• Home
  • About
  • Contact me
  • Social Housing as Heritage
  • The map of the blog
  • Mapping Pre-First World War Council Housing

Municipal Dreams

Municipal Dreams

Monthly Archives: July 2020

Council Housing in Oxford, Part I: ‘‘We don’t despise these people but …’

29 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Oxford

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1920s, 1930s

The Cutteslowe Walls in Oxford – built by developers in 1934 to separate their private estate from council housing next door – were infamous: a symbol of a contemporarily class-ridden society but also sadly a prejudice towards residents of public housing that has survived their demolition in 1959. This week’s post looks at that story and takes a broader, more nuanced look at the housing politics of interwar Oxford.

Cutteslowe Wall Aldrich Road

The Cutteslowe Wall seen from Aldrich Road on the council estate

Oxford was one of the fastest growing industrial cities in Britain between the wars. That takes us some way away from our usual image of the ‘city of dreaming spires’ (though they were to pay their part in this history) but the statistics are stark. Oxford’s population grew by 88 percent – from around 57,000 in 1921 to (with a significant border extension to absorb growing suburbs) 107,000 in 1941.

This breakneck growth was largely due to the rise of the local motor industry and allied trades. William Morris built his first car – the doubly eponymous Morris Oxford – in 1913; his workforce grew from 200 in 1919 to around 5000 from the mid-1920s. Pressed Steel, founded in 1926, employed similar numbers. The new trades provided almost a third of local jobs by the late 1930s when almost half Oxford’s insured male workforce were immigrants to the town, many from the local region but a significant number from the unemployment blackspot of south Wales. (1)

Cowley Works 1925

Morris’s Cowley works, 1925

This would affect the city’s politics in due course but it did so only slowly; for the time being the old order reigned. Oxford was a reformed corporation dating to 1835, a county borough from 1889, but its council retained university representation (nine councillors – three elected by convocation and six by college heads and senior bursars – and three aldermen) which persisted, incredibly, to 1974.

That said, it’s not clear that this affected the fundamentally conservative nature of the council: ‘Between 1918 and 1939 the distinction between Liberals and Conservatives on the council was said to have become almost nominal’. Against this, Labour representation – the first member in 1918, rising to 13 by 1939 in a council of 68 members – had little impact. (2)

Penson's Gardens St Ebbes Oxford History Centre

Penson’s Gardens, St Ebbes © Oxfordshire History Centre

Despite the depth of housing need and the prevalence of inner-city slum housing (St Ebbes was described as ‘a swamp converted into a cesspool’ as early as 1848), the Corporation was largely passive: (3)

Before 1914 undiluted laissez-faire predominated on Oxford City Council, in the field of housing as in other municipal activity. The council was notoriously unwilling to enforce sanitary improvements and impose building controls, and made almost no use of national legislation to deal with the worst unfit housing.

London Road council houses 1925

Headington’s new council housing, 1925

The First World War changed much, particularly in the field of housing. The first council homes in Oxford were actually built by Headington Rural District Council in 1920: 101 in total on London Road and Barton Road, designed by local architect James Wells and described by the Oxford Times as of ‘smart appearance, with their whitewashed fronts and red tiled roofs’. (Headington became an Urban District in 1927 but was incorporated into Oxford proper in 1929.) (4)

London Road SN

London Road council housing, 2017

But Oxford City Council could no longer afford to ignore local needs and national pressures though it did continue to follow its own path. In response to national directives leading to the 1919 Housing Act, the Council initially proposed to build 400 homes; in the event just 215 were completed by 1922.

These first estates were built at the fringes of the city on Iffley Road and Cowley Road, of high quality and architect-designed with ‘steeply gabled roofs and careful Arts and Crafts detailing [showing] a strong debt to the work of Parker and Unwin at Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb’. Their rents, though, were among the highest in the country as, perversely, the Council rejected Treasury funding, preferring to finance the schemes from its housing revenue account. (5)

It relented in 1924 when it acquired powers to borrow but the high standards remained as did the high rents. The latter were, apparently, a deliberate choice, intended to confine council homes to the better-off and more ‘respectable’ working class and allowing the worse-off to move from city slums to the slightly superior homes vacated by the new council tenants – the ‘filtering-up’ theory which was influential before the First World War.

South Park Estate, Oxford

An early view of the South Park Estate

The new, generously-sized, neo-Georgian-style homes were designed by Kellett Ablett who joined the City Engineer’s Department in 1925. (He went on to become Chief Housing Architect for Nottingham City Council and Chief Architect to Hemel Hempstead New Town.)  The South Park Estate and Morrell Avenue in particular, built between 1929 and 1931 on Headington Hill, is the showpiece, built on land formerly owned by the locally prominent brewing family; ‘as good as any of this kind built in England at the time’, according to Geoffrey Tyack.

Morrell Avenue, South Park Estate, Oxford

An early image of Morrell Avenue

That quality is first apparent in the streetscape – a curving, tree-lined road with verges separating road and footpath. It’s seen in the semi-detached and terraced homes in their brick banding, clay tiling and classical pilastered doorcases amongst other careful detailing.  Similar homes of the same quality and design can be found in the earlier housing of the nearby Gipsy Lane Estate.

Gipsey Lane Estate SN 4

Headington Road, Gipsy Lane Estate

After a slow start, the Council had built 1647 homes between 1923 and 1930, its room for manoeuvre hampered by the city’s growth and pressure on land and the reluctance of Oxford colleges to sell land for public housing. The problem of slum housing – only 129 houses had been demolished by 1929 – and the rehousing of its residents remained, however.

1930 – the year of the Greenwood Housing Act targeting slum clearance – marked a sharp turn nationally and locally. By 1939, the Council had cleared 872 slum houses, most of them in St Ebbes and there were plans for the demolition of almost another 600 St Ebbes’ homes and their replacement by working-class flats.

Croft Road New Marston 1935Des Blenkinsopp

Croft Road, New Marston. The houses bear a plaque marking their date of construction, 1935 © Des Blenkinsopp and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Council built several hundred more council homes in the 1930s (others were acquired through the expansion of its borders), principally on new estates in a constellation around the city fringes: Wolvercote to the north, New Hinksey to the south, and New Marston to the east.

Abingdon Road, New Hinksey SN

Barton 3 Plans 1 SN

Abingdon Road, New Hinksey

Some were built to previously high standards, as seen above in the plans and finished housing on Abingdon Road but most, while solid, decent homes were notably plainer and smaller than their predecessors. This reflected the changing and less generous subsidy regime over the interwar period and a belief that the so-called slum working class might be housed more cheaply.  The contrast can also be seen clearly in the later housing built on the Gipsy Lane Estate.

Gipsey Lane Estate SN 3

Later housing on the Gipsy Lane Estate

That prejudice lay behind one of the great causes célèbres of interwar Oxford – the Cutteslowe Walls.  The Council had bought agricultural land for housing in Summertown in the 1920s. The first Cutteslowe Estate was built between 1931 and 1932. Work on the second began in August 1933. Meanwhile, the city had sold part of the land to private developers, the Urban Housing Company.  Through some apparent miscommunication, Aldrich and Wolsey Roads on the new council estate joined up with their private estate counterparts. (7)

The Company alleged council tenants were responsible for vandalism on the private estate. It also claimed that the rehousing of former slum-dwellers on the estate breached an undertaking given by the Council that it wouldn’t be used for this purpose. Whatever the (not so) niceties, it’s not hard to see the naked class prejudice and commercial interest that lay behind the Company’s supposed grievances. It erected two-metre high, spiked walls – separating the council homes from their private equivalents – across the connecting streets in December 1934. They forced a 600-metre detour for council estate residents trying to reach the main road.

Cutteslowe Walls demo 11 May 1935

Protest, May 1935

This local class war provided an obvious opportunity for the city’s Communists led by Abe Lazarus but the Party’s attempt to lead local residents in the demolition of the walls in May 1935 was thwarted by the police and, in the words of another Oxford communist, the capitulation of ‘certain legalist members of the [tenants’] committee’. (8)

In this fight, however, the City Council was on the right side of history.  They wanted the walls down and, having pursued various legal avenues, they ended up taking what turned out to be their own form of direct action in June 1938 when Council workmen bulldozed both walls. A back and forth ensued between the workmen of both parties while Urban Estate residents looked on with some concern, as reported by the Daily Herald: (9)

‘We don’t despise these people’ said a Carlton-road dweller, ‘but …’ – and a finger was pointed at three cheerful urchins climbing a tree.

‘It is not that we look down on them’, said another, ‘but we live a different life from theirs’.

The High Court found the Council to have acted unlawfully and the walls were duly reinstated. And amazingly there they remained, despite a few mishaps, until demolished on 9 March 1959 – a sign of changing times perhaps but achieved by the legal manoeuvre of the Council buying the land on which they stood.

Cutteslowe Wall demolished

The wall demolished, March 1959

Class divides were not always so clear-cut. Oxford City Council had built over 2000 houses since the war; private developers around 7000.  We’ve seen an intra-class division operating within council housing – between the superior housing designed for a more ‘respectable’ working class in the 1920s and that provided for displaced slum-dwellers in the 1930s. Some of the new private housing would have been occupied by a more affluent working class too, notably the relatively well-paid car workers.

We’ll follow the post-war story of class and housing in Oxford in next week’s post.

Note

I’ve written previously about a similar wall erected on the Downham Estate, south London, which stood between 1926 and 1950.

Surprisingly, the class divide reared its ugly head again in Oxford in 2018 when the City Council repaved ‘posh’ Wentworth Road and halted its resurfacing as it became Aldrich Road on the council estate at precisely the point where the wall had previously stood. At least one local saw this as ‘Class War’ and expressed the view in spray paint. The Council claimed it was a purely pragmatic decision based on need.

There’s been a fair amount written on the Cutteslowe Walls, notably Peter Collison, The Cutteslowe Walls: A Study in Social Class (Faber and Faber, 1963). Apart from the sources listed below, the Past Tense blog provides an interesting perspective in this post: Class Walls – Cutteslowe, Downham and roadworks.

Sources

Much of the detail on individual estates in Headington is drawn from the well-researched and informative local history website, Headington History and this page on the area’s newer estates.

(1) Eleanor Chance, Christina Colvin, Janet Cooper, CJ Day, TG Hassall, Mary Jessup and Nesta Selwyn, ‘Modern Oxford’, in A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 4, the City of Oxford, ed. Alan Crossley and C R Elrington (Victoria County History, 1979)

(2) CJ Day, Modern Oxford: a History of the City from 1771 (Reprinted from the Victoria County History of Oxford by Oxford County Libraries, 1983)

(3) Alan Crosby, ‘Housing and Urban Renewal: Oxford 1918-1985’ in Kate Tiller and Giles Darkes (eds), An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire Record Society, ORS vol 67, 2010)

(4) Stephanie Jenkins, Headington history: Miscellaneous

(5) The quotation is from Geoffrey Tyack, Oxford: An Architectural Guide (Oxford University Press, 1998); the reference to funding from Crosby, ‘Housing and Urban Renewal: Oxford 1918-1985’

(6) Oxford City Council, Oxford Preservation Trust and English Heritage, Our East Oxford:  A Character Statement and Heritage Asset Register Survey for East Oxford (October 2014)

(7) Much of the detail here is drawn from Brian Robert Marshall, Cutteslowe Walls

(8) Duncan Bowie, Reform and Revolt in the City of Dreaming Spires (University of Westminster Press, 2018)

(9) ‘Rival Gangs in Wall Battle’, Daily Herald, June 9 1938.

Advertisement

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest

Like this:

Like Loading...

Rêves Municipales: the Paris region’s tribute to the Garden Cities movement

14 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Garden Cities, Guest Post, Housing, Paris

≈ 1 Comment

It’s Bastille Day – an appropriate occasion for Municipal Dreams to travel to France. Today, I’m very pleased to feature this fine guest post by Martin Crookston. Martin is the author of Garden Cities of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016) which featured in my Guardian Top Ten list of books on council housing.  He is a former partner at the Llewelyn-Davies planning consultancy and member of Richard Rogers’ Urban Task Force. 

Dotted around the immediate hinterland of the City of Paris – the ‘Petite Couronne’ – are a dozen « cités-jardins »: garden suburbs inspired by the British Garden City movement. They are both fascinating as municipally-built social housing, and unexpected – certainly to most of us, used as we are to thinking of the Parisian banlieue as an invariate sea of towers and slabs, the Grands Ensembles, of the sort you pass at Sarcelles on the final Eurostar approach to the Gare du Nord.

The cités-jardins are a product of a specific period, and a specific initiative: the interwar years, and the programme run by the Office Publique d’Habitations à Bon Marché de la Seine (OPHBM, founded in 1914) under the leadership of Henri Sellier. He argued for ‘social urbanism’ and for ‘a rational development of the suburbs, seeking to greatly reduce, for the working class, the burdensome consequences of urban overpopulation’.

Unlike in Britain, however, they did not become the basic model for thousands of housing estates nationwide: they rather sank into oblivion, though mostly surviving and now being rather more appreciated for their heritage value than ever before.  We’ll do a brief tour of some of them here – starting with one that is currently in the news because of a current threat to its continued existence in its present form.

La Butte Rouge (bus 195 from Robinson RER) is reminiscent of Roehampton in one respect at least: it’s miles from anywhere in the southwestern suburbs, a bus ride from the railhead, up against the huge Verrières forest.

It was built in three main phases (1931-35, 1949-50, 1960-65), to total nearly 4,000 homes on a 70-hectare site: the largest of the cités-jardins. The urban and landscape design was clearly carefully thought out by architect Joseph Bassompierre’s team, with main avenues interlacing winding walkways through a green setting of communal and private gardens. It was also a pioneering ‘eco-suburb’, thanks to a recycling /heating system and an early form of sustainable urban drainage (SUDS). Architecturally, it’s a sort of condensed history of French social housing: from brick to RC, and from individual homes and little blocks to 1960s slabs.

Sud 11 Butte Rouge, main avenue SN

La Butte Rouge: the main spine, Avenue Albert Thomas

Since 2012, though, it’s been threatened by a familiar (to Britain) story – the local authority of Chatenay-Malabry and ANRU (Agence nationale de rénovation urbaine) want to recast the estate, which currently accounts for 56 percent of the municipality’s social housing, as (yes, inevitably) a more mixed housing offer matching their vision for the area’s future. ‘Sauvons la Butte Rouge’ and the Association Citoyens Unis pour Châtenay-Malabry argue that this is pointless in housing terms – apart from needing better sound insulation, their homes are fine – and an act of vandalism in terms of architectural heritage, since the options being studied only guarantee retention of 20 percent of the original buildings.

PU 19_10_2019. 16 SN

‘Sauvons la Butte Rouge’ explain their concerns

They have been joined by concerned architects in the region – the Ordre des architectes d’Ile-de-France – and the eminent historian Jean-Louis Cohen at a heritage conference in April 2019; and perhaps more importantly by the prefects of the Hauts-de-Seine department and the Ile de France region, who have notified the municipality that ‘it seems to us that the demolition of a significant number of this heritage ensemble should be reviewed downwards’.  A familiar stand-off …

La Butte Rouge was actually one of the later starts in the OPHBM programme.  This had begun with a bang in 1921 in five locations, one of which was the suburb of Suresnes, where Sellier was the (Socialist) mayor from 1919 to 1941, and where he had already been quietly buying land for the OPHBM during the war.

18 Musee, Henri Sellier SN

Henri Sellier, commemorated in the MUS at Suresnes

Suresnes (T2 tramway from La Défense) is out to the west, just across the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne. Wikipedia says that of all of them « la plus emblématique est la cité-jardins de Suresnes » but this must be because it’s so intimately associated with Sellier: its physical form is not very ‘garden suburb’, and its total of 3000 homes is dominated by apartment blocks rather than individual houses (‘pavillons’ – 170 of them).

19.1 Cite-jardins, Jean Jaures & Judy

Suresnes: Place Jean-Jaurès (and there indeed he is)

The style is a sober municipal-block look, the layout more like the German Siedlungen with their open mansion-block form, than Hampstead or Welwyn; though with, for sure, much more garden space – both private and communal – than usual in French social housing. It still reflects the Sellier vision: architectural coherence, decent homes for workers, and high-quality public services.

20.1 Suresnes, rare pavillons SN

Suresnes: rare ‘pavillons’

Sellier’s programme

Henri Sellier expanded dramatically from his Suresnes base both organisationally – his OPHBM built all over the Seine départment over the next twenty years – and also politically: he was elected as a senator for Seine 1935-43, was health minister in Léon Blum’s great Popular Front government (1936), and ended his days in disgrace with the Vichy government and with a quotation from Robespierre on his office wall: ‘The hatred of the people’s enemies is the reward of the good citizen’.

The programme was in three main waves. In 1921 they began work on Suresnes itself, Arcueil in the south, Drancy in the east, Stains in the north, and Asnières a little downstream of Suresnes in the northwest industrial suburbs. Later in the twenties came Gennevilliers (1923), Le Plessis-Robinson (1924; another one where you could be in Kilmacolm, with its rendered facades and neat privet hedges) and Pré St Gervais (1927); in the thirties, Champigny and Butte Rouge (both 1931) and finally Vitry in 1935. These are dotted about the eastern and southern suburbs.

At Stains (bus 253 from St-Denis-Université metro), north about 10km from the city centre, we strike garden-suburb gold. Built between 1921 and 1927, it contains 1676 units: 456 houses, and 19 blocks of 4four or five floors. Practically unchanged since its creation (though with a very recent renovation), its heritage value was recognised in 1976 when it was listed. The departmental website Tourisme93.com describes it as ‘Directement inspirée par les réalisations britanniques et le mythe du « cottage »’, planned as picturesque village streets with winding roads and individual houses in a vernacular style with steep roofs and high chimneys. The ‘mythe du cottage’ is certainly realised as if we were in outer London. A long-standing tenant there told me that when she was bringing up her kids just outside the garden suburb, she used to say to them ‘come on, let’s go for a walk in England’.

Stains 1 SN

Stains: “Allons nous promener en Angleterre”

And not just the buildings: the layout too. If you know East London’s 1920s Becontree estate, there’s a shudder of recognition as you come along rue Rolland, and there’s a short cul-de-sac of the sort known in Becontree as a ‘banjo’.

Banjo SN

rue Rolland, Stains: echos of Becontree

Arcueil, back south again (RER B Arcueil-Cachan) to the cité-jardins de l’Aqueduc, only about 7 km south of central Paris, alongside the Aqueduc de la Vanne, a dramatic sweep of 19th century engineering on the alignment of its Renaissance and Roman predecessors.  If Stains is England, Arcueil is Scotland.  The houses are plainer than in Stains, and often rendered like Scots estates.

Arcueil 11 SN

Cité-jardins de l’Aqueduc: if Stains is England, Arcueil is Scotland

The original scheme, by the architect Maurice Payret-Dortail, was for 228 houses in groups of two to six, and they are at the core of the listing in the « Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel ». It has undergone rather more modification since it was built, and the layout is actually less coherent than Stains, both as layout and in individual groupings, and so less legible as you walk around. But it has one borrowing from the Garden Suburb – little back lanes – which must be great if you’re 7 or 8 (as very large numbers of its denizens seem to be).  I liked it: it seemed comfortable, mixed (socially and ethnically) and somehow familiar.

These three suburbs, and the rest of the Sellier interwar programme, are by no means all of the housing of this general type around Paris. The website of the Ile de France regional association of cités-jardins has a map on its website showing about sixty locations; they’re quite a mixture of forms, settings and target markets (both initial target market, and who now lives there).

In Paris

In Paris-Ville – the city proper, within the péripherique – the Sellier programme didn’t operate; presumably land was already too expensive, and in too short supply, for the lower density intrinsic to the garden suburb ‘product’.  What there is in the city itself is a collection of interesting contemporary, and earlier, schemes aimed at housing the working class before the big push by public authorities. Less of a trek out into the beyond, they include La Campagne à Paris, in the 20th arrondissement near the Porte de Bagnolet, built by a ‘Société anonyme co-opérative à personnel et capital variables d’habitations à bon marché’ –  at the outset, 60 percent of the co-operators were in manual occupations, and even today their descendants live alongside newer incomers attracted by the village atmosphere, perched above the traffic of the Porte and the boulevards des maréchaux.

Similarly the tight cluster of pretty terraces (called ‘Villas’, like the Villa du Progrès, Villa Emile Loubet, etc) off rue de Mouzaïa in the 19th (metro Danube), developed by the Societe anonyme des terrains et habitations à bon marché from 1899 on. This was not a philanthropic operation: it built small workers’ homes, with tiny gardens, using public loan funding, over a long period stretching up till the end of the thirties. Quirkiest of the lot is la Petite Alsace in the south side’s Butte aux Cailles (13th arr., metro Corvisart), 40 individual houses around a court, designed by Jean Walter in 1912 in a half-timbered style which wasn’t drawn from Letchworth but from Alsace – for the Habitation Familiale group founded by the priest Abbé Viollet.

La Petite Alsace

Opening day at La Petite Alsace, 1912

Gentrification has bitten deep into all three since the 1980s, and many houses have been added to, but all still retain a unity and some slight flavour of the Paris of a century ago. As for the suburban cités-jardins, even today you can feel some resonance of the purpose, and the feel, of Sellier’s ‘social urbanism’ of a century ago. They’re recognised as a heritage asset – not just by ‘le Patrimoine’, but by proud local residents too. As Michelin might say: “vaut le détour”!

martin.crookston@btinternet.com

Sources

Région Ile de France, Les cités-jardins d’Ile-de-France: une certaine idée du bonheur (Lieux-Dits, 2018); and Exhibition Suresnes MUS 2018

Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel

Association Régionale des Cités-Jardins de L’Ile-de-France Carte des cités-jardins d’Île-de-France

Henri Sellier, Les banlieues urbaines et la réorganisation administrative du département de la Seine, avec préface de Albert Thomas (M Rivière et cie, Paris 1920)

Wikipédia entries for Suresnes and Henri Sellier

Comité départemental du tourisme de Seine-Saint-Denis, Mettre les villes à la campagne avec les premières cités-jardins (2012)

Promenades Urbaines Promenade urbaine du samedi 19 octobre 2019 La cité-jardin de la Butte Rouge à Chatenay-Malabry   

Marjorie Lenhardt, ‘Châtenay-Malabry: seuls 20 % de la Butte Rouge sont sûrs d’être conservés’, Le Parisien, 4 July 2019

Charles-Edouard Ama Koffi, ‘Châtenay-Malabry: le maire persiste dans son projet de démolition à la Butte-Rouge’, Le Parisien, 18 December 2019

Julie Roland, ‘La Butte Rouge: d’un grand Paris social au grand Paris immobilier’, Chroniques d’architecture, 21 May 2019

Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Paris Mosaique (Calmann-Lévy, 2001)

Amina Sellali, ‘Quartier Mouzaïa’ in Virginie Grandval and Isabelle Monserrat Farguel (eds), Hameux, villas et cités de Paris (AAVP, 1998)

La Petite Alsace, Le piéton de Paris  (April 2010)

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest

Like this:

Like Loading...

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 20,122 other subscribers

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • February 2022
  • December 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013

Blogs I Follow

  • Coming Home
  • Magistraal
  • seized by death and prisoners made
  • Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700
  • A London Inheritance
  • London's Housing Struggles
  • architectsforsocialhousing
  • The Historic England Blog
  • The GDR Objectified
  • The London Column
  • A Sense of Place
  • distinctly black country
  • Suburban Citizen
  • Mapping Urban Form and Society
  • Red Brick
  • Single Aspect's Blog
  • History & Social Action News and Events
  • The Charnel-House
  • Musings
  • Council Homes Chat

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Coming Home

Magistraal

seized by death and prisoners made

stories from our past.

Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700

Leverhulme Funded Project at University of Exeter: Adopting a New Methodological Approach to Early Modern Women's Work

A London Inheritance

A Private History of a Public City

London's Housing Struggles

acting as a knowledge broker towards London's housing crisis, going on a search for alternatives, get in touch londonshousing@gmail.com

architectsforsocialhousing

Architects for Social Housing (ASH) has been set up to respond architecturally to London’s housing crisis.

The Historic England Blog

The GDR Objectified

A private collection of ephemera from or related to the German Democratic Republic

The London Column

Reports from the life of a city, from 1951 to now, compiled by David Secombe

A Sense of Place

Better Lives in Better Places

distinctly black country

a network for understanding yesterday's landscape today

Suburban Citizen

A fine WordPress.com site

Mapping Urban Form and Society

Red Brick

The place for progressive housing policy debate.

Single Aspect's Blog

because I care about public housing and hate single aspect flats

History & Social Action News and Events

News and events related to history and social action, especially in Battersea, Croydon, Kennington, Vauxhall & Wandsworth

The Charnel-House

From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

Musings

of a social historian

Council Homes Chat

Busting myths about Council Housing by providing a platform for people's stories/experiences #CouncilHomesChat #SocialHousing

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Municipal Dreams
    • Join 2,039 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Municipal Dreams
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: