The Watling Estate, Burnt Oak: ‘the raw, red tentacles of that housing octopus, the London County Council’

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1920s, 1930s, Barnet, Cottage suburbs, LCC

The London County Council built over 89,000 homes between the wars.   Over half – some 47,000 – were built in out-of-county ‘cottage suburbs’.   The Watling Estate, then in the urban district of Hendon, was the third largest of these (after Becontree and St Helier) with a population of 19,000 by 1939. But not everyone was sympathetic to the drive to rehouse Londoners from the crowded inner-cities, at least not in their backyard: (1)

Under construction, 1927: Burnt Oak Station to the right and Watling Avenue with Watling Avenue and Barnfield Road in centre © Britain from Above, EPW019190

Isn’t it time that Mill Hill woke up and tried to save itself from being trampled to death? Already the raw, red tentacles of that housing octopus, the London County Council Watling Estate, are pushing their way through the green meadows, devouring everything in their path…LCC wooden bungalows face houses that sold a few years ago for over £2,000. This surely is a scandal.

Scandal or not, Mill Hill’s fate had been sealed by the extension of the Northern Line to Edgware in 1924.  The LCC acted quickly to purchase 387 acres of farmland adjacent to the new Burnt Oak station.  The plans, drawn up by the LCC’s Chief Architect, George Forrest, set aside 46 acres for allotments and parks and 16 acres for schools and public buildings. The rest was for housing.

Building began in February 1926. The first family moved in in April 1927; 2100 more followed within twelve months.   By 1931, the Estate – 4021 dwellings in total – was complete, aside from 34 larger homes for letting at higher rents added in 1936.

Atholl Steel homes on Banstock Road in varying states of repair

Most were traditional brick but the total includes 252 ‘Atholl’ steel and 464 timber-frame homes built as the LCC experimented with methods it hoped would be cheaper and quicker.  The timber homes were apparently supplied with 12 feet of rubber hose due to the inadequacy of local fire services. (2)  Most were larger family homes, a mix of parlour and non-parlour; around 320 were flats.

Flats on Goldbeaters Grove

Other facilities came more slowly:  ‘No shops, no schools, the kids were running wild’, as one resident recalls; or another of the Estate’s early years: (3)

At that time there was nothing but bricks and mortar and acres of mud.  The main thoroughfares were narrow lanes – little more that footpaths and cart-tracks in part.

The first school opened in 1928, the large Watling Central School in 1931. The main shopping parade on Watling Avenue was built in 1930 – a welcome relief to local housewives who had previously had to travel to Edgware for their groceries.

Housing was the priority and the LCC’s architects were attentive to its design and detail, providing a range of Arts and Crafts touches across the Estate – in the predominant use of traditional brick and tile, timber window framing and doors, porches and canopies, and the deployment of dormers, eaves and bays adding visual interest and detail.

Compared to pre-war schemes such as the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham and the Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith or the early post-war Dover House Estate in Putney, Watling is plainer but it was good quality housing and a fine environment for Londoners escaping the inner city.

It is the Estate’s overall layout which is more striking.  Garden City ideals, albeit modified for scale and economy, were implemented in a range of the Estate’s features.  Streets were designed to make the best use of the undulating site and offer vistas and views.

Deansbrook Road looking towards Crispin Road

Buildings at corner sites and some of the short terraces were set back to open out the streetscape, provide variety and add greenery.  Greens and cul-de-sacs also reflect the contemporary idiom of Unwin-inspired cottage estates.  Unique to Watling was the Silk Stream – a meandering brook preserved to create a 45 acre open space running through the heart of the Estate. (4)

Blessbury Road

So who were the ‘colonists’ of this fine new estate?  Thanks to Ruth Durant’s 1937 survey we have a pretty good idea. One in five of the male heads of household were skilled workers, almost the same proportion worked in transport and almost one in ten were ‘blackcoated’ workers – clerical and administrative employees.  Around 25 per cent were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers.

This was then, typically for the new housing estates of the day, a relatively well-off though overwhelmingly working-class population.  Over half the men earned between £3 and £4 a week in wages.  Small families predominated and almost half the population was under 18.

Weatherboarded homes on Blundell Road

As Durant concluded, ‘only artisan families from London, in certain phases of their lives and possessing certain incomes, are eligible to live here’.  It was this selection that accounted for ‘the comparatively well-to-do aspect of the Estate’ though looks could be deceiving.

Take the case of Mrs Miller ‘down the top of Horsecroft’: (5)

she used to pawn her washing every, every Monday. Her laundry, bed sheets, bed linen. And take it out again on Friday night…she used to cart it down to Harvey and Thompsons, who were the big pawnbrokers in Watling…they were the lifeblood of many people in Watling.

Durant herself understood that the economic respectability of Watling’s residents was precarious, subject as they were to the vicissitudes of personal life and the market and to the additional expenses of the Estate:

Watling itself makes new demands upon the pockets of those who move there.  Shopping is more expensive when the market is unfamiliar.  The rents on the estates are a great financial burden, especially to those who formerly lived cheaply…The new house needs new linoleum, new curtains and even new furniture, and all is bought on hire purchase… Husbands have longer journeys to their work, are forced to eat more meals outside and to spend more on fares.

The lowest rent on the Estate (for a two-room flat) was a little over 50p; for a five-room parlour home it stood at around £1.44.  These were often twice the rents people had previously paid.

Then, she claimed, there were the new pressures of keeping up with the people next door:

In the old ‘mean street’, people were not tempted by example of their neighbours to acquire fresh impediments.  At Watling, where more households with better incomes have settled, the wireless next door becomes an obligation to bring home a wireless.

There were those too who found the isolation and lack of facilities of the Estate in its early days difficult to cope with: (6)

My husband thought it was terrible…’Godforsaken hole, miles away from anywhere’.

My mother wasn’t too happy because in Marylebone we were just down the road from Selfridges but when you got to Watling it was just fields plus fields.

All this helps explain why in its early years almost one in ten of households left the Estate annually, mostly to live more cheaply and closer to work or friends and family in central London though some left to buy their own homes nearby.

For Durant, this turnover of population was one of the major reasons why Watling failed to be the type of community she wanted: ‘in the long run’, she concluded, ‘Watling is not much more than a huge hotel without a roof’.

There was also the problem of demography.  Watling didn’t house independent younger people with, typically, lower incomes; in other words, its own children.  Still, the fact that ‘frequently Watling boys marry Watling girls’ – as she put it rather sweetly – and that both often found local employment did suggest that the population would stabilise.

In next week’s post I’ll look more closely at the type of community insiders and outsiders wanted Watling to be and the type of community it actually was and I’ll question a few assumptions along the way.

Sources

(1) A letter to the Hendon and Finchley Times, 11 November 1927, quoted in Daniel Weinbren, Hendon Labour Party, 1924-1992. A Brief Introduction to the Microfilm Edition (1998)

(2)  Alan Jackson, Semi-Detached London Suburban Development, Life and Transport 1900-1939 (1973)

(3) Ruth Durant, Watling, A Survey of Life on a New Housing Estate (1939).  Ruth Durant is better known, after her second marriage, as Ruth Glass.

(4) London Borough of Barnet, Watling Estate Conservation Area Character Appraisal Statement  (July 2007)

(5) A Watling resident quoted in Darrin Bayliss, ‘Building Better Communities: social life on London’s cottage council estates, 1919-1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol 29, No 3, July 2003

(6) Quoted in Bayliss, ‘Building Better Communities’

Cressingham Gardens, Lambeth: ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’

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1960s, 1970s, Lambeth, Regeneration

Last week, we introduced you to the architectural vision of Ted Hollamby and the reforming ideals of a generation of Lambeth councillors. They came together in Cressingham Gardens – a council estate intended to provide a sense of community and the highest quality housing for the ordinary people of the Borough.  That legacy is now under threat.

A plan of the estate © Karthaus Design Ltd, Cressingham Gardens Outline Redevelopment Options Study

Cressingham’s neighbourliness was fostered by a number of small design touches – front doors which faced each other, kitchen windows facing the walkways outside, and the walkways themselves which separated people and cars.

Hardel Walk

The estate as a whole was designed as a mixed community with homes suitable to elderly and disabled people, single people and couples as well as families.  A nursery school was provided in the innovatively-designed building now known as the Rotunda.

It was a ‘green’ estate also.  Many of the larger homes have patio gardens – a Hollamby signature at this time.  All were designed to overlook green open space.  Even in the centre of the estate, existing trees were preserved or new ones planted.  Concrete flowerbeds were provided on the raised walkways to ensure every home its splash of greenery and colour.

This panoramic view shows Teletubby Land with the estate nestling behind to the left and the near seamless border with Brockwell Park to the right. Click for a larger image.

But the most striking aspect of the estate is its location at the edge of Brockwell Park. In the dry language of the architects’ design brochure: (1)

It is proposed to provide all the accommodation needed in low rise dwellings. This will avoid any visual obtrusion on the views from Brockwell Park and will ensure that all dwellings will have a close contact with the site. Part of the plateau has been kept clear of buildings to extend the landscape of the Park into the site. The buildings are arranged around this in such a way that the lower buildings are adjacent to it with the height increasing to a maximum of four storeys around the perimeter of the site away from the park.

Real life, in this case, exceeds architectural description.  From the park, the estate is an almost seamless addition to its horizon; from the estate, the park seems almost to be its back garden.  They blend literally in what residents call Teletubby Land for its three green mounds – a central green space which is part of the Brockwell Park Conservation Area.

Another view of estate’s abundant greenery and boundary with Brockwell Park

This was a hard-fought achievement. In presenting the scheme, its lead architect, Charles Attwood argued successfully for a density of 100 persons per acre (against the expected 140) and he used a contour map of the site to identify ‘sightlines’ from the park by which to place the ‘fingers’ of low-rise development. Higher density housing in linked blocks was used to create a perimeter which sheltered the rest of the estate from the noise of Tulse Hill Road.

The rear of the estate backing on to Tulse Hill Road

The council minutes of the committee meeting which approved the design were unusually expressive in recording the councillors’ congratulations to Cressingham’s architects on their ‘bold and imaginative scheme’. (2)

Equal care was taken in the design of the individual homes.  Parker Morris standards guaranteed spacious homes but Hollamby and his team ensured they were as light and airy as possible with internal walls minimised, floor to ceiling windows provided which overlooked green space, high ceilings and skylights.

According to Ken Livingstone, Hollamby ‘passionately believed that council housing should be as good if not better than private housing’. (3) In Cressingham Gardens he triumphantly achieved this.

In all, 290 homes were planned.  A small extension to the scheme at its northern perimeter raised this to 306. Construction began on the £1.58m contract in May 1971 with an estimated completion date of January 1974. In those turbulent times within the building trade, by the summer of 1972 the contractors were already over six months behind schedule and in October work was halted by a national building strike.  The job was finished by direct labour and eventually completed in 1978.

And that, in a sense, should be the end of the story.  The estate has been a good home to generations of residents – as they’ll tell you themselves: (4)

When we came here, we thought ‘my God! It’s wonderful!’

It was like a fairy-tale, so beautiful

Of the 300 homes currently occupied, almost 70 per cent are still rented from the Council (or Lambeth Living in its current incarnation).  While there have been problems of crime and anti-social behaviour in the past, Cressingham now ‘is seen as a safe place’ and its crime rate is lower than surrounding areas.

Overwhelmingly, residents talk of their friendly neighbours and the estate’s strong sense of community – they look out for each other, keep an eye on each other’s children.  It’s what planners call ‘natural surveillance’ nowadays.  It’s really just part of that ‘village-like’ feel that Hollamby hearkened to all those years ago.

This is then by all accounts a success story except for the fact that the estate has, like the rest of us, grown older.  Six flats at the northern end of the estate have been empty for sixteen years due to subsidence.  It’s stated that repairs would cost £260,000 – a relatively small amount given the overall shortage of social housing and some question why the Council has allowed these flats to remain empty for so long.

A 2013 Council survey claimed that 40 per cent of council homes did not meet the current Decent Homes standard. The estate’s supporters query the figure which appears to result from a more general stock review carried out in 2012.

Structural surveyors, commissioned to carry out an estate-wide survey which might achieve ‘a common understanding, concluded that the structural condition of the homes was ‘generally acceptable’ though localised areas did ‘warrant repair’.  It’s obvious that failing zinc roofs and guttering require replacement but the report also makes it clear that many non-structural and drainage problems have been caused by poor tree maintenance over the years. (5)

Lambeth has claimed it will cost £3.4m to carry out such works.  It has also, in the meantime, raised the spectre of regeneration. (6)

Residents of other London estates – such as the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Woodberry Down in Hackney – understand the potential implications of such plans well.  Higher density housing, new registered social housing landlords and increased rents, the loss of social housing units (homes to the people who need them), ‘affordable’ rents which are a travesty of the term, and a sell-off of prime real estate to private developers have all been central elements of the regeneration schemes implemented to date.

Currently, the Council claims a range of options are still on the table, including refurbishment only, infill, various partial redevelopments and comprehensive redevelopment. (7)  Faced with resident protest, it has begun what appears to be a more authentic process of consultation though those most fearful of the regeneration option question its sincerity.  Many residents also question why the estate has been so poorly maintained over many years and fear a hidden agenda.  A number of estates subject to ‘regeneration’ have been run down until demolition was claimed as the only viable option.

The bottom line is that the majority of Cressingham’s residents love their estate and want to stay in it as it is.  An independent survey (carried out by Social Life commissioned by the Council to lead on resident engagement) found 81 per cent wanted to stay in their homes with repairs done. The ten per cent who wanted to move either wanted bigger homes or were fearful of the disruption of redevelopment.  That is effectively a unanimous vote in favour of the Estate – a massive tribute to the vision and professionalism of Ted Hollamby and his team and the Lambeth Council of earlier years.

In 1974, Hollamby outlined a philosophy of architecture that was ‘anti-monumental, anti-stylistic, and fit for ordinary people’.  In 1981 Lord Esher, past president of RIBA, described Cressingham Gardens as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’.  That might sound rather faint praise in a different context but it’s surely exactly the kind of encomium that Hollamby would have wished for and it’s one whose truth the estate’s residents would surely endorse. (8)

If you’re in London, do visit the estate during the Open House London weekend on 20 and 21 September, 2014.   For more information on the residents’ campaign against regeneration and background on the estate, visit Save Cressingham Gardens.

Sources

(1) This – with a range of other resources and thorough description and analysis – can be read at the excellent post by Single Aspect on Cressingham Gardens.

(2) Lambeth Borough Council Housing Committee minutes: 20 January 1969 (LBL/22/6)

(3) Ken Livingstone, You Can’t Say That: Memoirs (2011)

(4) Social Life, Living on Cressingham Gardens: Social Life’s conversations with residents 20.10.13

(5) Tall Consulting Structural Engineers, Cressingham Gardens Estate SW2 Structural Report, November 2013

(6) Cressingham Gardens: Lambeth Housing Standard cost assumptions

(7) Karthaus Design Ltd, Cressingham Gardens Outline Redevelopment Options Study (June 2014)

(8) The Hollamby quote is from ‘The Social Art’, RIBA Journal, March 1974; the Esher quote can be found in A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England, 1940-1980 (1981)

The Save Cressingham Gardens campaign has created a fine video on the estate and its residents available here on YouTube.

For more information, description and illustration of the estate, do visit the blog post by Single Aspect.

Cressingham Gardens, Lambeth: ‘a sense of smallness inside the bigness’

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1960s, 1970s, Lambeth

Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth is one of the finest council estates – I use that maligned term deliberately – in the country.  Superbly designed to make the best use of its site adjacent to Brockwell Park, it’s an apt tribute to the ideals and professionalism of its chief architect Ted Hollamby and a generation of local councillors who believed council tenants deserved nothing but the best.  It’s sad to report that this legacy is now under threat.

The southern edge of Cressingham Gardens looking towards Holy Trinity church

Back in 1974, with regrettable prescience, Hollamby lamented the contemporary tendency for architects ‘to work for business and lucrative contracts rather than local government’. (1)   His was a different generation – part of a post-war wave of architects and planners who believed that ‘architecture should be for the people, ordinary people’. (2)

Ted and Doris Hollamby, shown in retirement at the Red House

Hollamby and his wife Doris were members of the Communist Party (he finally left the Party after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) but his mother’s gentler politics – she was a member of that unsung group, the Cooperative Women’s Guild – was an equal influence, as was his stint as a young architect working for the Miners’ Welfare Commission.

But it was at the London County Council’s Architects’ Department that Hollamby truly cut his architectural teeth:

It was the most wonderful place to work in, we had the most wonderful work to do.  We had a Council that wanted to do the most wonderful things and the sheer opportunity to do them, and that was where those ideas of making a better world, we thought we were actually doing it’

In 1962, he was appointed Chief Architect for the Borough of Lambeth.  Interviewed in the Council Chamber with half the councillors present and appointed there and then, Hollamby describes the process as ‘inspiring’ – he was ‘amazed that there were such interesting and progressive views that were being put out by the councillors’.

One question and response was revealing.  He was asked by Council Leader Archie Cotton, ‘What do you think about that chap, le Corbusier?  Do you think we ought to ask him to do something here in Lambeth?’  Hollamby demurred – le Corbusier ‘would not be bringing to Lambeth something  which was essentially part of its history…What he would be interested in doing is imposing one of his sculptures’.

Hollamby’s own contribution to Lambeth housing would be of a very different stamp but first he was given the freedom to organise his own department, a first for Lambeth as it was to be enlarged and given new powers in the forthcoming reorganisation of London local government.  Hollamby determined it would be ‘multi-professional’, equipped to deal with strategic town planning, development control, architectural design, rehabilitation and conservation work – ‘the whole design field’.  At its peak, it would comprise over 750 architects, planners and construction workers.

In the sixties, Hollamby and Lambeth Council worked harmoniously at the cutting edge of housing and planning policy, pioneering the extensive use of rehabilitation and infill housing with Hollamby himself described as ‘the acknowledged leader in high density housing with low buildings’. (3) Cressingham Gardens takes its place in this pantheon.

These progressive policies withstood the arrival of a Conservative majority – described by Hollamby as ‘very empirical’ – on the Council in 1968.  In fact, one John Major was the deputy chair of the Housing Committee which approved the Cressingham Gardens scheme.

A bigger shock came with the arrival of Ken Livingstone and a new generation of Labour councillors –suspicious of council officer power – in 1972 but eventually a guarded mutual respect emerged. (4)  However, Hollamby could not survive – or no longer wished to – the political take-over by Ted Knight (‘Red Ted’ to those of you with longer memories) in 1978, despite the support of some Labour councillors including Peter Mandelson.  In 1981 he jumped ship to become Chief Architect and Planner to London Docklands Development Corporation, retiring from that position in 1985. (He died in 1999.)

I’m sorry if all this seems to have taken us some away from the focus of this post, Cressingham Gardens, but it seems important to establish this context and remember an era when local government had the power to innovate and held still to a vision of transforming the lives of our people.  In this project, it attracted some of the most idealistic and able individuals in the country; not all were ‘big names’, of course, though we have focused on those here.

Back in the 1960s when Labour and Conservative governments were vying in the number of council houses they could construct, a chief element of that transformative power lay in housing – in razing the slums and building (massively) anew.  In 1964, Richard Crossman, Labour Minister of Housing and Local Government (the terminology is telling), requested London’s new councils to prepare a seven-year housing programme.

Lambeth Towers

Lambeth responded enthusiastically.   Hollamby was not totally opposed to high-rise – though he preferred point blocks to slab.  Lambeth Towers, designed by George Finch, approved in 1964 but not finally completed until 1971, was a flagship Lambeth scheme – a group of eleven-storey blocks which included a medical practice, old people’s club, post office and shops: ‘a microcosm of the 1960s Welfare State’ according to one source. (5)

But central government was insisting increasingly that priority be ‘given to industrialised building systems and the rationalisation of building techniques’. (6) Lambeth architects used large-panel systems in a number of schemes at this time but their insistence on customised designs precluded cost-savings and strong reservations about the suitability of point blocks for families remained.

Here Hollamby’s philosophy of architecture and design was crucial: (7)

People do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings – but do they really like the monotonous, equally vast and characterless suburb?…[Most] people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not.

This approach complemented another of Hollamby’s priorities – community: (8)

We are not just dealing with housing as such.  We are building a community.  We don’t look at this in terms of so many houses. Rather we think in terms of the functions of a community. We don’t, you see, have club rooms for tenants but centres for a community.  We don’t have old people’s homes set aside on their own. We integrate them into other things we are planning.

‘Community’ was, of course, a central theme of planning discourse in the post-war period but it was one more easily fulfilled by the smaller-scale and design detail of Hollamby’s housing schemes for Lambeth in this period.  Hollamby sought, in his words, ‘to create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’. (9)

These principles were trialled in a number of Lambeth housing schemes of the late sixties – at Central Hill near Crystal Palace and in Virginia Walk and Cherry Laurel Walk on Tulse Hill, for example.  How did all this play out in their Tulse Hill neighbour, Cressingham Gardens?

Next week, we’ll look more closely at the estate itself and how these high ideals worked out in practice. We’ll look too at the threat currently posed to Cressingham as ‘regeneration’ is mooted.

Sources

(1) Quoted in ‘Hollamby’s Approach to Architecture’, Building, 1 February 1974

(2) Ted Hollamby, interview with Jill Lever, 1997. National Life Story Collection: Architects’ Lives, British Library.  Other quotations from Hollamby are taken from the same source unless otherwise credited.

(3) Jill Craigie, ‘People versus Planners’, The Times, 14 September, 1968.  Hollamby also appeared in Craigie’s BBC documentary, ‘Who are the Vandals?’, screened in February 1967.

(4) Ken Livingstone later wrote ‘We got on really well, except that I wanted things done overnight and Ted’s nature was to go over the details of every development until it was perfect’.  Ken Livingstone, You Can’t Say That: Memoirs (2011)

(5) Utopia London, Lambeth Towers

(6) Lambeth Borough Council Housing Committee minutes: 4 April 1965

(7) Hollamby speaking on ‘The Architect’s Approach to Architecture’ at RIBA, 24 January 1974, quoted in the Architects Journal, 6 February 1974.

(8) Quoted in ‘Lambeth – Edward Hollamby talks to Peter Rawstorne’, RIBA Journal, July 1965

(9) Quoted in Concrete Quarterly, January-March 1972

For more information on the residents’ campaign against regeneration and background on the estate, visit Save Cressingham Gardens.

If you’re impatient for more description, analysis and illustration of the estate, visit the excellent blog post by Single Aspect.

If you’re in London, do visit it yourself during the Open House London weekend on 20 and 21 September.

The First and Last Council Housing of Bath

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1970s, Pre-1914

If your image of Bath is Regency beaux and Jane Austen (or only that), think again. There’s a working town beyond the Crescents and that town had the slums and squalor typical of its age before 1914.  If the problems were typical, Bath’s response was not.  It became an early pioneer of municipal housing and, as so often in this early period, that response owed a great deal to the zeal and professionalism of key individuals. It was a city too where social housing would have an unusually significant and sometimes controversial visual impact.

Excelsior Street, Dolemeads © Museum of Bath at Work

William Symons became the town’s Medical Officer of Health in 1896, aged 42. His worthy but conservative predecessor had generally taken a laissez-faire attitude to the town’s housing problems but Symons was determined to take full advantage of the new powers granted by the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.

North of Julian Road and little more than five minutes’ walk from the Royal Crescent lay Lampard’s Buildings and within that area, Viners Court.  Here there were ten cottages: (1)

originally two-roomed, but the upper has been divided in two by a wooden partition…In such  cabins as this two or three children sleep in six of the cottages.  As regards water supply, one tap provides for the wants of 54 persons. The WCs in the front gardens, one being common to two houses, are fully exposed to view and are difficult to access by night or in bad weather.  This leads to the retention of excrement in vessels in rooms, which are otherwise filthy…All this within a stone’s throw of some of the best property in Bath.

Symons condemned the housing as unhealthy and persuaded the Council to demolish and rebuild.  After some delay in acquiring the land, plans – drawn up by the City Surveyor, Charles Fortune – were approved in 1902.  The Lampard’s Buildings municipal housing scheme of 36 homes – made up of two-storey houses of two and three bedrooms and four one-bedroom tenements for a population of around 176 – was completed in 1906.

Lampard’s Buildings Improvement Scheme plans, 1899 (taken from Hitchcock, ‘Public Housing in Bath, 1890-1925’)

The housing, though an improvement on the insanitary slums which preceded it, was basic.  The homes had no bathrooms and toilets were provided in outside lean-tos.  It wasn’t a cheap development, however.  While the new housing itself cost £7200 to build, compensation to existing owners, purchase of old properties and the erection of retaining walls necessary on the steeply-sloping site added an additional £9500.

The plans and elevations of the three-bedroom Type B housing, approved by the Local Government Board in 1902 (taken from Hitchcock, ‘Public Housing in Bath, 1890-1925’)

Still, William Thompson, that indefatigable campaigner for municipal housing in Richmond and elsewhere, could claim that ‘a wonderful improvement in the neighbourhood’ had been effected.  (2)

Lampard’s Buildings © Museum of Bath at Work

Symons had also identified another area urgently requiring redevelopment. Dolemeads was a seven acre site wedged between the Kennet and Avon Canal and the river.  Prone to frequent flooding, it was known locally as Mud Island.  The building of the Great Western Railway viaduct through the area in 1840 did little to add to the area’s amenities.

Middle Lane (later Broadway), Dolemeads, in 1901. The first new cottages, raised above flood level, are shown to the left. © Museum of Bath at Work

In 1898 the Council obtained an estimate for ‘the cost of preparing the site at Dolemeads and raising it to a sufficient height above flood level’.  Preparatory works – raising the site, building a new street, providing sewers, drains and foundations would cost £937 before the construction of new homes – 36 houses of four rooms each and four of five rooms – could begin. (3)

Dolemeads © Madison Oakley

Fortune – who described these municipal housing schemes as his ‘magnum opus’ – was again the architect and the houses were very similar to those of Lampard’s Buildings though constructed of a cheaper and locally uncharacteristic red brick rather than ashlar.

The first were opened by the Dowager Lady Tweedmouth – a local resident and Liberal matriarch (a grand-aunt of Winston Churchill and the mother of a Progressive member of the London County Council’s Housing Committee) – in July 1901. Another eighteen – on the eastern side of Archway Street and Middle Lane – were erected before the outbreak of war.

With rents set at 5 shillings (25p) for the smaller homes and 6s 6d (32.5p) for the larger, this was, as Dr Symons recognised, housing for the better-off working class:

There will no doubt be a ready demand for them at these rentals; but it is obvious that they will be occupied by the well-to-do artisan classes and cannot be considered as making provision for the very poor.

Some of the terraces suffered bomb damage during the Second World War and others were cleared in the 1970s.  Still, the area remains a little red-brick enclave in Bath and a testimony to early improvement ideals though Patrick Abercrombie, in his 1945 Plan for Bath, would later be critical of the dull uniformity of this ‘bye-law’ housing. (4)

The 1970s would also see the Council inflicting a far greater affront on some local sensibilities.  The so-called ‘Sack of Bath’ saw the demolition of the original Lampard’s Buildings council housing alongside six dilapidated terraces of Georgian and Victorian housing in a comprehensive redevelopment scheme.

Ballance Street Flats

The Ballance Street Flats erected on the site between 1969 and 1973 were designed by City Architect and Planning Officer Dr Howard Stuchbury.  It’s a development of 350 flats and maisonettes with ‘as much exposed concrete as Bath Stone and the approach to its building was uncompromising’.(5)

Ballance Street Flats

Critics thought its scale and exposed concrete ill-suited to Bath’s architectural context and perhaps to local gentility.  One described it as ‘the most detested addition to the Bath scene’: (6)

Tall, angular, inappropriate, overbearing apartment blocks, crowded again with frowning sham mansards. They demand our attention and insult our senses…ugly, intrusive, and tasteless; out of character and scale and harmony.

They don’t to me look that bad from the photographs and they did, of course, provide good city centre accommodation for the less affluent citizens of Bath.  But public outcry ensured further rebuilding was abandoned – a rather sad last hurrah for Bath Corporation’s ambitions to rehouse its people.

Local circumstances lent peculiar force to a wider national context which was turning away from high-rise housing and towards the reconditioning of homes which earlier generations had condemned as slums.  From 1979 the very idea of council housing at all was being anathematised.

Between times Bath had built garden suburbs, tenement blocks, prefabs, high-rise – in fact, the whole range of housing types by which the national and local state had once sought to provide good quality and genuinely affordable accommodation for its people.

This could not be a flawless record but it was a noble endeavour which fortunately – perhaps surprisingly – in Bath has been appropriately honoured.  We’ll revisit it and if you visit Bath look beyond the Royal Crescent and give respect to the more democratic ideals represented in the city’s social housing.

Sources

(1) William Symons, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1896 quoted in Malcolm Hitchcock, ‘Public Housing in Bath, 1890-1925’, Bath History, vol XI, 2009.  Other detail is drawn from this important source.

(2)  William Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (1907)

(3) Madison Oakley, ‘Widcombe History – Dolemeads’

(4) As noted in Michael Forsyth, Bath (Pevsner Architectural Guides: City Guides) (2003)

(5) Museum of Bath at Work, ‘The Best for the Most with the Least: Council Housing in Bath – a Social History’

(6) Adam Fergusson, The Sack of Bath: a record and an indictment (1973)

A big thank you to the Museum of Bath at Work for providing details of their exhibition on the history of Bath council housing which closed earlier this year.  The Museum is situated near to Ballance Street Flats in an eighteenth-century building saved from those over-ambitious redevelopment plans of the 1970s.

I’m very grateful also to the Bath Preservation Trust for providing a copy of the Malcolm Hitchcock article.  Their page on Post-War Bath contains a number of useful resources on the city’s more recent history.

Bath in Time has many excellent photographs of the developments and redevelopments described here.