The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’

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1930s, Penzance

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared.  Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830.  In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’.  He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’.  (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic.  The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861.  In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic.  Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared.  In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort.  Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

As we saw in Victoria Park, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’.  In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The opening of the pool, 1935 © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished.

All my photographs were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’.  It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham.  He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him.  He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25.  His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War.  He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903.  That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations.  The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and the war memorial to the right

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist.  The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea.  Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise.  As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’.  In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors,‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last.  War broke out within four years.  The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting.  Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed.  Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue.  February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however.  A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come.  Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

Sources

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history.  The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

Do visit the Friends of the Jubilee Pool’s website for more information and the latest news on the pool.

The North Hull Estate: the first Housing Action Trust

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, Cottage suburbs, Regeneration

As we saw in last week’s post, Hull had acted energetically in building homes and clearing slums after the First World War but the impact of a second would require it to redouble its efforts.  New estates were built on its northern fringes which made the original North Hull Estate seem rather old-fashioned – a good or bad thing according to taste.

Certainly, the Estate was ageing and subject, in recent decades, to the difficult transitions that have affected much of our council housing.  This, and a conjuncture of the ambitions of politicians national and local, would combine to make the Estate the nation’s first Housing Action Trust in 1991.

King Edward Street and Prospect Street during the Blitz

The strategically vital city of Hull suffered more damage from German bombing than any other in the UK except for London – over 1000 hours of raids destroyed 5300 homes outright and damaged almost 115,000. In fact, it was estimated that only 6000 homes had emerged unscathed.(1)   Nor did suburbs such as the North Hull Estate escape this destruction – bombs not dropped on port or factories were jettisoned over outlying areas to ease the bombers’ return to base.

Over 1400 people were killed; 152,000 (around half the population) were made homeless.  The ‘opportunity’ – an inappropriate word in the circumstances – to rebuild was recognised in 1942 when the Corporation commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie to design the post-war city.  The ‘fairer and nobler city’ that their Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull envisaged was, however, only partially fulfilled: ‘not the brave new world of Coventry nor  the stodgy classicism of Plymouth, more a grittier version of Welwyn Garden City following a civic style set in the 1930s’, according to Jones the Planner (2)

Queen’s Gardens – © Jones the Planner: ‘very Welwyn’

Early efforts focused necessarily on emergency measures – by 1948, 2525 temporary homes had been created in the city and repairs and rehabilitations returned a further 2720 bomb-damaged homes to use.  North Hull was complete before the war but 111 flats and bungalows were built on the estate in the early post-war years – infill development where bombing had destroyed existing homes.

In due course, much larger building schemes – in what was seen in the 1960s as a final push to solve the problem of the slums for once and for all – would affect Hull’s northern suburbs.   In the late-sixties, the Council embarked on the construction of the Bransholme Estate on the north-east fringes of the city – not the largest council estate in Europe as sometimes claimed but, with a population of 30,000 on its completion, very large indeed and a very different animal to the garden city that Luytens and Abercrombie had earlier envisioned.

The smaller Orchard Park Estate, adjacent to North Hull, was begun at around the same time.  It was built, according to the latest town planning principles, on Radburn lines, using cul de sacs, feeder roads and walkways to separate cars and pedestrians.  Both estates would suffer problems as they matured which we’ll examine in future posts.

Greenwood Avenue and its updated streetscape

North Hull, on the other hand, was a mature estate already and enjoyed in the 1950s and 60s what was probably its heyday. Certainly residents looking back remember a safe and friendly community, a ‘good place to grow up’ and, to someone who moved to the Estate as a youngster in 1963, ‘like a village, with trees and bushes and nice houses and plenty of shops and a school’. (3)

Of course, the housing stock was ageing and its facilities increasingly old-fashioned in an era when, so it was said, ordinary people had never had it so good.  Belatedly, in 1974, a major refurbishment took place, intended, as one resident recalls, ‘to bring the area back to the glory of the old days’. ‘It worked for a while,’ she concluded, ‘but the shops never got back to what they had been before’.  The Coop closed shortly afterwards.

19th Avenue

North Hull’s reputation declined as it – and the broader local economy – fell on harder times.  As council housing allocation policies shifted in the later seventies, the Estate (in the words of one observer) was ‘used to rehouse homeless people or single mothers’.  The stigma implied is unwarranted but it marks the shift in the role of council housing – and more so of perceptions of its role and residents – characteristic of recent decades.  A 1991 survey showed 70 per cent of tenants in receipt of housing benefit and one in five of the economically active population as unemployed.  Almost one in three of residents were over 60.

Still, it was very far from being a notorious ‘problem estate’ and local residents were quick to defend it: (4)

Outsiders see North Hull as a difficult area, they concentrate on marginal matters, drugs and the like, and fail to recognise this is a stable community. Mothers live next to daughters, and nobody wanders too far…Some people see this as an indication of a lack of adventure.  I wouldn’t, I would see it as a symptom of stability.  We have a tradition of strong women on the estate, neighbourhood ties and family ties are strong.

Maybe one of those strong women was the ‘weeping female’ noted in last week’s post who had once so embarrassed poor Mr Whitby.

Inglemire Lane, North Hull © Ian S

Further repairs and refurbishment began in the mid-eighties and almost half the Estate’s homes had been improved by 1989.  Hull City Council – the landlord of around half the city’s homes by this time – was anxious to complete the job but running out of money. It needed £50-60m to complete the work but the Conservative government refused funding under the Estate Action programme. It did, however, indicate that money might be available under a new scheme it was keen to get off the ground, the Housing Action Trust (HAT).

The first attempt to launch a HAT had been rebuffed by tenant activism in the Hulme Estate in Manchester and they were anathema to most Labour-controlled authorities as they required that the council cede ownership and control of its housing to an independent corporation.  But in Hull (where Labour held 57 of 60 seats on the local council), the Government met a man who wanted to do business.

John Black, chair of the Housing Committee, was, in his own words, ‘not an idealist’ – his interest was ‘in seeking to achieve results, not some theory of government’.  The makings of a deal began in a two-hour car journey shared by John Black and deputy housing minister, David Trippier, from Blackburn to Hull in July 1989. (John Black remains a powerful and, to some, a controversial figure on Hull City Council, currently ‘Portfolio Holder for Strategic and Operational Housing.)

The area of the North Hull HAT

In March/April 1991, on a 77 per cent turn-out, 69 per cent of tenants voted in favour of a HAT – the product of an assiduous campaign in its favour by the City Council and numerous concessions which the Council had wrested from a government needing a ‘victory’ for one of its flagship policies.  In brief, Hull – uniquely – secured a £5.75m ‘dowry’ for its North Hull housing (spent on the refurbishment of other estates), Estate Action grants for projects at the Bilton Grange and Bransholme Estates and, crucially, agreement that the tenants could – if they wished – return to the council as landlord when the HAT wound up. (5)

Ironically, given the ideological intent which underlay the HAT programme, Steven Tiesdell sees the result ‘as a demonstration of loyalty to the local authority’.  To other tenants, it came down to ‘a straight issue of whether you wanted your house done up in five years or twenty years’.

Westway Avenue showing improved streetscape

North Hull thus became the first HAT. It comprised 2436 dwellings (the half not previously refurbished): 2109 council-owned and 327 owner-occupied.  Apart from mandatory structural repairs, tenants were empowered to choose from a ‘menu’ of home improvements which included such things as rear porches, french windows, wall lights and higher-quality kitchen units.  An average of £31,000 was spent per property.  Streetscapes and the local environment were improved.  There were also various programmes – familiar from later iterations of ‘regeneration’ – to raise residents’ health and ‘self-esteem’ and increase employability through training and education.

The Pavilion, Hall Road: the HAT’s former head offices and now a very generic business park

The HAT was wound up in 1999.  Though residents complained about the lengthy disruption imposed by the refurbishment programme, most seem pleased with the results.  North Hull was improved – after all, adequate resources combined with a proper respect to tenants’ wishes and interests can achieve quite a lot. But it wasn’t transformed – it wasn’t one of the ‘worst estates’ (supposedly targeted by the HAT programme) in the first place and it continues to exist in social and economic circumstances which determine the life chances of its population as they do – for good or ill – the rest of us.

Every regeneration needs a Tesco but this is insultingly bland: Hall Road © Ian S

When tenants voted for their new landlord, 48 per cent elected to return to the City Council (down from 86 per cent in 1991) and 33 per cent to join one of a range of local housing associations.  The rate of owner occupation increased from 14 per cent to 18.

First Avenue – a true fulfilment of the garden suburb ideal

So, the story of council housing in Hull continues.  We’ve moved some way from the heady days of the interwar period when cottage estates such as North Hull seemed so obvious and vital a solution to the housing needs of the people but we can learn from them and should continue to build on their legacy.

As Martin Crookston concludes in his recent study: (6)

The cottage estates were, and are, garden suburbs. The best of them already show this country’s twentieth-century architecture and planning heritage at its most appealing and successful.  Their next 100 years should be based on reinvigoration, and a celebration, of that birthright.

Sources

(1) AC Saword (Chief Sanitary Inspector and Chief Housing Inspector, Kingston upon Hull), ‘Housing – Retrospect and Prospect’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 1949, 69: 547

(2) Jones the Planner, Hull: City of Culture offers an excellent overview and insight into all that Hull offers despite – or possibly because of – this omission.

(3) Quoted in Audrey Dunne and Alec Gill, The Quadrant and Little Greenwood Communities of North Hull (2005)

(4) Quoted in Brian Lewis, New for Old. The Story of the First Housing Action Trust (1988)

(5) All this detail is taken from Steven Alan Tiesdell, The Development and Implementation of Housing Action Trust Policy, University of Nottingham PhD thesis 1999

(6) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2014)

The North Hull Estate: the ‘Queen of the Estates’ or ‘Corned Beef Island’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

There was a time when the Quadrant area of northern Hull was known as ‘the Queen of the Estates’.  Mind you, there were others, less respectfully, who called it ‘Corned Beef Island’.  It formed the kernel of what became the North Hull Estate – the largest in the city as council housing expanded massively in the interwar period.  Let’s tell its story.

Marton Grove in the Quadrant © Paul Glazzard and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Before 1914, Hull, a port city and industrial centre, had the housing problems typical of the age.  In Hull the ‘characteristic feature of housing’ was: (1)

A Hull court

the ‘terrace system’…a short blind court usually 18 to 20 feet in width running from the main street.  The narrowness of the court and the practical absence of gardens back or front make it possible to have as large a number of people per acre as is practicable without resort to tenements or back-to-back dwellings.

The Corporation did relatively little to tackle the problem of the city’s insanitary slums until its hand was forced by an outbreak of scarlet fever in 1881 and a prolonged crisis of infantile diarrhoea, peaking in 1911.

Small slum clearances took place in Great Passage Street, Jameson Street and around what became Alfred Gelder Street and led to the building of three blocks of tenements and 77 workmen’s dwellings.  But a comprehensive programme to replace privies – the cause of the ill-health – with water closets was blocked by property owners and middle-class ratepayers. (2)

It was the war, itself, which would radically alter aspirations and expectations.  The rise of the local Labour movement added pressure.  The first candidates of the local Trades and Labour Council had been elected to the council in 1902.  After the war the Labour presence grew until the Party took control of the council in 1934. By 1939, Hull had built 10,700 council homes – around 42 per cent of all new homes in the city.

Back in 1920, Hull’s Medical Officer of Health had estimated 5000 houses were needed to meet wartime arrears and another 2778 required to rehouse those currently living in the slums.  The Council made a modest start under Addison’s 1919 Housing Act – 518 houses were built, mostly in new estates on the eastern and western fringes of the city.  A smaller number were constructed on Greenwood Avenue – the beginnings of the North Hull Estate and, until incorporation in 1935, beyond the then city’s northern borders.

Greenwood Avenue © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

North Hull would continue to grow – in a series of distinct phases, creating a large and rather amorphous estate of some 4371 homes by 1939.  All, save 32 ‘cottage flats’, were self-contained houses, built in short terraces and laid out ‘on the most approved and advanced Town Planning lines’. There were efforts, too, to get away ‘from the plain type of building…Now bay-windows are being put in, together with gables to roofs, Rosemary tiles between bays, etc.’.  All this gave, it was said, ‘quite a charming appearance to the Estate’. (3)

5th Avenue © Paul Harrop and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The best housing was built under the generous Addison subsidy but rents were correspondingly high.  As one resident recalled, ‘the man of the house had to be in a good steady job to enable him to pay for it – there weren’t any unemployed’. (4)

Construction was still under way as those first tenants moved in.  In 1923, ‘the roads were not even completed and were muddy tracks. There were stacks of bricks everywhere and wooden scaffolding poles lay haphazardly across the pathways’.  The nearest shops were a mile and a half away and it was the lack of shops and the difficulty in buying fresh food which gave the area its other nickname in these early years, ‘Corned Beef Island’.  Still, travelling tradesmen arrived to make good the deficiency – the rural setting ensured fresh milk from local farms, at least – and later residents recall a bustling range of shops, anchored, as was typical on these new corporation estates, by the local Coop.

Shops on Endike Lane © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Also typical of these early estates was the tale of residents unable to locate their home amidst its rather uniform new surroundings: (5)

My mother tells me because the houses all looked the same, on the first day we reached here they found me sitting on next door’s step crying. I couldn’t find our house.

This was a youngster whose family had moved to the estate from New George Street in 1933 ‘on the back of Fred Ollet’s coal cart’.

Aerial view, 1933. Greenwood Avenue runs through the centre of the image; earlier development around the Avenues and York Road to the left

That move – and many more in the 1930s – marked a new phase of North Hull’s development.  The 1930 Housing Act prioritised slum clearance and the rehousing of those who lived in them.  Hull had anticipated this shift – the New George Street clearance had begun in the mid-twenties – but a 1930 scheme planned to demolish and replace a further 3445 houses in the next five years. Over 2000 new homes were built on the North Hull Estate in consequence.

Slum clearance off Adelaide Street and William Street, Kingston upon Hull, 1937 © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/, EPW055051

Given that council housing in Hull and elsewhere had been very largely the preserve of a better-off working class, this shift in practice raised two issues.  One was affordability.  Casual dock labourers earned around £1.80 a week in 1930; oil millers (who processed rape, flax and cottonseed in Hull) generally worked half-time and earned less than £1.20.  These men reckoned they could pay about 6s to 8s (30p to 40p) a week in rent and rates but no more. (6)  Parlour homes rented at twice this level and much council housing – even as rents declined with the later, plainer housing – was beyond the means of Hull’s poorest citizens.  Travel to work costs added to the difficulty.  As one slum-dweller informed the Hull Daily Mail: (7)

Endike Lane’s no good to me, mister, it takes all our time to pay 4/6 rent and tram and bus fares to King George Dock.

Still, given the nature of Hull’s workforce in this period – around 9000 men worked on the docks, 9000 in chemicals and oils and 5000 in the fishing industry – it was inevitable that a significant number of council tenants did work in the town’s traditional sectors.  Many of the Quadrant’s residents worked in the St Andrew’s Fish Docks and the Corporation ran special buses with wooden slatted seats to bring them back from their work in the evening; buses with upholstered seats were put back into service after 6.30 when less fragrant passengers took over.

19th Avenue © Paul Harrop

The other perceived problem – for the Council, at least – was an alleged slum mentality:  ‘The “slummy” heart cannot be altered, they say’.  Mr Whitby, the council officer who reported this widespread sentiment, went on to describe many examples of those moving from the slums who had ‘made good’ – others might have asserted their respectability in the first place, of course. Nevertheless, he advised new tenants be given ‘proper instructions on the proper way to treat the houses’ to make sure that ‘the old slums do not disappear only to give place to new ones’.

For those moving from inner-city communities, there was also the problem of the loss of a formerly close-textured community life:

We had a tenant in a slum area who did not want to leave a ‘hovel’ for a new flat because of family associations. Upon pointing out the advantages of the new house, I was accused of being without any sentiment and the lady in question shed copious tears.

For poor Mr Whitby there was ‘nothing more embarrassing than a weeping female on your hands’ but then he hadn’t the benefit of having read the later sociological works describing the powerful matriarchal support networks of traditional working-class communities. (8)  In time, as we shall see, these would be replicated on the North Hull Estate.

Dingley Close, Inglemire, off Cranbrook Avenue © Paul Glazzard and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Meanwhile, the Corporation represented a strong patriarchal presence in tenants’ lives.  Mr Whitby reported ‘periodical visits…made to the Estate with a view to suppressing irregularities’, and continued:

The wise head appreciates the fact that the Corporation are ideal landlords, he gets good value for money, security of tenure and that freedom from neighbours’ annoyances that even the house-owner cannot always be assured of.

For all its heavy-handedness, that – when some commentators are so disparaging of council housing and council tenants – is a comment we can savour.  The idea that council homes gave their earlier residents a better environment than even owner occupiers might enjoy is worth emphasising.

On the other hand, the Council – ‘ideal’ or otherwise – was a rather unimaginative landlord.  Homes on the Estate were repainted externally every five years – the windows always cream and doors either blue, maroon or green; twelve houses were painted one colour, the next twelve another. Internally, the colour scheme was always magnolia, distempered walls and brown doors, frames and skirting boards.  Kitchen walls were painted brick and remained so until a major refurbishment in the 1970s.

A Yorkist range

Other facilities sound similarly basic to modern ears but back in the day they were the ‘mod cons’ of a good home and, of course, far superior to previous conditions.  Living rooms contained a ‘Yorkist range’ (regularly black-leaded by respectable housewives) with a back boiler to heat water and an oven.

The working heart of the home, however, was the scullery with its Belfast sink, copper (a free-standing gas boiler for washing clothes) and gas cooker.  A small pantry and coal store were situated under the stairs. Three bedrooms, a bathroom and inside toilet and large gardens added to what must have seemed luxury to many.

By 1939, Hull’s scheduled slum clearance programme was largely complete but the devastation of the Blitz would cause the city’s rebuilding efforts to be redoubled in the years of peace which followed.  Decades on, in 1991, the North Hull Estate would become the first Housing Action Trust – a sad fall from grace for what had once been ‘the Queen of the Estates’.  We’ll take up those chapters of north Hull’s housing history next week.

Sources

(1) ‘The Cost of Living of Working Classes’, Parliamentary Papers, 1908 quoted in Betty C Skern, Housing in Kingston upon Hull between the Wars, Kingston upon Hull City Council (1986)

(2) K. J. Allison (editor), Victoria County History, A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 1: The City of Kingston upon Hull (1969)

(3) WH Whitby (Treasurer’s Department, Hull City Council), Some Aspects of the Housing Problem. One of a series of public lectures on local government given at the Guildhall, May 7 1930

(4) Audrey Dunne and Alec Gill, The Quadrant and Little Greenwood Communities of North Hull (2005)

(5) Brian Lewis, New for Old. The Story of the First Housing Action Trust (1988)

(6) Whitby, Some Aspects of the Housing Problem

(7) Quoted in Skern, Housing in Kingston upon Hull between the Wars

(8) As argued by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London, first published in 1957.