Tackling the Slums: Addison and the Sanitary Inspectors: Part 2, 1914-1939

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1920s, 1930s

I’m very pleased today to feature the second of two guest posts by Dr Jill Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Health and Housing at Middlesex University, covering the important and sometimes neglected work of our earliest environmental health practitioners. You can follow Jill on Twitter @Jill_L_Stewart and see more of her work on her personal website, Housing, Health, Creativity. 

As the Great War drew to its end, the Sanitary Inspectors put forth their values and vision for housing for a new era of Homes fit for Heroes to live in: (1)

Proper housing is necessary on account to our climate, which makes it requisite, or at all events, desirable, that we should have shelter and protection from the elements. Also, in accordance with our modern ideas of civilisation, having progressed beyond that age of cave-dwellers and gipsy life…it is also very necessary for the proper upbringing of our children, so that they may develop into a healthy and virile race, sound in body and mind, and worthy of our great Empire, which, in due course, it will be their duty to maintain.

Before the War, as we saw in last week’s post, some more progressive councils has begun the process of slum clearance and area redevelopment, but the situation was erratic across the country. The war-time Munitions Estates, based on garden city ideals, had provided good housing for munitions workers in locations including Well Hall, serving the Woolwich Arsenal. (2)

Homes on Dickson Road in the Well Hall Estate

It is here that Dr Christopher Addison, then Minister of Munitions, later President of the Local Government Board and then the first Minister of Health, really comes to our attention for his work in state subsidised housing estates. As doctor turned learned politician, Addison’s understanding of poverty and health provided comprehensive impetus behind the Housing and Planning Act 1919 (Addison Act), recognising the need for council housing that was of decent quality and set in good environments in accordance with the recommendations of the 1918 Tudor Walters report.

However, there remained the perpetual problem of the thousands who continued to live in slums, despite ongoing interventions by the Sanitary Inspectors and Medical Officers of Health. This massive challenge resulted from sheer numbers, legal processes involved, and where to house those displaced by clearance.

Many streets continue to bear Dr Christopher Addison’s name, the housing here shows Arts and Crafts influence. Photo Jill Stewart

Whilst still President of the Local Government Board, Addison received deputations from the London County Council and the Greater London Local Authorities supported by the Sanitary Inspectors and relating to government financial assistance for large scale slum clearance and local housing development. The deputation asked for two things: that the deficiency grant be similar for those displaced but remaining in the slum cleared area as those re-housed in land not previously built on; and that processes to acquire slums from landlords prior to clearance should be both cheaper and quicker. In turn, Addison urged those present to deal with sanitary areas and build new homes without delay in advance of the forthcoming new legislation.

However with a lack of progress related to inadequate resource for both slum clearance and new houses fit for human habitation, the situation was bound to come to a head and, following the Government spending cuts of the 1922 Geddes Axe, Addison resigned. He published The Betrayal of the Slums in 1922, displaying fascinating insight and perception of what it meant to live in slums, the effect on health and costs to society. (3)

In Betrayal, Addison observed that in 1922 there were nearly a million ‘homes’ consisting of a maximum of two rooms, and that there was no nowhere else available for the tenants to relocate to. He referred to such places as entirely hindering people’s lives, development and opportunities, with no privacy, no opportunity for quiet or rest, no space for the mind and a ‘poison’ for the body. He clearly states the fact that this is entirely unacceptable for tenants and has wider cost to the rest of society: (4)

It is not the people’s fault that their life is spend in unsavoury tenements wherein they and, often enough, two or three other families have to share the same tap in the yard or on the next landing, as well as a dirty closet which it is nobody’s business in particular to keep clear. It is no fault of theirs that the mother of the family has only an ordinary fire grate in which to cook the meals and that the same room has to serve as a wash house, living room and bedrooms. It is not their fault that there is no possibility morning, noon or night for any member of the family to have any manner of privacy whatever; that the infant and the little child have to sleep in the room which other have to frequent when they come in for supper and during the evening; that is it not possible for fresh air to get through the tenement because if opens either on to a stuffy landing or is backed by another house; that boys and girls have to sleep in the same room together; that even at the time of birth, or in the hour of death, the same unyielding conditions, save for the kindliness of neighbours, similarly circumstances govern the whole conduct of their family life.

Following his resignation, Addison continued to campaign for better housing for the working classes and featured regularly in the early post-war editions of The Sanitary Inspector, praising their work and contribution to the housing process: (5)

The public are apt to forget the valuable work accomplished by the Sanitary Inspectors throughout the country, the steady maintenance of general conditions of effective sanitation is due to their devotion and toil under the guidance of the local Medical Officers of Health…The Sanitary Inspector is a hard-working and little praised official, who carries out much of the unpleasant work in keeping up the general level of the health services.

The Sanitary Journal discussed what the Inspectors found in the nation’s housing stock: houses that were originally built to cheap, low standards with bad materials and lack of planning and forethought. This was seen to aggravate deplorable conditions; overcrowding; rats, mice and vermin and reports on the substantial health effects. Unhealthy areas of slums, with underground rooms and back to backs regularly feature, referred to as an “evil trinity – dampness, darkness and dilapidation”. Tenants were seen as victims of their circumstance; and some landlords criticised for failing to take responsibility for repair (6).

Sanitary Inspectors’ 35th Annual Conference, Buxton 1922. Reproduced by kind permission of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

Between the wars, with a shortage of both rural and urban housing, overcrowding was particularly problematic. In a 1922 Sanitary Journal, a Mr JG Banks, Chief Sanitary Inspector at East Ham, said that overcrowding was ‘a national disaster for it must result in increased disease and mortality, immorality, drunkenness and vice being also fostered and fed in the overcrowded homes…’ (7).

Already overcrowded, many households were also forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet, leading to disease and premature mortality and, it was said, immorality, drunkenness and vice. By 1926 The Sanitary Journal reported a case of incest that the Judge directly attributed to the deplorable conditions the family lived in, and more widely the numerous common lodging houses in the street. Though the prisoner was found guilty, he was granted mercy; the Judge said that it was no one’s fault individually, but the fault of the country for allowing such housing conditions to exist. (8)

There was no let-up on poor housing and still little hope for those who had endured slum living sometimes across decades. There were numerous health risks relating to poor housing, and multiple physical and mental health effects as well as heightened risk of infectious disease such as tuberculosis and high child mortality.

A mother and three children in a slum dwelling, c1920, from A and LG Delbert Evans, The Romance of the British Voluntary Hospital Movement (1930) (c) Wellcome Library and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Drainage remained paramount to the Sanitary Inspector’s role, affecting both hygiene standards, then a public health priority, but also the need to control rats, an ongoing problem. Much advice was given, such as in the lengthily-headed 1926 publication ‘Drainage and Sanitation: A practical exposition of the conditions vital to healthy buildings, their surroundings and construction, their ventilation, heating, lighting, water and waste services: for the use of architects, surveyors, engineers, health officers, sanitary inspectors, and for candidates preparing for the examinations of the various professional institutions’ as the diagram below shows.

EH Blake, Drainage and Sanitation (BT Batsford Ltd, 1926). Image courtesy of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University

The problem of rat infestation was further addressed in Stewart Swift’s work Housing Administration of 1938 (9)

Rats, mice and vermin not infrequently infest old and structurally unsound houses. In some cases they are present to such an extent as to render the house unfit for human habitation, and on every occasion they may be a contributory factor thereto. The sanitary inspector should pay particular attention to these pests, examining the house for their presence besides making inquiries from the tenant. Not every householder likes to admit the presence of vermin, and walls, back of pictures, bedding, etc., should be carefully scrutinised wherever necessary for the presence of vermin. The presence of rats frequently indicate defective drains or the presence of accumulations of matter and filth, which should be dealt with under the Public Health Act. The presence of vermin – the bed bug chiefly – may be such as to render a house unfit for human habitation, and in the case of very old houses it may be quite impossible to eradicate them from the premises.

The Housing Act 1930 forced slum clearance and area improvement programmes to house those displaced; it also introduced powers to reduce overcrowding but problems remained entrenched.

The full extent of the tenants’ plight was revealed in the 1935 social documentary Housing Problems.  Tenants present their own narratives of living in slum housing and problems with rat and insect infestations. The film reveals the sheer length of time – sometimes decades – that many families had to endure such poor, sometimes dangerous and decaying living conditions and how they tried to cope with rats, overcrowding, no internal water supply or WC, child mortality, trying to cook next to the bed, with homes decaying around them and how this meant that they had to live their lives.

‘Slum housing’ (1937) (c) London Metropolitan Archives. collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

However the film also offers hope. It shows two then innovative ideas of new working class housing schemes at Quarry Hill in Leeds (10) and Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove (11). Now suddenly with an option for new housing, tenants describe their excitement and dreams for their new homes. A Second World War was of course not then on the horizon but, for many, their municipal dreams had once again to be put on hold.

Dr Jill Stewart (j.stewart@mdx.ac.uk)

Sources

(1) The Sanitary Inspector, 1918: 11

(2) The Historical England webpage First World War: Wartime Architecture provides some useful background.

(3) Addison, C., The Betrayal of the Slums (Herbert Jenkins Ltd , 1922)

(4) Addison, pp62-63

(5) Addison, C., ‘The Sanitary Inspector: his Valuable Work’, The Sanitary Journal, (1922) p104

(6) The Sanitary Journal (1924)

(7) The Sanitary Journal (1922) p202

(8) The Sanitary Journal, The Housing Problem [Referring to Birmingham Daily Post, 3 February 1926], (1926) p148

(9) Swift, S., Housing Administration (2nd ed), (Shaw and Sons Ltd, 1938) p85

(10) See also Ravetz, A., Model estate: planned housing at Quarry Hill, Leeds, (Croom Helm, 1974)

(11) Stewart, J. (2016) Housing and Hope: the influence of the interwar years in England, (available at the iTunes Store)

The Grove Park Estate, Lewisham: ‘a real “Garden City”‘

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Lewisham

In 1928, Southern Railway advised ‘there is so much open country all around Grove Park that no one need fear for the present it is going to become a part of London’. (1)  This was ironic given that its book was intended to promote the growth of suburbia (and lucrative commuterdom) on London’s fringes. It was also dishonest given that London County Council’s Downham Estate – over 6000 homes when completed in 1930 – was being built just to the west of Grove Park station.

‘The London County Council Downham Estate from the south-east, 1929’ (c) Britain from Above, EPW028496  (Grove Park station is on the bridge on the right edge of the image.)

Speculative housing built for middle-class owner-occupation did spread rapidly but the remarkable feature of this area of south-east London – for the purposes of this blog at least – is its swathe of what Martin Crookston has called ‘Corporation suburbia’. It stretches west to east, almost uninterrupted, from Downham itself to Lewisham’s interwar Grove Park Estate, to the GLC’s 1960s’ Chinbrook Estate, to the LCC’s 1930s’ Mottingham Estate, and finally Woolwich Council’s Coldharbour Estate, begun in 1947.

Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham Estate (c) Rob Clayton

A brisk 45-minute, two and a half mile walk provides a potted history of a form of housing – the garden suburbs – that, by Crookston’s reckoning, accounts for around one-sixth of English homes and some 40 per cent of the country’s current socially-owned housing stock. Here this amounts to over 11,000 homes.

This post and the next will concentrate on a smaller area and two of the smaller estates – Grove Park, a fine example of interwar planning and construction, and the unsung but remarkable Chinbrook Estate, one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished estates of the 1960s.

Lewisham Metropolitan Borough Council was securely Conservative throughout the interwar period and its housing efforts were modest. There had been short-lived plans, instigated by Deptford Borough Council and in cooperation with Bermondsey, for a jointly-owned ‘garden city’ on land owned by Lord Northbrook in Lewisham. Lewisham withdrew its support in 1920 and the plans fell through. Later the land was acquired by the LCC and would form the basis of the Downham Estate. (3)

Romborough Gardens

Lewisham’s contribution to the ‘Homes for Heroes’ drive of the immediate post-war era was limited therefore but it did build a small estate of 86 houses – solid, stripped-down neo-Georgian, two-storey terraces – under the terms of the 1919 Housing Act in Romborough Way, near Lewisham Park.  The short cul-de-sac and enclosed green of Romborough Gardens forms a particularly attractive enclave.

In February 1925, the Public Health Committee, alarmed by the Medical Officer of Health’s reports of increased overcrowding in the Borough, passed on its concerns to the Housing Committee. The latter identified a 43 acre site, east of Grove Park, as suitable for building. It had been bought speculatively by a local builder from Lord Northbrook in 1923 for £3600. In July 1926 it was acquired by the Council by Compulsory Purchase Order for an arbitrated price of £8825 – almost two and a half times what Mr Durbin had paid for it three years earlier. A reminder of how land values and the market distort our housing provision and how readily private interest profits from public need.

Grove Park Estate layout (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Building on the site, undertaken by three local contractors, began in August. Eight acres were set aside as a recreation ground and 1.5 acres for allotments. A site was provided to the LCC for a new primary school; the rest was allocated to housing.  And to its credit, the Council determined to build well; to erect ‘the best possible type of house that could be provided in a municipal undertaking’ and at the largest size permitted under the 1924 Housing Act.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

It appointed the eminent architect-planner WR Davidge – an early supporter of the Garden City movement, elected President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1926 – to design the Estate. Davidge’s pedigree is first seen in the use of existing topography – an undulating terrain which added, in the words of a Council brochure, ‘a pleasing feature to the general appearance’ of the new estate’.  Moreover: (4)

In the preservation of some of the old trees on the estate and the green in Roseveare Road, and more particularly by encouraging the cultivation and upkeep of the gardens, the Council have endeavoured to ensure that the Estate shall become a real ‘Garden City’.

An annual best-kept garden competition with a victory shield and prizes provided some of that encouragement; the rent collector’s weekly visit possibly provided some discipline. As Pauline Payne, who moved onto the Estate as a child in 1939, recalls, if he spotted an untidy garden or a hedge that needed cutting, ‘you would get a polite notice reminding you of the conditions of your tenancy agreement and a certain time limit to put things right’. (5)

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Davidge also ensured that the housing was of pleasing and varied appearance – as many as six types on a single street, it was said.  With justifiable pride, it seems, the Council concluded that:

The completed estate has the merit of combining convenience in the planning of roads, spacious and well-appointed houses and harmony in the design and conception of the whole.  Roofed with red hand-made sandfaced tiles, the walls of the houses have generally been externally dressed with cement left rough from the plasterer’s float and treated with various shades of colour wash. Doorsteps, window sills and chimney stacks have been carried out in purple and red facing bricks, which blend with the colour of the roofs.

In terms of accommodation, two blocks of what the Council called ‘storey flats’ provided 32 of the Estate’s homes but the bulk were solid three-bedroom houses; 136 of the so-called Type B with parlours and 336 Type A, non-parlour.  Internal arrangements included, to modern eyes, perhaps some surprising mod cons.  Pauline Payne noted an ‘enormous walk-in airing cupboard on the landing’, cupboards under the stairs and, either side of front door, a walk-in cloakroom and a walk-in larder.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

In the first phase of construction, gas provided lighting for both housing and streets.  In the second, electricity was used – the first streets in the Borough to be lit by electricity.  In other respects, arrangements were much more of their time although still, presumably, a vast improvement to most new residents.

Pauline Payne describes ‘a large iron pot-bellied copper in the kitchen [which] provided hot water for the whole house’. The bathroom (‘absolutely freezing in winter’) was next door to the kitchen with hot water ladled by hand from copper to bath.  The toilet stood next to the back door.

Mayeswood Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

Payne’s experience was, as she recognises, perhaps exceptional.  She was an only child (she recalls families of eight and thirteen children living either side of her new home in Cobham Street) of lower middle-class parents. The family moved to the estate when their own home was bombed and her first impressions were, perhaps for that reason, underwhelming:

Upon getting the keys for our first sight of our new home was gloomy indeed as the whole house was painted chocolate brown.  For years we had to live with that colour…and even after the war the council only varied the colour to bottle green.

This was the other side of municipal housing – the dull uniformity it could sometimes impose on its residents.

Public transport was poor in those days as well and local shopping limited but she has happier memories too – Chinbrook Meadows nearby (declared a public park in 1929) were ‘a paradise for children’; the tunnel under the nearby railway another play spot.

Leafy Oak Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

By 1939, Lewisham could declare proudly that the borough was ‘notably progressive in the matter of Housing’.  In terms of numbers, the Council had provided 558 houses and 211 flats (in 1930 60 flats were built in five blocks – since demolished – along Winchfield Road in Lower Sydenham).  This was a relatively small number but, in general, the standard was high. (6)

The war which broke out in 1939 would change much.  Its destruction forced the Borough and the capital to build on unprecedented scale.  A new politics emerged too, one that – for a time at least – placed the needs of the country’s working class to the fore.  We’ll see both play out in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to the Grove Park Community Group and John King for generously supplying some of the historical information within this post.  John King’s history of the area provides more detail.

My thanks also to Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre for providing additional useful resources and for permission to reproduce some images from their collection.

(1) Southern Railway, Country Homes at London’s Door (2nd ed, 1928)

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

(3) John King, Grove Park Revisited (2011)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham, Grove Park Housing Estate (ND – probably 1929)

(5) Pauline Payne, A Council House Kid, 1939-1957: Growing Up at Grove Park (typescript manuscript, ND, Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre)

(6) The Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham: the Official Guide of Lewisham Borough Council (1939)

Berlin’s Modernist Interwar Estates II: ‘Light, air and sun’

Tags

1920s, 1930s

Last week’s post examined two of Berlin’s strikingly modernist interwar estates and the politics which created them.  We’ll examine two more this week, built just before Weimar Germany’s famously progressive politics succumbed to Nazism.

That politics was, of course, always fiercely contested and the cultural battle for the German soul is clearly seen in the so-called Dächerkrieg (or Roof War) which erupted in Berlin in 1928.

An early image of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt

The point at issue resided in an apparently arcane architectural debate between the relative merits of flat and pitched roofs.  The social democratic and trades union building cooperative GEHAG had constructed a modernist (and therefore flat-roofed) estate in the southwestern Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.  The Gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft für Angestellten-Heimstätten (GAGFAH building society), representing the salaried, lower-middle classes, opened a combined architectural exhibition and more traditional, pitch-roofed housing estate adjacent to it.

The Roof War’s competing estates (with thanks to Atlas Obscura)

A battle royal ensued.  Modernist commentators berated the GAGFAH estate and argued that it – in its failure to build simple, functional homes – lacked public spirit and should be denied public funds.  Their opponents defended the estate as representing a specifically German style of architecture.

In other contexts, the question of roof forms might be seen as a simple and practical issue and certainly one susceptible to compromise. In interwar Germany, no such compromise was possible – ‘opinions as to what was the appropriate architectural style for the German home were essentially irreconcilable between progressives and conservatives’: the Roof War represented an existential struggle ‘of traditional versus modern, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, rural versus urban, the former regime versus the current republic’. (1)

Weiße Stadt: head-building at entrance to estate by Bruno Ahrends

The Weiße Stadt (White City) Estate with its flat roofs, cubical forms and white walls, built between 1929 and 1931, represented modernist architecture in stark form.  It was built by the Gemeinnützige Heimstättengesellschaft Primus mbH, a municipally-owned housing association, on a greenfield site in the northern suburb of Reinickendorf, funded by a municipal grant of 15m Reichsmarks as tax receipts from the housing interest tax dwindled.  That space allowed a more extensive design than that of the inner-city Carl Legien Estate but the emphasis – as the Great Depression hit – remained on economy.  Of its 1268 flats, four fifths comprised just 1½ to 2½ rooms. (2)

Weiße Stadt: bridge house by Otto Salvisberg

Designed by the Swiss architect Otto Rudolf Salvisberg and two Berlin architects Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning, it reflects the functional efficiency championed in the architectural style dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).  It presents a striking appearance, seen most notably in the five-storey portal buildings marking the entrance to the estate and the impressive Brückenhaus (bridge house) erected across Aroser Allee.  The spare white appearance of the blocks is at once offset and highlighted by their brightly coloured guttering, window frames and entrance doorways.

Weiße Stadt: Schillering – blocks by Büning to the left and Ahrends to the right

The apartment buildings are characteristically long four-storey ribbon blocks, including one of 230m length beyond the bridge house facing a school and an open terrain of sports fields.  Greenery and open space, designed by landscape architect Ludwig Lesser, remained a key element of the overall design with communal garden courtyards with benches and playgrounds between the housing.

Weiße Stadt: Emmentaler Strasse community building by Ahrends

Heating and hot water were supplied by a central plant.  Twenty-four shops, dotted around the estate, a pharmacy, kindergarten and health centre provided the estate with the facilities and community identity for which its planners strove.

At the same time and across the city to the south-west, Großsiedlung Siemensstadt was emerging. This was the most diverse of the modernist estates.  While Hans Scharoun was responsible for the estate’s masterplan and some of its housing, he commissioned a number of other architects to design individual blocks: Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Fred Forbat and Paul Rudolf Henning.  Like Scharoun, most were members of Der Ring (the Ring), an architectural collective formed in 1926 committed to modernist principles hence the name occasionally given to the scheme, the Ringsiedlung.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: ‘Der Panzerkreuzer’ by Hans Scharoun

For all this common allegiance, their designs – apart from the de rigeur modernist flat roofs – were diverse.  Scharoun designed the access to the estate with a grand head-building with retail outlets on the ground floor which became known as the Panzerkreuzer (armoured cruiser – it sounded less sinister before 1933) for its liberal borrowing of ship motifs: a ‘consciously anti-traditional, machine age aesthetic’ (3) Across the Jungfernheideweg he built a five-storey residential block with similarly deep-cut balconies and angles.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: Goebelstrasse – laundry building and apartments by Walter Gropius

Moving into the estate proper beyond the railway bridge, you reach two long blocks, in a palette of creamy white and grey, designed by Walter Gropius fronting Goebelstrasse: ‘sharply defined and crisp in their contours and dynamically elegant in the functional austerity of the rows of identical buildings’ (3) Gropius had founded the Bauhaus School some ten years earlier.  Here he applied its design ideals – ‘to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation’ – to social housing.

Otto Bartning’s 388m-long block along Goebelstrasse marks the southern perimeter of the estate and acts as a buffer to the railway line just behind. It’s a similarly functionalist grey-rendered block, broken by patches of exposed brickwork and splashes of cerise framing.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks on Goebelstrasse by Hugo Häring

Facing it along Goebelstrasse are nine blocks, aligned Zeilenbau-fashion on a north-south axis, designed by Hugo Häring, very different in outward form in which yellow-brown bricks, smooth beige plaster and dark brown main doors are used to complement the greenery of the open courtyards designed by Leberecht Migge.  Kidney-shaped balconies add an expressionist touch.  Six similarly disposed blocks to the north by Paul Henning echo Häring’s natural restrained shades.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks by Forbat along Geißlerpfad

Along Geißlerpfad on the eastern fringe of the estate lie the two long blocks designed by Fred Forbat, white-walled but with cut-out and protruding balconies with yellow brick to add to their texture.

Each in their different way captured the modernist aesthetics and ideology of their time.  Gropius and Bartning, ‘in accord with the pragmatics of the factory assembly line or the aesthetics of the Tiller Girl’: (4)

created strongly rational and anonymous structures that used repetitive forms to generate a fixed number of forms in terms of size and occupancy…In contrast to this rigid adherence to the ideologies of mass production and mass entertainment, Scharoun and Haring produced housing blocks that, although fully committed to modernism, were also wilfully allusive and organic in their design.

This divergence of form represented, to one architectural theorist, ‘one of the most serious ruptures within the modernist movement’ but, as a simple place of residence, the estate forms a signified and attractive whole and represents an ambition to decently house the working class rarely matched in later years.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: apartment blocks by Scharoun on Goebelstrasse at the entrance of the estate

The average size of apartment in the Großsiedlung Siemensstadt was just 54 square metres, a reflection of contemporary austerity.  Later affluence would expect greater space and more mod cons but the estate and its counterparts across the metropolis provide an uncommon example of architectural ideology committed to social service and progressive politics.

Berlin’s five modernist interwar estates – I’ve covered perhaps the most celebrated, the Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Britz in an earlier post – were exceptional, providing only around 6700 of the 140,000 new social homes built between 1924 and 1932.  Most of the new-build was of more conventional form although it uniformly represented a huge advance on the ‘rental barracks’ which had been the lot of the Berlin working class before the war.

All were provided with significant, and often direct, support from the local and national state although, as noted, in a manner very different – though more common on the Continent – than that in the UK where central government grants and local government provision were the norm.  It’s another model, closer to the housing association model which has largely undertaken the provision of social housing in this country (such as it is) since 1979.

With the direct participation of social democratic politicians and trades unions it was a potent one, although not without its critics.  The increasingly powerful Communist Party welcomed the new homes and rationalist mass production which delivered them but argued – with some justice – that socialised housing remained too dependent on land and construction material prices dictated by a capitalist free market.

That cleavage in the left was one factor which eased Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.  After 1933, left-wing ideals and activism, in whichever form, were damned and dangerous. Scharoun remained in Germany under the Nazi regime in a form of internal exile.  He would return to prominence in the 1950s to design his most famous building, Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall.  Bartning too remained in Germany, retreating to the safer terrain of church architecture for the duration of the Nazism. Häring attempted to convince the new regime that the new architecture was German rather than international (6). Forbat moved first to Hungary and then Sweden where he died in 1948.  Gropius fled to Britain (where he designed Impington College) and ended his life and career in the US.

Of the chief protagonists of Berlin’s Neue Bauen (New Building movement), Taut, who died in 1938, fled first to Japan and then to Turkey. Martin Wagner too spent time in exile in Turkey, where he briefly resumed collaboration with Taut, and devised a new city plan for Ankara. He took a position with the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1938 and died, an American citizen, in 1957.  All this represented a tragic loss of talent and social purpose to the German nation; many millions of others paid a far heavier price.

The aim of Berlin’s modernist estates had been to bring ‘light, air and sun’ to its citizens.  What followed was among the darkest periods of human history.  In 2008, the five estates were granted UNESCO Heritage status – a fitting tribute to the energy and ideals which inspired them.  They are now a properly celebrated aspect of a prouder German history and well worth a visit.

You’ll find some additional images of the two modernist estates featured here on my Tumblr page.

Sources

(1) Mark Hobbs, Visual Representations of Working-Class Berlin, 1924–1930.  University of Glasgow Department of History of Art PhD thesis 2010 and this well-illustrated article on the Atlas Obscura website.

(2) Ian Boyd White and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin (2012)

(3) Ronald Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution. German Reform in the 1920s (1971)

(4) Jörg Haspel and Annemarie Jaeggi (eds), Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style (2007)

(5) Boyd White and Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin

(6) Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (2002)

You’ll find more detail online including this comprehensive record of the five estates:  Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style: Nomination for Inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List.  The architects’ images and the two colour images of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt are taken from this source.

Berlin’s Modernist Interwar Estates I: ‘Every German their own healthy home’

Tags

1920s

This post is a little different, inspired by a trip to Berlin last December and in celebration of our common European home.  I’ve written about perhaps Berlin’s most famous modernist estate, the Hufeisensiedlung (the Horseshoe Estate) in an earlier post.

Weimar Germany, the democratic state founded in 1919, emerged from the horror of world war and the collapse of the reactionary and authoritarian regime which had largely triggered it.  It promised, for a troubled and tragically brief period, an humane alternative to the brutality which both preceded and succeeded it and its social democratic stronghold Berlin – Red Berlin – pioneered some of the most progressive working-class housing of its time.  This post and the next examine four of Berlin’s most significant modernist estates and allow us to study both a model and form of social housing provision radically different from that which existed in Britain.

An early image of Siedlung Schillerpark

The constitution of the new state was promulgated in the town of Weimar, 175 miles to the south-east of Berlin, in August 1919 when the capital, in the throes of revolutionary upheaval, was considered too dangerous for the newly elected National Assembly.  This was a democratic constitution, proclaimed plausibly – with its protection of democratic norms and minority rights – as the most democratic in the world.  (That it succumbed to Nazi tyranny within fourteen years might be taken as a lesson to another contemporary proudly constitutionalist state.)

The constitution was especially radical in its guarantee of social rights, most notably in Article 155 which promised ‘Every German their own healthy home’ – an attack on the speculative building and private profit which had dominated housing provision and blighted working-class lives hitherto. Henceforth, the Article continued, ‘the allocation and use of land’ was to ‘be controlled by the state in a way which prevents its misuse’.  The Reichssiedlungsgesetz (State Settlement Law), passed at the same time provided the detail of this ideal, giving the federal states powers of compulsory purchase and requiring them to set up non-profit-making building societies which would finance the new housing programme.

Greater Berlin, 1920 (c) Maximilian Dörrbecker and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Greater Berlin itself was a product, in 1920, of the new regime – an agglomeration of eight towns, 59 rural communities and 27 rural estates with the political clout and financial power to implement the reforming ambitions of its social democratic majority.  With a population of 3.86m, it was the third largest city in world.

That population had risen fourfold since 1871 and most of its working class were housed in the so-called Mietskaserne (rental barracks) which ringed the centre.  These were generally five-storey blocks built around a series of enclosed courtyards – privately (and expensively) rented, grossly overcrowded, with tiny individual apartments and shared facilities.

Berlin ‘Mietskaserne‘ in the 1920s (c) Aaron Cripps

In the aftermath of war, it was estimated the city needed 100,000 new homes.  By 1923, however, only around 9000 subsidised homes had been built in Berlin. Two things were critical to the social housebuilding boom which followed. The Hauszinssteuer (housing interest tax) of 1924 was a tax levied on housing wealth created during the hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923; it provided revenues of around 750m Reichsmarks into the late twenties.  The Dawes Plan, agreed with the United States in the same year, was intended primarily to help Germany pay the punitive reparations levied after the First World War but it brought access to international loans and helped fund mortgages on housing projects.

The architect-planner Martin Wagner was the crucial figure in the Neues Bauen (New Building – a term encompassing lifestyle as well as bricks and mortar) programme which followed.  In 1924, he organised three of Germany’s largest trade union groups to form the Deutsche Wohnungsfürsorgegesellschaft für Beamte, Angestellte und Arbeiter (mercifully we can call it DEWOG) which undertook the overall coordination of the country’s socialised housebuilding industry. One month later, he helped found the Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar- und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft (or GEHAG) – a housing cooperative which built much of Berlin’s housing in the succeeding years.

‘In Berlin the essential partner for new house-building initiatives was  the trade-union movement’ (2) and Martin Wagner himself, a committed social democrat, served as the city’s municipal building director from 1926 to 1933 until forced out by the Nazis. The dominant architectural figure was the Jewish socialist Bruno Taut.  With the personnel, politics and finance in place, it’s time to look at the buildings.

Some of the earliest blocks of Siedlung Schillerpark along Bristolstrasse

The first modernist estate was Siedlung Schillerpark erected in the Wedding district north of the city centre for the Berlin Savings and Building Association and built by the construction workers’ guild, the Bauhütte Berlin.  It features 330 homes, predominantly built to Taut’s designs in three phases between 1924 and 1930, with landscaping by Walter Rossow.

The earliest blocks are located along Dubliner and Oxford Strasse, three and four-storey blocks, red-brick with bands of white plastering, enclosing carefully planned courtyards intended to fulfil Taut’s principle of ‘outdoor living space’.  Alternating balconies and loggias, facing the sun, were used to create striking facades. There is a strong influence here of the Amsterdam School which Taut had studied in the early twenties. (3)

‘Outdoor living space’, Siedlung Schillerpark

The actual apartments were of more traditional form and some of the earliest – where three homes accessed a single landing – were single-aspect, lacking cross-ventilation.  The flats varied in size too, from 1½ to 4½ rooms (the main figure refers to living rooms separate from kitchen and bathroom; the fraction represents a small box-room) and, though designed intentionally for different income groups, all enjoyed the same standard of fitting.  Low attics contained laundry and drying rooms. A separate bathhouse and new kindergarten were provided in 1930.

One of the estate’s doorways

It was intended to pioneer a new and civilised form of urban living at density both in its quality of accommodation and design aesthetic.  Clearly modernist in form, Taut included some personal signatures – a rich use of colours, textures and surface patterns – and some idiosyncratic expressionist elements seen, for example, in the reinforced concrete tapered pillars.

To one commentator, it was all a: (4)

bold statement of new site planning ideas and building forms, a forcefulness of expression, drawing attention to itself as something revolutionary. The preference for flat roofs, straight lines, and right angles is symptomatic of the will to express the social spirit of a new age.

Most new public housing of the time was not of such consciously modernist design but new building regulations, drawn up municipal building councillor Walter Koeppen, introduced strict zoning rules separating housing and industry and banning the use of side and rear blocks in future developments.  New blocks had to be arranged either around the plot perimeter (Randbebauung) or as open-ended terraces (Zeilenbau).  The Mietskaserne had been consigned to history. (5)

A desperate housing shortage remained, however; by 1926 it was estimated 174,000 homes were required to accommodate Berlin’s growing population.  One consequence was rising rents; between 1925 and 1929, they almost doubled – for a two-bedroom flat, from 23.10 Reichsmarks to 43.75.  Planners and architects looked to secure affordable rents by standardising schemes and reducing space standards; at worst, a so-called Existenzminimum (‘minimum existence’) home, condemned by Wagner, contained just 1½ rooms and 40 square metres of floor space.

Carl Legien Estate head-building

The Carl Legien Estate (named after the German trades unionist and social democrat who had died in 1920), built for GEHAG between 1928 and 1930 in the densely-settled working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg, reflected such economising measures.  Eighty per cent of its 1149 flats were of 1½ to 2 rooms but it was an attempt by Taut (in collaboration with Franz Hillinger) to provide high-density housing in a consciously modernist and progressive form: in the words of Kurt Junghanns (Taut’s biographer): (6)

to defeat the tenement building system on its own terrain and to prove that the new principles can also be used to build in a better way in an urban context.

The estate comprised a series of four- to five-storey blocks along existing street lines but there the resemblance to the earlier tenement housing which surrounded it ended.  Two innovations stand out.

Carl Legien Estate courtyard

Firstly, Taut maximised the light and air of the new development by creating three large U-shaped open courts along its main artery Erich-Weinert-Strasse. Living rooms and balconies were placed on the inside of the blocks, facing the courts, to emphasise their communal, semi-public nature.

Carl Legien Estate side street

Secondly, Taut – who had famously urged that colour (he called it ‘this wonderful gift from God’) should have ‘absolutely the same rights as form’ – painted the exterior facades a sunny yellow which made the narrow side streets appear wider. Interior loggias were painted yellow too for emphasis and rear walls across the interior courtyards in pairs of red brown, blue or dark green.

Carl Legien Estate shops and facilities

Shops and two communal laundries were provided in the blocks’ impressive head-buildings and a central plant delivered heating and hot water to each of the tenements.  For all the necessary economies, the estate raised working-class living standards to a new level and it became ‘a very desirable residence’.

Ironically, the condition of blocks deteriorated sharply under the post-war socialist regime (Prenzlauer Berg found itself in East Berlin) and by 2005, within a united Germany, the estate suffered a 40 per cent vacancy rate.  A major refurbishment that year by a private real estate company has restored their former popularity but with the added irony supplied by a resurgent capitalism that it now caters for a ‘more affluent and wealthy clientele…Prenzlauer Berg, which used to be the epitome of poverty and overpopulation, has now become one of the most gentrified enclaves in Germany’.  (7)

It seems that each generation must fight anew the battle to secure good quality and affordable accommodation for its least well-off.  That struggle continued in innovative ways in Weimar Germany in the later 1920s and we’ll look at two more of Berlin’s modernist estates in next week’s post.

You’ll find some additional images of the two modernist estates featured here on my Tumblr page. 

Sources

(1) For more on these, see ‘Mietskasernes: Working Class Berlin, 1871-1922’

(2) Ian Boyd White and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012)

(3) Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style: Nomination for Inscription on the Unesco World Heritage List

(4) Ronald Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution. German Reform in the 1920s (1971)

(5) Mark Hobbs, Visual Representations of Working-Class Berlin, 1924–1930.  University of Glasgow Department of History of Art PhD thesis 2010

(6) Quoted in Jörg Haspel and Annemarie Jaeggi (eds), Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style (Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munchen Berlin, 2007)

(7) Ulduz Maschaykh, The Changing Image of Affordable Housing: Design, Gentrification and Community in Canada and Europe (Routledge, 2016)

Early Council Housing in Banbury, Part II: King’s Road and the Cow Fair Roarer

Tags

1920s, Pre-1914

I’m pleased to feature the second part of this fine guest post by Jane Kilsby – a wonderful record of the struggle to build decent working-class housing in the early years of the last century and a proper tribute to a man who dedicated his life to the cause.

Banbury was one of the very few shire towns to build council housing before the First World War. That it did so, as last week’s post made clear, owed much to the energy and idealism of Councillor Herbert Payne, the ‘Cow Fair Roarer’. This week’s post takes the story forward: Banbury built some of the finest early council housing in the country but for Payne himself life took a far more sombre turn.

A contemporary map of Banbury; King’s Road is to the centre-left. From OpenStreetMap and used under the terms of this Creative Commons licence.

To secure high-quality design, the Council announced an architectural competition in December 1911.  The Council wanted 40 houses – 20 at no more than £175 each and 20 at no more than £135 each – but they also wanted entrants to avoid monotony and make best use of the land.  A local exhibition on the scheme was so popular that its opening hours were extended.

Early twentieth century municipal housing schemes provided new opportunities and challenges for architects. Some 63 architects from across the country participated in the Banbury competition, attacking (in the words of the Banbury Guardian) ‘the problem of designing a cheap form of dwelling so as to give a maximum accommodation and amenity with a good deal of spirit’. Unfortunately, none of these plans appear to survive.  Mr J Fisher of Wellingborough, the architect appointed to design the new school in Grimsbury, was selected as adjudicator.  The winning design was by Messrs Geoffry Lucas and Lodge of Bloomsbury Square.

Thomas Geoffry Lucas (1872-1947) is best remembered now for his work with the garden city movement, notably in Letchworth where he designed a group of cottages in Paddock Close.  Lucas said of this ‘£150 House’ that ‘although simple, an effort has been made to obtain dignity, and an architectural treatment, without extravagance’. He also designed for Hampstead Garden Suburb and his house at 54 Parkway won first prize in a competition at Gidea Park. Together with Thomas Arthur Lodge (1888-1967), articled to Lucas and later his partner, he designed the art deco Parkinson Building for the University of Leeds and Hackney Town Hall.

Paddock Close, Letchworth: the ‘£150 house’ designed by Geoffry Lucas in 1904-05. Now Grade II listed

The roofs in King’s Road are very similar to Lucas’s houses in Paddock Close

Lucas and Lodge were paid a premium of £20 for their winning design.  Their plans for King’s Road are missing – they are not held by the current Town Council or by Sanctuary Housing Association, the current freeholders and managers – but the Banbury Advertiser of 7 March 1912 provides us with a detailed description:

Messrs Lucas and Lodge’s plans for the £175 houses show two-floor structures with gabled fronts at intervals, the bedrooms of the remainder of the houses having dormer windows rising from the eaves.  On the ground floor is the porch and lobby, the front living room measuring 13ft 7in by 12ft 1½ inches.  At the back is a scullery, about 7ft 6 in by 10ft, with larder, copper, coal-house, table-top bath and gas stove, with yard and w.c. at the rear.  On the first floor are three bedrooms, the dimensions of the front room being 15ft 3in by 10ft 3in, those of the two back rooms being 10ft 10in by 7ft 8in and 7ft 6in by 7ft 3in respectively.

The £135 houses were smaller but otherwise of similar design.  The cottages as a whole were constructed as reversed pairs in four groups of ten, each with its own garden.  It was ‘proposed that trees be planted along the road, with grass in the front gardens, and a bed of flowers and creepers against the cottages’.

King’s Road in the 1960s with what appears to be larch lapping on the front elevation. Photograph courtesy of the Oxfordshire History Centre

The Council set out its budget and applied to the Local Government Board to borrow £7685.  An Inquiry into the Banbury Housing Scheme was held on 2 August 1912.  The Mayor, councillors, the Medical Officer, Gilletts’ representatives and others were all on message and the loan was confirmed two months later.  Messrs Bosworth and Lowe of Nottingham were appointed as contractors.

Lucas and Lodge houses in King’s Road, front elevation, in 2016

Three-bedroom Lucas and Lodge house in 2016

Councillors followed the progress of the scheme closely and in October 1913, when the houses were almost complete, the decision on the name was made: the Cow Fair crowd’s choice: King’s Road.  The houses were let at 5s 3d for the three bedroom houses and 4s 3d for the two bedroom houses.

The First World War changed the national politics of housing radically. From this point, Banbury’s housing policy was no different from numerous other towns: good housing was needed and quickly, and the council made use of national government’s substantial help and finance.

A total of 770 council houses were built between 1919 and 1940; 361 of these were in Easington, due west of the town centre, where the Council carried out extensive slum clearance.  The fields northwest of King’s Road, the streets now known as Hilton Road, Park Road, Boxhedge Road West and Townsend were also a high priority for new building.

By July 1926, a commentator in the Banbury Advertiser was able to say:

whatever Banbury lacks, it does not appear that the former shortage of housing accommodation can be levelled as a reproach against the town now.  The council of recent years has taken the bit between its teeth – a ‘bit’ that despite one of our Aldermen’s fears I believe is one that Banbury can chew – and houses are springing up in our midst like brick-built mushrooms.

King’s Road with its red roofs is at the bottom of the photograph. It lies southeast of the medieval village of Neithrop, about half a mile from Banbury Market Place. Photograph by kind permission of Steve Gold.

King’s Road, the council’s model street, was now fully developed.  For six years the forty Lucas and Lodge houses had stood in pretty isolation in their semi-rural setting.  In 1914 the Council had, wisely, and at Payne’s instigation, negotiated with Gillett on an extension of the option period to buy the remainder of the land in King’s Road.  The pre-war experience was invaluable and the Council’s post-war plans began in King’s Road.

By October 1919 land clearing operations had begun at the western end of the road.  The land was cleared and plans were made and a set of 19 ‘non-parlour type’ workmen’s dwellings were built at a cost of £18,050.  These houses were built in the late 1920s.  These houses are of brick and have three bedrooms, a bathroom and large gardens.  Making use of Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, the council sold Local Housing Bonds of £5 upwards at 6 per cent interest.

Semi-detached house in King’s Road, one of the nineteen completed in 1921

A set of twelve semi-detached houses were built speculatively in 1928.

One of the twelve non-council houses in King’s Road in 2016

Finally, six more houses were built by the Council in 1929.  Councillor Monks’ remarked upon the:

extraordinary number of applications for these houses – 20 or 30 people have applied to me personally.  The Borough Accountant said he had about 50 applicants for the six 2 bedroom houses.  24 of the applicants were single and wanted to get married.  Only three houses could be offered, as the other three were offered to tenants in condemned properties.

The six council houses built in King’s Road in the late 1920s, photographed November 2016

The Council used ‘off the peg’-type designs available from the Ministry of Housing and the houses built in the 1920s have no remarkable architectural features.  They are solid, popular and durable, however, and King’s Road today is an unassuming, pleasant street with mature lime trees at its western end.  A residential street of less than 100 houses, it represents Banbury’s early municipal housing policy in microcosm and, you could say, a lasting memorial to our hero, Herbert Payne.

King’s Road in 2016. The forty Lucas and Lodge houses are on both sides of the road.

Let’s return to Herbert Payne and see what happened to him. He continued to serve on the Town Council for most of the Great War.  With local politics deferring to the national good, he sounds calmer and more conciliatory.  He had been re-elected as an independent in 1912 and became friends with the Liberals.  Housing activities were not on the agenda and, within the Council Chamber, Payne’s contributions were confined to the fine details of the Education Committee’s accounts and incremental improvements to the town’s sewerage system.

He continued with the cutlery business he had started in 1905.  Trading from his premises and home in Bridge Street, a stone’s throw from the Cow Fair, his customers were caterers, hotels and boarding houses.  He travelled the country extensively.  His turnover for 1915 is recorded at £3,000.

Herbert Payne, wife Florence and daughter Kathleen. Photograph with the kind permission of JR Hodgkins

He was, of course, young enough to join up.  He didn’t.  He was a pacifist to his core.  He was granted an exemption on conscientious grounds and in August 1916, the County Tribunal (on appeals for exemptions from military service) exempted him for a further three months on business grounds, with leave to apply again.

Payne’s career was all about making a difference to people’s lives and he did not give up easily.  Perhaps he thought he could change things, even in the War.  He took it upon himself to challenge the way the Oxfordshire County Tribunals were set up.  He lobbied hard for the County Tribunal to include employee representatives.  He went as far as organising and speaking at a public meeting – held in the Town Hall in full view of the military – to prepare a resolution for two representative trade unionists to be nominated for the Tribunal.  The handbills declared ‘ Attested Recruits, whether accepted or rejected, specially invited.  Ladies invited.’  In the Council meeting that followed, Payne presented the resolution that it was ‘imperative that [the County Tribunal] should have the confidence especially of the class from which the recruits are most likely to be drawn’.

By the time of the next appeal, casualty figures were catastrophic.  These were very dangerous times and, perhaps with some naivety, Payne told the County Military Tribunal that he refused to do non-combatant service but would be willing to do certain types of work of national importance.  The Tribunal ordered him to work on a farm.  He didn’t.

Details of the local appeals are set out in forensic detail in the Banbury newspapers, often on the same page as the lists of those who had fallen.  It’s impossible to know what his fellow councillors thought about Payne by then.  Some Town Council meetings start with expressions of sorrow for a councillor who had lost a son killed in action.  In any event, the knives were out for Payne.

His last Council meeting was on 2 April 1917.  True to himself, he spoke at length in congratulating the Medical Officer on a reduction in the infant mortality rate and badgered his fellow councillors on what further steps were being taken by the Water Company to improve the condition of the water supply.

A month later, he was arrested in Derby.  Handed over to a military escort, it is understood that he was sent to Winchester Prison.  Leading pacifist and conscientious objector, Fenner Brockway, remembered talking to Payne at the Martyrs Memorial in Oxford and that the next time they saw each other was in prison. (2)  He came home to Banbury in 1919.  There was no return to the Cow Fair crowds; he spent much of his time with the Congregationalists.  JR Hodgkins says that ‘he was a broken man and that the War had broken his heart’.  He died three years later, at 40.

Herbert Payne’s plain and unkempt grave is in Banbury Cemetery, Southam Road.  He is buried with his wife Florence who died in 1936. The inscription reads ‘Herbert Payne who fell asleep 23rd March 1922’.

Hodgkins pays tribute to Payne as a vigorous and successful pioneer of housing reform.  He ends his chapter on Payne with the hope: (2)

that one day Banbury can find the time and spare the energy to mark his memory.  Since his death, things have been going ‘Payne’s way’ all over the country.

They have indeed.

Sources

(1) Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser between 1905 and 1930 held by the British Newspaper Archive

(2) JR Hodgkins, Over the Hills to Glory: Radicalism in Banburyshire 1832-1945 (1978)

My thanks to the Oxfordshire History Centre of Oxfordshire County Council for their generosity in allowing the use of the credited images.

Early Council Housing in Exeter: ‘decent houses for the working class’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

Labour increased its majority on the council in May this year but before 1945 Exeter was a conservative and mostly a Conservative city. That, nevertheless, it was in the forefront of early town planning efforts before the First World War and built some 2200 council homes between the wars is proof that many in all parties believed in the duty of the state and local government to ensure decent housing for the working class.

Back in 1907, though, it was a Liberal administration which erected the city’s first council housing – on Isca Road, a by-product of slum clearance on nearby Alphington Road. The 49 plain two-storey, two-bed, red-brick terraced houses with gardens to the rear cost £149 each to build. A petition from tenants saw weekly rents reduced from 5s to 4s 9d; just enough, it was calculated, to repay construction costs. (1)

Isca Road

Floor plans of the Isca Road houses from W Thompson, Housing Up-to-Date (1907)

Though the Conservatives gained a majority on the Council in 1908 they kept for twenty-five years, a reforming politics still held sway, led by the chair of the Town Planning Committee, Alderman FJ Widgery and the Town Clerk, Hubert Lloyd Parry.  The Council hosted a regional town planning conference in 1912 and approved plans for further slum clearance and building in the years before the war.

In the event, a scheme for new housing in Pinces Garden was dropped in October 1914 due to high costs and in the mistaken anticipation of ‘prices falling within the near future’. (2) Perhaps they expected the war to be over by Christmas.  The war was to last much longer but it did in the end redouble the drive to build.

The Local Government Board’s Circular 86/1917, ‘Housing after the War’, promising ‘substantial financial assistance’ to councils ‘prepared to carry through without delay at the conclusion of the War, a programme of housing for the working classes’, marked that shift.  In Exeter, where the Town Clerk in response reported that there were ‘at present practically no vacant houses suitable for the working classes and in all respects fit for human habitation’, the need was urgent. (3)

Buddle Lane, Buddle Lane Estate

The Council responded swiftly, buying land for housing on Buddle Lane in July 1918 and, in December, endorsing plans to build 300 homes.  A deputation from the Trades and Labour Council protested that such plans fell far short of what was needed. It wanted 1000 new homes and demanded, in a sign of the times and its expectations, that the new houses: (4)

should comprise two living rooms, a scullery in which the cooking could be carried out, a bathroom and three bedrooms [and] should be built away from the centre of the City with the provision of ample garden space [at rents] within the means of the labourer as well as the skilled mechanic.

Their case was backed by the City’s Medical Officer of Health. He reported 106 families displaced through proposed slum clearance schemes, some 600 back-to-back houses in the city and around 500 on which repair orders ‘should be served’. One thousand new homes ‘would not be excessive’, he concluded. The Council accepted the case, amended its plans and purchased additional land for building near Polsloe Bridge.

Pinces Gardens

The 27 houses at Pinces Gardens proposed before the War, were completed rapidly and the white-rendered homes with their imposing doorways set around a substantial green remain among the most attractive of the Council’s early schemes.

A further 161 houses on the Polsloe Estate and the first thirty homes by Buddle Lane were also completed under the generous terms of the 1919 Housing Act. At a price – reflecting inflation and shortages of materials and labour – approaching £900 each, the new houses demonstrated the cost of the Council’s earlier decision to delay their construction.

Widgery Road, Polsloe Estate in the 1930s

Bennett Square, Polsloe Estate

Higher costs in the mid-1920s may also have reflected a ‘builders’ ring’ – a conspiracy of local contractors – to maintain their profits. The Exeter Master Builders’ Federation submitted a joint tender in November 1923 for the construction of 45 houses and the Council was informed that brick was three times more expensive than before the war.  One councillor, however, alleged discussions within the Federation where ‘in a whisper it was suggested that it might be got cheaper but that no mention must go outside’.  The Federation protested its innocence of any wrong-doing but the Ministry of Health stated such joint tendering practices – accepted as necessary in the immediate post-war period – were no longer approved. (5)

Laing ‘Easiform’ concrete houses, Buddle Lane Estate in the 1930s

Even without any dirty dealing, shortages compelled Exeter (like many other authorities) to investigate alternative, non-traditional, means of construction and a contract was agreed with Laings in 1926 for the building of 154 Easiform concrete homes on the Buddle Lane Estate. Despite long-running problems with their steel reinforcements, these homes survived many decades. One hundred were rebuilt in the 1990s; currently there are plans to demolish and rebuild the remaining 20. (6)

‘Housing off Burnthouse Lane and environs from the north-east, 1933’, EPW04117, Britain from Above (c) Historic England

Traditional building methods dominated in the Council’s major interwar schemes to the south-east of the city in Burnthouse Lane, commenced in 1928, and northerly extensions in Wonford and St Loye’s from the mid-thirties. The city’s 2000^th interwar home was opened by the Minister of Housing, Sir Kingsley Wood, at no. 10 Lethbridge Road in St Loye’s in March 1937. (7)

Burnthouse Lane in the 1930s

Milton Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

City Architect, John Bennett, oversaw their design and construction.  The layout along Burnthouse Lane was a very geometric expression of garden suburb ideals which were more sensitively applied in the St Loye’s Estate which followed. Miss Barber, an early resident, complained that: (8)

the tedious straight main line [of Burnthouse Lane] and the parallel Hawthorn, Chestnut, and Briar Crescents, suggest that the planners had very little imagination and little eye for anything more pleasant.

Recent attempts to make the area more pedestrian-friendly have brightened it but left it looking a little cluttered.

Hawthorn Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

In both estates, the houses, almost all in semi-detached pairs, are individually attractive – with a distinct Exeter house-style of patterned red and darker brick – but they’re repeated with such little variation that the whole suffers from that council estate uniformity criticised after the war. The 1948 Committee on the Appearance of Council Estates, for example, later slammed ‘the depressing appearance’ of some estates which resulted from their ‘monotony in design and layout, and the repetition of the same architectural unit in dull, straight rows or in severe geometrical road patterns’.

Hoker Road, St Loye’s Estate

Typically also, other facilities followed rather slowly on the housing and – in language often repeated of these early suburban council estates – Miss Barber remembers that:

Burnthouse Lane for a long time while in the process of developing had almost nothing except houses and fields, so cold and bleak people said, especially in winter, it was just like Siberia.

The Paul Street area was one of three areas ‘represented’ for slum clearance in 1919

Inner-city Exeter (the connotations are not inappropriate) suffered other problems. In the 1932 municipal elections, Labour activists in Trinity Ward (south of the cathedral) claimed ‘housing conditions in that part of the city…were a disgrace’.  One house, they stated, was occupied by 14 families each paying 5s a week rent.  They continued: (9)

There were rack-renters in Exeter and they would have to go. These miserable hovels would have to be pulled down and decent houses provided for the working class – the class that produced the wealth of the nation.

Labour won that contest and became the largest single party in 1945 though still – for the time being – excluded from power by the more or less formal Conservative-Liberal coalition that had operated since 1919.

Labour was at pains to claim credit for recent rehousing efforts but, in fairness, there were others, notably Councillor Shirley Steele-Perkins (a local doctor and the son and brother of two Exeter Medical Officers of Health), who also made the case: (10)

In the clearance area the population was 410 to the acre, by which it would be seen the congestion that was going on…in one case a man, his wife and five children were living in one room…Was that a condition which the Council should tolerate?…

I think I have shown you that if the time is ripe for us to put these people into houses where they can live a decent life and the children have a decent chance of being brought up in healthy surroundings, we should take every advantage of it.

With such sentiments in Exeter, slum clearance efforts, also encouraged by central government in the 1930s, continued but the question of the form of housing to replace them remained, particularly for the lower-paid working class who needed to be near central places of employment.

Preston Street flats, front and rear

A small three-storey tenement block of twelve homes (since demolished) had been built in Coombe Street in 1924 and a Housing Subcommittee was set up in January 1932 to investigate the viability of flats in the inner-city.  In Exeter, where schemes had of necessity to be small, there were no economies of scale and no savings to be made but some rather bijou two-storey flats (some surviving) were built to the west of Fore Street. In all, of those 2200 interwar council homes, just 44 were flats.

Walking those same streets now, of course, much has changed, not least as a result of the bombing raids which devastated central Exeter in May 1942. Some 1500 homes were destroyed, another 2700 severely damaged; 161 people lost their lives.  Post-war Exeter faced new problems of rebuilding but the success, failure and aborted hopes of that ‘Exeter Phoenix’ form another story. (11)

The narrative of interwar Exeter is less dramatic but it’s a reminder of a time when our duty to provide decent homes for those who needed them was widely accepted across the political spectrum. Those efforts were imperfect, the results unspectacular perhaps, but they provided good, secure and affordable homes for many.

Sources

(1) Alderman W Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (1907) and Exeter City Council, Workmen’s Dwellings Committee minutes, March 13 1907

(2) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, May 26 1914

(3) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, October 23 1917

(4) Housing and Town Planning Committee minutes, May 7 1919

(5) ‘Building Rings and Housing’, The Times, November 30 1923; the Federation’s response came in a letter from EC Lea (president of the Exeter Master Builders’ Federation) in The Times, December 3 1923; and the Ministry of Health’s comment in The Times, December 3 1923

(6) ‘Rebuilding plan for old Exeter council homes’, Exeter Express and Echo, February 24 2016

(7) City of Exeter, ‘Housing. Opening of 2000^th Post-War Municipal House by Right Honourable Sir Kingsley Wood, 9 March 1937’

(8) Miss K Barber, ‘The Development of Burnthouse Lane’ (1990). Unpublished manuscript in the Devon Archives and Local Studies Service.  You’ll find more detail on the early Burnthouse Lane Estate on the Exeter Memories website.

(9) Quoted in Bob Morley, Sam Davies, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–1938: A Comparative Analysis: Volume 4: Exeter – Hull (2013)

(10) Steele-Perkins, June 1932, quoted in Julia Frances Neville, Explaining Variations in Municipal Hospital Provision in the 1930s: A Study of Councils in the Far South West, PhD in Politics, University of Exeter, 2009

(11) Catherine Flinn, ‘“Exeter Phoenix”: Politics and the Rebuilding of a Blitzed City’, Southern History, vol 30, 2008

The Meadow Well Estate, North Shields I: ‘a victim of labelling’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

‘Decent people living on a decent estate’ – that’s how Carole Bell, a Meadow Well community activist wanted people to think of the Estate in 2012.  Unfortunately for her, they were more likely to remember the riots that ripped the community apart in September 1991 and the stigma attached to the Estate before that crisis and for some years after.  There’s much that’s been written on Meadow Well before the riots and since, most seeking to explain its poor reputation and troubled history. This post will examine and assess those accounts and look at what’s happened on the Estate since then.

With apologies to Carole Bell, I’ll begin by recounting the Estate’s crisis point – those 1991 riots, sparked by the death of two young local residents, Dale Robson and Colin Atkins, killed when the stolen car they were driving careered off the road during a police pursuit. (Police claims that there was no ‘hot pursuit’ – that they were half a mile from the crash site – were disbelieved by many locals.)

The graffiti shows the version of events believed by many young people on the Estate

The protests which followed rapidly degenerated into looting and arson; emergency services attending were attacked. In all, it was said that some 400 people were involved; 37 were arrested.

Images of the riots and their aftermath

In the aftermath, the Estate became a focus of national concern – belatedly, it might be claimed – and international interest.  Much has happened and a lot has changed since but let’s examine a very specific housing history first.

Meadow Well (also called Meadowell, interchangeably as far as I can tell) was part of the County Borough of Tynemouth, formed in 1849. This was an unusually mixed borough, comprising the resort of Tynemouth, large areas of middle-class suburbia as well as the working-class and industrial district of North Shields.  While Lib-Lab politics dominated before 1914, for most of its life the Council (dissolved into the Metropolitan District of North Tyneside in 1974) was under the control of Independents and Conservatives.

That politics (and the fact that in 1912 two-thirds of councillors had interests in the private housing sector) might explain the Council’s reluctance to build before the First World War.  A housing scheme proposed on land acquired at Balkwell Farm in 1912 was opposed by Conservative councillors.  Councillor Plummer thought that to ‘put houses on the market at a rent nobody could compete with was not fair to the owners of property…The scheme was not at all fair to the middle class people’.

Ropery Banks, Clive Street, 1933

When others raised the appalling housing conditions and high death rate of the Banksides area of North Shields, Alderman Coulson, a Tory builder and landlord, blamed: (2)

the filth and dirt people live in. This is the evil, not the condition of the house. Put some of these people into Alnwick Castle and by the time they have been there one month it will be a slum.

These views are not merely of quaint historic interest, of course.  Similar views – that council housing is subsidised by the better-off (though it isn’t), that inflated market rents are somehow sacrosanct, and that council tenants are feckless – inform a lot of current thinking around social housing and its residents.

Housing on the Balkwell Estate

In 1919, however, even Tynemouth’s councillors were swept up in the national drive to build ‘homes for heroes’.  The Council determined that 1746 new council homes were required to address the Borough’s housing needs in the next three years and the Balkwell scheme was revived.  Its early phases, built under the generous terms of Addison’s 1919 Housing Act, represented deliberately high-quality working-class housing and, by the end of the 1920s, the Estate would comprise 562 two-three bedroom houses, semi-detached or in short terraces, and 100 flats.

Corner of Oswin Terrace and Balkwell Avenue, the Balkwell Estate

There was no intention that this housing be let to the Borough’s poorer residents: (3)

it would be the height of folly to leave a skilled artizan and highly worthy citizen in his present cramped and inadequate home in a dingy street, a home which he fain would leave for one better and for which he would willingly pay a higher rent, and to build houses of a type superior to it, and let them at utterly disproportionately small rents to the dwellers in slumdom.

The intention – in a filtering up theory that was common among early housing reformers – was that the homes vacated ‘would be at once occupied by persons now living in houses of a still more inferior character’.

Meanwhile, the Borough’s housing efforts rapidly faltered. In fact, only 524 homes were built by 1922, some 924 by the end of the decade.  The Council had even disbanded its Housing Committee in 1928 but it was re-established in 1930 as central government’s second interwar housing drive – slum clearance – took off.

Union Stairs, North Shields, 1933

Whether as a result of national pressure or local politics (Communist agitation was strong in the Banksides), the Council responded.  Alderman Coulson’s earlier views notwithstanding, the necessity was pressing. A 1933 enquiry into what became the Clive Street Clearance Area revealed that 48 residents occupied 17 rooms in Union Stairs, sharing a single water tap.  Liddle Street’s 405 residents enjoyed (if that’s the word) one earth privy for every 11 people.  Only two homes had piped water; none had baths. Infant mortality stood at 143 per 1000 compared to the Borough average of 83. Across the Borough, ten per cent of housing stock was declared to be slum property. (4)

Cutting the first sod on the Ridges Estate, 1932

A five-year plan drawn up in 1930 projected the construction of 850 new council homes. In 1932, the Council purchased a 135 acre greenfield site on the north-western fringes of North Shields from the Duke of Northumberland.  This was to be the Ridges Estate – the original name of Meadow Well and one by which it is still sometimes known.

The new estate contained 1961 homes. Forty of these were old people’s bungalows, 268 were self-contained houses and 1653 (84 per cent) were so-called Tyneside flats, common in the area – two-storeyed dwellings with flats top and bottom and separate ground-floor front doors, built in blocks of four.

An early image of the Estate showing wide, curved and tree-lined streets

In contrast, only around 15 per cent of the Balkwell Estate was flatted and, in real terms, it had cost twice as much to build.  The Ridges was said to be poorer quality housing built on the cheap.   These lower standards and the reputation which attended them have been described as ‘the source of all subsequent difficulties’ on the Estate and, of course, it is the design characteristics of council estates that have been claimed as a major factor in the emergence of later social problems. (5)

There is some truth in this explanation.  The Balkwell Estate remained a more popular and highly thought-of development; the stigma of Meadow Well’s poorer housing persisted.  But, in broader terms, the explanation is at best insufficient.  National legislation had mandated lower quality council housing since 1923 and more so in the 1930s as the focus turned to rehousing slum dwellers.  In this Meadow Well was not notably atypical and, to be valid, the explanation of later disorder would have to hold true for many estates across the country which manifestly it does not.

Children playing on the Estate, 1976

In practice, the layout of the Estate paid some tribute to the earlier superior cottage suburbs in its ‘Garden City’-style crescents and cul-de-sacs and it represented a good home to its new residents.  As one of these, Sarah Redpath, recalls:  (7)

When I went into that house and saw the bathroom and all that, well, I just broke down; I couldn’t help it because it was such a pleasure to know we were getting to where we were. It was marvellous.  It was a lovely place; everyone had their gardens done, no fighting, no animosity amongst anybody.

Conversely, the Estate had none of the ‘design disadvantage’ Alice Coleman cited to explain antisocial behaviour in the 1980s – high-rise blocks, anonymous walkways, lack of ‘defensible space’, and so on.  If Coleman’s monocausal account of later problems is mistaken (she really was only interested in attacking modernist design), we need to look at what else might have ‘gone wrong’ at Meadow Well.

Even this later image of the blighted Estate shows little ‘design disadvantage’

Another explanation – also used more widely to account for ‘problem estates’ – seems superficially more credible:  that the Estate was, from the outset, a ‘dumping ground’ for ‘problem tenants’.  This was, after all, the ‘rough’ working class, decanted from the poverty-stricken Banksides, and the sea-faring occupations of many male heads of household left the Estate’s womenfolk to cope alone, effectively as single mothers.

The symbol and, to outsiders, confirmation of these rough origins was the fumigation of the furniture and effects of all incoming tenants but even this needs scrutiny.  Ann Hodgson, a long-term resident of the Estate, understood the stigma of this compulsory cleansing and how others looked on it, but she welcomed it as (in literal terms) a fresh start.

Contemporary reports also describe a very different estate than the one the early stereotype would suggest – this from a reporter from the Shields Daily News in May 1934:(8)

I had a thorough walk around the Ridges estate, the sun was shining…and the atmosphere was full of optimism.  The first resident I decided to have a few words with…invited me inside the living room to have a look at the house.  The room was neatness itself with new furniture in the best of taste.

In the same year, the Borough’s Medical Officer of Health concluded that ‘the cleanliness and tidiness of the dwelling houses on the new estate more than confirms my opinion that slums are not the product of the inhabitants’.

These stills from An English Estate (1992) show a different image of Meadow Well than that which is typical

Statistical analysis also undermines the ready negative characterisation of the Estate and its people.  Only 31 per cent of its displaced slum dwellers came from the Banksides; nor were seafarers disproportionately represented on the Estate.  Even the crude measure of rent arrears – an indication of those unable or unwilling to pay – disproves the stereotype:  the arrears of Meadow Well tenants were just 0.4 per cent higher than the Tynemouth average.

From this careful analysis of fact rather than perception, Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull conclude that what the Estate did undoubtedly suffer from was labelling – an unjustified reputation generated in part by the resentment of others competing for the scarce resource of housing:

Regardless of the objective reality, a significant and influential body of opinion had already determined that the area was a ‘problem’ and was bound to be a problem because of the nature of the people who moved there and the nature of the areas they moved from.

We see some of the same dynamics in play in the Knowle West Estate in Bristol and the North Hull Estate.

If we reject the idea that Meadow Well suffered some Original Sin that would explain its later fall, we need to look more carefully at what happened to the Estate in the post-war period.  We’ll do that in next week’s post.

Sources

Special thanks to Steve Conlan for providing and allowing me to use in this post and the next some of his fine images of the Estate taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  You can see more of Steve’s work online here.

(1) Carole Bell interviewed by Mike Proud, ITV Tyne-Tees News, ‘Community hero retires 21 years after Tyneside riots’, 3 September 2012

(2) These quotations and much of the detail which follows are drawn from North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP), North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing (1977). Documents from the North Tyneside CDP can be downloaded from the website of Purdue University, Indianapolis. The full collection of CDP records are held by the Tyne and Wear Archives.

(3) John F Smillie (Borough Surveyor, Tynemouth), ‘Some Thoughts upon Housing’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, September 1919; no. 4. vol. 40

(4) Details drawn from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing and David A Kirby, The geography of inter-war (1919-39) residential areas on Tyneside: a study of residential growth, and the present condition and use of property, PhD, University of Durham, 1970

(5) The quotation comes from North Tyneside CDP, North Shields: Working-Class Politics and Housing.  

(6) Michael Barke and Guy Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ in Bill Lancaster (ed), Working-Class Housing on Tyneside, 1850-1939. See also Barke and Turnbull, Meadowell: the Biography of an ‘Estate with Problems’ (1992)

(7) Interviewed in An English Estate, a Channel Four documentary from Hugh Kelly, broadcast in October 1992

(8) Quoted in Barke and Turnbull, ‘Meadowell and Mythology: the Making of the “Problem Estate”’ which also provides the statistical analysis which follows.

A Brief History of Council Housing in Wandsworth, Part I: 1900-1939

Tags

1920s, 1930s, LCC, Pre-1914, Wandsworth

Walk the streets of any London borough and you’ll see council housing.  Look more closely and you’ll see its story unfold.  In this, Wandsworth offers a particularly rich history – a range of forms and types, some innovatory, some all too typical, the best and the worst; and through these too it reveals the conflicted politics of council housing – high ideals, low politics and partisan agenda.

Before we begin, some geographical and political background.  The present day borough, formed in 1965, comprises the former Metropolitan Boroughs of Battersea and Wandsworth, less an eastern slice (made up of Clapham, Streatham Hill and Streatham) lost to the new Borough of Lambeth.  Above this local politics lay, at first, the London County Council, formed in 1890 and, from 1965, its larger successor, the Greater London Council.  All these bodies play their part.

Derinton Road on the Totterdown Fields Estate

Before 1914, Conservative Wandsworth built nothing but the Progressive LCC and Battersea – the so-called Municipal Mecca – built some of the most best new council housing of their day.   The Totterdown Fields Estate in Tooting, begun in 1900, was the first (alongside Norbury in Croydon) of the LCC’s cottage suburbs – a modest municipal Arts and Crafts embodiment of the garden city ideals being pioneered by Ebenezer Howard.

The Latchmere Estate

Battersea was a more densely-settled industrial borough but the council’s Latchmere Estate sought on a more compact scale – the Estate, with 315 houses and tenements was around one quarter the size of Totterdown – to emulate these same ideals though, given local politics, with a more radical twist.  The latter was seen practically in the insistence on including ‘what had once been regarded as luxuries’ – ‘baths, combined ranges and electric light’.  It was seen more symbolically in the naming of the streets – for ‘Freedom’ and ‘Reform’, after local labour leaders and, most provocatively, after General Joubert, the leader of the Boer forces in the recently concluded and unpopular (on the left) Boer War.

Another war, far larger and more terrible, brought about a decisive political shift in favour of council housing.  Lloyd George and, legislatively, the 1919 Housing Act committed the state – as reward or sop (take your pick) – to building ‘homes for heroes’.  This was a policy that, initially at least, commanded support across the political spectrum and in the interwar period, Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council – still Conservative dominated – built on a large scale, in total over 2800 homes.

Housing on the Openview Estate

The Magdalen Park Estate had originally been planned as a middle-class garden suburb by private builders, the Holloway Brothers. Those plans were scuppered by the war and, in the changed post-war climate, the Council purchased the freehold and built the Openview Estate on its western side: by 1922, 376 terraced and semi-detached houses of which 89 per cent were parlour homes.  Their cost – averaging £1099 for a parlour home (around three times the amount of equivalent pre-war housing) – was an indication of labour and materials shortages of the era and a symbol, for the time being, of the priority given to building high-quality working-class homes.  (1)

The Dover House Estate

This was seen at its absolute peak in the LCC’s contemporaneous Dover House Estate in Putney.  This was the Council’s first post-war estate, begun in 1919 and completed in 1927, and it remains one of its finest, outstanding for the richness of its Arts and Crafts detailing and its greenery and layout.   It was, as Mark Swenarton reminds us, a ‘showplace in its day…visited by many from all over the world’. (2)

But even here, as a contemporary equivalent of austerity kicked in from 1921, the size of homes fell as government subsidies and prescribed standards fell. This was seen also in the second of Wandsworth’s estates, Furzedown, where (at 30 Beclands Road) the then Minister of Housing Neville Chamberlain opened the Borough’s 1000^th post-war home.  The Estate enjoyed tennis courts and a bowling green provided by the Council but, of its 464 homes, just 17 per cent possessed a front parlour.

The Southfields Estate

On the Southfields Estate, erected in the mid-1920s under Chamberlain’s parsimonious 1923 Housing Act, Wandsworth also built the first of its maisonettes which were to be a feature of its later schemes.

Holgate Avenue

Battersea, Labour-controlled and committed to continuingly high standards, also faced the problem of a lack of suitable building land.  It was forced to build three-storey tenements, rather than the single family houses it would have preferred, in its Holgate Avenue scheme started in 1924, but the homes remain impressive for their design detail, seen in their diapered brickwork, striking porches and slate mansard roofs.  Internally, the provision of electric cooking and heating as well as lighting must have won the plaudits of a visiting delegation from Soviet Russia in 1925 who surely remembered Lenin’s dictum that Communism was ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. (3)

Newlyn House, East Hill Estate, in the 1930s

Five-storey tenement walk-up blocks remained the most characteristic form of London council housing in the interwar period and beyond but the LCC’s East Hill Estate, built between 1925 and 1929, was outstanding for its grand scale and imposing design.  It housed – in what would be the dominant motif of 1930s council schemes – 525 families decanted from slum clearance areas.  If you look for it now, you’ll find only its former ceremonial entrance (complete with LCC coat of arms), itself inherited and adapted from the Fishmongers Almshouses which formerly occupied the site.  The Estate was demolished and rebuilt from 1976 by the later Wandsworth Borough Council and then, under a Conservative administration in office from 1978, sold to the private sector. (4)

The St John’s Estate, Battersea in the 1930s

This New Right politics – a prefiguring of the Thatcherite politics of the 1980s – was seen even more controversially in the 1981 sale of another five-storey tenement scheme, the St John’s Estate in Battersea, built in the early 1930s.  Its 272 flats and maisonettes had been Battersea Council’s principal interwar housing effort.  A major modernisation programme was begun by a Labour-controlled Wandsworth Council in 1976 but in 1981 the reigning Conservatives sold the estate to Regalian Properties for £3.7m.  It was thoroughly refurbished and its flats sold on the open market.  Eighty per cent of homes went to first-time buyers but none to former tenants and, it is said, that Regalian reaped a handsome profit of £14m from the deal.  (5)

Winfield House on the privatised and refurbished St John’s Estate

Back in the 1930s, another Conservative politics held sway.  In 1928, Conservative Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough had decided ‘to concentrate on the provision of accommodation which could be let at a rent the lower-paid worker could afford to pay’.  This, it is true, represented one strand of right-wing thinking – that council housing should be built for the poorest rather than for general needs, but it acknowledged too a real problem of most of the housing built to date – that it was affordable only to the better-off working class.

Here, Wandsworth would anticipate the major thrust of 1930s housing policy – seen both in Labour’s 1930 Housing Act and the ‘National’ (predominantly Conservative) government’s 1935 Housing Act – which focused on slum clearance and rehousing.

Acuba House

Wandsworth built flats on Merton Road and Acuba Road for former slum dwellers and low income families in the early 1930s which, in appearance, are not dissimilar from the mansion blocks gracing middle-class areas.

Flats on the Fieldview Estate

Its eastern extension to the Magdalen Park development, the Fieldview Estate, looks as good as any middle-class suburb but a closer look at the front doors (two per unit) reveals that this later scheme is composed of flats, 344 in total.

Wandsworth Plain, completed 1939

Wandsworth also undertook a major slum clearance programme, demolishing unfit property (a 1930 survey of the Borough had revealed 758 houses unfit for human habitation and a 1935 survey 1801 local families living in overcrowded conditions) and rebuilding on Wandsworth Plain, Nelson’s Row/White’s Square and Felsham Road.

Henry Prince Estate entrance

Henry Prince Estate interior gardens

Its most important development, however, was the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield, formally opened in May 1938 by WE Elliot, the Minister for Housing. This 10 acre scheme with its long frontage along Garratt Lane, imposing brick archways and quiet inner courtyards comprised 272 flats.  It was named, deservedly I think, after Henry Prince, a Conservative councillor who had served as chair of the Housing Committee from 1919 to his death in 1936.

Henry Prince and the Wandsworth arms and clock which grace the Henry Prince Estate

Prince is remembered also in the clock above the Estate’s main entrance but the Estate is probably more strongly associated now with another, Labour, politician, Sadiq Khan, whose childhood home it was.

A cruder version of slum clearance would be applied by Nazi bombing in the years which followed.  We’ll look at its impact and that of the very different politics which shaped council housing after the Second World War in next week’s post.

This map shows the location of all the estates mentioned in this week’s post and the next.

Sources

(1) Wandsworth Conservation & Design Group, Magdalen Park Appraisal & Management Strategy (2009)

(2) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: the politics and architecture of early state housing in Britain (1981)

(3) Survey of London, Battersea, Ch 9 West of Plough Lane (2013)

(4) London County Council, London Housing (1937)

(4) Survey of London, Battersea: Introduction (2013) and Graham Towers, Shelter is Not Enough: Transforming Multi-storey Housing (2000)

Most of the other details come from the various Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth Official Guides published annually in this period.

The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, Part 1: Glasgow Housing in Historical Context

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s

I’m delighted to feature this guest post by Gerry Mooney of The Open University in Scotland and its follow-up next week. You’ll find additional details of Gerry’s work and writings at the end of the post. 

Introduction

On October 9 2015, the BFI London Film Festival screened the UK première of the late JG Ballard’s 1975 novel, High-Rise. (1) The story revolves around the residents of a 40 storey tower block and the gradual deterioration in relations between them all. Elsewhere in October 2015 other high-rise tower blocks have been in the news. Two days following the London screening, a set of high-rise housing blocks in Glasgow was demolished. (2)

Demolition of the remaining Red Road flats, October 11 2015 © The Scotsman and John Devlin

At one level there appears to be little to connect the fictional account of life in a high-rise as described by Ballard and the reality of what was life for the residents of some of the highest tower blocks in Europe at the Red Road in Glasgow. Ballard’s tower block was equipped with all the necessary amenities that its residents –all middle-class professionals – would wish to have around them: swimming pools, a supermarket, school and so on.

The Red Road Flats awaiting demolition, October 2015 © Hilary Mooney

While the Red Road flats had an underground bingo hall and some limited shopping facilities nearby, the lack of amenities – particularly for younger residents – was a hallmark of what came to be regarded as a failed housing experiment. The class structure of Glasgow’s Red Road Flats was sharply distinct from that of the tower block in Ballard’s story. This was not a place for middle class professionals – but for working class Glaswegians, many of whom who had previously been living in housing that was often run down and unfit for human habitation, largely in old tenement blocks in central areas of the city.

A map of Glasgow showing the principal locations mentioned in the text

Glasgow’s Housing in Historical Context

The rationale behind the construction of the Red Road Flats, and their subsequent decline, can best be understood when placed in the context of Glasgow’s historic housing problems and patterns of industrial decline in the post-1945 era.

The 1920s Mosspark Estate in the south-west of the city: an early cottage suburb © Wikimedia Commons

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the first waves of council housing development following the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act – and subsequent housing legislation in 1924, 1930 and 1935, Glasgow Corporation built a number of housing estates across the city. In doing so a particular classed geography came to characterise the landscape of Glasgow at that time.

Moorepark housing scheme in the Govan area, photographed in the 1970s: a typical 1930s Glasgow slum clearance estate. Moorepark was widely referred to as ‘Wine Alley’, ensuring its notoriety. © Sean Damer

Each of the inter-war housing acts provided accommodation for different classes of Glaswegians with housing built under the auspices of the 1919 Act representing the best housing – for what was then the labour aristocracy of industrial Glasgow. In the 1930s, by contrast, poor quality slum clearance housing was built for a lower class of tenant – and the housing constructed to very different, and as befitted the target population – much poorer standards, even if they were better than the dilapidated tenement slums. (3)

Carnoustie Street tenements, 1930s, in what is now the long demolished Tradeston area south of the River Clyde

Despite the building efforts of Glasgow Corporation during the 1920s and 1930s, Glasgow emerged from World War Two with enormous housing problems. It was then by far the most overcrowded city in the British Isles. 44 per cent of the entire housing stock was considered to be overcrowded and, in figures which today defy belief, 1/7^th of the entire Scottish population, note Scottish population not just the population of Glasgow, lived within 3 square miles of central Glasgow.

Post-1945 Glasgow: What is to be Done?

As with other UK cities, urban and regional planning was gaining momentum, not least as a means of addressing the widespread social and economic problems that characterised many of the older industrial cities and conurbations at the time. Glasgow’s problems – and those of the Clydeside conurbation more generally – were among the worst, if not the worst, in Britain. Together with the severe overcrowding problems, many houses were unfit and/or lacked basic amenities. Poverty, unemployment, ill-health and long-term problems of economic and industrial decline were all too evident.

Sir Patrick Abercrombie (to left) and Robert Matthew, joint authors of the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan

Headed by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan of 1946 (4) called for the decentralisation of Glasgow’s population who would be rehoused in purpose built new towns and in ‘overspill’ areas. ‘Overspill’ suggests a rather technical approach to planning but this was nothing more than the large-scale social and spatial engineering of a substantial proportion of Glasgow’s population. In turn industry would be directed away from the city to these overspill districts and new inward investment from foreign companies encouraged to avoid Glasgow.

The centre of Glasgow re-imagined in the 1945 Bruce Report

The CVRP’s recommendations stood in sharp contrast to the conclusions of another major planning report of the time. Produced for the Corporation of Glasgow, The Bruce Report of 1945 (5) was the work of the Corporation’s Chief Engineer, Robert Bruce. Its proposals were very different to those that would emerge in the CVRP a few years later in that it recommended the large-scale redevelopment and rebuilding of Glasgow to enable its growing population – then approaching its 1951 peak of 1.1m – to be rehoused entirely within the existing city boundaries. This would necessitate the wholesale clearance of huge areas of central Glasgow and the development of four large housing estates on the outer edges of the city – often referred to as ‘peripheral’ or ‘outer’ estates – and numerous other smaller council estates across the city.

While the fashion of the time for lower density housing was reflected in Bruce’s proposals, it was to become evident during the late 1940s and early 1950s that Glasgow would not be able to rehouse its population within the existing confines of the city. The expansion of the city into neighbouring districts was prevented by the establishment of a green belt around Glasgow, which meant that population overspill was the only answer – or the building of new housing estates on the periphery to higher densities than had been envisaged in the Bruce Plan. This created a legacy that was to come back and haunt the city in the period to follow, and which continues to shape Glasgow’s housing estates today.

The demolition of tenements and their high-rise replacement shown in an undated photograph from Parliament Road in Townhead.

The conflict between these two competing visions of post-war Glasgow was to shape the development of the city throughout the post-war period. Each of the reports saw important proposals enacted but the overspill and new town proposals of the CVRP came to dominate the post-1945 planning of the Clydeside conurbation and within that, of course, Glasgow itself.

Hutchesontown Area B, 1961

Taken together, the Bruce Plan and CVRP led to the large-scale demolition of many working class residential districts in Glasgow – and the ‘decanting’, displacement and rehousing of upwards of 250,000 Glaswegians. Older tenemental areas were bulldozed, family and community life disrupted, and older senses of attachment and of belonging to particular places were also disrupted in the process. For Bruce this was a radical plan, a ‘surgical plan’ in his words for the renewal of Glasgow through what today may be referred to as a process of ‘creative disruption’.

From the Peripheral to the Vertical: Glasgow Embraces High-Rise

With the peripheral estates under development in the 1950s, amidst the growing awareness by Glasgow Corporation that it was to lose a substantial proportion of its population through overspill, the city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development.

In 1947 a Glasgow Corporation delegation travelled to the French city of Marseilles to see at first hand the new tower blocks designed by famous Swiss architect, Le Corbusier as part of his Cité Radieuse (Radiant City). Constructed between 1947 and 1952, this was to be a hugely influential development, not least on the visitors from Glasgow.

Moss Heights, 1953 ©The Glasgow Story (Glasgow City Archives, Photographic Series)

In 1953 Glasgow’s first ‘multi-storey’ housing was constructed at the Moss Heights, in the Cardonald area in the South West of the city. On their opening the then Chairman of Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee commented: (6)

Let the planners check that all available city land is being built on. Let them push the frontier upwards instead of outwards. Where 10 floors are planned let them build 20 instead.

The scene was thus set for Glasgow’s foray into high-rise housing and the development of these blocks over the next half century or so was to reshape the city in ways that few could have imagined at the time.  We’ll examine what followed in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Chris Hall, ‘Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level’, The Guardian, October 3 2015

(2) BBC News, ‘Glasgow’s Red Road Flats to be Demolished Later this Year’, BBC News online, August 3 2015

(3) Sean Damer, From Moorepark to Wine Alley: The Rise and Fall of a Glasgow Housing Scheme, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1989)

(4) Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H Matthew, Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946, Edinburgh: His Majesty’s Stationery Office (1949)

(5) Robert Bruce, First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Glasgow: Corporation of the City of Glasgow (1945). For more on Bruce’s proposals, see BBC 4: Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain, A Revolution in the City: The Bruce Plan for Glasgow, August 21, 2013 and ‘The Bruce Plan‘ from the bestlaidschemes.com website.

(6) From the Glasgow Evening Citizen, quoted in Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Will Glasgow Flourish?, Glasgow: GCPH, 2007: p16

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the The Open University in Scotland, his academic profile here.  For additional information and writings, see his OU OpenLearn page. He has also written for The Conversation and you’ll find his dedicated pages here.  Follow Gerry on Twitter at @gerrymooney60.

The Saffron Lane Estate, Leicester I: ‘moving into paradise’

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

Back in the day, some people called the Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester ‘Candletown’.  Others called it the ‘Conks Estate’ which wasn’t meant kindly.  To understand these nicknames is to uncover the rich history of the Estate – the city’s first large-scale interwar housing scheme – and its community.

Aerial view of the Saffron Lane Estate, 1927

Leicester had grown rapidly in the later nineteenth century and had, for the most part, prospered but that growth – and the exigencies of war – had led by 1919 to severe pressures on housing.  The Council estimated it needed to build 1500 homes in the next four years to satisfy demand.   In fact, the City took seven years to build just 746 new homes under the 1919 Housing Act.

The Health Committee didn’t pull its punches, expressing its ‘increasing alarm and grave concern’ at the ‘overcrowding existing in the dwelling houses in the City [and] the physical suffering and mental misery involved’. It called on the Council to take ‘extraordinary measures’. (1)  At this point, 5747 people were on the council waiting list; four out of five in shared accommodation.

Herbert Hallam

The Council was a hung council in the interwar period but with a strong and capable Labour presence for whom high-quality working-class housing was a major concern.  Labour councillor Herbert Hallam became chair of the Housing Committee in 1924 and was largely responsible for the planning and building of the Saffron Lane and Braunstone Estates

Two tranches of land to the south of the city beyond its then borders had been bought which would become what was originally called the Park Estate and then, officially, the Saffron Lane Estate.  Construction began in September 1924. Six months later, more land was acquired which would form Elston Fields – at the heart of the new Estate and its green lung. (If you’re local, you might know it better as Tick-Tock Park, named after the large clock on its former central pavilion.)

Elston Fields © Mat Fascione and made available through a Creative Commons licence

‘Tick-Tock Park’ with its original clock tower

The problem that the Committee faced, however, was that only 140 of an estimated 4500 construction workers in the city were working on council housing. The pressure to find non-traditional methods of construction using less, or less skilled, labour was intense and, fortunately, a solution was to hand.  These were the concrete houses produced by Henry Boot Limited.  The Council ordered 1500; 1000 on the Saffron Estate and 500 on the new Braunstone Estate.

Boot houses, Broughton Road

The houses weren’t cheaper than brick-built homes (coming in at around £465 each compared to the £395 of their traditional counterparts) but, to councils across the country, they promised quick results.  Around 50,000 Boot homes were erected between the wars, including those we’ve looked at already on the Norris Green Estate in Liverpool.

The preliminary layout plan of the Park (Saffron Lane) Estate

The layout of the new Estate conformed closely to the Garden Suburb ideals of the day. There was some effort too made to spruce up these Boot houses and counter the uniformity of their design – roughcast exteriors of yellow gravel, white limestone or grey granite were added and different coloured tiles and style of chimney stack and window.  Not enough, however, to satisfy one of the first residents to move in, however:  ‘when we first saw this drab concrete house surrounded in churned-up mud, my enthusiasm waned quite a lot’. (2)

The Estate in the 1930s

That churned-up mud tells another story. The first 194 homes on the Estate were occupied by December 1925; two years later, 908 parlour and 906 non-parlour homes had been completed  (500 of each were the so-called Boot homes).  Typically, the Estate’s roadways were finished later and shops, community facilities, convenient local bus services followed slowly.  Incredibly, the Estate lacked mains gas or electricity till 1929.

You might have worked out those nicknames by now – the Conks Estate was a pejorative reference to its concrete-construction houses; Candletown to its early lack of power.

Copinger Road, 1930s

For all that, ‘the Saff’ was generally popular with its new tenants.  Houses with gardens, spacious pantries and sculleries, inside bathrooms and toilets were a step-up for the vast majority.  Mrs Bright speaks for many:

When I first moved into Belton Close, I thought it was heaven because for three years we had lived in two rooms…Belton Close was like moving into paradise because we had a bath and the children could have a separate bedroom. What I couldn’t get over was that I didn’t have to go very far, other than a tap in the house, to get water. In Bonchurch Street, we used to have to walk through the house and fetch water from the next-door neighbour’s tap.

The problem – particularly as slum clearance took off in the 1930s – was that the very poorest couldn’t afford the rents.  In 1927, the rent for a three-bed parlour house, including rates, stood at 13s 10s, a non-parlour at 11s 11d at a time when the wages of an unskilled worker might be as low as £2 a week.

To get a council house in Leicester, you not only had to prove that you could afford the rent but get at least three references, one from the vicar or priest of your local church or a councillor.  A council job which guaranteed a regular wage and steady employment helped.  William Orton, a Corporation gardener, and his wife Elsie moved to Fayrhurst Road and raised a family of four in 1935 but their eldest son, Joe, escaped to RADA and the bright lights of London in 1951. Joe felt he had come from ‘the gutter’ – a sentiment which his biographer, John Lahr, helpfully explains: (3)

Orton’s ‘gutter’ was not the brutal and bustling industrial landscape of the North, but the drab monotony of a comfortable city whose council housing reflected its unimaginative mediocrity. The bleak adequacy of the Saffron Lane Estates had a deceptive violence. Fayhurst [sic] Road where Orton lived, and the narrow streets around it seemed to have been vaccinated against life…

The sameness of the architecture and expectation had its special oppressiveness. Cramped, cold and dark, the rows of sooty pebble granite homes were to Orton a grey backdrop, set-pieces for a lifetime of making do.

It’s worth unpicking this.  It’s true that Lahr is far from the only person to have criticised the alleged sterility of interwar cottage estates.  It’s clear that the very scale of their ambitions – and always the tempering constraints of economy – did foster some of the uniformity and maybe some of the dullness he identifies.  But there’s way too much writerly sensibility and effect here.

On the one hand, to Lahr real working-class lives (in those overcrowded slums of the North) were ‘brutal’ but ‘bustling’ – that love-hate relationship with the slums that middle-class writers enjoy.  But then, he gets confused and seems to apply the clichés of slum life – ‘narrow streets…cramped, cold and dark…sooty homes’ – to the spacious garden suburbs built very deliberately to provide a far better and healthier environment. It doesn’t add up.  Orton’s misfortune was not his home but an unhappy family life and, of course, a society cruelly unforgiving of his sexuality.  His home’s been demolished since but the Council, more forgiving, has placed a plaque in his honour to mark the spot.

The front and rear of a house on Hawkes Hill – hardly cramped

The new bungalows (with plaque) built on the site of Joe Orton’s former home

Most people simply didn’t feel the way that Joe Orton did:

The Saff at first was a showpiece estate. People were proud to live there. They took care of their surroundings, their houses and their children.

Indeed, one of the objects of the Saffron and Kirby Estates Tenants’ Association, formed in the late twenties, was to ‘uplift the social and civic standard of the people of these estates’.  At its most consciously improving this included (as we saw at the Watling Estate in north London) educational lectures but the thrust of the Association was more practical.  A new bus stop, a stamp machine at the local post office, better lighting on the estate weren’t life-changing but they did improve people’s day-to-day lives.

As on the Watling Estate, ideas of ‘community’ also loomed large and the Association actively promoted a range of social activities and entertainments. It boasted its own football team and, by 1938, even a swing band. The ‘Penny Popular Parties’ (attendees paid a penny and provided their own entertainment) proved a little too popular though – there were complaints that the children were too rowdy.

Saffron Lane

There were some who thought this overall respectability owed a lot to the absence of drinking establishments or even an off-licence on the Estate and several city councillors and the Medical Officer of Health were strong advocates of Temperance.  When an off-licence was opened, some Leicester citizens petitioned for its closure.  That was a little too rich for William Vickerstaff, the president of the then Saffron Lane Municipal Tenants’ Association in 1928:

There are 2014 houses on this estate with an approximate population of 10,000 including children, unless the teetotal fanatics take us all for children….If the schoolmistresses who signed that circular assert that our kiddies are or will be sent to school in any the worse condition because of the existence of a licensed house on the Estate, then we can only say that such statements resemble gross impertinence.

That too is an authentic voice of working-class respectability.

In an apparent demonstration of local democracy, the Housing Department organised a ballot on the Estate on whether its residents wanted licensed premises. It returned a narrow majority in favour but insufficient it was said as only 40 per cent had voted.  Mr Vickerstaff suggested that many didn’t vote as, had they supported the proposal but later got into difficulties with the rent, ‘the fact would be borne in mind by the authorities’. The campaign continued and would, as times changed, succeed.

There were two local workingmen’s clubs, however, though here as well things were not as simple as that might seem.  The older-established was the Aylestone and District WMC on Saffron Lane but the people who lived on the ‘Conks Estate’ were said to be ‘looked down on rather by those going to the Aylestone Club…which was a bit more skilled working class if you like.’

The Saffron Lane WMC on Duncan Road was opened in 1929 to cater more directly to the Estate.  It grew to eclipse its ‘rival’, boasting, at its peak, 3000 members and four bars though changing times and tastes have led now to talk of downsizing and even closure. (4)

That brings us to the present and the post-war story of the Estate and its people will be told next week.

Sources

(1) Health Committee minutes, May 1924 quoted in Saffron Past and Present Group, The Story of the Saff (1998). Other quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source unless otherwise specified.

(2) Bill Willbond, 70 Years of Council House Memories in Leicester (1991)

(3) John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears. A Biography of Joe Orton (1978)

(4) You can read more on the Saffron Lane WMC (and watch a poignant 2012 video on its story and its current plight) on the Club Historians website.