The Whittington Estate, Camden: ‘a form of housing…more closely related to the existing urban fabric’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Camden

This is a story about fashion – the changing ideas and shifting trends which shape popular beliefs about housing and the planners’ briefs which emerge.  It reflects also – and perhaps unfashionably in discussions around the architecture of council housing – on how these affect those for whom this housing was intended whose needs (as the latest round of ‘regeneration’ shows even more strongly) are often marginal to the talk and decisions which take place.

Camden’s Highgate New Town redevelopment, begun in the late sixties and completed in 1981 by which time the door had slammed on such municipal dreams, offers as fine a case study of council housing’s fickle fashions as you could wish for.  Follow me on this three-part journey.

Whittington Estate, Raydon Street

Camden itself was becoming ‘trendy’ in the sixties and the new council formed in 1965 made the most of this – it was a (predominantly) Labour borough with the style, ambition and the rateable value to build council housing of the highest quality.  We’ve looked at its fine Alexandra Road and Branch Hill Estates already and today we examine another of its flagship schemes, the Whittington Estate.

Trend One: the demolition of rundown Victorian terraces 

Highgate New Town was an area of working-class terraced housing developed in later nineteenth century.  Multi-occupied from the outset, parts rapidly acquired a poor reputation and, as 75 per cent of the homes lacked bathrooms, it was a natural target for the planners and politicians of the sixties in their aim to rid the country once and for all of the slums which still housed many of our working-class. (1)

We’ll see that aim or, at least, that strategy questioned later but it’s worth remembering just how substandard those homes were and how far superior in space and facilities the local authority homes which replaced them.  The old terraces were seen as unhealthy and monotonous and those who moved out generally felt little affection for the world they left behind.

Trend Two: Low rise, high density

Camden’s planning of Stage One of the redevelopment scheme – what became the Whittington Estate – began in 1968.  The collapse of Ronan Point, a system-built tower block, in May that year had provided a final impetus to the increasing opposition to high-rise but, in this, Camden was ahead of the game.

Instead, the Council was developing what became its own signature house style: (2)

the linear stepped-section block…A form of housing was sought which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground.

The Estate’s pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber are also typical features of the Camden housing schemes of the era.

Stoneleigh Terrace

The design emerged, almost unbelievably, from the diploma project of a young Hungarian architect, Peter Tábori, then in his mid-twenties.  So impressed was Camden Borough Architect, Sydney Cook, with the project that he commissioned Tábori to design the final scheme.

The Whittington Estate comprises six parallel terraces – 271 dwellings housing around 1100, ranging from one-bed flats to six-bed houses – enclosing four pedestrian streets.  The bare description does little to capture the scheme’s attractiveness, firstly the intimacy of scale achieved by its thoughtful use of a sloping site.

Towards Sandstone Place

Then there are the terraces which are varied in form and broken up by staggered throughways to ensure each has a distinct character and appearance; the green spaces and play areas between them; and finally, the more informal planting which provides a greenery that obliterates any starkness that could linger in the Estate’s design.  If this is Brutalism, it’s very domesticated.

Sandstone Place

The individual homes, each with their own directly-accessed front door, received similar attention. Kitchens were placed to overlook the pedestrian walkways and allow supervision of children, anticipating the current vogue for what is called ‘the natural surveillance of the streets’.  All homes had a south-facing outdoor space – a balcony or terrace – and in dwellings of more than one floor living space was generally placed at an upper level to maximise internal light – glazed walls separated the living room from the terraces.

The interiors, mainly designed by Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services, were planned for flexible use – walls were divided into panels by storey-height doors, double doors and sliding partitions allowed for rooms to be opened up or closed according to need.  (3)

Entrance way, Lulot Gardens

If all this gets a contemporary thumbs-up, another nod to prevailing wisdom – the provision of a huge underground car park based on one car space per dwelling – now looks decidedly dodgy and became very problematic.  The full-time attendant planned didn’t materialise as local government belts were tightened and design features – attempts to introduce natural light and multiple entries – failed. Not overall a good use of the £611,890 spent on providing 268 car parking spaces. (4)

Still, in these less environmentally and apparently more status conscious times, Su Rogers, for one, was more concerned that ‘the status symbol of having your car parked outside the front door’ was neglected and only partly compensated for by the planned ‘Sunday morning workshops and “car washing clubs”’. (5)

Lulot Gardens looking towards Highgate Cemetery

For all the good intentions, the actual construction of the Estate was plagued with problems.  Building began in 1972 and was scheduled for completion in 1974.  The original contractors had problems with the scheme’s precast concrete panels and went bust in 1976.  Construction defects then required elements of the scheme built to date to be demolished and rebuilt.  In all, the Estate cost over £9m to build – well over twice the original estimate – and wasn’t finished until 1979.

The practical difficulties encountered in Stage 1 were a major factor in the decision to embark on a very different design for the second phase of redevelopment south of Raydon Street.  Changing tastes were another.

Trend Three: ‘Back to the Future’ – the rejection of estates and a return to streets

In this, and in the main thrust of her critique, Ms Rogers was far more prescient:

It is difficult not to question the policy of building housing “estates”, “areas”, “schemes” isolating one use from the more natural and spontaneous surrounding areas…I wonder how long it will be before the next generation will be appalled by the enormous acreage, albeit low-rise, of housing developments, self-contained within themselves with standard pedestrian decks, coloured front doors, toddler play areas, estate supermarkets and community centres which are the utopias of the local authorities.

Not long was the answer.  Written in 1973, this was an early anticipation of current wisdom – a wholesale rejection of the council estate model rooted in nostalgia for traditional streetscapes and the community which they (allegedly) fostered.

According to Su Rogers, ‘those wilful local authority signboards at the main entrance to postwar estates’ indicated by the very existence ‘failure by the architect to achieve any sort of order’

There’s much to unpick here – not least the romanticised notions of earlier housing forms and the disingenuous assumption that market-driven decisions (determined by class, relative power and wealth) are somehow innocent or ‘natural’.   But it reflects thinking that became the norm and was – without hyperbole – seismic in impact, not just on council housing but on the wider economy.  When planning is the enemy and the unfettered free market an ally, we open the door to the inequality and exploitation, the greed and division, which so mark contemporary society.

That politicians and planners made mistakes goes without saying, of course, some recognised in the very thinking which inspired the Whittington Estate.  Elsewhere, however, even as the Highgate scheme took off, reconditioning of older properties was becoming the vogue, not least in Camden itself where the Council’s wholesale purchase and refurbishment of such homes preserved many for working-class occupation. (6) Elsewhere in London these properties are now the des res’s of the middle-class, unaffordable to all but the most well-heeled.

Retcar Place

We’ll follow the continuing story of the Whittington Estate next week and look at the very different housing built in Stage Two of the Highgate New Town development – a continuing study in the contexts and trends that have shaped our social housing and, as importantly, our perceptions of it.

Sources

(1) Camden Council, Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (January 2009)

(2) James Dunnett, ‘The Work of the Department of Technical Service’ in Camden Libraries and Arts Department, Modern Homes in Camden (1984)

(3) Fabian Wilkinson, ‘The Rebuilding of Highgate New Town’, Highgate Society Buzz, Winter 2001

(4) London Borough of Camden, Housing (Development) Subcommittee, 29 October 1979

(5) Su Rogers, ‘Preview: Highgate New Town’, Architectural Review, September 1973

(6) Owen Hatherley, ‘This Property is Condemned’, Mute, 30 April 2013

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

Council Housing in Plymouth before 1914: ‘the merry homes of England’

Tags

Devon, Pre-1914

As housing emerges as a major election issue, it’s salutary to look to the past and examine some of the earliest debates and issues around social housing – and dispiriting to realise how little we have learnt.

This post looks at the first council housing built in Plymouth after the public duty to ensure decent housing for all was recognised in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.  Much has changed since the worst days of Victorian slumdom but a closer look reveals some uncomfortable echoes with present-day problems and our continuing failure to fulfil that duty recognised – however falteringly – over one hundred years ago. In the nineteenth century, Plymouth’s population was among the worst housed in the country. The first half of the century had seen three major cholera outbreaks and an epidemic of smallpox struck as late as 1872. The Corporation was slow to act – only adopting the 1848 Public Health Act six years after its enactment under pressure from the Board of Health.

Minor improvements followed but the population remained grossly overcrowded.  In 1890, over 16 per cent of the population inhabited two-room accommodation – a figure exceeded in only five other cities.  In 1902, official returns showed 560 one-room tenements in the borough with four persons or more in each and 388 two-room tenements with seven persons or more.  It was overall, in the words of the local Medical Officer of Health, ‘practically a tenement population’. (1)

An early photograph of Looe Street

Plymouth’s problems were compounded by its geography and patterns of land ownership – the Admiralty was a major local employer and landowner but provided little housing and, in fact, impeded housing development by sitting on land it controlled.  In consequence, local rents were the highest in the country outside London according to the Board of Trade in 1908.(2)

Perhaps those problems of failures of land utilisation, housing shortage and inflated rents sound familiar.

At this time, Plymouth was one of the Three Towns (alongside Devonport and Stonehouse) and had become a county borough only in 1888.  The new Corporation was to be more ambitious that its predecessors however, embarking – in 1895 – on its first municipal housing on land acquired on the town’s eastern outskirts at Prince Rock.

Corporation housing on Laira Bridge Road, Prince Rock

The Laira Bridge Road estate, comprising initially 104 flats and houses with accommodation for 824, opened one year later.  Solid, attractive housing, the estate makes it into Pevsner which describes it as ‘red-brick with timbered gables, a conscious adaptation of the English vernacular idiom’.(3)  Streets named after the members of the Housing Committee can be seen as an example of civic pride or personal self-aggrandisement according to taste.

Radford Avenue, Prince Rock

The estate was intended, in part, to rehouse those displaced by the Corporation’s other major pre-war scheme – a significant slum clearance project in the Barbican area, the town’s historic core.  Seventy houses in Looe Street and How Street were demolished, affecting a population of some 813.

© Mary Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’

The first housing was built on the northerly side of Looe Street – a three-storey slate-roofed terrace of painted brick, concrete floors and staircases and wooden sash windows at the top of the street and a more elaborate, two-storeyed, timber-gabled further down – before 1900.  How Street, adjacent, was completed in similar style.

Top end of Looe Street

Bottom end of Looe Street

The rents in both schemes were described as ‘high as against the wages of the tenants’ but ‘generally low as compared with the figure which could be obtained in open competitive market’ – figures ranged from 4s a week for the cheapest two-room flat to 8s a week for the most expensive four-roomed houses.

In Prince Rock, it was stated that very few tenants were earning more than 30s a week – a reasonable working-class wage at the time – and that most were earning around £1. This report continued: (4)

The occupations of the tenants may be described as those mainly of labourers, fishermen, and people of miscellaneous and more or less uncertain occupation. The distinct artisan class is almost entirely absent.

Over one third of the Prince Rock tenants were said to come from the former slums of Looe Street and How Street and most of the others were ‘from the same congested district…and of the same class’. If this was the case – and there seems to be some attempt to put a positive spin on things – this represented an unusually successful attempt to rehouse an inner-city slum population in Corporation housing.

How Street

By 1902, the Council had spent almost £50,000 on its central redevelopment scheme, a figure reflecting the relatively high cost of land, compensation paid to existing property owners and the extent of ancillary works.  But the death rate in the district had been cut by almost four per thousand and the Council was clear that, ‘although the cost of the scheme has been heavy, the good results to the community’ were ‘very solid and apparent’.(6)

It may seem surprising, therefore, that the Housing Committee also concluded that it couldn’t ‘recommend the wholesale clearance of sites in this manner again, except in extreme urgency’.  This brings us to the vexed question of finance.

Plymouth had incurred heavy debts in its programme of municipal enterprise – some resulting from the short thirty-year loans offered by the Local Government Board and some from bank loans.  It was also accused of using earmarked loans for alternative purposes.  As a result, it had been made subject to restrictions on its borrowing. (6)  A private parliamentary act in 1904 regularised its position but required the Corporation undergo external audit.

How Street rear

The Committee had already felt itself compelled to sell off part of its building land at Prince Rock and build ‘housing of a less costly type’ in its central scheme.   Its efforts at this point were concentrated on building tramways (to disperse an overcrowded population) and compelling repairs to existing slum properties.

Even under the restrictive terms offered by the Local Government Board, it was clear (as the Corporation argued) that its housing schemes were virtually self-financing – 1d on the rates met the immediate demand to service debt – and would be fully paid for within thirty years.

There is nothing new, therefore, in the financial short-termism which prevents councils borrowing to invest in much-needed housing or the crude fiscal calculus which proclaims the cost of everything but disregards the value – personal, societal, even economic – of investment in social infrastructure.

It’s good to see the Council recognising and maintaining this heritage.

Nor is there anything new in the housing protest which results.  In March 1900, the Plymouth branch of the Social Democratic Federation convened a meeting to establish the Three Towns Association for the Better Housing of the Working Classes.  Despite the left-wing politics of the Federation, it ‘hoped that the matter would be considered from an entirely non-political and non-sectarian point of view’ and the party worked hard to forge an inclusive, populist alliance.

The origins and dynamics of the current Homes for Britain campaign are a little different but reflect, at least, the belief that the need for good quality housing for all should be a unifying rather than divisive issue.

The problems of creating such an alliance then (as now perhaps) were powerful. Against those in the upper classes (and the more ‘respectable’ working classes) who believed slum conditions were created by slum dwellers, the Federation argued: (7)

The refinement and worthy character which a love of home develops are impracticable to large numbers of people in ‘the merry homes of England’…. If the people were all heroes or angels of perfection they would, of course, surmount all obstacles, and keep themselves perfectly clean; but as they are only human there are some who, discouraged by the disabilities which a grinding capitalist system has imposed upon them, fall into dirty habits.

It’s an argument couched to appeal to those who would denigrate our poorest citizens but it remains a lesson that the makers of Benefits Street and its ilk might profitably benefit from.

Within the Association itself, a major division occurred when the Plymouth Cooperative Society decided in 1902 that its Building Society housing would be built for sale rather than rental. Against those who made the case that this would provide its members security for old age, an opponent argued Cooperators should:

cater for the thousands who would never be in a position to purchase a house. Who, he asked had been paying the interest on the land? Why the poor members, of whom there are hundreds waiting an opportunity to get a decent house to reside in, and here was a chance to help them.

As former philanthropic housing trusts and many housing associations across the country are looking to make money from selling off what they own or building homes for sale to the wealthy, this also has an uncannily modern ring.

Finally, there was the question of what social housing – council housing at this time – should be built.  By 1906 the Corporation had rehoused a little under 1500 of a population (in 1901) of 107,000 and it embarked belatedly on another housing scheme in Prince Rock.

A three-storey block on Harvey Avenue, Prince Rock

Some of these new homes turned out to be hard to let, a fact used by some councillors to oppose further council house building.  The Association investigated and concluded that the rules against the keeping of fowl, rabbits or pigeons offended ‘the Englishman’s love of freedom’.  More practically, the three-storey blocks in particular were criticised as barrack-like with poor facilities – washhouses shared between eight flats and ‘visits to the WCs…in the notice of the whole block’. (8)

A reminder, if we need it, that social housing tenants should never be second-class citizens, excluded from shared space, required to use ‘poor doors’, deprived of the light and views enjoyed by their better-off fellow citizens or – simply – in any way treated as inferior.

There’s nothing new under the housing sun.  The moral, social and economic case for high quality and genuinely affordable social housing remains as compelling now as it was in turn-of-the-century Plymouth. Please support it in this election.

Sources

(1) The quotation – and other detail here – is drawn from Crispin Gill, Plymouth: a New History (1993). The 1902 figures come from ‘The Housing Problem at Plymouth’, Western Daily Press, Bristol, 11 December 1902.

(2) Mary Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’, University of Exeter PhD in Economic and Social History, 1998

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, Devon, Volume 5 (1991)

(4) ‘The Housing Problem at Plymouth’, Western Daily Press, Bristol, 11 December 1902

(5) Mortality statistics are from William Thompson, Housing Up-to-Date (1907), the quotation from the Western Daily Press article cited.

(6) ‘Plymouth Corporation and its Borrowings’, The Nottingham Evening Post, 21 May 1903

(7) AT Grindley, ‘The Warrens of the Poor’, Three Towns Association for the Better Housing of the Working Classes (1906) quoted in Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’.  Other quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(8) Ann Bond,  ‘Working-class housing in Plymouth 1870-1914’, Unpublished MRes thesis, Plymouth University, 2014

My thanks to Ann Bond for providing advice and detail for this post.  Ann will know better than me the errors and omissions that remain.

Housing in St Pancras before 1914: ‘the foulest parish in all London’

Tags

Camden, Pre-1914, St Pancras

After 1945, St Pancras Borough Council built more council housing than any comparable London borough.  That achievement looked unlikely in the early years of local administration which saw St Pancras dubbed ‘the foulest parish in all London’ but by 1914 the Borough, against initial resistance, had built the foundations of a housing record second to none.

Goldington Court

To begin with, that resistance: the pre-reform St Pancras Vestry – which ruled locally until 1900 – was slow to respond to problems of slum housing among the worst in London, so bad that even the Prince of Wales urged reform after an incognito visit to one particularly notorious district.

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884 by the local Medical Officer of Health, Dr Shirley Murphy, showed just how pressing was that need although Murphy himself resigned just one year later, frustrated by the inaction of the Vestry’s Moderate (Conservative) majority. (He went on to become the London County Council’s first Chief Medical Officer of Health – a position he used to pressure St Pancras to act.) (1)

St Pancras Vestry, 1874. The map is oriented south on left to north (with Hampstead Heath) on right. Approximate locations marked for (A) Prospect Terrace, (B) Flaxman Terrace, (C) Goldington Buildings. Click on the map for an enlarged view.

Prospect Terrace, an area of poor Irish settlement, just to the east of Gray’s Inn Road, was the particular focus of concern – an area (almost uniquely in London) of back-to-back housing, with death rates twice the capital’s average.  It was nicknamed – for reasons which are unclear but certainly not complimentary – Cat’s Meat Square.  A contemporary newspaper comment that the ‘Cockney Irish…seem to have the dirty habits of the Irish and the English added together’ was more revealing of upper class callousness than of the hard lives lived by their poorest compatriots.

The Vestry, still unwilling to spend its own money and with a number of slum landlords among its members, at first pressed the London County Council to act under part I of the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act as it had in Shoreditch where the first council estate in the country, the Boundary Estate, was planned. The LCC refused and pointed to local resources and responsibilities

Slowly and reluctantly the Vestry did respond.  In 1896, it proposed its own scheme to clear Prospect Terrace – and Bantome Place to the east – and erect municipal housing on site. Belatedly, in 1898, it also agreed to build a new tenement block to the north (at the intersection of Great College Street and St Pancras Way) intended, in principle, to rehouse a greater number of the 1500 people to be displaced.

The Vestry’s response remained dilatory, however.  When John Burns, the Lib-Lab MP, visited Prospect Terrace two years later he could still declare it worse than the Shoreditch area: in St Pancras ‘a new element was growing up: men who were living on women – the lowest of the low’.

One year later, the radical and campaigning journal Reynold’s News declared: (2)

St Pancras appears to be the foulest parish in all London.  It is indeed a veritable slum….Shame on the disgraceful Vestry responsible for this outrage on civilisation!  The whole of London must point the finger of scorn at such a disreputable public body and ask if it is league with the loathsome and criminal house-sweaters and rack-renters, most of whom ought to be in gaol…St Pancras is the Filth-hole and Sewage-yard of London.”

In the event, it was the Vestry’s successor, the St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council – still predominantly a Conservative body – formed in 1900, which would complete these projects.  It resolved to construct its new northern tenement block first.

Goldington Court

The Goldington Buildings were built between 1902 and 1904.  Externally, the building had – and retains – a certain grandeur with its red- and yellow-stock brick, corner quoins, terra-cotta detailing, decorative gables and mansard roof.  The opening programme boasted of its ‘large courtyard’ and ‘covered playing place for children’. (2)

Internally, it was far better accommodation than that which it replaced but it was basic – comprising 56 dwellings, mostly three-room tenements containing WCs, sculleries and coppers for hot water but no baths.

Goldington Court courtyard

But though ‘housing for the working classes’ (as its foundation stone states), its rents were too high for most of the displaced slum-dwellers.  Cheaper two-room flats let more readily but the three-room (at between 9s 6d and 11s 6d a week) were affordable only to the better-off. (3)  Indeed one of the earliest residents, William Neave, was a commercial traveller and his daughter a short-hand typist…until she became better known (and renamed) as Ethel le Neve, Dr Crippen’s mistress.

Since then Goldington Court (also renamed) has been modernised several times over to suit higher standards and changing times.  Most of the flats, but not all, had baths by 1935.  A major 1964 refurbishment replaced that now ‘dreary asphalt courtyard’ with a garden and increased the number of one-bed flats. Now managed by Origin Housing, the most recent (£3.9m) renovation in 2011 increased the number of larger family-size flats: 21 of the 30 current flats are three-bedroom.

All that, I guess, is a tribute to the sturdiness of the original construction and the resilience and adaptability of social housing.

Flaxman Terrace

After building the Goldington Buildings, the Council cleared Brantome Place and built in its stead Flaxman Terrace – 84 flats and a caretaker’s lodge completed in 1908.  Designed by architects Joseph and Smithem, it makes it into Pevsner where it is described as: (4)

Six storeys with much consciously pretty detail: roughcast top floor, domed corner towers and Art Nouveau railings.

It’s the Grade II-listed caretaker’s lodge, later transformed into tenants’ meeting rooms and currently being renovated once more, which is perhaps most striking. The flats themselves were adapted in 1964 and again in the mid-1980s (from 85 flats to 48) to provide the larger accommodation then in demand.

Flaxman Terrace Caretaker’s Lodge

In 1906, almost twenty years after its demolition had first been mooted, and against the protests of residents who lacked alternative accommodation, Prospect Place was cleared. Its replacement, also designed by Joseph and Smithem, contained 34 two-bed and 36 three-bed flats and a shared bathhouse made available (at 2d or 4d a time including soap and towels) to other local residents.

The new flats were each contained a WC and a scullery doubling up as a kitchen, the latter: (5)

fitted up with a washing trough and an independent copper for washing clothes, a larder, dresser, coal bunk, a small gas cooking range, and also an improved form of range. By lifting up a shutter in the middle of this range the fire can be transferred into the living room which adjoins the scullery, so that the tenants need only light one fire, which will serve for cooking and heating purposes.

Bedrooms contained ‘a dress cupboard with shelves and pegs for hanging clothes’ and the buildings lit with ‘incandescent gas’.

With rents ranging from 7s (for two rooms on top floor) to 12s for three rooms with the best outlook, the new accommodation was mostly too expensive for the 621 residents displaced. As one local councillor declared on the tenements’ official opening in October 1909:

although they would not be able to take in the submerged tenth which were cleared out of them, of course a better class of working men and women would take them, and the others would be able to take their places.

This notion of ‘filtering up’ was common to advocates of council housing at this time but its practicality is debateable.  Most of those displaced in fact moved to slum housing in the adjacent streets or to another area of very poor housing just to the north in Somers Town.

The new Prospect Terrace did not survive, destroyed by German bombs during the Blitz on the night of October 15/16, 1940.  Thirty-two residents lost their lives and the buildings were rased.  After the War, the LCC took over the land for its Kingsway College which occupies the site presently.

St Pancras Municipal Borough Coat of Arms

The Council had built 210 dwellings by 1914 – a not discreditable total in an era when so little council housing was being built but, as is evident, much remained to be done.  That work would be tackled by more energetic councillors in the years to come when the responsibility of the local and national state to secure the decent housing of its people would be better recognised.  These early years, however, provide a contrast and context for a later period when St Pancras – and its successor authority, Camden – would be among the leading housing providers in the country.

Sources

(1) Stephen W Job, Cat’s Meat Square. Housing and Public Health in South St Pancras 1810-1910, Camden History Society (2012).  Other detail and later quotations, where not otherwise credited, come from the same source.

(2) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, Housing of the Working Classes:  Opening of Goldington Buildings, Great College Street NW By Alderman Thomas Howell Williams Idris (mayor) on Saturday 4 June 1904

(3) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1912

(4) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London: North (1998)

(5) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1909

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.