The Honor Oak Estate, Lewisham: ‘A warning for planners’

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1930s, Lewisham

To some, the Honor Oak Estate is better known as Tenement Town, one of the London County Council’s largest interwar block estates and one of its worst.  Criticised for its location, its facilities (or lack of them) and for its low standard of design, it became ‘A Warning for Planners’ – an example of what to avoid as rehousing efforts redoubled after the Second World War. (1)

Greenwood House and Foreman House

The LCC acquired the 30-acre site in Brockley, divided between the Metropolitan Boroughs of Deptford and Lewisham, in 1932. Construction of what would become a 27 block, 1104 dwelling estate began shortly after.  The context – you’ll know this by now if you’ve been following the blog – was two-fold: one, the acceptance that in inner London there was little alternative but to build flats for those who needed to be near work and couldn’t afford the expense of the cottage suburbs and, two, the 1930’s drive against slums and overcrowding.

Foreman House front

Foreman House rear

In Honor Oak, 725 of the tenements were allocated to those displaced by slum clearance and 378 for those moved through overcrowding. (2)  Typically, this predominantly poorer working class could not afford council rents.  The solution for the Municipal Reform Party (the Conservatives in a London municipal guise) was to build more cheaply and thus rent more affordably.

Four of the early blocks were of the so-called ‘Modified Type B’.  These were around one fifth cheaper to build with rents reduced to match and represented, according to an LCC minute: (3)

a successful endeavour to provide suitable hygienic accommodation for the poorer classes at a substantially lower rent than that charged for accommodation of the ‘normal’ type.

‘Suitable’ in this context meant a shared washhouse (fitted with bath, copper and sink) between every three flats.  There were other economies too – stained, rather than painted, woodwork and unplastered walls in hallways and kitchens, smaller rooms, and ceilings lowered six inches to a height of 8 feet. (4)

One of the next blocks built, Turnham House, had baths in the kitchen.  A resident allocated to Turnham had the good fortune to meet the local postman on her way to inspect the flat: she took his advice to move instead to Kentwell House – nicknamed ‘the Mayfair block’ as all its flats had their own bathroom.

In 1934, Labour took control of the LCC and moved quickly to drop the so-called ‘modified’ tenements.  But Honor Oak suffered other disadvantages, not least its location – bounded on north, east and west by the Southern Railway and on the south by a cemetery – and split between two local authorities.

This isolation was compounded by the lack of community facilities.  The Estate’s harshest critic was scathing about this: (5)

Removed from all their own associations – from their neighbours and friends, their favourite pubs and cinemas, from the whole environment in which they had grown and to which they had adapted themselves – the people were left to their own resources, and had practically none.

Elsewhere, Len White wrote – with unconscious if compassionate condescension – that ‘the Honor Oak Estate, far from raising the standards and developing the capacities of its erstwhile slum tenants, has stunted their social development’. (6)

Turnham House and shops

Those tenants themselves recall ‘there was no proper road – it was all sleepers’ and, before a small terrace of shops opened on the ground floor of Turnham House, that ‘the Salvation Army used to come round with basins of soup [or] a van come round where we could buy things and pay at the end of the week’.  When those shops did open in 1936, another early resident complains ‘you couldn’t touch the prices, they were sky high.  I used to go off the estate to do my shopping’.

The Estate’s children were also badly served.  The local school was nearby – just 200 yards away – but across a closed railway footbridge which forced a circuitous mile hike to get to the school.  When the authorities relented, the footbridge was opened for just two twenty-minute periods in morning and afternoon.

The children may not have felt that welcome on arrival.  To the school’s head teacher, they stood out ‘“like red pillar boxes”…identified every time by their inferior physique, manners, speech and dress’.

Open space comprised asphalted courtyards between the blocks and one rough-surfaced playground.  Small strips of grass in front of the blocks were railed off and ‘no longer green’.  At least the Lewisham infant welfare centre was situated within one of the blocks but neighbours in Deptford had to travel a mile to reach their centre.

Some of these deficiencies were recognised.  There were plans for a community centre as early as 1938 – an ambitious £22,000 scheme to include ‘an assembly hall, dressing rooms, canteen, lecture rooms, gym and shower baths’. (7)  But the war intervened and it wasn’t until 1981 that the Honor Oak Community Centre was finally opened.

Dereham House

The social dislocation experienced by Honor Oak’s earliest residents was real enough but for middle-class observers, the problems were compounded by the character of the tenants who, having ‘lived narrow and circumscribed lives in their old environment’, were ‘deeply conservative and ill-fitted to adapt themselves to new conditions’.  There was also, it was said in an early use of the term, ‘a considerable proportion of problem families’.

Len White, the author of this commentary, was a member of a Pacifist Service Unit drafted to the Estate in 1941.  His close engagement with the Estate and commitment to its community is undoubted and yet he remains an outsider with the sensibilities of his type.

Sayer House

What is objectively the case is that on average over one in five of tenants moved out of the Estate in the years before 1939.  Those who didn’t vote with their feet, as it were, and those in particular who remained on the Estate to reminisce forty years later bring their own set of biases, of course but it’s worthwhile to honour their experience and insights too.

To one woman, her new home ‘was like a little palace. Everything was new’.  And they remember high standards, not a ‘sink’ community:

We had rules and regulations on our landing and on our rent cards. You had to have your mat swept and cleaned by 10 o clock and your balcony cleaned.  Each person did the stairs when it came to their turn.  They had to scrub them on their hands and knees but you could eat off them.

And dignity:

If somebody was getting buried, all the washing in the Square was taken down.  All the lines were taken down, both gates were opened for the hearse to come in. It was swept up early, just before the funeral. It used to be dead quiet. And everybody used to pay their respects from the balcony.

You can find your own ‘truth’ among these competing perspectives.

It was in any case a different world after 1945 and we’ll look at that history next week.

Sources

(1) This was the title of a work jointly authored by Ruth Glass and LE White in 1945, A Warning to Planners: the Story of Honor Oak Estate

(2) London County Council, London Housing (1937)

(3) Quoted in ‘A Street Door of Our Own’:  A Short History of Life on an LCC Estate by local people from the Honor Oak Estate, London (1977)

(4) JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (2004)

(5) LE White, Tenement Town (1946)

(6) LE White, Honor Oak Estate, A Talk to the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction, The Architects’ Journal, March 1 1945

(7) The Times 4 May 1938

Brighton’s Interwar Council Housing Estates: ‘Housewives with empty larders’

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1920s, 1930s

In 1921, Brighton was the second most densely populated county borough in the country after West Ham and, as a long-established town, a good deal of its housing was in worse condition than that of the London suburb.  If you associate it with Regency gentry or happy seaside holidays, this blog will show another side – a town with many slum homes and an urgent need to  better house its working-class population. But if council housing was the solution (as was accepted by nearly all in these days), the problem of making it affordable to the poorer working class remained a conundrum.

Brighton Corporation had begun slum clearance efforts back in the 1890s and even built a small number of homes to rehouse – though at rents they couldn’t pay – some of those displaced.   In 1919 much remained to be done; the local Medical Officer of Health estimated 3152 new houses were needed to ensure a decent home for all.  The Conservative-controlled council approached the task with the idealism typical of that early post-war period.

The South Moulsecoomb Estate was begun in 1920 on 94 acres of land purchased in the neighbouring parish of Patcham (incorporated into Brighton itself in 1923).  The Corporation employed two of the leading architects and planners of the day, SD Adshead (Professor of Town Planning at the University of London) and Stanley Ramsey, to design the initial scheme.  (Coincidentally, this partnership was also responsible for the later, very different – but also high quality – tenement scheme in Stepney which we covered last week.) Their design – an estate deployed along a curving road looped around an elongated valley sward – was eulogised in a contemporary issue of the Town Planning Review (which Adshead edited): (1)

This lay-out is situated in an exceedingly beautiful hollow in the Downs, and it is due to the steepness of the hillside on which it is situated, that a very informal system of planning has been adopted. There are many examples in Sussex of villages nestling in the hollows between Downs where a continuous green traverses the whole length of the village, and it is with recollections of these beautiful valley greens that the central feature of Moulsecoomb has been designed.

The Council even provided tennis courts.  The description of one local alderman – ‘homes fit for heroes’ – was hardly original but it seems justified.  However, these early semi-detached, parlour houses were expensive (at around £1120 each to build) and their rents – set between 26s and 32s  6d a week – far beyond the reach of many of the ‘heroes’ the homes were intended for, so much so that the Corporation resorted to advertising vacancies in the London press. (2)

The Highway, Moulsecoomb © Hassocks5849 Wikimedia Commons

Such was the anger and frustration that some locals took to direct action.  Up to 60 empty, privately-owned homes were occupied in the early 1920s and squatted until an appropriate rent was agreed between owners and would-be tenants.

A second Corporation scheme, its layout also designed by Adshead and Ramsey, was built one mile to the east of the town centre in the Queen’s Park area between 1923 and 1926.  This time considerable efforts were made to lower the costs of the 450 homes through omitting parlours, placing toilets on the ground floor and building to a much higher density.

Newick Road in the North Moulsecoomb Estate © Oast House Archive

A further 46 acres of land was acquired from Falmer in 1925 to form the North Moulsecoomb Estate, with better quality homes and a return to garden suburb principles, of 390 houses.   This land too was annexed to Brighton – in 1928 – alongside Ovingdean parish to the east of Brighton where construction of the large Whitehawk Estate began in the late twenties.

Brighton Racecourse and the Whitehawk housing estate under construction, Brighton, 1933 (Britain from Above) © English Heritage EPW041370

At Whitehawk, farmland and open space until this point, the first houses were built under the 1924 Wheatley Act along the western side of Whitehawk Road, Hervey Road (since demolished) and Whitehawk Crescent.  Brighton’s Medical Officer of Health was clear that these new homes would necessarily cater for a relatively affluent working class:

For the most part the tenants of these slums have to live near their work and they will not remove to the suburbs; they are generally so poor that they cannot afford the cost of travel to and from the centre of the town. Another difficulty is rent; the average these people can afford is about 8s a week, they cannot pay 15s a week or even the reduced rate of 12s a week.

He added, less sympathetically, ‘another important point…that many are dirty and unsatisfactory tenants who would quickly ruin a new house’ – a common prejudice of the period that we’ve seen expressed in the Knowle West Estate in Bristol, the North Hull Estate and elsewhere.

Whitehawk Crescent, 1976 © James Gray collection/Regency Society

‘Unsatisfactory’ or not, the legislation of the 1930s which focused on slum clearance and overcrowding forced the issue and when Whitehawk was extended the Corporation had to make efforts – largely unsuccessful as we shall see – to build housing that the poorer working class could afford.  (Through the interwar period as a whole, Brighton would demolish some 900 slum homes, displacing 4400 residents.)

As we’ve seen, this required building more cheaply and to lower standards. A scheme of 300 homes on the Estate comprised two-bedroom houses of 620 square feet in area and three-bedroomed of 700, built at a density of 14.5 per acre and with an average frontage of 20 feet.  All this brought the construction cost per house down to £204 and allowed an average rent of 9s (including rates).  The Borough Engineer asserted, however, that despite such economy efforts had been made to create an attractive overall appearance: (4)

The general design of the houses is made up of several designs intermixed, with the front elevations treated with rough cast in various colours and designs and Sussex bricks, so as to produce an attractive whole and thus avoid the too frequent dull uniformity in design without necessarily increasing the cost.

Later planners were more critical and standards were higher.  A radical redesign of the Estate began in 1975 which involved demolition of many older houses, the construction of some 1440 new homes and a new street scheme replacing some longer roads with a series of cul-de-sacs.  Still, there are those with long memories of the Estate who think the changes ‘no improvement at all’. (5)

Hervey Road in the 1970s, just prior to demolition © James Gray collection/Regency Society

Back in the 1930s, Brighton was redoubling its efforts to house displaced slum dwellers.  Housing was extended up Bevendean Valley to form the Bevendean Estate in the early thirties and land was purchased in 1935 to create the East Moulsecoomb Estate and in 1936 for the Manor Farm Estate, the latter to house principally those displaced by the Carlton Hill demolitions.

An undated photograph of the Carlton Hill area © tarnerhistory.org

But all was not well.  In 1933 it was reported that 21 per cent of tenants from Carlton Hill who had taken houses at Whitehawk had returned to central Brighton for financial reasons.  By the late thirties, concern about rents and working-class poverty on the new estates had become a major local issue.  The local paper, the Brighton Gazette, took up the cause, tellingly headlining one of a series of articles, ‘Rehousing slum dwellers has made poverty’. (6)

East Moulsecoomb Estate © Tony Mould, mybrightonandhove.org.uk

Two years later, a reporter wrote – of council homes – that he had:

heard of housewives with empty larders, of sick and ailing people in homes without the bare necessities of life, of children who sit a nights in lightless, fireless kitchens, because there is no money for the gas-meter, no coal for the grate.

Though such a description might be taken as journalistic overstatement, it is given credibility by a more objective study conducted in the same year.  Marion Fitzgerald found that of the 79 county boroughs in the country only Croydon and Newcastle had a higher number of properties let at over 12s a week.  On the South Moulsecoomb Estate – the most expensive to build – rents reached 27s a week.  Unsurprisingly, it was tenanted by ‘the better paid working classes and some middle class people’ who could afford such levels.

In North Moulsecoomb, three-bedroom parlour houses were let at 14s 4½d per week and her figures suggest that even here up to 45 per cent of residents were only able to meet their living expenses by economising on diet.  In East Moulsecoomb, built as a slum clearance estate, rents were lower – at 12s 7½d for a two-bedroom house and 13s 7½d for a three-bedroomed but these lower figures applied only to those displaced by slum clearance who were granted a 25 per cent rebate. (7)

When war broke out, this issue remained unresolved.  Brighton had built 4285 new council homes between the wars but Corporation policies had done little to alleviate the working-class poverty of which housing was only one aspect.  After 1945 new dynamics shaped working-class lives.  Many of these for a period of time – full employment, increased and more widely spread affluence, and a strengthened welfare state – have been positive.

Whitehawk Way © Paul Gillett and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

But not all have benefited and earlier gains have been lost.  In 2010, the Whitehawk Estate was one of the most deprived areas in the country – in the bottom five per cent nationally. I could quote employment figures, educational attainment statistics and so on but let’s get this down to basics – men on the Estate die on average seven years earlier than their counterparts in the rest of Brighton. (8)  The struggle to ensure that our social housing provides not only a roof but a measure of social equity remains.

Sources

(1)  ‘The Site Planning of Housing Schemes’,  The Town Planning Review, Vol. 8, No. 3/4, December 1920

(2) Ben Jones, ‘Interwar Developments’ on the East Brighton Bygones website

(3) Ben Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: the Practices and Politics of Council Housing in Mid-twentieth-century England’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2010

(4) David Edwards, Borough Engineer of Brighton, ‘Some Recent Municipal Activities at Brighton’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, Vol. 53, 1932

(5) East Brighton Bygones, ‘Whitehawk’

(6) Brighton Gazette, 20 November 1937 quoted in Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization’.  The quotation which follows taken from the same source, is from the Brighton Gazette of 1 April 1939

(7) Marion Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb (Brighton, 1939) quoted in Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization’

(8) Helen Drew,   ‘Whitehawk “one of the most deprived areas of Britain”’, The Politics Show, BBC Southeast, 12 July 2010

My thanks to the Regency Society with the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove for allowing use of images from the James Gray collection.

My Brighton and Hove is a superb website which contains more history and many memories of Brighton’s council housing over the years and much else.

John Scurr House, Stepney: ‘the greatness of the country lies in the houses of the people’

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1990s, Regeneration, Tower Hamlets

As we saw last week John Scurr House was opened – to much fanfare and with justified local pride – in July 1937. Despite the plaudits, ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’ (as one press headline of the day described them) were always most importantly homes to local people but as they became less new they also became very far from luxurious.  In troubled times, even that notion of ‘local people’ became a contested one. Nevertheless, in 2015 we can say the estate has survived these crises and remains to provide high-quality housing that Stepney’s pioneering reformers would recognise and respect.

The East End has long been home to a diverse population and one of the first families to move in to John Scurr House were the Kings – a black family resident in the borough for three generations.  War would find Mr King serving in the merchant navy and a son in the Royal Navy but when his daughter, Amelia, volunteered for the Women’s Land Army in 1943 she found herself rejected by the Essex committee, unacceptable, it was said, to local farmers.

The case was raised in Parliament by new local MP and serving councillor (in fact, the chair of the Housing Committee which had built John Scurr House) Walter (‘Stoker’) Edwards. He elicited an apology and a repudiation of the ‘colour bar’ from the Minister of Agriculture but there was no restitution for Amelia. (1)

Thirty years later, the ‘luxury flats’ of the 1930s were outdated, their decline compounded by systematic neglect by the successor landlord, Tower Hamlets Council, at a time when they were slated for demolition under a new road scheme. In fact, the planned Northern Relief Road was abandoned in 1982 but the deterioration of the Estate was so real and so severe that tenants’ complaints of faulty electrical wiring, inadequate heating, lack of washbowls in bathrooms, damp, and cracked and distorted window frames were formally upheld by the Local Government Ombudsman. (2)

The plan of John Scurr House from the programme of its official opening in 1937.

While the Kings lived in John Scurr House, it remained a showpiece development but, as the estate declined and as the district became a centre of Asian immigration, issues of racial discrimination would resurface.  The historic reality is that incoming migrants have traditionally been forced to accept the worst of the nation’s housing.  This, however, this took a particularly sinister turn in the Tower Hamlets of the 1980s when many Bengali families were desperate for accommodation – by 1987 they formed some 90 per cent of the officially homeless in the Borough.

Accusations of officially-sanctioned and systematic discrimination against ethnic minorities in the allocation of Tower Hamlets’ council housing led, between 1984 and 1985, to a formal investigation into the Council’s housing policies by the Commission for Racial Equality.  The CRE report, published in 1988, concluded that: (3)

the housing department over a period of 10 years had systemically allocated Asian applicants to poorer quality housing: specifically, John Scurr House where 49 per cent of the estate population were Bangladeshi compared to 9 per cent in the borough.

While the roots of discriminatory practice lay in earlier Labour administrations, the CRE argued that it had been maintained by the Liberal majority which came to power in 1986.  That majority would survive until 1994 and it advanced a populist localism that most commentators saw as a barely disguised racial politics. But that’s another story… (4)

Back to John Scurr House, in 1985 it had been decided to sell off the estate only for the decision to be reversed a year later.  In 1987, when only 23 of the 119 flats were occupied, it was agreed to pass the day-to-day management of the the blocks to a number of local housing associations; 59 of the flats to be set aside for homeless families nominated by the Council, the rest being let to single homeless people.

A rear view during the estate’s refurbishment in 1995

In 1993, these new residents – some of whom had lived in their flats for five years – faced eviction when the Council assembled a financial package that would finally enable the refurbishment of the estate.  The implementation of the £6.6m scheme (supported by a £2.8m grant from the Government’s Estate Action programme and funding from, amongst others,  the Housing Corporation and the London Docklands Development Corporation) followed between 1996 and 1998.

The line from a contemporary press report – ‘An eyesore estate branded unfit for humans is to get a new lease of life’ – conveys just how far the once proud estate had fallen. (5)

John Scurr House front elevation, 1937

John Scurr House, 2014

The £3.8m contract was won by Architype and included the provision of a new roof and windows, new kitchens and bathrooms, modernised heating systems, insulation and ventilation and a new entrance with concierge services.  The number of flats in the northern block was reduced from 84 to 72.

John Scurr entrance, 2014

The ‘light lid’ powder-coated steel roof jutting 2m out over the fifth-floor walkway is particularly striking; the ‘portholes’ (ventilating the stairways) and external flues offer a maritime touch, perhaps as a nod to the area’s docklands past. (6)

As you can see, it’s a radical transformation and one that will probably disappoint architectural purists.  The white and pastel, ‘industrial’ appearance of the refurbished block’s façade is eye-catching but critics might argue it lacks the strong lines and ‘honesty’ of the original modernist design.  I’m not an architect so I’ll let others adjudicate between conflicting architectural views of style and integrity – so long as they remember that for its residents John Scurr is not primarily a piece of architectural history but a home.

The southern block was demolished, replaced by six houses and six flats.  Sixteen new housing association self-build homes were built on an adjacent site.  The new flats were transferred to local housing associations.  Since 2000, two thirds have been managed by Tower Hamlets Community Housing (THCH – a local housing association which operates exclusively in the Borough), the rest by Newlon Housing.

Housing erected on site of demolished south block, 2014

The estate’s proximity to the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel and gritty Commercial Road ensure the area remains for the time being a relatively poor and ungentrified part of the capital and THCH serves a diverse and vibrant community. Still, a two-bed flat in the block is currently on sale for £270,000 and, to the agents, it’s close enough to ‘sought-after Narrow Street and the popular Thames-side bars and restaurants’ to offer future pickings.

The Stepney councillors who celebrated its opening back in 1937 couldn’t have anticipated this or the turbulent future of their flagship project.  They would take pleasure surely in the fact that John Scurr House continues to provide much-needed housing for local people and might recall the opinion expressed at the estate’s official opening that ‘the greatness of  the country lay in the houses of the people’.

Sources

(1) Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) and Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 23 September 1943 vol 392 cc390-1

(2) Lucy Ash, ‘Block was doomed’, East London Advertiser, 26 December 1986

(3) Jennifer Maureen Lowe, Social Justice and Localities: the Allocation of Council Housing in Tower Hamlets, University of London Queen Mary College, PhD Thesis 2004

(4) Sarah Glynn, ‘Playing the Ethnic Card – politics and segregation in London’s East End’ (2008)

(5) ‘Hello, John, got a new look?’, East London Advertiser, 3 March 1994

(6) Tender details from Construction News, 29 September, 1994 and David Birkbeck, ‘Economical with the Roof’, Building Homes, July 1997, Issue 7

My thanks to Tower Hamlets Community Housing for additional detail and resources.

John Scurr House, Stepney: ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’

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1930s, Multi-storey, Tower Hamlets

John Scurr House still looks quite special as you glimpse it from the DLR at Limehouse but it has an even more extraordinary history, both in its politics and its architecture.  It started life as a design showpiece – a daring example of municipal modernism and an exemplar of high quality tenement living for council tenants.  It came near to ending it as a slum but for its recent rescue and striking refurbishment.  This blog tells that story, one involving many of the leading names in social housing and addressing many of its key issues.

John Scurr House, 2014

The scheme was officially opened in July 1937 but the journey to that proud day for the Borough of Stepney was a complex one.  That the densely populated industrial borough needed new housing was not in doubt but what was desirable and what was practicable were fiercely controversial.

An aerial view of Shadwell and Stepney from the south-east in 1946. John Scurr House can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner. EAW000637 Britain from Above © English Heritage

Labour first swept to power in the Borough in 1919 but the local party felt its housing plans thwarted by government red tape, so much so that the mayor wrote to The Times: to Clement Attlee, it was clear that ‘either there is some influence at work endeavouring to prevent local authorities carrying out their work…or that Messrs Dilly and Dally have not yet been demobilised’. (1)

Ministry advice to make best use of the London County Council’s new suburban estates was also rejected – local dockers needed to be near their place of work and the Borough’s Jewish population near synagogues and kosher markets. (2)  However, it was estimated that there were just four acres of undeveloped land in Stepney and this in scattered pockets.  At this time London Labour firmly opposed what might seem the inevitable solution to this quandary – multi-storey blocks.  The Party’s members believed working-class families needed – and deserved – cottage homes.

In the event, Labour narrowly lost power in Stepney in 1922 to an anti-Socialist Ratepayers’ grouping whose leading figures were unusually both idealistic advocates of slum clearance and supporters of good quality tenement building. These combined in the Limehouse Fields scheme – an officially declared Unhealthy Area of ten acres and the largest borough slum clearance project in the capital – in which they proposed to build a ten-storey block of maisonettes.

Wainwright House in Wapping, opened in 1932, is an example of the more conventional five-storey walk-up blocks of the period

To counter the usual opposition to such ‘barracks-like’ constructions, this was to be a model of its kind, designed by leading housing reformers, Major Harry Barnes and William Robert Davidge. (3) Their plans included lifts, wide access galleries (almost a prefiguring of much later deck-access schemes) as well as private balconies, decorative facades and two acres of playground. The development’s principal supporter, Councillor JD Somper, even suggested that ‘fowl runs’ might be added to the drying areas and communal laundries that the scheme already included.

Despite such ambitions, Labour remained opposed to flats and scuppered the scheme when they regained power in Stepney in 1925. Still, the scale of local problems and the impossibility of building cottage estates in the Borough demanded some pragmatism.  The new Labour council commissioned Ewart G Culpin and Steuart Bowers – one of the most important architectural practices in public housing in the interwar period – to design a model six-storey maisonette block.

Riverside Mansions, 2014

Riverside Mansions in Wapping included lifts, clubrooms, laundries and drying areas as well as an on-site shop, maternity and child welfare centre and gymnasium. Its appearance was softened by the use of different exterior brick treatments and a mansard roof.

The battle over high-rise was not over yet however.  When Stepney Labour lost power in the debacle of 1931, a Conservative-led council commissioned another of the leading architectural partnerships of the day, SD Adshead and Stanley Ramsey, to draw up plans for another showpiece project.  The ten-storey scheme selected was opposed by Labour but it would form the basis, when Labour regained power yet again in 1934 (securely this time, winning all 60 seats on the council) of the modified six-storey project which would become John Scurr House.

John Scurr

John Scurr House was named after the Poplar councillor – imprisoned for his part in the 1921 Rates Revolt – and former Mile End MP who had died in 1932. It was built at a cost of £88,358 and contained 119 one to four-bedroom flats in two separate blocks but it was a more impressive scheme than the dry figures suggest.  The local press celebrated ‘Stepney Council’s New Luxury Flats’ – as well they might: the modernist scheme became the first municipal development to be accepted for the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy.

John Scurr House front elevation, 1937

In functional terms, the report praised the: (4)

automatically controlled passenger lift in each block; a system of refuse disposal by means of chutes from all floors into central containers, a splendid children’s playground on the roof of the north block; a gravel courtyard with tarmac pathways surrounding; a large window lighting the central staircase made of concrete and glass; hot water supply to each individual flat.

In course of construction before the days of health and safety – a good view of the buildings’ steel framework

In design terms, it was the light steel frame construction and appearance which attracted attention, particularly the sweeping access galleries running around the outside of the building (rather than being hidden at the back as was the practice in most contemporary LCC tenement blocks) in true modernist fashion.  Most flats also enjoyed small private balconies.

Interior of north block showing part of courtyard, 1937

Meanwhile, in the vital social context, it was estimated in 1937 that over 8000 Stepney families were living in overcrowded conditions and the Borough still contained 6134 illegal underground rooms.

Arbour House in Whitechapel may not be as strikingly modernist as John Scurr House but it’s another reminder of Stepney Borough Council’s architectural ambitions

Stepney’s housing programme of that year – the Borough also opened the impressive 76-flat Arbour House in Arbour Square – could only make a small dent in a problem of such scale.  The LCC, which rehoused 280 families (233 of whom outside the Borough, mostly on the Becontree Estate), could do little more. (5)

It was not surprising that the Whitechapel MP JH Hall declared at the ceremonial opening of John Scurr House that:

slums and overcrowding were tragedies and the greatness of  the country lay in the houses of the people.  It was sad to think that many people in Stepney had places not fit to be called houses.

Nor is it surprising that London Labour, in power in the LCC since 1934, had by this time shifted decisively in favour of multi-storey tenement building.  A housing research group, set up by Herbert Morrison prior to that election, concluded that in London ‘block dwellings [were] inevitable’ and that, furthermore, it would be unwise to be ‘dogmatic’ regarding their height. Among its members were Harry Barnes and Ewart Culpin and, no doubt, the Stepney experience had played its own part in changing opinions.

But while John Scurr House had played a significant role in London’s wider housing history, its own longer-term future was a troubled one. We’ll examine that story next week.

Sources

(1) Clement Attlee, ‘Housing in Stepney’, The Times, 12 April 1920

(2) Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, ‘Stepney and the Politics of High-Rise: Limehouse Fields to John Scurr House, 1925-1937’, London Journal, vol 34, no 1, March 2009

(3) Harry Barnes was a Liberal politician who would briefly serve as a Labour chair of the LCC’s Town Planning Committee before his death in 1935; WR Davidge was President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in1926-27.

(4) Eastern Post and City Chronicle, July 31 1937

(5) Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health FR O’Shiel, 1937

The contemporary photographs are taken from the official opening programme placed on the Facebook page of Tower Hamlets Community Housing. My thanks to them for sharing this resource and to the invaluable Tower Hamlets Local History Library.