)

but not more than unplanned building and a lot less than war. In a way, you know, this is London’s war, against decay and dirt and inefficiency. In the long run, plans such as this are the cheapest way to fight those enemies. What a grand opportunity it is. If we miss this chance to rebuild London, we shall have missed one of the great moments of history and shown ourselves unworthy of our victory.

In the event, London grew in a typically unfashioned way and we might not, on balance, regret that but we should lament at least the loss of those dreams of a humane environment, community living and decent homes for all.

Churchill Gardens stands as a worthy reminder of those dreams.  It was built – another indication of the world we have lost – by a Conservative local authority, Westminster City Council.

The site was an area of decayed terraces which had been scheduled for redevelopment in the 1930s.  Hitler’s bombs added their own urgency to rebuilding and, in their way, an opportunity for design on a grand scale.

Westminster organised a competition for the scheme which attracted 64 entries. It was won by two recent graduates from the Architectural Association, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, then aged just 24 and 25 respectively.  They were influenced,  it is said, by the Dutch housing projects of the 1930s and the Weissenhofsiedlung workers’ housing scheme of 1927 in Stuttgart. (2)

What is striking to any visitor to the Estate is – despite its size – its intimacy and humanity.  Powell himself described his ‘mistrust of conscious struggling after originality…of the monumental approach’.  And it seems clear that the Estate has worked – it has prospered as a decent place to live even as many other, superficially more grandiose post-war housing schemes have failed.

In bare descriptive terms, Churchill Gardens comprises a series of nine to eleven-storey slab blocks interspersed by smaller blocks of three to five-storeys.   A seven-storey block, with ground floor shops, encloses the Estate along its Lupus Street frontage.  Two terraces of three-storey town houses run along the Thames-side Grosvenor Road front of the Estate.

De Quincey House, Lupus Street

Telford Terrace, Grosvenor Road

Mixed development

It was a mixed development which embodied post-war planning ideals both structurally – in its range of building forms – and sociologically.  The Estate was intended to accommodate a balanced cross-section of society.  In this, it reflected the principles of Labour’s 1949 Housing Act which had removed the stipulation that council housing cater only for the working class and captures post-war visions of a classless society.

The taller blocks follow the Zeilenbau arrangement developed by Bauhaus architects in the 1920s – set in a parallel north-south axis, perpendicular to the river, which maximises the sunlight each home receives.

But the overall layout escapes any rigidity or that monumentalism that Powell decried.  Its main road curves through the Estate, placing the main blocks slightly irregularly, and the overall configuration creates a series of open spaces, courtyards and play areas which provide a human scale. (3)

Naturally, the housing blocks get most attention but the landscaping, also personally designed by Powell and Moya, deserves recognition too.  It’s disarmingly simple – Powell recalls they worked with a former head gardener at Kew ‘who was sufficiently diffident not to put a herbaceous border everywhere’.  Elain Harwood describes ‘small quadrangles with neat hedges or foot-high railings … careful patterns of paving and grass, which felt natural to the clients and themselves’. (4)

Keats House, first phase of construction

Projecting staircases, first phase of construction

The first four blocks completed towards the eastern edge of the Estate – Chaucer, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley Houses – in 1950 won Festival of Britain Architectural Awards.  Their concrete cross frame construction is offset by an applied brick facing and the eye-catching full-height, glazed staircases provide a vertical line to break up their horizontal mass.

Bramwell House, built in the second phase of the Estate’s construction

In the second phase, staircases were replaced by gallery access which allowed a larger number of smaller flats and larger windows.  The ‘piloti’ (stilts) on which the central blocks are raised gives a greater sense of openness to the overall design while ‘the subdivision and extent of glazing means many of the large blocks retain a delicate appearance, some with an almost translucent quality’. (5)

The final phase, back towards the east, facing Calverton Street, completed in the early sixties, reflects the changed architectural ethos of its time.  The five-storey block which bridges Churchill Gardens Road with its facing of white glazed brick echoes the stuccoed nineteenth-century terraces opposite and joins the Estate as a whole with its surrounding townscape.

The detail comes from Westminster City Council’s conservation audit.  The Estate was designated a conservation area in 1990. reflecting the earlier recognition it had received – two Civic Trust awards in 1962 (one for building, one for landscaping) – and that which was to come.  Six blocks were Grade II listed in 1998.

An early photo of the Estate showing the accumulator tower with Battersea Power Station in the background

So was the glazed accumulator tower – designed once more by Powell and Moya – which marks Britain’s first district heating system. Initially, it collected surplus heat from Battersea Power Station via a tunnel under the Thames. Battersea Power Station closed in 1980 and since 2006 heat has been supplied by the boilers in the Estate’s own pump house.  To Ian Nairn, the architecture of the heating system was the highpoint of the Estate: (6)

The best single building is the crisp and elegant boiler house at the bottom of the big polygonal tower…the machines and their fine-drawn glass and steel cage which surrounds them are a perfect match.

Of course, ultimately – whatever the architectural accolades – the Estate must stand or fall as a place to live, as a home.  And, in this, it seems to have served well.  For one resident, who moved in in 1952, ‘it was like moving into heaven’.  For another, who moved there as a child in 1963, it:

seemed endless and full of variety; a couple of pubs, the huge water tower, playgrounds, lots of green, the view of Battersea Power Station across the Thames. There was a school, the social club, the adjacent bombsite. There was nothing like it anywhere else in London.

Residents in the elite Dolphin Square flats nearby complained, facing a rent rise in 1962, that ‘many of the flats are not as nice as those put up by the Council in Churchill Gardens opposite’.  (7)

Nowadays about half the Estate’s homes have been purchased under Right to Buy.  Flats sold for as little as £13,500 now sell for much, much more – one agent is currently listing a two-bed flat on the estate at £535,000.  Or as one writer puts it (with an offensiveness to be expected from a property writer for the Daily Telegraph perhaps but with a surprising blindness to the real quality of Churchill Gardens): (8)

nowadays high-end estate agents visit Churchill Gardens more often than police officers…String vests and hole-ridden socks once dangled from balconies; now, it’s petunias and clematis. Yuppies have replaced the old municipal lino and Formica fittings with high-design interiors, a bit like putting a Porsche engine into a Vauxhall Viva.

In fact, the Estate has paradoxically – though in ways very far from those imagined in the heady days of post-war social democracy – become a mixed community…but not a classless one.

Managed by City West Homes since 2002, it suffers from problems that you would expect to find in any inner-city estate which still, disproportionately, houses some of the least well-off in our society.   There are complaints about drug-dealing, dangerous dogs and antisocial behaviour.   One of its two pubs now stands derelict. (10)

But in general residents like the Estate – they experience it as a friendly and safe community and a pleasant place to live.  The words of Westminster’s planners ring true:

Today it remains a testament to the optimism and spirit of renewal which characterised the post-war period and the belief in the possibility of provision of higher standards of housing for all.

That should be a call to action, not an epitaph.

Sources

(1) Interviewed in The Proud City: a Plan for London (1946)

(2) Philip Powell, Dictionary of National Biography

(3) Christine Hui Lan Manley, Churchill Gardens, Pimlico, Twentieth Century Society Building of the Month, August 2013

(4) Elain Harwood, ‘Post-War Landscape and Public Housing’, Garden History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer, 2000)

(5) City of Westminster, Churchill Gardens Conservation Area Audit (ND)

(6) For details and images, see the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking page on the 28DL Urban Exploration forum.  The quoation from Ian Nairn is in the English Heritage listing

(7) Quotations from Giles Worsley, ‘Estate of grace’, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2000, ‘Churchill Gardens, London – Living the high life’, The Independent, 13 February 2000 and ‘Rent Shock for Tenants’, The Times, April 30, 1962 respectively

(8) Catherine Moye, ‘Square deal that turned sour for the well-to-do’, Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2003.

(9) Residents’ complaints are taken from City of Westminster, Churchill War Profile (July 2012) – Churchill Ward also contains the Ebury Bridge Estate as well as areas of private housing – and Churchill Gardens News, April 2014

Nottingham’s Early Council Housing: ‘Nothing like this had been seen before in the city’

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1920s, Cottage suburbs, Pre-1914

My thanks to Alex Ball for writing this fascinating account of Nottingham’s impressive early council housing efforts.

There is still much work to be accomplished before the complete solution of the housing problem will be in sight. The shortage in numbers is far from being made good; and only when that has been done can an effective beginning be made of the great task of replacing with good dwellings the hundreds of thousands of old ones which have ceased through age, decay, or other reason to be fit for habitation by human families if they are to live a decent life.

The slightly archaic language aside, that statement could apply to many UK cities in the recent past.  But it’s actually from the introduction to an account from nearly one hundred years ago of the Progress of the Housing Schemes in Nottingham by the City’s municipal architect. (1)  This post outlines some of the early Municipal Dreams in Nottingham, focussing on the impact of that architect.

To truly trace the history of Nottingham’s council housing, we need to go back nearly 50 years further. The very first council houses in Nottingham were the Victoria Dwellings – now grandly renamed the Victoria Park View Flats – built in 1876 at Bath Street in the Sneinton area which would have been on the outskirts of the city at the time.

The building cost £11,114 and provided 93 units of bedsit accommodation but no bathrooms. The block is still standing and has been renovated considerably over time. The residents’ forum on their website suggests issues with the management company occupy their minds more than the place their home represents in Nottingham’s social history. (2)

A view of Victoria Park View showing the Gothic Revival features

A view from the rear, showing the recent modernisation in paler brick

These houses were unusual in being provided specifically for the employees of Nottingham Corporation (quite literally, Council houses) and received no subsidy other than from the general rates. It is interesting to speculate on the likely motivation for this act of Victorian munificence: philanthropy or enlightened self-interest? The latter seems possible but the lack of indoor sanitation would mean that the health of the workforce perhaps would not have been materially improved.

The block was renovated in 1976, reducing the 93 flats to 68, but conditions remained poor and Victoria Park View Flats were sold in the late 1980s to the private sector for refurbishment and sale. The flats were listed at Grade 2 in 1995 and the listing statement notes the ‘Gothic Revival style’ and the various features including the ‘square turrets with pyramidal spires’. (3)

The iconoclastic nature of the building seems to linger on despite its current slightly shabby state with this excellent anarchist graffiti being visible by the bin store round the back of the block.

A news story from last year offers a chance to see the interior of one of the flats – although it seems like a missed opportunity not to mention the block’s auspicious history.

There was then no further building of council houses in Nottingham until after World War One and the passing of the 1919 Housing Act.

To understand the significance of this piece of legislation on Nottingham we need to take a step back some 30 years to celebrate the birth of Thomas Cecil Howitt on 6th June 1889 in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. Little is known of his background other than his parents being from Lancashire originally and that Howitt, ‘attended Nottingham High School, but left in 1904 at the age of fifteen to begin his apprenticeship in the office of Albert Nelson Bromley, then a prominent Nottingham architect’ (4). We’ll hear more about Bromley later on.

Via a time as the Company Architect for Boots The Chemist (founded and still headquartered in the city) and a successful stint in the army during the First World War, the demobilised Staff-Major Howitt was appointed in late 1919 at the age of 30: (5)

to the Nottingham City Engineer’s Department, under the provisions of the Housing and Town Planning Act of that same year. Howitt’s task was to provide as quickly as possible the huge number of election-promised “homes fit for heroes” whilst still adhering to the vastly improved new government standards for housing.

The 1919 Act was designed to implement the recommendations of the Tudor Walters Committee, as captured in their 1918 report, ‘The Provision of Dwellings for the Working Classes’.  A key player on the Tudor Walters Committee was Raymond Unwin, one of the founders of the Garden City concept.

There were several parallel moves to progress with housing provision in Nottingham including when, in July 1919: (6)

some three months before Howitt’s demobilisation, the City Council’s Housing Committee had received a deputation from the Nottingham and Derby Architectural Society, among whose members was Howitt’s former employer, Nelson Bromley who…sought…to encourage members of the local profession to become involved in the provision of housing for the working classes. He asked the committee’s involvement…without apparent success; though the deputation was complimented for its public spirit.

With the impetus from central Government in the new 1919 Act and increasing impatience from the City Councillors who had been pressing for more housing since 1917, Howitt had a perfect chance to make his mark.

In fact, so keen was the city to provide new housing for its growing population that even whilst the war was ongoing the Housing Subcommittee had gone on tour to Birkenhead, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle and London. The committee reported back in March 1918 with the following conclusions:

1. That it does not appear to be the duty of the local authority to provide houses, except for the poorer working class
2. That under certain circumstances it may be desirable to provide dwellings on the flat or tenement system, preferring the Liverpool Corporation approach
3. Hot water system called for
4. Caretakers to influence the ‘habits and mode of life of the tenants’
5. In letting tenements preference for clearance households
6. Phased clearance to avoid temporary overcrowding
7. Large open spaces.

Howitt and his enthusiastic new team soon stimulated demand for the promised new housing and by October 1919 the city had received 2,027 applications for tenancies before a single home was completed. (7)

Once the decision had been made to progress with building, Howitt and the team set about procuring sites and accepting tenders for the construction works. The first tenders from builders were accepted 28th November 1919 for 36 houses on four sites at Woodville Drive in Sherwood, Wilford Grove in The Meadows, City Road in Dunkirk and First Avenue in Carlton by four different builders. (8) The first true social housing in Nottingham was completed in June 1920 on the Woodville Drive site at a cost of £844 per house. (9)

A 1912 map shows Newstead Road running broadly East-West in an upside-down flattened ‘V’ shape and the large house and grounds just North of it marked ‘Woodville’

The same view in 1937 shows it renamed Newstead Street in the Eastern portion and the Western portion now Woodville Drive: a row of ten houses on the Southern side and five on the Northern side

Woodville Drive in 2014 likely showing the houses commission by Howitt – although which of the row of ten are the four built by the City is unclear

Following this success and the completion of the other three sites work quickly progressed on the first large-scale estate of council houses which was planned for land just north of the Woodville Drive location.

This land was owned by the Babbington Coal Company and the City purchased 125 acres at a hard negotiated £215 an acre (although the mineral rights were retained by Babbington). A low density of development was agreed upon and Howitt went to work on his designs: (10)

The whole scheme was aimed at providing not just affordable working class housing, but also housing that would improve and maintain the health of those who lived there. Nothing like this had been seen before in the city.

Unwin’s Garden Cities influence was clearly seen, ‘to the point where the layout was adapted to fit in with existing old trees. Every house would have its own garden and a minimum of 75 feet between houses across a road’. The very smallest details were attended to: ‘living rooms were arranged to obtain the maximum sunlight…houses with east-west aspects were designed with a through room from road to the back garden’.

The internal designs of the houses were obviously very important to Howitt but he also paid a lot of attention to the external aesthetics: (11)

Howitt devised a series of house types that could be assembled into blocks of from two to eight houses, with a variety of configurations that were never reminiscent of the repetitive terrace. The most significant feature of Howitt’s layouts is the use of the formal and symmetrical axis around which to group house blocks and types. The advantage of this was that it provided a sense of location and place, and the framework for an almost unending series of variations within a single estate, while avoiding undue repetition on another.

The design drawings are available in the Nottinghamshire Archives and appear not to have been consulted since their incorporation into the historical record. The meticulous detail that Howitt put into his work is clear with the careful notation of the building types according to his own system.

The blueprint design for part of the Sherwood Estate

A close-up of Howitt’s signature on the designs

Despite the impact of the Right-To-Buy on this estate (around 50% of the properties have been sold-off), Howitt’s architectural intent is still clear to see, in particular the green spaces and wide roads that he insisted on being in place.

Green space and wide roads as per Howitt’s design

The meticulous planning that Howitt’s team put in was followed through and can still be seen in the houses of the estate. The design for house type ‘B59’ can be seen here:

Type B59

And the built home here, showing the large windows and the set-back position from the road:

The house as it exists in 2014

Similarly, the distinctive design of B66 with its flicked-out roof here:

Type B66

This property has been sub-divided into two maisonettes but the material aspects of the external design are still there.

Now divided into two homes in 2014

The estate of ‘557 houses was completed by August 1922. The part of the estate situated to the east of Edwards Lane, including a further 108 houses, was built between April and October 1922’. (12)

Howitt’s impact on Nottingham was not limited to just council housing, he is probably best known for his work on the magnificent town hall (known as, confusingly, the Council House) that still stands looking out across the market square. But for me the huge contribution that this man made on the housing and life-chances of the people of Nottingham can best be seen and understood through walking the ordinary roads of the estate he planned and built.

Alex Ball is a Labour Councillor for Nottingham City Council and has responsibilities for Housing and Regeneration in the City. Details of the ‘Building a Better Nottingham’ programme including nearly 400 new Council Houses can be found here.  Alex tweets here and blogs here. 

Sources 

(1) TC Howitt, A Review of Housing Schemes (1929), p v

(2) Parkview Court

(3) English Heritage listing details

(4) Ernie Scoffham, A Vision Of The City: The Architecture of T C Howitt (1992), p 7

(5) Scoffham, p 8

(6) Scoffham, p 10

(7) Records of Nottingham City Homes

(8) Records of Nottingham City Homes

(9) Howitt, pp 39.  Historic Maps courtesy of Nottingham City Insight Mapping

(10) Peter Foster, ‘Homes fit for heroes’: Nottingham’s First Council Houses, 1919–1927’, The Nottinghamshire Historian, No. 86, Spring/Summer 2011, pp 15-17

(11) Scoffham, p 11

(12) Foster, ‘Homes fit for heroes’

Lambeth’s interwar tenements: the necessity of ‘block dwellings’ for the poorer working class

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Lambeth, Multi-storey

Last week, we looked at the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth’s very own garden suburbs – housing estates of real quality constructed in the 1920s in the south of the borough. But such accommodation was unaffordable to many of Lambeth’s poorer residents – those most in need of rehousing – and often lay at too great a distance from their employment.

Initially, the Borough had left the most significant rehousing efforts in its poorer northern districts to the London County Council.  The Kennings Estate in Kennington – seven four-storey blocks – was completed in 1928.  The China Walk Estate – six five-storey blocks – was begun in 1928 and completed in 1934.  Both were typical LCC tenement schemes providing solid and sanitary inner-city housing.

Click here for a location map of Lambeth’s interwar housing estates

But by the later 1920s, the Borough Council was also beginning to rethink its own policies and priorities.  In the earlier period, the ‘Lambeth Policy’ of reconditioning slum properties had held sway while the Council concentrated on building in the suburbs. In this the Council reflected a widespread assumption that, even as a better-off working class occupied new municipal housing, their relocation would have beneficial knock-on effects for their poorer compatriots.

In 1929, Lambeth’s Medical Officer of Health challenged this belief: (1)

the type of dwelling subsidised by the 1923 and 1924 [Housing] Acts is far too expensive for the people who are most in need of other accommodation.  It has been argued that every new dwelling erected and occupied means a relief to the overcrowding elsewhere, and that its effect is felt through several strata of society. This is probably so, but the effect does not sink to that portion of the population which must live near its place of employment and cannot afford a rent of more than 8s to 12s a week, including rates.

He went on to suggest that two-room tenements – comprising living room, scullery and bathroom and one bedroom – would be adequate for smaller families of three to four. In 1918, the Tudor Walters Report – which would set post-war expectations of municipal housing design – had stipulated a minimum of two bedrooms.  Lambeth’s Conservative-controlled council probably felt more comfortable in challenging these standards than would contemporary Labour councils but it was, to be fair, also grappling with the genuine issues of affordability that we examined last week.

By 1931, Lambeth’s Borough Engineer, Osmond Cattlin, presumably either reflecting or informing Council opinion, was offering his own critique.  Postwar Tudor Walters standards of housing density – even as statutorily amended and relaxed (from 12 homes per acre to 20 where necessary) – could ‘not provide the largest number of dwellings within reasonable access of the place of work’.  Centrally located ‘block dwellings’ were the inevitable solution. (2)

The Black Prince Estate

In fact, Lambeth had begun to implement this policy four years earlier.  The Council’s first tenement scheme was built on Princes Road (now Black Prince Road) in 1927 – four five-storey blocks containing 108 flats and accommodating around 500.  This was ‘a high quality design…of stock brick with generous red brick dressings, given additional height and elegance by the tall chimneys’.  Two smaller blocks were demolished after the Second World War to create additional green space but Sullivan House and Deacon House remain along with a pair of iron gates bearing the initials of the Borough. (3)

Edward House plans (taken from Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’

Further tenement blocks followed.  Edward House, a four-storey block on Newburn Street in Kennington built on land leased from the locally powerful Duchy of Cornwall Estate, opened in 1931.

The scheme comprised 24 two-room flats and 12 three-room – each flat also contained a scullery and bathroom – let at rents of 11s 7d (58p) and 15s 1d (76p) respectively.  We saw last week that rents on the most expensive of the Council’s housing estates in the south of the borough lay between 20s 11d (£1.05) and 23s 7d (£1.18) a week.

Edward House, Newburn Street

Cattlin described the Newburn Street tenements as ‘of an experimental character…an attempt to provide accommodation at low rental…for this reason the two-room flat has been included for suitable tenants’. (4)

This plan shows the two-room (one bedroom) flats

Four further five-storey blocks with 96 flats in all were built on Cottington Street, just north of Kennington underground station, in 1932.  Three of the blocks were demolished in the 1980s but Isabella House survives.

Once more Lambeth’s ambitions grew as its experience expanded.  While, as we’ve seen, the Borough was initially reluctant to ‘represent’ and clear slum districts, by 1930 Medical Officer of Health had concluded that ‘much of the older property in the Inner Wards  was so worn that no expenditure can now render it fit for human habitation’.  He singled out the Hemans Street area which comprised 210 houses accommodating 1381 people as a particular case in point. (5)

The shift coincides, of course, with the change in national policy marked by the emphasis on slum clearance in Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act.  Lambeth’s first slum clearance scheme would also be a test case for Cattlin’s policy as many of the residents were said to be traders on the nearby Lambeth Walk and Wilcox Road markets and unwilling to move even as far as the LCC’s Vassall Road Estate which lay less than a mile away. For this reason, Hemans Street would be Lambeth’s largest interwar tenement scheme – 112 flats to accommodate around 600 people.

Hemans Street, Wandsworth Road frontage

A compulsory purchase order was agreed in 1934 and building began in the following year.  The scheme originally comprised six five-storey blocks – twelve two-room, 63 three-room, 17 four-room, eleven five-room, six six-room and three seven-room at rents between 8s 7d (43p) and 21s 5d (£1.07). Now just a single block remains but, even in its present very sorry state, it gives some idea of the design ideals Lambeth brought to its project: (6)

It is a well-articulated design combining art deco references found in Miami Beach (particularly the brise de soleil horizontal streamlined flats of the façade and the bold, white rendered balconies on the rear elevation) and more traditional vernacular influences – notably the tiled mansard roof and red brick central elevation.

The architecture of Hemans Street echoes that of the almost exactly contemporary LCC Oaklands Estate in Clapham, further south in the borough.  Both represent a break with the sober neo-Georgian that had characterised earlier tenement building though Oaklands’ sweeping ‘moderne’ design is a little more daring.

The first blocks were completed in 1936.  In March 1938, the Estate was visited by George VI and, according to Cattlin’s obituary, officially opened by his wife.  Contemporary images show civic dignitaries and excited crowds and offer glimpses of the buildings in their heyday. (7)

Hemans Street rear view

Hemans Street rear balconies

Away from the dignity conferred by architecture and the royal presence, more prosaic matters engaged the Housing Committee.  Sanitary inspectors were posted at homes being vacated to disinfest the furniture and effects of the families – moved at the rate of four or five a day – being relocated. Bedding was disinfested at the Council’s Wanless Road depot which remains the present Lambeth Council’s pest control HQ. (8)

Tenement accommodation, though an increasing element of both the LCC’s and London boroughs’ inner-city rehousing efforts, remained controversial.  There were those in the Labour movement who disliked its ‘barracks-like’ – always the adjective used by critics – appearance and lack of garden space.  Others lamented the loss of the close community life said to be fostered by earlier cheek by jowl conditions.

A middle-class observer – the secretary of a Lambeth Care Committee – stated that flat-dwellers were ‘much more inclined to keep themselves to themselves’ and that ‘the children of the little streets [seemed] to enjoy their play more’.  Given that one of the abandoned games she laments is ‘chasing rats with the help of the family dog’, one might be forgiven for not completely sharing this rosy-hued nostalgia. (9)

Interestingly, Mary Chamberlain’s study of Growing Up in Lambeth is far less romantic about earlier slum life in its description of neighbourly disputes and domestic violence. (10) The simple reality, of course, is that poverty is not ennobling.  The complex truth is that the lives of the poor are part most frequently of someone else’s agenda.

That agenda in the interwar period focused on housing.  Lambeth’s faltering but ultimately impressive efforts in this regard – both its cottage estates and tenements – reflect both the typical pressures and dynamics of the period and the peculiarities of the borough and its ambition to do things well.

Sources

(1) Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes: Report from the Medical Officer of Health, 10 January 1929

(2) Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’, Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, March 1931, 52

(3) London Borough of Lambeth, Vauxhall Gardens Conservation Area: Designation report and character assessment

(4) Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’

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

(6) Edmund Bird, Survey of Historic Housing Estates of the 1920s and 1930s, London Borough of Lambeth Conservation and Urban Design Team (July 2003)

(7) Osmond Cattlin’s obituary can be viewed here. Archival images of the royal visit can be seen here and here.

(8) Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes, July 9 1936

(9) Quoted in Social Services in North Lambeth and Kennington. 

(10) Mary Chamberlain, Growing Up in Lambeth (1989)

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.