Gleadless Valley Remembered

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1960, 1970s, Gleadless Valley

I posted a piece on the Gleadless Valley Estate in Sheffield in May last year. Keith Marriott contacted me via email with a long and very interesting account of his own experience of growing up on the estate and his subsequent career. With his agreement and support in supplying many of the images included, I’m pleased to feature that response in this week’s post. Keith will introduce himself in the article that follows.  

I grew up on Gleadless Valley in the 1960s. My Mum and Dad, my elder sister and I moved to Raeburn Road on Gleadless Valley in 1961, when I was aged two. I know that work began on the estate in 1955, and this was one of the earliest parts of the estate to be constructed so I don’t know whether the house was new when they moved in or not.

Gleadless Valley Estate, viewed from the Herdings © Markbaby and www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk

In the 60s, there was a wide socio-economic mix on the estate – unskilled and skilled manual workers, clerical and junior management. Many of the early residents of the estate had either grown up in the terraced back-to-back housing which was demolished to make way for the Park Hill flat or had quickly moved from Park Hill, which soon became prone to vandalism and became socially stigmatised.

My mum worked as a clerk at Sheffield Town Hall in the 70s ‘Egg Box’ extension. At the time they moved to Gleadless Valley my Dad was a commercial manager for British Tar Products in the city centre. Although he had left school in 1934 aged 14, this was only his second job including his six years in the army during WWII.  He had the opportunity to go to grammar school but that was an unaffordable option for my grandparents. His company moved its offices to Manchester in 1966 so he took a job, instead, at the Orgreave coking plant and chemical works. We didn’t own a car until then but it was a necessity as the bus journey was not feasible.

My parents lived in the same house at Gleadless until they died; my Dad in 2001 and my Mum in 2015. They remained as tenants throughout. When Thatcher introduced the Right to Buy in the early 80s, they didn’t buy theirs, as many of their long-time neighbours did. They had a very risk-averse attitude to debt and were unpersuaded about the benefit of embarking on a mortgage late in their working life.

I recall there was a very narrow racial mix on the estate; I don’t recall a single black or Asian pupil at primary or secondary school, but I don’t know how far this reflected the mix across Sheffield in the 60s and 70s.

Front cover of ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

It’s about five years since I’ve visited the estate but I feel, despite a loss of architectural coherence due to the impact of the Right to Buy, it has remained fairly intact except for the loss of its schools, library and the missing third tower at Herdings. The much later Supertram terminus below the towers is a positive addition, I’d say.

Womersley’s team had designed a community centre, between the shops and the towers at Herdings with a timber gridshell hyperbolic paraboloid roof but it was sadly never built. It would have been a fabulous addition, architecturally and socially.

The Herdings shopping centre, illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

The unbuilt community hall at the Herdings, illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

The private housing built in the 1990s at the base of the towers helps to give a bit of shelter to what was a pretty exposed hilltop. It’s 700 feet above sea level and was a bleak spot where you wouldn’t linger in winter. I remember visiting elderly residents in one tower in the 60s who felt rather isolated there when they were trapped in by bad weather. On the positive side, the panoramic views were stupendous, towards the hills of the Peak District or with the whole of the city lit up below. I’ve always felt that the Herdings towers were designed to be seen as landmarks in the landscape though rather than places to view from.

The three original Herdings Towers as illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

I think it is the estate’s low-rise, low-density housing that is its strongest point rather. The architectural team for Gleadless Valley comprised eight architects (credited in the Housing Department’s 1962 book ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield 1953-1963’) who showed enormous creativity in developing housing types with their own private outdoor spaces to suit the steeply sloping terrain.

Just two examples from ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’ of the variety of homes adapted to varying terrain and household needs across the estate.

They display a wide variety of different relationships to both private and public outside space, putting a great emphasis on privacy, which is, I think, one key to its lasting appeal. The 1962 book (it’s very telling that it is printed in the same format as Le Corbusier’s L’Oeuvre Complet with text in French and Russian) states the percentage of the housing stock built on steep slopes as well as the density. The density is in sharp contrast to the way Park Hill and Hyde Park handle a similarly steeply sloped site. Here the aspiration was to allow easy access to use the open public space, whereas at Park Hill the public space is really only a visual asset.

The existing woodland has flourished especially where it was extended, particularly at its south-east boundary. Comparing the 1892-1914 OS map with the current aerial photo on Bing maps on the National Library of Scotland’s geo-referenced side by side OS maps, shows this really well.

All the infrastructure of social facilities – shops, schools, libraries, pubs – were planned and built very early as the design recognised this as fundamental to a thriving community.

Education and transport vision supports housing and health. Sheffield’s subsidised bus service was legendary throughout the 60s and 70s and well into David Blunkett’s tenure as leader of the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’. Cheap, frequent reliable buses made it possible to get anywhere in the city (except Orgreave!) out as far as Castleton in the Peak District punctually and affordably. Access to the countryside, particularly to the west of the city, was promoted as a key benefit and by the Council to be enjoyed by all. See Sheffield: Emerging City (C.R. Warman 1969).

The original Herdings, Hemsworth, Rollestone and Gleadless Valley schools are all gone now, sadly. Womersley’s department designed all these civic buildings. All very good examples of mid-century modern public buildings, carefully and thoughtfully designed; functional, practical but above all a joy to inhabit. Herdings primary school and Gleadless Valley secondary school were opened in 1961 or 62, I think.

Herdings was two-storey with the full width of the south side glazed onto a very spacious playing field. Despite their aspect, the rooms didn’t overheat, due to plentiful fully opening windows. All the ground floor classrooms had direct access to the playing field and all the upper rooms for the eldest pupils had dual aspect, so were even brighter and airier.

I don’t think it’s just ‘rose tinted glasses’ but I’d go so far as to say the education was inspirational and visionary – particularly at primary school. There was a culture designed to broaden children’s horizons. We were exposed to gramophone records of Rubinstein playing Chopin, Albert Schweitzer playing Bach during daily morning assembly and Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett during indoor lunchtimes in the hall. French was taught from seven years, the head teacher published books on French and on sex education for primary school children.

I went to secondary school in 1969, the first year Sheffield introduced comprehensive education across the city. Prior to that Gleadless Valley school had been a secondary modern school and the large majority of its intake was from the Gleadless Valley estate. It was actually located about half a mile south-west of the estate on Norton Avenue.

Gleadless Valley School, photographed in 1994 © Picture Sheffield

It comprised a three-storey main block orientated north-south again with full-width windows overlooking spacious playing fields and clerestory glazing on the top floor. General purpose classrooms facing east and labs and arts rooms facing west. A block containing assembly hall, gym, dining room and kitchen and a separate technical block were connected to the main block by fully glazed single-storey link corridors.

Hemsworth Library, Blackstock Road © Picture Sheffield

Other public buildings now lost include the original Hemsworth public library on Blackstock and one of Womersley’s gems.  It closed to much protest in 1995 and was converted into a Lloyds chemist shop. It was a long, low block with an over-sailing flat roof forming a wide entrance porch; two long sides of the rectangular box were full-height glazed with end walls in brick inside and out. Internally the fittings were purpose-made joinery and matched slatted timber ceiling; it was a sort of display cabinet for books and culture!

I went to Liverpool University to study Architecture in 1976, the first in my family to go to university and of course in those days fees and a full grant were paid by my Local Education Authority. Early in my working career as an architect I worked for Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre. The theme of the visibility and accessibility of culture was a dominant one in his practice. I worked with him on a competition entry for the new Paris Opera House in 1983 and its key design principle was egalitarianism: everyone should have as good a seat in the house as everyone else and the glazed facade displayed what was going on inside to the world outside. He believed passionately, as did his patron at the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, that Culture (with a capital C) was not just for the privileged few; he would brook no dumbing down – he thought Shakespeare and Aristophanes could and should be enjoyed by all. This was a milieu that my teachers at Herdings primary school understood and promoted.

St Anthony’s Church

The churches have survived well. St Anthony’s Catholic Church at the Norton Avenue end of Raeburn Road and the now well-known Gleadless Valley Church on Spotswood Mount both remain. The former is not one of Womersley’s but with a distinctive copper roof is rather good example of a 60s Catholic parish church. The original entrance facing Sandby Drive was a glazed end wall but has been obscured by some untidy single-storey porches and ancillary spaces. St Anthony’s retained a patch of land alongside Norton Avenue on which it intended to build a Catholic school but this was sold to a housing developer in order to pay for Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1982.

One aspect of the estate which has not proved so successful into the 21st century is the huge increase in private car ownership. The roads, including the primary bus routes, are narrow, twisty and hilly. I think perhaps the increase in private car ownership was apparent to Womersley as early as 1962, by which time his department was already designing house types at a planned estate at Middlewood on the north side of Sheffield, which had integral garages. Perhaps it had become apparent that the limited number of rentable garages in small separate courtyards on Gleadless Valley was in high demand.

Patio houses (informally called ‘Upside-Down’ houses due to the living room occupying the upper floor), illustrated in ‘Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield’

For me there are three outstanding achievements. Firstly, I love the ingenuity of the range of houses, maisonettes and flats to suit the hilly terrain. Secondly, Womersley’s positioning of the three tower blocks on the highest point of the estate where they can be seen from 15 miles was probably his bravest architectural move as Sheffield’s Chief Architect. Thirdly, the decision to retain and enhance the existing woodland allowed the relationship between public and private space to be both rich and usable. Gleadless Valley was a fine and humane place to grow up in the 60s and 70s. I found the relationship between its architecture and Sheffield’s topography and landscape to be an inspiring one.

keithmarriott58@gmail.com

Four Council Cottages at Mickleton: Rural Council Housing in Gloucestershire before the First World War

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Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to host a new post by Chas Townley. He has written previously on the pre-First World War council housing of Dursley in Gloucestershire. Chas is a Labour District Councillor on Stroud District Council, a ‘no overall control’ authority in the county. He was chair of the Housing Committee. Chas has formerly worked in housing for both councils and housing associations and previously managed the Supporting People Programme in a unitary council. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.  He is a local historian and genealogist and has written on a variety of subjects including Chartism, Cooperatives, land clubs and building societies, and the Poor Law and pre-NHS health provision.  Chas has recently started a PHD at the University of Bristol exploring the provision of working-class housing before the Great War.

Four houses at Mickleton are the sum total of Campden Rural District Council’s provision of houses before the Great War but they were the first council housing built in Gloucestershire under the Housing of the Working Classes Acts.

Campden was a rural district created in 1894 for administrative convenience from the Gloucestershire parishes within the Shipston-on-Stour Poor Law Union. As the Poor Law Union also had parishes in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, Shipston-on-Stour and Brailes Rural Districts were also created. The offices of the three districts plus the Poor Law Union were at the workhouse in Shipston with the same officers serving the four bodies. Members served a dual mandate as both Rural District Councillor and Poor Law Guardian.

Shipston-on-Stour Poor Law Union map

The Mickleton Parish Council was exploring ways of providing houses and August 1910 discussed information from the Local Government Board on the terms loans for housing schemes could be provided to District Councils – 3 ½% over 80 years for land and 60 for buildings. The report extensively reports Charles Coldicott, who served as both Chairman of the Parish Council and the District Councillor for the Parish. Another quoted was Mr Dixon, a barrister and later a Justice of the Peace for both Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. (1)  

The newspaper report noted that ‘A lengthy discussion took place with regard to the probable cost of erecting four houses and the amount of rent to be charged’.  But one parishioner, Mr J Taylor, offered to give £600 towards the cost of the scheme providing that the rest of the cost could be raised and that houses became the property of the Parish Council – this wasn’t legally possible. Part of Taylor’s argument is enlightened self-interest:

They [the landowners and ratepayers] could not do without the working-man. He should not be in the position he was today if it was not for the men. It was their business and duty as Christians to see that the working-man was better housed.

The outcome of the meeting was that Dixon and Taylor were deputed to consult the ratepayers to see if they would assent to a voluntary rate for the houses.

At this point the Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 was in its infancy and the potential for the Act to deliver the improvement of homes in disrepair and the construction of new housing was largely untried in rural areas – even in four exceptional rural areas which had struggled through the barriers of earlier legislation to provide housing in their local areas.

Earlier housing in Mickelton © David Stowell and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Mickleton was undeterred and the Parish Council meeting in September made application to the Campden Rural District Council to ‘respectfully put into operation the Housing and Town Planning Act’.  The Cheltenham Chronicle account suggests this was due to both a housing shortage as well as the poor condition of existing housing. This led to a wider debate at the District Council about the work needed to put into force the systematic inspection of existing homes under the Act. As to the question of the new housing they set up a joint committee with the Parish Council to look at the provision of new housing in Mickleton. (2)

The Chronicle carried a short article later in the year giving an account of progress noting:

The promoters of the scheme have met with considerable difficulty one way or another, and some members of the Council have seemed reluctant to work under an Act which they know little or nothing about, as was shown by the discussion which took place at the meetings.

It also commented ‘but Mickleton people were persistent in their demand and their representative on the Rural Council (Mr Coldicott) threatened to appeal to the Local Government Board, if the Council refused to do that which was asked of them’. (3) Given that the legislation was a Liberal initiative and Charles Coldicott’s persistence to encourage the use of the new Act, it is easy to assume he was a Liberal but he was the leading Conservative in the village. (4)  

The procedure of the Act provided that four residents of a parish or the Parish Council itself could lay a complaint before the Local Government Board enabling them to intervene and order the District Council to provide housing in a parish. Before intervening the board had to consider the ‘necessity for further accommodation’ as well as ‘the probability that the required accommodation will not be otherwise provided‘ as well whether it is prudent to do so ‘having regard to the liability which will be incurred by the rates’. The Act also provided default powers for the County Council to act instead of the rural district. Compulsion by way of writ of mandamus could result in a range of sanctions including imprisonment for continued default. (5)

If there was a will to avoid building there was a way, as a defect in the legislation left the Local Government Board powerless to intervene beyond persuasion and coaxing unless there was a formal complaint. By the end of the 1912-1913 financial year, only 37 Rural Districts out of 661 had applied for a loan to build housing.  Consequently, by the eve of the Great War frustrations by the Liberal Government with rural districts were leading to an emerging policy of the state taking over the building of housing rather than leaving it to private enterprise and councils. (6) 

The belligerence against rural districts also extended to smaller urban districts and during 1917 and 1918 Addison’s Ministry of Reconstruction advocated for another option of transferring of housing powers to the counties, leading to Lord Salisbury to comment in reaction to Local Government Board proposals, ‘For reasons which we have stated over and over again we believe that the County Council is a far sounder authority’. (7)

By the spring of 1911 Campden were ready to apply to the Government for a £600 loan to build the four cottages, having agreed to lease a site for a period of 99 years from Mr SG Hamilton. (8) The inquiry was held by Major CE Norton, a Local Government Board Inspector. It was left to Charles Coldicott to present the case to the inspector, suggesting this was still very much a local Mickelton scheme rather than one owned by the District Council as a whole. In part this was a consequence of the funding mechanism as any deficit on the scheme was to be met from Mickleton’s ratepayers rather than the District rate.

Coldicott’s evidence recounted a Parish Meeting held the previous year which had resulted in a 40 to 2 vote in favour of the project. He claimed that many cottages had been demolished in recent years and none built. The main industry of the parish was agriculture and market gardening and some of the farm labourers were having to live a considerable distance out of the parish. The suggested rent for the cottages was 3s 6d (17.5p).

Dr Finlay, the Medical Officer of Health, gave evidence that there were no empty cottages in the village and only a day or two ago a family had to go out of the village because the cottage had been bought. He also knew of men who worked in Mickleton who lived in Quinton, three miles away across the border in Warwickshire.

It was left to Charles Gander, the Council’s surveyor and sanitary inspector, to go over the plans which showed ‘a good back living room, scullery, joint washhouse for each pair of cottages, three bedrooms (two large and one small) and separate coal houses and domestic offices’. The selected site was small and Gander justified the lack of garden ground on the basis that ‘all the cottagers rented allotments in the parish’. (9)  

Three opponents, supported by a petition signed by 28 ratepayers, spoke on the grounds that whilst there was an urgent need for housing in the village they thought the site selected was unsuitable. One of them suggested an alternative site which they considered more suitable owned by a Mr Box. The Inspector concluded the hearing by remarking that some alterations would need to be made to the plans before the Local Government Board would give its sanction to the scheme which would defer the matter for some time. Whilst it is not clear from the reports, the construction was probably solid brick rather than a cavity wall and this construction is assumed by the modern energy performance certificates for the properties – although cavity wall construction started in late Victorian times.

Walter Runciman (left) and Sir Ashton Lister (Lister image © Dursley Glos Web and Richard Buffrey)

Walter Runciman, then President of the Board of Agriculture and actively interested in small holdings and rural housing, visited Mickleton in December 1911, accompanied by Sir Ashton Lister, then Chairman of the County Small Holdings Committee and subsequently ‘Coupon’ Liberal MP for Stroud.  A description of the visit provides an account of the challenge for the County Council to provide affordable smallholders cottages alongside the newly developed council smallholdings: (10)

 At Mickleton we came face to face with the rural housing problem in its most acute form. The soil is remarkably fruitful, and lets readily for market-garden cultivation at £4 an acre without buildings. Land which was down at grass a few years ago has been let by the County Council to men who are probably obtaining as much as £4 for every £1 raised from the soil hitherto, or, to use a classic phrase, making four blades of grass grow where only one grew before. Yet there are not enough houses for the people to live in. A two roomed cottage nearly a mile from the occupier’s small holding fetches, it is true, only £4 per year, but in this very cheapness lies the root of the difficulty. ‘The County Council’, Mr Runciman explained, ‘couldn’t put up cottages with three bedrooms which is the standard size, for less than £400 the pair. They couldn’t let them at less than £10 a year each. If such a cottage were on your holding, would you be willing to take it?’.  ‘Well’, was the reply ‘that needs a deal o’ thinking on. Ten pound is a lot o’ money’.  Plainly if the Cottage Bureau should lead to the discovery of that dream of many a reformer, the satisfactory hundred-pound cottage, it will be the salvation of such villages as Mickleton.  

Sir Ashton Lister later noted at a Council meeting that one of the disadvantages for the Council was the fifty-year maximum loan period available for small holding buildings. (11)  This compared to a sixty-year period allowed for the construction of dwellings under the Housing of the Working Classes Acts. It clearly mattered not how the house was used but under what legislation it was provided. 

In another article was a more detailed explanation of the Cottage Bureau proposal that Runciman was developing, which was to ‘gather from all sources – whether English, American, or Continental – plans and specifications of modern-built country cottages, together with the details of the actual cost’. Very soon after in February 1912 Runciman appointed a Departmental Committee on the Equipment of Small Holdings which, when it reported a year later, included details of cottages suitable for rural labourers to be built as council housing. Whilst these developments did not directly benefit Mickleton they did ensure that model plans were available for other councils working to provide council housing in rural areas before the Great War. (12)

Returning to the development of four houses in Mickelton, by July 1911 work to resolve the perceived problems with the scheme had taken place and a new site owned by Mr Dixon was under consideration with a sixty-year lease on ‘nominal terms’ with a continuing lease for 999 years. The Local Government Board were willing to sanction the new site subject to the approval of revised plans. A sticking point appeared to be the design of the outbuildings which were considered to darken the scullery if placed too near the houses. (13)

Whilst we cannot be certain, it appears as if the original scheme was tendered before an application for a loan was originally made as in September the District Council had received an amended tender from the proposed contractor George Adams which was higher than the original taking account of the additional work required to assess the changes. Adams was part of a long-standing building firm based in Shipston-on-Stour and had undertaken other work for the Guardians in the past. (14)

Charles Coldicott was deputed to find out the views of the proposed tenants on a ‘small increase’ in the rent for the properties. This suggests that the properties had also been pre-let when the original plans were developed. At the October District Council meeting the revised tender of £674 was approved as a ‘fair charge’ for the work and formal application for a loan sanction of £700 was submitted to the Local Government Board.

Map showing Back Lane housing site

Mr Gander, the surveyor, reported to the April 1912 meeting of the Council that the difficulty of draining the newly erected cottages had been overcome by connecting with the drains of the cottages opposite by agreement with the Sladden and Collier brewery of Evesham (eventually becoming part of the Whitbread brewing combine) who ran the Butchers Arms in the village.  The Surveyor had also taken water samples from the well supplying the cottages. There is a later report stating that the well was ‘quite unfit ‘ – but this could be a misprint as the cottages were occupied by the May meeting, suggesting that any problems were quickly resolved with the Chairman saying they should be celebrated in a proper manner as the first council housing in the area. (15)

The Back Lane housing

Mickleton like many rural villages in Gloucestershire acquired mains water and sewerage late in the day. A water supply project was completed in 1927 and, in 1933 when the Granbrook Lane council houses were developed, the council resorted to installing a septic tank. There was still no public sewerage system when planning took place for post-Second World War reconstruction. (16)

Granbrook Lane

Who were the first tenants? 

That’s a very difficult question to answer as the records for that period are scant. We know for certain who was resident at the time of the 1939 National Registration giving four families with three of the four having close links to agriculture. One couple, George and Elizabeth Norton, at the time of the 1911 census, were agricultural carriers and had been resident in a cottage close to Charles Coldicott’s farm.

Their cottage was clearly overcrowded with ten living in four rooms – which would have included the living room.  They had been married for 17 years and had nine children, two of whom had died before 1911 and the remaining seven were all still living at home in a four-room cottage. Also living with them was ‘paralysed’ Samson Margretts aged 58. His original head of the household entry had been deleted and relegated to ‘boarder‘, perhaps suggesting he was the tenant of the cottage. But another household – again Norton – in 1911 had been living with members of three other concealed households in addition to their own children.

There is, however, a twist in the tale as all four properties appear to have ceased to be council housing by 1972. One of the properties is in private ownership having been auctioned off in 1972 with the other three owned by a local charity named after the person who leased the land to the Council in 1912. Whilst it is disappointing to find that the first council homes built in Gloucestershire are no longer providing affordable social rented homes, three continue to provide rented housing in the village.

This one scheme at Mickleton was not the end of Campden Council’s entry into the world of housing provision before the Great War as work had begun on developing a scheme of eight homes at Moreton in the Marsh. Despite the scheme having progressed a long way with a site ready to be purchased, plans drawn and loan terms accepted from the Government, paradise was postponed, like so much else, for the duration of the War, in October 1914.

Hill View Close

Within Mickleton a further six council homes were provided on Stratford Road under the ‘homes fit for heroes‘ housing scheme in  1921. (17)  Subsequently, during the late 1920’s and 1930s the provision of more homes took place along Granbrook Lane. (18) More housing followed in the post war period in Cedar Road but the direct provision of council housing ended with the decision of Cotswold District to cease being a landlord in 1997.  And the village was the beneficiary of 15 new social rent homes granted permission at Hill View Close in 2000, one of the first schemes completed by Fosseway Housing – the Cotswold District Council stock transfer association – now swallowed up into the 40,000 home Bromford Housing Group. (19)

Sources

(1) Evesham Standard, 13 August 1910, p5

(2) Cheltenham Chronicle, 8 October 1910, p8

(3) Cheltenham Chronicle, 10 December 1910

(4) Evesham Standard & West Midland Observer, 8 February 1919; Gloucestershire Echo, 4 January 1902 reports him being re-elected as Grand Master of the Mickleton Lodge.

(5) Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 Section 10

(6) The Central Land and Housing Council, The Liberal Land and Housing Policy: Rural Housing, circa 1914.

(7) National Archives Letter by Lord Salisbury Chairman Ministry of Reconstruction Housing Panel circulated to War Cabinet by Christopher Addison. CAB 24/44/76

(8) Sidney Graves Hamilton (1856-1916), born in Dublin and resident in Malvern is described as Lord of the Manor of Mickleton in the report of his will. Cheltenham Chronicle 20 January 1917. See also 1911 Census Class: RG14; Piece: 17650; Schedule Number: 13. The Lloyd George Survey also shows that he owned substantial holdings in the village and one of his farm tenants was Charles Coldicott.

(9) Cheltenham Chronicle, 25 March 1911

(10) Gloucester Journal, 23 December 1911, p9

(11) Gloucester Journal, 13 January 1912

(12) Departmental Committee on the Equipment of Small Holdings, Chaired by Christopher Turner March 1913, Cd 6708

(13) Evesham Standard, 15 July 1911

(14) There is an extensive archive of Adams Builders, Shipston-on-Stour covering the period 1796 to 1968 at Warwickshire Archives which may throw further light on this project.  Ref: 03887

(15) Cheltenham Chronicle, 20 April 1912; Evesham Standard, 18 May 1912

(16) Cheltenham Chronicle, 2 July 1927; The Tewkesbury Register and Agricultural Gazette, 21 January 1933. Gordon E Payne, Gloucestershire: A Survey – A Physical, Social and Economic Survey and Plan (Gloucestershire County Council, 1945)

(17) Gloucestershire Echo, 15 October 1921, p6 – report of Campden RDC meeting

(18) The Tewkesbury Register and Agricultural Gazette, 31 January 1931. This is an advert to complete 12 partially completed properties.

(19) Cotswold District Council planning files 98.02408 Construction of 15 dwellings for affordable housing, Meon Hill Nurseries, Nursery Close, Mickleton.

Great estates: the changing role of trees in the municipal housing landscape

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Westminster

I’m very pleased to feature this week a guest post by Paul Wood. Paul is the author of three books about trees in London: London’s Street Trees, London is a Forest and London Tree Walks, and he writes the blog thestreettree.com.

London Tree Walks, published in October 2020, features a dozen walks around London from Acton to Walthamstow looking at the city through the trees found in it. One of the walks, ‘Architectural Utopias Among The Trees: A Pimlico Circular’, guides walkers through the Millbank and Churchill Gardens Estates. This guest blog looks at how trees have been used in planned housing developments since the end of the nineteenth century with particular focus on the Pimlico Estates.

Signed copies of London Tree Walks are available from the author at this webpage.

By the end of the nineteenth century, trees in towns and cities had burst out of parks and squares to become established in new, urban and suburban settings across the UK and beyond. The opening of the Victoria Embankment in 1870 led to an almost overnight popularisation of planting trees in avenues, a phenomena that had hitherto been the preserve of great Continental cities such as Paris, where Hausmann’s grands boulevards had been attracting attention for several decades.

By the late nineteenth century, building houses among tree-lined streets had become an established practice for speculative builders wanting to attract the burgeoning middle classes to newly fashionable suburbs like Muswell Hill and Bedford Park. In Bedford Park, new street trees complemented those retained from the original fields, while in Muswell Hill, hundreds of London planes adorned the new avenues.

The Arnold Circus bandstand, Boundary Estate, surrounded by London planes

Planners and developers had realised that not only were trees an important part of a modern cityscape, they brought with them a host of benefits to those who lived near them. As the new craze for street tree planting reached fever pitch, it was only natural that the first public housing schemes should also have trees planted around them. The Boundary Estate in Shoreditch featured newly planted trees along its streets, mostly London planes and common limes, many of which, particularly those around Arnold Circus can still be seen. Rows of newly planted saplings feature in this photograph taken in 1903 soon after the estate opened.

‘Boundary Estate: Arnold Circus’ (1903) – before the bandstand was added. Note the newly planted trees whose growth over the decades has considerably altered the estate’s feel. © London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Twenty years after the Embankment planting, Victorian engineers had taken on board the need to engineer tree planting into new road schemes, the complexity of which was outlined by Clerk of the Improvements Committee, Percy J Edwards in 1876: (1)

To secure the well-being of trees, pits were formed and filled with proper soil, and the footway surrounding the trees was covered with an open grating to admit the rain and air to the soil, and to enable it to be stirred and kept loose on the surface. The grating and footway were supported independently by girders over the pits, so as to prevent the settlement of the paving and the hardening of the ground around the roots of the trees.

Following similar principles, the trees seen at Boundary Road and the Millbank Estate constructed soon afterwards are extraordinarily well encased. High quality engineering means subsidence has not been an issue and big trees have been left to reach their full potential and are now a significant physical feature defining these estates as much as their architecture.

Original London planes between blocks on the Boundary Estate

Trees planted in some privately developed housing schemes, including Muswell Hill, have not fared so well with whole streets of mature trees disappearing. This is down to two main factors: the cost of maintaining large trees is significant, sometimes at a level local authorities have struggled to keep up with; and the costs of paying out to litigious residents whose homes, built speculatively often with relatively poor foundations, have been subject to subsidence.

Trees are frequently implicated in subsidence cases, their adventurous roots, insurers claim, drain water from London’s porous clay soils causing contraction and can also undermine buildings. Rather than fight these often difficult-to-prove cases, authorities will avoid costs and conflict by simply removing trees. This practice has led to avenues being depleted, removed completely or being replaced piecemeal with different species. This last practice can mean an architecturally consistent scheme planted with, for instance, London planes can become a hotchpotch of trees with differing characteristics, size and age.

Looking down St Oswulf Street, Millbank Estate. Note how the well maintained London planes lean away from the buildings

This is not the case on the Millbank Estate however, defined – even more so than the Boundary Estate – by its well-manicured and mature London plane trees. It was completed in 1902 and was an ambitious attempt at social housing, building on the experience of its smaller Shoreditch sibling. Millbank’s trees appear, 120 years after their installation, to be in great shape and add to the architectural rigour even more so than those on the Boundary Estate. It may be obvious, but unlike buildings, trees change dramatically over time, albeit in relative slow motion. They are also subject to differing management regimes which themselves change over decades and so reflect factors including fashion, economics and arboricultural practices whose impact becomes apparent over multiple human lifetimes.

View from Boundary Gardens past the trunk of an original London plane with newer field maples on Palissy Street

Today, the Millbank Estate has a near full and consistent complement of trees, virtually all of which are London planes, the urban tree species of choice in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The Boundary Estate has some fine planes too, but appears to be relatively less forested today. Historically it appears, the Boundary Estate was planted with planes interspersed with common limes – another species well adapted to urban situations, mature examples of which can be seen on Rochelle Street. Elsewhere a handful of weeping ‘Pendula’ cultivars of wych elm, an ornamental species relatively resistant to Dutch elm disease are present. One in the small garden behind Sandford House next to Club Row is typical.

Recently planted field maples on the Boundary Estate

These curious crown-grafted trees were much in favour during the nineteenth century and are often a feature of public parks, however the estate examples appear to be rather younger than the buildings, they are perhaps second-generation replacements of original trees. In more recent years, streets such as Palissy Street have been planted with Field Maple, a smaller and shorter-lived species than London plane, but nevertheless, a good hardy tree.

The Boundary Estate has, it seems, lost some of its trees over the years, and those that remain have been less strictly managed than those on the Millbank Estate. Both feature mature planes that now reach the full height and more of the buildings that once towered over them. They have been planted close to the buildings, in retrospect maybe too close, often they have grown at angles several degrees away from upright in search of light. Their presence in such proximity to the buildings is testament to the high specification of the entire estate.  

Millbank Estate

To walk round the larger Millbank Estate today is to encounter an environment, both architectural and arboreal, that has been very well maintained over the years. With both estates, it is interesting to reflect on the planners’ original vision of how the trees would become integral to the estates over time. Did they consider the trees should be left to reach the heights seen today, or were they intended to be managed on a severe pollarding regime reflecting the fashions of the early nineteenth century? It is hard to know, or even if the longevity of the trees’ lives was considered.

Recently pollarded planes in winter on the Millbank Estate

Now though, and particularly in the summer, the mature trees’ canopies provide cool shade and, as evidence from elsewhere shows, traffic speed, noise and pollution are all reduced in such lush surroundings. Integral to the design of the estate was the inclusion of open space and the provision of trees.

Communal, mostly paved, areas are tucked away between the blocks, and the trees planted over 120 years ago line the streets running between them. London planes form something of a monoculture, which from a visitor’s perspective offers a harmonious aesthetic that sits well with the arts and crafts inspired architecture, but to a contemporary planner, this rigour may seem uninteresting and even risky given the spectre of plant pathogens that, like Dutch Elm Disease, can wipe out whole species in a very short time. 

No trees grace the courts between blocks on the Millbank Estate, unlike those of the Boundary Estate

It was undoubtedly a radical move to include trees in these early estates; by the late nineteenth-century social class was embedded in their selection and planting. As Harold Dyos wrote in his 1960s study of the growth of Camberwell: (2)

The choice of trees, too, had its social overtones: planes and horse chestnuts for the wide avenues and lofty mansions of the well-to-do; limes, laburnums and acacias for the middle incomes; unadorned macadam for the wage-earners.

Dyos’ observation illustrates that the high standards employed in early public housing development goes against the norms established by private developers. London plane, the tree that is associated with grand public thoroughfares like the Embankment and aspirational new suburbs like Muswell Hill was also the tree chosen to soften and embed these new housing forms into the fabric of the city. It would have appeared to be the perfect tree for planting as it is attractive, fast-growing and able to cope with the industrial pollution of the day. Over the years, the trees have been well cared for, having been regularly pollarded to keep them an appropriate size and shape for their location.

Churchill Gardens

A short and interesting walk from the Millbank Estate through the stuccoed splendour of Thomas Cubitt’s Pimlico, Modernist Churchill Gardens illustrates how the relationship between trees and public housing has changed over the years, and represents what might be considered the pinnacle of post-war inner city landscaping.

London’s Second World War destruction provided planners with a rare opportunity to rebuild a modern city. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1943 identified how war-damaged and slum housing could be cleared to make way for spacious modern homes with proper sanitation along with public open spaces. Born out of this optimistic vision, the Churchill Gardens estate was planned to provide 1,600 new homes.

The distinctive silhouette of Italian alders, Johnson’s Place, Churchill Gardens

Designed by the young architectural practice of Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, the estate’s development started in 1946, with the final blocks – those on the western side of Claverton Street – not completed until the 1970s. It is now a conservation area, with several of the oldest structures listed. Walking through the estate, it is possible to experience the utopian vision of large-scale planned housing. As well as one of the first, Churchill Gardens is one of the largest and most ambitious social housing developments with several innovations at its heart, notably the Accumulator Tower, a structure designed to hold hot water for heating the entire estate, which was pumped directly from Battersea Power Station across the river.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the estate is how it is enveloped by green space and mature trees. Unlike the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban ideal emphasising the separation of houses and greenery, Churchill Gardens represents a modernist vision of living among the trees. At every turn, mature hornbeams, tree privets, southern catalpas and other species are present. Well-kept gardens, tended by residents, pop up all over, and secret green corners among the tower blocks offer natural sanctuaries.

Johnson’s Place lime trees, Churchill Gardens

Unlike that other notable modernist development, the Alton Estate in Roehampton, where high quality architecture is scattered among a former Georgian parkland overlooking Richmond Park, the landscape at Churchill Gardens was planned from scratch. Consequently the trees reflect mid-twentieth century tastes that show both far greater species diversity and a modern sensibility regarding their purpose.

Unlike the Millbank Estate, the trees are no longer structural adjuncts to the built environment, instead they have become alternative focal points to the buildings. They act to soften the potentially brutalising effects of the monumental architecture, whose scale they cannot compete with. Between the slab blocks, gardens exist containing specimen trees which have more in common with park trees than street trees – a crucial difference between Churchill Gardens and the Millbank Estate, which has also led to different management practices.

A mature ‘Fastigiata’ hornbeam, one of the more frequent species of Churchill Gardens

Instead of well-pollarded planes, the trees here have been given ample space to attain fine maturity. Notable among the species are goblet-shaped hornbeams of the ‘Fastigiata’ cultivar, and evergreen Chinese tree privets, both neat, medium-sized trees. Elsewhere, a few larger trees like Italian alder, red oak, sycamore, Norway maple, southern catalpa and Japanese pagoda tree rub shoulders with smaller trees including ornamental cherries, magnolias and white mulberries. But perhaps the most exciting trees to look out for are an exceptional example of a southern European nettle tree next to Bramwell House, and a very rare (and poisonous) varnish tree next to Coleridge House.

Flowering magnolia, Churchill Gardens

According to Powell, the architects worked with a former Kew gardener on the landscape planting. As a result, Churchill Gardens is full of fine, well-tended trees that the people who live here are proud of and that help to foster a palpable sense of place and community.

Evergreen Chinese tree privet, Churchill Gardens

Trees have been part of our town and cityscapes for centuries, but their use on streets and among housing is a late nineteenth century innovation. As the first social housing schemes were built, tree planting was considered an essential part of their development. This impulse continued over subsequent decades with a shift away from London plane monocultures to much more diverse planting which, at its best can be akin to parkland or even botanical collections.

The use of trees within planned housing developments arguably reached its zenith in the heroic modernism of the post-war period expanding on new insights, derived from pioneering schemes like the Millbank Estate, into how buildings, people and trees interact. As estates have aged, the trees have too. Now we can reflect on the benefits of living among the trees and appreciate the grandeur they bring to developments through softening and humanising the architecture, while also providing seasonal interest and tangible environmental benefits.

Sources

(1) Percy J Edwards, History of London Street Improvements, 1855-1897 (London County Council, 1898)

(2) Harold Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester University Press, 1966)

Edinburgh’s 1919 Act Housing, Part II: ‘Healthy Houses for the People is the Best Public Health Insurance’

Tags

1920s

I’m delighted to feature the second of two new posts by Steven Robb. Steven also contributed an earlier post providing an overview of Edinburgh’s council housing from 1890 to 1945. He is Deputy Head of Casework for Historic Environment Scotland.  With qualifications in building surveying and urban conservation, he has a particular interest in early and interwar social housing in Edinburgh, and how new housing was incorporated within the historic city.

In last week’s post, I concentrated on the main three 1919 Council estates at Gorgie, Wardie and Northfield.  In this part, I will look at 1919 Act housing built for Leith and Midlothian, which was inherited and taken forward by Edinburgh in 1920.  I will also look at the new homes created from existing buildings, concluding with an assessment of Edinburgh’s approach to the 1919 Act.

Leith and Midlothian

In 1920 Edinburgh absorbed Leith Corporation and several suburban areas within the County of Midlothian, inheriting 1919 Act housing planned by these authorities.

Leith had planned sites for over 200 houses, but by September 1920 had only started three tenements on Ferry Road.  Designed by Leith’s Burgh Architect, George Simpson, and judged to be ‘houses of artistic design’, the initial choice of tenements was rare in 1919 housing.   A further nine houses were built round the corner in Clark Avenue.   

Tenements on Ferry Road

Leith also received, towards the end of 1923, 66 new flats in tenements designed by Campbell. Situated on St Clair Street, off Easter Road, these tenements had two small two-bedroom flats on each landing, and due to Campbell’s space planning and the ‘most rigid economies’ cost only £350 a house, showing how far costs had fallen by this date.

Edinburgh inherited schemes by Midlothian County to build pockets of housing including 48 houses at Longstone, and other modest developments at Corstorphine, Gilmerton and Davidsons Mains. Midlothian engaged the private architect David McCarthy, best known for designing the city’s Veterinarian School. His two storey houses were both plain and small, as Midlothian had argued strongly for the right to build no more than two bedroom houses.   

Reconstruction & Conversion

Scotland’s 1919 Housing Act was not only focused on building new homes; there was also a distinct focus on rehabilitating, or reconstructing, buildings for housing. Edinburgh’s overcrowded and decaying Old Town contained a number of many-storeyed historic tenements, several of which were in very poor condition.

Reconstruction works were led directly by the City’s Housing Director (and City Engineer) Campbell. The projects had become favourable after new provisions within the 1919 Act meant acquiring properties for demolition or reconstruction limited owners’ compensation payments to solely the value of the cleared site.

Intended as a cheaper option than newbuild, in many cases the reconstruction could be undertaken at around half the price of new build, with the subsidy often covering all costs.

Old Town tenements in the Cowgate, High Street, West Port, Dumbiedykes and St James were purchased and reconstructed, often with rear additions removed, to provide around 120 small flats. The  flats in the centre of town were close to jobs and amenities and proved popular with tenants. Sadly, the legislation later changed so that no part of a retained building could be subject to a housing subsidy, to the great harm of the city’s heritage.  Thus, later projects in the interwar period were mainly ‘conservative surgery’ schemes involving selective demolition and rebuilding housing in historicist styles.

Burnet’s Close, early 19th-century tenements refurbished under the Act. It was valued at only £150 and reconstructed at a cost of £2200. Courtesy of Capital Collections

An unusual use of the 1919 Act subsidies was the conversion of former army huts into homes, again at around half the price of permanent new houses. Early in 1920, as part of a nationwide project, a demonstration house was displayed to the public in the centre of St James Square. The hut had been converted to a three bedroom house by the Ministry of Munitions.  It consisted of a timber structure on a brick base, lined and roofed with asbestos with internal concrete walls and was designed to last twenty years. 

The demonstration house was obviously well received, as the Council went on to purchase 52 huts from the Ministry at a cost of £7470.  The Council proceeded to convert these huts into 140 homes which they called ‘bungalows’, but we might alternatively call pre-fabs. They were sited in London Road, Meadowbank and Iona Street off Leith Walk, and included the St James Square example, itself converted into two homes. They were given to applicants, including, appropriately, ‘married ex-servicemen’ who were ‘clamouring’ for houses.

Assessment

The 1919 Housing Act saw Edinburgh (and its recently acquired neighbours) build around 1300 new homes, with another 260 from reconstructed city tenements and converted army huts. The total cost was over £1.5m with over 80 percent of expenditure borne by the State.

Although this fell far short of the 3750 home envisaged, it was abundantly clear the circumstances were not ‘entirely favourable’.  The State had embarked upon the largest country-wide public housing programme ever seen in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic World War.   Dormant building contractors, reduced numbers of skilled tradesmen, and a sudden demand for scarce building materials led to spiralling costs. By the beginning of 1921 labour costs had risen by 300 percent, but the city still struggled to find builders. Joinery, lime and plaster costs had risen by 250 percent, brick costs had doubled and even the cost of carting materials to site had risen by 350 percent. Edinburgh suffered particularly with costs up to 70 percent higher than the Scottish average. As a country, Scotland ended up building around 25,500 houses, only 20 percent of its, admittedly more ambitious, target.

Facing brick in Northfield Crescent – brick prices doubled in the post-war period

Oversight and approval from the Board of Health elongated the process, but the City still hoped for a subsidy extension to allow them to reach their targets (although some questioned whether the targets had been set too high). However, in mid-1921 State expenditure was drastically curtailed with ‘Geddes Axe’ cuts.   

Over time the building market had begun to reach some form of equilibrium, and costs had started falling sharply in 1922.  However, by this date it was forbidden to start new schemes, and expansion of existing schemes was confined to minimum standards to cut costs.  Very sadly, at the point where criticism of expensive housing had ceased to be an issue, the subsidies were withdrawn.

As built Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing provided a specifically tailored version of the garden city ideal, differing from many other Scottish towns and cities by using a mix of cottages, flatted blocks and tenements.  

In Scotland around 63 percent of all 1919 Act housing was within cottages, but Edinburgh’s percentage was closer to half that. Seen by many in the city as an imposed English housing model, cottages were initially used at Wardie and Northfield but their high costs saw them being phased out throughout the life of the Act.

Instead, around half of Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing would be built within flatted blocks, the hybrid between cottage and tenement.  This was far in advance of a Scottish average of only 31 percent.   

Flatted block in Gorgie. Entrances to the upper flats are recessed either side from the front façade

Another Edinburgh anomaly was the use of the tenement, far in advance of a very low Scottish average of 6 percent.  This was especially evident in the latter phases of Gorgie, Northfield and Wardie which all used three-storey tenements.  Edinburgh’s Housing Director had set out his stall as early as March 1921, determining that tenements of ‘up to date design and arrangement’ were the undoubted solution for the ‘poorest and lower middle classes’ in the city, allowing them to live near their workplaces.  They could be ‘provided at less cost and with greater convenience’ than the cottage type of dwelling on the city fringes. 

Less use of cottages also meant smaller flats, with over 65 percnt of Edinburgh’s 1919 homes built with only two bedrooms, with the Scottish average at 57 percent.  Edinburgh had 16 percent of its housing with three bedrooms, well below a Scottish average of 35 percent.  The remaining 20 percent were either one or four bed. Such figures may be considered ungenerous in comparison with the expected accommodation south of the border, but it was supposedly demand-led and still represented a quantum leap from the one- and two-room houses of the overcrowded city centre. 

Stone was Edinburgh’s dominant building material, but it was only used extensively in Gorgie, and sparingly, (but to fine effect) at Northfield.  Gorgie was consistently lauded as an example for stone building well into the interwar period.  Although not unknown in the city, brick was still seen by many as an English material, and, with the exception of a few facing brick blocks at Northfield, was almost always covered in pollution-resilient grey harl.  Edinburgh’s experimentation with unharled concrete blocks at Wardie didn’t pay off.   

Solid stone walling at Northfield

The design of the housing used Arts and Crafts styling with wet dash harling, rubble stonework, natural slate bell-cast roofs and multi-pane sash windows. The layouts were inventive, varied and attractive with generous green infrastructure, including large gardens, grass verges, trees, parks, open spaces and allotments.  

Bell-cast slate roof at Gorgie

So far so good, but the 1919 Act housing was not as transformative as hoped, with only a small dent made in the city’s horrendous overcrowding figures.  Housing the very poorest wasn’t the concern or intention of the 1919 Act, and the Council soon sheepishly admitted the rents being sought set the housing way beyond the reach of many working-class families.  

Although some councillors were keen to impose low rents, others had concerns over the gap between actual and economic rents. In any case they were at the mercy of the Board of Health who insisted on higher rents (upwards of £30pa) to keep subsidies low.  Edinburgh set out to prioritise ex-servicemen with families, but an ability to pay the high rents would arguably become more important than homes for heroes. If paying high rents was not enough, the (then) peripheral locations required additional costs to travel to work and amenities.

So, rather than the Old Town poor, the new estates attracted the aspirant upper working and middle classes.  A glance at the 1925 Valuation Roll for Boswell Avenue, admittedly Wardie’s best street, shows several clerks, engineers, a civil servant, geologist, lecturer, surveyor, engineer, excise officer and a Chief Armourer (me neither?) paying up to £44pa.   Tenements were often allocated to those paying lower rents, but the 1925 Valuation Roll for Northfield shows tenement rents of between £31 to £37 with clerks and civil servants, an accountant, teacher, artist and engineer, besides occupations such as painters, joiners and a warehouseman.

Nos 22-24 Boswall Avenue. In 1925, the two semi-detached cottages were occupied by an apprentice Chartered Accountant and a painter, both paying rents of £38 pa.

An often overlooked part of the Act’s housing were the 120 or so houses achieved through the reconstruction of older buildings (and another 140 through reused army huts). As well as reflecting a strong conservation sensibility within the city, these ‘stitch in time’ conversions saved many of the city’s aged tenements that would otherwise have disappeared. Today we applaud the reuse of these historic buildings, but Campbell, who noted that ‘health was greater than history’, appears to have viewed the work pragmatically, as cheap fixes to give people improved homes as quickly as possible. 

Conscious of the 1919 Act’s failure to house the poor, a few years later a Council memo noted that unless new housing models were developed the:

betterment of the slum dweller is doomed to a further postponement, with consequent ill health, low vitality, loose morals, and criminal habits, which are but part of the penalty we pay for suffering the continuance of slums within the boundary of our city.

Such models would be developed with new housing acts in the 1920s and 1930s, when overcrowding and slum clearance to assist the poorest became a priority, and the private sector were warmly encouraged by the Council to provide general needs housing for the clerks and armourers.  

However, subsidies in the next housing Acts of 1923, and especially 1924, were far less generous, with surplus expenses shouldered by the Council.   In the majority of schemes densities went up and the quality of design went down. By the early 1920s Campbell was arguing for one-bedroom flats of 485 sq ft, well below accepted minimum standards. 

Plain tenements in Prestonfield (1927)

Plain flatted blocks and tenements designed to limited patterns took the place of expensive cottages, which would not be built again in the city until after WW2, notably at The Inch.  Until the early 1930s repetitive estates of facsimile designs would replace the varied architecture and sinuous layouts of the 1919 Act.

Today the three main 1919 Act estates remain popular, with many houses privately owned.  However, Right to Buy wasn’t a recent phenomenon, as 1919 Act provisions had allowed over a hundred council houses to be sold off before the second world war. 

All the estates have suffered to some extent by the scourge of off-street parking, with the removal of boundary hedges and paved-over gardens, sadly and pointlessly eroding their essential greenery and garden suburb character.  This really is unforgivable.

Paved over front gardens on Northfield Drive – a vehicular cul-de-sac

Most sash windows have gone, but the masonry walling and steep natural slate roofs largely remain in good order. Although none of the 1919 estates has yet been designated a conservation area, and only one stone crescent at Northfield is listed, (and deservedly so) there is a general appreciation of their quality, and the generosity of their planning.  Perhaps, now the estates are a century old there may be some moves to recognise their significance as a part of the city’s twentieth century history ?

Conclusion

Scotland’s 1919 Act housing followed a different approach than England, and within the country, Edinburgh pursued its own bespoke path.

The city provided high quality homes within modified garden city layouts with a variety of handsome designs and materials.  In addition, parts of the overcrowded historic city centre were regenerated with the refurbishment of ancient tenements.  

By planning a housing mix that included smaller flats within flatted blocks and tenements, instead of simply concentrating on large peripheral estates of land-hungry cottages, the city limited urban sprawl.  This was part of a strategy, at least in the Act’s later phases, that saw tenements in the ‘inner belt’ of the city as the solution to house the city’s workers close to workplaces and amenities.  Campbell’s approach was followed by his successor EJ MacRae, but where large peripheral estates had to be built, they often floundered.

Above all Campbell believed in prevention rather than cure.  His solution to the acute medical problems present in slum housing was to build ‘healthy houses for the people’.  This, he maintained, was ‘the best Public Health Insurance’. 

The capital suffered unduly from the high costs and labour shortages of the post-war period which sadly limited the numbers of homes built and reconstructed.  It also saw a later dip in quality and space standards, that would accelerate throughout the 1920s with cost cutting and policy changes.

However, although it didn’t solve the city’s overcrowding problems, and their depiction as Paradise is undoubtedly a high bar, a hundred years on much of Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing remains amongst the best social housing the city has ever created. 

Sources

A Grierson (Town Clerk, Edinburgh), ‘Housing Schemes in Edinburgh’ in Thomas Stephenson, Industrial Edinburgh (Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of Trade, 1921)

John Frew, ‘”Homes fit for heroes”: Early Municipal House Building in Edinburgh’, The Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland Journal, no 16, 1989

Town Council Minutes and City Chamberlain’s Reports, Edinburgh City Archives

Scotsman Newspaper Archive

Lou Rosenberg, Scotland’s Homes Fit for Heroes, Garden City influences on the Development of Scottish Working Class Housing, 1900 to 1939 (The Word Bank, 2016)

Edinburgh’s 1919 Act Housing, Part I: ‘Healthy Houses for the People is the Best Public Health Insurance’

Tags

1920s

I’m delighted to feature the first of two new posts by Steven Robb. Steven contributed an earlier post providing an overview of Edinburgh’s council housing from 1890 to 1945. He is Deputy Head of Casework for Historic Environment Scotland.  With qualifications in building surveying and urban conservation, he has a particular interest in early and interwar social housing in Edinburgh, and how new housing was incorporated within the historic city.

Northfield Crescent, a listed crescent of stone tenements

Just over a hundred years ago in October 1920, Edinburgh’s first 1919 Act housing was opened by a proud city councillor.   

In the first of two blogs I will look at Edinburgh’s particular housing issues and the ways in which the city used the Housing (Scotland) Act of 1919 to try and address them. It will then examine the three major housing estates built by Edinburgh Council, which between them provided around 1000 houses. The second part of the blog will look at additional housing provided in the city, and will conclude by assessing Edinburgh’s particular approach to housing under the Act.

The problem

Overcrowding was Scotland’s major housing problem. Edinburgh’s 1911 census found over 110,000 people living in either one- or two-room houses, which represented 41 percent of the city’s housing stock.  Almost 40,000 people were living at least three to a room.

Although Edinburgh’s average density at this period was only around 30 persons per acre, in the most overcrowded districts like the Old Town, it rose well into the hundreds, with homes in tenements and houses ‘made down’, or subdivided, to cram in more tenants.   In one block of eight tenements in St Leonards there were 186 separate homes containing 747 people; a density of 896 persons per acre.

Overcrowding was partly a consequence of Scottish building practice.  Unlike England’s rows of relatively cheap brick terraces, Scotland’s urban workers were housed in stone tenements of three or four storeys.   Such robust construction and stricter building regulations resulted in far higher build costs. 

In addition, land values in Scotland were elevated by the medieval system of land tenure (feu duties), resulting in the UK’s most expensive building land (outside London).  

To maximise returns developers built high density tenements, with their costs recouped by the highest rents outside the English capital. Rents were often paid communally by congested tenants. 

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the private sector found it uneconomic to continue building at affordable rents. To address this market failure, prior to WW1 Edinburgh Council built or reconstructed around 750 houses under legislation, including the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890).   The City Engineer’s new ‘sanitary tenements’ had open deck-access balconies providing light and fresh air to small flats. They were popular and partly responsible for significant improvements in infant mortality and death rates. However, the cost to the Council was excessive, with compensation payments to owners sometimes costing nearly as much as the new housing.

The Rent Restrictions Act (1915), introduced after major rent strikes and civil unrest in Glasgow, together with the anticipated post-war costs of building, meant State intervention in the housing market was both inevitable and desirable.  

The solution?

The Housing (Scotland) 1919 Act looked to address overcrowding and the housing shortage under the ethos of ‘a healthy family in a healthy home’.  Scotland’s specific problems saw a far more ambitious target than England and Wales, to provide 120,000 new homes.

Acknowledging Scotland’s higher building costs, there was a lower Council cap on expenses, at 4/5 of a penny on the rates rather than England’s penny.

The Act incorporated, informally during implementation, a series of recommendations from the 1917 Scottish Royal Commission on Housing (Ballantyne Report), which, along with the Tudor Waters report, acknowledged the different conditions and traditions in Scotland. 

One of these traditions was that Scotland’s houses contained less rooms, with a custom of larger living and kitchen space doubling up as accommodation. The result was that 50 percent (but later increased) of 1919 Act houses were permitted to be the minimum three apartments (living room and two bedrooms), where England and Wales generally looked for three-bed houses. 

Again, recognising traditions, there was a toleration for housing other than cottages, as individual houses on one or two storeys were called.   Flatted blocks (four in a blocks) were acceptable and, although generally discouraged, there was even a place for suitably designed tenements.

The Scottish Act finally gained Royal Assent on 19^th August 1919, but as early as November 1918 the Local Government Board (later Scottish Board of Health) had asked Edinburgh to assess its housing needs. The city responded with plans for 3000 new homes and 750 rehabilitated dwellings, a figure thought feasible within three years, if the ‘circumstances were entirely favourable’.

Edinburgh’s Town Clerk described the Act as being ‘imposed’ on the Council, and although, unlike previous legislation, it did compel action, this time the intention was Councils wouldn’t be left out of pocket, with generous subsidies bridging the difference between the outlay in building costs and rents received.  

Gorgie (386 houses)

The Council had their eye on half a dozen sites within the city but soon settled on Gorgie, where they already owned land.  

In January 1919, 50 acres of semi-rural land adjacent to the City’s Livestock Market were transferred (at £250 per acre) and James Williamson, the City Architect, drew up plans for 660 houses.  In April 1919 the Board of Health found Williamson’s proposals for gently curving streets with individual flatted blocks ‘eminently satisfactory’. These streets enclosed areas of communal allotments and open ground.

Stone flatted block with additional storey on Chesser Avenue

Gorgie’s flatted blocks consisted of four houses under a piended (hipped) roof with a separate entrance to each flat.  They were a hybrid between a cottage and a tenement, and suited a Scottish desire for one-floor-living.  Cheaper than cottages, they could, virtually, be built to a garden city layout, in this case 14 houses to the acre, close to the recommended 12. 

To keep tender costs down the Council’s surveyor recommended estimates for both stone and brick, as some builders were geared up for the former, and a mix of materials might be cheaper. The first tenders for 48 houses came back in June at around £800 a house, with the stone option only 0.5 percent more than the brick.  In order to accentuate the Scottish character of the housing, against the perceived Englishness of brickwork, the housing Committee agreed to use rubble sandstone sourced from nearby Hailes Quarry, adding that ‘Scottish people wanted substantial houses’.  

Stone flatted blocks on Chesser Loan

However, after brick prices fell and cavity walling was permitted, the cost difference increased, and the Board of Health refused to pay the additional subsidies for stone. Despite their earlier support the Council soon conceded that the second phase of Gorgie could be built in brick, which was rendered to cope with Scotland’s weather, and a lack of skilled Scottish facing-brick layers.

Chesser Gardens – a street of rendered brick flatted blocks

Begun in July 1919, Gorgie suffered several delays due to lack of skilled labour, rising material costs and availability, and even a plumbers and joiners strike.  Pegged to costs, the economic rent for a two-bed house would have been around £60-65pa. The Council suggested rents of £25-27pa, but these were soon upped to £31 by the Board of Health.

With the first completions in October 1920, on opening, a councillor noted the houses were ‘commodious inside and artistic outside’ and would ‘compare favourably with any houses being built in England or Scotland’.  Noting the generous gardens in front and allotment ground behind, the councillor added that ‘The City Gardener was preparing creepers for the walls and rambler roses for the gardens.  If these houses were not Paradise, he did not know where they would have to look for such a place’.

In early 1923 the city architect’s second phase to Gorgie was built on Slateford Road. By this date the individual flatted blocks with gardens on curved streets were dispensed with in favour of cheaper tenements built facing the main road.  These three-storey rendered brick tenements provided another 108 two-bed houses. Indeed, the majority of Gorgie’s houses, around 70 percent, were the recommended minimum of two bedrooms, with only 10 percent four bed and the remainder three.

Two-bedroom tenements on Slateford Road

Today the most distinctive Gorgie houses are the first-phase chunky rubble stone flatted blocks on Chesser Avenue, especially those with an additional twin-dormered storey for the few four bed flats. They retain distinctive sweeping slate roofs with swept eaves.  On adjacent streets are a mix of rendered and stone houses with a handful of red sandstone blocks, all with generous gardens.    

Competition

In mid-1919 the City Engineer Adam Horsburgh Campbell became Housing Director, controlling Council housing delivery until he retired in mid-1926.   He insisted on combining this new role with his existing engineering job, and would soon stray into architectural work.

Despite the skills within his Department the City Architect had already been snubbed in April 1919 when the Council agreed to hold an open competition for the remaining housing sites. Early studies like the Tudor Waters Report had advised involving the private sector, and the Council had also been lobbied by the Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (later RIAS).

The competition, open to private Midlothian architects, offered four new sites with firms asked to submit the most economical designs for cottages, flatted blocks and tenements with two, three and four bedrooms at 14 houses per acre. Conditions included limited use of combed (sloping) ceilings, avoidance of rear additions, and minimum room sizes, including living rooms of 180 sq ft, principal bedrooms of 160 sq ft and ceiling heights of 8ft 6 inches (2.6m).  

In August the panel Chairman Sir John Burnet, who had previously judged a 1918 Workers Housing Competition, awarded first prize for all four sites to Edinburgh architects AK Robertson and Thomas Aikman Swan.

However, as it had been previously decided no firm should have more than two schemes each, Robertson & Swan were awarded sites at Wardie and Craigleith. Charles Tweedie was given Saughtonhall, and Fairlie, Reid & Forbes allocated Northfield.

In due course the sites at Craigleith and Saughtonhall were abandoned so sadly Charles Tweedie, second placed in three competitions, got nothing.   Meanwhile, Fairlie, Reid & Forbes, third-placed in only one competition, got one of the two surviving commissions.

Wardie (366 houses)

In April 1919 the Council purchased 73 acres of land occupied by nurseries belonging to the trustees of Major Boswall, at a cost of £250 per acre. The architects, Robertson & Swan, designed a geometric garden city plan with tree-lined streets, open spaces, and cul-de-sacs, built with a mix of cottages, four in a blocks and later a few tenements placed on main roads and closing vistas.  Over 600 trees were planted at a cost of £180.

Tenement ending a vista along Boswall Avenue

At the end of 1920 work began on 360 houses, but the Council only developed the western side, the eastern half being developed privately.

Plan of Wardie. Only the western side was completed under the 1919 Act

Unusually, to combat high brick costs, the houses were built with unrendered concrete blocks, provided by the Unit Construction Company of London. This early use of concrete was purely on cost, the tenders (for £408,246), being £12,000 cheaper than brick. The tender worked out at around £1130 a house, but by March 1921 costs had risen with the first batch of 300 houses coming in at around £1300 each.  The largest four-bed cottages in Wardie would eventually soar to £1600 each, with critics considering them to be worth only £300 once the building boom was over. Their economic rent would have been £100pa but they would be let for, the still substantial, £44pa.

Cottage with original door and windows

Contractors were accused of profiteering, an ugly accusation in the aftermath of World War One, but the system didn’t encourage parsimony.

The letters page of the Scotsman newspaper saw a flurry of taxpayer complaints.  Critics judged Wardie as too remote from trams, schools and shops, whilst the houses were labelled ‘shoddy with small pokey rooms’.  Others even grumbled that the rooms were too small for their furniture.

Having said all this, the housing was popular and would be oversubscribed, with 10,000 initial enquiries for Wardie’s 360 houses, perhaps before the high rents were set.

Scotland’s climate put paid to Wardie’s experimental concrete block housing, and by 1928 all 360 of its increasingly damp houses were roughcast by the Council at a cost of £10,000.

Tree-lined grassed verge in Boswall Avenue

Today the estate is popular, with Boswall Avenue’s tree-lined grass verges perhaps Edinburgh’s best approximation of the garden city ideal.  The houses are in an Arts and Crafts style with natural slate swept hipped roofs and generous garden space.  There is a good variety of designs and mix of house types.

Northfield (322 houses)

In April 1919 the Council agreed to acquire 40 acres of agricultural land from the Duke of Abercorn’s Duddingston estate at £300 per acre. 

In June 1920 the architects Fairlie, Reid & Forbes exhibited their ‘admirable housing scheme’ for 320 houses at the Royal Scottish Academy.   It was thought likely to ‘produce a pleasing and picturesque ensemble upon the rising ground at the base of Arthur’s Seat’.

The firm was specially created for the competition. Reginald Fairlie was a noted Arts and Crafts architect who would later design the National Library, and became a specialist in Roman Catholic churches. George Reid & James Forbes would become Scotland’s foremost interwar school designers.  

The plan is sophisticated, belying its lowly competition place. On the highest point is a large circus ringed by cottages – almost a cul-de-sac – but connected to the other streets by small pedestrian link paths – which bisect the estate. There is a raised pedestrian entry path on the busy Willowbrae Road, planted verges, generous gardens and open spaces.  

Expensive semi-detached cottages on Northfield Circus, a large cul-de-sac with central park

The first tenders, in March 1920 suggested 196 cottages and flatted blocks could be built at an overall cost of £210,000 making a two-bedroom house £950 and a four bedroom house £1100. Again, costs rose quickly. Later estimates saw a four-bed cottage costing between £1360 and £1400.  A Scotsman article judged these ‘phenomenal costs … preposterously and impossibly high’.

Flatted blocks with brick and tile detailing

The cost of these cottages led to later phases of the estate being built in three-storey tenements. Between March 1921 and December 1923 around 130 tenements were built, all with gas for heating and electricity for lighting.    

Stone tenement with communal open ground in front

Details of stone tenements

Northfield’s planning is sophisticated and the housing attractive and hugely varied, both in use of materials from facing brick, rendered brick and stone, to the rarely duplicated house patterns. Fairlie’s Arts and Crafts eye is evident in the stone boundary walls, decorative stone piers and carved timber gateposts, as well as in the stone tenements with relieving arches and brick and tile detailing.  The tenements here served as a prototype for the Council’s later work in the city.

Details of stone wall and timber gateposts

In next week’s post, I’ll look at the council housing schemes inherited by Edinburgh from Leith and Midlothian and offer an overall assessment of Edinburgh’s approach to the 1919 Act.

Sources

A Grierson (Town Clerk, Edinburgh), ‘Housing Schemes in Edinburgh’ in Thomas Stephenson, Industrial Edinburgh (Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of Trade, 1921)

John Frew, ‘”Homes fit for heroes”: Early Municipal House Building in Edinburgh’, The Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland Journal, no 16, 1989

Town Council Minutes and City Chamberlain’s Reports, Edinburgh City Archives

Scotsman Newspaper Archive

Lou Rosenberg, Scotland’s Homes Fit for Heroes, Garden City influences on the Development of Scottish Working Class Housing, 1900 to 1939 (The Word Bank, 2016)

Cottingham’s Council Housing, Part II from 1930: New Forms of Housing Provision

Tags

1930, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Cottingham

I’m very pleased to feature the second post from Peter Claxton on Cottingham. Peter rekindled his love of history at university following his retirement having spent 40 years working in IT. He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. He is currently researching the contentious relationship between private interests and public improvements with regards to health and housing in Kingston upon Hull between 1854 and 1914.

In my previous blog I reviewed the first ‘tentative steps’ made by the Cottingham Urban District Council (UDC) regarding the provision of council housing between 1921 and 1930. In this follow-up blog, I pick up the story in the early 1930s and examine the efforts of the local authority through to the 1960s. It was a time, when for a brief period, provision was undertaken by someone with a national reputation, the village witnesses the creation of the ubiquitous council estate and the local authority ‘strayed away’ from the standard tendering process.

In 1932 with land remaining on the Southwood Estate, for some unexplained reason – possibly hoping to sell yet again at a favourable price – the council purchased land on the north side of the village to erect a further 18 houses. At 1/7d per square yard, it was in fact double the price paid in 1919. Superficial areas were now reduced to 760 and 630 feet super for the three- and two-bedroomed houses. Building again under the 1924 Act, with guidance from TC Slack, Surveyor to the Council, the Park Lane contract was awarded to Robert Greenwood Tarran who at the time was planning his own and subsequently ill-fated garden suburb just to the east of Cottingham.

Robert Tarran

Tarran enjoyed considerable success during the 1930s and 40s, and was known to adopt, when necessary, a somewhat cavalier approach to both business and civic duties. He later became the city’s Sheriff, welcoming the King and Queen to Hull in August 1941 following the heavy bombing raids in May. As Chief Air-Raid Warden, he instigated a personal crusade assisting many of the citizens to ‘trek’ out of Hull each evening to escape the ever-present threat of air-raids. Press exposure and concerns over morale ensured that the early evening movement of citizens out to the countryside, was eventually, placed on a more formal footing.

An advert for Tarran houses in the Hull Daily Mail, 23 August 1934

Tarran houses in Park Lane dating to 1932

Tarran frequently attracted both criticism and publicity in the press. None more so than his company’s involvement as a contractor for the Leeds City Council on the futuristic Quarry Hill flats. Suffice to say that the acrimonious relationships between the parties involved with the build – relating primarily to the pre-fabrication of the blocks with which to cloak the building’s steelwork – extended the project considerably.

Quarry Hill © Leeds Library and Information Service

Yet for Tarran overcoming the on-site casting difficulties proved to be of immense value during the post-war push for prefabricated housing. Under the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, 1944, Tarran Industries manufactured in excess of 19,000 homes. After exhibiting a pre-fabricated house at the Tate in London, he erected, under the public’s gaze, his ‘Experimental House’ close to his works in Hull. The four-day process attracted more than 6000 visitors; a tactic he had previously employed in the city during the 1930s when his company built a pair of wooden ‘Cedar Houses’. A benefit of such a house, according to one of the first residents, was that you could ‘hang a picture without swearing.’ When it came to large-scale speedy production, to some, Tarran was the ‘Henry Ford’ of housing! (1)

Ad advert from the Hull Daily Mail, 1 May 1944

By the middle of the 1930s the council completed the Southwood Estate building 20 dwellings a mix of two and three-bedroomed non-parlour houses under the 1933 Housing Act. It was however a swan-song for the Cottingham UDC, as a reorganisation of local authority areas in March 1935 – the second in seven years – resulted in its demise. The same fate befell the adjacent Hessle UDC, with the provision of housing becoming the responsibility of the newly formed and much larger Haltemprice UDC. In Cottingham between 1918 and 1939, seven percent (86) of the houses had been by local authority provision.

Phase 3 of the Southwood Estate

The post-war push for housing was manifest in the immediacy of the actions taken by the Haltemprice UDC. A swift yet temporary measure was the requisitioning of numerous large houses, becoming ‘makeshift’ accommodation for multiple occupancy. On a similar tack, former Ministry of Defence Nissen and Maycrete huts in the district were acquired and converted into temporary housing. One such site close to Cottingham had previously served as a National Services Hostel housing refugees from the Netherlands.

The shortage of accommodation was further tempered by the allocation of 30 AW Hawksley prefabricated aluminium bungalows, the first one completed was opened by Mr Thomas Williams, Minister of Agriculture Fisheries and Food. in 1949. It is interesting to note that with a unit price of approximately £1450, taking a £600 subsidy plus Exchequer grant into account, at just over £2 per foot super, the temporary aluminium bungalows were close to twice the target build price of conventional permanent housing.

AW Hawksley Aluminium Bungalows in Letchworth © Simon Trew and made available by a Creative Commons licence

Thomas Williams, later Baron Williams of Barnburgh; public domain

1960s permanent council housing replacing Hawksley bungalows

The provision of permanent local authority housing from 1946 onwards was achieved in a number of ways, represented today in the form of the Bacon Garth Estate plus a number of smaller ad hoc developments around the village. The post-war estate is now the usual mix of privately owned properties purchased under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, and those that remain within the remit of the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council. Irrespective of the modifications made to many of those properties now privately owned, the estate continues to confirm central government’s post-war intentions of equitable housing for the masses.

Bacon Garth Estate, the Parkway

The construction of the estate at the southern edge of the village, continued on an ‘as the needs dictate’ basis for more than 20 years, and now reflects the changing form of local authority provision. In 1946 the Ministry of Health requested that a minimum of four designs be adopted to avoid monotony and further insisted that a maximum build price of 22/3d per foot super be negotiated, the achievement of which regularly exacerbated the relationships between local authority, contractors and ministry. On one occasion an additional 2d per foot super was deemed unacceptable. Still with a preponderance of agricultural workers in the area – following instructions from the Ministry of Health – a number of horticulturalists were the first to be allocated permanent houses.

1949 Agricultural workers’ houses, Bacon Garth Estate

As an alternative to the standard practice of closed tenders – with contracts invariably awarded to the company with the cheapest quote – used during each phase of construction of the estate, to something a little less formal, the results could be markedly different. On several occasions the council used the Small Builders’ Scheme (SBS), the origins of which were based around a submission to the Ministry of Health by the building trade. Comprising of two parts, the first enabled local authorities to employ a builder to erect houses on his own plot(s) of land and purchase upon completion. The second part empowered councils to provide the land on which properties could be constructed on its behalf.

Using both options, the Haltemprice UDC acquired small clusters of properties around the village. Catering for the building of dwellings of a minimum 900 foot super, at prices that did not exceed those in tenders for comparable properties, there was also flexibility over design. Thus with options to negotiate a build price prior to construction, or purchase price post-construction, councils were well-positioned to procure limited numbers of houses that mirrored private provision. I suspect that today, there are very few, if any Cottingham residents mindful of the origins of these small assemblages.

A good example of the SBS is in evidence at the Hull-Cottingham boundary. Across three phases 52 houses were built along one of the arterial roads from Hull into Cottingham. A variety of designs successfully avoided the monotony so often the case along our main roads. 

Hull Road Cottingham, built 1948 under the Small Builders’ Scheme

Small Builders’ Scheme, looking towards Cottingham

When the opportunity arose in 1947, the council purchased 20 houses close to the centre of the village on the newly built Westfield Estate. And in so doing created an enclave of local authority housing amid those offered for sale. But as the saying goes, ‘beauty is only skin deep’, and one can only hazard a guess as to whether or not the internal finish of houses purchased under the SBS always matched their external appearance.

An incident on the Westfield Estate suggests that sometimes this might not be the case. The baths in all 20 houses were found to be defective and had to be replaced by the council. On this occasion, purchasing post-construction, proved problematical. Efforts to maximise profit margins was often reflected in the internal finish of houses built for sale compared to those built for local authorities through the tendering process and subject to scrutiny during the build cycle.

Westfield Close, built under the Small Builders’ Scheme in 1947

However, by way of comparison, some of the early Bacon Garth Estate houses clearly lacked kerb appeal. Fortunately, they bear little resemblance to the rest of the estate. One wonders what the architect involved with these houses was thinking of when he sat at his desk and came up with the following!

The Garth

However, they did benefit internally from a ‘woman’s touch’. Co-opted lady members were asked to advise on the types of fittings necessary to make the houses more homely. Sadly, the opportunity offered to the ladies was somewhat restricted as they were denied complete freedom to express their opinions regarding ‘all matters domestic’. Oddly, cooking ranges remained the remit of male committee members. A Yorkist type range – Wilsons & Mathiesons or equal not weighing less than 4.5 cwt – had to be fitted!

An advert for Wilsons and Mathiesons Ltd Yorkist range, 1938 © Grace’s Guide

Unusually, when the first estate houses were built, the decision was taken not to erect fencing and gates to the front gardens. It was thought prudent to retain direct responsibility for the appearance of the house-fronts rather than rely on residents whose horticultural ambitions, based on previous experiences, appeared to fall well-short of the council’s expectations.

The provision of local authority housing in Cottingham continued well in to the 1960s. From those rather utilitarian dwellings of the interwar period, to a variety of post-1945 styles that catered for and reflected the needs of differing family sizes and age range. The village was spared any pre-cast ‘bolt and hope’ concrete tower blocks, the medieval church clock tower remaining the tallest structure. Those that fancied living in the clouds could gaze wistfully across the fields to the high-rise developments on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate. All now reduced to hardcore and probably finding a second use as foundations for garage floors.

Yes of course the provision of approximately 500 houses over four decades pales into insignificance when compared to the provision in many of our towns and cities during the twentieth century. But spare a thought for those small urban and rural district councils with limited human resources that were suddenly thrust into the roles of both builder and landlord a hundred years ago. What stories are still to be told?

Sources

(1) ‘Here’s a Real Housebuilder’, Daily Mirror, 25 January 1943  

Cottingham’s Council Housing, Part I to 1930: ‘Simple and Harmonious as a Whole’

Tags

1920s, Cottingham

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two posts from Peter Claxton on housing in the village of Cottingham just north of Hull. Peter rekindled his love of history at university following his retirement having spent 40 years working in IT. He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. He is currently researching the contentious relationship between private interests and public improvements with regards to health and housing in Kingston upon Hull between 1854 and 1914.

Much has been written about the provision of local authority housing in our towns and cities but we should not overlook the fact that of the 1806 local authorities questioned by the Local Government Board in 1918 regarding their housing requirements, many were small urban or lightly populated rural district councils. (1) 

With a population of 5133 in 1921, Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was one such urban district council (UDC). Today, in part, it butts up to the city of Kingston upon Hull, but at the start of the nineteenth century with just 1927 residents it was one of a number of satellite villages that semi-circled the then port town.

Cottingham, circa 1905

Situated just five miles to the northwest of Hull, by the end of the eighteenth century it had acquired a reputation as an ideal place for the ‘well-heeled’ to relocate to and in so doing build their grand houses and lay-out ornamental gardens.

Elmtree House, built around 1820

Newgate House, built in the late 19th/early 19th century

The arrival of the railway in 1846 accelerated this process, with a number of villas and terraces built to house the emerging middle class. Yet there was a problem for all those that relocated. Keen as they were to escape the pervasive smells of Hull’s multifarious processing industries, distance offered them no such guarantee.

With market gardening Cottingham’s primary economic activity – there were 71 nurserymen in and around the village just before WW1 supplying the markets of both Hull and Leeds – the  daily transhipment of night soil from Hull to the fields around the village ensured that no matter how wealthy or upwardly mobile the incomers were, they could never completely leave their pasts behind them!

Low agricultural wages stifled the ambitions of many village residents, yet the desire for improved housing, just like the inhabitants of its much larger neighbour clearly existed. The reduced number made it of no less importance, it was simply a matter of scale. The village was unaccustomed to change, and in general, the UDC – set up under the 1894 Local Government Act consisted of just 12 members – busied itself approving the erection of private dwellings, undertaking nuisance control measures, tarring the roads and maintaining the street lighting.

As elsewhere, following cessation of hostilities in 1918, there was evidence of change. The laying out of new streets extended the built-up area far beyond the village’s traditional nucleus. (2) And as with the vacating of large properties in Hull during the nineteenth century in favour of Cottingham, the same fate now befell a number of those former imposing residences in the village. The vacant properties complete with their large gardens together with numerous unworked smallholdings in and around the village became ideal plots for local builders. Between 1918 and 1939, 1237 houses were built in Cottingham by 95 builders.

In 1918 when it came to the crunch, Cottingham UDC like so many other local authorities, had no experience of building or renting out houses. Enthusiasm could only achieve so much, which in the case of Cottingham, amounted to the purchase of 9.5 acres in April 1919 of the Westfield Estate at the fashionable west end of the village from Archdeacon J Malet Lambert. Viewed by many as a local philanthropist, he also had something of chequered past.

He was however a former and influential member of the Hull & District Sanitary Association, that had continually questioned the efficacy of Hull’s Local Board of Health, pressing for improvements to housing and sanitation within the Borough. So effective were its methods that a Local Government Board enquiry took place in 1888, subsequently making a number of recommendations for the sanitary improvement of the town.(3) Yet Malet Lambert’s philanthropy had limitations, originally offered £125 per acre, he refused to settle for anything less than £200. (4)

Purchasing a piece of land is one thing, populating it with houses is a different matter entirely. The appointment of Hull architect Harry Andrews on a project-only basis was a sound first move by the council. The first phase was for the provision of a modest 50 houses, yet this relatively small number, would in no way be the guarantee to a trouble-free build. Tenders approaching £10,000 for street works and sewerage had an immediate impact on the project. To reduce the civil costs the architect modified the lay-out of the houses positioning them all adjacent to the main road. Costs were trimmed but so was the number of houses, now down to 36. Built by Hull firm Holliday & Barker, they took the form of a single meandering row of 18 pairs of semi-detached houses.

Yet according to a local newspaper, the 12 parlour and 24 non-parlour three bedroomed houses were reported to be: (5)

One of the finest sites in the district, it has been developed to allow the erection of 98 houses, only 16 of which will have a northerly aspect … while somewhat severe in appearance in conformity with the Ministry of Health’s instructions, are exceedingly simple and harmonious as a whole …

Simple and severe certainly, but in no way were they harmonious, not according to many of the locals whose abhorrence towards the stark appearance of the dwellings, had two weeks earlier, prompted an irksome response from a council member who retorted: (6)

There was a most extraordinary and widespread misconception in Cottingham … The people seem to think the council were entirely responsible for the architecture of the houses which had been put up, and for the quality of materials used. This was not so. They had been entirely over-ruled by the authorities at Leeds.

The Southwood Estate, featured in the Hull Daily Mail, 27 October 1921

This was a direct reference to the Leeds-based Regional Housing Commissioner of the Ministry of Health and Housing who held sway over all matters relating to the provision of local authority housing in Yorkshire under the terms of the Housing & Town Planning Act, 1919.

First impressions clearly mattered, and for some of the class-conscious residents at the west end of the village, their dissatisfaction was all too apparent. The first ‘council houses’ were not detached from the village as in many large conurbations where those re-housed would be beyond the tram terminus or omnibus service, and therefore out of sight and out of mind. This was simply an extension to the western end of the village and therefore contiguous to existing properties. Snobocracy appeared to be alive and well in Cottingham and the neighbours were clearly not happy!

Southwood Villa © Bernard Sharp and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Southwood Hall © George Robinson and made available through a Creative Commons licence

No one in the village could question the need for additional housing, it was simply a matter of predetermined expectations. Inside each house the council had dutifully considered the needs of the soon-to-be tenants. All featured hot and cold water, cupboards, a space for a cycle or perambulator and the fitting of a tiled fireplace, and not just a cast iron mantlepiece. The metal window frames – cheaper and more readily available than wooden ones at the time – included a pivot mechanism on the upstairs frames that facilitated easy cleaning of the glazing. In addition the parlour houses had a window to the side to throw light over the shoulder of anyone sitting reading by the fire.

Yet these features did little to assuage the feelings of the neighbours, whose distain was based solely on the external appearance of the dwellings. Through the use of poor-quality commons and their box-like appearance, the houses were deemed to be an incongruous addition to the village. In an attempt to mollify dissenting voices, the council adopted a course of action which at the time was an earnest attempt to remedy the situation. The solution to the dilemma was to hide the brickwork. Each house was to be covered with a roughcast and colour-washed white with Tungaline paint.

An advert for William Jacks & Co Paints © The Priya Paul Collection, Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

And to further improve matters, the exteriors were to be enhanced by the tasteful application of a contrasting dark brown gloss paint to the woodwork!

Southwood Estate houses facing south

Southwood Estate houses facing east

For a time, all was well until the gradual and increasing appearance of brown blemishes to the white-washed walls. To the council’s horror, it was discovered that ironstone chippings constituted part of the roughcast mix and rust had started to leech through to the surface resulting in the mottled finish.

Continuing evidence of rusting

Yet again with good intentions and financial ramifications, the council attempted to remedy the situation by the removal and re-application of the roughcast. Unfortunately the remedial work was not carried out to an exacting standard and the problem is visible to this day. Recently applied external insulation masks the rusting on those properties still part of the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council housing portfolio.

The generous proportions of the ‘Addison Houses’ and high build costs were reflected in the weekly rents. Many early tenants were employed in local agriculture, and at the time of construction, the first cut of what by 1923 amounted to an overall 35 percent reduction in agricultural wages had taken place. (7)  With wages reduced to 24 shillings per week by 1923 there was little wonder that many tenants fell into rent arrears within the first 12 months of occupancy. An appeal to the Ministry of Health secured a reduction of 1/6d per week for each type of house. But with weekly rents of 11/6d or 9/6d excluding rates, it was still necessary for distraint warrants to be issued against persistent defaulters.(8)

High maintenance costs and difficulties with the collection of rents impaired the council’s judgement regarding further housing provision. Finding the whole experience exceedingly troublesome, it had within a matter of 18 months placed on record that an offer for the remaining land it held lay on the table. At 2/6d per square yard (£605 per acre) some three times the price paid in 1919, it proved too tempting an offer. Parcels of land were duly sold to private developers including the North Eastern Railway Cottage Homes. For the remainder of the decade, the council restricted activity to the authorisation of subsidies to private builders under the terms of the 1923 Housing Act. By the end of the decade, 30 ‘subsidy houses’ had been built in the village.

Reticence towards further provision was of course futile. At the start of the 1930s, a modest 12 houses were built on one of the remaining parcels of land. Gone were the generous terms offered in 1919, replaced by the more circumspect grants of the 1924 Housing Act. With a long memory and a Yorkshireman’s vice-like grip of the purse strings, the council did not repeat the mistakes of old. Tucked away behind the rusting white-washed ribbon development, variations in design improved the prospect of the new houses. Yet again commons were the order of the day but thankfully, the temptation to apply a roughcast finish had been resisted.

Phase 2 facing the NER Railway Cottage Homes

NER Cottage Homes

For the council – with still a little land in reserve – it was now a time for reflection. Builders were ‘ramping-up’ private provision locally and those who had ‘Dunroamin’ settled down at ‘Mon Repos’ and ‘Chez Nous’. (9) But, as a follow-up blog will suggest, even in a relatively quiet village things never stay the same for very long.

Sources

(1) Stephen Merrett, State Housing in Britain (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Cottingham UDC was one of the 400 authorities that had replied to the LGB by December 1918

(2) KJ Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars: the example of Cottingham’, East Yorkshire Local History Society, Bulletin, No. 55, Winter 1996/7

(3) During this period the town was often referred to (in print) as ‘Squalid Hull’.

(4)  From the minutes of Cottingham UDC, 2 April 1919, East Riding Archives

(5) ‘Cottingham Housing Scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 27 October 1921  

(6) ‘Cottingham’s New Houses’, Hull Daily Mail, 13 October 1921

(7) Martin Pugh, We Danced all Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (Bodley Head, 2008)

(8) ‘Cottingham Council Houses, Distraint Warrants Issued for Unpaid Rents’, Hull Daily Mail, 9 August 1923   

(9) Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars …’

The Role of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee: ‘Homes Fit for Heroines’

I’m delighted to feature today the second of two guest posts by Lynne Dixon examining the work of some of our early female housing campaigners and reformers. Lynne has a background in historical geography, town planning, the environment and education. Over the last few years she has been researching and writing about different aspects of woman’s history and local history. Her interest in women and housing in the early years of the nineteenth century has evolved from a U3A shared learning project on the origins of the organisation Women’s Pioneer Housing.  She has contributed to blogs on women in World War 1 and extensively on the Well Hall Estate and is currently writing a book on a woman architect/builder, Annabel Dott. 

Having outlined one mechanism through which women hoped to influence first rural and then urban housing at local levels in the post-war period in my earlier blog, this contribution deals with a group of women who could have had a more significant influence on housing at a national level: the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee (WHSC) of the Ministry of Reconstruction.

The recent centenaries for the women’s suffrage movement and World War One have ensured that we now know more than before about some aspects of women’s history for this period but there is still much more to know about women’s involvement in public life at this time. Many women were working for social change, not least in the field of housing, both during and then after (and indeed often before) the war.  The achievements of Florence Hamilton in my previous blog are just one example.  In parallel were the efforts of a group of women who were given the opportunity to influence at a national level the design of state houses – the ‘homes fit for heroes’ or, as more aptly named by Caroline Rowan, ‘homes fit for heroines’. (1)

The origins of the WHSC lie with the Ministry of Reconstruction which was established in 1917 to oversee the rebuilding of national life for the better at the end of the war. It established many committees each on different aspects of national life. The Minister of Reconstruction was the radically minded Dr Christopher Addison, later to be responsible for the 1919 Housing Act.  When the WHSC was being established it was said that, ‘it had been represented to us, both by societies and individuals, that women should be consulted about the construction of the new houses after the war’. (2)

The committee’s official purpose was to comment on the design of the working-class houses already built with public money and on plans put to the architects’ committee for future homes. They were to give special reference to the saving of labour for the housewife – very much a concern of the moment – and the convenience and well-being of the family generally. In other words, they were to offer a perspective on house design from the point of view of the housewife. Following the publication of the interim report the women were also asked to report on the conversion of middle-class houses into tenements for the working class. (3) 

The cover of the 1912 Fabian pamphlet on which Round About a Pound a Week was based

Membership of the WHSC included women from a range of backgrounds. Three women would already have been known to government through the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Women’s Advisory Committee: Lady Gertrude Emmott, Maud Pember Reeves and Dr Marion Phillips; the latter two also well-known for their previous work which included the publication, Round About a Pound a Week, a study of the spending of poor housewives in Lambeth. 

Gertrude Emmott was appointed ‘chairman’ and as such it is likely that she was able to help select other committee members.  She was a woman with a liberal and nonconformist background who had been involved in social and political work in the north-west of England, was a friend of Henrietta Barnett and had developed an interest in housing. The women she was perhaps influential in selecting had backgrounds in the garden city movement and town planning (Sybella Brandford, Ethel Lloyd and Mary D Jones); housing management (Maud M Jeffery, Annette Churton, Dr Janet Lane Claypon, Gerda Guy, Dorothy Peel); while others were politically active in the Labour Party or the Cooperative movement (Eleanor Barton, Rosalind Moore, Averil Sanderson Furniss, Alice Jarrett and Annie Foulkes Smith). 

Women had, of course, been involved in housing, town planning and architecture for some time as professionals – Octavia Hill in housing management from the 1880s; Ethel Charles, the first woman to pass the RIBA exams in 1898; the women sanitary inspectors who were involved in aspects of public health in housing; women such as Henrietta Barnett, a key mover in the garden city movement. Most recently in October 1917 one organisation, the Women’s Labour League, had started a housing campaign aimed at working class women and led by Averil Sanderson Furniss and Marion Phillips.  The work they did was to influence the work of the committee and may even have overlapped in time and content. (4)

Gertrude Emmott and Averil Sanderson Furniss

The committee and its two women secretaries first met in February 1918 and their work over the next few months was phenomenal.  As well as the focus on labour saving for the housewife, they were determined to seek out the views of working women.  A key part of their work was visiting working-class houses across the country with a standard set of twenty questions about each property – internal arrangements, room size, built-in features, rent, natural light and air, etc.  The first estate they visited was the Duchy of Cornwall’s housing estate in Kennington. 

A contemporary image of Courtenay Square, part of the Duchy of Cornwall’s housing estate in Kennington

In March 1918 they visited houses on the Well Hall Estate built for the munition workers of the Woolwich Arsenal. Averil Sanderson Furniss was one of those who visited the estate.  She commented on the headed paper of the National Women’s Labour League in a letter to Miss Leach the secretary of the committee: (5)

I think my main objections to the houses was that in practically all cases the windows were not large enough and did not give enough light.  I think they should have been higher in the bedrooms and lower in the sitting rooms allowing in the latter case for a window seat which would have much improved the rooms. Also I do not think that the baths in the scullery are good and if they must be downstairs which I recognise has to be the case in some instances they should be in a separate room.  In many cases I noticed that the bath was in a different corner of the room to the copper which must surely be most inconvenient when every drop of water has to be baled out of the copper into the bath.

This copper and bath in a home in the Cadburys’ model village of Bournville, c1905, addressed some of the problems addressed by women housing reformers but retained both in a downstairs scullery.

This theme of the covered bath in the scullery featured in the final report: 

Problems arose from ‘the practice of having the bath in the scullery with flap table over it … [which] meant that the housewife must clear everything from it before the bath could be used’ and prevented further use of the scullery for food preparation during bath times.’  The women were adamant that there should be a separate bathroom.  

Averil Sanderson Furniss continued in her letter, ‘these I think were two main points but I wish we could have had Mrs Barton with us as her practical experience would have been far more valuable.’

As a northerner and with her practical knowledge as a working-class woman, Eleanor Barton was clearly a significant member of the committee whose experience was highly valued; most of the other women in contrast were middle class.

An original ground floor plan of a home on the Well Hall Estate, reproduced with the permission of the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust

An early image of Lovelace Green on the Well Hall Estate

A further aspect of their work was to seek the views of both individual women and of organisations and one of the National Archive files contains many of these letters – usually handwritten but sometimes typed and some including diagrams to illustrate points being made – from across the country. (6)

The Sub-Committee had advertised in newspapers for women’s views and as a result local organisations had held meetings and conferences and competitions to gather opinions to pass on to the Sub-Committee and so responses came from a wide range of organisation such as the Derby Women’s Citizen Association; the Sutton Sisterhood; Flowers Farm War Gardens Association; the National Union of Women Workers, Howard St Club, Sheffield; the West Surrey Society; and the Women’s Votes Association of New Earswick. The Sub-Committee’s approach in doing this may be contrasted with the Tudor Walters Committee who, remaining in one place, saw a 127 witnesses only fifteen of whom were women. Their approach was surely innovative: an early example of public consultation. (7)

A sketch plan of a suggested layout for a workman’s house, hand copied from the National Archives original

The needs raised in the letters were wide-ranging – plenty of light in all rooms; simplicity in the joinery; special attention to housing large families, the aged and the poor; a sink in the scullery 14 inches deep; well protected water pipes to prevent freezing; minimum size of living room 15ft by 12ft; fixed cupboards in every room. 

It is not at all clear how the women of the committee, or more likely the two dedicated secretaries, processed the hundreds of comments received and data accumulated.  Within a few months, their work resulted in a lengthy interim report dated May 1918.  Two parts of the report were not published including comments that the women had made – uninvited – on the proposals of the Local Government Board (LGB). (8)  

The final report was finished a few months later in January 1919.  However, these final findings were also heavily suppressed resulting in another delayed publication.  The relationships between the LGB, the Ministry of Reconstruction and perhaps Addison himself were delicate.  There seem to have been divisions within the government of which these were part. (9)

In the end the Final Report was in effect overshadowed by the report of the Tudor Walters Committee which had been published in December 1918. (10) The LGB found the women’s findings ‘extravagant’ and treated with particular disdain the work the women had done on communal facilities.  Nevertheless, there was much in their work that was in agreement with the Tudor Walters conclusions and it was perhaps mainly in emphasis – what was seen as essential and what as desirable – that there were differences.  It is interesting to note that the only line of communication between the two committees had been informally via the secretary of the Tudor Walters Committee although four members of the WHSC did give evidence to the Tudor Walters Committee.

Central to the women’s findings, published or not, was the idea of the kitchen and the scullery as the workshop of the home where all hard and dirty work was done.  In most homes the internal layout of both these rooms was poor, with the consequence that endless short journeys were required for each simple task. Cooking a meal involved transferring food from inadequate storage facilities to a preparation area and then back to the cooker, with little ease of movement.  Analysing women’s work in the home was crucial to designing for labour saving.  In this there was no question that housework should be shared between husband and wife.  It was believed, even by those forward-thinking women who had campaigned for the vote, that housework was women’s work.  However, their time needed to be freed up so that they could be active citizens.

A majority of the women giving evidence to the Sub-Committee wanted a parlour in their homes, although they differed as to why it might be needed. In some districts, investigators found that the wish for a parlour was connected to customs surrounding death. At a time when most people died at home, death could raise practical challenges in small, badly designed and overcrowded houses. Housewives in Camberwell in contrast wanted parlours for their husbands ‘because there should always be somewhere for “him” to go and sit to rest himself’. 

This early image shows a working-class parlour on the London County Council’s Dover House Estate, one of the finest estates built under the 1919 Housing Act

Many mothers felt that the parlour was most needed when their eldest children wanted to bring friends home, or when it offered young courting couples a location ‘preferable … [to] the street corners or public house’.  The parlour may also have had a symbolic value, a status, which was important to many women.

In short, the women giving their views tended not to claim a parlour for themselves, but saw it as a way of providing a more pleasant environment for other members of the family. In contrast, the women writing the interim report promoted the idea that a parlour should provide an area for a woman who needed space for intellectual work, or work connected with her new role as a citizen. (11)

If officially sidelined, the report was at least appreciated by some.  As well as positive comments in the suffrage press, a critique of the report in The Town Planning Review commended that the report be read by ‘every architect designing houses and every member of a housing committee studying schemes’.

It is difficult to say exactly how much influence women had on national housing policy at this time because of the way their report was dealt with by the government. One writer has concluded that although they were able to form and even publish recommendations for national policy this in itself did not give them the power of decision making.  Their conclusions might be accepted as advice and were of particular use if they reinforced existing policy or official recommendations. (12)

Innovative or more challenging ideas were ignored. However, it is certainly possible to suggest that their involvement had other more enduring effects especially as they were part of a wider picture of women’s increasing involvement in housing provision and design. Some of this involvement was about guidance, advice and campaigning; some of it was to be a more active involvement. 

In 1919, Averil Sanderson Furniss and Marion Phillips published The Working Woman’s House, a short booklet illustrated with plans and photographs.  The report could be more explicit than the report of the Sub-Committee in linking labour saving to citizenship. They were able to link the traditional view that the home was a ‘woman’s place’ with the recent call by Prime Minister Lloyd George’s for new houses ‘fit for heroes to live in’. Phillips and Sanderson Furniss suggested that post-war reconstruction offered an opportunity for these two positions to be combined so that it should be possible for a woman to want her house to be: (13)

fit for a hero to live in and also wants to free her from the hard domestic work which is the result of the bad housing conditions and has prevented her from taking her full share of work as a citizen, wife and mother.  

The cover of The Working Woman’s House

In April 1919 the LGB, not long before its demise, set up the Housing Advisory Council to provide advice on housing policy.  Eleanor Barton, Averil Sanderson Furniss and Gertrude Emmott from the WHSC were included among its members.  When the board was abolished in June of that year, the Advisory Council seems to have continued in some form or another although it is clear that some women felt frustrated at its role and at the long delay in organising meetings.

One organisation which supported the role of women in influencing housing design was the Garden and Town Planning Association which had a short-lived women’s section run by Etheldred Browning. It produced a number of reports full of advice, one devoted to labour saving in the home, and it was also involved in commenting in late summer 1920 on public housing built by the Ministry of Health. Not surprisingly it was particularly critical of the lack of parlours, the small and badly shaped sculleries, the small third bedroom – ongoing themes.  They strongly recommended that before house plans were finally approved they should be submitted for criticism to a committee of women. (14)  

At a broader level, the legacy of the women’s suffrage movement seems to have been the continued proliferation of small organisations promoting women’s viewpoint and their desire to be involved in decision making. The involvement of women in housing was a part of this bigger picture.  For instance, housing was an issue for the Consultative Committee of Women’s Organisations which was established in 1921 and had a housing subcommittee for a number of years. (15)    

There were in the 1920s and 1930s a number of housing conferences and congresses organised by women or dealing with women and housing.  An international one was organised, for instance, by the National Housing and Town Planning Council in April 1924.  In these and other ways, women would continue to try to influence housing policy and design throughout the interwar period.

I think it is impossible to tell for certain if women had more influence nationally or locally.  It is possible that there was more likelihood for them to influence housing at the local level where they had some opportunities to make recommendations about internal arrangements and facilities. (16) There are a number of different references to promises for women to be involved in this way and to mechanisms whereby this could happen. 

In February 1919 The Times pointed out that the President of the LGB had promised that representatives of working woman should be consulted on municipal housing schemes and this eventually seems to have been enacted in the circular issued in December 1919 – just a few months after the Ministry of Health had taken over responsibility for housing from the LGB.  At this point Christopher Addison, the newly appointed minister, appears to have encouraged the involvement of many local women’s organisations in commenting on the design of housing schemes. Amongst these would be the already established Women’s Village Councils. There is research to be done at local levels to establish just how much influence these women went on to have and undoubtedly more to be found out about the role of women in housing generally and state housing in particular at a national level as the 1920s and 1930s progressed.

Unlike the Women’s Village Council movement, the work of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee has become somewhat more visible in recent years.  As well as original research using archives and online research in newspapers, I have therefore been able to draw on the research of academics such as Krista Cowman, Elaine Harrison and Lynn Pearson who have written specifically about the role of women in housing or in government at this time, as well as the broader texts of writers like Mark Swenarton in Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 1900 – 1930.

lynne.dixon@cantab.net

Sources

(1) Caroline Rowan, ‘Women in the Labour Party, 1906-1920’, Feminist Review, no 12, 1982, pp74-91

(2) The National Archives (TNA), RECO 1/618. IV. 7374, p1, quoted in Calum W White, “‘The foundations of the national glory are in the homes of the people”: the Addison Act, the First World War, and British housing policy’, University of Oxford PhD Thesis, 2018

(3) Krista Cowman, untitled paper.  She has also written ‘”From the housewife’s point of view”: Female Citizenship and the Gendered Domestic Interior in Post-First World War Britain 1918-1928’, English Historical Review, vol 130, no 543, April 2015, pp352–383 

(4) See, for instance, Christine Collette, For Labour and for Women: the Women’s Labour League 1906 – 1918 (Manchester University Press, 1989)

(5) This and the following quotations are drawn from TNA, RECO 1/622

(6) TNA, RECO 1/633

(7) Alongside the listed witnesses are the names of two all-male deputations and a further 61 experts, again all male.

(8) The Interim Report is available online.

(9) Mark Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 1900-1930 (IHS BRE Press, 2008)

(10) ) ‘The Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider Questions of Building Construction in Connection with the Provision of Dwellings for the Working Classes’ (The Tudor Walters Report, Cd 9191), 1918

(11) Krista Cowman, untitled paper

(12) Lynn Pearson and Patricia White, Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living (Springer, 1988)

(13) AD Sanderson Furniss and Marion Phillips,  

(14) Etheldred Browning ‘Women and House Planning: a Protest to the Ministry of Health’, The Women’s Leader, 3 November 1920.  Etheldred Browning also established Women’s Pioneer Housing in 1920 to provide housing for professional women. She later invited Florence Hamilton of the Women’s Village Council Federation to join its committee. Florence felt she could achieve more on the National Town Planning and Housing Council.

(15) ME Blyth ‘The Women’s Housing Movement: Housing Councils’, The Common Cause, 28 September 1923 

(16) Krista Cowman, untitled paper

‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’: Women’s Influence on State Housing in the Era of World War 1 and After

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1920s

I’m delighted to feature today the first of two guest posts by Lynne Dixon examining the work of some of our early female housing campaigners and reformers. Lynne has a background in historical geography, town planning, the environment and education. Over the last few years she has been researching and writing about different aspects of women’s history and local history. Her interest in women and housing in the early years of the nineteenth century has evolved from a U3A shared learning project on the origins of the organisation Women’s Pioneer Housing.  She has contributed to blogs on women in World War 1 and extensively on the Well Hall Estate and is currently writing a book on a woman architect/builder, Annabel Dott. 

The words of Blake which I have chosen as part of the title are more usually associated with the Last Night of the Proms or perhaps with the Women’s Institute.  What they represent for me is the determination of women to be involved in the design of state housing a century ago.  The words and music were first used by women at an event promoting the National Service for Women scheme in March 1917 and were then chosen by Florence Hamilton to represent the spirit and purpose of her Women’s Village Council movement in 1917.  The strapline first appeared in her article in The Common Cause in November of that year.

The role of the influential Tudor Walters Report of 1918 has been mentioned several times in contributions on this site.  The committee which prepared it was established to assist in dealing with the shortage of housing which was seen as a cause of industrial unrest during 1917. It was swiftly appointed following the announcement in July 1917 of the Local Government Board’s housing scheme and its resultant report laid down guidance on ‘building construction in connection with the provision of dwellings for the working classes’. (1) 

What is perhaps less well known is the role of women in discussing housing design throughout this wartime and post-war period.  This included their participation in contributions to the Tudor Walters report; their attempts to influence the quality and quantity of publicly funded housing, often in rural areas at a local level; and the report of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee (WHSC).  The recommendations of this latter’s report were ultimately eclipsed by the relatively more pragmatic and politically acceptable report of the fifteen-strong, all-male committee led by Sir John Tudor Walters.  In this blog, I will discuss women’s attempts to influence publicly funded housing at local levels and in a second contribution I will outline the role of the WHSC in more detail.

The Tudor Walters Report received evidence from 127 named witnesses of whom only fifteen were women.  A number of these women were linked to key organisations such as the Women’s Labour League, the Association of Women Housing Property Managers and the Rural Housing and Sanitation Association. Others appear to be individuals from across the country with no easily identifiable links to campaigning or professional groups. (2)

This undated image shows a Women’s Freedom League publicity caravan

A postcard image of Muriel Matters, an Australian-born actress and leading member of the Women’s Freedom League. Reproduced courtesy of The Muriel Matters Society Inc., Adelaide, South Australia

It was shortly after the creation of the Tudor Walters Committee and the publicity surrounding the government’s housing policy in the summer of 1917 that Florence Gertrude Hamilton – Mrs F.G. Hamilton – together with her sister Maud Rose Raey MacKenzie established the Findon Women’s Village Council, the first organisation of its kind. If Florence had some prior involvement in housing issues I have not been able to identify it but she had been a campaigning suffragist in the Women’s Freedom League in the pre-war period in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, when she had been a tax resister. (3)

By about 1913 she had left Wendover, eventually settling in Findon, Sussex, with her unmarried sister Maud. When the Local Government Board in July 1917 announced in a circular letter to councils that financial assistance was on offer to local authorities building workmen’s dwellings after the war, the two women felt that their Rural District Council was not preparing adequately for this. (4)  

A date of 15^th October had been given for the completion of a form issued by the Local Government Board on which local authorities could provide details of the number of houses needed.  Perhaps Florence’s idea to contribute to this through the influence of women was based not only on her involvement with the suffrage movement, but also on the success of the relatively new Women’s Institute in the southern counties.  She might have seen an opportunity to encourage women’s participation in local affairs through the initial mechanism of becoming involved in housing.

Within three months of the circular to local authorities, she had evolved and then promoted her idea of an organisation and a meeting was held on October 2 in the Wattle House at Findon which was suitably decorated with national flags for the occasion. It seems to have been well attended. (5)

The Wattle House today; photo credit Richard Bell, Findon

A meeting of the Findon Women’s Village Council (from a private collection)

At this inaugural meeting, the Findon Women’s Village Council (WVC) stated its aims as being: (6)

to assist the State-aided Housing Scheme of the Local Government Board by obtaining first-hand information on rural housing, with the present acute shortage of cottages, and bad conditions

to promote Maternity and Infant Welfare, and the cause of Education

to enable working women to educate themselves to take their place on Parish, Rural District, and County Councils.

Inaugural meeting poster; reproduced with the permission of the People’s History Museum

Florence was particularly keen to involve ‘the genuine rural working woman’ in her organisation but she also referred to the usefulness of involving suffragists with their ‘trained cooperation’. With missionary zeal she wanted to seize the opportunity to help remedy the lack of rural cottages and to influence the quality and quantity of new ones. Like a growing number of women, she felt that women were best placed to advise on the design of houses because of the time they spent in them and the work they did there. (7)

And so a resolution was passed at that first meeting in Findon and sent to the Local Government Board: (8)

We have pleasure in reporting to the Local Government Board that the Findon Village Women’s Council (for the purpose of collecting evidence for the State-aided Housing Scheme) has been started, and we beg that we may be recognised and consulted in all reforms and schemes connected with State-aided cottages in our village.

Just a few months later Florence had established a small advisory group to support the newly forming village councils and was making links with the plethora of other women’s organisations in their shared premises at 92 Victoria Street.  She enlisted amongst others the support of Annette Churton, Secretary of the Rural Housing and Sanitary Association and a former member of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee.

In a description reminiscent of language we would recognise today, an article of 1918 explained that the views on rural housing would come from people themselves: ‘the village women, the farmers’ and the labourers’ wives; it is not superimposed from the top’. The idea for forming such village councils spread across the counties of south-east England and beyond and women were encouraged to organise surveys of their local housing and also to give their own opinions on the ideal design of new cottages. (9)

In Findon: (10)

the headings of the Survey were drawn up by a professional surveyor, and dealt with such points as the materials of the roof (whether tiled, slated, or thatched), the water supply (whether laid on, brought from a distant well, or rain-water; and if the last, whether it was filtered), the number of occupants (how many over, and how many under, the age of sixteen), the sanitary arrangements. 

With the involvement of the local vicar, a report was produced and presented to the Rural District Council outlining the need for 50 new cottages.  I have not as yet been able to research further specifically what happened to their recommendations.  However, on September 1 an article appeared in the Worthing Gazette referring to the building of sixteen houses in Findon by Thakeham Rural District Council under their scheme for fifty-eight houses in their area.  Because 42 applicants for these sixteen houses had been received, the article commented that this was ‘a long way from a complete satisfaction of the demand’.  I have identified a possible group of houses on the north side of the village, The Oval, which might be those built in the late 1920s but have yet to verify their origins.

The ideas of Florence Hamilton were broadly idealistic, going beyond the scope of the quality and quantity of housing into the area of other rural problems. Ultimately, she hoped to educate women in effective roles as citizens with a wider involvement in parish councils.

In Florence’s own words: (11)

The immediate work of the women’s village councils is to demonstrate beyond doubt the tremendous need for state-aided housing and the almost inconceivably bad conditions of many agricultural labourers’ homes; to combat existing opposition and indifference; to suggest the possibility that garden villages need not be ‘blots on the landscape’; to tell of the marvels promised by reconstructive use of science for lighting, water supplies and cooking, and to do death to the legend that the only use likely to be made of the fixed bath would be the coal cellar.  All Women’s Village Councils are asking for third bedrooms, that boys and girls may have a chance of growing up with modesty; they also ask for parlours … The success of the Local Government’s Maternity Bill and the Continuation Classes of the new Education Act depends largely on the co-operation of village women, who have hitherto had small say in their children’s interest and education.

Florence Hamilton conducted her own campaigning at a broader level.  In December 1917, she had met with Henry Aldridge, secretary of the Town Planning Council, who may have provided a vital direct link with the LGB and who went on to invite her to a housing conference in December 1917.  Although she herself did not give evidence directly to the Tudor Walters Committee, it is highly likely that at least one of the other WVC women did.  In 1918 she went on to form a federation of the village councils as the movement grew.  Although it was focussed initially in the south-east, there were other councils which formed elsewhere. They had spread into nine counties by 1919 including some in the Midlands, and reportedly into fifteen by March 1919. (12)

The village councils were said to give women the opportunity of working with the ‘experts’ – in planning, housing and sanitation. A March 1919 Manchester Guardian article pointed out that housing schemes were perhaps more important in rural areas than they were in towns.  Concern about rural depopulation had already led to a rural reconstruction movement and the lack of houses and the poor quality of the housing stock in rural areas were seen as crucial factors. However, there was also a need in urban areas and complementary organisations, the Women’s Housing Councils, were established in those areas from about 1922. This urban equivalent, influenced by their rural sisters, began in North Kensington.  This comment about one of their meetings clearly demonstrates the need for housing improvement, arguably one which still exists: (13) 

Meetings were held, and the residents of the wealthy borough were made aware of the terrible conditions under which their poor neighbours were living – almost at their doors.  Public opinion was eventually aroused, and £7000 has already been subscribed for putting tenement dwellings into habitable conditions.

It should be said that in deference to the more widely known Women’s Institute, which was founded at about the same time as the WVCs, that this organisation also, at least in some areas, attempted to influence the government housing schemes.

By 1923 the urban and the rural organisations had merged and were known as the Women’s Housing and Village Council Federation and later as the Women’s Housing Council Federation before perhaps finally merging with the National Housing and Town Planning Council (NHTPC). It has been impossible to track down any archives from these organisations: the National Archives gives a reference of the NHTPC merging with ROOM which is now part of the Royal Town Planning Institute.  The RTPI cannot find any relevant records.

Florence Hamilton probably remained active at a national level for the last decade of her life.  She was a founder member of the Electrical Association of Women (1924) and continued to be involved in the National Housing and Town Planning Council.  Her involvement in housing was acknowledged in her obituary written by fellow suffragist, Muriel Matters, which appeared in The Vote in April 1932. The inscription on her tombstone in Brompton Cemetery must surely be a reference to her commitment to citizenship: ‘Our Citizenship is in Heaven’.  She was one of a group of women who had developed an interest in housing during the First World War and sometimes earlier, who continued to try and influence the design of housing into the post-war period.  Many of these other women were members of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee and this will be the subject of my second blog.

lynne.dixon@cantab.net

Sources

(1) ‘The Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider Questions of Building Construction in Connection with the Provision of Dwellings for the Working Classes’ (The Tudor Walters Report, Cd 9191), 1918

(2) The witnesses are listed in the report.

(3) Florence was baptised Florence Gertrude MacKenzie but on her marriage was often referred to as Florence Gardiner Hamilton so that her initials F.G. could stand for either middle name. For extensive information about the suffragists in Buckinghamshire, Colin Cartwright’s book, Burning to Get the Vote (Legend Press Ltd, 2013) is a mine of information

(4) ‘Working Class Houses’, The Times, 30 July 1917 and Florence G Hamilton ‘Findon Women’s Village Council’, The Common Cause, 9 November 1917

(5) There are several accounts of this meeting; see, for example, The Spectator, 15 June 1918, The Common Cause, 9 November 1917, and Worthing Gazette, 24 October 1917

(6) From a poster for the Findon Women’s Village Council, undated, People’s History Museum, ref cc/s.16.

(7) The quotations are drawn from Florence G Hamilton, ‘Findon Women’s Village Council: An Experiment in Local Organisation’, The Common Cause, 9 November 1917, and further analysis from Women Correspondent ‘The Village Council of Women: their Contribution to Housing Reform’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 March 1919

(8) Georgina Home ‘Findon Village Council’, The Spectator, 15 July 1918

(9) C Osborn, ‘Women’s Village Councils’, Charity Organisation Review, vol 43, no 256, April 1918 

(10) Georgina Home, ’Findon Village Council’, The Spectator, 15 July 1918

(11) Mrs Hamilton, ‘Women’s Village Councils Federations for State-Aided Housing and Rural Problems’, The Common Cause, 19 July 1918

(12) Women Correspondent ‘The Village Council of Women: their Contribution to Housing Reform’. I have managed to establish the names of some thirteen councils: West Sussex; Findon, Storrington, Durrington, Wiston, Rustington, Broadwater, Washington, Wiston, and elsewhere Ellesborough (Buckinghamshire) Solihull and Aldridge (Walsall Rural District); Runton (Norfolk); Sarisbury (Hampshire)

(13) ME Blyth, ‘The Women’s Housing and Village Councils Federation’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 13 July 1923

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Butte Rouge: the main spine, Avenue Albert Thomas

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

‘Sauvons la Butte Rouge’ explain their concerns

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

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

Henri Sellier, commemorated in the MUS at Suresnes

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

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

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

Suresnes: rare ‘pavillons’

Sellier’s programme

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

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

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

Stains: “Allons nous promener en Angleterre”

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

rue Rolland, Stains: echos of Becontree

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

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

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

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

In Paris

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

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

Opening day at La Petite Alsace, 1912

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

martin.crookston@btinternet.com

Sources

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

Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel

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

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

Wikipédia entries for Suresnes and Henri Sellier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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