Social Housing under Threat: Keep it ‘affordable, flourishing and fair’

Social housing – council housing in plain terms in earlier years – has transformed countless lives over the decades.  For some a safety net, for others a springboard, for nearly all a decent home, council housing has met the basic human need for shelter for millions for whom the free market has failed.

The recognition of our duty as a community to ensure good quality and affordable housing for all emerged in the late nineteenth century.  Industrialisation and urbanisation created slums that offended the Victorian social conscience.  An increasingly organised working class demanded reform.  And there was recognition too that housing conditions which stunted individual lives weakened the nation as a whole.  A case for council housing grew that was moral, political and economic.

Eldon Grove, Liverpool, opened in 1912. Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Before 1914 it was Conservative governments which were responsible for the most significant housing legislation.  These acts permitted (rather than required) local councils to build and their overall impact was small.  But local authorities of all political colours up and down the country took up the baton.  Tory Liverpool built the first council housing.  Liberal Manchester and Sheffield also built on a large scale in the pre-war era.  Conservative Richmond, spurred by a Liberal activist, built the first council housing in the London area and, most famously, the Progressive-controlled London County Council was responsible for the first and some of the finest council estates in the country.

The Boundary Estate, Shoreditch – the first council estate, opened by the Prince of Wales in 1900

And then comes war and it’s war which somehow combines to show both our capacity to destroy and our duty to build.  The promise of ‘homes for heroes’ made in 1919 was only partially fulfilled but over 1.1m council homes were built before the next conflagration.

In 1945, the popular determination to win not only the war but to ‘win the peace’ was redoubled.  Labour’s  1949 Housing Act spelled out the intention that council housing would be for general needs – neither confined to the affluent working class as it had tended to be in its early years or a ‘ghetto’ for the poorer ‘slum’ working class as it had increasingly become in the thirties.  The housing minister Aneurin Bevan wanted to:

introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the…labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen…to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.

That vision was fulfilled in part in the new towns such as Stevenage but the general duty to house the population well was taken up in large numbers by both major parties.  It was the Conservative Party which proclaimed in 1951 that:

Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by overcrowded homes. Therefore a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.

The new minister of housing, Harold Macmillan, saw the Conservative target of 300,000 houses a year exceeded in 1953 – a post-war peak; over 200,000 of the new homes were social rented.

Harold Macmillan

In 1963 Macmillan, now prime minister, pledged to build 350,000 houses a year.  Labour entered office in 1964 promising to build 400,000.  By 1969, some 900,000 new local authority homes had been provided.

We know well enough the mistakes that were made in this drive to build – with system-building and badly-designed high-rise – and hard lessons have been learnt. But it’s important to remember what was achieved, measured in the most vital way – not by numbers but by the lived experience of millions.

Back in the 1930s, Manchester’s Wythenshawe Estate had been described as:

the world of the future – a world where men and women workers shall be decently housed and served, where the health and safety of little children are of paramount importance, and where work and leisure may be enjoyed to the full.

For Berthold Lubetkin, the architect of Finsbury’s Spa Green Estate and Bethnal Green’s Cranbrook Estate, his designs and the social revolution they represented were part of ‘the struggle for a better tomorrow’.

Spa Green, opened in 1949. Illustrated in Margaret and Alexander Potters’ book, Houses, published in 1948. Click for a full-size view.

For those that moved into these new homes, it was ‘like moving into heaven’ – a resident of the Churchill Gardens Estate in Westminster.  Or as early tenants of the Aylesbury Estate – the reviled Aylesbury Estate! – in Southwark, remember, ‘coming to the new estate for most of us at that time was like Shangri-La’, ‘we thought we was moving into Buckingham Palace’.

And communities formed which, even as times grew harder, took pride in their homes and neighbourhoods.  As a long-time resident of Park Hill, Sheffield, states: ‘I lived there most of my life. No-one who didn’t live there can say anything bad about it at all. We all stuck together and looked after each other’.

Park Hill, completed in 1961 © Licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons licence

And then we lost our way.  Council housing became – to use the jargon – ‘residualised’.  A proper duty to house the most vulnerable and disadvantaged (enshrined in Labour’s 1977 Homeless Persons Act) combined catastrophically with the new Conservative ideology of the eighties which sold off existing council stock and banned the construction of new.

In 1981 councils and housing associations owned 5.2m rented homes in England. By 2012 the number had fallen to 4m.  The rationing of social housing which has followed has led to a new – but still mixed and complex – reality for council housing and, more dangerously, altered perceptions among parts of the media which have caused tenants, quite wrongly and cruelly, to be caricatured and demonised.

From James Meek, ‘Where will we live?’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 1, 9 January 2014. The graph starkly illustrates the linkage between declining social housing, falling private house-building and rising home prices.

At present, new social housing is being built at unprecedentedly low rates while private house-building has stagnated.  This imbalance between supply and demand has led to our current housing crisis – a situation in which:

• 1.3m households are paying more than 35 per cent of their household income in housing costs
• The housing benefit bill has risen from £1.1bn in 1970/71 to £24.6bn today
• In London, the rent of a three-bed home in the current  government’s so-called ‘affordable homes programme’ – the sorry charade which has replaced any meaningful commitment to providing homes for the less well-off – stands at £191 a week.

Meanwhile we spend just £1.2bn on new ‘affordable’ housing.

But this is not an elegy for a lost world but a call to action for values and priorities for which we must fight once more.

The moral, political and economic case for a large and vibrant social housing sector is as strong now as it has ever been.  And you will find that case made with forensic skill and proper passion in the new cross-party Campaign for Social Housing.  As it states, ‘Nothing is more important than secure, affordable housing as a bedrock for stable families and neighbourhoods’.  In this, social housing must once again play a vital role:

Social rented housing has a proud and noble record of providing affordable and decent homes for millions of people. It rescued millions of people from appalling housing conditions and allowed them to lead dignified and useful lives. It created stable and successful communities throughout the country and helped to keep the housing benefit bill low. Social rented housing was created because the market had failed to provide decent, affordable housing for working people. The market is still not working, as evidenced by the greatest housing crisis in almost a century.

It’s time to make the case for a major expansion of social rented housing and to protect existing social housing.

It’s time to say enough is enough. We need a genuinely affordable, flourishing and fair social housing sector.

Please support SHOUT (Social Housing under Threat) and the Campaign for Social Housing.

Sources

Much of the data and analysis above is drawn from SHOUT’s Affordable, Flourishing, Fair. A Manifesto to Save and Extend Social Rented Housing – an essential read for anyone concerned with housing.

For more information on SHOUT, please visit: www.facebook.com/pages/SHOUT-The-Campaign-for-Social-Housing/584137758345466

And follow them on Twitter @4socialhousing

Visit Council Homes Chat too – a recently formed group dedicated to ‘busting myths about council housing by providing a platform for people’s stories and experiences’ – and follow them on Twitter @Councilhomechat.

Other references above are drawn from earlier posts in my blog, an historical record of the work of local government and our municipal pioneers in building a better world – in housing, health, education and much else – and a reminder that we too can do better.

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Hornsey Town Hall, Crouch End: ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’

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1930s, Town Halls

It’s easy to miss the modernist masterpiece of Hornsey Town Hall, completed in 1935, as you fight your way through the yummy mummies and baby buggies of Crouch End but take time to admire it.  It’s been described as ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’. (1)  And look to the buildings to left and right and through the clutter of contemporary commercialism – this was a civic complex intended to enshrine the role of local government at the very centre of local life.

Hornsey’s first local administration had been formed as far back as 1867.  The Hornsey Local Board built its offices in Southwood Lane in Highgate the following year.  At that time, Hornsey was basically a collection of local villages but the coming of the railways would radically transform it.  With seven local rail stations by 1887, Hornsey became a centre of middle-class villadom – the home of London’s clerks and their daily commute.

Hornsey became an Urban District Council under the 1894 Local Government Act and was raised to municipal borough status in 1903.  Its bid to become a county borough (an all-purpose authority free of county council jurisdiction) was twice rejected but though the council was dominated by that local incarnation of Conservatism, the Municipal Reform Party, for most of its life, it saw itself as modern and progressive.  Some of the first council housing in the country was built by Hornsey UDC and in 1903 it inaugurated its own electricity supply service, building a generating station on Tottenham Lane.  A cottage hospital was opened in 1910.

By now, the borough’s centre of gravity had shifted to Crouch End and the council needed a home to reflect both this new reality and its civic pride.  It purchased a wedge-shaped area of land on the Broadway in Crouch End in 1920 and 1923 and ten years later it announced a design competition to build a town hall on this awkward plot.

The Council required the normal trappings of a civic building – a council chamber, committee rooms, administrative offices and a multi-purpose hall with seating for 800 to 1000 people.  But it was to cost no more than £100,000 and the Council was:

desirous that the character of the buildings shall be dignified and they rely on good proportions and a fitting architectural setting rather than elaborate decoration and detail, which is not required. Stress is laid on straightforward planning, with rooms and corridors well lighted and ventilated.

This would be a town hall, eschewing the municipal baroque or neo-classicism in vogue before the war, in a modern idiom.  Notwithstanding these intentions, The Architect and Building News was sniffy about this contest: ‘In all, 218 highly trained brains have exerted themselves to the full to find the solution to the problem which should never have been set’. (2)  But, in the end and as further plots on the frontage of the Broadway became available, a civic complex was created that would do the Borough proud.

The winner of the competition was Reginald Uren, a 27-year old New Zealander, and, though he went on to build a prestigious career, this would remain in many ways his masterpiece. Uren’s skill lay in separating out and distinguishing between the functional areas and setting the building back to provide as dignified an approach as the site allowed.

The public hall to the left-hand side was marked by elongated windows and a grand triple entrance.  The council offices were given a smaller but impressive ceremonial entrance to the right while the ‘dignified’ aspect of the council’s activities was given full play in the impressive council chamber and mayor’s parlour on the first floor.

The interiors were described as ‘extremely simple, with the emphasis on beauty of surface’ – that beauty provided by Australian walnut and Indian laurel in the assembly hall and council chamber and polished Perrycot stone in the foyer and staircases. (3)

© http://www.eyerevolution.co.uk

For those who didn’t venture inside, it was the exterior which inevitably caught the eye:

Gracious and rather slim in its lines, and faced with pinkish-grey bricks of a beautiful colour and texture, Hornsey Town Hall is the sort of building that is come upon with an exclamation of pleasure…That the building has both Dutch and Swedish flavours is true, but they are digested to the local scene.

The Times article celebrates the Royal Institute of British Architects bronze medal awarded in 1936, recognising the building as the best erected in London during the previous three years.  And those Dutch and Swedish influences which it identifies refer to two of the outstanding civic buildings of the era – Dudok’s Hilversum Town Hall (completed in 1931) and Stockholm Town Hall (completed in 1923) – which provided some of Uren’s inspiration. (4)  In fact, Uren employed decorative elements – notably a stone relief lintel, sculpted by Arthur Ayres, and an elaborate bronze grille at the right-hand entrance – to soften the rather stark lines of Dudok’s prototype.

Within a couple of years, the Council was also able to provide the Town Hall with a more complimentary setting.  The architectural firm, Dawe and Carter, designed a new showroom and offices for the Hornsey Gas Company – a private undertaking until nationalised in 1947 – to the right of the Town Hall in a style which paid conscious tribute to Uren’s building and was similarly graced by Ayres’ sculptures.

And Uren himself was able in 1938 to adapt a former telephone exchange to the left into showrooms for Hornsey’s municipal electricity department.  This too would feature an Ayres relief, representing – appropriately enough – the Spirit of Electricity.

Both buildings are now in private ownership – the former gas showrooms have become a branch of Barclays, the electricity showrooms an Italian restaurant.  But, listed and preserved, the ensemble reminds us of an era in which local government took justifiable pride in its key and progressive role in the life of its community.

The gas showrooms after nationalisation and before Barclays

Wider politics were less propitious and the Town Hall would witness some of the politics of this ‘low dishonest decade’ at first hand.  A meeting of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee – to support the democratic Republican forces against the threat of Franco’s Nationalists – was held in the Assembly Hall but another, apparently, was cancelled through fears of public disorder.

That concern did not halt a large rally by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists in January 1937.  On that occasion, the police remained outside and left the maintenance of ‘order’ to Fascist stewards – with predictable results.  Later that year, the left was represented once more when the Unity Theatre Group presented ‘Waiting for Lefty’ and ‘On Guard for Spain’ with a collection held for the Republican cause. (5)

For many, Hornsey Town Hall is better remembered as being the venue for some of the first performances of Ray Davies (then a student at the Hornsey College of Art, later of the Kinks) and the very first performance, in 1971, of Queen.

Later politics didn’t match the turbulence of the thirties and it’s possible that some local citizens have remained unaware of the Hornsey événements of 1968. The anarchist Stuart Christie lived in nearby Fairfield Gardens.  Fired up by the French uprising and an evening in the Queen’s pub, he and some comrades: (6)

raced to Hornsey Town Hall to announce the birth of a new society.  ‘Paris Today, Hornsey Tomorrow!’ was the slogan we scrawled across the full width of the building’s imposing façade.  There was no doubt about it. We would make sure that the good burghers of Hornsey would know the Revolution had begun.  But our triumphalism was short-lived.  By 10am the next day the forces of reaction in the form of Haringey Borough Council had stepped in and their cleaning department had almost obliterated our handiwork – almost, but not quite.  The ghostly outline of that night’s work remained for many years; it certainly outlasted our hoped-for revolution.

And thereby hangs another, less revolutionary tale, though one almost as disturbing to some of Hornsey’s ‘good burghers’.

In 1965, Hornsey Borough Council was abolished – swallowed up within a new Greater London alongside Tottenham and Wood Green as part of the new London Borough of Haringey.  The centre of gravity moved left politically and, administratively, to the east – to the Wood Green Civic Centre which became the headquarters of the new local authority.

The Town Hall remained home to a few of Haringey’s technical services for some years but the Assembly Hall was closed in 1987 – the Council being unable or unwilling to maintain it – and by 2004 the building as a whole was essentially redundant.   But Haringey’s proposal to dispose of the building aroused a storm of protest.

To opponents, organised by Crouch End for the People, this was a ‘defining and critical moment…the centrepiece of our “village” could be sold off by the council’.  The group set up its own Hornsey Town Hall Trust to promote community use of the building.  Having rejected the Trust’s alternative business plan, the Council set up its own Community Partnership Board – distrusted by Crouch End activists as an unrepresentative tool of the Council’s political interests.   An independent body, the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust, was set up in 2007.

You can read more of this on the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust’s own website or read an academic account which describes the protest as a form of ‘anti-municipalist communitarianism’ – apparently the citizens of Tottenham were far more deferential in accepting the Borough’s political leadership’s plans for the similarly redundant Tottenham Town Hall.  Perhaps the simpler analysis is just that you don’t mess with the middle class. (7)

In 2008 planning permission and Listed Building Consent was obtained for a scheme to bring the Town Hall back into use with public halls, community rooms, theatre space, cafes and landscaping but the funding depended partly on an adjacent building development.

In 2011, these proposals were superseded by a plan by the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts to transform the Town Hall into – in their words – ‘an arts, culture and education hub for Haringey, wider London and the UK’ but these plans also were withdrawn by early 2015.  In the meantime, the Town Hall has enjoyed a half-life as a location for a number of dramas, most notably The Hour (where it stood in the BBC’s Lime Grove studios) and Whitechapel.

Currently, a three-man arts collective has a one-year lease on the building, renting space to a range of creative enterprises and providing a programme of arts events whilst shoring up the basic fabric of the building.  Consultation continues regarding future uses and a possible partial residential redevelopment which will maintain public areas for community use.

I don’t have a dog in the fight and, as a municipal dreamer, I can’t help but regret the loss of the Town Hall complex’s original functions and, more intangibly, the dignity and presence attached to them.  If you do visit Crouch End, admire the architecture and recall the civic pride it spoke to.

You’ll find some images of the interior in this post to my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) Twentieth Century Society, Civic Plunge Revisited,  24 March 2012.  The Council guidelines which follow are quoted from the same source.

(2) The Architect and Building News, 20 October 1933 quoted in Twentieth Century Society, Civic Plunge Revisited

(3) This description and the following quotation comes from ‘Hornsey Town Hall’, The Times, 12 May 1936

(4) I’ve posted some images on my Tumblr site for comparison

(5) The Spanish Medical Aid Committee is reported in Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War (2003); Mosley’s meeting in Martin Pugh, Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars  (2013).  The photograph is taken from Action, the BUF newspaper, 30 January 1937; the black shirt is worn in defiance of the 1936 Public Order Act.  The Unity Theatre listing is in the Daily Worker, 2 October 1937

(6) Stuart Christie,  Edward Heath Made Me Angry: The Christie File : Part 3, 1967-1975 (2004)

(7) Bryan Fanning and Denis Dillon, Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation (2012).  More information on various proposals can be found in Richard Waite, ‘Bennetts win cash backing for Hornsey town hall overhaul‘, Architects’ Journal, May 31 2012.

The Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust website provides ongoing detail of what’s happening with and in the Town Hall, including an events calendar.

The fullest treatment of the architecture and history of Hornsey Town Hall is provided by Bridget Cherry, Civic Pride in Hornsey. The Town Hall and its Surrounding Buildings published by the Hornsey Historical Society (2006).  This provides the context for my own treatment of the topic.

The Dover House Estate, Putney: ‘Here comes Uniform Town’

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1920s, Cottage suburbs, LCC, Wandsworth

There were those who looked askance at the London County Council’s new Dover House Estate in 1919.  Well-heeled local people in the big houses nearby expressed concern that transport links were poor for the area’s new residents.  And then there was another ‘element for consideration’ – ‘that its conversion into a working-class district must enormously depreciate the rateable value of property in the vicinity’. (1)

Dover House Road

In fact, worries that the Estate would blight the neighbourhood and would be filled by ‘very, very poor people from the bad areas of the East End’ were illusory.  The Dover House Estate, initially known as the Roehampton Estate, would become a ‘show place in its day…visited by many from all over the world.’ (2)

And it would house an overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ working class.  Many of these worked in the public services – in public transport, as police officers or postal workers – and they would give the Estate its occasional nickname. We saw in Bristol the high standards of the earliest council housing built after World War One when ‘homes for heroes’ was briefly something more than a  slogan.  The Dover House Estate is a London equivalent and, as Mark Swenarton noted, it would ‘set the standard for LCC building in general’. (3)

Putney Park House after its recent refurbishment and conversion

In 1919, the LCC bought – its first post-war purchase – 147 acres of parkland belonging to the adjacent private estates of Dover House and Putney Park House.  The former was demolished but the latter survived as a social centre – the ‘Rec’ to local residents – for the new estate. It’s been sold off now and converted into private flats. Building began in early 1920 under the generous subsidies of Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act.  By July 1921, when the Addison scheme was axed, just 17 houses had been completed.  These cost £1150 each; in all 634 would be built under the terms of this initial contract until terminated as construction costs fell.

Laneway under construction

A further 168 homes were built in 1924 under Chamberlain’s Housing Act and more followed under the Wheatley Act of that year.  By 1927, when the Estate was complete, 1212 homes had been erected – ranging from five-room houses to two-room flats, accommodating a population of around 4400. (4) Size and quality deteriorated as the Estate expanded and Government subsidies and prescribed housing standards fell:

As financial problems arose so each new builder made the houses smaller as they went up the hill. They were smaller and smaller so that when you got to the top ones…if you opened the front door you had to close all the other doors, you know, otherwise you couldn’t get in.

The homes themselves built of stock brick with occasional decorative touches and roughcast rendering to bring variety.   Doors and porches were used to add to the ‘cottagey’ feel of the housing.  Rooflines – a range of gable and hipped ends, some houses with first-floor eaves and dormer windows – are varied strikingly, their visual impact heightened by the planners’ deliberate use of the Estate’s sloping landscape.

The front parlour of a Dover House Estate home

Internally, the homes were of their time – gas-lit in the first place with water heated in a downstairs coal-fired copper and pumped upstairs where necessary.  But every home had a garden and many, unusually, had a side garden – another feature deliberately employed by the planners to add to the Estate’s vistas and feeling of spaciousness. (5)

Dover House Estate site plan

But the real glory of the Dover House Estate lay in its overall design and layout. The 1921 estate plan shows how carefully its design conforms to Garden City ideals in its studied informality, open space and greenery, and curving streetscapes.

Laneway green

‘A prime objective’ of the LCC’s planners was that ‘each group of houses should overlook or have access to a small open space close by’.  Some of the cottages are arranged around greens but, even in the more conventional streets, terraces are short, often set back, with clusters of homes possessing an intimacy and identity.  Mature trees were retained and new ones planted.  Footways included wide grass verges – though the latter have fallen to the need for on-street parking, as some of the beautiful front gardens have been converted into hardstanding.

The Pleasance today

The Pleasance formed the Estate’s major open space but the nine acres set aside for allotments in the Estate were, in their way, an even stronger statement of Garden City ideals – an echo, at least, of Ebenezer Howard’s dream of healthy and self-sufficient living.  Two of the three allotment areas initially provided survive; one has been used for in-fill housing.

Huntingfield Road Elementary School, opened in March 1925, would be another key institution, especially when – in its early years – the Estate was home to so many young families.  The school’s single-storey design was another testament to the Garden City ideal of healthy living, being described by the LCC as ‘a pavilion type’, approximating ‘to the lines of a sanatorium’. (6)  It closed in 1993.

Girls’ drill at Huntingfield School in the 1920s © English Heritage

In other respects, community facilities were lacking.  A small row of shops was set at the periphery of the Estate but proved expensive even for better-off residents.  There was no library, no health centre.  No public houses either though those who found ‘the Rec’ too stuffy could walk to traditional pubs in Upper Richmond Road or Roehampton Village.

Shops on Upper Richmond Road

This was, in any case, a new community – literally in that the Estate’s new residents had moved from densely-settled inner-city areas but psychologically too. Looking back, older residents are quick to praise a traditional neighbourliness which existed in these years.  Two residents recall:

People left their doors open, their back doors open. You didn’t have to worry then, you see. There was no problem.

I mean my mum had to go off to hospital quite a bit…And automatically there would always be a neighbour to look after you until your mum came back. And you know that was just the way things happened.

But many acknowledge too – in almost identical terms – a shift:

People were friendly, but they kept themselves to themselves.

Just neighbourly you were, you talked and all that but you didn’t get that far with them.

We had very good neighbours, you know we’d help each other out. But it wasn’t like, not like the community spirit that you got in the East End.

I don’t think we were ever quite like the East End with the going in and out like that.

This was a new working class whose living conditions and relative affluence combined with a self-conscious ‘respectability’ to create a more domesticated and private life-style, one that knowingly and happily distanced itself from the old intimacies of slum living.  We saw this in the Wythenshawe Estate, Manchester, too.

And as at Wythenshawe, gardening was a key indicator of the new way of life.

Roehampton Estate Garden Society poster, from Darrin Balyliss’ thesis

At its most explicit, this feeling of difference translated into a sense that the new residents of the Dover House Estate were – quite literally – ‘chosen people’:

The earliest people here were chosen…They were chosen to come because they all had a steady job, and they were also chosen on what they looked like.  They, they were very careful who they brought here. You just couldn’t move here because you said you wanted to live here.

The LCC was as careful in selecting its tenants as that memory suggests.  Prospective tenants were expected to demonstrate a ‘good record for cleanliness and punctual payment of rent’ and have an income at least five times greater than the total of rent, rates and fares. (7)  In the Dover House Estate, where in 1927 some rents for houses built in its early years reached 30s (£1.50) a week this was a considerable hurdle.

It was, therefore, those in what were called at the time ‘the sheltered trades’ – various forms of public sector employment – who were best able to fit these criteria.  In fact, ten per cent of the homes were initially reserved for council employees.  Locals: (8)

gave us the name ‘Uniform Town’ because we had bus drivers, policemen, tram drivers and postmen living on the estate.  When we walked into the village one of the locals would say ‘Hello, here comes Uniform Town’. It was all in good fun.

In fact, in 1931 the LCC estimated that an incredible – for a council estate – 37 per cent of heads of household were white-collar workers whilst 34 per cent belonged to the skilled working class.  Some families even had maids.  So striking was this that in 1932 the council suggested that 201 of the more ‘well-to-do tenants’ move, presumably to houses that they could afford to purchase.

Still, selection criteria remained strict. A fall in white-collar households – to 21 per cent in 1939 – was offset by an eleven per cent rise in skilled working-class heads.  A smaller rise of unskilled heads had brought their total up to one quarter of the Estate as a whole – a small impact compared to that seen in Norris Green, Liverpool and the Knowle Estate in Bristol in the 1930s as Government slum clearance policies took effect.

In many ways, the rather ‘select’ air of the Estate seems to have survived to the present.  This is not a tale of ‘decline’, a charting of the new realities of council housing as it became increasingly reserved for the least well-off and most disadvantaged of our community. The sheer quality of the Dover House Estate’s design values and layout survives – protected since 1978 by its designation as a conservation area.  I suppose it’s a sign of the times – not necessarily a welcome one – that a homes and property article can describe the Estate as ‘a charming enclave on the western edge of Putney’.(9) Of course, right to buy has had a significant impact but the overall impression of the Estate now is that of a settled community.  One local survey showed over 50 per cent of respondents as over 50 – probably a skewed statistic but still a sign of a community which has, in a sense, grown old with the Estate. Over half of respondents had lived on the Estate over ten years and, hearteningly, some three-quarters wanted to stay at least another five years, many permanently. (10)

There were complaints about the traffic and rat-running, people wanted better facilities for children and older people but few thought that the Estate had changed for the worse and as many thought it had improved in recent years.

We’ll let those views and that experience stand as testimony to the quality of the original design and the ideals which informed it – a moment when aesthetics briefly triumphed over economy in the design of working-class housing and a time when council housing was viewed as a step-up not a safety net.

Sources

(1) Archibald D. Dawnay (Mayor of Wandsworth), ‘A Roehampton Estate’, letter to The Times, 15 April 1919

(2) Local residents quoted in Darrin Bayliss, Council Cottages and Community in Interwar Britain: A Study of Class, Culture, Community and Place, Queen Mary and Westfield College PhD, 1998.  The quotations which follow from local people are also taken from this source as is occupational data on the Estate’s tenants.

(3) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: the politics and architecture of early state housing in Britain (1981)

(4) Barbara Sanders, ‘Roehampton Council Housing Estates’, March 2004

(5) Most of the descriptive detail on the Estate here is drawn from Wandsworth Council, Dover House Estate Conservation Area Appraisal (ND)

(6) Quoted in Geraint Franklin, Inner London Schools, 1918-1944. A Thematic Study, English Heritage (2009)

(7) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes

(8) Quoted in Antonia Rubinstein, Just Like the Country. Memories of London families who settled the new cottage estates, 1919-1939 (1991)

(9) Anthea Masey, ‘Spotlight on Putney: a taste of country life in the capital’, London Evening Standard, July 13 2011

(10) Stuart King’s Dover House Estate residents’ survey, Autumn 2009

My thanks to Barbara Sanders whose experience and writing has provided the background to this post and who sparked my further research. Unless otherwise credited, images are taken from Wandsworth Council’s Dover House Estate Conservation Area Appraisal.

The Knowle West Estate, Bristol: ‘the difficulties in rehousing the slum population’

Tags

1930s, 1960s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

If a single estate can be taken to encapsulate the social, political and planning history of council housing in this country it is probably Knowle West in Bristol.  You’ll find in it all the hopes and dreams, all the good intentions and unintended consequences, that have marked the complex story of council housing over the last hundred years or so.  And you’ll find families and communities that have lived this story in all its complexity.

Broad Walk, Knowle © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

To begin with, let’s cast our eyes a little wider.  In the interwar period, the Bedminster and Knowle Estate was the largest of Bristol’s interwar council schemes.  Building began in 1920. By 1939 the estate as a whole comprised over 6000 council homes and a population of some 28,000.

As we saw in last week’s post, this was the product of three phases of council house building – that of 1919 to 1921 when the government was briefly committed to building high-quality ‘homes for heroes’; the legislation of 1923 and, more particularly, 1924 which set lower housing standards but also lower rents; and the turning point of 1930 when the government committed itself to the rehousing of the slum population.

The geographical and social implications of this were stark, as the sociologists Rosamond Jevons and John Madge noted: (1)

The composition of the population and the physical structure of the estate reflect…the evolution of housing policy since the first world war. From east to west, the estate falls into three main social zones. At Knowle Park are the expensive 1919 and 1923 Act houses…and the more prosperous tenants. Next comes a wide band of [1924] Act houses at somewhat lower rents. Filwood Park, at the western end, contains large numbers of slum clearance houses. It was on this estate that the first houses were built under the 1930 Act, and to which families from the oldest and worst slums were moved.

To begin with, there were problems of adjustment to the new estates that were broadly shared.  This was a population moving overwhelmingly from the inner cities, from densely packed housing which forced or fostered – depending on your perspective – a sociability and intimacy that could not be replicated on the new suburban estates.

This was particularly apparent in Bristol’s interwar estates, built at low density along Garden City lines to the town planning ideals of the day.  It was exactly the qualities of the estates – houses which were semi-detached or set in short terraces and dispersed amidst open spaces and greenery – which enforced the break with previous life-styles.

Newquay Road, Knowle West © Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

The houses themselves – all with gardens, all with their own bathrooms and WCs, nearly all (even the smaller non-parlour homes typical of later building) with more space than residents had previously enjoyed – reinforced this.  The sociability of the streets and pubs was a characteristic – however much it has been romanticised subsequently – of poverty, of homes from which people needed escape.

Still, it was certainly the case that it was hard to sustain community life in any form in the new estates.  The Council prioritised housing – both as the most obvious necessity to its tenants and because government subsidies covered housing but not community facilities.

‘Filwood Park, Bristol, from the north-east, 1933 – Britain from Above’ © English Heritage http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EPW041483

In Filwood Park (which would be renamed Knowle West), 3000 families had settled by 1935 and they had to make do with just ten shops (three from the local Coop), a temporary Anglican church and institute and a Baptist chapel.  To be fair, this deficit of community institutions was rectified rapidly.  In 1938, to serve a population of around 12,000, there were four places of worship and a number of voluntary organisations had moved into the area, including the Bristol University Settlement, the ‘Corner Cottage Club’ and an Unemployed Welfare Association.

‘The Filwood Social Centre and surrounding streets, Filwood Park, 1947 – Britain from Above’ © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EAW011968

The impressive Filwood Social Centre – with dance hall, gymnasium, meeting rooms, canteen, skittle alley, workshop and reading room – opened in the same year.  There were no doubt others who took more pleasure in the opening of the Broadway Cinema, also in 1938.  It was supported by a £7000 loan from the City Council and it’s a useful indicator of local issues which we’ll examine later that the Council stipulated that there be a separate doorway to the rear of the cinema, with its own pay box – ‘to enable the lower class of patrons to use the back entrance’. (2)

Filwood Broadway © Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

This was a working-class community and increasingly one – as the rehousing of the slum population took effect – of the less well-off working class.  The social survey of Jevons and Madge in 1937 revealed that 61.5 per cent of the heads of household belonged to the semi-skilled and unskilled workforce.  Around one in five were skilled workers; under one in ten held any kind of middle-class employment.

This is a picture strengthened by those who, in the later 1930s, were moving out:

The tenants who had left…proved to belong very largely to the better-off class on the estates.  No less than a third were skilled manual workers…Blackcoated workers, never very strong on the estates, showed the strongest tendency to leave.

And this brings us to one of the stark social realities of the enlarged Knowle Estate. As we saw in Norris Green, Liverpool, there were sharp tensions between the earlier, better-off residents and those who were moving in from the clearance areas:

The families displaced from the slums were, so to speak, the second wave of colonists on the new estates.  They were thus superimposed upon communities which had already become relatively established; the effect undoubtedly proved disturbing to the older tenants.  By the outbreak of the war the prevailing tone of some estates was set, through the force of numbers, by the least skilled and poorest tenants. Where this had occurred…it had become very difficult to secure co-operation between the different classes of tenants.

When Jevons and Madge questioned those who had left the Estate, they had moved ostensibly to better themselves, often to buy their own property.  But closer questioning revealed ‘dislike of the estate as such, and particularly dislike of neighbours.  The population was said to be too mixed’.  Jevons and Madge didn’t pull their punches in describing what we would now label as anti-social behaviour:

One objection was the difficulty of bringing up children decently when those of the neighbours are completely uncontrolled and have quite different and often unmentionable standards of behaviour and language.  Noise, quarrelling of adults, dirt, breakages, gossiping and prying were among the complaints.

As we saw in Blackbird Leys, Oxford, this was a characterisation that could come to apply to the estate as a whole.  Knowle had become identified with Knowle West (Filwood Park) – the slum dwellers’ area.

The Council shared this concern.  AW Smith, the Council officer in charge of housing, argued in 1930 that: (3)

one of the difficulties in rehousing the slum population was the mental attitude of many people who had resigned themselves to squalid surroundings, an attitude which could be expressed in the phrase ‘Here I am and here I remain’.  It was not enough to rehouse those people; new interests had to be aroused in them, and facilities provided for social intercourse.

But in the same year, he reported that the new tenants weren’t in fact storing coal in their baths: ‘contrary to the prophecies of pessimists, picture rails are used, and baths are not misused’. (4)  By the later 1930s, social workers testified to:

a marked improvement which has taken place in cleanliness of the houses and in clothes; the better housing environment has undoubtedly had a great educational effect upon the population.  A disgustingly dirty house is now uncommon.

There’s a lingering Victorianism here – middle-class attitudes which held that it was the improvidence of the poor rather than the objective reality of poverty that was to blame for social problems. The reality was harsher.

The Bristol Social Survey of 1937 found that one in three of council tenants were scraping along just above the poverty line (and clearly vulnerable to any personal or economic downturn in their fortunes); 16 per cent were officially below the poverty line.  When it looked at the children, 43 per cent were found to be in families just above the poverty line and a full 28 per cent living below it.

Poorer families tended to have more children – which, no doubt, seemed an indication of the improvidence often decried – and tended, as it happened, to live in the smaller, cheaper, houses.  The attempt to rectify this anomaly seemed fraught with difficulty: ‘Houses now let at higher rents tend to be in the more exclusive parts of the estates; the allocation of these houses to poorer and larger families would certainly encourage some of the older residents to leave’.

Broad Walk shops © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The reality was that it was more expensive to live on the estates than it was in inner-city privately rented accommodation.  Rents were higher in any case but on top of this came additional costs in heating and furnishing the new, larger homes, travel to work costs, and increased food bills as local shops sold more dearly.

In Filwood Park/Knowle West in the later thirties, one in four of the men were unemployed or dependent on casual labour, leading almost half of the area’s children to be living officially below the poverty line.

In this context, there’s a peculiarly tone-deaf quality to complaints that ‘there was often no proper mid-day meal’, that ‘children were given a slice of bread or a penny to buy chips’, that ‘tinned foods of all kinds figured prominently in the family menus’.

The Second World War intervened before Jevons and Madge could publish their report and their final observations reflect its impact:

It cannot be denied that many mothers are feckless over housekeeping; the absence of husbands, with the encouragement to wives to undertake part-time war work during the war, will not have improved matters.

That understanding of gender relations and women’s work is perhaps not one that we would share nowadays.

The war failed to improve matters in other respects too.  Bristol was heavily bombed; 5000 houses were either destroyed or badly damaged. In 1946 the waiting list for council housing stood at an unprecedented 26,000.

Bristol built – mostly in a generation of new estates developed on the city fringes but also, for the first time, in major inner city sites such as Redcliffe.  There was less scope for the growth of the interwar estates but in the 1960s the Inns Court area was developed on the eastern fringe of Knowle West. (5)

Inns Court © Copyright Jez McNeill and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new Inns Court was a radical departure from the Garden City principles of the rest of Knowle but it’s a good example of a later wave of town planning thinking.  Radburn estates were well-intentioned – they were meant to create viable and distinct neighbourhoods, breaking away from a traditional street layout and creating a more pedestrian-friendly, intimate environment by providing a feeder road (Inn Courts Drive here) and a series of cul-de-sacs.

Inns Court, the media portrayal: Bristol Post, 12 June 2013

By 2009, Bristol City planners had concluded that the reverse had occurred: (6)

The layout has resulted in a physical environment that contributes to isolation rather than facilitating community interaction and linkages across adjacent neighbourhoods. The system of cul-de-sacs also causes poor legibility and permeability of the area.

The design had ‘failed to provide a safe and well-overlooked environment’.

The Council proposed to demolish around 1000 homes but, as so often when redevelopment schemes are mooted, the residents themselves were opposed and failed to recognise the criticisms being levelled against their homes and neighbourhood.  The chair of the local residents’ association questioned the plan: (7)

I don’t see there is any necessity for demolishing our homes. When they were built, we were told they would last for 100 years but now they are talking about taking them down. I have lived here for more than 30 years. My wife and I are happy here. We brought up our family here. If they demolished the estate and rebuilt it, it would devastate the community.

The scheme has since been dropped.

But regeneration proposals live on and the problems of Knowle West are real. A 2007 survey concluded – in words which could have been applied to many other estates across the country: (8)

High levels of poverty…in the area with limited local facilities and geographical isolation. Educational attainment is poor and there are high levels of burglary and vandalism. The availability of work is limited and people lack the right skills. There is poor health, isolation and high levels of teenage pregnancies…Local residents identify bullying, crime, drug use, poor environment, transport and dumped cars as local priorities.

Filwood and Inns Court were ranked among the five per cent most deprived areas in the country.  In Filwood, numbers on Incapacity Benefit were double those of Bristol as a whole. In 2010, a Bristol City Council survey revealed – in the new jargon of planning and sociology – that over one third of people in Filwood ward and over half the children were ‘income deprived’. (9)

Knowle West shops awaiting redevelopment © Weirdoldhattie and made available in Wikimedia Commons

The wider Knowle Estate presented a different picture and conformed for the most part to the Bristol average but the original sin of a local housing neighbourhood built to house the poorest of the community lived on.  Little seemed to have changed since Jevons and Madge’s pioneering report of the 1930s.

Daventry Road, Knowle West © Jezhotwells and made available in Wikimedia Commons

At the time of writing, a ‘Regeneration Framework’ is in place for Knowle West intended to address the full range of issues facing the estate.  Working in partnership with local people, its aim is ‘a community full of confidence and pride, skilled and healthy, living in a thriving Bristol neighbourhood that is green and well-connected and low in living costs.’ (10)  It’s hard to argue with that.

The broader lesson is that local government remains, in the words of Winifred Holtby and in the language of her day: (11)

the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment.

It hasn’t always got it right and the story of Knowle West is a reminder of the complexity of the endeavour and the unintended consequences of the best-intentioned of municipal reform.   But local councils and those maligned stalwarts of local democracy – our councillors – will continue to write that story and many will be seeking to transform municipal dreams into the concrete reality of a better world.

Sources

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

(2) This detail – and much more – is supplied in the Flikr photostream of local historian Paul Townsend.

(3) Quoted in ‘Slums and Town Planning’, The Times, October 18, 1930

(4) Quoted in Madge Dresser, Housing Policy in Bristol, 1919-1930 In MJ Daunton (ed), Councillors and Tenants: local authority housing in English cities, 1919-1939 (1984)

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

(6) Bristol City Council, Knowle West Regeneration Framework Baseline Briefing (2009)

(7) ‘Facelift designs are not so grand, say Bristol residents’, This is Bristol, October 6 2010

(8) Lin Whitfield Consultancy, The Local Voluntary and Community Sector, Its Impact and Funding Issues: A Study of Knowle West, Bristol (August 2007)

(9) Bristol City Council, Deprivation in Bristol 2010

(10) For details of community involvement in the current regeneration and the full range of local events and activities, see the Knowledge website

(11) Winifred Holtby, South Riding (1936)

My thanks to the various local photographers acknowledged above who have made their images available for republication.