‘The London Borough of Thetford’?

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1970s, Expanded Towns

In the 1960s, Thetford was the fastest growing town in the country; almost two thirds of incomers came from London and a further 15 percent from the wider south-east. (1)  Some even called it ‘the London Borough of Thetford’.  By any standards, this was a seismic shift.  The last post examined the nuts and bolts of Thetford’s transformation from moribund rural town to, in effect, modern New Town; this will examine how it all worked out.

The official opening of the first housing on the Abbey Farm Estate, June 1968. Labour’s Minister of Housing, Anthony Greenwood, stands second left (I think)   © Archant

It was, in the first instance, a strongly working-class town.  Even after the social and economic shifts of the Thatcherite era, almost 62 percent of the workforce were categorised as skilled manual, semi-skilled and unskilled workers (compared to an English average of 48 percent) whilst only 38 percent belonged to the professional, managerial and administrative classes (52 percent).

And in the early years, it was difficult to persuade those new executives to live in the town; the managing director of Danepak stated rather unguardedly that, ‘with the 95 percent of council housing’ (an exaggeration), he thought the schools ‘rather oikish’.  Many preferred to live in the county town surrounds of nearby Bury St Edmunds. (2)

A shared complaint was the lack of hospital facilities (the nearest were in Bury) but for many of the new population it was the lack of recreational facilities – swimming pools and dance halls, for example – that rankled.  Some even preferred London’s parks to the open countryside which now surrounded them. All this was spelt out in some detail in a survey of incomers conducted by the local Rotary Club in 1963.

Mostly the picture is mixed. Locals called the incomers ‘smoggies’ apparently and some of the latter: (3)

thought that the local people were not particularly friendly towards them, whereas others said they had been received most warmly and that people had gone out of their way to make them feel at home.

Given the prevalence of young families, some missed having relatives close at hand to help with baby-sitting.  If that would gladden the hearts of Wilmott and Young (who had celebrated Family and Kinship in East London in 1957), they might have been surprised to learn that many thought ‘that on the housing estate there was a much friendlier atmosphere than in London and that one got to know one’s neighbours better than in a big city’.  (As an aside, it’s worth noting that many of the new settlers didn’t want to be housed – as was the practice – next to their workmates; there could be too much familiarity, it seems.)

The Redcastle Furze Estate. These are system-built ‘Anglia’ houses.

Almost all saw benefits in the move – better housing and lower rents the most significant, alongside improved health and less time travelling to work.  Surprisingly, at first glance, the overall cost of living increased for most that moved. This reflected the lower wage rates for some, the higher prices of local shops and, sometimes, new hire purchase commitments taken on to furnish new homes. What was, almost universally, a higher standard of living did not come not cost-free.

These were, of course, the pioneers and new amenities would be added as the town grew.  And Thetford worked hard to encourage and welcome new arrivals. As Jeyes considered its move from east London, the Town Clerk, William Ellis Clarke, ‘gave an illustrated talk on the town’s attractions’ to a meeting of employees in an Ilford cinema. Over the following weeks, the company brought coachloads of workers and their families to see those attractions – or otherwise – for themselves. (4)

A GLC showhouse on the Abbey Farm Estate

So most adapted. John Gardner (a warehouse supervisor at Jeyes), his wife Jean and their two children moved to the Abbey Farm Estate – as did most of the firm’s employees – in 1969. His new rented council home was a bargain compared to the house he had been purchasing in East Ham and the children were healthier. But, financially, they were worse off, not least because now they were running a car (in London ‘a luxury; here it is a necessity’). Jean faced giving up her weekly bingo.   The same calculus of cost and quality of life played out but the longer story was clearly positive: the longest settled were happiest with Norfolk and those ‘who grew into their teens in Thetford seem contented enough’. (5)

Canterbury Way, the Abbey Farm Estate

With hindsight, these seem the problems of affluence in an era of full and generally secure employment. Roll forward, thirty years in the new deindustrialised Britain where such new jobs as existed were often insecure and poorly paid, Thetford presents a different picture. In the new jargon we’ve learnt to apply, by 2004 three out of four Thetford wards were in the top quintile of most deprived wards for multiple deprivation across the country; likewise for income deprivation and child poverty. All four wards were in the top quintile for education, skills and training deprivation. (6)

Kimms Belt, Barnham Cross Common

Naturally, well-meaning local initiatives emerged to tackle this downturn in the town’s fortunes.  A ‘Healthy Thetford 2000’ project to improve training, education, job opportunities, housing, environment and community life in Thetford was succeeded by a ‘Thetford Partnership’ which received £2.5m of Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) funding to support ‘a broad and holistic scheme focusing on a range of initiatives to benefit people living in the western areas of the town in particular’.  (This was, predominantly, Abbey Farm; now the poorest area of Thetford.)  By 2007, under the continuing aegis of the Keystone Development Trust, some £8.5m of SRB funding had been allocated.

It’s not helpful, it might even seem a little snide, to point out that all this tinkers with fundamentally changed economic realities.  Thermos closed its Thetford factory in 2000 and moved to China.  The Tulip meat processing works (formerly Danepak) laid off 170 full-time employees in 2003. They were: (7)

replaced immediately with agency staff, most of them migrants on poorer terms – lower rates of pay, mostly just the minimum wage, less overtime money, less holiday, more antisocial shift patterns, uncertain hours. The full-time employees had no pay rise for three years and watched as their incomes were eroded by inflation.

It closed completely in 2007.  The furniture manufacturers Multiyork closed just before Christmas 2017.

All this makes Thetford seem less like the new Britain once envisaged and more like the ‘left behind’ country with which we are all now familiar. The local authorities have ‘washed their hands of us’, one local woman told an academic researcher in 2009.  The same research, unsurprisingly perhaps, identified other resentments directed towards outsiders. But: (8)

In Thetford … it was the Polish and Portuguese migrants disliked by white British people, who identified black and Asian people on their estate as part of the ‘we’.

Officially, according to the 2011 Census, Thetford’s population stood at around 21,000. Few locally believed this figure; the data of local GPs and the Fire Service suggested a figure approaching 29,000 which seemed to accord more closely with local perceptions (including some in the migrant community itself). (9)

We’re on tricky territory here and sometimes things can get ugly. There was certainly less contentment. After England’s defeat against Portugal in the 2004 Euros, there was an attack on a Portuguese-owned pub and its predominantly Portuguese clientele. It is also the case – and I am not eliding the two phenomena here – that Breckland (the local authority area of which Thetford is now a part) voted by 64 percent to leave the EU in the 2016 Referendum.

Townhouses on the Abbey Farm Estate

Against these stark headlines, closer analysis presents more complex realities: a Portuguese resident critical of eastern European migration; people in all communities wanting better integration; even, in a strange cameo of the new multiculturalism, a Polish and Lithuanian food store owned by an Iraqi Kurd.  In any case, some of the migrants are leaving already. (10)

All this paints a bleak picture and maybe one that will be unrecognisable or distasteful to local people who know the town better and experience it very differently.  The aim is not to portray dystopia but to draw a contrast – between the expansive ambitions of an earlier era and a state and economy working for ordinary people and our country today where so many feel abandoned and exploited.  As a famous son of Thetford, Thomas Paine, once said in a different context. ‘these are the times that try men’s souls’.

Meanwhile, life goes on and Thetford seeks to adapt to a new economy.  Thetford was awarded Growth Point status by central government in 2006. The latest Thetford Area Action Plan, adopted in 2012, projects 5000 new homes and 5000 new jobs by 2026.  A new enterprise park, first mooted thirty years ago, is perhaps finally getting off the ground. (11)

Captain Mainwaring © Keith Evans and made available through a Creative Commons licence

And in the new, old Britain, there’s heritage to be celebrated – a lot of genuine history as well as the invented tradition of Dad’s Army, filmed locally and marked by an unlikely statue of Captain Mainwaring in the town centre and a small museum.  There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Dad’s Army, its cast of characters and its bumbling patriotism but personally (and this might mark me out) I’d put statues up to the politicians and planners who sought to create a modern country and a healthier, better housed and more affluent population. They didn’t get everything right but we might use some of that will and action in our present beleaguered times.

Sources

(1) Greater London Council, Department of Architecture and Civic Design, ‘Thetford: Case Study in Town Development’ (March 1970); DG/TD/2/96, London Metropolitan Archives

(2) John Gretton, ‘Out of London’, New Society, 15 April 1971

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

(4) Michael Pollitt, ‘William Ellis Clarke, MBE: “Mr Thetford”: one of the architects who shaped the modern face of the town’, Eastern Daily Press, 9 January 2014

(5) Gretton, ‘Out of London’

(6) Keystone Development Trust, A Profile of Thetford (August 2004)

(7) Felicity Lawrence, ‘Poor Pay, No Rights: UK’s New Workforce’, The Guardian, 24 September 2007

(8) Garner, S., Cowles, J., Lung, B. and Stott, M. (2009) ‘Sources of resentment, and perceptions of ethnic minorities among poor white people in England’, National Community Forum/Department for Communities and Local Government quoted in Joseph Rowntree Foundation, White Working-Class Neighbourhoods: Common Themes and Policy Suggestions (November 2011)

(9) Ian Jack, ‘How many migrants does it take to change a Norfolk town?’, The Guardian, 29 September 2007

(10) Stephanie Baker, ‘This English Town Backed Brexit. Now the Poles Are Leaving’, Bloomberg, December 13, 2017

(11) Breckland District Council, Thetford Area Action Plan (2012) and Andrew Fitchett, ‘Hopes to resurrect troubled Thetford Enterprise Park as council look to kickstart £6m infrastructure scheme’, Eastern Daily Press, 4 January 2016

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Thetford: ‘A Town Which Has Picked Expansion’

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Expanded Towns, Thetford

Apologies for the lack of recent postings – I’ve been up and down the country talking about council housing and my book.  That is, of course, a shameless plug for Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing which is available from all good bookshops and can right now – just in time for Christmas – be bought for half-price from its publishers, Verso.

With the commercial break over, let’s get back to Thetford.  We left it a few weeks back in 1939, in a parlous state; both, to quote from that post, ‘a sleepy rural backwater’ and ‘a long-established borough with urban pretensions and ambitions’.

In the first instance and in the context of the post-war housing drive, those ambitions were met by a renewed council housebuilding programme.  Forty new homes were added to St Mary’s Estate, completed just before the outbreak of war, in the late 1940s and further new housing in the 1950s. By 1958, Thetford had built some 448 council homes and they formed almost 35 percent of the town’s housing stock. (1)  The town’s population stood at a little over 4600.

An image of old Thetford: King Street in the 1950s © Archant

But fundamental problems remained: (2)

the town had come to a point where continued existence as an independent unit was hardly feasible. Firstly the population of the town had decreased; secondly the community began to lose its youth as they sought jobs and a fuller life elsewhere; and thirdly the rating load was becoming unbearable.

Thetford had to expand. And it seemed that the Council’s Town Development Committee set up in 1952 might just be knocking on an open door. A prime goal of post-war planning – anticipated in the 1940 Barlow Report on the Distribution of Industrial Population and the 1943 County of London Plan – had been the dispersal of population from London. The first means to this objective had been Labour’s 1946 New Towns Act (responsible for the creation of Stevenage and Harlow, amongst others) but an uncontrolled growth in the service sector and a rising birth rate had mitigated its impact.  An incoming Conservative Government was, in any case, unsympathetic to what they saw as the heavy-handed statism of such an approach.

A map showing new and expanded towns in the south-east

In 1952, legislation was passed ‘to encourage Town Development in County districts for the relief of congestion and overpopulation elsewhere’.  Thetford’s initial approach to the London County Council (LCC) in 1953, proposing to receive some 10,000 Londoners, was rebuffed. A modified scheme, taking in some 5000, was suggested in 1955 but came to naught.

Its small-town air and distance from the capital may have hindered Thetford’s appeal but it held certain advantages, notably the existence of a single large landowner (the Crown) to aid expansion and its proximity to North Sea ports. Perhaps Thetford’s greatest asset, however, was its neediness – its desire for expansion: (3)

Legend has it that what finally won over the hearts of the London councillors was a plea by a Thetford woman councillor that ‘even taking on another dustman meant putting sixpence on the rates’.

London, in the meantime, was still committed to downsizing by the transfer of around 250,000 of its population and 400 acres of industry to new and expanded towns beyond the Green Belt in the late 1950s. (4)  Finally, in May 1957, agreement was reached. Thetford, the receiving authority under the 1952 Town Development Act, would agree to the LCC, acting as its agent, building some 1500 homes to house around 5000 moving from the capital.

Moving this story forward before looking in detail at its lived reality, these push-pull factors continued to operate.  By 1959, the Norfolk County Council was committed to a population for Thetford of 17,000 by 1980 with 60 percent representing an overspill population. The Borough Council and LCC themselves agreed an additional 5000 population transfer in 1960. The Government’s South-East Study, published in 1964, tasked the new Greater London Council with moving 110,000 families to Expanded Towns by 1981. (5)

By 1978, 3500 council homes had been built in Thetford in twenty years; they comprised near two-thirds of its housing stock.  In 1981, its population stood at 21,000.  These people needed jobs and another vital component of Thetford’s expansion was its ability to attract new employment.

A map from the mid-1960s with estate locations added

There were benefits to the move to Norfolk. For workers, the Industrial Selection Scheme inaugurated in 1953, guaranteed some on the LCC’s council housing waiting list both a job and a home. For companies, there was the lure of better (and cheaper) purpose-built factories and a relatively lower-paid workforce. (Skilled workers moving with London-based firms generally continued to receive London rates; those on the Industrial Selection Scheme fared less well.)

But there were difficulties too: (6)

It was found impossible to convince … early enquirers of the advantages of making this move, when there was nothing to show them but fields of poor quality sugar beet and some pretty coloured drawings.

And some initial encouragement was required.  In the end, the Borough Council kick-started the process by building and leasing two factories of its own. By 1966, there were 46 companies established in Thetford.  Around 52 percent of the local workforce worked in the manufacturing sector with no firm employing  over 200. This diverse economy was considered a plus given the catastrophic impact of the closure of the town’s single large employer in 1928. (7)  The larger manufacturers included such household names as Conran, Danepak, Thermos and, from the late 1960s, Jeyes, which had moved from East London.  That initial investment had paid off generously; by November 1973, 70 council-owned factories brought in rents of £176,000 a year and a penny rate was worth £20,000. (8)

An early photograph of Barnham Cross Common

Back in time, the first house on the first overspill estate in Barnham Cross Common (appropriately off London Road to the south-west of the town centre) was officially opened in April 1959. Almost 300 new homes were completed by 1961: (9)

The first two or three hundred families who moved in were very much in the nature of pioneers, living on estates which did not have a bus service into town, no community centre, and where the shopping parade on the estate … had not been completed.

The shops on Pine Close opened the following year.

The shops on Pine Close, Barnham Cross Common

Barnham Cross Common was a conventional estate of its time – existing belts of trees in the Breckland landscape characteristic of the area were retained; the houses themselves were conventional brick-built, two-storey homes built facing service roads around small greens and grassed courts.  The finished estate comprised 877 homes and – a  sign of the times – 523 garages.

An aerial shot of the Redcastle Furze Estate in 1972, showing the Radburn layout

An early photograph of the Redcastle Furze Estate

Planning for a new estate across the road began in 1963 which would eventually, after 1970, provide another 800 homes.  The Redcastle Furze Estate was a very different animal, incorporating the Radburn principles (separating traffic and pedestrians) now in vogue.

‘Anglia Houses’ under construction by Taylor Woodrow, Redcastle Furze Estate

Completed ‘Anglia Houses’, Redcastle Furze Estate

Some of the homes, reflecting another fashion of the era, were prefabricated. The Greater London Council’s ‘Anglia Houses’ were made of concrete crosswalls, supplied in up to four units, as well as factory-made timber panels forming roofs and internal partitions. Timber cladding panels were also supplied.  The intention was to minimise on-site work and the system, though designed for terraces, allowed variations in internal design and overall layout. (10)

An estate plan of Abbey Farm

The final, major estate – Abbey Farm – was commenced in May 1967 and completed in February 1971. It represented a further evolution in design.  Initial plans for a Radburn-style layout were abandoned: (11)

Early experience with the Redcastle Furze Estate indicated that although this type of layout had much to commend it, it had some drawbacks, e.g. visitors found difficulty in finding their way around, and thought was given to improvement that could be made in the layout at Abbey Farm.

Abbey Farm maisonettes, rear

Abbey Farm townhouses

Instead the estate was equipped with a large spinal road, Canterbury Way, running through its centre.  Large four-storey maisonette blocks were laid out this main road while narrow-frontage two- and three-storey houses, mostly with inbuilt garages were laid out along small cul-de-sacs leading off it.  The Housing Minister, Anthony Greenwood, visiting the estate in July 1968, declared the layout and design of the homes ‘exceptional’ and the best he had seen. (12)

The Ladies Estate

One other significant scheme remains: the so-called Ladies Estate, begun in 1974 and completed in 1979.  Elizabeth Watling Close and Sybil Wheeler Way commemorated two former mayors of the town; Boadicea, Edith Cavell and Elizabeth Fry were among other local female notables celebrated.   The 560 low-rise brick-built houses, bungalows and flats and curving streetscape created an attractive though undeniably suburban ensemble.

By 1979, Thetford had been transformed, by any objective measure, from its mid-century Slough of Despond into a successful and bustling expanded town. The next post examines how this shift played out, both for existing locals and the many thousands of incomers.  We’ll see too how far this apparent early promise has been fulfilled.

Sources

(1) Greater London Council, Department of Architecture and Civic Design, ‘Thetford: Case Study in Town Development’ (March 1970); DG/TD/2/96, London Metropolitan Archives

(2) John Gretton, ‘Out of London’, New Society, 15 April 1971

(3) Gretton, ‘Out of London’. A 1973 article was headlined appropriately ‘Thetford: a Town which has Picked Expansion’ (Built Environment, March 1973)

(4) ‘Town Expansion Scheme at Thetford’, The Surveyor, vol CXVI, no 3415, 5 October 1957

(5) Peter Jones (Town Development Division, GLC), ‘The Expansion of Thetford’, Era: the journal of the Eastern Region of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol 1, no 4, August 1968, pp34-40

(6)  WRF Jennings (Borough Engineer and Surveyor, Thetford), ‘Some Aspects of the Expansion of a Small Town’ [ND c1966]

(7) Jennings, ‘Some Aspects of the Expansion of a Small Town’ and Greater London Council, Department of Architecture and Civic Design, ‘Thetford: Case Study in Town Development’

(8) Michael Pollitt, ‘William Ellis Clarke, MBE: ”Mr Thetford”: one of the architects who shaped the modern face of the town’, Eastern Daily Press, 9 January 2014

(9) Peter Jones, ‘The Expansion of Thetford’

(10) ‘Expanding Towns: Thetford, Norfolk,’ Official Architecture and Planning, Vol. 30, No. 10 (October 1967)

(11) Thetford Borough Council and Greater London Council, ‘Abbey Farm Housing Estate’  DG/TD/2/93, London Metropolitan Archives

(12) GLC Press Office, ‘Thetford Homes’ – “Best I have seen” says Minister’, 10 July 1968

Council Housing in Thetford before 1939: No ‘borough as small had done more’

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914, Thetford

Often in London I shall think of Thetford and wonder if it is still alive … No one would notice if the whole town forgot to wake up one morning.

That, from Virginia Woolf in 1906, might have been a little unfair but it testifies powerfully to the town’s sad decline. (1)  In Saxon times, Thetford had been the capital of East Anglia. At the time of the Domesday survey in 1086, with a population of around 4500, it was reckoned the sixth biggest town in the realm. The same population, more or less, eight centuries later made it apparently one of the sleepiest.

The town sign celebrates Thomas Paine, born in Thetford, in 1737. The interwar Newtown Estate lies to the rear.

Thetford had fallen on hard times.  In 1868, Henry Stevens, the borough’s new Medical Officer of Health, having ‘carefully inspected every part of the Town’, stated that he had found ‘scarcely any of the conditions necessary to the health and well-being of an urban population’: (2)

the soil is saturated with sewage and excrementitious matter. I found this contaminated soil pierced in every direction by wells … from which alone the inhabitants could obtain water.

Unsurprisingly, Thetford suffered a series of major epidemics – measles, dysentery, diphtheria and cholera – in the same decade and its mortality rate, at 30 per 1000, stood a little higher than that of Whitechapel in London’s benighted East End.

Stevens’ pleas secured an improved water supply but no sewerage system and a further outbreak of typhoid occured in 1873 and another, alongside smallpox and diphtheria, in the 1890s.

In 1909, the survey of a later Medical Officer of Health reported 731 ‘privy vaults’ in Thetford, ‘practically none of them watertight, most of them merely holes in the ground’. The Council, however, still rejected a sewerage scheme as too expensive; a decision backed by 478 votes to 26 in the public meeting which followed, dominated, one presumes, by middle-class rate-payers rather than those most in need. It’s all a salutary corrective to the temptation to romanticise working-class life in small town and village England.

And yet, in other ways, Thetford would surprise. Allan Glaisyer Minns, born in the Bahamas, a doctor at the local workhouse and cottage hospital, was elected to the council in 1903. In 1904, he became the first black man to be elected mayor anywhere in the UK.

The Council was also one of the very few to build council housing before the First World War and, in St Mary’s Crescent, it built one of the most remarkable of early schemes.

St Mary’s Crescent

Plans were first mooted in 1911 when the Town Council’s Housing Committee (itself an innovative step for a small borough council) recommended the appointment of a Norwich architect, SJ Wearing, to oversee the scheme.  Tenders for ‘the erection of 50 workmen’s dwellings on Bury Road’ were issued the following year. By 1914, the scheme was near fully occupied and, despite an overall cost of around £6666, said to be self-supporting. (3)

St Mary’s Crescent

Not only had Wearing created an economical scheme, he had created an attractive one, dubbed later by locals as the White City for obvious reasons.  As such, the estate garnered considerable regional interest, including a deputation of councillors from Ely: (4)

In each dwelling, there was one good living room and scullery and three bedrooms upstairs … All the dwellings had been passed by the Local Government Board who said it was the best scheme of dwellings they had seen.

St Mary’s Crescent

With rents set at between 3s and 4s 6d (15-23p) a week – the amount varied according to the size of garden – the homes were affordable to the less well-off working-class; the average wages of the male heads of household were said to be around £1 and £1.20.

For all that this housing progress went some way in alleviating working-class conditions – a full sewerage system for the town wasn’t provided till 1952 incidentally – it could no nothing to address Thetford’s underlying economic malaise.  The local economy deteriorated as traditional rural industry contracted and the Council instituted unemployment relief works in the post-war recession in 1921.

An advertisement for Burrell’s steam engines, 1906

Disaster struck, however, in 1928 when the major employer, the agricultural machinery and steam engine works of Charles Burrell closed.  It had employed over 600 at peak. The 1931 census recorded 800 people leaving the town in the preceding decade and its population fell below 4000. Outward migration continued until the end of the decade when new military bases were established nearby in preparation for impending world war. (5)

The first world war had, in the meantime, provided means and motive for a further expansion of the town’s council housing.   The 1919 Housing Act required local authorities not only to survey housing needs but to build to address them.  In housing at least, Thetford was progressive and it acted promptly. A special meeting of the Town Council in October unanimously agreed an application to the Ministry of Health for a £1000 loan and the purchase of land in military use on London Road for housing purposes. SJ Wearing was again appointed architect. (6)

The Newtown Estate

The land duly purchased, the 72 houses of the Newtown Estate were complete by 1924.  The mayor praised the achievement – ‘he did not think there was a borough in the Kingdom as small as Thetford that had done more’ – but it’s an interesting sign of heightened expectations that the scheme was criticised by some for not addressing the requirements of those in greatest need.

Councillor Isaac Aspland, politically unaffiliated but as manager of Thetford’s Labour Exchange, someone in close contact with the poorest of the borough, praised it as: (7)

a splendid scheme and very well carried through but he did not think it relieved very much the pressure on housing of the poorer inhabitants … to a large extent the houses built at Thetford were not for the poorer classes because that class could not afford to pay the high rents.

He referred to eight cases of overcrowding before him including a married couple with seven children living in one bedroom and a box-room and another where a family of 11 had only two bedrooms.  Given their relatively high rents, estimated as between 6s and 7s 6d (30-38p), the ‘Newtown houses were, he contended, middle-class dwellings’.

The Newtown Estate

The new politics – the new expectation that council housing should directly address the needs of the poorest – was seen in national legislation in the 1930s: the 1930 Housing Act tackling slum clearance and the 1935 Act attacking overcrowding.

There could be no ‘Clearance Areas’ as permitted by the 1930 Act, in small town Thetford but a survey showed almost 39 percent of its housing as in some way defective under the terms of legislation. In 1938, 18 families were found in need of rehousing under the terms of the 1935 Act. (8)

The St Mary’s Estate of some 22 three- and four-bed non-parlour homes was built in consequence in the closing years of the decade.  The plaque at the entrance to the estate marks SJ Wearing as architect once more; the estate he has designed some 26 years earlier lies a few metres beyond.

St Mary’s Estate

In total, Thetford had built 144 council homes by 1939 and they formed around 11 percent of its housing stock.  Council homes formed 85 percent of the new homes built in the town between the wars. The figures are surprising but they capture a creative tension in the town’s character. Virginia Woolf may have seen it as a sleepy rural backwater but it was a long-established borough with urban pretensions and ambitions.

Those ambitions were to be fully explored in the next dramatic phase of the town’s history and development which began in 1957. We’ll explore that in a future post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Frank Meeres, Thetford and Breckland through Time (Amberley Publishing Limited, 2010)

(2) Quoted in Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (Phillimore, 1986)

(3) ‘Thetford Town Council’, Norfolk News, 15 July 1911, ‘Borough of Thetford. Erection of Workmen’s Dwellings’, Bury Free Press, 13 April 1912 and ‘Councillor Oldman on Yarmouth Health and Housing’, Yarmouth Independent, 14 March 1914

(4) ‘Ely Urban Council’, Cambridge Independent Press, 1 August 1913

(5) Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (Phillimore, 1986)

(6) ‘Thetford: The Housing Scheme’, Bury Free Press, 25 October 1919 and ‘Thetford Housing Problem’, Bury Free Press, 31 January 1920

(7) ‘Thetford Housing’, Bury Free Press, 6 December 1924

(8) ‘Thetford Housing’, Bury Free Press, 13 June 1931 and ‘Mayor Making at Thetford’, Bury Free Press, 14 November 1936