The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead II: ‘Not a mere assemblage of houses’

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s

Last week’s post looked at the controversy surrounding rival plans – one a more traditional cottage suburb submitted by Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson, the other an ostensibly more visionary re-imagining of community life proposed by the architect Sir Charles Reilly – for Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate.  The former had been preferred by the Conservative majority on the Council and they had appointed the Liverpool architect Herbert James Rowse to ‘to draw up designs for the houses to be erected on the estate’. (1)

This plaque is placed at the main entrance to the estate on the side wall of a house on Ackers Road

To general surprise, Rowse, perhaps unwilling to work within the confines of a scheme suggested by the Borough Engineer, perhaps seeking some third way compromise, returned to the drawing board and, in January 1945, submitted an entirely new scheme.  Labour pressed for reconsideration of Reilly’s plans but in March 1945, the Council – dividing again on party lines – endorsed those of Rowse. Building of the estate, after a twenty-year gestation, finally began in 1946.

Rowse’s 1945 plan from Architecture and Building News, 1950

Whilst he eschewed the social engineering proposed by Reilly, Rowse’s own proposals reflected the spirit and ambition of the time: (2)

The Woodchurch Estate is not a mere assemblage of houses placed on a plot ground in the maximum possible density and monotonous regularity of layout and pattern, after the manner of the vast unplanned and uncontrolled suburban development of the inter-war years: it is the architectural setting of a fully developed sociological conception of a community of people living within a defined neighbourhood, having a conscious identity of its own and equipped for the maximum possibilities of the full intercourse of such a community. The comprehensive character of this project makes it of outstanding interest.

For Rowse, the fulfilment of these promises lay in the layout, facilities and housing forms of his new estate.

The overall plan was ‘developed on the basis of the natural topographical features of the site’ with:

Every effort … made in the planning of the Estate to provide prospects of the attractive rural surroundings from every possible point and to allow the maximum amount of rural character to permeate the estate by means of planted green closes, forecourts, quadrangles, recreation spaces and allotment gardens.

Broad parkways divided the estate whilst a central square provided ‘for the social life of the community’ with shops, baths and assembly hall, community centre, cinema, library and clinic:

In contrast to the familiar monotony of streets or their suburban counterpart, the estate will present varied internal prospects of groupings of terraces and small blocks amidst trees and green spaces, having the general character of a contemporary version of the traditional English village scene.

For the 2500 houses of the estate, Rowse proposed brick of ‘good, common quality’ with ‘architectural interest … achieved by the application of lime-wash, pigmented in a range of quiet tones of yellow, blue, pink and grey, alternating with white’.  His interest extended to their interiors – those of the first homes completed being ‘decorated in warm ivory shade on the walls and a pale shade of blue on the ceilings’.  Criticism of this colour scheme led to a uniform white being applied externally by the early 1950s.

Rowse’s illustrations of Woodchurch housing from Architecture and Building News, 1950

The estate’s early housing reflects Rowse’s ambitions though, on a cold January day such as when I visited, those broad parkways can seem rather bleak.

Shops on Hoole Road © Rept0n1x and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Rowse’s supervision of the scheme was superseded by that of new Borough Architect TA Brittain in 1952 who, in Pevsner’s astringent words, ‘continued building to inferior standards of design’.  The volume dislikes the estate’s early neo-Georgian-style shopfronts but reserves its greatest disdain for the Hoole Road shops, once planned as a centrepiece of Rowse’s central parkway. (3)

This early image closely resembles the 1000th house on the estate, opened in 1953

The estate’s 1000^th home, no. 84 Common Field Road, was officially opened by local MP Percy Collick in 1953 – a gabled, tile-hung, arts and crafts-inspired design, clearly a legacy of Rowse’s tenure.

Early photographs of the estate

Later housing was plainer but the biggest departure from Rowse’s founding vision were the two 14-storey tower blocks – Grasswood Gardens and Ferny Brow Gardens – built in 1960 on New Hey Road; the architect, ironically was HJ Rowse. (4)  By the end of the decade, three 14-storey blocks were added, built by Wimpey – Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, at the Upton end of the estate.

Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, photographed in 1987 from the Tower Block website

Typically, for all the preceding rhetoric, even the most basic community facilities were slow to appear: the first shops in 1953, a health clinic in 1954, and the first local library (at first housed in the new secondary modern school) in 1959. A community centre followed in 1965.

St Michael and All Angels, January 2019

Church congregations met in private houses or local halls until the Methodist church opened in 1958 and the Roman Catholic St Michaels and All Angels in 1965. The latter was worth waiting for, at least with an impressive modernist design (by Richard O’Mahony), planned liturgically – in Vatican II style – to focus attention on the central altar and – in landscape terms – to provide a fitting climax to New Hey and Home Farm Roads.

 

Home Farm Road, January 2019

All this, however, was some way away from the promises of Rowse, let alone Reilly, and that post-war vision of planned community.  Later academic studies of the estate allow us to examine the community which did emerge. They present a mixed picture, both reflecting and challenging standard interpretations.

The new residents were predominantly young families. A points system determined priority, favouring ex-servicemen, established residency and size of family. Additional points were awarded to those living in unfit accommodation. They were also judged by their ability to pay the rent though this was often a struggle: an average rent for a three-bed home amounted to £1.40 whilst local wages ranged from £3.50 for an unskilled male worker to £5 and above for semi-skilled and skilled workers. In the struggle to make ends meets, cookers were often bought from the Gas Board and furniture from Sturla’s department store on the ‘never-never’ (hire purchase). (5)

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

In support of the Wilmott and Young narrative of ‘missing mum’ (or, more academically, missing inner-city matrilocal kinship networks), there were the many young women who trekked back on an almost daily basis from this peripheral estate to their parents. Some walked, some struggled with their Silver Cross prams (‘normally second-hand, mind’) on an inadequate bus service. One young mother with school-age children cycled to the Mount Estate – where her parents now lived – every day at 10am, having got up at 6am to clean the house and prepare evening meals. (5)

But there were others pleased to place some distance between themselves and family:

One male interviewee explained how he and his wife were glad to get away from his mother-in-law because ‘she was jealous of my wife’ and he described how the friction caused by the situation had put a strain on other family relationships.

As for community – or, more properly, neighbourliness – that was found informally, often in the revival of established friendships:

There was a knock at the door. When I went to the door there was [name] standin’ there with a tray an’ a pot of tea. We just couldn’t believe it when we saw each other’s faces. We’d lived in adjacent roads up near Bidston, had been good friends … childhood friends for many years … before the war an’ she was my next-door neighbour! I couldn’t believe it, it was like bein’ with family

Given that many people moved to Woodchurch at the same time from similar areas of central Birkenhead, these connections are not surprising, and, in due course, family links might also be resurrected as parents or siblings also moved to the estate.

Home Farm Road, January 2019

The much vaunted ‘spirit of a New Britain’ (discussed in last week’s post) seems absent but perhaps lived on in attenuated form:

It wasn’t just the fact that we were all from Birkenhead, we’d all been through more or less the same experiences … been in the same kind of housing … lost loved ones or our homes during the war. We were just glad to be alive an’ we weren’t goin’ to shut the door on a neighbour who needed a hand … where we came from it wasn’t the done thing.

But few came to look on the community centre as a centre of social life, still less civic engagement as had been hoped by post-war planners: a ‘number of the interviewees recalled that they only went there for Bingo “on a Tuesday night” or “when someone was havin’ a “do”.

In the end, ‘community’ developed very largely without the benign assistance of planners and politicians and, with hindsight, the would-be social engineering of the latter, however idealistic in motive, appears mechanistic in practice.  Real lives were led domestically, within the interstices of home, family and friendship, with little reference to formal institutions and with little desire to think or act more politically or civically.

New Hey Road, January 2019

Meanwhile, older traditions of heavy-handed council paternalism lived on – though typically enforced by women housing  officers raised on the Octavia Hill tradition.  Miss Crook was clearly the local exemplar:

I mean, everyone I’ve spoken to about it remembers the way she used to check the beds – the sheets, the blankets an’ that – she’d run her fingers over surfaces to check for dust, an’ the look on her face if she found any! It was like ‘Not dusted today then, dear?’ … Well, she did congratulate me on the standard of cleanliness, but by the time she’d finished doin’ her rounds I was ready to explode. But we just had to put up an’ shut up. Y’didn’t argue with authority at that time.

Respectability and responsible tenancy were thus rigorously policed in these early years.

For all that, Woodchurch, in some eyes, developed a bad reputation.  As early as 1952, a local newspaper article was headlined ‘Vandalism Sweeps Woodchurch Estate. £500 damage to bulldozer’. (The combination of many young children living on what were, in effect, huge building sites made such reports quite common across the country, in fact.)

Home Farm Road, January 2019

But as estates, such as Woodchurch, grew older, perceptions of them changed.  Press reports of crime on the estate in 1969 led the police to come to its defence: ‘The incidence of crime and disturbances on the estate is no more serious than in several other areas of the town … isolated incidents had been taken out of context’. (7)

By the 1980s, however, as unemployment and, in particular, youth unemployment rocketed, there were real problems.  Woodchurch (and even more notoriously, Birkenhead’s Ford Estate) became known as centres of heroin addiction: by 1983, it was claimed nine percent of 16-24 year-olds on the estates were taking the drug. ‘Woodyboy’ recalls the era: (8)

By the time my year finished our ‘O’ levels at Woody High in ’83 we well and truly knew what was going on around us. It seemed like everyone’s big brother or sister was a smackhead. They were the kids we remembered from primary school who were only a few years older. We knew kids in our year that had tried mushies or were into glue, but this was a whole different ball game.

The estate also became associated with wider problems of gang violence and antisocial behaviour.

Three ages of housing with Brackendale House to the rear, January 2019

From this time, there have been concerted efforts to raise the estate.  In Birkenhead, tower blocks were seen as one cause of this new social malaise and the new Borough of Wirral (formed in 1974) had been the first in Europe to demolish some of its blocks – beginning with the central Oak and Eldon Gardens towers in 1979. On the Woodchurch Estate, the two New Hey Road blocks were converted to housing for elderly people and renamed in 1984.  Now, only one – Brackendale – remains.  Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens have also been demolished.

Today, the worst social problems of Woodchurch are over and, to this outsider, the estate looked generally well-maintained and cared for, and attractive in its older parts where Rowse’s vision was more fully implemented.  It’s a council estate which means in modern Britain it houses disproportionately a poorer population and unemployment levels remain high. Four areas of the estate are among the ten percent most deprived in the country. (9)

There are some who would blame council housing for that. For me, it’s a manifestation of what has been done to council housing and its community.  Whilst the Woodchurch Estate itself was one small part of the ‘New Britain’ to emerge after 1945, a wider element of that promise was full employment and reduced inequality. That is a promise betrayed and we have asked council estates and their residents to carry the burden of that betrayal.

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

One early resident of the estate recalls it:

as being as good as any private housing … people didn’t realise it was a council estate … it was peaceful too in the early days. It was a good place to live and a good place to bring up the children.

That, I’m sure, remains true for many today.

Sources

Kenn Taylor, who was raised on the estate, has also written interestingly on its history and significance in The Memory of a Hope.

(1) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013.

(2) HJ Rowse, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Architect: H. J. Rowse’, Architect and Building News, October 14, 1950. The quotations which follow are drawn from this source.

(3) Nikolaus Pevsner, Edward Hubbard, Cheshire (1978)

(4) Tower Block (University of Edinburgh), Woodchurch: Contract 23

(5) Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft’

(6) As argued in Young and Wilmott,  Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Woodchurch analysis drawn from Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The quotations and later detail are drawn from Taylor, as is the following quotation.

(7) ‘Police Speak Up For Woodchurch Estate’, Liverpool Echo, 23 July 1969

(8) SevenStreets, ‘Smack City: Thirty Years of Hurt’ (ND, c2013). The statistic is drawn from the article; the testimony from comments below.

(9) Wirral Council Public Health Intelligence Team, Indices of Multiple Deprivation for Wirral 2015 (November 2015)

The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead I: ‘Repercussions over the Empire’

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1920s, 1940s

If you’re not from Merseyside, you probably haven’t heard of Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate but in 1944 it featured in a Picture Post article which, it was claimed, ‘had repercussions over the Empire’. (1)  That might have been an exaggeration but for a time conflicting ideas around the estate’s design dominated not only local politics but generated fierce debate in wider planning and political circles.  This post examines that controversy.

First, some background because there had been little previously to suggest that Birkenhead would merit such prominence in housing policy.  Unlike its neighbour Liverpool (which had built the first council housing in the country and pursued grandiose housing schemes in the interwar period), Birkenhead’s housing efforts had been modest.

It had grown as a docks and shipbuilding town from the early nineteenth century; from around 200 inhabitants in 1820 to 77,435 when incorporated as a borough in 1877.  Eleven years later and 22,000 inhabitants larger, it became a County Borough.

The Dock Cottages

That rapid growth had created appalling housing conditions for Birkenhead’s working-class population. The Queen’s Buildings (better known locally as the ‘Dock Cottages’ or just the ‘Blocks’), constructed in 1846 and financed by the major local employer John Laird, had been one early effort to ameliorate such conditions – 350 dwellings in four-storey blocks; built to the ‘Scotch’ plan (Laird hailed from Greenock) and claimed to be the first multi-storey tenements in England. Despite their compact design and dense layout, the flats themselves – equipped with a cold-water supply, gas burner, two iron bedsteads and a WC – were advanced for their day.

The 1917 plans for the Gilbrook Estate

The later council, for its part, proceeded more cautiously, clearing some 388 unfit houses but building just 18 cottages and 88 tenements to replace them by 1910. (2)  Its first major housebuilding scheme – the Gilbrook Estate in Prenton, north Birkenhead – was planned in 1917 but completed, to modified design, after the war.  The Council also purchased and renovated the Dock Cottages to let as council housing in the 1920s.

Vaughan Street, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019. (It was snowing!)

Arkle Road, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019

The ideological preferences of the Conservative-controlled council –  or perhaps an early version of the current preference for ‘mixed communities’ – were shown by the development of the Tranmere Hall Estate in the 1920s where, unusually, 400 of the homes were built for sale, available for purchase from the Council under the advantageous terms offered by the Small Dwellings Act.

When it came to the purchase of an area of farmland in the centre of the Wirral peninsula beyond the then boundaries of the Borough – what would become the Woodchurch Estate – in 1926, the Council was even more ambitious. There was a suggestion that the area could be developed along Garden City lines (though without self-governance) with land sold to developers on a leasehold basis and revenues accruing to the local authority.  Meanwhile, the Council approached one of the most prominent architects and planners of the day, TH Mawson, a lecturer at Liverpool’s prestigious School of Civic Design, elected president of the Town Planning Institute in 1923.

Mawson’s first recommendations were made in 1927; a more complete illustrated and typewritten report in 1929. He promised: (3)

a scheme that shall be of benefit … to posterity – aesthetically, hygienically, practically and in every way … the nicest and most tasteful of its kind in the Kingdom.

It was a plan explicitly referencing the arts and crafts ideals of William Morris and Raymond Unwin and the principles of the 1918 Tudor Walters Report.  Mawson talked of wide grass verges and tree-lined streets, even the ‘somewhat unusual step’ of planting roses instead of trees along some of the best streets. As to the housing itself, it reflected the usual reality of a ‘mixed community’ – large houses for the wealthy, lesser versions for the middle class, and small, terraced homes (at council rent) for the working class though he suggested the latter be built around ‘little town squares’ to avoid monotony.

I could write more but the formal adoption of Mawson’s plans was deferred and then, at some point in the mid-1930s, quietly abandoned. That controversy I teased you with is yet to come though the ideas raised here around ‘community’ would be central to later discussion.

Elsewhere, planning continued.  By 1939, land for what became the Mount Estate in Prenton had been purchased and Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson drew up plans for a garden suburb of some 502 homes.  War would delay their implementation but the Corporation had built around 4500 council homes by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Birkenhead suffered heavily from that war; 2079 houses were destroyed by bombing and 26,000 seriously damaged. Some 3464 people lost their lives.  But planning for better tomorrow began early. In 1944, Bertie Robinson unveiled new plans for the Woodchurch Estate. At around the same time, the Council appointed Professor Charles Reilly as a planning consultant with a brief to produce an outline plan for post-war Birkenhead as a whole. Reilly had been Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool from 1904 to his retirement in 1933; a charismatic figure, better known as an influential educator than as practitioner.

Robinson’s 1944 plan for the Estate

Robinson published details of his scheme in The Builder in November 1944. He first described the site in the Fender Valley: 457 acres of which the large municipally-owned Arrowe Park, containing golf course, bowling greens and football pitches, would be retained and the ‘attractive suburb’ of Upton conserved. So far as the residential areas were concerned, he proposed ‘a garden city for the purpose of housing on the basis of a neighbourhood unit’. (4)

A model of Robinson’s Woodchurch proposals from The Builder

In terms of layout, he planned two 100-foot boulevards in the form of a cross in a central square – these had given, he claimed, ‘the scheme the title of the “Green Cross”’ – and a 60-foot boulevard from which the estate’s service roads would radiate. These should be laid out on ‘attractive lines with grass verges, shrubs, trees and gradual curves’.  There would be little encouragement to traffic ‘other than that serving the estate itself’.

The estate as a whole was conceived as containing 2540 homes, serving a population of around 10,800 – a range of two, three, four and five-bedroom houses ‘suitable for north or south aspect’ built in ‘blocks of two, up to terraces of eight’ and set back to ‘varying building lines’.

With a central and two subsidiary shopping areas and provision for 156 shops in all, a public hall and community centre, 22.5 acres of allotments, ten schools and a ‘Young People’s College’, and plentiful open space, it was an ambitious and considered scheme which reflected contemporary planning ideas around community-focused design to improve on the widely criticised form and character of the interwar cottage suburbs.

Sir Charles Reilly, a 1943 portrait by Howard Coster © National Portrait Gallery and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Enter Reilly. He described: (5)

not liking very much the look of this layout which was on ordinary garden suburb lines … I suggested to the Borough Engineer that we should make a new layout plan together.

Less emolliently, in an article in the left-wing journal Tribune, he called Robinson’s scheme ‘a damn bad plan’. When Robinson rejected his offer to collaborate, Reilly, in his own words, ‘explained the ideas I thought would be welcomed everywhere and told him he would make his name by it if he did’.

Reilly’s Greens, as envisaged in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Reilly’s uninvited intervention and the spat, at least on Reilly’s side, which developed then became a much larger controversy. In essence, as they were further developed, Reilly’s alternative plans contained one big idea – the greens around which housing would be grouped.  He explained them in an April 1944 report in the Birkenhead News:

The motives of the scheme are the English Village Green and the small squares of the country town, where children can play and neighbours see one another and retain the friendliness of the little streets and slums. With pairs of semi-detached houses on the curved roads of the Garden Suburb type of plan this friendliness … turns to suburban snobbishness through not seeing and knowing one’s neighbours. The houses look away from one another and the people too.

Later, he expanded his attack on suburbia:

Why was there such a contempt with novelists for suburbia? It was because it bred a narrowness of outlook, in which the team spirit was not developed.  It lacked the intellectual development which came from sharpening one’s wits … allowing everyone to play with his own toy castle had produced an anti-social spirit.

In this, Reilly, of course, reflected much of the inverted snobbery directed towards the suburbs then and now.

He also articulated an architect’s disdain for tradespeople as represented here by the poor Borough Engineer:

Without being in any way personal, as an architect, I feel the layout of houses for human habitation is not in the first place an engineer’s job. The engineer’s training in steel construction in drains and such like inhuman things does not fit him for it. It is not humane enough. The architect however, is always thinking in terms of human lives. He, I suggest, should do the planning and the engineer keep him straight on the mechanical side.

Robinson kept his own counsel through all this though he had written thoughtfully – admittedly in measured bureaucratic tones – on housing in an article for a professional journal in 1936. (5)

However, beyond the interpersonal disputes, there were planning ideas. Reilly himself described his concept for communal greens as ‘a semi-new planning principle’. It owed much to Unwin’s quadrangles and had similarities to the bowling greens of nearby Port Sunlight.  His general critique of suburbia and, in particular, the Corporation suburbia of peripheral council estates, was certainly highly topical and gained traction from the publication in May 1944 of the government-sponsored Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings which was similarly critical.

And beyond the planning talk, there was politics – a politics writ large by wartime conditions and post-war aspirations. At its simplest, this was party politics, and in Birkenhead the debate over the contending plans split along purely political lines.  The ruling Conservative Party favoured Robinson’s scheme and the insurgent Labour opposition favoured and campaigned powerfully for what had now become known as the Reilly Plan.

Here, it elided easily with the wider issue of housing shortage; by July 1945, there were 2300 on Birkenhead’s council housing waiting list and, it was said, 150 fresh applications weekly. The debate over Woodchurch was, crudely, a useful local wedge issue.

Central area as depicted in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

But it was much more than this. It spoke too to what was really a unique moment in British history – a time when passionate debate around a new, more modern and better Britain to emerge in peacetime conditions dominated.  Speaking at the annual Labour Conference in December 1944, Harold Laski declared that ‘for Socialists the war was each day more fully an ideological war’. The sacrifice it demanded of those who fought: (7)

can be justified in one way only. It will be justified by the degree in which the Socialist commonwealth becomes the inheritance of the civilisation we are seeking to reshape.

That conference went on to pass a resolution that ‘the community basis of town planning, as illustrated by Professor Sir Charles Reilly’s plan for Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead, would best serve post-war housing needs’.

In the Picture Post article referred to, Caradoc Williams, secretary of Birkenhead Trades Council, declared his own support for the Reilly Plan with the spirit, if not the rhetoric, of Laski:

I believe it is in accordance with the community spirit developed during the war. Public opinion here wants a progressive plan. After all, the men out there are fighting for decent homes, not only for houses.

Mary Mercer, a former Labour councillor, saw ‘a spirit in the Reilly Plan … the spirit of the New Britain’. Birkenhead Tories less so.

For Councillor Guy Williams:

The whole idea of Professor Reilly’s Plan is to foster community spirit. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. But if a man doesn’t feel community-minded, he should thank God for a 5-ft hedge around his house.

For Lawrence Wolfe, who must have read this article, there could not have been a clearer expression of the ‘isolationist way of life’ he believed so damaging to the British psyche and society. It was Wolfe who, in 1945, most passionately advocated The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (as his book was titled). (8)

For him, it was a panacea to all psychological and social ills. The book provides a greatly expanded and highly prescriptive exposition of Reilly’s plans including the proposal that the Community Centre provide ‘a Restaurant and Meals Service’, supplying meals in large containers to nursery schools and ‘in small thermos containers’ to individuals. Wolfe went on to address contemporary concerns about the birth rate and sexual behaviour: ‘Under the Reilly Plan early marriage is easy and normal’; ‘sexual immorality outside marriage also diminishes’; venereal disease declines; and the birth rate would rise.

‘Single green with cricket match in progress’ from Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Wolfe went on, at his most fanciful, to evoke not only a New Britain but a Merry England:

In the village green world dancing is not confined to special times and places. People dance when they feel like it – and they often do. Impromptu merry-making would look crazy in the middle of an isolationist street; on the green it looks perfectly natural and the passer-by, far from being tolerantly amused or even scandalised, is more likely to join in.

Reilly’s introduction to the book rather disarmingly notes:

the many implications [Wolfe] has found in the plan which, I confess, I did not fully see when I drew it … he, I am glad to say, discerns many further advantages in what I thought was merely a natural expression of neighbourliness.

The reality is that this was very much Wolfe’s vision, the Reilly Plan his chosen vehicle, but the 71-year-old Reilly, ever the keen publicist of his own ideas and role, was happy to go along with it.

For all the storm and stress, the Council – dividing on party lines – had endorsed Robinson’s scheme in February 1944. A proposal from Labour leader Charles McVey for an inquiry into the rival proposals was defeated in July.

That, however, was not quite the end of the Reilly Greens. The idea was taken up enthusiastically, with Reilly’s active participation, in the Black Country boroughs of Bilston and Dudley. Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, no less, commended it in his major speech introducing the second reading of the New Towns Bill in May 1946: ‘the experiment was about to be tried in Bilston…and he would watch it with interest’. (9)  In the end, the concept was applied in much diluted form. (10)  Reilly himself died in February 1948.

Back in Birkenhead, in March 1945, the Council approved final plans for the Woodchurch Estate – not Reilly’s, nor Robinson’s, but new proposals drawn up by the Liverpool architect Herbert J Rowse.  Next week’s post examines this story and the longer story of the Woodchurch Estate that emerged from this extraordinary episode.

Sources

(1) Maurice Edelman, ‘Planning Post-War Britain: the Example of Birkenhead’, Picture Post, 8 July 1944

(2) William Thompson, Municipal Housing in England and Wales (1910)

(3) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013. Following detail is also drawn from this source.

(4) B Robinson, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Planner: B. Robinson, Borough Engineer’, The Builder, November 24, 1944

(5) Quoted in Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The following quotation is drawn from the same source.

(6) B Robinson, ‘Some Snags in Housing Schemes’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, vol 57, no 1, 1936

(7) ‘Labour Policy’, The Times, December 12 1944

(8) Lawrence Woolf, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (Nicholson and Watson, 1945). The author’s name is a nom-de-plume and, despite speculation, very little is known about him.

(9) ‘House of Commons’ The Times , May 9 1946

(10) This episode is discussed fully in Peter J. Larkham, New suburbs and UK post-war reconstruction: the fate of Charles Reilly’s “greens”, Birmingham: University of Central England, School of Planning and Housing, 2004,  and in Peter Richmond, Marketing Modernisms: The Architectural and Cultural Consequence of Sir Charles Reilly, University of Liverpool PhD, 1997.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Abercrombie Plan’s zonal reimagining of central Hull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A contemporary image of Exeter city centre © John Boughton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aylesham and the Planning of the East Kent Coalfield, Part II

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Aylesham

We left Aylesham last week – a new town and still a small one but with much riding on its success.  It represented new planning ideals and ambitions; it heralded – many hoped – a new industrial Britain whose prosperity was reflected in the healthier and happier homes of its working people   In practice, none of this would be easy.

There were, initially, high hopes for the East Kent coalfield, near to the prospering markets of south-east England at a time when much of the country was mired in a long-term industrial decline or hit by Great Depression of the early thirties. Kent’s miners increased in number from just over 2000 in 1925 to almost 7500 ten years later as the national mining workforce fell by a third.

That overall decline was complemented by the appalling industrial relations of the privately-owned industry, highlighted by a national mining strike in 1921 and the nine-month stoppage in 1926 which underlay the General Strike.  The new collieries of Kent seemed to offer a fresh start.

Whit Sunday Parade, King’s Road, Aylesham – a later image showing more prosperous and settled times, with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Cente

Many of Aylesham’s early families arrived heavily in debt and their children often suffered ‘various illnesses, including rickets and impetigo, largely attributable to insufficient nourishment resulting from the father’s unemployment before coming to Kent’. They came from depressed mining communities across the country – ‘so widely separated are they that some of the men can scarcely understand the language of others’. (1)

One early settler later recalled these dark days: (2)

They was trampin’ down here from Durham, Scotland – every village you could mention in Britain, I bet they knowed where Snowdown was. There was only Snowdown would sign them on and that wasn’t a pit, it was a pity – it were red ‘ot. Men had been so long unemployed Snowdown was killing them off … Men were breaking down with boils, pimps, carbuncles – the heat. Well, they was working in 98-100 was nothing.

Mr McEwan also pointed to a local difficulty.  Snowdown was nicknamed ‘Dante’s Inferno’ by the miners. At 3000 ft, it was one of the deepest pits in the country and one of the hottest with temperatures reaching 38°C (100°F) and 80 per cent humidity.

Although a strong and proud community developed later, these were inauspicious beginnings:

For the first three or four years the Welsh stuck to the Welsh, the Derbyshire stuck to the Derbyshire and the Geordies stuck to the Geordies. If they went into a pub they weren’t friendly – there was more trouble than anything else. Everybody used to fight each other over nothing many a time.

Snowdown Colliery, end of shift, 1972

But there was one particular source of contention – the butty system employed in Snowdown by which the company employed a subcontractor (the butty) who was responsible for organising a team of workmen and delivering coal to the surface at so much a ton.  Disputes around the butty’s cut and the wages he paid to his team were inevitable and bitter.

With apologies to current residents who know the town very differently, it was seen then as a rough sort of place: ‘If you put a towel on the line or a rug, you got to keep your eye on it for if you come inside it’d gone’; ‘if anybody wanted to light a fire, they just went out and pulled the fences up’, according to later testimony.  And a poor place with local shopping costly and irregular transport expensive.

For all that, the men in employment – with work to occupy their time and provide status – had an easier time of it than their wives.  Mrs Unwin arrived in Aylesham in 1931 and found it hard to settle:

I didn’t like it, I used to cry, used to cry night after night for a long time, I broke my heart to go back, but what could you do? We was married and we had a baby then. I missed my home life and there was nothing in the village you see, and we couldn’t afford the train fares to go out. Everything seemed to be so quiet here, being used to living in a town and going round the shops even – window shopping see. We just couldn’t do that here – there was no shops, there was only one co-op.

It was reckoned that 300 hundred families left the town in its first two years and those departures continued, frequently in the form of moonlight flits where debts had become unsustainable. (3) Snowdown suffered a particularly high turnover of labour. Often, as Gina Harkell concludes:

the decision of families to return to their previous home was initiated by women. The conditions in the pits were so appalling that many miners needed only a gentle prod from their unhappy and discontented wives to get them on the move back home.

Patrick Abercrombie’s good intentions had, it seems, come to nothing.  The larger ambitions for the East Kent coalfield had faltered and the planners’ dreams faded, buffeted by the economic difficulties which ensured only their partial fulfilment and the near impossibility of creating cohesive community in such embattled and fractious circumstances.

King’s Road, Aylesham

By the mid-thirties, only 500 houses had been built on a layout designed for some 2000.  The houses themselves were solid and decent: (4)

Every house has three bedrooms of reasonable size and a bathroom, containing a washing basin with hot and cold water. The living room in every case is excellently arranged, having two windows and being fitted with a fine cooking range. There is electric light in every room and the cupboard accommodation is ample.

But even the provision of bathrooms had proven controversial.  Some of the women thought that ‘in order to save the defiling of bedrooms with grimy clothes, the baths should have been on the ground floor’ – though the same journalist (accurately or merely conveying a trope of his time?) reported that, where baths had been provided on the ground floor in neighbouring villages, these were often used for storage with the miners preferring to use the scullery basin.  Perhaps this difficulty at least was solved by the first provision of pithead baths (by the Miners’ Welfare Committee) in 1935.

St Peter’s Church, Aylesham

In overall terms, however, one contemporary observer concluded in 1933 that ‘the whole village has a depressing air of arrested development’. (5)  And although a new estate of 104 homes was developed by the First National Housing Trust in 1935, another stringent local critic found almost one in ten homes unoccupied: ‘Aylesham does not strike one as a happy place. Why?’ Ironically, he blamed the stranglehold on new development wielded by the very public utility society, Aylesham Tenants Ltd., charged with overseeing the town’s growth and prosperity. (6)

A contemporary image of Aylesham Central School

Seemingly, little had changed in Aylesham by the end of the Second World War.  A survey conducted by the Ministry of Fuel and Power concluded in a precise echo of that earlier assessment that: (7)

the settlement suffers from arrested development, with many of the sites in the centre of the town still rough grassland. There is no public building of any architectural significance, except the central school, while the houses present a marked degree of monotony.

Much else had changed. For one, the mines themselves had come into public ownership in 1946. That was part of a larger shift heralded by Labour’s landslide victory in 1945. Planning ideas and goals, pioneered in East Kent in the 1920s, became mainstream in the wake of the catastrophic regional impact of the Great Depression and were further boosted by the machinery of war.  Aylesham hoped to benefit.

Aylesham in 1952, with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Centre

The Ministry of Fuel and Power agreed that the town needed to expand – 400 new homes were needed, it estimated, to return to pre-war levels of production and 400 more to achieve maximum output. New housing development was to be left largely to the local authorities and in 1947 Eastry Rural District Council accepted a £14,500 tender from Costains to build 46 of their Airey homes in the town.  Some 46,000 of these prefabricated reinforced concrete houses were erected in the early post-war years in the bid to build quickly and overcome shortages of labour and traditional materials.

Further housing was developed to the west of the original town centre in the 1950s and 1960s.  This is typical council estate housing of its time – spacious, well-built and well-equipped, and generally attractive.  In Aylesham, some of the street names capture a local labour politics and pride.

Attlee Avenue, Aylesham

Cripps Close, Aylesham

Another innovation came in 1948 with the opening of the Rego Shirt Factory, initially employing some 160 and the first local industry to provide work for women. There was a consensus view among planners and politicians that Aylesham was an ‘unbalanced community’ and needed light industry not only to attract a wider range of the population but to provide work for miners retiring from pneumoconiosis.

Bevan Way, Aylesham

The new road projected in 1950 was to be part of this but there were larger hopes that Aylesham might receive a proportion of the London population which Abercrombie (in a later guise as co-author of the 1943 The County of London Plan) had recommended be dispersed from the overcrowded capital ‘beyond the Metropolitan influence’. In 1950, the County Council tried to get the town added to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning’s list of ‘expanded towns’ – existing towns tasked with receiving an overspill population from the major conurbations. (8)

Newman Road, Aylesham

Those unfulfilled hopes remained into the 1960s.  The Kent Development Plan suggested Aylesham should grow to 40,000 within twenty years.  This was an ambition embraced by locals; as the chair of the Parish Council stated: (9)

We welcome anybody and everybody. We want light industry and houses, because that is the way to get more shops and services for our people. We want a balanced community. The miners want to meet and talk to people in other jobs and with other interests.

The failure of these plans is simply told: in 1961 the population of Aylesham stood at 4142; in 2011 at 4999.

Terraced housing in Boulevard Courrières, the street named after Aylesham’s twin town in northern France

Elderly person’s housing in Boulevard Courrières

That’s not quite the end of the story. Further expansion, now in the hands of private developers, is taking place and projected. A new Masterplan was adopted in 2004 and outline planning permission granted for up to 1200 new homes. By 2016, the first 200 homes of a new ‘Aylesham Garden Village’ were constructed; 400 were planned for 2018.  Whether Barratt Homes and Persimmon Homes will fulfil the ‘Garden Village’ ethos they claim is a moot point but, ironically, it is just that ‘feel of modern urbanism in the rural idyll’ that Patrick Abercrombie had sought back in the 1920s. (9)

A recent image, looking south, showing new development on the fringe of the original town.

In the meantime, the original raison d’être of the town had been destroyed.  At peak, Snowdown employed 3500 men. By 1981, when the National Coal Board announced an annual loss for the pit of £9m, it employed just 960 and it was slated for closure alongside 22 others. A three-day walk-out of miners in Kent, Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and Durham forced a temporary rethink but the words of the Snowdown National Union of Mineworkers branch chair, Morris Bryan, were prophetic: ‘There are millions of tons of reserves. If this pit is not safe, no pit in the country is’. (10)

Arthur Scargill at Snowdown Colliery, November 1983

As the threat of wholesale pit closures across the country strengthened in the early eighties, a year-long miners’ strike occurred in 1984-85.  It ended in heroic failure and the Kent miners – 96 percent struck in November 1984 and 93 percent were out when the action was finally called off – were among its staunchest supporters. Before the war, many miners blacklisted for union activity elsewhere had moved to Kent; that militant heritage remained.  Nevertheless, Snowdown was closed in 1987; Betteshanger, the last working Kent pit, followed in 1989.

‘Payday at Snowdown Colliery’ – designed by Derek Garrity and sculpted by Steve Melton

Though its proud mining heritage and traditions remain, the town had perforce to reinvent itself and in 2014 its unemployment rate stood at 2.8 percent, fractionally under the rate for Britain as a whole, a little higher than the South-East average.  The previous census revealed that a quarter of the local labour force now worked in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations though 40 percent of these worked 10 km or more from home. (In housing terms, 59 percent of households were owner occupiers, compared to the then English average of 68 percent.) (11)

It had been quite a journey.  The bustling industry envisaged for East Kent had never taken off and the healthier and happier model settlements envisaged for its projected workforce – Abercrombie had suggested that up to 278,000 would move to the area – withered on the vine. For all that, we should celebrate that early attempt to create working-class homes and communities suitable for the modern age. Aylesham is a decent place to live and it boasts a strong community which has overcome many difficulties.  Our subjection to the economic forces which govern our lives for good or ill apparently remains.

Sources

(1) ‘The Kent Mining Community’, The Times, 22 March 1930

(2) Gina Harkell, ‘The Migration of Mining Families to the Kent Coalfield between the Wars’, Oral History, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring, 1978.  Other direct quotations from residents are drawn from the same source.

(3) David Jeremiah, Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900-70 (Manchester University Press, 2000)

(4) ‘Growth of a New Town’, The Times, 27 April 1927

(5) MBA Churchard, An Analysis of the Agricultural and Industrial Life of South-East England with Especial Reference to the Effect of the Developing Kent Coalfield Thereon, PhD, University of London, 1933

(6) ‘Aylesham Calling: Another View’, Letter from Richard Carter, Missioner, Dover Express and East Kent News, 28 January 1938

(7) Ministry of Fuel and Power, Kent Coalfield Regional Survey Report (HMSO, 1945)

(8) ‘County Council and Aylesham’, Dover Express and East Kent News, 22 February 1946 and ‘Discussions of Future of Aylesham’, Dover Express, 24 February 1950

(9) Aylesham Village, ‘Welcome to Aylesham Garden Village’

(10) Richard Ford, ‘Snowdown Colliery men are in fighting mood, The Times, February 16, 1981 and Nicholas Timmins, ‘Case of the untypical pit’, The Times, 7 September 1982

(11) Keith Kintrea, ‘Imagined communities? Contextualizing claims about the White working class’, Dialogues in Human Geography, vol 6, no. 1, 2016

Kent History and Library Centre have produced an excellent timeline of Aylesham’s history which is worth consulting for further detail and illustration.

Aylesham and the Planning of the East Kent Coalfield, Part I

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1920s

For two thousand years, the ‘peaceful undulating country of East Kent’ had pursued ‘an agricultural and seaside existence, perturbed by nothing more agitating than an ephemeral military conquest or so!’  But in 1931, as Patrick Abercrombie noted, a new coalfield seemed destined to change all that: (1)

That deep peace is now permanently invaded; for, however much we may minimise the ugly effects of industrialisation, and however well-planned the new additions may be, so as to conform to the genius of the locality, a change fundamental and complete will have taken place from the peace of the country to the busy hum of men.

That ‘busy hum’ never quite had the impact anticipated by Abercrombie and others in the interwar years but it did, nevertheless, change significantly a bucolic corner of rural England.  Though the last mine of the East Kent coalfield closed in 1989, a significant residue remains.  This post and the next will focus on Aylesham, planned by Abercrombie, Britain’s foremost contemporary town planner, as a model settlement, and assess how successful these planning visions were.

Milner Crescent, Aylesham

The existence of coal in the area – a continuation of the seams heavily mined in northern France – had been surmised for some time but was proven in 1882 when trail borings for the first, abortive, Channel Tunnel, were made under the Shakespeare Cliff in Dover.  The Shakespeare Colliery, operational from 1896, was never successful – indeed, in a tragic reminder of the human costs of such enterprise, eight men were killed in an explosion in 1897 – and it was closed on the outbreak of the First World War.

Milner Road, Elvington – larger homes built for colliery managers?

Arthur Burr, the most ambitious of local mining entrepreneurs, opened a second pit at Tilmanstone, west of Deal, in 1906, which enjoyed a longer existence. The village of Elvington was developed in the interwar years to house its workforce – 230 three-bed houses, each with a parlour and living room plus scullery and bathroom, built by the Tilmanstone Miners Dwellings Syndicate. (3)

Snowdown Colliery, 1930

Burr followed this up with a second pit, five miles to the west, at Snowdown in 1907. Twenty-two men were drowned when the first shaft hit water but, by 1912, the colliery had turned its first profit.  A small number of miners’ houses were built in nearby villages but the pit closed for two years in the period of industrial slump and troubled industrial relations which followed the First World War. Purchased by Pearson & Dorman Long in 1924, an ambitious modernisation programme ensued, this time complemented by idealistic plans to create homes and community appropriate to the new, large workforce envisaged.

Planning was by now an emergent discipline.  It combined in East Kent with the powerful fears and hopes occasioned by both the threat – manufacturing blight and housing squalor – and opportunity – commercial profitability and remunerative employment – seemingly promised by a new coalfield in a country grown old industrially.  That this should occur in the relatively undeveloped South-East, in the so-called ‘Garden of England’, added to the sense of urgency and concern widely felt: (4)

It may well be that Coal and Iron in Kent is the biggest industrial happening in England of this quarter-century. Kent is not Durham or Lancashire or Glamorgan – distant spots glamoured in gloom: it is in the eye of the world. Coals in Kent are not coals in Newcastle: they are at London’s door.

The first planning conference for the new coalfield took place in Canterbury in 1922, followed in May 1923 by an East Kent Joint Town Planning Committee meeting attended by representatives of the seventeen local councils directly or indirectly affected.  As evidence of the interest of the Great and Good in planning matters affecting their backyard, a meeting, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, occurred in Lambeth Palace the following month attended, amongst others, by Lord Beauchamp (Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports), Lord Alfred Milner and John Jacob Astor, MP for Dover.

Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain, a scion of the Birmingham manufacturing family, had a less gilded
background and, as both a Birmingham MP and, from 1924 to 1929, Minister of Health and Housing, a more informed and practical interest in planning matters.  But his speech in 1926 captures the good intentions and nimbyism which characterised some of this anxiety around the East Kent Coalfield.

The good intentions focused on building better industrial communities than those allowed to develop in the nineteenth century, in Chamberlain’s words, ‘without plan, without thought, without foresight, just as happened to be the whim or the caprice of particular individuals’. And they focused, in particular, on healthier and more balanced mining settlements: (5)

You are getting away, on the one hand, from the straggling kind of development … and, on the other hand, from those pit-head villages which are an unfortunate feature of many of our mining areas. You are proposing a series of towns which are not to be at the pit-heads, but which are, nevertheless, near enough to serve them; and you can give the miners who will occupy these towns a social life of a far fuller, wider and more interesting character than they can ever hope to get in those mining villages in Wales.

The nimbyism, not unreasonably, stressed that ‘the utmost care [be] taken to preserve as much as the rural charm of the hinterland (much used for charabanc excursions)’ – ‘it is easy to imagine how disastrous to them would be the background of a smoke-grimed and dishevelled Black Country’.

Patrick Abercrombie, 1942 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Patrick Abercrombie – as a founder and honorary secretary of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and professor of civic design at the University of Liverpool – commissioned by the Joint Town Planning Committee in 1925 to prepare plans for East Kent was exceptionally well placed to address these concerns.  His first report, co-written with John Archibald, was issued in 1925.

The report projected large-scale industrial development in East Kent: 18-20 pits and a mining population (including wives and children) of around 180,000.  Associated steel works and ancillary trades were anticipated to bring a further 278,000 people to the area. Besides the necessary focus on new infrastructure, Abercrombie wrote at length on residential growth.

This 1926 map shows the projected extent of the coalfield.

He concluded that the ‘general result’ of company-developed schemes ‘would be deplorable’.  He looked rather to the Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn where Public Utility Societies controlled all aspects of planning and ensured land value gains accrued to the community. They were better, he argued, in providing public utilities and buildings as well as shops and entertainment. Existing pit villages were not romanticised in this analysis. ‘Of equal and, to many minds, superior importance to the economic gain of grouped sites’, he concluded, ‘is the opportunity they give for a fuller social life’.

An estimated 55,600 new homes would be needed, divided (in Abercrombie’s final, 1927, report) among seven new towns and a number of smaller villages. In terms of their overall layout, Abercrombie thought a ‘certain formality of treatment … inevitable in an artificially planned and quickly built community’ though one ‘which is instinctively tempered by the natural features of the site’. (Abercrombie tended, in any case, to favour rather formal Beaux Arts-style schemes as we’ve seen in his post-Second World War plans for Plymouth and Hull.)

King’s Road, Aylesham

In terms of housing design, he suggested there were ‘many local examples for inspiration’ and cautiously advanced:

a simple Georgian, modified into a provincial touch with somewhat high-pitched roofs, and with a further local flavour of the Flemish influence in its brickwork.

Aylesham, a new settlement next to the Snowdown Colliery and close to new mines envisaged (though never opened) in nearby Adisham and Wingham, was to be the canvas for Abercrombie’s grand designs.  The Aylesham Tenants Ltd was formed, as a Public Utility Society, by Eastry Rural District Council and Pearson & Dorman Long in July 1926; Kent County Council joined in the following year.  With a 600 acre site and £600,000 to spend – drawn in part from an Exchequer subsidy of £90,000, a £350,000 loan from the Public Works Loan Commissioners and £70,000 from a debenture stock issue – the company embarked on the construction of 1200 homes, envisaged as the first phase of a town planned to accommodate some 15,000.

Abercrombie’s 1926 plan for Aylesham – the first built homes are shown in black.

Abercrombie’s layout provided for a grand central tree-lined boulevard with a shopping centre at its centre where roads from the collieries crossed the main axis.  Churches, schools and plentiful open space were located at focal points. It was a ‘scientific’ plan, showcasing, according to its authors, the ‘beauty of efficiency and congruity’ and intended (in contrast to much of the local authority building of the time) to provide the essentials of community life ‘long before their actual need is felt’.  Abercrombie allowed himself one flight of fancy – the layout of the town emulated the shape of a pithead winding frame. (6)

Steel frame and concrete homes under construction on King’s Road (with thanks to Aylesham Heritage Centre)

Housebuilding commenced in September 1926; the first four pioneering families moved in May the following year. The homes themselves did not live up to Abercrombie’s hopes. Of the first phase of 400, half were of traditional plain brick construction, half of steel-frame and poured concrete. The latter were heralded as an innovative means of building quickly and circumventing shortages of building materials and skilled labour. In Aylesham, their use probably reflected more the commercial interests of Pearson & Dorman Long whose Dorman Long Housing Company subsidiary was the chief promoter of such housing.

An early photograph of Hyde Place, Aylesham – one of the first streets to be developed

Other facilities followed in relatively short order.  A temporary school and library and Co-op had opened by the end of 1927 (when Aylesham’s population stood at around 1000). The first pub (the Greyhound Hotel) opened in January 1928 and Anglican, then Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches all within the next year. As a marker of emergent community and workforce, the first parade of the Snowdown Colliery Welfare Band took place in June 1929.  The centrepiece new Central School opened the following year.

Market Square, Aylesham

The town, however, remained embryonic and parts had a desolate air.  These were early days but what form of community did emerge and how fully and how successfully were the grandiose plans for Aylesham and the East Kent coalfield fulfilled?  Next week’s post takes the story forward.

Sources

(1) Patrick Abercrombie, ‘The Kent Coalfields’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, no 409, vol 79, April 17, 1931

(2) Subterranea Britannica, Site Name: Tilmanstone Colliery (January 2011)

(3) JP Hollingsworth, ‘Those Dirty Miners’: a History of the Kent Coalfield (Stenlake Publishing, 2010)

(4) Patrick Abercrombie and John Archibald, East Kent Regional Planning Scheme Survey (University Press of Liverpool and Hodder and Stoughton, 1925). Later quoted detail is from this source.

(5) ‘Town Planning in East Kent. A Speech by the Right Hon Neville Chamberlain MP (Minister of Health) delivered at Canterbury, July 24 1926’ (PD Eastes and Co Ltd, Canterbury, 1926)

(6) MBA Churchard, An Analysis of the Agricultural and Industrial Life of South-East England with Especial Reference to the Effect of the Developing Kent Coalfield Thereon, PhD, University of London, 1933

Kent History and Library Centre have produced an excellent timeline of Aylesham’s history which is worth consulting for further detail and illustration.

Duncan Bowie, ‘The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning’ Book Review: ‘the State, the Municipality … doing what men cannot do, or do so well’

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Pre-1914

Duncan Bowie, The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning: From Puritan Colonies to Garden Cities (Routledge, 2017)

Duncan Bowie is an esteemed figure in housing and planning circles, both until recently as an academic at the University of Westminster and, over the years and in a variety of roles, as a hands-on practitioner in London local government.  As a politically engaged figure with an unusually profound historical knowledge of his subject, he is the ideal person to write this important account of what he describes as planning’s prehistory.

Bowie sets out his stall clearly in the book’s introduction. He laments the fact that ‘we have largely lost any concept of social purpose for planning’. His book, by contrast, seeks:

to use the historical record as a basis for challenging the dominance of neo-liberal perspectives within contemporary discourse [and] to reassert the positive role of planning as understood in previous historical periods.

He asserts a Benthamite perspective ‘that planning should be about achieving the greatest good in terms of benefit to the greatest number of people’. To this, he adds an explicitly socialist goal – that it also be used:

for redistributive purposes – to advance the interests of households with less wealth and income and access to the market, to mitigate the negative impact of the free market in land, property and development and to seek a more egalitarian society.

At first glance, the book’s earlier chapters might seem of more antiquarian interest.  Early settlement planning in the British Isles and colonies was heavily inspired by religious principles. John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously proclaimed in 1630 that the new community would be considered as ‘a city upon a hill’ and its prosperity dependent on fealty to the one true God. But it’s suggested that even Christopher Wren’s proposed remodelling of London after the Great Fire was influenced by contemporary ideas of the form and nature of the biblical Jerusalem.

A strength of the book is Bowie’s comprehensive excavation of earlier, often neglected, texts and, for all that their language and beliefs may sometimes seem archaic, it’s striking how many echo later concerns and foreshadow more recent ideas.  For James Stuart, in his 1771 pamphlet Critical Observations on the Buildings and Improvements of London, it was clear that ‘people accustomed to behold order, decency and elegance in public, soon acquire that urbanity in private, which forms at once the excellence and bond of society’.  As a critique, suitably modified, of later criticisms of the slums and a defence of their rational replacement, that would be hard to beat.

Attempts to limit London’s growth (a key element of Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan) were anticipated under Queen Elizabeth I and Cromwell. James Claudius Loudon, in Hints for Breathing Places (1829), provided the first explicit proposal for a Green Belt; a few years later, he called for a ‘representative municipal government’ for London.  Sidney Smirke, in Suggestions for the Architectural Improvement of the Western Part of London (1834), advocated that land ‘be purchased by public money and appropriated for the use of the labouring classes’ to build subsidised working-class housing.

The new settlement of Victoria, as envisaged by James Silk Buckingham

A following chapter discusses Utilitarian thinkers, concerned with both, in the title of the Radical MP John Silk Buckingham’s 1849 work, National Evils and Practical Remedies.  Buckingham proposed a new settlement (he called it Victoria in honour of the monarch; we might call it a New Town or Garden City) with sanitary and spacious working-class housing, free education and healthcare, careful zoning of its separate functions, all owned and managed by (in modern terms) a development corporation which reinvested profits.  Ebenezer Howard acknowledged his influence.

Robert Owen and the French Utopian Socialists are treated in succeeding chapters. The weakness of these communitarian theorists, as Bowie suggests, was their:

failure to challenge in any practical sense the contemporary domestic political and economic structures. The focus of the communitarians was on transcendence rather than reform – there was no attempt to take power within the existing society and state, only to escape from it.

He points out, however, that their followers and foot soldiers often played more practical and influential roles.

This brings us to a central thrust of Bowie’s analysis, the importance of pressure from below: reform has too often been seen as ‘something gifted by altruistic businessmen or reform politicians in parliament and in government’.  The conventional narrative, for example, focuses on the apparently humiliating failure of Chartism’s last big push in 1848; Bowie reminds us that its influence lived on in the plethora of organisations populated by former Chartists in the years which followed.

Martin James Boon and the title page of his pamphlet Home Colonization

Here land nationalisation and home colonisation emerged as key ideas.  In 1869, for example, Martin James Boon, a secretary of the Land and Labour League, published a detailed schema for the latter – a £120m investment to buy up 20m acres of wasteland, creating 310,000 new farms and providing, in total, employment for 1,920,000.  We might, in these jaded times, see that as fanciful but it is also an anticipation of the now unfashionable Keynesianism which did once promise full employment and a reminder of what even a more moderately interventionist state with will and vision might achieve.

The London Trades Council meeting the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), a member of the 1884 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes

Towards the end of the century, Christian socialism, positivism, the emerging social sciences provided new sources of middle-class reformism but, again, it was labour activists and organisations that concentrated attention on slum housing and its remedy. George Shipman, secretary of the London Trades Council, giving evidence to the 1884 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, was clear that:

It is totally impossible that private enterprise, philanthropy, and charity can ever keep pace with the present demands…What the individual cannot do, the State municipality must seek to accomplish.

Fred Knee

That view became increasingly accepted, advocated for example by the much neglected Workman’s National Housing Council headed by the tireless activist and propagandist Fred Knee. Others accepted a greater role for private enterprise and non-state agents. Ebenezer Howard, despite socialistic influences, needed the sympathies of landowners and liberals to implement his Garden City vision.

The archetypal statists of the Fabian Society responded that they did ‘not believe in the establishment of socialism by private enterprise’. And Sidney Webb asserted that the Cooperative Commonwealth would ultimately be achieved through ‘such pettifogging work as slowly and with infinite difficulty building up a Municipal Works Department under the London County Council’.

That might seem the very definition of ‘municipal dreaming’ but, significantly, radicals and socialists, Lib-Labs and trades unionists were increasingly engaging with a state which, for a variety of reasons, was belatedly showing an interest in tackling slum conditions.

Much more could be said about the range of ideas, individuals and organisations arguing for a spectrum of housing and planning reform in the years leading up to the First World War. Bowie covers them fully and judiciously and I won’t attempt any summary in a brief review.  There’s also an interesting discussion in the book of the currents and cross-currents around land value taxation, long advocated as a fairer and more progressive tax, supported by most reformers before the 1914 war and interestingly revived in Labour’s 2017 General Election manifesto.

I’ll put in a word too for William Thompson, councillor and alderman and later chair of the National Housing and Town Planning Council – the man who masterminded London’s first completed council homes, in Richmond, in the mid-1890s.

The book throws up some surprising gems.  William Morris is known as a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement and less celebrated as a revolutionary socialist but few have seen him as an early proponent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Here he is writing in 1884 on ‘Homes for the Poor’ in the Social Democratic Federation journal, Justice:

It might be advisable, granting the existence of huge towns for the present, that houses for workers should be built in tall blocks in what might be called vertical streets…This gathering of many small houses into a big tall one would give opportunity for what is also necessary for a decent life, that is garden space round each block.

From the 1890s, two key and lasting shifts in the housing and town planning field were taking place.  One was the central role increasingly advocated for local government, first significantly formalised in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.  Even Howard’s Garden Cities Association recognised this when it organised a conference on local authorities and town planning in 1907 – over 100 councils participated. Howard’s eventual successor and later chair of the Town and Country Planning Association, Fredric Osborne, acknowledged this more forcefully.

Sir Albert Rollit in an image by Spy captioned ‘Municipal Corporations’ from Vanity Fair, 1886

To some this was Socialism but, in essence, it was, in the words of Sir Albert Rollit (Conservative MP and sometime chair of Association of Municipal Corporations) in an 1889 speech to the revolutionaries of the National Union of Conservative Associations, a simple acknowledgement that:

Men must meet Socialism itself. It stalks abroad and we must look in its face. Not shirk from it as a spectre only to be avoided. In its one sense of the State, the Municipality or public bodies, doing what men cannot do, or do so well, for themselves, the principle has been adopted in many of those statutes which are our own work…

We would wish that present-day Conservatives in the face of the current housing crisis would forsake their current free market dogma for this practical truth understood better by their predecessors.

The second shift was the professionalisation of the field as RIBA and the Institution of Municipal and County Engineers took up the gauntlet, as various practitioner organisations were formed, as the subject became the focus of university teaching.

This copy of Thompson’s pamphlet on municipal housing, signed by John Burns and presumably from his personal library (now held by UCLA), illustrates the cross-play of ideas and personnel in the pre-1914 era

The pivotal moment, for Bowie, was the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act; legislation championed by John Burns, former trades unionist and socialist firebrand, as President of the Local Government Board in Asquith’s Liberal government. It further extended the planning role of local government and ensured that new settlements were no longer the preserve of philanthropy or private initiative.  (The legislation’s role in relation to council estate layout and design is discussed in my earlier post on the London County Council’s Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith.)

When it comes to public housing, the political and social impact of the First World War is usually taken as decisive.  Bowie’s analysis offers an important corrective by showing how widely accepted core principles of state support and local government agency in housing and planning had become before 1914.

In doing so, he rescues the role and ideas of these early pioneers. Though, as he acknowledges, much of their work comprised polemic and campaigning, by the turn of the century, radical and socialist ideas had become influential and increasingly accepted as both necessary and practical.

For Duncan Bowie:

the lesson of history is that arguments for change can sometimes actually lead to the change taking place. Such positive outcomes are not achieved without passion, belief and hard work. Change does not come quickly – nor is it inevitable.  That would be a lesson well learnt.

It’s a lesson well taught in his book too and it should be an inspiration for the current generation of housing and planning activists and practitioners fighting to ‘reassert the core Benthamite principle of planning for the public good against the practice of planning to enable private gain’.

Publication and purchase details of the book are available on the Routledge website. 

Notes

Duncan has created an invaluable website containing links to a podcast, images and many of the primary sources related to the book.

Anyone concerned with our current housing crisis and a progressive response to it will also be interested in another of his books, Radical Solutions to the Housing Supply Crisis, on sale from Policy Press for £7.99.

Municipal Dreams Goes to Hull, Part II: Civic grandeur, service and convenience

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Gibberd

We left Hull in last week’s post standing, figuratively at least, in its civic heart, Queen Victoria Square.  We’re looking at municipal Hull – the plans and promises as well as proud accomplishment.

Queen’s Gardens, which lie beyond Queen Victoria Square to the north-east, fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.  The area was once the Queen’s Docks, the first Hull docks constructed in the 1770s.  Obsolete by the interwar period, they were sold to the Corporation, infilled and opened (by Labour MP Herbert Morrison) as a park in 1935 and, as such, were a key element of the 1930s’ redesign of the city centre.   The fountain at the western end survives from that time but the Gardens as a whole were remodelled by Frederick Gibberd from the 1950s, building on the earlier Lutyens and Abercrombie vision for a new grand civic space, including assembly hall and winter gardens, which incorporated the Guildhall to the south.

– Kenneth Carter reliefs in front of former Central Police Station, Queen’s Gardens

Those larger ambitions remained unfulfilled and the Gardens remain poorly integrated into the wider cityscape – an issue addressed by a new masterplan issued in 2013 – but it’s a lovely space and walk into them to appreciate some fine past and present landscaping and public art. (1)  Amongst the latter are reliefs by Robert Adams by the pond at the eastern end and five panels by Kenneth Carter on a northern wall in front of the 1959 former Police Station, both commissioned by Gibberd (a great patron of public art as we’ve seen in Harlow).

– Queen’s Gardens, Wilberforce Monument and Hull College

What will catch your eye is the grand terminal vista of the Gardens at their eastern end.  The Wilberforce Monument (local boy William Wilberforce was the town’s MP from 1780) was erected by public subscription in 1834, just one year after the slave trade against which Wilberforce campaigned tirelessly was abolished in the British Empire, and moved to its present site in 1935.

– Hull College, Frederick Gibberd

Beyond it lies the Hull College of Technology (now Hull College), designed by Gibberd in Festival of Britain style in the 1950s, but completed in 1962.  Old Pevsner didn’t much like it – ‘run of the mill’ it thought – but the new guide is more complimentary of its ‘agreeable symmetry’.  A William Mitchell panel – depicting nautical and mathematical instruments – sits strikingly on the building’s façade.

– William Mitchell concrete and resin panel, c1960

From the College head south towards Alfred Gelder Street.  Alfred Gelder, an architect by profession, councillor and alderman for 43 years, was another of the nonconformist Liberals who left their progressive mark on the city.   The English Baroque-style Guildhall and Law Courts complex, designed by Edwin Cooper, on the street fittingly named after Gelder was begun on the latter’s initiative in 1905 and completed in 1916.  It’s a striking presence, monumental externally, lavishly decorated internally: a powerful statement of civic pride and purpose.

– The Guildhall

Facing the Guildhall on opposite sides of the road are the Maritime Buildings, a fine Edwardian office block, Grade II listed, awaiting new use and some TLC, and the former General Post Office, fully justifying its architectural descriptor, Edwardian imperial.  Buildings of their time just as their current redundancy or repurposing indicates changed times.  A Wetherspoons in the former post office building allows you to see some of its former grand interior. (2)

Wilberforce Museum

From here it’s a short walk to the heart of Hull’s Old Town (the new town of the 14^th century) and at the top end of the High Street, the city’s Museum Quarter – three excellent museums run by the council and free to enter.  Wilberforce gets due recognition in the house, now museum, where he was born and grew up.

Municipal tram in the Streetlife Museum

But a shout-out here for the excellent Streetlife Museum which offered a great combination of transport and social history – and a chance, keeping to my municipal theme, to take a photograph of a Hull Corporation tram of pre-First World War vintage.  The trams were municipalised in 1896, converted to a trolley-bus system in 1945, and finally closed in 1964.

– Tidal Surge Barrier with road and pedestrian swing bridges open

Walking further south along the River Hull, you come to some impressive infrastructure – Myton Bridge, a swing bridge carrying the A63 opened in 1980, and the Tidal Surge Barrier of the same year designed by Oliver Cox.  Cox made his name as a major figure in the housing division of the London County Council’s Architects Department so it was impressive to see the versatility displayed in this later work.

The Deep, Terry Farrell

Further on is The Deep, designed by Terry Farrell and completed in 2002 – an aquarium and major visitor attraction intended to regenerate this redundant area of former dockland. 

Nelson Street public conveniences

I should really spend more time on that bit of self-consciously showpiece architecture but we’re walking on, west along the Humber, towards Nelson Street and the now celebrated public toilets, Grade II listed (alongside the Tidal Surge Barrier and some other Hull landmarks) a few weeks ago. (3) Opened in 1926, the provision for women as well as men was innovative for the time and offers its own bit of social history as a mark of the greater independence allowed women in the interwar period. Otherwise, just enjoy the quality and beauty of the original Art Nouveau styling and fittings which survive to the present. (4)

– ‘Thieving Harry’s’, Fruit Market

Finally, on this perambulation, you can stop off for some well-earned refreshment in the revitalised Fruit Market area around the corner on the eastern side of Princess Docks. Now rebranded as an arts and cultural quarter, not so long ago it was just what it said it was as some of the surviving shopfronts and signs on Humber Street testify.  The Gibson Bishop building on the corner – once a fruit and vegetable merchant and now Thieving Harry’s café – is another fine example of 1950s’ reconstruction.

All that represents a full day’s visit but, hopefully, you’ll take time to explore the city further.  I’ll conclude with another idiosyncratic, municipally-themed, selection of other highlights.

– James Reckitt Public Library, Holderness Road

Heading east along the Holderness Road, you’ll find the James Reckitt Public Library (Reckitt was another local philanthropic Liberal industrialist), designed by Alfred Gelder and opened in 1889 as Hull’s first public library.

East Hull Baths, Holderness Road

Immediately adjacent are the more exuberant East Hull Baths, designed by Joseph H Hirst, then of the City Engineer’s Department, and opened in 1898.

Frederick I Reckitt Havens

A little under a mile further east, you reach the edge of the garden village developed before the First World War by Reckitt for the workers of his nearby works.  It’s a beautiful ensemble though now, for the most part, firmly for the more affluent middle classes.  The sweetly-named Frederick I Reckitt Havens, run by Anchor Housing, remain a not-for-profit enclave for elderly persons.

– The ‘Khyber Pass’ in East Park 

Next is East Park, originally 52 acres, now 120, designed by Borough Engineer Joseph Fox Sharp and opened by the Corporation in 1887. The Khyber Pass folly was constructed, possibly as a project for the local unemployed, between 1885 and 1888.  Not the worst reminder of Britain’s imperial past perhaps.

– Beverley Road Baths (c) Richard Croft and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Alternatively head north along the Beverley Road, there are more examples of progressive municipal endeavour – the Stepney Primary School, a Queen Anne-style building of the Hull School Board erected in 1886 and, next door, the Beverley Road Baths, designed by Joseph H Hirst, again, in 1905.

The former National Picture Theatre blitz site

Further north along Beverley Road is Britain’s last surviving Second World War Blitz site. The National Picture Theatre, a 1914 cinema, was bombed in 1941 and has remained largely undisturbed since then as an unintended memorial to wartime destruction.  There are now plans to resurrect the listed building as a formal commemoration of the era.

Pearson Park just to the west, originally the People’s Park, opened in 1862 – the city’s first public park – is a superb example of Victorian concern for working-class wellbeing and healthy recreation (even while the latter didn’t generally extend to their profit-making working lives or usually squalid homes).  The poet Philip Larkin’s home, another of the recently listed sites, is an attractive middle-class residence of the 1890s on the northern edge of the park.

– Sidmouth Street School

Larkin was famously chief librarian of Hull University which lies off Cottingham Road to the north.  If you cut across west from Beverley Road, you can take in another of the Hull Board’s fine schools, that on Sidmouth Street, erected 1912 and designed by the industrious Joseph H Hirst.

Court housing, Sidmouth Street

Across the road and on Exmouth Street nearby you’ll see some rare surviving examples of the court housing – short facing terraces built as cul-de-sacs off the main roads – which dominated much of the city’s working-class housing before the First World War.  These are later, and better built, examples from the 1880s.  One of the residents we spoke to was pleased that a couple of people up from London had ventured beyond the city centre.

– The Venn Building, University of Hull

On to the University and we’ll stretch a point here – though not too far – to make this our final example of municipal investment and innovation. The University was founded in 1925 on the back of a £250,000 donation from Thomas R Ferens and a £150,000 grant from the City Council.  There’s a lot of good architecture to be admired here but I’ll give you the Venn Building of 1928 (‘Neo-Early Georgian’ according to the experts) designed by William Forsyth to capture these interwar origins.

And that’s it. I’ve done a bit more than scratch the surface but all this is only really a taste of what Hull has to offer and a poor substitute for a visit in person.  Above all, it’s a reminder of the huge and important role that local government – as well as a broader civic culture supported by progressive actors – has played in the building and civilising of our cities.

Hull’s deserved status as the UK’s City of Culture in 2017 marks a later iteration of this same endeavour and I hope that the investment and interest it has attracted genuinely improves the lives of local residents as well as entertaining mere visitors such as myself.  I’ll end with a plea that this revival of municipal dreams is an exemplar, not a one-off – a testimony, like so much of what went before, to how a properly resourced and ambitious municipality can improve the lives of its citizens.

Sources

Much of the architectural detail in this post is drawn from the invaluable Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides, 2010) by David and Susan Neave.

(1) Hull City Council Economic Development and Regeneration Department, Masterplan Guidance, Queens Gardens, Hull (July 2013)

(2) The website British Post Office Buildings and their Architects: an Illustrated Guide has informative description and illustration on Hull’s General Post Office.

(3) For fuller detail on all the new Hull listings, take a look at the Historic England webpage.

(4) Of course, the issue of public conveniences (or present-day inconvenience) isn’t merely a matter of historic or architectural interest. The provision of public toilets was an important part of municipal service in its earlier years and the withdrawal of such provision is a major concern to many sections of the community now.  This is well dealt with, past and present, in a Hull context, in Paul Gibson’s post on Public Toilets in Hull.

Jones the Planner offers a full and more critical perspective on Hull’s post-war planning and architecture in ‘Hull: City of Culture’ (9 February 2014) and, alongside other case studies, in the book Cities of the North (2016).

 

 

Municipal Dreams in Hull, Part I: The best laid plans…

Hull, as I hope you all know, is the UK’s City of Culture for 2017.  You really don’t need an excuse to visit the city but, if that’s an incentive so much the better, because it’s worth it – Hull is one of the friendliest and most interesting places I’ve been to in a long while. What follows – touching on the city’s civic planning and an eclectic mix of some of its municipal highlights (I’ll do some housing stuff in future posts) – can only be an appetiser but I hope it will encourage you to explore the city for yourself.  This first post looks, in particular, at twentieth century plans to reconstruct the city.

Edward I and the city’s first borough charter commemorated in the Guildhall

Hull’s been a borough since 1299 and you’ll see some very early town planning in the grid-like pattern of streets off the High Street in the Old Town.  These were added to the original riverbank settlement by Edward I  who wanted the prosperous port as a base for his forays against the Scots and who renamed it formally Kingston upon Hull in the process.

The port – it was the UK’s third largest into the 1950s – and its associated industries expanded massively in the centuries which followed.  By the end of the nineteenth century, the Council – a reformed municipal corporation in 1835 and a county borough from 1888 – desired a civic presence which reflected the town’s importance and prosperity.  In the interwar period, new ambitions emerged to improve the city, a typically squalid product of breakneck Victorian-era urbanisation, as a living and working space for its broader population.  And then the Blitz – which hit Hull harder than any British city outside London – added its own necessity and aspirations to the task of post-war rebuilding.

The city centre (west-east) just before the Second World War. The newly completed Queen’s Gardens dominate the top of the image; Paragon Station is bottom centre with Jameson Street heading up. (From Lutyens and Abercrombie, Plan)

A 1943 RAF reconnaissance shot (north-south) showing city centre bomb damage (From Lutyens and Abercrombie, Plan)

Arriving by rail at Paragon Station brings you to the heart of a new Hull planned by an ambitious Corporation from the 1930s.  Then, the city centre slums which dominated the area were described by Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architectural eminence brought in to oversee the scheme, as an ‘eyesore and menace to heath…a disgrace to a progressive city’. He planned to replace the ‘irritating and unsightly jumble’ of older buildings with a neo-Georgian ensemble; the Council itself hoped that Ferensway, as the new thoroughfare was named, would take ‘its place among the famous streets of the world’.  (1)

Brook Chambers, Ferensway

To be honest, there’s not much to vindicate such hopes now but look north to the junction with Brook Street and you’ll see a vestige of them in Brook Chambers, erected in 1934.  In the event, wartime devastation – almost half the city’s central shops were destroyed – created new urgency and new opportunity to rebuild on a larger scale.

The Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan’s grand zonal reimagining of central Hull

Planning for ‘this second refounding of the great Port on the Humber’ began in 1941 and were finalised by 1944, commissioned by the Council from the two foremost town planners of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor Patrick Abercrombie. (2)  Lutyens had spent almost twenty years designing New Delhi; Abercrombie drew up influential post-war plans for London and Plymouth amongst others.  Although Lutyens died in January 1944, his imprint on the completed Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull seems strong in the grand Beaux Art scheme devised though it’s a form also favoured by Abercrombie in Plymouth.

More broadly, the Plan incorporated, in the words of Philip N Jones: (3)

the three great themes of post-war planning in Britain – inner city redevelopment; commitment to the social ideal of neighbourhood planning; and the trilogy of Containment – Green Belt – New Town.

A satellite town was planned in Burton Constable eight miles to the east with a narrow Green Belt separating the new settlement from the Hull suburbs.  Neither emerged and the new centre planned, in Abercrombie’s words, as ‘something completely new in Shopping Centres’ –  ‘a highly specialised precinct, free from traffic but adjacent to the central traffic routes’ – also took a very different form from that originally envisaged.

The sleek new shopping centre around Osborne Street envisaged in the Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan)

Abercrombie and Lutyens had hoped to create a new shopping centre centred on Osborne Street, adjacent to an expanded and re-formed civic quarter located around Queen’s Gardens. Established business interests and the prevalence of surviving buildings – despite the Blitz – stymied this vision.

The Lutyens and Abercrombie plan shows a re-sited main railway station and new shopping centre to the south-west

The alternative Chamber of Trade plan keeps a revamped shopping centre to the north. With thanks to Catherine Flinn.

The Chamber of Trade Plan – first mooted in 1947, drawn up by another eminent town planner, WR Davidge, and adopted in modified form in 1954 – was constructed on the foundations of the main existing shopping centre to the north and was seen as far less disruptive.  It incorporated ‘temporary shops’ on Ferensway which survived until 2013.

Temporary shops on Ferensway. With thanks to Catherine Flinn.

Still, something of Abercrombie’s influence remained, not least in the fact that the plan was overseen by Hull’s new planner, the grandly-named Udolphus Aylmer Coates appointed in 1948, who had been a student of Abercrombie’s at the Department of Civil Design at Liverpool University. (4)

Abercrombie himself thought that the Hull Plan was ‘probably the best report he had been connected with’ but, ironically, as Philip N Jones concludes, ‘no other wartime plan was so ignored or so apparently ineffective’. (5)

The House of Fraser store on Ferensway and Jameston Street

Nevertheless, the rebuilt streets that emerged offer an impressive testimony to the vision and design aesthetic of post-war reconstruction, most notably in the House of Fraser department store (originally Hammonds) on Ferensway and Jameson Street.  Designed by TP Bennett and Sons and opened in 1950, it’s commended by the new Pevsner for its unusual combination of 1930s and Festival of Britain architectural elements.  Like a number of businesses in the vicinity, it seems to have suffered from that later iteration of our commercial future, the indoor shopping centre, but the building itself remains, to my eyes, strikingly attractive.

Paragon Square towards Jameson Street

Across the road is a bit of more standard post-war neo-Georgian but, if you look very carefully to the bottom right of the image above, you’ll catch a glimpse of Tony, a local bus driver playing the spoons and giving a one-man band show before starting his shift. He wasn’t busking. As he told us, it was just a way of cheering people up and putting himself in a good frame of mind before work.  He gave us a brilliant introduction to Hull and its people.

Festival House, Jameson Street

Just along Jameson Street is Festival House where a tablet marks it as ‘the first permanent building to arise from the ashes of the centre of the city’ after its wartime destruction.

If you’ve just arrived, the telephone box in the centre of Jameson Street might be the first of Hull’s famous cream-coloured kiosks you’ll see.  This one looks like a Gilbert Scott’s K6 1930s’ design to me but experts can correct me.   The unusual colour (and lack of crown insignia) isn’t an affectation but a proud reminder that Hull Corporation inaugurated its own municipal telephone system in 1902 which remained free of General Post Office control and privatisation until finally sold off in 1999.  Hull’s telephone and internet services are now operated by Kingston Communications which controversially retains an effective local monopoly.

Walking on, there’s a mix of styles and ages until you come to South Street on the right where you meet Queen’s House, a huge neo-Georgian quadrangle occupying one whole block of the city centre, designed by Kenneth Wakeford and completed in 1952.

Queen’s House, Chapel Street

The photograph, of its Chapel Street frontage above, hardly does it justice but it does capture the decline of a commercial district which Abercrombie hoped would restore Hull to its pre-war eminence as a centre serving some 500,000 people.

Alan Boyson’s Three Ships mural

By this time, you will have spotted what should be one of Hull’s most proudly iconic images – Alan Boyson’s Three Ships mural, completed in 1963 and commissioned by the Co-op to celebrate Hull’s fishing heritage.  The stats are impressive enough – it’s an Italian glass mosaic of 4224 foot square slabs, each made up of 225 tiny glass cubes affixed to a 66ft x 64ft concrete screen – but what I love most is the confidence of its bravura statement of local identity.  And I love that it was commissioned by the Co-op, reminding us of a time when that organisation’s consumerism with a conscience (and its ‘divi’ for its working-class members) occupied centre-stage in the drive to build a fairer and more democratic Britain.

The mural in its earlier pomp above the flagship store of the Hull and East Riding Cooperative Society

The Co-op moved on; the premises were taken over by BHS and it went bust in 2016. The building now offers a ‘redevelopment opportunity’ but, whatever happens, please support the campaign to preserve the mural by following @BhsMuralHull on Twitter and signing the petition for listing.

The City Hall, Queen Victoria and the exit from the Gents toilets

From here, a right turn down King Edward Street takes you to the heart of civic Hull into Queen Victoria Square, created in 1903 some six years after Hull was granted city status. The 1903 statue of Victoria sits imperiously above some fine public toilets, added in 1923 and retaining their original earthenware stalls, cisterns and cubicles in the Gents.

Unless you’re desperate (and male), they probably won’t be the first thing you notice.  On your right, stands the Edwardian Baroque City Hall, designed by City Architect Joseph H Hirst, opened in 1910.  This was designed as a public hall for concerts, meetings and civic events; on the day we visited it was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University.

Ferens Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Square

Across the Square lies the Ferens Art Gallery – a ‘simple restrained classical cube of fine ashlar’ in the words of the latest Pevsner.  It was completed in 1927 following a £50,000 endowment from Thomas R Ferens, a director of Reckitt’s (one of the city’s major firms) and one-time Liberal MP for East Hull.   One of several significant benefactors to the city, Ferens was honoured after his death in 1930 in the naming of Ferensway.

An artwork purchased by the Corporation, one of many.

The early support of the Council is clear too among the many fine works on show. The Gallery, free to enter, with some good temporary exhibitions while we were there, is well worth a visit.

Maritime Museum, Queen Victoria Square

The civic triumvirate is completed by the Maritime Museum facing which was originally built in 1868-71 as the headquarters of the Hull Dock Company – a rare British building by Christopher George Wray who had made his name as an architect for the British Government in Bengal.

Both the dock offices (they became a museum in 1975) and City Hall were scheduled for demolition in the Lutyens and Abercrombie Plan as part of its creation of a new civic quarter – one reason perhaps, despite Abercrobie’s recognition that a ‘clean sheet approach’ would not be welcomed,  why the major part of the Plan went unfulfilled.

Next week’s post continues this tour of Hull, looking at other elements of post-war replanning as well as some of its major municipal accomplishments in the city centre and beyond. And, if you’re new to the blog, I’ve written on the North Hull council estate in an earlier post.

Sources:

(1) Blomfield is quoted in ‘Slums Cleared for New Cityscape’, BBC Legacies, UK History Local to You (ND). The latter quotation is from David and Susan Neave, Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides, 2010).  Much of the detail which follows is drawn from the same, invaluable, source.

(2) The quotation is from the Preamble to Edwin Lutyens and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for the City and County of Kingston upon Hull (A Brown and Sons Ltd., London and Hull, 1945)

(3) Philip N Jones, ‘“…a fairer and nobler City” – Lutyens and Abercrombie’s Plan for the City of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, no 3, volume 13, 1998

(4) RTPI, Rebuilding Hull: the Abercrombie Plan and Beyond (1940s) (2014)

(5) The first quotation comes from Abercrombie himself.  The second and further detail comes from Jones, ‘“…a fairer and nobler City”.

For an unusual but insightful perspective on the Abercrombie Plan for Hull, listen to this track from Christopher Rowe and Ian Clark in ‘Songs for Humberside’ (1971)

My thanks to Catherine Flinn for providing some of the images specified as well as supporting detail.  Her book on post-war city centre reconstruction in Hull, Liverpool and Exeter will be published next year.

Jones the Planner offers a full and more critical perspective on Hull’s post-war planning and architecture in ‘Hull: City of Culture’ (9 February 2014) and, alongside other case studies, in the book Cities of the North (2016).

A Radical Riverscape: Architecture and Revolution down the Fleet

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Finsbury

I’m pleased to share another guest post this week; this by Mike Althorpe, aka the London Ambler. This post, based on one of Mike’s guided walks, traces the fascinating housing history and politics of one of London’s most radical quarters. I’ll be participating, alongside author Owen Hatherley and art historian Rosamund West, in Mike’s next tour of the Fleet on June 3.

Of all of London’s great hidden waterways, none can claim the radicalism of the River Fleet. Weaving a route from Highgate to the Thames it has been both life source and life taker, carving out a landscape that became the epicentre for Victorian speculators and have-a-go railway pioneers, but also a landscape where London’s social campaigners, civic reformers and revolutionary agitators found their voice and their architectural expression.

Farringdon Road and the Metropolitan Railway, 1868

To trace its course today, through modern day Kings Cross, Clerkenwell and Farringdon is to reveal the memories of a set of ideas and episodes in housing and urban form that were to have profound national consequences for the UK.

The upper part of the Fleet was locally called the Bagnigge and it was upon the Bagnigge Marsh or Wash where new ideas in housing were pioneered. The river valley defined rich and poor. Put simply, for most of the 19th century the money held the high ground and those without waded in the marsh sharing cheap rents with a host of ramshackle warehouses, service yards, hospitals and factories.

In 1845, living conditions for the poor in Pentonville were deemed critical enough for the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes to step in with one of the earliest philanthropic housing ventures in London. On a narrow strip of land behind Calthorpe Street, they created a ‘Model Street’ of 15 buildings for 23 families in a variety of unit types arranged as two respectable terraces.

The ‘model dwellings’ in Pentonville

In one of them there were 30 rooms designated for widows and single women. It was a major advance, but was panned due to its cramped proportions. Writing at the time of its completion The Builder, an influential trade journal of the day, called it a ‘disgrace’, adding that if they didn’t buck their ideas up:

they will rear a hot-bed for infection, and throw a great impediment in the way of that improvement which they profess to seek.

Learning from the mistakes of the Society, just upstream on Wicklow Street, the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company (IIDC) created one of its most outstanding model tenement schemes, Derby Buildings by their builder architect Matthew Allen in 1865.

Derby Buildings (c) Mike Althorpe

The design of the blocks was the outcome of years of refinement loosely based on Henry Robert’s Great Exhibition model dwelling cottages of 1851. At Kings Cross, the IIDC scaled up the idea and gave it a heroic urban form with wrought iron access decks taking pride of place at the street. It was architecture where function and the necessity of plan, creating decent space and good ventilation, led. Many more followed.

The IIDC’s site had been left over by the creation of the Metropolitan Railway who smashed out 50 houses and displaced many local residents in the process. This was a story repeated down the length of the Fleet. The valley was a frenzy of commercial activity. As the railway pushed its way down to Farringdon it laid waste to poor neighbourhoods.

Railway cutting from Farringdon (c) Mike Althorpe

In the 1870s the Metropolitan Board of Works stepped in to make good the destruction, acquiring sites via compulsory purchase and selling them at a discount to private builders who would provide new affordable housing. At the edge of Clerkenwell Green, the Peabody Trust was offered one such site and completed Pear Tree Court, one of its characteristic artisan estates in London stock and Suffolk white brick. Clean and straightforward but, for many critics, monotonous and barracks-like.

Pear Tree Court (c) Mike Althorpe

Critics also highlighted that Peabody, common with many philanthropic housing ventures at the time, operated a strict tenant policy aimed at ‘the deserving poor’. This basically meant that it rehoused those morally upstanding members of the working class who had got married, had stable jobs and the economic means to exercise some choice in their lives. If you were unmarried, jobless, in casual low-paid work or homeless you wouldn’t qualify. It meant therefore that many in most urgent need of housing continued to suffer and were pushed outwards from the area.

By the 1880s, a number of parliamentary acts had been passed to improve working-class housing but the powers and machinery of local government – particularly in London – were grossly inadequate to the task. At a district level, some 30 local vestries existed, most rate-payer dominated and unwilling to act. The Clerkenwell Vestry, on the east side of the Fleet, however, was an unusually activist body as its new town hall, built in avant-garde arts and crafts style in the 1890s, testified.

Finsbury Town Hall

In 1900, this became home to Finsbury Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the 28 new boroughs created in a radical reform of London’s lower tier of local government.  Finsbury would maintain its predecessor’s reforming traditions.

The controversial problem of London’s strategic governance had been dealt with earlier. The Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1855 to oversee sewerage, streets and bridges, had long been criticised as unfit for purpose – undemocratic (it was indirectly elected by the vestries and district boards) and, in part, corrupt. The establishment, in 1889, of the London County Council (LCC) transformed this picture and its vision and drive was early manifested in the valley of the Fleet where the new municipal government inherited the Rosebery Avenue urban improvement scheme from its predecessor and expanded and completed it in grand style.

The Rosebery Avenue viaduct from Warner Street (c) Mike Althorpe

Straddling the Fleet Valley by means of a hidden viaduct between Clerkenwell and Holborn and engineered by the Edward Bazalgette (son of Joseph of the engineering dynasty), Rosebery Avenue was a new type of joined up urban improvement. It provided not only improved communication across the river valley, but land for housing, for business, civic infrastructure and amenities, tramways, public toilets, gardens and fire station. Clerkenwell Vestry’s new town hall at its northerly end was recognition of this transformation.

At the turn of the twentieth century where once Georgian slums and Dickensian rookeries stood, the LCC could claim this part of the Fleet valley as a piece of model city, a practical monument to social and urban progress which they continued to develop upon. A few years later, on the western side of the valley in Holborn, work started on the Bourne Estate, the third in a new generation of large council housing schemes by the LCC after its celebrated work in Bethnal Green and Millbank.

The Bourne Estate

Elsewhere on the slopes of the Fleet and later in the century, a confident Finsbury Borough Council embraced revolutionary architecture to demonstrate their commitment to social progress, pushing building design further than any other authority in the country had previously dared.

Behind Exmouth Market they completed the Finsbury Health Centre in 1938. Local in purpose, its bold modernist design by Russian émigré architect, Berthold Lubetkin, was ground-breaking and it became a rallying call across the UK for a bold new tomorrow, cementing Finsbury’s reputation as one of the most radical and progressive local authorities in the country and inspiring those campaigning for a National Health Service and an integrated Welfare State.

The Finsbury Health Centre (c) Mike Althorpe

Lubetkin’s association with the borough of Finbury went deep. In his architecture, the leaders of the council had at last found its radical form. It was bold and it was the future. As the health centre was completed, he turned his attention to housing and began work on designing what became the Spa Green Estate, commissioned in 1938 but completed after the war in 1949.

The Spa Green Estate

During the post-war years, to the north of the borough and up the hill from Bagnigge Wash and 90 years on from the IIDC blocks on Wicklow Street, Finsbury’s resolve was unshakable. Sweeping away Georgian terraces and squares originally built for the rich, the tiny borough continued to punch well above its weight and created Bevin Court in 1954, Y-shaped block of 112 flats and maisonettes designed again by Lubetkin.

Bevin Court

With its gymnastic display of concrete engineering and patterns of alternating balconies and windows, Bevin was inspired by the work of constructivist architects in Russia and it is here that the revolutionary spirit of Finsbury perhaps beats at its strongest with the block marking the site of Lenin’s 1903 London home. It was between here and the secret printing press downstream at Clerkenwell Green that revolution in Russia was forged.

With an election looming a walk through the valley of the Fleet is reminder of London’s own radical inheritance. While some of our most severe urban social problems may now lie elsewhere, it is a landscape loaded with the landmarks of a struggle that in 2017 is as poignant and perhaps as urgent as ever.

There are a few remaining places left for the 3 June walk, A Radical Riverscape: Architecture and Revolution down the Fleet. Click the link if you’d like to book.

You can follow Mike on Instagram and on Twitter.