The White City Estate, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone’

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1990s, 2000s, Hammersmith, Regeneration

Last week’s post examined the origins of the White City Estate at a time when the state’s role in providing decent homes for working-class people was firmly embedded.  Those ideals remained – and can be seen in the further development of the Estate – long into the post-war era but from the 1970s there were some who argued council housing caused rather than alleviated poverty. The Estate would become a site of this struggle and even today – as its ongoing regeneration continues – it’s a symbol of how far contemporary ideas around the form and character of social housing have shifted from the earlier model pioneered by the London County Council (LCC).

‘Air view of the White City Estate, Hammersmith’ from The County of London Plan (1943) – showing the Estate as completed by 1939

Originally, the intention remained to improve the design and facilities of council estates. Hammersmith Park, built on the site of the Japanese Garden created for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, was reopened for the benefit of White City residents with added tennis courts and playground in 1954.  More recently, it has become a mark of our changing values when, in 2013, the then Conservative-controlled Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham proposed to lease half the park to Play Football, a private company intending to let pay-to-play facilities.  Some form of compromise appears to have been reached but one which will, nevertheless, see free public facilities hived off to the private sector. (1)  Given the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets, the incentive – hard-pressed councils might argue the necessity – to monetise community assets will continue. (2)

Malabar Court

While the White City Estate was substantially complete by the early fifties, the neighbourhood shows the continuing attempts to modernise and adapt council housing to changing times.  Malabar Court (at the corner of India Way and Commonwealth Avenue) was designed by Neil Moffett and Partners as sheltered housing for elderly people and opened in 1966. A ‘pile of ascending hexagons’, Pevsner thought it a ‘welcome respite’ to what he considered the dull uniformity of the rest of the Estate. (3)

White City Close

The small White City Close (or Wood Lane) Estate, east of White City just north of Television Centre, shows how far thinking around council house design had evolved by the 1970s.  In a conscious reaction to the high-rise boom of the 1960s and overbearing scale of some earlier local authority schemes, White City Close was designed as a compact series of two- to four-storey brown-brick terraces enclosing landscaped footways and courts.  Designed by John Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke and opened in 1978, it’s a little echo of their earlier and successful Lillington Gardens Estate designed for Westminster City Council and their far more troubled (and since largely demolished) Marquess Estate built by Islington in the late seventies.

In 1981, ownership and management of the White City Estate was transferred to Hammersmith and Fulham Council from the Greater London Council but by the 1990s the Estate and its community had fallen on hard times.  In 1996, the Council (under Labour control from 1986 to 2006) successfully applied for an £8m grant from the Government’s Single Regeneration Budget to revive the Estate.

Commonwealth Avenue

Environmental improvements, housing upgrades and a renovated health centre followed but, if subsequent reports are to be believed, much remained to be done.  According to the Evening Standard in 2004, the Estate was ‘a blighted area where nobody wants to live’.  The rest is a masterclass in the demonising journalism which has so influenced perceptions of council estates in recent decades: (4)

When a man in a suit parks outside Canberra Primary School’s double-height wire fence, he cannot punch in the keypad security code and slip through the school’s fortified gates quickly enough.  Three blonde, pony-tailed girls pushing baby buggies display a similar heads-down, no looking left or right attitude, as they walk between the estate’s redbrick, five-storey blocks of flats. Nobody lingers on White City’s streets. Only a shuffling, middle-aged Asian man wants to chat, offering me a cigarette from an empty Marlboro packet.  “You live here?” he asks as I edge away. ‘No, just having a walk.’

One feels for the friendly (though ‘shuffling’) Asian man.  One wonders if the three young women with babies took such a hostile view of this stranger as she apparently took of them.  But, if you want to paint a picture of depressing anomie, the journalist had pressed all the right buttons.  Was it simply her brief or was she herself a product of how so many who didn’t live in council housing had been conditioned to understand it?

Champlain House

Five years later (and with, to be fair, some evidence of renewal taking place), rather more seasoned observers took a different view.  The Estate appeared – in contrast to earlier reports – ‘to be well provided for in terms of community facilities and amenities’ and ‘well maintained with evidence of repairs and maintenance work underway as well as new building’. (5)

Residents’ views were mixed.  Most would not recommend the Estate to others; some definitively (‘Not at all. Nothing to like about it’) but many rather more equivocally, as if reflecting how outsiders perceived the Estate as much as than their own experience:

It depends on what you’re looking for – for people who’ve got nowhere else to go it’s okay and they are upgrading it a lot, they are really doing a lot of work to it…

I love it. It’s where I know, I’ve seen it over the years. It’s my home…

I’ve been here twelve years so I like it but maybe it’s not for everyone, particularly if they want a house or need more space than these flats.

In general, the Estate’s actual residents ‘offered quite a balanced view’ of the Estate; some praising its quietness and convenience, many agreeing that young people in particular were poorly served.

Hard data provides another perspective.  By 2009, in terms of household income, White City was ‘among the most deprived areas of the whole country’, parts of it in the bottom five per cent nationally.  Three years later, another set of statistics gives chapter and verse.  Across the wider White City area, 29 per cent of households were single adults and 15 per cent lone parent with dependent children.  Members of ethnic minorities (mainly Black African, Somalian and Eritrean, and Black Caribbean) were also disproportionately represented, forming 46 per cent of the total.  Twenty-eight per cent of the population were under 18. (6)

Hudson Close

The point, of course, is not that these groups are the ‘problem’ but that they are the groups most likely to suffer problems.  To some extent, there was a continuity here; some had seen the Estate as ‘blighted’ from the outset by the large proportion of former slum dwellers who made up its first residents. Then most were probably in employment.  In 2012, 29 per cent of the Estate’s working-age residents received Income Support, Job Seekers Allowance or Employment and Support Allowance or Incapacity Benefits.

This reflected, of course, the residualisation of council housing that has occurred since the 1970s – the fact that it is increasingly confined to those with the most pressing and urgent needs.  This, in a sense, was an issue recognised by Stephen Greenhalgh who led Hammersmith and Fulham’s Conservative Council from 2006 to 2012: (7)

Social housing was meant to help lift people out of the slums. Instead many social housing estates have become the very ghettos of multiple social deprivation that they were supposed to replace.

‘Ghettos’ isn’t a very nice word but we might see some truth in this statement. Greenhalgh’s starting point, however, was that social housing was now ‘welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement predominate’.

The view of Greenhalgh and Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform. Question the labels and ignore the arrows.

There are two difficulties with this. Firstly, straightforwardly, it caricatures estates and their communities. On the White City Estate (where 74 per cent of occupants remained council tenants), local Labour councillor Jean Campbell articulated some of the anger and insult felt by local residents: (8)

My community on the White City Estate is a vibrant one. My neighbours include people working in health care, people working as police officers or people who are simply doing their best to bring up their kids and look after their families.

Secondly, it reverses cause and effect. Council housing is no longer seen as a response to social problems – the ‘safety net’ that even its minimalist advocates recognise – but one of their causes.  In one leap, Greenhalgh moves from correlation – the reality that many poorer people do live in council housing (for all the reasons of public policy that this blog has charted and because, fundamentally, they have been failed by the free market) – to causation.

To do so, of course, suits a free market agenda ideologically opposed to state intervention in all its forms which is seen in his astonishing solution to these alleged difficulties.  Greenhalgh recommended that social housing rents should rise to market levels and that a single form of (so-called) Assured Tenancy – assured for six months – should operate across private and public rental sectors.  Documents secured by Hammersmith’s Labour MP Andy Slaughter under Freedom of Information legislation revealing a 2009 meeting between Greenhalgh, Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps (then shadow Ministers of Communities and Local Government and Housing respectively) show the influence of this radical thinking upon the incoming Conservative government. (9)

Unsurprisingly when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s 2011 Localism Act gave social landlords the right to introduce fixed-term tenancies, Hammersmith and Fulham were among to signal their acceptance of the offer, proposing five year tenancies for most but as little as two years for others, especially those under 25. It wanted, apparently, ‘to incentivise residents to make the most of the their lives’.  That actual tenants ‘better able to predict their housing future…reported being better placed to manage other challenges in their life’ (including employment) was not considered. (10)

Whilst the hard-core radicalism of that agenda has not yet been implemented, it was previewed in 2012 when the plans of Hammersmith and Fulham Council to relocate 500 of the Borough’s homeless families on benefits to the Midlands – to move them to rented accommodation elsewhere rather than prioritise them for local council housing. Tory Hammersmith wanted to favour ‘wealth creators’ rather than the ‘workless and dependent on benefits…not making a contribution that could help drive economic growth’. (11)

This was linked to a voluntary and accelerated programme of selling off council homes by Hammersmith and Fulham: of 256 homes sold between April 2011 and December 2013, 46 went through Right to Buy and 210 were sold at auction, mostly through Savills. (12)  The phrase ‘social cleansing’ might be overused but here it seems justified.

A surprise victory by the Labour Party in the 2014 Borough elections – the Party gained 11 seats and took control of the Council – has put paid to the most far-reaching and ideologically-driven of these proposals but they exist, of course, on a spectrum and ‘regeneration’ – in Hammersmith and across London – continues to be controversial and, in many cases, a threat to established communities. (13)

This view towards central London shows BBC Television Centre to bottom left and the Westfield shopping centre under construction

There should be nothing controversial in desiring and assisting the economic uplift of an area.  The White City Opportunity Area was first mooted in 2004 and has received broad cross-party support since then.  The project’s initial ‘Framework for Development’, produced jointly with the Greater London Authority, contains the laudable ambitions of most such documents: (14)

By the end of the decade, the White City Opportunity Area will have been transformed into a thriving new, mixed use urban quarter of the highest quality, with a strong sense of place and local identity shared with the surrounding community…The area will be recognised as an exemplar of sustainable urban development, successfully combining strategic and local aspirations.

It was also clear that in housing terms, ‘social rented accommodation should predominate and there should be affordable key worker housing’.

In later iterations, the emphasis has shifted to ‘affordable’ housing and most of you reading this will know that that is a very shifty term indeed – Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Mayor of London defined it as 80 per cent of market rates.  In 2013, the broad goal was ‘to increase housing choice’ in ‘White City West’ (including the Estate) and to ‘enable estate renewal and seek a mixed and balanced community’. (15)  If Greenhalgh represents the most extreme position, a broad critique of mono-tenure council estates has achieved wider political agreement.

An artist’s impression of the Westfield Centre and new housing

Back in 2004, it was projected optimistically that the regeneration of the White City area – the BBC Media Village, the Westfield shopping centre (opened in 2008 and currently being extended), the ongoing development of a new Imperial College campus, and more – might create 11,000 new jobs.  Training schemes for young people were part of the package.

Typically, these were concentrated in the retail sector whilst the London Development Agency promoted a scheme ‘to train the estate’s 30 per cent unemployed to fill hospital jobs such as receptionists, ward clerks and security guards’. Mark Billington, Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s head of employment initiatives, was quoted as saying ‘Life is easier if employers tell us exactly what the skills they need are, and what type of people they want’. (16)

You can draw your own conclusions here but, given that almost one in three of the White City Estate’s working-age residents remained jobless eight years later, the impact has been less than hoped.  One wonders too how many of these relatively unskilled and non-unionised jobs are on zero-hours contracts.

Welcome to the new world. The White City Estate was born into an era of full employment where secure and decent homes were viewed as the necessary accompaniment to secure jobs. Now it seems that insecurity is seen as the necessary corrective to some perceived failure of personal enterprise and the market must rule.

Sources

(1) The Shepherds’ Bush Blog, ‘Reprieve For Hammersmith Park?’, 28 March 2014

(2) This is well documented in Tom Crewe, ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, London Review of Books, 15 December 2016

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

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

(5) Laura Lane and Anne Power (LSE Housing and Communities), Low income housing estates: a report to Hammersmith United Charities on supporting communities, preventing social exclusion and tackling need in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (September 2009)

(6) White City Neighbourhood Budget Pilot Project produced for London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham prepared by NHS North West London and Research by Design Ltd (2012)

(7) Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform (Localis, 2009)

(8) ShepherdsBushW12.com, ‘Council Plotting to Get Rid of the Poor’, MP claims housing plans are ‘Shirley Porteresque’, 9 July 2009

(9) ‘Not Decent! The Evolution of Radical Tory Social Housing Policy: Full extracts from documents supplied by Hammersmith & Fulham Council in response to an FoI request from Andrew Slaughter MP’.  These documents can be found on the website of the site of West Ken and Gibbs Green – a Hammersmith and Fulham residents’ group fighting proposals to demolish their own Earls Court estate.

(10) Hammersmith quotation and residents’ views from D Robinson and A Walshaw, ‘Security of Tenure in Social Housing in England’, Social Policy and Society, vol 13 no. 1, January 2014. The damaging effects of insecurity of tenure are also discussed in John Bone, ‘Neo-Liberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK‘, Sociological Research Online, vol 19, issue 4, 2014

(11) Randeep Ramesh, ‘Tory borough plans to move homeless away from London’, The Guardian, Wednesday 2 May 2012

(12) Dave Hill, ‘The great Hammersmith and Fulham council house sell off‘, The Guardian, 19 May 2014

(13) In Hammersmith, this is particularly true of the Earls Court scheme (mentioned in footnote 9) which has been extensively charted by Dave Hill in the Guardian.

(14) Hammersmith and Fulham Council, White City Opportunity Area: A Framework for Development (adopted 2004)

(15) Greater London Authority, Opportunity Area Planning Framework: Second Public Consultation, June 2013

(16) Susan Gray, ‘Great White Hope’

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

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1930s, Hammersmith

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

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

The Franco-British Exhibition, 1908

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Silkin in 1947

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canning House with moderne styling

Carteret House rear with stairwells

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

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

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

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

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

McKenzie Close showing courtyard and private balconies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

(5) LCC, London Housing (1937)

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

(7) LCC, London Housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Oak Estate, Hammersmith: ‘that line of beauty which Hogarth said was in a curve’

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Cottage suburbs, Hammersmith, LCC, Pre-1914

Imagine a Hampstead Garden Suburb built for working people.  Better still, if you’re in London take the Tube and get off at Acton East and visit the Old Oak Estate where you’ll find just such an estate.

Du Cane Road

We’ve looked at the work of the LCC’s Architects’ Department Housing of the Working Classes branch before – at the Millbank Estate, at Totterdown Fields, and at the White Hart Lane Estate. These are all fine arts and crafts-inspired estates but to Susan Beattie, Old Oak stands as ‘the culminating achievement of the Council’s venture into garden suburb planning before the first world war’ – a work of ‘splendid maturity’. (1)

Rising costs of land and labour were forcing the LCC to look to what were then the London fringes.  In 1905, the Council purchased 54 acres in Hammersmith from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners at a cost of £29,858.  Eight acres were sold on to the Great Western Railway for its Ealing-Shepherd’s Bush branch line which still bisects the Estate.  The open space of Wormwood Scrubs lies to the north-east.

Initial plans projected a density of 27 cottages an acre and some 1527 cottages in all which would house – they estimated very precisely – 11,438 people. (2)

An early photograph of the Erconwald Street/Wulfstan Street junction with ‘butterfly’ plan typical of Unwin and Hampstead Garden Suburb

Contemporary view

Building of the first phase of the Estate, west of the railway line, began in 1911.  By January 1914, 304 cottages and five shops had been completed. Each of the cottages and flats had ‘a scullery and the usual offices’ but only the cottages of five and four rooms and 14 of the three-roomed cottages were fitted with baths. (3)

Roads and sewers for the second, eastern, section were completed before the war but construction was halted until 1920 when the Estate (and the neighbouring Wormholt Estate built by Hammersmith Borough Council) became significant components of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ campaign of the day.

Two more shops and 722 houses were built by 1922 and an additional 14 houses in 1927.  In all, the finished estate comprised 1056 homes – 228 five-room, 443 four-room, 341 three-room, 27 two-room and 16 one-room houses or flats plus ‘a superintendent’s quarters’. (3)

These are dry statistics though we understand today well enough just how vital such numbers are in the balance between housing supply and demand. Still, what was and what remains most striking about the Estate is its design and aesthetic – and the ideals these reflect.

Fitzneal Street

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow was published in 1898.  The Fabian Society published Cottage Plans and Common Sense – Raymond Unwin’s manifesto addressing how municipalities might best ‘provide for the Housing of the People’ – in 1902.   Unwin would be appointed Architect and Surveyor of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in 1906.

These currents all directly influenced the Old Oak Estate. And, in fact, one of the LCC architects responsible for the design of the Estate was Archibald Stuart Soutar, the brother of – and sometime collaborator with – JCS Soutar who replaced Unwin in Hampstead in 1914.

The 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act (partly modelled on the private 1906 Hampstead Garden Suburb Act) was also critical to the accomplished design.  Previously, planning had been hamstrung by well-meaning but unimaginative and restrictive bye-laws.  These were intended to enforce safe and sanitary housing construction but they also forced rigid building lines and tightly regulated streetscapes.

The 1909 Act’s promoter, John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, spoke eloquently of ‘that line of beauty which Hogarth said was in a curve’ and passionately of the moral as well as physical purpose of high quality housing and planning. The object of the bill, he proclaimed, was: (5)

to provide a domestic condition for the people in which their physical health, their morals, their character and their whole social condition can be improved…The Bill aims in broad outline at, and hopes to secure, the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified, and the suburb salubrious. It seeks, and hopes to secure, more houses, better houses, prettier streets, so that the character of a great people, in towns and cities and in villages, can be still further improved and strengthened by the conditions under which they live.

From that to the ‘privet hedging, grass verges, street trees and the provision of small cottage gardens’ and ‘the widespread use of wooden mullioned window frames (both sash and casement), brick façades, pitched and gabled roofs, small dormers and panelled doors’ – as noted in contemporary conservation guidelines –might seem a come-down. (6)

But it’s these features and the Estate’s overall design which combine to create, in the words of Susan Beattie, ‘the LCC’s finest contribution to the revival of English domestic architecture’.   Consistency of style, variety between blocks and an intimacy of detail make the Old Oak Estate a showpiece of public, vernacular architecture.

An early photograph of Henchman Street

A contemporary view

But social housing is never just bricks and mortar.  It reflects its times and the public priorities and policies of those times.  Early council housing catered principally for the better-off working class – those in regular employment who could afford its generally higher rents.

In 1920, a survey of the Estate reported no serious arrears with one exception – a Mr Mcneff: an ex-soldier, suffering from shell shock, struggling to pay his 16s (80 pence) a week rent from an army pension.

Others were more fortunate: from the approximately 500 households, around 150 men were reported as taking advantage of the new workmen’s fares to Liverpool Street (8d – 3.5p – for a day return if you left before 7.30am), an indication perhaps of the East End origins of many of the new tenants. (7)

Junction of Du Cane Road and Fitzneal Street

In another sign of the ‘respectability’ of this early population, the Old Oak Cooperative Women’s Guild – always respectable, always aspirational – complained of the poor condition of the school playground and requested that the Estate’s cinder paths be replaced with proper paving. (8)

Ninety years on, new residents also complained of poor facilities for children and young people.  One teenager grumbled: (9)

There was a youth club but it’s shut and it was only on once a week, you had to be over 13 and it only had a broken pool table! There should be a youth club with proper stuff and not broken.

Generally, however, residents liked the Estate.  ‘It’s alright – though new people see it as rough. It’s OK when you live here’.  Another, long-term, resident concluded:

Along here it’s an established community – many of them have been here for 30-40 years and we look out for each other, especially for the older ones who live on their own.

It was certainly some kind of tribute to the quality of the Estate’s housing and layout that so many exercised their right to buy after 1979.  The public landscaping of the Estate is also impressive and, to my eyes when I visited recently, superbly maintained.

By the early 2000s, only 54 per cent of homes in the College Park and Old Oak ward which contains the Estate were socially rented.  Most of these were now managed by the Old Oak Housing Association, formed in 1999, as part of a stock transfer from Hammersmith and Fulham council.  A £23 million refurbishment of the Estate’s homes followed.

Social housing in this new guise had changed also – it no longer housed an upwardly mobile working class and had come, in the eyes of many, to be seen as housing of last resort for the less well-off.   Old Oak was very far from being a so-called ‘sink estate’ but it did not escape these changes – 22 per cent of the population (as against 14 per cent nationally) were in receipt of some form of benefit.   And local people called for better policing to tackle the problems they perceived of anti-social behaviour, drug-dealing and car theft.

Erconwald Street

This was not the vision of John Burns and those early LCC housing reformers.  But the Estate itself – whilst it cannot escape the social and economic dynamics which have so damaged council estates and their communities in more recent years – remains a superb example of an ideal and a duty that we should seek to emulate.

Note

I’ve posted some additional early photographs and plans of the Estate on my Tumblr account.

Sources

(1) Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC housing architects and their work 1893-1914 (1980)

(2) Letter from LCC Architect’s Department, 19 March 1907, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/008, London Metropolitan Archives

(3) London County Council, Housing of the Working Classes, 1855-1912 (1912)

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

(5)  Quoted in Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing

(6) Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Design and Conservation, Development Services Division, ‘Design Guidelines for Old Oak and Wormholt Conservation Area’ (1996).  The Estate was designated a conservation area in 1980.

(7) Memorandum 9 December 1920, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/009, London Metropolitan Archives

(8) Letter to LCC from Mrs M Swallow, Old Oak Cooperative Women’s Guild, July 1920, in LCC/HSG/GEN/01/009, London Metropolitan Archives

(9)  This and the following quotation are taken – as are subsequent statistics – from Laura Lane and Anne Power, LSE Housing and Communities, Low income housing estates: a report to Hammersmith United Charities (September 2009)

Early photographs of the Estate are taken from the Hammersmith United Charities website.