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

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1920s, 1930s, 1940s

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

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

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

Mosspark, 1927 © Britain from Above (SPW019519)

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

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

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

An early image of Mosspark

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

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

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

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

An early image of Hamiltonhill

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

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

West Drumoyne shops and housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prestwick Street, Craigbank, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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

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1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellison Square, central Gateshead, built c1851

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

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

Gainsborough Crescent, Carr Hill Estate

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

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

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

The Avenue, Sheriff Hill

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

Broadway, Sheriff Hill

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

Rawling Road, Field House Estate

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

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

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

Demolition of the Pipewellgate area, 1935

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

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

Aerial view of the Deckham Hall Estate

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

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

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

Chiswick Gardens, Deckham Hall Estate

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

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

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

Hendon Road, Deckham Hall Estate

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

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

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

Sources

(1) JB Priestley, English Journey (1934)

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

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

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

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

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

(7) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? 

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

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1920s, 1930s

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

Cromwell Road, Lower Stanmore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Mary Street, Stanmore

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

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

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

Battery Hill, Upper Stanmore

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

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

The Prince of Wales visits the Stanmore Estate, 1923

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Martin’s Close

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

Gordon Avenue, Highcliffe

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

Portal Road, Bar End

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s

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

From the Banbury Advertiser (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first there was the need for commemoration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hilton photographed by the Banbury Advertiser, 1925 (1)

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

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

Hilton Road, Banbury, photograph May 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banbury Borough Bowls Club.  Photograph May 2019

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

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

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

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

1890 Act housing

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

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

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

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

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

1919 Act housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-1919 Act Housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ebenezer MacRae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

steven.robb@hes.scot

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading 

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

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

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

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

The Newlyn Clearances, part II: ‘the modest homes that make a nation’

Tags

1930s, Newlyn

Last week’s post provided the background to the clearance of Newlyn’s slums and described the modest council estate built to replace them. Far more dramatic events ensued as the broader scope of Penzance Borough Council’s intentions became clearer. The five-day public inquiry into its plans in July 1937 was the locus of a housing protest which briefly gripped the nation.

The Rosebud at Westminster, October 1937

There were, to begin with, perhaps justified complaints that the Council had been less than open about its plans.  The clearance orders had been passed by the Council without it having seen the wider proposals of Borough Surveyor Frank Latham.  Latham’s wish to widen the harbourside road through the village (and the demolition of homes not deemed unfit this required) drew further criticism and the sardonic observation that the regular traffic to Mousehole comprised merely a local bus.

Duke Street, Newlyn

The most vocal complaint centred on the issue of compensation.  Owners of homes officially designated as unfit for human habitation and subject to demolition (marked pink on council plans) received only their site value. Homes marked grey on the plans (to be cleared to allow rational reconstruction), on the other hand, were not classified as slums and their owners were to be compensated by their full market value. This difficult demarcation proved controversial in both respects.

The meat of the ensuing struggle was contained in the legalistic wranglings which resulted but its emotional heart lay elsewhere.  That was provided in the beguiling image of simple Cornish fisherfolk battling bureaucratic and unfeeling modernity.  Newlyn was its ideal site.

Stanhope Forbes: Home-Along: Evening (Newlyn Harbour, 1910) © Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

One major factor in this was the presence of an artists’ colony, active in the village since the 1880s. Stanhope Forbes, the grand old man of local artists, regarded: (1)

the idea of demolishing any part of our priceless village as a piece of sheer vandalism and folly. To me and thousands of holidaymakers the prospect of new and ugly buildings will be ghastly.

Local artists such as Geoffrey Garnier played a leading role in the Newlyn Housing Committee formed to oppose the clearances; Phyllis Gotch (the Marquise de Verdières since her 1922 marriage) was the daughter of two Newlyn-based artists and the instigator of some of the campaign’s more imaginative protests.  Her letter to the Manchester Guardian (complete with an ‘authentic’ local voice) is worthy of lengthy quotation and captures some of its most romantic imagery: (2)

Newlyn, by an astonishing order of the Penzance Town Council under the Slum Clearance Act, is to be swept away. Her cobbled streets, where Perkin Warbeck strode in his glory, her ancient manors and moulded ceilings, her secret lifts and smugglers’ passages are all to go…

Many of the houses are owned by the inhabitants, who are of a fine and independent spirit, scorning outside help if they can possibly help themselves, and facing hardship with dumb and gallant courage…

A deputation came to me to-day. The spokesman was a grand, old fisherman. God-fearing and wise. He said:

Miss Phyllis, for we shall always call ee that, we’ve been thinking that if you was to tell England and Scotland and Wales and the people over to Ireland what was happening to we, how the homes we’ve laboured for are being took away, and how there be’nt no money to pay lawyers to help us. Surely there’d be some as would plead for us, some as would say ‘This must not be?’

A petition of Newlyn women to the new Queen played on some of the same tropes in its plea ‘to the first lady in the land, our kind and beautiful Queen’ who would know ‘so well what the love of home means and…understand above all what the Celtic people feel about the soil on which their forefathers have dwelt for centuries’. (3)

‘Life class at Newlyn’, Picture Post, 15 October 1938

It’s altogether tempting, in this context, to see elite manipulation at play in such presentation but that would merely add another patronising depiction to a more complex, multi-layered story.  It ignores, as Tim Martindale argues, the ‘extent to which members of the fishing community of Newlyn actively participated and performed in the construction of their representation’, the socially embedded role of local artists, and a powerful sense of Cornish identity among local residents. (4)

This was wonderful stuff for a national (indeed international) press looking, then as now, for human interest stories to tug their readers’ heart strings.  Punch took up the baton and took a side-swipe in its doggerel at Penzance, the villain of the piece: (3)

Each to his own. Penzance may sleep,
Swaddled in palms and sanitation
So Newlyn (and the country) keep
The modest homes that make a nation;
If not, both reason and romance
(if England study either school in)
Tell us we might not miss Penzance
But cannot do away with Newlyn

PZ87 Rosebud in Westminster, an early colour image by Charles Hoyland © Margaret Perry Collection

All this provided the context for the campaigners’ most inspired and theatrical protest – the voyage of the 50-foot Newlyn lugger, Rosebud in October 1937 to Westminster and a meeting with the Minister of Health and Housing, Sir Kingsley Wood.  The skipper Cecil Richards, a Newlyn fisherman and a resident of one of the condemned homes, and his crew were met by local MP Alec Beechman. His speech avoided controversy but Billy ‘Bosun’ Roberts made it clear that the ‘Cornish boys [were] here to fight for their homes!’

The crew of The Rosebud with Alex Beechman MP

Then, in the words of Pennsylvania’s Reading Eagle, ‘the grizzled fishermen…cap in hand’ met Wood and told the Minister ‘how much they loved their picturesque cottage homes, how unhappy they would be in the new houses “over the hill”.’ (5)  Wood, clearly an early master of PR, provided the deputation with a Cornish cream tea and a thoroughly sympathetic hearing.  His verdict would come two weeks later but, for the time being, the Cornishmen were impressed by his apparent honesty and understanding.

Coverage from the Daily Express, 18 October 1937

For all the resonance and power of this campaign, opinions in the village were divided. We saw Reverend George Richards’ opinion of the new council homes on the Gwavas Estate last week – he had described them as ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’.  A Daily Mirror article contrasted pictures of the old village and the new estate under the headline ‘What Would You Rather See?’.

But such attitudes angered many in the village. ‘A Tenant’ who called into the offices of the Cornish Evening Telegraph described his family’s experience of living in a one-up, one-down cottage with a single bedroom, a solitary, rapidly filled bucket which served as a toilet, and a washbasin shared with three other households. He commented caustically that ‘the most militant in defence of the old village already lived up the hill’ and reckoned:

eighty percent of the working people of Newlyn welcome the building of the new houses and are longing for the day when they will have a chance to live in them.

Gender and generational differences emerged.  Some women – as wives and mothers – seemed to favour new and better-equipped homes as their husbands, out at work and relieved of domestic duties, defended the old.  A petition from ‘Younger Residents of Newlyn’ urged the Minister to sanction the clearances and expedite an early move to more sanitary accommodation. Its advocates were outspoken:

We say that Newlyn is no longer a fishing village – granted a few elderly men and a few out-of-date boats…they will soon disappear. The sons of these men are not going fishing. No sir, they are finding employment in Penzance and elsewhere.  We say that far too much has been made of a small grievance which the few fishermen might have, for after all they represent a very small minority in Newlyn.

That petition was signed by some 400 people; a rival petition protesting ‘the wholesale destruction of our village [and the] ruthless appropriation of private property’ attracted 1093 local signatures.  You can make your own judgement on the balance of forces in play.

Chywoone Avenue, Gwavas Estate

To be fair to the Newlyn Housing Committee, they were clear that defence of the old homes did not require opposition to the new and it avoided criticism of the new estate. Still, in what was a compelling narrative, it became natural to juxtapose the two.

The Newlyn Housing Committee also commissioned Professor Stanley Adshead (a leading architect and planner and the designer of significant council housing developments in Norwich, Stepney and Brighton amongst others) to review the clearance scheme. He took an advanced position in opposing its road widening element (‘Is it not conceivable that reduction in the size of the cart is better than improvement in the strength of the horse?’) and concluded firmly that the Housing Acts should be amended ‘to make special provision for dealing with cottages and villages possessing historic interest and peculiar charm’.  In the present, however, all hinged on Sir Kingsley Wood.

Wood pronounced in November 1937 in a letter to Penzance Borough Council. In the rush to headlines, the press initially greeted a victory for the protesters.  One block of homes was to be saved, some frontages preserved, and he called on the Council to: (6)

to rehouse the fishermen and the older people near the harbour and to cooperate with all those who would help them secure a redevelopment which will meet the legitimate interests of those affected and also preserve the amenities of the village.

Navy Inn Court

In a follow-up letter to the Council in December, he commended its cooperation with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and RIBA and the priority given to rehousing fishermen and the elderly at Navy Inn Court. (7)

It was a masterly political response. Woods had saved only 23 of the homes slated for demolition; he had transferred 54 from ‘pink’ to ‘grey’ thereby ensuring more generous compensation, and he offered more cash to those whose homes were still condemned as ‘unfit’.

Chapel Street, Newlyn

The Fragdan, Newlyn

Disillusion soon set in among the campaigners but the battle was essentially over and it was, in the end, a qualified victory for their cause. A guerrilla war, fought over legal issues of designation and compensation, delayed clearance. The Council, wary of the storm it had created, was, in any case, in no hurry to proceed. Only 58 demolitions had taken place by 1940, some more in 1943, and larger clearances in 1951 and 1955. By 1974, 130 of the homes originally condemned still stood and many were now part of a conservation district. Times had changed.

The harbour, Newlyn, 2018

For one, those younger residents were wrong about Newlyn’s fishing industry – in 2016 it was the largest fishing port in England in terms of quantity of landings. It remains a busy, bustling harbour and, not far away, lie the narrow lanes and traditional cottages beloved of tourist Cornwall – now with all mod cons and, presumably, a great many of them occupied as second homes or holiday lets.

Rosebud Court and plaque

As a visitor myself, it seems impossible to lament their survival and the failure of the rational modernism once threatened.  But their current situation highlights housing realities, both interwar and contemporary. There are rightly a number of monuments in Newlyn to the Rosebud and the struggle it represented. Ironically, one of these, Rosebud Court, is social housing; a block of four flats completed for the Penwith Housing Association in 2000.  And, above the old village, the Gwavas Estate continues to offer the decent and affordable housing that – with over 900 on local waiting lists – private enterprise seems incapable of providing. The Newlyn clearance saga, often romanticised as the struggle of the ‘little man’ against faceless modernity, offers complex lessons.

Sources

(1) ‘The Newlyn Slum Clearance Scheme. RAs Fight to Save a Village’, Cornishman, 22 October 1936

(2) The Marquise de Verdières, ‘Letters to The Editor: Slum-Clearance in Cornwall’, The Manchester Guardian, 18 October 1937

(3) Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Truran, 2003). Other detail is drawn from the same source which offers the most comprehensive coverage of the extended saga.

(3) Punch, 27 October 1937. Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton.

(4) Tim Martindale, ‘Livelihoods, Craft and Heritage: Transmissions of Knowledge in Cornish Fishing Villages’, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London 2012

(5) ‘Britain Gets Rid of Slums. Five Year Clearance Programme Meets Some Protest in England’, Reading Eagle, 28 November 1937

(6) ‘Cottages at Newlyn’, The Times, 4 November 1937

(7) ‘Rehousing at Newlyn’, The Times, 28 December 1937

The Newlyn Clearances, part I: the Gwavas Estate – ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’

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1930s, Newlyn

The 1930s’ Gwavas council estate on the hill above the fishing village of Newlyn in Cornwall doesn’t look anything out of the ordinary but it was to play its part – alongside the controversial slum clearances which accompanied it – in one of the most resonant housing protests of the interwar period.  Matters came to a head when a Newlyn lugger, the Rosebud, and its local crew sailed up the Thames to Westminster in October 1937 to demand an end to the demolition of their traditional village homes. This was romantically portrayed as a protest of the ‘little man’, epitomised in the press images of Cornish fisherfolk, against modernising bureaucrats. As ever in reality, matters were a little more complex.

An example of the romanticised imagery that attracted artists to Newlyn

Newlyn’s role as a fishing port dates at least to the 1400s but it’s been a chequered history. If you watch Poldark, you’ll know the significance of the pilchard catch but it waxed and waned.  The port was boosted by the completion of the Tamar Bridge in 1859 (and a direct rail connection to the capital) but the village was a quaint, rather backward backwater when first ‘discovered’ by the artists Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes in the early 1880s. By 1887, there were 27 artists living in the village. Its place as an artistic centre of the en plein air movement (a form which stressed working directly in nature and subject matter drawn from rural life) was cemented by Forbes’ foundation of the Newlyn School of Art in 1899.

Stanhope Forbes, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885)

In fact, the village was changing.  Large new piers to expand the port were constructed in 1887 and 1888. And there were riots in 1896 as local, staunchly Methodist, fishermen protested against rivals from the north landing fish in the port on a Sunday.  Tradition and modernity were already vying as one of the Newlyn artists, Norman Garstin, noted as early as 1909: (1)

The Newlyn of today and that of the first artist settlers twenty-five years ago are two quite different places. When Mr Stanhope Forbes painted his fish sale there was no harbour; today there is a spacious one, which large as it is, [is] crowded with fishing boats, steamers, sailing vessels and craft of all descriptions. All this has brought a life and animation that no one would have dreamt of a quarter of a century ago.

The artists, of course, loved Newlyn for its ‘old world’ charm but some of those picturesque cottages were clearly unfit for human habitation. Paul Urban District Council condemned 18 homes in Newlyn in March 1915 and in 1920 a ‘lady inspector’ found 30 unfit houses and two unhealthy areas in the district. One of these was the birthplace of the working-class radical William Lovett which was demolished in 1921. (2)

Newlyn Street scene, 1890, water shoot to the rear left  © Penlee Gallery

Paul was by no means an activist authority.  Matters were to come to head after 1934 when Newlyn (alongside Mousehole, Paul village, Sheffield and Heamore) came within the newly extended borders of the Borough of Penzance.  It was said – it was certainly felt by many in Newlyn – that Penzance had little regard for its smaller, poorer neighbour but housing conditions in the village spoke for themselves.  Most Newlyn homes had neither running water nor sewerage.  Water was drawn from the many ‘shoots’ in the village; toilet facilities often consisted of an Elsan bucket emptied ‘over cliff’ at night. (3)

Penzance’s Medical Officer of Health, Richard Lawry, made his first foray into Newlyn in 1935. The first clearance order followed with little controversy.  The former Navy Inn now comprised flats accommodating some 29 people. It and neighbouring properties in Factory Row and Factory Square were decanted by 1937 and cleared by 1939. Navy Inn Court, comprising 32 one- and two-bed flats) and Bowjey Court were built on the cleared sites.

In his official report to the Council in the following year, Lawry stated he had visited 100 houses in the village, nearly all of which he judged unfit for human habitation. This time sensing possible controversy, he requested back-up on a follow-up visit and was duly accompanied by an alderman and two councillors.

St Peter’s Square, since demolished

The first tranche of compulsory purchase orders under the 1936 Housing Act for the properties deemed slums duly followed – for Lower Green Street, Fore Street, Vaccination Court (the name itself is a reminder of cholera epidemics which hit Newlyn in 1832 – when over 100 people died – and 1873), St Peters Hill in 1936, and Fore Street, Gwavas Road, Boase St and North Corner in 1937.

Chapel Street, 1937

In total, some 350 properties were earmarked for demolition in the original orders. Not all were slums. Those marked in pink were and their owners were offered site value only in compensation; neighbouring properties (marked grey) whose clearance was administratively necessary were offered market price.  Around 6.75 acres of the old village were affected including areas to be cleared for a proposed road widening scheme at the harbour’s edge.  A five-day official inquiry into the proposals began in Penzance in July 1937.

Meanwhile, the Borough was moving ahead with the construction of an estate of ‘workmen’s dwellings’ to replace those homes scheduled for clearance.  Twenty acres of land had been acquired on a greenfield site above the village, enough the Borough Surveyor, Frank Latham, estimated to accommodate some 250 homes at 12 per acre. In the event, 242 were built on the new Gwavas Estate by local contractors at a cost of £95,380.

Higher Gwavas Road, showing the steep ascent to the estate

There were some complaints about the location. It’s a stiff 350 feet climb up the hill to the Estate. Alderman Treganza objected that ‘they were taking people 79 and 80 years of age to the top of Paul Hill. How were they going to get there!’  A comment from the audience in the council chamber on the ‘good air there’ only drew his riposte that it would ‘take an aeroplane to get them there’. (4)

Chywoone Avenue, Gwavas Estate

The homes themselves – block-built and characteristically rendered in local style – were solid and laid out, along curving roads and crescents, in a miniature version of the garden suburb style favoured in its time.  Some disliked their appearance. The Reverend George Richards had condemned them as ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’ at the earlier public inquiry.

But they came with toilets, bathrooms, hot water – the basic facilities so conspicuously lacking in the cottages of old Newlyn. The first residents (from Navy Inn Court and Factory Row) moved in just before Christmas, 1937, and the estate was substantially complete by May 1938. For many of the new residents this was a huge and welcome improvement in their standard of living.  Still, there were some complaints.

Chywoone Crescent, Gwavas Estate

The climb up to the estate was, naturally, one of these, alongside the high bus fares paid by those who required transport. Typically, the rents were significantly higher, sometimes double, than those charged in the old cottages – over 8 shillings (40 pence) in some of the larger houses.  Tenancy regulations which banned trades or business in the new council homes were also a problem to some who had supplemented their income with needlework, net-mending, laundry work and so on.

The biggest grievance – for the 124 potential residents who signed a petition to the Council in March 1937, at least – was the decision to install gas cookers rather than the Cornish cooking ranges which they favoured.  (These cast iron ranges provided heating as well as an oven and stove top.)  The Council stood firm that the new facilities – ‘provided for the convenience and comfort of those who would have to live in the houses’ – would prove more economical though some residents were to complain about cold and damp in the new homes. (5)

This, of course, is only half the story.  Dramatic events were unfolding down in the village as the clearance process moved on and the estate itself was drawn into that controversy.  We’ll examine all this in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Stef Russell, Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey, Historic Characterisation for Regeneration: Newlyn (Cornwall Archaeological Unit, October 2003)

(2) Joanne Mattingly, Penwith Project: Housing Issues 1914-34

(3) Michael Sagar-Fenton, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Truran, 2003). Much following detail is drawn from the same source which offers the most comprehensive coverage of the extended saga.

(4) ‘Penzance Town Council. £95,380 Housing Scheme for Newlyn’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 16 January 1936

(5) ‘Penzance Town Council. Reduction of 8d in the Rates’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 11 March 1937

Council Housing in Thetford before 1939: No ‘borough as small had done more’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914, Thetford

Often in London I shall think of Thetford and wonder if it is still alive … No one would notice if the whole town forgot to wake up one morning.

That, from Virginia Woolf in 1906, might have been a little unfair but it testifies powerfully to the town’s sad decline. (1)  In Saxon times, Thetford had been the capital of East Anglia. At the time of the Domesday survey in 1086, with a population of around 4500, it was reckoned the sixth biggest town in the realm. The same population, more or less, eight centuries later made it apparently one of the sleepiest.

The town sign celebrates Thomas Paine, born in Thetford, in 1737. The interwar Newtown Estate lies to the rear.

Thetford had fallen on hard times.  In 1868, Henry Stevens, the borough’s new Medical Officer of Health, having ‘carefully inspected every part of the Town’, stated that he had found ‘scarcely any of the conditions necessary to the health and well-being of an urban population’: (2)

the soil is saturated with sewage and excrementitious matter. I found this contaminated soil pierced in every direction by wells … from which alone the inhabitants could obtain water.

Unsurprisingly, Thetford suffered a series of major epidemics – measles, dysentery, diphtheria and cholera – in the same decade and its mortality rate, at 30 per 1000, stood a little higher than that of Whitechapel in London’s benighted East End.

Stevens’ pleas secured an improved water supply but no sewerage system and a further outbreak of typhoid occured in 1873 and another, alongside smallpox and diphtheria, in the 1890s.

In 1909, the survey of a later Medical Officer of Health reported 731 ‘privy vaults’ in Thetford, ‘practically none of them watertight, most of them merely holes in the ground’. The Council, however, still rejected a sewerage scheme as too expensive; a decision backed by 478 votes to 26 in the public meeting which followed, dominated, one presumes, by middle-class rate-payers rather than those most in need. It’s all a salutary corrective to the temptation to romanticise working-class life in small town and village England.

And yet, in other ways, Thetford would surprise. Allan Glaisyer Minns, born in the Bahamas, a doctor at the local workhouse and cottage hospital, was elected to the council in 1903. In 1904, he became the first black man to be elected mayor anywhere in the UK.

The Council was also one of the very few to build council housing before the First World War and, in St Mary’s Crescent, it built one of the most remarkable of early schemes.

St Mary’s Crescent

Plans were first mooted in 1911 when the Town Council’s Housing Committee (itself an innovative step for a small borough council) recommended the appointment of a Norwich architect, SJ Wearing, to oversee the scheme.  Tenders for ‘the erection of 50 workmen’s dwellings on Bury Road’ were issued the following year. By 1914, the scheme was near fully occupied and, despite an overall cost of around £6666, said to be self-supporting. (3)

St Mary’s Crescent

Not only had Wearing created an economical scheme, he had created an attractive one, dubbed later by locals as the White City for obvious reasons.  As such, the estate garnered considerable regional interest, including a deputation of councillors from Ely: (4)

In each dwelling, there was one good living room and scullery and three bedrooms upstairs … All the dwellings had been passed by the Local Government Board who said it was the best scheme of dwellings they had seen.

St Mary’s Crescent

With rents set at between 3s and 4s 6d (15-23p) a week – the amount varied according to the size of garden – the homes were affordable to the less well-off working-class; the average wages of the male heads of household were said to be around £1 and £1.20.

For all that this housing progress went some way in alleviating working-class conditions – a full sewerage system for the town wasn’t provided till 1952 incidentally – it could no nothing to address Thetford’s underlying economic malaise.  The local economy deteriorated as traditional rural industry contracted and the Council instituted unemployment relief works in the post-war recession in 1921.

An advertisement for Burrell’s steam engines, 1906

Disaster struck, however, in 1928 when the major employer, the agricultural machinery and steam engine works of Charles Burrell closed.  It had employed over 600 at peak. The 1931 census recorded 800 people leaving the town in the preceding decade and its population fell below 4000. Outward migration continued until the end of the decade when new military bases were established nearby in preparation for impending world war. (5)

The first world war had, in the meantime, provided means and motive for a further expansion of the town’s council housing.   The 1919 Housing Act required local authorities not only to survey housing needs but to build to address them.  In housing at least, Thetford was progressive and it acted promptly. A special meeting of the Town Council in October unanimously agreed an application to the Ministry of Health for a £1000 loan and the purchase of land in military use on London Road for housing purposes. SJ Wearing was again appointed architect. (6)

The Newtown Estate

The land duly purchased, the 72 houses of the Newtown Estate were complete by 1924.  The mayor praised the achievement – ‘he did not think there was a borough in the Kingdom as small as Thetford that had done more’ – but it’s an interesting sign of heightened expectations that the scheme was criticised by some for not addressing the requirements of those in greatest need.

Councillor Isaac Aspland, politically unaffiliated but as manager of Thetford’s Labour Exchange, someone in close contact with the poorest of the borough, praised it as: (7)

a splendid scheme and very well carried through but he did not think it relieved very much the pressure on housing of the poorer inhabitants … to a large extent the houses built at Thetford were not for the poorer classes because that class could not afford to pay the high rents.

He referred to eight cases of overcrowding before him including a married couple with seven children living in one bedroom and a box-room and another where a family of 11 had only two bedrooms.  Given their relatively high rents, estimated as between 6s and 7s 6d (30-38p), the ‘Newtown houses were, he contended, middle-class dwellings’.

The Newtown Estate

The new politics – the new expectation that council housing should directly address the needs of the poorest – was seen in national legislation in the 1930s: the 1930 Housing Act tackling slum clearance and the 1935 Act attacking overcrowding.

There could be no ‘Clearance Areas’ as permitted by the 1930 Act, in small town Thetford but a survey showed almost 39 percent of its housing as in some way defective under the terms of legislation. In 1938, 18 families were found in need of rehousing under the terms of the 1935 Act. (8)

The St Mary’s Estate of some 22 three- and four-bed non-parlour homes was built in consequence in the closing years of the decade.  The plaque at the entrance to the estate marks SJ Wearing as architect once more; the estate he has designed some 26 years earlier lies a few metres beyond.

St Mary’s Estate

In total, Thetford had built 144 council homes by 1939 and they formed around 11 percent of its housing stock.  Council homes formed 85 percent of the new homes built in the town between the wars. The figures are surprising but they capture a creative tension in the town’s character. Virginia Woolf may have seen it as a sleepy rural backwater but it was a long-established borough with urban pretensions and ambitions.

Those ambitions were to be fully explored in the next dramatic phase of the town’s history and development which began in 1957. We’ll explore that in a future post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Frank Meeres, Thetford and Breckland through Time (Amberley Publishing Limited, 2010)

(2) Quoted in Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (Phillimore, 1986)

(3) ‘Thetford Town Council’, Norfolk News, 15 July 1911, ‘Borough of Thetford. Erection of Workmen’s Dwellings’, Bury Free Press, 13 April 1912 and ‘Councillor Oldman on Yarmouth Health and Housing’, Yarmouth Independent, 14 March 1914

(4) ‘Ely Urban Council’, Cambridge Independent Press, 1 August 1913

(5) Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (Phillimore, 1986)

(6) ‘Thetford: The Housing Scheme’, Bury Free Press, 25 October 1919 and ‘Thetford Housing Problem’, Bury Free Press, 31 January 1920

(7) ‘Thetford Housing’, Bury Free Press, 6 December 1924

(8) ‘Thetford Housing’, Bury Free Press, 13 June 1931 and ‘Mayor Making at Thetford’, Bury Free Press, 14 November 1936

The Jubilee Pool, Penzance: ‘Municipal modernity and faith in a brighter, more enlightened future’ UPDATE

Tags

1930s, Penzance

I don’t normally update posts but four years ago, when I last visited the Jubilee Pool in Penzance, it was closed and storm damaged. A fundraising campaign was in place to secure its repair and re-opening.  Well, last week I saw that the campaign had succeeded magnificently so I’m pleased to add to that earlier post and bring things up-to-date. (The revisions are in italics.)

Jubilee Pool, August 2018

Municipal Dreams is on holiday this week but the Jubilee Pool in Penzance is so municipal and so dreamy it just had to be shared. Opened in 1935, the pool is maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Arc Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.

My original photos were taken in August 2014 and show the pool closed and awaiting repair.

Penzance became a borough in 1614 and seems over the years to have been a rather enterprising one – a reservoir to supply the town with water was constructed in 1759, the first gas lighting arrived in 1830. In 1849, the Corporation was one of the first to form a local board of health and numerous improvements followed.

The Prom: originally built in 1843, this is the 1896 renovation with pink tinted slabs to reduce glare, August 2018

Fishing, minerals and trade formed the basis of its early prosperity but the Napoleonic Wars (which prevented the wealthy travelling to watering places on the Continent) opened new possibilities as one commentator praised the town for ‘the mildness of its air, the agreeableness of the situation and the respectability of its inhabitants’. He dubbed it ‘the Montpellier of England’. (1)

The Corporation built a seaside promenade to the west of the town in 1843 and the first Borough Surveyor built wide new roads to its rear from the 1860s. The rail link to London established in 1859 made these aspirations to resort gentility far more realistic. The first large hotel, Queen’s, opened in 1861. In its interwar resort heyday, Penzance was hailed as the ‘Cannes of the Cornish Riviera’. (2)

To its working population, Penzance was less idyllic. Battery Square – an area of run-down cottages and industrial works to the south of the town centre and adjacent to the promenade – was ‘one of the slummiest parts of the town’. (3)

In 1933, it was cleared. In a couple of years, large new municipal housing estates were built on the outskirts of town but meanwhile the Corporation focused on Penzance, the resort. Where Battery Square stood, the Borough Surveyor, Captain Frank Latham, created pleasure gardens and – a sign of the times – a car park.

At this time, Penzance was also lamenting the ‘unkind act of nature’ which had destroyed ‘the lovely beach which once ran from the Battery Rocks to the Tolcarne river’. A solution suggested itself – a lido built on the Rocks themselves.

The view from Tolcarne towards Battery Rocks and the Pool, August 2014

In this, Penzance was following the fashion of the day: (4)

By the early 1930s, open-air pools had become emblems of municipal modernity and of faith in a brighter, more enlightened future, in much the same way as public libraries had become a generation or two earlier.

Undated photograph © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The pools also reflected a greater independence enjoyed by women – a cultural shift but, in this context, a practical one too made possible by new swimwear designs which allowed them to take up swimming in addition to the more sedate bathing previously judged more seemly. 

Opening Day, 1935 © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

As we saw in Victoria Park, East London, Herbert Morrison – leader of the Labour administration which ran the London County Council from 1934 – had declared London would be ‘a city of lidos’. In the year that the Jubilee Pool opened, the Tinside lido was opened in Plymouth, Saltdean in Brighton and open-air pools in Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough and Aylesbury.

The Jubilee Pool was officially opened on 31 May, 1935. It was, the programme stated, ‘ the consummation of one of the most important projects undertaken by the Borough of Penzance’ . The celebratory prose went on to praise the clearance of the:

slum property that had marred the eastern approach to the Promenade – today this depressing and unattractive scene has been swept away and a complete transformation effected.

‘Professor Hicks’ takes the first plunge at the official opening © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd. 

A full programme of activities followed with the accompaniment of the Penzance Silver Band.  ‘Professor’ Hicks, ‘the Cornish Veteran’ and former West of England swimming champion whose swim career had begun in 1868 was present and his inaugural laps were followed by a ‘programme of aquatic sports and exhibitions’ including races for ladies and girls. The ‘Beauty Parade of Bathing Belles’ was perhaps less of a blow struck for feminism. 

Prices, at 6d (2.5p) for adults and 3d for children, were relatively high but more controversial to some was the fact that the pool was to be open on Sundays and Councillor Birch went so far as to proclaim that ‘people in favour of Sunday labour were tyrants’.  The Mayor himself declared he would rather the pool be permanently closed than open on Sundays but later took part in the opening ceremony nevertheless. By 16 votes to 9, the Council overruled the primarily religious objections to Sunday opening (4a)

Members of the Penzance Swimming Association and Water Polo Club, mid-1950s (?) © Jubilee Pool Penzance Ltd.

The Jubilee Pool was 330 feet long by 240 feet wide at its greatest extent, not the biggest of its time but, apparently, the largest by volume of water – seawater regularly replenished by seven sluice gates. The size was designed to meet national and international standards for swimming and water polo matches. 

August 2014

But beyond the dry detail, the pool is a thing of beauty, spectacularly sited on Battery Rocks with commanding views of Mount’s Bay, resting, in the words of the latest Pevsner:

sleekly like a liner at anchor projecting into the sea…a subtle Art Deco composition of curvilinear concrete terraces in cool blues and whites, separated to accommodate sunbathers below and spectators of the arena-like space within or views of the town without.

As the local press noted at the time, the pool wasn’t ‘only a fine piece of engineering’. It was also:

a work of art. The monotony of straight walls and right angles – the domain of the compass and ruler – has been entirely avoided. Instead there are graceful curves and pleasing lines.

The programme, in full awareness of these artistic credentials, commented conversely on ‘the cubist style … adopted in the interior in the matter of diving platforms and steps’. 

August 2014

The architect of this masterpiece was Borough Surveyor, Captain Latham. He usually gets a name-check in descriptions of the pool but I’m intrigued by him. He had been appointed to the post in 1899, aged 25. His rank came from a commission in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. He retired, awarded the Freedom of the Borough, in 1938 and died in 1946.

Captain Frank Latham

In his younger years, he had written The Construction of Roads, Paths and Sea Defence, published in 1903. That expertise was clear in the skilful use made of Battery Rocks for the pool’s foundations. The same local press report was pleased, more prosaically, to record that, as a result, the whole project cost £14,000 whereas comparable pools elsewhere had cost over £100,000.

St Michael’s Mount to the rear and war memorial to right, August 2014

Latham – as I imagine him, this practical man and local government bureaucrat – somewhere possessed the soul of an artist. The design of the Pool was inspired, so he said, by watching a gull alight on the sea. Its architecture is a beautiful confection of Modernism and Art Deco, typical of its time but all of its own and making superb use of its site.

August 2014

It represented too, in the fashion of its day, fresh air and healthy exercise. As the mayor opined at the pool’s opening, ‘there can hardly be any better form of bodily exercise than swimming’. In any case, he added, ‘people who live by the sea and those who live on the sea should be able to swim’.

But the pool – which had seemed such a benefit to the town and its inhabitants and visitors, ‘an event of the greatest importance’ as the headline proclaimed – had come by the 1960s to seem a ‘white elephant’.

The lido craze didn’t last. War broke out within four years. The post-war world of foreign travel and indoor leisure centres – and, always, the vagaries of the English weather – contrived to make these outdoor pools seem old-fashioned, even rather uninviting. Somehow, the Jubilee Pool survived but, by the 1990s a sceptical local council reckoned each swim cost the local ratepayer between £16 and £18 and the case for closing it seemed strong. (5)

The Friends of Jubilee Pool were formed in 1992 and they achieved their first victory in the following year when the Pool was Grade II listed. Major funding followed from English Heritage and the European Regional Development Fund and a grand re-opening took place in May 1994.

Now lidos and open-air pools up and down the country are enjoying a revival though many are still dependent on the voluntary efforts of local enthusiasts. The ups and downs of the Jubilee Pool itself continue. February’s storms caused significant damage to the Pool and have prevented its opening this year.

Catching the full force of a winter storm © The Friends of Jubilee Pool

The most recent news is positive, however. A joint bid from Cornwall Council, Penzance Town Council and the Friends of Jubilee Pool for £1.95m funding from the Coastal Communities Fund was approved by the Department for Communities and Local Government this month.

The Friends are continuing their own fund-raising campaign to ensure that the Pool will be reopened with a wider range of activities that should safeguard its future in years to come. Captain Latham and the enterprising councillors whose vision created the Jubilee Pool in the 1930s would be pleased.

2018

A £3m renovation programme, supported by the Coastal Communities Fund and matching funding from local authorities and the Friends of Jubilee Pool, was completed in 2016 and the pool reopened in May that year.

August 2018

The Pool is now owned and managed by the Friends of Jubilee Pool operating as a Community Benefit Society committed its survival as a community asset.  The latest stage in this is the drilling of a geothermal well to provide renewable energy which will enable part of the pool to be heated.  A fundraising share offer is in place to complement the grant funding provided by the European Union. (6)

August 2018

Finally, that future is properly supported by a celebration of the Pool’s past. ‘Jubilee Pool Stories‘ is a project to create a digital archive as well as new media work and exhibitions. If you’re interested or can contribute your own memories, please follow the link.  My thanks to them for providing the historic photographs included in this post.

Sources

The amended post benefited from an exhibition in the Penzance Exchange gallery, ‘The Jubilee Pool: Then, Now, To Come’, which is running till 22 September 2018.

(1) WG Maton in 1794, quoted in Peter Beacham and Nikolaus Pevsner, Cornwall (2014)

(2) JH Wade in 1928, quoted in Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey Historic characterisation for regeneration: Penzance (September 2003)

(3) The quotations are taken from ‘An Event of the Greatest Important’, The Cornishmen, a June 1935 newspaper report republished online in The West Briton, May 27, 2010

(4) Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2005) quoted in Tom de Castella, review, New Statesman, 29 August 2005

(4a) ‘Penzance Town Council. The Bathing Pool’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 15 May 1935

(5) See Martin Nixon, ‘Jubilee Pool: Enormous Liability or Massive Opportunity?’ for some of this later history. The figures are taken from the de Castella review.

(6)  Visit the Jubilee Pool’s dedicated website for full details on past work and future plans.

With planning permission granted for the proposals, Dezeen have just published ‘Penzance could become “spa town of Cornwall” with revamp of art-deco sea pool’

Council Housing in Walsall, Part II: The Interwar Period

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1920s, 1930s

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

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

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

Brockhurst Street, Fullbrook

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

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

Homes on the Poets Estate, Harden

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

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

West Bromwich Road, Palfrey

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

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

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

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

Talke Road, Fullbrook

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

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

Dorsett Place, Leamore

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

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

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

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

11 Walstead Road, now privately owned.

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

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

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

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

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

Prefabs on Alumwell Road

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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