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 Holborn, Part I: Early Council Housing to 1945

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1920s, 1930s, Holborn, Pre-1914

Holborn, created in 1900, was at just 403 acres the smallest of the London boroughs. With a population to match – declining from 59,000 when established to barely 22,000 on abolition in 1965 – and an overwhelmingly Conservative council, neither was it in the forefront of council housebuilding. Still, it has a rich council housing history and after 1945, with Sydney Cook as Borough Architect (who would go on to make his name in the same office at Camden), it stood in the forefront of modernist design.

Holborn can be seen near the centre of this interwar map of the Metropolitan Boroughs. Together with St Pancras and Hampstead, it would form the London Borough of Camden from 1965.

This first post will look at its earlier history and begins with what the Survey of London describes as ‘the first council housing in England’.  In fact, Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road, completed in 1865, were built by the City of London, largely at the initiative of Alderman Sydney Waterlow, better known as the founder of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company. For that reason and given the nature of the City of London Corporation, I place it more strongly in the Victorian tradition of philanthropic housing and, like most of these early ‘model dwellings’ and their relatively high rents, its 168 tenements housed the better-off working class and the lower middle class.  The buildings were demolished in 1970. (1)

An early engraving of Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Road

The City of London built another block, Viaduct Buildings containing 40 tenements, in 1880 but it was the London County Council (LCC), created in 1889, that built most of Holborn’s council housing proper before the First World War.  The LCC’s first scheme was a small one, intended to clear and improve a run-down area between Brooke Street and Leather Lane. Completed in 1897, Cranley Buildings (unusually three-storey tenements rather than the five that was the norm) comprised just twelve two- and three-roomed tenements, housing 60 people. Only 55 had been displaced by slum clearance but the usual problem of high rents ensured that these new residents too were the better-off rather than the poorest who had previously lived in the area. (2)

Cranley Buildings

The LCC’s next scheme, the Bourne Estate, south of Clerkenwell Road, was a much grander affair: eleven principally five-storey blocks containing some 763 homes: (3)

designed by the LCC Architect’s Department in a free Classical style, with Arts and Crafts touches … [of] international significance as the model for the much admired and highly influential public housing erected in Vienna immediately after the First World War.

It’s the grand arches which find their greatest echo in the later Austrian schemes but the attractive green courtyards of the Bourne Estate contain little of the communal buzz sought by Red Vienna.

The Bourne Estate

Holborn was far from alone among the metropolitan borough councils in building no council housing of its own before 1914 but its overwhelmingly Conservative membership no doubt made that decision easier.  Two Labour councillors were elected in 1919 but they soon lost their seats and through most of the 1920s the Council was wholly Conservative.

The First World War and its aftermath – and specifically the promise of ‘Homes for Heroes’ – had changed much in 1919 and the celebrated Housing Act of that year required that all councils not only survey local housing needs (within three months!) but actively prepare schemes to meet them.  Holborn went through the motions, going so far as to inspect four possible sites for council housing, but finally concluded that: (4)

Although from a purely public health point of view there is at present necessity existing in the Borough for better housing accommodation for the working classes, many other factors have to be taken into consideration by the Council.

To be fair, there was some truth in the factors identified: population movement from central London, cheaper and better housing in suburban districts, cheaper commuting, and Holborn’s growing significance as a business centre. But they didn’t obviate the pressing problems of the day, not least the 611 unadapted large family houses now in multiple occupation.  Clearly, political opposition to public housing remained the determining factor for the Council’s Conservative majority.

The 1919 report identified a precise total of 999 LCC flats in the borough. This number was not added to in the interwar period but Holborn itself did in the end build some 92 council homes by the early 1930s – only Chelsea and Paddington Metropolitan Boroughs provided fewer in the period.

Betterton House

Holborn’s first council housing was built on Betterton Street in Covent Garden. Betterton House was opened in 1927 by Prince Arthur of Connaught, a small, five-storey infill block of 15 tenements designed by Borough Surveyor JE Parr, replacing buildings declared derelict. The arched front entrance led to a stairway providing balcony access at the rear. Fifteen further tenements were added in a 1930 extension. A small but active Labour opposition group on the council were denouncing the flats as ‘slums’ by the later 1930s. (5)

Boswell House. Richbell, a post-war block, lies to the immediate right set back from the previous street line.

The Council’s next scheme – Boswell House in Boswell Street, Bloomsbury – also designed by Parr, comprised 62 flats and was opened in 1932.  There were over 400 applicants for the new homes; the lucky few selected were: (6)

Holborn residents living in unsatisfactory conditions, in a number of cases being large families in single room tenements. Many of the tenants are employed in market work, in hotels and restaurants, or other occupations where the hours of work necessitate residence near to the place of work.

The design details provided by the Medical Officer of Health suggest the Council took some pride in the scheme: (7)

All the flats will have a well-ventilated larder, sink, draining board, dresser-cupboard, gas cooker, copper-boiler, bathroom and W.C., coal bunker, cupboards, shelving, hat and coat racks, etc. … A playing yard is provided for children, and the blocks of flats have been so arranged as to provide the maximum amount of sunshine, light and air for the dwellings. The flats, balconies, staircases and the yard will be lighted at night by electric light.

This was, unusually, a seven-storey scheme (the top two floors were maisonettes), necessary to make fullest use of the restricted, one-third of an acre, site. Almost uniquely, for a council housing scheme before the 1946 special lifts subsidy, it contained two service lifts. In this, at least, Holborn was ahead of the game.

That does, however, represent the peak of its pre-war housing record. The context is important – a population that by 1937 was estimated to have fallen to 34,600 – but on other measures housing need remained severe. From 1930, housing legislation focused on slum clearance and rehousing.  The 1935 Housing Act required all local authorities to undertake a survey of overcrowding in their districts.  In Holborn, by the modest criteria of the day, 700 families were found to be living in overcrowded conditions, over nine percent of the local population. This placed Holborn tenth among the capital’s 28 Metropolitan Boroughs for overcrowding. Much therefore remained to be done.

Much more after the devastating impact of the Blitz.  Some 650 buildings were destroyed in Holborn (one seventh of the Borough’s total) and 426 people killed. Around 282 high explosive bombs fell at the height of the Blitz in April-May 1941 and a number of V1 and V2 rockets in a second wave of attacks in 1944. Per head of population, Holborn was reckoned the worst hit administrative district in the country. (8)

An image of Buckea’s Bakers Shop on the corner of Boswell Street and Theobalds Road taken in 1945.

The political impact of the war seems almost as seismic.  In the general election of June 1945, Irene Marcousé, elected a local councillor in 1939, stood for Labour in Holborn. She posed the all-important question of the day: (9)

Who is going to win the peace? Are you – the ordinary citizens of Holborn and Britain?  Or are THEY – the privileged few who have always cheated you and the peace and plenty you have earned?

Marcousé didn’t win but she came within 925 votes of the victorious Conservative candidate on a 19-point swing in a two-horse race. This was a very creditable result in Holborn where business voters – those with a vote through ownership of business premises in the constituency – represented around 6 percent of the electorate. (Plural voting was abolished for parliamentary elections in 1948 but remained in local elections – and significant therefore in Holborn – till 1969.)

Across the country, Labour gained 239 seats to form its first (landslide) majority government. This was a harbinger of the November local elections in which Labour took control of the Borough for the first and only time, winning 24 seats to the Tories’ 18.  Marcousé became leader of the Council and chair of the Housing Committee.

It’s worth a pause here to take a look at Marcousé and the new council. Marcousé was born in East Prussia in 1900 and educated in Belgium before graduating from the universities of Heidelberg and London. Frank Dobson, Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras in later years, recalled she could sing The Internationale in English, French and German.  She had married Hugh Chaplin (Principal Keeper of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and a fellow Labour activist) in 1938; together they lived in Russell Square.  But she was, in Dobson’s words, ‘a hard-bitten, awkward and effective old socialist’. Better known as Ina Chaplin, she would represent the party on the LCC, Greater London Council and Inner London Education Authority till 1977. (10)

Under Marcousé’s leadership, in what almost might be described as the ruins of Holborn, the Council  opened information and social centres in disused and bomb-damaged premises, created new children’s playgrounds, organised open-air entertainments in local squares, and published a regular council newsletter. It was a broad and cultural programme that seems in some ways to prefigure the New Left politics of later years.

But the key issue was housing and we’ll examine its record on that and the longer post-war story next week.

Sources

(1) Philip Temple (ed), Farringdon Road‘, Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, (2008)

(2) Fuller detail is provided in Martin Stilwell, Housing the Workers Early London County Council Housing 1889-1914, 10: Brooke’s Market, Holborn Scheme (pdf)

(3) Historic England, Bourne Estate (Northern Part), Denys House, Frewell House, Ledham House, Radcliffe House, Redman House, Scrope House, Skipwith House: listing details

(4) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1919 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(5) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1927 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972). On Labour, see Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s.

(6) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1933 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(7) Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1932 (Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972)

(8) A Walk in History, Friday 30th May – The Blitz

(9) Quoted in Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Random House, 2010)

(10) See Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s. 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 (an out of London boarding school founded by the LCC in 1951 where she was a governor until 1986).