The Canley Estate, Coventry: ‘The Place Where I Grew Up’

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1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs

I’m very pleased to feature another fine guest post (and would welcome others), this one from Dr Ruth Cherrington.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

I wasn’t sent to Coventry: I was born there. Though I left a long time ago I regularly visit family still living there and the familiar sites of the estate where we grew up: Canley. We can take ourselves out of our childhood homes, but do they ever really fade away from our own sense of attachment and place? For me, the answer is a resounding no. I’m still very much a ‘Canley kid’ at heart after all these years.

I’ve seen many changes, of course. But the constants are clearly visible such as the strong element of working class identity that remains, though now embattled in many ways. I’ve been in a good position to observe the life and times of Canley given my lifetime’s experience of this former council estate. From my recollections and observations I have compiled a two-part blog about the place where I grew up. I write about what made Canley similar to other post-war housing estates but also what made it special not only to me but also in historical terms.

 What and Where is Canley?

Canley existed long before Coventry Corporation bought 20,000 acres of the land from local landowning family, the Leighs, in 1926. It is mentioned in Medieval documents, linked to the nearby Fletchampstead, Westwood, and Stoneleigh estates. These historical aspects are important, reflected as they are in names of roads and schools but also in the attempt to design into the new estate a village feel.

The Canley we now see is largely the result of a pre-war vision of a ‘planned neighbourhood unit’ on the outskirts of Coventry. Building began in the 1930s mainly to rehouse people from city slum clearance programmes but the war halted construction. It continued with renewed haste thereafter, especially given the severe bombardment Coventry suffered. The first bombs to fall actually landed in the industrial area of Canley on August 18^th 1940.

Coventry city centre after the 14 November 1940 air raid

Then came the blitzkrieg, lasting until mid-November with three quarters of the city centre destroyed. This included the 14^th century cathedral, with only its shell remaining once the fires had died out after the single most concentrated attack on any British city during the War on the night of November 14^th, 1940. A new word was coined to describe such sustained heavy bombing – to ‘Coventrate.’

Residential areas were badly damaged such as the older district of Foleshill where my parents, still single, were living with their families. Over 41,000 homes were damaged, many destroyed completely and 550 people lost their lives. It has been said that the German bombers continued what the town planners had begun before the war – the wholesale modernisation of the city. Coventry Corporation had intended to implement grand designs for a new city centre surrounded by healthy suburban estates such as Canley.

When Coventry was the city of the future: the Precinct, 1955

The war left a scarred landscape and a severe depletion of the housing stock. Resuming the construction of Canley was part of the post-war drive to provide new homes. The pre- and post-war parts of the estate not surprisingly have a different look to them reflecting the changed contexts of the grand 1930s plans and the pressing post-war needs.

Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers’ fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45.

Canley Ford circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

Canley Ford Milk bar – a popular place for kids in the summer holidays circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

There were two woods very close to our house. Ten Shilling Wood was so named because that was how much a licence cost to shoot there in former times. Park Wood was at the top of our street though we never called it by its proper name: I’m not even sure we knew it then. To us it was the ‘top wood’ with Ten Shilling Wood being the ‘bottom’ one. Park Wood was also known as the dark woods or the bluebell wood because of the wonderful displays in springtime when we would collect huge bunches for our mothers. Both woods were remnants of the ancient Forest of Arden.

Canley has three main ‘boundaries.’ Fletchamstead (N.B. Modern spelling) and Kenpas highways, comprising part of the Coventry Bypass (A45) was one of these. This major route links Coventry to Birmingham in one direction, and ultimately to London, about 100 miles away, in the other.

There were older parts of Canley on the other side of the Bypass, however, including some pre-war council housing along Burnsall Road from the early 1930s estate construction period.

Burnsall Road, November 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

There is also Canley station, formerly Canley Gates, opened mainly for workers at the Standard Motor Works in 1940. This is on the main London to Birmingham railway line, which forms another Canley boundary. Constructed between 1833 and 1838, the railway cut through number of farmer’s fields and several small bridges and crossing points were put in place as access for the farmers and their livestock. Rather than being used to move cows between fields, it’s now a main thoroughfare from Canley to Tile Hill and beyond.

Former cattle crossing point under the London to Birmingham Railway Line at Wolfe Road, Canley (Ruth Cherrington Aug. 2006)

Charter Avenue, the main road into and out of the estate, forms the third boundary. It begins at a junction with the A45, marked conveniently by the Phantom Coach pub. This is typical of many built in the interwar years, being spacious when compared to older city centre ‘boozers’, with gardens back and front. It was intended to serve the expanding new estate as well as to pick up passing trade from thirsty travellers on the A45.

Phantom Coach Pub, Charter Avenue/A45, Canley. October 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

Moving westwards along Charter Avenue, we see all key Canley estate roads branch off to the right hand side in ribbon style development. The road is a dual carriageway as far as Mitchell Avenue, where building stopped before the war. This also represents an internal ‘border’ within Canley, marking the older from the newer part, the top from the bottom end of the estate. Charter Avenue continues as a single carriageway from there till it ends about a mile later at the junction with Cromwell Lane. This marks the edge of Canley and in the past of Coventry City’s limits.

Charter Avenue is Canley’s main road and buses to and from the city centre still pick up passengers from stops along here as they have always done.

Charter Avenue, looking towards bus stop at junction with Wolfe Road (Ruth Cherrington, 2006)

Canley’s Early Residents

Coventry was in many ways a ‘city of factory workers’ with so many engineering plants, some of them in the Canley area. It was arguably one of the most industrial cities in Europe and my own ancestors had mostly pitched up in Coventry looking for industrial work of various kinds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Canley was also to be all council housing, offering decent homes for the workers many of whom were living in overcrowded conditions in older parts of the city. Some residents were to be migrants from other areas of the country in search of work. Industrial Coventry had long been a magnet for those thrown out of jobs, whether from the mills of Lancashire, shipbuilding yards of Tyneside or collieries of South Wales. Coventry welcomed skilled and unskilled labour and Canley would count among its own resident a broad mix of people from across Britain.

The ideal was fair rent, with no family expected to live in a house too small for its size, with the council as a non-exploitative landlord. Acting upon a belief that ‘environment makes the slum dweller’, the Corporation wanted to make ‘better’ people on a new estate with a ‘healthy and pleasant environment.’

Building an Estate of ‘Happiness and Health’

An article in the Midland Daily Telegraph in 1938 (May 17^th) declared that ‘Canley Contributes to Coventry’s Happiness and Health.’ It was referring to the 150 houses already occupied in the Prior Deram Walk and Queen Margaret’s Road area. The layout of the new streets and houses led the writer to conclude that:

Canley is, without a doubt, a very healthy housing estate. It is already becoming attractive in appearance, for many of the front gardens of the first 100 houses built are a mass of colour.

Clearly the residents had been very busy in their gardens.

The good-sized gardens front and back were for the men to grow not only flowers but also vegetables and to breathe in fresh air. They were for kids to play in but there were plenty of planned green spaces as well.

The houses were mostly redbrick, semi-detached, typical of those being constructed across the country. Coventry planners aimed to avoid ‘displeasing uniformity’ by building in blocks of four, some of them being set back a few feet. Variety would promote ‘beauty and harmony.’ Different colours were used for roof tiles and also for the doors and the pebbledash. No two blocks were to be painted the same.

Inside the one, two, three and four bedroomed houses there was light and space, fitted cupboards, storage space, picture rails and kitchen ranges. The houses were the sort of suburban home middle-class couples might aspire to buy but these were not for sale.

Redbrick houses along Charter Avenue (courtesy of Robin Brooker)

Nearby this new ‘township’ was a row of shops, which were later on referred to the ‘big shops’ after the construction of the ‘little shops’ in the post-war part of Canley. There was a brand new primary school as well, named after the son of local tenant farmers, Sir Henry Parkes, who grew up in nearby Moat House Lane. He went on to become Premier of New South Wales in 1872. A statue of a kangaroo was erected in front of the school to mark this link. A small public library was also built next to the school.

Prior Deram Walk shops today (November 2015, courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The City Corporation planners were forward thinking and included small retirement bungalows in their scheme, many of which remain today for retired people. The street is nicknamed ‘Pensioner’s Row.’

Two and three bedroomed redbrick houses were built along Charter Avenue as far as Mitchell Avenue. A few houses were built just inside the new turnings intended to be fully-fledged streets but the war came and these were put on hold.

After the war, the builders, including some of prisoners of war, returned. The ideals were not to be diluted but construction had to be speeded up. The decision was taken to use a new type of house specially designed in this period: the British Iron and Steel Federation or BISF house. (1)

Row of BISF or steel houses, Charter Avenue/Marler Road junction. (R. Cherrington 2006)

Looking down Marler Road, BISF houses (R. Cherrington, 2006)

To us locals, they were simply steel houses, built around a steel frame with part of the outside cladding steel as well. They are ‘non-conventional build’ because they are not brick with slate tiled roofs. Whilst the materials may be non-conventional, they are, in fact, traditional three bed, semi-detached houses. They were also meant as permanent, not temporary homes and differed from wholly prefab houses.

View from a BISF house, looking into the garden. (R. Cherrington)

A plot of land near Prior Deram walk saw several rows of steel houses go up, around Thimbler Road and Sheriff Avenue. Some prefabricated bungalows were erected along John Rous Avenue and Mitchell Avenue thus largely finishing more quickly and cheaply the construction of Canley. The prefabs have long since been demolished and replaced with brick houses but the steel houses remain.

The prefabs were praised in a Coventry Evening Telegraph article in 1945 (October 30^th) as the ‘Coventry’ experiment. Not only had the Corporation ‘pioneered a house of novel construction and design’, but had cut through red-tape. This referred to the fact that the plumbing system contravened building by-laws, but the pressing need for housing was seen as justification.

The compact homes were described as cosy due to good insulation, with no wastage of space: much research had gone into their design and construction. Coventry’s Lord Mayor described them as being good for housewives. By easing their burden, he believed the homes made a great contribution to society and also recognised the part women played in the war. Many women had worked in ‘men’s jobs’ but in peacetime were expected to return quietly to the home and domestic roles.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s several four storey blocks of flats were built plus some maisonettes in Donegal Close and Penrosa Walk. This renewed building in streets behind the ‘little shops’ and also further up Charter Avenue was done in a thoughtful manner, with variation of style and of colours.

Flats at bottom of Donegal Close, November 2015. (Courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The aim of providing light, airy houses, large gardens and green spaces remained as Canley expanded with the view that creating a better environment would create better people. Canley was still a planned neighbour, despite the war intervening, and was a practical example of current town planning ideas and ideals.

I will consider in the next blog to what extent the blueprint of architects and planners succeeded in promoting a sense of community across the pre- and post-war built estate.

Notes

(1) You can find more images and detail on post-war British Iron and Steel Federation homes at the BISF website.

Stow Road, Ixworth: ‘Thingoe’s Follies’

Tags

Ixworth, Pre-1914, Rural council housing

They called them ‘Thingoe’s Follies’ – the eight homes built on Stow Road in Ixworth, Suffolk, which formed the first council housing built (in 1894) in the English countryside. And so they were if the attempt to provide decent homes for some of the poorest in England – the agricultural working class of the day – was folly.

In reality, they are a site of struggle.  Depending on your perspective, it’s a story of rural class struggle, pitting an oppressed labouring poor against the entrenched Tory landowning class which ruled village England before the Great War. Or you might see in it an enlightened Toryism – more Downton than Tolpuddle – that remembered traditions of noblesse oblige and adapted the local state to its purpose. Most dramatically, it could be taken to mark the rise of modern Liberalism, a radicalism mobilised by and personified in the unlikely figure of the village’s new vicar, FD Perrott, who believed that his care of souls extended to the tortured bodies of his poor parishioners.

‘A Cottage with Sunflowers’ at Peaslake, Surrey, by Helen Allingham. Undated, probably 1890s, made available through Wikimedia Commons

In telling it, we can begin by forgetting any notions of pastoral idyll we might entertain: (1)

You pass through our quiet villages and you see old cottages covered with honeysuckle, roses, and ivy; you think how beautiful! how restful!  But you little imagine what sad decay and misery the outer beauty covers.

British agriculture was suffering an unprecedented depression (largely caused by grain imports from the opening of the American Mid-West) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  The rural population was falling – fuelling the growth of the cities which has been the main concern of this blog – but conditions for those who remained were often abysmal, as bad as any in the cities.  In Ixworth, with a population of about 850 in 1901: (2)

There is a row of houses, the total number of inhabitants is forty-four, and there are three closets for their use. In one house, consisting of two rooms, there are ten in family… Doors are very bad, and the walls tumbling down.  When it rains much, the water runs from the back kitchen into the sitting-room, and forms a pool in the centre.

Such conditions were shocking to Perrott who arrived in the parish in 1888, finding that ‘the Church had scarcely anything to do with the people and the people scarcely anything to do with the Church’.

St Mary’s Ixworth: Perrott’s church © Wikimedia Commons

One of his first acts was to help form – at a time when agricultural trades unionism was a growing though embattled force in the country – the Ixworth Agricultural Labourers’ Association.  The Association surveyed local housing needs – both the sorry condition of existing homes and the desperate need for new – and petitioned the local Rural Sanitary Authority (the Thingoe Board of Guardians at this time) to take action under the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.

The Sanitary Authority responded by evicting existing tenants under Part II of the Act addressing unfit accommodation.  Perrott and the Association mobilised – ‘meeting after meeting was held’ – to halt these evictions (which would only exacerbate a local housing shortage) and press for action under Part III of the Act, permitting the building of new homes.  Reluctantly, the Authority asked the Local Government Board to organise a local inquiry which could compel – if the need for proven – the County Council to grant the permission Thingoe needed to adopt Part III.  (This laborious procedure was a major reason for rural authorities’ inaction on housing – and also a fine pretext for it.)

High Street, Ixworth, Suffolk © Andrew Hill and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Inquiry was chaired by Lord Francis Hervey, the local Conservative MP with – before you leap to conclusions – great care and sympathy. (3)  He concluded the case was clearly proven and went further in arguing, against those who railed at the expense to rate-payers: (4)

A certain number of families will be removed from unwholesome lodgings, devoid of proper conveniences, to healthy dwellings with a sufficiency of garden ground; and it is reasonable to suppose that there will not only be less poverty arising from sickness, but that there will be also an addition to the family resources from the sedulous cultivation of the soil, in both cases with results favourable to the ratepayers…Upon economical grounds alone, therefore, the putting in force of Part III of the Act is capable of being justified; but it is impossible to forget that we are in presence of other considerations, social and moral, which, though not susceptible of being gauged by money values, are intrinsically of still higher importance.

There (with just a little archaism) you have the economic and ethical case for council housing – as true now as then – made by a Tory aristocrat.

This side view shows the extensive allotment gardens attached to the homes

Still, the question of finance remained.  Hervey had assumed the expense would be borne by the wider district rather than the parish of Ixworth. The Sanitary Authority seized on this alleged unfairness to its ratepayers to secure a second inquiry, ostensibly to tackle the question of funding but in practice used to re-open the entire question.

Perrott’s response was fierce; he attacked the Sanitary Authority: (5)

They were not and had not shown themselves to be guardians of the poor. They had simply been guardians of the rates…They had not treated this case as a poor man’s one but as only as one touching their own pockets… Could there be a body in England so fatuous?

Perrott – by now dubbed the Radical Vicar of Ixworth – also clashed with the local lord of the manor, Captain RN Cartwright, an opponent of the new housing and owner of three quarters of the parish’s 1700 acres and 14 of its run-down cottages.  He had earlier attacked Cartwright for evicting an elderly widow in order to house an estate worker. The rhetorical flourish of Perrott’s published address to the Labourers’ Association had a clearly local resonance: (6)

Under the shadow of the luxurious ‘Hall’, at the gate of the tenant-farmer’s comfortable homestead, the labourer (upon whose work both live) drags out a hard life, compelled with wife and children to find shelter and make ‘home’  under a roof beneath which neither squire nor farmer would stable their very cattle.

The inquiry, under Colonel Frederick Pocklington, was convened at 3pm in a deliberate attempt to exclude local workers – though a newspaper report records (after its list of the local great and the good) that ‘a few labourers stood at the back’. (7)  It overturned the result of the first inquiry.

At this point, Hervey returned to the field.  He secured legal opinion that – as no new evidence had been adduced – Pocklington’s decision was invalid.  The verdict of the first inquiry decision stood – the Thingoe Sanitary Authority was compelled to build. Elections to the Authority in 1892 returned a reforming majority and Perrott (as chair) served for one meeting to secure the housing’s final go-ahead.

Stow Road, Ixworth: Britain’s first rural council houses

After all that sound and fury, the results might seem disappointing.  Eight cottages, designed by the Suffolk County Surveyor, were built on four acres of land at a cost of £1700.  They comprised four semi-detached, two-storey houses with a single-storey extension at the rear, housing kitchen, washhouse and lavatory.

With its homes let at £5 5s a year and an additional charge for their large, allotment-style, gardens, financed on a short thirty-year loan, the scheme was not a financial success and the houses proved too expensive for the poorest of the local people for whom they were originally intended.

Council homes, Stow Road, Ixworth

But they were the first fruits of a hard-fought struggle by which the rural working-class would escape a reigning near-feudalism.  By 1900, just six rural district councils (the new bodies of local government established in 1894) had adopted part III of the 1890 Act and Thingoe’s eight cottages remained its sole concrete fruits.  A 1900 Act, intended to support council housing in the countryside by allowing county councils to build where district councils refused and formally giving parish councils the right to petition for action, had little impact.

Still, Ixworth was a harbinger though, in practice, it would be a new post-war politics that made the difference.  The 1936 Housing Act, providing rural councils with a subsidy of up to 80 per cent for the construction of agricultural labourers’ cottages, was crucial. By 1939, 159,000 council houses had been built by England’s rural district councils. (8)

These and their successors were to become a vital component of village life. They are now, sad to say, under unprecedented threat from the Conservative Government’s extension of Right to Buy to Housing Association properties and we’ll need a new generation of middle-class reformers and working-class activists to defend them. (9)

The Reverend Perrott left Thingoe in the year of victory, 1892, and resigned from the priesthood four years late.  Re-qualified as a barrister, he remained active for some years as a campaigner for housing reform and, as Frank Duerdin Perrott, the unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Clapham in the 1900 General Election.  He died in 1936, bequeathing funds to support parapsychological research at his alma mater, Trinity College, in Cambridge. (10)

As for the ‘village Hampdens’ of the Labourers’ Association, I can provide neither names nor details.  The houses remain their monument, one pair, no’s 1 and 2 Stow Road, are now Grade II listed – a reminder of the struggle of working people to secure decent housing and its continued necessity.

Sources

(1) Jane Escombe, quoted in Moritz Kaufmann, The Housing of the Working Classes and of the Poor (1907)

(2) George Francis Millin, Life in Our Villages (1891)

(3) Lord Francis Hervey (1846 –1931), educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; a barrister and Conservative MP from 1874-80 and 1885-92.  However, he had also served for three years from 1876 on the London School Board as a member for Finsbury and this perhaps gave him a better understanding of working-class conditions.  He went on to become head of the Civil Service.

(4) Quoted in William Walter Crotch, The Cottage Homes of Old England (1908) – the fullest guide to the intricacies of the process.

(5) ‘The Ixworth Labourers’ Association’, Bury Free Press, 19 December 1891

(6) ‘The Vicar of Ixworth on the Ixworth Houses’, The Bury and Norwich Post and Suffolk Standard, 6 October 1891

(7) ‘The Ixworth Housing’, Bury Free Press, 26 September 1891

(8) Trevor Wild, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (2004)

(9) Andrew Motion, ‘Forget Shoreditch: It’s our rural villages most at risk from gentrification’, Daily Telegraph, 26 October 2015. The Rural Housing Alliance published Affordable Rural Housing: A practical guide for parish councils in December 2014.

(10) Perrott became a committee member of the London Reform Union and published three pamphlets in 1900 – The Demand for Fair Rent Courts, Overcrowded London and the less snappily titled but descriptive The Housing of the Working-Classes Act, 1890. An Account of the Solitary Instance of the Putting Part III of the Act Into Operation in an English Village where the Labourers Were Rack-rented and Overcrowded in Dilapidated and Insanitary Dwellings

Octavia Hill: ‘a life more noble’

Tags

Pre-1914

When I was asked to write on the newly published celebration of the life, work and legacy of Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill (full disclosure: I received a free review copy), I felt – as a chronicler and advocate of what I’ll insist on calling old-fashionedly municipal housing – that I was possibly not the best person for the task.

Octavia Hill (1838-1912): a portrait of c1882

Hill hated municipal housing. She had many objections – it was unfair that property owners paying rates should, in effect, subsidise their competitors; it was corrupting that local councillors should solicit votes from their own tenants.  But primarily – and she was speaking here as the London County Council began its own massive rehousing efforts – she believed that ‘rate-supported dwellings paralysed individual effort’. (1)

Market Court, Kensington, c1865 © Historic England

This emphasis on self-help would be the key-note of her own reforming role.  Her housing work began in 1865 when she purchased, with the help of John Ruskin (a friend and ally), three run-down houses in Paradise Place (now Garbutt Place), Marylebone.  He insisted on a five per cent return, not to safeguard his own investment but as an incentive for others to follow.

She was a good landlord – ensuring that the properties were well-maintained and kept in good order – but a firm one.  Any non-payment of rent led to rapid eviction; her goal for tenants was a ‘dignified independence…in the sense that they are really paying for their own home’.

Paradise (now Garbutt) Place, Kensington

At best, this was a form of ‘tough love’.  She collected rents personally each week and used these visits as an early form of social work, though one very much predicated on her own Victorian values of gentility and respectability.  As she stated: (2)

You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately.  The principle on which the whole work rests is that the inhabitants and their surroundings must be improved together.

The success of this early venture led, again with Ruskin’s financial aid, to the purchase of a court of five court cottages and a larger house in nearby Freshwater Place in the following year.  Its extension, as her portfolio expanded, led to what became recognised and lauded as the Octavia Hill system – her housing managers collected rents weekly, personally supervised tenants, ensured proper maintenance of properties and, where financially feasible, improved them.

These managers were female and, by employing women, Hill had created a new profession, almost the only one open to capable middle- and upper-class women of the day, albeit one rooted in the domestic sphere that was their allotted role. (With the kind of conservatism that enrages her critics, Hill opposed female suffrage and – despite her own increasingly public role and status – a wider political role for women.)

One contributor to the book, Rita Powell, a resident of 49 years’ standing in Gable Cottages in Sudrey Street, Southwark (an attractive purpose-built block of homes designed for Hill by Elijah Hoole in 1889) remembers ‘the ladies’ as ‘quite strict’, insisting – in that quintessential display of middle-class respectability – on net curtains in the windows, for example.  But she remembers also their kindness, buying saving stamps for the children and bringing food around when illness had struck. You can negotiate the complexities of that relationship – the mix of control, patronage and compassion – yourself.

Gable Cottages

The book itself is a ragbag or, to put it more generously, a compendium of contributions from the great and the good, employees and volunteers of what is now known as Octavia Housing, and its residents.  It is pegged on the contributors’ varied understanding of what is taken to be Hill’s mission statement – her ambition:

to make individual life noble, homes happy and family life good.

The most meaningful responses come, to my mind, from Octavia Housing’s volunteers and residents.  The great and the good (whose names feature on the cover) tend to project their own causes and values on Hill, sometimes in apparent ignorance of just how strongly those might differ from Hill’s.  Her rich and varied and essential generous life does, to be fair, give them ample scope.  Hill was, amongst other things, a founder member of the Charity Organisation Society (founded to assist the ‘deserving’ poor) and the National Trust.

Both represented a natural extension to her work in housing.  She added playgrounds and gardens to her housing schemes as resources allowed and believed, as Simon Jenkins reminds us, that ‘we all want beauty for the refreshment of our souls’. (This reminds me of two other committed Christians, Alfred and Ada Salter, who also sought – albeit by means of the municipal socialism that Hill abhorred – to bring the ‘chiefest means of natural grace’ to the poor of London by their beautification of Bermondsey.)

An early view of Octavia Hill’s Red Cross Cottages, opened in 1887

Red Cross Garden today, Southwark

There are plenty of people who will point very plausibly to the limitations and contradictions of Hill’s philosophy (although that is a term which she herself would have abjured – she saw herself as a pragmatist, concerned with practicalities rather than grand theory).  She was absolutely a person of her class, time and place and it is easy – though perhaps less easy now – to see how far her individualistic and self-help values have been superseded by both a better understanding of the structural causes of disadvantage and their assumed remedy in collective and state action.

It is more interesting to take a look at what she got right (when some others didn’t) and to see what has persisted and remains relevant in her labours.

For one thing, she was adamant that her homes should be affordable to the poorest.  Writing of Barrett’s Court (which Hill renamed St Christopher’s Place) off Oxford Street, she argued ‘if we had rebuilt, we must have turned [the existing tenants] out in favour of a higher class, thus compelling them to crowd in courts as bad as Barrett’s Court itself was when we bought it’. This had been precisely the deficiency of contemporary model dwelling schemes and would be the fault of the Boundary Estate, the LCC’s first housing scheme. It remained the case that council housing into the interwar period was beyond the reach of many of the lowest paid workers.

Sarsden Buildings, an Octavia Hill property in St Christopher Place © Christine Matthews and made available through a Creative Commons licence

To this end, Hill was prepared to rehabilitate older properties and accept the continuing necessity of single-room dwellings.  That’s a position that most would find unacceptable today and it’s one which became obsolete as municipal building and systems of rent allowances and rebates (which Hill would presumably have decried as promoting dependency) developed.

Whitehill Houses, Southwark: originally 24 three-roomed tenements opened in 1899.

But her overall stance would acquire a surprising later resonance.  Hill opposed the utilitarian (though ‘model’) tenement schemes of her day, the block dwellings, but also rejected their supposed alternative, working-class suburban cottage estates.  In that regard, the unfashionable Octavia Hill comes close to the criticisms made after her death of many later municipal developments. Her support for affordable inner-city living for the poor and the street life in which it rested is a cause which echoes to the present.

The ‘lady collectors’ are ripe for gentle – or not so gentle – criticism too: they were ‘an altogether superficial thing’ according to Beatrice Webb in the face of the ‘collective brutality’ and squalor of endemic poverty. (3)  But, in fact, their role and legacy persisted.  Ironically, for all Hill’s antagonism to municipal housing, a number of councils were to follow her model, including in her own day Kensington (whose approach for collaboration Hill rejected) and Camberwell.

The Association of Women Property Managers was formed in 1916 and one of its members (who had worked for Octavia Hill from 1910) would go on to become the first female municipal property manager in the country – for Chesterfield Town Council in 1927. Miss Upcott (surely only her family ever called her Janet) was insistent on applying Hill’s methods: (4)

the careful management of the houses by persons thoroughly acquainted with the social needs of an area and able to deal with each individual case according to its requirements. Managers trained on Octavia Hill lines are accustomed to deal with difficult tenants without rejecting them instantly as undesirable; to regenerate slum areas without undue dispossession of the tenants there.

Another graduate of Hill’s, Miss Evelyn Perry, went on to work for the St Pancras House Improvement Society and, in 1928, St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council where she managed a municipal estate in Somers Town.

In changed times and in different ways, in Octavia Housing (as the book makes clear) and in other housing associations and departments across the country, this work continues.

James Hill House, North Kensington: a new Octavia housing scheme for elderly people

Ultimately, what the book highlights is the enduring need and value of social housing.  Something as simple as a fixed address – to register for health services and schooling – can make all the difference.  The willingness of recent governments to tolerate the rise of homelessness we see on our streets is nothing less than shocking.

More profoundly, a proper home provides security.  Alan Johnson MP writes movingly of his own experience as an Octavia Hill resident as the child of a single mother.  In difficult times, she made sure the rent was paid regularly:

Battered by ill fortune and dogged by poor health, my mother’s basic human need for shelter had at last been met and she wasn’t going to let that slip away. Octavia was our source of security –a ‘trust’ in more ways than one.

That is a sentiment echoed by a number of current Octavia Housing residents whose testimonies are included in the volume. It’s ironic that there are right-wing ideologues who criticise social housing for promoting dependence when, in fact, it enables its opposite.

That these homes should be affordable goes – or should go – without saying except that in our current housing Wonderland we live in a world where ‘affordable’ rents are defined as being 80 per cent of current inflated market rates.  Octavia Hill understood that rents – particularly in inner London where her work was concentrated – had to be within the means of its poorest citizens.  A number of the contributions remind us that social housing remains the best – perhaps the only – means of ensuring truly affordable rents for all our people.

Ian Hislop describes Hill as ‘both brilliant and brittle, inspiring and infuriating, dogmatic and yet an undeniable force for good’.  Hill herself wrote of what she hoped would be an evolving legacy:

When I am gone I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. New circumstances require various efforts; and it is the spirit, not the dead form which should be perpetuated.

Rather, as Gillian Darley reminds us, Hill wished to bequeath ‘greater ideals, greater hope and patience to realise both’.  In that spirit, this book is a worthy memorial to her life and labour.

A Life More Noble is published by Octavia and can be purchased for £9.99.  You can find out more on the book from its dedicated website.

Sources

(1) Enid Moberley Bell and Reginald Rowe, Octavia Hill (1942) and Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (1990). A revised and updated edition, still in print, of Gillian Darley’s biography of Hill was published in 2010.

(2) Quoted in Caroline Morrell, Housing and the Woman’s Movement, PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University (1999)

(3) Quoted in Marion Brion, Women in the Housing Service (1995)

(4) JM Upcott, ‘The Management of Municipal Housing Estates on Octavia Hill Lines’. Paper read in Section D, Personal and Domestic Hygiene, of the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute, Plymouth, July 14 to 21, 1928.

Upcott (1888-1985) founded the Conference of Women Municipal Managers in 1928 and went on to play a key role in the National Trust as a member, amongst other things, of its Estates Committee for 56 years.

My thanks to the Bishopsgate Institute for the unexpected discovery of Miss Upcott’s pamphlet.