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

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1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

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

Homes on Dickson Road in the Well Hall Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

(1) The Sanitary Inspector, 1918: 11

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

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

(4) Addison, pp62-63

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

(6) The Sanitary Journal (1924)

(7) The Sanitary Journal (1922) p202

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

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

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

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

The Speke Estate, Liverpool: a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’

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1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

Speke, lying just over seven miles south-east of Liverpool’s city centre, wasn’t planned as just another large council estate.  The Corporation envisaged it as a ‘satellite town…planned to accommodate all classes of the community’. (1)  At times, the reach of that ambition must have seemed close to fulfilment but by the 1980s some called it – and not in a good way – ‘Beirut’ or, a few years later as civil war raged in the former Yugoslavia, ‘Sarajevo’. (2)  That was never fair and much has changed since.  This post looks at the longer history, the hopes and the fears and the more complex story of the community’s ups and downs.

‘Housing Estate, Speke’

Liverpool – a securely (though idiosyncratically) Conservative authority until 1956 – built over 42,000 council homes in the interwar period, most in large cottage suburbs such as Norris Green, some famously in imposing ‘Continental-style’ tenement blocks.  The Speke Estate represented another strand in this ambitious agenda, providing not just housing but employment as the Corporation sought far-sightedly to shift the city from its dependence on precarious and low-waged dock labour.

The keystone of this approach lay in the 1926 Liverpool Corporation Act which empowered the council to develop industrial estates and parallel housing developments. The Corporation bought the Speke estate – the local gentry family had died out in 1921 and the land had been placed in trust –for £200,000 in 1928.   Then in the neighbouring Rural District of Whiston, the area was formally incorporated into the County Borough of Liverpool in 1932.

Speke Airport’s original terminal building, built 1937-40 to the designs of EH Bloomfield of Liverpool Corporation Land Stewards and Surveyors Office (c) Dave Wood and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Speke Airport, operational from 1930, was the first fruit of this new venture – one of 35 municipal airports opened between 1929 and 1937.  Near at hand lay the Speke Industrial Estate, the first factory completed in 1934.  By 1939, 28 factories were built or under construction, eleven of these provided directly by the Corporation which also advanced over £300,000 in loans to encourage firms to locate in the new estate.  Some 7000 jobs had been provided, most – as war loomed – in the government airframe factory. (3)

A contemporary image of Little Heath Road

Factories needed workers.  At the same time, Liverpool citizens living in the city’s many slums needed decent homes.  In 1935, the Corporation had committed itself to an eight-year programme clearing 15,692 slums and the construction, within five years, of some 5000 new homes.  The Corporation’s transfer of 650 acres of land in Speke to the Housing Committee in April 1936 was central to these plans.

By 1939, 1631 homes had been completed on the Estate although demand was much higher. Companies drawn to the industrial estate by the lure of local housing for its workforce complained about slow progress and the failure of the Corporation to fulfil its side of the bargain; Rootes alone claimed it needed 1285 homes for its workers. (4)  This urgency led to Speke’s early housing being built without subsidy under the 1925 Housing Act.

Lancelot Keay

Just over 50 per cent of this housing were parlour homes, a high percentage in these straitened times and an indication of the prestige of the Speke scheme and the commitment of Speke’s mastermind Lancelot Keay, Liverpool’s dynamic Director of Housing, to high-quality housing.  Even the non-parlour homes were – at 750 square feet – relatively spacious and included upstairs bathrooms. (5)  The rents – reaching 18s 6d (92.5p) for a three-bed parlour home in 1939 – were relatively high and, although some 88 per cent of heads of household were classed as skilled or semi-skilled, there were reports of a high turnover of former central slum dwellers who had moved to the Estate. (6)

These homes were, in the fashion of the day, laid out on ‘Garden City’ lines though, in this case, the lines themselves were rather pronounced.  The existing village of Speke housed around 400; its parish church was judged ‘not of such importance as to be made the focal point of the new development’.

A 1936 proposal for the layout of Speke, later modified, drawn from Keay’s 1936 Report to the Housing Committee

Furthermore, the ‘absence of any natural features, the levels of the grounds, and the regularity of the boundaries,…all tended to suggest a formal layout and the consequent need of a central spacious boulevard and one main cross-road’. (6)  Western Avenue running north-south and Central Avenue east-west continue to mark that original plan with the Estate’s basic grid broken up by the cul-de-sac ways and closes which nodded towards Ebenezer Howard’s more bucolic ideals.

A post-war layout scheme, from Gale. Modern Housing Estates (1948)

Typically, for all community ideals proclaimed at the Estate’s inception, other facilities were slow to follow.  In 1941, tenants were complaining that only three shops had been provided though they had been resident for two years.  (7)

The war had naturally hindered further construction though the important military role of the airport and industrial estate no doubt played its part in the permission granted to build an additional 367 houses during the war itself.  Post-war efforts were dedicated – in the words of Labour’s 1945 election poster, to winning the peace. The attempt to fulfil Speke’s founding ideals was redoubled.

In 1949 Stanley Gale described Speke as ‘unique among housing estates developed by local authorities’.  Although it was not yet a ‘self-contained community’ as planned, its 29 factories were reported to employ some 11,000 workers; the completion of the Estate’s 6000 homes confidently projected.

Greyhound Farm Road, Speke (later the home of the actor Leonard Rossiter)

It’s worth looking at the detail of the latter: that total was made up of over 5143 two- to four-bed family homes with living room and dining room (the change of terminology from ‘parlour’ was itself telling of new times), 250 cottage flats for the elderly, 92 single person flats, and 221 two- to four-bed flats for families with living room and dining room.

This was the ‘mixed development’ – a larger range of housing types to accommodate people in different life stages and circumstances (though, as yet, without high-rise) – which became standard in the post-war years.  In Speke, there was an important added element to reflect that original intent to ‘accommodate all classes of the community’ – 294 large houses with garages and four bedrooms for ‘professional men, managers, etc.’. (8)

‘Houses with garages’, Speke

Here Speke had anticipated the ethos of the New Towns programme launched in 1946 and reflected the vision which Aneurin Bevan – who argued council housing shouldn’t be just for the poor – outlined eloquently in 1949.  Bevan insisted that the ‘segregation of the different income groups [was] a wholly evil thing’, creating ‘castrated communities’, and his new Housing Act removed the stipulation that it be specified as working-class housing.

Gerneth Road, Speke

Lancelot Keay, who considered Speke his last major project, echoed these ideals and hoped, in 1946, to oversee the scheme’s completion – ‘a projected community of about 30,000 persons with all the buildings that will be necessary and with houses for all those who may desire to share in the life of that community’ – in three years. (9)  In a period of such genuine austerity that was over-optimistic.  Keay retired in 1948.  The Estate was completed in the late 1950s with those 6000 homes and a population (its peak population as it happened) of around 25,000.

But Keay understood that Speke’s new community required more than just good housing.  It was, he said:

most essential that we should endeavour to bring back a greater measure of gaiety into the lives of ordinary people.  They should have the opportunity of enjoying all those excitements and pleasantries of life which are too often reserved for those in the higher-income levels. It is for this reason that a central community building will provide, with its dance hall, concert hall and restaurant, for the pleasures as well as the adult education of the people.

The phrasing remains a little patrician, a little ‘improving’ although there’s no mistaking the good intent.  That good intent, however, was slow to be fulfilled.  Keay’s successor as Director of Housing, Ronald Bradbury lamented three years into his term (he served till 1970) that it had ‘not been possible as yet, owing to present conditions, to erect the Civic libraries, departmental stores, swimming baths, hotels, etc., for which sites have been reserved’.  (10)

Austin Rawlinson Swimming Baths, c1965

Speke Central Library, c1965

The new Austin Rawlinson Swimming Bath and Civic Laundry (named after a local swimming Olympian and national coach) and Speke Central Library weren’t opened till 1965.

We’ll leave Speke in its heyday – a place with decent housing, facilities and, most importantly – always the economic underpinning of working-class prosperity – good jobs. Next week’s post will examine its later more troubled history and recent attempts to revive the Estate conceived with such high hopes.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing Progress at Liverpool: Estate for all classes’, The Times, 17 September 1937

(2) David Hall, ch10 ‘Images of the City’ in Ronaldo Munck (ed), Reinventing the City?: Liverpool in Comparative Perspective  (2003)

(3) Stephen V. Ward, ‘Local industrial promotion and development policies 1899-1940’, Local Economy, vol. 5, no. 2, August 1990

(4) Madeline McKenna, The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars, University of Liverpool PhD, 1986

(5) Colin G Pooley and Sandra Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945, University of Lancaster, Resource Paper for the Centre for North West Regional Studies (1984)

(6) City of Liverpool Housing Committee, Speke Estate: Report of the Director of Housing on a Proposal for the Building of a Self-Contained Community Unit, 21 October 1936

(7) Pooley and Irish, The Development of Corporation Housing in Liverpool, 1869-1945

(8) Stanley Gale, Modern Housing Estates (London, 1949)

(9) LH Keay, ‘Post-war Housing’, RIBA Journal, vol 53, no 7, May 1946

(10) Ronald Bradbury, ‘The Technique of Municipal Housing in England: with Particular Reference to Liverpool’, The Town Planning Review, vol 22, no 1, April 1951

Most of the earlier black and white images are drawn from Liverpool Corporation, Liverpool Builds 1945-1965 (1967)

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

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Lewisham

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

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

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

Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham Estate (c) Rob Clayton

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

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

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

Romborough Gardens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayeswood Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

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

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

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

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

Leafy Oak Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s

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

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

An early image of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weiße Stadt: bridge house by Otto Salvisberg

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

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

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

Weiße Stadt: Emmentaler Strasse community building by Ahrends

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

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: ‘Der Panzerkreuzer’ by Hans Scharoun

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

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

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

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks on Goebelstrasse by Hugo Häring

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

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks by Forbat along Geißlerpfad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White City Estate, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘the modern outlook in housing provision’

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1930s, Hammersmith

In 1939, the Times described the London County Council’s new White City Estate as ‘the largest and finest estate of flats which the council has yet built’.  By 2004, one jaundiced journalist was describing it as ‘a blighted area where nobody wants to live’. (2)  Now, in 2017, it lies at the epicentre of a regeneration project which has seen the local area transformed.  The White City Estate might look unremarkable at first glance but it contains a rich and complex history.

The first clue to that lies in the Estate’s designation and the unreconstructedly imperialist names of its main thoroughfares. In 1908, it had been the site of the Franco-British Exhibition.  Its whitewashed, stuccoed steel and concrete pavilions gave the later White City Estate its otherwise inapt appellation; the Exhibition’s celebration of Europe’s twilight heyday of empire (continued in four subsequent exhibitions held prior to 1914 before the site fell into disuse) explain Bloemfontein Road, India Way, Canada Way and Australia Road which bisect the contemporary estate.

The Franco-British Exhibition, 1908

Older readers will recall the White City Stadium, built for the 1908 London Olympics but chiefly remembered for its greyhound racing until eventual demolition in 1984.  (Today’s fun fact is that the official length of the modern marathon, adopted in 1921, derives from the distance between the starting point of the 1908 marathon at Windsor Castle and its finishing line in front of the royal box in the White City Stadium.)  Its site is now occupied by the buildings of BBC White City, now largely sold off as White City Place.  BBC Television Centre had been opened further south on Wood Lane in 1960.  The latter – Grade II listed in 2009 – survives but it’s been sold off too; a business and media centre now also containing some high-end accommodation.

This image shows BBC Television Centre under construction c.1960 bottom left and the White City Stadium to the right. The Estate lies behind.

But this is to jump ahead.  Back in 1935, the LCC bought 52 acres of the redundant exhibition site and plans for an estate of 2286 flats in 49 five-storey tenement blocks housing some 11,000 were in place by 1937.  In the event, only 23 blocks had been completed by 1939 when the war temporarily halted construction but in 1953 the finished estate – with 35 blocks and 2011 homes housing a population of around 8885 – substantially fulfilled this earlier vision.

An attack on tenement blocks from Bermondsey Labour Party in the mid-1920s

All this represented a significant shift for the London Labour Party which had wrested control of the LCC in 1934 having long been critical of tenement schemes, invariably described in the Party’s earlier propaganda at least as ‘barracks-like’.  Back in 1918, Herbert Morrison had declared the Party’s official position to ‘build no more tenements, or monotonous rows of houses, however much red and white and green there might be around them’; Labour backed ‘new towns where possible or Garden Suburbs where that was the best [it] could do’. (3)

The interwar two-storey housing along Bloemfontein Road and Bryony Road across from the Estate represents earlier Labour ideals

Such idealism could hardly survive the pressing practical necessities of slum clearance and reconstruction in the 1920s and the need to build at density for a poorer inner-city working class. By 1934, a Party Housing Research Group convened by Morrison had concluded, far more pragmatically, that on ‘the question of how many storeys there should be in Central London dwellings (for in such areas block dwellings are inevitable), it is unwise to dogmatise’.

But if flats were now seen as inevitable – even Ada Salter whose Bermondsey Borough Council had most fiercely opposed tenement building in the 1920s had come to accept that – the new onus was to make them attractive to tenants.  Modernist architectural advocates and some socialists also argued well-designed flatted schemes could promote community and offer far better amenities than conventional cottage estates. (4)  Ironically, as the preceding Municipal Reform (Conservative) majority pursued a policy of building more cheaply to secure more affordable tents, the standards and facilities of the LCC’s tenement schemes had deteriorated.

The 1923 ‘Normal’ flat combined kitchen and bathroom. The ‘Simplified’ design authorised in 1925 provided a detached (though private) scullery and WC and a bathroom and washroom shared between two flats. Most controversially, the ‘Modified Type B units’ introduced in 1932 (seen on the Honor Oak Estate, for example) saw bathroom and washroom facilities shared between three flats.  Further economies were achieved by lower standards of finish and reduced space standards – the ‘Modified B’ flat was one third smaller than the ‘Normal’ flat of 1925.

Lewis Silkin in 1947

In 1934, the incoming Labour administration quickly introduced a conversion programme to make the ‘Modified Type B’ homes self-contained. Larger ambitions were shown by the Continental Grand Tour of European urban housing schemes undertaken by Lewis Silkin (the chair of the LCC’s Housing and Public Health Committee) and two Council officers at the end of 1935 and its influence can be seen in the design of the White City Estate and some of its homes.

Silkin’s report concluded, for example, that there was: (5)

little doubt that staircase access secures greater privacy for the tenants and tends to make a flat more homely, better lighted and more attractive internally than one to which the only access is from a common balcony.

By 1937, the LCC was officially committed to bringing flat design ‘more to accord with the modern outlook in housing provision’. (6)  Here, the main thrust was to replace balcony-access – the basis of the existing five-storey walk-up blocks – with staircase access, each landing serving two to three homes.  Whilst most of the White City blocks were of traditional design, 312 tenements of the ‘New Flat’ design were prominently pioneered on the northern edge of the Estate.

With their higher standard of finishing and additional features, the Times concluded they:

almost qualify for the house-agents’ description ‘luxury flats’.  They are approached by internal staircases, each of which has a dust-chute for disposing of rubbish. The flats with three, four or five rooms each have their private balcony, with permanent concrete window boxes. The kitchen has direct access to the living room through doors which slide wide apart.

The downside was that their rents reached 24s 6d for a five-room flat compared to the 18s 3d charged for an equivalent flat of traditional design but the Council believed that ‘a proportion of the working-class population for whom it is the Council’s duty to provide accommodation…[were] able and willing to pay higher rents’. (7)

Meanwhile, all the flats had their own bathroom with tiled floor and wash-basin and the larger ones benefitted from ‘a lavatory in a separate compartment’.  Flats were not yet – if they ever were – the accommodation of choice for most but the economy drive which had prioritised affordability at the expense of working-class living conditions had been reversed.

This artist’s impression shows blocks with moderne and International Style influence. The completed blocks with squarer brick-faced  balconies were less contemporary.

Elsewhere the LCC had also experimented with a revised aesthetic – the 1936 Oaklands Estate in Clapham was distinguished by the strong horizontal lines of its moderne styling marked by its banded brickwork and wide steel windows and, most notably, its sweeping, ocean liner-style balconies.  Paler versions of this can be seen in some of the Estate but the blocks of ‘New Flats’ stuck more to the LCC’s established neo-Georgian form with only the prominent, slightly curved, glassed stairwells breaking with its conventional, somewhat boxy look. (8)

Canning House with moderne styling

Carteret House rear with stairwells

The White City Estate was, however, innovative in at least one other respect – it represented the Council’s first attempt to apply the new ideas of slum clearance and comprehensive redevelopment contained in the 1935 Housing Act.  Again, it also reflected (or was intended to reflect) best European practice; Silkin himself acknowledged that ‘facilities for social welfare, rest and recreation’ had been better provided in the showpiece Continental schemes than in London.

The reliefs on the exterior of Carteret House depicting idealised images of childhood and maternity capture some of the hopes of the new Estate. (Identical sculptures can be found at the Tulse Hill Estate built at the same time as White City along the same lines.)

The ‘desirability of a reasonable provision in respect of social services’ was recognised by the Council  by reserving sites ‘for 14 shops, an administrative building and possible schools, medical clinic, reading rooms, etc., and children’s playgrounds’.  Some heralded the Estate as a ‘new town’ and the British Commercial Gas Association entitled its promotional film (albeit promoting the use of gas as much as the estate itself), A Town in Born.

The 1937 plan gives a good impression of the blocks’ north-south orientation and open southern aspects of some of the courtyards

One other influence of Silkin’s tour (and broader contemporary architectural thinking) can be seen in the attempt to implement the fashionable Zeilenbau principles of layout pioneered in Germany. This prescribed, in Silkin’s words, ‘the adoption of a generally north-south line whereby access of available sunshine is made possible on both main fronts of the buildings’.  The ideal was only partially fulfilled on the White City Estate as it conflicted with another goal of the planners – the provision of attractive enclosed courtyards – but closed quadrangles were mostly avoided by leaving the southern side of the elements undeveloped. (9)

McKenzie Close showing courtyard and private balconies

On a bright winter’s day such as when I visited, the courtyards with their mature trees and greenery looked attractive but the overall Estate didn’t receive the critical acclaim this careful planning might seem to warrant.  The Architects’ Journal asked rhetorically: (10)

Why all the five-storey blocks? Why the soulless mechanism of the layout? Why not, with the golden opportunity of unhampered space, some really high blocks (with lifts instead of…dreary flights of stairs) making way for terraced houses for the larger families?

It wanted something more excitingly modernist and its call contains an anticipation of the mixed development ideas (demanding a range of housing forms to create greater visual interest) which took off in the 1950s.

Pevsner concurred, decrying what he termed ‘the deadening utilitarian ranks of the vast White City Estate’.  Writing later, he also noted how far the Estate – ‘built (like the out-county estates) with a singular lack of amenities’ – had fallen short of the ‘new town’ ideals proclaimed on its inception. (11)  Typically, housing was prioritised at the expense of community facilities.

‘The White City Estate and environs, 1947’ (c) Britain from Above, EAW005416. Loftus Road, home of QPR bottom right

For the time being, the LCC’s proclaimed aim in its treatment of housing ‘to maintain an appearance of domesticity whilst keeping within the bounds of economy’ held sway and another element of the planners’ description – they noted how ‘the repetition of blocks of similar size and arrangement lends itself to rapid and economic construction by a process of multiple contracts’ – seems more telling of the finished product. (12)

Nevertheless, the Estate, the flats certainly, represented a significant advance on the penny-pinching economies of Honor Oak and it’s provided a decent home to many thousands as at least one resident recalls: (13)

I want to say how proud I am to say I lived on the estate…There was a wonderful sense of community on this estate and the flats were a design success apart from the small kitchens. My memories of living here are of children – lots of children,all playing in safety and in harmony (well as far as kids do!).

The outbreak of war and subsequent post-war austerity didn’t help fulfil the larger ambitions of its creation and in the succeeding decades, White City probably seemed a rather ordinary and even dull estate to some distinguished by its size but in other respects hardly reflecting the more extravagant claims which initially surrounded it.

By the turn of the new century, as the Estate grew old and its community fell on hard times, some politicians viewed council housing not as a solution to social problems but as one of their causes.  The Estate was ripe for regeneration but that would be, as we shall see, a controversial and contested process.

Sources

(1) ‘2,166 White City Flats’, The Times, 21 July 1939

(2) Susan Gray, ‘Great white hope; What hope is there for a blighted area where nobody wants to live?’, Evening Standard 22 March 2004

(3) Quoted in Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, ‘Upward or Outward? Politics, Planning and Council Flats, 1919-1939’, The Journal of Architecture, vol 13, no.1, February 2008 which also provided much of the detail in the following paragraphs.

(4) These ideals were pursued by Director of Housing Lancelot Keay and Liverpool’s Unionist city council.  See Liverpool’s Interwar Multi-Storey Housing: Building an ‘A1 community in a properly planned township of flats’

(5) LCC, London Housing (1937)

(6) LCC, Working-Class Housing on the Continent and the Application of Continental Ideas to the Housing Problem in the County of London. Report by the Chairman of the Housing and Public Health Committee of the Council, Mr Lewis Silkin MP as the result of a visit to Continental Housing Estates in September and October 1935 (October 1936)

(7) LCC, London Housing

(8) Nicholas Merthyr Day, The Role of The Architect on Post-War State Housing: A case study of the housing work of the London County Council 1939-1956, University of Warwick Department of the History of Art PhD Thesis, June 1988

(9) LCC, Working-Class Housing on the Continent and the Application of Continental Ideas to the Housing Problem in the County of London

(10) Architects’ Journal, 27 July 1939 quoted in Pepper and Richmond

(11) Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 3: North West (1991)

(12) The first quotation is from LCC, London Housing; the second from in JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (1992)

(13) Douglas Gray who contributed his memories and this photograph to the Britain from Above website. Go to the page for extended memories of the Estate’s tradespeople and community in its earlier years.

The Ellor Street Redevelopment Area, Salford: ‘No Hanky Park, no more’

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1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s

In early October, I was invited by John Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming to visit the Pendleton Estate in Salford, one a number of people who have visited.  We were asked to provide a response to the experience and an impression of the estate.  These will feature, along with the archive of documentation accumulated by John and Jane during their long years of residency in the estate, in an exhibition at the People’s History Museum running from 29 October 2016 to 15 January 2017.

The post which follows represents what might be called a prehistory of the estate – looking at the housing it replaced, the ideas behind the huge redevelopment which took place in the sixties, and the questions of community raised by each. 

…streets, mazes, jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together, two rooms above and two below; in some cases, only one room alow and aloft; public houses by the score where forgetfulness lurks in a mug; pawnshops by the dozen where you can raise the wind to buy forgetfulness; churches, chapels and unpretentious mission halls where God is praised; nude, black patches of land, “crofts”, as they are called, waterlogged, sterile, bleak and chill.

Walter Greenwood cast an unsparing eye on the Salford he grew up in and knew so well. (1) He was brought up on Ellor Street in Pendleton, the only son of a master hairdresser and educated at the local Langworthy Road Primary School.  His schooling ended aged thirteen; he’d worked outside school hours as a pawnbroker’s clerk twelve months previously and would go on to experience a range of other menial jobs as well as periods of unemployment before writing Love on the Dole, published in 1933.

56 Ellor Street, Greenwood’s birthplace, shown empty and derelict in the 1960s (c) WGC4-4-2, Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

The book’s protagonist, Harry Hardcastle, unwisely forsakes his ‘soft’ office job as just such a pawnbroker’s clerk to become as an apprentice at ‘Marlowe’s’, a local engineering works – man’s work to Harry but after seven years, his time served, Harry is laid off just as the men preceding him had been as the Great Depression hit.  The props – a living wage (just) and the dignity of work – which might have made his harsh environs endurable are removed and the squalor of the mean slum terraces and abject lives they spawned exact their toll.

Greenwood wasn’t writing for effect and his novel – working men and women and those without work are its heroes – is a world away from the poverty porn which disfigures contemporary attitudes towards the poor.

Concerned middle-class observers such as the Manchester Social Service Group of the [Christian] Auxiliary Movement echoed his description of local conditions: (2)

Tall factory buildings pollute the air with smoke and block out sunshine and light, so that many householders have to burn gas all day.  Not a single house has a garden and all are grimy with soot.  There is no recreation ground, although small vacant plots, dusty, often littered with refuse, and absolutely devoid of grass, are sometimes used for this purpose.

The corner of Florin Street and Douglas Street in the 1960s (c) WCG4-4-3, Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

They surveyed the Chapel Street/Blackfriars Road area of Salford two miles east of Hanky Park (nicknamed after the main local thoroughfare, Hankinson Street) where Greenwood set Love on the Dole.  Of some 500 houses, only four had baths and all, or very nearly all, needless to say, shared (outside) toilets.  On the other hand:

As is found in other poor districts, the shops catering for wants rather than needs are surprisingly numerous. The section first mentioned contains six public houses, five supper bars, and five shops selling sweets and tobacco.

Our modern-day critics might make something of that wasteful spending on fripperies but one senses here something more sympathetic – a realisation that hard lives needed something softer to make them bearable.

The E Griffiths Hughes Chemical Works, the Adelphi Iron Works and environs, Salford, 1934 (c) Historical England EPW045058

Local government provided a more bureaucratic but more statistically telling account of local living conditions thirteen years later.  In the 50,500-odd homes of the County Borough of Salford (it had, of course, its more salubrious middle-class suburbs), over half lacked hot water; almost one in five were judged ‘totally unfit and scheduled for early demolition’, one in ten ‘other unfit homes’ were slated for later demolition.  Of the rest, 24,500 were substandard – too good for demolition but still, nevertheless, falling ‘below reasonably fit standard’.  JE Blease, a Salford sanitary inspector, pointed out that these obsolescent terraces were the late Victorian byelaw housing ‘heralded with pride’ for their sanitary improvements ‘by building surveyors some sixty years ago as an approach to the artisan’s utopia’. (3)

We’ve arrived at 1943 in a world at war – a war which made those redundant working-class male bodies of the thirties valuable once more, either in military service or on the home front in war production.  We can be cynical about a society which places a premium on human lives which it is otherwise busy destroying but there were, during this second world war, other more humane and progressive forces at play.

In this context, the first film version of Love on the Dole in 1941 might initially seem surprising.  What more searing indictment of Britain’s class-ridden and socially unjust society could there be?  For this reason, the censors were initially reluctant to authorise its production (they deemed it ‘a very sordid story in a very sordid surrounding’) and yet the director John Baxter, was, for his part, determined that the film should ‘not be a star-vehicle because it should represent ordinary people’. (4)  (Deborah Kerr who played Harry’s sister, Sally, would make her name later.)

There was a significant shift, however. John Harris notes a ‘doughty, optimistic dialogue that was not in the novel’ and the film (unlike the book) ends on a positive note with the parting words of Harry’s mother:

One day we’ll all be wanted. The men who’ve forgotten how to work, and the young ‘uns who’ve never had a job. There must be no Hanky Park, no more.

Greenwood must surely have approved.  Some of his early mentors had been working-class activists and much of the novel had been written at Ashfield Labour Club in Salford. Greenwood himself was briefly – he wasn’t cut out for active politics himself – a Labour councillor.  In a later interview, he stated his novel’s purpose in showing ‘what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth’.

In this 1941 iteration, Love on the Dole was an emphatic ‘never again’ – both a demand and, implicitly, a promise of a better post-war world.

Again, the rhetoric of local government was drier but its planners believed their craft and vision central to this new world and saw planning, humane and rational, as the very antithesis of the destructive anarchy wrought by the free market.

In February 1942 Salford’s City Engineer, W Albert Walker, emphasised that the ‘central concern’ of town planning was ‘the health, happiness and well-being of the people’. ‘The very starkness in which we have now seen the defects’, he continued, ‘may arouse new interest with a fresh determination that prevailing conditions must be improved’. (5)

The Beveridge Report, a 1943 best-seller

Nationally, the Beveridge Report published ten months after Walker’s Salford speech promised to slay the five ‘Giant Evils’ – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness – which so straitened the lives of the Salford working class Greenwood portrayed. The Report sold 630,000 copies.  Many obviously shared Mrs Hardcastle’s hopes for the future.

But if all this was a revolution, it was a very British one.  Beveridge himself emphasised that his great scheme of social security was ‘first and foremost, a plan of insurance – of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence level’ (though, crucially, without the Means Test which scarred the family lives of Greenwood’s protagonists).

In housing (the ‘Squalor’ that Beveridge attacked), there were similarly pragmatic proposals.  Mr Blease suggested that much of the borough’s terraced housing could be reconditioned.  However, his helpful sixteen point checklist of required improvements – covering roofs and guttering, windows and doors and much else beyond the now bare essentials of baths and toilets – suggested the difficulty.  ‘The desired up-grading of substandard houses will not be accomplished by philanthropic enthusiasm on the part of landlords’, he commented mildly; nor could it be funded under existing local government powers.

An illustration of bye-law housing drawn from JE Blease, ‘The Unfit House’.  This area is now the site of Urban Splash’s radical redesign of these traditional terraces.

Labour’s 1949 Housing Act did, in fact, allow local authorities to acquire homes for improvement or conversion with 75 per cent Exchequer grants but this was not yet the approach prioritised by central or local government.

City Engineer Walker spoke to higher ambitions: for ‘large agglomerations…there must be satellite towns. When a central area is re-developed, there must be a reduction in density’.  He was far more sceptical about high-rise construction:

There appears to be no reason or excuse for blocks of flats in the average town of one hundred thousand population or under. There is an attraction about erecting a large block of buildings. They look compact and tidy. The proportion of the site built up may be kept low. But how will they be classed in, say, forty years? In the large urban aggregations to which reference has been made, flats will no doubt find a place, but they are only the next best thing to good houses.

We’ll just let those comments stand.  To many, they might seem an almost uncannily prescient anticipation of a debate that had erupted fiercely in the four decades which Walker prescribed.

At first, Salford followed Walker’s advice with the creation of a large overspill estate in the then Urban District of Worsley some eight miles to the west of Salford’s historic centre.  Inaugurated in 1949, the Salford-Worsley scheme had, by 1959, relocated almost 10,000 (of a projected 17,000) Salfordians.  In the fifties, the Borough proposed moving almost a quarter of its population (40,000 of 178,000) to greenfield sites beyond its borders. (6)

Overspill housing in Little Hulton, part of the Worsley scheme (c) Eccles and District Local History Society, www.hultonhistory.btck.co.uk/Memories/Salfordoverspill

Such a shift was not without problems for those involved.  The new council rents were, on average, three times higher than those paid previously.  Seven in ten of the estate’s workforce commuted – one and half hours there and back – back to Salford for work.  And then, according to the planner JB Cullingworth, there were added expenses caused by a new ‘social necessity to “keep up appearances”’.

Ten per cent of families returned to Salford; in Cullingworth’s survey, three-quarters would have returned if only they ‘could obtain accommodation in Salford which was of “the Worsley standard”’.   There lay the rub, of course:

Over a quarter of the families have moved from shared and overcrowded houses; a further third had previously lived in damp and obsolescent accommodation. Their present living conditions form a most striking and welcome contrast.

So most settled and, in time, a new community would develop. It would, however, be a very different community from that described by Greenwood.  Cullingworth, in a single sentence, captures the shift which some contemporary observers decried: ‘The intimate life of the slums has given way to the more reserved, home-centred life of the typical middle-class suburb’.

Writing of the new out-of-county estates of the London County Council, Peter Willmott and Michael Young lamented the loss of ‘the sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries’ that had made up the old East End and mourned, in particular, the break-up of the matriarchal kinship networks they held to have previously sustained community life. (7)  They’ve been criticised since for a selective use of evidence and a much romanticised view of slum living.

Greenwood is a corrective here and Cullingworth himself offered a far more sardonic take:

Separation from ‘Mum’ has not been the hardship which some sociologists have led us to expect; on the contrary it has often allowed a more harmonious relationship to be established. The possession of a house in which pride can be taken has resulted in a closer and more intimate family life: activities are now centred on the home, the garden and the television set.

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this was an escape from the pub to be celebrated, not the escape to it required by previously inhospitable home conditions.

The charge – it was usually a lament or criticism – of embourgeoisement (the view that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values) is a more interesting one.   For all the practical difficulties, Cullingworth found that the ‘majority of families were thrilled with their new way of life’.  Perhaps, therefore, we should recast this argument.

A image of the new affluence: the new Salford shopping precinct as imaged in the Report on the Plan

Are we really saying that as soon as the working class achieve decent living standards that they have thereby become middle-class?  Sometimes it seems that way; sometimes it seems that some left-wing commentators would prefer the working class to be ‘poor but happy’ (or even unhappy if that better maintained a purer and more militant proletarian politics).  Let’s just scrap the labels which seem to affix too readily essentialist class attributes to certain modes of living.  Besides the definitive study of the so-called ‘affluent worker’ found that, despite their more ‘privatised’ home life, their working lives remained distinct and harder and their politics largely unaltered. (8)

Still, there was truth in Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s statement in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.  This was an era of full employment and rising living standards. It seemed a tectonic shift; Love on the Dole was an historic record, a reminder of a lost world, one not to be repeated.

The new world was represented in the redevelopment of the Ellor Street area first approved by the Municipal Borough in 1960.  In the words of Albert Jones, the chair of the Council’s Planning and Development Committee, ‘we may be thirty years late but we are trying now to obliterate Hanky Park as it was known and propose to make the area something of which we can be proud’. (9)

The bare bones of the plan were to clear 89 acres of land in which, according to Jones, ‘three thousand families lived in slum conditions as bad as any to be found in the country’. (10)  But the form of redevelopment was peculiar to its time.

In March 1961, the Council commissioned Sir Robert Matthew, formerly Chief Architect to the London County Council and now Professor of Architecture at Edinburgh University, to act as consultant.  His plan, prepared in collaboration with architect-planner Percy Johnson-Marshall, director of the University’s Housing Research Unit, envisaged something far more sweeping than the mere replacement of substandard housing.

The project was seen ‘strategically as a vital part of the regeneration of the industrial north of England’; its aim ‘to recreate within the Greater Manchester Region a city centre which will make for a high standard of environment in terms of living, shopping and civic affairs, using the latest techniques of planning and development to fit the new centre for the motor age’. (11)

Matthews continued, in the Report on the Plan which would form the template of the finished project:

The basic idea of the scheme is to provide a beautiful and spacious environment with large and continuous pedestrian space over a large area so that the citizens of the new Salford may drive off efficiently to work or else walk down a new parkway right into one of Europe’s finest shopping centres without having to cross any roads.

Much of the proposal therefore features what was planned as a combined Civic and Shopping Centre – the former containing a new town hall, library, and museum and art gallery as well as what was billed as a ‘contemporary Trafalgar Square’ for the borough; the latter, 400,000 square feet of retail space as well as parking for 2070 cars.  The adjacent A6 was to be brought up to motorway standard to aid traffic flow.

‘View looking eastward along the main pedestrian way’ (Broadwalk from the shopping precinct) as envisaged in The Report on the Plan

Practically, this spoke to Colin Buchanan’s influential report, Traffic in Towns, published in 1963. It was designed to manage the problems caused by increased car ownership and enhance the quality of urban life – there were 10.5 million vehicles registered in Britain at the time but the figure was expected to almost double by the end of the decade.  It was the report’s support for urban motorways, however, which, as implemented, blighted a number of city centres that have secured its hold in the popular imagination.

Ideologically, the plan reflected the sense that a modern and prosperous Britain was emerging, one whose promise extended to a working class, more securely employed and better-off than ever before. In this context, Hanky Park did, indeed, seem a remnant of a benighted past.

A 1961 concept model of the new estate

‘Forward to the City Beautiful!’ proclaimed one Salford newspaper headline of 1961 and the plan was claimed by its boosters as vital to the borough’s renaissance.  One Salford councillor asserted that ‘our future as a city stands or falls by Ellor Street’ – the redevelopment would ‘add 2800 families to our population, revitalise our trade, and give our rateable value its first boost since the war’.

There, of course, was represented another aspect of the scheme’s appeal. Salford, like other similarly placed towns and cities, had turned against the large-scale decanting of its population to distant and beyond-border estates.  The latter had, as we’ve seen, its practical problems for the new suburbanites but there was a fear too that the local authorities themselves were – literally and metaphorically – diminished by the loss of population the policy created.

Aerial view of the Ellor Street Redevelopment Area, c.1964 (c) Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections

The new housing, therefore, wasn’t – though it is discussed in the concluding section of the Report on the Plan – exactly an afterthought but it was covered rather summarily.  ‘Immediate housing requirements have been met by siting three 15 storey blocks on the north-west corner of the site’, it stated. For the rest, it proposed mainly eight-storey maisonette blocks, some four-storey, eight unit blocks providing family houses and, rather casually, three twenty-two storey point blocks and other 16-storey blocks which would ‘give emphasis and continuity to the visual sequence of the development’.

This was, to say the least, a sharp break from the two-storey terraces which had dominated previously and a clear contrast with the more cautious approach suggested by that wartime generation of planners discussed earlier.  But it reflected the wisdom of the age that assumed high-rise construction offered a quick and easy means to provide both the new housing and urban density required by the new wave of slum clearance.

The Ellor Street redevelopment Stage 8 (c) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block (1984)

By some accounts, the residents of Ellor Street and surrounds, those who would inhabit the brave new world created by the planners and politicians, were less sure of the solutions proposed.  One local journalist observed: (12)

It is a district of people whose roots are firmly embedded in the hard ground, and there is every sign that they are not going to take kindly to the sudden upheaval.  There was a sense of uneasiness around, which is in many cases hidden by a joke or a resolution to face the new life – the sort of resolution one reaches when facing a visit to the dentist to have that worrying tooth removed.

It seems the stoicism deployed to survive the hardships of the thirties was required once more to cope with the benefits bestowed by modern affluence.  We’ll see how all this played out in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933)

(2) Manchester Social Service Group of the Auxiliary Movement, No. 9 Report on a Survey of Housing Conditions in the Salford Area (Manchester, Sherratt and Hughes, 1930)

(3) JE Blease (Sanitary Inspector, Salford), ‘The Unfit House’, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol. 66, January 1946, pp11-18

(4) The British Board of Film Classification is quoted in John Harris, ‘Rereading: Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood’, The Guardian, 7 August 2010, and John Baxter in Chris Hopkins, ‘Why Love on the Dole stands the test of time’, 20 January, 2016

(5) W Albert Walker, ‘Post-War Housing Development’, Read at a Sessional Meeting held at Salford on February 14th, 1942; The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, vol 62, April 1942, pp75-84

(6) JB Cullingworth, ‘Overspill in South East Lancashire: The Salford-Worsley Scheme’, The Town Planning Review, vol. 30, no. 3, October, 1959, pp189-206

(7) Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Kinship in East London (Routledge, 2013; first published 1957), p97

(8) John H Goldthorpe, David Lockwood et al., ‘The Affluent Worker and the Thesis of Embourgeoisement: Some Preliminary Research Findings’, Sociology, vol. 1 no. 1, January 1967, pp11-31

(9) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain, 1957-62, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p397

(10) Cllr Albert Jones, Foreword, in Robert Matthew and Percy Johnson-Marshall, Report on the Plan (Edinburgh: Bella Vista, 1963), p1

(11) Matthew and Johnson-Marshall, Report on the Plan p6. The quotation which follows comes from p7.

(12) Salford City Reporter, 3 April 1959 quoted in Kynaston, Modernity Britain, p289

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

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

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

Isca Road

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

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

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

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

Buddle Lane, Buddle Lane Estate

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

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

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

Pinces Gardens

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

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

Widgery Road, Polsloe Estate in the 1930s

Bennett Square, Polsloe Estate

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

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

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

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

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

Burnthouse Lane in the 1930s

Milton Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

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

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

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

Hawthorn Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

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

Hoker Road, St Loye’s Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preston Street flats, front and rear

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs

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

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

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

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

Images of the riots and their aftermath

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

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

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

Ropery Banks, Clive Street, 1933

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

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

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

Housing on the Balkwell Estate

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

Corner of Oswin Terrace and Balkwell Avenue, the Balkwell Estate

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

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

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

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

Union Stairs, North Shields, 1933

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

Cutting the first sod on the Ridges Estate, 1932

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

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

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

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

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

Children playing on the Estate, 1976

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

Derinton Road on the Totterdown Fields Estate

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

The Latchmere Estate

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

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

Housing on the Openview Estate

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

The Dover House Estate

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

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

The Southfields Estate

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

Holgate Avenue

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

Newlyn House, East Hill Estate, in the 1930s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acuba House

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

Flats on the Fieldview Estate

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

Wandsworth Plain, completed 1939

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

Henry Prince Estate entrance

Henry Prince Estate interior gardens

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canley Estate, Coventry: ‘The Place Where I Grew Up’

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs

I’m very pleased to feature another fine guest post (and would welcome others), this one from Dr Ruth Cherrington.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

I wasn’t sent to Coventry: I was born there. Though I left a long time ago I regularly visit family still living there and the familiar sites of the estate where we grew up: Canley. We can take ourselves out of our childhood homes, but do they ever really fade away from our own sense of attachment and place? For me, the answer is a resounding no. I’m still very much a ‘Canley kid’ at heart after all these years.

I’ve seen many changes, of course. But the constants are clearly visible such as the strong element of working class identity that remains, though now embattled in many ways. I’ve been in a good position to observe the life and times of Canley given my lifetime’s experience of this former council estate. From my recollections and observations I have compiled a two-part blog about the place where I grew up. I write about what made Canley similar to other post-war housing estates but also what made it special not only to me but also in historical terms.

 What and Where is Canley?

Canley existed long before Coventry Corporation bought 20,000 acres of the land from local landowning family, the Leighs, in 1926. It is mentioned in Medieval documents, linked to the nearby Fletchampstead, Westwood, and Stoneleigh estates. These historical aspects are important, reflected as they are in names of roads and schools but also in the attempt to design into the new estate a village feel.

The Canley we now see is largely the result of a pre-war vision of a ‘planned neighbourhood unit’ on the outskirts of Coventry. Building began in the 1930s mainly to rehouse people from city slum clearance programmes but the war halted construction. It continued with renewed haste thereafter, especially given the severe bombardment Coventry suffered. The first bombs to fall actually landed in the industrial area of Canley on August 18^th 1940.

Coventry city centre after the 14 November 1940 air raid

Then came the blitzkrieg, lasting until mid-November with three quarters of the city centre destroyed. This included the 14^th century cathedral, with only its shell remaining once the fires had died out after the single most concentrated attack on any British city during the War on the night of November 14^th, 1940. A new word was coined to describe such sustained heavy bombing – to ‘Coventrate.’

Residential areas were badly damaged such as the older district of Foleshill where my parents, still single, were living with their families. Over 41,000 homes were damaged, many destroyed completely and 550 people lost their lives. It has been said that the German bombers continued what the town planners had begun before the war – the wholesale modernisation of the city. Coventry Corporation had intended to implement grand designs for a new city centre surrounded by healthy suburban estates such as Canley.

When Coventry was the city of the future: the Precinct, 1955

The war left a scarred landscape and a severe depletion of the housing stock. Resuming the construction of Canley was part of the post-war drive to provide new homes. The pre- and post-war parts of the estate not surprisingly have a different look to them reflecting the changed contexts of the grand 1930s plans and the pressing post-war needs.

Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers’ fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45.

Canley Ford circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

Canley Ford Milk bar – a popular place for kids in the summer holidays circa late 50s/early 60s (unattributable source)

There were two woods very close to our house. Ten Shilling Wood was so named because that was how much a licence cost to shoot there in former times. Park Wood was at the top of our street though we never called it by its proper name: I’m not even sure we knew it then. To us it was the ‘top wood’ with Ten Shilling Wood being the ‘bottom’ one. Park Wood was also known as the dark woods or the bluebell wood because of the wonderful displays in springtime when we would collect huge bunches for our mothers. Both woods were remnants of the ancient Forest of Arden.

Canley has three main ‘boundaries.’ Fletchamstead (N.B. Modern spelling) and Kenpas highways, comprising part of the Coventry Bypass (A45) was one of these. This major route links Coventry to Birmingham in one direction, and ultimately to London, about 100 miles away, in the other.

There were older parts of Canley on the other side of the Bypass, however, including some pre-war council housing along Burnsall Road from the early 1930s estate construction period.

Burnsall Road, November 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

There is also Canley station, formerly Canley Gates, opened mainly for workers at the Standard Motor Works in 1940. This is on the main London to Birmingham railway line, which forms another Canley boundary. Constructed between 1833 and 1838, the railway cut through number of farmer’s fields and several small bridges and crossing points were put in place as access for the farmers and their livestock. Rather than being used to move cows between fields, it’s now a main thoroughfare from Canley to Tile Hill and beyond.

Former cattle crossing point under the London to Birmingham Railway Line at Wolfe Road, Canley (Ruth Cherrington Aug. 2006)

Charter Avenue, the main road into and out of the estate, forms the third boundary. It begins at a junction with the A45, marked conveniently by the Phantom Coach pub. This is typical of many built in the interwar years, being spacious when compared to older city centre ‘boozers’, with gardens back and front. It was intended to serve the expanding new estate as well as to pick up passing trade from thirsty travellers on the A45.

Phantom Coach Pub, Charter Avenue/A45, Canley. October 2015. (Photo courtesy Robin Brooker)

Moving westwards along Charter Avenue, we see all key Canley estate roads branch off to the right hand side in ribbon style development. The road is a dual carriageway as far as Mitchell Avenue, where building stopped before the war. This also represents an internal ‘border’ within Canley, marking the older from the newer part, the top from the bottom end of the estate. Charter Avenue continues as a single carriageway from there till it ends about a mile later at the junction with Cromwell Lane. This marks the edge of Canley and in the past of Coventry City’s limits.

Charter Avenue is Canley’s main road and buses to and from the city centre still pick up passengers from stops along here as they have always done.

Charter Avenue, looking towards bus stop at junction with Wolfe Road (Ruth Cherrington, 2006)

Canley’s Early Residents

Coventry was in many ways a ‘city of factory workers’ with so many engineering plants, some of them in the Canley area. It was arguably one of the most industrial cities in Europe and my own ancestors had mostly pitched up in Coventry looking for industrial work of various kinds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Canley was also to be all council housing, offering decent homes for the workers many of whom were living in overcrowded conditions in older parts of the city. Some residents were to be migrants from other areas of the country in search of work. Industrial Coventry had long been a magnet for those thrown out of jobs, whether from the mills of Lancashire, shipbuilding yards of Tyneside or collieries of South Wales. Coventry welcomed skilled and unskilled labour and Canley would count among its own resident a broad mix of people from across Britain.

The ideal was fair rent, with no family expected to live in a house too small for its size, with the council as a non-exploitative landlord. Acting upon a belief that ‘environment makes the slum dweller’, the Corporation wanted to make ‘better’ people on a new estate with a ‘healthy and pleasant environment.’

Building an Estate of ‘Happiness and Health’

An article in the Midland Daily Telegraph in 1938 (May 17^th) declared that ‘Canley Contributes to Coventry’s Happiness and Health.’ It was referring to the 150 houses already occupied in the Prior Deram Walk and Queen Margaret’s Road area. The layout of the new streets and houses led the writer to conclude that:

Canley is, without a doubt, a very healthy housing estate. It is already becoming attractive in appearance, for many of the front gardens of the first 100 houses built are a mass of colour.

Clearly the residents had been very busy in their gardens.

The good-sized gardens front and back were for the men to grow not only flowers but also vegetables and to breathe in fresh air. They were for kids to play in but there were plenty of planned green spaces as well.

The houses were mostly redbrick, semi-detached, typical of those being constructed across the country. Coventry planners aimed to avoid ‘displeasing uniformity’ by building in blocks of four, some of them being set back a few feet. Variety would promote ‘beauty and harmony.’ Different colours were used for roof tiles and also for the doors and the pebbledash. No two blocks were to be painted the same.

Inside the one, two, three and four bedroomed houses there was light and space, fitted cupboards, storage space, picture rails and kitchen ranges. The houses were the sort of suburban home middle-class couples might aspire to buy but these were not for sale.

Redbrick houses along Charter Avenue (courtesy of Robin Brooker)

Nearby this new ‘township’ was a row of shops, which were later on referred to the ‘big shops’ after the construction of the ‘little shops’ in the post-war part of Canley. There was a brand new primary school as well, named after the son of local tenant farmers, Sir Henry Parkes, who grew up in nearby Moat House Lane. He went on to become Premier of New South Wales in 1872. A statue of a kangaroo was erected in front of the school to mark this link. A small public library was also built next to the school.

Prior Deram Walk shops today (November 2015, courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The City Corporation planners were forward thinking and included small retirement bungalows in their scheme, many of which remain today for retired people. The street is nicknamed ‘Pensioner’s Row.’

Two and three bedroomed redbrick houses were built along Charter Avenue as far as Mitchell Avenue. A few houses were built just inside the new turnings intended to be fully-fledged streets but the war came and these were put on hold.

After the war, the builders, including some of prisoners of war, returned. The ideals were not to be diluted but construction had to be speeded up. The decision was taken to use a new type of house specially designed in this period: the British Iron and Steel Federation or BSIF house. (1)

Row of BSIF or steel houses, Charter Avenue/Marler Road junction. (R. Cherrington 2006)

Looking down Marler Road, BISF houses (R. Cherrington, 2006)

To us locals, they were simply steel houses, built around a steel frame with part of the outside cladding steel as well. They are ‘non-conventional build’ because they are not brick with slate tiled roofs. Whilst the materials may be non-conventional, they are, in fact, traditional three bed, semi-detached houses. They were also meant as permanent, not temporary homes and differed from wholly prefab houses.

View from a BISF house, looking into the garden. (R. Cherrington)

A plot of land near Prior Deram walk saw several rows of steel houses go up, around Thimbler Road and Sheriff Avenue. Some prefabricated bungalows were erected along John Rous Avenue and Mitchell Avenue thus largely finishing more quickly and cheaply the construction of Canley. The prefabs have long since been demolished and replaced with brick houses but the steel houses remain.

The prefabs were praised in a Coventry Evening Telegraph article in 1945 (October 30^th) as the ‘Coventry’ experiment. Not only had the Corporation ‘pioneered a house of novel construction and design’, but had cut through red-tape. This referred to the fact that the plumbing system contravened building by-laws, but the pressing need for housing was seen as justification.

The compact homes were described as cosy due to good insulation, with no wastage of space: much research had gone into their design and construction. Coventry’s Lord Mayor described them as being good for housewives. By easing their burden, he believed the homes made a great contribution to society and also recognised the part women played in the war. Many women had worked in ‘men’s jobs’ but in peacetime were expected to return quietly to the home and domestic roles.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s several four storey blocks of flats were built plus some maisonettes in Donegal Close and Penrosa Walk. This renewed building in streets behind the ‘little shops’ and also further up Charter Avenue was done in a thoughtful manner, with variation of style and of colours.

Flats at bottom of Donegal Close, November 2015. (Courtesy of Robin Brooker)

The aim of providing light, airy houses, large gardens and green spaces remained as Canley expanded with the view that creating a better environment would create better people. Canley was still a planned neighbour, despite the war intervening, and was a practical example of current town planning ideas and ideals.

I will consider in the next blog to what extent the blueprint of architects and planners succeeded in promoting a sense of community across the pre- and post-war built estate.

Notes

(1) You can find more images and detail on post-war British Iron and Steel Federation homes at the BISF website.