Birmingham’s Interwar Council House Building: an ‘achievement without parallel’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Between the wars, Conservative-controlled Birmingham built over 51,000 new council homes – more than any other local authority in the country outside London.  When Neville Chamberlain, a former city councillor and now Edgbaston MP, opened the city’s 40,000^th council home in 1933 he spoke with much local pride and only a little exaggeration of:(1)

an achievement on the part of Birmingham which has no parallel in this or any other country

While Chamberlain might seem the quintessential interwar Conservative, his name and local heritage stood for something more.  Before his father Joseph Chamberlain, a dominating figure both as local councillor and MP, became a Unionist, he was a radical.  His influence, that mix, remained powerful in Birmingham.  Neville, his more pallid son, represented some of its good intent and many of its contradictions.

The Birmingham Gazette article marking Chamberlain’s formal opening of the city’s 40,000th council home, October 1933

In fact, Birmingham’s record of municipal house-building before 1914 under Joseph’s influence had been dilatory.  The crowded slums of its inner-city remained – and would remain – among the worst in the country.  But in 1919 the combination of a reforming city council and a national commitment to reward wartime sacrifice created an unprecedented drive to build

A survey undertaken under the 1919 Addison Act estimated that 14,500 new homes were needed within three years – an enormous figure though a modest one given that Birmingham’s so-called Inner Ring still contained some 40,000 back-to-backs and 200,000 people living in unfit accommodation.

The Council planned to build 10,000 within three years.  In the event, only 3234 houses were built under the 1919 Act – around 92 per cent of them the superior 3B type with parlour, living room, scullery and three bedrooms.   The first homes occupied, in 1919, were in Cotterill’s Lane, Alum Rock. (2)

Cotterills Lane, Alum Rock

This relatively modest figure – though not uncommon in a period of severe difficulties for the building trades – prompted a Special Inquiry into the Housing Committee in 1922, critical of inexperienced officials and the Public Works Committee.

Arkley Road, Gospel Oak, Birmingham mid-1930s

Responsibility for building was transferred to a new Public Works and Town Planning Committee whilst the Estates Department was placed in charge of managing the new estates which had sprung up across the suburbs of Birmingham in Birchfield, Bordesley Green, Bournville, California, Erdington, Gospel Oak, King’s Heath, Little Bromwich, Quinton, Short Heath, Stechford, and Warstock.

Kenwood Road, Batchelor’s Farm

The Batchelor’s Farm Estate in Bordesley Green was one of the earliest large estates completed – with a total of 1360 houses – and, at three miles’ distance, one of the closest to the city centre, its design typifying the garden suburb ideals of the day.

Ironically, only 3433 municipal homes were completed under Neville Chamberlain’s own 1923 Housing Act.  Birmingham’s Conservative council shared Chamberlain’s faith in private enterprise and went so far as to implement its own generously subsidised mortgage scheme, aided paradoxically by the fact that Birmingham, uniquely, possessed its own Municipal Bank (founded by Chamberlain in 1916).  By 1929, when the subsidy was discontinued, £1m had been loaned to buyers of 3314 houses but, with average repayments inclusive of rates reaching almost £1 a week, the scheme did very little for the ordinary working-class inhabitants of Birmingham, let alone the poorer slum dwellers.

It was under Labour’s 1924 Act that municipal house-building took off in the city. By 1926, with 13,000 council homes completed, Birmingham had become the largest municipal housing provider in the country outside London.  Altogether, it would – by 1933 when the scheme was ended – build 33,612 houses under the Wheatley Act.

A 1931 map of Birmingham’s council estates

Nearly all those homes were built on Birmingham’s periphery, the City’s efforts being focused on new cottage suburbs in green-field sites.  The strength of this commitment was demonstrated in 1928 when the City incorporated 3000 acres of predominantly agricultural land in Perry Barr on its northern borders.

Kingstanding Housing Estate, 1938 http://www.britainfromabove Image epw059310 © English Heritage

This area would over the next decade come to comprise an almost unbroken series of new municipal estates in Kingstanding, Kettlehouse, Witton Lodge Farm and Oscott College – almost 10,000 homes with a population the size of Shrewsbury.

Kings Road, Kingstanding © Martin Richard Phelan and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Another land grab – as suspicious neighbouring authorities no doubt saw it – occurred in 1931 with the acquisition of 4466 acres to the east in Sheldon, Warwickshire.   By 1939, the Lea Hall Estate here comprised 3500 council homes.

The Holmes Estate on Garrison Lane, built in the late 1920s – an early interwar flatted scheme

As yet, very little had been done to tackle the scourge of the inner-city back-to-backs and courts.  There had been small-scale experiments with multi-storey schemes near the centre but the scale of the problem was daunting and, it was said, the ‘Birmingham prejudice against flats’ remained.

But pressure for action was gathering.  The continuing squalor of inner-city conditions grew more intolerable as expectations rose.  The need to clear the slums and redevelop at density this inner core seemed undeniable.  And it was understood that, so long as local wages remained low and living costs on suburban estates high, cheaper housing in the centre was essential for those displaced from the slums.

Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act represented the first concerted attempt to clear the slums and rehouse their population.  The year would also mark the peak of Birmingham’s house-building efforts in the interwar period – 6715 homes completed.  Greenwood himself formally opened the City’s 30,000^th council home in (the Conservative council giving due deference to the Labour Minister for Housing) Greenwood Place, Kingstanding.

Greenwood Place, Kingstanding

In response to the Act, Birmingham informed Greenwood’s Ministry that it planned to build 30,000 homes over next five years.  For the first time, 7000 of these were specifically to target slum clearance and rehousing.

In practice, little was achieved before 1939 but the sweeping changes of the post-war era were anticipated.  In 1935 Herbert Manzoni was appointed City Engineer and Surveyor.  He would become a controversial figure but his vision, energy and impact are unquestionable.  It was Manzoni who would push for what was planned in 1937 as the most extensive redevelopment scheme in England – the clearance and rebuilding of 267 acres of inner-city Duddeston and Nechells.

As Manzoni wrote twenty years later: (3)

to bring back an obsolete district to a high standard…can only be achieved if the whole layout is changed with the proper zoning, and all the amenities of a new and up-to-date development; to rebuild a few groups of houses in an already dingy setting will never do this – the whole area must be new and it must look completely different.

This was a strong anticipation of much wartime and post-war planning wisdom (epitomised in the various plans proposed by Patrick Abercrombie) and a clear marker for the new Birmingham.

Earlier, the 1935 Housing Act had identified the need to tackle overcrowding as major thrust and measure of rebuilding efforts.  In a survey which followed, Birmingham assessed that 13.5 per cent of the city’s population were living in overcrowded conditions (an underestimate given the laxity of the legislative definition).  Most of these, of course, were living in the congested Inner Ring.

A court in Summer Lane in the 1920s

In 1938 a joint report from the Estates and Public Works Committees estimated 37,000 new homes were needed to meet the city’s needs.  It planned to build 25,000 in the next five years;  of these, 15,000 were to be flats or maisonettes.  The Birmingham love affair with the cottage suburb was well and truly over.

The Second World War would derail these immediate plans but it would reinforce their thrust and help create – for good or ill – a new Birmingham which we will examine in future posts.  In the meantime, next week we’ll take a closer look at the form and politics of the city’s new interwar estates and we’ll see how the Chamberlain grip on Birmingham was loosening.

Sources

(1) The Times, 24 October 1933

(2) Carl Chinn, Homes for the People. 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991).  Much of the detail which follows is also drawn from this source.

(3) Carl Chinn, ‘Change came fast with Herbert Manzoni’, Birmingham Mail, 18 May, 2013

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Balfron Tower, Poplar: ‘they all said the flats were lovely’

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1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

In last week’s post, we left Balfron Tower just as its first residents were moving in, among them the Tower’s architect, Ernő Goldfinger, and his wife, Ursula.  That affluent couple moved out after a couple of months.  It’s a cruel irony that Balfron Tower, conceived in the twentieth century as decent housing for ordinary people, will in the twenty-first become the preserve solely of the most wealthy.  How did it come to this?

Balfron and the Brownfield Estate © Theo Simpson, Lesser Known Architecture

Back in 1968, the champagne parties thrown by the Goldfingers for their neighbours made it easy for some to condemn their stay as a piece of show-boating by a wealthy couple who would soon return to Hampstead but Goldfinger was serious in his intention to discover the strengths and weaknesses of his design.  This is clear in his own account and in the careful notes drawn up by Ursula – even if they do smack a little of an ethnographic exercise in participant observation. (1)

Goldfinger at Balfron

For instance, good on detail, Ursula noticed how difficult the heavy swing doors to the bridges were for those with parcels or a pram.  And the access corridor was ‘appallingly cold in an East wind’.  These comments are tempered by her observations of the community: ‘everyone was helpful with the doors, not just to me but with each other or a child, or anyone at all’.  And that cold corridor was:

well kept, I have never seen rubbish in it at any time of day. Milk bottles are left outside the doors all day as people are at work, never turned over or broken. Some people have door mats outside, I have not yet heard that one has been stolen. This happened to me and friends of mine in Hampstead.

As regards the flats themselves, those she had visited were ‘ beautifully kept, people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments’ – although she did add that she didn’t think the fabric designs ‘much worse than those I see at the Design Centre’.

We might mock the condescension here and feel unsettled by her surprise that working-class people could actually behave rather well but it is worth making the point that this was a respectable and law-abiding community.  If things went wrong later, this wasn’t the result of some original sin in the building’s design.

Balfron Tower from St Leonard’s Road © Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

Some of the early faults were corrected. Ernő noted copper gaskets on the windows which made a ‘trumpeting noise’ in the flats when winds were high (they were replaced) and the need for thresholds on front doors (which were added), for example.  They both noted – the eternal problem of municipal high-rise – the inadequacy of the lifts and he added an extra lift to his plans for Trellick Tower, Balfron’s sister in north Kensington completed in 1972.

In general, Balfron seems to have been popular in their early years.  According to Ursula, one woman stated of her flat that she ‘wouldn’t change it for Buckingham Palace’.  Ursula continued:

I have heard many people who live low down say they would like a flat higher up. I have heard no tenant who lives high up say they would like a flat lower down…they all said the flats were lovely…I have never heard anybody express regret for the terrace houses they have mostly come from.

But three months after the Tower’s opening Ronan Point collapsed and the love affair with high-rise was very near its end.  Moreover, Balfron would not be immune from the social and environmental problems which afflicted council estates up and down the country from the late seventies.

For those who hated high-rise and hated in particular the uncompromising architecture of Balfron, the lessons were obvious: ‘high-rise living, at its worst, can be a ghastly and isolating experience’. (2) An intrepid reporter sent to the Tower found evidence to back this up: a 59-year old resident living alone on the top floor felt like ‘a battery chicken in a box’; he didn’t know his neighbours and had been burgled twice.  A young single mother complained, understandably, how badly being ‘cooped up in the flat all day’ was affecting her two pre-school children.

Sign in service lobby

There were criticisms too of poor maintenance.  On the abolition of the GLC in 1985 the Tower was transferred to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.  Its new caretaker described it as ‘a disaster area…burnt-out cars, black soot stains, bin rooms full of old rubbish’. (3)

For all that, Balfron was never as notorious or troubled as Trellick – the same source describes it as having ‘had a boring life’ and possessing a more stable community – and it seems to have recovered quickly.  CCTV was installed in 1990 and that caretaker later reported few problems with vandalism: ‘I know all the kids, who their mums and dads are. I’ll knock on someone’s door if I’ve seen them doing something’.

Refuse chute in service tower

Balfron has worked, not for everyone and not all the time – not a modernist utopia for sure but a decent home to most of its residents.  It stood the test of time structurally too.  There was no experiment with system-building here and the concrete fabric is described as being ‘in good condition’ and many of the internal finishes ‘surprisingly resilient’.  That solid concrete – ‘spine walls and slabs that pass straight from the inside to the outside’ – does make for very poor thermal insulation, however, and requires substantial work to meet modern standards. (4)

Doorway. The original residents didn’t like the letterbox doubling up as a door knocker and installed electric bells with trailing wires much to Goldfinger’s disappointment

It was Grade II listed by English Heritage in 1996 and ownership was transferred to the local Poplar HARCA housing association in 2006 after one of those ‘an offer that can’t be refused’ ballots that marked the housing stock transfers from councils to housing associations of the time.  Tenants were promised new kitchens, new bathrooms, a whole range of repairs and improvements – basically the kind of necessary upgrade that local councils were financially unable to offer.

Poplar HARCA also planned to build 130 new low-rise homes on the Brownfield Estate for which Tower residents would have priority. If they moved out, their former flats would be sold to help finance the overall programme of redevelopment. (5)

One or two households were still holding out in September 2014

In 2010 it became clear – belatedly, it might seem – that the building’s repair and refurbishment would require all tenants to be – in that chilling bureaucratic phrase – ‘decanted’.  And the rules of the game changed.  The option for tenants to return to improved homes has been removed; all flats are now to be sold on the open market.

Poplar HARCA reckons it will spend £137,000 on each flat – an expensive job made more expensive by the need to safeguard the architectural integrity of a listed building. In December 2013 Londonewcastle, which describes itself as ‘a luxury residential property development company’, was awarded the contract to do the work.  In the words of its website: (6)

Whether clients move to us for a hip studio, neighbourhood apartment or luxury penthouse, Londonewcastle creates inspiring, vibrant environments which combine high specification residential services with select retail, restaurant and offices.

Understandably, the City types who move in (Canary Wharf is so close) or the speculators that buy won’t want poor people sullying their space.

God and Mammon – the view to the south and the likely workplaces of the new residents

In the meantime, as Balfron has emptied (one or two families are still holding out), its flats have been let out to property guardians and artists.  This brings in a little income, it provides a little security but it’s hard not to see all of them as an insidious gentrifying vanguard – embedded agents of regeneration, in the words of one critical participant. (7)

The view to the west showing the Chrisp Street market and clock tower and parts of the Lansbury Estate built for the 1951 Festival of Britain

The kind of ‘urban renaissance’ proposed for areas such as Poplar nowadays rests on conspicuous consumption and the affluence of middle-class incomers.  It displaces and marginalises existing communities.  By way of contrast, look just to the west, go back sixty years, and see a different world, different priorities – the Lansbury Estate, a council estate built in 1951 to meet ‘the needs of the people’ and the model then of a better and more democratic future.

‘Local housing association Poplar Harca has been seeking a partner to give a new lease of life to the 145 apartments in the late-1960s brutalist block designed by architect Erno Goldfinger for the Greater London Authority’. Image and blurb from the Londonewcastle website

Defenders of Poplar HARCA would argue they are doing their best to work the system – a sell-off of prime real estate here, some replacement social housing there.  The rules require that we sell off homes in the social rented sector to maintain the ones we have. The same rules imply that some homes are too good for ordinary people.  And, in practice, those rules break up communities and disperse too many tenants far from their original homes and neighbourhoods.

There may be some good people trying to make those rules work as effectively as possible for those that need housing.  But many more are making a quick buck and the rules need changing.  We have come to accept our society’s divisions and the exclusion of our poorest neighbours. The need to defend existing social housing and build anew has rarely been so stark.

The Focus E15 protest at the loss of social housing at the nearby Carpenters Estate in neighbouring Newham

As Balfron Tower, built to provide good quality and affordable housing for the ordinary people of the borough, is set to become a plaything of the hip and wealthy, there are 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing in Tower Hamlets; 1500 households, officially homeless, are living in temporary accommodation. (8)

Its sell-off is a loss of housing for those who need it most.  For the rest of us, it’s a loss of common purpose and decency.

Sources

(1) Ruth Oldham, ‘Ursula Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower Diary and Notes’, C20: The Magazine of the Twentieth Century Society, 1 September 2010

(2) George Tremlett, Conservative housing policy director on the GLC, quoted from a speech to RIBA in the East London Advertiser, 21 July 1978.  The following quotations come from the same source.

(3) David Secombe, ‘Balfron Remembered’, The London Column, September 19, 2014

(4) Will Hunter, ‘The future’s golden for Balfron’, BD Magazine, October 2008.  The quotation is from Greg Slater of PRP Architects who are consultants on the refurbishment.

(5) London Borough of Tower Hamlets, East India Estates Offer, August 2006

(6) londonewcastle.com, ‘Our Aims’

(7) Richard Whitby, Angels, The Phoenix, Bats, Battery Hens and Vultures – The Bow Arts Trust Live/Work Scheme

(8) Tower Hamlets Citizens, ‘Tower Hamlets. A Report on the Housing Crisis in one of London’s most expensive boroughs’ (2014).  For detail on the attempts to remove tenants from the waiting list, read James Butler, Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron Tower Evictee.  The favoured tactic is to use the Rent Deposit Scheme for privately rented accommodation – more expensive and of inferior quality. Thus we spend money on Housing Benefit to subsidise private landlords rather than investing directly in homes.

Rab Harling took photographs of 120 of the flats over three years as a ‘portrayal of a community living with housing insecurity.’  View his slideshow here.

Balfron Tower, Poplar: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’

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1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

Balfron Tower is now one of the stately homes of England – a National Trust attraction no less.  Recently it’s hosted an arts season, a Shakespeare play, and it’s provided live-work accommodation for twenty-five artists since 2008.  And all that, to be honest, makes me sad because once Balfron was simply housing for the local people who needed it – although its size and style and big name architect did always get it special attention.

Photograph taken in 1969 showing original concrete chimneys to service tower boilers (from LBTH, Brownfield Estate, Poplar Conservation Management Plan)

The site for what is currently the Brownfield Estate, in which Balfron is located, had been identified as early as 1951.  The now truncated St Leonard’s Road was one of Poplar’s principal streets; the area as a whole comprised a dense grid of old and substandard terraced housing.  The land was acquired in 1959 just as the new Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach to the east was cutting its own brutal swathe through these old streets.  In 1963, the London County Council asked Ernő Goldfinger – one of the most celebrated modernist architects of the day – to design the first buildings of the new development.

Rowlett Street Phase I, as the Balfron Tower was originally known, was built – by the LCC’s successor body, the Greater London Council – between 1965 and 1967 and officially opened in February 1968 by Desmond Plummer, leader of the GLC.

It is 26 storeys and 276 feet high – in plain construction terms, ‘an in-situ reinforced concrete cross-wall structure linked to the service tower by precast concrete bridges at every third floor’. (1)  It contained 146 homes in all, 136 flats and 10 maisonettes.  The maisonettes were located at ground level and on the 15^th floor – the latter provides the distinct break which can be seen in the otherwise uniform façade of the Tower.

Service tower

The idea of a service tower had been pioneered by Denys Lasdun at Sulkin House and Keeling House in the 1950s.  Its advantage, as Goldfinger pointed out, was that ‘all noisy machines, including lift motors, water pumps, fire pumps, rubbish chutes, and the boiler house at the top, are completely insulated from the dwellings’.   Noise within the flats was also reduced ‘sideways by a 9 inch concrete wall and top and bottom by a 1 foot thick concrete floor’.  It wasn’t so easy to deal with the near-motorway just outside the block.

Service tower lobby

The service towers also contained two communal laundries and ‘hobby rooms’ for teenagers, one for table tennis or billiards and the other set aside – in language which must have been a little dated even for its time – as a ‘jazz/pop room’.  Decades later, in a rather more authentic demonstration of youth culture, the Tower was home to pirate radio stations which made good use of its commanding height.

Living room and access to balcony

Goldfinger hoped that the large balconies provided for each home would provide a play area for toddlers; ‘a sunken play area with slides, towers, water and a sandpit’ was located at ground level with a day nursery to follow.  He acknowledged that ‘common shopping and welfare facilities’ were lacking – as they were in so many estates in which councils understandably prioritised the immediate pressing need for roofs over heads.  This, he said, was a problem which needed to be solved on ‘a political plane’.

As for the height of the block, Goldfinger was sure this was a positive: ‘The whole object of building high is to free the ground for children and grown-ups to enjoy Mother Earth and not to cover every inch with bricks and mortar’.  (2)

Goldfinger was a larger-than-life character (to put it kindly) and this makes it easy to conflate the building and the man and see both as somehow ‘brutal’ – more concerned with a showpiece building than the lived experience of its residents.  In fact, he recognised clearly that:

the success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationship of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.

‘These particular buildings,’ he continued, ‘have the great advantage of having families with deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood as tenants’.  Of the first 160 families in the estate, most were rehoused from the immediate neighbourhood and all but two from Tower Hamlets. They tried, where possible, to rehouse former neighbours together.

Goldfinger hoped, perhaps a little optimistically, that the access galleries – he counted the number of front doors on each, 18 on seven of the levels – would form ‘“pavements” on which the normal life of the neighbourhood’ might continue ‘very similar to a “traditional East End” street’.

Access corridor

Those corridors weren’t exactly ‘streets in the sky’ but he saw their design as far preferable to a traditional point block where only a few flats could be arranged around a single internal corridor.

Such were the good intentions and it’s worth recounting them to remind ourselves that these Brutalist blocks were designed – above all and for all their drama – to provide good homes for ordinary people.  (The same is true of the even more heavily criticised Robin Hood Gardens estate nearby, designed by the similarly controversial Smithsons.)

In fact, it’s often the acolytes rather than the architects themselves who most deserve criticism.  There’s an astonishing amount of writing about Balfron Tower which simply fails to register that it was housing at all.

Then there are the architectural descriptions which seem to celebrate the more dramatic but arguably inhuman features of its design, reaching their nadir in this account of Balfron by Goldfinger’s former collaborator, James Dunnett: (3)

It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artifacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation tower are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror.

Lynsey Hanley, perhaps unfairly critical of Balfron elsewhere, was very reasonably critical of this: ‘is living in a council flat supposed to be delicately terrifying?’ (4)

Internally, of course, the flats were spacious and airy with a quality of fixtures and fittings that very few of their residents would have enjoyed before.  And the views were wonderful.

The contemporary view to the west

Among the first to move in were an unusually affluent couple from Hampstead – Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger.  They moved in to flat 130 on the 25^th floor (now refurbished with sixties kitsch as part of the National Trust tour), paying as was proper the full rent of £11 10s rather than the subsidised figure of £4 15s 6d due from tenants.  They stayed two months.

Goldfinger wanted: (5)

to experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise so that I can correct them in future.

In next week’s post, we’ll see how that experiment went, we’ll assess how Balfron Tower succeeded as social housing for its more usual residents, and we’ll examine the twisted politics which have brought it to its current sad state.

Sources

(1) Ernő Goldfinger, ‘Balfron Tower’, East London Papers, vol. 12, no.1, Summer 1969

(2) Letter to the Guardian, 21 February 1968

(3) James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp (eds), Ernő Goldfinger: Works 1 (1983)

(4) Lynsey Hanley, Estates (2007)

(5) Quoted in Nigel Warburton, Ernő Goldfinger. The Life of an Architect (2004)

The Watling Estate, Burnt Oak: ‘Building the new England’

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1920s, 1930s, Barnet, Cottage suburbs

We looked last week at the building of  the Watling Estate and its early residents.  Watling was seen – for good or ill – as a symbol of the ‘new England’.  Middle-class observers – particularly the new breed of sociologists and planners – asked what type of community was it, was it a community at all? Perhaps what really concerned them was that it should be the right sort of community.

Storksmead Road

As we saw last week, it certainly wasn’t that for many of the well-heeled residents of near-by Mill Hill and Edgware, shocked by this supposed incursion of uncouth slum-dwellers. A 1927 letter to the Hendon and Finchley Times reported flowers stolen from gardens, fruit trees stripped and language that apparently even shocked a local workman. (1)  Children attending the Watling Central School from outside Watling saw the Estate as ‘dirty’ and ‘rough’, according to Ruth Durant. (2)

Watling Central School: class divided its pupils more than gender in the interwar period

All this, of course, tells us far more about the prejudices of middle-class observers than it does of the reality of the Estate or its people and it’s a reminder that demonising caricatures of those who live in council homes are nothing new.  Still, not all the local middle class were prejudiced.  As one ‘Millhillian’ recounted:

On many occasions it has been my pleasure to employ for household duties young ladies from the Watling Estate. In practically every case I have found them to be most diligent in their duties, kind to my children, and exceptionally clean.

Actually, for all its unconscionable patronage, there is something so guileless about this particular letter that it’s hard not to warm to its well-meaning author.  Read the extended version in the footnotes. (3)

Meanwhile, the antagonism or condescension of what some called the ‘snobocracy’ of Mill Hill and Edgware was a powerful factor in creating an assertive sense of identity among early residents of the Estate.

Despite the newness of the Estate, the Watling Resident could depict a strangely traditional view of England

The middle class also feared the new Estate’s politics.  Some named it ‘Little Moscow’ though in reality the Estate was a long way away from the South Wales valleys or Scots coalfields where that term might have had some validity.  There was a small branch of the Communist Party (we’ll come back to them) but the local Labour Party had 250 members in 1936 and Watling returned Labour councillors to Hendon Urban District Council.  When two Communist candidates ran in 1932 they received just seven per cent of the vote.  Even the Estate’s Conservative Association had 150 members.

Parts of the estate could almost justify that bucolic image of England: Colchester Road

To put all this into some sort of final perspective, the largest social organisation on the Estate – with over 500 members – was its horticultural society.

That would have pleased those who wanted a community life rooted in constructive leisure activities.    Their chief tool in this was the Watling Residents’ Association, founded in 1928. In its early years, it was active – and popular among residents – in campaigning for facilities that the new Estate lacked.

Orange Hill Road

The Association’s campaign for a community centre brought it in touch with some of the liberal and reforming currents of the day represented in the National Council of Social Service, the British Association of Residential Settlements and the Educational Settlements Association.  In 1929 these organisations had joined to form a New Estates Community Committee.

With the lure of financial support, the Residents’ Association was persuaded to rename and reorganise itself as the more civic-minded Watling Association in 1930 and include representatives of these middle-class bodies on its board. It also appointed a full-time Organising Secretary whose salary was paid by the New Estates Committee. (4)

I don’t want to be too critical of a middle-class take-over here. There was genuine idealism here and one shared by the local residents who were typically the most active in local bodies – those with experience in ex-servicemen’s organisations, the political parties and trades unions.

It was expressed strongly in an editorial of its newsletter, the Watling Resident, in the following year:

We must all cooperate to make a success of Watling, to develop a community of which we may be proud in every way, to make the most of the opportunities which have been given to us, to play our part in building the new England.

The Association got its community centre – opened by the Prince of Wales – in 1933 after receiving a £2000 grant and £700 loan from the Pilgrim Trust.  The Times celebrated it, claiming rather disingenuously that it would provide residents with ‘some of the normal social facilities to which they were accustomed in their former environment…a hall for meetings, a room for games, a committee room and a kitchen’. (5)  (The Times didn’t report a hall opened later in the same year on the Estate by the Labour Party.)

The Centre depicted on the front cover of the Association newsletter

But despite this apparent success, the influence and attraction of the Association was waning.  The Resident was purchased by 81 per cent of households in 1929 and just 24 per cent by 1936.  This decline in active membership, by an irony that might please more radical readers, provided an opportunity for the local Communists.  By packing meetings, they were able to get the Centre to organise a lecture series on the class struggle and briefly it played host to a Communist Sunday school.  This was very definitely not the sort of active citizenship the Association wished to promote and when the Communists attacked the Association in print they were duly expelled. (6)

The Watling Centre today

It’s a reasonable conclusion to draw that the large majority of Estate residents lacked interest in either the worthy self-improvement the Centre offered or the class war that Communists promoted.  Certainly, a reasonable number continued to attend the earnest evening lectures (on town planning and youth hostels, for example) and the new wireless discussion groups but it is the complaint of the ex-service Old Comrades perhaps which captures the wider mood: they wanted, they said, ‘ordinary things…not the singing of high-brow folk songs and the reading of poetry’. (7)

Other locals missed a pub: ‘there was no means of going to have a drink like the families used to in London. That was part of your community’.  The LCC banned public houses from its estates in this period.  It had in 1928 sought tenders for a ‘bona fide refreshment house for the supply of food and alcoholic and non-alcoholic liquors’ on Watling but its stipulation that employees have no ‘direct pecuniary interest in encouraging the sale of alcoholic liquor’ did not encourage takers. (8)

Montrose Avenue

This, of course, reinforces a second strand of criticism of the new estates’ lack of community – that they lacked the sociability and neighbourliness of traditional inner-city working-class areas.  Some commentators have blamed the comfort of the new council homes and the physical layout of the new estates for encouraging a family-centred domesticity.  Examined more closely, this might seem like an academic variant of a ‘poor but happy’ nostalgia for the slums.  Others lamented the loss of the kinship ties that previously connected working-class women in particular.

There was change, of course; even loss.  As we’ve seen in Wythenshawe, in the Dover House Estate and elsewhere, this was a new working class – more mobile, more aspirational, more private.  Politics, sociology and geography combined with economic shifts that would have altered – and broadly improved – working-class lives with or without the accelerant of the new estates.

Banstock Road

But the narrative should still be challenged.  Firstly and straightforwardly, why this prescriptive middle-class concern for how the working class live their lives?  Who goes into the middle-class suburbs to calibrate ‘community’ and – more or less explicitly – urge ‘better’ ways of living?  Much of the political and sociological analysis of working-class community has reflected the agenda of the observer far more than the concerns of those they would observe.

In any case, against those who perceived a decline of neighbourliness, some Watling residents recall an intense sociability on the Estate: (9)

When I moved in here, there wasn’t a house along this road that I couldn’t go into and have a cup of tea…Everybody knew everybody and everybody’s house was open to everybody.

You soon knew people. If you imagine the cul-de-sac, it was like a banjo, and that was a nice community, you know. Everybody, well people had their keys behind the door and you used to pull a piece of string and go in.

Such memories are partial and may be suffused with nostalgia.  They’re not the ‘truth’, certainly not ‘the whole truth’, but they offer direct testimony and a challenge to the conventional narrative.

In any case, estates evolved.  Robert Elms grew up on the Estate – he describes it as ‘a vast, low-rise, low-rent ghetto in Burnt Oak…a red-brick NW9 Noweto’ – in the 1960s.  But he also describes somewhere boisterous and bustling: (10)

Resolutely and noisily working-class, Burnt Oak had a high street and a street market, a huge branch of the Co-op and a big bingo hall. It also had the Bald Faced Stag, a pub so notoriously rowdy that people still stop me now and ask what it was really like in there.  It was the O.K. Corral with a dartboard.  For all sorts of reasons Burnt Oak had a bad name.  It was a good place.

Add the territorial teenage gangs of the era and the questionable fashion choices and all this was a long way away from the improving community envisaged by earnest interwar reformers.   But then life is generally what happens between the plans and good intentions.

It’s clear, though, from the numbers who read last week’s post and many of the comments, that the Estate is regarded with great affection by many: (11)

Wonderful people every one of them. Gardens were always looking tidy and privets cut, everybody did their bit, no airs and graces, just really nice people that’s what I remember, No regrets being born and reared in Little Moscow.

Watling Avenue, 2014

Meanwhile Watling has changed again – it’s almost 50 per cent owner occupied now and, since 1980, in the hands of Barnet Council. Robert Elms remembers the second-generation Irish families of the Estate and one in five of Burnt Oak’s population still identifies as white Irish.  It is now though a far more diverse community overall –one in ten describe themselves as Black African and over 40 per cent of Barnet’s council tenants now belong to black or minority ethnic communities.

It’s a new England and it continues to make its own history.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Anna Rubinstein, Age Exchange, Just Like the Country. Memories of London Families who Settled in New Cottage Estates, 1919-1939, 1991

(2) Ruth Durant, Watling, A Survey of Life on a New Housing Estate (1939)

(3) The letter, sent to Watling Resident in March 1935 is included in Durant. A fuller version reads:

‘On many occasions it has been my pleasure to employ for household duties young ladies from the Watling Estate. In practically every case I have found them to be most diligent in their duties, kind to my children, and exceptionally clean.

Is it, I wonder, that a small part of the inhabitants of the Estate take no interest in themselves or their families that these [negative] remarks are so often passed by Mill Hill people?  I rather think it is, but it is, I know, the endeavour of the inhabitants of Watling to improve themselves.

If I may say so, the fault lies in the inferiority complex that some of the Watlingites have.  May I suggest that if you dear people would only for a short space of time imagine that you are equally as good as Mill Hill people, and in many cases infinitely better, you would in time  develop a superiority complex and forge right ahead.

It is a wonderfully organised estate, and, with the improvements the inhabitants are making, it ought to be a model estate, and no doubt in time Millhillians will say ‘Those too sweet people of our wonderful council estate’

I know it hurts to be termed inferior, but even the greatest man of earth founded our faith on His very inferiority.  I say this with all reverence.

Good bye and keep bucking up your ideas.

A MILLHILLIAN’

(4) Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (2003)

(5) ‘Community Centre on Watling Estate’, The Times, 18 January 1933

(6) Edward Sewell Harris and PN Molloy, The Watling Community Association: the first twenty-one years (1949).  Sewell Harris, a Quaker, Cambridge graduate and founding member of the New Estates Community Committee, was the Organising Secretary of the Association. He would go on to work in Harlow New Town in 1953.

(7) Watling Resident, September 1931 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

(8) ‘Public Notices’, The Times, 3 July 1928

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

(10) Robert Elms, The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads (2014)

(11) Comment on blog, 5 October 1014