‘Somewhere Decent to Live: London County Council Estates in Photographs, 1895-1975’

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LCC

A brief bonus post this week to mark the exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives celebrating the ‘housing designed and built for Londoners by the London County Council (LCC) and Greater London Council (GLC)’.  The exhibition runs till 26 May, full details at the bottom of the post.

It’s a small show – just the tiniest glimpse into the rich photographic and documentary record held by the Met Archives – but it offers a representative overview and some stunning images.  There is also a ten-minute film show featuring excerpts from three LCC/GLC films – ‘The Changing Face of London’ (1960), ‘Somewhere Decent to Live’ (1967) and Thamesmead 1970 (1970). These put the human face onto a proud housing record and remind you of the high hopes and ideals, not always fulfilled, which informed the work of the Councils and their architects.  Thamesmead looks wonderful, by the way, ‘a city of the 21st century’ as the commentary claims – and maybe it will be yet.

Tabard Street, Southwark (c) London Metropolitan Archives

The image of the slums of Tabard Street at the entrance to the exhibition reminds us why we built.  The LCC’s first estate was, famously, the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, opened in 1900.

The Boundary Estate in the 1890s (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Whilst tenements – designed with fine arts and craft sensibilities – were necessary in the inner city, the Council also built cottage suburbs such as the White Hart Lane Estate in Haringey which captured the Garden City ideals of the day.

The White Hart Lane Estate, 1908 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

This 1934 map of LCC estates shows just how much was achieved in a short period as council house building in London took off – the LCC built around 10,000 homes before 1914 and over 89,000 between the wars, over half of these located in the new cottage suburbs.

London County Council Housing Estates, 1934 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Flats were still needed in inner London and by the 1930s there were attempts to make them more attractive to would-be tenants.  The Oaklands Estate in Clapham with its sweeping, moderne, ocean liner-style balconies is one of the finest examples.

The Oaklands Estate, 1936 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Post-war construction saw some of most striking highs and lows – literally and metaphorically – of London’s council housing.  The Alton Estate built in two phases in the 1950s and early 1960s – Alton East reflecting the Scandinavian-influenced, ‘New Humanist’ wing of the LCC Architect’s Department; Alton West, the le Corbusier-inspired ‘Brutalists’ – represents the very best.

The Alton Estate (c) London Metropolitan Archives

In this period, the LCC  possessed the world’s largest architects’ office with, in 1952, a staff of over 1500 including 350 professional architects and trainees. This shot of an Alton home reminds us that equal care was given to designing comfortable, modern interiors.

Alton Estate, 1961 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

By the 1960s, much new council housing was high-rise – the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in Newham in May 1968 is traditionally taken to mark the end of this fashion. The St George’s Estate, opened in Stepney in 1972, was among the last of the point blocks.

The St George’s Estate, Stepney, 1972 (c) London Metropolitan Archives

In 1981 there were 769,996 council homes in Greater London, many built by the boroughs. Forty-three per cent of London households lived in council homes.  All this was a stupendous achievement, sometimes imperfectly executed but the solid mark of a state and society which believed in its duty to decently house all its people.

This is just a brief selection of the images – and a whistle-stop tour of the history – included in the exhibition.  My thanks to the London Metropolitan Archives for supplying most of the images above (a couple of the lower-quality ones were taken by me at the exhibition).

The exhibition is running from the 24 to the 26 May between 9.30 and 19.30 at the London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Rd, London EC1R 0HB.  Full details are posted on their website. 

A Brief History of Council Housing in Wandsworth, Part II: 1945 to the present

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, GLC, LCC, Wandsworth

Last week’s post took this history up to 1939 by which time the Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth had built 2842 council homes and Battersea a little over 1000.  London County Council estates added to the total but much of this work was undone by the wave of flying bomb attacks between June 1944 and March 1945 which hit the district hard. In the aftermath of war, the immediate focus was on temporary housing for those made homeless.  In the longer term, Wandsworth would feature some of the most celebrated and a few of the most notorious council estates in the capital.

A Portal prefab and wooden hutment (neither of these is a Wandsworth example)

To cope with the immediate crisis, almost 1500 Portal prefabs had been erected in the Borough and 257 wooden hutments by 1947.  Less well known is the extensive use of requisition powers made in this period – unoccupied homes taken over by the local council under emergency powers granted by government.  As late as 1953, 3700 homes (housing around 6400 people) were taken over and let by the Council. It wasn’t until 1960 that all these homes were returned to their owners or otherwise disposed of.

The changed politics of post-1945 Britain also affected Wandsworth.  A tiny (sometimes non-existent minority) in the interwar period, Labour took control of the Council in 1945, only to lose power four years later and not regain it until 1962.  Battersea remained securely Labour.  In practice, and in contrast to the far more divided politics of the 1970s and beyond, it was probably the broad political consensus behind the construction of council housing in this period which was most significant.

Eight-storey blocks on the Wendelsworth Estate

Housing for older people on the Wendelsworth Estate

It was, however, a Labour council and a Labour Housing Minister – Aneurin Bevan – who opened Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council’s first permanent post-war scheme, the Wendelsworth Estate in April 1949.  (And just to prove that party politics were far from dead, the ceremony was boycotted by Conservative councillors who viewed it, perhaps rightly in view of its timing, as an election stunt.)

Wandsworth Borough arms on the Wendelsworth Estate

Wendelsworth shows something of the ambition of these times.  It comprised 448 flats and 16 houses and, in the attempt to cater for a broader cross-section of the population beyond the families which council housing had principally accommodated to date, 21 homes for elderly people and a hostel for 120 single women.  A nursery school and community centre were also provided, reflecting the neighbourhood ideals to the fore in this early post-war period.

As notable was a conscious attempt to provide attractive accommodation: (1)

the dreary brown-tiled entrance halls which have characterised many of the earlier municipal blocks have been abandoned by the architect, and part of the walls are covered with a bright green material…As for the flats themselves – they are delightful.  The passage of the flat I inspected was very bright because of the admirable glass door to the living room.  Housewives, I am sure, will welcome the door which connects the kitchen and the dining room and the excellently planned kitchen itself.

Oatlands Court

The Estate – its tallest blocks were eight storeys high – also included lifts, always considered too expensive for working-class accommodation in pre-war years.  These, of course, were the essential precursor to high-rise and the LCC built its very first point block in Southfields.  At just eleven storeys, Oatlands Court qualified for Ian Nairn’s praise – ‘compact, not too tall, immediately lucid’ with ‘charm and humanity and, above all, modesty’.(2)  In design terms, the T-shaped block, one flat in each arm, provided its residents with considerable quiet and privacy.

Fitzhugh Estate

The modern design detailing of the original Fitzhugh Estate

The Estate today

Encouraged by this early success, the LCC built between 1953 and 1955 a larger and more sculptural scheme in the Fitzhugh Estate where Oliver Cox of the LCC Architects Department designed five eleven-storey blocks carefully arranged to fit and exploit an existing greenfield setting.

An early image of one of the Ackroydon Estate’s eleven-storey point blocks

At this stage – in the early 1950s – high-rise was seen as the best means of providing the ‘mixed development’ schemes (with a range of housing types to both create greater visual interest and cater for a wider range of population than earlier, more uniform, estates) then coming into vogue.  The Ackroydon Estate to the west of Wandsworth borough in Wimbledon Parkside, built between 1950 and 1953, is a fine early example – according to one early resident, ‘the finest estate in London, and anybody here will tell you so’. (3)

Mixed development on the Ackroydon Estate

The bare numbers give a good idea of just how ‘mixed’ the development was – 16 houses, 106 maisonettes in four-storey walk-up blocks and 314 flats in a range of three, five, eight and eleven storey blocks.  But the real success of the Estate was in the disposition of its dwellings and its landscaping which followed upon ‘a complete survey of the site including the position, size and condition of all trees, landscape and garden features’. (4)

The Alton Estate: East to the bottom of the image, West at the top

This was said to be a triumph for ‘the Swedish boys’ – that is those within the LCC Architects Department who looked to the ‘softer’, more humane social housing of the Scandinavian welfare states as their model.  Their grand set piece is, of course, Alton East constructed in the early 1950s – a mix of low-rise two-storey terraces and four-storey maisonettes and eleven-storey point blocks: 744 dwellings overall whose effect, according to Pevsner, was one of ‘picturesque informality’.

An early image of Alton East

Those are words that might have horrified the followers of le Corbusier who designed the later Alton West Estate which embodied a more consciously monumental and uncompromisingly modernist aesthetic designed to make dramatic use of its parkland setting. Here, though low-rise homes also feature, it is the 15 eleven-storey point blocks and the five ten-storey slab blocks which dominate.

The classic image of Alton West

The Alton Estate (you can choose your sides between East and West) reflects the soaring ambitions of its day and does so with a quality and panache that later mass housing almost uniformly failed to achieve.  By the 1960s, high-rise had become more of an expedient and less of a tool – a situation created, in financial terms, by the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act (which awarded higher grants the higher you built) and, politically, by a housing drive supported by both major parties determined to build on a scale that would replace the country’s remaining slum housing – there was still a great deal of it – for once and for all.

As Conservative and Labour competed to promise the most new homes – Conservatives committed to 350,000 a year in 1963 but were outbid by a Labour opposition promising 500,000 in the following year, the consequence was a reliance on system building as the necessary means to deliver such numbers.  At this point our story becomes more sombre.

Here we return to the boroughs and specifically Battersea.  The Winstanley Road area had long been earmarked for clearance and over a ten year period from 1956 a new estate emerged.  The first phase was modest three-storey; the second comprised 547 homes in blocks of varying heights, the tallest rising to 18 storeys. Still, these towers were built conventionally of in-situ concrete but later lower blocks were system-built by Wates.(5)

A contemporary image of the refurbished Winstanley Estate

Despite a RIBA medal for good design in 1967, design flaws rapidly emerged with deficient vents and doors, faulty lifts and internal condensation.  There were social problems too as the Estate became plagued with vandalism. Plans for the regeneration of the Estate have been in motion since 2013 with the residents’ ‘preferred option’ favouring comprehensive rebuilding at a cost of around £100m.  The Estate is allegedly one of the hundred on David Cameron’s hit list of so-called ‘sink estates’ announced this month. Given the timing and finances just mentioned, you can judge for yourself the significance of Cameron’s announcement.

The garage, grime and hip hop collective, So Solid Crew, were formed on the Estate and member Jason Phillips remembers Winstanley as ‘our playground, even guys from neighbouring estates would head down there’. ‘Hopefully,’ he continues, ‘the development will bring some new working-class people to the area’.(6)  Given Wandsworth’s Council’s record and the current Government’s definition of ‘affordability’ that, sadly, seems unlikely.

York Road Estate point block  (c) Stephen Richards and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The York Road Estate – over 600 flats in three eight-storey slab blocks and three 16-storey towers – begun by Battersea and completed by the new Wandsworth Borough Council was also system-built. A 2010 refurbishment which included re-cladding, new windows, rewiring, CCTV upgrades and landscaping to address the range of its problems cost £6.4m.

The refurbished Doddington Estate

The Doddington Estate, inaugurated by Battersea but again completed between 1967 and 1971 by Wandsworth, was built by Laings using a Jespersen system. At its worst, 400 of its 970 flats lost heating and two plumbers were kept on permanent standby to deal with problems.  By 1983, due to problems of crime and anti-social behavior, it had been dubbed by a sensationalist local press as ‘the Estate of Terror’.  Between 1986 and 1993, £17m was spent on a renewal programme which also included the removal of crime-ridden underground car parks and elevated walkways.

The refurbished Doddington Estate

Daringly, though with questionable politics, the Conservative-led Wandsworth Council aspired in 1987 to create a place where ‘a middle class couple can come back to late at night and buy some pâté and a bottle of wine’.  The second element of their programme was a scheme of ‘homesteading’ whereby flats were sold at rock-bottom prices with the onus on new owner-occupiers to carry out necessity internal repairs.

Sporle Court, Winstanley Estate

This was a very different politics to that which had inspired Sidney Sporle, chair of Battersea Metropolitan Borough’s Housing Committee, who had been the initial driving force behind these grandiose schemes.  Some might see Wandsworth’s modern politics as a form of corruption or, at least, betrayal but Sporle’s corruption was clear-cut – he was gaoled for four years in 1971 for taking bribes from contractors.  His links with T Dan Smith and John Poulson capture the febrile, money-charged ambitions of the day.

Sporle, however, looking back in 1976, preferred to recall the ideals of the new housing: (7)

Sidney Sporle

It was heaven to them. Now they have a separate kitchen, separate toilets. It was unheard of in the old days there. You went down the end of the garden…People were fighting to get in them. They were luxury flats – then… In the old houses there were four to five families to a house.  Some houses didn’t even have a bloody roof.  The kids had no room to play there either. But they didn’t vandalise the place.

He acknowledged, though, that the taller blocks might have been a mistake:

If I had to do it all over again I would not go over five storeys…There’s a new generation now, and those at the top of tower blocks – they don’t seem nearer to God, but further away.

But, ultimately, his parting shot? ‘Life is too short for regrets mate’.

If all this will seem to many an appropriate death knell to the hopes placed in social housing, it is not the end of the story.  After the mistakes of the 1960s, much of the best council housing was built in the 1970s, just as Wandsworth’s new Conservative council and the Thatcher government elected in 1979 were about to perform its last rites.  By 1978, the Borough owned around 28,000 homes, housing around a third of its population.  Of these, 40 per cent had been sold off by 1990.

Kambala Estate

The Kambala Estate in Battersea, a modest scheme of low-rise brick-built houses and flats, was built between 1976 and 1979.

Maysoule Estate

The Maysoule Estate, tucked away and easily overlooked just to the west of Clapham Junction, designed by Phippen, Randall & Parkes for Wandsworth Council, was completed at the same time.  To the authors of the London Survey, it: (8)

demonstrates the quiet intelligence and decency which were sometimes attained shortly before the public housing programmes came to a halt.

Perhaps, after all the sound and fury, that slightly elegiac note provides a fitting point at which to end this brief survey of Wandsworth’s council housing – a repository of dreams, ideals and ambitions but, above all and however flawed, an attempt to meet the housing needs of ordinary people with a drive and on a scale that we might wish to emulate today.

This map shows the location of all the estates mentioned in this week’s post and the last.

Sources

(1) ‘Brighter Council Flats’, Wandsworth Borough News, 25 Feb, 1949, included with a range of sources and other detail in the history page of the Wendelsworth Residents Association website.

(2) Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (originally published 1966, republished 2014)

(3) Quoted in David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 (2013)

(4) Boris Ford, Cambridge Cultural History of Britain: Volume 9, Modern Britain (1992)

(5) Simon Hogg, Labour councillor for Latchmere Ward which covers Winstanley, has published a fascinating collection of photos and recollections of the Estate here: Why Was the Winstanley Estate Built?. His set of photographs of the Estate also provide a deliberate corrective to the usual negative images deployed.

(6) Quoted in Mark Blunden, ‘London housing estate where So Solid Crew formed set for demolition‘, Evening Standard, 20 February 2014

(7) Tony Cohen, ‘Up the Junction in a Tower Block Is No Family Life’, South London Press, 10 November 1976.  The architecture and politics of this era of Battersea council housing are dealt with in greater detail by the Survey of London, Battersea: (Draft) Introduction (2013)

(8) Survey of London, Battersea; Ch 9 (draft) West of Plough Lane (2013)

A Brief History of Council Housing in Wandsworth, Part I: 1900-1939

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1920s, 1930s, LCC, Pre-1914, Wandsworth

Walk the streets of any London borough and you’ll see council housing.  Look more closely and you’ll see its story unfold.  In this, Wandsworth offers a particularly rich history – a range of forms and types, some innovatory, some all too typical, the best and the worst; and through these too it reveals the conflicted politics of council housing – high ideals, low politics and partisan agenda.

Before we begin, some geographical and political background.  The present day borough, formed in 1965, comprises the former Metropolitan Boroughs of Battersea and Wandsworth, less an eastern slice (made up of Clapham, Streatham Hill and Streatham) lost to the new Borough of Lambeth.  Above this local politics lay, at first, the London County Council, formed in 1890 and, from 1965, its larger successor, the Greater London Council.  All these bodies play their part.

Derinton Road on the Totterdown Fields Estate

Before 1914, Conservative Wandsworth built nothing but the Progressive LCC and Battersea – the so-called Municipal Mecca – built some of the most best new council housing of their day.   The Totterdown Fields Estate in Tooting, begun in 1900, was the first (alongside Norbury in Croydon) of the LCC’s cottage suburbs – a modest municipal Arts and Crafts embodiment of the garden city ideals being pioneered by Ebenezer Howard.

The Latchmere Estate

Battersea was a more densely-settled industrial borough but the council’s Latchmere Estate sought on a more compact scale – the Estate, with 315 houses and tenements was around one quarter the size of Totterdown – to emulate these same ideals though, given local politics, with a more radical twist.  The latter was seen practically in the insistence on including ‘what had once been regarded as luxuries’ – ‘baths, combined ranges and electric light’.  It was seen more symbolically in the naming of the streets – for ‘Freedom’ and ‘Reform’, after local labour leaders and, most provocatively, after General Joubert, the leader of the Boer forces in the recently concluded and unpopular (on the left) Boer War.

Another war, far larger and more terrible, brought about a decisive political shift in favour of council housing.  Lloyd George and, legislatively, the 1919 Housing Act committed the state – as reward or sop (take your pick) – to building ‘homes for heroes’.  This was a policy that, initially at least, commanded support across the political spectrum and in the interwar period, Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council – still Conservative dominated – built on a large scale, in total over 2800 homes.

Housing on the Openview Estate

The Magdalen Park Estate had originally been planned as a middle-class garden suburb by private builders, the Holloway Brothers. Those plans were scuppered by the war and, in the changed post-war climate, the Council purchased the freehold and built the Openview Estate on its western side: by 1922, 376 terraced and semi-detached houses of which 89 per cent were parlour homes.  Their cost – averaging £1099 for a parlour home (around three times the amount of equivalent pre-war housing) – was an indication of labour and materials shortages of the era and a symbol, for the time being, of the priority given to building high-quality working-class homes.  (1)

The Dover House Estate

This was seen at its absolute peak in the LCC’s contemporaneous Dover House Estate in Putney.  This was the Council’s first post-war estate, begun in 1919 and completed in 1927, and it remains one of its finest, outstanding for the richness of its Arts and Crafts detailing and its greenery and layout.   It was, as Mark Swenarton reminds us, a ‘showplace in its day…visited by many from all over the world’. (2)

But even here, as a contemporary equivalent of austerity kicked in from 1921, the size of homes fell as government subsidies and prescribed standards fell. This was seen also in the second of Wandsworth’s estates, Furzedown, where (at 30 Beclands Road) the then Minister of Housing Neville Chamberlain opened the Borough’s 1000^th post-war home.  The Estate enjoyed tennis courts and a bowling green provided by the Council but, of its 464 homes, just 17 per cent possessed a front parlour.

The Southfields Estate

On the Southfields Estate, erected in the mid-1920s under Chamberlain’s parsimonious 1923 Housing Act, Wandsworth also built the first of its maisonettes which were to be a feature of its later schemes.

Holgate Avenue

Battersea, Labour-controlled and committed to continuingly high standards, also faced the problem of a lack of suitable building land.  It was forced to build three-storey tenements, rather than the single family houses it would have preferred, in its Holgate Avenue scheme started in 1924, but the homes remain impressive for their design detail, seen in their diapered brickwork, striking porches and slate mansard roofs.  Internally, the provision of electric cooking and heating as well as lighting must have won the plaudits of a visiting delegation from Soviet Russia in 1925 who surely remembered Lenin’s dictum that Communism was ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. (3)

Newlyn House, East Hill Estate, in the 1930s

Five-storey tenement walk-up blocks remained the most characteristic form of London council housing in the interwar period and beyond but the LCC’s East Hill Estate, built between 1925 and 1929, was outstanding for its grand scale and imposing design.  It housed – in what would be the dominant motif of 1930s council schemes – 525 families decanted from slum clearance areas.  If you look for it now, you’ll find only its former ceremonial entrance (complete with LCC coat of arms), itself inherited and adapted from the Fishmongers Almshouses which formerly occupied the site.  The Estate was demolished and rebuilt from 1976 by the later Wandsworth Borough Council and then, under a Conservative administration in office from 1978, sold to the private sector. (4)

The St John’s Estate, Battersea in the 1930s

This New Right politics – a prefiguring of the Thatcherite politics of the 1980s – was seen even more controversially in the 1981 sale of another five-storey tenement scheme, the St John’s Estate in Battersea, built in the early 1930s.  Its 272 flats and maisonettes had been Battersea Council’s principal interwar housing effort.  A major modernisation programme was begun by a Labour-controlled Wandsworth Council in 1976 but in 1981 the reigning Conservatives sold the estate to Regalian Properties for £3.7m.  It was thoroughly refurbished and its flats sold on the open market.  Eighty per cent of homes went to first-time buyers but none to former tenants and, it is said, that Regalian reaped a handsome profit of £14m from the deal.  (5)

Winfield House on the privatised and refurbished St John’s Estate

Back in the 1930s, another Conservative politics held sway.  In 1928, Conservative Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough had decided ‘to concentrate on the provision of accommodation which could be let at a rent the lower-paid worker could afford to pay’.  This, it is true, represented one strand of right-wing thinking – that council housing should be built for the poorest rather than for general needs, but it acknowledged too a real problem of most of the housing built to date – that it was affordable only to the better-off working class.

Here, Wandsworth would anticipate the major thrust of 1930s housing policy – seen both in Labour’s 1930 Housing Act and the ‘National’ (predominantly Conservative) government’s 1935 Housing Act – which focused on slum clearance and rehousing.

Acuba House

Wandsworth built flats on Merton Road and Acuba Road for former slum dwellers and low income families in the early 1930s which, in appearance, are not dissimilar from the mansion blocks gracing middle-class areas.

Flats on the Fieldview Estate

Its eastern extension to the Magdalen Park development, the Fieldview Estate, looks as good as any middle-class suburb but a closer look at the front doors (two per unit) reveals that this later scheme is composed of flats, 344 in total.

Wandsworth Plain, completed 1939

Wandsworth also undertook a major slum clearance programme, demolishing unfit property (a 1930 survey of the Borough had revealed 758 houses unfit for human habitation and a 1935 survey 1801 local families living in overcrowded conditions) and rebuilding on Wandsworth Plain, Nelson’s Row/White’s Square and Felsham Road.

Henry Prince Estate entrance

Henry Prince Estate interior gardens

Its most important development, however, was the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield, formally opened in May 1938 by WE Elliot, the Minister for Housing. This 10 acre scheme with its long frontage along Garratt Lane, imposing brick archways and quiet inner courtyards comprised 272 flats.  It was named, deservedly I think, after Henry Prince, a Conservative councillor who had served as chair of the Housing Committee from 1919 to his death in 1936.

Henry Prince and the Wandsworth arms and clock which grace the Henry Prince Estate

Prince is remembered also in the clock above the Estate’s main entrance but the Estate is probably more strongly associated now with another, Labour, politician, Sadiq Khan, whose childhood home it was.

A cruder version of slum clearance would be applied by Nazi bombing in the years which followed.  We’ll look at its impact and that of the very different politics which shaped council housing after the Second World War in next week’s post.

This map shows the location of all the estates mentioned in this week’s post and the next.

Sources

(1) Wandsworth Conservation & Design Group, Magdalen Park Appraisal & Management Strategy (2009)

(2) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: the politics and architecture of early state housing in Britain (1981)

(3) Survey of London, Battersea, Ch 9 West of Plough Lane (2013)

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

(4) Survey of London, Battersea: Introduction (2013) and Graham Towers, Shelter is Not Enough: Transforming Multi-storey Housing (2000)

Most of the other details come from the various Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth Official Guides published annually in this period.

The Brandon Estate, Southwark II: ‘It was going to be paradise’

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, LCC, Southwark

The Brandon Estate was a concrete expression of the London County Council’s desire to build a better world.  It’s telling that, in these more cynical or simply more jaded times, I hesitated in writing that sentence but it’s fact, not hyperbole, however much the expression may jar.  Last week’s post looked at the ideals and design principles behind that aspiration; this week’s looks at how it all played out in practice.

An early image of the Estate from the south-west

To begin with, all was well.  The Architects’ Journal concluded the scheme was:  (1)

an important essay by the LCC to create a community in the true sense of the word rather than a mere housing estate. The diversification of design, although it has sometimes degenerated into inconsistency, reflects the provision for a wide variety of social activities…This is a positive attempt to overcome a major failure of much inter-war housing in the London area.

The Estate’s Civic Trust award plaque on the wall of ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom

Even John Betjeman – admittedly most taken by the rehabilitation of the Victorian terraces – thought the Estate ‘attractive, habitable by modern standards, and probably the beginning of a general raising of the self-respect of the neighbourhood’.  (2)

More importantly, its early residents liked it. Ethel Frampton, reminiscing after 40 years of living on Brandon, remembered ‘vividly being asked, how do you like living on a showcase estate. My answer then was, I love it.’ (3)

All this is a tribute to the design of the Estate and a commentary on the slum conditions most had moved from.  As ‘Mrs Bedford’, a 77 year old widow, told Tony Parker in 1983: (4)

I couldn’t say I have any complaints about living on the estate at all. I never had had.  When I think about the conditions we had to live in when I was a kid, well those days will never come back again and a good thing too. People complain and you sometimes hear them talking about the good old days and that sort of rubbish.  All I can say is that they must have forgotten what the good old days were like because for the ordinary class of working people there was nothing good about them at all.

Another resident, who had moved into an 11^th floor flat in one of the towers, remembers:

it was all very, very smart, somewhere really good, somewhere you were proud to live.  Do you remember those what they used to call ‘garden cities’ before the war, Letchworth, Welwyn and those places?  Well that’s the nearest to it in atmosphere I mean, it was like them. All very well kept and peaceful, with a sort of rural air about it; hardly like being in a city at all.

Most often, it was simply the size of their homes that most struck new residents – ‘It was massive, it looked like bloody Buckingham Palace compared to what we were living in’.  This was, as intended, high quality accommodation.

Flats on Lorrimore Road

But beyond this, there was a community.  In one block of low-rise flats at least, they were ‘nearly all local people, all got moved in here together from the same streets when our houses were pulled down’ and ‘Joan Kirby’ describes singsongs along the balcony for someone’s birthday and landings cleaned for weddings and funerals when visitors would be coming.

Maisonettes on Lorrimore Road

There was a broader truth to this if the oral history is to be trusted; this from ‘Bert Weir’, a caretaker in one of the towers:

When they first built it twenty years ago or more it was going to be paradise, wasn’t it?  For the people who were coming to live here, I mean. They’d all been living in slums and places like that, and here was this marvellous modern new housing estate which was going to give them a wonderful new life. It’s true, in those early days there was a great sense of community among the people who came to live on [Brandon].  They all knew they had all come here to have a new start in life. They all knew the sort of background they’d come from and what sort of background everyone else had come from and it gave them a big feeling of all being in the same boat. It was a fresh start for everyone.

I make no apologies for quoting extensively from Tony Parker’s important book.  Most of what we know about council estates and their people comes from the concerned middle class; sometimes well-meaning sociologists, often a politically hostile commentariat.   In People of Providence, Parker allows them to speak for themselves.

If there’s an element of nostalgia in these recollections, comments on the later estate make less comfortable reading. For the fact is that much of this early shine had rubbed off by the 1970s.  As early as 1975, Neil McIntosh could write that ‘although the Brandon is a “show estate” it is also in some senses a problem estate’ with levels of juvenile crime and vandalism that rated it ‘among the worst estates’. (5)

Fleming Road and towers

By the end of the decade, Brandon was subject to an equal onslaught from the local press as its headlines made clear: ‘Vandal-hit estate goes to war’, ‘Corridors of Fear’, ‘It’s revolting! Slum estate tenants in new protest’. (6)

What happened?  According to one of those articles, the Brandon Estate was simply – even as a panoply of security measures was being taken – ‘a monument to the dogged determination of the vandal’ but this is to look at the symptom rather than the cause.

Others blamed the Greater London Council’s removal of resident caretakers in 1971 but, in fact, those caretakers were already beleaguered – lacking the authority and means to tackle vandalism and removed for their own safety.

For Parker’s older interviewees, one explanation was simply ‘new people’ coming in.  They could and would – as we’ll see – express this more pungently but, for the time being we might accept that an earlier community and perhaps a shared ethos were dissolving.

Walters House

To Alice Coleman, the explanation was straightforward – ‘design disadvantage’ was the (more or less) technical term she applied; what she meant was council estate high-rise caused juvenile delinquency.  It really was that simple: ‘two or three storeys are harmless, but more are harmful’.  ‘Defensible space’ was one solution; in the later 1980s, one of her intrepid team:  (7)

lived on the Brandon Estate and persuaded the tenants to use a small fund to fence in one of the blocks. The result was magical. Ground-floor tenants who had boarded up their windows and lived in artificial light to avoid the high risk of being burgled, felt safe enough to take the boards down and let daylight in.

If only it really were that simple.  Now is not the time to critique Coleman yet again (though the article from which the quotation is drawn is hubristic even by her standards) but her refusal to engage with socio-economic factors, her lack of curiosity about change over time and her wilful ignorance of similar problems of antisocial behaviour in a range of housing environments should be enough to invalidate her position.

Molesworth House

Still, to be clear, council tenants are entitled to be – and feel – safe so, of course, it made sense to install entryphone systems and beef up general security as the GLC and latterly Southwark Council have attempted to do.

There was another equally simplistic explanation to hand: ‘Enoch was right’. (8)  A number of Parker’s interviewees associated the decline of the Estate with the arrival on it of (in their words) ‘coloureds’.  We could dismiss this as white, working-class racism and move on but (apart from the fact that easy phrase lets the middle class off the hook) it’s more useful to look at the dynamics of what happened.

Moreton House

A second wave of slum clearance and rehousing in Southwark coincided with a change in council housing allocations policy from a system favouring established local residency to one prioritising needs.  In this context, a black population which had hitherto been confined to low quality privately rented housing became eligible for council housing.  In the competition for a scarce resource, what was ‘fair’ and progressive in policy terms – those in greatest need or those now being displaced being given housing – could be perceived as ‘unfair’ by those who felt they had longer-established claims. (9)

One of Parker’s interviewees described the Estate’s newcomers in stark terms: ‘Every one of them are all problem families…and all blacks, or nearly all of them’.  This was racism but it was not racism based on some primal antagonism between white and black (as I believe later history has demonstrated) but a conflict in which race was the cipher. For long-term white residents confronting a decline in the Estate, it was easy to confuse correlation with causation but, in reality, most of the newer black residents were equally victims of the criminal behaviour of young people of varying ethnicity.

Eglington Court

A final explanation rests on those youth demographics.  For the Southwark Community Development Group in 1975 the reason for the prevalence of vandalism on Brandon was ‘not hard to find’ – 27 per cent of the Estate’s population were aged between 5 and 16. This was almost ten per cent above the Borough average.

Is this sufficient an explanation – a kind of updated version of ‘boys will be boys’?  Surely not but in a context where traditional structures of authority were in decline perhaps it does represent a significant component of one.

Trevelyan House

Meanwhile, embrace the complexity.  Parker also talked to ‘Ian’, a young lad in his early teens (white as it happens) who artlessly describes the favourite pastimes of he and his ‘gang’ of mates – stealing milk bottles, ‘bombing’ people by dropping bottles from balconies, petty theft, ‘tagging’ buildings, and so on.  He had also embraced a school scheme which saw him helping out elderly residents with their shopping and odd jobs:

One old lady said to me when I did something in her house that she used to think children nowadays were all bad but it had made her change her mind.

Little did she know.  How little any of us really know.

All this is to accentuate the negative.  It dwells on a particularly dysfunctional period for the country as a whole, the strains and stresses of which were far from being confined to the Brandon Estate.  In reality, as Parker’s introduction is at pains to make clear the reality was ‘mixed’. More recently, the biggest controversy has been Southwark Council’s needless and insensitive programme to replace functional wooden window frames with uPVC which was eventually overturned (for the leaseholders at least) in the courts. (10)

Shopping precinct and ‘Hairy Mammoth’ clubroom (now library). The Civic Trust award is to the bottom right of the building.

Life’s too messy for the Estate to have ever fulfilled all the hopes placed in it in 1961 but an estate described as ‘perfect’ and the ‘closest to heaven I’ll ever get’ can’t be all bad, can it?  It’s had money spent on it – a significant refurbishment programme in the 1980s and a £1m repair programme in the early 1990s – but really this is little more than routine maintenance.

It has survived the worst of its social problems; with hindsight, a phase that afflicted estates of all kinds across the country (for which I’ve yet to see definitive explanation). It has been the only Southwark estate to escape major regeneration and it remains popular with the vast majority of its residents who value both the quality of their homes and environment.

The Brandon Estate has stood the test of time, a tribute to the vision of the Council and architects who planned it and, if it hasn’t created a better world – a tall order, it has certainly created a better life for many thousands of its people.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(2) John Betjeman, ‘Making the Best of Brick’, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1959

(3) The Brandon 1 TARA [Tenants’ and Residents’] Newsletter, July 2005

(4) Tony Parker, People of Providence. A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants (1983).  ‘Providence’ is the name Parker applied to the Estate to preserve its anonymity.  His interviewees are also anonymised though personal details are accurate.

(5) Neil McIntosh, Southwark Community Development Group, Housing for the Poor? Council Housing in Southwark, 1925-1975 (July 1975)

(6) These headlines are drawn from articles in the Mercury, 3 August 1978; South London Press, 12 March 1980; and Mercury, 28 May 1981 respectively found in the news cuttings files of the Southwark Local History Library and Archives.

(7) Alice Coleman, ‘Design Disadvantage in Southwark’ (2008)

(8) The quotation appears at least twice in People of Providence.  It’s a reference to the then Conservative British politician Enoch Powell whose ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968 foretold social breakdown and violence resulting from ethnic minority immigration.

(9) This is argued in far greater detail by Harold Carter in ‘Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945-1995’, The London Journal, vol 33, No 2, July 2008

(10) Euan Denholm, ‘Million Pound Window Fiasco in Walworth’, Southwark News, 27 January 2005

The Brandon Estate, Southwark I: ‘New and dramatic’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, LCC, Mixed Development, Southwark

The Brandon Estate in Southwark is ‘one of the most novel’ of the London County Council’s housing schemes. (1)  There’s a lot to talk about – its visual presence, path-breaking high-rise, pioneering mixed development and, conversely, an early rehabilitation of Victorian terraces. Then there’s maybe the more familiar tale of descent – from ‘showpiece’ to ‘problem estate’.

Pointing to the future, an early image of the Estate from Lorrimore Square

To begin with, the Estate was intended as a statement – part of the LCC’s attempt to regenerate ‘the decaying and lifeless south bank of the Thames’.  This had begun in 1911 with County Hall, now shamefully debased (a metaphor for our times) into a tacky tourist attraction.  It was developed, in a grander post-45 vision, with the Festival of Britain and its legacy.  The LCC proclaimed: (2)

the slim white towers of the LCC’s  Brandon Estate at Kennington Oval have added a new and dramatic feature to the South London skyline…the 20^th century South London Panorama is at last beginning to rival the older glory of the scene across the river.

All this replaced, in the words of the Council, ‘a depressing area of dingy 19^th century terrace houses interspersed with bomb sites’, acquired by the LCC in 1952.  The housing was overcrowded, lacking basic amenities and in poor repair but it was ‘for the most part structurally sound’.  In another age, these might have become the des res’s of a gentrifying middle class; in social democratic Britain, 182 of these houses were converted into 328 self-contained council-owned flats and maisonettes which formed around one quarter of the new estate.

Rehabilitated Victorian terraces on Lorrimore Square

Facing new build on Lorrimore Square. The wooden figure is the adapted remains of another artwork provided for the Estate – William Mitchell’s 14 ft totem pole originally equipped with chains for children to climb on

These are best seen in Lorrimore Square, retained from an existing but substantially adapted street pattern at the western end of the Estate.  One side of the square is formed of substantial three-storey Victorian terraces and two sides of equivalent modern homes.  The other is occupied by the new St Paul’s Church, a modernist Grade II-listed building of reinforced concrete designed by Woodroffe Buchanan & Coulter in 1959-1960 to replace one destroyed by wartime bombing.

The rehabilitation drive is rightly associated with the later 1960s’ disenchantment with estate design but it had been prefigured in a neglected clause of Nye Bevan’s 1949 Housing Act which provided 75 per cent Exchequer grants to councils for the purchase of homes for improvement or conversion.  More famously, that Act declared a classless vision of council housing by removing the stipulation it be considered solely working-class accommodation.  Different times and a lost alternative history.

Forsyth Gardens, on the Estate’s main artery Cook’s Road, was a new square lined with brick-faced four-storey maisonettes designed by Gregory Jones, intended to maintain, in Pevsner’s words, this ‘revival of Georgian town planning traditions’. (3)

The original LCC plan for the Estate

Rehabilitation and the retention of an existing streetscape will please contemporary critics but the latter was the cause of some anguish at the time when the principle of separating cars and pedestrians was very much the governing wisdom.

The Council lamented that it had been ‘impossible to provide an ideally comprehensive system of independent footpaths’ but concluded that: (4)

by closing certain roads, through traffic had been canalised in Cook’s Road and every effort has been made to cater imaginatively for the pedestrian…a third of the inhabitants will in fact have uninterrupted pedestrian access to shops and open space.

Apparently, this wasn’t enough for early residents, two-thirds of whom wanted less traffic, and the author of the Architects’ Journal review of the Estate urged the closure of Cook’s Road too. You can make up your own mind of the rights and wrongs here but it’s a reminder at least that later judgments should be humble.

Napier House from Cook’s Road. You can see Hollaway’s decorative mural at the top of the block but the Canterbury Arms pub sign is missing.

Further east, the Estate assumes its more striking and daringly modernist form.   Across Cook’s Road lies the ten-storey Napier Tower, a gateway to the Estate’s pedestrianised shopping precinct, and beyond that its signature six 18-storey point blocks carefully set in a new extension to Kennington Park.   In 1957, these were the highest blocks the LCC had built.

The six 18-storey point blocks

If you visit the Estate, you’ll see that these towers are not some alien and overpowering presence in the terrain but fit, as the architects intended, comfortably into their landscape.  Their mix of bush hammered (providing texture) and precast finishes, pattern of strong horizontals and range of solid and glazed balconies gave, it was said, ‘a more humane scale and greater architectural sophistication than earlier points’. (5)

The high-rise development at the Estate’s eastern end was necessary to achieve the required density of 137 persons per acre – in total, the completed Estate would house a population of 3800, 600 more than had lived in the area prior to redevelopment.

The key principle of the Estate, designed by an LCC Architect’s Department team headed by Ted Hollamby, was ‘mixed development’.  This was the coming idea of the mid-1950s, promoting the ideal of a range of housing forms intended to break both the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – public and private – and provide housing appropriate to a range of people and households in different life stages.  It also licensed the idea of building high at a time when it was not envisaged that tower blocks would house young families.

Bungalows for old people on Lorrimore Road

Family houses on Greig Terrace

Brandon is the acme of the mixed development idea in a number of ways.  It’s seen, most obviously, in its: (6)

range of building types designed to cater for as many tastes and requirements as possible – bungalows for old people, two-storey houses and maisonettes for families who want gardens (and one person in three on this new estate will have a garden), together with flats ranging in height from three storeys to the 18 storey tower blocks.

But it’s there too in the variety of external materials used – ‘the list would read like a building exhibition catalogue of cladding materials’ according to one somewhat sceptical observer.  He went on to criticise ‘an exaggerated fear of monotony, reflected in some strangely inconsistent and unprincipled detailing and a wilfully random choice of finishes’.  But ultimately he was won over by: (7)

a conscious attempt to embody something of the visual intricacy and complexity which characterise, and attract us, in the organic and slow-grown parts of our older cities.  It succeeds in this, to a greater extent than most recently planned environments built in one piece.

This attention to a humane environment was seen also in other details of the Estate.  It included, for example, a number of small and secluded courtyard spaces – to the apparent consternation of the Housing Manager who foresaw ‘immorality in all sheltered corners’.  In this, of course, Alice Coleman would prove a worthy successor.

This early photograph of the Precinct also shows Hollaway’s ‘Hairy Mammoth’ and Canterbury Arms pub sign

It was seen as well in the artworks and decorative elements which adorned the Estate, notably the work of Anthony Hollaway and Lynn Easthope, employed by the LCC’s Housing Committee ‘as consultants for decorative treatment on housing estates’. Hollaway’s ‘hairy mammoth’ (marking the discovery of a fossilised mammoth tooth during site excavation) on the exterior wall of the club room survives as does his decorative frieze at the top of Napier Tower but the illuminated sign created for the Estate pub, the Canterbury Arms, and the broken tile mosaic in the precinct commemorating the Chartist meeting in 1848 on Kennington Common and other elements have been lost.

Cornish House with Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 to the foreground

All this art came at a cost of £3215 which included Hollaway’s £1760 annual fee.  He was rather resentful of the £8000 spent on the Estate’s masterpiece, Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 (donated at cost price by the artist), located in front of the Cornish House. (8)

All this is important as an indication of the care, attention and money (around £3.6m) that Hollamby and the LCC invested in the Brandon Estate, intended as a showpiece and not just another anonymous council estate.  But the Estate stands or falls as a home for its people and, in this too, standards were high.

Children at play on the Estate, 1976

Firstly, it was designed as a community.  Apart from the shopping precinct and club room already mentioned, there was a doctor’s surgery, a library, a housing area office and nine play spaces for toddlers and four playgrounds for older children.

The six point blocks contained 64 two-bedroom flats with all the modern conveniences to be expected in public housing – a bathroom and separate toilet, an electric drying cupboard, a linen cupboard and broom cupboard plus warm air central heating (from a central boiler room) and constant hot water.  Each flat also benefited from a full-length private balcony at its front and a second, smaller, balcony in front of the kitchen windows.

Living room of tower block flat

This image of the kitchen-diner also shows the Weatherfoil hot air heating system

At the top of each of the point blocks were four bed-sitter penthouses with private patios. The Housing Manager, moral antennae twitching, insisted that these be let to either all men or all women in any one block.  One observer described these as ‘the only genuine metropolitan penthouses’ she knew ‘to be had for £4 a week with heating thrown in’.

Living room of penthouse flat

It was with understandable pride, therefore, that the Estate was formally opened in December 1960 by Mrs Florence Cayford, chair of the LCC, as she ceremonially handed over the keys of no 62 on the 16^th floor of Cornish House to Mr and Mrs O’Brien.

Mr and Mrs O’Brien receive their keys from the mayor of Southwark in front of Cornish House

Another  early resident was Mr Lawrence Fenton – an accountant of a music publishing firm and perhaps a quiet embodiment of Nye Bevan’s classless vision of council housing, the 30 year-old chair of the Estate’s tenants association and a leading light of its cine club.  In the following year, the Estate was given a Civic Trust award for its design excellence. (9)

What could possibly go wrong?  We’ll follow up in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism, English Architecture, 1945-1975 (2015)

(2) This and the preceding quotation are drawn from London County Council, Brandon Estate Southwark (ND)

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South (1983)

(4) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library, November 1 1961

(5) ‘LCC Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architecture and Building News, 3 January 1957

(6) ‘First of the “high altitude” tenants gets his key’, South London Observer, 21 January 1960

(7) ‘Housing at the Brandon Estate, Southwark’, Architects’ Journal Information Library

(8) Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’ and ‘Current condition of LCC Patronage artworks’

(9) ‘Brandon Estate Clubs Get Off to Photo-Start’, South London Press, 23 December 1960. You can see some of the efforts of the Cine Club and much of the early life of the Estate on YouTube.

The LCC and the Arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ Scheme

Tags

1950s, 1960s, LCC

Last week’s post looked at the LCC’s open-air sculpture exhibitions but arguably the more significant contribution to the worthy attempt to bring art to the people lay in its ‘Arts Patronage Scheme’ inaugurated in 1956. By 1964 when it (and the LCC) were wound up, over 70 works of art had been purchased – adorning schools and housing estates across the capital.

Henry Moore, Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3, the Brandon Estate, Lambeth © Steve Cadman and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Many of these were significant pieces by some of the leading artists in the country. Nearly all were modernist works and its efforts were not, therefore, without controversy but they remain: (1)

outstanding in their ambition and coherence…In this respect, the LCC may be said to have assisted in the democratisation, if not the socialisation, of art.

The origins of the scheme are marked by their time and place.  Although a Conservative government ruled, a broadly social democratic consensus prevailed which held that a progressive and classless society would be achieved, in part, by a democratic civic culture.  In this, the arts would be a shared patrimony, neither solely derived from nor confined to a cultural elite.

Practically, there was a feeling – as the years of a genuine rather than enforced and politically motivated austerity passed – that the LCC could now look beyond immediate necessities and broaden its efforts to improve Londoners’ quality of life.  In 1954, Isaac Hayward, Labour Leader of the LCC, expressed his view that ‘the Council has both a cultural and an educational responsibility to do what it reasonably can to encourage and assist in the provision of works of art’. (2)

Isaac Hayward

If that, to jaundiced eyes, might reek of middle-class do-goodery, take another look.  Isaac (‘Ike’) Hayward was a former South Wales miner (he started work down the pits aged 12) brought to London by his trade union work. A councillor for Rotherhithe and Deptford, he had been chair of the Public Assistance Committee which reformed the Poor Law before playing a key role in introducing comprehensive education to the capital. The Royal Festival Hall – designed and constructed by the LCC – was built under his determined leadership.  The Hayward Gallery remains a fitting tribute to his role.

In 1956, with the approval of the Conservative Minister of Education, the LCC set aside £20,000 annually (the equivalent of perhaps £0.5m in present-day terms) for the purchase of artworks.  It was thought ‘a reasonable sum’ at a time when the LCC was spending around £20m a year on ‘new architectural work and open-space development’. Some of the money was to be spent on the acquisition of existing works of art but the bulk was to go towards ‘the commissioning of new work and the encouragement of living artists’.

The LCC understood the sensitivities involved in this: (3)

The Council’s fundamental problem in running the scheme lies in the collective exercise of taste: an exercise which has to be accepted by those who provide the money, by those responsible for the service concerned, and by those who ultimately have to live with it.

And, as it acknowledged, such sensitivities were exacerbated by the predominantly modernist form of the works themselves:

Because most of the works acquired were to be associated with the Council’s own contemporary architecture, they have in practice been examples of contemporary style in art. This has sometimes been the cause of criticism, particularly where advanced design was in question.

It’s a valid point. Traditional statuary – a classicist monument or some ‘great man’ memorial – would have been as visually out of place as it was politically inappropriate.  But the public art debate was usually couched in ideological terms: between modernists (criticised by some as ‘highbrow’ and ‘difficult’) and traditionalists who defended representational art and, they claimed, the taste of the ‘man in the street’.

Robert Clatworthy, The Bull, Alton Estate © Edwardx and made available through Wikimedia Commons

For all that sound and fury, however, there were relatively few open controversies around the Council’s selections.  A Reg Butler figure for the new Crystal Palace Recreation Centre commissioned in 1961 and eventually rejected was criticised by the Times as too abstract and opposed by a local Conservative councillor who wanted something with ‘the themes of vigour, strength or sport’.  He concluded that: (4)

All this is just another symptom of the current mystique of art – that it is much too clever for ordinary people to understand.  There are very clever things to be seen now in Battersea Park, and let no-one suggest that they are a load of old iron.

In the meantime, David Wynne’s Gorilla was installed nearby – a much safer and more popular choice at a time when its model Guy was a star attraction at the London Zoo.  A John Hoskins sculpture intended for the Chicksand Estate in Whitechapel was also rejected as ‘too advanced’ by the Housing Committee.

David Wynne, The Gorilla, Crystal Palace Park

But, conversely, the LCC, which had wanted a representational work at the Elmington Estate celebrating the poet Browning’s connection with Camberwell, ended up with a more abstract piece in Willi Soukop’s wall relief, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. (The sculpture was removed in 2000 when parts of the Estate were renovated but, to Southwark’s credit, has recently been restored to a wall at the adjacent Brunswick Park Primary School.)

Willi Soukop, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Elmington Estate, Camberwell

In general, the LCC’s selections reflect (in words quoted by Margaret Garlake) an ‘aesthetic eclecticism’.  This might reflect the cumbersome approval process involving – in fairly indecipherable fashion – departmental proposals, a Director of Arts, the Council’s General Purposes Committee and its Special Development and Arts Subcommittee and, finally, an Advisory Body on Art Acquisition itself advised by the Arts Council.  By some bureaucratic magic, public art emerged.

Siegfried Charoux, The Neighbours, Highbury Quadrant Estate, Islington

General themes and trends do stand out, however.  The earlier selections were marked by more thematic or obviously humanist content.  Siegfried Charoux’s The Neighbours, located in the Highbury Quadrant Estate in Islington is an example of this; Geoffrey Harris’s Generations in the Maitland Park Estate off Haverstock Hill, Camden, another.

Geoffrey Harris, Generations, Maitland Park Estate, Camden © Stu and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Some later works, such as Robert Clatworthy’s Bull, erected on the Alton Estate, Roehampton, in 1961 have a more obviously modernist sensibility.  Henry Moore was, of course, the prime contemporary exponent of the genre and two of his most prestigious works were placed in showpiece LCC estates – Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 in the Brandon Estate, Lambeth, in 1961 and his Draped Seated Woman in the Stifford Estate, Stepney, in 1962.

Some of you will know the recent controversy that has surrounded this last work, affectionately known as Old Flo to local residents.  It was sold to the LCC by Moore at the knock-down price of £7000 – a mark of his own commitment to public art – and based in part on his celebrated Wartime Shelter drawings of East End residents taking refuge underground from the Blitz.  It represents, to its supporters, ‘the post-war desire to improve the lives of Londoners’ – its story ‘one of idealism, resilience and the marking of social change in London’. (5)

Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman (‘Old Flo’), Stifford Estate, Stepney

That continuing social change was further marked by the demolition of the Estate’s three tower blocks in the 1990s.  Old Flo was removed and later moved for safekeeping to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  In 2012 the then Mayor of Tower Hamlets, which claimed ownership , proposed to sell it off for £20m – a tempting sum for a cash-strapped and impoverished east London borough.  To cut a long story short, a public campaign in its defence, legal action and the recent change of political leadership in the Tower Hamlets appear to have saved the sculpture – and some of that vision it embodied – for the Borough though a new local location it is yet to be found. (6)

Lynn Chadwick, The Watchers, Alton Estate, Roehampton. Photograph by John Donat.

But this is only one element of the threat that these public artworks face.  Theft is another – the fate which befell one of the three figures contained in Lynn Chadwick’s The Watchers unveiled on the Alton Estate in Roehampton in 1966.  Having ‘discovered’ (their own words) the statues in their grounds, Roehampton University are now committed to re-casting the lost piece and safeguarding the work in the grounds of their Downshire House hall of residence. (7)

The vandalised remains of Sydney Harpley’s Dockers (1962) on the Lansbury Estate, Poplar

Another threat is sheer neglect and this perhaps is the most telling.  We have travelled a long way from the idealism of the post-war world.  Local government, once a flagship of a new and more democratic world, is now a beleaguered institution, its budgets cut to the bone, left fighting to defend its front-line services.

All that, inseparably, marks the new dispensation under which our state, society and culture labour – a world in which we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The classless civic culture envisaged by Ike Hayward and the LCC seems a lost dream but we can and should value its remains.

Postscript

I hope to write more on this topic.  Much remains to be said on the LCC’s programme of school artworks and the less ‘high arts’ elements of its support for public art.  I’d be pleased to hear from anyone with memories, detail or photographs of lost or remaining LCC public artworks and would also be delighted to hear of municipal public art across the country.

Sources

(1) Margaret Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(2) Dolores Mitchell, ‘Art Patronage by the London County Council (L.C.C.) 1948-1965’, Leonardo, Vol. 10, 1977 

(3) London County Council, ‘Patronage of the Arts Scheme’ (1966), London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/DG/PUB/01/364/U2336

(4) Quoted in Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’

(5) Art Fund, ‘Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman: timeline of events’

(6) Mike Brooke, ‘People of the East End win High Court battle for Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”’, East London Advertiser, 9 July 2015

(7) The theft is recorded in ‘Second bronze sculpture stolen’, The Guardian, 24 January 2006; the University’s commitment to restoration and safeguarding in University of  Roehampton, ‘Sculpture to stand watch over Roehampton once again’, 20 February 2015.

Especial thanks go to @SirWilliamD for answering an early Twitter query and supplying copies of the original sources which inform this post.  Any errors, of  course, are all mine.

The LCC and the Arts I: The Open-Air Sculpture Exhibitions

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Battersea, LCC

If we remember 1945 at all – and it seems, sadly, an increasingly distant memory – we remember it for its principles of a free and national health service, a system of social security (not ‘welfare’ or ‘benefits’) in which a common duty to share burdens and support the less fortunate was almost universally accepted, and for the seemingly radical idea that the economy should be the people’s servant, not their master.

But beyond this – as if those values were not sufficiently remarkable by contemporary standards – there was a belief in a democratic and shared civic culture.  The arts were understood as an integral part of this.

Labour’s 1945 manifesto, ‘Let Us Face the Future’ (modestly described as ‘A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation’), urged that:

National and local authorities should co-operate to enable people to enjoy their leisure to the full, to have opportunities for healthy recreation. By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centres, we desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation.

At a national level, the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts founded in 1940 was replaced, in January 1945, by the Arts Council and its budget boosted from £50,000 to £235,000. But while described by some as ‘the cultural arm of the Welfare State’, the Council became circumscribed by the elite aesthetics and values of its ‘natural’ middle-class constituency.

It became, increasingly, the responsibility of local councils to navigate the difficult terrain between high-brow and popular culture.  Section 132 of the 1948 Local Government Act permitted local authorities to provide financial support (up to sixpence in the pound of local rates) to leisure and the arts and gave them this opportunity.  Typically, the London County Council was in the vanguard of such efforts.

Battersea Park open-air sculpture exhibition, 1948

In 1947, Patricia Strauss, the chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, suggested holding open-air sculpture exhibitions in the capital’s parks.  Strauss herself (a wealthy middle-class member of the Labour Party and a patron of the arts in her own right) embodied the tensions in the enterprise but she was clear that she wanted it ‘to frankly be an exhibition of Modern Sculpture’ – ‘if the discussion aroused is controversial, so much the better’. (1)

In this, she represented the prevalent views of the more progressive sections of the contemporary arts world and was assisted by Henry Moore, the leading figure in British sculpture of the time.  Moore was an active member of the contemporary arts establishment: ‘a new brand of English public intellectual, committed to a more democratic culture’. (2)

Henry Moore shown working on Three Standing Figures; photograph Felix Man © Picture Post, May 15 1948

But his work, though undoubtedly ‘advanced’, was understood – with its themes of family and the human figure – as humanist and Moore himself was not a figure of the metropolitan elite.  He came from Yorkshire; his father had been a pitman and a Labour Party and trade union activist. As a Picture Post article of 1948 stated: (3)

Henry Moore is not one of those sheltered artists who have always lived on the margin of life.  He is a miner’s son, a matter-of-fact fellow, eminently sociable and sensible.

Moore was on the organising committee of the first LCC exhibition which took place in Battersea Park in 1948 and, with two pieces on show, probably its biggest name.

The show was adjudged a great success.  Over 150,000 paid to enter and some 50,000 bought the 6d programme, written to enable ‘a person on the threshold of the study of sculpture to take an intelligent interest in the exhibits’. (4)  It was also the topic of six radio broadcasts and an early television report and received very favourable international coverage.

It’s harder to judge the fine grain here but contemporary observations that most visitors were relatively well-heeled and that those who weren’t preferred the ‘less difficult’ works can’t come as any great surprise.  A contemporary Times report notes Zadkine’s Laocoon and Modigliani’s Head as among the more challenging works but concluded it required ‘no special training to appreciate the lovely figures by Rodin and Maillol, Epstein’s Girl with the Gardenias or John Skeaping’s spirited stallion’. (5)

Zadkine, Laocoon

John Skeaping, The Horse (1934); now in the Tate

Moore’s work, particularly Three Standing Figures, attracted most interest and comment. According to one guide ‘almost everyone wanted to know…what is the meaning of the Moore group’ though a London taxi-driver (then, as now, the go-to people for pithy comment) described them simply as ‘one-eyed, little minded women having a gossip’.

Henry Moore, Three Standing Figures, Battersea Park © Yair Haklai and made available through Wikimedia Commons

One of the exhibition guide/lecturers, Matvyn Wright, concluded that it attracted ‘a large public whose intelligence is on average, much higher than in the provinces’. (6)  (What would he have made of Henry Moore?)  But Strauss, who had fought for an accessible exhibition – physically at least to the extent that attendees were to be allowed to ‘pat and touch the work’ – concluded it provided firm evidence that ‘ordinary people could enjoy sculpture’.

The second exhibition in 1951, also in Battersea Park, with a stronger international presence, coincided with the Festival of Britain; the rival attraction held to be an explanation of its lower though still impressive attendance of 110,000. The Festival itself was a major source of artistic patronage and display – the Arts Council commissioned works from Lynn Chadwick, Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, FE McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, and Eduardo Paolozzi amongst others, some of these works being displayed at Battersea.

Frank Dobson, London Pride, commissioned for the Festival of Britain 1951 and still on the South Bank

The 1954 exhibition (held in Holland Park) focussed on British artists and was, apparently, influenced by the more conservative tastes of a new working-class Labour chair of the Parks Committee, Councillor Alfred Kemp.  The suggestion that potential exhibitors submit models or photographs of their work prior to its acceptance was also resented by the bigger beasts of the art world who withdrew their participation as a result and the exhibition was criticised for its ‘lack of lustre’. (7)  Just 60,000 attended.

The 1957 exhibition, also in Holland Park, was principally curated by Gilbert Ledward, the President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was exclusively British in content.  Numbers attending rose slightly – to 72,000 – but that would be the latter peak.  Although the final exhibitions – back in Battersea Park – were more innovative in content (that of 1960 was Anglo-French in theme, the 1963 show featured artists from the US), the public fervour for public arts and entertainments had receded.

1960 Programme. The illustration is Henry Moore, Glenkiln Cross

The 1963 Exhibition was notable for its inclusion of a piece by Barbara Hepworth: Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62. This was one of three iterations of the work (the others may be found at the United Nations building in New York and in Baltimore) and ‘would, but for the Council’s action’ – they purchased it for 6000 guineas – ‘have been sold abroad’. The General Purposes Committee had been advised that it was ‘the finest work produced by Miss Hepworth in recent years’. (8) It remains today to adorn Battersea Park.

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62’, Battersea Park

The final exhibition – the seventh of the triennial series, held under the auspices of the Greater London Council after the abolition of the LCC – took place in 1966 but the GLC would prove to be generally less high-minded and expansive in its promotion of public art than its predecessor.

The open-air exhibitions were only one strand of the LCC’s efforts to bring art to  the people. We’ll look at its arts patronage scheme which placed artworks in council estates and schools and other council buildings next week.

Sources

(1) Jennifer Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, 2013

(2) Andrew Stephenson, ‘Fashioning a Post-War Reputation: Henry Moore as a Civic Sculptor c.1943’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

(3) Quoted in Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity.  Quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source.

(4) AL Lloyd, ‘Henry Moore Prepares for Battersea’, Picture Post, May 15 1948

(5) ‘Sculpture in Battersea’, The Times, 14 May 1948

(6) Quoted in Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’.  We shouldn’t be too hard on Wright – he was also the illustrator of Andy Pandy.

(7) Margaret Garlake, ‘A War of Taste’: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(8) ‘LCC to Pay 6000 Gns for Hepworth Bronze’, The Times, 13 December 1963

The Honor Oak Estate, Lewisham: ‘the forgotten estate’

Tags

LCC, Lewisham, Regeneration

We left the Honor Oak Estate last week, perhaps as oppressed by the inequality and constraints that have marked the lives of our poorer citizens as by Nazi bombs.  1945 brought the defeat of Hitler; the struggle to achieve decent conditions for all our people would be longer-fought.  In this and for the new generation of planners, the Estate would feature as a warning of what to avoid.  The ‘neighbourhood units’ and ‘mixed developments’ favoured – in principle rather better than in practice – in the post-war years were a conscious reaction to the design failings of interwar council estates, of which Honor Oak was taken to be a prime example. (1)

Barville Close

The General Election of 1945 saw a Labour landslide and a shift, it seems, in the politics and identity of the Estate too: ‘After the war we all went voting for Labour’, largely, as remembered, through the efforts of one party activist. ‘And it was only Mr Cooper who did it.  He went round this estate, “Vote for Labour”. He got everybody out’. (2)  I hope that gives heart to some of you pounding the pavements.

In a poignant turn of phrase, another resident recalls:

They had what was called the Labour Party then.  They used to come round and collect our money each week and see what could be done.  The majority of the estate was in it and it was that man who came round collecting who got all our action otherwise we had got nobody.

How you read that particular account will depend on your politics.

More concretely, additional shops and a pub arrived in 1948 – the pub, the Golden Dragon, in the ground floor of a new housing block.  (It closed in 2009 and the building has been demolished.)

The former Golden Dragon pub just prior to demolition © Oxyman, Wikimedia Commons

There were other changes too.  The first black and ethnic minority residents, mainly of African-Caribbean origin, moved into the area in the sixties and racial tensions were strong.  Nesta Wright and her three young children moved on to the Estate in 1970.

Her son Ian, seven at the time, remembers a difficult childhood and a struggle against the racial bigotry and antagonism that sought to hold him back.  Fortunately, he met a teacher at the Estate’s Turnham Primary School – ‘my mentor and my major, main man’, he says – who made the difference (as good teachers can).  Let’s hear it for that teacher, Sidney Pigden, and Ian Wright of Arsenal and England. (3)

These tensions dissipated only slowly.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation instigated a ‘Partnership Initiatives for Communities’ (PICs) project on the Estate in 1998.  At a time when about half the residents were of black African and African Caribbean heritage, the project found little contact between them and their white neighbours and a sense that an older-established and more conservative white community monopolised community facilities.

Ironically, these ‘rival’ groups actually shared similar concerns and problems and both felt that the Estate was neglected and its people disrespected: (4)

The way the council looks at people on the estate, their perception of the people they are housing reflects the service that we are given. Most of them think we are brain dead.”

“Sometimes you go in to the council office and as soon as you say you are from Honor Oak you can see what they are thinking.

In fact, the Estate was subject to a plethora of initiatives.  Some of the flats, particularly those of the ‘modified type’ which shared bathrooms, had been rehabilitated in the early post-war period and later the railway line on the western border of the Estate was replaced by Coston Walk, a new low-rise scheme of flats and maisonettes built by the Greater London Council in 1970.

Coston Walk

But still, the Estate’s troubles and a sense of isolation continued: (5)

Hopelessly out-dated and lacking in facilities by modern standards, cramped and comfortless, the flats were fair game for vandals, their tenants discontented and demoralised.

When the Estate was transferred from the Greater London Council to Lewisham in 1971, the Borough declared it a General Improvement Area and major refurbishment followed.  In Skipton House, for example, one of the last to be renovated, forty flats were replaced by 28 with larger rooms, fitted kitchens and bathrooms and new gas heating at a cost of around £10,000 a unit.  Lifts were added and landscaping improved but the finishing touch was to invite Ideal Home to decorate a show flat.  This was the 1970s so naturally there was Laura Ashley wallpaper in the hallway.

The 1977 History I’ve quoted from, published by the Honor Oak Estate Neighbourhood Association, was another conscious attempt to support and strengthen the Estate’s community:

The writers of this book also want to let the authorities know how much better the estate was managed and serviced in the past. Thus they hope to create improvements.

Such improvements were promised and partially fulfilled when Lewisham opted to participate in the Department of Environment’s Priority Estates Project in 1980 – one of twenty across the country.  The Project brought various local management initiatives and some improvements to security and the physical environment. (6)

Sulby House

These seem to have increased residents’ satisfaction with the Estate and, though Lewisham’s bid for Estate Action funding in 1992 was unsuccessful, money was found to upgrade bathrooms and heating across the Estate.  That much remained to do is clear from the three-year PICs project mentioned earlier:

I look out of my window and I see abandoned cars, kids hanging around, dog dirt everywhere. What do I want to go out for?

Honor Oak’s problems were far from unique, of course.  At this time, the residents’ complaints of ‘disaffected youth and out-of-control children, crime and vandalism, drugs and alcohol abuse’ were replicated in ‘problem estates’ nationwide.

And, likewise, underlying such problems were economic difficulties felt with peculiar force in council estates increasingly housing a poorer working class. Of the families that made up half the Estate, almost two thirds were headed by lone parents.  (No disrespect to single mothers of course but a group which can be assumed to be peculiarly disadvantaged.) Around one third of the Estate’s adults were on benefits.

To some that might seem all we need to know.  Poverty blights any community and, in this regard, the quality of the Estate itself – its housing and environment – could be taken as almost irrelevant.  The PICs focused on ‘soft regeneration’ – an attempt (in its fashionable jargon) ‘to build capacity and empower, and hopefully integrate, a fractured and excluded estate community’.  A ‘citizens’ workshop’ was held and from it emerged a multiracial steering group to represent the Estate and lobby for improvements.

Thomas Joseph House on St Norbert Road

This ‘soft regeneration’ was fortunate, however, in finding its aspirations backed by some hard cash. In 2000, the Borough Council promised £18.4 million to refurbish the ‘forgotten estate’.  The deputy mayor of Lewisham spoke with disarming honesty when he stated:  (7)

We’re finally going to do something about Honor Oak. It’s going to be the biggest programme of housing investment Lewisham has had for ten years.

Over the years that followed, of the blocks which remain, all have been modernised with new kitchens, bathrooms and toilets, double-glazing and central heating.  Externally, a visit to the Estate shows a green and pleasant and well-maintained environment.

Turnham House rear

Other initiatives accompanied and reinforced these physical improvements: in 2000 a £156,000 Home Office grant provided six wardens to patrol the Estate for a two-year period – ‘to reassure tenants, not act as security guards’, it was said, and wearing bomber jackets in a colour chosen by the residents.

In the following year, a Sure Start scheme opened; in 2003, a neighbourhood housing management centre and in 2005 a one-stop centre offering a range of services and support.  Honor Oak’s first neighbourhood manager was one of the three unemployed single mothers who had joined the first steering group.  The neighbourhood association is now said to be a diverse and representative organisation.  Even that security team and the local police beat officers won awards.  Either the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are brilliant self-publicists or something went right.

Honor Oak Medical Centre, Turnham Road © Malc McDonald and made available under a Creative Commons licence

We can agree that money alone is not enough – but we might also conclude that it sure does help. The longer history of the Honor Oak Estate shows that the social costs of building cheaply far outweigh any short-term financial savings.  The story is of catch-up and always, from the outset, exclusion – that buzz-word does capture something here. On the other hand, while money can’t create community, investment in its infrastructure certainly supports it. For the time being, the parting words of the residents’ history contain a plaintive truth that I can’t express better:

Why is it that housing continues to be geared more towards costs than the needs of the people?

Sources

(1) Ruth Glass and LE White, A Warning to Planners: the Story of Honor Oak Estate (1945)

(2) Maybe this was Fred Cooper of Revelon Road. He’s listed as the secretary of the local Clarion Cycling Club – a socialist organisation – in the 1930s by Hayes People’s History. Does anyone know for sure?

(3) See Rick Glanvill, The Wright Stuff (2012) and ‘Passed/failed: An education in the life of Ian Wright, footballer and broadcaster’, The Independent, 20 March 2008, from which the quotation is drawn.

(4) David Page, Respect and Renewal. A study of neighbourhood social regeneration, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2006)

(5) ‘Design for Living Honor Oak’, Ideal Home, May 1978, vol 115, no 5

(6) Anne Power, Running to Stand Still. Progress in local management on twenty unpopular housing estates, Priority Estates Project (PEP), 1991

(7) Vicky Wilkes, ‘£18.4 million package for “forgotten estate”’, Mercury, 23 February 2000

The Watling Estate, Burnt Oak: ‘the raw, red tentacles of that housing octopus, the London County Council’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Barnet, Cottage suburbs, LCC

The London County Council built over 89,000 homes between the wars.   Over half – some 47,000 – were built in out-of-county ‘cottage suburbs’.   The Watling Estate, then in the urban district of Hendon, was the third largest of these (after Becontree and St Helier) with a population of 19,000 by 1939. But not everyone was sympathetic to the drive to rehouse Londoners from the crowded inner-cities, at least not in their backyard: (1)

Under construction, 1927: Burnt Oak Station to the right and Watling Avenue with Watling Avenue and Barnfield Road in centre © Britain from Above, EPW019190

Isn’t it time that Mill Hill woke up and tried to save itself from being trampled to death? Already the raw, red tentacles of that housing octopus, the London County Council Watling Estate, are pushing their way through the green meadows, devouring everything in their path…LCC wooden bungalows face houses that sold a few years ago for over £2,000. This surely is a scandal.

Scandal or not, Mill Hill’s fate had been sealed by the extension of the Northern Line to Edgware in 1924.  The LCC acted quickly to purchase 387 acres of farmland adjacent to the new Burnt Oak station.  The plans, drawn up by the LCC’s Chief Architect, George Topham Forrest, set aside 46 acres for allotments and parks and 16 acres for schools and public buildings. The rest was for housing.

Building began in February 1926. The first family moved in in April 1927; 2100 more followed within twelve months.   By 1931, the Estate – 4021 dwellings in total – was complete, aside from 34 larger homes for letting at higher rents added in 1936.

Atholl Steel homes on Banstock Road in varying states of repair

Most were traditional brick but the total includes 252 ‘Atholl’ steel and 464 timber-frame homes built as the LCC experimented with methods it hoped would be cheaper and quicker.  The timber homes were apparently supplied with 12 feet of rubber hose due to the inadequacy of local fire services. (2)  Most were larger family homes, a mix of parlour and non-parlour; around 320 were flats.

Flats on Goldbeaters Grove

Other facilities came more slowly:  ‘No shops, no schools, the kids were running wild’, as one resident recalls; or another of the Estate’s early years: (3)

At that time there was nothing but bricks and mortar and acres of mud.  The main thoroughfares were narrow lanes – little more that footpaths and cart-tracks in part.

The first school opened in 1928, the large Watling Central School in 1931. The main shopping parade on Watling Avenue was built in 1930 – a welcome relief to local housewives who had previously had to travel to Edgware for their groceries.

Housing was the priority and the LCC’s architects were attentive to its design and detail, providing a range of Arts and Crafts touches across the Estate – in the predominant use of traditional brick and tile, timber window framing and doors, porches and canopies, and the deployment of dormers, eaves and bays adding visual interest and detail.

Compared to pre-war schemes such as the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham and the Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith or the early post-war Dover House Estate in Putney, Watling is plainer but it was good quality housing and a fine environment for Londoners escaping the inner city.

It is the Estate’s overall layout which is more striking.  Garden City ideals, albeit modified for scale and economy, were implemented in a range of the Estate’s features.  Streets were designed to make the best use of the undulating site and offer vistas and views.

Deansbrook Road looking towards Crispin Road

Buildings at corner sites and some of the short terraces were set back to open out the streetscape, provide variety and add greenery.  Greens and cul-de-sacs also reflect the contemporary idiom of Unwin-inspired cottage estates.  Unique to Watling was the Silk Stream – a meandering brook preserved to create a 45 acre open space running through the heart of the Estate. (4)

Blessbury Road

So who were the ‘colonists’ of this fine new estate?  Thanks to Ruth Durant’s 1937 survey we have a pretty good idea. One in five of the male heads of household were skilled workers, almost the same proportion worked in transport and almost one in ten were ‘blackcoated’ workers – clerical and administrative employees.  Around 25 per cent were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers.

This was then, typically for the new housing estates of the day, a relatively well-off though overwhelmingly working-class population.  Over half the men earned between £3 and £4 a week in wages.  Small families predominated and almost half the population was under 18.

Weatherboarded homes on Blundell Road

As Durant concluded, ‘only artisan families from London, in certain phases of their lives and possessing certain incomes, are eligible to live here’.  It was this selection that accounted for ‘the comparatively well-to-do aspect of the Estate’ though looks could be deceiving.

Take the case of Mrs Miller ‘down the top of Horsecroft’: (5)

she used to pawn her washing every, every Monday. Her laundry, bed sheets, bed linen. And take it out again on Friday night…she used to cart it down to Harvey and Thompsons, who were the big pawnbrokers in Watling…they were the lifeblood of many people in Watling.

Durant herself understood that the economic respectability of Watling’s residents was precarious, subject as they were to the vicissitudes of personal life and the market and to the additional expenses of the Estate:

Watling itself makes new demands upon the pockets of those who move there.  Shopping is more expensive when the market is unfamiliar.  The rents on the estates are a great financial burden, especially to those who formerly lived cheaply…The new house needs new linoleum, new curtains and even new furniture, and all is bought on hire purchase… Husbands have longer journeys to their work, are forced to eat more meals outside and to spend more on fares.

The lowest rent on the Estate (for a two-room flat) was a little over 50p; for a five-room parlour home it stood at around £1.44.  These were often twice the rents people had previously paid.

Then, she claimed, there were the new pressures of keeping up with the people next door:

In the old ‘mean street’, people were not tempted by example of their neighbours to acquire fresh impediments.  At Watling, where more households with better incomes have settled, the wireless next door becomes an obligation to bring home a wireless.

There were those too who found the isolation and lack of facilities of the Estate in its early days difficult to cope with: (6)

My husband thought it was terrible…’Godforsaken hole, miles away from anywhere’.

My mother wasn’t too happy because in Marylebone we were just down the road from Selfridges but when you got to Watling it was just fields plus fields.

All this helps explain why in its early years almost one in ten of households left the Estate annually, mostly to live more cheaply and closer to work or friends and family in central London though some left to buy their own homes nearby.

For Durant, this turnover of population was one of the major reasons why Watling failed to be the type of community she wanted: ‘in the long run’, she concluded, ‘Watling is not much more than a huge hotel without a roof’.

There was also the problem of demography.  Watling didn’t house independent younger people with, typically, lower incomes; in other words, its own children.  Still, the fact that ‘frequently Watling boys marry Watling girls’ – as she put it rather sweetly – and that both often found local employment did suggest that the population would stabilise.

In next week’s post I’ll look more closely at the type of community insiders and outsiders wanted Watling to be and the type of community it actually was and I’ll question a few assumptions along the way.

Sources

(1) A letter to the Hendon and Finchley Times, 11 November 1927, quoted in Daniel Weinbren, Hendon Labour Party, 1924-1992. A Brief Introduction to the Microfilm Edition (1998)

(2)  Alan Jackson, Semi-Detached London Suburban Development, Life and Transport 1900-1939 (1973)

(3) Ruth Durant, Watling, A Survey of Life on a New Housing Estate (1939).  Ruth Durant is better known, after her second marriage, as Ruth Glass.

(4) London Borough of Barnet, Watling Estate Conservation Area Character Appraisal Statement  (July 2007)

(5) A Watling resident quoted in Darrin Bayliss, ‘Building Better Communities: social life on London’s cottage council estates, 1919-1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol 29, No 3, July 2003

(6) Quoted in Bayliss, ‘Building Better Communities’

The Dover House Estate, Putney: ‘Here comes Uniform Town’

Tags

1920s, Cottage suburbs, LCC, Wandsworth

There were those who looked askance at the London County Council’s new Dover House Estate in 1919.  Well-heeled local people in the big houses nearby expressed concern that transport links were poor for the area’s new residents.  And then there was another ‘element for consideration’ – ‘that its conversion into a working-class district must enormously depreciate the rateable value of property in the vicinity’. (1)

Dover House Road

In fact, worries that the Estate would blight the neighbourhood and would be filled by ‘very, very poor people from the bad areas of the East End’ were illusory.  The Dover House Estate, initially known as the Roehampton Estate, would become a ‘show place in its day…visited by many from all over the world.’ (2)

And it would house an overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ working class.  Many of these worked in the public services – in public transport, as police officers or postal workers – and they would give the Estate its occasional nickname. We saw in Bristol the high standards of the earliest council housing built after World War One when ‘homes for heroes’ was briefly something more than a  slogan.  The Dover House Estate is a London equivalent and, as Mark Swenarton noted, it would ‘set the standard for LCC building in general’. (3)

Putney Park House after its recent refurbishment and conversion

In 1919, the LCC bought – its first post-war purchase – 147 acres of parkland belonging to the adjacent private estates of Dover House and Putney Park House.  The former was demolished but the latter survived as a social centre – the ‘Rec’ to local residents – for the new estate. It’s been sold off now and converted into private flats. Building began in early 1920 under the generous subsidies of Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act.  By July 1921, when the Addison scheme was axed, just 17 houses had been completed.  These cost £1150 each; in all 634 would be built under the terms of this initial contract until terminated as construction costs fell.

Laneway under construction

A further 168 homes were built in 1924 under Chamberlain’s Housing Act and more followed under the Wheatley Act of that year.  By 1927, when the Estate was complete, 1212 homes had been erected – ranging from five-room houses to two-room flats, accommodating a population of around 4400. (4) Size and quality deteriorated as the Estate expanded and Government subsidies and prescribed housing standards fell:

As financial problems arose so each new builder made the houses smaller as they went up the hill. They were smaller and smaller so that when you got to the top ones…if you opened the front door you had to close all the other doors, you know, otherwise you couldn’t get in.

The homes themselves built of stock brick with occasional decorative touches and roughcast rendering to bring variety.   Doors and porches were used to add to the ‘cottagey’ feel of the housing.  Rooflines – a range of gable and hipped ends, some houses with first-floor eaves and dormer windows – are varied strikingly, their visual impact heightened by the planners’ deliberate use of the Estate’s sloping landscape.

The front parlour of a Dover House Estate home

Internally, the homes were of their time – gas-lit in the first place with water heated in a downstairs coal-fired copper and pumped upstairs where necessary.  But every home had a garden and many, unusually, had a side garden – another feature deliberately employed by the planners to add to the Estate’s vistas and feeling of spaciousness. (5)

Dover House Estate site plan

But the real glory of the Dover House Estate lay in its overall design and layout. The 1921 estate plan shows how carefully its design conforms to Garden City ideals in its studied informality, open space and greenery, and curving streetscapes.

Laneway green

‘A prime objective’ of the LCC’s planners was that ‘each group of houses should overlook or have access to a small open space close by’.  Some of the cottages are arranged around greens but, even in the more conventional streets, terraces are short, often set back, with clusters of homes possessing an intimacy and identity.  Mature trees were retained and new ones planted.  Footways included wide grass verges – though the latter have fallen to the need for on-street parking, as some of the beautiful front gardens have been converted into hardstanding.

The Pleasance today

The Pleasance formed the Estate’s major open space but the nine acres set aside for allotments in the Estate were, in their way, an even stronger statement of Garden City ideals – an echo, at least, of Ebenezer Howard’s dream of healthy and self-sufficient living.  Two of the three allotment areas initially provided survive; one has been used for in-fill housing.

Huntingfield Road Elementary School, opened in March 1925, would be another key institution, especially when – in its early years – the Estate was home to so many young families.  The school’s single-storey design was another testament to the Garden City ideal of healthy living, being described by the LCC as ‘a pavilion type’, approximating ‘to the lines of a sanatorium’. (6)  It closed in 1993.

Girls’ drill at Huntingfield School in the 1920s © English Heritage

In other respects, community facilities were lacking.  A small row of shops was set at the periphery of the Estate but proved expensive even for better-off residents.  There was no library, no health centre.  No public houses either though those who found ‘the Rec’ too stuffy could walk to traditional pubs in Upper Richmond Road or Roehampton Village.

Shops on Upper Richmond Road

This was, in any case, a new community – literally in that the Estate’s new residents had moved from densely-settled inner-city areas but psychologically too. Looking back, older residents are quick to praise a traditional neighbourliness which existed in these years.  Two residents recall:

People left their doors open, their back doors open. You didn’t have to worry then, you see. There was no problem.

I mean my mum had to go off to hospital quite a bit…And automatically there would always be a neighbour to look after you until your mum came back. And you know that was just the way things happened.

But many acknowledge too – in almost identical terms – a shift:

People were friendly, but they kept themselves to themselves.

Just neighbourly you were, you talked and all that but you didn’t get that far with them.

We had very good neighbours, you know we’d help each other out. But it wasn’t like, not like the community spirit that you got in the East End.

I don’t think we were ever quite like the East End with the going in and out like that.

This was a new working class whose living conditions and relative affluence combined with a self-conscious ‘respectability’ to create a more domesticated and private life-style, one that knowingly and happily distanced itself from the old intimacies of slum living.  We saw this in the Wythenshawe Estate, Manchester, too.

And as at Wythenshawe, gardening was a key indicator of the new way of life.

Roehampton Estate Garden Society poster, from Darrin Balyliss’ thesis

At its most explicit, this feeling of difference translated into a sense that the new residents of the Dover House Estate were – quite literally – ‘chosen people’:

The earliest people here were chosen…They were chosen to come because they all had a steady job, and they were also chosen on what they looked like.  They, they were very careful who they brought here. You just couldn’t move here because you said you wanted to live here.

The LCC was as careful in selecting its tenants as that memory suggests.  Prospective tenants were expected to demonstrate a ‘good record for cleanliness and punctual payment of rent’ and have an income at least five times greater than the total of rent, rates and fares. (7)  In the Dover House Estate, where in 1927 some rents for houses built in its early years reached 30s (£1.50) a week this was a considerable hurdle.

It was, therefore, those in what were called at the time ‘the sheltered trades’ – various forms of public sector employment – who were best able to fit these criteria.  In fact, ten per cent of the homes were initially reserved for council employees.  Locals: (8)

gave us the name ‘Uniform Town’ because we had bus drivers, policemen, tram drivers and postmen living on the estate.  When we walked into the village one of the locals would say ‘Hello, here comes Uniform Town’. It was all in good fun.

In fact, in 1931 the LCC estimated that an incredible – for a council estate – 37 per cent of heads of household were white-collar workers whilst 34 per cent belonged to the skilled working class.  Some families even had maids.  So striking was this that in 1932 the council suggested that 201 of the more ‘well-to-do tenants’ move, presumably to houses that they could afford to purchase.

Still, selection criteria remained strict. A fall in white-collar households – to 21 per cent in 1939 – was offset by an eleven per cent rise in skilled working-class heads.  A smaller rise of unskilled heads had brought their total up to one quarter of the Estate as a whole – a small impact compared to that seen in Norris Green, Liverpool and the Knowle Estate in Bristol in the 1930s as Government slum clearance policies took effect.

In many ways, the rather ‘select’ air of the Estate seems to have survived to the present.  This is not a tale of ‘decline’, a charting of the new realities of council housing as it became increasingly reserved for the least well-off and most disadvantaged of our community. The sheer quality of the Dover House Estate’s design values and layout survives – protected since 1978 by its designation as a conservation area.  I suppose it’s a sign of the times – not necessarily a welcome one – that a homes and property article can describe the Estate as ‘a charming enclave on the western edge of Putney’.(9) Of course, right to buy has had a significant impact but the overall impression of the Estate now is that of a settled community.  One local survey showed over 50 per cent of respondents as over 50 – probably a skewed statistic but still a sign of a community which has, in a sense, grown old with the Estate. Over half of respondents had lived on the Estate over ten years and, hearteningly, some three-quarters wanted to stay at least another five years, many permanently. (10)

There were complaints about the traffic and rat-running, people wanted better facilities for children and older people but few thought that the Estate had changed for the worse and as many thought it had improved in recent years.

We’ll let those views and that experience stand as testimony to the quality of the original design and the ideals which informed it – a moment when aesthetics briefly triumphed over economy in the design of working-class housing and a time when council housing was viewed as a step-up not a safety net.

Sources

(1) Archibald D. Dawnay (Mayor of Wandsworth), ‘A Roehampton Estate’, letter to The Times, 15 April 1919

(2) Local residents quoted in Darrin Bayliss, Council Cottages and Community in Interwar Britain: A Study of Class, Culture, Community and Place, Queen Mary and Westfield College PhD, 1998.  The quotations which follow from local people are also taken from this source as is occupational data on the Estate’s tenants.

(3) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: the politics and architecture of early state housing in Britain (1981)

(4) Barbara Sanders, ‘Roehampton Council Housing Estates’, March 2004

(5) Most of the descriptive detail on the Estate here is drawn from Wandsworth Council, Dover House Estate Conservation Area Appraisal (ND)

(6) Quoted in Geraint Franklin, Inner London Schools, 1918-1944. A Thematic Study, English Heritage (2009)

(7) Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes

(8) Quoted in Antonia Rubinstein, Just Like the Country. Memories of London families who settled the new cottage estates, 1919-1939 (1991)

(9) Anthea Masey, ‘Spotlight on Putney: a taste of country life in the capital’, London Evening Standard, July 13 2011

(10) Stuart King’s Dover House Estate residents’ survey, Autumn 2009

My thanks to Barbara Sanders whose experience and writing has provided the background to this post and who sparked my further research. Unless otherwise credited, images are taken from Wandsworth Council’s Dover House Estate Conservation Area Appraisal.