Brighton’s Interwar Council Housing Estates: ‘Housewives with empty larders’

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1920s, 1930s

In 1921, Brighton was the second most densely populated county borough in the country after West Ham and, as a long-established town, a good deal of its housing was in worse condition than that of the London suburb.  If you associate it with Regency gentry or happy seaside holidays, this blog will show another side – a town with many slum homes and an urgent need to  better house its working-class population. But if council housing was the solution (as was accepted by nearly all in these days), the problem of making it affordable to the poorer working class remained a conundrum.

Brighton Corporation had begun slum clearance efforts back in the 1890s and even built a small number of homes to rehouse – though at rents they couldn’t pay – some of those displaced.   In 1919 much remained to be done; the local Medical Officer of Health estimated 3152 new houses were needed to ensure a decent home for all.  The Conservative-controlled council approached the task with the idealism typical of that early post-war period.

The South Moulsecoomb Estate was begun in 1920 on 94 acres of land purchased in the neighbouring parish of Patcham (incorporated into Brighton itself in 1923).  The Corporation employed two of the leading architects and planners of the day, SD Adshead (Professor of Town Planning at the University of London) and Stanley Ramsey, to design the initial scheme.  (Coincidentally, this partnership was also responsible for the later, very different – but also high quality – tenement scheme in Stepney which we covered last week.) Their design – an estate deployed along a curving road looped around an elongated valley sward – was eulogised in a contemporary issue of the Town Planning Review (which Adshead edited): (1)

This lay-out is situated in an exceedingly beautiful hollow in the Downs, and it is due to the steepness of the hillside on which it is situated, that a very informal system of planning has been adopted. There are many examples in Sussex of villages nestling in the hollows between Downs where a continuous green traverses the whole length of the village, and it is with recollections of these beautiful valley greens that the central feature of Moulsecoomb has been designed.

The Council even provided tennis courts.  The description of one local alderman – ‘homes fit for heroes’ – was hardly original but it seems justified.  However, these early semi-detached, parlour houses were expensive (at around £1120 each to build) and their rents – set between 26s and 32s  6d a week – far beyond the reach of many of the ‘heroes’ the homes were intended for, so much so that the Corporation resorted to advertising vacancies in the London press. (2)

The Highway, Moulsecoomb © Hassocks5849 Wikimedia Commons

Such was the anger and frustration that some locals took to direct action.  Up to 60 empty, privately-owned homes were occupied in the early 1920s and squatted until an appropriate rent was agreed between owners and would-be tenants.

A second Corporation scheme, its layout also designed by Adshead and Ramsey, was built one mile to the east of the town centre in the Queen’s Park area between 1923 and 1926.  This time considerable efforts were made to lower the costs of the 450 homes through omitting parlours, placing toilets on the ground floor and building to a much higher density.

Newick Road in the North Moulsecoomb Estate © Oast House Archive

A further 46 acres of land was acquired from Falmer in 1925 to form the North Moulsecoomb Estate, with better quality homes and a return to garden suburb principles, of 390 houses.   This land too was annexed to Brighton – in 1928 – alongside Ovingdean parish to the east of Brighton where construction of the large Whitehawk Estate began in the late twenties.

Brighton Racecourse and the Whitehawk housing estate under construction, Brighton, 1933 (Britain from Above) © English Heritage EPW041370

At Whitehawk, farmland and open space until this point, the first houses were built under the 1924 Wheatley Act along the western side of Whitehawk Road, Hervey Road (since demolished) and Whitehawk Crescent.  Brighton’s Medical Officer of Health was clear that these new homes would necessarily cater for a relatively affluent working class:

For the most part the tenants of these slums have to live near their work and they will not remove to the suburbs; they are generally so poor that they cannot afford the cost of travel to and from the centre of the town. Another difficulty is rent; the average these people can afford is about 8s a week, they cannot pay 15s a week or even the reduced rate of 12s a week.

He added, less sympathetically, ‘another important point…that many are dirty and unsatisfactory tenants who would quickly ruin a new house’ – a common prejudice of the period that we’ve seen expressed in the Knowle West Estate in Bristol, the North Hull Estate and elsewhere.

Whitehawk Crescent, 1976 © James Gray collection/Regency Society

‘Unsatisfactory’ or not, the legislation of the 1930s which focused on slum clearance and overcrowding forced the issue and when Whitehawk was extended the Corporation had to make efforts – largely unsuccessful as we shall see – to build housing that the poorer working class could afford.  (Through the interwar period as a whole, Brighton would demolish some 900 slum homes, displacing 4400 residents.)

As we’ve seen, this required building more cheaply and to lower standards. A scheme of 300 homes on the Estate comprised two-bedroom houses of 620 square feet in area and three-bedroomed of 700, built at a density of 14.5 per acre and with an average frontage of 20 feet.  All this brought the construction cost per house down to £204 and allowed an average rent of 9s (including rates).  The Borough Engineer asserted, however, that despite such economy efforts had been made to create an attractive overall appearance: (4)

The general design of the houses is made up of several designs intermixed, with the front elevations treated with rough cast in various colours and designs and Sussex bricks, so as to produce an attractive whole and thus avoid the too frequent dull uniformity in design without necessarily increasing the cost.

Later planners were more critical and standards were higher.  A radical redesign of the Estate began in 1975 which involved demolition of many older houses, the construction of some 1440 new homes and a new street scheme replacing some longer roads with a series of cul-de-sacs.  Still, there are those with long memories of the Estate who think the changes ‘no improvement at all’. (5)

Hervey Road in the 1970s, just prior to demolition © James Gray collection/Regency Society

Back in the 1930s, Brighton was redoubling its efforts to house displaced slum dwellers.  Housing was extended up Bevendean Valley to form the Bevendean Estate in the early thirties and land was purchased in 1935 to create the East Moulsecoomb Estate and in 1936 for the Manor Farm Estate, the latter to house principally those displaced by the Carlton Hill demolitions.

An undated photograph of the Carlton Hill area © tarnerhistory.org

But all was not well.  In 1933 it was reported that 21 per cent of tenants from Carlton Hill who had taken houses at Whitehawk had returned to central Brighton for financial reasons.  By the late thirties, concern about rents and working-class poverty on the new estates had become a major local issue.  The local paper, the Brighton Gazette, took up the cause, tellingly headlining one of a series of articles, ‘Rehousing slum dwellers has made poverty’. (6)

East Moulsecoomb Estate © Tony Mould, mybrightonandhove.org.uk

Two years later, a reporter wrote – of council homes – that he had:

heard of housewives with empty larders, of sick and ailing people in homes without the bare necessities of life, of children who sit a nights in lightless, fireless kitchens, because there is no money for the gas-meter, no coal for the grate.

Though such a description might be taken as journalistic overstatement, it is given credibility by a more objective study conducted in the same year.  Marion Fitzgerald found that of the 79 county boroughs in the country only Croydon and Newcastle had a higher number of properties let at over 12s a week.  On the South Moulsecoomb Estate – the most expensive to build – rents reached 27s a week.  Unsurprisingly, it was tenanted by ‘the better paid working classes and some middle class people’ who could afford such levels.

In North Moulsecoomb, three-bedroom parlour houses were let at 14s 4½d per week and her figures suggest that even here up to 45 per cent of residents were only able to meet their living expenses by economising on diet.  In East Moulsecoomb, built as a slum clearance estate, rents were lower – at 12s 7½d for a two-bedroom house and 13s 7½d for a three-bedroomed but these lower figures applied only to those displaced by slum clearance who were granted a 25 per cent rebate. (7)

When war broke out, this issue remained unresolved.  Brighton had built 4285 new council homes between the wars but Corporation policies had done little to alleviate the working-class poverty of which housing was only one aspect.  After 1945 new dynamics shaped working-class lives.  Many of these for a period of time – full employment, increased and more widely spread affluence, and a strengthened welfare state – have been positive.

Whitehawk Way © Paul Gillett and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

But not all have benefited and earlier gains have been lost.  In 2010, the Whitehawk Estate was one of the most deprived areas in the country – in the bottom five per cent nationally. I could quote employment figures, educational attainment statistics and so on but let’s get this down to basics – men on the Estate die on average seven years earlier than their counterparts in the rest of Brighton. (8)  The struggle to ensure that our social housing provides not only a roof but a measure of social equity remains.

Sources

(1)  ‘The Site Planning of Housing Schemes’,  The Town Planning Review, Vol. 8, No. 3/4, December 1920

(2) Ben Jones, ‘Interwar Developments’ on the East Brighton Bygones website

(3) Ben Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization: the Practices and Politics of Council Housing in Mid-twentieth-century England’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2010

(4) David Edwards, Borough Engineer of Brighton, ‘Some Recent Municipal Activities at Brighton’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, Vol. 53, 1932

(5) East Brighton Bygones, ‘Whitehawk’

(6) Brighton Gazette, 20 November 1937 quoted in Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization’.  The quotation which follows taken from the same source, is from the Brighton Gazette of 1 April 1939

(7) Marion Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb (Brighton, 1939) quoted in Jones, ‘Slum Clearance, Privatization and Residualization’

(8) Helen Drew,   ‘Whitehawk “one of the most deprived areas of Britain”’, The Politics Show, BBC Southeast, 12 July 2010

My thanks to the Regency Society with the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove for allowing use of images from the James Gray collection.

My Brighton and Hove is a superb website which contains more history and many memories of Brighton’s council housing over the years and much else.

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Pioneer Cottages, Penshurst: ‘three pairs of pretty dwellings’ UPDATE

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Penshurst, Pre-1914, Rural council housing

Having recently visited Penshurst, I’m able to include some better images of the original Pioneer Cottages and a little more history and illustration of later developments.

Last week, we looked at the very first rural council housing to be built – in Ixworth, Suffolk.  Its pioneering efforts did little to ease the path of its few successors.  It took five years to build the six council homes built in Penshurst in Kent in 1900.  That achievement was very largely due to the tireless efforts of one of our first women councillors – ‘perhaps the most stubborn woman councillor’ – Miss Jane Escombe. (1)

Penshurst, an early undated postcard

Escombe seems an unlikely hero of housing reform.  Born in India in 1839, the daughter of an official of the East India Company, she lived in Penshurst in an all-female household as a lady of independent means.  Still, she was a more radical figure than this conventional façade might suggest.

‘An Etcher Biting’ by Jane Escombe © Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service

She had been an accomplished artist in her younger years, exhibiting several times at the annual shows of the Royal Academy. (2) And when the 1894 Local Government Act created elected parish councils and rural and urban district councils and permitted women to serve on them, she secured election to the village’s new parish council.

Penshurst was an attractive village and an apparently affluent one, already within commuting distance of London by 1900 when it had a population of around 1600. But Escombe knew it was no rural idyll for many of its poorer citizens.  In one of her first actions as councillor in November 1895, ‘joined by a workman who knew where the shoe pinched’, she called on the parish council to build its own housing under Part III of the 1890 Housing Act which allowed local authorities to build where unfit homes had been condemned. (3)

That motion was rejected and, in any case, the Parish Council had to secure permission from higher authorities.  In the following year, however, backed by local GP Louis Wood, the Parish Council called upon the Sevenoaks Rural District Council to support their demand.  To press the case, the Parish Council conducted a survey of employers and workmen regarding local housing needs. It concluded 20 new houses were needed to accommodate local families without homes of their own.

In response, the District Council first canvassed local landowners on their willingness to build.  As low-rental working-class housing was not – then as now – of interest to profit-driven private enterprise, the response was negative and the Council had, reluctantly, to accept the necessity of council building.  It had first, however, to prove the need by means of a public inquiry.

The March 1897 inquiry also concluded the case proven and the District Council followed the next step of this laborious process by applying for permission to build from Kent County Council.  Four months later, approval was granted but the District Council dragged its heels until – under the continued prompting of Miss Escombe – a joint committee with the Parish Council was formed to forward the process.  Wood and Escombe (its honorary secretary) were members.

Penshurst, an early undated postcard

Progress was boosted by the decision of the local vicar to sell three-quarters of an acre of the church’s glebe land on Smarts Hill for £130. Escombe was clear though that good quality and attractive housing was necessary: (4)

Our village is one of the most beautiful in Kent, full of picturesque old buildings and cottages; to build brick boxes with slate lids would have been desecration.

Sixty architects rose to the challenge but, while they reckoned ‘the erection of three pairs of pretty dwellings’ would cost £1140, the lowest builder’s estimate came in at £1729.  Eventually, a lower estimate of £1463 was secured and the Parish Council applied to the Local Government Board for approval of a loan of £1800. After a third enquiry, this was granted but construction delayed until an adequate water supply guaranteed.  A well was sunk and water pump supplied.  In fact, Wood and Escombe went further, securing in 1902 the village’s first piped water supply with a reservoir built by the Parish Council, also at Smarts Hill.

These two images of Pioneer Cottages are taken from William Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (1907)

Finally, construction began in November 1899 and by December the following year the aptly-named Pioneer Cottages were built and fully occupied.  They contained two ground floor rooms with a separate entrance and hallway and an extension to the rear containing a scullery and washhouse with three bedrooms on the second floor.  At this time, separate earth closets were provided at the back of the houses.

This high-quality accommodation came at a price – a rental of 5s a week which Escombe candidly acknowledged was affordable only to ‘the higher class of workmen’ but she hoped – as was typical among housing reformers of the day – that a trickle-down effect would occur and that ‘they would move into our better cottages and leave theirs at a lower rent to the agricultural labourer’.

The memorial to Jane Escombe in Penshurst parish church

Escombe’s efforts were rightly celebrated – Sidney Webb himself commending ‘the energy of a lady councillor’ which had secured the Penshurst housing – and she became an acknowledged housing expert and campaigner. (5)  She died, aged 64, in 1905 ‘loved and honoured’, her memorial tablet states, ‘by those to whose welfare she ministered with untiring zeal, sympathy and devotion’.

For all that, her speech at annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers in 1900 marks her as a woman of her time and place: (6)

It behoved women, now that the privilege of serving on public bodies was granted to them, to use that privilege; they had more leisure than fathers, brothers and husbands and ought to work: sanitary matters appealed especially to them and the housing problem was at the root of all sanitary reform. Badly built, badly drained, insanitary houses led to disease, to the spread of infection, and to lessened vitality.  Lessened vitality in its turn tended to the liability to fall an easy prey to disease and the drink habit.  On children, bad housing had the most serious physical, mental and moral effects, and this from a race point of view was most harmful and damaging.

I’m sure the many working women of her day did not enjoy such greater leisure – in fact, they were probably working a double shift – and some of her concerns reflect a typical Victorian preoccupation with working-class morality.  That uncomfortable reference to ‘race’ echoes the pre-1914 discourse of National Efficiency – a eugenicist concern, which united many on the left and right, with the fitness of the British working classes to work and, if necessary, fight in a world perceived (rightly as it happens) as more competitive and threatening.

Pioneer Cottages: contemporary images, February 2018

After Jane’s death, her elder sister Anne – in what looks like a local variant of the Octavia Hill method – collected the rents of the cottages for the Parish Council.  She was proud to claim in 1907 that the cottages had been continuously occupied and only six weeks’ rent lost throughout and that only when tenants had changed occupation.

 

Floor plans of Pioneer Cottages taken from William Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (1907)

Her only misgiving – a demonstration of an upper-class ignorance of the significance of the parlour kept ‘for best’ in respectable working-class homes – was that: (7)

The tenants mostly live in what we meant for a scullery, but has now become a small living room, the larger room being used only occasionally. Otherwise, the cottages are, I think, satisfactory.

‘We should plan differently now’, she concluded, and that revised plan was presumably implemented in a second scheme of eight cottages let at lower rents built before the war.  The Warren Cottages formed the nucleus of what became a larger interwar council housing scheme at Glebelands.

Interwar homes on Smarts Hill

This image shows both the original and later council homes.

In the interim, there was further development on Smarts Hill with what looks like an interwar development of three semi-detached pairs and one short, three-house terrace immediately to the north of Pioneer Cottages towards Penshurst itself. These homes are notable for their tile-hung first floors – a clear homage to the local vernacular and quite a common feature of council housing in the area.

Post-war council housing in Glebelands, Penshurst

At Glebelands, the post-war estate, the homes are the ‘brick boxes’ that Escombe decried but they are attractively laid out amidst spacious gardens.

Forge Close

The sheltered housing at Forge Close in the village itself is also post-war but thoughtfully designed to fit into its historic surrounds.  There’s a lot of council-built housing for older people in the countryside.  It reflects, presumably, the financial regime operational after 1954 when central government support was limited to slum clearance redevelopment and homes for the elderly as well as the particular needs of country people often dependent on tied housing linked to their employment during their working lives.

All this, of course, is mere history but history has a habit of repeating itself.  In 2014, the Parish Council – one hopes with memories of its illustrious predecessor in mind – conducted a new survey of local housing needs: (8)

High property prices and a predominance of privately owned homes means that some local people are unable to afford a home in the parish of Penshurst. At the time of writing the report the cheapest property available was a 2 bedroom house for £295,000. For a first time buyer to afford to buy this property a deposit of approximately £44,250 is required along with an income of approximately £71,643.

It found 15 households – including 10 in unsuitable privately-rented accommodation, three who were sharing and one in tied housing – who needed some form of social rented housing or shared ownership.

Miss Escombe might be disappointed that such housing needs remained in the village and in such similar circumstances.  Given her enormous efforts to secure suitable affordable accommodation for the less well-off of Penshurst’s people, she would surely oppose the current Government’s intention to extend Right to Buy to housing associations which will further diminish the countryside’s stock of affordable housing. (9)  Sadly, then, this piece of history is as relevant to the continued struggle to house all our people decently as it was over one hundred years ago

Sources

(1) As described by Patricia Hollis in Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (1987)

(2) The portrait above was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877 and features Edwin Edwards who had married Jane’s sister in 1852.  It is wrongly attributed on the BBC Your Paintings website to Jane Esmond.

(3) William Walter Crotch, The Cottage Homes of Old England (1908)

(4) Quoted in Moritz Kaufmann, The Housing of the Working Classes and of the Poor (1907)

(5) Sidney Webb, Five Years’ Fruits of the Parish Councils Act, Fabian Society Tract, no. 105 (1901)

(6) ‘National Union of Women Workers Conference at Brighton’, The Courier, 26 October 1900

(7) Quoted in William Thompson, Housing Up-to-Date (1907)

(8) Tessa O’Sullivan (Rural Housing Enabler), Penshurst Housing Needs Survey, October 2014 with the support of Penshurst Parish Council and Sevenoaks District Council

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

The Newlyn Clearances, part II: ‘the modest homes that make a nation’

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1930s, Newlyn

Last week’s post provided the background to the clearance of Newlyn’s slums and described the modest council estate built to replace them. Far more dramatic events ensued as the broader scope of Penzance Borough Council’s intentions became clearer. The five-day public inquiry into its plans in July 1937 was the locus of a housing protest which briefly gripped the nation.

The Rosebud at Westminster, October 1937

There were, to begin with, perhaps justified complaints that the Council had been less than open about its plans.  The clearance orders had been passed by the Council without it having seen the wider proposals of Borough Surveyor Frank Latham.  Latham’s wish to widen the harbourside road through the village (and the demolition of homes not deemed unfit this required) drew further criticism and the sardonic observation that the regular traffic to Mousehole comprised merely a local bus.

Duke Street, Newlyn

The most vocal complaint centred on the issue of compensation.  Owners of homes officially designated as unfit for human habitation and subject to demolition (marked pink on council plans) received only their site value. Homes marked grey on the plans (to be cleared to allow rational reconstruction), on the other hand, were not classified as slums and their owners were to be compensated by their full market value. This difficult demarcation proved controversial in both respects.

The meat of the ensuing struggle was contained in the legalistic wranglings which resulted but its emotional heart lay elsewhere.  That was provided in the beguiling image of simple Cornish fisherfolk battling bureaucratic and unfeeling modernity.  Newlyn was its ideal site.

Stanhope Forbes: Home-Along: Evening (Newlyn Harbour, 1910) © Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

One major factor in this was the presence of an artists’ colony, active in the village since the 1880s. Stanhope Forbes, the grand old man of local artists, regarded: (1)

the idea of demolishing any part of our priceless village as a piece of sheer vandalism and folly. To me and thousands of holidaymakers the prospect of new and ugly buildings will be ghastly.

Local artists such as Geoffrey Garnier played a leading role in the Newlyn Housing Committee formed to oppose the clearances; Phyllis Gotch (the Marquise de Verdières since her 1922 marriage) was the daughter of two Newlyn-based artists and the instigator of some of the campaign’s more imaginative protests.  Her letter to the Manchester Guardian (complete with an ‘authentic’ local voice) is worthy of lengthy quotation and captures some of its most romantic imagery: (2)

Newlyn, by an astonishing order of the Penzance Town Council under the Slum Clearance Act, is to be swept away. Her cobbled streets, where Perkin Warbeck strode in his glory, her ancient manors and moulded ceilings, her secret lifts and smugglers’ passages are all to go…

Many of the houses are owned by the inhabitants, who are of a fine and independent spirit, scorning outside help if they can possibly help themselves, and facing hardship with dumb and gallant courage…

A deputation came to me to-day. The spokesman was a grand, old fisherman. God-fearing and wise. He said:

Miss Phyllis, for we shall always call ee that, we’ve been thinking that if you was to tell England and Scotland and Wales and the people over to Ireland what was happening to we, how the homes we’ve laboured for are being took away, and how there be’nt no money to pay lawyers to help us. Surely there’d be some as would plead for us, some as would say ‘This must not be?’

A petition of Newlyn women to the new Queen played on some of the same tropes in its plea ‘to the first lady in the land, our kind and beautiful Queen’ who would know ‘so well what the love of home means and…understand above all what the Celtic people feel about the soil on which their forefathers have dwelt for centuries’. (3)

‘Life class at Newlyn’, Picture Post, 15 October 1938

It’s altogether tempting, in this context, to see elite manipulation at play in such presentation but that would merely add another patronising depiction to a more complex, multi-layered story.  It ignores, as Tim Martindale argues, the ‘extent to which members of the fishing community of Newlyn actively participated and performed in the construction of their representation’, the socially embedded role of local artists, and a powerful sense of Cornish identity among local residents. (4)

This was wonderful stuff for a national (indeed international) press looking, then as now, for human interest stories to tug their readers’ heart strings.  Punch took up the baton and took a side-swipe in its doggerel at Penzance, the villain of the piece: (3)

Each to his own. Penzance may sleep,
Swaddled in palms and sanitation
So Newlyn (and the country) keep
The modest homes that make a nation;
If not, both reason and romance
(if England study either school in)
Tell us we might not miss Penzance
But cannot do away with Newlyn

PZ87 Rosebud in Westminster, an early colour image by Charles Hoyland © Margaret Perry Collection

All this provided the context for the campaigners’ most inspired and theatrical protest – the voyage of the 50-foot Newlyn lugger, Rosebud in October 1937 to Westminster and a meeting with the Minister of Health and Housing, Sir Kingsley Wood.  The skipper Cecil Richards, a Newlyn fisherman and a resident of one of the condemned homes, and his crew were met by local MP Alec Beechman. His speech avoided controversy but Billy ‘Bosun’ Roberts made it clear that the ‘Cornish boys [were] here to fight for their homes!’

The crew of The Rosebud with Alex Beechman MP

Then, in the words of Pennsylvania’s Reading Eagle, ‘the grizzled fishermen…cap in hand’ met Wood and told the Minister ‘how much they loved their picturesque cottage homes, how unhappy they would be in the new houses “over the hill”.’ (5)  Wood, clearly an early master of PR, provided the deputation with a Cornish cream tea and a thoroughly sympathetic hearing.  His verdict would come two weeks later but, for the time being, the Cornishmen were impressed by his apparent honesty and understanding.

Coverage from the Daily Express, 18 October 1937

For all the resonance and power of this campaign, opinions in the village were divided. We saw Reverend George Richards’ opinion of the new council homes on the Gwavas Estate last week – he had described them as ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’.  A Daily Mirror article contrasted pictures of the old village and the new estate under the headline ‘What Would You Rather See?’.

But such attitudes angered many in the village. ‘A Tenant’ who called into the offices of the Cornish Evening Telegraph described his family’s experience of living in a one-up, one-down cottage with a single bedroom, a solitary, rapidly filled bucket which served as a toilet, and a washbasin shared with three other households. He commented caustically that ‘the most militant in defence of the old village already lived up the hill’ and reckoned:

eighty percent of the working people of Newlyn welcome the building of the new houses and are longing for the day when they will have a chance to live in them.

Gender and generational differences emerged.  Some women – as wives and mothers – seemed to favour new and better-equipped homes as their husbands, out at work and relieved of domestic duties, defended the old.  A petition from ‘Younger Residents of Newlyn’ urged the Minister to sanction the clearances and expedite an early move to more sanitary accommodation. Its advocates were outspoken:

We say that Newlyn is no longer a fishing village – granted a few elderly men and a few out-of-date boats…they will soon disappear. The sons of these men are not going fishing. No sir, they are finding employment in Penzance and elsewhere.  We say that far too much has been made of a small grievance which the few fishermen might have, for after all they represent a very small minority in Newlyn.

That petition was signed by some 400 people; a rival petition protesting ‘the wholesale destruction of our village [and the] ruthless appropriation of private property’ attracted 1093 local signatures.  You can make your own judgement on the balance of forces in play.

Chywoone Avenue, Gwavas Estate

To be fair to the Newlyn Housing Committee, they were clear that defence of the old homes did not require opposition to the new and it avoided criticism of the new estate. Still, in what was a compelling narrative, it became natural to juxtapose the two.

The Newlyn Housing Committee also commissioned Professor Stanley Adshead (a leading architect and planner and the designer of significant council housing developments in Norwich, Stepney and Brighton amongst others) to review the clearance scheme. He took an advanced position in opposing its road widening element (‘Is it not conceivable that reduction in the size of the cart is better than improvement in the strength of the horse?’) and concluded firmly that the Housing Acts should be amended ‘to make special provision for dealing with cottages and villages possessing historic interest and peculiar charm’.  In the present, however, all hinged on Sir Kingsley Wood.

Wood pronounced in November 1937 in a letter to Penzance Borough Council. In the rush to headlines, the press initially greeted a victory for the protesters.  One block of homes was to be saved, some frontages preserved, and he called on the Council to: (6)

to rehouse the fishermen and the older people near the harbour and to cooperate with all those who would help them secure a redevelopment which will meet the legitimate interests of those affected and also preserve the amenities of the village.

Navy Inn Court

In a follow-up letter to the Council in December, he commended its cooperation with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and RIBA and the priority given to rehousing fishermen and the elderly at Navy Inn Court. (7)

It was a masterly political response. Woods had saved only 23 of the homes slated for demolition; he had transferred 54 from ‘pink’ to ‘grey’ thereby ensuring more generous compensation, and he offered more cash to those whose homes were still condemned as ‘unfit’.

Chapel Street, Newlyn

The Fragdan, Newlyn

Disillusion soon set in among the campaigners but the battle was essentially over and it was, in the end, a qualified victory for their cause. A guerrilla war, fought over legal issues of designation and compensation, delayed clearance. The Council, wary of the storm it had created, was, in any case, in no hurry to proceed. Only 58 demolitions had taken place by 1940, some more in 1943, and larger clearances in 1951 and 1955. By 1974, 130 of the homes originally condemned still stood and many were now part of a conservation district. Times had changed.

The harbour, Newlyn, 2018

For one, those younger residents were wrong about Newlyn’s fishing industry – in 2016 it was the largest fishing port in England in terms of quantity of landings. It remains a busy, bustling harbour and, not far away, lie the narrow lanes and traditional cottages beloved of tourist Cornwall – now with all mod cons and, presumably, a great many of them occupied as second homes or holiday lets.

Rosebud Court and plaque

As a visitor myself, it seems impossible to lament their survival and the failure of the rational modernism once threatened.  But their current situation highlights housing realities, both interwar and contemporary. There are rightly a number of monuments in Newlyn to the Rosebud and the struggle it represented. Ironically, one of these, Rosebud Court, is social housing; a block of four flats completed for the Penwith Housing Association in 2000.  And, above the old village, the Gwavas Estate continues to offer the decent and affordable housing that – with over 900 on local waiting lists – private enterprise seems incapable of providing. The Newlyn clearance saga, often romanticised as the struggle of the ‘little man’ against faceless modernity, offers complex lessons.

Sources

(1) ‘The Newlyn Slum Clearance Scheme. RAs Fight to Save a Village’, Cornishman, 22 October 1936

(2) The Marquise de Verdières, ‘Letters to The Editor: Slum-Clearance in Cornwall’, The Manchester Guardian, 18 October 1937

(3) Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Truran, 2003). Other detail is drawn from the same source which offers the most comprehensive coverage of the extended saga.

(3) Punch, 27 October 1937. Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton.

(4) Tim Martindale, ‘Livelihoods, Craft and Heritage: Transmissions of Knowledge in Cornish Fishing Villages’, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London 2012

(5) ‘Britain Gets Rid of Slums. Five Year Clearance Programme Meets Some Protest in England’, Reading Eagle, 28 November 1937

(6) ‘Cottages at Newlyn’, The Times, 4 November 1937

(7) ‘Rehousing at Newlyn’, The Times, 28 December 1937

The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’ UPDATE

Tags

1930s, Swimming Pool

I don’t normally update posts but four years ago, when I last visited the Jubilee Pool in Penzance, it was closed and storm damaged. A fundraising campaign was in place to secure its repair and re-opening.  Well, last week I saw that the campaign had succeeded magnificently so I’m pleased to add to that earlier post and bring things up-to-date. (The revisions are in italics.)

Jubilee Pool, August 2018

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared. Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

My original photos were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830. In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

The Prom: originally built in 1843, this is the 1896 renovation with pink tinted slabs to reduce glare, August 2018

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’. He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’. (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic. The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861. In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic. Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared. In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort. Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool, August 2014

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

Undated photograph © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The pools also reflected a greater independence enjoyed by women – a cultural shift but, in this context, a practical one too made possible by new swimwear designs which allowed them to take up swimming in addition to the more sedate bathing previously judged more seemly. 

Opening Day, 1935 © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

As we saw in Victoria Park, East London, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’. In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The Jubilee Pool was officially opened on 31 May, 1935. It was, the programme stated, ‘ the consummation of one of the most important projects undertaken by the Borough of Penzance’ . The celebratory prose went on to praise the clearance of the:

slum property that had marred the eastern approach to the Promenade – today this depressing and unattractive scene has been swept away and a complete transformation effected.

‘Professor Hicks’ takes the first plunge at the official opening © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

A full programme of activities followed with the accompaniment of the Penzance Silver Band.  ‘Professor’ Hicks, ‘the Cornish Veteran’ and former West of England swimming champion whose swim career had begun in 1868 was present and his inaugural laps were followed by a ‘programme of aquatic sports and exhibitions’ including races for ladies and girls. The ‘Beauty Parade of Bathing Belles’ was perhaps less of a blow struck for feminism. 

Prices, at 6d (2.5p) for adults and 3d for children, were relatively high but more controversial to some was the fact that the pool was to be open on Sundays and Councillor Birch went so far as to proclaim that ‘people in favour of Sunday labour were tyrants’.  The Mayor himself declared he would rather the pool be permanently closed than open on Sundays but later took part in the opening ceremony nevertheless. By 16 votes to 9, the Council overruled the primarily religious objections to Sunday opening (4a)

Members of the Penzance Swimming Association and Water Polo Club, mid-1950s (?) © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished by seven sluice gates. The size was designed to meet national and international standards for swimming and water polo matches. 

August 2014

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’. It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The programme, in full awareness of these artistic credentials, commented conversely on ‘the cubist style … adopted in the interior in the matter of diving platforms and steps’. 

August 2014

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham. He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him. He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25. His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

Captain Frank Latham

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903. That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations. The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and war memorial to right, August 2014

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist. The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea. Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

August 2014

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise. As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’. In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors, ‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last. War broke out within four years. The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting. Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed. Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue. February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however. A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come. Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

2018

A £3m renovation programme, supported by the Coastal Communities Fund and matching funding from local authorities and the Friends of Jubilee Pool, was completed in 2016 and the pool reopened in May that year.

August 2018

The Pool is now owned and managed by the Friends of Jubilee Pool operating as a Community Benefit Society committed its survival as a community asset.  The latest stage in this is the drilling of a geothermal well to provide renewable energy which will enable part of the pool to be heated.  A fundraising share offer is in place to complement the grant funding provided by the European Union. (6)

August 2018

Finally, that future is properly supported by a celebration of the Pool’s past. ‘Jubilee Pool Stories‘ is a project to create a digital archive as well as new media work and exhibitions. If you’re interested or can contribute your own memories, please follow the link.  My thanks to them for providing the historic photographs included in this post.

Sources

The amended post benefited from an exhibition in the Penzance Exchange gallery, ‘The Jubilee Pool: Then, Now, To Come’, which is running till 22 September 2018.

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(4a) ‘Penzance Town Council. The Bathing Pool’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 15 May 1935

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history. The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

(6)  Visit the Jubilee Pool’s dedicated website for full details on past work and future plans.

With planning permission granted for the proposals, Dezeen have just published ‘Penzance could become “spa town of Cornwall” with revamp of art-deco sea pool’

The Mile Cross Estate, Norwich: ‘providing adequate living accommodation for all’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Norwich, contrary to the county town image that some may have of it (though that too was true), was a densely-settled, industrial city which came under Labour control in 1933.  The Council built over 7500 houses in the 1920s and 30s (twice the number of new private homes built in the same period) and rehoused some 30,000 people – almost a quarter of the population.  Mile Cross was the finest of its new estates.

The Cathedral from the castle battlements, 1933 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

It was an old city.  When HV Morton visited in 1927, he arrived (1)

knowing nothing about the city except that it has always made money, that it was once the third city in England, that when its weaving trade went north after the coalfields, Norwich just put on a flinty face and learned how to make women’s shoes.

Around 15 per cent of the workforce, men and women, manufactured shoes in the 1920s but with unemployment peaking at 20 per cent in 1933 and never falling below 10 per cent before the war, making money wasn’t always so easy. And away from the castle and cathedral were slums – around 4000 homes, housing over 10,000 of the city’s working class in 1919: (2)

small dwellings in scattered areas spread over the city, mostly within the old city walls. Many…are timber-framed, and therefore difficult to condemn as regards structural stability, but…they are lacking in light and air, and are damp, and deficient as regards sanitation.

But as James Bullough (the City Engineer), continued, ‘for the first time the public conscience had been awakened to the necessity of providing adequate living accommodation for all’ and the City Council determined to build 1200 new houses, 300 of these on 102 acres of farmland and brickfield purchased for £10,600 just west of the Aylsham Road – the future Mile Cross Estate.

Appleyard Crescent, Mile Cross, 1928 EPW021219 © http://www.britainfromabove

Not only that but the Corporation appointed SD Adshead (the leading contemporary figure in council house design and layout whose work we have seen in Stepney and Brighton) as consultant.  Adshead himself appointed four well-known local architects – Stanley Wearing, George Skipper, AF Scott and SJ Livock – to design some of the new homes and planned the new scheme as a community from the outset, with schools, churches, shops, pubs and community centres.  It would, naturally, be a garden suburb and with its fresh air and open space complemented by public allotments and parks.

Suckling Avenue © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

The first sixty houses were built by direct labour – at a cost of £690 each – after the Council had baulked at the high prices quoted by private builders and the first phase of development took place along the grand axial boulevard of Suckling Avenue.  Here and on Losinga Crescent (all the streets were named after historical worthies of the county) were the so-called ‘Architects’ houses’. (3)

Wearing, Adshead’s chief collaborator, wrote in the Architects’ Journal of the ‘abundance of good early 19th century work in Norwich’: a style, he argued, which leant ‘itself to a simple and dignified treatment for work of this nature’.  This is the neo-Georgian which typified much council house design of the period but in Norwich its good quality redbrick construction and pantile roofing give it a local, vernacular feel which is atypical.

Losinga Crescent four-bed home (with replacement windows)

At the other extreme were the 184 standard plan ‘Dorlonco’ houses erected in this first phase.  These were steel-framed homes developed by Adshead, Patrick Abercrombie and Stanley Ramsey in conjunction with the Dorman Long Company in Redcar, designed to be built on a mass scale but adaptable with a range of skins to suit local preferences.  Here in Mile Cross, they reflected the double-fronted neo-Georgian style of the estate’s other early homes but are marked out by their lower-quality brick and slate roofs.

A Dorlonco house on Bolingbroke Road

The Estate was extended in the later twenties, to a design by Bullough, to the south around a second axis formed by the pedestrian footway of The Lane and Burgess Road.  There was a deliberate attempt to use, both here and on the other Norwich estates, a range of design – a contrast to the terraces and bye-law housing of the pre-war period:

Over fifty types of houses have been planned, giving variety in accommodation and design, which has prevented the Corporation housing estates from becoming stereotyped in monotonous rows of dwellings, a contrast to the dreary view of similarly designed dwellings of pre-war days presenting a wearisome drabness all too familiar to us all over the whole country.

You’ll see this in the range of building materials employed at Mile Cross although most of the 148 concrete block houses and six all-steel houses have since been demolished.  There was some effort to incorporate the arts and crafts aesthetic of the time in the use of low eaves, roughcast rendering, hanging tiles and mock timber framing but in Norfolk they do different and, as the Norwich conservationists point out, this was a vernacular derived from Kent and Sussex rather than East Anglia.

Mile Cross Library © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

Alongside all this, community facilities followed relatively quickly – the first infants’ school in 1926 (and primary and secondary schools in due order), the Drayton Road shops in 1928, the local library in 1931 and the striking St Catherine’s Church in 1936.

The one-acre (grade II listed) Mile Cross Gardens, designed by Adshead and executed by the estimable City Parks Superintendent Captain Sandys-Winsch, were opened in 1929, their construction – and particularly their concrete shelters – used to give work to the city’s unemployed.

By 1932, the Mile Cross Estate comprised around 1400 council homes, two-fifths of the city’s total. (4)  The city had been eighth among county boroughs in its rate of construction under the 1924 Housing Act and would open its 5000^th council home in 1935. Large estates also grew in Earlham and Lakenham.

By this time, greater attention was being given to slum clearance. In the city centre areas of Pitt Street and Coslany Street, 3238 houses were cleared displacing a population of some 9873. (5)  The Housing Committee gave its attention to attention to the construction of flats ‘on Continental lines’.   The three-storey flats on Barrack Street were erected in 1936.

Bargate Court, Barrack Street, in 1938 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

The city, a Labour stronghold from 1933 to 2000, would continue to be on the ball – a prodigious and innovative builder of housing for its people.

In the early days, as was typical, these Corporation tenants were vetted for their ability to pay. The first tenants included a few shoe operatives but also clerks, engine drivers and teachers. But the Council also stated it would give preference to ex-servicemen (or their widows) and those for whom the ’physical and moral welfare of the applicant’s family [was] being endangered under existing conditions’.   The latter would be increasingly favoured as slum clearance took off.

Mile Cross shops © Northmetpit, Wikimedia Commons

One long-term resident of Mile Cross moved to the estate from an inner-city slum when her brother contracted pneumonia: (6)

I can remember my mother saying she was the envy of her sisters because she had a bathroom. It led off the kitchen and the kitchen and bathroom had concrete floors which my mother, I can remember her doing it with red cardinal polish and that used to look quite nice, and a rug in front of her seat.

Another recalls the bath of his new Mile Cross home – ‘a luxury’ even if the bath was in the kitchen and the ‘kitchens weren’t plastered or nothing’.

Looking back, then, these are modest homes but the city’s acceptance of ‘the necessity of providing adequate living accommodation for all’ and seeking to do so, where possible, in some style was impressive.

Mile Cross Details, © Norwich City Council, Mile Cross Conservation Area Appraisal

When Morton visited canary-breeding was the working-class hobby of the day and the local football team played at a ground called The Nest.  The Canaries are still going strong – one badge of local identity, and another is council housing.  At peak, around half the population lived in council housing and, despite the failure of the City Council’s attempts to resist Right to Buy in the 1980s, the proportion remains high.  We’ll come back to Norwich – it’s close to my heart.

Sources

(1) HV Morton, In Search of England (1927)

(2) James S Bullough (Norwich City Engineer), ‘The Housing Problem’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol 53, January 1932

(3) Norwich City Council, Mile Cross Conservation Area Appraisal (Number 12, June 2009).  Much of the detail on the Estate is drawn from this excellent source.

(4) JJ McLean, ‘A Fine City, Fit for Heroes?’ The Rise of Municipal Housing in Norwich, 1900-1939. An Historical Perspective (ND).  Other detail on the city’s interwar housing is also drawn from this valuable account.

(5) Alan Armstrong, ‘Population 1700-1950’ in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds) Norwich Since 1550 (2004)

(6) Quoted in Sarah Housden (ed), Norwich Memories (2009)

As credited, a number of the images above are taken with permission from the collection of photographs taken by George Plunkett between 1931 and 2006.  If you’re interested in Norwich (and Norfolk) past and present, do visit the wonderful website put together by his son.

The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’

Tags

1930s, Penzance

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared.  Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830.  In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’.  He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’.  (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic.  The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861.  In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic.  Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared.  In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort.  Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

As we saw in Victoria Park, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’.  In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The opening of the pool, 1935 © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished.

All my photographs were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’.  It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham.  He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him.  He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25.  His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War.  He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903.  That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations.  The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and the war memorial to the right

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist.  The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea.  Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise.  As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’.  In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors,‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last.  War broke out within four years.  The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting.  Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed.  Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue.  February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however.  A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come.  Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

Sources

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history.  The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

Do visit the Friends of the Jubilee Pool’s website for more information and the latest news on the pool.

Early Municipal Housing in Swansea: breaking ‘the thrall of dreary terracing’

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Cottage suburbs, Pre-1914

By 1914 Swansea was in the vanguard of council house building and design. The First World War initially dealt a blow to its ambitions but earlier progress left the council well-placed to capitalise on the post-war drive for ‘Homes for Heroes’ and the improved standards set.

Swansea was once a fashionable seaside resort but, come the Industrial Revolution, the town’s  proximity to coal resources and its port facilities (allowing the easy import of ores) led to it becoming one of the largest metal-smelting centres in the world.  No longer ‘the Brighton of Wales’, it was known as ‘Copperopolis’.

Copperopolis

Swansea’s population grew from a little over 6000 in 1801 to 94,500 by the end of the century and increased by a further 20,000 in the decade that followed. In 1852, 900 of the town’s 3500 homes were two-room court cottages, in-fills behind existing street frontages.  Cholera erupted in 1832 and 1849.

The Swansea Urban Sanitary Authority, spurred by a further cholera outbreak in 1866, was one of the very few local bodies to take advantage of the 1875 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act.  Its 1876 Swansea Improvement Scheme cleared five streets and nine courts in the central Greenhill area to create the Alexandra Road approach to the main railway station.  A public library and privately-built houses replaced the slums. (1)  The County Borough, created in 1889, would go further in building workers’ housing.

Liberals, broadly progressive but representative of Swansea’s industrial elite, dominated the early council.  The competition of a growing socialist and labour movement provided the incentive and principles for more radical housing reform.  By 1906, there were eight Independent Labour councillors (of 40 in total) on the Borough Council.  The 1913 municipal elections returned a near equilibrium with Conservatives holding 13 seats and Liberals and Labour twelve each (there were three independents).

The Council’s intentions were marked by the creation of a Housing Department in 1902 and an Estates Department in 1904.  Still, its initial efforts were cautious – confined to infill housing, fitting in with existing speculative building and looking, at first glance, similar to it.

There was, however, a significant difference.  Private building was generally ‘tunnelback’ – one room wide with a rear annexe which maximised housing density and builders’ profits but restricted light and air to residents.  The council houses, of superior red brick, were purposely built without this rear projection. (2)

Colbourne Terrace

In 1905, small-scale building took place at Waun Wen and Colbourne Terrace and the initial success of the scheme led the council to plan an estate of 142 houses in the surrounding Baptist Well area.  Labour activists celebrated the role of William Morris, the Labour chair of the Housing Committee. The struggle to build – ‘a battle royal between the monied classes and the Labour elements’ as Morris described it – would be renewed when the Council came to consider far more ambitious plans for a ‘garden city’ estate. (3)

But Labour was not the only reforming force.  Local architect CT Ruthen was a Liberal councillor.  He and a colleague had attended the annual conference of the National Housing and Town Planning Council in December 1906 where they met one of the leading contemporary advocates of housing and planning reform, Raymond Unwin.  Unwin would become closely associated with subsequent developments in Swansea and Ruthen himself – later Sir Charles Ruthen – would become President of the Society of Architects and President of the Institute of Structural Engineers as well as Director-General of Housing to the Ministry of Health.

Spurred by the example of the housing reform movement, the Council determined to organise its own exhibition of model working-class dwellings.  A joint committee was formed – with members of neighbouring local authorities and including trade union representatives from the local trades council – and a site chosen:  Mayhill, on Corporation land, with stunning views of Swansea Bay.

The view from Nicander Parade

The layout of the exhibition site reflected Unwin’s influence.  He had visited Swansea and urged the importance of closes and culs-de-sac to ‘break the thrall of dreary terracing’. (4)

The South Wales Cottage Exhibition opened in September 1910.  Twenty-nine houses were built – 21 on Llewellyn Circle and Nicander Parade designed by private architects; eight designed and built by Swansea County Borough Council on Tan y Marian Road.  They came in a variety – in pairs, threes and fours; some of stone, some of brick; some rendered or faced with slate; often with arts and craft touches of gables and hipped roofs, porches and bay windows.

Among the architect prize winners in a high-calibre field were ECP Monson (whose later work we have seen in Bethnal Green), Ruthen himself and the partnership of George Pepler and EG Allen.

Exhibition cottages on Llewellyn Circle

The Council was perhaps more impressed by its own efforts.  Its eight houses – built by direct labour – came in at £300 less than the lowest tender and encouraged the Council both in its general preference for direct labour and its immediate ambitions to build 100 more houses on the Mayhill site.

Swansea Borough Council-built houses on Tan Y Marian Road

In the event, these were not completed but the Council’s aspirations were marked by the appointment of a Borough Architect, Ernest Morgan, in 1911 and by the cooperation of Raymond Unwin and Borough Surveyor, George Bell, in the design of the new Townhill Estate (adjacent to Mayhill) in 1912.  The plan was celebrated in Ewart Culpin’s book, The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date published the following year:

In November 1912 local architect HG Portsmouth was approached to design a scheme of 300 houses.  A back and forth ensued – the Council rejected plans for houses with less than three bedrooms (not encouraged by the Local Government Board at the time) and regretfully turned down proposals for semi-detached dwellings as too expensive. They compromised on terraces of six but increased the total to be built to 500.

In October 1913 Morgan presented the Housing Committee with a revised plan for 500 homes ‘closely adhering to the design of Mr Unwin’.  The Committee resolved to build six immediately by direct labour and these were completed in July 1914.  In the same month, the Council applied for a loan of £101,990 from the Local Government Board (LGB) to build 500 houses.

1914 council housing on Islwyn Road

In 1914, Swansea’s record on housing and its future promise stood proud. A total of 321 municipal houses had been built – mostly in the improved terraces discussed above but with model housing on garden suburb lines to come.  The LGB had approved a loan for 300 homes with an in principle agreement for more.  In June, councillors were considering a European tour to acquaint themselves with the latest ideas in town planning which would take them to Prague, Budapest, Leipzig and Vienna later in the year.

By September, all those cities lay in enemy territory.  Worse was to follow.  While the preparatory works for the Townhill Estate were completed – against a backdrop of wartime labour shortages – in 1915, in March the LGB cancelled its loan.  A deputation from the Council visited Whitehall to plead for reconsideration but to no avail.

Two years later, however, the mood had shifted.  As industrial unrest increased, as the housing shortage grew more pressing, and as thoughts turned to the necessary tasks of post-war reconstruction, the government looked to housing once more.  In July, the Local Government Board’s Circular 86/1917, ‘Housing after the War’, committed:

substantial financial assistance from public funds to those local authorities who are prepared to carry through without delay at the conclusion of the War, a programme of housing for the working classes approved by the LGB.

In Swansea, housing shortages were particularly serious as the town’s population had grown by 12,000 during the war itself.  Fortunately, Swansea’s earlier planning now paid off.  In September 1917, the Borough Architect forwarded a plan for 500 homes to the Local Government Board.   Given that the LGB received firm proposals for only 42,000 homes nationally at this time, Swansea had placed itself in the very forefront of post-war building.

The Townhill Estate that emerged after 1919 adhered closely to Unwin’s design and the 1913 plan – its characteristic blocks of six are a good indication of this – and as its historian Nigel Robins states:

The first ‘Homes for Heroes’ in Swansea were largely designed before the war had properly started.  They were acceptable in the spirit of improvement of 1919 because they were of such high standard

A total of 425 houses were built at Townhill under Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act.  By 1939, the Borough had built some 4000 new homes.  This latter housing was plainer in design but well-proportioned and equipped.  The current City Council owns and manages a little over 13,000 homes.  The Labour Party itself would become the largest party on the Council in 1927 and secure a majority – which it held until 1976 – in 1933.

Swansea offers a fine case-study of early council housing – both in its ideals and design and the political and economic pressures that brought it into being.  The borough takes justifiable pride in these early achievements and was fortunate in the calibre of councillors and officers whose values and drive made these possible.  This is a drive, these are values – to house the people, well and affordably – that we need to harness and liberate once more.

Sources

(1) Stephen Hughes, Copperopolis: Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea (2008) and William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903)

(2) Nigel Alan Robins, Homes for Heroes.  Early Twentieth Century Council Housing in the County Borough of Swansea, City of Swansea (1992)

(3) Quoted in Thomas John McCarry, Labour and Society in Swansea, 1887-1918, University of Wales PhD, 1986

(4) The Unwin quote is from Robins; other detail taken from City and County of Swansea, The 100th anniversary of the South Wales Cottage Exhibition

The photographs of the early Townhill Estate are taken from the Swansea City Council video, The Building of the Townhill Estate