Council Housing in Holborn, Part I: Early Council Housing to 1945

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1920s, 1930s, Holborn, Pre-1914

Holborn, created in 1900, was at just 403 acres the smallest of the London boroughs. With a population to match – declining from 59,000 when established to barely 22,000 on abolition in 1965 – and an overwhelmingly Conservative council, neither was it in the forefront of council housebuilding. Still, it has a rich council housing history and after 1945, with Sydney Cook as Borough Architect (who would go on to make his name in the same office at Camden), it stood in the forefront of modernist design.

Holborn can be seen near the centre of this interwar map of the Metropolitan Boroughs. Together with St Pancras and Hampstead, it would form the London Borough of Camden from 1965.

This first post will look at its earlier history and begins with what the Survey of London describes as ‘the first council housing in England’.  In fact, Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road, completed in 1865, were built by the City of London, largely at the initiative of Alderman Sydney Waterlow, better known as the founder of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company. For that reason and given the nature of the City of London Corporation, I place it more strongly in the Victorian tradition of philanthropic housing and, like most of these early ‘model dwellings’ and their relatively high rents, its 168 tenements housed the better-off working class and the lower middle class.  The buildings were demolished in 1970. (1)

An early engraving of Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Road

The City of London built another block, Viaduct Buildings containing 40 tenements, in 1880 but it was the London County Council (LCC), created in 1889, that built most of Holborn’s council housing proper before the First World War.  The LCC’s first scheme was a small one, intended to clear and improve a run-down area between Brooke Street and Leather Lane. Completed in 1897, Cranley Buildings (unusually three-storey tenements rather than the five that was the norm) comprised just twelve two- and three-roomed tenements, housing 60 people. Only 55 had been displaced by slum clearance but the usual problem of high rents ensured that these new residents too were the better-off rather than the poorest who had previously lived in the area. (2)

Cranley Buildings

The LCC’s next scheme, the Bourne Estate, south of Clerkenwell Road, was a much grander affair: eleven principally five-storey blocks containing some 763 homes: (3)

designed by the LCC Architect’s Department in a free Classical style, with Arts and Crafts touches … [of] international significance as the model for the much admired and highly influential public housing erected in Vienna immediately after the First World War.

It’s the grand arches which find their greatest echo in the later Austrian schemes but the attractive green courtyards of the Bourne Estate contain little of the communal buzz sought by Red Vienna.

The Bourne Estate

Holborn was far from alone among the metropolitan borough councils in building no council housing of its own before 1914 but its overwhelmingly Conservative membership no doubt made that decision easier.  Two Labour councillors were elected in 1919 but they soon lost their seats and through most of the 1920s the Council was wholly Conservative.

The First World War and its aftermath – and specifically the promise of ‘Homes for Heroes’ – had changed much in 1919 and the celebrated Housing Act of that year required that all councils not only survey local housing needs (within three months!) but actively prepare schemes to meet them.  Holborn went through the motions, going so far as to inspect four possible sites for council housing, but finally concluded that: (4)

Although from a purely public health point of view there is at present necessity existing in the Borough for better housing accommodation for the working classes, many other factors have to be taken into consideration by the Council.

To be fair, there was some truth in the factors identified: population movement from central London, cheaper and better housing in suburban districts, cheaper commuting, and Holborn’s growing significance as a business centre. But they didn’t obviate the pressing problems of the day, not least the 611 unadapted large family houses now in multiple occupation.  Clearly, political opposition to public housing remained the determining factor for the Council’s Conservative majority.

The 1919 report identified a precise total of 999 LCC flats in the borough. This number was not added to in the interwar period but Holborn itself did in the end build some 92 council homes by the early 1930s – only Chelsea and Paddington Metropolitan Boroughs provided fewer in the period.

Betterton House

Holborn’s first council housing was built on Betterton Street in Covent Garden. Betterton House was opened in 1927 by Prince Arthur of Connaught, a small, five-storey infill block of 15 tenements designed by Borough Surveyor JE Parr, replacing buildings declared derelict. The arched front entrance led to a stairway providing balcony access at the rear. Fifteen further tenements were added in a 1930 extension. A small but active Labour opposition group on the council were denouncing the flats as ‘slums’ by the later 1930s. (5)

Boswell House. Richbell, a post-war block, lies to the immediate right set back from the previous street line.

The Council’s next scheme – Boswell House in Boswell Street, Bloomsbury – also designed by Parr, comprised 62 flats and was opened in 1932.  There were over 400 applicants for the new homes; the lucky few selected were: (6)

Holborn residents living in unsatisfactory conditions, in a number of cases being large families in single room tenements. Many of the tenants are employed in market work, in hotels and restaurants, or other occupations where the hours of work necessitate residence near to the place of work.

The design details provided by the Medical Officer of Health suggest the Council took some pride in the scheme: (7)

All the flats will have a well-ventilated larder, sink, draining board, dresser-cupboard, gas cooker, copper-boiler, bathroom and W.C., coal bunker, cupboards, shelving, hat and coat racks, etc. … A playing yard is provided for children, and the blocks of flats have been so arranged as to provide the maximum amount of sunshine, light and air for the dwellings. The flats, balconies, staircases and the yard will be lighted at night by electric light.

This was, unusually, a seven-storey scheme (the top two floors were maisonettes), necessary to make fullest use of the restricted, one-third of an acre, site. Almost uniquely, for a council housing scheme before the 1946 special lifts subsidy, it contained two service lifts. In this, at least, Holborn was ahead of the game.

That does, however, represent the peak of its pre-war housing record. The context is important – a population that by 1937 was estimated to have fallen to 34,600 – but on other measures housing need remained severe. From 1930, housing legislation focused on slum clearance and rehousing.  The 1935 Housing Act required all local authorities to undertake a survey of overcrowding in their districts.  In Holborn, by the modest criteria of the day, 700 families were found to be living in overcrowded conditions, over nine percent of the local population. This placed Holborn tenth among the capital’s 28 Metropolitan Boroughs for overcrowding. Much therefore remained to be done.

Much more after the devastating impact of the Blitz.  Some 650 buildings were destroyed in Holborn (one seventh of the Borough’s total) and 426 people killed. Around 282 high explosive bombs fell at the height of the Blitz in April-May 1941 and a number of V1 and V2 rockets in a second wave of attacks in 1944. Per head of population, Holborn was reckoned the worst hit administrative district in the country. (8)

An image of Buckea’s Bakers Shop on the corner of Boswell Street and Theobalds Road taken in 1945.

The political impact of the war seems almost as seismic.  In general election in June 1945, Irene Marcousé, elected a local councillor in 1939, stood for Labour in Holborn. She posed the all-important question of the day: (9)

Who is going to win the peace? Are you – the ordinary citizens of Holborn and Britain?  Or are THEY – the privileged few who have always cheated you and the peace and plenty you have earned?

Marcousé didn’t win but she came within 925 votes of the victorious Conservative candidate on a 19-point swing in a two-horse race. This was a very creditable result in Holborn where business voters – those with a vote through ownership of business premises in the constituency – represented around 6 percent of the electorate. (Plural voting was abolished in 1948.)

Across the country, Labour gained 239 seats to form its first (landslide) majority government. This was a harbinger of the November local elections in which Labour took control of the Borough for the first and only time, winning 24 seats to the Tories’ 18.  Marcousé became leader of the Council and chair of the Housing Committee.

It’s worth a pause here to take a look at Marcousé and the new council. Marcousé was born in East Prussia in 1900 and educated in Belgium before graduating from the universities of Heidelberg and London. Frank Dobson, Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras in later years, recalled she could sing The Internationale in English, French and German.  She had married Hugh Chaplin (Principal Keeper of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and a fellow Labour activist) in 1938; together they lived in Russell Square.  But she was, in Dobson’s words, ‘a hard-bitten, awkward and effective old socialist’. Better known as Ina Chaplin, she would represent the party on the LCC, Greater London Council and Inner London Education Authority till 1977. (10)

Under Marcousé’s leadership, in what almost might be described as the ruins of Holborn, the Council  opened information and social centres in disused and bomb-damaged premises, created new children’s playgrounds, organised open-air entertainments in local squares, and published a regular council newsletter. It was a broad and cultural politics that seems in some ways to prefigure the New Left politics of later years.

But the key issue was housing and we’ll examine its record on that and the longer post-war story next week.

Sources

(1) Philip Temple (ed), Farringdon Road‘, Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, (2008)

(2) Fuller detail is provided in Martin Stilwell, Housing the Workers Early London County Council Housing 1889-1914, 10: Brooke’s Market, Holborn Scheme (pdf)

(3) Historic England, Bourne Estate (Northern Part), Denys House, Frewell House, Ledham House, Radcliffe House, Redman House, Scrope House, Skipwith House: listing details

(4) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1919 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(5) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1927 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972). On Labour, see Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s.

(6) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1933 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(7) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1932 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(8) A Walk in History, Friday 30th May – The Blitz

(9) Quoted in Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Random House, 2010)

(10) See Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s. A transcript of Frank Dobson’s obituary of Marcousé published in The Guardian, 9 April 1990, can be found in the online archives of Woolverstone Hall School (an out of London boarding school founded by the LCC in 1951 where she was a governor until 1986).

 

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part I: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

Tourists might know Shrewsbury as a town with over 660 listed buildings, ‘full of higgledy-piggledy streets with names you want to say out loud’. (1)  As a working town and somewhere to live, council housing has been equally important to its past and present and the council took an early, innovative role after some initial hesitation. This first post looks at this history up to the Second World War and the controversies surrounding it.

A contemporary aerial view of Shrewsbury. Ditherington lies to the north beyond the Severn loop enclosing the town centre.

In 1901, with a population of around 23,300, Shrewsbury was a medium-sized county town – an administrative and trading centre, not untouched by the Industrial Revolution (indeed Ditherington Flax Mill, built in 1797, was the first iron-framed building in the world) but still predominantly traditional in form and make-up.

Politically, this was reflected in a local politics largely ‘based on personality rather than ideology’. The town’s first Labour councillor, John Kent Morris of the Shrewsbury Trades Council (a trade union body) was elected in 1903 but the dominant figure was the Conservative Alderman Thomas Pidduck Deakin, a baker and hotelier. (2)

This (literally) picture postcard image of Shrewsbury, taken c1900, belies the reality of working-class housing in its courts and passages.

That tradition was also reflected in slums – not the Victorian terraces of industrial England but in the words of the borough’s Medical Officer of Health in 1927:

small, isolated groups, scattered throughout the town in the form of small houses, huddled together in enclosed and shut-in courtyards, approached through a dark alley leading off the main street.

Back in 1907, the then Medical Officer of Health estimated there were 200 houses in Shrewsbury unfit for human habitation. A resolution that the Council adopt Part III of the 1890 Housing Act (allowing it to acquire land to build council housing) followed.  The debate that ensued is worth examining in some detail as representative of the arguments of the day.

Some councillors professed simple shock at the conditions suffered by many of the working class: Councillor Franklin: (3)

had no idea that there were such places for human beings to live in as there were in Shrewsbury … some houses were entirely devoid of light, others filthy in the extreme, and some without any back door; houses which were really a disgrace to civilisation.

From the left, Councillor Morris drew what seemed to him the inescapable conclusion:

The evils of the present system were so great that they could not be tolerated any longer, and he hoped the Council would step into the breach and say that the people must be properly housed at rents which they could afford to pay. If it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.

To many, it won’t seem that too much has changed.

But some – as was common then and now – blamed the poor for their squalor of their homes. Councillor Pace, a Liberal, was ‘afraid in some cases the people themselves caused a great deal of the unpleasantness that existed by their own actions’. If just one drain and service pipe per group of dwellings were demanded, he suggested, the private sector would provide all the housing required.

Councillor How, a Conservative, decried municipal housing as ‘the road to socialism’. But his party colleague, Councillor Bromley, spoke to a  rival tradition of Tory Democracy that professed a concern for working-class conditions:

Mr How told them that the proposal might be ruinous to the country but was it not ruinous to the country to have an enormous infantile death-rate caused very largely by insanitary dwellings, and to permit the existence of slums which were undermining the health of the people. They were told that what they proposed was Socialism. If that was so then he was a Socialist – and he was among the Conservative Socialists because the Conservatives passed that act in 1890.

In the end, the motion was passed but, for the moment, the resistance to council housing prevailed. A few existing homes were declared unfit but in general efforts focused on reconditioning rather than demolition.

Raymond Unwin

Agitation renewed with the formation of a Shrewsbury Housing Reform Council in 1911.  A public meeting in February 1912 – described as ‘one of the most important and representative gatherings in the history of Shrewsbury’ and addressed by Raymond Unwin, the leading housing reformer of the day – seems to have decisively swung opinion. (4)

Wingfield Gardens

The Council appointed a Housing Committee and purchased land north of Ditherington Mill. Wingfield Gardens was completed in April 1915 – 63 solid family homes arrayed around a generous green open space: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’.  Alderman Deakin, now chair of the Housing Committee though previously sceptical towards municipal housebuilding, spoke of ‘an enormous demand for houses’ and concluded ‘the Corporation would have to provide other garden suburbs’. (5)

Wingfield Gardens

As a token of the seriousness of the Council’s intent, sanction was received for a further housing scheme in 1916 though without, in wartime, much prospect of it being built in the near future. However, thoughts were turning to war’s end and, perhaps in response to the Local Government Board’s circular of July 1917 ‘Housing after the War’, in October that year, the Council sought permission to build 400 houses. (6)

Deakin, whose conversion to municipal housebuilding was now complete, observed that building small houses for private let had ceased being profitable for at least ten years before the war and he became the driving force behind the Council’s interwar programme.  It’s a reminder that an uptick in council housebuilding began in the run-up to the First World War though its aftermath and the demand for ‘Homes for Heroes’ proved decisive.

The Council bought 19 acres of land in December 1918 and a further 38 acres at Coton Hill in March 1919 and was described, justifiably, as ‘one of the most forward in respect to its housing schemes’. (7)

That advanced thinking was evident in its detailed planning too. The new homes were:

to be on garden city lines – not more than ten to the acre, and the lay-out includes such amenities as village institutes, bowling greens, and open spaces, while tree planting is to be a feature of the two estates now being developed.

Naturally, the new homes included ‘such domestic facilities as a gas boiler and gas cooker’.  The location of the bath – in a cubicle off the scullery – caused some debate but the Housing Committee concluded that ‘that the balance of convenience for the working housewife [was] to have the bath downstairs’.

Longden Green

The Longden Green Estate was completed in 1922, the first stage of the Coton Hill Estate one year later.  The plans of both were closely based on the 1919 Housing Manual (written appropriately in a Shrewsbury context by Raymond Unwin) which accompanied Addison’s celebrated housing act of the same year. How, still a Conservative member of the council, now an alderman, was angry that the houses designed by ‘certain faddy architects in London’ cost £1000 each; Deakin countered ‘the ship should not be spoilt for a ha’p’orth of tar’.

Sultan Road

Those high prices were a problem though, not least in rents affordable to only the most affluent workers. The generous funding regime of Addison’s legislation was axed in 1921; Longden Green’s community hall was not built. And the Council determined that their next building scheme would be built more economically at rents that lower paid workingmen could afford. The 70 houses built on Sultan Road cost around £370 each but the scheme was widely criticised for its austerity.  The 204-home Monkmoor Estate, built on land purchased in June 1925, reverted to garden suburb ideals.

White House Gardens

Nationally, the 1930s marked a shift to slum clearance and the targeted rehousing of slum-dwellers. Shrewsbury made small progress in this regard; in 1939, there were still 221 houses in town judged unfit for human habitation including 29 homes in Fairford Place deemed insanitary since the 1850s. However, the council’s building continued apace in smaller schemes at Judith Butts, White House Gardens, Wingfield Close (adjacent to the council’s first housing), New Park Road and Close, and Old Heath.

New Park Road

The Council’s 1000^th home was opened in March 1937 – a proud record. The historian Barrie Trinder reckoned by this time that ‘the better-paid workman had been very nearly catered for’ but he acknowledged that many who were less well-off in Shrewsbury remained in squalor. (9)

The renewed housing drive after a second world war and its commitment to provide decent housing for all will be examined in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Original Shrewsbury website

(2) This detail and the following quotation are drawn from WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014)

(3) ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(4) Champion and Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography

(5) ‘Shrewsbury’s Garden Suburb’, Liverpool Daily Post, 9 April 1915

(6) ‘The Housing of Shrewsbury Workers’, Birmingham Daily Post, 9 October 1917

(7) This and following quotations are drawn from ‘Shrewsbury Housing Schemes. Garden City Developments’, Kington Times, 14 June 1919

(8) Barrie Trinder, Beyond the Bridges: the Suburbs of Shrewsbury, 1760-1960 (2008)

ECP Monson: A Thoughtful and Proudly Municipal Architect

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1920s, 1930s, Bethnal Green, Islington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature another guest post from Andrew Parnell who wrote an earlier post on Charles Dickens House in Bethnal Green. Andrew is a walking tour guide with Footprints of London and East London on Foot who leads walks on architecture and housing history in Tower Hamlets. These include walks in Bethnal Green which take in buildings designed by ECP Monson. More information and tickets for Andrew’s walks can be obtained from the Footprints of London website. 

The architect Edward Charles Philip Monson (1872-1941) designed over 25 London housing estates in the first half of the twentieth century. He worked in private practice but dedicated his life to public building, the overwhelming majority of it housing. In a period when housing provision for the less-well-off grew from its 19^th century philanthropic beginnings to the inter-war surge in local authority building, he worked for a variety of housebuilding bodies which reflect that progression.

ECP Monson

Monson remains relatively unsung in architectural circles, his work overshadowed by that of more celebrated, sometimes flamboyant, figures who came to prominence later in the century. His practice – in partnership with his brother Harry and son John – has been described as ‘capable, prolific but perhaps rather stolid.’ That may be true, but his work can also be seen as highly accomplished, adapting stylistically to changing trends and tastes whilst placing residents’ needs – practical and psychological – before architectural display.

After starting off professionally working in the practice of his architect father, Monson set up in his own right in 1904. Among his early commissions were several of the early estates built by the William Sutton Trust, a philanthropic body founded in 1900 with a huge monetary endowment by a wealthy benefactor. It joined a group of similar housing bodies formed by wealthy individuals in the mould of the Peabody Trust which had been operating since the mid-19^th century. The estates Monson designed were ‘grand and impressive places,’ in a relatively mellow, decorated style which distinguished the Sutton Trust’s work from that of the other philanthropic bodies which were variously criticised as ‘barrack-like’, ‘cliff-like’ and ‘prison-like.’ At the Sutton Estate in Chelsea, completed in 1913, for example, he used rustication, stone wreaths, swags and Corinthian colonnades to add ‘liveliness’ to the massive five-storey blocks. According to one resident, ‘the pointing [of the estate] was said to be so perfect that people used to come specially to see it.’

Sutton Estate, Chelsea

An attempt by the current owner to demolish most of the century-old Chelsea estate’s buildings was fended off by residents and others in 2018 on the basis not only of their architectural but also of their historical significance as early examples of large-scale social housing. That case brought to light another, much earlier conflict which arose around the time the estate was built between the Sutton Trust and the London County Council (LCC) which was then the ‘new kid on the block’ in the housebuilding world. The LCC criticised what it saw as the low level of spending, and the consequent basicness of the accommodation, created by the Trust which was operating under the financial constraints of a ‘no-profit’ approach. The fledgling local authority had levelled this criticism at the work of other philanthropic bodies – which it saw as competitors – and it was referred to in the recent case by the would-be demolishers to question the merits of the estate’s design.  

Sutton Estate, Chelsea, rear view

The argument failed when the context of the tension between the LCC and the philanthropic bodies was taken into account. The housing Monson designed for the Trust may have been very simple but it was intended to be affordable: by keeping building costs down, rents could be kept down. Ironically, the LCC in its first great housing project – the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green – found itself obliged by financial pressures to charge high rents to recover its relatively lavish expenditure on building the estate with the result that the new buildings were occupied not by residents of the slums they replaced but by more affluent tenants. The Chelsea Sutton Estate, whatever its limitations, continues to provide 383 badly-needed social housing units (compared with 237 which the proposed redevelopment would have included).

After World War I, the rate of house-building by London’s Metropolitan Boroughs increased substantially, boosted by the introduction of housing subsidies and other measures contained in the Housing Act 1919. Monson attached himself to the Metropolitan Boroughs in two areas: Bethnal Green and nearby Stepney, both later absorbed into the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End; and Finsbury and next-door Islington, which later merged to become the single London Borough of Islington, in North London. He would go on to design a stream of estates for these councils in the 1920s and 30s.

One of Monson’s early projects for Bethnal Green, which was known as the Parmiter Estate during construction, gave rise to an amusing controversy when, as it was nearing completion in 1927, the left-wing (part-Communist) council voted to call it the Lenin Estate.

At the Parmiter Estate, Monson’s style had moved on from the gigantic blocks of the philanthropic period to a version of the neo-Georgian style widely used by the LCC and other local authorities by that time: simple, orderly and well-proportioned with windows taller than they are wide. However, at Parmiter Monson added decorative flourishes, such as venetian windows in the gables, which were uncharacteristic of this ‘house style.’ This may have reflected the Bethnal Green council’s desire to make a splash with the first estate to be designed by its ‘own’ architect. A splash it certainly made, with right-wing newspapers expressing outrage at the extravagance of ‘luxury’ flats built with public money by a left-wing council.

Parmiter Estate, Bethnal Green

In fact, during his career Monson adopted, or showed touches, of a variety of styles, reflecting latest trends, but sometimes seeming to jump back and forth across time, perhaps reflecting his clients’ preferences, or what they thought residents would prefer, or his own perception of what would be appropriate. As well as Neo-Georgian, the labels Queen Anne (itself a sort of potpourri of past styles), Arts and Crafts, Edwardian Renaissance/Baroque, Art Deco and Modernist have been used in relation to his various works.

For example, later in Bethnal Green he produced the Delta Estate (1936-7), a gem of a building which, with elegant curved-ended balconies and semi-circular concrete door canopies, discreetly adopts elements of the Art Deco-influenced style, used by other local boroughs in the 1930s, which they sometimes called ‘Moderne’ (everything sounds better in French!). Delta has what the architectural bible Pevsner calls ‘jazzy Expressionist brickwork’ over the doorways.

Brickwork and balconies on the Delta Estate, Bethnal Green

Lively brickwork can also be seen in another of Monson’s Bethnal Green projects, the Digby and Butler Estates (1936 and 1938), which, like the Delta Estate, have the wide windows (wider than they are tall) characteristic of the 1930s.  

The Butler Estate, Bethnal Green

However, another of his Bethnal Green works of the 1930s, Claredale House (1931-32), has windows which would look more at home in the old neo-Georgian style and even features a high brick archway entrance which seems to hark right back to the huge, stern archways found in some philanthropic blocks of earlier decades.  

Arches at the Sutton and Claredale Estates

In Bethnal Green and the other boroughs he was associated with, Monson worked for some radical councils implementing a huge social programme of public housebuilding. But from the limited information we have, it is hard to imagine he was a socialist firebrand. His photo shows him with big moustache, pince-nez spectacles and wing collar, looking every inch the Edwardian bank manager or solicitor. His curriculum vitae lists memberships of just about every relevant professional body, to many of which he devoted copious amounts of time voluntarily in committee and executive work, including as President of the Institute of Structural Engineers. A keen and senior member of the Territorial Army, he was also, as his father had been, a prominent Freemason.  

Whatever we may think of these associations, it should not detract from the fact that his professional life was overwhelmingly focused on what contemporaries referred to as ‘the Housing of the Working Classes.’ The output of estates by his small firm would have done credit to the whole architects’ department of a local authority.

Islington was the area where Monson was most prolific. His work there shows a variation and progression of styles, as in the East End. But there is one estate which, for me, represents an epitome or culmination of Monson’s work. The Brecknock Road Estate (1938-9) was recently added to Islington’s Local List of Historical Assets. It was nominated as being:

an evocative example of a thoughtful and proudly municipal conception of modern architecture.

By this late stage of his life and career, Monson had visited Europe and seen how some designers of mass housing there (for example in the Weimar Republic and ‘Red Vienna’) were adopting a modernist approach. At Brecknock Road, Monson used this style, but in a characteristically restrained manner. By this time, he may well have been working with his brother and son who continued the practice under his name after his death.  

The Brecknock Estate, Islington

Modernism at Brecknock Road can be seen in the rectangular balconies which now have 90 degree corners (no curves) and in corner windows at 90 and 135 degree angles in the two-faceted and three-faceted bay windows. The horizontality of long balconies and rows of windows is cut through by the vertical lines created by the bay windows and rubbish chute ‘chimneys.’ But this modernism is tailored to its context. The estate – comprising 225 flats in 16 perimeter blocks around two internal courtyards – makes a virtue of the sloping topography and irregular shape of the site. The blocks have stepped rooflines and their arrangement is not entirely symmetrical, so they occupy the space ‘in a relaxed way.’ The slate roofs are not flat – as strict modernism would dictate – but slightly pitched to match the Victorian roofs of surrounding streets. Between the blocks are glimpses into the attractively planted sloping courtyards. The outward-facing sides of the blocks are predominantly red brick punctuated by the white rendered balconies. The inward-facing sides are predominantly white and pale green, producing a light, airy feel.  

Brecknock Estate, Islington, rear view

Altogether this creates an environment in which you feel that people can live comfortably. One resident and (art) critic has written that the blocks are not monolithic but each ‘is a knowable community,’ and the lack of grand and large-scale effects mean residents can ‘feel more entitled to be there.’ It has a ‘sense of refuge and quiet.’ For an architect of social housing, those comments, coming from a resident of one of his estates, could be seen as the highest praise, an accolade as satisfying as a Grade I listing.

Monson’s work now stands in the shade – physical and critical – of that of more radical individuals with perhaps greater socialist credentials such as Denys Lasdun (whose Keeling House of 1957 in Bethnal Green towers over Monson’s Claredale House across the road) and the emigres from eastern Europe Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger. But Monson’s comparatively quiet, gentle and sensitive approach, expertly using changing styles but without letting any design imperative stand before the wellbeing and contentment of residents, could be said to have produced housing that has stood the test of time and fulfilled its primary function at least as well.

Sources

Royal Institute of British Architects, Biographical Files: Edward Charles Philip Monson and Edward Monson (father)

‘E. C. P. Monson, English Architect’, The Structural Engineer, October 1932, p 413

P. L. Garside, The Conduct of Philanthropy: William Sutton Trust 1900 – 2000 (Athlone Press, 2000)

Letter from The Victorian Society to The Planning Inspectorate re: William Sutton Estate, Cale Street and Ixworth Place, London, 28 March 2018

Ian Hunt, ‘Modernism for sociable living’, Journal of Islington Archaeology & History Society, Spring 2013, Vol 3, No.1

London Borough of Islington Planning Committee Recommendation, Brecknock Road Estate, 4 December 2012

P. Garside and T. Hinchcliffe, ‘E. C. P. Monson in Islington: local authority housing in 1919-65’,  London Architect, October 1982, pp 8-9

Modernism in Metro-Land, In House – Part 4: Islington, April 2017

Book Review: Seán Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919–1956

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s

Seán Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919–1956 (Edinburgh University Press, October 2018)

In 1919, Glasgow, with a population surpassing one million, was the ‘Second City of the Empire’. It was also, by some distance, Britain’s most densely settled and poorly housed city; two thirds of its people lived in two rooms or less; one fifth in ‘single ends’, a single room.  The Council estimated that 57,000 new homes were needed immediately. In the event, some 54,289 council homes were built by 1939.

Seán Damer’s book is a vital guide to the new estates – called ‘schemes’ in Scotland, hence the title – built between the wars and those built in the decade after 1945. It’s a deeply engaged social and political history, of interest not only to Glaswegians but to anyone seeking a critical understanding of council housing, its successes, failures and complexities.

Mosspark, 1927 © Britain from Above (SPW019519)

Damer begins his story with Mosspark, built a couple of miles to the south-west of the city centre on land purchased as far back as 1909; its plans approved in April 1919. It was not the first of Glasgow’s post-war housing schemes but it was by far the most prestigious.

Mosspark’s plan clearly shows the influence of garden suburb ideals

Built under the generous terms of Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act, this was a scheme which fulfilled Tudor Walters ideals with generous landscaping and a density of around nine houses per acre. The homes themselves were of similar quality; cottage homes, almost two-thirds of which were (in Scottish parlance) ‘four-’ or ‘five-apartment’ houses containing three or more bedrooms.

An early image of Mosspark

The homes – as was typical of ‘Addison houses’ – were expensive to build (at around £1150 each) and had high rents to match.  The rents were sufficient themselves to bar the average workingman but the latter’s exclusion was ensured by the zealous gatekeeping of those in the council responsible for housing allocations. As one resident later recalled:

This place was full of professionals – teachers, government officers, and Corporation workers. Everybody knew that you had to be earning £5 per week to get a house.

The average wage for a skilled worker stood then at £3 a week and in the mid-1920s council records show professional, skilled white-collar and white-collar workers formed around three-quarters of heads of household.

This was, then, a self-consciously affluent and ‘respectable’ community; one, in Damer’s words, ‘with more than a hint of the ‘unco guid’ [excessive self-righteousness] which can be the hallmark of the Scots Presbyterian’.  The church, bowling club and tenants’ association formed the pillars of that community and helped ensure the solid Tory affiliations of its earlier years.

An early image of Hamiltonhill

Damer goes on to discuss Hamiltonhill, an unusual scheme built under a slum clearance provision of the little-known 1921 Housing Act, but the thrust of his analysis is provided by the two succeeding chapters, examining the West Drumoyne and Blackhill schemes.

By the mid-1920s, Glasgow’s powerful labour movement – whose organisation and agitation had, of course, been essential to the ‘Moderate’ (Tory) controlled council’s willingness to build in the first place – was protesting the Corporation’s failure to provide council housing for the average working-class householder, many still living in appalling conditions in the inner city.

West Drumoyne shops and housing

West Drumoyne, built under the terms of the 1924 Housing Act (championed by local son, Labour’s Minister of Health and Housing, John Wheatley), was the Moderates’ response – and a defeat for the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The ILP had wanted cottage homes; the eventual scheme offered two- and three-storey tenements at a density of over 26 houses per acre. The latter – rightly or wrongly – became stigmatised as slum clearance housing though, in practice, West Drumoyne comprised overwhelmingly skilled and semi-skilled workers, many working in the Govan shipyards.

An image from Blackhill in 1976 capturing some of the raucous self-entertainment that Damer describes © The Herald

Blackhill, on the other hand, was explicitly built as a slum clearance estate. Approved in 1933, it was a product of the 1930 and 1935 Housing Acts which targeted for the first time slum clearance and rehousing.  It won’t be a surprise to learn that its design reflected its origins – early housing comprised tenement blocks and, another distinctively Scottish form, ‘four-in-a-block’ tenement blocks (four flats under a hipped roof block of more or less cottage appearance).  Almost a half of heads of household were classified as labourers and average wages were £2 a week though many more were unemployed.

Such social divisions, often reflected in a similarly differentiated quality of housing, could be found in estates across Britain but, as Damer charts with rigour and some anger, Glasgow Corporation took it a stage further.  This was a rigid three-tier system: ‘Ordinary’ schemes built under the 1919 and 1923 Acts; ‘Intermediate’ schemes built under the 1924 Act; and ‘Slum Clearance and Rehousing’ schemes built under the legislation of the 1930s.

The prejudice of housing officials – in their judgments about who ‘deserved’ higher quality housing and in their allocation of such housing  ensured – as Damer argues, that:

any council tenant in Glasgow could tell at a glance into which category a housing scheme fell, and to which category he or she could aspire.

The stigma attached to slum clearance estates affected Blackhill in particular, built on cheap land adjacent to a gas works and chemical plant, geographically isolated; even its name contained its own ‘black mark’.

Prestwick Street, Craigbank, 2004

Whilst, in principle, post-Second World War schemes – Damer discusses Craigbank, in the huge new peripheral Pollok estate, and South Pollok – were intended to supersede such rigid social segregation, the so-called ‘New Ordinary’ estates were little more than a re-branding of the former ‘Intermediate’ category. Meanwhile, allocations policies ensured that Craigbank catered for the better-off working class and South Pollok for the least well-off. They soon acquired corresponding reputations.

Cowcaddens – the area of Glasgow from which many of the residents of Hamiltonhill moved

It’s worth pointing out, however – not as a form of special pleading but as a simple record of fact – that the new tenants, both interwar and post-war, were, overwhelmingly, delighted with their new council homes. South Pollok, later labelled by some outsiders as ‘the White Man’s Grave’, built (badly) in 1947-48 and demolished in 1973, still represented in housing terms a huge step up:

It was like heaven! It was like a palace, even without anything in it … We’d got this lovely, lovely house. Well it was lovely to me! When I got into that big empty house and the weans were running up and doon mad and – it was just like walking into Buckingham Palace because I had a bath!

For Damer, as he states in his introduction, ‘­the story of council housing in Glasgow is the story of class-struggle’. Damer feels that the Glasgow working class itself – as a potentially unified political force – was splintered by these imposed divisions. Depending on their political perspective perhaps, others will come to their own conclusion as to whether it was actively splintered or just splintered in the first place.  It’s undeniable, at least, that the story was shaped by class divisions and class prejudices; in particular, by the bigotry directed towards the so-called slum working class by politicians and officials.

Those attitudes were reflected in the rigorous policing of the new estates by the council’s Resident Factors, female housing inspectors and public health nurses – a troika dedicated to ensuring decent, respectable and sanitary living particularly among poorer residents not trusted to behave well.

A real strength of Damer’s book is its rich anecdotal record gathered from interviews conducted with residents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it’s clear, for all the disrespect addressed to officialdom, there was a strong sense – at least in hindsight – that this supervision had helped create a respectability (self-policed as well as imposed) that had been lost in more recent years.

That record – and Damer’s sympathetic eye – also creates a vivid picture of community on the various estates. If Mosspark is treated somewhat caustically, the ‘lower’ working-class estates are painted empathetically and the variety of informal means of working-class self-help and neighbourliness delineated in some detail – from the ‘menodges’ (local savings clubs), to various forms of money-lending, to ‘nicking’ as a form of resource redistribution.

Damer’s summary of Blackhill can stand for his broader perspective. It was, he says:

an impoverished, largely unskilled, manual working-class community characterised by a variety of familial and social survival strategies, including elaborate collective self-help mechanisms largely organised by women, and thieving, largely organised by men … It was a tough place, where one had to be tough to survive. But the real violence was that of poverty, which Blackhill tenants combated with humour, imagination and resilience.

And one interviewee, recalling the role of his mother on the estate, can speak to that matriarchy:

My mother came from Ayrshire, a very, very hard-working woman. Tremendous intelligence but no skills. When I say no skills – no skills that she could work with but was respected in the community, she was the one who helped people through a birth, was sent for – in those days when a child was not well they gave them a mustard bath – she was the sort of local witch doctor. She was unbelievable. Her organisational sense was unbelievable for somebody that was supposed to be semi-literate.

Much of this finds echoes in estates across Britain – the inter- and intra-class divisions, the role of officialdom, the means of getting by in often hostile circumstance.

Blackhill, 1986 after redevelopment in the 1970s; image Alex Glass

But Glasgow was council housing writ large. By the mid-1970s, almost seven in ten of its population lived in ‘Corporation housing’; the City Council was the largest public sector landlord in western Europe and in many ways a problematic one.  Damer does not shy away from addressing this issue and his final chapter asks ‘Why was Glasgow’s council housing so dire?’.

You can read his answer for yourself but the sheer inhumanity of existing conditions and a drive to alleviate them which all too often emphasised quantity over quality, the legacy and persistence of prejudiced attitudes towards poorer residents, and the divisions that the latter caused all played their part.

I recommend the book not only as rich and challenging account of council housing built at scale in one of our major cities but as a significant contribution towards our wider understanding of how to build badly and how to build well.

Purchase and publication details can be found on the Edinburgh University Press website. 

Note

For a good account of Glasgow’s later housing history, you can read Gerry Mooney’s guest posts on this blog, Glasgow Housing in Historical Context and Failed Post-War Visions?.

Council Housing in Gateshead, part I to 1939: ‘The liberty of the subject’

Tags

1920s, 1930s

JB Priestley visited Gateshead in 1933. It’s fair to say he wasn’t impressed: (1)

If there is any town of like size in Europe that can show a similar lack of civic dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation, I should like to know its name … No true civilisation could have produced such a town.

I’ll annoy some locals today by harking back to that pejorative view and, unsurprisingly, at the time the town’s politicians and press were outraged. The Journal noted that Priestley ‘was accompanied by vile weather and a severe cold in his head’ and lamented that the latter hadn’t ‘kept Mr Priestley confined to his hotel’.  Others, more objectively, pointed to the contemporary impact of the Great Depression. (2)

Of course, in defence of Priestley, his English Journey was intended to highlight exactly the inequality he described so damningly; the poverty of parts of England which might already have been described as ‘left behind’.  And his social commentary would play its own part in the project to build a better Britain in the aftermath of World War Two.

Nineteenth-century Gateshead slums: Bankwell Stairs leading to Pipewellgate in 1886 (to the left), and Friars Dene Road, Old Ford, not dated

There had, in any case, already been attempts to improve local conditions, seen in the Borough’s slum clearance schemes and grand new housing estates. These would continue and Gateshead, both in terms of scale and innovation, would be among the leaders in efforts to better house the working class. It was not, however, among the pioneers and, naturally, as we shall see, it didn’t get everything right in its own journey.

Gateshead was another of the boom towns of the Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution, growing from a population of 8597 in 1801 to 85,692 just ninety years later: a municipal borough in 1835 and a county borough in 1889.  That breakneck growth created the slum conditions one might expect but the regular appeals of the borough’s Medical Officer of Health to use the building powers granted by the 1890 Housing Act went unheeded. A committee of the Council convened to consider the issue in 1899 concluded: (3)

They saw no reason for the building of workingmen’s dwellings by the Corporation as there was always plenty of that class of house to be procured within reasonable distance.

If that were an apparently practical objection to state intervention, personal and ideological opposition were perhaps stronger. The Liberal alderman William Henry Dunn believed ‘dirty people made dirty houses’; he ‘would not interfere with their pleasure in filth’.  A few years later, Alderman Robert Affleck, whose family were among Gateshead’s major private developers, opposing a later housing bill suggested that it would:

filch away the liberty of the subject. Occupants of lodging houses, people who often would make no effort to better their environment, were by this Bill to be given the same privileges as ordinary citizens.

In fact, the Council did close almost 390 tenements as unfit for human habitation under sanitary legislation prior to the First World War. But the hostility to outside intervention was extended even to private philanthropy when, in 1911, it rejected a proposal by the Sutton Trust to build its own ‘model dwellings’ for the working class. They were built in Newcastle instead.

Ellison Square, central Gateshead, built c1851

In a similar fashion as late as 1917, the Council peremptorily rejected the offer made by the Local Government Board promising ‘substantial financial assistance from public funds’ to local councils prepared to implement approved programmes of working-class housing.

Yet, just two years later, the Council acknowledged the need to build 1950 houses in three years.  The explanation lay, firstly, in the changed politics of the post-war era and the commitment made by prime minister Lloyd George – but seemingly accepted across the political spectrum – ‘to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’.  Secondly, the Council was now subject to the legislative mandate of the 1919 Housing Act which required all authorities not only to undertake a survey of local housing needs but prepare concrete plans to meet them. In Gateshead, one in three working-class families was found to be living in overcrowded conditions.

Gainsborough Crescent, Carr Hill Estate

The changed times were obvious well before the new Housing Act received the Royal Assent in July 1919.  The Council had established a Housing Committee in February. A town hall meeting, convened by local churchmen in April and addressed by housing reformer Seebohm Rowntree, added pressure from below. The Council purchased 65 acres of land at Carr Hill and Sheriff Hill for building purposes and appointed local architect Richard Wylie to design the new schemes.

Then the Council faltered before initial plans for just 360 new homes were revised upwards to match the more ambitious proposals of other local councils.  A revised plan for 650 was then accepted by the Ministry of Health and Housing but only as a first instalment of a larger scheme.

The first homes were completed at Sheriff Hill, those at Carr Hill to the north-east a little later. Some 232 had been built by 1923. If the numbers were smaller than anticipated, the quality generally was not. These were the garden suburbs of the early post-war era when finance and politics briefly meshed to deliver the promise of ‘Homes for Heroes’.

The Avenue, Sheriff Hill

Broadway on Sheriff Hill and its cross-streets best capture the ambition of the moment with their mix of parlour and non-parlour semi-detached houses and short terraces, the end houses treated as ‘pavilions’ and marked by steep gables and hips. The second phase which formed the Carr Hill Estate – a further 342 houses – used a harder red brick and sometimes render on the upper floor. (4)

Broadway, Sheriff Hill

The generous programme of the 1919 Act had been halted by spending cuts in July 1921 and later estates characterise the more economical construction of later legislation. But the drive to build remained; at the end of 1923, the Borough reckoned 2839 new homes were needed to rehouse its population decently.

Rawling Road, Field House Estate

The Field House estate in the Saltwell district was completed by the late 1920s and in the early thirties Gateshead was developing new estates at Old Ford, Victoria Road, Wrekenton, Deckham Hall and Lobley Hill. By 1936, the Borough had built around 2360 council homes.

But the 1930s introduced something which was surprisingly new in the sector – a determined attempt, spearheaded by national legislation, to rehouse those living in the worst conditions.  Generally, the relatively high rents of council housing and council expectations of ‘good tenants’ who could be expected to reliably pay them had excluded the poorest from council housing. Labour’s 1930 Housing Act targeted slum clearance and incentivised the rehousing of slum-dwellers.

The ‘National’ Government’s 1935 Housing Act added overcrowding to existing definitions of unfit housing. The survey it required that all councils take of local housing conditions revealed Gateshead as having the second worst housing of county boroughs in England and Wales (Sunderland came first) – almost 16 percent pf the population were living in overcrowded homes.  The continued prevalence of ‘Tyneside flats’ – single-storey flats upstairs and down in two-storey terraces estimated to form 60 percent of Gateshead’s housing stock in 1911 – was part of the explanation.

Demolition of the Pipewellgate area, 1935

In the early 1930s, a major slum clearance drive in Gateshead cleared some of its worst housing in the Barn Close, Pipewellgate, Hilgate, Bridge Street, Church Street and Old Fold area. By 1939, some 1654 families had been rehoused.

Estates built in the 1930s specifically to rehouse the slum population were often built more cheaply in the attempt to makes their rents more affordable. More intangibly, some would retain a certain stigma marking this origin, not least among better-off and longer-term council tenants who considered themselves more ‘respectable’.

Aerial view of the Deckham Hall Estate

In the case of the Deckham Hall Estate, the former at least was certainly true.  Begun in 1936 by the North-Eastern Housing Association created for the purpose, it’s an estate of generally semi-detached two-bedroomed housing: (5)

The houses were of very uniform appearance compared with those built at Carr Hill and Bensham. Orange brick was used throughout and less attention given to landscaping, with only a few green spaces and evidently no tree planting, producing an austere effect overall.

The estate’s layout of irregular concentric rings earned it the nickname among locals of the ‘Frying Pan’ or, less politically correctly, the ‘African Village’.

Chiswick Gardens, Deckham Hall Estate

The estate is still seen by some as a ‘bad estate’, undeservedly according to Martin Crookston and I’m sure to the resentment of many of its current residents. In 2006, the estate still suffered, in the Council’s words – the exclamation mark is in the original – from a: (6)

poor environment … caused by low grade boundaries and public realm materials, under-investment in upkeep and a lack of attractive landscaping in both public (!) areas and private gardens.

Low take-up of Right to Buy seemed to confirm its unpopular reputation. More to the point perhaps and certainly illustrating that interplay of negatives that characterises what used to be called ‘hard to let’ estates, the unemployment rate stood at 12 percent, compared to a local average of seven. (7)

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate

The photographs from my visit to the estate (now owned and managed by the Home Housing Association and Gateshead Housing Company) earlier this year show the environmental upgrades that have taken place since, part of a package intended also to address what was euphemistically described as ‘tenure imbalance’, in other words a perceived lack of owner-occupiers.  The estate looks neat and generally well-cared for, though still (to be honest) a little austere.

Goodwood Avenue, Racecourse Estate, begun in the late 1930s

But we’re moving ahead of ourselves.  Back in 1939, Gateshead had built 3104 council homes. After a second world war with renewed demands to clear the slums, Gateshead would build on an even larger scale.  Some of the newbuild would replicate the ‘cottage suburbs’ of the interwar period but there was also a significant shift to high-rise.  We’ll follow that story in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) JB Priestley, English Journey (1934)

(2) Tony Henderson, ‘JB Priestley’s Views on the North East Examined Again’, The Journal, 26 October 2009

(3) This and the quotations which follow are drawn from FWD Manders, A History of Gateshead (Gateshead Corporation, 1973)

(4) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016)

(5) Simon Taylor and David B Lovie, Gateshead. Architecture on a Changing English Urban Landscape (English Heritage, 2004)

(6) Gateshead Council, Urban Design, Heritage & Character Analysis Report: Deckham, March 2006. The Right to Buy data is drawn from Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners, Deckham Neighbourhood Housing Analysis (ND but c2006)

(7) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? 

Council Housing in Winchester – Part I to 1939: ‘these houses will be the most sought after in Winchester’

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1920s, 1930s

If you know Winchester – or think you do – you probably think of its cathedral or maybe the College; a county town and one-time capital of England. It’s a beautiful city which I know well and one of the country’s least affordable places to live where the average house costs over £555,000. (1)  You probably don’t know it as somewhere with award-winning council estates and a long and proud council housing history.

Cromwell Road, Lower Stanmore

It’s worth pointing out from the outset that Winchester – even Winchester – was essentially a working-class city for much of the last century.  A housing survey in 1919 – we’ll come back to this – estimated that 76 percent of its homes (for a population of around 23,000) were working-class housing. (2)

And, though it lacked large areas of slum housing, some of those homes were in very poor condition. In June 1914, a report of the Medical Officer of Health to that effect had galvanised the City Council to appoint a subcommittee to oversea the ‘erection of not more than 25 houses suitable for the working classes’. Typically, the intention was, in the words of Councillor Hayward, not to provide the cheapest houses but ‘something decent at about 6 shillings [30p] a week’.  Whatever the intentions, the war which broke out three months later put paid to such ambitions and the scheme was deferred in March 1915 owing to the increased cost of labour and materials. (3)

Four years later, as that war ground to its bloody conclusion, it provided new pressures but this time to build the ‘Homes for Heroes’ promised by prime minister Lloyd George.  It was the 1919 Housing Act which required the survey of housing needs already mentioned and the obligation to meet those needs where necessary.  In Winchester, an average of just 33 houses had been built annually in the five years before the war and none at all through its duration.  Nonetheless, there was little overcrowding reported but 73 houses were listed as insanitary and requiring demolition; a further 374 could, it was thought, be brought up to standard. The report concluded that 560 new or renovated homes were needed to meet local demand.

One of the earliest efforts ‘to ease the housing difficulty in Winchester’ was to take over hutments provided as married quarters at the now redundant military camp on St Giles Hill.  Fifty-seven huts were taken over to provide homes for between 30 to 40 civilian families. They were expected to last between five to ten years.  At the same Council meeting in August 1919, it was reported that construction work on land acquired in the south-west of the city at Airlie Road for some 250 houses could begin in October. (4)

‘Stanmore Housing Scheme’ from the article by W Curtis Green in The Architect, 1923

The Stanmore Estate was to be a far more prestigious affair. Underway by 1920, the plans expanded to build some 556 houses and eight shops in what’s now known as Lower Stanmore around Cromwell Road, Stuart Crescent and King’s Avenue.  The contractors, Messrs Holloway Brothers, built a railway siding on the adjacent mainline to bring materials to the site (horse and cart served to transfer it up the hill) but were hampered by the post-war shortage of skilled labour – it was said 20 bricklayers were working on the scheme which could have employed some 150.

‘Stanmore Housing Scheme’ from the article by W Curtis Green in The Architect, 1923

In bare figures, the new estate occupied 110 acres, of which just 53 acres were set aside for housing at 10 houses per acre.  The houses, ‘built of brick and roofed in tiles in keeping with the city’, ranged from a single cottage to blocks of six, from two-bed to four bed, with and without parlours. The gardens were small but there were ‘convenient allotments adjoining each group of houses’. (5)

‘Stanmore Housing Scheme’ from the article by W Curtis Green in The Architect, 1923

The Council’s laudable commitment to quality was evidenced not only in their choice of contractors but by their appointment of the notable architect William Curtis Green, who designed the houses, and a landscape architect William Dunn responsible for their layout.  Dunn made imaginative use of a hilly site, with curved roads and cul-de-sacs centred around a ‘village green’ and shops.

St Mary Street, Stanmore

A fulsome article in the local press praised the estate and admonished those locally who would look down on the estate: (6)

It is a safe forecast that in five years’ time these houses will be the most sought after in Winchester for several reasons. First, because the site is a most healthy one and beautifully placed, then because the amenities will be such as will scarcely be equalled in any other part of the city.

These included a bathroom supplied with hot and cold water in every home and ground floors ‘finished on concrete with a lino-like substance, which will make all who now occupy dry-rot houses  envious … such a thing as a rat or mouse beneath the floors will be a physical impossibility’.  Plans of this ‘model estate’ were shown at the Wembley Exhibition in 1922.

Battery Hill, Upper Stanmore

Curtis Green himself later provided further detail in the architectural press, pointing out the estate’s variety – ‘no houses of the same plan are on both sides of the same street’ – and an ingenious internal design which avoided ‘back elevations’:

In nearly every case a back porch is provided in which are placed the doors to the scullery, the WC, and its fuel store, an arrangement that saves the appearance of three external doors. It shields the WC door, forms a convenient place for boot scraping under cover, and it enables the scullery door to be left open in bad weather.

The Prince of Wales visits the Stanmore Estate, 1923

It’s doubtful that the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) noted this particular aspect as he was driven ‘through cheering crowds to the Garden City at Stanmore’ in November 1923 but the commemorative tree he planted to mark the formal opening of the estate remains. (7)

The tree planted by the Prince of Wales at Cromwell Road, Stanmore

The rents, ranging from 11s 6d (58p) for a two-bed house to 15s 3d (78p) for a three-bedroom parlour home, were typically of council housing of its time relatively high and, in normal circumstances, excluded the less well-off working class.  An exception, when in 1922 the rent and rates of two or three unemployed tenants were being met by Poor Law relief, caused much resentment among the local Board of Guardians: ‘the payment is, of course, much in excess of what is usually paid by persons in this position, and consequently the relief given is much higher scale’. (8)

This image from 1930 shows the Stanmore Estate in 1930, Lower Stanmore to the bottom right with Stanmore Lane and Battery Hill reaching up to Romsey Road EPW032310 © Britain from Above

They went on to suggest that the Council, whilst it could not be responsible for changes of circumstance, should avoid letting homes to those on relief ‘unless it is absolutely necessary in consequence of being unable to obtain a house elsewhere’. The Housing Committee responded curtly that it felt ‘quite competent to let their own houses, without assistance from the Guardians’. (8)

If the Council seem the ‘good guys’ in this exchange, the complexity of relations and the competing sensibilities involved are further illustrated by another dispute between the two authorities in 1929.  Mr and Mrs Balding and their children had been granted one of the ex-military hutments in 1921 when their then home was condemned as unfit.

There they remained until the last of the hutments was demolished in 1927. Balding, it was said, was ‘a satisfactory tenant in one respect only, that he paid his rent’.  Now the husband and wife were occupying ‘for work purposes a disused bakehouse, and had sleeping accommodation elsewhere’; the seven children ‘were kept by the Guardians’. (9)

The Board of Guardians urged the Council to provide a council home and, in this instance, it seems to occupy the moral high ground – though, presumably, it was a solution that also favoured them financially.  The Housing Committee’s refusal to rehouse Balding led to a full debate in Council and the opposing positions were expressed concisely. Councillor Hayward stated they ‘were bound to provide houses for the poorer classes. Colonel Ross said their first duty was provide houses for people of satisfactory character’. The latter view prevailed with just two dissentients.

It’s a fascinating insight into the character of earlier council housing and a stark reminder that decent housing must not only be supplied but be made affordable to all that need it, irrespective of supposed character. The Boards of Guardian were abolished in 1930, the last vestiges of the hated Poor Law system in 1948.  A discretionary system of rent rebates for council housing began in 1930 but a national system of rent allowances, covering local authority and privately-rented housing, was not introduced till 1973. Recent so-called ‘welfare reforms’ continue to make this a fraught issue.

By 1925 those St Giles Hill hutments were already ‘showing signs of serious dilapidation’; many were not waterproof, many were ‘excessively filthy’. With some 511 houses in the city occupied by more than one family and 101 houses unfit for habitation, the Medical Officer of Health estimated Winchester needed a total of 485 new homes. (10)

This poor quality image gives some indication of the construction and appearance of the Monolithic Concrete houses.

Prefabrication had been touted as a cheaper and more efficient way to meet housing needs since the end of the war – the steel-framed Dorlonco system, Airey’s Duo-Slab concrete homes, even a form of adapted Nissen hut, to name but a few.  Winchester chose a form of system-built housing which, so far as I know, was unique in Britain – the concrete homes built by Monolithic Concrete Houses, Ltd.

A trial concrete bungalow, ‘built in 14 days by liquid cement poured into moulds’, was opened by the mayor in July 1925. A favourable press report described the new home: (11)

Attractive in appearance, with its green sliding shutters, white stuccoed walls, and red tiled roof, there is nothing at first sight to show that there is any difference between this and ordinary brick and plaster house. Economy, speedy building, and durability are the three essential features of this new invention.

Encouraged and apparently persuaded by the company’s claims that building costs were 18 to 20 percent lower than equivalent brick- and steel-built houses, the Council agreed a contract with the company to build 42 houses at Bar End for £16,212.

The white Monolithic Concrete houses are shown here towards the bottom left in this section of an image ‘The city, Winchester, from the south-east, 1947’ EAW008848 © Britain from Above

The new homes on Milland Road were opened in 1927 and were apparently good enough to persuade the Council to adopt a further scheme of 40 at Fairdown on St Giles Hill where the hutments were about to be demolished. Twenty-eight two-bed houses and 12 three-bed were agreed despite the arguments of the ‘lady members of the Council’ who wanted the proportions reversed. A little later, plans were made to expand the Stanmore Estate; in April, the Council agreed a contract to build 40 three-bed, non-parlour brick and tile houses on Battery Hill. (12)

St Martin’s Close

This was a solidly Conservative council – its first official Labour representative wasn’t elected till 1929 (and he ended up a Conservative mayor but that’s another story).  And yet the duty to build council homes and to build at least as well as financial conditions allowed was accepted.  Sixty-three three-bed houses were built off Beggar’s Lane in 1929 – St Martin’s Close was agreed as a more suitable name for the new development – and 80 more to the east in Highcliffe from 1932. (13)

Gordon Avenue, Highcliffe

There were, in fact, few ‘beggars’ in council homes before the war and the ‘respectability’ of those lucky enough to earn the right to a council tenancy was well policed – by the residents themselves but also by the housing authorities.  In 1937, the Council appointed Miss May West as Housing Supervisor. Miss West – the eldest daughter of Mrs Randall Hasking and the late Lieut-Colonel F West – was a member of the Society of Women Housing Estate Managers and a graduate of the Octavia Hill school of housing management. She was recruited from Lancaster Corporation where she must have been schooled by the formidable Miss Baines discussed in an earlier post. (10)

Portal Road, Bar End

In all, Winchester City Council had built 1128 houses by 1939 – over 700 on its flagship estate at Stanmore, 300 on the Highcliffe and Bar End side of town and a total of 92 at the two smaller sites near St Giles Hill. Seventy-nine percent of these were three-bedroom family homes as was typical of the time.  About one in five of the local population lived in council housing. (14)

Winchester would survive the war unscathed but it too took a significant part in the post-war housing drive and would go on to build much more high quality council housing.  We’ll talk about that in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Charlie Bradshaw, ‘Housing prices: Winchester one of the most expensive cities in UK’, Winol, 10 May 2019. According to a recent survey, Winchester is the third least affordable town in Britain: Myra Butterworth, ‘Where could you climb the housing ladder?’, Daily Mail, 2 February 2019

(2) RW Breach, ‘Winchester: the community on the eve of the General Strike, 1926’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society, vol 39, 1983, pp213-222

(3) ‘Winchester Municipal Matters’, Hampshire Advertiser, 6 June 1914 and ‘The Housing Question’, Hampshire Advertiser, 6 March 1915

(4) ‘The City Council’, Hampshire Advertiser, 9 August 1919

(5) W Curtis Green ARA, Architect, ‘Stanmore Housing Scheme’, The Architect, 2 November 1923

(6) ‘Winchester Housing Plans’, Hampshire Advertiser, 12 June 1920

(7) ‘Prince of Wales at Winchester’, Western Morning News, 8 November 1923

(8) ‘Stanmore Estate Houses: Guardians Resent Winchester Council’s Letter’, Portsmouth Evening News, 31 July 1922

(9) ‘A Difficult Housing Problem’, Hampshire Telegraph, 28 December 1928 and ‘Family Without A Home. Winchester Housing Problem’, Portsmouth Evening News, 8 February 1929

(10) ‘Winchester Housing. Important Report to City Council’, Portsmouth Evening News, 3 April 1925

(11) ‘A Concrete Bungalow Economy, Speedy Building, And Durability’, Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 14 July 1925

(12) ‘Replacing Temporary Hutments’, Portsmouth Evening News, 7 January 1927 and ‘New Building Scheme’, Portsmouth Evening News, 8 April 1927

(13) ‘Another Building Scheme’, Portsmouth Evening News, 2 August 1929 and ‘More Housing Provisions’, Hampshire Telegraph, 13 May 1932

(14) PH Warwick, ‘House Building in Winchester, 1920-1952’, British Housing and Planning Review, July-August 1952

The People’s Park, Banbury, Part I: ‘The Brightest Spot Throughout the Whole History of the Borough’

Tags

1920s, 1930s

I’m pleased to feature another guest post from Jane Kilsby who has previously contributed excellent articles on pre-First World War council housing in Banbury and interwar schemes in north Oxfordshire. Jane worked in housing management for councils and housing associations across the country for over twenty years before settling in Banbury over five years ago. Here she writes on the People’s Park in Banbury, a public park celebrating one hundred years of municipal ownership in 2019. 

From the Banbury Advertiser (1)

On 19 July 1919, a Fine Lady on a White Horse led a stunning procession through the streets of Banbury.  In a gown of brocaded plush with an ermine border and a veil of valenciennes lace and in pouring rain, the Fine Lady made her way to the People’s Park to celebrate peace and a new beginning for the park.  Her horse, a white arab charger, had served throughout the Great War and wore the Mons ribbon on his brow.  She was followed by wounded soldiers and sailors, Red Cross hospital nurses, the Fire Brigade, boy scouts and guides, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the Co-operative Society and many, many more representing the town’s public services and commercial interests.

Unlike a majority of towns in England and Scotland, Banbury did not have a public park laid out in the Victorian period.  Banbury’s Aldermen felt that there was so much open countryside surrounding their town that there was no need for one.  But, as Banbury’s population and industrial activities grew, overcrowded and unsanitary conditions became more common and a place for fresh air began to be seen as an essential.

There are several People’s Parks in England: some of them have proper names too such as Victoria Park in East London and there are larger and much older People’s Parks in Halifax and Tiverton, for example.  Banbury’s People’s Park came about through a combination of late Victorian benevolence, imagination and a sense of public responsibility on the part of the town’s council in the early 20^th century.  Let’s return to the decorated wagons and the large crowd in the park in July 1919 to hear how the story began.

The Town Clerk read out the will of the late George Vincent Ball.  Ball had left a legacy of approximately £3,200 for the Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Banbury:

to be applied by them in the purchase of land in some suitable situation near the town as a Park for the recreation of all classes during every day of the week from sunrise to sunset all the year round, to be ornamentally laid out, and called the People’s Park.

Born in Banbury in 1814, George Ball owned a chemists shop from 1844. (1) A borough councillor from 1858 to 1864; the provision of accessible stiles into fields around Banbury was among his achievements.  He died in 1892.

In response to his legacy the borough received offers of land but rejected all of them either because they were too small or the locations were not quite right.  In any event Ball’s legacy was deferred until his sister’s death.  The burgesses were reluctant to raise money via the rates before the legacy was available.  It was to be eighteen years before the perfect opportunity presented itself.

Central Banbury 1882 indicating the location of the People’s Park and the Neithrop House estate. The ‘Old Flower show Ground’ was rejected as a potential site.  Map courtesy of Banbury Museum Trust

The Neithrop House estate came up for auction in October 1910.  The lot comprised the house, gardens and pleasure grounds – about three acres – and six and a half acres of rich turf, stabling, gardener’s and coachman’s cottages, and 19 cottages in Paradise Square.

Neithrop House, a hunting box built for the Croome family in 1839.  Photograph c1988 courtesy of the Oxfordshire History Centre

As a site for their people’s park this was irresistible.  The Council had no funds to bid and did not expect the Local Government Board to grant a loan; the rules on councils taking on mortgages to buy land at that time only applied to sewage disposal schemes.  But, the week before the auction, the Mayor, Joseph Chard, called for the formation of a syndicate.  The People’s Park Syndicate was the only one in Banbury which announced, from the outset, its intention to give no interest or profits to its subscribers. (1)

Within days, the syndicate received a donation of £500 and went ahead in the knowledge that there was no better location and price for a people’s park.  The estate did not meet its reserve; the syndicate bought the whole lot privately shortly afterwards for £5,250.  Ball’s sister, Mrs Luckett, was 83; the syndicate assumed the council would be able to use Ball’s legacy to buy the estate from them before long.

By December 1910, total subscriptions from the great and good of Banbury, including several councillors, were £990 and the final purchase account including conveyancing was £5,305 17s 6d.  A bank loan made up the difference.

People’s Park Syndicate certificate, 1910.  Copy courtesy of Oxfordshire History Centre.

Syndicate members set about managing their estate with competence and efficiency.  They put up sanitary conveniences and did some repairs to the cottages.  Members were able to visit the parkland; some were a little resentful of the 2s 6d they had to pay for a key.  The park was not open to the public; new fencing protected their investment.

The syndicate held some enchanting garden parties.  Photograph 1912 courtesy of The Banbury Museum Trust

Councillor Brooks, elected Mayor in November 1910 and then Chairman of the People’s Park Syndicate, nevertheless saw the syndicate solely as the park’s temporary caretaker.  By February 1912 the syndicate offered the council:

a rent of £80 per annum to include all liabilities… the syndicate will apply any balance of income arising year to year to reduce the ultimate purchase price of the estate.

Councillor Herbert Payne , local housing campaigner, pounced on the syndicate’s proposal.  In the council’s debate on it, Payne pronounced: (1)

three things were wanted in Banbury: a public lavatory, a people’s park and a public library…The place could be made a very pleasant outdoor pleasure resort….  It was easy of access and the splendid trees and undulating turf made it a delightful spot and they (the Council) should encourage the present tendency of taking pleasure in the open air.  There would be no first class, second class or third class; the youngest and oldest, the richest and poorest could meet here.

His fellow councillors agreed that this was a very good deal; some expressed their embarrassment that Banbury did not already have a public park. With a joint committee of council and syndicate representatives set up the council took on the rent of the parkland.

A ceremony was held on 25 June 1912 to mark this landmark in the park’s history.  The Mayoress, Mrs J.Bloomfield, planted an oak tree and, as a symbol of the park’s opening to the public, she was presented with a key.

Only a week later, the Banbury Guardian reported: (1)

The People’s Park is evidently going to verify its name.  Ample evidence of this was given on Sunday afternoon when there was a very large number of the inhabitants taking advantage of this charming ‘rus in urbe.’  Strangers from a distance – as well as residents – were loud in their praise of the foresight of the public-spirited gentlemen who had secured such a sylvan spot for the recreation of the people.

The council continued to rent the park from the syndicate until 1918.

Understandably, no action was taken on the option to buy the estate during the First World War.  In February 1918 the legacy became available on the death of Ball’s sister and, with a bank loan making up the difference, the council bought the park, Neithrop House and the cottages in Paradise Square for £5,186 18s 2d.  The land’s value had doubled during the syndicate’s ownership but no profit was paid to the subscribers.  The council anticipated that the rents from the cottages would, over time, clear the overdraft from the bank; the People’s Park came into local authority ownership without any funds from ratepayers.  The 1919 procession and garden party to celebrate the council’s ownership of the People’s Park was a huge success.

The Banbury Advertiser in 1932 described the whole process of the acquisition of the People’s Park by the council – with its combination of private generosity and public opportunism – as ‘the brightest spot throughout the whole history of the Borough.’ (1)

Municipal ownership brought in some talented and diligent municipal managers.  Recreational facilities, thoughtful planning and ordered cultivation turned approximately eight acres of green fields and trees into a recognisable and well-used public park.

But first there was the need for commemoration.

The cenotaph in the People’s Park designed by T Gardner, FRIBA in 1922. (2) Photograph May 2019

In municipal ownership from 1919 and open to all, the people of Banbury were not the only occupants of their new park.

In August 1917 four sheep were found dead beneath an elm tree after a violent thunderstorm.  Photograph from the early 1920s courtesy of Banbury Museum.

The syndicate had tendered for sheep grazers throughout their tenure of the park.  Equally loathe to waste money on a lawn mower, the council followed like sheep.

Cicely Bailey describes how much she enjoyed the park during her childhood: (3)

there were sheep in the park then and … we children loved them.  They used to wander back and forth, eating the long grass which was sometimes as high as the smaller children.

It was not until spring 1926 that the council enjoyed showing off a new Ransome’s triple mower.

The council wanted to make its presence felt and instil some discipline.  Its byelaws for the People’s Park were approved by the Minister of Health in 1920.  Drying washing, beating rugs, singing, injuring birds, wading or bathing in the stream and playing any sports or games that needed a dedicated space were all banned with a £5 penalty payable for every offence. (4)

Tom Rawlings was appointed as Park Keeper in November 1926.  His wages were £3 a week with free accommodation in part of Neithrop House. Councillors found him an excellent worker and always ‘busily engaged’ (1); children thought him stern and feared his stick. (3)

Banbury Borough Council’s first plan for the park’s facilities, drawn up mid 1920s (1)

The 1920s were a period of great interest and increased participation in sport, there was public support for new facilities.  The building of ‘homes for heroes’ was putting a strain on council staff’s time and expertise; the borough council needed someone to carry out their plans for the park.

Sidney Hilton was appointed as the new Borough Engineer, Surveyor and Architect in April 1925.  Born in 1891, the son of a King’s Lynn builder, the Banbury Guardian welcomed him:

Everyone will be most anxious for his success for upon him largely depends the welfare, development and expansion of the town.  His duties are onerous and it will be necessary to exercise some patience before Mr Hilton can possibly obtain a full knowledge of the many problems under his administration.

Hilton photographed by the Banbury Advertiser, 1925 (1)

They needn’t have worried.  Hilton was one of the Borough’s most respected and talented employees.  Described as one of the old school of ‘dual-qualification’ men, Hilton was a member of the Institute of Municipal Engineers, a Registered Architect, Member of the Royal Sanitary Institute and a Fellow of the Institute of Housing.

Council housing was Hilton’s greatest interest and he designed 24 different types of houses, including houses built in 1933, when the Ministry of Housing demanded the utmost economy, for £260 each, a design used as a model of economical building by authorities across the country.  He was responsible for the completion of Banbury’s larger peripheral estates – about 1,200 houses – including the large post 1945 development in Ruscote.  Importantly, it was Hilton who designed the layout of these new estates, all with public parks, as well as individual house designs.  Hilton Road was named in recognition of his work.

Hilton Road, Banbury, photograph May 2019

During Hilton’s career Banbury’s population increased from about 13,000 to 20,000.  In 1933 he designed an extension to Banbury’s sewage works that doubled the works’ capacity.  The Borough’s outdoor swimming pool, opened in 1939, is all Hilton’s work, as was an extension to the public library, town centre public conveniences and a new street lighting scheme.  He retired in 1955 after 46 years of local government service as the first Honorary Freeman of the Borough and the last man to wear a silk hat to civic functions.

But what did he do in the People’s Park?  A lot, as you might expect.  It was Hilton who designed and, as the director of the council’s direct labour force, built almost all of the park’s facilities in the interwar period.  He turned what was really a field full of sheep into a classic English well-ordered public park with soft grasses and trees, and plenty more besides.

Council elections in November 1925 threw up calls for action.  Councillor Allsopp expressed the public’s demands. (1)

there is a crying need for the provision of further opportunities for recreation for all classes of the community.  A bandstand and tennis courts would provide remuneration and an increasing attraction to Banbury without unduly burdening the rates.

If we note that Leeds, for instance, had 150 public tennis courts in its parks by 1924, Banbury’s initial plans – for three lawn tennis courts – seem unambitious.  But by the late 1920s Hilton’s comprehensive approach included a bowling green, a putting green, a park shelter, a pay office, new paths, a children’s corner with a swing, see-saw and giant’s stride, new entrances, seating, toilets and cloakrooms.  With estimates of £2,000 for these facilities the council received some donations and took on a Public Works Board loan: £1,170 repayable in 10 years and £520 in 20 years.  Well received by the public, these facilities were put in place during the next five years.

The tennis courts came first, in 1926.  Next, the park shelter, with a buffet at one end and then a new toilet block near Neithrop House.  Sanctioned by the Ministry of Health, the new block replaced the syndicate’s conveniences and was built by W & A Collisson of Banbury.  Hilton knew the high quality of W & A Collisson’s work – between the wars they built 216 council houses and a further 100 houses after 1945.  (5)  Hilton’s neat and clever design for the new block, in Banbury brick, incorporates the park’s boundary walls and provided access even when the park gates were closed at night.

The old toilets in the People’s Park are currently vacant.  Photograph May 2019

The Oxfordshire Surveyors’ Association met in Banbury in July 1927. (1)  In reporting on his achievements Hilton added ‘we have no miracles to show you.’  He hadn’t, but the Councillors noted that their new facilities had attracted three times the number of visitors than previously.  They wanted more.

Banbury’s unemployment figures in 1930 were not as high as elsewhere but the council, urged on by central government advice, wanted to ease living conditions for unemployed men in their town.  With no large unemployment scheme to refer to the Minister of Labour, they set a budget of £1960 for the pool, playground, putting green and bowling green and, very unusually in Banbury, agreed to pay all of it from revenue with the levy of a separate rate.  Councillor Monks described the building of the bowling green as: (1)

it was much better to give the men work they could see something for rather than they should be on the dole.  About half the money would go in wages; they would employ about 50 men for eight weeks in the park.

Hilton planned the green for the Banbury Borough Bowls Club – founded in 1929.  It was built using direct labour.  Insisting on best quality turf – Lancashire sea-washed turf – he wanted people to use it.  90 percent of club members’ fees went to the borough council.

Banbury Borough Bowls Club.  Photograph May 2019

The new children’s corner and a pool for toy yachts and paddling, the putting green and a drinking fountain completed this phase of new facilities.

The paddling pool was enjoyed by generations.  A breach of the byelaws c. early 1970s.  Children over 14 were not allowed to use it.  Photograph courtesy of Sheila Evans.

Next week’s post will look at further improvements to the People’s Park and the council’s changing approach to horticulture during the post war period.

Sources

(1) Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser between 1897 and 1955 held by the British Newspaper Archive.

(2) K Northover, Banbury During the Great War (2003)

(3) C Bailey, Childhood Memories of Banbury 1922-1939 (1998)

(4) Byelaws made by the Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of the Borough of Banbury with respect to the People’s Park, 31 August 1920 held at the Oxfordshire History Centre

(5) W & A Collisson, builders, Banbury 1874-1967, archive records held at the Oxfordshire History Centre

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

Tags

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.

‘Health is greater than history’: an introduction to Edinburgh’s social housing, 1890-1945

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

I’m delighted to include this expert and informative post by Steven Robb. Steven is Deputy Head of Casework for Historic Environment Scotland.  With qualifications in building surveying and urban conservation, he has a particular interest in early and interwar social housing in Edinburgh, and how new housing was incorporated within the historic city.

Throughout the latter nineteenth century Edinburgh’s population expanded greatly.  Although some new working-class housing was provided within the inner suburbs (1), many of the poorest still occupied badly converted tenements in the overcrowded medieval Old Town and Southside.

Although historically uncommon in England, most working-class urban Scots (and many of the middle classes) lived in tenements.   Unlike the numerous small rooms of the terraced house, tenements often had large rooms, but for the poor there were fewer of them, including many one-room houses or ‘single-ends’.

1890 Act housing

In the early 1890s council housing for the poor was promoted by a Liberal City Councillor, John MacPherson, a churchgoer and temperance hotel owner.  At a time when a hundred families in the city actually lived underground (in vaults), MacPherson railed against the ‘thirty or forty thousand people’ living in one-room houses.

In 1893 the city instituted a major Sanitary Improvement (or slum clearance) scheme under the provisions of the 1890 Housing Act.  It involved both sensitive ‘conservative surgery’ of historic buildings in the Old Town by proto-town planner Sir Patrick Geddes (2) and small reconstruction and new-build schemes by the Burgh Engineer, John Cooper.

Cooper’s new housing was often a sanitised version of the traditional tenement, utilising deck-access balconies for light and ventilation.  He designed a new street layout in Stockbridge and several projects around the Old Town, one of the earliest being High School Yards (1896-7).  Here, two sandstone (3) tenements containing thirty-two small flats, costing £200 each were built, unusually with shops underneath.

The Council’s housing developments were, at least partly, responsible for significant improvements in health.   In the High School Yards area alone, infant mortality figures fell from a horrific 247 to 39 per 1000 in only a decade and, between 1892 and 1910, death rates fell from 53.7 to 12.4 per 1000.

One of the first developments was High School Yards in the overcrowded Old Town.  Two linked Scots Baronial five-storey sandstone tenements with rear deck access balconies.

1919 Act housing

Despite compensation payments costing almost as much as the new housing itself, the Council provided around 750 houses before the War.

Output increased significantly following the 1919 Housing Act with its generous State subsidies.  In the following decades there would be reconstruction and infill schemes in the historic city, and new housing on peripheral greenfield sites or underused suburban land. (4)  Initially, housing was either ‘general needs’, or improvement (slum clearance) housing at lower rents.

The Council were quick of the mark, with City Architect James A Williamson’s Chesser scheme prepared before the Act had passed.  He primarily used the flatted block, a peculiarly Scottish hybrid between cottage and tenement consisting of four flats under a hipped roof.  Two ground floor flats were entered from front gardens with upper flats accessed from the sides or central close.   Their relative scale allowed them to address the lower density layouts advocated by the garden city movement.

The mini-tenement.  A flatted block, designed by Campbell in the early 1920s. This form, used throughout Scotland, were also known as ‘cottage flats’ or commonly as a ‘four in a block’.  The central door is an open close to the upper flats. Images courtesy of Edinburgh City Archives.

Besides Chesser, in April 1919, the Council had held a competition for private architects for four housing sites, two of which progressed in 1920.

The Wardie scheme, planned by architects AK Robertson & TA Swan, was carried out according to garden city principles.  It largely contained cottages and flatted blocks within geometric tree-lined streets with grass verges and cul-de-sacs.  Rendered concrete blocks were used instead of bricks to save costs.

The second development was Willowbrae /Abercorn, by Fairlie, Reid & Forbes. It successfully mixed tenements, flatted blocks and cottages together in a meandering characterful plan using brick, roughcast and solid stone walling.

The housing was high-quality and well-designed but had been both expensive to build and to rent.  It also didn’t cater for the poorest in society, this not being an intention of the Act.

Post-1919 Act Housing

Edinburgh built around thirteen hundred 1919 Act houses, but high costs resulted in the State withdrawing its provisions and building ceased until after the 1923 and 1924 Acts.

However, the new Acts encouraged standardisation and prefabrication to lower costs, with design or material extravagances met by Councils not the State.   In Edinburgh, this immediately resulted in cottages being phased out, less bedrooms and plainer, cheaper finishes.

In June 1919 the Burgh Engineer, Adam Horsburgh Campbell (1862-1947), was hurriedly appointed Director of Housing to take forward the city’s programme. This prompted criticism from Scotland’s premier architect Sir R. Rowand Anderson who considered the role should have gone to an architect.(5)   However, his concerns were misplaced as Campbell was a skilled designer with previous experience building social housing in London.(6)

Rather than wait for new housing to be built, Campbell immediately began to subdivide vacant townhouses in the New Town and recondition Old Town tenements, at half the price of new-build.   Sadly, later subsidies prioritised demolition and new-build, rather than reconstruction. (7)

Campbell quickly realised Edinburgh’s housing problems would only be served by higher densities and returned to tenements, officially discouraged but not forbidden.  In October 1923, he designed a new three-storey example for Leith, followed by a cheaper standard tenement which could (almost) be built to garden city layouts or linked into terraces.  He also designed two standard patterns of ‘four in a block’ housing for peripheral estates.

Campbell focussed on cost-cutting and delivery by whatever means, including, in 1925, the experimental use of Dutch Korrelbeton (no-fine-aggregate) concrete which was cheaper than brick and required only semi-skilled labour.   He also sanctioned outsourcing, approving 1000 Duo-Slab concrete and brick houses from the private contractor, WM Airey of Leeds.  With his engineering eye, he also trialled flat-roofs, timber and steel construction and reintroduced deck-access balconies to some tenements.

Standard tenement and a first floor plan.  Living rooms were 13ft6” by 14ft3½”.  Finished floor to ceiling heights were 8ft 6”.  Figs in circles are square footage. Images courtesy of Edinburgh City Archives.

Ebenezer MacRae

Campbell provided around 4500 houses (built or planned) but worked himself ill with his two jobs, and 16 hour days.  On medical advice he refused a two-year extension as Housing Director alone and retired early in June 1926.   Anderson finally got his way when Edinburgh’s recently-appointed City Architect, Ebenezer James MacRae (1881-1951), absorbed the additional housing role.

Politically, the same year MacRae took charge, Labour first emerged as a force in the city, and to counter this, Edinburgh developed a loose anti-socialist coalition of Tories and Liberals termed the ‘Moderates’ then ‘Progressives’.  Although proficient at slum clearance housing, they would be lukewarm in supporting general-needs housing, considering this was the role of the private sector.  Despite railing against public spending they were content to directly loan or subsidise private builders who constructed over 11,000 houses for rent or owner-occupation between the wars, continuing support even after beneficial subsidies were removed.(8) This position was vindicated by central Government who withdrew general needs subsidies between 1933 and 1935, the focus moving solely to slum clearance and overcrowding, addressing the very poorest in society.

In post, MacRae immediately cancelled Campbell’s experimentation, returning to traditional masonry construction with pitched slate roofs.  His direct control of housing was music to the ears of Edinburgh’s trade unions who had opposed Campbell’s involvement of the private sector, semi-skilled labour and moves away from separate-trades tendering.

Whitson Crescent (1932)   MacRae’s first feature crescent, showing brick before and after roughcast.  Note the horizontal stone banding at first floor level. Image courtesy of Edinburgh City Archives.

Like Councillor MacPherson, MacRae was a religious man, the son and grandson of Free Church of Scotland ministers.  He had a charitable view of humanity and a strong desire to provide the best housing possible to help tenants better themselves.  His horror of overcrowding gave him a healthy zeal for daylighting.

Although subsidies favoured brick, covered in roughcast for Scotland’s climate,(9) in the historic city MacRae made a special effort to build ‘in keeping with surrounding buildings’ and, where possible, built solid stone walls for frontages and visible gables.

The Pleasance (1934-8)  Solid stone tenements and shops.  Differences in building planes, storey heights and tall chimney stacks add interest to the composition.

Where Campbell and MacRae may have differed on their rehousing methods; Campbell favouring quick fixes against MacRae’s concentration on quality, both shared a desire to see tenants housed near their workplaces.  MacRae also saw tenements as the answer but his use of denser developments, even on peripheral sites, sometimes failed.  At Niddrie Mains, a slum clearance estate on the very edge of Edinburgh, 2000 houses were built, entirely with three-storey tenements together with (literally) a handful of shops and other amenities.(10) It never really prospered, but Prestonfield, built at the same time, did, perhaps because it had a careful mix of tenements and flatted blocks, and was nearer workplaces and established communities?

The rear of a Niddrie Mains (Craigmillar) tenement prior to demolition.  Traditionally built, they would have been simple to refurbish, but the area’s bad reputation led to around 2000 houses being demolished without public consultation.

The Department of Health were still wary of subsidising tenements, especially those over three storeys, and several schemes were delayed or had to be redesigned.  However, MacRae persevered, and in the year ending 1936 had delivered over 1100 houses, 88 percent of which were within tenements.

MacRae’s team first used Campbell’s standard pattern housing for peripheral work, including his flatted blocks, which MacRae saw as a compromised ‘English’ solution.

However, in the early 1930s he expanded his repertoire, introducing new designs and layouts with some influence from Europe, the fruits of his numerous continental trips.  These culminated in his influential role in the Highton delegation, which led to the Report on Working Class Housing on the Continent in 1935.

However much MacRae may have admired the planning and ambition of contemporary European housing, he disliked the austerity of international modernism and found fault with their flat roofs and cantilevered balconies.  He considered four-storeys high enough and found the ‘Germanic’ communalisation of services and amenities unsuitable for Edinburgh.

The Report on Continental Housing, together with the 1935 Scottish Architectural Advisory Committee Report, did, however, lead to change.  MacRae shared the Report’s desire for less-drab layouts and better architecture, together with enhanced community facilities.

He designed several higher-density perimeter blocks set around communal courts at the Pleasance (1934) and Craigmillar (1936).  Where space didn’t permit such layouts he planned linear street-facing blocks.  Architecturally, they were enhanced by changing storey heights, building planes, and canted corners, bays and staircase-towers.   As centrepieces to new estates, he introduced feature crescents at Saughton (1932), Granton (1935), Craigmillar (1936) and Warriston (1936).   A subtle touch was the introduction of horizontal stone banding at first floor level, likely sourced from Vienna or Berlin. (11)

Royston Mains Crescent (1935)  The only inter-war Council housing built in facing brick, a direct result of the Highton Report. It followed the 1935 Housing Act’s desire for two-storey 4 apartment (3 bedroom) family houses and utilised MacRae’s signature banding at first floor level.

Linear street block on Gorgie Road (1936) enhanced with projecting stone elements and canted bays.  Every ground floor flat had a garden with shared spaces to the rear.

MacRae’s last major developments include Piershill (1938) and West Pilton (1938).   Piershill, arguably his masterpiece, used a near-continuous snake of three and four storey, largely stone, tenements angled to address its south-facing site.  It was European in plan but unashamedly Scottish in design.

Piershill (1938): Three and four storey tenements in stone and roughcast, designed in MacRae’s traditionalist Scots style. The south-facing plan showcases MacRae’s love of daylight, and included a few sun balconies for the first (and last) time. Image from Official Architect, September 1941

On the city’s periphery, the plans for West Pilton comprised 2000 houses and proper community facilities, with a giant circus ringed with stone tenements as a centrepiece.  Sadly, war intervened, with timber unattainable and bricklayers lost to defence work.  Work recommenced in 1942 to a greatly diminished specification and much increased cost, but space for promised community facilities was seized for temporary housing.

By the time of his retirement, in 1946, MacRae had delivered around 12,000 houses, as well as important studies on Edinburgh’s historic buildings, a precursor to the listing system.  His departure came just as subsidies for private housing were discontinued and council housing gained the ascendancy (12), but it also saw the end of the authority and power of the City Architect, with the first major post-war housing estate being offered to open competition.

steven.robb@hes.scot

Footnotes

Title: ‘Health is greater than history’; this 1923 quote from Adam H Campbell represents the conflict between providing new housing and the loss of historic buildings in the city during slum clearance.

(1) Including the wonderful ‘colony’ developments of the 1860s onwards by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company throughout the city.

(2) Steven Robb, ‘Conservative Surgery in Edinburgh’, CONTEXT Magazine (IHBC), July 2017

(3) Many of the developments, in less visible positions were built in brick covered in roughcast, or harling in Scots.  It was a wet-dash render finish normally, and unfortunately, coloured grey to cope with air pollution.

(4) Often old aristocratic estates, hutment ground or, with consequent disquiet, golf courses.

(5) Anderson’s mood likely darkened further when Glasgow appointed a Sanitary Engineer as their Director shortly afterwards.  The City Architect would also have been upset, especially as his Chesser scheme was seen as an exemplar.

(6) Brooks Avenue (1902) in East Ham.  He designed two magnificent Carnegie libraries now both listed.

(7) Over 100 tenement flats were reconditioned under the 1919 Act, with the full costs of works being met.  Although Campbell’s intention was to provide quick cheap housing, many of the tenements were of great historic interest and he essentially saved them by his intervention.

(8) These houses often differed very little from their Council counterparts.

(9) Bare brick wasn’t seen as able to cope with the Scottish climate, and in any case there wasn’t a stock of good bricklayers for facing brick – which was expensive and hard to get hold off.

(10) Niddrie Mains, often referred to as Craigmillar, was demolished in the early 2000s – It is now being rebuilt, ironically, in tenement form.

(11) But possibly closer to home.  An C18th Edinburgh mansion has horizontal banding at first floor.

(12) Two thirds of houses built between 1946 and 1960 were social housing, reversing the inter-war ratio.

Further Reading 

Jim Johnson and Lou Rosenburg, Renewing Old Edinburgh; The enduring legacy of Patrick Geddes (2010)

Lou Rosenburg, Scotland’s Homes Fit for Heroes (2016)

John Frew, ‘Concrete, Cosmopolitanism and Low-cost House Design: The Short Architectural Career of AH Campbell, 1923-1926’, Architectural Heritage V (1995), p29-38.

Steven Robb, ‘Ebenezer MacRae and Interwar Housing in Edinburgh’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, Volume 13 (2017)

Nissen-Petren Houses: ‘Not obnoxious and the people would be delighted to pay an economic rent’ UPDATE

Tags

1920s, Non-traditional, Rural council housing

I don’t usually re-post old blogs but I’m pleased to add here some interesting information and insight provided by Mark Swenarton. 

If you’ve travelled along the A303 in Somerset, you may have noticed, like many thousands of others since the mid-1920s, a rather strange sight to the north of the village of West Camel. Amidst the green rolling English countryside, four chimneyed semi-circular red roofs add a touch of rolling exoticism.  They look like a domesticated version of the army Nissen huts familiar to older generations and that, indeed, is pretty much what they are. This is their story; the story of one of the most unusual attempts to provide the cheap and decent council housing our country has needed.

West Camel

The four pairs of semi-detached homes in West Camel were erected in 1925. Their prototype was developed by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen of the 29th Company Royal Engineers some nine years earlier in April 1916 in the midst of the Great War whose execution demanded such economic and easily assembled buildings to house its personnel and services on an enormous scale.  Production began four months later and by war’s end some 100,000 of these eponymous Nissen huts had been erected. (1)

The end of the war saw an unprecedented commitment to provide ‘homes for heroes’ for those whose sacrifice had secured victory but the idealism and financial generosity of the 1919 Housing Act was short-lived – quashed by austerity measures imposed in 1921. And while new Housing Acts passed in 1923 and 1924 were intended to boost council housing, shortages of traditional building materials and skilled labour continued to hinder its construction.  The search for new cheaper and labour-efficient methods was on and in 1925 the Ministry of Health (also responsible for housing) allocated £34,000 to support the building of demonstration homes using non-traditional methods in 86 local authorities across the country. (2)

Ten councils were already pioneering such efforts.  A bewildering variety of systems was on offer though broadly differentiated by those using steel, timber or pre-cast concrete factory-made components for on-site assembly and those using pre-cast or in-situ concrete components manufactured on-site.  (3)

The Somerset houses were designed by John Petter and Percy J Warren, a local architectural practice appointed Borough Architects to Yeovil Town Council in 1911.  The obvious debt to Nissen was acknowledged in their formation of Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd – a company established to market their new design to local authorities – with Nissen on the board of directors, alongside Sir Ernest Petter, a Yeovil industrialist and founder of Westland.  (Petren was a compound of Petter and Warren as you’ve probably worked out.)

My thanks to Mark Swenarton whose investigations have added further important context here:

One of the foremost promoters of non-traditional methods was Neville Chamberlain who served briefly as Minister of Health and Housing in 1923 during Bonar Law’s short-lived government and again in Stanley Baldwin’s government of 1924-29.  The clauses promoting non-traditional construction in Labour’s 1924 Housing Act (the Wheatley Act) were inserted purely at Chamberlain’s instigation.

For Chamberlain, part of the appeal of new methods was that they cut out the union-controlled building trades and put the unions and the public into opposed camps (in contrast to Wheatley’s programme, which had placed them on the same side).  Non-traditional methods were also a central plank in the housing policy of the ‘New Conservatives’ in the party’s 1924 election manifesto.

Chamberlain’s particular ally was the armaments manufacturer Lord Weir and, in fact, though Chamberlain did not state this publicly, his initiative was centred on the timber-framed, steel-clad ‘Weir House’ whose components were manufactured in Weir’s Glasgow shipyards.

Sir Ernest Petter was very much a local counterpart to Weir and probably the driving force behind the West Country initiative. Westland had manufactured over 1000 planes for the Government during the First World War and Petter believed he could produce 100,000 houses a year using the Nissen system!

In 1927, Westland got a large order for its new Wapiti biplane which may explain Petter’s loss of interest in the housing proposals.  Chamberlain himself lost interest in the new methods as their problems (not least cost) became apparent.  But he had, in the meantime, overseen the expansion of the Building Research Station and its move to Garston near Watford where it remains today.

Mark discusses Chamberlain’s espousal of non-traditional methods more fully in chapter 11, ‘Houses of Paper and Brown Cardboard’ in his book Building the New Jerusalem:  Architecture, Housing, and Politics, 1900-1930.

Times advert, 7 April 1925

The Nissen-Petren homes were steel-framed houses, obviously so given their dominant feature – the semi-circular steel ribbed roof (covered with ‘Robertsons’ Asbestos Protected Metal’) bolted on to concrete foundations – with, in this first iteration, pre-cast concrete cavity walls. The company’s advert in The Times proclaims the advantages of this revolutionary and unusual design – it required only half the skilled labour needed to build traditional brick-built homes and could be erected in half the time.  Another benefit: the early erection of the roof enabled ‘the work of filling in the walls and building the fireplaces and chimney backs to be proceeded with independently of weather conditions’. The estimated cost of construction, at £350, was reckoned £100 less than that of traditional housing. (4)

Goldcroft, Yeovil

The first two of the Nissen-Petren houses, commissioned by Yeovil Town Council, were erected on Goldcroft in the town in 1925 and the Council’s pride in its pioneering role was amplified when it was visited ‘by a large and distinguished company’ including ‘representatives of the War Office, the Air Ministry, various municipalities and members of the London Press’ in March. The delegation was conveyed by car to the Borough Restaurant where it was addressed by Sir Ernest Petter who stated his hope that the experimental houses ‘would prove to be the solution of the housing problem of the country’. (5)

There were cavils about the appearance of the new homes (to which we’ll return) but these were swept aside by the Mayor:

when the model of the new houses was first shown to the Council many of them were not enamoured of them but they felt that there was something far more important in Yeovil than mere outward appearance of the houses.  The great problem which confronted the local authorities today was to build a house, the rent of which the ordinary wage-earner could afford to pay.

In those terms, their estimated rents – at 5s (25p) a week plus rates and reckoned to be well within the reach of the average working man – were a critical advantage.

Howell Hill, West Camel

The same point was argued strongly by the chairman of Yeovil Rural District Council, JG Vaux, and, given the low wages of the rural working class, was judged even more important. (Yeovil Town Council was an urban district council; the surrounding countryside was administered by its rural counterpart):

Whatever their appearance, they were better than some of the brick hovels existing today.  If they could put up 200 of these houses they would be able to demolish some of the hovels in their district. He believed that with regard to the dome-shaped roofs they had been just a little prejudiced against them and that if a number were erected away from the brick houses that people would soon get used to them.

The semi-detached Goldcroft houses were non-parlour homes with a living room, bedroom, scullery, bathroom, larder and coal store on the ground floor and two bedrooms and two box-rooms on the upper floor. Despite this rather unconventional layout, they were judged (by one observer at least) as ‘cosy and comfortable’:

The rooms are wide and airy, being well lit and properly ventilated. It would seem to the layman that the new roof far from restricting inside space, has allowed of more room.

Later, the tenants themselves were said to be ‘very satisfied with the accommodation provided’. (6)

Higher Bullen, Barwick

This then was an optimistic period for the promoters of Nissen-Petren housing in a context where they appeared to offer a genuine solution to a very real need.  Yeovil Rural District Council followed up its initial interest with a decision in April to invite tenders for six Nissen-Petren parlour houses in Barwick, four (two parlour and two non-parlour) in South Petherton and six non-parlour in West Camel. But only after a ‘heated discussion’.  One member had declared himself personally ‘very much against these things’ (‘I call them “things”’) and there were allegations of water leakage in some of the houses built to date. (7)

Fairhouse Road, Barwick

A compromise ensued in the next meeting in which the Council agreed to proceed only where desired by the local parish councils.  Some remained enthusiastic. Barwick ‘urged the erection of houses in that district with the utmost speed’, knowing that ‘it was impossible for an agricultural labourer to pay a rent of 8s or 9s a week’ that traditional homes cost. West Camel now asked for eight Nissen-Petren homes and South Petherton said it could take more. But Montacute refused them and, one month later, Ash requested brick or stone houses in preference to Nissen-Petren. (8)

Ryme Intrinseca

A pair of Nissen-Petren houses was also built in the beautifully named north Dorset village of Ryme Intrinseca –  it features in a John Betjeman poem – by (I assume) Sherborne Rural District Council but clearly taking its inspiration from Yeovil six miles to the north.  In their idyllic setting, Lilac Cottage and the Lilacs look quite bucolic and the facing of the concrete cavity walls has a patina of age not dissimilar to that of adjacent cottages in local stone.

Frog Lane, Bampton (Google Streetview)

Interest in the new homes had spread further, however.  Petter and Warren’s design had been worked up in conjunction with DJ Dean, the Surveyor for Bampton Urban District Council in Devon and that council built a block of three semi-detached Nissen-Petren houses in Frog Street. The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, in which the Palace of Engineering (overseen by Sir Ernest Petter) featured seven prototype new homes including a model of the Nissen-Petren houses, was still running and the locals apparently nicknamed them Wembley Terrace, a name which has stuck unofficially. (Or perhaps, more likely, it was a reference to the twin domes of the then new Wembley Stadium.)

A subcommittee of the adjacent Tiverton Rural District Council visited Yeovil and returned ‘favourably impressed’ though Mr New, the chair of the Council, felt it incumbent to ask ‘the members to set aside prejudice’ – ‘the houses were not obnoxious and the people would be delighted to occupy them and pay an economic rent’.  That might sound a little like damning with faint praise but a tender for 16 Nissen-Petren houses in Uffculme was accepted for a contract price of £5000 in December 1925.

At £312 each, that was low but problems of water percolation were reported in the new homes in the course of erection in 1927. (9)  The local contractors erecting them stated that had followed the specifications set by the Nissen-Petren Company (to whom they paid royalties) and the Company claimed this was the first time they had had a complaint (though, as we’ve seen, water seepage was reported in the Yeovil Rural District). Presumably, a damp course inserted took care of the immediate problems but the houses themselves have, to the best of my knowledge, subsequently been demolished.

Edward Road, Queenborough (Google Streetview)

Meanwhile, councils beyond the West Country were expressing an interest in the potential of the new homes. Ipswich appears not to have taken this further but a delegation of two councillors and the Borough Surveyor from Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey (who had visited Yeovil in May 1925) were, having investigated a number of other options, keen to proceed.  It was agreed to build three semi-detached ‘specimen houses’ on Edward Road, numbers 6-8 and 10-12 as parlour houses, and 2-4 as non-parlour. On this occasion the external walls were constructed of roughcast brickwork. (10)

The final authority to investigate the Nissen-Petren houses was Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex where an initial tender was accepted for homes on the Sidley estate and a further tender for 36 homes in the new Buxton Drive housing scheme in July 1927.  A final tender from Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd – but not the lowest – was received in September 1928.

By this time, things were going downhill for the enterprise.   The final bill for the Goldcroft houses in Yeovil was received in September 1925 and came to the grand total of £1028 – over £513 per house and more expensive than conventionally built homes of the time.  The architects waived their fees and the builder accepted a £100 loss but – despite reassurances that costs would be lower in larger future schemes with consequent economies of scale – that was essentially the end of the experiment.  The Council congratulated itself on its initiative but licked its wounds. (11)

Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd was wound up in September 1928 and a bankruptcy notice issued in 1930. (12)  I’m not clear that any of the Bexhill houses were built – I can find no further record of them. Does anyone know?

That is almost the end of the story so far as Nissen housing in Yeovil is concerned but for two quirky codas.  In 1946, in the midst of an unprecedented housing shortage, a wave of squatting spread like wildfire across the country. By October an estimated 1038 military camps had been commandeered as emergency homes by almost 40,000 activists.  Two of these unlikely radicals were – as named by contemporary press reports – Mrs Frank Ward (her husband was a dustman for Yeovil Town Council) and Mrs Kenneth Bowley (whose husband was serving with the RAF in Egypt); each had a three-year old child. They jointly occupied ‘the better of two Nissen huts off Eliott’s Drive’, a local site for barrage balloons, cleaned them out, hung curtains and got the stove going. (13)

Goldcroft, Yeovil

Finally, to return to the Nissen-Petren houses proper, many are now listed, beginning with 172 and 174 Goldcroft in Yeovil in October 1983 despite their being described at the time by local councillors fighting their preservation as ‘eyesores, abysmal and shocking’. (14) Those in Barwick, Ryme Intrinseca and Bampton are also listed; those in South Petherton had been previously demolished.  The pair in Queenborough survive without protection for the time being.  (15)

Of around 4.5m new homes built in Britain between the wars, it’s estimated that not more than 250,000 were of non-traditional construction.  Most of these, despite their unconventional construction, mimicked a more or less traditional form.  The Nissen-Petren houses, of which there were around 24 in the Yeovil district and not more than 50 nationally, stand out.  Their distinctive appearance wasn’t always well liked but many survive to provide an eccentric addition to some of our towns and villages and an arresting footnote to our wider housing history.

Sources

My thanks to all those people who responded to an earlier Twitter exchange on Nissen-Petren homes.  The ‘Nissen-Petren Houses’ are also discussed by Bob Osborne in his A-to-Z of Yeovil’s History and Yeovil in Fifty Buildings.

(1) ‘FWJ McCosh, Nissen, Peter Norman (1871–1930)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 2004) [Subscription needed]

(2) ‘Steel Houses’, The Times, 18 June, 1925

(3) Harry Harrison, Stephen Mullin, Barry Reeves and Alan Stevens, Non-Traditional Houses. Identifying Non-Traditional Houses in the UK 1918-1975

(4) Nissen-Petren Advert, The Times, 7 April 1925 and ‘Steel Houses at Yeovil’, The Times, 11 March 1925

(5) ‘The Nissen-Petren House’, Western Chronicle, 13 March 1925. Quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(6) ‘Nissen Houses’, The Times, 29 May, 1925

(7) ‘The “Nissen-Petren” Houses. Heated Discussion by RDC’, Western Chronicle, 24 April 1925

(8) ‘The “Nissen-Petren” Houses’, Western Chronicle, 22 May 1925 and ‘Yeovil Rural District Council’, Western Chronicle, 17 July 1925

(9) ‘Housing in Tiverton Area’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 1 May 1925, ‘Tiverton Rural District Council’, Western Times, 11 December 1925 and ‘Complaint Concerning New Buildings Being Erected’, Western Times, 4 February 1927

(10) Susie Barson, Jonathan Clarke, Geraint Franklin and Joanna Smith, Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey, Kent Historic Area Appraisal (Research Department Report Series no 39/2006, English Heritage)

(11) ‘The Nissen-Petren Houses Houses’, Western Chronicle, 25 September 1925

(12)  The Times, 17 August 1928 and The Times, 11 September 1930

(13) ‘Families in Army Huts. Squatters in the West Country’, Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 17 August 1946

(14) ‘Nissen Huts Not Needed’, Building Design, no 677, 17 February 1984

(15) You can read the Historic England listing details for these buildings on their website.