Book Review: Karen Averby, Town Halls

Karen Averby, Town Halls (Amberley Publishing, 2023)

Town halls in towns and cities throughout the country are the physical embodiment of local democracy, and urban expressions of local civic pride. They reflect the character and urban pride of the town or city in which they were built, and despite variations in ages and forms, it is their function as symbolic civic and public buildings housing all municipal functions that unites them.

The opening sentences of Karen Averby’s new book express precisely and well the importance of our town halls. Within Britain’s highly centralised system of government, councils may not always have the power or financial resources to do all that we or they might want (or they may sometimes do things we don’t want) but historically local government has contributed immeasurably to the health and happiness of our towns and communities. Town halls are the place where this work gets done. Poplar’s Labour council couldn’t afford a ‘palace of the people’ in 1938 but it hoped its New Town Hall, opened that year, would be ‘a worthy workshop for the worker’s welfare’.

As Averby reminds us, the origins of the town hall lie in the medieval growth of towns, freer of royal or aristocratic influence, and a mercantile class with the wealth and status to demand at least limited self-government. As the book illustrates. early town halls come in all shapes and sizes – Corfe Castle Old Town Hall, dating to the sixteenth century, is often claimed to be the smallest – and often combined administrative and commercial functions.

The Old Town Hall, Corfe Castle, dating to the 17th century

And consequently, the terminology is varied and confusing. In Scotland and parts of northern England, the building that contained the town council, such as it was in earlier times, and courts was usually named the ‘tolbooth’. ‘Market halls’ often combined premises for the sale of local goods on an open ground floor with administrative offices above. ‘Guildhalls’, most often linked with those medieval corporations of tradesmen and artisans, were occasionally just civic buildings.

As Britain industrialised in the eighteenth century, the elites of growing towns assumed greater powers (typically prioritising policing and sanitation) through private acts of parliament. Full scale and more rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth century belatedly compelled more comprehensive national legislation.

The official opening of Ossett Town Hall, June 1908 © Karen Averby

The 1835 Municipal Corporations established a uniform system of rate-payer elected municipal boroughs and allowed new towns to apply for incorporated status (62 had done so by 1882). Then, establishing the recognisably modern system of local government that persisted until 1974, the 1888 Local Government Act created county councils and county borough councils; towns of over 50,000 population could apply for county borough – in effect, unitary – status. The 1894 Local Government Act established urban and rural district councils as well as allowing women property holders to vote and stand for election for the first time.

Thus began what was arguably the heyday of local government when confident towns and cities assumed significant reforming powers – in housing, health, education and leisure services but also in a range of municipal enterprise such as transport and energy. (It was the nationalising Labour government of 1945-51 that would see these powers diminish.)

Leeds Town Hall, designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, 1853-58, in Classical/Baroque style © Karen Averby

And as Averby charts, this was reflected in some of the great showpiece town halls of the day, most strikingly in so-called ‘provincial’ cities which then, far from being left behind, were in the vanguard of the country’s economic and social progress. Classical forms dominated earlier in the nineteenth century; Gothic in the latter part, reflecting its greater flexibility as well as contemporary taste.

Sometimes whole civic complexes formed as the city fathers (as they still generally were) built to meet not only the council’s statutory duties but a goal of cultural improvement in the museums and galleries that multiplied.

The impressive town halls of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds are all duly noted but it’s a real strength of Averby’s book that it ranges widely and apparently effortlessly (though it reflects considerable research and knowledge) across ‘lesser’ examples that, of course, were anything but to their local communities.

For a detailed architectural history, you may look elsewhere (and Averby provides a useful list of further reading at the end of the book) though the broad evolution and trends are well recorded – from that Classical and Gothic heyday to twentieth century Modernism and, more rarely, Brutalism (we’re looking at you, Hove).  

Poster, Leeds Town Hall © Karen Averby

But, to me, another quality of the book is that it isn’t narrowly architectural but always shows a keen awareness of the buildings’ wider role and functions – in Averby’s words ‘from the practical to the pleasurable’ . Her chapter ‘Town Halls and Society’ reminds us of their place as venues of celebration and protest and (perhaps most significantly for many less engaged citizens) entertainment – from classical concerts to tea dances to wrestling.

Town Halls is a brisk and affordable, 64-page run-through this rich history combining a thoughtful text with a beautifully curated and diverse selection of illustration – a good introduction to an important topic.

For further publication and purchase details, please visit the Amberley Publishing website

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Book Review: Tjerk Ruimschotel, ‘Architectural Guide London’

Tjerk Ruimschotel, Architectural Guide London (DOM Publishers, 2021)

To begin, an apology: new posts have been pretty sparse recently. Firstly, for obvious reasons, it’s been hard to get out and about over the last year and libraries and archives have been closed.  Secondly, I’m writing a new book and that has to take priority in my current writing and research. I’ll try to keep things ticking over and, of course, I’ll be as grateful as ever for new guest posts on estates that you have researched and know well.

But one of the good things that has happened recently is receiving a copy of the new book by Tjerk Ruimschotel. I met Tjerk after a talk I gave a couple of years ago when he told me about his current project. I’m delighted to see it finished and to such a high standard. Tjerk is a Dutchman, a lecturer and urban designer, formerly chief urban designer for the city of Groningen. His knowledge of and familiarity with London deserve to make him an honorary citizen of the capital.   

The Brandon Estate © Tjerk Ruimschotel

The book’s subtitle is ‘Twentieth-Century Housing Projects’ and that gives you a pretty good idea of its focus. As he points out in his introduction, London ‘has always been a residential metropolis’ but by projects he means not the ordinary and ubiquitous, primarily suburban, housing that characterises the city but estates and buildings that are in some respects extraordinary in terms of their design or architectural and historical significance – in Tjerk’s words, ‘a representative cross-section of projects that not only provided a good home for their inhabitants but also made a significant contribution to the spatial quality of the surrounding environment’. Of these just over half are, broadly defined, social housing.

Central Hill © Tjerk Ruimschotel

Many of the latter will be familiar to aficionados and are rightly given due recognition here. The work of the London County Council features prominently, both in its early tenement buildings, its interwar cottage estates and its later showpiece, predominantly high-rise, schemes. Camden, of course, is featured and many more borough developments too numerous to list but including some personal favourites of mine such as Churchill Gardens and Central Hill – the latter (as he notes) tragically under threat of demolition.

The Boundary Estate © Tjerk Ruimschotel

I know a bit about council housing and I found his concise summaries accurate and informative. A strength of the book is that it extends beyond the narrowly architectural and provides some description of the social and political context of the estates both in their inception and their later evolution. I could stress that context more heavily in terms of how estates – and their communities – have evolved but he demonstrates a sympathetic awareness of the myriad factors that have shaped both the realities and, perhaps more importantly, the perceptions of social housing over time.

The Webb Estate, pages from the book.

Conversely, a real quality of the guide is its coverage of a wide array of private schemes. Some of these – such as the Isokon Building, Pullman Court and Highpoint I and II – will be well-known to architectural enthusiasts but others perhaps less so. The quality of the pre- and post-First World War Webb Estate in Croydon and the 1930s Modernism of Gidea Park stood out for me as well as the proper notice given to some of the better interwar mansion blocks such as Cholmeley Lodge in Haringey and Du Cane Court in Wandsworth. But you will have your own favourites and discover some others.

The Isokon Building © Tjerk Ruimschotel

In overall terms, the book is impressive for its balanced coverage and geographic and chronological range with seven sections reaching from Parnell House in Bloomsbury, the first of the ‘model dwellings’ built for the working class back in 1848, to Dujardin Mews in Enfield, designed by Karakusevic Carson Architects for the Borough of Enfield in 2017. An epilogue on the ‘past, present and future’ of social housing in London provides a useful overview.

Kensal House © Philipp Meuser

Tjerk’s analysis is fluent, knowledgeable and precise throughout but – and in no way detracting from that – for me the stand-out quality of the book (and what distinguishes it from potential competitors) is its high production values. It features high-quality colour photography throughout, excellent and genuinely useful mapping (even QR codes that help you navigate to the buildings discussed) as well as two indexes, one to the schemes themselves and one to their architects. The illustrations provided should give some impression of that quality. This is a good book, one to keep on your coffee table or to carry around as you explore the wonderful variety and frequent quality of London’s more recent housing.

Book Review: ‘The Return of Squalor: an Anthology from the First Ten Years of Red Brick Blog’

It might seem a masochistic exercise to read what is, in effect, a real-time account of the sustained assault on council housing and its residents that occurred since 2010 but, on this occasion, it’s one I recommend. The Red Brick Blog is a product of the Labour Housing Group, affiliated to the Labour Party but describing itself – correctly, I believe – as ‘the place for progressive housing debate … open to anyone interested in the progressive debate about housing, communities, and wider politics’. As this anthology of over 100 of its past posts suggests, it’s been one of the most authoritative and best-informed forums for the analysis of contemporary housing policy of the last decade.

As you would expect, many of the posts deal with that assault in properly passionate but forensic detail. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government set out their stall early on – a 50 percent cut in cash terms in social housing investment in 2011. By 2016, as past editor and contributor Monimbo records, the Government was spending £43 billion on Help to Buy and ‘Starter Homes’ for first-time buyers and just £18 billion on affordable housing.

Subsequent posts unpick the multi-pronged nature of this attack on social housing – housing associations (too often not the good guys) converting homes to ‘affordable rent’ and voluntarily selling off their housing; Right to Buy where the promise of one-to-one replacement was rapidly forgotten (the actual figure was about one-in-seven); the inadequate powers open to local authorities to leverage planning gain to community benefit further weighted towards developers; regeneration schemes which generally reduced social housing stock; and so on. Many of you will be familiar with this broad picture but it’s salutary to see it delineated with such force and clarity.

A cartoon celebrating the 1942 Beveridge Report’s attack on the ‘Five Giants’

The consequences, of course, were obvious – new social housing reduced to historically low levels, the rise of homelessness and of homeless households placed in temporary accommodation, increased overcrowding and rising house prices. A housing crisis in short. All this did indeed, as the title of the anthology – reprised from a powerful post by Steve Hilditch on ‘Beveridge: 70 Years On’ claims – mark a ‘return to squalor’.

Whilst such criticisms might be seen by some as politically partisan, Red Brick is scathing on the economic illiteracy of this approach. Harrow Council, for example, spent £500,000 buying back 35 former council homes sold at discount to house the homeless. Spending on Housing Benefit was massively increased as the Government forced significant increases in social rents and many more people into the expensive private rented sector.

Social security – increasingly translated into social insecurity – was the other great target of austerity, of course. The bedroom tax stands out for its basic inhumanity but the ‘reform’ with the greatest impact were the cuts to Local Housing Allowance in 2010 reckoned to affect 900,000 households, an average loss of £12 a week from a £126 benefit.

Fixed-term tenancies, ‘Pay to Stay’ (aimed at higher-earning tenants), the forced sale of high-value council homes all receive due attention as further attempts to undermine council housing. That not all these changes were fully implemented is a tribute to housing campaigners and the common sense of at least some legislators.

All this is duly depressing but a quality of the anthology is the positive case consistently made for a significant and viable public housing sector. That’s seen, firstly, in the necessary dismantling of some of the negative myths surrounding the sector. Those privileged ‘lifetime tenancies’ enjoyed by council tenants since 1981? Nothing more than the fact that a tenancy is not time limited and that public sector landlords are required like others to provide grounds for possession and get a court order.

Most powerful is the challenge to the argument that council housing is, in any meaningful sense, subsidised housing. Broadly speaking, social housing runs a surplus with initial loans paid off and maintenance cost covered. Sometimes an element of cross-subsidy from pooled rents helps finance newbuild. The further belief that sub-market social rents should emulate the far higher levels of the private rented sector is, firstly, to give quite unwarranted respect to a dysfunctional and failing housing free market and, secondly, to ignore the huge additional cost to the Treasury in benefits that increased social rents would bring.

Conversely, it’s the case that owner occupiers and private landlords enjoy a range of ‘subsidies’, ranging from renovation grants and mortgage interest support if unemployed to Right to Buy discounts and shared ownership deals. The most even-handed response here is to recognise that public spending on housing in various forms is not a cost but an investment.

Nowhere was the argument better made for investment in social housing than by SHOUT – the Campaign for Social Housing – formed back in 2014 when that case was far more marginalised than it has now, thankfully, become. SHOUT and its landmark 2015 report are properly lauded in these pages. The bottom line? – that a programme of 100,000 new social rent homes a year would cost ‘well under 1 per cent of planned 2013-14 spending; the equivalent of less than 1p on income tax, or just 13 days of welfare spending; and less than 15% of the planned cost of HS2’. The value – though reasonable projections could be made in terms of job creation and savings on Housing Benefit and less readily quantifiably in terms of personal and social benefit and health and educational outcomes – was and is inestimable.

Red Brick records subsequent expansions on this theme from the Chartered Institute of Housing in 2018 and Shelter in 2019. The Overton Window – the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time – had, as it noted, shifted. Even Theresa May, then Prime Minister, appeared a convert though the blog was correct to view this with a degree of scepticism. The role of housing and tenant activists and campaigners, a Labour Party belatedly converted to a significant programme of social housing newbuild, Tory overreach and the tragedy of Grenfell are credited with this hard-fought success which – despite the current uptick in new council homes – remains to be fulfilled at scale.

Grenfell which, of course, features significantly, reminds us of another theme broached frequently in the anthology – the need for a meaningful tenants’ voice. In 2012, the book laments how progress made in this regard by the New Labour government in its latter years was lost in the Coalition’s ‘bonfire of red tape’, one consequence of which was the very real fire at Grenfell.

There’s much else to absorb from this over-200 page collection – the need for planning and land reform, changes to the leasehold system, the impact of Covid 19, and some useful broader housing history touching on John Wheatley, Harold Wilson and including a thoughtful review of my own book on council housing.

It’s a book of bite-sized chunks to dip into (the lack of an index is one regrettable omission) but the whole – edited and significantly contributed to by Steve Hilditch, the pseudonymous Monimbo, Karen Buck (an MP who brings a rare and valuable personal and professional experience of social housing to her work), Alison Inman and many others – is an important record of a tumultuous, too often dispiriting, phase of housing history. I recommend it and hope that it offers not only a perspective on the recent past but a guide to what can be a more positive future.

The anthology is available as a paperback for £9.99 and as a Kindle book at £6.99. It can be purchased here. All royalties (around £2.50 per copy) will go to the Labour Housing Group. 

Book Review: Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Community

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

A myth of ‘community’ became a dominant motif of post-war planning, significant both for the partial truth it contained and the ‘truth’ it created. Planners, taking their cue from the sociologists of the day, criticised the sterility of the interwar cottage suburbs. They hoped through the creation of ‘neighbourhood units’ and the provision of more community facilities to foster the intimacy and sociability believed to be a feature of the slum areas from which many of the new council tenants were being displaced. Later, after the 1960s era of high-rise and mass public housing, council estates were held peculiarly responsible for the anomie and social breakdown widely decried by media pundits and social commentators. The reality, as ever, was far more complicated.

We are fortunate, therefore, to have this new book by Jon Lawrence, an historian at the University of Exeter, to provide an informed and nuanced guide to the debate. The book, in his words:

challenges many of preconceptions about community and individualism in recent English history … It seeks to overturn simplistic assumptions about the ‘decline of community’ since the Second World War.

Lawrence’s method is to re-examine the surviving field notes from ten major social science studies conducted between 1947 and 2008. In doing so, he does indeed challenge much of the conventional wisdom that has surrounded discussions of community since 1945. What follows is not a comprehensive review – the book is a richly detailed and wide-ranging survey – but rather an analysis of his account and conclusions where they touch upon themes and issues raised in my own study of council housing.

Green Street, Bethnal Green

The Holy Grail of sociological research and planning was working-class community, never more so than in the early post-war years. Lawrence looks at Raymond Firth’s study of Bermondsey and the more well-known research of Michael Young on Bethnal Green. For both and particularly for Young (a co-author of Labour’s 1945 General Election manifesto), a clearly political agenda was in play.  They went, Lawrence argues:

in search of ‘community’ – or, to be more specific, in search of the community spirit they believed had animated people’s defiant response to the Blitz and had underwritten Labour’s decisive electoral breakthrough.

In this context, Young’s published work – written in conjunction with Peter Wilmott – made much of the matrilocal kinship networks held to sustain family and community life in the East End. But, of these, Lawrence comments mildly, ‘one struggles to find supporting evidence in either his field-notes or in Firth’s’. (1)

Lawrence, using Young’s research data, found married daughters resentful of their mother’s role or neglectful of their duties towards it and mothers themselves equally keen to be shorn of their supposed family responsibilities. There were countervailing examples too, of course, but there was little overall to sustain Young’s argument.

New housing at Little Hulton on the Worsley Estate

Tellingly, when Barry Cullingworth came to study Salford’s new and distant council suburb in Worsley in the late 1950s, he found: (2)

Separation from ‘Mum’ has not been the hardship which some sociologists have led us to expect; on the contrary it has often allowed a more harmonious relationship to be established.

Young’s defence of an imagined traditional working-class community was matched by his active disdain for the new ‘out of county’ council estates many former slum-dwellers were moving to. He praised the East End’s ‘sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries’, contrasting it positively to, a later case-study, the ‘drawn-out roads and spacious open ground’ of the London County Council’s new Debden Estate in Essex.  The latter, he argued, represented a shift from ‘a people-centred to a house-centred existence … relations are window-to-window not face-to-face’.

The Debden Estate under construction, 1950 © Britain from Above, eaw031776

Lawrence finds instead a ‘fierce culture of domestic privacy’ common among working-class households in both districts – a desire to resist intrusion into the home.  And, in relation to the migration to the new council estates, he notes, many ‘wanted the chance to withdraw from forced sociability – to socialize instead on their own terms, with the family and friends of their choosing’.

This finding is echoed by Stefan Ramsden’s work on Beverley. He found: (3)

The decline in older-style neighbourhood sociability and mutuality was compensated by new forms, frequently conducted between relatives and friends who did not live on the same street but were scattered across the town.

What some decried as ‘increasing “privatism”’, Ramsden concludes, was, in fact, ‘a more expansive sociability’.

Lawrence identifies another change in the early post-war years:

For the first time, the vast majority of working people believed that it was their birthright to enjoy a decent standard of living ‘from cradle to grave’.

The enhanced role of the state in ensuring just that was nowhere better seen than in the programme of New Towns and expanded towns that developed in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Lewis Silkin, Labour’s Minister of Town and Country Planning, addressing a town hall meeting in 1946 in the first designated New Town, Stevenage, proclaimed they were ‘building for the new way of life’. In 1959 the town came under the critical eye of Raphael Samuel, then working as a researcher for Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies.

Stevenage

This was an era of rising living standards for the many, not (just) the few. But some middle-class socialists worried that all this affluence might be corrupting; that, in particular, working-class people might start voting Conservative.  After a third consecutive Conservative election victory in 1959, this concern had some apparent validity and it was the focus of John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s study of Luton in 1961-62.

Writing of Stevenage in 1963, two New Town advocates may have unwittingly encouraged such fears: (4)

The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.

In fact (and further supported practically by Labour election victories in 1964 and 1966), the evidence gathered from the social surveys was heartening.  Of Stevenage, Lawrence concludes that it was:

striking how many people displayed a strong sense of being part of a shared project of self-improvement and self-making as residents of the new town … [At] least in Stevenage, people’s ambition to ‘better’ themselves … was intertwined with an awareness that this was also a collective endeavour.

Residents understood post-war prosperity as ‘something that was at last to be shared by “people like us”. Its ethos was as much communal as individualist.’

Broad Walk, Harlow, in the mid-1950s when it became know as ‘Pram Town’

Later recollections of another New Town, Harlow, though possibly suffused with nostalgia, seem to attest to the same feeling. The journalist Jason Cowley remembers Harlow as ‘a vibrant place, with utopian yearnings’; another recalls the town he left in 1971 as one marked by ‘youthful energy, enthusiasm, and social sharing’. ‘I guess the Great Dream was still alive and thriving’, he concludes ruefully.

Marymead, Broadwater, Stevenage

In their early decades, most New Towns residents lived in social housing built by the Development Corporations. This was, in effect, council housing built for ‘general needs’, the classless vision upheld in Labour’s 1949 Housing Act (albeit one overturned by Conservative legislation in 1954).  Gary Younge, another journalist brought up in a New Town, remembers that there ‘was no sense of incongruity in Stevenage between being a young professional and living in social housing’.  Lawrence notes more broadly the lack of stigma attached to living in council housing in the 1950s.

But this was changing. By the early 1960s, a majority of workers both in Luton and Cambridge (another subject of study) owned their own homes and many more wanted to.  Their collectivist attitudes notwithstanding, many Stevenage residents also expressed support for a Right to Buy their Corporation homes.

Before any of the widely publicised (and usually exaggerated) problems of council estates in the 1970s and beyond, a significant psychological shift had taken place in popular attitudes towards council housing.  It came to be seen as inferior to home ownership.  Stefan Ramsden noted this in the comment of one estate resident in Beverley: ‘I think because you got a stigma with it … you were seen to be a lower class of people if you were in a council house’.

Attitudes towards new council homes more generally were positive though there seems a widespread dislike of flats. ‘You don’t get privacy in flats; everyone knows all your business’ and ‘they mix you up with all sorts’, according to two Bethnal Green residents in Young’s study. In Stevenage too, the Development Corporation found incomers expressing ‘their desire to get away from communal staircases, balconies or landings, and to have a house with its own front door’.  It’s a reminder of that desire for privacy already noted.

A Harlow kitchen as featured in the town’s publicity material.

Almost unanimously, of course, people were grateful for the cleanliness, conveniences and comfort of their new council homes. Those carrying out the surveys could sometimes fail to properly appreciate this step change in working-class life. In summarising the words of one new resident settling into life as Debden, Michael Young, seems almost disdainful :

There was the usual stuff about more shops, better bus services, greater privacy, value of garden, improvement in children’s health and in particular the advantage of a new house was stressed.

On that matter of health, as an aside (though it should hardly qualify as such), at the South Oxhey Estate (another of the LCC’s out-of-county estates, in Hertfordshire), 55 percent of new tenants had initially been re-housed on health grounds.  In Harlow New Town, the mortality rate of newborns in 1964 stood at 5.5 per 1000 compared to the national average of 12.3.  Some people literally owe their lives to this ‘social engineering’.

In comparison, the acquisition of new stuff – televisions, washing machines, furniture and the like – might seem trivial. It was sometimes seen as corrosive. Some of the social survey interviewers seem to have wanted their working-class respondents to emulate their own more Bohemian life-styles. Raph Samuel lamented the purchase of new (not second-hand) furniture by one Stevenage household as a ‘pattern of mass media-imposed misery’.  Some decried these improved living standards as embourgeoisement, a belief that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values. We, I hope, will see it simply as poor people getting less poor.

Barnham Cross, Thetford

As for the friendliness (or otherwise) of the new estates compared to the former slum quarters, the story is naturally mixed but a significant proportion of new residents – probably a preponderance – describe them as more sociable. In the expanded town of Thetford in Norfolk (another destination of some Bethnal Green residents), some residents believed that ‘there was a much friendlier atmosphere than in London and that one got to know one’s neighbours better than in a big city’. (5)

One disgruntled resident even compared the large overspill estate of Houghton Regis near Luton to, irony of ironies, ‘a chunk of Bethnal Green on a bright evening, with kids committing hopscotch and vandalism and grannies leaning over the garden-gates or sitting on the step’.  (That children might be thought guilty of ‘committing hopscotch’ perhaps tells us more about the interviewee than the estate.)

Lawrence goes on to discuss later social surveys conducted in the north-east and Sheppey in changed and generally harsher circumstances. There’s much of interest here too – on occupational cultures, gender relations and social attitudes – but I’ll stick to my housing brief and draw this post to a conclusion.

Lawrence’s conclusion from the early post-war social surveys can stand more widely: what they revealed was a ‘remarkable diversity of lifestyles and attitudes’ – a diversity, he argues, that ‘exposes the absurdity of imagining that there was ever such thing as a single “working-class culture” or “working-class community”’.

We might, therefore, ask why middle-class professionals took such interest in this alien territory. Ostensibly, it reflects a laudable concern for the less well-off. But it could also be seen, by more caustic observers at least, as an extension of the elite anxiety that has seen the working class as a fit subject (‘subject’ being the operative word) for study and improvement since Victorian times.

There were sometimes more clearly political agenda at play too as we’ve seen. Here perhaps it reflects one of the foundational myths of left-wing politics – that working-class people should think and behave in a certain (i.e. broadly left-wing, communitarian) way. The agonised debate over the last general election and the fall of Labour’s supposed ‘Red Wall’ of working-class constituencies reflects this too with many on the Left seeking to blame malign external forces rather than examine Labour’s own political failings or contend with the complexity of the actually existing working class.

Lawrence’s conclusion (written well before the election) makes its own more thoughtful contribution to this debate. He argues, rightly I think, that:

that any new politics of community has to enhance, rather than erode, the personal autonomy and independence that the majority of people have fought hard to secure for themselves and their families.

But, in a challenge to the alienated and self-centred atomisation this could represent, he also argues that this new politics ‘needs to re-focus on promoting the aspects of public life and culture that are open to all’ (art galleries, libraries, museums, leisure venues, etc.) in ways that ‘help us facilitate social connection and promote a general sense of living in an interconnected, shared social environment’.

Given the purpose of this blog and my book, I could hardly disagree with that though a small part of me wonders if it isn’t a (cautiously expressed) continuation of the improving, rational recreation agenda promoted by middle-class professionals in earlier times. At any rate, it’s a great book which you should read and assess yourself. For a hardback book with academic heft, it’s fairly reasonably priced and, hopefully, there will be a paperback edition in the near future. Or better still, borrow it from a library!

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Notes

(1)  Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

(2) JB Cullingworth, ‘Overspill in South East Lancashire: The Salford-Worsley Scheme’, The Town Planning Review, vol. 30, no. 3, October 1959

(3) Stefan Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

(4) Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis (1963)

(5) Rotary Club of Thetford, Norfolk, ‘Thetford Town Expansion: Report on Social Survey’ (March 1964); DG/TD/2/95, London Metropolitan Archives

Book Review: Seán Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919–1956

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s

Seán Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919–1956 (Edinburgh University Press, October 2018)

In 1919, Glasgow, with a population surpassing one million, was the ‘Second City of the Empire’. It was also, by some distance, Britain’s most densely settled and poorly housed city; two thirds of its people lived in two rooms or less; one fifth in ‘single ends’, a single room.  The Council estimated that 57,000 new homes were needed immediately. In the event, some 54,289 council homes were built by 1939.

Seán Damer’s book is a vital guide to the new estates – called ‘schemes’ in Scotland, hence the title – built between the wars and those built in the decade after 1945. It’s a deeply engaged social and political history, of interest not only to Glaswegians but to anyone seeking a critical understanding of council housing, its successes, failures and complexities.

Mosspark, 1927 © Britain from Above (SPW019519)

Damer begins his story with Mosspark, built a couple of miles to the south-west of the city centre on land purchased as far back as 1909; its plans approved in April 1919. It was not the first of Glasgow’s post-war housing schemes but it was by far the most prestigious.

Mosspark’s plan clearly shows the influence of garden suburb ideals

Built under the generous terms of Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act, this was a scheme which fulfilled Tudor Walters ideals with generous landscaping and a density of around nine houses per acre. The homes themselves were of similar quality; cottage homes, almost two-thirds of which were (in Scottish parlance) ‘four-’ or ‘five-apartment’ houses containing three or more bedrooms.

An early image of Mosspark

The homes – as was typical of ‘Addison houses’ – were expensive to build (at around £1150 each) and had high rents to match.  The rents were sufficient themselves to bar the average workingman but the latter’s exclusion was ensured by the zealous gatekeeping of those in the council responsible for housing allocations. As one resident later recalled:

This place was full of professionals – teachers, government officers, and Corporation workers. Everybody knew that you had to be earning £5 per week to get a house.

The average wage for a skilled worker stood then at £3 a week and in the mid-1920s council records show professional, skilled white-collar and white-collar workers formed around three-quarters of heads of household.

This was, then, a self-consciously affluent and ‘respectable’ community; one, in Damer’s words, ‘with more than a hint of the ‘unco guid’ [excessive self-righteousness] which can be the hallmark of the Scots Presbyterian’.  The church, bowling club and tenants’ association formed the pillars of that community and helped ensure the solid Tory affiliations of its earlier years.

An early image of Hamiltonhill

Damer goes on to discuss Hamiltonhill, an unusual scheme built under a slum clearance provision of the little-known 1921 Housing Act, but the thrust of his analysis is provided by the two succeeding chapters, examining the West Drumoyne and Blackhill schemes.

By the mid-1920s, Glasgow’s powerful labour movement – whose organisation and agitation had, of course, been essential to the ‘Moderate’ (Tory) controlled council’s willingness to build in the first place – was protesting the Corporation’s failure to provide council housing for the average working-class householder, many still living in appalling conditions in the inner city.

West Drumoyne shops and housing

West Drumoyne, built under the terms of the 1924 Housing Act (championed by local son, Labour’s Minister of Health and Housing, John Wheatley), was the Moderates’ response – and a defeat for the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The ILP had wanted cottage homes; the eventual scheme offered two- and three-storey tenements at a density of over 26 houses per acre. The latter – rightly or wrongly – became stigmatised as slum clearance housing though, in practice, West Drumoyne comprised overwhelmingly skilled and semi-skilled workers, many working in the Govan shipyards.

An image from Blackhill in 1976 capturing some of the raucous self-entertainment that Damer describes © The Herald

Blackhill, on the other hand, was explicitly built as a slum clearance estate. Approved in 1933, it was a product of the 1930 and 1935 Housing Acts which targeted for the first time slum clearance and rehousing.  It won’t be a surprise to learn that its design reflected its origins – early housing comprised tenement blocks and, another distinctively Scottish form, ‘four-in-a-block’ tenement blocks (four flats under a hipped roof block of more or less cottage appearance).  Almost a half of heads of household were classified as labourers and average wages were £2 a week though many more were unemployed.

Such social divisions, often reflected in a similarly differentiated quality of housing, could be found in estates across Britain but, as Damer charts with rigour and some anger, Glasgow Corporation took it a stage further.  This was a rigid three-tier system: ‘Ordinary’ schemes built under the 1919 and 1923 Acts; ‘Intermediate’ schemes built under the 1924 Act; and ‘Slum Clearance and Rehousing’ schemes built under the legislation of the 1930s.

The prejudice of housing officials – in their judgments about who ‘deserved’ higher quality housing and in their allocation of such housing  ensured – as Damer argues, that:

any council tenant in Glasgow could tell at a glance into which category a housing scheme fell, and to which category he or she could aspire.

The stigma attached to slum clearance estates affected Blackhill in particular, built on cheap land adjacent to a gas works and chemical plant, geographically isolated; even its name contained its own ‘black mark’.

Prestwick Street, Craigbank, 2004

Whilst, in principle, post-Second World War schemes – Damer discusses Craigbank, in the huge new peripheral Pollok estate, and South Pollok – were intended to supersede such rigid social segregation, the so-called ‘New Ordinary’ estates were little more than a re-branding of the former ‘Intermediate’ category. Meanwhile, allocations policies ensured that Craigbank catered for the better-off working class and South Pollok for the least well-off. They soon acquired corresponding reputations.

Cowcaddens – the area of Glasgow from which many of the residents of Hamiltonhill moved

It’s worth pointing out, however – not as a form of special pleading but as a simple record of fact – that the new tenants, both interwar and post-war, were, overwhelmingly, delighted with their new council homes. South Pollok, later labelled by some outsiders as ‘the White Man’s Grave’, built (badly) in 1947-48 and demolished in 1973, still represented in housing terms a huge step up:

It was like heaven! It was like a palace, even without anything in it … We’d got this lovely, lovely house. Well it was lovely to me! When I got into that big empty house and the weans were running up and doon mad and – it was just like walking into Buckingham Palace because I had a bath!

For Damer, as he states in his introduction, ‘­the story of council housing in Glasgow is the story of class-struggle’. Damer feels that the Glasgow working class itself – as a potentially unified political force – was splintered by these imposed divisions. Depending on their political perspective perhaps, others will come to their own conclusion as to whether it was actively splintered or just splintered in the first place.  It’s undeniable, at least, that the story was shaped by class divisions and class prejudices; in particular, by the bigotry directed towards the so-called slum working class by politicians and officials.

Those attitudes were reflected in the rigorous policing of the new estates by the council’s Resident Factors, female housing inspectors and public health nurses – a troika dedicated to ensuring decent, respectable and sanitary living particularly among poorer residents not trusted to behave well.

A real strength of Damer’s book is its rich anecdotal record gathered from interviews conducted with residents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it’s clear, for all the disrespect addressed to officialdom, there was a strong sense – at least in hindsight – that this supervision had helped create a respectability (self-policed as well as imposed) that had been lost in more recent years.

That record – and Damer’s sympathetic eye – also creates a vivid picture of community on the various estates. If Mosspark is treated somewhat caustically, the ‘lower’ working-class estates are painted empathetically and the variety of informal means of working-class self-help and neighbourliness delineated in some detail – from the ‘menodges’ (local savings clubs), to various forms of money-lending, to ‘nicking’ as a form of resource redistribution.

Damer’s summary of Blackhill can stand for his broader perspective. It was, he says:

an impoverished, largely unskilled, manual working-class community characterised by a variety of familial and social survival strategies, including elaborate collective self-help mechanisms largely organised by women, and thieving, largely organised by men … It was a tough place, where one had to be tough to survive. But the real violence was that of poverty, which Blackhill tenants combated with humour, imagination and resilience.

And one interviewee, recalling the role of his mother on the estate, can speak to that matriarchy:

My mother came from Ayrshire, a very, very hard-working woman. Tremendous intelligence but no skills. When I say no skills – no skills that she could work with but was respected in the community, she was the one who helped people through a birth, was sent for – in those days when a child was not well they gave them a mustard bath – she was the sort of local witch doctor. She was unbelievable. Her organisational sense was unbelievable for somebody that was supposed to be semi-literate.

Much of this finds echoes in estates across Britain – the inter- and intra-class divisions, the role of officialdom, the means of getting by in often hostile circumstance.

Blackhill, 1986 after redevelopment in the 1970s; image Alex Glass

But Glasgow was council housing writ large. By the mid-1970s, almost seven in ten of its population lived in ‘Corporation housing’; the City Council was the largest public sector landlord in western Europe and in many ways a problematic one.  Damer does not shy away from addressing this issue and his final chapter asks ‘Why was Glasgow’s council housing so dire?’.

You can read his answer for yourself but the sheer inhumanity of existing conditions and a drive to alleviate them which all too often emphasised quantity over quality, the legacy and persistence of prejudiced attitudes towards poorer residents, and the divisions that the latter caused all played their part.

I recommend the book not only as rich and challenging account of council housing built at scale in one of our major cities but as a significant contribution towards our wider understanding of how to build badly and how to build well.

Purchase and publication details can be found on the Edinburgh University Press website. 

Note

For a good account of Glasgow’s later housing history, you can read Gerry Mooney’s guest posts on this blog, Glasgow Housing in Historical Context and Failed Post-War Visions?.

Book Review – ‘Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses’

The publication of a new and revised edition of Chris Matthews’ fine book is a good reason to re-post this earlier blog. As noted (in a later addition to the original post), it was probably Chris’s judgement in the book (which I endorse) that council housing provided the ‘biggest collective leap in living standards in British history’ that was favourably quoted by then prime minister Theresa May in a speech to the National Housing Federation last year. 

For publication and purchase details, go to this Nottingham City Homes webpage.

Chris Matthews, Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses (Nottingham City Homes, 2015; revised edition 2019)

It’s a pleasure to see this fine account of Nottingham’s council housing history.  It’s a story well worth telling and one – in Nottingham and elsewhere – that this blog has sought to share.  Above all, it is a people’s history, a history of homes and communities but it encompasses high (and low) politics too, architecture and planning and much, much else: a history of concern to anyone interested in the fabric – in the broadest sense – of our society.

If all that reads like a shameless plug for this blog, it is also a very definite recommendation for Chris Matthews’ new book.  It’s a warts and all history, recording the highs and lows of Nottingham’s council housing and Nottingham City Homes is to be congratulated for commissioning a serious and well-researched account.  There’s a place – a very proper place at a time when social housing’s past is traduced and its future near written off – for a more straightforwardly celebratory history but this is a book which anyone interested in a nuanced understanding of our housing history should read.

Chris Matthews provides a thorough chronological account which I won’t attempt to replicate in this brief review – the illustrations alone (over 120 carefully selected and well reproduced black and white and colour images) tell a compelling story.  But I will pull out a few of the themes which struck me in my reading of it.

Victoria Dwellings, now the Victoria Park View Flats under private ownership

We’ll begin with the need for – the absolute necessity of – council housing.  In this, Nottingham was a comparatively slow starter despite a problem of slum housing which was – as a result of the Corporation’s failure to expand into the open land enclosing the city’s historic core – amongst the worst in the country.  Early efforts, notably the Victoria Buildings on Bath Street completed in 1876 (and second only to Liverpool), were not followed through and it was the large peripheral cottage suburbs built in the 1930s which constituted the city’s first serious attempt to rehouse its slum dwellers.

Narrow Marsh, 1919

Council plans for the redevelopment of the Red Lion Street area of Narrow March, 1920s (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

What is more easily forgotten is the persistence of unfit housing.  As late as 1951, 43 per cent of Nottingham homes lacked a bathroom.  Into the 1960s, in the long neglected St Ann’s area most houses lacked an inside toilet and bath; 53 per cent had no proper hot water supply.  All this provides a context for the mass housing programmes of this later period which we are quick to condemn – for their undoubted deficiencies – but so little understand.

St Ann’s, an image taken from the City Council’s 1970 redevelopment brochure ‘St Ann’s: Renewal in Progress’ (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

New housing in St Ann’s © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It follows, therefore, that these new homes were embraced by their residents: ‘the sheer luxury of four bedroomed houses with an inside flush toilet…a really big bath’ as a tenant of the interwar Broxtowe estate recalls.  But even high-rise dwellings, later condemned (literally so and demolished in many cases), were welcomed.   One new tenant of the maligned Hyson Green flats describes ‘an indoor bathroom, beautiful kitchen. It was paradise, absolutely paradise’.  Marcia Watson, a young black woman (now a city councillor) remembers:

High rise was popular then. People weren’t fussy back then. The view was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.  I loved it…for me, moving in and living there, it was the first home of my own.

Council homes were important for providing a disadvantaged minority community with their first decent homes and a step up, as they did for so many others.  Matthews argues, rightly, that council housing provided the ‘biggest collective leap in living standards in British history’.

It was good to see this quoted – and hopefully sincerely endorsed – by prime minister Theresa May no less in her keynote speech on social housing made to the National Housing Federation in September 2018. The speech was taken to herald a sea change in contemporary Conservative attitudes towards both the past value and present necessity of social housing.  We’ll wait and see.

This looks like a 1950s development but the privet hedges and greenery are in keeping with Howitt’s ideals © SK53 and made available through a Creative Commons licence

We might take those sanitary essentials celebrated by Marcia Watson for granted now (though too many can’t) but the quality of much council housing is striking too, how much could be done ‘by the steady and consistent exercise of careful thought and skilled imagination’.  That was Raymond Unwin, no less, praising Nottingham’s interwar council housing, recognised – thanks to the visionary leadership of City Architect TC Howitt – as some of the best in the country.

In fact, most Nottingham council homes – even in the 1960s – were solid, well-built terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses which, though sometimes lacking the aesthetic of Howitt’s work, continued to provide decent family homes for many who could not afford or did not wish to buy.  It’s an irony that some of the very best council housing up and down the country was built in the 1970s when, with lessons learnt from recent mistakes, low- and medium-rise, predominantly brick-built estates were erected.  Nottingham built more council housing in the 1970s than in any previous decade.

Osier Road, the Meadows

The Meadows scheme was built with such intent, its Radburn-style cul-de-sacs and greens incorporating the planning ideals of the day by their separation of cars and people.  Those ideals are now held to have ‘failed’ and there are proposals to restore a more traditional streetscape to the estate.  You can take this as an emblem of planning hubris or, more properly in my view, as a reminder of how transitory the ‘common sense’ of one age can seem to another.  Posterity should perhaps be a little more humble and not quite so condescending.

This brings us, inescapably, to the politics of council housing.  There has in the past been – these seem now like halcyon days – a broad consensus on the topic.  William Crane, a Conservative and building trades businessman, was chair of the Housing Committee from 1919 to 1957, surviving several changes of administration and building over 17,000 council homes in the interwar period when Nottingham was among the most prolific builders of council housing in the country.

Edenhall Gardens, Clifton Estate © Alan Murray-Rust and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Then there is the politics of the post-war period when Labour and Conservative governments vied to build the most houses with council housing as a central element of the mix. The Clifton Estate, a scheme of over 6000 homes housing 30,000 built to the south of the city between 1951 and 1958, encapsulates some of these ideals, not least in its focus on neighbourhood.  Planning ideals are not always fulfilled, particularly in local authority building where they nearly always conflict with budgetary constraints, but still the Estate’s early isolation, expense and lack of facilities probably didn’t merit its description (in a 1958 ITV documentary) as ‘Hell on Earth’ and certainly didn’t do so in the longer term.

The house-building ‘arms race’ came to a head in the 1960s when high-rise and system building were seen as the modern means to build on a mass scale and rid the country, once and for all, of the scourge of its slums.

The refurbished Woodlands group of high-rise blocks in Radford © John Sutton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Here Nottingham provides some salutary lessons.  The city embraced these methods, these ambitions and, yes, these ideals.  High-rise and deck access developments were adopted; major contractors, notably Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow, employed to build their off-the-peg schemes across the city.  Matthews is candid in acknowledging the defects of these estates whilst rightly noting the legislative and economic changes which were also afflicting disproportionately the communities which lived in council homes. Equally honestly, he addresses the dissatisfaction with the council as landlord in this period, particularly in relation to repairs. The combination was stigmatising – ‘no longer was renting a council house aspirational’.

A part of the Hyson Green scheme prior to demolition

Beginning with the deck-access Balloon Woods Estate (a Yorkshire Development Scheme completed in 1969) in 1984, with point blocks at Basford and deck-access at Hyson Green following shortly after, many of the troubled developments of the later 60s and early 70s have been demolished.  Low-rise traditional housing has mostly taken its place.  Others have been thoroughly refurbished through Estate Action programmes and suchlike.  One hundred per cent of current stock now meets Decent Homes standards.

Tony Crosland as Sec of State opening Nottingham’s 50,000th council house in The Meadows with Chair of Housing, Cllr Bert Littlewood, 1976 (with thanks to Dan Lucas)

By 1981, almost half of Nottingham’s people lived in council homes; some 50,000 had been built in preceding years.  But the bomb had dropped. In fact, a Conservative-led administration in Nottingham had sold off 1635 homes to existing tenants by 1977 (for more detail on this, do read the comment by Dan Lucas below) but the Right to Buy enacted by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1981 would see 20,761 homes lost to the Council in the next quarter-century. The Labour chair of the Housing Committee in the 1990s describes its role as simply ‘trying to hold the fort’.  There was as the title to chapter 6 declares a ‘Right to Buy but no Right to Build’.

Nevertheless, a lot – in terms of the demolitions and rebuilding noted above – was achieved.  The Decent Homes programme was a positive ‘Blairite’ achievement though marked by an unwonted antipathy towards local government.  The latter led – a necessity if central funding for improvements was to be secured – to the creation of a new arm’s-length management organisation in 2005.

An impression of some of the new council housing to be built, in Radford

Nottingham City Homes would be one of the largest ALMOs in the country, managing 28,000 homes.  After a troubled start, it seems justifiably proud of its recent achievements, not least a building programme of 400 new homes to be completed by 2017.  Indeed, as Matthews argues, the commissioning of this history itself marks a ‘renewed confidence in Nottingham’s council housing’.

It’s desperately sad that this – in broader terms – is not a confidence shared by the current government, driven by an ideological hatred of social housing and a fantasy of owner occupation for all – though even that, perhaps, is to give it too much credit. The reality is that this government is willing to consign our less affluent citizens to an increasingly marginalised and diminished social housing sector and the tender mercies of private landlordism.

That makes this honest, intelligent and informative account of Nottingham’s council housing all the more important.  As Chris Matthews concludes:

The history shows that, alongside other tenures, council housing can and does transform lives, providing a solution to a wide range of housing problems.

Buy the book, spread that message.

Notes

This webpage provides full details on how and where to purchase the book.

My thanks to Dan Lucas, Strategy and Research Manager for Nottingham City Homes and a key contributor to the book, for providing some of the images used in this post.

Alex Ball, a Labour Councillor for Nottingham City Council with responsibilities for Housing and Regeneration in the city, contributed an earlier guest post to the blog: Nottingham’s Early Council Housing: ‘Nothing like this had been seen before in the city’

Since writing this post, I visited Nottingham. This later, fully illustrated, post describes my visit: Nottingham’s Council Housing by Bus and Tram.

Book Review: Stewart and Lynch, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health

Jill Stewart and Zena Lynch, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health (Second edition), Routledge, 2018

Environmental health policy is far from my area of expertise but I know a lot more now and this wide-ranging and comprehensive book has convinced me of the vital role it plays – or can play when fully resourced and effectively implemented – in securing decent housing for all. In fact, environmental health practitioners might just be the unsung heroes of the housing sector.

As Jill Stewart and Zena Lynch argue:

Housing is a key social and economic determinant of health, perhaps the most important for the multiple roles it can play both in security and as part of anti-poverty strategies.

That might seem obvious if a little bureaucratic. For me, a strength of their approach is its emphasis on housing as home:

somewhere to feel safe, secure, do mundane day-to-day things; have access to school, health and healthcare services; as well as social services; somewhere to develop socially, change, and have a level of wellbeing and quality of life across the life course.

It reminds me of the words of the late Doreen Massey, the geographer and social scientist, at a housing conference some years ago: her upbringing on the Wythenshawe Estate in Manchester didn’t create dependency, she argued, it provided security – the foundation we all need to live healthy and fulfilled lives.

Illustration from William Henry Tucker’s Inspector of Nuisance notebook, Cardiff, dated 1899 onward. Permission to copy given by Dr Hugh Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Public Health

I know Jill Stewart as a passionate and knowledgeable advocate of decent housing for all – the same, I’m sure, is true of Zena Lynch too who I don’t know personally – and I’m pleased to say she has been a contributor to this blog.  Her first post charted the rise of the environmental health profession from the humble Inspector of Nuisances to the latter-day Sanitary Inspectors before the First World War.

Addison Close, Northwood, LB Hillingdon © Jill Stewart

A second, fittingly in this centenary year, focused on interwar sanitary reform in the wake of Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act.  That breadth of background is found throughout this book but is highlighted in interesting and well-illustrated sections providing a brief history of housing (with a strong focus on social housing) and guidance on how to assess the age of dwellings.  Jill’s photographs provide an excellent context to each and the book as a whole is unusually well-illustrated for an academic work.

Roupell Street, Lambeth, dating from the 1830s © Jill Stewart

All this provides background to the far more extended and increasingly pressurised role of environmental health professionals today outlined so clearly and fully in the book.

An opening chapter ‘Why environmental health?’ covering the range of environmental health interventions is followed by one more specifically for practitioners in the field on ‘Gathering Evidence’. Chapter 4, ‘Legislation for Healthier and Safer Housing’ is an important guide to current law. This, despite (or perhaps because of) contemporary housing problems, has been usefully strengthened in recent years.  (A quick shout-out here to Karen Buck MP whose Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act, extending that basic requirement to all private landlords, was passed in December 2018.)  Chapter 5 ‘Working More Effectively Together’ focuses on implementation and strategy.

A bed in a shed © Russell Moffatt

One powerful feature of the book is its range of case studies – drawn from both academic sources and practitioners in the field, sometimes a combination of the two – charting not only the variety of problems dealt with but positive strategies to tackle them.  These range from hoarding to public funerals, from ‘beds in sheds’ to the particular issues affecting gypsies and travellers and those living on houseboats.

It’s no surprise, overall, that the issue of homelessness features strongly. Statutory homelessness – requiring councils to provide accommodation – applies only to those in ‘priority need’.  Stewart and Lynch report a Shelter estimate that 150 families are made homeless in Britain each day. Elsewhere Shelter estimate that homelessness (understood as affecting all those in, at best, temporary and insecure accommodation in addition to perhaps 4000 rough sleepers) affects some 277,000 nightly. (1)

This is not a polemical or campaigning work but the authors don’t shy from the obvious conclusion:

The main problem is, of course, lack of affordable housing. Home ownership has fallen and private renting has risen, and the ending of a private rented tenancy is now the biggest cause of homelessness.

External disrepair © Jill Stewart

Government figures suggest that almost one in three cases of statutory homelessness result from the termination of a private tenancy, a symptom of the tenure’s insecurity since the 1988 Housing Act introduced assured shorthold tenancies (usually of a six to twelve months’ fixed term) and ‘no fault’ evictions. The 2002 Homelessness Act ‘requires local authorities to have a strategy to reduce homelessness and put better services in place for homeless people’. With little social housing stock available (some 1.15 million households are on waiting lists) and stretched resources, this, with the best will in the world, has become increasingly difficult for councils.

Stewart and Lynch report a 60 percent increase in homeless families being placed in temporary accommodation between 2011 and 2017.  And only this month, the Guardian reported that London councils – where pressure on housing is highest – had paid private landlords £14m in sweeteners simply to persuade them to accept homeless families. (2)

Basement flat, Margate © Jill Stewart

This brings us to the Private Rental Sector (PRS) which naturally occupies a large part of the work of environmental health professionals and this book.  The authors provide the context for this: there are 945,000 more households with children living in the PRS now than in 2005. Private tenants pay an average 35 percent of their income on rents, compared to 18 percent for mortgagors and 29 percent for social renters.   What they get for this (apart from insecurity of tenure) is in many cases some of the oldest housing stock in the country – 34 percent of the PRS dates from before the First World War.  It’s estimated therefore that 28 percent of privately rented homes fail to meet Decent Homes Standards (compared to 13 percent in the social rented sector and 18 percent of privately-owned homes.)  The welter of statistics confirms that far too often the PRS does not provide secure, decent and affordable accommodation.

Housing in Multiple Occupation © Jill Stewart

In the new paperback edition, the book is reasonably priced but it will remain primarily a book for the specialist – an essential book for environmental health students and professionals (a virtual one-stop shop for so much of the broad field they must understand and practise) and a useful one for many others in the housing sector including local councillors.  I recommend it to anyone interested in housing law and policy and the many social issues raised by our highly dysfunctional housing market. And, if you don’t buy your own copy, I hope you’ll find it on the shelves of your local library.

For further publication and purchase details, please visit the Routledge website. 

Sources

(1) Shelter Commission on the Future of Social Housing, A Vision for the Future (2019)

(2) Robert Booth, ‘London councils pay landlords £14m in “incentives” to house homeless people’, The Guardian, 25 March 2019

Book Review: ‘The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead’

The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead (Here Press, 2019)

At times, Thamesmead must have seemed less like the ‘Town of Tomorrow’ than the ‘Land that Time Forgot’.  It’s been a chequered story to say the least and it’s one that’s lent itself easily to the usual tropes of planner overreach and misplaced architectural ambition. But Thamesmead, in its latest iteration since 2014 under the stewardship of Peabody, lives on. Perhaps, with Crossrail looming and a DLR connection mooted, some of those earlier promises will be more fully fulfilled though typically, as is now the way, in less visionary form.

So it’s time to celebrate Thamesmead and we’re fortunate to have a newly published book which does that in a positive though clear-eyed way. The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead is, above all, a superb pictorial record of its past and present – of the ideals and plans which formed it, the buildings and landscapes which shaped it, and the people who have lived it.

John Grindrod’s introduction lays out the broad outline of its history with typical panache.  The eyes of the London County Council first looked eastwards towards the Erith Marshes in the early 1960s after their ambitious plans for a New Town at Hook in rural Hampshire were thwarted. Ted Hollamby’s vision of a series of ‘platform villages’ was abandoned as too costly and impracticable but the new Greater London Council (GLC) formed in 1965, seeking to fulfil its strategic housing mandate and aided by Government plans to redevelop abandoned Ministry of Defence land such as the Woolwich Arsenal site, returned to the concept.

Images from ‘Woolwich-Erith: A Riverside Project’, (GLC, 1966) © London Metropolitan Archives

‘Woolwich-Erith: a Riverside Project’ was born in 1966 – a plan, in conjunction with the Boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, to create a new town of some 60,000 people on 1300 acres of largely unused land lying on the southern back of the Thames.  Water was one of its defining features – Robert Rigg, the GLC planner, had been influenced by Scandinavian schemes built around the presence of water and how, in Grindrod’s words, that ‘helped create an atmosphere of calm and wellbeing’.

Construction of towers on Southmere Lake, 1970 © London Metropolitan Archives

More practically, the risk of flooding demanded unusual means to keep people safe and dry – towers raised on stilts, deck-access homes and high-level walkways dotted around the artificial lakes which would ensure proper drainage. But the conceptual genius of the scheme was to make virtue of necessity. If separation of cars and people was a contemporary planning mantra, there was in Thamesmead, as Grindrod describes:

a more Venetian approach, with bridges and paths floating above what might at any moment become canals and overspill from the river.

The architects’ impressions featured in the book capture a ‘Cool Britannia’ in its first, sixties’, iteration and with a heavily Continental slant:

It was pure south of France, white concrete buildings shining in the warm blue waters, reflected alongside yachts, bikinis and polo necks.  The ambition for Thamesmead would bring the lifestyle of the European jetset – the kind of world portrayed in art house movies and racy novels – and combine it with the more functional aims of creating much needed council housing.

The prosaic minutes of the GLC’s Thamesmead Committee in 1967 record the latter – the ‘central objective of the development [was] to provide housing, and in so doing, create a reservoir of housing for decanting population from the hard-pressed inner area’ in an era when slum clearance was in full spate.

Detail of model showing Coralline Walk (front) and Yarnton Way (left), 1967 © London Metropolitan Archives

The long spinal terraced ziggurats of Coralline Walk and Binsey Walk and adjacent thirteen-storey tower blocks were the first fruits of this approach; system-built and ‘as modular and groovy as any Habitat stackable moulded plastic furniture of the day’.

The southern end of Coralline Walk, viewed from Lensbury Way, 1969 © London Metropolitan Archives

The first residents, Joan and Terence Gooch and their two children, moved into 64 Coralline Walk in July 1968 – the sole residents for six months at a time when the new ‘stark white modernist homes were marooned in a wasteland of mud, puddles, concrete and construction equipment’.

Children’s playground and the Lakeside Health Centre, Tavy Bridge, 1973  © Bexley Local Studies & Archive Centre

The first school opened in 1968. The health centre – a wonderful modernist building built at Tavy Bridge over one of the artificial lakes and sadly demolished in 2008 – opened in 1970; the first shops amazingly not till 1971.  By 1974, the population stood at around 12,000.

Crossing Eastern Way (A2016), via the ‘A’ Bridge, built 1973, c1979. Photography © George Plemper

Philip Samuel – one of a number of residents who tell of their own experience in the book – moved to Thamesmead in 1975 with his family at the age of eight:

We lived on Maran Way. I could ride my bike for miles without ever touching the ground. I felt like I was in a Judge Dredd futuristic paradise. It was a good place to be a kid. There was so much nature and wide-open space. In the spring, there would be grass fights, in the summer there’d be water fights, autumn would be mud bombs and winter would be snow balls.

Thamesmead: A Place in London’s Future. Fold-out leaflet, published by the GLC, 1982. © London Metropolitan Archives

Salianne Heaton, who arrived the following year, has similar memories:

Thamesmead was like a giant playground. You never had to cross any roads, everywhere had flyovers. We used to play knock and run in the squares in the middle of the housing estate.

Generally, looking back as adults, people remember a close-knit community – as Robert Dyer recalls ‘everybody knew everybody back then so, if you did anything bad, someone would tell your mum’.

Of course, nostalgia and selection plays its own part in these perhaps unusually affectionate remembrances but it’s vitally important to allow people to tell their own stories which, all too often are at odds with dominant media narratives.

Aerial photograph of Area 1 looking north with Southmere Lake (top), 1971
© Bexley Local Studies & Archive Centre

One unwitting element in the latter was Stanley Kubrick’s filming of Clockwork Orange in Thamesmead in 1971. Grindrod points out that Kubrick had intended its ‘formal beauty, lakes and crisp white architecture’ to serve as counterpoint to the film’s scenes of sudden violence, making them ‘even more shocking and incongruous’.  In practice, it was the myth of Thamesmead as some kind of futuristic dystopia which became dominant. (1)

Still, there’s no doubt there were real hardships and difficulties for these early pioneers. The great failing, apart from that slow development of infrastructure which is all too common in major schemes, was the failure to provide the new township with the quick and efficient transport links its population required.

And then it was failed by a changed politics and faltering ambition. Thamesmead’s projected population was downgraded from 60,000 to 45,000; by the end of the 1970s no more than 400 new homes were being completed annually and by 1982, the population stood at 20,000, around half the initially projected figure.

Manordene Road, off Crossway, Area 5, looking north-east along the waterway that runs from Moat Gardens to Tump 39 and the Thamesmead Ecology Study Area, 1982
© London Metropolitan Archives

System-building and modernist design were abandoned and conventional brick build – admittedly the new vernacular was often more to popular taste – became pre-eminent. This also, no doubt, sat more comfortably with a desire to promote ‘mixed communities’ and owner occupation – a 40 percent target was set for the latter in 1978 and 96 tenants had bought their formerly council-rented homes by 1979, well before Margaret Thatcher’s implantation of Right to Buy.  (At present, around 40 percent of homes are social rented.)

The aesthetic shift was facilitated by the raising of the Thames riverbank in 1974 which alleviated flood risks and enabled ground floor construction but it spoke more broadly to a loss of the more audacious hopes which had initially inspired the project.

Hill View Drive, Area 7, viewed from Gallions Hill, 2018.
Photography © Tara Darby

Thatcher’s politically-motivated abolition of the GLC in 1986 seemed merely confirmation of the retreat of social democracy. Thamesmead Town Ltd, a not-for-profit private company, took over the project from the GLC until it split in the later 1990s into three components – the Gallions Housing Association managing housing stock, Trust Thamesmead supporting community development, and Tilfen Land, a commercial property developer.

The demolition of some of the original town’s signature landmarks (including the health centre) and the unimaginative replacements and newbuild which followed resulted, according to a typically caustic Owen Hatherley, in a ‘straggling half-demolished mess of crap spec housing, wasteland and forlorn Brutalist fragments’. (2)

Vision for Silvermere Lake, Thamesmead Waterfront, 2018
© LDS Architects

Now, since all three of those bodies were absorbed by Peabody in January 2014, a new and more exciting vision is being proclaimed once more: ‘20,000 new homes, thousands of new jobs, plus new leisure, cultural and commercial facilities’ alongside ‘immediate improvements needed in areas such as pedestrian routes, play facilities, lighting and local amenities’. Ultimately, Peabody say, ‘our plan for Thamesmead is simple – to create an amazing place that people love to work in, to visit, and of course, call home.’ (3)

Well, you can’t argue with that, can you?  It will, however, be important to see how the promised mix of ‘affordable’ (80 percent market rate) and genuinely affordable social rented homes works out and here we may be less optimistic.

Sheniz Bayraktar (née Mehmet) with her brothers at a celebration of The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in South Thamesmead, 1977
Photography © George Plemper

The book, edited by Peter Chadwick and Ben Weaver with contemporary photography and interviews by Tara Darby, is a great introduction to Thamesmead, and John Grindrod provides a sensitive and eloquent account of its planning and architectural evolution. It’s good to see residents’ memories and experiences also featured strongly. For many people, the 193 colour and black and white illustrations (I’ve included a small representative selection of these in this post), which tell so much of its story so powerfully, will suffice to capture both the bold vision of its inception and more troubled maturity.

Further information on the book and purchase details are available here on the Here Press website. 

Notes

(1) The article by Inez de Coo for Failed Architecture, ‘Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate’, offers an excellent account of how Kubrick’s film and later depictions have adversely shaped attitudes towards Thamesmead.

(2) Owen Hatherley, ‘Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past at Thamesmead’, Architects’ Journal, 8 April 2015 (subscription required)

(3) Quoted from the Thamesmead Now website, Thamesmead: the Plan.

 

Book Review: Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities. Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities

Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams and Stark Realities (Bloomsbury, 2018)

I looked at post-Second World War planning in my book, Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing, mainly in the context of housing in which much was achieved.  But there was another side to that idealism which lay in the ambition to rebuild and redesign the centres of Britain’s blitzed cities.  There, as Catherine Flinn painstakingly describes in her important new book, the picture is far less positive.

The worst phase of German bombing in 1940 and 1941 was reckoned to have destroyed 75,000 shops, 42,000 commercial premises and 25,000 factories. By the end of the war the total cost of destruction was estimated at £1,150m. And the practical, and what some saw as the moral, commitment to rebuild the worst-affected towns and cities in particular began early – as early as 1940 when a Cabinet committee on reconstruction was established.

The impact of the Blitz is shown dramatically in this photograph of Exeter

In December 1940, Sir John Reith, then Minister of Works and Buildings, presented a paper on the ‘Reconstruction of Town and Country’ to Cabinet. His memo referred to the public attention already directed to the issue:

not just because of opportunities in restoration of damaged property but in the hope of a fresh start in a new spirit of cooperation and with the high objective of a better Britain.

Flinn expertly charts the complex iterations of committees and ministries and legislation that followed but, throughout, the expectation remained that the blitzed cities would receive priority in the post-war era and that their reconstruction would indeed foreshadow and exemplify the new and better Britain to emerge.

Reith’s language was measured when compared to the extravagant heights reached by Thomas Sharp, one of the foremost planners of the day, quoted by Flinn.  In ‘Building Britain: 1941’ (which he billed as ‘Words for Pictures Perhaps A Film Script’ and not published – in the Town Planning Review – till 1952), Sharp proclaimed:

There is so much now to plan for, to prepare for,
A whole shining world is possible.
Is there for the asking if we choose to make it:
Is ours if we will.
We are the shapers of our environment.
We are the makes of our own destiny.
We are the creators of our own happiness.
If truly we desire it we can build
A new and noble world for generous living…

If that was a rhetorical outlier, it was only partly so. When We Build Again, a film commissioned by the Cadburys in Birmingham in 1943 and scripted by Dylan Thomas, declared ‘Nothing is too good for the people’.  And it’s interesting to note that in Britain, a country so often mired in tradition, that such plans were uniformly, in Flinn’s words, ‘modern, optimistic and forward-looking’ – an interesting contrast to Germany and Poland, say, where reconstruction often meant restoration.

Thomas Sharp and his book Town Planning, published in 1940. It sold 250,000 copies – a clear sign of the public interest in post-war reconstruction.

This range of promises of post-war betterment in a variety of forms and media is outlined in Flinn’s second chapter.  It’s hard to disagree with William Holford, another planner and architect, quoted later in the book, that ‘it is true that not only the planners but the Government itself had promised, if not a new heaven, at least a new earth at the end of the war’.

So, if you’re looking at the contemporary British city, you are probably wondering what became of this brave new world. With the significant exceptions of Plymouth (which I’ve written about in previous blog posts) and Coventry, the transformative impact of post-war reconstruction was paltry and often lamented. The rest of the book explains why.

Corner  of Royal Way and Armada Way, Plymouth city centre – a product of 1943 Plan for the city. © John Boughton

The simple and established answer is that post-war priorities rapidly shifted from physical to economic reconstruction.  The great value of the book is not only to detail the processes by which this occurred but to delineate the myriad other obstacles to post-war rebuilding that facilitated this shift.

Taking that economic focus first, the little-known Investment Programmes Committee established by the Attlee government in 1947 takes centre-stage and, in particular and almost the villain of the piece, its chair, the civil servant FF Turnbull.  Turnbull repeatedly vetoed the building licence allocations that city centre reconstruction required; his widely-accepted rationale (in Flinn’s words) was that:

Resources going to the blitzed cities would necessarily draw on precious needs for industry and other business relating to exports and economic recovery.

Flinn also notes how a governmental ‘insistence on the maintenance of Britain’s world role’ and a ‘tendency to focus on global status diminished some of the discussions on the domestic agenda’.

The Abercrombie Plan’s zonal reimagining of central Hull

On the ground, the ‘overwhelming complexity in preparing and implementing reconstruction in the blitzed cities’ is amply illustrated by her three representative case studies of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool. Both Hull and Exeter had commissioned grand plans for post-war rebuilding, from Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Thomas Sharp respectively.  Liverpool, by contrast, pursued a more in-house process in closer collaboration with interested parties.

For all the differences between the three cities (in terms of history, local economy and political control), common themes stand out. The first and most crucial is the lack of central government support already noted, reflected not only in the issue of allocations (or lack of them) but in the sometimes obstructive, often critical attitude of Ministry officials who believed they knew better than councillors and planners on the ground.

The proposals for a new shopping centre envisaged here by Abercrombie around Osbourne Street were scuppered by trader resistance.

Beyond that, issues of existing property ownership and the competing financial interests they represented were uppermost.  In Hull, for example, the Council’s vision was challenged by a rival plan put forward by the city’s Chamber of Trade in 1947. In the end, Flinn concludes ‘the Abercrombie plans were not only controversial but, in practical terms, impossible to implement’.  Her forensic examination of the complex conditions operating in all three cities not only explains why so little was achieved but leaves you a little surprised that anything was built at all.

The final irony is that such reconstruction as did occur was often critically received.  D Rigby Childs, the editor of the Architects’ Journal, writing in 1954, thought that:

With the new permanent buildings one gets the impression that only too frequently the architects have been overwhelmed with frustrations of all kinds, allied with problems of finance, leading to a building which is, at best, humdrum and lifeless.

Rebuilding in Exeter, an historic city and victim of the Baedeker raids in April-May 1942, was described as ‘insipid’ and criticised by local residents.

A contemporary image of Exeter city centre © John Boughton

For all the subsequent disparagement of post-war rebuilding, it was decidedly not, in John Gold’s words, ‘the product of imposing utopia visions’.  While council officials were able to some extent influence the overall look of new developments, practical issues around finance and rationing played a greater role in what went up. It’s true, however, that the sparse, clean lines of modernist design also sat somewhat uncomfortably with popular taste.

Jameson Street and Paragon Place are fruits of Hull’s post-war reconstruction © John Boughton

Flinn sets out, in a broader sense, to examine ‘why cities look the way they do’.  A large part of the answer in this instance, as explained in a later chapter which raises interesting questions for further research, lies in the role of private property developers. Here Ravenseft stands out; a company which began by building a small terrace of shops on a Bristol council estate and then expanded to develop large city centre schemes in Exeter, Hull and other blitzed cities. The firm was initially backed by Harold Samuel of the Land Securities Trust and acquired by that company in 1955. Landsec in its new incarnation is now the largest commercial property development and investment company in the UK.

The lack of financial support from government and the pressing need to replace rates income lost to wartime destruction left local authorities dependent on such economic muscle. The developers themselves, of course, were more interested in lettable space than aesthetics.

‘Exeter Phoenix’. The sculpture was placed on the original Princesshay shopping centre opened by the then Princess Elizabeth in 1949, subsequently demolished. It’s now on the exterior of the new precinct opened in 2007. © John Boughton

Flinn’s close empirical study provides much more detail, not only with regard to central government policy but also in relation to the local personalities, politics and issues in her three case studies. It is complemented by a range of relevant images – of plans, proposals as well as pre-existing and completed realities.  As such, it is essential reading to anyone interested in post-war reconstruction as well as that larger question as to why our ‘cities look the way they do’.

It’s an academic book and scholars in the field will be grateful for its apparatus of data and references. That means, of course, that it comes at an academic price and is probably out of reach to the general reader.  But it repays study at your local library –  or perhaps we can persuade the publishers to issue a cheaper edition for a wider readership.

Catherine Flinn, Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams and Stark Realities was published by Bloomsbury on 27 December 2018. (Hardback, ISBN – 9781350067622).  Follow the link for further information. 

Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova, ‘Prefabs’ Book Review

Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova, Prefabs (Historic England, 2018)

We thought we’d reached paradise.  The bathroom, indoor toilet, central heating, kitchen fitted with an oven, refrigerator and folding table were miracles of luxury. The spacious bedrooms and living room, the integral drawers and cupboards, the huge windows, the large garden and Anderson coal shelter were, to us, more palace than prefab.

Those are the words of Neil Kinnock, describing the South Wales prefab he lived in from the age of six till he went on to university (‘the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university’ if you remember his speech when elected Labour leader) at the age of 18.

They capture much of the vital story of these prefabricated homes so finely and fully captured in this new book from Historic England. It reminds us these were, predominantly, working-class homes for generations of people moving from the slums. It tells us that, contrary to the cute, folksy image that understandably prevails, these were modern – indeed modernistic – homes, embodying a cutting-edge technology and providing unheralded amenity and convenience for their new residents.

We’re talking here of the post-war prefabs, part of a £150m programme inaugurated by the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act under which some 156,623 prefab homes were erected across the country by 1949.  An appendix provides full details of the range of forms and technology applied.

Wake Green listed Phoenix Prefab, Birmingham © Elisabeth Blanchet

Designed to last around ten years, there were still 67,353 in use in 1964 and in London some 10,000 were occupied into the 1970s. A few survive to the present and some are now listed: six on the Excalibur Estate in south London, 16 on Wake Green Road in Moseley, Birmingham (the latter can be viewed on open days on the 6 and 7 September this year).  Others have been adapted and preserved, notably in Redditch and around Inverness Road in Ipswich where the 142 prefabs form the largest surviving estate of their type.

Tarran prefabs in Ipswich, 2016 © Elisabeth Blanchet

For all that longevity, these post-war prefabs were temporary homes. The wider value of the book lies in its full coverage of prefabricated homes planned as permanent. This longer history and the range of non-traditional forms devised and constructed will surprise many – it surprised me and I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert.

In this, private enterprise has played its part.  Henry Munnings ‘portable colonial cottage’ from 1833 will be new to most; the Sears Roebuck mail order homes in the US are better known with over 100,000 sold between 1908 and 1940.  It’s interesting to learn – and somehow entirely appropriate – that IKEA are currently pioneering a form of emergency flatpack home in conjunction with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

But true to form, I’ll focus on the role of the national and local state and here the recurring motif is the desire to meet pressing housing needs as rapidly and economically as possible when traditional brick-built housing was proving both too slow and expensive to build

‘Labourers’ Concrete Dwellings’, Eldon Street, Liverpool, 1905

Liverpool City Engineer John Brodie built the prefabricated ‘Labourers’ Concrete Dwellings’ in Eldon Street as early as 1905. A version was featured in the Cheap Cottage Exhibition in Letchworth Garden City the same year and it survives (Grade II* listed) at 158 Wilbury Road.  The exhibition brochure expressed an intent and context which would persist in different forms across the years.  This, it said, was a ‘system of building’:

designed … with the special objective of providing a thoroughly sanitary and economical building, suitable in every way for the housing of the poorest classes displaced owing to the demolition of insanitary areas in Liverpool.

Eleven years later, in the midst of the First World War, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen of the Royal Engineers devised the hut that bore his name. One-hundred thousand Nissen huts were erected to serve military needs by 1918. It’s pleasing that a few were built for peacetime housing purposes in the 1920s, though sadly – as this recent blog post records – not with any great success.

Nissen-Petren houses in Ryme Intrinseca, Dorset © John Boughton

This was part of a broader wave of experimentation in non-traditional construction methods, promoted by the 1919 Housing Act and the newly-established Standardisation and New Methods of Construction Committee. The Committee received 90 proposals of which 75 were approved. The steel-framed Dorlonco homes of the Dorman Long Company, Airey’s Duo-Slab system combining precast and in situ concrete, and Lord Weir’s steel-clad, timber-framed homes were among the more widely built. In total, some 50,000 prefabricated homes had been erected by the end of the 1920s.

Dorlonco housing, King’s Road, Aylesham, Kent © Aylesham Heritage Centre

A second world war – and, with it, the same urgent need to provide decent housing for the many who needed it – provided a new impetus to prefabricated housebuilding.  (A 1945 White Paper estimated that 750,000 new homes were required immediately and a further 500,000 to replace existing slums.)  The wartime government anticipated a repeat of the shortages of skilled labour and traditional materials that had hit construction in the early 1920s and set up the Interdepartmental Committee on House Construction (the Burt Committee) in 1943.

To the Architects’ Journal in June 1943, as to many others, there was:

one solution only to the problem of post-war housing. It can be expressed in three words – use the machine

The book again provides an invaluable guide to the range of new prefabricated homes constructed. There were steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) houses, for example, designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, of which 40,000 were built.

Airey Houses © Historic England

Other designs utilised precast reinforced concrete (PRC).  Here the Wates (60,000 built), Airey (26,000), and Orlit houses (17,000) stand out. The so-called Cornish Units, developed by the English China Clay Company using concrete in which aggregate was a fine sand by-product from their mines, are an interesting variant; around 10,000 were built principally in the south-west.

Cornish Units, Hoo Street, Werburgh, Kent © Historic England

They and the 17,000 aluminium-framed AIROH homes, developed by the Aircraft Industries Research Organisation on Housing illustrate another aspect of the prefabrication drive – the desire to maintain wartime industries in full production in peacetime conditions.  Conversely, some 5000 timber-framed houses – the so-called Swedish houses – were imported in flatpack sections from (you guessed it) Sweden.

Swedish Houses © Historic England

Generally, these homes have stood the test of time though construction and materials flaws emerged in some (nearly all the Orlit homes have been demolished due to a defective concrete mix) and others have required substantial renovation in recent years. Some were disliked due to their unconventional appearance. Generally, cost savings were small if any. Traditional brick-built houses remained more popular and, but for a small spike of prefabricated construction during Macmillan’s housing drive in the 1950s, took centre-stage once more as shortages eased.

This was not, however, the end of ‘the machine’.  An era of mass public housing, rooted in the determination to end slum living forever, took off in the sixties and, in the confident modernity represented by what Harold Wilson had called the ‘white heat’ of the ‘scientific revolution’, system-building emerged as the seemingly obvious solution to the need to build at pace and at scale.

Building the Aylesbury Estate: the LPS method in operation

The Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, currently suffering a slow demolition against residents’ protests, and the Hulme Crescents in Manchester are among the best known, both variants of the very widely employed Large Panel System of construction (LPS).  Due to what was in too many cases very poor build quality and the problems which followed, such estates were rapidly dubbed ‘notorious, none more so than Ronan Point, a Newham LPS tower block which partially collapsed after a small gas explosion in May 1968, killing four.

Ronan Point seemed to mark the end of the apparently hubristic hopes placed in system-building though – suitably modified – system-built schemes continued to be built into the early seventies. A closing chapter of the book, however, tells of a small-scale revival of prefabricated construction in the present housing crisis, both in the UK and globally, and suggests – lessons learned, rigorous standards ensured – that prefabrication remains a plausible and perhaps necessary means of building the affordable homes many millions need.

Catherine Bazell’s family in front of their prefab in North London, 1950s © The Prefab Museum

This brief summary – focusing as it does on numbers and forms – might suggest a dry history but a huge quality of Elisabeth Blanchet and Sonia Zhuravlyova’s work is its focus on the lived experience of those that have lived – and continue to live – in prefab homes over the years.  This is a rich social history, full of colour and detail, beautifully illustrated, replete with resident memories and testimonies – a powerful and humane telling of a story in which technology was mobilised to serve human need and societal necessity.

A ceremony marking the completion of the 100,000th, Wandsworth, 1947 © Historic England

Though the authors’ closing words take us back to those seemingly quaint post-war prefabs, they might stand for the broader enterprise this fine book describes:

Although modest to the modern eye and by no means perfect, these temporary prefabs really did change people’s lives by giving them the opportunity to be masters of their very own detached homes – their ‘little castles’. The tenants considered themselves lucky, and the prefabs were a testament to the will to make life better for people after the trials of the Second World War.

You can sample the book via this link. You’ll find publication and purchase details here. 

The Prefab Museum is an online archive containing further information, images and testimonies illustrating the history of the temporary post-war prefabs and an interactive map of their past and present locations.