The Campsbourne Cottage Estate, Hornsey: ‘a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country’

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Hornsey, Pre-1914

I’m delighted to feature another guest post today, this by Ray Rogers. Ray is a conservation and historic buildings specialist with a long-standing interest in housing policy and design going back to his early experience of designing council housing in a London borough architects’ department. He is currently writing a series of conservation area appraisals and management plans.

The Campsbourne Cottage Estate in Hornsey, north London, is an early example of council housing built following powers granted to municipal authorities by the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890. The first part of the Campsbourne estate pre-dates the London County Council’s better-known cottage estates such as Totterdown Fields in Tooting and Tower Gardens in Tottenham.

Nightingale Lane

The design and detailing of the houses and the quality of materials and workmanship give the estate its distinctive character. Apart from some bomb damage sustained in World War Two and some recent alterations to individual houses, the estate remains substantially unchanged in appearance and is exceptionally well preserved. However, it is the story behind the creation of the Campsbourne estate that illustrates the pioneering nature of such developments in responding to the housing issues of their time.

Early housing legislation such as the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875 gave local authorities powers to clear entire areas of ‘insanitary’ buildings but few municipalities (with the exception of major cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool and the London County Council) fulfilled the requirement to replace housing lost through slum clearance, and those that did so mainly relied on philanthropic bodies such as the Peabody Trust to undertake rebuilding.

Most new housing was provided by private speculative builders and in Hornsey as elsewhere these houses were aimed at the emerging lower middle classes. It was the skilled working class that was most directly affected by cyclical slumps in speculative building and the rising cost of housing, and advocates of housing for working people made the case that: (1)

working men of all grades and occupations have been unable to get a decent cottage to live in and have had to choose between occupying part of expensive and overcrowded houses, quite unsuitable for more than one family, or occupying a dilapidated and insanitary dwelling … commonly described as slums.

From the last decade of the 19^th century a new type of municipal housing emerged, not just replacing ‘unhealthy’ housing lost through slum clearance but providing a net addition to the housing stock. This was given statutory basis by Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. The new Urban District Councils, created under the Local Government Act of 1894, were well placed to take advantage of these new powers and Hornsey U.D.C. lost little time in implementing the opportunities offered by the 1890 Act, following its adoption by the authority in 1896.

Northview Road corner with Nightingale Lane

Hornsey is now part of the London borough of Haringey but until the late 19^th century it was a historic settlement straddling both sides of Hornsey High Street. Development of the surrounding open fields proceeded rapidly following the opening of Hornsey station in the late 1860s. Twenty-four acres of land north of the High Street were acquired in 1866 by the British Land Company which laid out an estate of speculative terraced houses that followed the grid iron street pattern and narrow fronted houses typical of ‘by-law’ housing.

Further development was delayed until after 1896 when the Priory estate was sold, of which four and a half acres of land to the west of Nightingale Lane, on the southern boundary of Alexandra Palace, was acquired by Hornsey U.D.C. in 1897. By 1899 the council had built 108 cottages in Nightingale Lane and in Northview and Southview Roads. Another six acres were bought in 1902 and a second scheme of another 140 cottages was started in 1904. (2)

Hornsey is an exceptionally healthy and well-managed urban district in the northern suburbs of London, contrasting very favourably with other urban districts further eastwards. Realising that ‘prevention is better than cure’ the Council and its officers have endeavoured to prevent the growth of new slum areas by themselves establishing a good supply of model cottages for workmen rather than have their district unduly disfigured and deteriorated by the objectionable and overcrowded products of the jerry-builder.

An early photograph of Nightingale Lane

Both schemes (and a third scheme in Highgate) were overseen by Edwin J Lovegrove, the Borough Engineer and Surveyor, who had designed an earlier cottage development for Richmond Town Council, the ‘Richmond Municipal Cottages’, regarded as one of the first successful cottage developments and described in detail by William Thompson in his Housing Handbook of 1903. Thompson also describes the Hornsey cottages development, then known as the Nightingale Lane scheme, with special attention given to the costs and financing of the project, resulting in a self-financing development with rents considerably lower than those in the private rental market and with no impact on the local rates. On reviewing the Campsbourne schemes in 1905 James Cornes wrote: (3)

No wonder that, with so much knowledge of this subject, he (Lovegrove) has been able … to rear a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country. This for London is a revolution in cottage building, and clearly indicates the thought, care, and real ability that the Surveyor must of necessity have put into this work. The Housing Committee and Corporation must be congratulated upon the excellent results of this undertaking, and for the splendid example they have been able to set to other municipalities.

On the east side of Nightingale Lane, the Campsbourne School, opened in 1897, was contemporary with the cottage estate. Designed by Thomas Chatfield Clarke, architect to Hornsey School Board, the school buildings are a good example of a late Queen Anne style Board school.

Northview Road

The first Campsbourne scheme had two classes of houses, Class A having a sitting-room, living room, scullery and three bedrooms and Class B having similar accommodation but smaller and with two bedrooms. The sitting room was in fact the ‘front parlour’ and the living room was the kitchen with scullery attached.

The second scheme was more ambitious in the range and size of cottages provided. There were four classes of dwelling: Class A had a sitting room, living room, scullery and four bedrooms; Class B the same but with three bedrooms and Class C had two bedrooms. Class D contained a living room, small scullery, bathroom and two bedrooms. The innovation in this scheme was the use of Cornes and Haighton’s combined range, copper and bath in each cottage. The bath could be covered when not in use. The Class A cottage provided for the larger family, as described with typical Edwardian moral condescension by James Cornes in 1905: (3)

… attention should be given to the highest rented cottage in the scheme, providing as it does four bedrooms and a larger sitting room and living room, let to the working man with a wage earning family, thus keeping in a comfortable home grown-up sons and daughters who, too frequently, are turned out into the world and, as a result, contract early and undesirable marriages which might have been avoided had the home surroundings been of a different character.

Second scheme – Class A cottage

The completed cottage estate consisted of four streets of two storey houses arranged in short terraces of six to eight houses each. The houses are built in red brick with shallow brick arches over window and door openings. Each of the end of terrace houses are stepped forward slightly and have large projecting gables with barge boards, with two smaller gables within the terrace. The houses have flat street fronts and there are no bays or other projections apart from some porches on the second phase of building.

Northview Road

The plain uniformity of the terraces is lightened by the use of simple repetitive detailing in the brickwork. All of the houses have a scalloped brick relief panel set beneath each window cill and a course of dog tooth brickwork set between two projecting brick courses runs along the full length of each terrace.

Southview Road

The houses in Nightingale Lane, Northview Road and Southview Road formed the first phase of development. On these houses the dog-tooth band course runs across each elevation at first floor window cill level. On Nightingale Lane and Northview Road the large chimney stacks also have a dogtooth detail. Northview Road, together with the Nightingale Lane frontage, is the best-preserved of the two streets as Southview Road was affected by bomb damage in World War Two.

Beechwood Road

Hawthorn Road and Beechwood Road comprised the second phase of the development and show some changes in form and materials, although still based on terraces each of six or eight houses. The main difference is the use of yellow London stock brick for alternate terraces on both sides of the road, giving the street frontage a more varied and picturesque appearance than in the first phase. The dogtooth band course is retained on the red brick terraces but it runs in a continuous band midway between ground and first floor instead of at window cill level.

Hawthorn Road

On some of the yellow brick terraces the dogtooth detail was replaced with a continuous projecting band of dentilled brickwork in red brick and a similar detail can be seen on some terraces in the LCC’s Tower Gardens estate. The window arches and scalloped relief panel are also all in red brick. Five of the later terraces have paired porches either side of the projecting party wall with a lean-to slate roof and small paned windows.

Hawthorn Road

Hawthorn Road

By 1914 the rest of the land south of Alexandra Palace and to the west of Nightingale Lane had been developed by private builders, completing Northview, Southview, Hawthorn and Beechwood Roads with speculative terraced housing, some using the eclectic pattern book of local architect John Farrer and others in the form of ‘Tyneside’ flats, in which the street frontage has two front doors, one leading to a ground floor flat and the second leading directly to a staircase to a first floor flat.

1914 Ordnance Survey map showing the extent of the cottage estate with Alexandra Park to the north

Building in Hornsey stopped in 1914 and after the war councillors could not agree on the need for further council housing in the borough, with many feeling that adequate provision had been made pre-war. The council resisted complying with the Housing and Town Planning Act (the Addison Act) of July 1919, which charged local authorities with building more working-class homes with controlled rents, even though poor housing and insanitary conditions, particularly in the Campsbourne area, had been brought to the attention of its Public Health Committee. An editorial in the Hornsey journal of 7^th February 1919 said: (4)

Inasmuch as Hornsey is not altogether what is superficially described as a “working-class” area, it will be seen that the Town Council have not lagged in the provision of workmen’s dwellings. The first of the four schemes was completed in 1898 and the last in 1912. We have reason to believe that the dwellings are almost exclusively occupied by men who actually earn their living in the borough – the local police, the postmen, municipal employees, and others.

The Council can say with the strictest veracity that they have provided for a considerable number of families, but that no further accommodation is needed is not so incontrovertible. Is there no overcrowding in Hornsey? Is there no “unsuitable accommodation”? Are the artisan and the labouring the only classes for whom cheap provision should be made?

Beechwood Road

Towards the end of 1919 the council eventually gave in to pressure and instructed Edwin Lovegrove to draw up plans for 79 houses to be built on land that had been requisitioned during the war for allotments. However, the housing scheme was never progressed, being dropped on grounds of cost, and the land was bought by the council in 1923 as part of the newly laid out Priory park. This marks the end of a chapter in the pioneering of council house building in Hornsey.

Hawthorn Road

The Campsbourne Cottage estate makes no pretensions to great architecture or town planning, being barely touched by the influence of the early Garden City movement, but nevertheless it remains a significant milestone in the provision of affordable housing for working class families and when compared to the housing typical of the time this was no mean achievement. (3)

… Within a few miles of the heart of London he (E J Lovegrove) has succeeded in building a self-contained cottage with a forecourt, garden at the rear and four rooms including a bath and every other modern convenience, to let at 6s. 6d. per week inclusive rental.

The houses are still much valued today. The estate was designated as a conservation area in 1994. A conservation area appraisal and management plan has recently been prepared and it is hoped this will assist the planning authority in controlling some of the piecemeal changes being wrought by ‘home improvements’ that are beginning to detract from the unified appearance of the estate.

Notes

If you’re interested in learning more of Hornsey’s local history, do visit the website of the Hornsey Historical Society.

Sources

(1) William Thompson, quoted in The Lowestoft Journal, 25 February 1899

(2) William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903)

(3) James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country (1905)

(4) Janet Owen, Hornsey’s Post-War Housing Problem, Hornsey Historical Society

Hornsey Town Hall, Crouch End: ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’

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1930s, Town Halls

It’s easy to miss the modernist masterpiece of Hornsey Town Hall, completed in 1935, as you fight your way through the yummy mummies and baby buggies of Crouch End but take time to admire it.  It’s been described as ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’. (1)  And look to the buildings to left and right and through the clutter of contemporary commercialism – this was a civic complex intended to enshrine the role of local government at the very centre of local life.

Hornsey’s first local administration had been formed as far back as 1867.  The Hornsey Local Board built its offices in Southwood Lane in Highgate the following year.  At that time, Hornsey was basically a collection of local villages but the coming of the railways would radically transform it.  With seven local rail stations by 1887, Hornsey became a centre of middle-class villadom – the home of London’s clerks and their daily commute.

Hornsey became an Urban District Council under the 1894 Local Government Act and was raised to municipal borough status in 1903.  Its bid to become a county borough (an all-purpose authority free of county council jurisdiction) was twice rejected but though the council was dominated by that local incarnation of Conservatism, the Municipal Reform Party, for most of its life, it saw itself as modern and progressive.  Some of the first council housing in the country was built by Hornsey UDC and in 1903 it inaugurated its own electricity supply service, building a generating station on Tottenham Lane.  A cottage hospital was opened in 1910.

By now, the borough’s centre of gravity had shifted to Crouch End and the council needed a home to reflect both this new reality and its civic pride.  It purchased a wedge-shaped area of land on the Broadway in Crouch End in 1920 and 1923 and ten years later it announced a design competition to build a town hall on this awkward plot.

The Council required the normal trappings of a civic building – a council chamber, committee rooms, administrative offices and a multi-purpose hall with seating for 800 to 1000 people.  But it was to cost no more than £100,000 and the Council was:

desirous that the character of the buildings shall be dignified and they rely on good proportions and a fitting architectural setting rather than elaborate decoration and detail, which is not required. Stress is laid on straightforward planning, with rooms and corridors well lighted and ventilated.

This would be a town hall, eschewing the municipal baroque or neo-classicism in vogue before the war, in a modern idiom.  Notwithstanding these intentions, The Architect and Building News was sniffy about this contest: ‘In all, 218 highly trained brains have exerted themselves to the full to find the solution to the problem which should never have been set’. (2)  But, in the end and as further plots on the frontage of the Broadway became available, a civic complex was created that would do the Borough proud.

The winner of the competition was Reginald Uren, a 27-year old New Zealander, and, though he went on to build a prestigious career, this would remain in many ways his masterpiece. Uren’s skill lay in separating out and distinguishing between the functional areas and setting the building back to provide as dignified an approach as the site allowed.

The public hall to the left-hand side was marked by elongated windows and a grand triple entrance.  The council offices were given a smaller but impressive ceremonial entrance to the right while the ‘dignified’ aspect of the council’s activities was given full play in the impressive council chamber and mayor’s parlour on the first floor.

The interiors were described as ‘extremely simple, with the emphasis on beauty of surface’ – that beauty provided by Australian walnut and Indian laurel in the assembly hall and council chamber and polished Perrycot stone in the foyer and staircases. (3)

© http://www.eyerevolution.co.uk

For those who didn’t venture inside, it was the exterior which inevitably caught the eye:

Gracious and rather slim in its lines, and faced with pinkish-grey bricks of a beautiful colour and texture, Hornsey Town Hall is the sort of building that is come upon with an exclamation of pleasure…That the building has both Dutch and Swedish flavours is true, but they are digested to the local scene.

The Times article celebrates the Royal Institute of British Architects bronze medal awarded in 1936, recognising the building as the best erected in London during the previous three years.  And those Dutch and Swedish influences which it identifies refer to two of the outstanding civic buildings of the era – Dudok’s Hilversum Town Hall (completed in 1931) and Stockholm Town Hall (completed in 1923) – which provided some of Uren’s inspiration. (4)  In fact, Uren employed decorative elements – notably a stone relief lintel, sculpted by Arthur Ayres, and an elaborate bronze grille at the right-hand entrance – to soften the rather stark lines of Dudok’s prototype.

Within a couple of years, the Council was also able to provide the Town Hall with a more complimentary setting.  The architectural firm, Dawe and Carter, designed a new showroom and offices for the Hornsey Gas Company – a private undertaking until nationalised in 1947 – to the right of the Town Hall in a style which paid conscious tribute to Uren’s building and was similarly graced by Ayres’ sculptures.

And Uren himself was able in 1938 to adapt a former telephone exchange to the left into showrooms for Hornsey’s municipal electricity department.  This too would feature an Ayres relief, representing – appropriately enough – the Spirit of Electricity.

Both buildings are now in private ownership – the former gas showrooms have become a branch of Barclays, the electricity showrooms an Italian restaurant.  But, listed and preserved, the ensemble reminds us of an era in which local government took justifiable pride in its key and progressive role in the life of its community.

The gas showrooms after nationalisation and before Barclays

Wider politics were less propitious and the Town Hall would witness some of the politics of this ‘low dishonest decade’ at first hand.  A meeting of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee – to support the democratic Republican forces against the threat of Franco’s Nationalists – was held in the Assembly Hall but another, apparently, was cancelled through fears of public disorder.

That concern did not halt a large rally by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists in January 1937.  On that occasion, the police remained outside and left the maintenance of ‘order’ to Fascist stewards – with predictable results.  Later that year, the left was represented once more when the Unity Theatre Group presented ‘Waiting for Lefty’ and ‘On Guard for Spain’ with a collection held for the Republican cause. (5)

For many, Hornsey Town Hall is better remembered as being the venue for some of the first performances of Ray Davies (then a student at the Hornsey College of Art, later of the Kinks) and the very first performance, in 1971, of Queen.

Later politics didn’t match the turbulence of the thirties and it’s possible that some local citizens have remained unaware of the Hornsey événements of 1968. The anarchist Stuart Christie lived in nearby Fairfield Gardens.  Fired up by the French uprising and an evening in the Queen’s pub, he and some comrades: (6)

raced to Hornsey Town Hall to announce the birth of a new society.  ‘Paris Today, Hornsey Tomorrow!’ was the slogan we scrawled across the full width of the building’s imposing façade.  There was no doubt about it. We would make sure that the good burghers of Hornsey would know the Revolution had begun.  But our triumphalism was short-lived.  By 10am the next day the forces of reaction in the form of Haringey Borough Council had stepped in and their cleaning department had almost obliterated our handiwork – almost, but not quite.  The ghostly outline of that night’s work remained for many years; it certainly outlasted our hoped-for revolution.

And thereby hangs another, less revolutionary tale, though one almost as disturbing to some of Hornsey’s ‘good burghers’.

In 1965, Hornsey Borough Council was abolished – swallowed up within a new Greater London alongside Tottenham and Wood Green as part of the new London Borough of Haringey.  The centre of gravity moved left politically and, administratively, to the east – to the Wood Green Civic Centre which became the headquarters of the new local authority.

The Town Hall remained home to a few of Haringey’s technical services for some years but the Assembly Hall was closed in 1987 – the Council being unable or unwilling to maintain it – and by 2004 the building as a whole was essentially redundant.   But Haringey’s proposal to dispose of the building aroused a storm of protest.

To opponents, organised by Crouch End for the People, this was a ‘defining and critical moment…the centrepiece of our “village” could be sold off by the council’.  The group set up its own Hornsey Town Hall Trust to promote community use of the building.  Having rejected the Trust’s alternative business plan, the Council set up its own Community Partnership Board – distrusted by Crouch End activists as an unrepresentative tool of the Council’s political interests.   An independent body, the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust, was set up in 2007.

You can read more of this on the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust’s own website or read an academic account which describes the protest as a form of ‘anti-municipalist communitarianism’ – apparently the citizens of Tottenham were far more deferential in accepting the Borough’s political leadership’s plans for the similarly redundant Tottenham Town Hall.  Perhaps the simpler analysis is just that you don’t mess with the middle class. (7)

In 2008 planning permission and Listed Building Consent was obtained for a scheme to bring the Town Hall back into use with public halls, community rooms, theatre space, cafes and landscaping but the funding depended partly on an adjacent building development.

In 2011, these proposals were superseded by a plan by the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts to transform the Town Hall into – in their words – ‘an arts, culture and education hub for Haringey, wider London and the UK’ but these plans also were withdrawn by early 2015.  In the meantime, the Town Hall has enjoyed a half-life as a location for a number of dramas, most notably The Hour (where it stood in the BBC’s Lime Grove studios) and Whitechapel.

Currently, a three-man arts collective has a one-year lease on the building, renting space to a range of creative enterprises and providing a programme of arts events whilst shoring up the basic fabric of the building.  Consultation continues regarding future uses and a possible partial residential redevelopment which will maintain public areas for community use.

I don’t have a dog in the fight and, as a municipal dreamer, I can’t help but regret the loss of the Town Hall complex’s original functions and, more intangibly, the dignity and presence attached to them.  If you do visit Crouch End, admire the architecture and recall the civic pride it spoke to.

You’ll find some images of the interior in this post to my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) Twentieth Century Society, Civic Plunge Revisited,  24 March 2012.  The Council guidelines which follow are quoted from the same source.

(2) The Architect and Building News, 20 October 1933 quoted in Twentieth Century Society, Civic Plunge Revisited

(3) This description and the following quotation comes from ‘Hornsey Town Hall’, The Times, 12 May 1936

(4) I’ve posted some images on my Tumblr site for comparison

(5) The Spanish Medical Aid Committee is reported in Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War (2003); Mosley’s meeting in Martin Pugh, Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars  (2013).  The photograph is taken from Action, the BUF newspaper, 30 January 1937; the black shirt is worn in defiance of the 1936 Public Order Act.  The Unity Theatre listing is in the Daily Worker, 2 October 1937

(6) Stuart Christie,  Edward Heath Made Me Angry: The Christie File : Part 3, 1967-1975 (2004)

(7) Bryan Fanning and Denis Dillon, Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation (2012).  More information on various proposals can be found in Richard Waite, ‘Bennetts win cash backing for Hornsey town hall overhaul‘, Architects’ Journal, May 31 2012.

The Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust website provides ongoing detail of what’s happening with and in the Town Hall, including an events calendar.

The fullest treatment of the architecture and history of Hornsey Town Hall is provided by Bridget Cherry, Civic Pride in Hornsey. The Town Hall and its Surrounding Buildings published by the Hornsey Historical Society (2006).  This provides the context for my own treatment of the topic.