Municipal Greenwich and a bit of the Isle of Dogs, Part I

This blog began with a walk – just a ramble through some local streets and, with it, a realisation of just how much we owed to local government.   This post marks another walk. It wasn’t planned as an excavation of municipal heritage – the route’s a bit random and its ‘sights’ are eclectic to say the least – but, as a reminder of the breadth and depth of municipalism’s contribution to our lives, it’s probably hard to beat.

We start at the Island Gardens DLR station at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs.  Turn to your left on exit and you’ll see Millwall Park.  Poorly drained and unattractive to speculative builders, the area remained predominantly pasture land into the late nineteenth century though Millwall FC occupied a couple of sites from 1885 till their move south of the river in 1910. In 1919 the London County Council (LCC) bought the land and created a playground and park.  In 1925, they added an open-air swimming pool but that was destroyed in the Blitz and not rebuilt. (1)

‘Woman and Fish’ by Antonio Lopez Reche after Frank Dobson

At the edge of the park there’s a statue of a woman holding a fish. An adjacent plaque tells you it’s by Antonio Lopez Reche and was placed there in 2007 but it has a back-story.  It’s a replica of an artwork – ‘Woman with Fish’ – by the sculptor Frank Dobson, bought by the LCC in 1963 in the year of his death.  It was originally located on the Carpenter Estate in Stepney, part of the Council’s ‘Patronage of the Arts’ scheme which saw over 70 works of art placed in estates and schools across the capital for the pleasure and edification of working-class Londoners.  Here it is in its original setting.

‘Cleveland Estate: “Woman with Fish” sculpture by Frank Dobson’ (1962) (c) London Collage

The original provided drinking water too but it was badly vandalised in the late 1970s and removed, originally for restoration, in 1983.  Then it was destroyed.  Fortunately, we have this replica to remind us of that progressive past though its present rather isolated position and backdrop seem to speak to different values. (2)

Greenwich Power Station (to left) and the Old Royal Naval College

Wandering over to Island Gardens themselves, you get your first grand vista of the River Thames. A few of you might first notice the impressive buildings of the Old Royal Naval College immediately across the river but true municipal dreamers will be more taken by the powerful bulk of Greenwich Power Station lying just to the east.  It was designed and built by the LCC between 1902 and 1910 – an early example of a steel-frame building with a stone-clad brick cover – to provide power to the Council’s tramways.  Coal, oil and gas-fired over the years, it’s now one of the oldest operational power stations in the world and recently converted to generate low carbon power for the Tube and local homes and businesses. (3)

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

Naturally, we’ll use the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to cross the river, designed by the civil engineer Sir Alexander Binnie and constructed by John Cochrane and Co. but commissioned by the seemingly ubiquitous LCC. The 370 metre-long tunnel was opened in 1902, after a campaign by Will Crooks (docker, trade unionist, councillor and Labour MP), to provide reliable access from south of the river to workers employed on the Isle of Dogs.

Meridian Estate and Cutty Sark

Meridian Estate

As you emerge on the south bank, the first thing you’ll notice (apart from the Cutty Sark) is the Meridian Estate, a traditional LCC estate of five-storey, walk-up, balcony-access tenement blocks, begun by in 1933 with its westernmost buildings completed after the end of the Second World War.  It must now be among the best-sited estates, commanding some of the finest views, of any in the capital.   Today, riverside locations are the prerogative of the well-heeled. Back in the day, when first acquired by the Council, this was unattractive industrial land – a mix of docks and allied trades and humble terraced homes – and it was deemed good enough for working people. (4)

Greenwich Town Hall

We’ll ignore the tourist hustle and bustle of central Greenwich and walk on up along Greenwich High Road.  As you turn the corner past Hawksmoor’s St Alfrege Church, completed in 1718, you catch a first glimpse of Greenwich Town Hall or rather, initially, its 50 metre tower and look-out platform.  This was a complex designed by the architectural practice, Culpin & Son. The father Ewart was a Labour alderman and vice-chair of the LCC in the interwar period and, together with his son Clifford (chiefly responsible for the Greenwich building), he had also designed Poplar New Town Hall opened in 1938. Greenwich followed one year later.

Entrance and commemorative tablet. The mosaic is almost certainly by David Evans.

It’s a building whose form and style consciously reflects local government with a progressive agenda – the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich came under Labour control in 1934 as did in the same year the LCC itself: (5)

Avowedly modernist in its uncluttered and irregular elevations, juxtaposing verticality, through a clock tower, with the horizontality of flat-roofed, low-rise office blocks. For Pevsner in 1951, this was ‘the only town hall of any London borough to represent the style of our time adequately’

Clifford Culpin was clear on his inspiration, Willem Dudok whose Hilversum Town Hall in the Netherlands (1931) provided a model:

I was a devoted admirer of Dudok, and when I had the Greenwich building to design, I went to Hilversum and though the great man had a house full of guests, he devoted a very long day to showing me his best buildings.

The Borough Hall

Aside from the council offices and Council Chamber, the complex contains two public halls, including the principal Borough Hall, originally with seating for 534 (and 259 on the balcony) on its sprung maple dance floor.  The Council ‘hoped that the new Civic Centre will become the focus of the social life of the Borough’.  Older residents can tell me if that were ever the case. As of now, sold off in the early 1970s, the Borough Hall is occupied by registered charity Greenwich Dance (‘the home of dance in South East London’) whilst the former civic buildings (now Meridian House) house the Greenwich School of Management and some private flats.

West Greenwich Library

Immediately adjacent to the south is West Greenwich Library, built in 1905-7 and designed by HW Willis and J Anderson according to Pevsner and Sir AB Thomas by Historic England.  We’ll go with the latter’s detailed description of ‘the three-bay building, of modest baroque appearance’.  It was – as a central tablet records – ‘The gift of Andrew Carnegie Esq’; one of 660 libraries in the UK (there are 2509 worldwide) paid for by Carnegie, a Scots-born US steel magnate who dedicated $350m – some 90 per cent of his personal fortune – to philanthropic causes in the closing years of his life.

Follow the road south as it branches east on Greenwich South Street and look up above number 23.  Here there’s a plaque marking the birthplace in 1873 of Alfred Salter – doctor, Bermondsey councillor and MP and (with his wife and fellow councillor, Ada) one of the leading and most idealistic municipal reformers of his generation. (The work of the Salters and Bermondsey’s Labour council in the interwar period are extensively recorded in my earlier series of posts on Bermondsey.)

Queen Elizabeth College

Across the road is something which isn’t municipal but it worthy of note for both its architecture and social purpose.  Queen Elizabeth College is (despite its name) an example of the earliest form of social housing – alms-houses originally endowed by landowner and antiquarian William Lambarde in 1576 who entrusted their management to the Drapers Company which still runs them.  The buildings you see now fronting Greenwich High Road were built in 1818 and provide 40 self-contained one-bedroom cottages.

Lambard House, Queen Elizabeth College

Lambard House (William seems to have lost an ‘e’ somewhere along the line) on Langdale Road is an attractive extension, maintaining that mission by providing 28 further flats in 1967. (6)

We’ll walk on in next week’s post to follow this municipal trail further.

Sources

(1) For this and much more on Millwall Park, see Isle of Dogs – Past Life, Past Lives, Millwall Park (10 August 2015)

(2) Sally Williams, London Park and Gardens Trust, ‘Looking out for Art – LCC’s Patronage of the Arts’

(3) BBC News, ‘Low Carbon Plans Announced for Greenwich Power Station’, 8 January 2015

(4) Greenwich Industrial History, ‘The Old Loyal Britons, 62 Thames Street, Greenwich, SE10’ (20 August 2014)

(5) English Heritage, London’s Town Halls. The Architecture of Local Government from 1840 to the Present (1999)

(6) The Greenwich Phantom, Almshouses (3) Queen Elizabeth’s College (3 July 2008)

 

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Aylesham and the Planning of the East Kent Coalfield, Part II

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Aylesham

We left Aylesham last week – a new town and still a small one but with much riding on its success.  It represented new planning ideals and ambitions; it heralded – many hoped – a new industrial Britain whose prosperity was reflected in the healthier and happier homes of its working people   In practice, none of this would be easy.

There were, initially, high hopes for the East Kent coalfield, near to the prospering markets of south-east England at a time when much of the country was mired in a long-term industrial decline or hit by Great Depression of the early thirties. Kent’s miners increased in number from just over 2000 in 1925 to almost 7500 ten years later as the national mining workforce fell by a third.

That overall decline was complemented by the appalling industrial relations of the privately-owned industry, highlighted by a national mining strike in 1921 and the nine-month stoppage in 1926 which underlay the General Strike.  The new collieries of Kent seemed to offer a fresh start.

Whit Sunday Parade, King’s Road, Aylesham – a later image showing more prosperous and settled times, with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Cente

Many of Aylesham’s early families arrived heavily in debt and their children often suffered ‘various illnesses, including rickets and impetigo, largely attributable to insufficient nourishment resulting from the father’s unemployment before coming to Kent’. They came from depressed mining communities across the country – ‘so widely separated are they that some of the men can scarcely understand the language of others’. (1)

One early settler later recalled these dark days: (2)

They was trampin’ down here from Durham, Scotland – every village you could mention in Britain, I bet they knowed where Snowdown was. There was only Snowdown would sign them on and that wasn’t a pit, it was a pity – it were red ‘ot. Men had been so long unemployed Snowdown was killing them off … Men were breaking down with boils, pimps, carbuncles – the heat. Well, they was working in 98-100 was nothing.

Mr McEwan also pointed to a local difficulty.  Snowdown was nicknamed ‘Dante’s Inferno’ by the miners. At 3000 ft, it was one of the deepest pits in the country and one of the hottest with temperatures reaching 38°C (100°F) and 80 per cent humidity.

Although a strong and proud community developed later, these were inauspicious beginnings:

For the first three or four years the Welsh stuck to the Welsh, the Derbyshire stuck to the Derbyshire and the Geordies stuck to the Geordies. If they went into a pub they weren’t friendly – there was more trouble than anything else. Everybody used to fight each other over nothing many a time.

Snowdown Colliery, end of shift, 1972

But there was one particular source of contention – the butty system employed in Snowdown by which the company employed a subcontractor (the butty) who was responsible for organising a team of workmen and delivering coal to the surface at so much a ton.  Disputes around the butty’s cut and the wages he paid to his team were inevitable and bitter.

With apologies to current residents who know the town very differently, it was seen then as a rough sort of place: ‘If you put a towel on the line or a rug, you got to keep your eye on it for if you come inside it’d gone’; ‘if anybody wanted to light a fire, they just went out and pulled the fences up’, according to later testimony.  And a poor place with local shopping costly and irregular transport expensive.

For all that, the men in employment – with work to occupy their time and provide status – had an easier time of it than their wives.  Mrs Unwin arrived in Aylesham in 1931 and found it hard to settle:

I didn’t like it, I used to cry, used to cry night after night for a long time, I broke my heart to go back, but what could you do? We was married and we had a baby then. I missed my home life and there was nothing in the village you see, and we couldn’t afford the train fares to go out. Everything seemed to be so quiet here, being used to living in a town and going round the shops even – window shopping see. We just couldn’t do that here – there was no shops, there was only one co-op.

It was reckoned that 300 hundred families left the town in its first two years and those departures continued, frequently in the form of moonlight flits where debts had become unsustainable. (3) Snowdown suffered a particularly high turnover of labour. Often, as Gina Harkell concludes:

the decision of families to return to their previous home was initiated by women. The conditions in the pits were so appalling that many miners needed only a gentle prod from their unhappy and discontented wives to get them on the move back home.

Patrick Abercrombie’s good intentions had, it seems, come to nothing.  The larger ambitions for the East Kent coalfield had faltered and the planners’ dreams faded, buffeted by the economic difficulties which ensured only their partial fulfilment and the near impossibility of creating cohesive community in such embattled and fractious circumstances.

King’s Road, Aylesham

By the mid-thirties, only 500 houses had been built on a layout designed for some 2000.  The houses themselves were solid and decent: (4)

Every house has three bedrooms of reasonable size and a bathroom, containing a washing basin with hot and cold water. The living room in every case is excellently arranged, having two windows and being fitted with a fine cooking range. There is electric light in every room and the cupboard accommodation is ample.

But even the provision of bathrooms had proven controversial.  Some of the women thought that ‘in order to save the defiling of bedrooms with grimy clothes, the baths should have been on the ground floor’ – though the same journalist (accurately or merely conveying a trope of his time?) reported that, where baths had been provided on the ground floor in neighbouring villages, these were often used for storage with the miners preferring to use the scullery basin.  Perhaps this difficulty at least was solved by the first provision of pithead baths (by the Miners’ Welfare Committee) in 1935.

St Peter’s Church, Aylesham

In overall terms, however, one contemporary observer concluded in 1933 that ‘the whole village has a depressing air of arrested development’. (5)  And although a new estate of 104 homes was developed by the First National Housing Trust in 1935, another stringent local critic found almost one in ten homes unoccupied: ‘Aylesham does not strike one as a happy place. Why?’ Ironically, he blamed the stranglehold on new development wielded by the very public utility society, Aylesham Tenants Ltd., charged with overseeing the town’s growth and prosperity. (6)

A contemporary image of Aylesham Central School

Seemingly, little had changed in Aylesham by the end of the Second World War.  A survey conducted by the Ministry of Fuel and Power concluded in a precise echo of that earlier assessment that: (7)

the settlement suffers from arrested development, with many of the sites in the centre of the town still rough grassland. There is no public building of any architectural significance, except the central school, while the houses present a marked degree of monotony.

Much else had changed. For one, the mines themselves had come into public ownership in 1946. That was part of a larger shift heralded by Labour’s landslide victory in 1945. Planning ideas and goals, pioneered in East Kent in the 1920s, became mainstream in the wake of the catastrophic regional impact of the Great Depression and were further boosted by the machinery of war.  Aylesham hoped to benefit.

Aylesham in 1952, with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Centre

The Ministry of Fuel and Power agreed that the town needed to expand – 400 new homes were needed, it estimated, to return to pre-war levels of production and 400 more to achieve maximum output. New housing development was to be left largely to the local authorities and in 1947 Eastry Rural District Council accepted a £14,500 tender from Costains to build 46 of their Airey homes in the town.  Some 46,000 of these prefabricated reinforced concrete houses were erected in the early post-war years in the bid to build quickly and overcome shortages of labour and traditional materials.

Further housing was developed to the west of the original town centre in the 1950s and 1960s.  This is typical council estate housing of its time – spacious, well-built and well-equipped, and generally attractive.  In Aylesham, some of the street names capture a local labour politics and pride.

Attlee Avenue, Aylesham

Cripps Close, Aylesham

Another innovation came in 1948 with the opening of the Rego Shirt Factory, initially employing some 160 and the first local industry to provide work for women. There was a consensus view among planners and politicians that Aylesham was an ‘unbalanced community’ and needed light industry not only to attract a wider range of the population but to provide work for miners retiring from pneumoconiosis.

Bevan Way, Aylesham

The new road projected in 1950 was to be part of this but there were larger hopes that Aylesham might receive a proportion of the London population which Abercrombie (in a later guise as co-author of the 1943 The County of London Plan) had recommended be dispersed from the overcrowded capital ‘beyond the Metropolitan influence’. In 1950, the County Council tried to get the town added to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning’s list of ‘expanded towns’ – existing towns tasked with receiving an overspill population from the major conurbations. (8)

Newman Road, Aylesham

Those unfulfilled hopes remained into the 1960s.  The Kent Development Plan suggested Aylesham should grow to 40,000 within twenty years.  This was an ambition embraced by locals; as the chair of the Parish Council stated: (9)

We welcome anybody and everybody. We want light industry and houses, because that is the way to get more shops and services for our people. We want a balanced community. The miners want to meet and talk to people in other jobs and with other interests.

The failure of these plans is simply told: in 1961 the population of Aylesham stood at 4142; in 2011 at 4999.

Terraced housing in Boulevard Courrières, the street named after Aylesham’s twin town in northern France

Elderly person’s housing in Boulevard Courrières

That’s not quite the end of the story. Further expansion, now in the hands of private developers, is taking place and projected. A new Masterplan was adopted in 2004 and outline planning permission granted for up to 1200 new homes. By 2016, the first 200 homes of a new ‘Aylesham Garden Village’ were constructed; 400 were planned for 2018.  Whether Barratt Homes and Persimmon Homes will fulfil the ‘Garden Village’ ethos they claim is a moot point but, ironically, it is just that ‘feel of modern urbanism in the rural idyll’ that Patrick Abercrombie had sought back in the 1920s. (9)

A recent image, looking south, showing new development on the fringe of the original town.

In the meantime, the original raison d’être of the town had been destroyed.  At peak, Snowdown employed 3500 men. By 1981, when the National Coal Board announced an annual loss for the pit of £9m, it employed just 960 and it was slated for closure alongside 22 others. A three-day walk-out of miners in Kent, Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and Durham forced a temporary rethink but the words of the Snowdown National Union of Mineworkers branch chair, Morris Bryan, were prophetic: ‘There are millions of tons of reserves. If this pit is not safe, no pit in the country is’. (10)

Arthur Scargill at Snowdown Colliery, November 1983

As the threat of wholesale pit closures across the country strengthened in the early eighties, a year-long miners’ strike occurred in 1984-85.  It ended in heroic failure and the Kent miners – 96 percent struck in November 1984 and 93 percent were out when the action was finally called off – were among its staunchest supporters. Before the war, many miners blacklisted for union activity elsewhere had moved to Kent; that militant heritage remained.  Nevertheless, Snowdown was closed in 1987; Betteshanger, the last working Kent pit, followed in 1989.

‘Payday at Snowdown Colliery’ – designed by Derek Garrity and sculpted by Steve Melton

Though its proud mining heritage and traditions remain, the town had perforce to reinvent itself and in 2014 its unemployment rate stood at 2.8 percent, fractionally under the rate for Britain as a whole, a little higher than the South-East average.  The previous census revealed that a quarter of the local labour force now worked in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations though 40 percent of these worked 10 km or more from home. (In housing terms, 59 percent of households were owner occupiers, compared to the then English average of 68 percent.) (11)

It had been quite a journey.  The bustling industry envisaged for East Kent had never taken off and the healthier and happier model settlements envisaged for its projected workforce – Abercrombie had suggested that up to 278,000 would move to the area – withered on the vine. For all that, we should celebrate that early attempt to create working-class homes and communities suitable for the modern age. Aylesham is a decent place to live and it boasts a strong community which has overcome many difficulties.  Our subjection to the economic forces which govern our lives for good or ill apparently remains.

Sources

(1) ‘The Kent Mining Community’, The Times, 22 March 1930

(2) Gina Harkell, ‘The Migration of Mining Families to the Kent Coalfield between the Wars’, Oral History, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring, 1978.  Other direct quotations from residents are drawn from the same source.

(3) David Jeremiah, Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900-70 (Manchester University Press, 2000)

(4) ‘Growth of a New Town’, The Times, 27 April 1927

(5) MBA Churchard, An Analysis of the Agricultural and Industrial Life of South-East England with Especial Reference to the Effect of the Developing Kent Coalfield Thereon, PhD, University of London, 1933

(6) ‘Aylesham Calling: Another View’, Letter from Richard Carter, Missioner, Dover Express and East Kent News, 28 January 1938

(7) Ministry of Fuel and Power, Kent Coalfield Regional Survey Report (HMSO, 1945)

(8) ‘County Council and Aylesham’, Dover Express and East Kent News, 22 February 1946 and ‘Discussions of Future of Aylesham’, Dover Express, 24 February 1950

(9) Aylesham Village, ‘Welcome to Aylesham Garden Village’

(10) Richard Ford, ‘Snowdown Colliery men are in fighting mood, The Times, February 16, 1981 and Nicholas Timmins, ‘Case of the untypical pit’, The Times, 7 September 1982

(11) Keith Kintrea, ‘Imagined communities? Contextualizing claims about the White working class’, Dialogues in Human Geography, vol 6, no. 1, 2016

Kent History and Library Centre have produced an excellent timeline of Aylesham’s history which is worth consulting for further detail and illustration.

Aylesham and the Planning of the East Kent Coalfield, Part I

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1920s

For two thousand years, the ‘peaceful undulating country of East Kent’ had pursued ‘an agricultural and seaside existence, perturbed by nothing more agitating than an ephemeral military conquest or so!’  But in 1931, as Patrick Abercrombie noted, a new coalfield seemed destined to change all that: (1)

That deep peace is now permanently invaded; for, however much we may minimise the ugly effects of industrialisation, and however well-planned the new additions may be, so as to conform to the genius of the locality, a change fundamental and complete will have taken place from the peace of the country to the busy hum of men.

That ‘busy hum’ never quite had the impact anticipated by Abercrombie and others in the interwar years but it did, nevertheless, change significantly a bucolic corner of rural England.  Though the last mine of the East Kent coalfield closed in 1989, a significant residue remains.  This post and the next will focus on Aylesham, planned by Abercrombie, Britain’s foremost contemporary town planner, as a model settlement, and assess how successful these planning visions were.

Milner Crescent, Aylesham

The existence of coal in the area – a continuation of the seams heavily mined in northern France – had been surmised for some time but was proven in 1882 when trail borings for the first, abortive, Channel Tunnel, were made under the Shakespeare Cliff in Dover.  The Shakespeare Colliery, operational from 1896, was never successful – indeed, in a tragic reminder of the human costs of such enterprise, eight men were killed in an explosion in 1897 – and it was closed on the outbreak of the First World War.

Milner Road, Elvington – larger homes built for colliery managers?

Arthur Burr, the most ambitious of local mining entrepreneurs, opened a second pit at Tilmanstone, west of Deal, in 1906, which enjoyed a longer existence. The village of Elvington was developed in the interwar years to house its workforce – 230 three-bed houses, each with a parlour and living room plus scullery and bathroom, built by the Tilmanstone Miners Dwellings Syndicate. (3)

Snowdown Colliery, 1930

Burr followed this up with a second pit, five miles to the west, at Snowdown in 1907. Twenty-two men were drowned when the first shaft hit water but, by 1912, the colliery had turned its first profit.  A small number of miners’ houses were built in nearby villages but the pit closed for two years in the period of industrial slump and troubled industrial relations which followed the First World War. Purchased by Pearson & Dorman Long in 1924, an ambitious modernisation programme ensued, this time complemented by idealistic plans to create homes and community appropriate to the new, large workforce envisaged.

Planning was by now an emergent discipline.  It combined in East Kent with the powerful fears and hopes occasioned by both the threat – manufacturing blight and housing squalor – and opportunity – commercial profitability and remunerative employment – seemingly promised by a new coalfield in a country grown old industrially.  That this should occur in the relatively undeveloped South-East, in the so-called ‘Garden of England’, added to the sense of urgency and concern widely felt: (4)

It may well be that Coal and Iron in Kent is the biggest industrial happening in England of this quarter-century. Kent is not Durham or Lancashire or Glamorgan – distant spots glamoured in gloom: it is in the eye of the world. Coals in Kent are not coals in Newcastle: they are at London’s door.

The first planning conference for the new coalfield took place in Canterbury in 1922, followed in May 1923 by an East Kent Joint Town Planning Committee meeting attended by representatives of the seventeen local councils directly or indirectly affected.  As evidence of the interest of the Great and Good in planning matters affecting their backyard, a meeting, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, occurred in Lambeth Palace the following month attended, amongst others, by Lord Beauchamp (Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports), Lord Alfred Milner and John Jacob Astor, MP for Dover.

Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain, a scion of the Birmingham manufacturing family, had a less gilded
background and, as both a Birmingham MP and, from 1924 to 1929, Minister of Health and Housing, a more informed and practical interest in planning matters.  But his speech in 1926 captures the good intentions and nimbyism which characterised some of this anxiety around the East Kent Coalfield.

The good intentions focused on building better industrial communities than those allowed to develop in the nineteenth century, in Chamberlain’s words, ‘without plan, without thought, without foresight, just as happened to be the whim or the caprice of particular individuals’. And they focused, in particular, on healthier and more balanced mining settlements: (5)

You are getting away, on the one hand, from the straggling kind of development … and, on the other hand, from those pit-head villages which are an unfortunate feature of many of our mining areas. You are proposing a series of towns which are not to be at the pit-heads, but which are, nevertheless, near enough to serve them; and you can give the miners who will occupy these towns a social life of a far fuller, wider and more interesting character than they can ever hope to get in those mining villages in Wales.

The nimbyism, not unreasonably, stressed that ‘the utmost care [be] taken to preserve as much as the rural charm of the hinterland (much used for charabanc excursions)’ – ‘it is easy to imagine how disastrous to them would be the background of a smoke-grimed and dishevelled Black Country’.

Patrick Abercrombie, 1942 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Patrick Abercrombie – as a founder and honorary secretary of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and professor of civic design at the University of Liverpool – commissioned by the Joint Town Planning Committee in 1925 to prepare plans for East Kent was exceptionally well placed to address these concerns.  His first report, co-written with John Archibald, was issued in 1925.

The report projected large-scale industrial development in East Kent: 18-20 pits and a mining population (including wives and children) of around 180,000.  Associated steel works and ancillary trades were anticipated to bring a further 278,000 people to the area. Besides the necessary focus on new infrastructure, Abercrombie wrote at length on residential growth.

This 1926 map shows the projected extent of the coalfield.

He concluded that the ‘general result’ of company-developed schemes ‘would be deplorable’.  He looked rather to the Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn where Public Utility Societies controlled all aspects of planning and ensured land value gains accrued to the community. They were better, he argued, in providing public utilities and buildings as well as shops and entertainment. Existing pit villages were not romanticised in this analysis. ‘Of equal and, to many minds, superior importance to the economic gain of grouped sites’, he concluded, ‘is the opportunity they give for a fuller social life’.

An estimated 55,600 new homes would be needed, divided (in Abercrombie’s final, 1927, report) among seven new towns and a number of smaller villages. In terms of their overall layout, Abercrombie thought a ‘certain formality of treatment … inevitable in an artificially planned and quickly built community’ though one ‘which is instinctively tempered by the natural features of the site’. (Abercrombie tended, in any case, to favour rather formal Beaux Arts-style schemes as we’ve seen in his post-Second World War plans for Plymouth and Hull.)

King’s Road, Aylesham

In terms of housing design, he suggested there were ‘many local examples for inspiration’ and cautiously advanced:

a simple Georgian, modified into a provincial touch with somewhat high-pitched roofs, and with a further local flavour of the Flemish influence in its brickwork.

Aylesham, a new settlement next to the Snowdown Colliery and close to new mines envisaged (though never opened) in nearby Adisham and Wingham, was to be the canvas for Abercrombie’s grand designs.  The Aylesham Tenants Ltd was formed, as a Public Utility Society, by Eastry Rural District Council and Pearson & Dorman Long in July 1926; Kent County Council joined in the following year.  With a 600 acre site and £600,000 to spend – drawn in part from an Exchequer subsidy of £90,000, a £350,000 loan from the Public Works Loan Commissioners and £70,000 from a debenture stock issue – the company embarked on the construction of 1200 homes, envisaged as the first phase of a town planned to accommodate some 15,000.

Abercrombie’s 1926 plan for Aylesham – the first built homes are shown in black.

Abercrombie’s layout provided for a grand central tree-lined boulevard with a shopping centre at its centre where roads from the collieries crossed the main axis.  Churches, schools and plentiful open space were located at focal points. It was a ‘scientific’ plan, showcasing, according to its authors, the ‘beauty of efficiency and congruity’ and intended (in contrast to much of the local authority building of the time) to provide the essentials of community life ‘long before their actual need is felt’.  Abercrombie allowed himself one flight of fancy – the layout of the town emulated the shape of a pithead winding frame. (6)

Steel frame and concrete homes under construction on King’s Road (with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Centre)

Housebuilding commenced in September 1926; the first four pioneering families moved in May the following year. The homes themselves did not live up to Abercrombie’s hopes. Of the first phase of 400, half were of traditional plain brick construction, half of steel-frame and poured concrete. The latter were heralded as an innovative means of building quickly and circumventing shortages of building materials and skilled labour. In Aylesham, their use probably reflected more the commercial interests of Pearson & Dorman Long whose Dorman Long Housing Company subsidiary was the chief promoter of such housing.

An early photograph of Hyde Place, Aylesham – one of the first streets to be developed

Other facilities followed in relatively short order.  A temporary school and library and Co-op had opened by the end of 1927 (when Aylesham’s population stood at around 1000). The first pub (the Greyhound Hotel) opened in January 1928 and Anglican, then Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches all within the next year. As a marker of emergent community and workforce, the first parade of the Snowdown Colliery Welfare Band took place in June 1929.  The centrepiece new Central School opened the following year.

Market Square, Aylesham

The town, however, remained embryonic and parts had a desolate air.  These were early days but what form of community did emerge and how fully and how successfully were the grandiose plans for Aylesham and the East Kent coalfield fulfilled?  Next week’s post takes the story forward.

Sources

(1) Patrick Abercrombie, ‘The Kent Coalfields’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, no 409, vol 79, April 17, 1931

(2) Subterranea Britannica, Site Name: Tilmanstone Colliery (January 2011)

(3) JP Hollingsworth, ‘Those Dirty Miners’: a History of the Kent Coalfield (Stenlake Publishing, 2010)

(4) Patrick Abercrombie and John Archibald, East Kent Regional Planning Scheme Survey (University Press of Liverpool and Hodder and Stoughton, 1925). Later quoted detail is from this source.

(5) ‘Town Planning in East Kent. A Speech by the Right Hon Neville Chamberlain MP (Minister of Health) delivered at Canterbury, July 24 1926’ (PD Eastes and Co Ltd, Canterbury, 1926)

(6) MBA Churchard, An Analysis of the Agricultural and Industrial Life of South-East England with Especial Reference to the Effect of the Developing Kent Coalfield Thereon, PhD, University of London, 1933

Kent History and Library Centre have produced an excellent timeline of Aylesham’s history which is worth consulting for further detail and illustration.