The Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury: ‘healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’

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1930s, Finsbury

They’ve done a pretty good job with the recent £16.5m refurbishment of the Ironmonger Row Baths in Islington (Finsbury as was). The new facilities are smart and state-of-the-art but the ‘municipal’ look and feel of the exterior (which was Grade II listed in 2006) have been respected.

Times change. Now the Baths are operated by a social enterprise. There’s a privately run-spa which makes the old Turkish baths look a bit Dickensian in hindsight. But if our Municipal Dreams are to be more than mere nostalgia, perhaps these are necessary – or, at least, unavoidable – changes and it seems to me that the Baths still pay some proper regard to the ideals and intentions of the Finsbury Borough Council which opened them in 1931.

The refurbished Baths and new entrance

By then, the case for public baths and washhouses was long-established. Liverpool corporation led the way with the first publicly-funded public baths in 1828 and went one step further with the opening of a combined baths and washhouse (laundry) in 1842.

In London, an Association for Promoting Cleanliness among the Poor was founded in 1844. And Parliament passed permissive legislation empowering local vestries and corporations to use local rates to finance building in 1846 and 1852.

The stated aims of the 1846 Public Baths and Washhouses Act capture well the glorious mix of condescension and elevation that characterise Victorian social reform:

To promote the health and cleanliness of the working classes, and as a necessary consequence, improve their social condition and raise their moral tone, thereby tendering them more accessible to and better fitted to receive religious and secular training.

If we baulk at the patronage and thinly-veiled social control on display here, we should remember that these pious middle-class reformers were, for all that, on the side of the angels.

Angels, however, were thin on the ground in Finsbury. The borough council began discussing the erection of public baths within months of its creation in 1900. In 1902 plans were prepared by AWS Cross, the leading architect of the day in the field, but shelved. Five further schemes were debated in the years immediately following…and nothing happened.

By 1918, every town of over 200,000 population had either a public baths or laundry, as did every borough in London but Finsbury – one of the city’s poorest. Discussions began again in 1923 but talk was cheap, building expensive. Again the matter was shelved.

The politics of the borough were shifting however. From its inception, the council had been firmly in the hands of Conservatives, Municipal Reformers and Ratepayers – varying labels for a single politics – but the Labour Party had been gaining ground since the war. In 1928, Labour took control – narrowly (by 29 seats to 27) – and resolved to act.

The case seemed unarguable given the statistics presented by the new Baths and Washhouses Committee. Of 20,005 families in the borough, 4917 shared a single room and 7253 lived in two rooms. Of 12,000 dwellings, just 500 – only 4 per cent – had private baths.

Land was purchased and AWS Cross was commissioned once again – though now in partnership with his son, KMB Cross – to do the design. In October 1929, the Council voted to implement the Crosses’ plans using direct labour, accepting the Borough Engineer’s tender of £53,200. Labour argued ‘in this way the Council would be finding work for Finsbury unemployed, it would mean a better job’ and it would save money.

Unfortunately, the last point was not – in the strictest accounting terms – accurate. A lower private tender of £48,426 had been received. The Ratepayers’ Association (the current incarnation of the local Conservative Party) complained to the Ministry of Health of this waste of tax-payers’ money and the Ministry refused the necessary loan unless the cheapest tender were accepted.  The Labour majority was forced to back down. It’s not clear whether their face-saving stipulation that the contractors give work – at this time of severe depression – to the local unemployed was acted upon.

After all the politics, the Baths were formally opened by the Mayor of Finsbury in June 1931. The official programme of the event eschews rhetoric but then the dry detail – 18 washing compartments, five washing machines, three hydro-extractors, 30 drying horses and ironing tables with electric irons in the laundry; 40 slipper baths for men, 40 for women – meant more in practical terms.

The laundry © Islington Local History Centre

Washing troughs © Islington Local History Centre

The baths were open seven days a week, the laundry for six, with long hours and low prices that did their best to address local needs. At the height of the Great Depression, the Council provided free access to the baths to the local unemployed and pensioners.

© Islington Local History Centre

A planned second phase of building – and what leant the Baths their especial character – was completed in 1938. Full-sized and children’s swimming pools were opened…

The large pool: 100ft by 35ft with underwater floodlighting © Islington Local History Centre

The children’s pool: 50ft by 21ft © Islington Local History Centre

…and the most unusual new feature: Turkish baths containing a ‘Russian Vapour Room, three Hot Rooms and Shampoo Room’, open to men and women on alternate days at just 2/6 (12.5p).

In the official programme of the opening ceremony, the Council proclaimed its vision (1):

Believing that facilities for healthy recreation and personal cleanliness are essential for the health and well-being of our people, the Council for some years past have rigorously pursued a policy of providing modern public baths in the Borough, easy of access and within the reach of the most slender purse.

And then, in a sense, the Baths embedded themselves into the community. The Turkish Baths became one of only three public facilities in London and attracted a loyal clientèle  Into the 1960s, admission stood at 6 shillings (30p); a pot of tea could be had for a shilling and poached egg on toast for 1/4 (6.5p). They were a place for gossip or deals but above all for a little pampered relaxation in lives full of care.

The Baths in 1938 © Islington Local History Centre

Times change. Numbers attending fell, prices rose (though remained a far cry from their private spa equivalents) and the clientèle evolved. By the 1990s, one observer noted the ‘City fat cats’ and ‘more affluent Islington residents’ who populated the Baths.

The Baths shortly before their refurbishment © Nigel Cox and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The swimming pools remained a great resource for local schools and clubs and enthusiasts. And people still needed to do their laundry – a fact recognised in the modernisation and extension of the laundry in 1960 and its retention even in the new set-up. And when people did their laundry, they chatted and made friends.

The Ironmonger Row Baths were a social space – a statement which, when so much of our lives is privatised, is not as banal as it sounds.  This aspect was recognised by Islington and the architects commissioned for the refurb. So, while the facilities are ‘more pleasant, more comfortable, a bit more pampering’ now, they are not ‘too posh’ and those spaces where people gather have been retained.(2)

Still, part of you can’t help feeling that something is lost. The Spa does, nevertheless, seem pretty posh and the three young women in the sauna discussing art installations in Shoreditch light years away from the grounded realities of the hard lives of the Baths’ original patrons.

But then you give yourself a little shake and ask what precisely are you being nostalgic for – childhood rickets and a lack of indoor sanitation?  Wouldn’t those Finsbury councillors be celebrating the progress made in the lives of so many (though not all)?

In the end, I think the Ironmonger Row Baths represent what local councils can do best – address local needs in a collective fashion in changing times.

Sources:

(1) Programme for the official opening ceremony, 22 October 1938.

(2) Adam Goodfellow of Tim Ronalds Architects quoted in Plunging into History

Especial thanks to the helpful people at the Islington Local History Centre for access to relevant archives.

The Rowan Arts’ Plunging into History – Stories from Ironmonger Row Baths and Beyond project is a wonderful source which provides detail and colour and much more information on the local area and people than this brief blog entry could.

Esther Oxford, ‘Bath Time: faded grandeur…‘, The Independent, 3 August 1994, captures the Baths well before their refurbishment.  Hugh Pearman, ‘Scrubbing up nice‘, Riba Journal, is informative on the rebuild.

The amazing Victorian Turkish Baths website will tell you about Ironmonger Row and more historic and surviving Turkish baths in the UK than you could ever imagine.

The Baths and Washhouses Historical Archive is a superb and comprehensive resource on the subject more generally.  Do visit it.

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‘Local government…the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’

When I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it all righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

The words of Winifred Holtby in 1936.

I started this blog back in January to celebrate the efforts and achievements of our early municipal reformers.  I’m taking a break this week but it’s an opportunity to review what’s been covered and, if you’re new to the blog, provide a little tour of what you’ve missed.

WE Riley’s plans for the White Hart Lane Estate

There’s been a lot about housing – probably the most important sphere of municipal endeavour and the one with the largest direct impact on the masses of people.  The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act provided the initial breakthrough, seized upon by the London County Council, most famously, in Arts and Crafts-inspired developments at Millbank, Totterdown Fields and the White Hart Lane Estate but also by smaller, progressive councils such as Sheffield in the Flower Estate and Battersea in the Latchmere Estate.

The First World War gave impetus and urgency to the efforts of government to house the people, supported by Housing Acts and financial subsidies of greater or lesser generosity.  The fruits of these were seen principally in the massive new ‘garden suburbs’ such as the LCC’s Becontree and Downham and Woolwich’s Page Estate in the London outskirts and Manchester City Council’s Wythenshawe Estate, then seen as ‘the world of the future’. 

For most, working people and housing reformers, ‘a cottage home for every family’ remained the ideal, seen most clearly in Bermondsey’s small Wilson Grove Estate. More pragmatic councils in densely settled boroughs embraced tenement building such as that in Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras.

Housing architecture and thinking were generally conservative but there were some early modernist designs, inspired by Continental example – in the LCC’s Ossulston Estate, for example.  Leeds’ massive Quarry Hill scheme was an inner-city product of the first large-scale slum clearance efforts of the 1930s.

War, ‘the locomotive of history’, brought even more radical changes in housing after 1945.  The Lansbury Estate in Poplar, for all its proclaimed modernity, was something of a throwback.  Blackbird Leys in Oxford was also a postwar estate which echoed earlier suburban developments.

The Spa Green Estate, from Margaret and Alexander Potter’s Houses, 1948

But as ambitions, scale and urgency grew, council housing grew higher and denser. The Spa Green Estate in Finsbury was an early progressive vision of high-rise housing.  Park Hill – those ‘streets in the sky’ in Sheffield – represents the trend at its most far-reaching.

Resistance or backlash to high-rise on an industrial scale began in the late sixties, seen initially in Camden Council’s commitment to high-quality, low-rise housing such as that in the Alexandra Estate and Branch Hill and – in a different key – to Newcastle’s commitment to re-created community at Byker.

If housing met one of the most basic human needs, it was understood by municipal reformers as part of a wider environment which they sought to make healthier and more humane.

Bermondsey Borough Council – as in so many things – took the lead here with its vision of beautifying that inner-city borough.  Victoria Park in London’s East End is a more typical city park but a great democratic exemplar of what parks can do to improve lives and lift spirits.

Planning on a larger scale was much more a post-Second World War ideal.  The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 deserves wider notice as a truly progressive but, in the best sense, conservative measure.  Planning as a tool of benevolent social engineering has had less impact but Plymouth can be fairly described as our ‘first great welfare state city’.

Abram Games’ 1943 poster featuring the Finsbury Health Centre

All such work was in the service of a healthier life for the masses of people.  Local government – before the creation of a national health service in 1948 – was in the forefront of direct healthcare provision.  We’ve looked at Bermondsey, for whose socialist councillors there was ‘no wealth but life’, Finsbury where nothing was ‘too good for ordinary people’ and Woolwich as examples of the range and scale of this commitment.

Baths and washhouses were less striking – though ambitions could run high as seen in the Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury – but important contributors to the amelioration of working-class living conditions. ‘Healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’ were not such trivial goals.

Shoreditch Maternity and Child Welfare Centre, 1923

If healthcare measures were particularly dedicated to the raising of new generations so, of course, was education – also a scene of municipal pride and endeavour as we’ve noted in the case of the London School Board. Its schools – those ‘sermons in brick’ – were ‘beacons of the future’, harbingers of a ‘wiser, better England’.

With all this proper focus on reforms which not only improved lives but in many cases saved them, a celebration of town halls might seem a distraction but this blog celebrates local government and a reforming, progressive spirit of civic pride and local identity which is sometimes best seen in its great monuments.

Poplar Town Hall, 1938

Limehouse Town Hall is a modest early example. The Council House in Birmingham is an inspiring ‘bricks and mortar monument to the municipal gospel’ of a progressive middle class.  Poplar Town Hall – ‘a worthy workshop for the workers’ welfare’ – was a sign of changing times.

That’s a rather lengthy list but I hope it shows what we owe to local government and how vital that work remains. The blog will continue to commemorate the effort and enterprise of our local councils and municipal reformers – men and women up and down the country who dedicated their lives to elevating the condition of the people.

If you support this endeavour, please continue to read the blog, spread the word and please feel free to contribute your own ideas and your own pet projects to the continuing record.

Let’s celebrate this ‘first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’.

Open House London 2016: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

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#OpenHouse2016, Town Halls

This bonus post – the final post relating to Open House London on the 18-19 September – offers a whistle-stop tour of some of the other municipal buildings featured, some grand, some more humble.  We’ll begin with municipal seats of government: in chronological order, the town halls which manifested the civic pride of local government in its heyday.

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

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

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

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

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall, on the other hand, almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 as the headquarters of a mere vestry, the modest form of local government which preceded the Metropolitan Boroughs established in the capital in 1900. Shoreditch, however, was far from modest – it was one of the most ambitious and innovative such bodies in London, taking particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking.  The Vestry and later Borough’s motto ‘More Light, More Power’ had more than metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too.

After a long period of decline the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.  Look out for a full programme of events celebrating the building’s 150^th anniversary later this year.

Limehouse Town Hall

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

Battersea Arts Centre (former Town Hall)

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

Richmond Old Town Hall

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

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils. If you visit, take time to look at Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre five minutes to the south and the Spa Green Estate just to the north though neither feature in the Open House programme.  The headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920 just across the road, do, however.

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

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

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

Redbridge (formerly Ilford) Town Hall (c) Sunil060902 and made available through Wikimedia Commonsw

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

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

Tottenham Town Hall today

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

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

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

Deptford Town Hall

Another fine example of Baroque revival is Deptford Town Hall, designed by the noted team HV Lanchester, JA Steward and EA Rickards and completed in 1907.  Its exterior sculptures capture local pride in the area’s naval heritage. The guided tours focus on more controversial times – the Town Hall’s role as a court for trying conscientious objectors during the First World War.

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

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

The interwar era featured a new wave and new style of municipal architecture.  Probably the most notable example, Hornsey Town Hall in Crouch End, doesn’t feature in Open House this year but, now a local arts centre, can be viewed at other times.

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

Opened one year later in 1936, Romford Town Hall (now serving the London Borough of Havering) is a less elaborate building, designed by Herbert R Collins and Antoine Englebert O Geens in an architectural competition stressing the need for strict economy. It remains, however, a very fine example of the new International Moderne style in vogue at the time. Though its steel-framed construction is hidden here by brickwork and stone, rather than the white cement often favoured, this was a consciously forward-looking, more democratic architecture shedding the detritus of the past.

Waltham Forest (formerly Walthamstow) Town Hall

Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) probably has the best setting of any town hall in London – a grand civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain. The Town Hall itself was commissioned by the new Borough of Walthamstow created in 1929 and designed by Phillip Hepworth in a stripped down classical style with Art Deco touches owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.

From the Walthamstow Town Hall Council Chamber

Begun in 1937 and completed in wartime, these straitened circumstances led to some economising in fixtures and fittings but it remains an impressive building. Walk round the back to see five figures by Irish sculptor John Francis Kavanagh, inspired by local hero William Morris, and note the Borough Coat of Arms mosaic at the entrance (and elsewhere) with its motto taken Morris – ‘Fellowship is Life’.  You’ll see this inscribed on the pediment of the Assembly Hall, contemporaneous, to the right.  The Magistrates’ Courts to the left weren’t built until the 1970s.

All these buildings, in different ways, reflect perhaps the proudest and most progressive era of local government – seen most practically in the health centres, washhouses and baths and housing which I’ve written of elsewhere but manifested too in administrative headquarters intended to represent and mobilise a civic patriotism.

Harrow Civic Centre (c) Nigel Cox and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Some of that shine had rubbed off by the 1970s – an era of civic centres in which function outweighed form in terms of design.  Harrow Civic Centre, despite a distinguished architectural pedigree – it was designed by Eric Broughton, the winner of an architectural competition judged by a panel including Sir Basil Spence and Sir Hugh Casson – is no exception in this respect.  Opened in 1973, it’s essentially a Brutalist, checkerboarded concrete box built around a large central courtyard.

Now it’s due for demolition.  According to Chief Executive, Michael Lockwood:

45 years ago, Harrow Council built this Civic Centre because local government was growing and workers needed a building to match. Today, with the cuts faced by every Council, local government is changing all around the country.

It’s proposed to relocate, in his words, ‘a smaller and more agile organisation’, in three new centres.  Presentations on the regeneration scheme will be presented in the Council Chamber during Open House.

Brent Civic Centre

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

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

Postscript

I could add much, much more.  I’m conscious that I’ve not included the many schools which feature in Open House, nor the libraries, old and new.  Those endeavours reflect the cultural ambitions and achievements of municipalism but I’ll conclude with a brief mention of examples of more prosaic but vital functions.

The former Shacklewell Road Baths

Two example of Hackney public baths feature, firstly the small but beautifully formed bath and washhouse on Shacklewell Road now the Bath House Children’s Community Centre, designed by Borough Architect Percival Holt in what’s described as Modernist Classical style, opened in 1931. It’s been converted as the name implies.

The former Gainsborough Road Baths, now the Cre8 Centre (c) Dr Neil Clifton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Four years later, Holt designed a grander Art Deco scheme in Hackney Wick. The former Gainsborough Road Baths are now the Cre8 Centre, a busy cultural and event space.

The modernised Ironmonger Row Baths

These provided slipper baths and laundries.  Finsbury was again more ambitious. The Ironmonger Row Baths, designed by specialist architect AW Cross and opened in 1931, included those, two pools and then – unheard of luxury for working men and women – Turkish baths.

The Council believed ‘facilities for healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…essential for the health and well-being of our people’.  The words speak to the best of service to community which local government has embodied.

Early Council Housing in Banbury, Part I: King’s Road and the Cow Fair Roarer

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Pre-1914

I’m delighted to feature this week and next another guest post – a fascinating piece of social, political and housing history from Jane Kilsby in Banbury.  Jane worked in housing management for councils and housing associations across the country for over twenty years before settling in Banbury three years ago. Thanks also to her husband Steve, another former housing professional, who first spotted the significance of the King’s Road houses. 

It’s amazing what turns up on eBay these days, isn’t it?  Recently, I bought this postcard: (1)

It’s a tribute to Herbert Payne, local councillor and advocate of social reform in early 20^th century Banbury. Forty houses were built by Banbury Borough Council in King’s Road in 1913 and they came about largely as a result of Herbert Payne’s powerful commitment to the benefits of good housing for working people.

King’s Road in November 2016

Banbury is 64 miles from London; a prosperous market town with a large rural hinterland.  On the edge of the Cotswolds, much of its early prosperity was from the wool trade; later it became a centre for cattle sales, horse trading, weaving, printing, engineering and comfort food of all kinds.  Cakes, custard, cheese, chocolate and coffee have all played a large part in Banbury’s employment and charm.  Banbury lies more or less in the middle of England; it’s a long way from the sea and transport improvements in the 18^th and 19^th centuries made a dramatic difference to the size of the town.  The Oxford Canal connected Banbury to the Midlands in 1778 and the railways invigorated Banbury’s trading links to the North of England and to Paddington. The M40 maintains Banbury’s role as a distribution centre today.

Banbury is a hardly a hotbed of reform and revolt but its famous nursery rhyme provides an air of innocence which belies some notable instances of radicalism in its history.  The townspeople, strongly Puritan, destroyed the original Banbury Cross and, later, Cromwell’s men smashed Banbury Castle to smithereens.  In the 1840s there were agricultural workers’ riots.

With the coming of the railways, Banbury’s population grew by about 40 per cent between 1851 and 1881.  Rapidly constructed terraces and much older agricultural workers houses made of the local ironstone rubble left a legacy of sub-standard property.

Rag Row in Neithrop – a notorious slum pictured in about 1890. These houses lasted at most forty years. Photograph courtesy of Oxfordshire History Centre

Banbury was one of the boroughs reformed by the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. The councillors and Town Clerk came from the local elite and, between them, the Liberals and the Conservatives busied themselves with matters of great importance such as new lighting for the Town Hall in time for the Hunt Ball.  They received regular reports from the Medical Officer of Health on the extent of insanitary housing but did nothing about it.

But the wider world was changing.  Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in February 1906 brought about a period of social reform and, with 29 Labour MPs elected, there was some impact on local affairs, even in Banbury.  A Banbury branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was formed in 1906; Herbert Payne was among its early members.

One of the first ILP meetings, in September 1906, in Banbury took as its topic the ‘House Famine – its cause and cure’.  ‘The workers of Banbury are waking up’, it declared: (2)

In Banbury there was a scarcity of houses suitable for working men and high rents appeared to be the order of the day, and yet no attempt had so far been made by the Town Council to provide houses for the workers and their families, notwithstanding the utter failure of private enterprise.

The proposal to run two ILP candidates, one of them Herbert Payne, in the next Borough elections was met with acclaim and housing became a hot topic as the ILP renewed its case for municipal homes:

These cottages will be let as near cost as possible and would not cost a penny to the ratepayers.  Private builders are making fortunes.  Why then should it be a failure for the Council to build?

On 1 November, the two ILP candidates were elected.  With victory declared, Payne and William Timms were lifted up in chairs, cheered and paraded around the town, finally coming to rest at the ILP committee rooms, then in Parsons Street.

Herbert Payne was born in Uppingham in Rutland in 1882.  Nothing is known about his education except to say that he did not attend Uppingham School.  He came to Banbury in about 1901, working at Mawles, a large ironmongers in the Market Place. Dismissed for talking politics in the shop, he set himself up as a commercial traveller, selling cutlery, and that was his business for the rest of his life.  He lived in a terraced house in Queen Street, now Queen’s Road, later moving to Marston House, 37 Bridge Street, now demolished, where he had his business premises.  He was 24 when elected to the Town Council.

Payne was a respectable radical, a Congregationalist, a pacifist, a teetotaller and a vegetarian.  Above all, he was a great speaker, described as someone who could really hold a crowd, with a voice full of resonance and power.(3) It was not long before his opponents began to call him ‘the Cow Fair Roarer’.

The Cow Fair was the favourite meeting ground for local politicians. Cows were tethered and sold in the street until 1931. The Town Hall with its tower is in the background.

Payne lost little time in making his presence felt at the Town Hall.  In February 1907, his motion to increase the wages of Corporation workmen was agreed unanimously.  At the same meeting, he demanded the Council appoint a ‘Housing Investigation Committee…to enquire into…the sufficiency or otherwise of the existing supply of dwelling-houses’ for local working people. Furthermore, he requested that it look into the work of other councils under the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act and whether Banbury itself should build.

After a lively debate, Payne got what he wanted.  The Banbury Advertiser mentions that this Council meeting set a record, lasting three and a quarter hours.  The reporter must have been exhausted.

Payne kept up the pressure, chivvying the Town Clerk for news of progress inside the Council chamber and agitating outside it.  In Boxhedge Square in Neithrop, an area notorious for its squalor, stench and unruly behaviour (4 ), Payne roared to a large crowd about ‘the rotten and bad houses with foul drains, leaky roofs, small windows and dirty walls…only inhabited because the people had nothing better to go to.’

Payne’s campaign was supported by the local Co-operative movement and railwaymen.  Mr T Jackson, secretary of the Banbury Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, told the Council in December that many of his members:

who were sent to Banbury had to wait weeks or even months before they could bring their wives and families to the town owing to their inability to procure houses at a rent suitable to their earnings.

Local businesses added their own pressure.  An open letter from W Braithwaite, the president of the Banbury Borough Development Association formed in 1907, suggested that some firms had declined to set up in Banbury due to ‘the present and prospective insufficiency of housing accommodation for their workpeople’.

A house in the Tan Yard, photographed c.1903.  Banbury Borough Council issued a demolition order on it in June 1914 (from Barry Trinder, Cake  Cockhorse (the magazine of the Banbury Historical Society), vol 3, no. 6, 1966

The Medical Officer and the Inspector of Nuisances also reiterated to the Council the dire facts of Banbury’s housing situation.  The population was 13,483 by 1911 and the number of inhabited houses was 3085.  Rents for workmens’ dwellings ranged from two shillings to six shillings a week.  The former were mostly unfit for habitation – some had no backs and many were overcrowded – but six shillings was more than most workingmen in Banbury could afford when the average wage for unskilled men was 15 to 20 shillings a week.  The Medical Officer often stated that he would have condemned more houses had there been any possibility of alternative housing for the residents to move in to.

It was to be six years before King’s Road was built.  Most councillors were hesitant and they were anxious about costs – they wanted expansion but didn’t want to increase the rates.  Some of them were landlords and they worried that a larger pool of accommodation for working men and their families would reduce their rents.

Payne too was adamant that any house building should be done with a minimal impact on the rates. In 1908, he tried to persuade the Council to back the campaign of Huddersfield and other councils for land tax reform which would encourage landowners to sell land for housing:

Land is being held in Grimsbury and Neithrop – if people chose to hold their land idle, let them pay what they ought to pay for it in taxation.

The debate rumbled on.

JR Hodgkins mentions that Payne never enjoyed good health and it is tempting at this point to speculate that at times he was not particularly well.  Certainly he is absent from several consecutive Council meetings in 1909 and 1910.  By then he must have been working hard on his business which took him away from home for long periods.

It was the Housing and Town Planning Act, passed in January 1910, combined with Payne’s tenacity, which crystallised Banbury’s decision to build.  The Housing Committee also visited Newbury and returned impressed by the ten houses recently built by the local council:

Let at 4s.6d. per week each: these rents are rather lower than those charged by private owners for similar property and therefore there is no difficulty in obtaining tenants.

The death of both the Town Clerk and the Medical Officer – on whom the Council was heavily reliant for facts and advice – in August 1911 delayed progress but Payne, at last appointed to an enlarged Housing Committee, kept up the pressure.

In May 1911, he addressed a mass meeting – the Banbury Advertiser describes ‘a large assembly round the waggonette in the Cow Fair’ – alongside Liberal councillors Ewins and Viggers, and Mr Jackson of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants.  They accused councillors of slumbering ‘very peacefully’ and Ewins pointed to the example of Hornsey, which he had visited, where he found that ‘after six years the local authorities had 60 houses and were £360 to the good with which to put up two or three more houses’:

If other towns where land and labour were dearer than in Banbury, could go in for housing schemes and make them successful, why could not Banbury?  Were not Banbury workmen as good, as clever and as hard-working as those in any other place?

Payne and his comrades railed against complacency.  The crowd called for action:

people were in favour of having something practical and useful and why should the Council not build 50 or 100 houses, to start with, to commemorate the coronation of the King?

The question, however, remained where to build.  The Council already owned several acres of land in Grimsbury but there were problems of drainage and flooding.  Eventually the decision was taken to construct a new school and a mechanical sewerage system but no housing.

Thankfully, there were the Gilletts, Banbury bankers, Quakers and local philanthropists. In the mid 19^th century many Oxfordshire farmers had their accounts with Gilletts Bank and, as farming profits fell, the bank acquired fields through forfeiture.  In 1895, Gilletts began a programme of land disposal, creating Queen Street in Neithrop (now Queen’s Road and parallel with King’s Road) by selling parcels of land to builders to build terraced housing for sale.

Queen’s Road.  The bay windows and house names are a token of its respectability.

Gilletts set strict rules on the quality of construction which ensured that Queen Street became an attractive residential area. Payne’s first family home was in Queen Street; his rent was £15 per year. (5)

Joseph Gillett approached the Council with a field northwest of Queen Street that was let out as allotments.  At just a shilling a square yard, the price, £1000, was considered reasonable but the councillors still saw a dilemma – the site was too large.  To everyone’s relief, a deal was struck.  The Council paid £500 for half the land with an option to buy the rest for the same amount three years later.  From then on, the whole project ran smoothly.

The Council elections of November 1911 saw cross-party agreement that ‘housing has become the most pressing requirement of our town’. This was a striking achievement for Payne, a councillor for just five years and still a young man under thirty. Next week’s post looks at the fine new homes which resulted and the personal tragedy which followed Herbert Payne’s early triumph.

Sources

(1) Postcard from Past Time Postcards

(2) Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser between 1905 and 1930 held by the British Newspaper Archive

(3) JR Hodgkins, Over the Hills to Glory: Radicalism in Banburyshire 1832-1945 (1978)

(4) Barrie Trinder, Cake & Cockhorse (The magazine of the Banbury Historical Society), Vol 3, no. 6, 1966, pp83-127

(5) Derrick Knight, Once Upon A Time, Queen’s Road: Its Origins, Its Growth, Its Character (2014)

My thanks to the Oxfordshire History Centre of Oxfordshire County Council for their generosity in allowing the use of the credited images.