North Oxfordshire: The ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ and their first council houses, Part II

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1920s

I’m pleased to feature the second of Jane Kilsby’s superbly researched and illustrated guest posts on some of the finest rural council homes in the country. Last week’s post examined the background to their construction; this week’s details their form and tells the story of those who designed and built them.

Banbury Rural District Council (BRDC) in North Oxfordshire did not build any council houses before 1914.  In part I, we saw how the council members, the ‘Foxhunters, Farmers and Parsons’, made a decision to build before the outbreak of war but were overtaken by events. (1)  Then, with the Addison Act of 1919 to spur them on and in the space of 18 months, they built 170 houses for the benefit of local farmworkers and returning soldiers.

Courtington Lane, Bloxham. Photograph June 2017

BRDC’s first council houses are only a fraction of the 170,000 or so completed in the early tranche under Addison, but they were described at that time as ‘the best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country’. (2)  Let’s have a look at who designed and built these stylish, comfortable houses.

BRDC had clear ideas about the type of houses they wanted to build.  They wanted to see stone, not bricks, and local Hornton stone at that.  They wanted the houses to be in or very close to each village with attractive views over the countryside and large gardens.  High ground was their preference for ‘healthy homes’.

Sanitary Inspector, Mr Gander put himself forward as architect.  He had done some training in an architect’s office before the War and had valuable local knowledge.  The Housing Committee was pleased to make him their architect on a salary of £150 per year on condition that he appoint his son – still in the army – full time to help with all of his duties: Surveyor, Sanitary Inspector and now architect.  The Committee’s appointment, however, was very quickly revoked.  Councillor Crawford-Wood said:

 the public are disgusted with this piling up of dual and triplicate offices on one man when other men require jobs.

The Local Government Board’s Housing Inspector agreed with their decision.   His advice was to take on a qualified architect; any additional salary that would have been paid to Mr Gander would not be covered by the Local Government Board loan.   As Councillor Dr Thorne put it, we will ‘have to get an architect with a grand brass plate in front of his house’.

And so they did.  The council decided to appoint an ‘architect who has served in HM Forces and whose work has been interfered with so doing’.  They approached the Architect’s War Committee – set up by RIBA to find work for architects returning from the War – and received ‘the names of four gentlemen recently demobilised to carry out the architect’s work’.  Mr T Lawrence Dale of Richmond produced his drawings and testimonials at interview.  Very impressed, the Council appointed him with the proviso that he could start at once and would open an office in Banbury.  The Council agreed to pay him the RIBA-recommended fees (£2500) and reimbursed him his first class rail fare from London.  Dale opened an office at 6 Horse Fair and took on an assistant at £6 a week.

Thomas Lawrence Dale (1884-1959) was born in London.  He trained at The Architectural Association School of Architecture, the AA.  He qualified in 1906 and became an Associate of RIBA the following year.  In 1914 he had his own practice in Bedford Row.  A Captain with the Army Cyclists Corps, he was mentioned in despatches.  Before the War his commissions included houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb and Horn Park in Dorset, now Grade II listed.

A drawing by T Lawrence Dale of a terrace of four houses appeared in the Banbury Guardian in 1919. A terrace of four houses was built for BRDC in 1920 by Henry Meckhonik of London.

Lawrence Dale’s name in the render of one of the houses in The Firs, Wroxton

The summer of 1919 was a whirl of activity.  The Housing Committee met fortnightly with an earlier start time of 10.30AM.  Mr Dale’s plans were approved by the Local Government Board, BRDC appointed a Housing Clerk and land deals were done across the district.

The council had an initial loan of £122,270 for the building work and the land.  Terms of repayment were variable; a 60 year repayment period at 6 per cent interest was typical.  The Council needed temporary loans from its own banker, however, pending the raising of permanent loans, indicating the pace and extent of their activity.   Rents needed the Ministry’s approval; in 1920 the rent for a parlour type house was 7s 6d a week, non-parlour houses were 6s a week.

Dr Addison, MP and Minister of Health wrote to the Council in July expressing his appreciation of their progress.

The ten houses in Upper Wardington were the first to be completed. They were let by Christmas 1920. Photograph June 2017.

The Housing Committee had made a tour of these houses in August 1920

Lawrence Dale designed at least two distinct types of houses for BRDC: the ‘A1 south’ type and the ‘Cropredy’ type.  The A1 south type has ‘a parlour, large living room, kitchen range grate, cement-floored scullery, a washhouse with a boiler and space for a bath and a shed for fuel and potatoes.’  There were rainwater tanks with a capacity of 200 gallons outside at the back of each house.  The Cropredy type has a larger entrance hall and steel window frames.

There are three pairs of semis of the ‘A1 south’ type in South Newington. BRDC bought the land from Magdalen College for £175 in 1919. The building included the provision of a septic tank. Photograph June 2017.

A ‘cottage’ non-parlour style was also used, for example, in Adderbury.  Some of the developments contain a mix of styles, at Hook Norton, Drayton and Milcombe, for example.

The ‘Cropredy’ type houses in Barford St Michael have flank walls of brick. A well was sunk here by the contractor, another local builder, A Hopcraft and Sons of Deddington. Photograph June 2017.

Cottage-style semi in The Crescent, East Adderbury. 200 men from Adderbury and Milton went to the War. These houses were let specifically to returning soldiers and their families. (6) Photograph June 2017.

A pair of semis in Milton, with very large front gardens, built by the Harpenden Building Co.  Photograph June 2017

The houses in Mollington are in the centre of the village and on higher ground. Lawrence Dale grouped houses together as much as possible ‘on the assumption that neighbours should also be friends’ (2). Photograph July 2017

Some of the cottages have names carved in a stone lintel above the front door.  Thisbe and Pyramus Cottages are in Wroxton and the six in Cropredy were all named to commemorate the Battle of Cropredy Bridge, 1644.  Charles, Cleveland, Cavalier, Culverin, Kentish and Waller Cottages are in Chapel Close.

Every house had a garden of not less than a quarter of an acre, double the Ministry of Health’s requirement for new rural houses.  Council-built housing was a brand new concept in these villages: there was a concern that a lot of people thought that they would not be allowed to build pig sties.  The Banbury Advertiser reported the Chairman’s insistence that:

where there was a large garden there should be a sty.  He hoped the Press would note that there were no conditions of any kind whatever which prevented tenants putting up pig-sties.

The Banbury Guardian of 26 August 1920 was very complimentary:

The old idea of building a modern cottage was to put up four straight walls with a sort of box roof, the whole being severely plain, and, if economical, was exceedingly ugly.  The council set out to resist the promulgation of these atrocities and the Housing Committee through their architect, Mr Dale, have produced cottages which do not detract from the picturesqueness of the villages, as was dreaded would happen when new buildings were called for.

The article noted too the striking form of the new houses:

the fronts, sides, and in some instances the backs, are of stone up to the roof, which is the mansard type, that is it breaks the front and back lines and is continued down over the first floor, but at a greatly reduced angle so that it does not curtail the space inside.

Walton Close, Bodicote. This site was one of the very few that had a water supply before the houses were built. Photograph June 2017

All of the Lawrence Dale houses have mansard, ‘cat slide’ type roofs. The houses in Horley have Hornton stone on all sides. Photograph June 2017.

There is no need to describe the interior of the houses when we have the film. The Hook Norton Village website includes 24 Square Miles Re-visited made in 1992.

This shorter film of highlights includes footage of the houses in Tadmarton.  At about 9 minutes 22 seconds in, the film stresses that in 1944 the houses still had sinks but no taps and indoor toilets that were only a bucket.  As BRDC knew only too well, good houses are only as good as their location and their water supply. (3)

The Tadmarton houses are on the hill in the distance, as in the film Twenty Four Square Miles. Mrs Summers, a widow who lost two sons in the War, was the first tenant of no 6. Photograph July 2017

Henry Boot steps into our story in 1920.  Joiner and builder from Sheffield, he set up his company in 1886 and achieved rapid expansion.  The company was the first building company to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.  In the same year, 1919, Boot’s eldest son, Charles, took the lead.  With a keen interest in house building, his company’s prospectus of 1919 refers to the ‘immense field for commercial enterprise opened up by this enormous volume of construction’. (4)

Henry Boot (1851-1931). Photograph with the kind permission of Henry Boot PLC.

Building contracts under the Addison Act started with an average size of 40 dwellings and, for contracting purposes, most local authorities split any planned large estates into small lots and this suited the building firms operating at the end of the War.  As more councils began to build – there were 4,400 ministry-approved council housing schemes by 1922 – they needed economy of scale and speed.

With inflation and a scarcity of labour and materials, many smaller firms struggled to get finance.  The work was there but they needed capital to get their schemes off the ground.  BRDC had some experience of this; there were no difficulties with quality but some tender advertisements had a poor response.

Crucially, £300,000 raised as capital through their flotation gave Henry Boot & Sons the edge.  The company was able to take advantage of the option to submit prices for groups of villages.

In April 1920 the Housing Commissioner received a proposal from Henry Boot that the company take on all of BRDC’s remaining sites and those of adjoining districts, including Towcester RDC.  Boot’s offer was accepted.  Charles Boot hosted a meeting at his London office in July attended by the Housing Commissioner, Lawrence Dale and Mr Fisher to thrash out details of the contract, including an agreement that the council would pay for building materials as and when they were delivered on site.

Boot & Sons built 128 of the 170 houses.  Operating concurrently on 16 sites, the value of their contract was £126,934.  Their work included the larger sites e.g. at Hook Norton (26 houses), Tadmarton (14), East Adderbury (22).  Local carpenter, Percy Alcock, quickly became Boots’ foreman and then site agent for all 16 sites.

Houses under construction in Horley, 1920. Percy Alcock, Henry Boot’s site agent, is on the far left. One of the first lettings was to a Mr Green who had lived in an old cottage on this site. Photograph with the kind permission of PR Alcock and Sons.

Henry Boot & Sons (London) Ltd in the render of a house at The Firs, Wroxton

Distinctive ‘snail-creep’ pointing by stonemason Mr Cronk (employed by Boot & Sons) on the front of one of the houses in Shutford Road, North Newington. This is said to be very high quality ‘snail-creep’, an unusual technique in buildings faced with Hornton stone. There are BRDC 1921 plaques on many of the houses.

With so much going on, transport became an issue.  Mr Gander was already using a council-owned motor-bicycle; the council bought a Ford light van and a motor-bicycle and side-car for Boots’ foremen on condition that they would be auctioned at the end of the contract.

There are three pairs of semis in The Close, Great Bourton. BRDC acquired this site under a compulsory purchase order. A shortage of tiles led to a delay in completion. Photograph June 2017.

By August 1922, all 170 houses (106 parlour type and 64 non parlour) were complete and let.  Notices were put up in the villages asking anyone who was interested in a tenancy to get in touch with the Clerk to the Council, Mr Fisher.  The council tried to offer the houses to local people from the same villages, with preference given to people who had served in the War.

And what did they all do next?

The ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ continued to build council houses.  Their later additions made use of the Ministry of Health’s standard house designs.  Their successors, in tweeds, are portrayed towards the end of Twenty-Four 24 Square Miles.

Mr Gander retired through ill health in November 1921.  BRDC was so appreciative of his loyalty that they kept him on as a Consulting Surveyor at £75 per year.  What’s sauce for the goose?  He died in 1925.

Edward Lamley Fisher, MBE, BRDC’s first Clerk, retired after 55 years of service.  As Superintendent Registrar he had officiated at over 3000 marriages.  In January 1945 at a party to celebrate his 50^th anniversary at the council, his colleagues recalled the ‘extremely interesting and happy days just after the last great war…working with Mr Fisher on matters appertaining to the selection of sites for council houses’.

Lawrence Dale had a successful career; he became Oxford Diocesan Surveyor in the 1930s, designing and renovating parish churches.

Ickford Village Hall, Buckinghamshire, designed by T Lawrence Dale and Simon Dale in 1946; a style that will be familiar to residents of BRDC’s first council houses.

Charles Boot died in 1945 but not before Henry Boot & Sons had built more houses between the wars, public and private, in the UK than any other company.  They built 20,000 council houses before 1930.  With offices in Paris, Athens and Barcelona, the company diversified very successfully into building hospitals and bridges.  They built Pinewood Studios in 1935.  Henry Boot plc today specialises in commercial buildings and plant hire.

Laid off at the end of the Boot contract, site agent Percy Alcock formed his own company in 1922 with Cronk, the stonemason.  PR Alcock & Sons continues today from their Banbury yard, carrying out high quality restoration and joinery works on period houses and churches and for the National Trust.

The houses themselves stand in settled peace.  Most of them have been sold under the Right to Buy and change hands infrequently, the parlour types at a minimum of £450k.  Sanctuary Housing Group manages those available for rent, for Cherwell District Council.  There are interesting examples of the use of the huge plots but most of the gardens remain intact.  Some of the houses are in Conservation Areas.

Wykham Lane, Broughton. The 1920s gardens were wide enough to accommodate new bungalows built in the 1950s. Photograph June 2017.

So, are these the ‘best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country?’  They are probably not the cheapest.  The 1920 Fabian Tract on Housing puts the average cost of a parlour-type house, at January 1920, at £803 per house, excluding the cost of the land, road-making and sewerage. (5)

BRDC had a ‘rule of thumb’ – house and land price – of £1,000 for each architect-designed cottage.  The council’s accounts were done separately for each site: the Sibford Gower site of six parlour-type houses, for instance, cost a total of £4,945 15s 1d – that’s £824 5s 10d per house – very close to the Fabian average.  Whether BRDC’s costs were included in the Fabians’ calculation is unclear.  Value for money?  Certainly.

South Newington. Photograph June 2017.

Thisbe and Pyramus Cottage, The Firs, Wroxton. Photograph June 2017.

The Old Council Houses, Horley. Photograph June 2017

The best?  I can do no more than continue to quote from the Banbury Guardian’s description in August 1920, when the first houses were nearing completion:

the use of the word cottage seems hardly correct…the new houses might be called bijou villas.

Sources

(1) A phrase used by Arthur Gregory of SW1 in a letter to the Banbury Advertiser published 13 March 1919.  ‘The foxhunters, farmers and parsons have monopolised the councils far too long, and it is time the co-operator, smallholder and the officials of the Agricultural and Workers’ Unions took their place and do what they can in the interest of progress’.

(2) Banbury Guardian, 26 August 1920

(3) 24 Square Miles Re-Visited a film made by South News, distributed by Trilith Films, 1992

(4) RPT Davenport-Hines (ed), Business in the Age of Depression and War (Routledge, 1990).  Includes Cash and Concrete: Liquidity Problems in the Mass Production of ‘Homes for Heroes’ by Sheila Marriner.

(5) CM Lloyd, Housing, Fabian Tract No. 193 (1920), p11

(6) Nicholas Allen, Adderbury: A Thousand Years of History (Phillimore & Co.Ltd, 1995)

Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser and Banbury Guardian between 1911 and 1925 held by the British Newspaper Archive.

My thanks to the Oxfordshire History Centre of Oxfordshire County Council for making available the BRDC council minutes from 1921.

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North Oxfordshire: The ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ and their first council houses, Part I

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Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to include, this week and next, guest posts by Jane Kilsby. They feature some great research and, as you’ll see, some quite exceptional rural council housing.  Jane worked in housing management for councils and housing associations across the country for over twenty years before settling in Banbury four years ago.  She wrote about Banbury’s first council homes in an earlier post. 

‘The best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country.’  This was the verdict of ‘one who has had opportunities of seeing many of the housing schemes in progress in different parts’. (1)

I don’t know who paid this astonishing compliment; I like to think it was one of the Local Government Board’s Housing Commissioners, sent to North Oxfordshire in August 1920 to check on progress under Addison’s council house building programme.  This is the story of how they came about.

North Oxfordshire has a quiet beauty.  Its ‘hummocky hills’ are set among vast fields of green and gold, interspersed with villages and grand estates.  Banbury’s fertile, rural hinterland is a place of calm prosperity.  Since the Civil War, nothing of any significance has happened here.

Fields near Tadmarton. Photograph July 2017

Farming has always been the chief activity.  In the 19^th century, grain, hay, straw, malt and beer went to London and Birmingham via Banbury’s canal and railway.  Until the 1920s, carriers’ carts provided the only link with Banbury market and great droves of cattle and sheep made their way to the Market Place, as they had done for centuries.

By 1914 Oxfordshire was suffering the full impact of the agricultural depression which had begun in the 1870s.  With cheaper imported grain and meat and a run of poor harvests, the county slipped from being one of the richest to one of the poorest; farm workers’ wages were the lowest in England.  In summer, life in these villages could be very pleasant indeed.  But, for many farmworkers, there were times of insecurity and isolation.

The local building stone is Middle Lias marlstone, containing iron and known as Hornton stone.  It is this that gives this district its distinct appeal.  Many villages had their own quarries.  Thatched cottages are still common.

The villages were, and still are, undoubtedly pretty. Many cottages survive from the 17th century. Wroxton.  Photograph July 2017

The Agricultural Economics Research Institute of the University of Oxford made a thought-provoking film in 1944, Twenty-Four Square Miles, directed by Kay Mander. (2) It examines farming and village life in this area during World War II.  Life here during World War I was surely very similar, if a little harsher.

The film highlights how time-consuming and physically demanding it was to collect water for domestic use and the complete absence of plumbing as we know it today. Until the 1950s most of the North Oxfordshire villages did not have a piped and safe water supply.  Villagers used wells, the one or two public taps in each village, springs and shared earth closets.

Footage of the district council’s first council houses appears at about 19-21 minutes in, but more of that later.

Banbury Rural District Council (BRDC) was formed as a result of the Local Government Act of 1894 and comprised most of what was previously the Banbury rural sanitary district.  The Council was made up of 33 representatives from 31 parishes.  In 1911 the population was 11,457.  BRDC was dissolved and became part of Cherwell District Council in 1974.

Rev Blythman, chairman of the BRDC 1902-1917, was rector of Shenington for 57 years. Photograph by courtesy of the Oxfordshire History Centre.

The Council members – the ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ (3) – were well-connected.  Rev. Arthur Blythman, was the Chairman from 1902 to 1917.  Rector of Shenington, a Balliol man, magistrate and lifelong friend of the Earl of Jersey, Blythman was described in the local newspapers as a man who ‘unremittingly gave every possible attention, in every detail to every section of the community, whatever their political or religious creed.’

Chief foxhunter among them, James Crawford-Wood of Alkerton House, was a columnist with The Field.  Colonel North of Wroxton Abbey, Lord North’s family seat, spent years away on active service and returned to his council duties in 1919.  In the early 20^th century the Rural District Council had its offices in Horse Fair in Banbury.  Council meetings were always on Thursdays, market day.

Party politics and policy statements do not feature in newspaper reports of the council’s meetings.  However, improving living conditions in their district appears to have been the councillors’ general aim and they were interested in practicalities.  Their first two decades were spent grappling with drains, sewers, cesspools, flooding, pumps, springs and wells. The council’s first Clerk was Edward Lamley Fisher.  He was appointed in 1895.  Solicitor, Registrar and Clerk to the Poor Law Board of Guardians, he is credited in the local newspapers for his knowledge, humour and urbane manner.

Initially, poor housing conditions in rural areas received little attention at Government level; politicians of both parties were accused of ‘neglecting absolutely the agricultural question and were intoxicated with industrial success’ but the housing of agricultural labourers and rural poverty was a matter of longstanding concern to the reforming Liberal Government of 1906-1914. (4)

Lloyd George conceived the Land Enquiry in May 1912 and part of its remit was to establish what the stumbling blocks were in improving conditions for farmworkers.  It had little difficulty in establishing that rural housing conditions were appalling.  Wages were lower than in urban areas, rents were relatively high and landlords were often unable or unwilling to improve living conditions.  Its report of 1913 put forward a number of solutions ranging from a reformed Land Tax, subsidies for Councils to build cottages and the wider encouragement of smallholdings.  The Great War was to intervene before a coherent set of reforms on the ‘land question’ could be put in to practice.

The ‘land question’ was a complex subject of much debate in rural areas.  Through Lord Saye and Sele of Broughton Castle, a Liberal, there was a local connection with the National Land and Home League, a non-party organisation formed in 1910 that wanted to improve rural life.  He organised and chaired a number of the League’s meetings held in Oxfordshire to discuss rural development policies.

The Housing Acts were in place and applied to rural areas.  The 1875 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act allowed councils to clear slums and draw up improvements of their own.  The 1900 Housing of the Working Classes Act extended the 1890 Act of the same name to places outside London, allowing councils to build houses.  Importantly, the 1910 Housing and Town Planning Act made it easier for councils to borrow money cheaply.

Between 1910 and 1914 there were some 1300 cottages built by councils in English villages.  Not many councils made use of their new powers to build and let out their own houses.  There are, however, some interesting examples of cottages built for rural workers by councils and through the strenuous efforts of local reformers.  For example, in Ixworth, Suffolk, and Penshurst in Kent.

BRDC, however, had only a growing awareness of its poor housing.  By 1913 Henry Gander, Sanitary Inspector and Surveyor since 1900, was doing house to house inspections in every village, with particulars of over 1000 houses in his ‘housing book’.  The Medical Officer for Health, Dr Morton, reported regularly on sanitation and housing; outbreaks of diphtheria and scarlet fever were not uncommon and the council issued some closure orders on old cottages.  The work of the Sanitary Inspectors is explained in earlier posts by Dr Jill Stewart.

The ‘Foxhunters, Farmers and Parsons’ of BRDC were well-meaning and perhaps unaccustomed to outside opinion.  It took a government inspection of the condition of the district for the council to adopt its housing powers.  A fresh pair of eyes on the housing conditions, in the form of a housing inspection and a report from the Local Government Board, was what led the council to decide to build.

In April 1913 the Clerk, Mr Lamley Fisher, received a letter from the Local Government Board asking the council why it had not built anything yet.  Without a satisfactory answer, the Board wrote again in January 1914:

An Inspector was to make an inspection of the District with the purpose of obtaining ‘information respecting the housing accommodation.  He should commence his inspection on Tuesday 27^th inst, and would call at Mr Fisher’s office.

OFSTED-like, the Inspector expected Dr Morton and Mr Gander to meet him there.

The offices of the Banbury Rural District Council, built in 1900 and now a nursery, are in Horse Fair, Banbury, opposite Banbury Cross.  Photograph August 2017.

Mr Gander reported on the Inspector’s visit to the Council’s next meeting.  He had shown his housing book to the Inspector and hoped that the Inspector had seen that he was doing the work as it should be done.  Councillor Page remarked:

I suppose the Local Government Board have not very much for these Inspectors to do, so they send them round for exercise?

But, on 30 April 1914 Courtenay Clifton –  the Local Government Board Inspector who had overseen the achievements of BRDC’s municipal counterparts at King’s Road in Banbury in 1912-13 – sent his report to Mr Fisher.

It put an end to BRDC’s dithering.  In the Board’s view, there was an urgent demand for more houses in Cropredy, Hornton and Wardington.  A house in Hornton had been closed by the council as unfit for human habitation three years ago but re-occupied in its same condition because the tenants were unable to find other accommodation in the parish.

The Board urged the District Council to provide accommodation themselves, under Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890, adding that ‘it should be possible at these places to devise schemes that would be nearly, if not quite, self-supporting.’

Further, the Board knew about cases of overcrowding in Barford St John, Barford St Michael, Bloxham, Milton and West Adderbury and expected the Council to take immediate action.  There was disrepair: damp walls and floors in Bloxham, East Adderbury, Shutford, Epwell and North Newington.  Councillor Pettipher remarked:

in all probability we will have to face the music in one or two of the villages before long.

Almost every parish was named in the Board’s report.  The council spent the summer debating where houses were most needed and how to pay for them.  Parishes overburdened with the cost of sewerage schemes were reluctant to agree that ‘the cost of any new houses not met by the rents be charged to the parish concerned’.

By the time war had broken out, the Local Government Board had written to BRDC another three times asking for progress.  Rev Blythman had been to several sites but negotiations on land prices proved tricky.  The council decided to wait until June 1915 which they felt would be ‘a more propitious time.’

The memorial in Alkerton is a simple piece of Hornton stone. The population of the village in 1911 was 102. Cllr Crawford-Wood lost both his sons in the First World War. Photograph August 2017.

The Local Government Board began working on reconstruction as early as August 1917.  Dr Addison, MP was Lloyd-George’s Minister for Reconstruction during the latter years of the War and then from June 1918, as Minister for Health, it fell to him to put into practice an extensive programme of state-led house building.

Addison aimed to put an end to the country’s poor housing stock and provide decent homes for those returning from the War.  The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, known as the Addison Act, gave local councils powers to build unlimited numbers of new houses at low, controlled rents with any losses on their building costs met by government subsidies.  Loans raised by councils did not have to cover the whole cost of housing schemes; this was the start of publicly-funded housing.

ln North Oxfordshire, local opinion anticipated Lloyd-George’s cry for homes for heroes: in June 1918 Clement Gibbard, late of the Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry, wrote to the Banbury Guardian:

I suggest, to commemorate victory in this awful war, every village should place a brand new cottage for every man who has been out to fight for liberty, so that the health and comfort of the rural community would be happier and healthier in the future than it has been in the past.  In comparison to the number of people per acre there is as much illness in the rural districts as there is in large towns.  The Irish recruits have been promised land if they will join up, then why should not we England lads get a victory sanitary cottage for helping to save the Empire.

The Local Government Board’s Housing Commissioner wanted a new survey of every District detailing for each parish i) the present estimated shortage of houses, ii) the actual state of overcrowding, and iii) the number of houses that should be condemned if there were no other houses available for accommodating the persons displaced.  BRDC was ready for this and duly complied.  By July 1918 the Housing Committee was able to confirm that, ‘on the assumption that financial facilities will be afforded by the Government, that a scheme be prepared for submission to the Local Government Board at an early date’. 

There was no more procrastination or debate: the council knew they were on a tight timetable.  Poor housing conditions in the district before the War had become critical; a pent up demand for farmworkers cottages and for returning soldiers and their families had become a necessity.  The day after the Armistice, the Chairman, by then Joseph Pettipher, went out with Sanitary Inspector, Mr Gander, making use of Mr Gander’s motor-bicycle and petrol:

to ascertain what land is suitable for building purposes, reporting to the Clerk from time to time in order that he may be in a position to put himself into communication with the owners of such land and the terms on which such land can be acquired.

It may not be quite true that you can walk from Oxford to Cambridge without leaving land owned by the colleges, but the Oxford colleges owned a lot of land in North Oxfordshire.(5)  The colleges co-operated and a number of housing sites, such as in Milcombe, were purchased directly from them.

Building was underway very quickly.

The houses in South Newington under construction in 1920. Built by Wheeler Bros. of Reading, two of the builders appear to be in uniform. Photo with kind permission of Laurence Carey.

House building by councils was one of the numerous aspects of society changed forever by the Great War.  In a remarkable burst of activity, BRDC had built and let 170 houses by 1922; it had a rent roll of almost £3,000 and outstanding loans from the Local Government Board of £178,000.

In early 1919 a letter signed by 25 discharged soldiers and the vicar in Cropredy urged the Council to speed up a housing scheme in the village. Three pairs of semis were built in Chapel Close in 1921. Photograph June 2017.

In part II, we will look in detail at who designed and built BRDC’s first council houses and wonder whether these are indeed the ‘best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country’.

Sources

(1) Banbury Guardian, 26 August 1920

(2) Twenty-Four Square Miles, a film by Basic Films, 1946

(3) A phrase used by Arthur Gregory of SW1 in a letter to the Banbury Advertiser published 13 March 1919. ‘The foxhunters, farmers and parsons have monopolised the councils far too long, and it is time the co-operator, smallholder and the officials of the Agricultural and Workers’ Unions took their place and do what they can in the interest of progress.’

(4) W Hills, M.P. for Durham, at his talk in Banbury on 9 April 1914 on ‘The Rural Worker: His Work, Housing and Wages.’

(5) What do the Oxford Colleges own?  25 September 2016 in Who Owns England?

Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser and Banbury Guardian between 1911 and 1925 held by the British Newspaper Archive.

My thanks to the Oxfordshire History Centre of Oxfordshire County Council for making available the BRDC council minutes from 1921.

 

Open House London 2017: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

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Town Halls

This second post marking Open House London on 16-17 September offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – this weekend. (Open House venues are picked out in bold; the links relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall (c) Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.  The adjacent Guildhall Library and Art Gallery are also open to view – great facilities along with others provided the City but, as the Corporation is hardly a triumph of democracy, we’ll move on.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

Old Vestry Offices, Enfield (c) Philafrenzy and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The Old Vestry Offices in Enfield, a small polygonal building built in 1829 originally housed the local beadle – responsible for local enforcement of the Poor Law – and then, until the 1930s, a police station.

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services largely related to public safety.  As towns grew and expectations – initially focused on health and, increasingly, on housing – increased, the more ambitious vestries took on enhanced roles and garnered greater prestige.  One such was Shoreditch.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too. After a long period of decline, the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

Limehouse Town Hall

Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881, is a humbler building despite the Italian palazzo styling adopted by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston. It also started life as a Vestry Hall but one intended nevertheless as ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It went on to serve as offices for Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Ealing Town Hall (c) PG Chamion and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Ealing had a local board of health from 1863 and didn’t become an urban district until 1894 under the Local Government Act of that year.  Ealing Town Hall, a grand neo-Gothic building, designed by Charles Jones and opened in 1888 replaced a smaller town hall (still standing, now a bank on The Mall) built just fourteen years earlier but now deemed too small for purpose.  The newer town hall was itself extended in the 1930s and includes an impressive double-height council chamber.

Battersea Arts Centre (former town hall)

Battersea Town Hall, begun in 1892 – an ‘Elizabethan Renaissance’ design by Edward Mountford – survived a disastrous fire in 2015.  Fortunately, repairs and improvements have re-established what is now the Battersea Arts Centre as a wonderful local resource.  Its local government heritage survives, however – a worthy memorial to the time when Battersea’s radical politics earned it the title, the ‘Municipal Mecca’. (The Latchmere Estate, a fifteen minute walk to the north and the subject of my very first post, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour in 1903.)

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation in Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital. Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils.  Nearby, you can visit the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920, just up the road at New River Head.

Back to Finsbury Town Hall, it’s been the home of the Urdang Academy – a school of dance and musical theatre – since 2006 and, in its words, ‘an inspiring and fitting environment in which to train’.  The Town Hall is still a local registry office for weddings and, for that reason, close to my heart and that of the woman who puts the ‘dreams’ into ‘municipal’.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, built to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Redbridge (formerly Ilford) Town Hall (c) Sunil 060902 and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The first ‘free Classical’ phase of Redbridge Town Hall, by architect Ben Woollard, was opened in 1901 for Ilford Urban District Council. A new central library was built in the 1927 extension for the newly created Municipal Borough and further office space in the 1933 extension, contributing to the eclectic Renaissance of the overall ensemble. Since 1965 it’s served as the headquarters of the London Borough of Redbridge. The Council Chamber is one of the finest in London.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country.

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

And without doubt, Woolwich Town Hall, an elaborate Baroque design by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, is one of the most impressive town halls in the capital.  Queen Victoria presides over the main stairway of the building’s staggeringly impressive central lobby but the building was opened, following Labour’s capture of the Metropolitan Borough Council in 1903 by local MP and dockers’ leader Will Crooks.  That take-over by one of the largest and most active Labour organisations in the country (don’t neglect the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society here) heralded a proud era of reform to raise the health and living standards of the local working class.

Town Hall Hotel, Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green Town Hall, Edwardian Baroque, was opened in 1910 to designs by Percy Robinson and W Alban Jones.  Sculptures by Henry Poole adorn the exterior.  The growth of local government responsibilities in the interwar period compelled the opening of a large extension to the rear, designed by ECP Monson – restrained neo-classical outside, sumptuous and modern inside – in 1939.  (Monson was also a significant architect of the era’s council housing such as the briefly notorious Lenin Estate built in the 1920s when the Council was briefly under joint Labour-Communist control.)

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall (c) Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

Islington Town Hall (c) Alan Ford and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Islington Town Hall, opened in 1925, takes us into the heyday of local government as councils assumed ever greater powers and purpose. It was designed by ECP Monson again. Its neo-classical style has been described as old-fashioned for its time but it’s finely executed.

Kingston Guildhall (c) Steve Keiretsu and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Kingston Town Hall, built ten years later for the then Municipal Borough of Kingston-on Thames and designed by Maurice Webb, displays another of the more traditional forms still favoured in the era – redbrick, neo-Georgian.  The Magistrates Courts, incorporated into the building, are now the offices of the Borough’s History Centre.

Hackney Town Hall

Hackney Town Hall, designed by Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge, is also formally neo-classical but its lines and styling are sleeker, more modern and, internally it’s a masterpiece of Art Deco.  When formally opened in 1937 by Lord Snell, Labour Leader of the House of the Lords, he described it as a building:

devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all…It represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living…a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

That’s an ideal of local governance that we would do well to remember and revive in these straitened times.

Havering (formerly Romford) Town Hall (c) MRSC and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Opened one year earlier, Romford Town Hall (now serving the London Borough of Havering) is a less elaborate building, designed by Herbert R Collins and Antoine Englebert O Geens in an architectural competition stressing the need for strict economy. But it’s an important representative of the International Moderne style increasingly in vogue at this time. Though its steel-framed construction is hidden here by brickwork and stone, rather than the white cement often favoured, this was a consciously forward-looking, more democratic architecture shedding the detritus of the past.

Dagenham Town Hall

The former Dagenham Town Hall (now the Coventry University London Campus) was designed by E Berry Webber in 1937 for what was then Dagenham Urban District Council, undergoing massive growth as a result of the LCC’s nearby Becontree Estate.  It’s a modernist design of steel-framed construction – a quintessential civic building of the era. The full height, marbled ceremonial stairway in the building’s main hall is on of the most impressive in the capital.

Waltham Forest Assembly Hall

The consummation of this ambitious era of municipal construction is found in Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) and the adjacent Assembly Hall – a magnificent civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain. Both the Town Hall, not open this year, and Assembly Hall were designed by Phillip Hepworth in a stripped down classical style with Art Deco touches owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.  The front of the Hall, famed for its acoustics and a favourite recording venue, is inscribed with the words of local son William Morris (which also provide the Borough motto), “Fellowship is Life; Lack of Fellowship is Death’.

London City Hall (ca) Garry Knight and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to some 21^st century examples of new civic architecture. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened in 2002 – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

Brent Civic Centre

The new Brent Civic Centre, opened in 2013 near Wembley Stadium lets us end on a positive note.  The building unites Brent’s civic, public and administrative functions under a single roof – in the words of its designers Hopkins Architects, ‘a new hub and heart for the community where residents can meet, shop and eat’.  The latter, of course, is another reflection of changed times and priorities and an ethos in which public service is at best complemented by commercial imperatives and, at worst, subordinated to them.

I haven’t seen it but it looks, to be fair, a rather stunning building and, since it houses a community hall and library as well as a civic chamber and offices for the 2000 employees who keep the borough’s services going, let’s celebrate it as a worthy update to the civic heritage this post records.

 

Open House London, 2017: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing

The most important buildings in London – those with the greatest social significance for the mass of its people and those which have made the greatest visual impact on the capital – are council houses. In 1981, at peak, there were 769,996 council homes in the capital and they housed near 31 percent of its population.

It’s partly this ubiquity and familiarity that means most council estates don’t make it into Open House London, the capital’s annual celebration of its built heritage taking place this year on the weekend of the 16-17 September. And, then – let’s be fair here – there’s the fact that not all municipal schemes have represented the very best of architecture and design.

Housing crisis and protest

But there’s another process in play – the marginalisation of social housing and its contribution to the lives of so many. We are asked to forget all that social housing has achieved, just as we are asked by some supporters of a boundless free market to discount it as a solution to the present housing crisis.

This post offers an alternative perspective: a chronological tour of the Open House London venues which do mark an alternative and progressive history – council housing to savour and celebrate.  I’ve written on many of these in the past so click on the links to get to those earlier posts and further information. Open House locations are picked out in bold.

Houses on the Risley Avenue and Awlfield Avenue junction, Tower Gardens Estate: a ‘butterfly junction’ of the type pioneered in Letchworth Garden City

We’ll begin, appropriately, with the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham – designed and built by the London County Council (LCC) before the First World War: a cottage estate for working people inspired by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements of the day.  Just under 1000 homes were built on the Estate before the war halted construction; a further 1266 houses and flats were added – in plainer style but in keeping with Garden City ideals – in a northwards extension to the Estate between the wars.

Dickson Road, Progress Estate

The Progress Estate in Eltham wasn’t a municipal scheme.  It was built by the Ministry of Works during the First World War and designed by the Ministry’s Chief Architect, Frank Baines; its role, to support the war effort by providing high-quality housing to the workers of the nearby Royal Arsenal Munitions Works.  Almost 1300 homes were built in the single year of 1915, showing what can be done when housing needs are prioritised. Originally named the Well Hall Estate, it was renamed in 1925 when the Government sold it to the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.  Fifty-five years later, the 500 remaining social rented homes were sold on to the Hyde Housing Association.

26 Chittys Lane, Becontree, with a plaque marking it as the first house completed on the estate

The Estate was a crucial influence on the 1918 Tudor Walters Report which in turn did much to shape the form and nature of council housing in the interwar period when the LCC alone built 89,049 council homes in the capital.  Some 26,000 of these were built on the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, first mooted in 1919 at the height of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign.   It was the largest of the LCC’s interwar estates, housing by 1939 a population of 120,000.  Such size (and an unpromising site) led some – despite the planners’ best efforts – to criticise the mass and uniformity of the Estate but to many, moving from inner-city slums, ‘it was heaven with the gates off.’

If you’re there, make sure to visit Valence House too, a 15th century manor house purchased to serve local needs by the LCC in 1926, and now a local museum recording the distant and more recent history of the area, including some interesting records and re-creations of Becontree.

A brochure for the Lansbury Estate, 1951

The Lansbury Estate in Poplar would serve as a model for another era of post-war council housing when it was opened in 1951 to serve as a living ‘Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning, and Building Research’ for the Festival of Britain.  It’s easy to be unimpressed by its modest yellow-brick terraces and small blocks of flats and maisonettes – and much contemporary architectural opinion was – but take time to savour a moment when (in the words of the Festival’s on-site town planning exhibition) our politics were driven by ‘The Battle for Land’ and ‘The Needs of the People’ and the question ‘How can these needs be met?’.

The Estate epitomises the ‘neighbourhood unit’, a key element of post-war planning envisaged as a means of preserving and enhancing an ideal of ‘community’ which some felt betrayed by larger, more anonymous council estates such as Becontree.  Its centrepiece was Frederick Gibberd’s Chrisp Street Market and clock tower – the first pedestrianised shopping centre in the country.

While there, you’ll see Balfron Tower which is a five-minute walk to the west. Designed by Ernő Goldfinger and opened by the Greater London Council in 1968, Balfron is famous (or infamous according to taste) as one of the most imposing Brutalist designs of its time but it was, first and foremost, housing for working-class people being moved from local slums. Now the block’s council tenants have been ‘decanted’ and the flats are to be sold to those with the means to buy them on the open market. With a history of ‘art washing’ intended to sanitise this loss of social role and purpose, it’s perhaps a good thing that Balfron doesn’t feature in Open House this year.

Trellick Tower

Fortunately, Balfron’s younger sister designed by Goldfinger, Trellick Tower and opened in 1972, does, despite Right to Buy, remain social housing owned by the now infamous Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  You can visit a social enterprise, comprising furniture workshops and showroom and café on the lower floors.  I’ve not written on Trellick but the posts on Balfron will give you some background.

Berthold Lubetkin

This was an era when the ‘starchitects’ of the day were part of a social democratic vision of Britain’s future and for no-one was this truer than Berthold Lubetkin, the architect of the Finsbury Health Centre, who famously declared that ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people’.  He fulfilled this vision in the Spa Green Estate, to the north, opened in 1949 and described by the Survey of London, not prone to hyperbole, as ‘heroic’ and by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time.

Neither of these appear in Open House but two of Lubetkin’s schemes for the Finsbury Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the most progressive in the capital – are featured.  Bevin Court was opened in 1954; the Cold War having put paid to plans to name the building after Lenin (who had once lived on it site).  Its innovative seven-story Y-shape capitalised on its site and ensured none of the flats faced north but, visually, its crowning glory is its central staircase.  Visit to see that and the newly restored Peter Yates murals and bust of Bevin in the entrance lobby.

Kendal House and Reddington House, Priory Green Estate

A few minutes’ walk to the north, you can also visit Lubetkin’s Priory Green Estate, completed three years later.  It’s a much larger estate – 288 homes in seven large blocks but with similar attention paid to lay-out and landscaping and more striking, sculptural staircases.  The Estate was transferred from Islington Borough Council, Finsbury’s successor after 1965, to Peabody in 1999 and, having fallen on hard times, has since been renovated with the aid of a £2m Heritage Lottery grant.

The Cranbrook Estate – old people’s bungalows and Elisabeth Frink’s Blind Beggar and His Dog (centre left) in foreground

Finsbury’s progressive counterpart to the east was Bethnal Green and Lubetkin designed the Cranbrook Estate, built between 1955 and 1966, for the Borough.  With 529 homes in total – arranged in a geometric ensemble of six tower and five medium-rise blocks artfully diminishing in scale to the single-storey terrace of old people’s bungalows on the Roman Road – it is one and half times the size of le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.  Lutbetkin’s biographer, John Allen, rightly describes it as a ‘stupendous tour de force’ and only detracts from that compliment by seeming to lament the ‘domestic intricacies of municipal housing’ which lie behind it.  I’ll take those – as Lubetkin would – as, in fact, its crowning achievement.

Dawson’s Heights: Ladlands and the view to the north

When she designed Dawson’s Heights, in East Dulwich, for Southwark Borough Council, Kate Macintosh, aged just 26, was no such star though she’s since become one of the most renowned of council housing architects and a doughty defender of the sector’s value and continuing purpose.  Dawson’s Heights literally crowns its dramatic hill-top setting, so much so that English Heritage (in a listing proposal rejected by the Secretary of State) was moved to almost lyrical praise of the scheme’s ‘striking and original massing’ and its ‘evocative associations with ancient cities and Italian hill towns’.  The Estate, two large ziggurat-style blocks designed to offer views and sunlight to each of their 296 flats, was built between 1968 and 1972.

The World’s End Estate

Another estate which capitalises on its superb setting is the World’s End Estate, completed in 1977, set on the banks of the Thames across London and built, in happier times, by the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.  Designed by Eric Lyons and HT (‘Jim’) Cadbury-Brown, in plain terms it comprises seven 18 to 21-storey tower blocks, joined in a figure of eight by nine four-storey walkway blocks but the whole, clad in warm-red brick, possesses a romantic, castellated appearance, providing  great views within and without.

Darfield Way, Silchester Estate

Three miles to the north at the top end of the Borough lies the Silchester Estate, built in the early 1970s by the Greater London Council on land cleared of slums in Notting Dale. Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West Estate lie immediately to the east. Grenfell offers its own tragic indictment of the marginalisation of social housing residents and cost-cutting regeneration – I won’t add here to the mountain of words and outpouring of grief that catastrophe engendered except to say that I hope lessons will be learnt.

Silchester offers its own lessons.  You are invited to view a ‘new development of 112 mixed tenure homes, community and retail facilities delivered jointly by Peabody and Kensington and Chelsea’.  It’s a symbol of the new world of social housing – new build financed by the construction of homes for sale and the mantra that mono-tenure (i.e. working-class, social rented) estates need to be ‘improved’ by an injection of middle-class affluence and aspiration. Some social housing has been replaced on a like-for-like basis; 70 percent of the new homes are said to be ‘affordable’ though that, as you will know, is a slippery and all too often duplicitous term.

Frinstead House and Waynflete Square, Silchester Estate

Take a look at the adjacent, older estate while you there – four 20-storey tower blocks and a range of low-rise blocks set around the leafy Waynflete Square. It’s well-liked by residents who cherish their homes, their community and the estate’s attractive open spaces.  All, in recent years, have been subject to plans to demolish and rebuild.  A strong residents’ campaign and recent events at Grenfell may have postponed that threat but such estates and communities across the capital deserve our support.

Ted Hollamby

Nowhere is this truer than in Lambeth. As Chief Architect for the new (post-65) Borough of Lambeth, Ted Hollamby had concluded that ‘people do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings’.  Hollamby believed that ‘most people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not’.  His vision can be seen enacted in two very fine council estates on show during Open House.

Central Hill in Upper Norwood, completed in 1973, is a stepped development designed to make best use of its attractive site but it reflects Lambeth and Hollamby’s signature style in its intimacy and human scale.  It’s worked; it’s a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact, once more the threat of demolition.

Central Hill

The principal driver of this policy in London is money or the lack of it – the pressure to sell council real estate and build private housing for sale in order to raise capital for social housing at best or so-called ‘affordable’ housing at worst.  A second is ‘densification’ – a belief that working-class homes must be built at greater density to accommodate the capital’s growing population.  Not all regeneration is bad but where it means the destruction of good homes and the wiping out of existing communities it should be opposed.

Cressingham Gardens

The plans to wreak this havoc on Cressingham Gardens, one of Lambeth’s finest estates – described in 1981 by Lord Esher, president of RIBA, as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’ – have already been approved, its residents still fighting valiantly a rearguard action.  It’s a beautiful estate nestling on the edge of Brockwell Park which manages superbly, in Hollamby’s words again, to ‘create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’.

Thamesmead as envisaged in the mid-1960s

Ten miles to the east, Thamesmead on the southern bank of the Thames Estuary represented planning and construction on a much grander scale. A gleam in the eye of the LCC from the fifties and then, from 1966, the Greater London Council’s ‘Woolwich-Erith Project’, it was envisaged as a ‘town of the 21st Century’ with a population of between 60- to 100,000 people.

Thamesmead south and central, 2017 (c) Kleon3 and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Only 12,000 had settled by 1974 and the estate – with its difficult location, poor transport links and lack of facilities – was considered by many a failure. Taken over by Peabody in 2015, benefiting from new investment and the arrival of Crossrail in 2018, it’s on the up now and worth visiting for both its past and future promise.

Meanwhile, across the capital, another progressive borough, Camden – under the enlightened leadership of Borough Architect Sydney Cook – had also developed its own striking house style.  Cook rejected the system-building then in vogue as the means to build as much as cheaply as possible – ‘I’ll use standardised plans if you can find me a standardised site,’ he said.  And he rejected high-rise, particularly the tower blocks set in open landscape popular at the time.

Stoneleigh Terrace, Whitington Estate

This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, another young architect then in his mid-twenties. It’s a larger, grander scheme than those of Lambeth – in signature Camden style, six parallel linear stepped-section blocks of light pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber.  It was designed to be a ‘form of housing…which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground’. Each home had its own front door and a walk through the front door of 8 Stoneleigh Terrace during Open House will allow you to glimpse the innovative interior design of the housing too, chiefly the work of Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services.

Neave Brown

Aside from Cook, Camden’s superb council housing of this era is chiefly associated with Neave Brown, the only living architect to have had all his UK work officially listed. This year’s Open House features, the Dunboyne Road (formerly Fleet Road) Estate (no. 36 to be precise), designed by Brown in 1966 and finally completed in 1977.

Its three white, stepped parallel blocks and now mature gardens provide a striking ensemble, noted by English Heritage in their 2010 Grade II listing for its ‘strong modernist aesthetic’ and a ‘simple, bold overall composition’ belying the scheme’s complexity and sophistication.

Dunboyne Road Estate

The other Brown scheme in Open House is generally judged one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, the Alexandra Road Estate,  listed Grade II* in 1993.  It’s better seen than described but, in its scale and confidence, it marks (in the words of modernist architect John Winter), ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  Make sure to visit the recently renovated Alexandra Road Park and Tenants’ Hall (also featured in Open House), both integral to the design and original conception of the estate.

Rowley Way, the Alexandra Road Estate

Alexandra Road was completed in 1979 – the year in which such high ambition would be consigned to the graveyard of history.  It’s a sad irony that some of the very best of our council housing was built just as its near-century long story of practical idealism and shared social purpose was drawing to a close.

I hadn’t intended this tour of some of London’s finest council estates to be so elegiac but the contemporary picture of social housing’s marginalisation and market-driven ‘regeneration’ creates a poignant counterpoint to the energy and aspirations of previous generations.  If you visit any of the estates on show during Open House London, my plea to you is to think of them not as monuments to a bygone era but as beacons of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

Notes

The Silchester residents’ campaign to defend their estate can be found at Save Our Silchester. The residents of Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens also have active campaigns fighting to preserve their homes and communities.  See Save Central Hill and Save Cressingham Gardens to find out more and lend your support.