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

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1920s, Non-traditional, Rural council housing

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

West Camel

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

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

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

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

Times advert, 7 April 1925

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

Goldcroft, Yeovil

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

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

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

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

Howell Hill, West Camel

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

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

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

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

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

Higher Bullen, Barwick

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

Fairhouse Road, Barwick

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

Ryme Intrinseca

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

Frog Lane, Bampton (Google Streetview)

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

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

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

Edward Road, Queenborough (Google Streetview)

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

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

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

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

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

Goldcroft, Yeovil

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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1920s

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

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

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

Milner Crescent, Aylesham

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

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

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

Snowdown Colliery, 1930

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

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

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

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

Neville Chamberlain

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

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

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

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

Patrick Abercrombie, 1942 © National Portrait Gallery, London

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

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

This 1926 map shows the projected extent of the coalfield.

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

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

King’s Road, Aylesham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Square, Aylesham

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Council Housing in Walsall, Part II: The Interwar Period

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1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

Brockhurst Street, Fullbrook

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

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

Homes on the Poets Estate, Harden

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

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

West Bromwich Road, Palfrey

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

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

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

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

Talke Road, Fullbrook

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

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

Dorsett Place, Leamore

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

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

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

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

11 Walstead Road, now privately owned.

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

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

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

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

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

Prefabs on Alumwell Road

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Council Housing in Walsall, Part I: Before 1914 and the Impact of War

Tags

1920s, Pre-1914

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

Walsall might seem a workaday kind of place to some, typical of many such towns in the North and Midlands which prospered as Britain industrialised but fell on hard times as that, by now, traditional manufacturing economy faltered. It has, however, amongst its other claims to fame, a rich council housing history. This first post will examine the earliest phase of this history – the debate around state provision of working-class housing that developed before 1914 and the impact of the war itself on a council housebuilding programme.

Statue of Sister Dora (c) Derek Bennett and made available under a Creative Commons licence

In 1800, Walsall’s population stood a little over 10,000; by 1901 86,430 lived in the town, employed in a diverse range of trades, most famously leather manufacture.  The town’s squalid housing reflected this rapid population growth but, at first, there was neither the will nor the power to tackle the problem of its slum housing.  There were cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 and smallpox epidemics in 1872 and 1875. The heroic role of the Anglican nun, Sister Dora (Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison) in tending to those affected in the latter outbreak is recognised in what is said to be the country’s first statue, erected in Walsall town centre in 1886, to a woman not of royal blood

Townend Bank, 1875, a photograph by WB Shaw (with thanks to A Click in Time)

Belatedly, the Victorian state and its elites moved to address the sanitary crisis caused by Britain’s breakneck urbanisation. The 1875 Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Improvement Act allowed local authorities to compel the demolition of unfit properties (but made no provision for rehousing those affected).  One year later, Walsall’s first Medical Officer of Health, Dr James MacLachlan, ordered the clearance of the central Townend Bank area; ‘a conglomeration of abominations’ in MacLachlan’s view. One hundred and twenty dwellings, housing almost 600 people, were demolished. (1)

But the ambivalence – to put it kindly – of ‘respectable’ Victorian attitudes towards slumdom and its inhabitants lingered on and the tendency to blame the poor for their poverty and squalor remained. According to the local mayor: (2)

Many of the tenants have been for generations the sloth of the idle and the profligate and abounded in associations which are disgusting to public morality and common decency. The very soil on which they stand is known to be saturated with disease and death, while the whole district seems to be given over to drunkenness and dissoluteness.

Wider opinion was shifting, however, a change seen legislatively in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act which strengthened the powers of councils to clear slums and, critically, permitted them to build new housing.

This reflected a changing political climate.  After 1884, working-class men formed a majority of the electorate and traditional parties had both to address this new electorate and contend with emerging socialist ideas. Haydn Sanders, an independent socialist, was elected to the Council in 1888, and the first Labour councillor, Joe Thickett, in 1913.

Cllrs Thickett (to left) and Hucker, 1915 (with thanks to Black Country History; made available under a Creative Commons licence)

Thickett was a railway signalman and he was joined the following year by his fellow railwayman, Henry Hucker.  The local press pointed out, when Thickett was succeeded by Hucker as mayor in 1924, that they worked alternate shifts in the same box.  That was a later sign of a changing party political balance but, before the First World War, Walsall, a County Borough from 1888, remained broadly Liberal in its politics.

Working-class housing conditions remained dire despite the Borough’s modest slum clearance programme, a problem compounded by the town’s population growth – up to 92,115 by 1911 – and the shortage of suitable and affordable homes. Belatedly, in October 1913, the Health Committee was instructed to: (3)

inquire into and report upon the whole question of housing conditions in Walsall, and in the event of appearing from such inquiry that there is a deficiency of housing accommodation for the working classes, to consider and report as to the steps to be taken to meet such deficiency.

The subsequent report by the Medical Officer of Health revealed just 148 vacant houses of up to 7s (35p) a week rental (obviously the figure taken to represent the maximum working-class households could afford), of which 49 were unfit. Meanwhile, 132 one-room tenements were occupied by 210 persons and 530 two-room tenements by some 1528. In all, it was estimated that over seven percent of the town’s population lived more than two to a room, taken as the benchmark for overcrowding.

The Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle headline of 14 February 1914

The deficiency was obvious and had a further impact on slum clearance efforts. As the Medical Officer of Health concluded the ‘present shortage of houses handicaps the Health Committee in dealing with houses which are unfit for habitation, because if the houses are closed the occupants may be unable to obtain other dwellings’.

The Health Committee concluded unanimously that there was ‘a pressing need for the provision of additional houses for the working classes’.  However, only a majority of the Committee supported the further recommendation that ‘a scheme should be prepared for the provision by the Council of about 200 dwellings under the Housing Act’.  That division gave rise to a fierce debate as to what the Council’s role should be.  And that debate – covered thoroughly in the local press – is revealing of the broader disagreements, then and now, on what the proper role of the national and local state should be in providing decent homes for the working class.

Conservative opposition to a council housebuilding programme rested on a number of propositions, the most basic being that private enterprise could be expected to step up to the plate. This ideological commitment to the free market ignored its failure to date and the fact that contractors’ profits lay in building more expensive homes for the middle class. (Plus ça change…)

It was perhaps in recognition of those realities that a second, superficially more humane, argument was advanced to oppose a council scheme – that the new homes would be unaffordable to those who needed them most, ‘the submerged tenth’ as one councillor described them.  It was true that council house rents lay beyond the means of the poorest; the new homes catered primarily for precisely the better-off working class, those most likely within the labour movement to be campaigning for them. (Some reformers argued that a ‘filtering up’ process would occur whereby the slightly better homes vacated by new council tenants would be taken over by the poorer moving from slummier quarters.)  In part recognition of this case, the Council eventually agreed a smaller scheme of 125 new homes of which 25 would be reserved for those affected by slum clearance.

However such apparent compassion coalesced uncomfortably with thoroughly unreconstructed attitudes towards the poor and their poverty. Alderman Walker claimed he would support building 200 houses for slum clearance purposes but he believed that the real solution to housing squalor lay in prosecuting those tenants ‘who would not keep their places clean’:

that was the only way they would improve the condition of things. They might provide houses but some of the people were not fit to go into them.  In their homes, they found a three-legged stool and a broken chair; the women wore dirty dresses, and the children looked as though they had not been washed for days.

In the event, a progressive majority agreed to investigate the smaller scheme proposed but to opponents this obviously represented kicking the scheme into the long grass.

Trades unionists on the local trades council sought to maintain the pressure and were clear that the plea of affordability should not be an excuse to build low-quality housing. Joe Thickett (a railway trades unionist as well as a Labour councillor) urged that the Council ‘adhere to the scheme for the provision of artisans’ dwellings, and not build low-class homes or barracks which would eventually lead to the repetition of the present slums’ – ‘5s a week houses with a good garden attached’ were wanted.

He pointed too to the progress being made nationally. The Local Government Board had committed £1.75m to the provision of working-class housing: (4)

The number of houses to be provided throughout the United Kingdom was 7,700. That was a monument to municipal progress, and they in Walsall had not contributed one single brick to that magnificent pile.

In the end, such arguments were victim of the larger tides of history.  War broke out in August 1914, and eight months later it was agreed to defer the Walsall scheme until the end of the conflict. Councillor Thickett berated Lloyd George for sacrificing house building to the war effort but acknowledged ‘that if the Prussian Junkers had never been born they would have seen the municipal houses rising from the foundations’. (5) His ‘visions of town planning, and of garden cities springing up’ survived, however, and ultimately would be enormously boosted by the war which had, for the moment, put paid to them.

In this context, Walsall offers some evidence relating to the debate between those who argue between continuity and change in council housing history – between those who argue that a council housebuilding programme was substantially in place before 1914 and would have developed despite the First World War and those who argue that the war itself was a determinant factor.  We can conclude, safely perhaps, that council housing would have grown substantially without the war and, in some respects, was delayed by it whilst acknowledging, on the other hand, that the war and the pressures it engendered was undoubtedly at least a catalyst and more probably a significant accelerant to the emergent movement.

The Tudor Walters Report of 1918, outlining the Government’s recommendations for the form and layout of post-war municipal housing, embodied some of Thickett’s hopes and Addison’s 1919 Housing Act compelled, for the first time, a council housebuilding programme. The Act required councils not only to survey local housing needs but to implement concrete plans to address them.

Homes in Blakenall Lane, amongst the earliest built by the Council

In the first flush of enthusiasm for this ‘land fit for heroes to live in’ promised by prime minister Lloyd George, Walsall committed to building some 1500 homes and the very first completed, at 98 Blakenall Lane, Bloxwich, was opened in June 1920.

Early council homes, East Street

At the same time, other homes – in modest but well-built terraces – were erected in Haskell Street and East Street to the south off West Bromwich Road. Priority was given first to ex-servicemen, their widows and children, and then the overcrowded.

Thereafter the going got tough.  There were already complaints about the construction costs of the new homes as post-war labour and materials shortages hit.   Under contracts let in February 1920, parlour homes were costing £840 to build and non-parlour £740 (about three times the pre-war figure). Unusually for the time, some 100 homes in Walsall were built by direct labour as a means of reducing expenditure. Rents were correspondingly high though the Council’s proposal to charge 9s a week for parlour homes and 7s a week for non-parlour houses was knocked back by the Ministry of Health. (6)

Early council homes, Haskell Street

In September 1920, the Corporation retrenched.  The 1500 home target, it was said, had been ‘been inserted under strong pressure from the Ministry’ and, as one councillor concluded, the programme ‘had not provided homes at a reasonable cost, and the rents which had to be charged were greater than people could afford to pay’. It was agreed to cut the programme to 450 homes. (7)

In this, the Council was merely anticipating events at the national level.  The Government scrapped the generous subsidies of the 1919 Housing Act in April 1921. Nationally, only 213,000 houses of the half-million initially promised were built under the legislation. Walsall itself completed some 310.  That almost 40 per cent of these were the parlour homes advocated in the Tudor Walters Report was vestigial testimony to the higher ideals of war’s end. (8)

That fortunately was not the end of the story. New pressures and demands emerged, new legislation passed and Walsall would become proportionately one of the largest providers of council housing in the country during the interwar period and beyond.  The next phase of this history will be discussed in next week’s post.

Sources

The early images of Walsall councillors are drawn from the online archive, Black Country History.

(1)  AP Baggs, GC Baugh and DA Johnston, ‘Walsall: Public services‘, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 17, Offlow Hundred (Part), ed. MW Greenslade (London, 1976)

(2) Quoted in Simon Briercliffe, ‘”Slums” of the Black Country: Town End Bank, Walsall’, 30 November, 2015.  Read the article for a fuller description of sanitary conditions and reform in Walsall in this period.

(3) ‘Municipal Housing. Health Committee to Prepare Scheme’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 14 February 1914

(4) ‘Municipal Housing Scheme. Discussed by Trades Council’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 14 February 1914

(5) ‘Municipal Housing. Proposed Shelving of Scheme’, Walsall Observer and South Staffordshire Chronicle, 13 March 1915

(6) ‘Walsall Town Council. Progress of Housing Scheme’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 February 1920 and ‘Walsall Town Council. Priority for Corporation Houses’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 February 1920

(7) ‘Walsall Town Council. The Housing and Abattoir Schemes’, Staffordshire Advertiser, 24 April 1920

(8) AT Parrott and DR Wilson, ‘Housing Development in Walsall: Progress and Problems’, British Housing & Planning Review, July-August 1954

Council Housing in Beverley: ‘Top notch in them days’

Tags

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

If you visit Beverley, you’ll likely go to see the Gothic minster – the finest parish church in the land – and its beautifully conserved town centre.  It’s dubbed the Georgian Quarter now, a bit of tourist branding which in this case is fully justified.  But there’s an alternative history – of a small industrial town with an important working-class presence. And that, in the twentieth century, meant council housing, lots of it.

Beverley market place, c1900s (c) East Riding Archives

This post, naturally, focuses on the latter.  It tells the story of Beverley’s council estates and the people who lived on them which, for once, are unusually well recorded.  Next week’s post looks at the working-class community that the new housing spawned.

Grovehill shipyard, 1950 (c) East Riding Archives

In the nineteenth century, Beverley, administrative and commercial capital of Yorkshire’s largely rural East Riding, had the industries typical of a town with its large agricultural hinterland. Surprisingly perhaps, from 1901 with the establishment of the Cook, Welton and Gemmell yard, a significant steel shipbuilding industry developed, at Grovehill on the River Hull to the east of the town. The company employed around 650 men into the 1950s until the yard closed down in 1976 with 180 redundancies. (1)

Factory workers, Armstrongs, 1940s (c) East Riding Archives

By 1937, however, the town’s largest employer, was the Armstrong shock absorber works on Eastgate.  In the 1960s, the factory employed around 2000; it too closed in the 1970s. Together with Hodgson’s Tannery and other smaller works, Beverley – for all its county town ambience – had the largest industrial working class in the East Riding outside Hull.

For all this industry, Beverley remained a small town.  Before the First World War, its population stood at a little over 13,000 and it grew only slowly to 15,500 by 1951.  Nor did it suffer, in scale or concentration, the problems of working-class slum housing that affected Britain’s larger industrial towns.

Butcher Row, 1912 (c) East Riding Archives

A 1901 survey enumerated 3046 inhabited houses and 3095 households in the town; an average of 4.3 persons per house.  In Beverley, the problem was not expanses of jerry-built Victorian terraces but infill – cottages in small clusters built in courts, backyards and alleys off the main streets of the historic centre: (2)

There were some examples of gross overcrowding, but not many: 191 houses had fewer than five rooms and more than five occupants. In the years 1901-14 the medical officer of health condemned an average of eight houses annually, but there was no policy of replacement. Pressure on housing was not seen as a major problem.

Ostensibly, not much had altered by 1919 when, of 2923 houses in the town designated ‘working-class’, 39 were classified ‘dilapidated’ (21 were empty), 115 suffered ‘marked’ overcrowding and 33 were occupied by more than one family.  This was hardly a housing crisis – except for those families affected – but the wider context had changed significantly.

That survey was a product of the 1919 Housing Act, itself a consequence of the First World War.  Housing was now at the top of the political agenda and ‘homes for heroes’ were intended both as a reward for working-class sacrifice in the war and as a sop to any revolutionary sentiments the working class might, in these turbulent times, harbour.

Crucially, the Act required that councils not only assess local housing needs but act on them.  Beverley Corporation was a largely Conservative authority at this time – the first official Labour candidates weren’t elected until 1951 – but it acted quickly on these new imperatives.

Concrete houses on Warton Avenue, Grovehill Estate

In 1920, the Council bought land on Grovehill Road (literally on the wrong side of the tracks – to the east of the Hull-Scarborough railway line) to build its first council homes.  By 1923, 88 concrete houses had been built on Neville Avenue, Warton Avenue and Routh Avenue; the use of concrete a reflection of post-war shortages of building materials and skilled labour.  A further 78 houses, conventionally brick-built, were added under the 1924 Housing Act on Schofield Avenue and Hotham Square.

By contemporary standards, these new homes were far from luxurious as one resident who moved into a house on Routh Avenue in 1942 recalls: (3)

Gas lights, the toilet and coalhouse in an outside lobby, the bath in a tiny room at the end of the kitchen. My mother used to stipple her walls, put borders around. [A neighbour’s] weren’t plastered, they were painted brick, dark brown at the bottom and cream at the top.

But they were, in nearly all cases, far superior to the privately-rented housing from which their residents moved.  In 1926, as the Corporation contemplated further land purchases and building, the mayor, Robert Harding Wood (a master butcher), reported: (4)

He was receiving a number of letters every day as well as personal visits asking for houses. Some of those who came to see him were living under conditions which were a disgrace to civilisation.

Bartlett Avenue and Champney Road

In the event, the Corporation purchased the town centre estate of the late Admiral Walker for £10,000. The big house served as municipal offices from 1930 until local government reorganisation in 1996 but an 8.5 acre portion of the land was dedicated to new council housing – some 119 houses principally along Champney Road and Central Avenue.

By 1930, the Council had built some 285 houses, a sizeable total for a town of its size, but fresh impetus to construction was provided by Labour’s 1930 Housing Act with its particular focus on slum clearance.  Despite the fact that only about half Beverley’s homes had water closets in 1934 (not until the later 1950s did all its houses enjoy this basic amenity), the Council’s clearance efforts were hindered in 1933 when 14 owners of condemned housing appealed successfully against demolition.

Riding Fields Square, Cherry Tree Estate

Nevertheless, 126 houses were built between 1931 and 1933 on land to the west of the existing Grovehill Estate off Cherry Tree Lane. A further 128 houses were added in the last years of the decade but the outbreak of war prevented further construction on a new site, purchased in 1938, off Goth’s Lane to the north. The new houses were reserved to those who had been displaced by the Council’s slum clearance programme.

Greenwood Avenue, Cherry Tree Estate

Amongst the new streets – Hodgson Avenue, Thompson Avenue and Riding Fields Square – it’s nice to see a Greenwood Avenue named after Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Minister of Health and Housing who had overseen the 1930 legislation.  Greenwood’s real recognition, however, comes in the memory of a resident who moved into a new home on Greenwood Avenue in 1940:

It was lovely really, top notch in them days. They had a toilet and bathroom, good heavens, a bathroom – we’d been used to bathing in a tub in front of the fire.

He moved again, in 1949, to a house on Thompson Avenue: ‘It was a bigger house, more modern…It had a proper living room and a kitchen and a dining room, and three bedrooms’.

Beverley, in sharp contrast to nearby Hull, was relatively unscathed by wartime bombing but its housing needs remained pressing in the post-war period. The town was allocated 75 prefabs at the end of 1944, sited – after some delay – off Goth’s Lane but by the following year around 900 remained on the waiting list. (5)

Larger and longer-term solutions were needed and these were announced by the Council in February 1946. On 130 acres of land, adjacent to the existing estates to the east, it planned: (6)

a modern estate of 800 houses with park and recreational sites, community centre, health centre, branch library, sub-post office, licensed house and shopping centre.

In addition, ten acres would be set aside to the East Riding Education Committee for two new schools and land was allocated for a park and recreational space, next to shops, in the middle of the new estate.

All this reflected the planning ideals of the post-war era – the ambition to create neighbourhood – and was a conscious corrective to what many now saw as the failure of pre-war estates to provide the facilities needed to promote community.  Locally, one correspondent to the Beverley Guardian in June 1945 had noted problems caused by moving people from central areas onto estates without community provision: ‘Where this is not done it is unfair for anyone to speak disparagingly of corporation house tenants’. (7)

Prince’s Gardens, 1954, designated for slum clearance (c) East Riding Archives

Beverley reflected too the new thrust which dominated housing policy from the 1950s as immediate pressures for reconstruction eased – the desire to eradicate, for once and for all, the slum conditions in which so many still lived. A 1952 survey by the Council’s Medical Officer of Health slated 511 houses for immediate demolition and some 719 for later clearance.

Wilbert Court

Around 20 to 40 houses – mostly in the yards and alleys off the town centre’s main streets – were demolished annually in the fifties as new housing became available.  Beverley even ventured into the multi-storey living now becoming more typical though, in this case, it was just a single five- and six-storey block built nearer the centre on Wilbert Lane. Some three-storey blocks of flats and maisonettes were also built in the newer developments as it was increasingly realised that the two-storey family home staple of interwar construction failed to meet the range of contemporary housing needs.

By 1964, 1332 council homes had been built in Beverley since the war and in all council housing made up around one quarter of the town’s housing stock.  These were good homes too – a new resident on Coltman Avenue recalls:

These houses seemed very luxurious, a living room and separate dining room and well fitted kitchen, a spacious hall and three bedrooms with an upstairs bathroom.

On Burden Road, houses featured another innovation – the through lounge recommended by the Dudley Committee in its wide-ranging report on housing design and layout issued in 1944.

Coltman Avenue, Goth’s Lane Estate. The image captures a little of the initially more open-plan nature of the newer schemes.

There was a self-conscious but modest modernism to the new estates and, in some way, a deliberately more ‘democratic’ feel.  (Ian Waites has captured this well in his writing on the Middlefield Estate in Gainsborough, a Lincolnshire town bearing close comparison to Beverley.) They were characterised by more open space and wider, curving roads – a contrast to the more boxy, rectangular forms which marked earlier schemes.

Bernard Walling, who moved into a house on Sigston Road in 1966, remembers it as:

very open plan, no hedges, no walls, no fences, there was small kerbstones at the pavement edge of the gardens and that idea was in those days – the whole of the estate was open plan…

That, as we’ll see, has changed over the years.  There’s far more what Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman would later call ‘defensible space’ now – enclosed, privatised areas fenced off as front gardens, hard standing for cars and the like – but the road and others around it retain something of this original form and ethos.

In next week’s post, we’ll take this exploration of working-class community and its changing forms further.

Sources

My thanks to the East Riding Archives and Local Studies service for making the older photographs credited available on a Creative Commons licence.  You can find other historic photographs of Beverley and the surrounding area on their Flickr page.

(1) Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, Cook, Welton and Gemmell

(2) AP Baggs, LM Brown, GCF Forster, I Hall, RE Horrox, GHR Kent and D Neave, A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 6, the Borough and Liberties of Beverley, ‘Political and Social History, 1835-1918’

(3) East Riding of Yorkshire Council, ‘I thought I’d never find town’: A history of council housing on Beverley’s Riding Fields (2006). Other direct quotations from residents are taken from the same source.

(4) ‘A Beverley Estate. Town Council’s New Building Site’, Hull Daily Mail, 13 April 1926

(5) ‘Beverley Council and Temporary Houses’, Hull Daily Mail, 19 July 1945. For waiting list figures, see ‘Ex-Serviceman in Council House’, Yorkshire Post, 20 November 1946

(6) ‘New Housing Estate for Beverley. A Community Centre’, Hull Daily Mail, 25 February 1946

(7) Quoted in Stefan Ramsden, Working-Class Community in the Era of Affluence: Sociability and Identity in a Yorkshire Town, 1945-1980, University of Hull PhD thesis (2011).  See also Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

North Oxfordshire: The ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ and their first council houses, Part II

Tags

1920s

I’m pleased to feature the second of Jane Kilsby’s superbly researched and illustrated guest posts on some of the finest rural council homes in the country. Last week’s post examined the background to their construction; this week’s details their form and tells the story of those who designed and built them.

Banbury Rural District Council (BRDC) in North Oxfordshire did not build any council houses before 1914.  In part I, we saw how the council members, the ‘Foxhunters, Farmers and Parsons’, made a decision to build before the outbreak of war but were overtaken by events. (1)  Then, with the Addison Act of 1919 to spur them on and in the space of 18 months, they built 170 houses for the benefit of local farmworkers and returning soldiers.

Courtington Lane, Bloxham. Photograph June 2017

BRDC’s first council houses are only a fraction of the 170,000 or so completed in the early tranche under Addison, but they were described at that time as ‘the best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country’. (2)  Let’s have a look at who designed and built these stylish, comfortable houses.

BRDC had clear ideas about the type of houses they wanted to build.  They wanted to see stone, not bricks, and local Hornton stone at that.  They wanted the houses to be in or very close to each village with attractive views over the countryside and large gardens.  High ground was their preference for ‘healthy homes’.

Sanitary Inspector, Mr Gander put himself forward as architect.  He had done some training in an architect’s office before the War and had valuable local knowledge.  The Housing Committee was pleased to make him their architect on a salary of £150 per year on condition that he appoint his son – still in the army – full time to help with all of his duties: Surveyor, Sanitary Inspector and now architect.  The Committee’s appointment, however, was very quickly revoked.  Councillor Crawford-Wood said:

 the public are disgusted with this piling up of dual and triplicate offices on one man when other men require jobs.

The Local Government Board’s Housing Inspector agreed with their decision.   His advice was to take on a qualified architect; any additional salary that would have been paid to Mr Gander would not be covered by the Local Government Board loan.   As Councillor Dr Thorne put it, we will ‘have to get an architect with a grand brass plate in front of his house’.

And so they did.  The council decided to appoint an ‘architect who has served in HM Forces and whose work has been interfered with so doing’.  They approached the Architect’s War Committee – set up by RIBA to find work for architects returning from the War – and received ‘the names of four gentlemen recently demobilised to carry out the architect’s work’.  Mr T Lawrence Dale of Richmond produced his drawings and testimonials at interview.  Very impressed, the Council appointed him with the proviso that he could start at once and would open an office in Banbury.  The Council agreed to pay him the RIBA-recommended fees (£2500) and reimbursed him his first class rail fare from London.  Dale opened an office at 6 Horse Fair and took on an assistant at £6 a week.

Thomas Lawrence Dale (1884-1959) was born in London.  He trained at The Architectural Association School of Architecture, the AA.  He qualified in 1906 and became an Associate of RIBA the following year.  In 1914 he had his own practice in Bedford Row.  A Captain with the Army Cyclists Corps, he was mentioned in despatches.  Before the War his commissions included houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb and Horn Park in Dorset, now Grade II listed.

A drawing by T Lawrence Dale of a terrace of four houses appeared in the Banbury Guardian in 1919. A terrace of four houses was built for BRDC in 1920 by Henry Meckhonik of London.

Lawrence Dale’s name in the render of one of the houses in The Firs, Wroxton

The summer of 1919 was a whirl of activity.  The Housing Committee met fortnightly with an earlier start time of 10.30AM.  Mr Dale’s plans were approved by the Local Government Board, BRDC appointed a Housing Clerk and land deals were done across the district.

The council had an initial loan of £122,270 for the building work and the land.  Terms of repayment were variable; a 60 year repayment period at 6 per cent interest was typical.  The Council needed temporary loans from its own banker, however, pending the raising of permanent loans, indicating the pace and extent of their activity.   Rents needed the Ministry’s approval; in 1920 the rent for a parlour type house was 7s 6d a week, non-parlour houses were 6s a week.

Dr Addison, MP and Minister of Health wrote to the Council in July expressing his appreciation of their progress.

The ten houses in Upper Wardington were the first to be completed. They were let by Christmas 1920. Photograph June 2017.

The Housing Committee had made a tour of these houses in August 1920

Lawrence Dale designed at least two distinct types of houses for BRDC: the ‘A1 south’ type and the ‘Cropredy’ type.  The A1 south type has ‘a parlour, large living room, kitchen range grate, cement-floored scullery, a washhouse with a boiler and space for a bath and a shed for fuel and potatoes.’  There were rainwater tanks with a capacity of 200 gallons outside at the back of each house.  The Cropredy type has a larger entrance hall and steel window frames.

There are three pairs of semis of the ‘A1 south’ type in South Newington. BRDC bought the land from Magdalen College for £175 in 1919. The building included the provision of a septic tank. Photograph June 2017.

A ‘cottage’ non-parlour style was also used, for example, in Adderbury.  Some of the developments contain a mix of styles, at Hook Norton, Drayton and Milcombe, for example.

The ‘Cropredy’ type houses in Barford St Michael have flank walls of brick. A well was sunk here by the contractor, another local builder, A Hopcraft and Sons of Deddington. Photograph June 2017.

Cottage-style semi in The Crescent, East Adderbury. 200 men from Adderbury and Milton went to the War. These houses were let specifically to returning soldiers and their families. (6) Photograph June 2017.

A pair of semis in Milton, with very large front gardens, built by the Harpenden Building Co.  Photograph June 2017

The houses in Mollington are in the centre of the village and on higher ground. Lawrence Dale grouped houses together as much as possible ‘on the assumption that neighbours should also be friends’ (2). Photograph July 2017

Some of the cottages have names carved in a stone lintel above the front door.  Thisbe and Pyramus Cottages are in Wroxton and the six in Cropredy were all named to commemorate the Battle of Cropredy Bridge, 1644.  Charles, Cleveland, Cavalier, Culverin, Kentish and Waller Cottages are in Chapel Close.

Every house had a garden of not less than a quarter of an acre, double the Ministry of Health’s requirement for new rural houses.  Council-built housing was a brand new concept in these villages: there was a concern that a lot of people thought that they would not be allowed to build pig sties.  The Banbury Advertiser reported the Chairman’s insistence that:

where there was a large garden there should be a sty.  He hoped the Press would note that there were no conditions of any kind whatever which prevented tenants putting up pig-sties.

The Banbury Guardian of 26 August 1920 was very complimentary:

The old idea of building a modern cottage was to put up four straight walls with a sort of box roof, the whole being severely plain, and, if economical, was exceedingly ugly.  The council set out to resist the promulgation of these atrocities and the Housing Committee through their architect, Mr Dale, have produced cottages which do not detract from the picturesqueness of the villages, as was dreaded would happen when new buildings were called for.

The article noted too the striking form of the new houses:

the fronts, sides, and in some instances the backs, are of stone up to the roof, which is the mansard type, that is it breaks the front and back lines and is continued down over the first floor, but at a greatly reduced angle so that it does not curtail the space inside.

Walton Close, Bodicote. This site was one of the very few that had a water supply before the houses were built. Photograph June 2017

All of the Lawrence Dale houses have mansard, ‘cat slide’ type roofs. The houses in Horley have Hornton stone on all sides. Photograph June 2017.

There is no need to describe the interior of the houses when we have the film. The Hook Norton Village website includes 24 Square Miles Re-visited made in 1992.

This shorter film of highlights includes footage of the houses in Tadmarton.  At about 9 minutes 22 seconds in, the film stresses that in 1944 the houses still had sinks but no taps and indoor toilets that were only a bucket.  As BRDC knew only too well, good houses are only as good as their location and their water supply. (3)

The Tadmarton houses are on the hill in the distance, as in the film Twenty Four Square Miles. Mrs Summers, a widow who lost two sons in the War, was the first tenant of no 6. Photograph July 2017

Henry Boot steps into our story in 1920.  Joiner and builder from Sheffield, he set up his company in 1886 and achieved rapid expansion.  The company was the first building company to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.  In the same year, 1919, Boot’s eldest son, Charles, took the lead.  With a keen interest in house building, his company’s prospectus of 1919 refers to the ‘immense field for commercial enterprise opened up by this enormous volume of construction’. (4)

Henry Boot (1851-1931). Photograph with the kind permission of Henry Boot PLC.

Building contracts under the Addison Act started with an average size of 40 dwellings and, for contracting purposes, most local authorities split any planned large estates into small lots and this suited the building firms operating at the end of the War.  As more councils began to build – there were 4,400 ministry-approved council housing schemes by 1922 – they needed economy of scale and speed.

With inflation and a scarcity of labour and materials, many smaller firms struggled to get finance.  The work was there but they needed capital to get their schemes off the ground.  BRDC had some experience of this; there were no difficulties with quality but some tender advertisements had a poor response.

Crucially, £300,000 raised as capital through their flotation gave Henry Boot & Sons the edge.  The company was able to take advantage of the option to submit prices for groups of villages.

In April 1920 the Housing Commissioner received a proposal from Henry Boot that the company take on all of BRDC’s remaining sites and those of adjoining districts, including Towcester RDC.  Boot’s offer was accepted.  Charles Boot hosted a meeting at his London office in July attended by the Housing Commissioner, Lawrence Dale and Mr Fisher to thrash out details of the contract, including an agreement that the council would pay for building materials as and when they were delivered on site.

Boot & Sons built 128 of the 170 houses.  Operating concurrently on 16 sites, the value of their contract was £126,934.  Their work included the larger sites e.g. at Hook Norton (26 houses), Tadmarton (14), East Adderbury (22).  Local carpenter, Percy Alcock, quickly became Boots’ foreman and then site agent for all 16 sites.

Houses under construction in Horley, 1920. Percy Alcock, Henry Boot’s site agent, is on the far left. One of the first lettings was to a Mr Green who had lived in an old cottage on this site. Photograph with the kind permission of PR Alcock and Sons.

Henry Boot & Sons (London) Ltd in the render of a house at The Firs, Wroxton

Distinctive ‘snail-creep’ pointing by stonemason Mr Cronk (employed by Boot & Sons) on the front of one of the houses in Shutford Road, North Newington. This is said to be very high quality ‘snail-creep’, an unusual technique in buildings faced with Hornton stone. There are BRDC 1921 plaques on many of the houses.

With so much going on, transport became an issue.  Mr Gander was already using a council-owned motor-bicycle; the council bought a Ford light van and a motor-bicycle and side-car for Boots’ foremen on condition that they would be auctioned at the end of the contract.

There are three pairs of semis in The Close, Great Bourton. BRDC acquired this site under a compulsory purchase order. A shortage of tiles led to a delay in completion. Photograph June 2017.

By August 1922, all 170 houses (106 parlour type and 64 non parlour) were complete and let.  Notices were put up in the villages asking anyone who was interested in a tenancy to get in touch with the Clerk to the Council, Mr Fisher.  The council tried to offer the houses to local people from the same villages, with preference given to people who had served in the War.

And what did they all do next?

The ‘foxhunters, farmers and parsons’ continued to build council houses.  Their later additions made use of the Ministry of Health’s standard house designs.  Their successors, in tweeds, are portrayed towards the end of Twenty-Four 24 Square Miles.

Mr Gander retired through ill health in November 1921.  BRDC was so appreciative of his loyalty that they kept him on as a Consulting Surveyor at £75 per year.  What’s sauce for the goose?  He died in 1925.

Edward Lamley Fisher, MBE, BRDC’s first Clerk, retired after 55 years of service.  As Superintendent Registrar he had officiated at over 3000 marriages.  In January 1945 at a party to celebrate his 50^th anniversary at the council, his colleagues recalled the ‘extremely interesting and happy days just after the last great war…working with Mr Fisher on matters appertaining to the selection of sites for council houses’.

Lawrence Dale had a successful career; he became Oxford Diocesan Surveyor in the 1930s, designing and renovating parish churches.

Ickford Village Hall, Buckinghamshire, designed by T Lawrence Dale and Simon Dale in 1946; a style that will be familiar to residents of BRDC’s first council houses.

Charles Boot died in 1945 but not before Henry Boot & Sons had built more houses between the wars, public and private, in the UK than any other company.  They built 20,000 council houses before 1930.  With offices in Paris, Athens and Barcelona, the company diversified very successfully into building hospitals and bridges.  They built Pinewood Studios in 1935.  Henry Boot plc today specialises in commercial buildings and plant hire.

Laid off at the end of the Boot contract, site agent Percy Alcock formed his own company in 1922 with Cronk, the stonemason.  PR Alcock & Sons continues today from their Banbury yard, carrying out high quality restoration and joinery works on period houses and churches and for the National Trust.

The houses themselves stand in settled peace.  Most of them have been sold under the Right to Buy and change hands infrequently, the parlour types at a minimum of £450k.  Sanctuary Housing Group manages those available for rent, for Cherwell District Council.  There are interesting examples of the use of the huge plots but most of the gardens remain intact.  Some of the houses are in Conservation Areas.

Wykham Lane, Broughton. The 1920s gardens were wide enough to accommodate new bungalows built in the 1950s. Photograph June 2017.

So, are these the ‘best and cheapest houses in any rural district in the country?’  They are probably not the cheapest.  The 1920 Fabian Tract on Housing puts the average cost of a parlour-type house, at January 1920, at £803 per house, excluding the cost of the land, road-making and sewerage. (5)

BRDC had a ‘rule of thumb’ – house and land price – of £1,000 for each architect-designed cottage.  The council’s accounts were done separately for each site: the Sibford Gower site of six parlour-type houses, for instance, cost a total of £4,945 15s 1d – that’s £824 5s 10d per house – very close to the Fabian average.  Whether BRDC’s costs were included in the Fabians’ calculation is unclear.  Value for money?  Certainly.

South Newington. Photograph June 2017.

Thisbe and Pyramus Cottage, The Firs, Wroxton. Photograph June 2017.

The Old Council Houses, Horley. Photograph June 2017

The best?  I can do no more than continue to quote from the Banbury Guardian’s description in August 1920, when the first houses were nearing completion:

the use of the word cottage seems hardly correct…the new houses might be called bijou villas.

Sources

(1) A phrase used by Arthur Gregory of SW1 in a letter to the Banbury Advertiser published 13 March 1919.  ‘The foxhunters, farmers and parsons have monopolised the councils far too long, and it is time the co-operator, smallholder and the officials of the Agricultural and Workers’ Unions took their place and do what they can in the interest of progress’.

(2) Banbury Guardian, 26 August 1920

(3) 24 Square Miles Re-Visited a film made by South News, distributed by Trilith Films, 1992

(4) RPT Davenport-Hines (ed), Business in the Age of Depression and War (Routledge, 1990).  Includes Cash and Concrete: Liquidity Problems in the Mass Production of ‘Homes for Heroes’ by Sheila Marriner.

(5) CM Lloyd, Housing, Fabian Tract No. 193 (1920), p11

(6) Nicholas Allen, Adderbury: A Thousand Years of History (Phillimore & Co.Ltd, 1995)

Contemporary quotations from the press, unless otherwise credited, are taken from the Banbury Advertiser and Banbury Guardian between 1911 and 1925 held by the British Newspaper Archive.

My thanks to the Oxfordshire History Centre of Oxfordshire County Council for making available the BRDC council minutes from 1921.

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

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

Homes on Dickson Road in the Well Hall Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

(1) The Sanitary Inspector, 1918: 11

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

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

(4) Addison, pp62-63

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

(6) The Sanitary Journal (1924)

(7) The Sanitary Journal (1922) p202

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Lewisham

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

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

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

Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham Estate (c) Rob Clayton

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

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

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

Romborough Gardens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayeswood Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

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

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

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

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

Leafy Oak Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s

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

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

An early image of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weiße Stadt: bridge house by Otto Salvisberg

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

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

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

Weiße Stadt: Emmentaler Strasse community building by Ahrends

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

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: ‘Der Panzerkreuzer’ by Hans Scharoun

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

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

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

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks on Goebelstrasse by Hugo Häring

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks by Forbat along Geißlerpfad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s

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

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

An early image of Siedlung Schillerpark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the earliest blocks of Siedlung Schillerpark along Bristolstrasse

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

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

‘Outdoor living space’, Siedlung Schillerpark

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

One of the estate’s doorways

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

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

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

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

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

Carl Legien Estate head-building

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

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

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

Carl Legien Estate courtyard

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

Carl Legien Estate side street

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

Carl Legien Estate shops and facilities

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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