Book Review: Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Community

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

A myth of ‘community’ became a dominant motif of post-war planning, significant both for the partial truth it contained and the ‘truth’ it created. Planners, taking their cue from the sociologists of the day, criticised the sterility of the interwar cottage suburbs. They hoped through the creation of ‘neighbourhood units’ and the provision of more community facilities to foster the intimacy and sociability believed to be a feature of the slum areas from which many of the new council tenants were being displaced. Later, after the 1960s era of high-rise and mass public housing, council estates were held peculiarly responsible for the anomie and social breakdown widely decried by media pundits and social commentators. The reality, as ever, was far more complicated.

We are fortunate, therefore, to have this new book by Jon Lawrence, an historian at the University of Exeter, to provide an informed and nuanced guide to the debate. The book, in his words:

challenges many of preconceptions about community and individualism in recent English history … It seeks to overturn simplistic assumptions about the ‘decline of community’ since the Second World War.

Lawrence’s method is to re-examine the surviving field notes from ten major social science studies conducted between 1947 and 2008. In doing so, he does indeed challenge much of the conventional wisdom that has surrounded discussions of community since 1945. What follows is not a comprehensive review – the book is a richly detailed and wide-ranging survey – but rather an analysis of his account and conclusions where they touch upon themes and issues raised in my own study of council housing.

Green Street, Bethnal Green

The Holy Grail of sociological research and planning was working-class community, never more so than in the early post-war years. Lawrence looks at Raymond Firth’s study of Bermondsey and the more well-known research of Michael Young on Bethnal Green. For both and particularly for Young (a co-author of Labour’s 1945 General Election manifesto), a clearly political agenda was in play.  They went, Lawrence argues:

in search of ‘community’ – or, to be more specific, in search of the community spirit they believed had animated people’s defiant response to the Blitz and had underwritten Labour’s decisive electoral breakthrough.

In this context, Young’s published work – written in conjunction with Peter Wilmott – made much of the matrilocal kinship networks held to sustain family and community life in the East End. But, of these, Lawrence comments mildly, ‘one struggles to find supporting evidence in either his field-notes or in Firth’s’. (1)

Lawrence, using Young’s research data, found married daughters resentful of their mother’s role or neglectful of their duties towards it and mothers themselves equally keen to be shorn of their supposed family responsibilities. There were countervailing examples too, of course, but there was little overall to sustain Young’s argument.

New housing at Little Hulton on the Worsley Estate

Tellingly, when Barry Cullingworth came to study Salford’s new and distant council suburb in Worsley in the late 1950s, he found: (2)

Separation from ‘Mum’ has not been the hardship which some sociologists have led us to expect; on the contrary it has often allowed a more harmonious relationship to be established.

Young’s defence of an imagined traditional working-class community was matched by his active disdain for the new ‘out of county’ council estates many former slum-dwellers were moving to. He praised the East End’s ‘sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries’, contrasting it positively to, a later case-study, the ‘drawn-out roads and spacious open ground’ of the London County Council’s new Debden Estate in Essex.  The latter, he argued, represented a shift from ‘a people-centred to a house-centred existence … relations are window-to-window not face-to-face’.

The Debden Estate under construction, 1950 © Britain from Above, eaw031776

Lawrence finds instead a ‘fierce culture of domestic privacy’ common among working-class households in both districts – a desire to resist intrusion into the home.  And, in relation to the migration to the new council estates, he notes, many ‘wanted the chance to withdraw from forced sociability – to socialize instead on their own terms, with the family and friends of their choosing’.

This finding is echoed by Stefan Ramsden’s work on Beverley. He found: (3)

The decline in older-style neighbourhood sociability and mutuality was compensated by new forms, frequently conducted between relatives and friends who did not live on the same street but were scattered across the town.

What some decried as ‘increasing “privatism”’, Ramsden concludes, was, in fact, ‘a more expansive sociability’.

Lawrence identifies another change in the early post-war years:

For the first time, the vast majority of working people believed that it was their birthright to enjoy a decent standard of living ‘from cradle to grave’.

The enhanced role of the state in ensuring just that was nowhere better seen than in the programme of New Towns and expanded towns that developed in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Lewis Silkin, Labour’s Minister of Town and Country Planning, addressing a town hall meeting in 1946 in the first designated New Town, Stevenage, proclaimed they were ‘building for the new way of life’. In 1959 the town came under the critical eye of Raphael Samuel, then working as a researcher for Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies.

Stevenage

This was an era of rising living standards for the many, not (just) the few. But some middle-class socialists worried that all this affluence might be corrupting; that, in particular, working-class people might start voting Conservative.  After a third consecutive Conservative election victory in 1959, this concern had some apparent validity and it was the focus of John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s study of Luton in 1961-62.

Writing of Stevenage in 1963, two New Town advocates may have unwittingly encouraged such fears: (4)

The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.

In fact (and further supported practically by Labour election victories in 1964 and 1966), the evidence gathered from the social surveys was heartening.  Of Stevenage, Lawrence concludes that it was:

striking how many people displayed a strong sense of being part of a shared project of self-improvement and self-making as residents of the new town … [At] least in Stevenage, people’s ambition to ‘better’ themselves … was intertwined with an awareness that this was also a collective endeavour.

Residents understood post-war prosperity as ‘something that was at last to be shared by “people like us”. Its ethos was as much communal as individualist.’

Broad Walk, Harlow, in the mid-1950s when it became know as ‘Pram Town’

Later recollections of another New Town, Harlow, though possibly suffused with nostalgia, seem to attest to the same feeling. The journalist Jason Cowley remembers Harlow as ‘a vibrant place, with utopian yearnings’; another recalls the town he left in 1971 as one marked by ‘youthful energy, enthusiasm, and social sharing’. ‘I guess the Great Dream was still alive and thriving’, he concludes ruefully.

Marymead, Broadwater, Stevenage

In their early decades, most New Towns residents lived in social housing built by the Development Corporations. This was, in effect, council housing built for ‘general needs’, the classless vision upheld in Labour’s 1949 Housing Act (albeit one overturned by Conservative legislation in 1954).  Gary Younge, another journalist brought up in a New Town, remembers that there ‘was no sense of incongruity in Stevenage between being a young professional and living in social housing’.  Lawrence notes more broadly the lack of stigma attached to living in council housing in the 1950s.

But this was changing. By the early 1960s, a majority of workers both in Luton and Cambridge (another subject of study) owned their own homes and many more wanted to.  Their collectivist attitudes notwithstanding, many Stevenage residents also expressed support for a Right to Buy their Corporation homes.

Before any of the widely publicised (and usually exaggerated) problems of council estates in the 1970s and beyond, a significant psychological shift had taken place in popular attitudes towards council housing.  It came to be seen as inferior to home ownership.  Stefan Ramsden noted this in the comment of one estate resident in Beverley: ‘I think because you got a stigma with it … you were seen to be a lower class of people if you were in a council house’.

Attitudes towards new council homes more generally were positive though there seems a widespread dislike of flats. ‘You don’t get privacy in flats; everyone knows all your business’ and ‘they mix you up with all sorts’, according to two Bethnal Green residents in Young’s study. In Stevenage too, the Development Corporation found incomers expressing ‘their desire to get away from communal staircases, balconies or landings, and to have a house with its own front door’.  It’s a reminder of that desire for privacy already noted.

A Harlow kitchen as featured in the town’s publicity material.

Almost unanimously, of course, people were grateful for the cleanliness, conveniences and comfort of their new council homes. Those carrying out the surveys could sometimes fail to properly appreciate this step change in working-class life. In summarising the words of one new resident settling into life as Debden, Michael Young, seems almost disdainful :

There was the usual stuff about more shops, better bus services, greater privacy, value of garden, improvement in children’s health and in particular the advantage of a new house was stressed.

On that matter of health, as an aside (though it should hardly qualify as such), at the South Oxhey Estate (another of the LCC’s out-of-county estates, in Hertfordshire), 55 percent of new tenants had initially been re-housed on health grounds.  In Harlow New Town, the mortality rate of newborns in 1964 stood at 5.5 per 1000 compared to the national average of 12.3.  Some people literally owe their lives to this ‘social engineering’.

In comparison, the acquisition of new stuff – televisions, washing machines, furniture and the like – might seem trivial. It was sometimes seen as corrosive. Some of the social survey interviewers seem to have wanted their working-class respondents to emulate their own more Bohemian life-styles. Raph Samuel lamented the purchase of new (not second-hand) furniture by one Stevenage household as a ‘pattern of mass media-imposed misery’.  Some decried these improved living standards as embourgeoisement, a belief that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values. We, I hope, will see it simply as poor people getting less poor.

Barnham Cross, Thetford

As for the friendliness (or otherwise) of the new estates compared to the former slum quarters, the story is naturally mixed but a significant proportion of new residents – probably a preponderance – describe them as more sociable. In the expanded town of Thetford in Norfolk (another destination of some Bethnal Green residents), some residents believed that ‘there was a much friendlier atmosphere than in London and that one got to know one’s neighbours better than in a big city’. (5)

One disgruntled resident even compared the large overspill estate of Houghton Regis near Luton to, irony of ironies, ‘a chunk of Bethnal Green on a bright evening, with kids committing hopscotch and vandalism and grannies leaning over the garden-gates or sitting on the step’.  (That children might be thought guilty of ‘committing hopscotch’ perhaps tells us more about the interviewee than the estate.)

Lawrence goes on to discuss later social surveys conducted in the north-east and Sheppey in changed and generally harsher circumstances. There’s much of interest here too – on occupational cultures, gender relations and social attitudes – but I’ll stick to my housing brief and draw this post to a conclusion.

Lawrence’s conclusion from the early post-war social surveys can stand more widely: what they revealed was a ‘remarkable diversity of lifestyles and attitudes’ – a diversity, he argues, that ‘exposes the absurdity of imagining that there was ever such thing as a single “working-class culture” or “working-class community”’.

We might, therefore, ask why middle-class professionals took such interest in this alien territory. Ostensibly, it reflects a laudable concern for the less well-off. But it could also be seen, by more caustic observers at least, as an extension of the elite anxiety that has seen the working class as a fit subject (‘subject’ being the operative word) for study and improvement since Victorian times.

There were sometimes more clearly political agenda at play too as we’ve seen. Here perhaps it reflects one of the foundational myths of left-wing politics – that working-class people should think and behave in a certain (i.e. broadly left-wing, communitarian) way. The agonised debate over the last general election and the fall of Labour’s supposed ‘Red Wall’ of working-class constituencies reflects this too with many on the Left seeking to blame malign external forces rather than examine Labour’s own political failings or contend with the complexity of the actually existing working class.

Lawrence’s conclusion (written well before the election) makes its own more thoughtful contribution to this debate. He argues, rightly I think, that:

that any new politics of community has to enhance, rather than erode, the personal autonomy and independence that the majority of people have fought hard to secure for themselves and their families.

But, in a challenge to the alienated and self-centred atomisation this could represent, he also argues that this new politics ‘needs to re-focus on promoting the aspects of public life and culture that are open to all’ (art galleries, libraries, museums, leisure venues, etc.) in ways that ‘help us facilitate social connection and promote a general sense of living in an interconnected, shared social environment’.

Given the purpose of this blog and my book, I could hardly disagree with that though a small part of me wonders if it isn’t a (cautiously expressed) continuation of the improving, rational recreation agenda promoted by middle-class professionals in earlier times. At any rate, it’s a great book which you should read and assess yourself. For a hardback book with academic heft, it’s fairly reasonably priced and, hopefully, there will be a paperback edition in the near future. Or better still, borrow it from a library!

Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Notes

(1)  Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

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

(3) Stefan Ramsden, Working-class Community in the Age of Affluence (Routledge, 2017)

(4) Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, The New Towns. The Answer to Megalopolis (1963)

(5) Rotary Club of Thetford, Norfolk, ‘Thetford Town Expansion: Report on Social Survey’ (March 1964); DG/TD/2/95, London Metropolitan Archives

Council Housing in Holborn, Part II: ‘Diminishing the Tenement Atmosphere’

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1940s, 1950s, Holborn

We left Holborn last week in 1945, in a ruinous state and with a new Labour council.  That council, radical in its politics and ambition, was under no illusions about the task it faced – a mission, as described by its leader Irene Marcousé (better known later as Ina Chaplin), ‘to win the peace [for] the ordinary citizens of Holborn’.

Holborn’s population had fallen during wartime to around 18,700 (it rose to near 25,000 by 1951) and the impact of the Blitz, as we noted, had been devastating.  The new Council, however, was clear that the borough’s housing problems were not mitigated by its size, nor solely the consequence of the war: (1)

the existence behind the facades of modern buildings on Kingsway and High Holborn of streets comprising old and derelict property, lacking normal amenities and badly overcrowded. Indeed, the scenes presented today in localities such as Seven Dials are unchanged from the day when they inspired Hogarth to produce his famous masterpieces of London life and John Gay to write the ‘Beggar’s Opera’.

If the rhetoric was powerful, the cold statistics were more so. At a Town Hall meeting on housing in April 1947, Marcousé revealed that some 3500 families in Holborn lacked a bathroom, 2000 had no separate toilet and 1700 lacked their own water supply. (2)

In this context, the 20 temporary prefabs erected between Topham Street and Baker’s Row identified by the estimable Prefab Museum were welcome luxury but provided only a stopgap and small-scale solution to the wider housing crisis. (3)

Requisitioning (begun under wartime emergency powers granted in 1939 but extended into peacetime) offered another emergency response and here Marcousé, as Frank Dobson later recalled, was typically forthright: (4)

Councils had the power to requisition empty property to let to the homeless. Holborn officials told Ina it would be too difficult to implement. So she told the Town Clerk to sign 500 requisition notices. Armed with these and a bag of nails, Ina set out, accompanied by a carpenter and hammer to identify anywhere that looked vacant and requisition it.  Between Ina and a bag of nails, 500 families got somewhere to live.

In May 1946, the Tory opposition on the Council proposed that requisitioning be halted, responding – in part at least – to the genuine problem of preparing this number of homes for habitation. Marcousé told them: (5)

It is ridiculous to suggest that we are requisitioning too much. We shall requisition everything that is available. If the old Council had done this the people of Holborn would be much better off by now.

By 1951, there were 1042 requisitioned properties providing homes for Holborn’s homeless.

The goal, of course, remained, high quality permanent housing but building new council homes in Holborn in the immediate post-war years presented its own huge problems. The high cost of land was one: in Holborn, land sold for up to £150,000 an acre at a time when the London County Council (LCC) had set a value limit of £60,000 on land for housing purposes. The zoning of the entire borough for commercial purposes was another.  Shortages of building materials and skilled labour affected the country as a whole.

A photograph of the Tybalds Estate under construction. © A London Inheritance

Undaunted, in 1946 the Council began negotiations with the LCC to make use of the one large area of land available to them – a site to the south of Great Ormond Street largely cleared by wartime bombing. The plans, drawn up by architects Robert Hening and Anthony Chitty, were ready in three months; detailed negotiations on land purchase, finance and planning regulations took a further eight. (6)

The image from Werk in 1949 shows the newly completed Blemendsbury block.

Construction itself was hampered by supplies difficulties and required on-the-job adjustments. Initially steel for the steel-framed construction was in good supply; ‘later in the job the reverse became true and brickwork was substituted for concrete walling when the shortage of shuttering carpenters became acute’. (7)

Here, the indomitable Marcousé came to the fore again. According to Dobson:

she used to go personally to harass Nye Bevan (the health minister then responsible for housing) until he authorised the building work – just to get rid of her.

In commissioning the Dombey Street scheme or what became known as the Tybalds Estate, the Housing and Planning Committee’s instruction to the architects, mindful no doubt of Labour’s earlier criticism of interwar schemes, had been to ‘diminish the tenement atmosphere’. (8)

Blemendsbury in 2019

To this end, the estate was envisaged as part of a ‘neighbourhood unit’: a residential district of some 4000 people with its own shops on Lamb’s Conduit Street, community centre, schools, open spaces and service roads. It’s hard not to see it nowadays – in a good way – as anything other than part of inner London’s dense urban fabric but the ‘neighbourhood unit’ and its quest for community was a key ideal of post-war planning.

Additionally, the architects provided: (9)

a generous layout of gardens between the blocks with shrubs and flowering trees, cobblestones and a shady place with pleached limes for sitting out upon.  The gardens are so planned as to give facilities to the rather dreary pre-war housing scheme (Boswell House) which adjoins. Dombey Street is to be closed and to form part of the garden layout.

The ‘tenement atmosphere’ was further diminished by the quality of flats’ internal design and provision: each had central heating and a private balcony, choice of gas or electricity for cooking and refrigerators.  ‘Each flat [was] compact and arranged to give the housewife the minimum of work and yet provide a home of which the family can be proud.’ That workload – before most families came to own their own washing machine – was further reduced by utility rooms on each floor in some blocks and in others a larger basement laundry room containing washing machines, double sinks and mangles. (10)

Windmill

Blemundsbury and Windmill were the first two blocks completed, in 1949. At ten storeys, the former was briefly the highest residential block in London and it caught the eye for its striking modernist design – ‘not lavish, but of delicate precision and agreeably devoid of mannerisms’ according to Pevsner in 1952 –  at a time when the housing schemes of the LCC in particular (then under the unimaginative control of the Valuers Department) were heavily criticised for their old-fashioned plainness. When JM Richards launched a fierce attack on the LCC’s designs in the pages of the Architects’ Journal in March 1949, his critical article was accompanied by a highly complimentary review of the Holborn scheme to offer point and contrast. (11)

This quality – particularly in Holborn – came at a price. At a cost of £2100 per flat, the scheme was reckoned among the most expensive ever passed by the LCC. Rents to match – up to 35 shillings (£1.75) a week – attracted criticism from the local Communist Party. The Labour Council countered that ‘tenants’ savings in the cost of fuel, heating of water, laundry charges, etc.’ would more than compensate for the additional expense. (12)

Sydney Cook © Camden New Journal

In 1947, however, the Council’s continuing commitment to high quality housing was demonstrated by its appointment of Sydney Cook as Borough Architect. Cook’s first job had been as an architect for Luton Borough Council but from 1945 he had worked for the Bournville Village Trust, a significant player in contemporary discussions around post-war reconstruction. (13)

Holborn Central Library

Before moving on to housing in next week’s post, we should note Cook’s contribution to the leisure and cultural provision that was an important element of the Council’s politics. Here Holborn’s new Central Library, opened in 1960, stands out – ‘a milestone in the history of the modern public library’, according to the Twentieth Century Society. Typically, it was designed not by Cook himself but by his deputy and assistants (Ernest Ives and assistants ID Aylott and EL Ansell to give them due credit). As many of you will know, Cook went on to become Borough Architect for the newly created Camden Council (incorporating Holborn) in 1965 and here he guided and managed a team of architects that would create some of the finest council housing in the land. (14)

Chancellors Court

The Tybalds Estate itself grew further in the 1950s and 60s. Two fourteen-storey point blocks, Babington and Chancellors’ Court, were opened in 1958 – constructed by Laings, their design credited to Cook. Though probably designed by members of his team, they are a reminder that Cook was not always committed to the low-rise, high density format that became his signature in Camden. Devonshire Court, a five-storey development of shops and flats fronting Boswell Street at the edge of the estate was completed in 1962.

Devonshire Court

Returning briefly to 1949, the May local elections were catastrophic for the Holborn Labour Party which lost 23 seats and retained a single solitary councillor. The Borough would remain under solid Conservative control until its abolition in 1965. It was an awful year for Labour generally in electoral terms but in Holborn in particular the results seem to indicate the exceptionalism of 1945.  However, a strong, cross-party consensus remained that councils should build homes and we’ll examine Holborn’s further efforts in this regard in the next post.

Note 

My thanks to A London Inheritance for permission to use the earlier photograph of the Tybalds Estate under construction.  The post ‘Building the Tybalds Close Estate’ provides a fuller and longer history of the area. The blog as a whole is a wonderful record of London past and present.

Sources

(1) Holborn Borough Council, ‘Tybalds Close: the Holborn Housing Scheme’ (Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre: 60.69 Tybalds Close Estate)

(2) Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s

(3) They are recorded on the Prefab Museum map.

(4) A transcript of Frank Dobson’s obituary of Marcousé published in The Guardian, 9 April 1990, can be found in the online archives of Woolverstone Hall School.

(5) Quoted in Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s.

(6) Holborn Borough Council, Tybalds Close: the Holborn Housing Scheme (60.69 Tybalds Close Estate)

(7) ‘Housing in Holborn: Blemendsbury House, Theobalds Road WC for the Holborn Borough Council’, The Builder, March 4 1949, pp267-270

(8) Quoted in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1993)

(9) ‘Housing for London Boroughs’, Architectural Design, vol VIII, no 11, November 1948, pp229-242

(10) Holborn Borough Council, Tybalds Close: the Holborn Housing Scheme (60.69 Tybalds Close Estate)

(11) See Nicholas Merthyr Day, The Role of the Architect in Post-War State Housing: A case study of the housing work of the London County Council 1939 – 1956, PhD, University of Warwick 1988

(12) See Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s and Holborn Borough Council, Tybalds Close: the Holborn Housing Scheme (60.69 Tybalds Close Estate)

(13) Mark Swenarton, ‘Geared to producing ideas, with the emphasis on youth: the creation of the Camden borough architect’s department under Sydney Cook’, The Journal of Architecture, Volume 16, no 3, 2011

(14) Susannah Charlton, Twentieth Century Society, ‘Holborn Library, Building of the Month, July 2013’. On Cook’s later schemes for Camden, see my posts ‘Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: the Making of Modern Housing’,  ‘The Whittington Estate, Camden’ and successor posts, ‘The Branch Hill Estate, Camden’ and the ‘The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden’.

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part II: the Post-War Housing Drive

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1940s, 1950, 1960

In last week’s post, we saw how Shrewsbury Borough Council had built homes even before 1914 and had built on a large scale after 1918. A second world war created new needs and ambitions in its aftermath. In fact, the Borough emerged from war largely unscathed – just two bombs fell on the town – but its population and significance as a manufacturing centre had grown and it faced the same housing crisis affecting most of the nation.

The local responses – driven in any case by national policy and direction – were similar too. This was seen firstly in the temporary prefab bungalows erected in the town, part of 156,623 nationwide – 50 at Harlescott (some for essential workers in the nearby Sentinel Waggon Works), 55 in Abbots Gardens, 30 in New Park Close and a smaller group for elderly people in the Old Heath Estate. (1)

BISF homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

Permanent prefabs seemed to offer another solution. The steel-framed BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) House had been designed by Frederick Gibberd during the war; 50 were built on the new Crowmeole Estate from 1948. Of the 329 new homes planned for the Springfield Estate from December 1948, 150 were Wimpey No-Fines, a form of in-situ concrete construction.  Of 624 homes planned for the Meadows Farm Estate from autumn 1950, 212 were of Wates pre-reinforced concrete panel construction.

Brick-built homes, Oakfield Drive, Crowmeole

The majority of the homes, however, were traditional brick-built houses, most of conventional design, a few with a slightly more modernist aesthetic. Those built in the 1940s reflected the generous space standards of the Bevan era; those after 1951, the economising of the Macmillan era.

The occupation of disused military bases had been another – highly unofficial but practical – response to the post-war housing crisis. By October 1946 it was estimated that around 46,000 people were squatting some 1811 camps across the country. Similar direct action in Shrewsbury and vicinity came later – with reports of military buildings being occupied in 1948 in Monkmoor, Atcham and Forton amongst others – but testified to the same pressing need.

Occupation of Harlescott Camp, May 1949

The largest and best-organised local squat, however, began in May 1949 when Thomas G Ryder, local leader of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, led a group (complete with seven to eight lorries of furniture) that occupied 22 huts at RAF Harlescott. The trigger here seems to have been the belief that the buildings were about to be allocated to single Polish men working at the Sentinel factory. Ryder declared:

We are not going to allow it to become a glorified camp for Poles paid for by the British tax-payer when British families have nowhere to go.

I’ll let you determine the balance between laudable working-class activism and xenophobia in that particular episode.  Ryder himself would go on to become, in modern terminology, a ‘centrist’ leader of the Labour Group on Shrewsbury Borough Council and a senior manager at Sentinel.

Stapleton Road, Meole Brace

Construction of new housing continued apace with the commencement, in 1954, of the 500-home Meole Brace Estate on the south-eastern fringes of the borough. As other towns looked to high-rise, plentiful land and, presumably, political choice kept Shrewsbury building low.  The rather austere five-storey blocks built by Wimpey at Meole Brace seem to have represented the physical, height of its ambition.

Spring Gardens, Ditherington

As the immediate housing crisis declined, thoughts turned again to the slum clearance programme begun in the 1930s.  Between 1955 and 1959, the Council demolished 515 unfit homes – around 144 deemed individually unfit but a greater number (371) in designated clearance areas. Three-storey blocks replaced derelict housing around Ditherington Mill; passages and courts in Frankwell and the town centre were also cleared.

Ryton Close, Meole Brace

By 1956, the council housing waiting list had increased to over 1700 and the Council faced having to rehouse some 794 families from homes designated unfit. This pressure brought about the borough’s next major housing expansion – a further 143 homes on the Meole Brace Estate and a large new estate on agricultural land at Harlescott Grange. (2) By the summer of 1958, the Council had built 2382 homes since 1945 and boasted 857 underway or approved.

Ditherington and Harlescott in 1948 showing Shrewsbury’s expansion to the north © Britain from Above, eaw017470

A local press report described Harlescott as ‘Shrewsbury’s industrial suburb’, a sign of the borough’s expanding manufacturing base. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government provided additional support to housing for skilled workers and the Council agreed that 20 of its ‘bonus’ 30 houses should be allocated to Rolls-Royce employees, the company having taken over the Sentinel works in 1956. (3)

Bainbridge Green, Harlescott Grange

Housing allocations, however, were controversial. Shrewsbury came late to a points-based system and, ironically, when it did in 1954, it downgraded what had previously been the sole criterion – overcrowding.  Now points were added for waiting time and local connection as well as obvious priorities such as number of children and medical need. Localism cam to the fore again nine years later when councillors across the spectrum unsuccessfully opposed the priority given to incoming skilled workers. (4)

Housing for elderly people was prominent in later schemes. Halcroft Court, Ditherington

Smaller schemes continued in the 1970s but the great age of council housebuilding was over.  Shrewsbury itself was amalgamated with Atcham Rural District Council (itself a significant housebuilder) in 1974 and together in 1994 – after the depredations of Right to Buy – the new council owned and managed 6205 council homes. Seven hundred fewer council homes – 5593 to be precise – were transferred by large-scale voluntary transfer to Severnside Housing in 2001.

Then Shrewsbury itself disappeared, administratively at least; absorbed in 2009 into the new unitary authority of Shropshire. An active Town Council (in fact, a newly created parish council) remains. By 2011, around 16 percent of the homes in the district were social rented, a little below the national average.

Shropshire Council is an overwhelmingly Conservative body but it’s a sign of the times and the new housing crisis that its 2017 Local Plan Review concluded that ‘the market is not, and will not, build the housing needed to meet the broad future needs of communities’.  Essentially, despite a significant building programme, private developers were failing to deliver the affordable and smaller homes that many local people required. (5)

It’s an uncomfortable echo of the case made by Shrewsbury’s first socialist councillor over a century earlier: ‘if it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.’  (6)

The Council set up its own wholly-owned, private housebuilding company in February this year. It plans to build 2000 new homes, some for key workers, some for elderly people, some for younger people leaving care. Naturally today, ‘affordable homes’ and homes for sale are in the mix and it’s unclear what the proportion of social rent homes will be.  That market failure and local government intervention remind us that council housing as such – let at genuinely affordable rents – is as necessary today as it ever was when Shrewsbury’s housing efforts began. (7)

Sources

(1) WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014). Other detail and quotations in this post are also drawn from this source.

(2) ‘New Housing Estate at Shrewsbury’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 July 1956

(3) ‘Housing Tender for Shrewsbury Estate’, Birmingham Daily Post, 25 July 1958

(4) New Housing Points Scheme Proposed at Shrewsbury, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 July 1954 and ‘Allocation of houses criticised’, Birmingham Daily Post, 10 December 1963

(5) Dominic Robinson, ‘2000 homes planned as Shropshire Council to set up its own house building company’, Shropshire Star, 7 December 2018

(6) Councillor John Kent Morris quoted in ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(7) Shropshire Newsroom, ‘Building homes that people need: housing company gets Council go-ahead’, 1 March 2019

Tayler and Green and Loddon Rural District Council, Part II: ‘a triumph of artistic patronage’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Loddon Rural District Council, Tayler and Green

As we saw in last week’s post, David Green was appointed consultant architect to Loddon Rural District Council in March 1945.  Together with his partner Herbert Tayler, he would enjoy a relationship with the council described by one close observer as ‘a triumph of artistic patronage’. (1)  The architectural excellence of the housing commissioned by Loddon and designed by Tayler and Green is widely known but we’ll look too at the wider context in which their joint enterprise flourished.

‘Swedish Houses’, Leman Grove, Loddon. The vertical panelling on the left reflects the original form.

Before that, however, the housing crisis in Loddon district, as elsewhere in the country, presented more pressing issues. The Council had bid successfully for 30 temporary prefab bungalows in 1944; 20 were built in Loddon itself and 10 in Raveningham. Permanent prefabricated housing was another favoured solution. By 1948, 34 so-called ‘Swedish Houses’ (imported from Sweden and built of timber) and 62 pre-cast concrete Airey Houses had been erected across the district. (2)

Tayler and Green were closely involved with their construction, often presenting a list of defects to the Housing Committee to be corrected before new homes could be signed off. It was unsurprising that by February 1948 their report to the Housing Committee  concluded that: (3)

in their opinion non-traditional houses could not yet compete with traditional types as regards cost and finish and that their advice to the Council was to press for more brick and tile houses and not consider erecting any more non-traditional types.

In south Norfolk, decommissioned airbases presented another field of activity. In April 1947, the Council agreed to convert sick quarters and other disused buildings at Seething Airfield to provide 14 temporary dwellings; in the following month it was agreed to adapt six Nissen huts in Raveningham. There were 72 such ‘converted hutments’ by 1949.  Meanwhile, rationing and building materials shortages hindered new construction – even lavatory basins were rationed until June 1948. (4)

That a traditional building programme was needed was not in doubt: the Housing Committee’s 1949 annual report detailed 175 sub-standard houses in the district, 71 cases of overcrowding and some 194 households on the waiting list. (5)  Belatedly – and belatedly for those of you understandably keen to focus on the work of Tayler and Green – that programme was bearing fruit.

College Road, Thurlton

Tayler and Green’s first schemes for the Council were completed in 1948 – in Leman Grove, Loddon, shared with some Swedish Houses, and College Road in Thurlton, an extension of a pre-war scheme.  Writing in 1947 as their schemes developed and thinking evolved, the partners asserted the obvious but neglected truism that rural housing should differ from urban. ‘Far too often the ordinary semi-detached urban dwelling is planted down in the countryside with all the consequent disadvantages to the occupier’. In contrast, their schemes resulted from  ‘a study of rural requirements’. (6)

A rural worker wears gumboots which ‘have to be taken off in a sheltered position without bringing mud into the house’; ‘he grows a certain amount of his own food’ and requires additional storage space for tools, potatoes, etc.’; ‘he requires to be able to wheel manure through to his garden’; he needs to store wood for fuel; ‘he makes greater use of his bicycle than does the townsman’.

For this reason, Tayler and Green replaced front and back doors with a single side entry which opened off a roofed passage connected to a large outside store: (7)

Thus the sequence of arrival, storing of bicycle, and then going indoors is completed under cover and in privacy … The kitchen without a back door ceases to be a passage for the whole household.

This might have been an architectural innovation rooted in prosaic reality (even down to the concrete floors lifted just three inches to ease the movement of bikes, prams and wheelbarrows) but it became part of the unique aesthetic that the architects brought to their designs.

Windmill Green Ditchingham

That was seen more dramatically at their next major scheme, Windmill Green in Ditchingham, the first phase completed in 1949, in the use of terraces; in Tayler’s words, ‘not used in rural districts since the 18^th century, with their advantages of economy, warmth and restful appearance in the landscape’. (8)  Terraces also served to conceal what Tayler called the ‘rural scruff’ of back gardens from public view.

Windmill Green Ditchingham

The thirty houses at Ditchingham, arranged in a horseshoe around a large open green, seemed to Ian Nairn to be ‘an attempt to entrap the whole of East Anglian space in one great gesture’. (9) As Tayler acknowledged, in Norfolk ‘it is the land itself which competes with you, as it always competed with man before architecture existed’. (10)

The junction of Kenyon Row and Forge Grove at Gillingham captures the range of Tayler and Green’s decorative techniques.

By coincidence, I found almost the identical image published in the Architectural Review in 1958. I think the later image shows how well the designs have aged.

Beyond this, there was a conscious attempt to capture the picturesque, not in the twee way this term often implies, nor in an ‘in keeping’ archaism.  This was modern architecture though Pevsner thought it might be better described as ‘post-modern’. Tayler was clear, however, that they had broken with the austerity of the international modern style. He felt: (10)

people lacked decoration and enjoyment in the look of the houses, so we introduced colours (different for each house), brick patterns, dates. The date of the terrace in raised brickwork was an immediate success. Everybody liked it, people do like decoration.

Colour wash was used in earlier schemes to disguise unattractive Fletton bricks and was later replaced by coloured facing bricks as these became available.  Open screens and trellises on walls and fretted bargeboards on gable ends followed.

As their portfolio developed, Tayler and Green emphasised how ‘each site is given a marked individuality and each is immediately recognisably different from the others’. This, as they argued, was ‘in itself, is a step forward for “Council housing”’.  Indeed, much of it is no longer council housing and that individuality has been further emphasised by the fact that in Windmill Green, for example, 60 percent have tenants have exercised their Right to Buy.

The first single-storey homes were built at Geldeston in 1949 and bungalows intended primarily for older people became an increasing feature of later schemes. This was significant in rural areas where farm workers often lived in tied housing, provided by their employers during their working lives.  By the later 1950s, bungalows formed around 17 percent of council stock by which time the Council owned and managed near 900 homes, around 20 percent of the Rural District’s total.

This reflected a broader demographic change apparent into the 1960s – a declining agricultural workforce, rural depopulation and an ageing population that remained. The great age of rural council housebuilding was over.

Two images from the 1949 Housing Manual

The contribution of Tayler and Green to its heyday was widely recognised.  The Ministry of Health’s 1949 Housing Manual (in which rural housing featured surprisingly heavily) included no less than four illustrations of their schemes. Early schemes at Woodyard Square, Woodton, and Bergh Apton, completed in 1951, were widely praised, as was Forge Grove, Gillingham, built in the mid-1950s.

Davy Place, Loddon, plaques

In all, Elain Harwood reckons the duo were awarded five Festival of Britain Merit Awards, three awards from Ministry of Health and its post-1951 successor the Ministry of Housing, two Civic Trust awards and a RIBA Bronze Medal. (13)

Woodyard Square, Woodton, bungalows

Woodyard Square as seen in the Norfolk landscape in an image from Architectural Review, 1958

In 1958, Ian Nairn could already cast an almost valedictory eye on a programme (which would eventually total some 687 homes) that was ‘almost finished’. He concluded that the region was ‘more rural, more Norfolk-like than it was in 1945’ – ‘no other [Rural District] that the writer has been in could say that of itself’. (14)

This was achieved by interpreting the local spirit but doing so:

in purely twentieth-century terms, using twentieth-century industrial organisation, creating five or six standard types of each detail and ringing the changes on them according to the needs of each site … In doing so, they have been faithful to the genius loci in a deeper sense that that implied by a few design clichés.

Church Road, Bergh Apton

More recently, the architect Charles Holland commented that the houses: (15)

unremarkable in some ways, still stand as an exemplary way to build sensitively and well in the countryside … It’s quiet and unassuming but in a generous rather than austere or hairshirt way. It convinces you that if you plan things intelligently and with beauty and care you can leave the rest to itself. The houses seem to cater for life rather than prescribe it, which is something that modern architecture finds incredibly difficult to do generally.

The Housing Committee minutes suggest very little of all this. A suggestion by Councillor Fairhead that downstairs toilets be placed outside the main entrance was brushed aside by Green and rejected by the Committee.  A suggestion that parlours (a second living room) be provided was opposed by Green as being £80 dearer than their present plans; they would also presumably have mitigated the bright, airy interiors of the south-facing living rooms that were integral to all their designs.  In general, the Housing Committee was simply ‘a good client’ as Tayler and Green were magnanimous in agreeing that ‘Loddon Council have undoubtedly been’. (16)

Scudamore Place, Ditchingham

The councillors therefore occupied themselves principally with finance and management.  A comprehensive points system was devised to determine allocations; the fact of being an agricultural worker granted 20 points, living with relatives a further 20, and so on in some detail.  The Council also applied its discretion in charging agricultural workers reduced rents, typically 2 shillings (10p) less than the 12 to 15 shillings normally charged for its family homes. Agricultural wages were around 40 percent lower than the national average. (17)

Rural realities impinged in other ways too.  In 1947, the Committee informed Mr Hazell of no. 3 Council Houses, Woodton, that rearing pigs in his back garden contravened his tenancy agreement. But then they relented; by June 1948, it was agreed that pig-keeping regulations (stipulating sties ‘of brick and concrete construction’) be drawn up. (18)

The term ‘problem families’ was first used in 1943. By 1951, it had made its way to Loddon in uncompromising form when the Medical Officer of Health referred to around 100 families in the district characterised by ‘intractable ineducability [and] instability or infirmity of character of one or both parents’. These, he maintained, expressed themselves in: (19)

persistent neglect of children, in fecklessness, irresponsibility, improvidence in the conduct of life and indiscipline in the home wherein dirt, poverty, squalor are often conspicuous.

New issues of housing management – though articulated in ways not far removed from the nineteenth-century language of the ‘undeserving poor’ – were presenting themselves.

Forge Grove, Gillingham

In many ways, Loddon Rural District Council was typical of rural authorities across the country. There were new demands to decently house the rural working class amidst harsh realities of rural life both persistent and evolving.  But in Loddon an aspirational authority combined with two architects, in Tayler and Green, uniquely committed to the design of high-quality council homes.  Together they bequeathed a legacy of decent, affordable housing which stands not only as a monument to past achievement but to present necessity.

Note

I’ve added additional images of some of the schemes on my Tumblr account: Bergh Apton, Ditchingham, and Gillingham and Loddon.

Sources

The best illustrated and fullest architectural online guide to Tayler and Green’s work is provided by Matt Wood in his Ruralise blog. The essential text is the Harwood and Powers volume referenced below.

(1) The architect and critic Sherban Cantacuzino quoted in Norman Scarfe, ‘The Impact on a Layman of Tayler and Green’s Exemplary Housing’ in Harwood and Powers (eds), Tayler and Green, Architects 1938-1973: The Spirit of Place in Modern Housing (1998)

(2) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, ‘Housing Programme’, 26 July 1948

(3) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 9 February 1948

(4) On ‘converted hutments’, see Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 28 April 1947 and 1 May 1947; on materials shortages, see 24 June 1947 and 28 June 1948

(5) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 31 May 1949

(6) ‘Rural housing for Loddon RDC, Norfolk; Architects: Tayler & Green’, RIBA Journal, vol. 54, October 1947, pp607-09

(7) ‘Loddon Rural District Council, Norfolk: various schemes; Architects: Tayler & Green’, Architecture & Building News, 29 October 1948, pp358-363

(8) ‘Rural housing at Gillingham for Loddon Rural District Council; Architects: Tayler & Green’; RIBA Journal, January 1959, pp 98-99

(9) Ian Nairn, ‘Rural Housing: Post-War Work by Tayler and Green’, Architectural Review, October 1958

(10) Quoted in Elain Harwood, ‘Post-War Landscape and Public Housing’, Garden History, vol. 28, no. 1, Summer, 2000, pp. 102-116

(11) Quoted in David Gray, ‘Tayler and Green, Architects, 1938-1973’, AA Files, no. 37, Autumn 1998, pp. 65-68

(12) Loddon Rural District Council, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1957

(13) Elain Harwood, ‘Tayler & Green and Loddon Rural District Council’ in Harwood and Powers (eds) Tayler and Green, Architects 1938-1973: The Spirit of Place in Modern Housing (1998)

(14) Ian Nairn, ‘Rural Housing: Post-War Work by Tayler and Green’

(15) Charles Holland, ‘Kitchen Sink Realism’, Fantastic Journal blog, July 11 2012

(16) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 14 May 1948 and 17 January 1949. The final quotation is drawn from ‘Rural housing at Gillingham for Loddon Rural District Council; Architects: Tayler & Green’

(17) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 29 December 1949 and, rents, 6 August 1947. Wage figures from Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900 (2003)

(18) Loddon Rural District Council, Housing Committee minutes, 13 October 1947 and 28 June 1948

(19) Loddon Rural District Council, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1951

 

Tayler and Green and Loddon Rural District Council, Part I: ‘a set of council houses unequalled in the whole country’

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1930s, 1940s, Loddon Rural District Council, Tayler and Green

The architects Herbert Tayler and David Green created in south Norfolk what Ian Nairn described as ‘a set of council houses unequalled in the whole country’ – 687 houses, bungalows and flats for Loddon Rural District Council. (1)  Much has been written about the architectural quality and influences of their designs by people better placed than me to explain them and I’ll reference that analysis in my posts.  In this first post, however, I’ve set out to provide some fuller context for their work and, in particular, the otherwise very typical rural local authority that provided their platform.

Herbert Tayler (1912-2000) to the left and David Green (1912-1998)

That context is provided firstly by local government: the county councils established in 1889 and the rural district councils five years later.  The initial role of rural district councils was limited, confined largely to matters of water supply and sanitation.  Dominated as they were by the local gentry and middle-class ratepayers, few ventured further. Despite, as we’ll see, the desperate need, very few built housing.  Ixworth in Suffolk and Penshurst in Kent, which built the first rural council housing in 1894 and 1900 respectively, were rare early exceptions.

While legislation in 1890 and 1919 at first allowed and then, to some degree, required councils to build housing, up to 1926 smallholder dwellings had been ‘virtually the sole means of public supply of rural housing’. (2)  The first Small Holdings Act of 1892 and its successors allowed county councils to advance loans to farm labourers and other landless villagers to purchase areas of land up to 50 acres in extent. By 1926, some 30,0000 such small holdings existed. The 1926 Housing (Rural Workers) Act provided another means of addressing the rural housing crisis by enabling local councils to provide loans to landlords to recondition unfit homes.

Map of Loddon Rural District Council, taken from Harwood and Powers (eds), Tayler and Green, Architects 1938-1973: The Spirit of Place in Modern Housing

But the breakthrough so far as rural council housing was concerned did not come till 1936. Then new legislation declared not only ‘the duty of the council of every county … to have constant regard to the housing conditions of the working classes’ but also to ensure ‘the sufficiency of steps which the council of the district have taken, or are proposing to take, to remedy these conditions and to provide further housing accommodation’. The 1936 Act also gave rural councils the power to declare and rebuild ‘slum clearance areas’ which Loddon Rural District Council (RDC) did in Loddon itself and the villages of Ditchingham, Gillingham and Hales.

The bureaucratic language concealed a truly shocking picture.  We can take Loddon as an example.  In 1937, the council’s Medical Officer of Health found 139 homes surveyed unfit or ‘not to be in all respects reasonably fit for human habitation’.  Sixty-six homes inspected for overcrowding were found to contain 72 families and 446 people. (3)

The problem reflected far more than the dereliction of isolated properties.  Public health legislation since 1848 had addressed urban squalor but improving standards of sanitation and sewerage did not extend to rural areas.  Even in 1938, a scheme of 18 new council houses completed in Loddon was provided an external water supply (by means of a well sunk for the purpose and electric pump) but no internal supply or fixed baths. To have provided baths would have required connection to sewers for drainage and that, councillors lamented, was simply too expensive given the inadequacy of government grants. (4)

The 1944 Rural Water Supplies and Sewerage Act was a belated attempt to address this problem and Loddon RDC was the first council to adopt its provisions. Necessarily so. In 1950, only seven percent of the district’s homes were connected to sewers, fully 83 percent (3000 in number) were reliant on pail closets.  The council employed its own workers to collect what was euphemistically termed ‘night soil’ in three villages. (5)

The litany of statistics can get wearying but it’s worth recording that even by 1964 – after significant progress and in figures which underestimate rural deficiencies by their inclusion of more suburban areas on the Norwich fringes – that 22 percent of homes in the Loddon rural district lacked a cold water tap, 45 percent a hot water tap and 43 percent a fixed bath. Forty-two percent still lacked sewerage. (6)

Typically, after the war new council housing schemes that did eventually emerge were among the first to be properly equipped and connected to mains water and sewerage.  (The usual peripheral location of new council schemes on roads leading into villages made this process easier.) David Green himself took a close and practical interest in the provision of these basic services, looking after ‘engineering matters, such as footings and weight-bearing and drainage’ whilst Tayler was the principal ‘aesthetic arbiter’ of their schemes. (7)

College Road, Thurlton

If pre-war standards weren’t, as we’ve seen, quite so exacting, the Council had nevertheless embarked on a significant housebuilding programme by the late 1930s.  It had pressed for increased government support in a resolution passed by the Housing and Town Planning conference of Local Authorities in the Eastern Counties in 1937. (8) Notwithstanding that, in 1938, the Council completed 118 new homes, contributing to a pre-war total of 262 council homes across the district. Land for a further 163 homes was purchased and provided the Council’s building programme a running start at war’s end.

Leman Grove, Loddon. The side extensions reflect later sanitary improvements.

As yet, there was no hint of architectural enterprise. These were the solid, boxy, red-brick houses that began to mark (some said blot) the English countryside in the era.  In 1955, Tayler was to comment caustically that ‘beauty is almost suspected by ratepayers as a fancy extravagance’ whilst advocating for precisely the design and planning then being successfully implemented in Loddon. (9)

Back in 1938, the Council was sufficiently proud of its unreconstructed schemes to include a plaque and date for each as the examples in Loddon and Thurlton show.  Tayler and Green would continue this tradition far more colourfully.

Loddon began its post-war planning in 1944. Tayler and Green had moved to nearby Lowestoft in 1941, following the death of Green’s architect father that year. Even recent biographical accounts are strangely reticent of the fact that they were a gay couple. No doubt, discretion was required in earlier years but it seems, to me at least, that today this is something we can celebrate.  They became significant members of an active East Anglian cultural scene which included, amongst others, Benjamin Britten and they lived together, having retired to Spain on local government reorganisation in 1974, till Green’s death in 1998.

As a business partnership, they received their first local housing commission from Lothingland RDC in 1943 for six houses in Blundeston and Wrentham in Suffolk. Housing for agricultural workers was then in great demand and being heavily promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture.  Such demand – allied with as yet relatively unmechanised farming techniques – was maintained into the 1950s. In 1951, of a local workforce in Loddon Rural District of around 2900, 53 percent worked on the land. (10)

Trees and Wheat Field near Fuller’s Farm, Toft Monks © Roger Jones and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The area itself was low-lying and ‘very flat’ as Noel Coward might have said though gently undulating to those of more discerning eye.  Its beauty, if you saw it, lay in its open skies; apart from Loddon itself, just qualifying as a small town with a population of 1100, its other settlements were ‘queer loosely linked agglomerations of houses whose wayward charm is due more to light and air than to the buildings themselves’. (11)  Its overall population stood at a little over 11,800 across some 60,000 acres – just 2 per acre.

In 1945, the Council were looking around for a new consultant architect and in February a delegation inspected Tayler and Green’s work at Wrentham.  The design tweaks and innovations they had applied to the recommended standard design had already attracted attention and the councillors left suitably impressed. Green was appointed the following month.

The rest is history but it’s worth decoding.  Who were these councillors that gave free rein to Tayler and Green to produce such high-quality homes?  Well, they were not, in Ian Nairn’s words:

a miraculous Norfolk race of Men of Taste left over from the eighteenth century; they were just ordinary councillors who had to be argued with and convinced like any set of councillors anywhere.

In 1947, the Housing Committee comprised 15 councillors of whom six were women and four were clergymen.  The chair was Charles Hastings, a land agent at one of the big local houses, Gillingham Hall.  His niece, Mary Bramley, was the lady of the manor and a supportive chair of the RDC from 1962. Elain Harwood references ‘ex-officers, a builder and his wife’ too.  (12)

Beyond this and the implied noblesse oblige of some of the local upper classes at least, it’s hard to go but the local Norfolk Southern parliamentary constituency had returned a Labour MP in 1945 (Christopher Mayhew – he lost his seat in 1950) and the county as a whole was a stronghold of agricultural trades unionism. In 1957, Labour took control of the Council – a first for ‘a rural district council in a purely agricultural area’ as the Daily Herald proclaimed. (13)  One must assume that this working-class voice made its voice heard too.

The Council was at any rate, as Tayler claimed in 1960: (14)

an excellent client in every respect, but particularly in this, that they never fussed over architectural matters, but stated their opinions freely and then left it to us.

This, and the wider story of the district’s council housing, will be followed up in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Ian Nairn, ‘Rural Housing: Post-War Work by Tayler and Green’, Architectural Review, October 1958

(2) Trevor Wild, Village England.  A Social History of the Countryside (LB Tauris, 2004)

(3) Loddon Rural District Council, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1937

(4) ‘Baths in Council Houses’, Yarmouth Independent, 8 January 1938

(5) Loddon Rural District Council, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1950

(6) Loddon Rural District Council, Medical Officer of Health Report, 1964

(7) Norman Scarfe, ‘Obituary: David Green‘, The Independent, 9 October 1998 and Alan Powers, ‘David Green, Modernist exponent of rural housing’, Architects’ Journal, 15 October 1998

(8) ‘East Anglia Housing Needs’, Yarmouth Independent, June 19, 1937

(9) Herbert Tayler, ‘Landscape in Rural Housing’, Housing Centre Review, no. 3, May/June 1955

(10) 1951 Census, Occupational Classification, Loddon RDC

(11) Ian Nairn, ‘Rural Housing: Post-War Work by Tayler and Green’

(12) Elain Harwood, ‘Tayler & Green and Loddon Rural District Council’ in Harwood and Powers (eds), Tayler and Green, Architects 1938-1973: The Spirit of Place in Modern Housing (1998)

(13) Daily Herald, May 13 1957

(14) Quoted in Harwood, ‘Tayler & Green and Loddon Rural District Council’

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 II post-1945: ‘The world has moved on’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Multi-storey

Last week’s post examined the huge growth of council housing that took place in Gateshead in the aftermath of World War One. Although some 10,500 children were evacuated at the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, the town – despite being a major industrial centre – suffered very little from the wartime bombing anticipated.

The war, however, exacerbated an existing housing crisis and in 1942 it was estimated that 5620 people in the town were living in homes scheduled for demolition.  One early response to that crisis was the temporary prefab programme though only a relatively small number of the 156,623 erected nationally were allocated to the Gateshead area – 25 on Sunderland Road and 55 at The Drive in what was then part of Felling Urban District Council. (1)  The Borough of Gateshead itself had declared against temporary housing.

Orlit flats, Saltwell Road

Permanent prefabricated housing was another attempt to solve the housing crisis and deal with the shortages of materials and skilled labour which persisted into the 1950s. A precast reinforced concrete Orlit block of 18 flats survives on Saltwell Road; 150 semi-detached Dorran houses, formed of concrete panel walls, were built on Rose Street and Carr Hill Lane at Black Hill and elsewhere in the early part of the decade. Most of the latter, still in council ownership, were refurbished and reclad in the 1990s and more thoroughly renovated in 2014.

Dorran houses on Carr Hill Road, the one on the left presumably in private ownership and unrenovated

A longer-term product of war and the politics of post-war reconstruction was the planning movement, exemplified in the formation of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and the New Town movement.  However, proposals in the Pepler-MacFarlane, North‐East Area Development Plan of 1949 to develop a New Town of 80,000 population in Barlow, eight miles to the west of Gateshead, were stymied by its distance.

Meanwhile the Council had announced ambitious plans in 1945 to build 1000 permanent homes within two years.  In practice, in unprecedentedly difficult post-war circumstances, only 171 new homes were completed by 1947 and a further 387 by the end of the following year in new estates at Highfield and Blue Quarries.

Hawkshead Place, Beacon Lough Estate

Another 1300 homes were built at the Lobley Hill and Beacon Lough Estates by 1950.  The latter was ‘a large and sprawling low-density estate’ according to Simon Taylor and David Lovie: (2)

typical of the large brick-built cottage estates constructed in many parts of the country in the years immediately after the war. With its numerous winding side roads and culs-de-sac, it was recognised by the Minister of Health as one of the best laid out housing estates in the country.

The ‘Wrekenton Neighbourhood Unit’, just south of Beacon Lough, of 1372 homes was another large-scale project. The Cedars Green Estate, on the other hand, was a deliberate contrast – small and secluded, comprising just 59 homes and regarded locally as a prestige development.

Slum clearance and the new Barn Close flats in 1955

By 1956, the Council had built 5482 new homes since the end of the war but pressure on land and new opposition to urban sprawl was forcing consideration of new approaches as the drive to finally clear the slums intensified.  This huge rebuilding drive was overseen by Labour Alderman Ben Nicholson Young who served as chair of the Housing Committee from 1945 to 1974. Leslie Berry was appointed Chief Architect in 1958 and the Borough Architect’s Department gained a national reputation for the novelty and quality of its designs.

Brisbane Court, Sydney Court, Adelaide Court and Melbourne Court , Barn Close, from the south, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

A contemporary image of Regent Court

The Council’s first high-rise blocks – four ten-storey slab blocks – were completed at Barn Close in the centre of town in 1955. Three eight-storey blocks – Priory, Peareth and Park Courts – were completed on East Street and the ten-storey Regent Court two years later as a further element in central area redevelopment. (3)

Chandless clearance, 1956

Chandless Estate, St. Mary’s Court in foreground, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

The Chandless Redevelopment Area nearby was approved in 1960. The three 16-storey towers, providing 384 flats, built in Phase I of the scheme were designed by the Architect’s Department and built by Stanley Miller Ltd – a major local contractor – using an innovative in situ concrete system.

A contemporary image of Bensham Court

Berry also oversaw the design of the 16-storey tower, Bensham Court, completed in 1963 and the four 12-storey towers at Beacon Lough in 1967.  Redheugh and Eslington Courts, completed in the Teams Redevelopment Area in 1966 were the tallest Gateshead blocks at 21 storeys.  Further high-rise continued across the borough.

A contemporary image of Redheugh and Eslington Courts

In sheer numbers, the results were undeniably impressive.  Gateshead built over 1000 new homes in 1965 and, in that same year, its 10,000^th council home.  By 1970, as the municipal borough’s historian recounts with some civic pride, 10,686 homes had been built since the war, at a rate of almost two each working day and three times the national average. (4)

‘Gunnel houses’ Beacon Lough East Estate

Beacon Lough East Estate, 1970 (Photographer, The Studio; Gateshead Libraries, GL002509)

And, amidst the drive to build big, were attempts to create innovative mixed development schemes.  One such was the extension to the Beacon Lough Estate, built in the mid-sixties in which four 12-storey blocks in a parkland setting were accompanied by 165 flat-roofed ‘gunnel houses’ (named after the passageways connecting the semi-detached homes), patio bungalows for older people as well as some conventional brick-built terraced housing. A primary school, pub and shops completed the ensemble. The Estate won a Government award for ‘Good Design in Housing’ in 1968.

Prime minister Harold Wilson opening St Cuthbert’s Village, 1970 (Gateshead Libraries, LS000214)

The most novel was St Cuthbert’s Village, completed in 1969, comprising: (2)

a maze of low- and medium-rise linking ‘scissor blocks’ with roof gardens, on either side of Askew Road and, radiating from the centre and linked by various communal walkways and steps around open communal areas.

St Cuthbert’s Village, 1987 (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

It was planned as a self-contained community of 3500 people, largely young single people and couples, and opened, to much fanfare, by prime minister Harold Wilson in April 1970. But facilities followed slowly and residents felt isolated.  The estate’s high-density living, far from promoting the neighbourliness intended, seems to have created dispute and ill-feeling. By 1992, a local press report was describing St Cuthbert’s Village as ‘as estate plagued by soaring crime and poor design’. Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council reckoned each flat cost £1000 a year to maintain compared to the borough average of £424.  A survey of residents concluded that fully 85 percent wanted to move out. (5)  By 1995, all but the 18-storey point block had been demolished.

Clasper Village plan

A general disenchantment from high-rise was manifest from the late 1960s, reflecting – practically – its failure to deliver promised cost-savings and problems with construction and design, notably on system-built estates.  One early local response to this was the construction of Clasper Village in 1970 though the choice to build low-rise cluster blocks also reflected the existence of underground mine workings in the Teams area which precluded high-rise construction.

Clasper Village, c1975

In 2004, observers commented on the popularity of its ‘intimate scale’ – ‘accommodation there has always been in high demand; it remains an attractive and well-maintained residential unit’. (2)  Seven years later, the Gateshead Housing Company found little to praise, complaining of its lack of housing mix (the estate comprised only two-bed flats), a void rate of 21 percent, an annual turnover of lettings of near 15 percent, and problems of condensation and water penetration affecting most of its homes. Levels of anti-social behaviour were said to be about average but perceptions were as significant: ‘the stigma and reputation has significantly affected demand for properties on the estate’. (6)

All that goes to remind us that all judgements are necessarily temporary and that reputational damage can be as harmful to estates as design flaws as real as the latter were in the case of Clasper Village.  Demolition of the estate commenced in 2014. In May,. this year, as part of a £1.8 million funding deal with Homes England, the Council committed to a £30 million regeneration of the 12 acre site. (7)

A contemporary image of Priory Court

Other high-rise estates suffered less dramatic problems – the lack of play areas at Barn Close was said to have caused problems of antisocial behaviour, Priory Court was apparently plagued by beetles breeding in heating ducts – but the shift from high-rise was now complete. (2)

Nursery Lane demolitions (http://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk)

System building was part of the problem. Four ‘Ronan Point-type’ tower blocks at Nursery Lane, built using the Larsen Nielsen system and designed by John Poulson for Felling Urban District Council in 1968, were demolished by the new metropolitan authority in 1987. (8)

In 2004, Gateshead Council transferred its entire housing stock of some 20,000 homes to the Gateshead Housing Company, an arms-length management organisation (ALMO).  The promise was to improve housing services; the practical necessity was to secure funding needed to carry out the Decent Homes Programme announced by the Labour government four years earlier.  The ALMO’s initial ten-year life-span was extended by a further five in 2015.

Demolition of Chandless Estate, 2015 (photograph by Sharon Bailey, courtesy of the Spirit of Chandless website)

The decision to demolish the Chandless Estate, a system-built estate suffering structural issues said to prevent economic repair, was taken in 2010.  As the 16-storey Monk Court block in Chandless was being prepared for demolition in 2013, Councillor Catherine Donovan (Gateshead Council’s Cabinet member for Housing) concluded ‘the world has moved on and families expect different things of their homes’. (9)  Demolition was complete by 2015.

Two years later, Gateshead Council committed to building its first new council homes for thirty years – seven homes in Dunston and 14 in Winlaton and Blaydon. The Council also announced plans to 36 homes through its wholly-owned business, the Gateshead Trading Company though just 15 percent of the latter were categorised as ‘affordable’. (10)

All these were a modest component of a larger plan to build 11,000 new homes across the Gateshead area by 2030. The larger target would be met principally through cooperation with so-called ‘volume providers’ (including a joint venture between the Council and developers Galliford Try and housing association Home Group) as well as by support given to small and medium-enterprise building companies. (11)

Amidst ongoing policy changes and recent modest moves giving local authorities greater powers and financial freedoms to build, all this is – to say the least – shifting terrain.  It’s also well beyond my comfort zone, both practically and ideologically.  Suffice to say, that a relatively straightforward and highly cost-effective model which built what we must now call social-rent homes in huge numbers in Gateshead and across the country has been replaced by a system of complex public-private partnerships, opaque finances, and ‘mixed developments’ which all too often fails to deliver the genuinely affordable homes most required.

Central Gateshead, 1971

As we’ve seen, local government didn’t get everything right but it’s hard not to applaud the ambition or admire the scale of what was achieved. That ambition and scale could be a little intimidating, perhaps overreaching, at times as the above image suggests. Nevertheless, it’s entirely proper, in my view at least, to envy an era when the local and national state invested heavily to secure decent homes for all whilst, of course, we learn its lessons, both positive and negative.

Sources

My thanks to Gateshead Libraries for providing several of the images used in this post.

(1) According to the invaluable and comprehensive Prefab Museum website.

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

(3) For further detail, see the incredibly useful and informative database provided by Tower Block UK.

(4) FWD Manders, A History of Gateshead (Gateshead Corporation, 1973)

(5) Andrew Smith, ‘Estate to be Demolished’, The Journal, 3 September 1992

(6) Minutes of The Gateshead Housing Company Asset Management Committee, 30 June 2011

(7) Gateshead Council, ‘£1.8 million to boost development of new homes in Gateshead‘, 22 May 2019

(8) ‘Gateshead to demolish four towers’, Building Design, no. 832, 17 April 1987, p44

(9) Katie Davies, ‘Gateshead’s Chandless Estate is demolished bit by bit’, Chronicle Live, 12 September 2013

(10) Peter Apps, ‘Gateshead Council to build first homes for 30 years’, Inside Housing, 24 November 2017

(11) Gateshead Council, Housing Delivery Test Action Plan (ND, c2017)

Council Housing in Winchester – Part II post-1945: ‘Visually pleasing and economic in development’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s

Winchester City Council’s proud record of housebuilding between the wars discussed in last week’s post might surprise some who forget the broad political consensus which has supported local authority housing for much of its life.  The drive to rehouse the population decently was even stronger after 1945 and Winchester would go on to build new estates of the highest quality. Moreover, it continued to build council homes even as a wider politics trampled the ideals and suppressed the means which had provided (to quote Theresa May no less) the ‘biggest collective leap in living standards in British history’. (1)

Planning for the new Britain began early across the country and Winchester entrusted the design of its post-war housing programme to local architects AET Mort and P Sawyer as early as 1942. Their successors presented plans in 1944 and the first construction works – the laying out of roads and sewers carried out by prisoners of war in an extension to the prewar Stanmore Estate – began as the war officially ended with the surrender of Japan in August 1945. (2)

Prefabs, The Valley, Stanmore

By 1946, there were 1100 households on the local waiting list for council housing. An immediate response to this national housing crisis had been the programme of temporary prefabricated bungalows intended to last ten years inaugurated in 1944. Of 153,000 erected across the country, 50 were allocated to Winchester – placed in The Valley, Stanmore, aptly named.

For all their Heath Robinson appearance, these were state-of-the-art homes with fitted kitchens and units, valued by most of their residents. Ernie Nunn moved into his prefab – no. 37, The Valley – in 1947:

It was brilliant. We had built-in wardrobes – all you really wanted was a table and chairs; most things were there for you.

Winchester was and remained a major centre of the military but such were the housing needs of the time that the Conservative mayor of the city (Alderman CG Sankey who 17 years earlier had been elected Winchester’s first Labour councillor) protested against the conversion of an American Red Cross Centre on Christchurch Road into offices for the Ministry of Labour and National Service rather than flats, complaining ‘of old Winchester families living “more or less like gypsies”’. (4)

A contemporary advert for Scottwood houses

Permanent prefabricated housing was seen as another quick means of providing housing and Winchester – which had experimented with its use in the interwar period but now preferred traditional brick-built construction – erected 50 steel BISF and 50 timber Scottwood houses on the new Stanmore estate.  The latter, manufactured locally by the British Power Boat Company in Southampton, were the more unusual with only 1500 built in total.

Turning to the Stanmore Estate and the 624 new homes projected in 1946, the newbuild was built up the hill in what became known as Upper Stanmore to the south of Stanmore Lane. The 1940s’ housing resembles that of earlier Lower Stanmore, redbrick but plainer, cleaner; later housing is recognisably more ‘modern’ in style.

Somers Close, Upper Stanmore

In 1951, just as the Conservatives took office and Harold Macmillan became Housing Minister, the new estate was awarded a Housing Medal and Diploma by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Construction continued but whereas the earlier post-war homes had two toilets (one upstairs, one down), residents moving into the Somers Close, completed in 1959, lamented the fact their new home had just one. This, presumably, marks the shift from Nye Bevan’s expansive vision of high-quality council housing to the more economical ‘People’s Houses’ promoted by Harold Macmillan in the early 1950s.

A 1952 plan of the enlarged Stanmore Estate. The interwar Lower Stanmore is seen to the right and centre; post-war Upper Stanmore to bottom left. The Valley prefabs are marked at the top.

The most striking aspect of the newer estate is its siting and layout: (5)

The new Stanmore Estate site is hilly, and the layout of roads has been designed to take advantage of the natural shape of the ground to give an effect which will be visually pleasing and at the same time economic in development. Roads have been designed to give interest to the layout and provide a variety of views.

These early mages capture the sweeping lines and open terrain of the Upper Stanmore Estate

Wavell Way provides a grand sweeping boulevard through the heart of the estate with wide green verges and now mature trees but the estate as a whole with its generous spacing (just 5 to 6 houses per acre) and broad vistas impresses with the imagination and vision applied.

A 1952 plan of Weeke Estate

As the new Stanmore housing was taking shape, Winchester embarked on another, even more ambitious development when, in 1948, it purchased land in Weeke Manor to the north-west of the city centre. The new Weeke Estate was projected to comprise some 650 new homes.  Here the land was flatter and there was a desire to build at greater density: ‘The layout is therefore of a more formal type, although it is felt that the resulting road pattern avoids monotony and gives interest’. (5)

Fromond Road, Weeke

Some of that interest was provided by the wide dual carriageway, Fromond Road, forming the entrance to the estate and, off it, the semi-circular site allocated to a new church (the church itself, St Barnabas, wouldn’t be opened until 1966):

This will provide an attractive open space and advantage of this has been taken in designing as a background a three-storey terrace block to for what will undoubtedly be the most impressive housing group on the Estate.

Even the lampposts received attention, the City Engineers favouring ‘a square-section tapered column with a post-top mounting lantern of Perspex and alloy’. The roads were initially of concrete, deemed more economical.

A section of Trussell Crescent, Weeke

Trussell Crescent, the curving three-storeyed flat block is, as planned, the largest housing feature of the estate. Most of the other homes are semi-detached houses with some longer terraces. Most (63 percent) of the homes were three-bed but the 60 one-bed homes, many bungalows for older people, mark the post-war attempt to cater for a wider demographic cross-section of the population. In another sign of the times ‘ample garage accommodation at the ratio of one to every four dwellings’ was planned.

The Weeke Estate under construction

The earliest post-war housing in Stanmore had been (excepting the non-traditional homes) architect-designed.  After that the City Engineers took over but they seemed to have maintained reasonable – if simpler – standards. The City Engineer himself, PH Warwick, paid tribute to Alderman Ernest Clifford Townend, chair of the Housing Development Committee from 1941 into the mid-fifties: ‘it is very true indeed to say that the successful issue of the programme is very largely due to his energetic efforts and personal interest’.

From 1939 to 1951, private builders in Winchester had built just 103 new homes for sale; the City Council some 736 for council rent. By 1951, of the city’s 6701 homes, 1678 – 25 percent – were council-rented.  This reflects post-war rationing and the priority given to local authority housing but, even as those restrictions were finally withdrawn in 1954 (when private housebuilders were freed from the obligation to secure building licences), the Council’s ambitions to build remained.

Winnall Manor Road, Winnall

Land had been purchased at Winnall for a further 400-500 homes in 1952. A new estate of generally semi-detached homes and curving streets emerged on both sides of Winnall Manor Road.  And in 1961, the Council undertook its one foray into (modest) high-rise with the construction of four eight-storey point blocks at the head of Winnall Manor Road, built by Wates, officially opened by the mayor in August 1963.

Flats at Winnall

Thus, with its modestly large peripheral estates and its similarly modest high-rise, Winchester echoes, in microcosm, the housing developments typical across the country in the 1950s. And while the term inner-city Winchester might seem a misnomer, there were the same pressures to clear slum housing.  By 1958, it was reported that 533 houses had been declared unfit under the terms of the 1951 Housing Act, most in the central Brooks area. Of 342 houses taken over by the Council, 170 had been vacated and 56 demolished.  (The Winchester City Trust was formed in 1957 to oppose these clearances and it’s probably true to say that a later generation would have preserved and rehabilitated the area.) (6)

By 1971, 39 percent of Winchester households rented from the council – a high figure challenging common stereotypes of the city. (7)  There were changes in the housing stock too. The prefabricated Monolithic Concrete Homes (described in last week’s post) were finally demolished in the late 1970s, replaced at Bar End by a sheltered housing scheme and low-rise flats and, in Fairdown Close, by new council houses.

Penton Place sheltered housing (left) and Test House on Milland Road, Bar End, built to replace the Monolithic Concrete Homes in the late 1970s and mid-1980s respectively.

A reorganisation of local government in 1974 (the council was amalgamated with the largely Tory Winchester and Droxford Rural District Councils) and, nationally, Margaret Thatcher’s accession to power in 1979 might suggest this story is drawing to a close. In fact, something extraordinary happened. As council housing nationally was sold off and new build virtually halted, Winchester developed around 1000 new social-rent homes from the late 1980s.

John Cloyne

A fortuitous combination of factors explains how Winchester was able to buck the trend.  The Council fell into No Overall Control in 1987 which left a small but activist Labour group – it comprised at peak just six members of a 54-seat council – holding the balance of power.  An exceptionally able and energetic Labour councillor, John Cloyne, became chair of the Housing Committee; Jock Macdonald, a Liberal Democrat, was a supportive vice-chair. (8)

Cloyne was determined to build social housing to address the needs of the 3500 on the Council’s waiting list. The means devised was to channel receipts from Right to Buy sales – otherwise untouchable for housing purposes – to a new Council-controlled private company (Saturn Management No. 1 but more commonly known as SATMAN) where they could be used to support finance council-supported building schemes.

Sheltered housing in The Valley, Stanmore

The results were impressive. In the new climate, housing associations (whose homes were exempt from Right to Buy), funded by SATMAN, played a vital role. The Winchester Housing Group (Cloyne became a board member) was established in 1989 and was responsible, for example, for a development of around 150 new homes at Turnpike Down in Winnall and the Octavia Hill scheme in Stanmore.  A significant number of new council homes were built directly or acquired through purchase and conversion.

It required determination and imagination to build new social housing in this era and, a few years later, it transpired that the SATMAN scheme – cleared by officers and approved by full council – was illegal.  There was no question of individual wrong-doing but Winchester City Council had to pay around £14m back to the Treasury. The legacy of sorely-needed, decent and affordable housing remained, however.

Housing departments haven’t always acted perfectly and, as a housing activist and opposition councillor from the 1970s, Cloyne himself had been highly critical of the council’s repairs service. In office, he improved it and even kept it in-house against government rules on competitive tendering intended to privatise local services. This was significant in the next struggle to retain and develop Winchester’s council housing.

The Labour leaflet, with thanks to former Labour councillor Chris Pines

Nationally, the Conservatives wanted council housing transferred to housing associations. Funding rules ensured that there was little that was ‘voluntary’ in so-called Large Scale Voluntary Transfer but they made it an attractive option to some officers and unsympathetic councillors. When a new Director of Housing (with the support of a Tory and Liberal Democrat majority on the council) proposed the transfer of Winchester’s housing, the local Labour Party mobilised in opposition, leafleting every council home in the district. In the ensuing tenant ballot, around 96 percent voted to stay with the Council. A second ballot a few years late produced a majority of around 90 percent.

Alternating since between Conservative and Liberal Democrat control, the Council has rarely matched the level of ambition shown in the late 1980s but it has a record of continued innovation that might be surprising to some.  Despite its affluence – in fact, because of it – genuinely affordable social housing is desperately needed in Winchester.  As of 2011, only 15 percent of households in the enlarged Winchester City district, lived in social rented homes. Currently, you need an annual income of £60,000 to purchase the cheapest of the city’s housing and £50,000 to rent a decent home – figures that exclude 50 and 40 percent of local households respectively. There are almost 1700 people on the city’s social housing waiting list. (9)

A council scheme of 21 new homes on the former site of the New Queens Head pub on Stanmore Lane

The City Council has recently announced plans to build 1000 new ‘affordable’ homes by 2028 and is planning to set up – déjà vu – a housing company to deliver some of these. (10)  The devil may well be in the detail and I hope that direct investment in genuine social rent homes will form a major part of this ambitious programme.  It’s unfashionable but it worked.  I’ll leave the final word with the estimable local newspaper, the Hampshire Chronicle, and its 2017 editorial endorsement of the sentiments of a local Tory councillor: (10)

What is needed … is a carefully-planned creation of new ‘council’ estates. Winchester has a fine record. Stanmore, Winnall and Weeke were well-designed, with good-sized homes with gardens and, when built, a strong community spirit.

Many people will disagree, saying the city would be under threat. It’s nonsense. Winchester has always evolved. The truth is that for the last 40 years the biggest threat to the city has been the lack of council house building.

Sources

My thanks to Patrick Davies and John Cloyne, friends and former colleagues in Winchester Constituency Labour Party, for providing detail and resources to inform and illustrate this post.

(1) Theresa May, PM speech to the National Housing Federation summit,19 September 2018. She was almost certainly quoting Chris Matthews from his book Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses (Nottingham City Homes, 2015)

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

(3) A Postcard for Stanmore, Ernie Nunn at the prefabs, 1947, YouTube

(4) ‘Offices Instead of Flats Mayor’s Regret’, West Sussex Gazette, 1 August 1946

(5) PH Warwick, ‘House Building in Winchester, 1920-1952’

(6) ‘Winchester Whispers’, Hampshire Telegraph, 10 January 1958

(7) 1971 Census reported in ‘A Vision of Britain through Time: Winchester Housing Data’

(8) Much of following section is drawn from private communication with John Cloyne, 17 June 2019

(9) Winchester City Council, Winnall Flats Consultation Boards 17 July 2018 (pdf)

(10) Michael Seymour, ‘Backing for council’s housing company plans’, Hampshire Chronicle, 1 April 2019

(11) ‘Chronicle Comment: City council leadership on social housing’, Hampshire Chronicle, 12 October 2017.

The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead II: ‘Not a mere assemblage of houses’

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s

Last week’s post looked at the controversy surrounding rival plans – one a more traditional cottage suburb submitted by Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson, the other an ostensibly more visionary re-imagining of community life proposed by the architect Sir Charles Reilly – for Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate.  The former had been preferred by the Conservative majority on the Council and they had appointed the Liverpool architect Herbert James Rowse to ‘to draw up designs for the houses to be erected on the estate’. (1)

This plaque is placed at the main entrance to the estate on the side wall of a house on Ackers Road

To general surprise, Rowse, perhaps unwilling to work within the confines of a scheme suggested by the Borough Engineer, perhaps seeking some third way compromise, returned to the drawing board and, in January 1945, submitted an entirely new scheme.  Labour pressed for reconsideration of Reilly’s plans but in March 1945, the Council – dividing again on party lines – endorsed those of Rowse. Building of the estate, after a twenty-year gestation, finally began in 1946.

Rowse’s 1945 plan from Architecture and Building News, 1950

Whilst he eschewed the social engineering proposed by Reilly, Rowse’s own proposals reflected the spirit and ambition of the time: (2)

The Woodchurch Estate is not a mere assemblage of houses placed on a plot ground in the maximum possible density and monotonous regularity of layout and pattern, after the manner of the vast unplanned and uncontrolled suburban development of the inter-war years: it is the architectural setting of a fully developed sociological conception of a community of people living within a defined neighbourhood, having a conscious identity of its own and equipped for the maximum possibilities of the full intercourse of such a community. The comprehensive character of this project makes it of outstanding interest.

For Rowse, the fulfilment of these promises lay in the layout, facilities and housing forms of his new estate.

The overall plan was ‘developed on the basis of the natural topographical features of the site’ with:

Every effort … made in the planning of the Estate to provide prospects of the attractive rural surroundings from every possible point and to allow the maximum amount of rural character to permeate the estate by means of planted green closes, forecourts, quadrangles, recreation spaces and allotment gardens.

Broad parkways divided the estate whilst a central square provided ‘for the social life of the community’ with shops, baths and assembly hall, community centre, cinema, library and clinic:

In contrast to the familiar monotony of streets or their suburban counterpart, the estate will present varied internal prospects of groupings of terraces and small blocks amidst trees and green spaces, having the general character of a contemporary version of the traditional English village scene.

For the 2500 houses of the estate, Rowse proposed brick of ‘good, common quality’ with ‘architectural interest … achieved by the application of lime-wash, pigmented in a range of quiet tones of yellow, blue, pink and grey, alternating with white’.  His interest extended to their interiors – those of the first homes completed being ‘decorated in warm ivory shade on the walls and a pale shade of blue on the ceilings’.  Criticism of this colour scheme led to a uniform white being applied externally by the early 1950s.

Rowse’s illustrations of Woodchurch housing from Architecture and Building News, 1950

The estate’s early housing reflects Rowse’s ambitions though, on a cold January day such as when I visited, those broad parkways can seem rather bleak.

Shops on Hoole Road © Rept0n1x and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Rowse’s supervision of the scheme was superseded by that of new Borough Architect TA Brittain in 1952 who, in Pevsner’s astringent words, ‘continued building to inferior standards of design’.  The volume dislikes the estate’s early neo-Georgian-style shopfronts but reserves its greatest disdain for the Hoole Road shops, once planned as a centrepiece of Rowse’s central parkway. (3)

This early image closely resembles the 1000th house on the estate, opened in 1953

The estate’s 1000^th home, no. 84 Common Field Road, was officially opened by local MP Percy Collick in 1953 – a gabled, tile-hung, arts and crafts-inspired design, clearly a legacy of Rowse’s tenure.

Early photographs of the estate

Later housing was plainer but the biggest departure from Rowse’s founding vision were the two 14-storey tower blocks – Grasswood Gardens and Ferny Brow Gardens – built in 1960 on New Hey Road; the architect, ironically was HJ Rowse. (4)  By the end of the decade, three 14-storey blocks were added, built by Wimpey – Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, at the Upton end of the estate.

Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens, photographed in 1987 from the Tower Block website

Typically, for all the preceding rhetoric, even the most basic community facilities were slow to appear: the first shops in 1953, a health clinic in 1954, and the first local library (at first housed in the new secondary modern school) in 1959. A community centre followed in 1965.

St Michael and All Angels, January 2019

Church congregations met in private houses or local halls until the Methodist church opened in 1958 and the Roman Catholic St Michaels and All Angels in 1965. The latter was worth waiting for, at least with an impressive modernist design (by Richard O’Mahony), planned liturgically – in Vatican II style – to focus attention on the central altar and – in landscape terms – to provide a fitting climax to New Hey and Home Farm Roads.

 

Home Farm Road, January 2019

All this, however, was some way away from the promises of Rowse, let alone Reilly, and that post-war vision of planned community.  Later academic studies of the estate allow us to examine the community which did emerge. They present a mixed picture, both reflecting and challenging standard interpretations.

The new residents were predominantly young families. A points system determined priority, favouring ex-servicemen, established residency and size of family. Additional points were awarded to those living in unfit accommodation. They were also judged by their ability to pay the rent though this was often a struggle: an average rent for a three-bed home amounted to £1.40 whilst local wages ranged from £3.50 for an unskilled male worker to £5 and above for semi-skilled and skilled workers. In the struggle to make ends meets, cookers were often bought from the Gas Board and furniture from Sturla’s department store on the ‘never-never’ (hire purchase). (5)

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

In support of the Wilmott and Young narrative of ‘missing mum’ (or, more academically, missing inner-city matrilocal kinship networks), there were the many young women who trekked back on an almost daily basis from this peripheral estate to their parents. Some walked, some struggled with their Silver Cross prams (‘normally second-hand, mind’) on an inadequate bus service. One young mother with school-age children cycled to the Mount Estate – where her parents now lived – every day at 10am, having got up at 6am to clean the house and prepare evening meals. (5)

But there were others pleased to place some distance between themselves and family:

One male interviewee explained how he and his wife were glad to get away from his mother-in-law because ‘she was jealous of my wife’ and he described how the friction caused by the situation had put a strain on other family relationships.

As for community – or, more properly, neighbourliness – that was found informally, often in the revival of established friendships:

There was a knock at the door. When I went to the door there was [name] standin’ there with a tray an’ a pot of tea. We just couldn’t believe it when we saw each other’s faces. We’d lived in adjacent roads up near Bidston, had been good friends … childhood friends for many years … before the war an’ she was my next-door neighbour! I couldn’t believe it, it was like bein’ with family

Given that many people moved to Woodchurch at the same time from similar areas of central Birkenhead, these connections are not surprising, and, in due course, family links might also be resurrected as parents or siblings also moved to the estate.

Home Farm Road, January 2019

The much vaunted ‘spirit of a New Britain’ (discussed in last week’s post) seems absent but perhaps lived on in attenuated form:

It wasn’t just the fact that we were all from Birkenhead, we’d all been through more or less the same experiences … been in the same kind of housing … lost loved ones or our homes during the war. We were just glad to be alive an’ we weren’t goin’ to shut the door on a neighbour who needed a hand … where we came from it wasn’t the done thing.

But few came to look on the community centre as a centre of social life, still less civic engagement as had been hoped by post-war planners: a ‘number of the interviewees recalled that they only went there for Bingo “on a Tuesday night” or “when someone was havin’ a “do”.

In the end, ‘community’ developed very largely without the benign assistance of planners and politicians and, with hindsight, the would-be social engineering of the latter, however idealistic in motive, appears mechanistic in practice.  Real lives were led domestically, within the interstices of home, family and friendship, with little reference to formal institutions and with little desire to think or act more politically or civically.

New Hey Road, January 2019

Meanwhile, older traditions of heavy-handed council paternalism lived on – though typically enforced by women housing  officers raised on the Octavia Hill tradition.  Miss Crook was clearly the local exemplar:

I mean, everyone I’ve spoken to about it remembers the way she used to check the beds – the sheets, the blankets an’ that – she’d run her fingers over surfaces to check for dust, an’ the look on her face if she found any! It was like ‘Not dusted today then, dear?’ … Well, she did congratulate me on the standard of cleanliness, but by the time she’d finished doin’ her rounds I was ready to explode. But we just had to put up an’ shut up. Y’didn’t argue with authority at that time.

Respectability and responsible tenancy were thus rigorously policed in these early years.

For all that, Woodchurch, in some eyes, developed a bad reputation.  As early as 1952, a local newspaper article was headlined ‘Vandalism Sweeps Woodchurch Estate. £500 damage to bulldozer’. (The combination of many young children living on what were, in effect, huge building sites made such reports quite common across the country, in fact.)

Home Farm Road, January 2019

But as estates, such as Woodchurch, grew older, perceptions of them changed.  Press reports of crime on the estate in 1969 led the police to come to its defence: ‘The incidence of crime and disturbances on the estate is no more serious than in several other areas of the town … isolated incidents had been taken out of context’. (7)

By the 1980s, however, as unemployment and, in particular, youth unemployment rocketed, there were real problems.  Woodchurch (and even more notoriously, Birkenhead’s Ford Estate) became known as centres of heroin addiction: by 1983, it was claimed nine percent of 16-24 year-olds on the estates were taking the drug. ‘Woodyboy’ recalls the era: (8)

By the time my year finished our ‘O’ levels at Woody High in ’83 we well and truly knew what was going on around us. It seemed like everyone’s big brother or sister was a smackhead. They were the kids we remembered from primary school who were only a few years older. We knew kids in our year that had tried mushies or were into glue, but this was a whole different ball game.

The estate also became associated with wider problems of gang violence and antisocial behaviour.

Three ages of housing with Brackendale House to the rear, January 2019

From this time, there have been concerted efforts to raise the estate.  In Birkenhead, tower blocks were seen as one cause of this new social malaise and the new Borough of Wirral (formed in 1974) had been the first in Europe to demolish some of its blocks – beginning with the central Oak and Eldon Gardens towers in 1979. On the Woodchurch Estate, the two New Hey Road blocks were converted to housing for elderly people and renamed in 1984.  Now, only one – Brackendale – remains.  Leamington, Lynmouth and Lucerne Gardens have also been demolished.

Today, the worst social problems of Woodchurch are over and, to this outsider, the estate looked generally well-maintained and cared for, and attractive in its older parts where Rowse’s vision was more fully implemented.  It’s a council estate which means in modern Britain it houses disproportionately a poorer population and unemployment levels remain high. Four areas of the estate are among the ten percent most deprived in the country. (9)

There are some who would blame council housing for that. For me, it’s a manifestation of what has been done to council housing and its community.  Whilst the Woodchurch Estate itself was one small part of the ‘New Britain’ to emerge after 1945, a wider element of that promise was full employment and reduced inequality. That is a promise betrayed and we have asked council estates and their residents to carry the burden of that betrayal.

Ganney Meadows Road, January 2019

One early resident of the estate recalls it:

as being as good as any private housing … people didn’t realise it was a council estate … it was peaceful too in the early days. It was a good place to live and a good place to bring up the children.

That, I’m sure, remains true for many today.

Sources

Kenn Taylor, who was raised on the estate, has also written interestingly on its history and significance in The Memory of a Hope.

(1) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013.

(2) HJ Rowse, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Architect: H. J. Rowse’, Architect and Building News, October 14, 1950. The quotations which follow are drawn from this source.

(3) Nikolaus Pevsner, Edward Hubbard, Cheshire (1978)

(4) Tower Block (University of Edinburgh), Woodchurch: Contract 23

(5) Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft’

(6) As argued in Young and Wilmott,  Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Woodchurch analysis drawn from Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The quotations and later detail are drawn from Taylor, as is the following quotation.

(7) ‘Police Speak Up For Woodchurch Estate’, Liverpool Echo, 23 July 1969

(8) SevenStreets, ‘Smack City: Thirty Years of Hurt’ (ND, c2013). The statistic is drawn from the article; the testimony from comments below.

(9) Wirral Council Public Health Intelligence Team, Indices of Multiple Deprivation for Wirral 2015 (November 2015)

The Woodchurch Estate, Birkenhead I: ‘Repercussions over the Empire’

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1920s, 1940s

If you’re not from Merseyside, you probably haven’t heard of Birkenhead’s Woodchurch Estate but in 1944 it featured in a Picture Post article which, it was claimed, ‘had repercussions over the Empire’. (1)  That might have been an exaggeration but for a time conflicting ideas around the estate’s design dominated not only local politics but generated fierce debate in wider planning and political circles.  This post examines that controversy.

First, some background because there had been little previously to suggest that Birkenhead would merit such prominence in housing policy.  Unlike its neighbour Liverpool (which had built the first council housing in the country and pursued grandiose housing schemes in the interwar period), Birkenhead’s housing efforts had been modest.

It had grown as a docks and shipbuilding town from the early nineteenth century; from around 200 inhabitants in 1820 to 77,435 when incorporated as a borough in 1877.  Eleven years later and 22,000 inhabitants larger, it became a County Borough.

The Dock Cottages

That rapid growth had created appalling housing conditions for Birkenhead’s working-class population. The Queen’s Buildings (better known locally as the ‘Dock Cottages’ or just the ‘Blocks’), constructed in 1846 and financed by the major local employer John Laird, had been one early effort to ameliorate such conditions – 350 dwellings in four-storey blocks; built to the ‘Scotch’ plan (Laird hailed from Greenock) and claimed to be the first multi-storey tenements in England. Despite their compact design and dense layout, the flats themselves – equipped with a cold-water supply, gas burner, two iron bedsteads and a WC – were advanced for their day.

The 1917 plans for the Gilbrook Estate

The later council, for its part, proceeded more cautiously, clearing some 388 unfit houses but building just 18 cottages and 88 tenements to replace them by 1910. (2)  Its first major housebuilding scheme – the Gilbrook Estate in Prenton, north Birkenhead – was planned in 1917 but completed, to modified design, after the war.  The Council also purchased and renovated the Dock Cottages to let as council housing in the 1920s.

Vaughan Street, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019. (It was snowing!)

Arkle Road, Gilbrook Estate, January 2019

The ideological preferences of the Conservative-controlled council –  or perhaps an early version of the current preference for ‘mixed communities’ – were shown by the development of the Tranmere Hall Estate in the 1920s where, unusually, 400 of the homes were built for sale, available for purchase from the Council under the advantageous terms offered by the Small Dwellings Act.

When it came to the purchase of an area of farmland in the centre of the Wirral peninsula beyond the then boundaries of the Borough – what would become the Woodchurch Estate – in 1926, the Council was even more ambitious. There was a suggestion that the area could be developed along Garden City lines (though without self-governance) with land sold to developers on a leasehold basis and revenues accruing to the local authority.  Meanwhile, the Council approached one of the most prominent architects and planners of the day, TH Mawson, a lecturer at Liverpool’s prestigious School of Civic Design, elected president of the Town Planning Institute in 1923.

Mawson’s first recommendations were made in 1927; a more complete illustrated and typewritten report in 1929. He promised: (3)

a scheme that shall be of benefit … to posterity – aesthetically, hygienically, practically and in every way … the nicest and most tasteful of its kind in the Kingdom.

It was a plan explicitly referencing the arts and crafts ideals of William Morris and Raymond Unwin and the principles of the 1918 Tudor Walters Report.  Mawson talked of wide grass verges and tree-lined streets, even the ‘somewhat unusual step’ of planting roses instead of trees along some of the best streets. As to the housing itself, it reflected the usual reality of a ‘mixed community’ – large houses for the wealthy, lesser versions for the middle class, and small, terraced homes (at council rent) for the working class though he suggested the latter be built around ‘little town squares’ to avoid monotony.

I could write more but the formal adoption of Mawson’s plans was deferred and then, at some point in the mid-1930s, quietly abandoned. That controversy I teased you with is yet to come though the ideas raised here around ‘community’ would be central to later discussion.

Elsewhere, planning continued.  By 1939, land for what became the Mount Estate in Prenton had been purchased and Borough Engineer Bertie Robinson drew up plans for a garden suburb of some 502 homes.  War would delay their implementation but the Corporation had built around 4500 council homes by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Birkenhead suffered heavily from that war; 2079 houses were destroyed by bombing and 26,000 seriously damaged. Some 3464 people lost their lives.  But planning for better tomorrow began early. In 1944, Bertie Robinson unveiled new plans for the Woodchurch Estate. At around the same time, the Council appointed Professor Charles Reilly as a planning consultant with a brief to produce an outline plan for post-war Birkenhead as a whole. Reilly had been Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool from 1904 to his retirement in 1933; a charismatic figure, better known as an influential educator than as practitioner.

Robinson’s 1944 plan for the Estate

Robinson published details of his scheme in The Builder in November 1944. He first described the site in the Fender Valley: 457 acres of which the large municipally-owned Arrowe Park, containing golf course, bowling greens and football pitches, would be retained and the ‘attractive suburb’ of Upton conserved. So far as the residential areas were concerned, he proposed ‘a garden city for the purpose of housing on the basis of a neighbourhood unit’. (4)

A model of Robinson’s Woodchurch proposals from The Builder

In terms of layout, he planned two 100-foot boulevards in the form of a cross in a central square – these had given, he claimed, ‘the scheme the title of the “Green Cross”’ – and a 60-foot boulevard from which the estate’s service roads would radiate. These should be laid out on ‘attractive lines with grass verges, shrubs, trees and gradual curves’.  There would be little encouragement to traffic ‘other than that serving the estate itself’.

The estate as a whole was conceived as containing 2540 homes, serving a population of around 10,800 – a range of two, three, four and five-bedroom houses ‘suitable for north or south aspect’ built in ‘blocks of two, up to terraces of eight’ and set back to ‘varying building lines’.

With a central and two subsidiary shopping areas and provision for 156 shops in all, a public hall and community centre, 22.5 acres of allotments, ten schools and a ‘Young People’s College’, and plentiful open space, it was an ambitious and considered scheme which reflected contemporary planning ideas around community-focused design to improve on the widely criticised form and character of the interwar cottage suburbs.

Sir Charles Reilly, a 1943 portrait by Howard Coster © National Portrait Gallery and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Enter Reilly. He described: (5)

not liking very much the look of this layout which was on ordinary garden suburb lines … I suggested to the Borough Engineer that we should make a new layout plan together.

Less emolliently, in an article in the left-wing journal Tribune, he called Robinson’s scheme ‘a damn bad plan’. When Robinson rejected his offer to collaborate, Reilly, in his own words, ‘explained the ideas I thought would be welcomed everywhere and told him he would make his name by it if he did’.

Reilly’s Greens, as envisaged in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Reilly’s uninvited intervention and the spat, at least on Reilly’s side, which developed then became a much larger controversy. In essence, as they were further developed, Reilly’s alternative plans contained one big idea – the greens around which housing would be grouped.  He explained them in an April 1944 report in the Birkenhead News:

The motives of the scheme are the English Village Green and the small squares of the country town, where children can play and neighbours see one another and retain the friendliness of the little streets and slums. With pairs of semi-detached houses on the curved roads of the Garden Suburb type of plan this friendliness … turns to suburban snobbishness through not seeing and knowing one’s neighbours. The houses look away from one another and the people too.

Later, he expanded his attack on suburbia:

Why was there such a contempt with novelists for suburbia? It was because it bred a narrowness of outlook, in which the team spirit was not developed.  It lacked the intellectual development which came from sharpening one’s wits … allowing everyone to play with his own toy castle had produced an anti-social spirit.

In this, Reilly, of course, reflected much of the inverted snobbery directed towards the suburbs then and now.

He also articulated an architect’s disdain for tradespeople as represented here by the poor Borough Engineer:

Without being in any way personal, as an architect, I feel the layout of houses for human habitation is not in the first place an engineer’s job. The engineer’s training in steel construction in drains and such like inhuman things does not fit him for it. It is not humane enough. The architect however, is always thinking in terms of human lives. He, I suggest, should do the planning and the engineer keep him straight on the mechanical side.

Robinson kept his own counsel through all this though he had written thoughtfully – admittedly in measured bureaucratic tones – on housing in an article for a professional journal in 1936. (5)

However, beyond the interpersonal disputes, there were planning ideas. Reilly himself described his concept for communal greens as ‘a semi-new planning principle’. It owed much to Unwin’s quadrangles and had similarities to the bowling greens of nearby Port Sunlight.  His general critique of suburbia and, in particular, the Corporation suburbia of peripheral council estates, was certainly highly topical and gained traction from the publication in May 1944 of the government-sponsored Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings which was similarly critical.

And beyond the planning talk, there was politics – a politics writ large by wartime conditions and post-war aspirations. At its simplest, this was party politics, and in Birkenhead the debate over the contending plans split along purely political lines.  The ruling Conservative Party favoured Robinson’s scheme and the insurgent Labour opposition favoured and campaigned powerfully for what had now become known as the Reilly Plan.

Here, it elided easily with the wider issue of housing shortage; by July 1945, there were 2300 on Birkenhead’s council housing waiting list and, it was said, 150 fresh applications weekly. The debate over Woodchurch was, crudely, a useful local wedge issue.

Central area as depicted in Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

But it was much more than this. It spoke too to what was really a unique moment in British history – a time when passionate debate around a new, more modern and better Britain to emerge in peacetime conditions dominated.  Speaking at the annual Labour Conference in December 1944, Harold Laski declared that ‘for Socialists the war was each day more fully an ideological war’. The sacrifice it demanded of those who fought: (7)

can be justified in one way only. It will be justified by the degree in which the Socialist commonwealth becomes the inheritance of the civilisation we are seeking to reshape.

That conference went on to pass a resolution that ‘the community basis of town planning, as illustrated by Professor Sir Charles Reilly’s plan for Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead, would best serve post-war housing needs’.

In the Picture Post article referred to, Caradoc Williams, secretary of Birkenhead Trades Council, declared his own support for the Reilly Plan with the spirit, if not the rhetoric, of Laski:

I believe it is in accordance with the community spirit developed during the war. Public opinion here wants a progressive plan. After all, the men out there are fighting for decent homes, not only for houses.

Mary Mercer, a former Labour councillor, saw ‘a spirit in the Reilly Plan … the spirit of the New Britain’. Birkenhead Tories less so.

For Councillor Guy Williams:

The whole idea of Professor Reilly’s Plan is to foster community spirit. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. But if a man doesn’t feel community-minded, he should thank God for a 5-ft hedge around his house.

For Lawrence Wolfe, who must have read this article, there could not have been a clearer expression of the ‘isolationist way of life’ he believed so damaging to the British psyche and society. It was Wolfe who, in 1945, most passionately advocated The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (as his book was titled). (8)

For him, it was a panacea to all psychological and social ills. The book provides a greatly expanded and highly prescriptive exposition of Reilly’s plans including the proposal that the Community Centre provide ‘a Restaurant and Meals Service’, supplying meals in large containers to nursery schools and ‘in small thermos containers’ to individuals. Wolfe went on to address contemporary concerns about the birth rate and sexual behaviour: ‘Under the Reilly Plan early marriage is easy and normal’; ‘sexual immorality outside marriage also diminishes’; venereal disease declines; and the birth rate would rise.

‘Single green with cricket match in progress’ from Wolfe, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life 

Wolfe went on, at his most fanciful, to evoke not only a New Britain but a Merry England:

In the village green world dancing is not confined to special times and places. People dance when they feel like it – and they often do. Impromptu merry-making would look crazy in the middle of an isolationist street; on the green it looks perfectly natural and the passer-by, far from being tolerantly amused or even scandalised, is more likely to join in.

Reilly’s introduction to the book rather disarmingly notes:

the many implications [Wolfe] has found in the plan which, I confess, I did not fully see when I drew it … he, I am glad to say, discerns many further advantages in what I thought was merely a natural expression of neighbourliness.

The reality is that this was very much Wolfe’s vision, the Reilly Plan his chosen vehicle, but the 71-year-old Reilly, ever the keen publicist of his own ideas and role, was happy to go along with it.

For all the storm and stress, the Council – dividing on party lines – had endorsed Robinson’s scheme in February 1944. A proposal from Labour leader Charles McVey for an inquiry into the rival proposals was defeated in July.

That, however, was not quite the end of the Reilly Greens. The idea was taken up enthusiastically, with Reilly’s active participation, in the Black Country boroughs of Bilston and Dudley. Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, no less, commended it in his major speech introducing the second reading of the New Towns Bill in May 1946: ‘the experiment was about to be tried in Bilston…and he would watch it with interest’. (9)  In the end, the concept was applied in much diluted form. (10)  Reilly himself died in February 1948.

Back in Birkenhead, in March 1945, the Council approved final plans for the Woodchurch Estate – not Reilly’s, nor Robinson’s, but new proposals drawn up by the Liverpool architect Herbert J Rowse.  Next week’s post examines this story and the longer story of the Woodchurch Estate that emerged from this extraordinary episode.

Sources

(1) Maurice Edelman, ‘Planning Post-War Britain: the Example of Birkenhead’, Picture Post, 8 July 1944

(2) William Thompson, Municipal Housing in England and Wales (1910)

(3) Margaret H Taylor, ‘Creating a Municipal Gemeinschaft? Disputations of Community’, Manchester Metropolitan University MPhil, 2013. Following detail is also drawn from this source.

(4) B Robinson, ‘Woodchurch estate, Birkenhead; Planner: B. Robinson, Borough Engineer’, The Builder, November 24, 1944

(5) Quoted in Lilian Potter, ‘National Tensions in the Post War Planning of Local Authority Housing and ‘The Woodchurch Controversy’, University of Liverpool PhD, 1998. The following quotation is drawn from the same source.

(6) B Robinson, ‘Some Snags in Housing Schemes’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, vol 57, no 1, 1936

(7) ‘Labour Policy’, The Times, December 12 1944

(8) Lawrence Woolf, The Reilly Plan: a New Way of Life (Nicholson and Watson, 1945). The author’s name is a nom-de-plume and, despite speculation, very little is known about him.

(9) ‘House of Commons’ The Times , May 9 1946

(10) This episode is discussed fully in Peter J. Larkham, New suburbs and UK post-war reconstruction: the fate of Charles Reilly’s “greens”, Birmingham: University of Central England, School of Planning and Housing, 2004,  and in Peter Richmond, Marketing Modernisms: The Architectural and Cultural Consequence of Sir Charles Reilly, University of Liverpool PhD, 1997.