Cressingham Gardens, Lambeth: ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’

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1960s, 1970s, Lambeth, Regeneration

Last week, we introduced you to the architectural vision of Ted Hollamby and the reforming ideals of a generation of Lambeth councillors. They came together in Cressingham Gardens – a council estate intended to provide a sense of community and the highest quality housing for the ordinary people of the Borough.  That legacy is now under threat.

A plan of the estate © Karthaus Design Ltd, Cressingham Gardens Outline Redevelopment Options Study

Cressingham’s neighbourliness was fostered by a number of small design touches – front doors which faced each other, kitchen windows facing the walkways outside, and the walkways themselves which separated people and cars.

Hardel Walk

The estate as a whole was designed as a mixed community with homes suitable to elderly and disabled people, single people and couples as well as families.  A nursery school was provided in the innovatively-designed building now known as the Rotunda.

It was a ‘green’ estate also.  Many of the larger homes have patio gardens – a Hollamby signature at this time.  All were designed to overlook green open space.  Even in the centre of the estate, existing trees were preserved or new ones planted.  Concrete flowerbeds were provided on the raised walkways to ensure every home its splash of greenery and colour.

This panoramic view shows Teletubby Land with the estate nestling behind to the left and the near seamless border with Brockwell Park to the right. Click for a larger image.

But the most striking aspect of the estate is its location at the edge of Brockwell Park. In the dry language of the architects’ design brochure: (1)

It is proposed to provide all the accommodation needed in low rise dwellings. This will avoid any visual obtrusion on the views from Brockwell Park and will ensure that all dwellings will have a close contact with the site. Part of the plateau has been kept clear of buildings to extend the landscape of the Park into the site. The buildings are arranged around this in such a way that the lower buildings are adjacent to it with the height increasing to a maximum of four storeys around the perimeter of the site away from the park.

Real life, in this case, exceeds architectural description.  From the park, the estate is an almost seamless addition to its horizon; from the estate, the park seems almost to be its back garden.  They blend literally in what residents call Teletubby Land for its three green mounds – a central green space which is part of the Brockwell Park Conservation Area.

Another view of estate’s abundant greenery and boundary with Brockwell Park

This was a hard-fought achievement. In presenting the scheme, its lead architect, Charles Attwood argued successfully for a density of 100 persons per acre (against the expected 140) and he used a contour map of the site to identify ‘sightlines’ from the park by which to place the ‘fingers’ of low-rise development. Higher density housing in linked blocks was used to create a perimeter which sheltered the rest of the estate from the noise of Tulse Hill Road.

The rear of the estate backing on to Tulse Hill Road

The council minutes of the committee meeting which approved the design were unusually expressive in recording the councillors’ congratulations to Cressingham’s architects on their ‘bold and imaginative scheme’. (2)

Equal care was taken in the design of the individual homes.  Parker Morris standards guaranteed spacious homes but Hollamby and his team ensured they were as light and airy as possible with internal walls minimised, floor to ceiling windows provided which overlooked green space, high ceilings and skylights.

According to Ken Livingstone, Hollamby ‘passionately believed that council housing should be as good if not better than private housing’. (3) In Cressingham Gardens he triumphantly achieved this.

In all, 290 homes were planned.  A small extension to the scheme at its northern perimeter raised this to 306. Construction began on the £1.58m contract in May 1971 with an estimated completion date of January 1974. In those turbulent times within the building trade, by the summer of 1972 the contractors were already over six months behind schedule and in October work was halted by a national building strike.  The job was finished by direct labour and eventually completed in 1978.

And that, in a sense, should be the end of the story.  The estate has been a good home to generations of residents – as they’ll tell you themselves: (4)

When we came here, we thought ‘my God! It’s wonderful!’

It was like a fairy-tale, so beautiful

Of the 300 homes currently occupied, almost 70 per cent are still rented from the Council (or Lambeth Living in its current incarnation).  While there have been problems of crime and anti-social behaviour in the past, Cressingham now ‘is seen as a safe place’ and its crime rate is lower than surrounding areas.

Overwhelmingly, residents talk of their friendly neighbours and the estate’s strong sense of community – they look out for each other, keep an eye on each other’s children.  It’s what planners call ‘natural surveillance’ nowadays.  It’s really just part of that ‘village-like’ feel that Hollamby hearkened to all those years ago.

This is then by all accounts a success story except for the fact that the estate has, like the rest of us, grown older.  Six flats at the northern end of the estate have been empty for sixteen years due to subsidence.  It’s stated that repairs would cost £260,000 – a relatively small amount given the overall shortage of social housing and some question why the Council has allowed these flats to remain empty for so long.

A 2013 Council survey claimed that 40 per cent of council homes did not meet the current Decent Homes standard. The estate’s supporters query the figure which appears to result from a more general stock review carried out in 2012.

Structural surveyors, commissioned to carry out an estate-wide survey which might achieve ‘a common understanding, concluded that the structural condition of the homes was ‘generally acceptable’ though localised areas did ‘warrant repair’.  It’s obvious that failing zinc roofs and guttering require replacement but the report also makes it clear that many non-structural and drainage problems have been caused by poor tree maintenance over the years. (5)

Lambeth has claimed it will cost £3.4m to carry out such works.  It has also, in the meantime, raised the spectre of regeneration. (6)

Residents of other London estates – such as the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Woodberry Down in Hackney – understand the potential implications of such plans well.  Higher density housing, new registered social housing landlords and increased rents, the loss of social housing units (homes to the people who need them), ‘affordable’ rents which are a travesty of the term, and a sell-off of prime real estate to private developers have all been central elements of the regeneration schemes implemented to date.

Currently, the Council claims a range of options are still on the table, including refurbishment only, infill, various partial redevelopments and comprehensive redevelopment. (7)  Faced with resident protest, it has begun what appears to be a more authentic process of consultation though those most fearful of the regeneration option question its sincerity.  Many residents also question why the estate has been so poorly maintained over many years and fear a hidden agenda.  A number of estates subject to ‘regeneration’ have been run down until demolition was claimed as the only viable option.

The bottom line is that the majority of Cressingham’s residents love their estate and want to stay in it as it is.  An independent survey (carried out by Social Life commissioned by the Council to lead on resident engagement) found 81 per cent wanted to stay in their homes with repairs done. The ten per cent who wanted to move either wanted bigger homes or were fearful of the disruption of redevelopment.  That is effectively a unanimous vote in favour of the Estate – a massive tribute to the vision and professionalism of Ted Hollamby and his team and the Lambeth Council of earlier years.

In 1974, Hollamby outlined a philosophy of architecture that was ‘anti-monumental, anti-stylistic, and fit for ordinary people’.  In 1981 Lord Esher, past president of RIBA, described Cressingham Gardens as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’.  That might sound rather faint praise in a different context but it’s surely exactly the kind of encomium that Hollamby would have wished for and it’s one whose truth the estate’s residents would surely endorse. (8)

If you’re in London, do visit the estate during the Open House London weekend on 20 and 21 September, 2014.   For more information on the residents’ campaign against regeneration and background on the estate, visit Save Cressingham Gardens.

Sources

(1) This – with a range of other resources and thorough description and analysis – can be read at the excellent post by Single Aspect on Cressingham Gardens.

(2) Lambeth Borough Council Housing Committee minutes: 20 January 1969 (LBL/22/6)

(3) Ken Livingstone, You Can’t Say That: Memoirs (2011)

(4) Social Life, Living on Cressingham Gardens: Social Life’s conversations with residents 20.10.13

(5) Tall Consulting Structural Engineers, Cressingham Gardens Estate SW2 Structural Report, November 2013

(6) Cressingham Gardens: Lambeth Housing Standard cost assumptions

(7) Karthaus Design Ltd, Cressingham Gardens Outline Redevelopment Options Study (June 2014)

(8) The Hollamby quote is from ‘The Social Art’, RIBA Journal, March 1974; the Esher quote can be found in A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England, 1940-1980 (1981)

The Save Cressingham Gardens campaign has created a fine video on the estate and its residents available here on YouTube.

For more information, description and illustration of the estate, do visit the blog post by Single Aspect.

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Cressingham Gardens, Lambeth: ‘a sense of smallness inside the bigness’

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1960s, 1970s, Lambeth

Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth is one of the finest council estates – I use that maligned term deliberately – in the country.  Superbly designed to make the best use of its site adjacent to Brockwell Park, it’s an apt tribute to the ideals and professionalism of its chief architect Ted Hollamby and a generation of local councillors who believed council tenants deserved nothing but the best.  It’s sad to report that this legacy is now under threat.

The southern edge of Cressingham Gardens looking towards Holy Trinity church

Back in 1974, with regrettable prescience, Hollamby lamented the contemporary tendency for architects ‘to work for business and lucrative contracts rather than local government’. (1)   His was a different generation – part of a post-war wave of architects and planners who believed that ‘architecture should be for the people, ordinary people’. (2)

Ted and Doris Hollamby, shown in retirement at the Red House

Hollamby and his wife Doris were members of the Communist Party (he finally left the Party after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) but his mother’s gentler politics – she was a member of that unsung group, the Cooperative Women’s Guild – was an equal influence, as was his stint as a young architect working for the Miners’ Welfare Commission.

But it was at the London County Council’s Architects’ Department that Hollamby truly cut his architectural teeth:

It was the most wonderful place to work in, we had the most wonderful work to do.  We had a Council that wanted to do the most wonderful things and the sheer opportunity to do them, and that was where those ideas of making a better world, we thought we were actually doing it’

In 1962, he was appointed Chief Architect for the Borough of Lambeth.  Interviewed in the Council Chamber with half the councillors present and appointed there and then, Hollamby describes the process as ‘inspiring’ – he was ‘amazed that there were such interesting and progressive views that were being put out by the councillors’.

One question and response was revealing.  He was asked by Council Leader Archie Cotton, ‘What do you think about that chap, le Corbusier?  Do you think we ought to ask him to do something here in Lambeth?’  Hollamby demurred – le Corbusier ‘would not be bringing to Lambeth something  which was essentially part of its history…What he would be interested in doing is imposing one of his sculptures’.

Hollamby’s own contribution to Lambeth housing would be of a very different stamp but first he was given the freedom to organise his own department, a first for Lambeth as it was to be enlarged and given new powers in the forthcoming reorganisation of London local government.  Hollamby determined it would be ‘multi-professional’, equipped to deal with strategic town planning, development control, architectural design, rehabilitation and conservation work – ‘the whole design field’.  At its peak, it would comprise over 750 architects, planners and construction workers.

In the sixties, Hollamby and Lambeth Council worked harmoniously at the cutting edge of housing and planning policy, pioneering the extensive use of rehabilitation and infill housing with Hollamby himself described as ‘the acknowledged leader in high density housing with low buildings’. (3) Cressingham Gardens takes its place in this pantheon.

These progressive policies withstood the arrival of a Conservative majority – described by Hollamby as ‘very empirical’ – on the Council in 1968.  In fact, one John Major was the deputy chair of the Housing Committee which approved the Cressingham Gardens scheme.

A bigger shock came with the arrival of Ken Livingstone and a new generation of Labour councillors –suspicious of council officer power – in 1972 but eventually a guarded mutual respect emerged. (4)  However, Hollamby could not survive – or no longer wished to – the political take-over by Ted Knight (‘Red Ted’ to those of you with longer memories) in 1978, despite the support of some Labour councillors including Peter Mandelson.  In 1981 he jumped ship to become Chief Architect and Planner to London Docklands Development Corporation, retiring from that position in 1985. (He died in 1999.)

I’m sorry if all this seems to have taken us some away from the focus of this post, Cressingham Gardens, but it seems important to establish this context and remember an era when local government had the power to innovate and held still to a vision of transforming the lives of our people.  In this project, it attracted some of the most idealistic and able individuals in the country; not all were ‘big names’, of course, though we have focused on those here.

Back in the 1960s when Labour and Conservative governments were vying in the number of council houses they could construct, a chief element of that transformative power lay in housing – in razing the slums and building (massively) anew.  In 1964, Richard Crossman, Labour Minister of Housing and Local Government (the terminology is telling), requested London’s new councils to prepare a seven-year housing programme.

Lambeth Towers

Lambeth responded enthusiastically.   Hollamby was not totally opposed to high-rise – though he preferred point blocks to slab.  Lambeth Towers, designed by George Finch, approved in 1964 but not finally completed until 1971, was a flagship Lambeth scheme – a group of eleven-storey blocks which included a medical practice, old people’s club, post office and shops: ‘a microcosm of the 1960s Welfare State’ according to one source. (5)

But central government was insisting increasingly that priority be ‘given to industrialised building systems and the rationalisation of building techniques’. (6) Lambeth architects used large-panel systems in a number of schemes at this time but their insistence on customised designs precluded cost-savings and strong reservations about the suitability of point blocks for families remained.

Here Hollamby’s philosophy of architecture and design was crucial: (7)

People do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings – but do they really like the monotonous, equally vast and characterless suburb?…[Most] people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not.

This approach complemented another of Hollamby’s priorities – community: (8)

We are not just dealing with housing as such.  We are building a community.  We don’t look at this in terms of so many houses. Rather we think in terms of the functions of a community. We don’t, you see, have club rooms for tenants but centres for a community.  We don’t have old people’s homes set aside on their own. We integrate them into other things we are planning.

‘Community’ was, of course, a central theme of planning discourse in the post-war period but it was one more easily fulfilled by the smaller-scale and design detail of Hollamby’s housing schemes for Lambeth in this period.  Hollamby sought, in his words, ‘to create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’. (9)

These principles were trialled in a number of Lambeth housing schemes of the late sixties – at Central Hill near Crystal Palace and in Virginia Walk and Cherry Laurel Walk on Tulse Hill, for example.  How did all this play out in their Tulse Hill neighbour, Cressingham Gardens?

Next week, we’ll look more closely at the estate itself and how these high ideals worked out in practice. We’ll look too at the threat currently posed to Cressingham as ‘regeneration’ is mooted.

Sources

(1) Quoted in ‘Hollamby’s Approach to Architecture’, Building, 1 February 1974

(2) Ted Hollamby, interview with Jill Lever, 1997. National Life Story Collection: Architects’ Lives, British Library.  Other quotations from Hollamby are taken from the same source unless otherwise credited.

(3) Jill Craigie, ‘People versus Planners’, The Times, 14 September, 1968.  Hollamby also appeared in Craigie’s BBC documentary, ‘Who are the Vandals?’, screened in February 1967.

(4) Ken Livingstone later wrote ‘We got on really well, except that I wanted things done overnight and Ted’s nature was to go over the details of every development until it was perfect’.  Ken Livingstone, You Can’t Say That: Memoirs (2011)

(5) Utopia London, Lambeth Towers

(6) Lambeth Borough Council Housing Committee minutes: 4 April 1965

(7) Hollamby speaking on ‘The Architect’s Approach to Architecture’ at RIBA, 24 January 1974, quoted in the Architects Journal, 6 February 1974.

(8) Quoted in ‘Lambeth – Edward Hollamby talks to Peter Rawstorne’, RIBA Journal, July 1965

(9) Quoted in Concrete Quarterly, January-March 1972

For more information on the residents’ campaign against regeneration and background on the estate, visit Save Cressingham Gardens.

If you’re impatient for more description, analysis and illustration of the estate, visit the excellent blog post by Single Aspect.

If you’re in London, do visit it yourself during the Open House London weekend on 20 and 21 September.

Lambeth’s interwar tenements: the necessity of ‘block dwellings’ for the poorer working class

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1920s, 1930s, Lambeth, Multi-storey

Last week, we looked at the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth’s very own garden suburbs – housing estates of real quality constructed in the 1920s in the south of the borough. But such accommodation was unaffordable to many of Lambeth’s poorer residents – those most in need of rehousing – and often lay at too great a distance from their employment.

Initially, the Borough had left the most significant rehousing efforts in its poorer northern districts to the London County Council.  The Kennings Estate in Kennington – seven four-storey blocks – was completed in 1928.  The China Walk Estate – six five-storey blocks – was begun in 1928 and completed in 1934.  Both were typical LCC tenement schemes providing solid and sanitary inner-city housing.

Click here for a location map of Lambeth’s interwar housing estates

But by the later 1920s, the Borough Council was also beginning to rethink its own policies and priorities.  In the earlier period, the ‘Lambeth Policy’ of reconditioning slum properties had held sway while the Council concentrated on building in the suburbs. In this the Council reflected a widespread assumption that, even as a better-off working class occupied new municipal housing, their relocation would have beneficial knock-on effects for their poorer compatriots.

In 1929, Lambeth’s Medical Officer of Health challenged this belief: (1)

the type of dwelling subsidised by the 1923 and 1924 [Housing] Acts is far too expensive for the people who are most in need of other accommodation.  It has been argued that every new dwelling erected and occupied means a relief to the overcrowding elsewhere, and that its effect is felt through several strata of society. This is probably so, but the effect does not sink to that portion of the population which must live near its place of employment and cannot afford a rent of more than 8s to 12s a week, including rates.

He went on to suggest that two-room tenements – comprising living room, scullery and bathroom and one bedroom – would be adequate for smaller families of three to four. In 1918, the Tudor Walters Report – which would set post-war expectations of municipal housing design – had stipulated a minimum of two bedrooms.  Lambeth’s Conservative-controlled council probably felt more comfortable in challenging these standards than would contemporary Labour councils but it was, to be fair, also grappling with the genuine issues of affordability that we examined last week.

By 1931, Lambeth’s Borough Engineer, Osmond Cattlin, presumably either reflecting or informing Council opinion, was offering his own critique.  Postwar Tudor Walters standards of housing density – even as statutorily amended and relaxed (from 12 homes per acre to 20 where necessary) – could ‘not provide the largest number of dwellings within reasonable access of the place of work’.  Centrally located ‘block dwellings’ were the inevitable solution. (2)

The Black Prince Estate

In fact, Lambeth had begun to implement this policy four years earlier.  The Council’s first tenement scheme was built on Princes Road (now Black Prince Road) in 1927 – four five-storey blocks containing 108 flats and accommodating around 500.  This was ‘a high quality design…of stock brick with generous red brick dressings, given additional height and elegance by the tall chimneys’.  Two smaller blocks were demolished after the Second World War to create additional green space but Sullivan House and Deacon House remain along with a pair of iron gates bearing the initials of the Borough. (3)

Edward House plans (taken from Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’

Further tenement blocks followed.  Edward House, a four-storey block on Newburn Street in Kennington built on land leased from the locally powerful Duchy of Cornwall Estate, opened in 1931.

The scheme comprised 24 two-room flats and 12 three-room – each flat also contained a scullery and bathroom – let at rents of 11s 7d (58p) and 15s 1d (76p) respectively.  We saw last week that rents on the most expensive of the Council’s housing estates in the south of the borough lay between 20s 11d (£1.05) and 23s 7d (£1.18) a week.

Edward House, Newburn Street

Cattlin described the Newburn Street tenements as ‘of an experimental character…an attempt to provide accommodation at low rental…for this reason the two-room flat has been included for suitable tenants’. (4)

This plan shows the two-room (one bedroom) flats

Four further five-storey blocks with 96 flats in all were built on Cottington Street, just north of Kennington underground station, in 1932.  Three of the blocks were demolished in the 1980s but Isabella House survives.

Once more Lambeth’s ambitions grew as its experience expanded.  While, as we’ve seen, the Borough was initially reluctant to ‘represent’ and clear slum districts, by 1930 Medical Officer of Health had concluded that ‘much of the older property in the Inner Wards  was so worn that no expenditure can now render it fit for human habitation’.  He singled out the Hemans Street area which comprised 210 houses accommodating 1381 people as a particular case in point. (5)

The shift coincides, of course, with the change in national policy marked by the emphasis on slum clearance in Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act.  Lambeth’s first slum clearance scheme would also be a test case for Cattlin’s policy as many of the residents were said to be traders on the nearby Lambeth Walk and Wilcox Road markets and unwilling to move even as far as the LCC’s Vassall Road Estate which lay less than a mile away. For this reason, Hemans Street would be Lambeth’s largest interwar tenement scheme – 112 flats to accommodate around 600 people.

Hemans Street, Wandsworth Road frontage

A compulsory purchase order was agreed in 1934 and building began in the following year.  The scheme originally comprised six five-storey blocks – twelve two-room, 63 three-room, 17 four-room, eleven five-room, six six-room and three seven-room at rents between 8s 7d (43p) and 21s 5d (£1.07). Now just a single block remains but, even in its present very sorry state, it gives some idea of the design ideals Lambeth brought to its project: (6)

It is a well-articulated design combining art deco references found in Miami Beach (particularly the brise de soleil horizontal streamlined flats of the façade and the bold, white rendered balconies on the rear elevation) and more traditional vernacular influences – notably the tiled mansard roof and red brick central elevation.

The architecture of Hemans Street echoes that of the almost exactly contemporary LCC Oaklands Estate in Clapham, further south in the borough.  Both represent a break with the sober neo-Georgian that had characterised earlier tenement building though Oaklands’ sweeping ‘moderne’ design is a little more daring.

The first blocks were completed in 1936.  In March 1938, the Estate was visited by George VI and, according to Cattlin’s obituary, officially opened by his wife.  Contemporary images show civic dignitaries and excited crowds and offer glimpses of the buildings in their heyday. (7)

Hemans Street rear view

Hemans Street rear balconies

Away from the dignity conferred by architecture and the royal presence, more prosaic matters engaged the Housing Committee.  Sanitary inspectors were posted at homes being vacated to disinfest the furniture and effects of the families – moved at the rate of four or five a day – being relocated. Bedding was disinfested at the Council’s Wanless Road depot which remains the present Lambeth Council’s pest control HQ. (8)

Tenement accommodation, though an increasing element of both the LCC’s and London boroughs’ inner-city rehousing efforts, remained controversial.  There were those in the Labour movement who disliked its ‘barracks-like’ – always the adjective used by critics – appearance and lack of garden space.  Others lamented the loss of the close community life said to be fostered by earlier cheek by jowl conditions.

A middle-class observer – the secretary of a Lambeth Care Committee – stated that flat-dwellers were ‘much more inclined to keep themselves to themselves’ and that ‘the children of the little streets [seemed] to enjoy their play more’.  Given that one of the abandoned games she laments is ‘chasing rats with the help of the family dog’, one might be forgiven for not completely sharing this rosy-hued nostalgia. (9)

Interestingly, Mary Chamberlain’s study of Growing Up in Lambeth is far less romantic about earlier slum life in its description of neighbourly disputes and domestic violence. (10) The simple reality, of course, is that poverty is not ennobling.  The complex truth is that the lives of the poor are part most frequently of someone else’s agenda.

That agenda in the interwar period focused on housing.  Lambeth’s faltering but ultimately impressive efforts in this regard – both its cottage estates and tenements – reflect both the typical pressures and dynamics of the period and the peculiarities of the borough and its ambition to do things well.

Sources

(1) Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes: Report from the Medical Officer of Health, 10 January 1929

(2) Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’, Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, March 1931, 52

(3) London Borough of Lambeth, Vauxhall Gardens Conservation Area: Designation report and character assessment

(4) Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’

(5) Quoted in Social Services in North Lambeth and Kennington.  A Study from Lady Margaret Hall Settlement (1939)

(6) Edmund Bird, Survey of Historic Housing Estates of the 1920s and 1930s, London Borough of Lambeth Conservation and Urban Design Team (July 2003)

(7) Osmond Cattlin’s obituary can be viewed here. Archival images of the royal visit can be seen here and here.

(8) Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes, July 9 1936

(9) Quoted in Social Services in North Lambeth and Kennington. 

(10) Mary Chamberlain, Growing Up in Lambeth (1989)

My thanks to the staff of the Lambeth Archives in the Minet Library for their advice and help in accessing some of the sources listed above.

Lambeth’s interwar cottage estates: the ‘character of a sleepy garden village’

Tags

1920s, Cottage suburbs, Lambeth

The Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth formed in 1900 was a strange hybrid – stretching seven miles north to south but little over two and a half miles across at its widest point, encompassing industrial and poor working-class districts to the north and leafy middle-class suburbs to the south.  This duality found reflection in the Borough’s politics and housing policies.  But it did create some of the finest council housing of its time.

In terms of party politics, the Borough followed a London pattern in the interwar period.  Labour briefly controlled the Council in an alliance with the Liberal Party from 1919 to 1922 but, wiped out in 1922, it would not hold power again until 1937.  The Conservative Party governed in the interim.

In social terms, in 1925, Lambeth’s Medical Officer of Health stated ‘the well-known fact that there are practically no so-called “slum areas” (in the usual acceptance of the term) in the Borough’. (1)

This might have surprised Frank Briant, the radical Liberal MP for Lambeth North, who just six years earlier had described ‘almost unbelievable congestion’ in the Borough.  He continued: (2)

I know of basement rooms in which people regularly sleep which are only 6 ft high and their ceilings less than a foot above ground level. The only admittance for light and air is through a low grating which it is impossible to keep always open owing to the dirt and wet getting in.

And as late as 1938 some 5600 homes with inhabited underground rooms remained.

But the Medical Officer of Health’s statement was perhaps true in the narrow sense that there were few courts or back-to-backs in Lambeth.   Rather, as Briant described in his constituency, there was a large number of houses, built in more prosperous times, ‘formerly rented by single families…now let out as tenements’.  According to the 1931 Census, over two thirds of Lambeth families lived in multiple occupation; over one third lived three families to a home. (3)

In the 1920s, the ruling Conservative Party pursued what it was proud to call the ‘Lambeth Policy’ – a policy of reconditioning rather than slum clearance.  Between 1920 and 1925, some 2966 inspections resulted in just 107 demolitions; in the vast majority of cases the Council’s housing inspectors specified and then enforced repairs.

But Lambeth did build – in its own suburbs to the south, on a small scale but impressively.  Its 1920s schemes reflected the spirit of the 1918 Tudor Walters Report and the design ideals of the immediate post-war period and its pledge of ‘homes for heroes’.

St Louis Road, St Louis Estate

The Borough’s St Louis Estate in West Norwood was completed in 1923 – a mix of cottages and two-storey flats.  The homes were modest – though the flats’ porticoes and windows add a little grandeur – but careful attention was paid to contemporary town planning principles in their arrangement and landscaping.

St Louis Road, St Louis Estate

The Holderness Estate in Norwood completed two years later took these principles further.  Tree-lined avenues and the green open space at its heart complemented the ‘steeply-pitched tiled roofs and overhanging eaves, tile quoins and country cottage elevations’ of its housing.  According to Edmund Bird, the ‘general character of the estate is one of a sleepy garden village’. (4)

Tivoli Road, Holderness Estate

Furneaux Avenue, Holderness Estate

The Bloomfield Estate would be the finest of the Borough’s interwar estates.  The Council had acquired 18.5 acres of land in Norwood belonging to the late Sir Alfred Tritton in 1924.  It proposed building 318 dwellings on the land at a density of 17 per acre. (5)   A tender of £55,316 to build the first 86 houses was accepted from private contractors Higgs in October that year. The relatively high amount was agreed by the Ministry of Health in view of the difficulties of the site. (6)

Durning Road, Bloomfield Estate

The Estate was finished in 1927, the planners having made imaginative use of its hilly terrain as can be seen in the ‘village green’ on Durning Road.  Garden City ideals are also apparent in the cul-de-sacs of Gibbs Square and Close, in the overall greenery of the Estate – in September 1927, the Housing Committee agreed to spend £270 on trees for Bloomfield – and the arts and crafts references in the timber porches of some of the homes and other detailing.

Gibbs Square, Bloomfield Estate

Roman Rise, Bloomfield Estate

In planning and architectural terms, there is genuine quality to Lambeth’s working-class garden suburbs of this time.  Still, as a corrective to the view that construction failings belong only to the era of modern system-building, it’s worth recording that a severe snap of cold weather in March 1929 led to 325 of 535 homes on the three Lambeth estates suffering burst pipes. The Bloomfield Estate Tenants’ Association complained that roofs weren’t boarded, nor cistern and water pipes lagged.

That cost-cutting notwithstanding, this was expensive housing.  The Bloomfield Estate had cost £234,931 to build, £195,888 on the housing alone.  Such expenditure was inevitably reflected in the rents and therefore in the housing’s affordability.

Floor plan of three-bed home (taken from Osmond Cattlin, ‘Provision and Planning of Working-Class Dwellings: Post-War Policy’, Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, March 1931)

In 1925, as the Council came to determine allocations for the new Bloomfield Estate, it estimated that prospective tenants would likely require an income of £4 a week to afford its rents.  Of 3500 then on the Council waiting list, only around 500 qualified. In north Lambeth – where housing needs were most pressing – the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement reckoned the average wage of ‘a family man’ into the 1930s to be around £3 a week.  In 1929, with rents set at between 20s 11d (£1.05) and 23s 7d (£1.18) a week, wages on the Bloomfield Estate were said to average between £3 and £4 a week.  Not surprisingly, around one third of tenants were in arrears.

The Housing Committee examined these arrears carefully.  In the case of Mr HW Bryant – unable to pay the rent through unemployment and sickness in the family – it was the Council’s own Relieving Officer who requested he be allowed to pay off the deficit at 4s (20p) a week:

if this family (which consists of nine persons in all) is ejected they, having no alternative accommodation, will have to be admitted to the Guardians’ Institution and…the Guardians already have chargeable a large number of children residue of families admitted in like circumstances.

The bureaucratic language reminds us that the shadow of the workhouse still lay heavily over the working class into the 1920s.

For all Lambeth’s genuine achievements in the housing field in the postwar period – and despite the parallel efforts of the London County Council in the borough – there was still clearly much to do.  By 1929 the number of ‘live’ cases on the waiting list had risen to 4000 and the problem of providing affordable housing for the borough’s poorest and most overcrowded residents remained pressing.

We’ll examine Lambeth’s changing policies in that regard in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1848-1972: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth, 1925

(2) Quoted in ‘Lambeth Slums’, The Times, 10 May 1919

(3) Cited in Social Services in North Lambeth and Kennington.  A Study from Lady Margaret Hall Settlement (1939)

(4) Edmund Bird and Fiona Price, Lambeth Architecture, 1914-1939 (2012) and Edmund Bird, Survey of Historic Housing Estates of the 1920s and 1930s in the London Borough of Lambeth, London Borough of Lambeth Conservation and Urban Design Team (July 2003)

(5) ‘Lambeth Housing Scheme’, The Times, 5 March 1924

(6) This detail and that which follows is extracted from the Metropolitan Borough of Lambeth Housing Committee Minutes held in the Lambeth Archives.

My thanks to the staff of the Lambeth Archives in the Minet Library for their advice and help in accessing some of the sources listed above.

Aspen House Open Air School, Lambeth: doing ‘the world of good’

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1920s, Lambeth

There’s something counter-intuitive about exposing ‘delicate’ children to the elements, come rain, come shine: (1)

Sometimes, when we got there in the morning the snow would have blown in on to the tables and chairs and we would have to clear it off before we could start.

But by all accounts, it did Norman Collier, a pupil at the Aspen House Open Air School in Streatham in the 1930s, ‘the world of good’.

‘Open Air Schools’: photograph from Gibbon and Bell, History of the London County Council, 1889-1939

The school was opened by the London County Council in 1925 for pupils described at the time as ‘pre-tuberculous’ – children who were anaemic, asthmatic or malnourished.   It was the fifth of the LCC’s open-air schools.  The first had been opened in Bostall Wood in Woolwich on land donated by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society in 1907.  But it was the first built to the council’s ‘improved design’ which would go on to be used in fourteen schools across the capital.

Administrative offices were contained in the adapted stable block of the villa which had formerly occupied the property and there was additional space provided for dining and sleeping – both important parts of the school’s regime we’ll examine later.

But the heart of the school lay in its classrooms – four square pavilions, built on timber posts with timber half-walls and exposed roofs.  The continuous windows above the dado were unglazed until sometime in the 1950s. (2)

Open-air classroom, Aspen House, with added glazing © English Heritage

Interior view © English Heritage

Of equal importance were the school grounds.  For the school’s first head teacher, Mr IG Jones, there was no such thing as too much fresh air: (3)

Although our classrooms are open-sided shelters which cannot be closed, yet it is much pleasanter to work in the open-air without a roof overhead whenever possible.

This outdoors teaching required ‘stands’ and raised pathways – ‘eighty large duckboards or wooden slats were made; measured and cut by the bigger boys and nailed together by the smaller ones’.  The boys also made ‘coat-racks, toothbrush racks, soap boxes, carrier boxes with handles for gardening purposes’.

Later, as the school developed, work requiring ‘more skill and accuracy’ followed – ‘clog stands, a bird table, a sunshine recorder and stand, moulds for concrete work, a sundial, and bathroom equipment’.

Open-air teaching: this at Charlton Park School (www.charltonparks.co.uk/the-parks/special-places/)

There’s no mention here of the school’s female pupils but they played their full part – albeit in traditionally gendered fashion – in the gardening, nature study and handicrafts which were a major part of the Aspen House curriculum.  Mr Jones founded a bee keepers’ society, for example, for older pupils and one admiring observer noted: (4)

one of the most remarkable results of the training in this delightful school is the spirit of cooperation that makes the children feel the garden belongs to all, and its pleasures should be shared by all.

In 1930, the school roll comprised some 204 pupils – perhaps the peak number: 115 boys and 89 girls.  They travelled from across London, receiving breakfast before lessons began at nine. They remained until around four, provided dinner and tea and required to take an early afternoon nap of between one and two hours in special hammocks with their own designated blankets.

In these early years, each pupil also received a weekly bath. A full-time matron on-site and regular medical examinations completed a regime which catered to body and soul.

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.  Don’t tell Mr Gove!

Norman Collier remembers that the pupils were all taught their Three Rs but generally they remained at the school for around eighteen months before resuming a more conventional education.  Students remember principally the kindness of teachers in an era where home circumstances and schooling were not always as kind.   JV Morley recalls only one instance of caning – ‘frankly deserved’ – when one boy had struck another with a milk bottle.  (5)

The school today, now Orchard School

Aspen House remained in these premises until 1977 when it moved to new purpose-built premises in Kennington Park where it still operates as a ‘Community Special School’.  In those fifty years and beyond, it serves to remind us of the best of local government education – now so maligned – and a vision of schooling which catered for the wellness and wholeness of its students.

Few now believe that its spartan fresh air regime was as restorative as its early adherents claimed but the space the school afforded for children’s personal development and, more prosaically but perhaps of greater practical impact, the clean environment and three square meals a day it provided were crucial.  Perhaps the cod liver oil, given at no charge on a daily basis to pupils who received free school meals, helped too. (6)

Uffculme School, Birmingham

In 1939, there were 155 open-air schools across Britain, fifteen in London alone which educated around 2000 children.  The LCC also boasted a residential open-air school in Bushey Park which gave every year ‘some three thousand London schoolboys a spell of camp life’ and similar schools for girls in St Leonard’s and elsewhere.  Open-air classes in London’s parks were attended by 6000 children. (7)

Impington Village College, designed by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry, opened 1939

After the Second World War, the welfare state – its health services and structures of social security currently under unprecedented attack – combined to make the work of the open-air schools less pressing.  The 1955 Clean Air Act also did much to reduce the atmospheric pollution that had blighted the lives of so many.

But Aspen House and the movement it represents aren’t of merely historic interest. Many of its principles went on to inform post-war education – both in terms of school design and pedagogy – and we jettison these values in a numbers-driven vision of educational quality at our peril.

Sources

(1) Norman Collier quoted in Brian Cathcart, ‘School’s Out’, The Independent, 23 January 2005

(2) English Heritage listing details for Classroom D at former Aspen House Open Air School

(3) This and the following quotations come from LCC, Medical Officer of Health Report 1927, made available on-line by the Wellcome Library in London’s Pulse: Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1848-1972.

(4) Elizabeth Montizambert, ‘Gazette’s Budget of London Topics’, The Montreal Gazette, 18 August, 1928

(5) Quoted in ‘Not Just Another Brick in the Wall. A booklet celebrating the life of Aspen House School, 1925 to 1995’

(6) School Managers’ Minutes, 10 December 1926, quoted in ‘Not Just Another Brick in the Wall’

(7) Gwilym Gibbon and Reginald W Bell, History of the London County Council, 1889-1939 (1939)

My thanks to the staff of the Lambeth Archives for their help in accessing the primary sources noted above.