Council Housing in Holborn, Part I: Early Council Housing to 1945

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1920s, 1930s, Holborn, Pre-1914

Holborn, created in 1900, was at just 403 acres the smallest of the London boroughs. With a population to match – declining from 59,000 when established to barely 22,000 on abolition in 1965 – and an overwhelmingly Conservative council, neither was it in the forefront of council housebuilding. Still, it has a rich council housing history and after 1945, with Sydney Cook as Borough Architect (who would go on to make his name in the same office at Camden), it stood in the forefront of modernist design.

Holborn can be seen near the centre of this interwar map of the Metropolitan Boroughs. Together with St Pancras and Hampstead, it would form the London Borough of Camden from 1965.

This first post will look at its earlier history and begins with what the Survey of London describes as ‘the first council housing in England’.  In fact, Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road, completed in 1865, were built by the City of London, largely at the initiative of Alderman Sydney Waterlow, better known as the founder of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company. For that reason and given the nature of the City of London Corporation, I place it more strongly in the Victorian tradition of philanthropic housing and, like most of these early ‘model dwellings’ and their relatively high rents, its 168 tenements housed the better-off working class and the lower middle class.  The buildings were demolished in 1970. (1)

An early engraving of Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Road

The City of London built another block, Viaduct Buildings containing 40 tenements, in 1880 but it was the London County Council (LCC), created in 1889, that built most of Holborn’s council housing proper before the First World War.  The LCC’s first scheme was a small one, intended to clear and improve a run-down area between Brooke Street and Leather Lane. Completed in 1897, Cranley Buildings (unusually three-storey tenements rather than the five that was the norm) comprised just twelve two- and three-roomed tenements, housing 60 people. Only 55 had been displaced by slum clearance but the usual problem of high rents ensured that these new residents too were the better-off rather than the poorest who had previously lived in the area. (2)

Cranley Buildings

The LCC’s next scheme, the Bourne Estate, south of Clerkenwell Road, was a much grander affair: eleven principally five-storey blocks containing some 763 homes: (3)

designed by the LCC Architect’s Department in a free Classical style, with Arts and Crafts touches … [of] international significance as the model for the much admired and highly influential public housing erected in Vienna immediately after the First World War.

It’s the grand arches which find their greatest echo in the later Austrian schemes but the attractive green courtyards of the Bourne Estate contain little of the communal buzz sought by Red Vienna.

The Bourne Estate

Holborn was far from alone among the metropolitan borough councils in building no council housing of its own before 1914 but its overwhelmingly Conservative membership no doubt made that decision easier.  Two Labour councillors were elected in 1919 but they soon lost their seats and through most of the 1920s the Council was wholly Conservative.

The First World War and its aftermath – and specifically the promise of ‘Homes for Heroes’ – had changed much in 1919 and the celebrated Housing Act of that year required that all councils not only survey local housing needs (within three months!) but actively prepare schemes to meet them.  Holborn went through the motions, going so far as to inspect four possible sites for council housing, but finally concluded that: (4)

Although from a purely public health point of view there is at present necessity existing in the Borough for better housing accommodation for the working classes, many other factors have to be taken into consideration by the Council.

To be fair, there was some truth in the factors identified: population movement from central London, cheaper and better housing in suburban districts, cheaper commuting, and Holborn’s growing significance as a business centre. But they didn’t obviate the pressing problems of the day, not least the 611 unadapted large family houses now in multiple occupation.  Clearly, political opposition to public housing remained the determining factor for the Council’s Conservative majority.

The 1919 report identified a precise total of 999 LCC flats in the borough. This number was not added to in the interwar period but Holborn itself did in the end build some 92 council homes by the early 1930s – only Chelsea and Paddington Metropolitan Boroughs provided fewer in the period.

Betterton House

Holborn’s first council housing was built on Betterton Street in Covent Garden. Betterton House was opened in 1927 by Prince Arthur of Connaught, a small, five-storey infill block of 15 tenements designed by Borough Surveyor JE Parr, replacing buildings declared derelict. The arched front entrance led to a stairway providing balcony access at the rear. Fifteen further tenements were added in a 1930 extension. A small but active Labour opposition group on the council were denouncing the flats as ‘slums’ by the later 1930s. (5)

Boswell House. Richbell, a post-war block, lies to the immediate right set back from the previous street line.

The Council’s next scheme – Boswell House in Boswell Street, Bloomsbury – also designed by Parr, comprised 62 flats and was opened in 1932.  There were over 400 applicants for the new homes; the lucky few selected were: (6)

Holborn residents living in unsatisfactory conditions, in a number of cases being large families in single room tenements. Many of the tenants are employed in market work, in hotels and restaurants, or other occupations where the hours of work necessitate residence near to the place of work.

The design details provided by the Medical Officer of Health suggest the Council took some pride in the scheme: (7)

All the flats will have a well-ventilated larder, sink, draining board, dresser-cupboard, gas cooker, copper-boiler, bathroom and W.C., coal bunker, cupboards, shelving, hat and coat racks, etc. … A playing yard is provided for children, and the blocks of flats have been so arranged as to provide the maximum amount of sunshine, light and air for the dwellings. The flats, balconies, staircases and the yard will be lighted at night by electric light.

This was, unusually, a seven-storey scheme (the top two floors were maisonettes), necessary to make fullest use of the restricted, one-third of an acre, site. Almost uniquely, for a council housing scheme before the 1946 special lifts subsidy, it contained two service lifts. In this, at least, Holborn was ahead of the game.

That does, however, represent the peak of its pre-war housing record. The context is important – a population that by 1937 was estimated to have fallen to 34,600 – but on other measures housing need remained severe. From 1930, housing legislation focused on slum clearance and rehousing.  The 1935 Housing Act required all local authorities to undertake a survey of overcrowding in their districts.  In Holborn, by the modest criteria of the day, 700 families were found to be living in overcrowded conditions, over nine percent of the local population. This placed Holborn tenth among the capital’s 28 Metropolitan Boroughs for overcrowding. Much therefore remained to be done.

Much more after the devastating impact of the Blitz.  Some 650 buildings were destroyed in Holborn (one seventh of the Borough’s total) and 426 people killed. Around 282 high explosive bombs fell at the height of the Blitz in April-May 1941 and a number of V1 and V2 rockets in a second wave of attacks in 1944. Per head of population, Holborn was reckoned the worst hit administrative district in the country. (8)

An image of Buckea’s Bakers Shop on the corner of Boswell Street and Theobalds Road taken in 1945.

The political impact of the war seems almost as seismic.  In the general election of June 1945, Irene Marcousé, elected a local councillor in 1939, stood for Labour in Holborn. She posed the all-important question of the day: (9)

Who is going to win the peace? Are you – the ordinary citizens of Holborn and Britain?  Or are THEY – the privileged few who have always cheated you and the peace and plenty you have earned?

Marcousé didn’t win but she came within 925 votes of the victorious Conservative candidate on a 19-point swing in a two-horse race. This was a very creditable result in Holborn where business voters – those with a vote through ownership of business premises in the constituency – represented around 6 percent of the electorate. (Plural voting was abolished for parliamentary elections in 1948 but remained in local elections – and significant therefore in Holborn – till 1969.)

Across the country, Labour gained 239 seats to form its first (landslide) majority government. This was a harbinger of the November local elections in which Labour took control of the Borough for the first and only time, winning 24 seats to the Tories’ 18.  Marcousé became leader of the Council and chair of the Housing Committee.

It’s worth a pause here to take a look at Marcousé and the new council. Marcousé was born in East Prussia in 1900 and educated in Belgium before graduating from the universities of Heidelberg and London. Frank Dobson, Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras in later years, recalled she could sing The Internationale in English, French and German.  She had married Hugh Chaplin (Principal Keeper of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and a fellow Labour activist) in 1938; together they lived in Russell Square.  But she was, in Dobson’s words, ‘a hard-bitten, awkward and effective old socialist’. Better known as Ina Chaplin, she would represent the party on the LCC, Greater London Council and Inner London Education Authority till 1977. (10)

Under Marcousé’s leadership, in what almost might be described as the ruins of Holborn, the Council  opened information and social centres in disused and bomb-damaged premises, created new children’s playgrounds, organised open-air entertainments in local squares, and published a regular council newsletter. It was a broad and cultural programme that seems in some ways to prefigure the New Left politics of later years.

But the key issue was housing and we’ll examine its record on that and the longer post-war story next week.

Sources

(1) Philip Temple (ed), Farringdon Road‘, Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, (2008)

(2) Fuller detail is provided in Martin Stilwell, Housing the Workers Early London County Council Housing 1889-1914, 10: Brooke’s Market, Holborn Scheme (pdf)

(3) Historic England, Bourne Estate (Northern Part), Denys House, Frewell House, Ledham House, Radcliffe House, Redman House, Scrope House, Skipwith House: listing details

(4) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1919 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(5) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1927 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972). On Labour, see Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s.

(6) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1933 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(7) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1932 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(8) A Walk in History, Friday 30th May – The Blitz

(9) Quoted in Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Random House, 2010)

(10) See Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s. A transcript of Frank Dobson’s obituary of Marcousé published in The Guardian, 9 April 1990, can be found in the online archives of Woolverstone Hall School (an out of London boarding school founded by the LCC in 1951 where she was a governor until 1986).

 

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part II: the Post-War Housing Drive

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1940s, 1950, 1960

In last week’s post, we saw how Shrewsbury Borough Council had built homes even before 1914 and had built on a large scale after 1918. A second world war created new needs and ambitions in its aftermath. In fact, the Borough emerged from war largely unscathed – just two bombs fell on the town – but its population and significance as a manufacturing centre had grown and it faced the same housing crisis affecting most of the nation.

The local responses – driven in any case by national policy and direction – were similar too. This was seen firstly in the temporary prefab bungalows erected in the town, part of 156,623 nationwide – 50 at Harlescott (some for essential workers in the nearby Sentinel Waggon Works), 55 in Abbots Gardens, 30 in New Park Close and a smaller group for elderly people in the Old Heath Estate. (1)

BISF homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

Permanent prefabs seemed to offer another solution. The steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) House had been designed by Frederick Gibberd during the war; 50 were built on the new Crowmeole Estate from 1948. Of the 329 new homes planned for the Springfield Estate from December 1948, 150 were Wimpey No-Fines, a form of in-situ concrete construction.  Of 624 homes planned for the Meadows Farm Estate from autumn 1950, 212 were of Wates pre-reinforced concrete panel construction.

Brick-built homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

The majority of the homes, however, were traditional brick-built houses, most of conventional design, a few with a slightly more modernist aesthetic. Those built in the 1940s reflected the generous space standards of the Bevan era; those after 1951, the economising of the Macmillan era.

The occupation of disused military bases had been another – highly unofficial but practical – response to the post-war housing crisis. By October 1946 it was estimated that around 46,000 people were squatting some 1811 camps across the country. Similar direct action in Shrewsbury and vicinity came later – with reports of military buildings being occupied in 1948 in Monkmoor, Atcham and Forton amongst others – but testified to the same pressing need.

Occupation of Harlescott Camp, May 1949

The largest and best-organised local squat, however, began in May 1949 when Thomas G Ryder, local leader of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, led a group (complete with seven to eight lorries of furniture) that occupied 22 huts at RAF Harlescott. The trigger here seems to have been the belief that the buildings were about to be allocated to single Polish men working at the Sentinel factory. Ryder declared:

We are not going to allow it to become a glorified camp for Poles paid for by the British tax-payer when British families have nowhere to go.

I’ll let you determine the balance between laudable working-class activism and xenophobia in that particular episode.  Ryder himself would go on to become, in modern terminology, a ‘centrist’ leader of the Labour Group on Shrewsbury Borough Council and a senior manager at Sentinel.

Stapleton Road, Meole Brace

Construction of new housing continued apace with the commencement, in 1954, of the 500-home Meole Brace Estate on the south-eastern fringes of the borough. As other towns looked to high-rise, plentiful land and, presumably, political choice kept Shrewsbury building low.  The rather austere five-storey blocks built by Wimpey at Meole Brace seem to have represented the physical, height of its ambition.

Spring Gardens, Ditherington

As the immediate housing crisis declined, thoughts turned again to the slum clearance programme begun in the 1930s.  Between 1955 and 1959, the Council demolished 515 unfit homes – around 144 deemed individually unfit but a greater number (371) in designated clearance areas. Three-storey blocks replaced derelict housing around Ditherington Mill; passages and courts in Frankwell and the town centre were also cleared.

Ryton Close, Meole Brace

By 1956, the council housing waiting list had increased to over 1700 and the Council faced having to rehouse some 794 families from homes designated unfit. This pressure brought about the borough’s next major housing expansion – a further 143 homes on the Meole Brace Estate and a large new estate on agricultural land at Harlescott Grange. (2) By the summer of 1958, the Council had built 2382 homes since 1945 and boasted 857 underway or approved.

Ditherington and Harlescott in 1948 showing Shrewsbury’s expansion to the north © Britain from Above, eaw017470

A local press report described Harlescott as ‘Shrewsbury’s industrial suburb’, a sign of the borough’s expanding manufacturing base. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government provided additional support to housing for skilled workers and the Council agreed that 20 of its ‘bonus’ 30 houses should be allocated to Rolls-Royce employees, the company having taken over the Sentinel works in 1956. (3)

Bainbridge Green, Harlescott Grange

Housing allocations, however, were controversial. Shrewsbury came late to a points-based system and, ironically, when it did in 1954, it downgraded what had previously been the sole criterion – overcrowding.  Now points were added for waiting time and local connection as well as obvious priorities such as number of children and medical need. Localism cam to the fore again nine years later when councillors across the spectrum unsuccessfully opposed the priority given to incoming skilled workers. (4)

Housing for elderly people was prominent in later schemes. Halcroft Court, Ditherington

Smaller schemes continued in the 1970s but the great age of council housebuilding was over.  Shrewsbury itself was amalgamated with Atcham Rural District Council (itself a significant housebuilder) in 1974 and together in 1994 – after the depredations of Right to Buy – the new council owned and managed 6205 council homes. Seven hundred fewer council homes – 5593 to be precise – were transferred by large-scale voluntary transfer to Severnside Housing in 2001.

Then Shrewsbury itself disappeared, administratively at least; absorbed in 2009 into the new unitary authority of Shropshire. An active Town Council (in fact, a newly created parish council) remains. By 2011, around 16 percent of the homes in the district were social rented, a little below the national average.

Shropshire Council is an overwhelmingly Conservative body but it’s a sign of the times and the new housing crisis that its 2017 Local Plan Review concluded that ‘the market is not, and will not, build the housing needed to meet the broad future needs of communities’.  Essentially, despite a significant building programme, private developers were failing to deliver the affordable and smaller homes that many local people required. (5)

It’s an uncomfortable echo of the case made by Shrewsbury’s first socialist councillor over a century earlier: ‘if it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.’  (6)

The Council set up its own wholly-owned, private housebuilding company in February this year. It plans to build 2000 new homes, some for key workers, some for elderly people, some for younger people leaving care. Naturally today, ‘affordable homes’ and homes for sale are in the mix and it’s unclear what the proportion of social rent homes will be.  That market failure and local government intervention remind us that council housing as such – let at genuinely affordable rents – is as necessary today as it ever was when Shrewsbury’s housing efforts began. (7)

Sources

(1) WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014). Other detail and quotations in this post are also drawn from this source.

(2) ‘New Housing Estate at Shrewsbury’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 July 1956

(3) ‘Housing Tender for Shrewsbury Estate’, Birmingham Daily Post, 25 July 1958

(4) New Housing Points Scheme Proposed at Shrewsbury, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 July 1954 and ‘Allocation of houses criticised’, Birmingham Daily Post, 10 December 1963

(5) Dominic Robinson, ‘2000 homes planned as Shropshire Council to set up its own house building company’, Shropshire Star, 7 December 2018

(6) Councillor John Kent Morris quoted in ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(7) Shropshire Newsroom, ‘Building homes that people need: housing company gets Council go-ahead’, 1 March 2019

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part I: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

Tourists might know Shrewsbury as a town with over 660 listed buildings, ‘full of higgledy-piggledy streets with names you want to say out loud’. (1)  As a working town and somewhere to live, council housing has been equally important to its past and present and the council took an early, innovative role after some initial hesitation. This first post looks at this history up to the Second World War and the controversies surrounding it.

A contemporary aerial view of Shrewsbury. Ditherington lies to the north beyond the Severn loop enclosing the town centre.

In 1901, with a population of around 23,300, Shrewsbury was a medium-sized county town – an administrative and trading centre, not untouched by the Industrial Revolution (indeed Ditherington Flax Mill, built in 1797, was the first iron-framed building in the world) but still predominantly traditional in form and make-up.

Politically, this was reflected in a local politics largely ‘based on personality rather than ideology’. The town’s first Labour councillor, John Kent Morris of the Shrewsbury Trades Council (a trade union body) was elected in 1903 but the dominant figure was the Conservative Alderman Thomas Pidduck Deakin, a baker and hotelier. (2)

This (literally) picture postcard image of Shrewsbury, taken c1900, belies the reality of working-class housing in its courts and passages.

That tradition was also reflected in slums – not the Victorian terraces of industrial England but in the words of the borough’s Medical Officer of Health in 1927:

small, isolated groups, scattered throughout the town in the form of small houses, huddled together in enclosed and shut-in courtyards, approached through a dark alley leading off the main street.

Back in 1907, the then Medical Officer of Health estimated there were 200 houses in Shrewsbury unfit for human habitation. A resolution that the Council adopt Part III of the 1890 Housing Act (allowing it to acquire land to build council housing) followed.  The debate that ensued is worth examining in some detail as representative of the arguments of the day.

Some councillors professed simple shock at the conditions suffered by many of the working class: Councillor Franklin: (3)

had no idea that there were such places for human beings to live in as there were in Shrewsbury … some houses were entirely devoid of light, others filthy in the extreme, and some without any back door; houses which were really a disgrace to civilisation.

From the left, Councillor Morris drew what seemed to him the inescapable conclusion:

The evils of the present system were so great that they could not be tolerated any longer, and he hoped the Council would step into the breach and say that the people must be properly housed at rents which they could afford to pay. If it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.

To many, it won’t seem that too much has changed.

But some – as was common then and now – blamed the poor for their squalor of their homes. Councillor Pace, a Liberal, was ‘afraid in some cases the people themselves caused a great deal of the unpleasantness that existed by their own actions’. If just one drain and service pipe per group of dwellings were demanded, he suggested, the private sector would provide all the housing required.

Councillor How, a Conservative, decried municipal housing as ‘the road to socialism’. But his party colleague, Councillor Bromley, spoke to a  rival tradition of Tory Democracy that professed a concern for working-class conditions:

Mr How told them that the proposal might be ruinous to the country but was it not ruinous to the country to have an enormous infantile death-rate caused very largely by insanitary dwellings, and to permit the existence of slums which were undermining the health of the people. They were told that what they proposed was Socialism. If that was so then he was a Socialist – and he was among the Conservative Socialists because the Conservatives passed that act in 1890.

In the end, the motion was passed but, for the moment, the resistance to council housing prevailed. A few existing homes were declared unfit but in general efforts focused on reconditioning rather than demolition.

Raymond Unwin

Agitation renewed with the formation of a Shrewsbury Housing Reform Council in 1911.  A public meeting in February 1912 – described as ‘one of the most important and representative gatherings in the history of Shrewsbury’ and addressed by Raymond Unwin, the leading housing reformer of the day – seems to have decisively swung opinion. (4)

Wingfield Gardens

The Council appointed a Housing Committee and purchased land north of Ditherington Mill. Wingfield Gardens was completed in April 1915 – 63 solid family homes arrayed around a generous green open space: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’.  Alderman Deakin, now chair of the Housing Committee though previously sceptical towards municipal housebuilding, spoke of ‘an enormous demand for houses’ and concluded ‘the Corporation would have to provide other garden suburbs’. (5)

Wingfield Gardens

As a token of the seriousness of the Council’s intent, sanction was received for a further housing scheme in 1916 though without, in wartime, much prospect of it being built in the near future. However, thoughts were turning to war’s end and, perhaps in response to the Local Government Board’s circular of July 1917 ‘Housing after the War’, in October that year, the Council sought permission to build 400 houses. (6)

Deakin, whose conversion to municipal housebuilding was now complete, observed that building small houses for private let had ceased being profitable for at least ten years before the war and he became the driving force behind the Council’s interwar programme.  It’s a reminder that an uptick in council housebuilding began in the run-up to the First World War though its aftermath and the demand for ‘Homes for Heroes’ proved decisive.

The Council bought 19 acres of land in December 1918 and a further 38 acres at Coton Hill in March 1919 and was described, justifiably, as ‘one of the most forward in respect to its housing schemes’. (7)

That advanced thinking was evident in its detailed planning too. The new homes were:

to be on garden city lines – not more than ten to the acre, and the lay-out includes such amenities as village institutes, bowling greens, and open spaces, while tree planting is to be a feature of the two estates now being developed.

Naturally, the new homes included ‘such domestic facilities as a gas boiler and gas cooker’.  The location of the bath – in a cubicle off the scullery – caused some debate but the Housing Committee concluded that ‘that the balance of convenience for the working housewife [was] to have the bath downstairs’.

Longden Green

The Longden Green Estate was completed in 1922, the first stage of the Coton Hill Estate one year later.  The plans of both were closely based on the 1919 Housing Manual (written appropriately in a Shrewsbury context by Raymond Unwin) which accompanied Addison’s celebrated housing act of the same year. How, still a Conservative member of the council, now an alderman, was angry that the houses designed by ‘certain faddy architects in London’ cost £1000 each; Deakin countered ‘the ship should not be spoilt for a ha’p’orth of tar’.

Sultan Road

Those high prices were a problem though, not least in rents affordable to only the most affluent workers. The generous funding regime of Addison’s legislation was axed in 1921; Longden Green’s community hall was not built. And the Council determined that their next building scheme would be built more economically at rents that lower paid workingmen could afford. The 70 houses built on Sultan Road cost around £370 each but the scheme was widely criticised for its austerity.  The 204-home Monkmoor Estate, built on land purchased in June 1925, reverted to garden suburb ideals.

White House Gardens

Nationally, the 1930s marked a shift to slum clearance and the targeted rehousing of slum-dwellers. Shrewsbury made small progress in this regard; in 1939, there were still 221 houses in town judged unfit for human habitation including 29 homes in Fairford Place deemed insanitary since the 1850s. However, the council’s building continued apace in smaller schemes at Judith Butts, White House Gardens, Wingfield Close (adjacent to the council’s first housing), New Park Road and Close, and Old Heath.

New Park Road

The Council’s 1000^th home was opened in March 1937 – a proud record. The historian Barrie Trinder reckoned by this time that ‘the better-paid workman had been very nearly catered for’ but he acknowledged that many who were less well-off in Shrewsbury remained in squalor. (9)

The renewed housing drive after a second world war and its commitment to provide decent housing for all will be examined in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Original Shrewsbury website

(2) This detail and the following quotation are drawn from WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014)

(3) ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(4) Champion and Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography

(5) ‘Shrewsbury’s Garden Suburb’, Liverpool Daily Post, 9 April 1915

(6) ‘The Housing of Shrewsbury Workers’, Birmingham Daily Post, 9 October 1917

(7) This and following quotations are drawn from ‘Shrewsbury Housing Schemes. Garden City Developments’, Kington Times, 14 June 1919

(8) Barrie Trinder, Beyond the Bridges: the Suburbs of Shrewsbury, 1760-1960 (2008)