Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing

My apologies for not posting much on the blog recently. My book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing was published by Verso in April and things have been hectic since then. I’ve more posts in the pipeline – on Nottingham, Hull, Thetford, Liverpool and London but just need to find the time to complete the research and write them up. Guest posts from people with expertise in their local area are also still very welcome.

In the meantime, there have been some great reviews for the book – from Lynsey Hanley in the Guardian, Rowan Moore in the Observer,  Hugh Pearman in the Spectator and Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times amongst others. And lots and lots of media interest – I’ve been on ‘You and Yours’ on Radio 4, on BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio London and local radio stations in Hull and Newcastle with Lancashire and Leeds forthcoming.  I also did a slot on Sky News and recorded an interview for BOOKTalk on BBC Parliament.  I’ve done talks on the book to groups in London, Manchester and Nottingham with more coming up across the country.

So that’s my excuse but, if that comes across as self-important, I want to say two things. Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who has read and supported the blog since it began over five years ago.  Your interest helped the blog succeed – it’s had over 960,000 views to date – and the book which followed would not have been possible without you.

Secondly, that welcome for the book and media interest tells us that its subject-matter is timely and important.  This reflects, I think, both a very broad concern over the current housing crisis and an increasing belief that a significant programme of public housing is needed to solve it.  People are hungry for a positive (but open-eyed) narrative of council housing which records its past achievements and testifies to its potential.

Nearly all the interviews have revolved around three key questions.

One, ‘why council housing?’  The simple answer is that the private sector has never been able or willing to supply decent affordable housing on the scale required, not in the nineteenth century, nor today.

Two, ‘what went wrong?’  I will always challenge the premise and prejudice of that question; beyond the stigmatising stereotypes, so much didn’t go wrong for so many.  But I also try to explain what did change and how, in many ways, council estates are better understood as the victim of that change rather than its agent.

Three, ‘can we build again?’  The answer, of course, is ‘yes’.  We have built huge numbers of decent council homes in the past when the country was poorer than it is at present, sometimes in periods of genuine austerity. We have the means to build; we require the political will and vision.

In an interview with Forbes Magazine, I made the economic case for a renewed programme of public housing as both an investment in our people and their well-being and as an essential part of any broader housing market. Currently, we choose to subsidise an inefficient market system and private landlordism.  Investment in secure, decent and affordable social housing would improve the lives and well-being of millions and in the longer-term, pay for itself.  In the shorter term, it might – as the tragic case of Grenfell Tower reminds us – save lives.

And that brings us back to the moral case for properly funded and resourced public housing, as compelling now as it was when the long, proud story of council housing began in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Council Housing in Walsall, Part II: The Interwar Period

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1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

Brockhurst Street, Fullbrook

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

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

Homes on the Poets Estate, Harden

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

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

West Bromwich Road, Palfrey

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

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

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

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

Talke Road, Fullbrook

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

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

Dorsett Place, Leamore

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

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

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

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

11 Walstead Road, now privately owned.

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

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

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

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

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

Prefabs on Alumwell Road

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Guide to What You May Have Missed

I’m on my hols but there is an addition to the blog today – a new page (which will be updated) which provides a location and brief details of all the posts to date. You can click on the link just provided or find it at any time by clicking on the ‘Map of the Blog’ link at the top right of the page.

The map of the blog – the real thing is interactive and allows you to zoom in

I’ve tried to ensure a decent geographical coverage but it reminds me that there’s plenty of good stuff out there which deserves coverage.  I’m very happy to receive suggestions (recommended sources and detail always welcome!) of places and topics to cover or guest posts if there’s something you would like to share.

Thanks for reading the blog.

‘Local government…the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’

When I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it all righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

The words of Winifred Holtby in 1936.

I started this blog back in January to celebrate the efforts and achievements of our early municipal reformers.  I’m taking a break this week but it’s an opportunity to review what’s been covered and, if you’re new to the blog, provide a little tour of what you’ve missed.

WE Riley’s plans for the White Hart Lane Estate

There’s been a lot about housing – probably the most important sphere of municipal endeavour and the one with the largest direct impact on the masses of people.  The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act provided the initial breakthrough, seized upon by the London County Council, most famously, in Arts and Crafts-inspired developments at Millbank, Totterdown Fields and the White Hart Lane Estate but also by smaller, progressive councils such as Sheffield in the Flower Estate and Battersea in the Latchmere Estate.

The First World War gave impetus and urgency to the efforts of government to house the people, supported by Housing Acts and financial subsidies of greater or lesser generosity.  The fruits of these were seen principally in the massive new ‘garden suburbs’ such as the LCC’s Becontree and Downham and Woolwich’s Page Estate in the London outskirts and Manchester City Council’s Wythenshawe Estate, then seen as ‘the world of the future’. 

For most, working people and housing reformers, ‘a cottage home for every family’ remained the ideal, seen most clearly in Bermondsey’s small Wilson Grove Estate. More pragmatic councils in densely settled boroughs embraced tenement building such as that in Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras.

Housing architecture and thinking were generally conservative but there were some early modernist designs, inspired by Continental example – in the LCC’s Ossulston Estate, for example.  Leeds’ massive Quarry Hill scheme was an inner-city product of the first large-scale slum clearance efforts of the 1930s.

War, ‘the locomotive of history’, brought even more radical changes in housing after 1945.  The Lansbury Estate in Poplar, for all its proclaimed modernity, was something of a throwback.  Blackbird Leys in Oxford was also a postwar estate which echoed earlier suburban developments.

The Spa Green Estate, from Margaret and Alexander Potter’s Houses, 1948

But as ambitions, scale and urgency grew, council housing grew higher and denser. The Spa Green Estate in Finsbury was an early progressive vision of high-rise housing.  Park Hill – those ‘streets in the sky’ in Sheffield – represents the trend at its most far-reaching.

Resistance or backlash to high-rise on an industrial scale began in the late sixties, seen initially in Camden Council’s commitment to high-quality, low-rise housing such as that in the Alexandra Estate and Branch Hill and – in a different key – to Newcastle’s commitment to re-created community at Byker.

If housing met one of the most basic human needs, it was understood by municipal reformers as part of a wider environment which they sought to make healthier and more humane.

Bermondsey Borough Council – as in so many things – took the lead here with its vision of beautifying that inner-city borough.  Victoria Park in London’s East End is a more typical city park but a great democratic exemplar of what parks can do to improve lives and lift spirits.

Planning on a larger scale was much more a post-Second World War ideal.  The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 deserves wider notice as a truly progressive but, in the best sense, conservative measure.  Planning as a tool of benevolent social engineering has had less impact but Plymouth can be fairly described as our ‘first great welfare state city’.

Abram Games’ 1943 poster featuring the Finsbury Health Centre

All such work was in the service of a healthier life for the masses of people.  Local government – before the creation of a national health service in 1948 – was in the forefront of direct healthcare provision.  We’ve looked at Bermondsey, for whose socialist councillors there was ‘no wealth but life’, Finsbury where nothing was ‘too good for ordinary people’ and Woolwich as examples of the range and scale of this commitment.

Baths and washhouses were less striking – though ambitions could run high as seen in the Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury – but important contributors to the amelioration of working-class living conditions. ‘Healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’ were not such trivial goals.

Shoreditch Maternity and Child Welfare Centre, 1923

If healthcare measures were particularly dedicated to the raising of new generations so, of course, was education – also a scene of municipal pride and endeavour as we’ve noted in the case of the London School Board. Its schools – those ‘sermons in brick’ – were ‘beacons of the future’, harbingers of a ‘wiser, better England’.

With all this proper focus on reforms which not only improved lives but in many cases saved them, a celebration of town halls might seem a distraction but this blog celebrates local government and a reforming, progressive spirit of civic pride and local identity which is sometimes best seen in its great monuments.

Poplar Town Hall, 1938

Limehouse Town Hall is a modest early example. The Council House in Birmingham is an inspiring ‘bricks and mortar monument to the municipal gospel’ of a progressive middle class.  Poplar Town Hall – ‘a worthy workshop for the workers’ welfare’ – was a sign of changing times.

That’s a rather lengthy list but I hope it shows what we owe to local government and how vital that work remains. The blog will continue to commemorate the effort and enterprise of our local councils and municipal reformers – men and women up and down the country who dedicated their lives to elevating the condition of the people.

If you support this endeavour, please continue to read the blog, spread the word and please feel free to contribute your own ideas and your own pet projects to the continuing record.

Let’s celebrate this ‘first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies’.