Council Housing in Devon in the 1920s: a Local History Project

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Devon

My apologies again for lack of recent posts – I’m writing a book – but normal service will be resumed when possible. In the meantime, I’m very grateful to guest contributors and others working in the field on whom much of my work depends. Today’s post has been written by Julia Neville who is the (volunteer) project manager for a local history research collaboration on Devon in the 1920s.

Our project covers a wide range of different histories – from the Legacy of the First World War to Growing Up in the 1920s and on to Progress and Technology. And of course you can’t study 1920s local history seriously without coming across the problems of housing: the overall housing shortage and the inadequacy of the housing in which many people had to live. We need to take a close look at how agencies in the 1920s attempted to solve these almost intractable problems. As the Municipal Dreams blog makes clear, local authorities, urban and rural, were key players in this. Our research group was therefore delighted when John Boughton agreed earlier this month to come and launch our review of housing needs and development in Devon and set the scene for us of national initiatives (and backtracking) and how local authorities responded.

As readers may imagine, recreating what happened across the county of Devon is a challenge. Local authorities with housing interests comprised two county boroughs (Exeter and Plymouth); ten municipal boroughs; twenty-two urban districts; eighteen rural districts ranging in size from the giant St Thomas (26,500 population) to the tiny Culmstock (3200 population) which proudly related in 1931 that ‘’The council has taken up housing and 40 houses have been erected’. (1)  There was also Devon County Council itself, whose interest in housing, especially the reconditioning of tumbledown housing. was shown in its response to the Housing (Rural Workers) Act 1926. (2)  The county considered itself a driving force for rural housing improvement, as the pictures below illustrate. We hope to be able to update readers on our progress over the next year or so.

An image taken from The Jubilee of County Councils, 1889-1939 (1939)

Amongst our group of volunteers, I am probably the lucky one, because my home patch is Exeter, and a post on this blog gives an overview of Exeter City Council’s forays into municipal housing during the interwar years, so some of the spade work on the 1920s has already been done for me. I hope to add value to it over the next year or so by investigating more closely the actors involved – both the ‘doers’ and the ‘done to’s’.

Exeter City Council in the 1920s was a complex mix of traditionalists and modernisers. The mayoralty was held alternately by a businessman (and it was always a man) and then a professional man and most councillors came from one or other of those backgrounds. Many councillors strenuously denied party politics had any influence, but this was a polite fiction as it was normally quite clear at national elections who was supporting which party. The arrival of first the Labour Party (the first councillor ‘crossed the floor’ to represent Labour rather than the Liberals in 1918) and then the Ratepayers’ Association (very active between 1924 and 1925) also disturbed this polite fiction as those groups did arrange to cast their votes as a bloc. I hope to find out more about the dynamics of getting things done and who the procrastinators were. As part of that process I intend to consider the contributions of some of the forgotten councillors such as Edith Splatt, Exeter’s first woman councillor, who was elected on a Ratepayers’ Association ticket but who was all her life a campaigner for better housing.

A blue plaque for Edith Splatt © Julia Neville

Secondly, I hope to find out more about the families who moved to the new estates. Initially these were working families with a reasonable level of wages, and thus able to pay the rents required, but as legislation changed more families came from poor housing areas such as the slums of the West Quarter. A wide range of oral histories were collected in Exeter thirty or forty years ago which give us some clues to what the residents thought about their ‘old’ and their ‘new’ houses in the interwar years. Lil Shapcott, for example, remembers how when she was a child in Preston Street ‘you had to go to the toilet out in the yard, and there were rats … Once my sister said “Stay indoors and I’ll go out.” She had a pair of my brother’s hob-nailed boots … she kicked this rat and kicked it until it went away or died or something.’ Lil’s father, a fish hawker, always said of the new estates: ‘You won’t get me out there so long as I live’. And in fact he did die before they had to move, but her mother and the children moved out, and her mother relished the garden that came with the new house on the Burnthouse Lane estate. ‘She had four squares with big rocks around, and she had all these flowers, and once a year the Council men used to come round and judge the gardens, and my mother had First Prize …’ (3)

An early photograph of Widgery Road on the Polsloe Estate

Recently in a compilation called Childhood in Exeter in the 1920s, I came across an account by Charles Tucker, who was born in 1920 into a single room tenement in a tumbledown house. He reflected on the gradual move of his friends during the 1920s and 1930s out to the different Exeter estates: ‘The Council decided on slum clearance, and sent them to all parts of the city. To Buddle Lane, which was nicknamed ‘Shanghai’, why I don’t know. To Whipton [the Polsloe Estate] which was known as ‘Chinatown’, I still don’t know why, and to Burnthouse Lane. I don’t know why they didn’t give that a name.’ (4) Eventually ‘they’ did: it was known as ‘Siberia’.

On the map above, courtesy Google Earth, I have marked the locations of the estates and also of the High Street which for many had originally been little more than a three or four minute walk away from home, and was now thirty or forty minutes. I imagine, and it’s the common assumption, that the estates got those nicknames because of their distance from the High Street and the markets. But I’d be really interested to find out whether other readers of this blog are aware of nicknames attached to the interwar council estates in their area and what those nicknames represented. If you have any examples to share, please send them to me, Julia Neville, via the Devon History Society website, Contact – Devon History Society

Please contact Julia directly (or leave a comment as appropriate) but I’ll also be very pleased to hear of, and happy to feature on the blog, other local research into the history of council housing.

References

(1) Municipal Year Book, 1931, Municipal Journal Ltd (1931)

(2) The work of the county council is described in R.T. Shears, Conservation of Devonshire Cottages, Bideford Gazette Printing (1968)

(3) Lil Shapcott, Memories, courtesy of Olwen Foggin

(4) Charles Tucker (Mr W), in Childhood in Exeter, 1920-1950, Exeter City Council (1987)

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

Tags

1920s, Devon, Non-traditional, Rural council housing

I don’t usually re-post old blogs but I’m pleased to add here some interesting information and insight provided by Mark Swenarton. 

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

West Camel

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

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

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

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

My thanks to Mark Swenarton whose investigations have added further important context here:

One of the foremost promoters of non-traditional methods was Neville Chamberlain who served briefly as Minister of Health and Housing in 1923 during Bonar Law’s short-lived government and again in Stanley Baldwin’s government of 1924-29.  The clauses promoting non-traditional construction in Labour’s 1924 Housing Act (the Wheatley Act) were inserted purely at Chamberlain’s instigation.

For Chamberlain, part of the appeal of new methods was that they cut out the union-controlled building trades and put the unions and the public into opposed camps (in contrast to Wheatley’s programme, which had placed them on the same side).  Non-traditional methods were also a central plank in the housing policy of the ‘New Conservatives’ in the party’s 1924 election manifesto.

Chamberlain’s particular ally was the armaments manufacturer Lord Weir and, in fact, though Chamberlain did not state this publicly, his initiative was centred on the timber-framed, steel-clad ‘Weir House’ whose components were manufactured in Weir’s Glasgow shipyards.

Sir Ernest Petter was very much a local counterpart to Weir and probably the driving force behind the West Country initiative. Westland had manufactured over 1000 planes for the Government during the First World War and Petter believed he could produce 100,000 houses a year using the Nissen system!

In 1927, Westland got a large order for its new Wapiti biplane which may explain Petter’s loss of interest in the housing proposals.  Chamberlain himself lost interest in the new methods as their problems (not least cost) became apparent.  But he had, in the meantime, overseen the expansion of the Building Research Station and its move to Garston near Watford where it remains today.

Mark discusses Chamberlain’s espousal of non-traditional methods more fully in chapter 11, ‘Houses of Paper and Brown Cardboard’ in his book Building the New Jerusalem:  Architecture, Housing, and Politics, 1900-1930.

Times advert, 7 April 1925

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

Goldcroft, Yeovil

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

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

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

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

Howell Hill, West Camel

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

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

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

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

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

Higher Bullen, Barwick

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

Fairhouse Road, Barwick

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

Ryme Intrinseca

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

Frog Lane, Bampton (Google Streetview)

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

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

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

Edward Road, Queenborough (Google Streetview)

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

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

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

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

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

Goldcroft, Yeovil

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Devon, Pre-1914

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

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

Isca Road

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

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

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

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

Buddle Lane, Buddle Lane Estate

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

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

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

Pinces Gardens

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

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

Widgery Road, Polsloe Estate in the 1930s

Bennett Square, Polsloe Estate

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

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

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

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

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

Burnthouse Lane in the 1930s

Milton Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

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

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

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

Hawthorn Road, Burnthouse Lane Estate

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

Hoker Road, St Loye’s Estate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preston Street flats, front and rear

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Council Housing in Plymouth before 1914: ‘the merry homes of England’

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Devon, Pre-1914

As housing emerges as a major election issue, it’s salutary to look to the past and examine some of the earliest debates and issues around social housing – and dispiriting to realise how little we have learnt.

This post looks at the first council housing built in Plymouth after the public duty to ensure decent housing for all was recognised in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.  Much has changed since the worst days of Victorian slumdom but a closer look reveals some uncomfortable echoes with present-day problems and our continuing failure to fulfil that duty recognised – however falteringly – over one hundred years ago. In the nineteenth century, Plymouth’s population was among the worst housed in the country. The first half of the century had seen three major cholera outbreaks and an epidemic of smallpox struck as late as 1872. The Corporation was slow to act – only adopting the 1848 Public Health Act six years after its enactment under pressure from the Board of Health.

Minor improvements followed but the population remained grossly overcrowded.  In 1890, over 16 per cent of the population inhabited two-room accommodation – a figure exceeded in only five other cities.  In 1902, official returns showed 560 one-room tenements in the borough with four persons or more in each and 388 two-room tenements with seven persons or more.  It was overall, in the words of the local Medical Officer of Health, ‘practically a tenement population’. (1)

An early photograph of Looe Street

Plymouth’s problems were compounded by its geography and patterns of land ownership – the Admiralty was a major local employer and landowner but provided little housing and, in fact, impeded housing development by sitting on land it controlled.  In consequence, local rents were the highest in the country outside London according to the Board of Trade in 1908.(2)

Perhaps those problems of failures of land utilisation, housing shortage and inflated rents sound familiar.

At this time, Plymouth was one of the Three Towns (alongside Devonport and Stonehouse) and had become a county borough only in 1888.  The new Corporation was to be more ambitious that its predecessors however, embarking – in 1895 – on its first municipal housing on land acquired on the town’s eastern outskirts at Prince Rock.

Corporation housing on Laira Bridge Road, Prince Rock

The Laira Bridge Road estate, comprising initially 104 flats and houses with accommodation for 824, opened one year later.  Solid, attractive housing, the estate makes it into Pevsner which describes it as ‘red-brick with timbered gables, a conscious adaptation of the English vernacular idiom’.(3)  Streets named after the members of the Housing Committee can be seen as an example of civic pride or personal self-aggrandisement according to taste.

Radford Avenue, Prince Rock

The estate was intended, in part, to rehouse those displaced by the Corporation’s other major pre-war scheme – a significant slum clearance project in the Barbican area, the town’s historic core.  Seventy houses in Looe Street and How Street were demolished, affecting a population of some 813.

© Mary Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’

The first housing was built on the northerly side of Looe Street – a three-storey slate-roofed terrace of painted brick, concrete floors and staircases and wooden sash windows at the top of the street and a more elaborate, two-storeyed, timber-gabled further down – before 1900.  How Street, adjacent, was completed in similar style.

Top end of Looe Street

Bottom end of Looe Street

The rents in both schemes were described as ‘high as against the wages of the tenants’ but ‘generally low as compared with the figure which could be obtained in open competitive market’ – figures ranged from 4s a week for the cheapest two-room flat to 8s a week for the most expensive four-roomed houses.

In Prince Rock, it was stated that very few tenants were earning more than 30s a week – a reasonable working-class wage at the time – and that most were earning around £1. This report continued: (4)

The occupations of the tenants may be described as those mainly of labourers, fishermen, and people of miscellaneous and more or less uncertain occupation. The distinct artisan class is almost entirely absent.

Over one third of the Prince Rock tenants were said to come from the former slums of Looe Street and How Street and most of the others were ‘from the same congested district…and of the same class’. If this was the case – and there seems to be some attempt to put a positive spin on things – this represented an unusually successful attempt to rehouse an inner-city slum population in Corporation housing.

How Street

By 1902, the Council had spent almost £50,000 on its central redevelopment scheme, a figure reflecting the relatively high cost of land, compensation paid to existing property owners and the extent of ancillary works.  But the death rate in the district had been cut by almost four per thousand and the Council was clear that, ‘although the cost of the scheme has been heavy, the good results to the community’ were ‘very solid and apparent’.(6)

It may seem surprising, therefore, that the Housing Committee also concluded that it couldn’t ‘recommend the wholesale clearance of sites in this manner again, except in extreme urgency’.  This brings us to the vexed question of finance.

Plymouth had incurred heavy debts in its programme of municipal enterprise – some resulting from the short thirty-year loans offered by the Local Government Board and some from bank loans.  It was also accused of using earmarked loans for alternative purposes.  As a result, it had been made subject to restrictions on its borrowing. (6)  A private parliamentary act in 1904 regularised its position but required the Corporation undergo external audit.

How Street rear

The Committee had already felt itself compelled to sell off part of its building land at Prince Rock and build ‘housing of a less costly type’ in its central scheme.   Its efforts at this point were concentrated on building tramways (to disperse an overcrowded population) and compelling repairs to existing slum properties.

Even under the restrictive terms offered by the Local Government Board, it was clear (as the Corporation argued) that its housing schemes were virtually self-financing – 1d on the rates met the immediate demand to service debt – and would be fully paid for within thirty years.

There is nothing new, therefore, in the financial short-termism which prevents councils borrowing to invest in much-needed housing or the crude fiscal calculus which proclaims the cost of everything but disregards the value – personal, societal, even economic – of investment in social infrastructure.

It’s good to see the Council recognising and maintaining this heritage.

Nor is there anything new in the housing protest which results.  In March 1900, the Plymouth branch of the Social Democratic Federation convened a meeting to establish the Three Towns Association for the Better Housing of the Working Classes.  Despite the left-wing politics of the Federation, it ‘hoped that the matter would be considered from an entirely non-political and non-sectarian point of view’ and the party worked hard to forge an inclusive, populist alliance.

The origins and dynamics of the current Homes for Britain campaign are a little different but reflect, at least, the belief that the need for good quality housing for all should be a unifying rather than divisive issue.

The problems of creating such an alliance then (as now perhaps) were powerful. Against those in the upper classes (and the more ‘respectable’ working classes) who believed slum conditions were created by slum dwellers, the Federation argued: (7)

The refinement and worthy character which a love of home develops are impracticable to large numbers of people in ‘the merry homes of England’…. If the people were all heroes or angels of perfection they would, of course, surmount all obstacles, and keep themselves perfectly clean; but as they are only human there are some who, discouraged by the disabilities which a grinding capitalist system has imposed upon them, fall into dirty habits.

It’s an argument couched to appeal to those who would denigrate our poorest citizens but it remains a lesson that the makers of Benefits Street and its ilk might profitably benefit from.

Within the Association itself, a major division occurred when the Plymouth Cooperative Society decided in 1902 that its Building Society housing would be built for sale rather than rental. Against those who made the case that this would provide its members security for old age, an opponent argued Cooperators should:

cater for the thousands who would never be in a position to purchase a house. Who, he asked had been paying the interest on the land? Why the poor members, of whom there are hundreds waiting an opportunity to get a decent house to reside in, and here was a chance to help them.

As former philanthropic housing trusts and many housing associations across the country are looking to make money from selling off what they own or building homes for sale to the wealthy, this also has an uncannily modern ring.

Finally, there was the question of what social housing – council housing at this time – should be built.  By 1906 the Corporation had rehoused a little under 1500 of a population (in 1901) of 107,000 and it embarked belatedly on another housing scheme in Prince Rock.

A three-storey block on Harvey Avenue, Prince Rock

Some of these new homes turned out to be hard to let, a fact used by some councillors to oppose further council house building.  The Association investigated and concluded that the rules against the keeping of fowl, rabbits or pigeons offended ‘the Englishman’s love of freedom’.  More practically, the three-storey blocks in particular were criticised as barrack-like with poor facilities – washhouses shared between eight flats and ‘visits to the WCs…in the notice of the whole block’. (8)

A reminder, if we need it, that social housing tenants should never be second-class citizens, excluded from shared space, required to use ‘poor doors’, deprived of the light and views enjoyed by their better-off fellow citizens or – simply – in any way treated as inferior.

There’s nothing new under the housing sun.  The moral, social and economic case for high quality and genuinely affordable social housing remains as compelling now as it was in turn-of-the-century Plymouth. Please support it in this election.

Sources

(1) The quotation – and other detail here – is drawn from Crispin Gill, Plymouth: a New History (1993). The 1902 figures come from ‘The Housing Problem at Plymouth’, Western Daily Press, Bristol, 11 December 1902.

(2) Mary Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’, University of Exeter PhD in Economic and Social History, 1998

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, Devon, Volume 5 (1991)

(4) ‘The Housing Problem at Plymouth’, Western Daily Press, Bristol, 11 December 1902

(5) Mortality statistics are from William Thompson, Housing Up-to-Date (1907), the quotation from the Western Daily Press article cited.

(6) ‘Plymouth Corporation and its Borrowings’, The Nottingham Evening Post, 21 May 1903

(7) AT Grindley, ‘The Warrens of the Poor’, Three Towns Association for the Better Housing of the Working Classes (1906) quoted in Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c1890-1920’.  Other quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(8) Ann Bond,  ‘Working-class housing in Plymouth 1870-1914’, Unpublished MRes thesis, Plymouth University, 2014

My thanks to Ann Bond for providing advice and detail for this post.  Ann will know better than me the errors and omissions that remain.