Council Housing in Walsall, Part IV: from 1979 to the present

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Regeneration

This is the last of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

We left Walsall’s council housing last week at its peak – literally so in terms of the high-rise blocks built in the late sixties but numerically too when, in the early 1980s, the Council managed around 42,000 homes in the expanded borough.  This final post concentrates on the politics of council housing in more recent decades, including some radical attempts to decentralise local government with an idiosyncratically local flavour.

Firstly, however, Right to Buy.  The sale of council homes to sitting tenants legislated by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 saw the Council’s housing stock decline dramatically but it was a policy pioneered by her Conservative predecessors in Walsall as far back as 1967.

Birmingham Post, September 1967

In that year, the council offered its council houses (flats were excluded) for sale to sitting tenants at a discount of 20 per cent with a flat rate fee of £40 to cover expenses.  One hundred applications were received with 500, it was said, in the pipeline, incentivised by the 15s (75p) a week increase being proposed for council rents. (1)  The real damage to council housing stock, however, came in the later iteration of Right to Buy; by 2003 only some 23,000 homes in Walsall remained under council management.

There were other winds of change too. Estates up and down the country fell on hard times in the 1970s. At the same time, minority communities – often previously excluded from council housing by local residency rules yet frequently in greatest need – were, as needs-based allocations became the norm, being granted tenancies in greater numbers.

Pleck flats, 1987. With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

The two currents collided in ugly fashion on the Pleck Estate in Walsall.  In March 1977, a newly-formed tenants’ association called for the vetting of new tenants as a means of countering vandalism.  This became explicitly and straightforwardly racist a few months later when the chair of the association stated his belief that ‘on the whole Asians will not conform to our way of life…the way things are going in Pleck flats they are going to be turned into ghettos’. The Commission for Racial Equality found the Housing Department to have colluded in this discrimination. (2)

Caldmore Green

Other far more benign but controversial localist currents were emerging in in Walsall politics at this time. A left-wing Caldmore Residents’ Group  (Tribunite in its politics for older readers) established a Caldmore Advice Centre and Caldmore Housing Association to campaign for the depressed community’s interests. They were intended to represent and promote a radically devolved vision of local government and its services, focused on the neighbourhood.

The Group’s leading activist, Dave Church, spoke critically of the gap he saw that had grown between local councillors and the wider council bureaucracy and those they worked for: (3)

In the vastness of the civic centre, many [local politicians] had had little or no contact with the people they were supposed to serve; personal contact on such rare occasions that it had been unavoidable had nearly always meant some more or less frightening confrontation with a tenant driven to despair by neglect and indifference and who had somehow managed to evade the elaborate defences provided by the civic centre.

The Group became influential in the local Labour Party and in 1980 Walsall Labour fought the local elections on a far-reaching manifesto entitled Haul to Democracy which committed it to forming neighbourhood offices to deliver housing and welfare services and mobilise a community-based politics.  A Labour victory saw 35 such centres created but, ousted by an anti-socialist alliance within two years, it was a short-lived experiment.

Walsall Civic Centre

Structurally, the issue remained dormant for the decade which followed but by 1995 Dave Church’s left-wing politics had triumphed within the Labour Group.  The Party’s manifesto in that year, Power to the People, went even further than the 1980s scheme in proposing the complete devolution of Walsall’s local government by the formation of 55 locally elected neighbourhood councils.

The Conservative Party characterised the programme as ‘loony leftism’ and the new neighbourhood councils as ‘mini-Kremlins’ but, more importantly, the council found itself at odds with Tony Blair’s Labour Party.  By the end of the year, the predominant left-wing faction within the Labour group was suspended from Party membership and Labour had lost control of the council.

It would be easy, and not wholly misguided, to see this defeat of a radical, grass-roots politics as a consequence of New Labour’s centralising tendencies and its crushing desire to earn itself the electoral respectability which would, two years later, lead to its 1997 landslide.  But the plans, however good their intent, were dangerously flawed.

Their promised job cuts and budget savings alienated local and national trades unions; the left-wing group was isolated even from other radical Labour councils of the time; and the proposals themselves were illegal under existing local government legislation. In essence, this was a voluntarist left-wing politics which lacked the grass-roots support it claimed to embody. The ‘Democratic Labour’ group formed by expelled councillors had lost all its seats by 1999 by which time more mainstream Labour representatives had resumed control of the council. (4)

Ultimately and ironically, a very watered down version of this devolutionist politics emerged in the regeneration schemes which followed. In April 1996, after his removal from office, Church’s bid for Single Regeneration Budget funding was rewarded by a £14.6m grant from its ‘Empowering Local Communities’ programme. Elected local committees were formed in the seven areas of the Borough to benefit from the funding. (5)  Other local committees were formed in the five areas which received City Challenge funding.  These, of course, were consultative, not executive.

The New Art Gallery is a signature element of the town’s wider regeneration

These regeneration programmes were part and parcel of a very changed housing politics. The Conservative government which came to power in 1979 didn’t like council housing. Right to Buy was only the most blatant example of this.  Cuts in the Housing Investment Programme budget were another.  Walsall bid for £22m support from central government in 1980-81 but was granted £13m. One new council house was started that year.  In 1981-82, it bid £20m, reckoning that 1000 new homes were needed to make at least a dent in the 9000-strong waiting list. It received £7.5m. (6)

The various estate regeneration programmes, whatever their sometime positive effect and intention, were also a means of marginalising council-owned and managed homes as funding was restricted for the most part to third sector providers.

The Chuckery Estate

The Tenants Management Organisation (TMO) established in Chuckery 1988 was formed in response to an Estate Action bid.  Three others were founded around the same time to take over management of other high-rise estates.  TMOs were promoted as a means of allowing residents and tenant activists real management of their own homes.  In Walsall, at least, they seem to have been successful and poplar. By the end of the decade there were eight TMOs in Walsall. The Walsall Alliance of Tenant Management Organisations (WATMOS) was formed in 2002 and currently comprises eleven subsidiaries, including – in an interesting example of contemporary third sector entrepreneuralism –  two in the London Borough of Lambeth. (7)

Providence Close, Leamore, run by a WATMOS TMO.

By this time, large-Scale Voluntary Transfer was the new game in town – a process initiated under the Conservatives in 1988 which took off under New Labour after 1997 – which transferred council housing stock to housing associations.  The rules which restricted new state investment in housing and regeneration to the latter made the process all but inevitable.

Walsall transferred the entirety of its housing stock in 2003 though the transfer ballot approval was underwhelming – 50 per cent of tenants agreed to transfer on a 71 per cent turnout. At any rate, the Borough’s 22,971 homes were transferred; around 21,000 to the Walsall Housing Group housing association and 1700 – the remaining tower blocks – to WATMOS.

The transfer enabled the implementation of the Labour Government’s 2000 Decent Homes Programme which has upgraded and improved many thousands of homes in Walsall and across the county.  Another very New Labour programme, the New Deal for Communities, was implemented in the Blakenhall, Bloxwich East and Leamore area of Walsall in 2005.

Tower blocks, which had once heralded a bright new housing future, were often judged incapable of improvement. In the 2000s, Walsall demolished nine of its tower blocks – including three 1950s blocks at Blakenall Gardens and two 1960s blocks in Darlaston.  Alma and Leys Courts, the last to be completed, were ironically among the first to be razed – in 2001. (8)

The Pinnacle (formerly St Mary’s Court), Willenhall

All that will confirm much conventional wisdom about the ‘failure’ of high-rise housing but a more nuanced view is justified.  The 16-storey St Mary’s Court block was closed by the council and scheduled for demolition in 1997. Instead, it was sold to the private sector, refurbished (and rebranded as The Pinnacle) and it survives to provide good homes – just no longer to social housing tenants.

It’s also true that high-rise council tenants had been unhappy.  In 2002, as demolitions were in full swing, a survey showed just 33 per cent of tenants in Walsall tower blocks satisfied with their landlord. WATMOS claims that a 2009 survey of the same homes showed 92 per cent satisfaction under their new management.  Taken at face value, the evidence suggests anger directed more towards poor management and neglect than high-rise living as such.

Clarke House with Cartwright House in foreground, Sandbank Estate (1988). With thanks to Prof Miles Glendinning and Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh.

That seems justified anecdotally by a 2013 press report (sparked by a government report calling for blocks to be demolished and replaced by ‘streets people actually want to live in’) in which residents of the Sandbank Estate challenged its authors to visit and enjoy its ‘1950s-style community spirit’.  One long-term resident stated, ‘even if I won the lottery tonight I’d still live here. I’d just get a butler in’. (9)  Such views – and a more complex story of high-rise living – are confirmed in the Block Capital’s Living in the Sky project, a history of high-rise council flats in the Black Country.

Barracks Lane, Blakenall – a scheme of 73 new social rented homes built by the Walsall Housing Group

Meanwhile, the majority of Walsall’s now social housing remains the solid two-storey housing built by the Council over many decades.  It’s a diminishing resource as more homes are privately purchased but it remains a vital and life-enhancing one for many thousands. The Walsall Housing Group has built some 530 new homes since 2003. In the current climate, that is an achievement though it’s one which pales into insignificance when compared to the building and slum clearance programme of its predecessors studied in previous posts.

Sources

(1) ‘”Hot cake” council house sales’, Birmingham Post, 26 September 1967

(2) CRE, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, Practice and policies of housing allocation (February 1985)

(3) Quoted in Mark Whitehead, ‘”Love thy neighbourhood” – Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall’s Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy’, Environment and Planning A, vol 35, 2003

(4) This account is drawn from Whitehead, ‘”Love thy neighbourhood” – Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall’s Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy’ and John Rentoul, ‘So, just how loony are they in Walsall?’, The Independent, 9 August 1995

(5) Pete Duncan, Sally Thomas, Neighbourhood Regeneration: Resourcing Community Involvement (Policy Press, 2000)

(6) David Winnick, MP, Housing (Walsall), House of Commons Debate, 30 July 1981, vol 9, cc1341-8

(7) Gene Robinson, ‘Taking control of Walsall’, Inside Housing, 15 April 2011 and WATMOS Community Homes: About

(8) The Block Capital Project, Living in the Sky: a History of High-Rise Council Flats in the Black Country (2015)

(9) ‘Walsall tower blocks high in satisfaction’, Express and Star, 2 March 2015

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Council Housing in Walsall, Part III: Postwar Estates and High-Rise

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

This is the third of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

After 1945, the need for decent and affordable housing became one of the biggest issues in British politics and, in sharp contrast to the present, the local and national state mobilised on a massive scale to address this problem.  That meant in Walsall, as elsewhere, estates on traditional – though ‘improved’ – low-rise lines but it would mean in due course new and varied forms of multi-storey housing.

In reality, the former remained predominant.  Almost two-thirds of council homes built in the UK between 1945 and 1979 were two-storey houses in more or less ‘garden’ suburbs but in popular consciousness and media portrayal, the era became associated with high-rise flats, often described as ‘notorious’. In fact, multi-storey housing (of six-storeys or more) only surpassed one-fifth of new schemes in England and Wales in the short period between 1964 and 1967. (1) Walsall offers an excellent case-study by which to study the more complex and diverse realities of post-war public housing.

Southbourne Avenue

As we saw in the second of our Walsall posts, prefabs were adopted as a temporary ‘fix’ to an immediate post-war housing crisis but new permanent homes – in huge numbers – remained the goal. That goal, however, in an era of genuine austerity, first required the use of other non-traditional means. By 1950, 850 non-traditional homes had been built in Walsall, in a range reflecting the experimentation of the time.

Partially refurbished BISF housing on Hawbush Road

The largest number, at 240, were BISF houses – steel-framed homes (to a design by Sir Fredrick Gibberd) manufactured by the British Iron and Steel Federation.  Next came the Orlit homes produced by the Edinburgh firm of that name; 198 of these precast reinforced concrete houses were erected. Wates offered a similar form of pre-cast concrete construction while Wimpey offered in-situ concrete housing; 100 of each were built in Walsall. Other steel-framed homes and some 50 permanent aluminium bungalows completed the list.

Non-traditional housing, Heather Road, Dudley’s Field Estate

Many disliked the appearance of these new homes; even Walsall’s Chief Architect, AT Parrott, guardedly admitted they presented ‘a subject for very sympathetic handling if happy aesthetic results were to be achieved’. (2)  Design and construction flaws emerged later.  As brick supply increased and skilled labour became more readily available, traditional brick construction was happily resumed.

Some 490 of these non-traditional homes were built on the Dudley’s Field Estate in Bloxwich, Walsall’s first new post-war estate begun in 1946. Parrott described it as ‘probably our least successful from the point of view of appearance, but…very valuable as an object lesson’.  Interwar estates had been widely criticised for their dormitory feel and lack of community provision. The 1944 Dudley Committee and the 1948 Committee on the Appearance of Housing Estates were intended to address these deficiencies but in the immediate aftermath of war, in Parrott’s words:

Speed was of prime importance and, whilst certain attempts were made to add interest to the layouts, the vital lessons which have been brought the design of Council housing today to a standard never before reached had yet to be learned.

The Mossley Estate, 1660 new homes on completion, just to the north of Dudley’s Fields, and the Gipsy Lane Estate (now Beechdale), of similar size, to the south followed in short order.  If the good intentions were to provide these new estates greater facilities, these were fulfilled belatedly.  Eight hundred houses had been completed on the Gipsy Lane Estate before any shops were open and the Chief Architect himself described it as a ‘large and isolated estate, and a very long journey for the housewife whenever there is shopping to be done’.

Mossley Estate

Another feature of most of Walsall’s new build that it was located on reclaimed, brownfield land containing coal, clay and gravel workings, slag and brickwork waste Over 500,000 cubic yards of materials were removed from the Gipsy Lane site alone. The risk of subsidence here and elsewhere meant that most of the new homes were restricted to semi-detached pairs.

Pershore Road, Mossley Estate (c) Richard Vince and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Up to 1949, the focus on three-bed family homes remained total. Some two-bed homes followed and after 1954, a 25/75 two-bed/three-bed split was projected.  As part of the  the realisation of the waiting list’s varied needs, a site was set aside on the Mossley Estate for an old people’s home.  There were, as yet, no multi-storey homes though flats and maisonettes were said to be popular and some three-storey blocks were projected on outer estates.

Alumwell Road, Pleck

These were generously sized homes. Walsall’s three-bed houses averaged 963 square feet, some way over the 900 square feet minimum prescribed by Labour’s post-war Minister of Housing Nye Bevan.  The so-called ‘People’s Homes’ – at around 750 to 850 square feet – designated by his Conservative successor, Harold Macmillan, in the attempt to increase the rate of housebuilding, were significantly smaller.

Walsall’s 10,000^th council home was officially opened by the town’s Labour MP WT Wells at 65 Primley Avenue in Alumwell in June 1950.  The Council’s brochure to mark the occasion boasted of building an average of four houses every three working days since 1920 – an astonishing rate when compared to the present day’s faltering efforts and a tribute to the contribution public housing made (and could make again) to meeting our housing needs. (3)

St Matthew’s Close

There was little signature architecture and planning in these new estates though one later commentator remarked on their ‘carefully designed informal layouts with much greenery’ and the ‘steel casements, pantiled roofs and distinctive copper flashing’ of the Borough’s housing. (4) An exception to the decent but stolid output which predominated was the St Matthew’s Close scheme designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe and opened in 1953 as part of the now Grade II-listed Memorial Gardens on Church Hill – an area of open land resulting from the slum clearance drive of the 1930s. (5)

Alfred Street maisonettes

Halted by the war and delayed by the urgent need to build new housing after 1945, that determination to clear the slums took off once more in Walsall after 1954 when the Alfred Street area in Bloxwich was represented and new maisonette blocks erected (since replaced themselves, as best as I can tell). In 1958, there were plans to demolish 1500 unfit homes in the next four years.

Warewell Close

For the first time, Walsall was looking to multi-storey replacements. This had begun modestly in 1955 with Warewell Close on Lower Rushall Street near the town centre – two five-storey blocks, their form and, particularly, their colourful, angular balconies reflecting the New Humanist/Festival style then in vogue.  (The work of Frederick Gibberd and Norman & Dawbarn in Hackney in the 1950s offers a close comparison.)

By the end of the decade, Walsall was clear that multi-storey blocks were a necessary part of its housing mix in the ‘endeavour to make the best use of the land available where this has been suitable for this type of development’. (6)  This new direction is best seen in an estate deserving of wider recognition completed just to the south of St Matthew’s Close in November 1961.

The Orlando Estate

When I visited the Orlando Estate last summer, one of the residents was initially a little suspicious of this stranger taking photographs. When I explained my interest, she understood immediately and described it herself as ‘a time capsule of the 1960s’; she’d even written on it as part of a university course. So it’s had some love. Let’s give it some more.

Orlando Street prior to redevelopment

The four acre estate – Walsall’s largest redevelopment scheme to date – replaced severely rundown streets of two- and three-storey terraced housing. The official description provides context and detail: (7)

Because of the severe housing shortage in the Midlands, it was necessary to redevelop at high density without giving an impression of overcrowding; this has been achieved by designing a mixed residential scheme with four blocks of eight-storey flats, one three-storey block of flats, two-blocks of three-storey terraced houses and eleven two-storey terraced houses

The detailing is more telling – internal stairways in the eight-storey blocks finished with terrazzo, stairs and landings with granolithic, prodoglaze tiling on the walls, and entrance porches and internal screens of West African mahogany. External interest was added by coloured panelling and hung tiling.

The Orlando Estate

Some 169 homes were provided in this compact and attractive £403,000 scheme, completed, as the Chief Architect proudly records, seven months ahead of schedule. We can give Wates some credit here, both for the design – jointly devised by the Borough’s architect’s department and GF Elliott, divisional architect for the company – and execution. (You’ll find additional images of the estate in this Tumblr post.)

Providence Close, formerly the Leamore Redevelopment Area

Walsall’s second multi-storey estate was completed three years later as part of the Leamore redevelopment scheme which saw 180 properties demolished, replaced by 280 homes in a mixed development scheme of six nine- and twelve three-storey blocks.  The estate’s multi-storey car park was ‘believed to be the first of its kind in municipal housing’ and was another sign of the modernity these new developments represented.  This was another scheme built by Wates and jointly designed by the Chief Architect and Mr Elliott of Wates. (8)

An early image of the Sandbank Estate

Walsall’s ambitions grew, literally so in its next major scheme, opened in April 1965 at Sandbank, Bloxwich which featured one 16-storey and three 12-storey blocks – 253 homes replacing 44 including 18 surviving post-war prefabs. The scheme was built by Wates, this time, in another sign of the times, using a proprietary method of system building. (9)

The Chuckery Estate from St Matthew’s Hill

By 1965, Walsall Borough Council owned near 18,500 homes. When the borough expanded to incorporate Darlaston and part of Willenhall in 1966, it acquired a further 8500 but it continued to build.  The £1.5m Paddock Redevelopment Scheme in Chuckery, central Walsall was completed in 1969, comprising 357 flats in three 17-storey and two 13-storey blocks. (10)

Millsum House, the Chuckery Estate

It was built – you guessed it – by Wates and again designed jointly by Wates and the Borough architect’s department; system-built using steel moulds which allowed the direct application of decorative wall finishes. In full production, the on-site factory produced one floor each day for both the 13- and 17-storey blocks.  System building gets, for good reason, a bad press but here it seems to have been efficient and the end-result attractive.  A £2.2m refurbishment in the mid-90s– with its added colour and pattern – seems even more reminiscent of the Scandinavian schemes which had provided a model for system building’s British adoption in the sixties.

As Glendinning and Muthesius note, in ‘the Black Country, Wates established itself as a trusty mainstay of medium-sized boroughs…by constructing in-situ blocks and building up a local work-force’.  Such reliance on a locally dominant company (McAlpine also built some Walsall blocks but far fewer) could lead to unfortunate and corrupting results – as was the case with Bryants and Birmingham) but here it seems to be very largely a case of mutual benefit.  When Walsall’s Conservative council leader Sir Cliff Tibbits tried to test the market against Wates, he failed: ‘Wates were giving such good service that nobody wanted to leave them!’. (11)

Alma and Leys Courts, Darlaston

By the late 1960s, the star of high-rise housing was waning but there was an inevitable lag as already planned schemes were fulfilled. The last tower blocks built in the Black Country, the 15-storey Alma and Leys Court flats in Darlaston, were completed in 1973.

Meanwhile, low-rise building continued apace until, by the early 1980s, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council (created in the 1974 reorganisation of local government which amalgamated Walsall with neighbouring Aldridge-Brownhills) the council managed some 42,000 homes, including some 66 tower blocks.  Next week’s post examines the very different housing politics of this later period.

Sources

My thanks to the Walsall Local History Centre and Archives for providing some of the sources used in this post.

(1) See Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-1975. A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (1981)

(2) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1954. The quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(3) Walsall Town Council, The 10,000^th House (1950)

(4) Peter Arnold, A Guide to the Buildings of Walsall (2003)

(5) Historic England, Walsall Memorial Garden

(6) Walsall Town Council, The 15,000^th House (1958)

(7) AT Parrott, ‘New Housing at Walsall’, Official Architecture and Planning, December 1961

(8) Walsall Town Council, Leamore Redevelopment Scheme Official Brochure (1964)

(9) ‘Sandbank housing scheme, Walsall’, Architects’ Journal, 3 September, 1969 and Walsall Town Council, Sandbank Redevelopment Scheme (1965)

(10) Walsall Town Council, Paddock Redevelopment Scheme (1969)

(11) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993)

Council Housing in Walsall, Part II: The Interwar Period

Tags

1920s, 1930s

This is the second of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

As we saw in last week’s post, Walsall’s and the nation’s housing programme stalled in 1920 but the drive to provide decent working-class homes revived in the mid-1920s and in the 1930s was joined by a determined effort to address the slum conditions afflicting so many.  In both, Walsall took a prominent role though it was dominated by a Conservative-Liberal ‘anti-socialist’ alliance which outnumbered a growing but disunited Labour presence on the Council.

Neville Chamberlain’s 1923 Housing Act kick-started this process nationally but it was under the more generous 1924 Act passed by a short-lived Labour government that council housebuilding in Walsall took off.  In fact, the Borough built 4204 homes under the 1924 Act, a rate of housebuilding – at 40.8 homes per 1000 of its population – which placed it second among county boroughs only to Carlisle, ironically another council dominated by a self-declared anti-socialist alliance. (1)

Brockhurst Street, Fullbrook

In January 1925, as the town’s housing shortage (blamed in the Council on the lack of skilled labour and building materials) became apparent once more, it was agreed to purchase land for housing purposes in Pleck.  Three months later the Council approved a large scheme of 1671 houses at a cost of over £750,000. (2)

By this time, cheaper non-parlour homes were preferred (parlour homes formed only 12 per cent of the new build compared to 40 per cent in the 1919 programme) but – at 98 per cent of the total – three-bed family homes dominated.  These early Walsall estates featured ‘a small range of standard designs, either semi-detached pairs or “triplets”’.  Their solid redbrick housing can be seen across Walsall, still providing good decent homes even if the purists will regret the replacement of their original wooden casement windows ‘by bland UPVC’. (3)

Homes on the Poets Estate, Harden

A second wave of construction under the 1924 Act began in 1930.  In April, the Council purchased a 91.5 acre site between Field Road and Blakenall, sufficient for 1000 homes and three months later, the Council voted, without division, to build 500 immediately. (4)  Despite this ambition and a rapid scale of construction (2417 houses were built in the five years to 1930), Walsall was running to stand still and its waiting list for homes had actually increased in the same period by 1500 to 3500. (5)

In the late summer of 1930, a new Housing Act – the product of another brief and minority Labour government – received the Royal Assent which instigated a new direction for the national housing programme. Arthur Greenwood’s legislation focused on the slums which continued to blight working-class lives in huge numbers by providing financial incentives for slum clearance and obliging local authorities to rehouse all those displaced.

West Bromwich Road, Palfrey

Walsall responded rapidly. A special joint meeting of the Council’s Housing and Health Committees in December 1930 proposed a £1.8m five-year building programme for 5000 houses – 4000 to meet ordinary needs and 1000 for slum clearance.  In the end, a still impressive scheme of 4000 new homes was agreed. The first ‘clearance area’ (an area of housing designated ‘insanitary’ under the terms of the 1930 Act) was declared at the same time.

Alderman Hucker, the Labour chair of the Health Committee, stated that the Council had spent £28,000 in last five years dealing with epidemics: (6)

He believed the slum clearance question had never been tackled before in the borough but under the 1930 Housing Act they were able to make a start to give the people better living conditions.

In larger towns, central slum clearance typically required its replacement by multi-storey flats (still no more than five or six storeys so long as lifts were deemed too costly for working-class homes) if housing densities were to be maintained and people kept close to their work. Walsall was small enough for the time being to escape this fate and was able, as one councillor urged, to rehouse ‘people in spaces where there was plenty of fresh air’. (7)

Talke Road, Fullbrook

This time all the new homes were non-parlour but all were standard two-storey houses – yet again three-bed homes dominated – with the exception of the 344 one-bed bungalows constructed, reflecting the needs of elderly persons rather than the younger families to whom council housing had overwhelmingly catered for previously.

The Ministry of Health’s 1933 circular stipulating that henceforth all public housing subsidies were to be dedicated solely to schemes of slum clearance sharpened the Council’s focus.  By 1934, some 1159 houses were scheduled for demolition and some 5200 people rehoused. It represented one in twenty of the Borough’s total housing stock.

Dorsett Place, Leamore

Despite this, the Council’s Chief Sanitary Inspector, CA Stansbury defended the Victorian ‘jerry-builder’ (and supplied the quotation marks).  The houses they built were apparently already being described as ‘desirable working class investment properties’ and practically all, in his view, were ‘readily capable of being kept in a fit state for human habitation at reasonable expense’.  In this, he might be seen as prescient, anticipating both the rehabilitation drive of the later 1960s and the more recent cachet of some of these once condemned older terraces.

He challenged some conventional wisdom, however – that which we’ve seen in Walsall and elsewhere which blamed the personal failings of slum dwellers for their living conditions: (8)

A new spirit is abroad, these folk are getting anxious to move, and, what is more important, are reacting to their improved conditions ; they are now fit to take their place as worthy citizens in our towns. It is amazing to see how some of them set about getting their new house and garden in order. It is then that one realises that this programme is worthwhile. There are black sheep, of course, but there is high hope for the future.

Under the National Government’s 1935 Housing Act, the attack on slum living acquired a new metric – overcrowding. All local authorities were required to survey local conditions and in Walsall it was revealed that almost five per cent of its 26,894 households were living in overcrowded conditions.  Surprisingly, some 519 families living in the town’s 5491 council homes were found to be overcrowded; at 9 per cent a rate of overcrowding which exceeded that in private homes (3.6 per cent).  The anomaly was blamed on the slightly smaller rooms of council housing though it might reflect too the prevalence of young and larger families living in council homes. A proposal to build 500 new homes of which 350 would be four- to five-bedroom was made to address the point. (9)

11 Walstead Road, now privately owned.

In March 1935, Walsall’s 5000^th council home was opened – at 11 Walstead Road West in Delves Green.  This was part of an extensive building programme in the town’s southern suburbs – some 400 homes had been completed by the mid-thirties in Fulbrook and Delves Green; around 1000 in Palfrey.

In a clockwise direction, new large estates were developed to the west between Wolverhampton Road and Pleck Road and to the north, where Walsall proper merged into Bloxwich, Leamore, Harden and Goscote.

There was little rebuilding in the centre but further slum clearance was agreed in 1936 around St Matthew’s Church and, further north, around Coal Pool.  A new estate was built in the latter in the late 1930s. By 1937, it was reckoned that 107 clearance areas had been declared in the town and some 2262 houses represented as unfit. (10) But much remained to be done. Although almost 11,000 people had been rehoused, around 556 condemned homes were still in occupation. And when war broke out and new construction was halted, only 2664 houses of the 4000 planned in the 1930s had been built. (11)

Nursery Road, Leamore. The distinctive garden walls seem to have been a feature of most of Walsall’s interwar housing.

During the war itself, despite its importance as an industrial centre, Walsall suffered relatively lightly from the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids. In 1944, it even acted as a safe haven for around 1500 evacuees from the V1 and V2 bombing raids in London. (12)  Nevertheless, lack of maintenance and the cessation of new construction created in Walsall, as elsewhere, an immediate housing crisis as the country turned towards peacetime reconstruction.

Prefabs on Alumwell Road

The 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act committed £150 million to a programme of prefabricated homes and Walsall was allocated some 446 of the 156,623 two-bed bungalows that sprung up across the country.  The first was erected on Alumwell Road in September 1945. With a projected life-span of ten years, many in Walsall survived into the 1970s.

Despite that longevity, the prefabs were understood as a temporary fix. In 1945, the local housing waiting list stood at 5000 and thoughts had already turned to the creation of the modern, permanent homes that its people both needed and – with expectations raised – demanded.

The next post after Christmas looks at Walsall’s extensive building programme in the post-war era.  Much of this built on earlier achievements and forms but by the later 1950s multi-storey and high-rise solutions entered the mix too and a new chapter of council housing history took off.

Sources

My thanks to the Walsall Local History Centre and Archives for providing some of the sources used in this post.

(1) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1954 and John H Jennings, ‘Geographical Implications of the Municipal Housing Programme in England and Wales, 1919-1939’, Urban Studies, vol 8, No 121, 1971

(2) ‘Walsall Town Council. Housing Problems Discussed’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 17 January 1925 and ‘Walsall Town Council. Big Housing Scheme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 March 1925

(3) Peter Arnold, A Guide to the Buildings of Walsall (Tempus, 2003)

(4) ‘Walsall Town Council. Big Housing Scheme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 March 1925, ‘Walsall Town Council: Big Housing Site Purchased’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 5 April 1930 and ‘Walsall Town Council. More Houses to be Built’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 19 July 1930

(5) ‘Walsall Town Council: Big Housing Programme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 20 December 1930

(6) ‘Walsall Town Council: Big Housing Programme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 20 December 1930 and AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1954

(7) ‘Walsall Town Council. Slum Clearance’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 13 May 1933

Council Housing in Walsall, Part I: Before 1914 and the Impact of War

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1920s, Pre-1914

This is the first of four posts telling the story of council housing in Walsall.  Beyond any local interest, it reflects the dynamics of a wider national history of council housing.  That fuller story will be told in my forthcoming book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which will be published by Verso in April 2018.

Walsall might seem a workaday kind of place to some, typical of many such towns in the North and Midlands which prospered as Britain industrialised but fell on hard times as that, by now, traditional manufacturing economy faltered. It has, however, amongst its other claims to fame, a rich council housing history. This first post will examine the earliest phase of this history – the debate around state provision of working-class housing that developed before 1914 and the impact of the war itself on a council housebuilding programme.

Statue of Sister Dora (c) Derek Bennett and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In 1800, Walsall’s population stood a little over 10,000; by 1901 86,430 lived in the town, employed in a diverse range of trades, most famously leather manufacture.  The town’s squalid housing reflected this rapid population growth but, at first, there was neither the will nor the power to tackle the problem of its slum housing.  There were cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 and smallpox epidemics in 1872 and 1875. The heroic role of the Anglican nun, Sister Dora (Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison) in tending to those affected in the latter outbreak is recognised in what is said to be the country’s first statue, erected in Walsall town centre in 1886, to a woman not of royal blood

Townend Bank, 1875, a photograph by WB Shaw (with thanks to A Click in Time)

Belatedly, the Victorian state and its elites moved to address the sanitary crisis caused by Britain’s breakneck urbanisation. The 1875 Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Improvement Act allowed local authorities to compel the demolition of unfit properties (but made no provision for rehousing those affected).  One year later, Walsall’s first Medical Officer of Health, Dr James MacLachlan, ordered the clearance of the central Townend Bank area; ‘a conglomeration of abominations’ in MacLachlan’s view. One hundred and twenty dwellings, housing almost 600 people, were demolished. (1)

But the ambivalence – to put it kindly – of ‘respectable’ Victorian attitudes towards slumdom and its inhabitants lingered on and the tendency to blame the poor for their poverty and squalor remained. According to the local mayor: (2)

Many of the tenants have been for generations the sloth of the idle and the profligate and abounded in associations which are disgusting to public morality and common decency. The very soil on which they stand is known to be saturated with disease and death, while the whole district seems to be given over to drunkenness and dissoluteness.

Wider opinion was shifting, however, a change seen legislatively in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act which strengthened the powers of councils to clear slums and, critically, permitted them to build new housing.

This reflected a changing political climate.  After 1884, working-class men formed a majority of the electorate and traditional parties had both to address this new electorate and contend with emerging socialist ideas. Haydn Sanders, an independent socialist, was elected to the Council in 1888, and the first Labour councillor, Joe Thickett, in 1913.

Cllrs Thickett (to left) and Hucker, 1915 (with thanks to Black Country History; made available under a Creative Commons licence)

Thickett was a railway signalman and he was joined the following year by his fellow railwayman, Henry Hucker.  The local press pointed out, when Thickett was succeeded by Hucker as mayor in 1924, that they worked alternate shifts in the same box.  That was a later sign of a changing party political balance but, before the First World War, Walsall, a County Borough from 1888, remained broadly Liberal in its politics.

Working-class housing conditions remained dire despite the Borough’s modest slum clearance programme, a problem compounded by the town’s population growth – up to 92,115 by 1911 – and the shortage of suitable and affordable homes. Belatedly, in October 1913, the Health Committee was instructed to: (3)

inquire into and report upon the whole question of housing conditions in Walsall, and in the event of appearing from such inquiry that there is a deficiency of housing accommodation for the working classes, to consider and report as to the steps to be taken to meet such deficiency.

The subsequent report by the Medical Officer of Health revealed just 148 vacant houses of up to 7s (35p) a week rental (obviously the figure taken to represent the maximum working-class households could afford), of which 49 were unfit. Meanwhile, 132 one-room tenements were occupied by 210 persons and 530 two-room tenements by some 1528. In all, it was estimated that over seven percent of the town’s population lived more than two to a room, taken as the benchmark for overcrowding.

The Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle headline of 14 February 1914

The deficiency was obvious and had a further impact on slum clearance efforts. As the Medical Officer of Health concluded the ‘present shortage of houses handicaps the Health Committee in dealing with houses which are unfit for habitation, because if the houses are closed the occupants may be unable to obtain other dwellings’.

The Health Committee concluded unanimously that there was ‘a pressing need for the provision of additional houses for the working classes’.  However, only a majority of the Committee supported the further recommendation that ‘a scheme should be prepared for the provision by the Council of about 200 dwellings under the Housing Act’.  That division gave rise to a fierce debate as to what the Council’s role should be.  And that debate – covered thoroughly in the local press – is revealing of the broader disagreements, then and now, on what the proper role of the national and local state should be in providing decent homes for the working class.

Conservative opposition to a council housebuilding programme rested on a number of propositions, the most basic being that private enterprise could be expected to step up to the plate. This ideological commitment to the free market ignored its failure to date and the fact that contractors’ profits lay in building more expensive homes for the middle class. (Plus ça change…)

It was perhaps in recognition of those realities that a second, superficially more humane, argument was advanced to oppose a council scheme – that the new homes would be unaffordable to those who needed them most, ‘the submerged tenth’ as one councillor described them.  It was true that council house rents lay beyond the means of the poorest; the new homes catered primarily for precisely the better-off working class, those most likely within the labour movement to be campaigning for them. (Some reformers argued that a ‘filtering up’ process would occur whereby the slightly better homes vacated by new council tenants would be taken over by the poorer moving from slummier quarters.)  In part recognition of this case, the Council eventually agreed a smaller scheme of 125 new homes of which 25 would be reserved for those affected by slum clearance.

However such apparent compassion coalesced uncomfortably with thoroughly unreconstructed attitudes towards the poor and their poverty. Alderman Walker claimed he would support building 200 houses for slum clearance purposes but he believed that the real solution to housing squalor lay in prosecuting those tenants ‘who would not keep their places clean’:

that was the only way they would improve the condition of things. They might provide houses but some of the people were not fit to go into them.  In their homes, they found a three-legged stool and a broken chair; the women wore dirty dresses, and the children looked as though they had not been washed for days.

In the event, a progressive majority agreed to investigate the smaller scheme proposed but to opponents this obviously represented kicking the scheme into the long grass.

Trades unionists on the local trades council sought to maintain the pressure and were clear that the plea of affordability should not be an excuse to build low-quality housing. Joe Thickett (a railway trades unionist as well as a Labour councillor) urged that the Council ‘adhere to the scheme for the provision of artisans’ dwellings, and not build low-class homes or barracks which would eventually lead to the repetition of the present slums’ – ‘5s a week houses with a good garden attached’ were wanted.

He pointed too to the progress being made nationally. The Local Government Board had committed £1.75m to the provision of working-class housing: (4)

The number of houses to be provided throughout the United Kingdom was 7,700. That was a monument to municipal progress, and they in Walsall had not contributed one single brick to that magnificent pile.

In the end, such arguments were victim of the larger tides of history.  War broke out in August 1914, and eight months later it was agreed to defer the Walsall scheme until the end of the conflict. Councillor Thickett berated Lloyd George for sacrificing house building to the war effort but acknowledged ‘that if the Prussian Junkers had never been born they would have seen the municipal houses rising from the foundations’. (5) His ‘visions of town planning, and of garden cities springing up’ survived, however, and ultimately would be enormously boosted by the war which had, for the moment, put paid to them.

In this context, Walsall offers some evidence relating to the debate between those who argue between continuity and change in council housing history – between those who argue that a council housebuilding programme was substantially in place before 1914 and would have developed despite the First World War and those who argue that the war itself was a determinant factor.  We can conclude, safely perhaps, that council housing would have grown substantially without the war and, in some respects, was delayed by it whilst acknowledging, on the other hand, that the war and the pressures it engendered was undoubtedly at least a catalyst and more probably a significant accelerant to the emergent movement.

The Tudor Walters Report of 1918, outlining the Government’s recommendations for the form and layout of post-war municipal housing, embodied some of Thickett’s hopes and Addison’s 1919 Housing Act compelled, for the first time, a council housebuilding programme. The Act required councils not only to survey local housing needs but to implement concrete plans to address them.

Homes in Blakenall Lane, amongst the earliest built by the Council

In the first flush of enthusiasm for this ‘land fit for heroes to live in’ promised by prime minister Lloyd George, Walsall committed to building some 1500 homes and the very first completed, at 98 Blakenall Lane, Bloxwich, was opened in June 1920.

Early council homes, East Street

At the same time, other homes – in modest but well-built terraces – were erected in Haskell Street and East Street to the south off West Bromwich Road. Priority was given first to ex-servicemen, their widows and children, and then the overcrowded.

Thereafter the going got tough.  There were already complaints about the construction costs of the new homes as post-war labour and materials shortages hit.   Under contracts let in February 1920, parlour homes were costing £840 to build and non-parlour £740 (about three times the pre-war figure). Unusually for the time, some 100 homes in Walsall were built by direct labour as a means of reducing expenditure. Rents were correspondingly high though the Council’s proposal to charge 9s a week for parlour homes and 7s a week for non-parlour houses was knocked back by the Ministry of Health. (6)

Early council homes, Haskell Street

In September 1920, the Corporation retrenched.  The 1500 home target, it was said, had been ‘been inserted under strong pressure from the Ministry’ and, as one councillor concluded, the programme ‘had not provided homes at a reasonable cost, and the rents which had to be charged were greater than people could afford to pay’. It was agreed to cut the programme to 450 homes. (7)

In this, the Council was merely anticipating events at the national level.  The Government scrapped the generous subsidies of the 1919 Housing Act in April 1921. Nationally, only 213,000 houses of the half-million initially promised were built under the legislation. Walsall itself completed some 310.  That almost 40 per cent of these were the parlour homes advocated in the Tudor Walters Report was vestigial testimony to the higher ideals of war’s end. (8)

That fortunately was not the end of the story. New pressures and demands emerged, new legislation passed and Walsall would become proportionately one of the largest providers of council housing in the country during the interwar period and beyond.  The next phase of this history will be discussed in next week’s post.

Sources

The early images of Walsall councillors are drawn from the online archive, Black Country History.

(1)  AP Baggs, GC Baugh and DA Johnston, ‘Walsall: Public services‘, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 17, Offlow Hundred (Part), ed. MW Greenslade (London, 1976)

(2) Quoted in Simon Briercliffe, ‘”Slums” of the Black Country: Town End Bank, Walsall’, 30 November, 2015.  Read the article for a fuller description of sanitary conditions and reform in Walsall in this period.

(3) ‘Municipal Housing. Health Committee to Prepare Scheme’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 14 February 1914

(4) ‘Municipal Housing Scheme. Discussed by Trades Council’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 14 February 1914

(5) ‘Municipal Housing. Proposed Shelving of Scheme’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 13 March 1915

(6) ‘Walsall Town Council. Progress of Housing Scheme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 February 1920 and ‘Walsall Town Council. Priority for Corporation Houses’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 February 1920

(7) ‘Walsall Town Council. The Housing and Abattoir Schemes’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 24 April 1920

(8) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing & Planning Review, July-August 1954