Sedbergh: ‘the luckiest town in the country with regard to housing’

01 Tuesday Nov 2022

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Cumbria, Housing

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Sedbergh

In 1947, the Yorkshire Post declared Sedbergh ‘the luckiest town in the country with regard to housing’. (1) In the midst of a national housing crisis, no new council homes had been built in the district since the end of the war and apparently none were needed. Nevertheless, Sedbergh had built before the war and would build substantially in the 1950s and 1960s. The story of council housing in the district is therefore both representative of wider rural dynamics and unique to the town.

Sedbergh in an Ordnance Survey map of 1920 (surveyed in 1912). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Sedbergh might be best known today for its independent school or as a ‘book town’ conveniently placed for visitors at the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, close to the Lake District. Until 1974, it lay in the West Riding of Yorkshire, administered by Sedbergh Rural District Council (RDC). Now it lies in Cumbria within South Lakeland District Council. It’s all change again in April 2023 when a new unitary authority Westmorland and Furness takes over. It’s a small town (the population of the Rural District stood between 3- to 4000 for most of the last century), significant historically for farming and woollen production but prospering today, as those past staples have receded, as a local centre of commerce and tourism.

In 1914, when traditional industries still held sway, the Local Government Board – as part of a significant national drive to increase the rate of council housebuilding – had urged the Council ‘to build cottages for the working classes owing to there being a scarcity in the neighbourhood’. By June, the RDC had responded positively, purchasing land in the town (with plans to buy more in the neighbouring hamlet of Millthrop) and commissioning Kendal architect John Stalker to design a scheme of twelve well-equipped houses, each with: (2)

a good living room, scullery, pantry, store closet, w.c., and coal house on the ground floor, and each cottage will have a separate wash house with washing copper. On the chamber floor there will be three bedrooms and clothes closets.

Scarcely six weeks later, the outbreak of the First World War forced other priorities. The plans were abandoned and, perhaps more surprisingly, were not initially revived at war’s end when Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act was passed to fulfil prime minister Lloyd George’s promise of 500,000 new ‘homes for heroes’.

Sedbergh bided its time but its housing needs remained pressing, albeit small-scale. According to the Council’s Medical Officer of Health, Francis Atkinson: (3)

The houses, which are stone-built, are many of them old in type and congested on site, making it impossible to carry out adequate improvements. In Sedbergh town there are many yards branching off the narrow main street, in which the houses are small and congested, and deficient in ventilation and sunlight.

An aerial view of Sedbergh, 1929. The new Fairholme development can be seen clearly at the upper left of the image. © EPW026569, Britain from Above

A postcard view of Fairholme, undated but pre-war. Note the hedges and well-tended gardens © Sedbergh and District History Society

This early view of Fairholme captures well its setting beneath the Howgill Fells that Alfred Wainwright described as resembling ‘sleeping elephants’ © Sedbergh and District History Society

Given the number of houses that might be declared unfit, it was ‘decided that the [Government] subsidy might be required for 30 houses’. In 1925, the Council purchased five acres of land to the immediate north of the town on what became Fairholme and engaged Mr A Knewstubb of Penrith to prepare a layout and plans for six houses; 18 more were planned for the following year.

The Council’s second scheme of around 40 semi-detached and terraced homes at Havera was completed in 1935 – the date is recorded on a plaque in the gable end of a semi-detached pair of houses at the top of the street. The name is derived from the Saxon word ‘haver’, a hillside where oats were grown.

Elsewhere attention turned to reconditioning of existing homes in poor condition. Today, Millthrop is a picture postcard settlement of quaint stone cottages. In the 1930s, most of these were rural slums. Sedbergh’s application for a grant to finance improvements to 17 homes under the 1926 Housing (Rural Workers) Act was refused by the West Riding County Council (which administered the scheme locally) but, in this instance, the owner was prevailed upon to make improvements. Their scale – new floors, roofs and windows, internal redecoration, a new water supply, pail closets replacing privy middens (still no sewerage note) – is a reminder of the appalling conditions prevailing in many rural homes at the time.

Former council homes at Bridge End Field, Millthrop

An article published in the ‘patriotic’ John Bull magazine in May 1936 had publicised the case of an ex-serviceman, his wife and nine children living on the moors three miles out of town ‘in a wooden hutment the exact size of which is 30 feet long and 10 feet wide! No proper sanitation and no water supply’. Applications for council housing had failed as Sedbergh had no home big enough to house the family.(4) Perhaps this prompted the council to build two houses for large families living in unfit conditions on land purchased at Bridge End Field in Millthrop. The extensive back gardens signify a time when it was expected that rural tenants would grow a large part of their own food. (5)

By the outbreak of war in 1939, a total of 77 council homes had been built in the district. The war itself – as a result of Sedbergh’s relatively isolated position – increased housing pressures in the town. In August 1939, 126 children and 41 adults – mothers, teachers and helpers – were evacuated to the town from Bradford. (By the end of the year, just 41 remained in total; ‘generally the evacuees did not seem to take kindly to country life after town’, it was said.) In 1940, 70 children and 29 adults arrived, mostly from London. (6)

Sedbergh prefabs © Sedbergh and District History Society

A press photo, unknown date, of the Pinfold prefabs © Sedbergh and District History Society

These incomers were billeted in local homes but a more comprehensive response was required when, after the bombing of Coventry, Armstrong Siddeley opened shadow factories manufacturing aircraft components in local mills at Farfield and Millthrop. Workers and their families were accommodated in two estates of prefabricated huts to the south-east of the town in Maryfell and, a little further out, Pinfold. Army personnel undergoing training at the 11th Battle Training School, housed in the former Baliol Girls School, were also accommodated in Pinfold.

As the end of the war approached and the closure of the temporary factories loomed, the Ministry of Aircraft Production asked the Rural District Council to take over the management of the two estates. (7) In the event, the council took over the Maryfell estate, buying its 50 bungalows for £80 each, but not Pinfold where Whitehall had deemed the site unsuitable for permanent housing. (The Pinfold site is now a caravan park.) As war workers returned home, Sedbergh had a readymade supply of empty housing to provide to local residents. In 1947, it was reported that there were just six households on the council’s housing waiting list and that vacancies for council homes were advertised in a main street shop window.

The Daily Mirror report concluded: (8)

the Housing Committee, with no worries, can sit back and plan carefully. ‘When our plans are finally approved,’ said the clerk, ‘we can carry out a first-class building programme and not be troubled by present shortages’

The clerk, Mr W F Lee, spoke of a planned building programme of 114 permanent homes but, while the temporary prefabs of Maryfell would certainly need replacing in the near future, for the moment it was a scheme just to the north along Cautley Road and Long Lane that took priority. The Council invited tenders for the construction of 46 houses in July 1950 – 38 in Sedbergh, eight in Dent where six were set attractively around a green on Dragon Croft. Semi-detached and terraced housing was built in the short culs-de sac of Castlehaw and Thornsbank in Sedbergh.

Dragon Croft, Dent

These images from the 1970s show horses and traditional bow top caravans gathered on the green at the edge of Maryfell for the annual gypsy and traveller Appleby Fair. They are now discouraged from parking in or near the town. © Sedbergh and District History Society

The redevelopment of Maryfell came two years later with an initial tender for 24 two-storey houses and 36 flats in three-storey blocks. The estate was completed by summer 1956. Early tenants were apparently discomfited by its open-plan layout, unpersuaded perhaps when the estate’s architect, T M Jones, ‘pointed to the practice on many modern housing estates and said the best effect had been gained through the absence of fences’. (9) Nowadays, only traces of the estate’s former unfenced design remain, even fewer as Right to Buy has exerted its own form of privatisation.

Press photograph, 14 April 1961 © Sedbergh and District History Society

In 1961, after slow beginnings, the Council celebrated the completion of its 200^th home with due pomp when its keys were formally handed to Mrs B Douglas, the fortunate new tenant, by a group of local councillors.

Gladstone House and bungalows, contemporary photograph

The following year, reflecting a typical turn within rural council housing in catering increasingly to an older and poorly-housed population, the Council opened Gladstone House on Fell Close in the Maryfell Estate – eight new warden-assisted bungalows and four flats and a community room, adjacent to some existing accommodation for older people on the estate. The West Riding County Council, whose responsibilities covered the welfare of the elderly, contributed to the scheme’s costs.

It was, according to a local press report: (10)

obviously a much cheaper and more humanitarian way of dealing with the problem of caring for the old by giving them every comfort in their local environment, rather than to send them to a home, which is liable to have something of an institutional character and atmosphere, however well camouflaged.

In the mid-1960s, its last major development, the Rural District Council built 17 three-bed and two four-bed houses and 30 two-bed flats on Castlegarth, to the north of Long Lane. Marking a new relative working-class affluence, 18 garages were provided with a further 31 to follow. A new fire station, new police station and three new police houses – county council responsibilities – were built adjacent. (The fire station remains; the police station is now a funeral directors.)

In all this, Sedbergh RDC had become, in the words of that same press report, ‘one of the foremost local authorities in the North-West in its post-war housing development’. The town’s extensive new housing catered to the wider district as well as established residents; conversely some of the latter now found work in Kendal, many at K Shoes.

To conservation specialists, the town’s new eastern suburbs ‘present a bland appearance with “standard” house types that provide a harsh contrast alongside traditional stone buildings’ and it’s true enough that neither the town’s interwar council housing or, more particularly, its post-war made much effort to ‘fit in’ with a local vernacular. (11) Fairholme represents some of the best of interwar council housing; Havera, a decoratively pared down and presumably cheaper version of the same. The cream to grey roughcast, semi-detached pairs of the early post-war era are used fairly indiscriminately. At Maryfell, though the three-storey flats come as an initial surprise in this rural setting, standard housing is made more attractive by lighter colours and patterning, Castlegarth, greyer, appears rather stark by comparison.

On the other hand, it did all, of course, provide genuinely affordable housing meeting local needs. Currently, it’s estimated that around 12 percent of Sedbergh’s 1323 homes are second homes while, in recent times at least, rising house prices and declining social housing stock, have further limited the ability of lower-income residents or would-be residents to buy or rent local homes. It is reported that: (12)

families are moving out of Sedbergh to larger conurbations or to remote rural areas to access more affordable homes. Businesses of all sizes across all sectors have confirmed that both housing cost and availability is negatively impacting on their ability to recruit and retain staff.

Social rent housing isn’t a cost; it remains, as it ever was, an investment – both in the wellbeing of individuals and the vitality of local communities. Sedbergh’s past and present illustrate these lessons very clearly.

Note

I am very grateful to the Sedbergh and District History Society for providing information and resources to support this account and, as credited, some wonderful photographs to illustrate it.

Sources

(1) ‘Sedbergh Luckiest Town for Housing’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 27 January 1947

(2) ‘Sedbergh Housing – Council to Build Working Class Cottages’, Lancashire Evening Post, 19 June 1914

(3) Sedbergh Rural District Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1925

(4) ‘Eleven Doomed to One Room’, John Bull, 23 May 1936

(5) Sedbergh Rural District Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1937

(6) Sedbergh Rural District Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the year 1940

(7) Karen Bruce Lockhart, ‘Wartime Sedbergh – The Final Months 1945’, The Sedbergh Historian, The Annual Journal of the Sedbergh and District History Society, vol VII, no. 3 Summer 2020

(8) ‘Town That Has No Housing Problem Put “To Let” Notices in Shop Window’, Daily Mirror, 6 February 1947

(9) Press cutting, 26 April 1956, supplied by Sedbergh and District History Society

(10) Press cutting, 30 March 1962, supplied by Sedbergh and District History Society

(11) Sedbergh Conservation Area Appraisal Final Report for Public Consultation, December 2009

(12) Joanne Golton, Housing Growth in Sedbergh – Economic Assessment. Final Report, Autumn 2020

Bright, Breezy, Bracing Bridlington: Part 2

05 Tuesday Jul 2022

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Guest Post, Housing, Seaside Municipalism, Yorkshire

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1950s, Bridlington

I’m very pleased to feature the second of two new guest posts from Peter Claxton recounting Bridlington Borough Council’s significant council housing programme and its vigorous efforts to promote the town as a seaside resort. (Peter has contributed earlier posts on the history of council housing in Cottingham.) He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century with particular emphasis on public health and housing.

…they were the best houses the Corporation had ever built, surpassing those in other parts of the town. (1)

In my previous blog I examined the varying fortunes of the two diverse parts of Bridlington, The Quay and Old Town during the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century; a period that witnessed the start of municipal provision of housing for the working classes and support for the burgeoning leisure market. In this follow-up blog, I pick up the story as the demands placed upon the borough council by both the ‘local populace’ and ‘leisure interests’ intensify.

The actions of Bridlington Borough council during the 1920s mimicked those of many other seaside authorities. Bournemouth, Folkestone, and Southend had spent £171,000, £96,000, and £135,000 respectively on seafront attractions. (2) North of the harbour, new colonnade shelters and a wide deck promenade provided seating for 3000 people, as well as cover in the unlikely event of an inclement day by the North Sea. Nearby the new Beaconsfield tennis courts catered for the sportier type. However, further development of the north shore – as detailed in the Bridlington Corporation Act, 1920 – was scaled-back and attention switched to the south shore.

Beaconsfield tennis courts and colonnade shelters (EPW023156) ©Britain from A bove

South of the harbour, 1926 witnessed the opening of the art deco New Royal Spa Hall, built at a cost of £50,000. Sadly, the pleasures derived from visiting this attraction were short-lived. Also, the golf course was now in municipal hands and work had already started on a new sea wall south of the Spa. Completed in 1928, it was named after the Princess Mary.

New Spa Royal Hall 1926 (EPW023157) ©Britain from Above

Yet not everyone benefited from the new attractions and rising visitor numbers. One disillusioned council tenant questioned how: (3)

The town expects to get any rates when all the people who are staying here are in camps. There are many like myself who depend solely on visitors.

Although the change in the ‘holidaying habits’ of visitors affected many of the town’s residents financially, they also presented a new opportunity for the council. It quickly sought to accommodate campers on a purpose-built site south of the town. (4)

Committed to build on foundations recently laid, a lecture at the Spa Theatre by J.W. Mawson titled ‘Town Planning and the Future of British and Continental Health Resorts’ offered the council a way forward. (5) His father T. H. Mawson – once referred to as the Capability Brown of Empire – was a leading landscape architect and town planner. One-time president of the Town Planning Institute, he was offered the position of visiting lecturer following the founding of a chair in civic design at Liverpool University by Lord Leverhulme.

Engaged to formulate both a statutory town planning scheme and a comprehensive development plan for the town and sea front, neither came to fruition. Inter-authority wrangling over apportioning costs relating to the town planning scheme and the radical nature of the proposed town and seafront redevelopment scuppered the council’s ambitions. Fortuitously, the council engaged the services of a bright young architect, Percy Maurice Newton.

Previously employed by the Corporation of Hull, Newton’s work at Bridlington – initially in the surveyor’s department – did much to secure the town’s position as a leading east coast resort. In the Old Town during the 1930s, his work included housing off South Back Lane, Marton Road and Baptist Place. Of the latter, a council member noted, ‘truly practical houses always were beautiful, and he thought those houses came as near to that category as any in Bridlington.’ (6)

Bridlington, 1938. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Of the 3000 houses built in Bridlington between the wars, 635 were by the council. Yet Newton’s influence on ‘civic improvement’ was to be seen in more than just housing. And in 1930 the opportunity to display his talent presented itself. A new town hall – to replace the harbourside one lost to fire – was proposed and would be strategically positioned between the two parts of the town. Built in the late Wren style, (7) by local firm Smallwood & Sons, the £34,000 build did not place a significant financial burden on local ratepayers. Support from the Unemployment Grants Committee at Westminster reduced the debt to £12,950. (8) Complete with council chamber, offices and ballroom, the building boasted a fan-assisted ducted heating system and rubber surfaced walkways to aid noise reduction.

But in January 1932 as the build was nearing completion, disaster struck the town. The 1926 New Spa Hall was also lost to fire. Newton was tasked with designing a replacement and the ambitious target of ‘opening for the season’ was set. Taking direct responsibility for the ‘build phase’, Newton ensured that the Spa Hall, built in 52 days, was ready for visitors by the end of July. His health suffered, and in response, an indebted council financed an ocean cruise holiday to aid his recuperation.

1932 Spa Royal Hall (EPW039058) © Britain from Above

Away from the seafront, Newton also designed a new Senior Elementary School. (9) Eventually catering for 800 children, the first phase of the St George’s School accommodated 400 boys and opened in 1935. The girl’s department followed in 1938. (10)

By the mid-1930s, the dated Grand Pavilion on the north shore was finally demolished. Newton’s 1937 replacement – regarded by some as his most aesthetically pleasing work – was built on the Victoria Terrace Gardens. It was later described as ‘visually … the most successful International Modern style building in East Yorkshire, [and] very much a symbol of a modern forward-looking resort.’ (11)

The new Grand Pavilion, photographed by R. Hartley

Bridlington, 1950. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Across the road from the new town hall, the Newton designed Corporation Electricity showrooms opened in 1939. It was destroyed by enemy action in 1941 and later rebuilt. The municipal power station had closed in 1935 following the town’s connection to the National Grid.

With permission from Bridlington Local Studies Library

Seasonal visitor numbers increased significantly between the wars. With a resident population of around 20,000 during the 1930s, it was estimated that 60,000 visitors were in the town on August Bank Holiday 1935. (12) This was scant solace for the residents. Even the local fishing industry was in decline during this period.

Post 1945, the Corporation moved decisively in an attempt to alleviate the town’s two perennial problems, ‘winter unemployment’ and ‘lack of good housing’. To the south-west of the town a small industrial estate – for light industry – was built, and by the end of the decade, further industrial development would take place at Carnaby, on a former RAF airfield just to the south of the town. Yet in 1951, the town still had 13 per cent of males and 45 per cent of females employed in personal services compared to 4.5 and 20 per cent nationally. (13)

Attracting new industry to a seaside town often proved difficult. The possibility of a tannery – classified as a special industry – being established on the industrial estate was one such example. Deemed that it would have an adverse effect on the town’s major industry, leisure, the County Planning Officer remarked: (14)

A large proportion of the holidaymakers that come to Bridlington are desirous of leaving behind them such things as ‘special industries’ and would cease to come. If such were the case we might be left with a prosperous industrial estate but a decadent health resort.

There was after all, the title of ‘King of watering places’ to take into consideration.

With almost 1300 families requiring rehousing, the council compulsory purchased 86 acres of the Bessingby Estate. The award-winning West Hill estate designed by Clifford E. Culpin, welcomed its first tenants in 1949. (15) Close to 800 homes would eventually be built on the West Hill site; almost two thirds of the council’s post-war provision.

Proposed West Hill Estate site (EAW013984) © Britain from Above

As the council worked its way through its rehousing programme dark clouds were gathering. The well-established holidaying habits of the town’s loyal seasonal clientele were changing. Coach and rail travel still dominated through the 1950s, but when the axe fell on branch lines in the mid-1960s, Bridlington lost its direct link to both South and West Yorkshire. The motor car gave families the flexibility and freedom to choose alternative destinations. For some, sun, sand, and sangria beckoned.

By 1972 the council had completed its housing provision. Just over 1800 homes had been built by the local authority since 1913. But as with the demise of the Old Town 100 years earlier, Bridlington, yet again, had to re-evaluate its future. Local government re-organisations would come and go, borough status would be lost, and absorption into the area of the East Riding of Yorkshire Council would take place.

Today, many visitors are day trippers, others are owners of mobile homes or static caravans. The ubiquitous guest house still prevails, and the town continually seeks to find new ways to promote itself. Just as the words of a certain James Coates had 200 years earlier. (16)

Peers, knights, and squires, and dames repair
To bathe, and drink, and take the air.
Such situation on the coast,
Such air, such water, none can boast.

References

(1) Bridlington Local Studies Library, Annals 55

(2) Seafront regeneration briefing document, East Riding Archives, BOBR/2/15/4/518

(3) D. Neave, Port, Resort and Market Town: A history of Bridlington (Hull Academic Press, 2000

(4) Hull Daily Mail, 26 April 1933

(5) Hull Daily Mail, 16 February 1927

(6) Annals55

(7) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An introduction to its History and Buildings (Smith Settle Ltd., 2000)

(8) Hull Daily Mail, 10 May 1932

(9.) Hull Daily Mail, 18 March 1931

(10) Hull Daily Mail, 16 May 1938

(11) Neave, Port Resort

(12) Neave, Bridlington

(13) K. L. Mayoh, Comparative study of the Resorts on the Coast of Holderness. unpublished M.A., University of Hull, 1961.

(14) Hull Daily Mail, 1 March 1950

(15) Neave, Bridlington

(16) J. Coates, Bridlington Quay, 1813.

Bright, Breezy, Bracing Bridlington: Part 1

28 Tuesday Jun 2022

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Guest Post, Housing, Seaside Municipalism, Yorkshire

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Bridlington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two new guest posts from Peter Claxton recounting Bridlington Borough Council’s significant council housing programme and its vigorous efforts to promote the town as a seaside resort. (Peter has contributed earlier posts on the history of council housing in Cottingham.) He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century with particular emphasis on public health and housing.

Bridlington in winter is a silent place, where cats and landladies’ husbands walk gently down the middle of the street.

T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – in his observations on 1930s ‘out of season’ Bridlington, highlighted a problem that beset – and still does to this day – many of our seaside resorts, the lack of year-round employment. (1) Twenty years earlier when the borough council first contemplated the provision of housing, the Medical Officer of Health laid bare the problem to be faced: (2)

The Corporation will have to be very careful in tackling this question in the future. As Bridlington is a seaside resort the majority of the working classes do not desire workmen’s houses but larger ones, so that their income may be largely increased by taking in visitors.

The task was further complicated by the fact that Bridlington was a town divided, as the old Local Board had noted: (3)

The Old Town is mostly residential and takes the bulk of the labouring classes, whilst The Quay is chiefly occupied by lodging houses and private residences.

Bridlington 1849-50, National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

The arrival of the railway in 1846 came to represent more than just a delineation on a map, it influenced the fortunes of each part of the town. Bridlington Quay was no longer a ‘harbour of refuge’ for the coastal trade or the port through which much of the East Riding’s agricultural produce – predominantly malt – was shipped. And as a result, the Old Town to the north-west slipped into an interminable decline. Within a decade of the railway’s arrival the 600-year-old market was in a state of atrophy. The residences and offices of solicitors, bankers and merchants, intrinsic elements of a former vibrant agrarian economy, were by the end of the nineteenth century, but marcescent reminders of its former standing as a market town. Attestation to the area’s demise was further evidenced by a plethora of insanitary working-class dwellings.

Conversely , as a late nineteenth-century trade directory noted: (4)

Bridlington Quay a mean and insignificant village at the commencement of the present century, [is] now a small but handsome town and seaside resort, with all the comforts and conveniences which [a] luxurious age demands …

The Alexandra Hotel (built 1866), North Bay, 1928 (EPW023341) ©Britain from Above

The Quay, to the south-east of the railway, was the new face of Bridlington, offering entertainment for those that came ‘for the day’ or ‘stayed a week.’ It was, ‘the seaside resort nearest to most of the great centres of population of the West Riding.’ (5) It also attracted the commuter and by 1921, more than 2,800 Bridlington residents worked in Hull or the West Riding, with many residing in villa style houses that populated the new roads close to the seafront. (6)

As such, the work of the district council – declared a borough in 1899 – differed at each side of the railway, and by the outbreak of war in 1914, it had erected new housing in the Old Town, and at The Quay, entered the world of entertainment and leisure.

Poster c1913, © Science Museum made available under a Creative Commons licence

Following a visit to Joseph Rowntree’s model village of New Earswick in 1913, it was suggested at a council meeting that: (7)

Rowntree’s cottages in York, they were no doubt excellent in many ways but they could not be erected by the council at anything like the price … Garden Cities – they were not always suitable or satisfactory or cheap.

Words that clearly identified the problems to be faced by the borough council. There was no local benefactor ready to fund provision; agricultural wages were depressed, and other forms of employment predominantly seasonal. These issues would be reflected in the design and size of properties erected. Maximum weekly rents were to be in the region of five shillings (25p) per week, in fact the council hoped that smaller properties might be let at less than four shillings (20p).

Also, there were members on the council associated with the building trade, evidently nervous of the possibility of stepping away from traditional methods of construction. Letchworth was cited as an example, where as well as standard brick construction, alternative build techniques had been introduced. It was noted that ‘many were becoming cracked and [were] generally too-well ventilated.’ (8)

By 1914, the council had built 35 terraced houses – with ten allocated to employees working at the town’s power station – and twelve bungalows. Yet it suffered criticism regarding rents and in particular, the bijou nature of the bungalows for ‘old couples and widows.’ At 300 foot super the three-roomed dwellings were exceedingly small. As a councillor insensitively questioned, ‘How on earth was a fat woman to turn in a scullery such as was proposed …’ (9)

With the town’s sleeping population often quadrupling during the summer months, the sub-letting of rooms became an imperative for many families. (10) The council signalled acceptance of the practice confirming: (11)

[It] had no objection to the taking in of visitors. If they could make a little money that way it would help to pay their rents.

This was a perennial problem for both council and tenants. The council saw the wisdom in building smaller houses, thereby reducing the risk of unpaid rents during the winter months. Tenants were keen on larger properties to augment their income during the summer.

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Ashville Street – council employee housing

Portland Place – council employee housing

Indeed, there were opportunities galore for those with spare room to let. The privately built New Spa south of the harbour attracted 80,000 visitors within a month of opening in 1896. (12)

© East Riding Archives – made available under a Creative Commons licence

The council responded to the lack of amenities on the North Shore in 1904, erecting a glass and iron Floral Pavilion adjacent to the bandstand on the Royal Princes Parade.

The Floral Pavilion and Bandstand – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Two years later it built the Grand Pavilion at the north end of the Royal Princes Parade. With a seating capacity for 2000, it was in the popular ‘oriental end of pier’ style favoured at many seaside resorts.

The Grand Pavilion – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Everything of course changed in August 1914. A provincial weekly publication summed up the town’s plight perfectly: (13)

But the place had a strangely deserted appearance, where it was usual to see thousands, there were only hundreds. You may write to half-a-dozen boarding houses, and find that any one of them can spare you a room or rooms…

The town’s Medical Officer of Health’s comments were far more revealing: (14)

Owing to the outbreak of war in August the season proved a failure, … there is no doubt that many spinsters and widows, who rely upon their income and livelihood to come from visitors, are on the verge of starvation.

In 1919, the council’s intentions were made clear when it purchased the 1907 Spa Theatre and Opera House, as well as the original 1896 Spa. The future of the town and its residents, rested with the development and promotion of the resort.

North-west of the railway, municipal attention turned once more to the town’s permanent residents. But the vagaries of employment in both agriculture and leisure remained. The local Master Builders’ Association continued its crusade for larger properties: (15)

What is needed in a seaside resort is a house of a rather larger type, with sufficient accommodation to enable tenants to augment their income by taking visitors during the season.

The council’s vision of the way forward, was however, diametrically opposed to that of local builders. There were to be no lavish plans for an inordinate number of large council houses each with spare rooms to rent out. A perceptible change in the ‘holidaying habits’ of those that came to stay for a week had been noted. Visitors were starting to choose, ‘… camp sites for cheaper holidays free from the irksome rules of boarding houses.’ (16) The age of the tent, converted railway carriages or buses, ex-army huts or wooden bungalows had arrived. (17).

A photograph taken by R. Hartley in the 1930s

In tandem with private provision, house building gradually brought the two parts of the town together. Following a modest build of twelve houses in 1921 on the aptly named Borough Road, construction of the Postill estate began two years later. By the middle of the decade the council had erected approximately 200 properties.

Sadly, an attempt to promote home ownership during the 1920s failed to gain traction. A proposed ‘purchase out of rent’ scheme attracted a mere six inquiries and was swiftly shelved by the council. (18) At the same time, a briefing document regarding the regeneration of the seafront reiterated: (19)

Apart from the fishing industry there are no established industries in the Borough which is purely a health and pleasure resort for the large industrial populations …

The document informed that visitor numbers arriving by train ‘during the season’ had risen from 216,000 in 1922, to 320,000 by 1925, (20) and the town had to move with the times. Visitors were now seeking, ‘… music and entertainments as evidenced by the popular craze for dancing.’ (21) It would take a substantial amount of money, approximately £100,000, and the council was convinced that this was the way forward.

Disappointingly, no matter how busy the seafront was during the summer, it could never sustain the whole town through the winter months. But, as we shall see in a follow-up blog, efforts to increase year-round employment proved contentious. And when ambitious plans for the regeneration of the seafront failed to come to fruition, a subsequent appointment by the council proved fortuitous.

References

(1) R. Knowles and P. Clabburn, Cats and Landladies’ Husbands: T.E. Lawrence in Bridlington (The Fleece Press, 1995)

(2) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1911, wellcomecollection.org

(3) District of Bridlington Local Board & Urban Sanitary Authority Report for 1893, wellcomecollection.org

(4) T. Bulmer & Cos., Directory of East Yorkshire, 1892

(5) D. Neave, Port, Resort and Market Town: A History of Bridlington (Hull Academic Press, 2000)

(6) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction to its History and Buildings (Smith Settle Ltd., 2000)

(7) ‘The Housing Problem’, Bridlington Free Press, 31 January 1913

(8) ibid

(9) ‘12 Cottages to be built’, BFP, 20 March 1913

(10) Neave, Port Resort

(11) ’Visitors and Workmen’s Houses’, BFP, 26 September 1913

(12) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An introduction

(13) ibid

(14) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1914

(15) ‘Boarding-Houses Preferred’, BFP, 1 March 1920

(16) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction

(17) ibid

(18) ‘Purchase out of rent scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 28 April 1927

19. Seafront regeneration briefing document, East Riding Archives, BOBR/2/15/4/518

(20) ibid

(21) ibid

Workers’ Democracy in Building Greenwich Borough’s Homes Fit for Heroes, 1920–23

22 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Guest Post, Housing, London

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

1920s, Greenwich

I’m very pleased to feature this new guest post by Michael Passmore. Michael is a historian specialising in housing and town planning after a career in estate management. In 2015, King’s College London awarded Michael a PhD for a thesis on the politics of council housing between 1971 and 1983. Since 2015 Michael has been affiliated to University of Greenwich, first as a visiting lecturer and currently as a visiting fellow. He engaged in organising with Professor Mark Swenarton and others the successful 2019 Homes Fit for Heroes Centenary Conference at the Institute of Historical Research, London University.

Charlton in South–East London is known for its fine Jacobean mansion, Charlton House, and for The Valley football ground where Charlton Athletic first played in 1919. A less well-known part of the district’s heritage is the Guild Estate, part of Greenwich Council’s contribution to the Lloyd George government’s Homes Fit for Heroes campaign. It forms a section of Charlton Estate comprising some 440 cottage-style semi-detached and terraced houses.

An observant visitor to Charlton might notice a pointer to the significance of this 1920s estate from an ornate plaque (or tablet) on the front wall of a pair of semis at the eastern end of The Village. It records the names of some dignitaries of Greenwich Metropolitan Borough and others involved in developing the first phase of the estate during 1919–21.

The name of the construction company inscribed is ‘Guild of Builders (London) Limited.’ This was one of several building guilds, set up as part of a short-lived movement following the First World War. My research reveals that the homes in Charlton are the only ones that a guild erected in the former County of London, although the London Guild also built Higham Hill Estatefor Walthamstow Urban District Council just over the county border.

Initially, the proponents of the guilds had lofty expectations. During 1920, G.D.H. Cole, the Oxford academic and leading theorist of the guild socialist movement, saw the London branch in action and welcomed the contribution its members were making. He had hopes that “The guild system would develop into as great a movement as the co–operative movement.”

Guild of Builders

The guilds were created at a time of unrest among working people that had been fomenting since the First World War especially over poor working conditions and squalid housing. There were dreams of replacing private enterprise with a new form of business organisation through workers’ control. In April 1920, Richard Coppock, a young trade union official in Manchester, set up a national building guild with Samuel (S.G.) Hobson, a political idealist, who was one of the people involved in founding Letchworth Garden City. (Coppock later became Chairman of London County Council.) The guild was an alliance of several independent unions representing building workers and known as the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives (NFBTO). Hobson became General Secretary of the national guild.

The guild aimed to make decisions democratically, to improve the status of building workers and to achieve high standards by reviving artisanship in the industry. Echoing ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, the guild aspired to do work worthy of the Middle Ages. Workers formed self-governing branches including the one in the London area, although most were in the north of England. Unlike the prevailing practice on building sites, the guilds aimed to continue paying worker–members when bad weather prevented activity as well as during holidays and sickness. Many labourers and skilled workers responded enthusiastically to an opportunity to participate in the new venture.

The housing campaign associated with Health Minister Christopher Addison’s Act of 1919 generated plenty of building work and so presented an opportunity for newly formed building guilds to participate where local councils were prepared to engage them. Addison initially encouraged their involvement because private contractors showed little interest in building council housing.

The London Guild of Builders was set up on the lines of a model constitution recommended by the National Guild with Malcolm Sparkes as secretary. He was a Quaker who at one time ran his own building firm.

Political control changes in Greenwich Town Hall

Before municipal elections took place in November 1919, the Conservatives, who operated in London local government as the Municipal Reform Party, had controlled Greenwich Council for two decades. As in several London boroughs and to the surprise of many, the Labour Party became the majority party on Greenwich Council in 1919. If it had not done so, the inexperienced London Guild might not have succeeded in building the council’s first housing project. A close relationship quickly developed between the new council and the guild when it came onto the scene. Nevertheless, councillors across the political divide adopted a bipartisan approach over participating in the government’s Homes Fit for Heroes campaign.

The newly elected council decided to retain the experienced mayor, solicitor Sir Charles Stone, not least because there was no financial allowance at a time when most Labour councillors were in full-time employment. By the following year, when a stipend was available for the office of mayor, the council appointed a leading Labour member – Benjamin Lemmon, a marine engineer and energetic trades unionist.

Work starts on the scheme

By the time that the Labour leadership took on its responsibilities, the council had identified forty acres of greenfield land of irregular shape. Only a small part was in its ownership and most of the site was being acquired from Sir Spencer Maryon-Wilson whose family had owned Charlton House and much of the area for centuries. The development land skirted three sides of a 30-acre wood that Maryon-Wilson was in the process of donating to London County Council for use as a public park. This helped make the housing site attractive because Christopher Addison advised local authorities to build estates near open space so that tenants would have easy access for recreation.

In 1925, Greenwich Council was to acquire Charlton House from Maryon-Wilson with its 40-acre park opposite the new estate, thus adding to the local amenities.

During its first six months, the new council made substantial progress with the housing scheme. Having obtained Whitehall’s approval to the site, the council appointed a Greenwich-based architect, Alfred Roberts, to draw up an estate layout (with the borough engineer) and design the houses. Roberts and the council settled on four building types ranging between two and four bedrooms and all were to have bathrooms.

Planned estate layout (left) and final street plan

On 10^th July 1920, a customary ‘cutting the first sod’ ceremony took place to mark the start of construction works. Alderman Lemmon, who chaired the event, explained to the gathering that the Housing Ministry had approved plans for the scheme and that the necessary funds were available. He blamed the nation’s housing problem for much of the prevailing industrial unrest. Lemmon was delighted that the woodland next to the new homes was to become available for public use.

Meanwhile, a firm of private contractors began work on an initial phase of eighteen houses on a strip of land detached from the main site and fronting onto Kinveachy Gardens, an established residential road. The recently formed London Guild lobbied the council for the job but missed the date for submitting a tender price. They made sure that they met the conditions for the main contract.

As the London Guild submitted the lowest tender for building 164 houses on the main site, the council quickly settled the contract details with them. Most of the new homes were to have three bedrooms.

Included in the contract were another 26 homes on a strip of land to the west of Charlton Village that was to become Mascalls Road. The council agreed to pay for the work in stages as building progressed. This enabled the guild to raise the working capital needed for its operation from the Co-operative Bank that served trade unions. As Whitehall officials were slow in approving the terms of the contract, it was not until late 1920 that they gave Greenwich the go-ahead to start work. By this time there was a waiting list of workers wanting to join the guild and within a few months, a local newspaper reported that there were 300 on site.

Design of the homes

The authors of the South London volume of the popular Pevsner Architectural Guides recommend their readers to look at the estate to see what they describe as the ‘straightforward pantiled and roughcast cottage housing.’ This entry captures the more attractive features of the homes although in recent years alterations to many of the exteriors are out of character with the original designs.

When preparing the drawings for the new Greenwich homes, Alfred Roberts followed the official housing design manual issued to local authorities. This publication was in line with the report Sir Raymond Unwin edited on the Tudor Walters Committee, which the government set up in 1916 to improve the standard of working-class housing. The manual included plans of several types of model home but allowed for variations to suit local conditions.

Roberts would have been aware of the picturesque estate at nearby Well Hall, Eltham, designed during the war by Sir Frank Baines of H.M. Office of Works. However, the manual made it clear that designers should avoid the expense of unnecessary ornamentation, although the Health Ministry did not object to Roberts including the Arts and Crafts motif of a rising sun in brickwork on some semis. Again, to reduce costs, Unwin urged councils to use standardised building components where possible, so Roberts specified precast door hoods and steel casement windows. The council wanted the latter to be in wood, but the ministry ruled out this traditional material as it was slightly more expensive. There was variation in the roof coverings as the architect substituted slates when tiles were unavailable.

Grand opening

The event to celebrate completion of the first homes took place on Saturday 2^nd July 1921. In readiness for the occasion, two departmental stores – the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society and Cuffs of Woolwich – each furnished a new home to show what tenants could buy. These show houses remained open to the public for several days as there was keen interest from local people.

At the crowded ceremony, the previous mayor Sir Charles Stone and others praised the high quality of the building work. Mayor Lemmon declared that he identified with others living in squalid conditions by revealing that he and his wife, belonged to the great mass of people who were cooped up in small rooms in bad surroundings’. He referred to a government announcement that they were halting the house-building programme when he criticised them for not doing enough to support the council in tackling the housing shortage.

Secretary of the London Guild, Malcolm Sparkes, proclaimed that the guilds were a new industrial system whose growth had only reached the stage of a year-old infant. Unfortunately, at the time of the formal opening, the national economic climate was deteriorating.

Events turn against the guilds

Alfred Mond, who replaced the progressive Addison as Health Minister, had earlier favoured the guilds, but now changed the way housing schemes were financed to the detriment of the guilds. Private contractors were putting pressure on the government by complaining that it favoured guilds unfairly.

In Greenwich, the London Guild put in a tender to build the next phase of the estate known as the Pound Park section, but private contractors undercut the pricing. The housing committee still preferred the guild because of its proven reliability, but ministry officials persuaded them to accept the tender from a Birmingham firm.

For a while, the National Guild and local branches merged, but by the end of 1922 the movement was failing financially. The Cooperative Bank was not prepared to make further loans without collateral that was beyond the organisation’s capacity. It signalled the end of the experiment and, sadly, the winding up of Guild of Builders (London) Ltd. took place in 1924. So, the growth of the industrial system that Malcolm Sparkes envisioned never reached maturity. Nevertheless, the London Guild completed its section of the Charlton Estate satisfactorily, leaving a legacy of well-built homes for future generations.

Suggested Reading

Geoffrey Ostergaard (ed. Brian Bamford), The Tradition of Workers’ Control (London: 1997)

Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: 2001)

Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes (London: 1981/2018)

Council Housing in Llandudno: Part I, to 1939

31 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Guest Post, Housing, Wales

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Llandudno, Pre-1914

My apologies for the lack of recent posts – I’m busy writing a second book. The blog will continue to be updated and, in the meantime, I’m very grateful for (and continue to welcome) guest contributions such as this. Matthew Evans, the principal author, works in communications within local government and has been assisted in research and writing by his father, Philip Evans, who has been a councillor on Aberconwy Borough and subsequently Conwy County Borough councils since 1976 and was twice Mayor of Llandudno, in 1983/4 and 2006/7. Many of the details of council minutes, personal details and recollections in this piece come from him. Most photographs (unless otherwise credited) have been kindly taken by the author’s sister, Kimberley Evans.

The context of Llandudno

Llandudno is today a popular resort town of 20,000 or so residents, known for its unique setting between the headlands of the Great and Little Ormes and its wealth of Victorian architecture. It is situated halfway along the coast of North Wales and lies around 45 minutes from Chester and under an hour and a half from the major cities of the North West of England; cities on which its economy has largely depended for 150 years.

It was the growth spurred by the Industrial Revolution and the income that generated – enabling people to enjoy leisure time and vacations – that led to the founding of the modern town in what had up until then been a small copper mining and farming village on the lower slopes of the Great Orme. This small village overlooked marginal grazing land on the isthmus separating the mountain from the mainland and which included the legendary marsh of Morfa Rhianedd. This marsh famously features in the ancient Welsh poem, The Tale of Taliesin, as the place from where the poet prophesied that a ‘monster’ would rise and ‘bring destruction on Maelgwyn Gwynedd’, the ancient King of Gwynedd. This marsh, now drained, is where much of modern-day Llandudno – and its council housing – is located.

The land around Llandudno had been owned by the Mostyn family of Mostyn Hall in Flintshire since around 1460, when Hywel ab Ieuan Fychan had married Margaret ferch Gruffydd, the heiress of the Gloddaeth estate, which lies about a mile outside the present town. Following this, the land around Llandudno lay largely undisturbed as an obscure and remote part of the Mostyn lands for hundreds of years. Only a few writers remarked on the place, most notably the travel writer Thomas Pennant, who in his ‘Tour in Wales’ of 1778 commented on the ‘beautiful half-moon bay of Llandudno’.

All this changed in 1848 when a Liverpool Surveyor, Owen Williams, stranded in Llandudno during a storm, saw the potential of the landscape and setting for a new resort for the newly wealthy middle classes. He shared his ideas with Lord Mostyn, who leapt at the idea, and the two set about building a planned model resort, and obtained the necessary Act of Parliament to start. Within 50 years, and greatly accelerated by the arrival of the railway in 1858, central Llandudno had become essentially the town we see today, with wide, well-planned streets incorporating all the architectural styles of the latter half of the 19^th century. The original plan called for a formal grid of streets, where the height of any building was not allowed to exceed the width of the street. Perhaps mindful of the poor living conditions of the big cities, no court or basement dwellings were permitted and the plan stipulated that ‘the town that is to be shall resemble, as far as practicable, the country’.

Llandudno Town Hall, designed for the Urban District Council by Silcock & Reay and opened in 1902 © John Boughton

All of these measures created an attractive, fashionable town that had many of the grandest hotels, shops and entertainment venues that the Victorian and Edwardian holidaymaker could find anywhere in the UK. But all of these pleasures depended on having a large working population close at hand to work in the hotel and hospitality industries. It was this need, both to ensure a large pool of labour, but also to house them in a way that befitted the town – and was in accordance with the rules of development – that led the local authorities in Llandudno to create the earliest social housing in Wales. A provision of housing for local need that has endured to the present day.

The first council houses

Llandudno can lay claim to having built the first council homes anywhere in Wales. The first 19 ‘workmen’s dwellings’ were built in Council Street, Llandudno in 1897 at a cost of £210 each.

The Minutes of Llandudno Urban District Council (UDC) give the background to the development and how events progressed, and they give an idea of the process involved in building council housing at this time. At a meeting of the Council held on June 17, 1896, the Minutes notes that members ‘Resolved that Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 be, and is hereby, adopted within the Urban District of Llandudno.’

The Local Government Board then held an enquiry in June 1896 to consider the Council’s request for approval to borrow money for the building of the homes. Construction was started in September 1896 and the Local Government Board queried why work had commenced prior to the loan sanction having been applied for. They required a fresh resolution to apply for the loan sanction.

This further resolution read: ‘That application be made to the Local Government Board for sanction to borrow £4357 for the purpose of carrying into effect Part 3 of the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1893 (sic) by the erection of 19 cottages in accordance with the plan and estimates prepared by the Surveyor and approved by the Council.’

In November 1896 the sanction was approved and the contractor was a Mr Hassell.

The scheme was not without its controversies however. The Minutes of the Workmen’s Dwelling Committee of February 22, 1897 record the Surveyor, E. Paley Stephenson, reporting on a series of accusations in the chamber from a Councillor John Owen, relating to the houses. The report states that Councillor Owen had clearly gone public on his criticisms and these comments were also printed in the Llandudno Directory and caused some outrage. The report and minutes note his concerns (all wording and punctuation as original):

They were as follows:-

That the fire-places were of common bricks.
That the floors were not concreted.
That the beam filling in party walls and eaves was not done.
That the roof is not water-tight, and that snow and rain would get through.
That the doors were ‘made in Canada.’
That the windows were bad and appeared as if ‘coming from the Transvaal.‘

The surveyor rejected or explained all these issues and noted there was ‘no liability on the contractor to get them [the doors] made in Llandudno, and they are good’. He seemed confused by the reference to windows from the Transvaal, observing: ‘though I do not know where they were made [they] are of fair workmanship’.

The Committee then paid a visit to see the claims for themselves and the next Committee Meeting of February 27 notes:

After a minute examination of the houses the Committee came to the conclusion they could not endorse the statements made by Mr. Councillor Owen, at the last meeting of the Council. On the contrary, they are of the opinion that the erections and workmanship contrasted very favourably with other property in Llandudno. Although inspected on a stormy day, after 12 hours almost incessant rain, the houses shewed no sign of rain having penetrated.

After this firm rejection of Councillor Owen’s criticisms, the Committee’s only other resolution that day was: ‘That the Council, as an experiment, be recommended to fit up ten of the dwellings with penny in the slot gas meters.’

View of Council Street, now Norman Road. Though appearing modern the structures are original, but have been extensively re-rendered twice © John Boughton

These first council properties were refurbished and converted into warden-controlled flats in the late 1970s. This involved re-rendering and each dwelling was converted into two flats, one accessed from the original front door of each property and the upper flat being accessed from the back, up a stairway. At that time the street was re-named Norman Road. The former name had become unpopular as the houses had declined over time and the houses on one side of the road had never, in fact, been council properties. However, the former name lives on in the western extension of the road, which is a light industrial area called Council Street West.

Despite the criticisms of the likes of Councillor Owen and the press reports of debates on the council, the Council Street scheme was just the start of social housing building as Llandudno looked towards the Edwardian era. On October 28, 1896, the Workmen’s Dwellings Committee dealt with negotiations to buy land for further housing from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Terms were subsequently offered by the Commission and accepted by the UDC to buy land for 69 cottages at a total cost of £13,661. This was a scheme in Alexandra Road, West Shore, but this part of the street was subsequently renamed as part of King’s Road.

The part of King’s Road constructed as an extension to Alexandra Road in 1897, 1900 and 1902

On January 28, 1897, the Workmen’s Dwellings Committee notes a Surveyor was authorised to arrange for a memorial stone with the following wording to be fixed in a convenient part of the building: ‘Workmen’s Dwellings erected by the Urban District Council of Llandudno 1897’

In May 1900, the Surveyor put forward a further scheme for erection of 28 houses and in April 1902 tenders were presented for a further 28 houses in Alexandra Road.

Homes Fit for Heroes

The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, commonly known as the Addison Act after the Minister of Housing Christopher Addison, laid the foundation for the large rise in council housing the country saw after the First World War. This was part of the call for ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ made by Prime Minister David Lloyd George towards the end of the war. Llandudno Urban District Council moved quickly into action and decided to build further houses in West Shore. Llandudno was perhaps further spurred into action by the fact that David Lloyd George was the local MP for Caernarfon Boroughs (of which Llandudno was part). The first section of King’s Road was completed in 1920, with a commemorative stone laid on 8th October 1920 by Dame Margaret Lloyd George, wife of the Prime Minister; and Mrs E. R. Woodhouse, wife of the Chairman of Llandudno UDC.

The foundation stones of the houses built in 1920 laid by Dame Margaret Lloyd George and the wife of the Chairman of the UDC

The building of new council housing continued throughout the 1920s and 30s mainly in the West Shore area, in Maesdu (where the majority of council housing would take place after the war) and up the Great Orme itself. Rather than large estates, council developments at this time were mainly one or two roads in size, such as the adjoining Lees Road and Knowles Road. These streets were named after the Conservative politician, philanthropist and supporter of social housing and the Guinness Trust, Sir Lees Knowles, who died in 1928. In 1926 and 1934 Marian Road and Marian Place were built alongside the railway line around the same time that the UDC constructed its new bridge over the tracks linking Deganwy and Llandudno and replacing the level crossing that had hampered communications in the peak holiday season when Llandudno could see over 100 hundred trains a day passing in and out. The bridge also gave its name to the Bridge Road estate built around the same time. In 1934 Cwm Place was built, a development that would later be surrounded by the Tre Creuddyn estate, but which when built was somewhat isolated from the urban area of the town. The full list of developments at this time – always referred to as ‘workmen’s dwellings’ in the council minutes – shows the almost continuous building activity that took place:

1920 King’s Road
1922/23 Dyffryn Road
1923 Mowbray Road
1924 Knowles Road & Trinity Avenue
1925 Knowles Road
1925 Marian Road
1926 Maesdu Road & Maesdu Place
1927 Lees Road, King’s Avenue, King’s Place
1929 Bridge Road
1930 Ty’n y Coed
1933 Llwynon Road
1934 Cwm Place 33 houses and 3 flats
1935 Cwm Place 16 houses and 16 flats
1934 Marian Place
1935 Maesdu Road

The architecture of this housing evolved over the interwar years. Given the difficult economic context of the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the housing of 1920 in King’s Road housing is plain and simple, semi-detached houses with flat fronted and pebbledash render. By the middle of the 1920s, as can be seen in the following images, the houses became larger. The author’s grandmother, known to all her 13 grandchildren by her surname as ‘Nanna Breeze’, lived in a typical 1923 house of this type in Mowbray Road, indicated in the picture, from around 1970, until her death in 2006.

Houses in Mowbray Road, built in 1923, much of the interwar housing was of this type and standard – the author’s grandmother lived in the house left centre of the picture.

This house had a bay window with a recessed entrance porch, substantial lawned gardens front and back, three bedrooms, inside toilet and separate bathroom, kitchen, large hall with a staircase with 90-degree return, and a front parlour and separate back living room. I recall, even in the late 1980s when I was a child, the front room overlooking the road was reserved for special visitors and completely out of bounds for us children, even though visitors of sufficient quality for entry were few and far between. The back room, where all family life was conducted, faced south and used to become unbearably hot during the summer when, with our parents at work, my sister and I had to go and spend most days in the school holidays with our grandmother.

This picture shows my grandmother Sybil Breeze sitting in the Chairman’s Chair in the Llandudno Council Chamber when my dad was made a Freeman of the Town of Llandudno in the early 2000s. From this seat many of the decisions to build council housing in the town would have been taken.

She was a cleaner in a seafront hotel by that point (well over 70 years of age), but the management allowed my sister and I to sit and play in the guest lounge while she completed her morning cleaning shift. In the afternoons, back at her house, she would naturally have a nap and I would then often sneak quietly into the cool, north-facing front room – unknown to her and in total contravention of the visitors-only rule – to escape the stifling heat in the back room. Sorry Nanna!

A further style of house in Mowbray Road with front door at the side

Such was the quality of this housing that my Nanna recalled having been told by several residents that the houses had been built by a private developer that had gone bankrupt and had to sell his privately built houses to the council for social housing. This was a myth, however, as the Council minutes are clear that this high-quality housing was all planned and built by the UDC itself for working people.

Houses in Knowles Road showing the 1920s houses in the background compared to infill council housing from the 1960s in the foreground

All of this shows that by the eve of the Second World War, Llandudno had made great strides in rehousing substantial numbers of people within good quality housing, with genuine commitment and a pioneering attitude from local councillors and officers. After the Second World War, the inevitable pressures of housing need and changing styles would mean that housing was less substantial and generous in style than before the war. The continuing story will be told in next weeks post.

You can find Matthew Evans on Twitter @MattEvans170

A Housing History of Barrow-in-Furness, part II from 1918: ‘Ours must be a slumless city’

12 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing

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Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

We left Barrow last week just as its first public housing was under construction. These were homes – though not all justified the term – built by the Ministry of Munitions to house Barrow’s huge armaments workforce just as, it turned out, the First World War was drawing to its bloody conclusion. In 1917, the town’s Medical Officer of Health (echoing the Council’s official line), had argued that ‘the only solution for gross overcrowding is a scheme for the provision of houses carried out by the Ministry of Munitions’. By April 1918, the Council’s Health Committee had concluded that ‘it is the duty of local authorities to carry through a programme of housing for the working classes’. Much had changed and this post will deal largely with the council housebuilding programme that ensued, albeit in faltering fashion. (1)

Firstly, however, there was the problem of the two Ministry of Munitions schemes launched in October 1917. The Roosegate development of semi-permanent housing was built by the Ministry itself; 200 bungalows (of the 500 originally projected) were completed in 1918 – to almost universal obloquy. As one Barrow resident recalled, ‘they were one-roomed and two-roomed houses. It was just simply a box with a lid on’. Locals called the scheme ‘China Town’. In June 1920, the Health Committee warned of the ‘intolerable condition’ of its streets; by March the next year, the Committee described the housing as a ‘a threat to the health of residents’. Its closure was announced in July 1925. (2)

The second Ministry scheme at Abbotsmead comprised permanent housing, built by the Council under Ministry contract to designs provided by the latter. The estate’s layout was better though the houses themselves were criticised for their small rooms and poor build quality. A bigger problem was the proposed rent levels, initially set at an exorbitant 17s a week (85p) by the Ministry with the Council considering even reduced rents of 10-12s (50-60p) too high. The scheme was abandoned by war’s end with around half of the proposed 500 houses completed. Hopes that the Council might purchase the homes in peacetime were thwarted by cost; most by the mid-1920s had been sold to sitting tenants.

Despite acknowledging in March 1919 that ‘the provision of housing [was] one of its most pressing needs’ and despite the combination of generosity and compulsion offered by the 1919 Housing Act, the Council was slow to respond. However, belatedly in April 1920, it agreed proposals to build in 113 homes on Devonshire Road and 44 on Walney Island. Both schemes were largely completed in 1921.

Local as well as national politics had shifted. Labour gained its first majority on the Council in 1920 and would govern again between 1928 and 1931 and 1934 to 1938. An average turnout of 69 percent through the interwar period, peaking at 81 percent in 1925, shows how fiercely contested these municipal elections were. (3)

However, through much of this period, economics loomed larger than politics. With military orders withdrawn and facing unprecedentedly harsh international trading conditions, Barrow’s traditional industrial mainstays were decimated. By 1922, 60 percent of its shipbuilding workforce and half of its engineering workers were unemployed – 44 percent of its insured workforce overall. Vickers’ workforce fell from 23,000 in July 1918 to a low point of just over 3700 in 1923. Wage cuts forced a bitter engineering strike in the town in May 1922.

The new housing crisis was manifest in rent arrears and evictions, the latter sometimes fiercely contested as when 20 police officers were sent with bailiffs to enforce evictions in Vickerstown (where 800 tenants had been laid off and rent arrears approached £7000) in February 1922. In the 1920s, the Council’s preoccupation lay with collecting rents – reduced in 1924 from the already low levels of 7s 6s to 5s (37½ to 25p) weekly – rather than building anew.

A second major slump hit Barrow with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 when at peak in 1931 some 7500 of the locally insured workforce was jobless. There was little female employment in the town to offset mass male unemployment. Rearmament in the later 1930s would restore the town’s fortunes whilst other of its former large employers in railway and locomotive building and metal founding closed permanently.

Flats on Thrums Street, Roosegate Estate

The Labour-controlled Council was able to commence one small building scheme in 1931 on land purchased from the Ministry of Munitions’ failed Roosegate development: 56 flats for elderly people on Thrums Street, followed by an adjacent scheme of 116 semi-detached houses finally completed in 1948.

The national shift towards slum clearance signified by the 1930 Housing Act and, in Barrow’s case more particularly, the 1935 Housing Act provided greater scope for the Council. Some 6384 homes were inspected under the surveys required by the latter legislation and just over half found ‘not in all respects fit for human habitation’ between 1935 and 1937. Applying overcrowding criteria, 887 homes accommodating 5475 persons were found overcrowded in 1937, equating to 6 percent of the town’s housing stock. Twenty-seven clearance areas were declared.

Barrow also suffered unusually from what might be kindly called ‘informal housing’ – shacks and tents predominantly on Walney Island’s western shore. Some of these were occupied by young people evading the household income provisions of the means test and the Council proceeded cautiously but 28 huts at Biggar Bank on Walney Island were cleared by 1939.

The biggest scalp, however, were the Scotch Flats in Hindpool discussed in last week’s post – tenement buildings dating to 1871 which were among the first of Barrow’s company housing. After two public enquiries, the Ministry of Health agreed the inspector’s decision to demolish in 1939 though – with war intervening – they were to survive till 1956.

From a low point of some 66,000 in 1931, Barrow’s population had increased to around 75,000 by 1940. Population pressures and increased finances encouraged the Council to embark on larger building projects in the later 1930s. The Risedale Estate was commenced in 1936; its 148 new homes were completed in 1948.

The Vulcan Estate, built on the site of the former Vulcan Ironworks in Salthouse, was built between 1936 and 1937 as a slum clearance estate to house those displaced from the Strand Clearance Area. Its relatively plain housing may reflect those origins.

Land a short distance to the north was purchased for the Greengate Estate, North and South, in 1937 but, with contracts for 180 houses and 54 flats not agreed till the summer of 1939, little progress was made before the war – just 18 houses in Greengate South were completed by February 1940.

The Barrow Blitz: Exmouth Street, May 1941

Some of those were damaged in the Barrow Blitz, two sustained bombing raids on 14-16 April and 3-10 May 1941. Ironically, the town’s heavy industry was relatively unaffected but some 83 civilians died and over 10,000 homes damaged. In Barrow, as elsewhere, the desire to build bigger and better in the post-war world was expressed as conflict raged.

Unsurprisingly, the Ministry of Health rejected immediate plans for rebuilding proposed by the Council as early as 1943 but the Borough Surveyor prepared further plans for Greengate South and a new estate of 900 homes in Newbarns – part of a vision announced by the mayor, Councillor GD Haswell, in November that year to create a ‘new post-war Barrow’. The Newbarns scheme was approved in May 1944.

The Council’s Barrow Development Committee, tasked with overseeing peacetime reconstruction, was clear on the ‘paramount necessity of suitably housing our people’:

The social benefits to health, education, family life and ‘moral well-being’ are of course ample justification for the provision of houses adequate in number, properly designed and located with ample accommodation. But even from an economic point of view ample and suitable accommodation is a valuable asset. The fact that we have the necessary labour to offer is enhanced in value greatly if we can show it is properly and suitably housed. Ours must be a slumless city.

As that ambition took shape, the town was allocated 400 temporary prefabs to help meet the immediate housing crisis in November 1944. Many of these Tarran concrete bungalows were erected in Tummerhill on Walney Island, replaced from 1956 by permanent housing; others dotted around the town survived longer. Permanent prefabs – in this case around 200 steel-framed British Iron and Steel Federation houses – were built by Laings on Park Road, and north of Chester Street and Bradford Street on the Ormsgill Estate. They were replaced in the mid-1970s as the estate continued to grow.

Earlier plans for the Greengate estates were completed in the late 1940s but Barrow’s new hopes were placed in the Newbarns Estate, planned to comprise some 800 homes housing around 3000. Post-war planning ideas around ‘neighbourhood units’ were reflected in the provision made for new churches, schools and recreation facilities though the promised tennis courts and recreation centre were never built.

Building continued apace with the Abbotsmead Estate completed in the mid-1950s and what was promoted as ‘a new town at Walney’ of over 2700 homes in the north of the island approved in 1953 where building continued into the 1960s. Some 2600 council homes were built between 1945 and 1961.

Later council housing in the south of Walney Island at Cote Ley Crescent

For Barrow, the era of large-scale council housebuilding was over by the late-1960s; new schemes were smaller and largely infill, including the Cartmel and Grange Crescent flats in the centre of town and bungalows and flats principally for older residents around Cotswold Crescent on the former site of the Griffin Chilled Steel Works. A scheme of 79 houses and flats on and around Exmouth Street in 1985 marked an adaptive return to more traditional terraced forms.

At peak, in the early 1980s, the Council owned around 5500 homes in the borough. Currently, it owns and manages just over 2500 homes with a much smaller number run by housing associations. Around 10 percent of households live in social rented homes, a surprisingly low figure – below the national average – for a town dubbed the most working-class in England (an admittedly inexact judgement apparently reflecting its prevalence of chip shops, workingmen’s clubs and trade union offices). That may reflect the early tradition of working-class owner occupation referenced last week, the amount of company housing since transferred to private ownership and council housebuilding programmes constrained by economic downturn. (5)

‘The Spirit of Barrow’ by Chris Kelly was unveiled in 2005

The town continues to be marked by its industrial history and the ups and downs of the local economy. Vickers, now BAE Systems (that is a considerable simplification of a complex history), was sustained by nuclear submarine orders into the 1990s but now employs only around 5000 workers from 14,000 in the 1980s. The pre-pandemic unemployment rate stood at around 4 percent, a fall from recent figures but above the national average. Earlier this year, the town was reported as having suffered the largest population fall of any area in England – around 6.8 percent between 2001 and 2019 to the present figure of around 67,000. (6)

Elsewhere, Barrow is often described as being at the end of the longest cul-de-sac in England due to its location at the tip of the Furness peninsula, 33 miles off the nearest motorway and 33 miles back. The fact that this ‘western industrial periphery’ had briefly been ‘a major Bessemer iron and steel centre of Europe and the world’ tells you something of its impressive and turbulent economic history. (7)

Give Barrow a visit – it has some proud municipal heritage and a unique housing history; it’s a hardworking town working hard to adapt to changing circumstance as it has throughout its lifespan. And that ‘remote’ location is actually pretty special.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Bryn Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built (Hougenai Press, 1985). Much of the information here and particularly that on later council housing, which is little documented elsewhere, is drawn from this invaluable source by Barrow’s leading historian.

(2) Quotations drawn from Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Working-Class Housing in Barrow and Lancaster 1880-1930’ Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol 127, 1978 and Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built

(3) Sam Davies and Bob Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919-1938: A Comparative Analysis (Routledge, 2016). The unemployment figures which follow are drawn from the same source.

(4) Quoted in Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built

(5) On the town’s working-class character see Caroline Evans, ‘Barrow, Capital of Blue-Collar Britain’, The Guardian, 5 October 2008

(6) Eleanor Ovens, ‘Barrow named as having biggest population drop in England’, The News, 20 June 2020

(7) The quote is drawn from John Duncan Marshall and John K Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester University Press, 1981)

Edinburgh’s 1919 Act Housing, Part II: ‘Healthy Houses for the People is the Best Public Health Insurance’

01 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Edinburgh, Guest Post, Housing, Scotland

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1920s

I’m delighted to feature the second of two new posts by Steven Robb. Steven also contributed an earlier post providing an overview of Edinburgh’s council housing from 1890 to 1945. He is Deputy Head of Casework for Historic Environment Scotland. With qualifications in building surveying and urban conservation, he has a particular interest in early and interwar social housing in Edinburgh, and how new housing was incorporated within the historic city.

In last week’s post, I concentrated on the main three 1919 Council estates at Gorgie, Wardie and Northfield. In this part, I will look at 1919 Act housing built for Leith and Midlothian, which was inherited and taken forward by Edinburgh in 1920. I will also look at the new homes created from existing buildings, concluding with an assessment of Edinburgh’s approach to the 1919 Act.

Leith and Midlothian

In 1920 Edinburgh absorbed Leith Corporation and several suburban areas within the County of Midlothian, inheriting 1919 Act housing planned by these authorities.

Leith had planned sites for over 200 houses, but by September 1920 had only started three tenements on Ferry Road. Designed by Leith’s Burgh Architect, George Simpson, and judged to be ‘houses of artistic design’, the initial choice of tenements was rare in 1919 housing. A further nine houses were built round the corner in Clark Avenue.

Leith also received, towards the end of 1923, 66 new flats in tenements designed by Campbell. Situated on St Clair Street, off Easter Road, these tenements had two small two-bedroom flats on each landing, and due to Campbell’s space planning and the ‘most rigid economies’ cost only £350 a house, showing how far costs had fallen by this date.

Edinburgh inherited schemes by Midlothian County to build pockets of housing including 48 houses at Longstone, and other modest developments at Corstorphine, Gilmerton and Davidsons Mains. Midlothian engaged the private architect David McCarthy, best known for designing the city’s Veterinarian School. His two storey houses were both plain and small, as Midlothian had argued strongly for the right to build no more than two bedroom houses.

Reconstruction & Conversion

Scotland’s 1919 Housing Act was not only focused on building new homes; there was also a distinct focus on rehabilitating, or reconstructing, buildings for housing. Edinburgh’s overcrowded and decaying Old Town contained a number of many-storeyed historic tenements, several of which were in very poor condition.

Reconstruction works were led directly by the City’s Housing Director (and City Engineer) Campbell. The projects had become favourable after new provisions within the 1919 Act meant acquiring properties for demolition or reconstruction limited owners’ compensation payments to solely the value of the cleared site.

Intended as a cheaper option than newbuild, in many cases the reconstruction could be undertaken at around half the price of new build, with the subsidy often covering all costs.

Old Town tenements in the Cowgate, High Street, West Port, Dumbiedykes and St James were purchased and reconstructed, often with rear additions removed, to provide around 120 small flats. The flats in the centre of town were close to jobs and amenities and proved popular with tenants. Sadly, the legislation later changed so that no part of a retained building could be subject to a housing subsidy, to the great harm of the city’s heritage. Thus, later projects in the interwar period were mainly ‘conservative surgery’ schemes involving selective demolition and rebuilding housing in historicist styles.

Burnet’s Close, early 19th-century tenements refurbished under the Act. It was valued at only £150 and reconstructed at a cost of £2200. Courtesy of Capital Collections

An unusual use of the 1919 Act subsidies was the conversion of former army huts into homes, again at around half the price of permanent new houses. Early in 1920, as part of a nationwide project, a demonstration house was displayed to the public in the centre of St James Square. The hut had been converted to a three bedroom house by the Ministry of Munitions. It consisted of a timber structure on a brick base, lined and roofed with asbestos with internal concrete walls and was designed to last twenty years.

The demonstration house was obviously well received, as the Council went on to purchase 52 huts from the Ministry at a cost of £7470. The Council proceeded to convert these huts into 140 homes which they called ‘bungalows’, but we might alternatively call pre-fabs. They were sited in London Road, Meadowbank and Iona Street off Leith Walk, and included the St James Square example, itself converted into two homes. They were given to applicants, including, appropriately, ‘married ex-servicemen’ who were ‘clamouring’ for houses.

Assessment

The 1919 Housing Act saw Edinburgh (and its recently acquired neighbours) build around 1300 new homes, with another 260 from reconstructed city tenements and converted army huts. The total cost was over £1.5m with over 80 percent of expenditure borne by the State.

Although this fell far short of the 3750 home envisaged, it was abundantly clear the circumstances were not ‘entirely favourable’. The State had embarked upon the largest country-wide public housing programme ever seen in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic World War. Dormant building contractors, reduced numbers of skilled tradesmen, and a sudden demand for scarce building materials led to spiralling costs. By the beginning of 1921 labour costs had risen by 300 percent, but the city still struggled to find builders. Joinery, lime and plaster costs had risen by 250 percent, brick costs had doubled and even the cost of carting materials to site had risen by 350 percent. Edinburgh suffered particularly with costs up to 70 percent higher than the Scottish average. As a country, Scotland ended up building around 25,500 houses, only 20 percent of its, admittedly more ambitious, target.

Facing brick in Northfield Crescent – brick prices doubled in the post-war period

Oversight and approval from the Board of Health elongated the process, but the City still hoped for a subsidy extension to allow them to reach their targets (although some questioned whether the targets had been set too high). However, in mid-1921 State expenditure was drastically curtailed with ‘Geddes Axe’ cuts.

Over time the building market had begun to reach some form of equilibrium, and costs had started falling sharply in 1922. However, by this date it was forbidden to start new schemes, and expansion of existing schemes was confined to minimum standards to cut costs. Very sadly, at the point where criticism of expensive housing had ceased to be an issue, the subsidies were withdrawn.

As built Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing provided a specifically tailored version of the garden city ideal, differing from many other Scottish towns and cities by using a mix of cottages, flatted blocks and tenements.

In Scotland around 63 percent of all 1919 Act housing was within cottages, but Edinburgh’s percentage was closer to half that. Seen by many in the city as an imposed English housing model, cottages were initially used at Wardie and Northfield but their high costs saw them being phased out throughout the life of the Act.

Instead, around half of Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing would be built within flatted blocks, the hybrid between cottage and tenement. This was far in advance of a Scottish average of only 31 percent.

Flatted block in Gorgie. Entrances to the upper flats are recessed either side from the front façade

Another Edinburgh anomaly was the use of the tenement, far in advance of a very low Scottish average of 6 percent. This was especially evident in the latter phases of Gorgie, Northfield and Wardie which all used three-storey tenements. Edinburgh’s Housing Director had set out his stall as early as March 1921, determining that tenements of ‘up to date design and arrangement’ were the undoubted solution for the ‘poorest and lower middle classes’ in the city, allowing them to live near their workplaces. They could be ‘provided at less cost and with greater convenience’ than the cottage type of dwelling on the city fringes.

Less use of cottages also meant smaller flats, with over 65 percnt of Edinburgh’s 1919 homes built with only two bedrooms, with the Scottish average at 57 percent. Edinburgh had 16 percent of its housing with three bedrooms, well below a Scottish average of 35 percent. The remaining 20 percent were either one or four bed. Such figures may be considered ungenerous in comparison with the expected accommodation south of the border, but it was supposedly demand-led and still represented a quantum leap from the one- and two-room houses of the overcrowded city centre.

Stone was Edinburgh’s dominant building material, but it was only used extensively in Gorgie, and sparingly, (but to fine effect) at Northfield. Gorgie was consistently lauded as an example for stone building well into the interwar period. Although not unknown in the city, brick was still seen by many as an English material, and, with the exception of a few facing brick blocks at Northfield, was almost always covered in pollution-resilient grey harl. Edinburgh’s experimentation with unharled concrete blocks at Wardie didn’t pay off.

The design of the housing used Arts and Crafts styling with wet dash harling, rubble stonework, natural slate bell-cast roofs and multi-pane sash windows. The layouts were inventive, varied and attractive with generous green infrastructure, including large gardens, grass verges, trees, parks, open spaces and allotments.

So far so good, but the 1919 Act housing was not as transformative as hoped, with only a small dent made in the city’s horrendous overcrowding figures. Housing the very poorest wasn’t the concern or intention of the 1919 Act, and the Council soon sheepishly admitted the rents being sought set the housing way beyond the reach of many working-class families.

Although some councillors were keen to impose low rents, others had concerns over the gap between actual and economic rents. In any case they were at the mercy of the Board of Health who insisted on higher rents (upwards of £30pa) to keep subsidies low. Edinburgh set out to prioritise ex-servicemen with families, but an ability to pay the high rents would arguably become more important than homes for heroes. If paying high rents was not enough, the (then) peripheral locations required additional costs to travel to work and amenities.

So, rather than the Old Town poor, the new estates attracted the aspirant upper working and middle classes. A glance at the 1925 Valuation Roll for Boswell Avenue, admittedly Wardie’s best street, shows several clerks, engineers, a civil servant, geologist, lecturer, surveyor, engineer, excise officer and a Chief Armourer (me neither?) paying up to £44pa. Tenements were often allocated to those paying lower rents, but the 1925 Valuation Roll for Northfield shows tenement rents of between £31 to £37 with clerks and civil servants, an accountant, teacher, artist and engineer, besides occupations such as painters, joiners and a warehouseman.

Nos 22-24 Boswall Avenue. In 1925, the two semi-detached cottages were occupied by an apprentice Chartered Accountant and a painter, both paying rents of £38 pa.

An often overlooked part of the Act’s housing were the 120 or so houses achieved through the reconstruction of older buildings (and another 140 through reused army huts). As well as reflecting a strong conservation sensibility within the city, these ‘stitch in time’ conversions saved many of the city’s aged tenements that would otherwise have disappeared. Today we applaud the reuse of these historic buildings, but Campbell, who noted that ‘health was greater than history’, appears to have viewed the work pragmatically, as cheap fixes to give people improved homes as quickly as possible.

Conscious of the 1919 Act’s failure to house the poor, a few years later a Council memo noted that unless new housing models were developed the:

betterment of the slum dweller is doomed to a further postponement, with consequent ill health, low vitality, loose morals, and criminal habits, which are but part of the penalty we pay for suffering the continuance of slums within the boundary of our city.

Such models would be developed with new housing acts in the 1920s and 1930s, when overcrowding and slum clearance to assist the poorest became a priority, and the private sector were warmly encouraged by the Council to provide general needs housing for the clerks and armourers.

However, subsidies in the next housing Acts of 1923, and especially 1924, were far less generous, with surplus expenses shouldered by the Council. In the majority of schemes densities went up and the quality of design went down. By the early 1920s Campbell was arguing for one-bedroom flats of 485 sq ft, well below accepted minimum standards.

Plain flatted blocks and tenements designed to limited patterns took the place of expensive cottages, which would not be built again in the city until after WW2, notably at The Inch. Until the early 1930s repetitive estates of facsimile designs would replace the varied architecture and sinuous layouts of the 1919 Act.

Today the three main 1919 Act estates remain popular, with many houses privately owned. However, Right to Buy wasn’t a recent phenomenon, as 1919 Act provisions had allowed over a hundred council houses to be sold off before the second world war.

All the estates have suffered to some extent by the scourge of off-street parking, with the removal of boundary hedges and paved-over gardens, sadly and pointlessly eroding their essential greenery and garden suburb character. This really is unforgivable.

Paved over front gardens on Northfield Drive – a vehicular cul-de-sac

Most sash windows have gone, but the masonry walling and steep natural slate roofs largely remain in good order. Although none of the 1919 estates has yet been designated a conservation area, and only one stone crescent at Northfield is listed, (and deservedly so) there is a general appreciation of their quality, and the generosity of their planning. Perhaps, now the estates are a century old there may be some moves to recognise their significance as a part of the city’s twentieth century history ?

Conclusion

Scotland’s 1919 Act housing followed a different approach than England, and within the country, Edinburgh pursued its own bespoke path.

The city provided high quality homes within modified garden city layouts with a variety of handsome designs and materials. In addition, parts of the overcrowded historic city centre were regenerated with the refurbishment of ancient tenements.

By planning a housing mix that included smaller flats within flatted blocks and tenements, instead of simply concentrating on large peripheral estates of land-hungry cottages, the city limited urban sprawl. This was part of a strategy, at least in the Act’s later phases, that saw tenements in the ‘inner belt’ of the city as the solution to house the city’s workers close to workplaces and amenities. Campbell’s approach was followed by his successor EJ MacRae, but where large peripheral estates had to be built, they often floundered.

Above all Campbell believed in prevention rather than cure. His solution to the acute medical problems present in slum housing was to build ‘healthy houses for the people’. This, he maintained, was ‘the best Public Health Insurance’.

The capital suffered unduly from the high costs and labour shortages of the post-war period which sadly limited the numbers of homes built and reconstructed. It also saw a later dip in quality and space standards, that would accelerate throughout the 1920s with cost cutting and policy changes.

However, although it didn’t solve the city’s overcrowding problems, and their depiction as Paradise is undoubtedly a high bar, a hundred years on much of Edinburgh’s 1919 Act housing remains amongst the best social housing the city has ever created.

Sources

A Grierson (Town Clerk, Edinburgh), ‘Housing Schemes in Edinburgh’ in Thomas Stephenson, Industrial Edinburgh (Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of Trade, 1921)

John Frew, ‘”Homes fit for heroes”: Early Municipal House Building in Edinburgh’, The Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland Journal, no 16, 1989

Town Council Minutes and City Chamberlain’s Reports, Edinburgh City Archives

Scotsman Newspaper Archive

Lou Rosenberg, Scotland’s Homes Fit for Heroes, Garden City influences on the Development of Scottish Working Class Housing, 1900 to 1939 (The Word Bank, 2016)

Edinburgh’s 1919 Act Housing, Part I: ‘Healthy Houses for the People is the Best Public Health Insurance’

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Edinburgh, Guest Post, Housing, Scotland

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1920s

I’m delighted to feature the first of two new posts by Steven Robb. Steven contributed an earlier post providing an overview of Edinburgh’s council housing from 1890 to 1945. He is Deputy Head of Casework for Historic Environment Scotland. With qualifications in building surveying and urban conservation, he has a particular interest in early and interwar social housing in Edinburgh, and how new housing was incorporated within the historic city.

Northfield Crescent, a listed crescent of stone tenements

Just over a hundred years ago in October 1920, Edinburgh’s first 1919 Act housing was opened by a proud city councillor.

In the first of two blogs I will look at Edinburgh’s particular housing issues and the ways in which the city used the Housing (Scotland) Act of 1919 to try and address them. It will then examine the three major housing estates built by Edinburgh Council, which between them provided around 1000 houses. The second part of the blog will look at additional housing provided in the city, and will conclude by assessing Edinburgh’s particular approach to housing under the Act.

The problem

Overcrowding was Scotland’s major housing problem. Edinburgh’s 1911 census found over 110,000 people living in either one- or two-room houses, which represented 41 percent of the city’s housing stock. Almost 40,000 people were living at least three to a room.

Although Edinburgh’s average density at this period was only around 30 persons per acre, in the most overcrowded districts like the Old Town, it rose well into the hundreds, with homes in tenements and houses ‘made down’, or subdivided, to cram in more tenants. In one block of eight tenements in St Leonards there were 186 separate homes containing 747 people; a density of 896 persons per acre.

Overcrowding was partly a consequence of Scottish building practice. Unlike England’s rows of relatively cheap brick terraces, Scotland’s urban workers were housed in stone tenements of three or four storeys. Such robust construction and stricter building regulations resulted in far higher build costs.

In addition, land values in Scotland were elevated by the medieval system of land tenure (feu duties), resulting in the UK’s most expensive building land (outside London).

To maximise returns developers built high density tenements, with their costs recouped by the highest rents outside the English capital. Rents were often paid communally by congested tenants.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the private sector found it uneconomic to continue building at affordable rents. To address this market failure, prior to WW1 Edinburgh Council built or reconstructed around 750 houses under legislation, including the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890). The City Engineer’s new ‘sanitary tenements’ had open deck-access balconies providing light and fresh air to small flats. They were popular and partly responsible for significant improvements in infant mortality and death rates. However, the cost to the Council was excessive, with compensation payments to owners sometimes costing nearly as much as the new housing.

The Rent Restrictions Act (1915), introduced after major rent strikes and civil unrest in Glasgow, together with the anticipated post-war costs of building, meant State intervention in the housing market was both inevitable and desirable.

The solution?

The Housing (Scotland) 1919 Act looked to address overcrowding and the housing shortage under the ethos of ‘a healthy family in a healthy home’. Scotland’s specific problems saw a far more ambitious target than England and Wales, to provide 120,000 new homes.

Acknowledging Scotland’s higher building costs, there was a lower Council cap on expenses, at 4/5 of a penny on the rates rather than England’s penny.

The Act incorporated, informally during implementation, a series of recommendations from the 1917 Scottish Royal Commission on Housing (Ballantyne Report), which, along with the Tudor Waters report, acknowledged the different conditions and traditions in Scotland.

One of these traditions was that Scotland’s houses contained less rooms, with a custom of larger living and kitchen space doubling up as accommodation. The result was that 50 percent (but later increased) of 1919 Act houses were permitted to be the minimum three apartments (living room and two bedrooms), where England and Wales generally looked for three-bed houses.

Again, recognising traditions, there was a toleration for housing other than cottages, as individual houses on one or two storeys were called. Flatted blocks (four in a blocks) were acceptable and, although generally discouraged, there was even a place for suitably designed tenements.

The Scottish Act finally gained Royal Assent on 19^th August 1919, but as early as November 1918 the Local Government Board (later Scottish Board of Health) had asked Edinburgh to assess its housing needs. The city responded with plans for 3000 new homes and 750 rehabilitated dwellings, a figure thought feasible within three years, if the ‘circumstances were entirely favourable’.

Edinburgh’s Town Clerk described the Act as being ‘imposed’ on the Council, and although, unlike previous legislation, it did compel action, this time the intention was Councils wouldn’t be left out of pocket, with generous subsidies bridging the difference between the outlay in building costs and rents received.

Gorgie (386 houses)

The Council had their eye on half a dozen sites within the city but soon settled on Gorgie, where they already owned land.

In January 1919, 50 acres of semi-rural land adjacent to the City’s Livestock Market were transferred (at £250 per acre) and James Williamson, the City Architect, drew up plans for 660 houses. In April 1919 the Board of Health found Williamson’s proposals for gently curving streets with individual flatted blocks ‘eminently satisfactory’. These streets enclosed areas of communal allotments and open ground.

Stone flatted block with additional storey on Chesser Avenue

Gorgie’s flatted blocks consisted of four houses under a piended (hipped) roof with a separate entrance to each flat. They were a hybrid between a cottage and a tenement, and suited a Scottish desire for one-floor-living. Cheaper than cottages, they could, virtually, be built to a garden city layout, in this case 14 houses to the acre, close to the recommended 12.

To keep tender costs down the Council’s surveyor recommended estimates for both stone and brick, as some builders were geared up for the former, and a mix of materials might be cheaper. The first tenders for 48 houses came back in June at around £800 a house, with the stone option only 0.5 percent more than the brick. In order to accentuate the Scottish character of the housing, against the perceived Englishness of brickwork, the housing Committee agreed to use rubble sandstone sourced from nearby Hailes Quarry, adding that ‘Scottish people wanted substantial houses’.

However, after brick prices fell and cavity walling was permitted, the cost difference increased, and the Board of Health refused to pay the additional subsidies for stone. Despite their earlier support the Council soon conceded that the second phase of Gorgie could be built in brick, which was rendered to cope with Scotland’s weather, and a lack of skilled Scottish facing-brick layers.

Chesser Gardens – a street of rendered brick flatted blocks

Begun in July 1919, Gorgie suffered several delays due to lack of skilled labour, rising material costs and availability, and even a plumbers and joiners strike. Pegged to costs, the economic rent for a two-bed house would have been around £60-65pa. The Council suggested rents of £25-27pa, but these were soon upped to £31 by the Board of Health.

With the first completions in October 1920, on opening, a councillor noted the houses were ‘commodious inside and artistic outside’ and would ‘compare favourably with any houses being built in England or Scotland’. Noting the generous gardens in front and allotment ground behind, the councillor added that ‘The City Gardener was preparing creepers for the walls and rambler roses for the gardens. If these houses were not Paradise, he did not know where they would have to look for such a place’.

In early 1923 the city architect’s second phase to Gorgie was built on Slateford Road. By this date the individual flatted blocks with gardens on curved streets were dispensed with in favour of cheaper tenements built facing the main road. These three-storey rendered brick tenements provided another 108 two-bed houses. Indeed, the majority of Gorgie’s houses, around 70 percent, were the recommended minimum of two bedrooms, with only 10 percent four bed and the remainder three.

Today the most distinctive Gorgie houses are the first-phase chunky rubble stone flatted blocks on Chesser Avenue, especially those with an additional twin-dormered storey for the few four bed flats. They retain distinctive sweeping slate roofs with swept eaves. On adjacent streets are a mix of rendered and stone houses with a handful of red sandstone blocks, all with generous gardens.

Competition

In mid-1919 the City Engineer Adam Horsburgh Campbell became Housing Director, controlling Council housing delivery until he retired in mid-1926. He insisted on combining this new role with his existing engineering job, and would soon stray into architectural work.

Despite the skills within his Department the City Architect had already been snubbed in April 1919 when the Council agreed to hold an open competition for the remaining housing sites. Early studies like the Tudor Waters Report had advised involving the private sector, and the Council had also been lobbied by the Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (later RIAS).

The competition, open to private Midlothian architects, offered four new sites with firms asked to submit the most economical designs for cottages, flatted blocks and tenements with two, three and four bedrooms at 14 houses per acre. Conditions included limited use of combed (sloping) ceilings, avoidance of rear additions, and minimum room sizes, including living rooms of 180 sq ft, principal bedrooms of 160 sq ft and ceiling heights of 8ft 6 inches (2.6m).

In August the panel Chairman Sir John Burnet, who had previously judged a 1918 Workers Housing Competition, awarded first prize for all four sites to Edinburgh architects AK Robertson and Thomas Aikman Swan.

However, as it had been previously decided no firm should have more than two schemes each, Robertson & Swan were awarded sites at Wardie and Craigleith. Charles Tweedie was given Saughtonhall, and Fairlie, Reid & Forbes allocated Northfield.

In due course the sites at Craigleith and Saughtonhall were abandoned so sadly Charles Tweedie, second placed in three competitions, got nothing. Meanwhile, Fairlie, Reid & Forbes, third-placed in only one competition, got one of the two surviving commissions.

Wardie (366 houses)

In April 1919 the Council purchased 73 acres of land occupied by nurseries belonging to the trustees of Major Boswall, at a cost of £250 per acre. The architects, Robertson & Swan, designed a geometric garden city plan with tree-lined streets, open spaces, and cul-de-sacs, built with a mix of cottages, four in a blocks and later a few tenements placed on main roads and closing vistas. Over 600 trees were planted at a cost of £180.

Tenement ending a vista along Boswall Avenue

At the end of 1920 work began on 360 houses, but the Council only developed the western side, the eastern half being developed privately.

Plan of Wardie. Only the western side was completed under the 1919 Act

Unusually, to combat high brick costs, the houses were built with unrendered concrete blocks, provided by the Unit Construction Company of London. This early use of concrete was purely on cost, the tenders (for £408,246), being £12,000 cheaper than brick. The tender worked out at around £1130 a house, but by March 1921 costs had risen with the first batch of 300 houses coming in at around £1300 each. The largest four-bed cottages in Wardie would eventually soar to £1600 each, with critics considering them to be worth only £300 once the building boom was over. Their economic rent would have been £100pa but they would be let for, the still substantial, £44pa.

Contractors were accused of profiteering, an ugly accusation in the aftermath of World War One, but the system didn’t encourage parsimony.

The letters page of the Scotsman newspaper saw a flurry of taxpayer complaints. Critics judged Wardie as too remote from trams, schools and shops, whilst the houses were labelled ‘shoddy with small pokey rooms’. Others even grumbled that the rooms were too small for their furniture.

Having said all this, the housing was popular and would be oversubscribed, with 10,000 initial enquiries for Wardie’s 360 houses, perhaps before the high rents were set.

Scotland’s climate put paid to Wardie’s experimental concrete block housing, and by 1928 all 360 of its increasingly damp houses were roughcast by the Council at a cost of £10,000.

Tree-lined grassed verge in Boswall Avenue

Today the estate is popular, with Boswall Avenue’s tree-lined grass verges perhaps Edinburgh’s best approximation of the garden city ideal. The houses are in an Arts and Crafts style with natural slate swept hipped roofs and generous garden space. There is a good variety of designs and mix of house types.

Northfield (322 houses)

In April 1919 the Council agreed to acquire 40 acres of agricultural land from the Duke of Abercorn’s Duddingston estate at £300 per acre.

In June 1920 the architects Fairlie, Reid & Forbes exhibited their ‘admirable housing scheme’ for 320 houses at the Royal Scottish Academy. It was thought likely to ‘produce a pleasing and picturesque ensemble upon the rising ground at the base of Arthur’s Seat’.

The firm was specially created for the competition. Reginald Fairlie was a noted Arts and Crafts architect who would later design the National Library, and became a specialist in Roman Catholic churches. George Reid & James Forbes would become Scotland’s foremost interwar school designers.

The plan is sophisticated, belying its lowly competition place. On the highest point is a large circus ringed by cottages – almost a cul-de-sac – but connected to the other streets by small pedestrian link paths – which bisect the estate. There is a raised pedestrian entry path on the busy Willowbrae Road, planted verges, generous gardens and open spaces.

Expensive semi-detached cottages on Northfield Circus, a large cul-de-sac with central park

The first tenders, in March 1920 suggested 196 cottages and flatted blocks could be built at an overall cost of £210,000 making a two-bedroom house £950 and a four bedroom house £1100. Again, costs rose quickly. Later estimates saw a four-bed cottage costing between £1360 and £1400. A Scotsman article judged these ‘phenomenal costs … preposterously and impossibly high’.

Flatted blocks with brick and tile detailing

The cost of these cottages led to later phases of the estate being built in three-storey tenements. Between March 1921 and December 1923 around 130 tenements were built, all with gas for heating and electricity for lighting.

Stone tenement with communal open ground in front

Northfield’s planning is sophisticated and the housing attractive and hugely varied, both in use of materials from facing brick, rendered brick and stone, to the rarely duplicated house patterns. Fairlie’s Arts and Crafts eye is evident in the stone boundary walls, decorative stone piers and carved timber gateposts, as well as in the stone tenements with relieving arches and brick and tile detailing. The tenements here served as a prototype for the Council’s later work in the city.

Details of stone wall and timber gateposts

In next week’s post, I’ll look at the council housing schemes inherited by Edinburgh from Leith and Midlothian and offer an overall assessment of Edinburgh’s approach to the 1919 Act.

Sources

A Grierson (Town Clerk, Edinburgh), ‘Housing Schemes in Edinburgh’ in Thomas Stephenson, Industrial Edinburgh (Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of Trade, 1921)

John Frew, ‘”Homes fit for heroes”: Early Municipal House Building in Edinburgh’, The Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland Journal, no 16, 1989

Town Council Minutes and City Chamberlain’s Reports, Edinburgh City Archives

Scotsman Newspaper Archive

Lou Rosenberg, Scotland’s Homes Fit for Heroes, Garden City influences on the Development of Scottish Working Class Housing, 1900 to 1939 (The Word Bank, 2016)

Preston’s Council Housing, Part I to 1939: ‘Compactness, Convenience and Taste’

03 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Preston

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1920s, 1930s

In 1709, Preston was described as ‘a very pretty town with abundance of gentry in it; commonly called Proud Preston’. The gentry may have disappeared and the town (a city since 2002) changed out of all recognition but the appellation has remained. Local pride might be seen now in what has been dubbed the ‘Preston model’ – a form of ‘guerrilla localism’ in the words of Aditya Chakrabortty; a scheme of community wealth building based on plural ownership of the economy, local procurement and socially productive use of land and property. (1)

The Preston Martyrs Memorial on Lune Street by Gordon Young, commemorates the four strikers killed in 1842 © Andrew Gritt and made available through a Creative Commons licence

These posts will look at what might be properly understood as an earlier form of community wealth building – the city’s history of council housebuilding. That history was rooted in a common experience though one writ large in the Lancashire town – industrialisation and urbanisation. Preston’s first cotton mill was opened in 1777; by 1835, there were 40. Working conditions (and Chartism) led to a general strike in 1842 during which four protestors were shot dead by the military. An eight-month lockout and strike in 1853-54, witnessed by Charles Dickens, inspired his famous description of ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times:

a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.

Karl Marx added his own excited commentary: ‘The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened, they begin to cry: Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!’. (2)

A Preston townscape. The lithograph shows unemployed mill hands at work on Preston Moors in 1862 during the ‘Cotton Famine’ caused by the American Civil War

St Petersburg/Petrograd may have come good for Marx in 1917 but Preston’s municipal politics in the interwar period in its first great era of council housebuilding were, as we’ll see, to be far more collaborative and collegiate.

Preston’s population grew from under 12,000 in 1801 to 117,000 in 1920 and its insanitary terraced housing brought cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1848 and a major typhus epidemic in 1862. Infant mortality rates remained well above the national average – in the early 1890s standing at 235 deaths per thousand against an English average of 151 – but they fell before the First World War as the Corporation converted privies to water closets at the rate of 1- to 2000 a year. Living standards remained low, however, with the prevalence of female employment (around 30 percent of married women worked in the mills in 1905) having the collateral effect of reducing male wages. (3)

An active housing improvement programme notwithstanding, the council – a county borough since 1881 – had no interest in housebuilding. It remained – despite the election of its first Labour councillor in 1904 – a largely Conservative borough. However, as was typical across the country, the First World War changed much.

This wind of change was illustrated powerfully by the March 1918 Local Government Board circular requesting local authorities to provide detail of ‘definite building schemes’ and numbers of new council homes projected. Preston Borough Council discussed the circular in April, not only forming a Housing Committee but identifying land in Moor Park and Deepdale (near the Preston North End football ground) as suitable for building. It was one of 1300 councils replying by the deadline of December 1918. (4)

Thereafter, progress was slow and more controversial. By February 1919, the Preston Trades and Labour Council (PTLC) was viewing ‘with regret the inaction of the Town Council in the matter of housing’, Next month, the Housing Committee resigned when its detailed plans for an estate at Holme Slack were rejected by full council which instructed it ‘to advertise and offer prizes for competitive designs’. In May, the PTLC intervened again, decrying the paucity of council proposals and demanding that ‘at least 50 per cent of direct representatives of labour should be co-opted’ to serve on the now reconstituted Housing Committee.

That proposal was deemed unlawful – the Preston Building Trades Employers’ Association had also expressed their displeasure – but it’s an interesting sign of local politics and national trends that it was agreed in September to co-opt two members of the PTLC alongside one representative of the Preston Property Owners Association. The emphasis on women’s voices on housing in this post-war period (discussed in a recent post) was reflected in the inclusion of one representative of the (Conservative) Preston Women Citizens’ Association and one from the local Women’s Cooperative Guild. (5)

All this before the 1919 Housing Act, overseen by Christopher Addison, received its Royal Assent in July. The housing needs survey required of all local authorities was produced by Preston in October when the Medical Officer of Health reported that 980 local homes were overcrowded, 136 unfit for habitation and 12 areas comprising in total 806 houses justified clearance. Up to 2000 new homes were needed. (6)

By then progress had been made. The government’s regional Housing Commissioner had visited the town in May and plans for estates of around 500 homes each in Holme Slack and Ribbleton had been approved. At this point the Council was taking an unusually close interest in the fine detail of the proposed housing.

This image of Waldon Street on the Callon Estate shows more recent streetscape improvements made by the City Council

Members of the Housing Committee visited Merseyside for ideas and models as well as the Daily Express Model Homes Exhibition in London. In November 1919, a subcommittee was appointed to ‘consider the construction, materials and equipment of the houses’ and later in the month four pages of detailed written notes were provided covering such minutiae as tarmacked garden paths and concrete clothes posts. (In further testimony to the hands-on approach taken here, handwritten notes in the archives record the names and addresses of new council house tenants.) (7)

The new houses were (as required) cottage homes built to Tudor Walters standards but the Council sought to go further by insisting on 8ft 6in height ceilings, rather than the 8ft recommended. It would compromise on this issue – it was agreed upper-floor ceilings should be 8ft high – under protest. The Council was less successful in insisting on lower rents than those demanded centrally. Rents of 8s (40p) and 10s (50p) for two- and three-bed non-parlour house respectively were agreed but the Council’s plea that the larger parlour houses were ‘intended to be tenanted by large families with young children’ was rejected and these were let at 12s 6d (62½p) and 15s (75p). (8)

Despite the generous financial terms of the 1919 Act, the expectation was that rents would be ‘economic’ and, with Preston’s new council homes costing between £891 and £976 to build, those rents would be out of reach to many. The Council, as was typical in this post-war era, prioritised ex-servicemen and their widows in its allocations policy but by 1930, in socio-economic terms, only some 38 percent of Holme Slack heads of households could be classified as manual working class; 30 percent belonged to the non-manual working class whilst 17 percent comprised those in professional, managerial or commercial categories. (9)

Practical problems of materials and labour shortages delayed construction despite the special subcommittee (which included representatives from the Preston Master Builders’ Association and Preston Building Trades Operatives) appointed in May 1920 to overcome supply difficulties and the strong action in November when the Council used its powers under the Housing (Additional Powers) Act to temporarily halt construction of non-essential work on a cinema. (10)

Early council housing on Chestnut Crescent, Ribbleton Estate

The first two houses on the Ribbleton Estate, one opened as a show home, were completed in March 1921. Designed by local architects Messrs JH and W Maugan and reflecting the attention paid by the Council to their design, the local press was suitably complimentary: (11)

The house furnished for the exhibition at once suggests compactness, convenience and taste … [The estate] comprises blocks of two, three and four houses arranged on the garden city plan. There are no continuous and monotonous lines of houses.

A cupboard and glass cabinet in the parlour, linen cupboard and wardrobe in the main bedroom, ‘ample provision in the way of shelves’ as well as the sanitary necessities that would previously have been luxuries to many of the new tenants, all made this high-quality accommodation, ‘tastefully treated’ throughout. (12)

Homes on Manor Road, the Holme Slack Estate

If the new residents were grateful, they were far from humble. A Holme Slack Householders’ Association had been formed by September 1921 whose main object was to: (13)

inculcate and foster a spirit of mutual endeavour in all things calculated to promote the welfare of the new district, having special regard to the upkeep of the gardens and the appearance of the dwellings.

That mix of pride and expectation was reflected in complaints about the unfinished nature of the early estates, illustrated by the Ribbleton Estate Tenants’ Association ‘strong disapproval at the deplorable condition of [its] roads, pathways and system of drainage’. Such criticisms – typical of estates nationwide where completed housing was prioritised above infrastructure – continued into 1922. (14)

The generous housing programme of the Addison Act was axed in July 1921 but a broadly cross-party commitment to build council housing in Preston remained. In July 1923, the Council agreed to recommence housebuilding without government grant but Labour’s 1924 Housing Act restored a more generous level of financial support that enabled it to embark on a much larger programme – 1910 houses under its terms by 1932.

The Miller Road Estate of 165 homes was sanctioned in July 1924; the Callon Estate of 591 homes in October. Other significant estates were built at Delaware Street, Deepdale and Greenlands alongside an extension to the Ribbleton Estate. The new homes were generally slightly smaller than those built under Addison and overwhelmingly non-parlour; the large Callon estate contained 10 parlour homes.

Another attempt to build more cost-effectively was seen in the acceptance of a tender from Makinsons of Horwich to build ten steel-framed houses: a ‘system of roofing before walls are built’ as the Lancashire Daily Post reported it, having the ‘the advantage that the houses were erected more quickly than by the ordinary method’. The reference to Blackpool in the report suggests these were a licensed variant of the ‘Dennis Wild’ houses built in that town – one of a number of largely unsuccessful attempts to apply prefabrication to housebuilding in the era. The fact that nothing more is heard of this experiment suggests it fared little better. (15)

The high rents of this early council housing excluded many of the poorest of local residents and slum housing remained on a large scale. In October 1924, the Medical Officer of Health recommended the clearance of the Marsh Lane area, ‘condemned on the ground of its narrowness, closeness, bad light, and want of air and proper ventilation’. Of 118 houses inspected, nearly all were structurally defective. The Health Committee had rejected the proposal but in full council it was passed by 25 votes to 16. The Labour councillor HE Rhodes expressed the view that: (16)

The property owners who allowed their property to get into such a condition should not be paid compensation, but should be recommended for penal servitude, because they were murdering the child life of the town. The property … was a disgrace to the town and was situated in an area where the streets were bad and where there was nothing beautiful. He appealed to the committee to go on with the work and make one bright spot in the place.

That was perhaps an unusually trenchant intervention from a Labour representative; elsewhere the party has been criticised by some for its accommodation with existing civic elites. That came to a head in 1928 when Labour (with 22 councillors) formed a majority of elected members but controversially abided by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that retained an overall Conservative majority through the latter’s number of aldermen. In an apparent quid pro quo, Labour councillor WE Morris became chair of the Housing Committee. On the other hand, as we shall see so far as housing was concerned at least, there remained a reforming majority so it may be equally plausible to commend a broadly progressive (though contested) cross-party consensus on the matter.

In fact, Preston was ahead of many authorities in tackling slum clearance in the 1920s but that issue would be prioritised nationally in housing legislation in 1930 and 1935. In October 1931, three further central areas were designated for clearance and a programme of 600 new council homes proposed, generally in extensions to existing suburban estates. (17)

The problem that more distant estates and continuingly relatively high rents precluded some in greatest need was seized on by some hostile to public housing more generally. In 1933, Cllr JS Howard argued ‘the time had come when they ought to stop municipal building, especially as there were quite a number of tenants who ought not to occupy municipal houses’. He advocated some form of means test. More sympathetically, Cllr Blackburn observed: (18)

that many of the people displaced by slum clearance schemes were not remaining in the houses provided for them by the Corporation, but drifting back to their old surroundings. The slum clearance problem was too hastily met by building houses in the suburbs. The need should be met by some other method, such as the building of flats or other suitable dwelling.

This was a genuine problem but the fact that over 600 families on an over 2000-strong waiting list for council homes were living in shared accommodation ensured that opposition to newbuild was easily overcome.

Housing on Grizewood Avenue in the pre-war Moor Nook Estate

The Great Depression, whilst it did not hit a slightly more diversified and modernising economy in Preston as strongly as it did elsewhere, brought new hardships. The National Unemployed Workers Movement’s plea for a 10 percent rent reduction across the board in January 1932 was rejected. But general rent reductions (ranging from 4d to 1s 6d a week on weekly rents ranging between 6s 9d to 9s) were agreed in 1933 and 1934. Preston also implemented the provision of the 1930 Housing Act which gave the power to enact rent rebate schemes by granting reduced rents to displaced slum dwellers according to family size and income. (19)

The Farringdon Park Estate as planned and with completed homes in 1950

The housing survey required by the 1935 Housing Act revealed 1399 houses ‘not in all respects fit for human habitation’. By 1938, as some 300 new council homes were being built on the Thirlmere and Farringdon Park estates, it was reported this number had fallen to 980. In all, the Borough Council had provided some 2847 new council homes between the wars.

The war itself would bring new challenges and new expectations and those will be discussed in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) See Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control’, The Guardian, 31 January 2018 and Centre for Local Economic Strategies and Preston City Council, How We Built Community Wealth in Preston: Achievements and Lessons (July 2019)

(2) Karl Marx, ‘Only the Beginning’, New York Daily Tribune, 1 August 1854

(3) Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Working-Class Standards of Living in Three Lancashire Towns, 1890-1914’, International Review of Social History, vol 27, no 1, 1982

(4) William Hudson, ‘Welfarism Anew? Territorial Politics and Inter-War State Housing in Three Lancashire Towns’, University of Liverpool PhD, 2002

(5) See Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/1 1919-1923, Lancashire Archives

(6) ‘Preston Council Housing Scheme Approved’, Lancashire Daily Post, 30 October 1919

(7) 19 September and 12 November 1919, Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/1 1919-1923. See also DR Beattie, ‘The Origins, Implementation and Legacy of the Addison Housing Act 1919, with special reference to Lancashire’, University of Lancaster PhD, 1986. On new tenancies, see, for example, the minutes of the Housing Sub-Committee dated 16 July 1930.

(8) See Beattie, ‘The Origins, Implementation and Legacy of the Addison Housing Act 1919’, Hudson, ‘Welfarism Anew?’, and ‘Preston Housing’, Lancashire Daily Post, 29 July 1920

(9) See Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

(10) See 24 November 1920 Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/1 1919-1923 and Beattie, ‘The Origins, Implementation and Legacy of the Addison Housing Act 1919’

(12) ‘Preston Housing Scheme’, Lancashire Daily Post, 24 March 1921

(13) 14 September 1921, Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/1 1919-1923

(14) 23 November 1921, 3 March 1922 and 27 June 1922, Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/1 1919-1923

(15) ‘Preston Town Council Tenders For 50 More Houses. A System of Roofing Before Walls Are Built’, Lancashire Daily Post, 30 October 1924

(16) ‘Preston’s Unhealthy Areas’, Lancashire Daily Post, 27 November 1924

(17) ‘Demolition of Houses. Animated Discussion at Preston Council Meeting’, Lancashire Daily Post, 29 October 1931

(18) ‘Preston Council Debate Housing’, Lancashire Daily Post, 30 March 1933

(19) On the NUWM delegation, see 13 January 1932; on rent reductions and rebates see, minutes in March 1933 and 1934, Preston Borough Council, Housing Committee Minutes: CBP 32/3 1929-1939

Cottingham’s Council Housing, Part I to 1930: ‘Simple and Harmonious as a Whole’

13 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Guest Post, Housing, Rural council housing, Yorkshire

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1920s, Cottingham

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two posts from Peter Claxton on housing in the village of Cottingham just north of Hull. Peter rekindled his love of history at university following his retirement having spent 40 years working in IT. He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. He is currently researching the contentious relationship between private interests and public improvements with regards to health and housing in Kingston upon Hull between 1854 and 1914.

Much has been written about the provision of local authority housing in our towns and cities but we should not overlook the fact that of the 1806 local authorities questioned by the Local Government Board in 1918 regarding their housing requirements, many were small urban or lightly populated rural district councils. (1)

With a population of 5133 in 1921, Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was one such urban district council (UDC). Today, in part, it butts up to the city of Kingston upon Hull, but at the start of the nineteenth century with just 1927 residents it was one of a number of satellite villages that semi-circled the then port town.

Situated just five miles to the northwest of Hull, by the end of the eighteenth century it had acquired a reputation as an ideal place for the ‘well-heeled’ to relocate to and in so doing build their grand houses and lay-out ornamental gardens.

Newgate House, built in the late 19th/early 19th century

The arrival of the railway in 1846 accelerated this process, with a number of villas and terraces built to house the emerging middle class. Yet there was a problem for all those that relocated. Keen as they were to escape the pervasive smells of Hull’s multifarious processing industries, distance offered them no such guarantee.

With market gardening Cottingham’s primary economic activity – there were 71 nurserymen in and around the village just before WW1 supplying the markets of both Hull and Leeds – the daily transhipment of night soil from Hull to the fields around the village ensured that no matter how wealthy or upwardly mobile the incomers were, they could never completely leave their pasts behind them!

Low agricultural wages stifled the ambitions of many village residents, yet the desire for improved housing, just like the inhabitants of its much larger neighbour clearly existed. The reduced number made it of no less importance, it was simply a matter of scale. The village was unaccustomed to change, and in general, the UDC – set up under the 1894 Local Government Act consisted of just 12 members – busied itself approving the erection of private dwellings, undertaking nuisance control measures, tarring the roads and maintaining the street lighting.

As elsewhere, following cessation of hostilities in 1918, there was evidence of change. The laying out of new streets extended the built-up area far beyond the village’s traditional nucleus. (2) And as with the vacating of large properties in Hull during the nineteenth century in favour of Cottingham, the same fate now befell a number of those former imposing residences in the village. The vacant properties complete with their large gardens together with numerous unworked smallholdings in and around the village became ideal plots for local builders. Between 1918 and 1939, 1237 houses were built in Cottingham by 95 builders.

In 1918 when it came to the crunch, Cottingham UDC like so many other local authorities, had no experience of building or renting out houses. Enthusiasm could only achieve so much, which in the case of Cottingham, amounted to the purchase of 9.5 acres in April 1919 of the Westfield Estate at the fashionable west end of the village from Archdeacon J Malet Lambert. Viewed by many as a local philanthropist, he also had something of chequered past.

He was however a former and influential member of the Hull & District Sanitary Association, that had continually questioned the efficacy of Hull’s Local Board of Health, pressing for improvements to housing and sanitation within the Borough. So effective were its methods that a Local Government Board enquiry took place in 1888, subsequently making a number of recommendations for the sanitary improvement of the town.(3) Yet Malet Lambert’s philanthropy had limitations, originally offered £125 per acre, he refused to settle for anything less than £200. (4)

Purchasing a piece of land is one thing, populating it with houses is a different matter entirely. The appointment of Hull architect Harry Andrews on a project-only basis was a sound first move by the council. The first phase was for the provision of a modest 50 houses, yet this relatively small number, would in no way be the guarantee to a trouble-free build. Tenders approaching £10,000 for street works and sewerage had an immediate impact on the project. To reduce the civil costs the architect modified the lay-out of the houses positioning them all adjacent to the main road. Costs were trimmed but so was the number of houses, now down to 36. Built by Hull firm Holliday & Barker, they took the form of a single meandering row of 18 pairs of semi-detached houses.

Yet according to a local newspaper, the 12 parlour and 24 non-parlour three bedroomed houses were reported to be: (5)

One of the finest sites in the district, it has been developed to allow the erection of 98 houses, only 16 of which will have a northerly aspect … while somewhat severe in appearance in conformity with the Ministry of Health’s instructions, are exceedingly simple and harmonious as a whole …

Simple and severe certainly, but in no way were they harmonious, not according to many of the locals whose abhorrence towards the stark appearance of the dwellings, had two weeks earlier, prompted an irksome response from a council member who retorted: (6)

There was a most extraordinary and widespread misconception in Cottingham … The people seem to think the council were entirely responsible for the architecture of the houses which had been put up, and for the quality of materials used. This was not so. They had been entirely over-ruled by the authorities at Leeds.

The Southwood Estate, featured in the *Hull Daily Mail*, 27 October 1921

This was a direct reference to the Leeds-based Regional Housing Commissioner of the Ministry of Health and Housing who held sway over all matters relating to the provision of local authority housing in Yorkshire under the terms of the Housing & Town Planning Act, 1919.

First impressions clearly mattered, and for some of the class-conscious residents at the west end of the village, their dissatisfaction was all too apparent. The first ‘council houses’ were not detached from the village as in many large conurbations where those re-housed would be beyond the tram terminus or omnibus service, and therefore out of sight and out of mind. This was simply an extension to the western end of the village and therefore contiguous to existing properties. Snobocracy appeared to be alive and well in Cottingham and the neighbours were clearly not happy!

Southwood Villa © Bernard Sharp and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Southwood Hall © George Robinson and made available through a Creative Commons licence

No one in the village could question the need for additional housing, it was simply a matter of predetermined expectations. Inside each house the council had dutifully considered the needs of the soon-to-be tenants. All featured hot and cold water, cupboards, a space for a cycle or perambulator and the fitting of a tiled fireplace, and not just a cast iron mantlepiece. The metal window frames – cheaper and more readily available than wooden ones at the time – included a pivot mechanism on the upstairs frames that facilitated easy cleaning of the glazing. In addition the parlour houses had a window to the side to throw light over the shoulder of anyone sitting reading by the fire.

Yet these features did little to assuage the feelings of the neighbours, whose distain was based solely on the external appearance of the dwellings. Through the use of poor-quality commons and their box-like appearance, the houses were deemed to be an incongruous addition to the village. In an attempt to mollify dissenting voices, the council adopted a course of action which at the time was an earnest attempt to remedy the situation. The solution to the dilemma was to hide the brickwork. Each house was to be covered with a roughcast and colour-washed white with Tungaline paint.

An advert for William Jacks & Co Paints © The Priya Paul Collection, Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

And to further improve matters, the exteriors were to be enhanced by the tasteful application of a contrasting dark brown gloss paint to the woodwork!

For a time, all was well until the gradual and increasing appearance of brown blemishes to the white-washed walls. To the council’s horror, it was discovered that ironstone chippings constituted part of the roughcast mix and rust had started to leech through to the surface resulting in the mottled finish.

Yet again with good intentions and financial ramifications, the council attempted to remedy the situation by the removal and re-application of the roughcast. Unfortunately the remedial work was not carried out to an exacting standard and the problem is visible to this day. Recently applied external insulation masks the rusting on those properties still part of the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council housing portfolio.

The generous proportions of the ‘Addison Houses’ and high build costs were reflected in the weekly rents. Many early tenants were employed in local agriculture, and at the time of construction, the first cut of what by 1923 amounted to an overall 35 percent reduction in agricultural wages had taken place. (7) With wages reduced to 24 shillings per week by 1923 there was little wonder that many tenants fell into rent arrears within the first 12 months of occupancy. An appeal to the Ministry of Health secured a reduction of 1/6d per week for each type of house. But with weekly rents of 11/6d or 9/6d excluding rates, it was still necessary for distraint warrants to be issued against persistent defaulters.(8)

High maintenance costs and difficulties with the collection of rents impaired the council’s judgement regarding further housing provision. Finding the whole experience exceedingly troublesome, it had within a matter of 18 months placed on record that an offer for the remaining land it held lay on the table. At 2/6d per square yard (£605 per acre) some three times the price paid in 1919, it proved too tempting an offer. Parcels of land were duly sold to private developers including the North Eastern Railway Cottage Homes. For the remainder of the decade, the council restricted activity to the authorisation of subsidies to private builders under the terms of the 1923 Housing Act. By the end of the decade, 30 ‘subsidy houses’ had been built in the village.

Reticence towards further provision was of course futile. At the start of the 1930s, a modest 12 houses were built on one of the remaining parcels of land. Gone were the generous terms offered in 1919, replaced by the more circumspect grants of the 1924 Housing Act. With a long memory and a Yorkshireman’s vice-like grip of the purse strings, the council did not repeat the mistakes of old. Tucked away behind the rusting white-washed ribbon development, variations in design improved the prospect of the new houses. Yet again commons were the order of the day but thankfully, the temptation to apply a roughcast finish had been resisted.

Phase 2 facing the NER Railway Cottage Homes

For the council – with still a little land in reserve – it was now a time for reflection. Builders were ‘ramping-up’ private provision locally and those who had ‘Dunroamin’ settled down at ‘Mon Repos’ and ‘Chez Nous’. (9) But, as a follow-up blog will suggest, even in a relatively quiet village things never stay the same for very long.

Sources

(1) Stephen Merrett, State Housing in Britain (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Cottingham UDC was one of the 400 authorities that had replied to the LGB by December 1918

(2) KJ Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars: the example of Cottingham’, East Yorkshire Local History Society, Bulletin, No. 55, Winter 1996/7

(3) During this period the town was often referred to (in print) as ‘Squalid Hull’.

(4) From the minutes of Cottingham UDC, 2 April 1919, East Riding Archives

(5) ‘Cottingham Housing Scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 27 October 1921

(6) ‘Cottingham’s New Houses’, Hull Daily Mail, 13 October 1921

(7) Martin Pugh, We Danced all Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (Bodley Head, 2008)

(8) ‘Cottingham Council Houses, Distraint Warrants Issued for Unpaid Rents’, Hull Daily Mail, 9 August 1923

(9) Allison, ‘The boom in house-building between the wars …’

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