Council Housing in Portsmouth, Part I to 1945: ‘Providing for the health and betterment of the people’

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1920s, 1930s, Planning, Pre-1914

Portsmouth is the UK’s only island city.  Though the relatively narrow Portsbridge Creek, on the landward side, has been bridged several times, historically the city’s location has given it the highest population density in the country and it’s helped contribute to what is a particularly rich and diverse housing history.

Portsmouth’s population grew from around 32,000 in 1800 to over 188,000 by century’s end.  That rapid growth created the poor housing conditions typical of the era; a cholera outbreak in 1849 killed around 1000 people and a Government health inspector Robert Rawlinson described the town as ‘one huge cesspool’. It had become through its long Victorian terraces what some call ‘the northern city on the south coast’.  (1)

Dr Andrew Mearns Fraser, pictured in 1934

Municipally, our story begins in 1909 when the unusually go-ahead Medical Officer of Health of the Borough Council (it became a city in 1926), Dr Andrew Mearns Fraser, carried out a survey of Portsmouth’s insanitary housing. He identified, in a report entitled ‘Improvement Scheme for an Unhealthy Area in Portsea’ published the following year, a particular area near the naval dockyards as worthy of reform and, unusually, recommended not mere clearance or a garden suburb but an inner-city town planning scheme. (1)

Mearns Fraser’s original plans for Curzon Howe Road

A notable feature of Mearns Fraser’s proposal was a central square ‘planted with trees, which shall be a lung for the neighbourhood, and afford a playground for children’.  His determination to tackle the prevalence of lung disease in the neighbourhood (seven times higher than the rest of the borough) was shown in another innovation; whilst the cottage designs generally reflected the progressive influence of housing reformer Raymond Unwin, Type B offered ’a more original plan’ – a single, dual-aspect ‘large, and well lighted living room’ to replace the smaller parlour and living room then usually favoured.

Curzon Howe Road today

In the end, cost-cutting won the day. Though 193 run-down houses were demolished, a far more conventional – though still attractive and well-proportioned – linear street of 43 new houses emerged. The council could, however, still take justifiable pride in Curzon Howe Road when it was officially opened in October 1912.  The Cluett family recorded a tenancy of 76 years at no 26, beginning in 1915 but apparently now just three of the homes remain in council ownership.

The plaque unveiled in 1912 and pictured contemporarily

The First World War and its aftermath brought more pressure to clear slums and build the ‘homes for heroes’ promised by prime minister Lloyd George. The Council, still securely in Conservative hands, hesitated initially, concerned over high building costs (at around £1000 per house) and rents likely reaching 12 to 16 shillings (60 to 80p) a week. It’s an indication of the pressure brought by central government at the time that it took a phone call from the Ministry of Health and Housing’s local commissioner – threatening a motion for default against the council – to force its hand. (3)

Councillor Charles Childe (chair of the Housing Committee) at least was clear that the Council must seize the moment:

He agreed the housing schemes were not a business proposition, but there was a side of the housing question that was not economic. By carrying out these schemes they would be providing for the health and betterment of the people. It was better to spend money in that way rather than in building sanatoria.

Medina Road, Wymering Garden Village

In the end, helped by a 1920 boundary extension which incorporated Cosham and Wymering on the mainland to the north, Portsmouth built 591 homes under Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing Act.  Among the largest estates were Henderson Road in Eastney, with 254 homes, and what was called a little grandiloquently Wymering Garden Village. After that, the Council’s eloquence failed and most of the estate’s hundred or so new houses – good quality homes along tree-lined streets – were built on First, Second and Third Avenues off Medina Road.

Unusually this pair of houses on Medina Road, Wymering, is precisely dated: 1924

Lloyd George’s promise and Addison’s programme were cut short by spending cuts in 1921 but municipal housebuilding was revived by Housing Acts in 1923 and, more importantly, 1924.  Portsmouth built 951 homes under the 1924 Act, most dotted around the island, a few to the far north on Portsdown Hill.

Cottage flats, St Faiths Road

Nationally, the housing programme took a new direction in 1930 when Arthur Greenwood’s Housing Act targeted slum clearance and the rehousing of its residents for the first time. Here Portsmouth was ahead of the game, having demolished 381 derelict homes in Portsea under the 1924 Act.  Eighty-nine further homes were cleared around Voller Street in Landport.  The street disappeared but the 52 cottage flats built to replace them on St Faiths and Temple Streets remain.

Campaigning by the local press may have played its part. The Evening News invited readers on the waiting list – over 1000-strong in 1924 – to send details of their housing circumstances and it publicised the most egregious cases, for example a five-roomed cottage inhabited by twelve people: ‘the applicant has six children and his wife died of tuberculosis and the lodger is in the last stages of the disease’, it reported. (4)

Brightstone Road, Isle of Wight Estate

Portsmouth built a further 1148 homes under the 1930 legislation – houses in Landport and Portsea on the island and major schemes to the north in Wymering, north of Whitstable Road and south of Medina Road on the so-called Isle of Wight Estate where roads were named after Wight towns.

Slum clearance remained a priority, however, pushed by central government and encouraged by Mearns Fraser’s successor as Medical Officer of Health, Dr AB Williamson, who described slums as ‘radiating centres of disease and health and mental degradation’ at a local church conference in 1934.   That message was endorsed by Councillor AE Allaway, chair of the Health Committee, who was clear that ‘money spent on slum clearance will be more than saved in other health services’. (5)

For the moment, Portsmouth was prepared to put its money where its mouth was. The Council had scheduled (declared for clearance) fifteen areas, nine of them on the island, involving the demolition of 796 homes and the rehousing of some 3659 residents. Some 508 individual insanitary houses were additionally slated for demolition. In total, the Council estimated around a 1000 new council homes would be required. (6)

Cllr AE Allaway

The issue of where this housing should be was also beginning to preoccupy the Council.  Councillor Allaway hoped that by means of three-storey flats it would be possible to ‘to put quite one-third more people on the sites than if we built houses’.  By 1937, turning back to the pioneering work of Andrew Mearns Fraser, a Special Committee of the Council had been convened ‘to consider the layout of the Portsea area’. (7)  The time and expense of travel to work from distant Corporation suburbs were a particular issue for many of the poorer residents displaced from central Portsmouth.

Privett House © Mike Faherty and made available through a Creative Commons licence

By 1939, the Council had built 2806 new homes. Around 430 of these were flats in the inner city including those in Privett House, a five-storey block north of Cumberland Street, commenced in the late 1930s.

This image of the centre of Portsmouth with cleared bombsites in 1950 shows the extent of the impact of wartime bombing.

But that constructive work was rapidly overshadowed by the devastating impact of the Blitz on Portsmouth. From July 1940 to May 1944, the city suffered 76 air raids and some 930 civilians were killed. It was estimated 6625 houses were destroyed – around 10 percent of housing stock – and a further 6549 severely damaged.

This photograph of Conway Street in Landport in 1940 shows its personal impact.

Typically, planning for the post-war world began early with the Council setting up a Special Replanning Committee in February 1941. It was boosted by a visit from Lord Reith, Minister of Works and Buildings, in March at which he urged Portsmouth ‘to plan boldly and on a large scale … with the expectation that a good many of the difficulties that have prevented them doing so in the past will be adjusted’. FAC Maunder, then Deputy City Architect, was tasked with preparing preliminary proposals for the Council. (8)

Other interested parties also made their views known. A Replanning Advisory Panel of the Chamber of Commerce, set up in July 1941, recommended the dispersal of around 50,000 of the city’s current population to large new settlements on the mainland. In 1943, the Replanning Committee of the local Labour Party urged municipally owned estates and ‘self-contained houses wherever possible’.  Despite their political differences, both reports opposed flats except, in the Labour Party’s words, ‘in a few instances where absolutely necessary’. In this, they captured popular sentiment: a Mass Observation survey in the city showed 92 percent wanting to live in a house rather than flat. (9)

Maunder’s report, accepted with one dissentient, was published in February 1943 and largely followed these lines. It advocated an urban (in effect, island) population of 150,000 at no more than 70 persons per acre, grouped – the coming idea – into neighbourhood units. Its big idea was to disperse around 60,000 of the current population into two new settlements, one around Leigh Park (on land within Petersfield Rural District and Havant and Waterloo Urban District) – envisaged as a satellite town, ‘the Garden City of the South’ – and another, more of a dormitory estate, around Waterlooville.  Maunder himself was appointed City Planning Officer heading a new City Planning and Reconstruction Department in July 1944.

Cllr FGH Storey

Little could be achieved under the exigencies of war but the Council had already acted boldly as Reith had advised in setting in motion the purchase of land at Leigh Park. It had rather daringly entrusted Conservative councillor FGH Storey with full powers to negotiate the deal as early as August 1943 and the land (with an additional extension in 1946) was bought in 1944.

We’ll continue this story in next week’s post, examining what became – amongst other things – of those high ideals around Leigh Park and the conflicting ideas around suburban and inner-city development.

Sources

(1) Portsmouth City Council, A History of Council Housing in Portsmouth (2011).  The ‘northern city’ quotation is drawn from John Ashmore, ‘Rebalancing Britain: The northern city on the south coast’, CAPX, 18 July 2019.

(2) Andrea Verenini and Fabiano Lemes De Oliveira, ‘The Ambiguity of Town Planning: Innovation or Re-Interpretation?’, 15th International Planning History Society Conference, July 2012

(3) Details drawn from ‘Portsmouth Council. More About the New Houses: their Cost when Erected’, Hampshire Telegraph and Post, 14 May 1920 and ‘Portsmouth’s Housing. The Council and the Hill Scheme’, Portsmouth Evening News, 4 December 1920

(4) ‘Portsmouth’s Terrible Record. Facts for the Town Council’, Portsmouth Evening News, 31 December 1924

(5) ‘Slum Clearance’, Portsmouth Evening News, 6 March 1934

(6) Councillor AE Allaway, ‘The Housing and Slum Clearance Problem in Portsmouth’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, vol 55, no 1, January 1934

(7) ‘Portsmouth Slum Clearance’, Portsmouth Evening News, 28 April 1937

(8) ‘Plan Boldly’, Portsmouth Evening News, 21 March 1941

(9) Tatsuya Tsubaki, Post-war Reconstruction and the Questions of Popular Housing Provision, 1939-1951, PhD thesis in Social History, University of Warwick, 1993

(10) ‘Portsmouth City Council Buy Leigh Park Estate’, Portsmouth Evening News, 9 February 1944

Council Housing in Norwich: ‘I thought we were ever so posh’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, Cottage suburbs, Planning

The fine city of Norwich is known for its castle, cathedral and Canaries. I won’t detract from those, particularly the latter, but it deserves to be better known for its council housing. By the 1970s, Norwich had the highest proportion of council housing of any town in the country.  It also had some of the best. We’ll tell the first part of that story this week. It’s unique because in Norfolk (as they’ll proudly tell you) they do different, but there’s a lot too about the wider dynamics which have shaped council housing – for good or ill – across the country.

In 1919, 90 per cent of Norwich’s 28,000 homes were occupied by the working-class; of these homes, some 7000 were judged substandard.  In the short-lived enthusiasm for ‘homes for heroes’, the City Council committed to building 1200. Just under 150 of these were to be built in an extension of the city’s tiny Angel Road scheme – its twelve tenements opened in 1904 (since demolished) represented the council’s only pre-war building.  Most were to be built on new cottage estates at Harford Hall, Earlham and Mile Cross – the city’s interwar showpiece.  (1)

Early post-1WW housing on Angel Road © Northmetpit and made available under a Creative Commons licence

The Mile Cross Estate in the City of Norwich Plan (1945)

Labour and materials shortages in the immediate post-war period stalled this programme but, anxious to build, the Council investigated the alternative concrete-mix systems being promoted at the time. Three were commissioned: Duo-Slab (of which some remain in Mile Cross), Underdown and Winget. Of the 500 of the latter systems built, the last on the Earlham Estate were demolished in 2006. (2)

A close in the Earlham Estate from the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Construction picked up as materials and labour shortages eased. Land was purchased for a new scheme in Lakenham in 1923.  Construction of the North Earlham Estate began in 1927, extended in the later-1930s when the new Larkman and Marlpit Estates were also being developed.  These in particular mark the new priorities of the time, built largely to rehouse those displaced by city centre slum clearance. By June 1938, as part of a comprehensive five-year programme,  the Council had demolished 2280 homes, displacing 7483 people and building 2346 homes to replace those lost.

‘The Woodrow Pilling Estate. Not one of the best Corporation Estates; probably the result of depression of standards by higher authority’ according to the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

This could seem an almost miraculous transformation as one long-term resident, moved to Earlham, as a child recalls: (3)

I can remember going into this brand new house and I can remember running about; I thought we were ever so posh or we’d come into money or something. Of course we hadn’t.  They were going to knock down all these slums in Ber Street and they put us all that had two or three children, they put them in all these new council houses.

But to managers, the re-housing of ‘slum-dwellers’ – typically poorer than those traditionally let council homes, sometimes viewed as almost a separate tribe – raised (or so it was felt) particular issues as the City Estates Surveyor, Mr RJ Allerton explains.

All prospective tenants, he tells us, were ‘visited at least twice before being moved to estates to learn of their family circumstances, needs and general cleanliness’ so they could be placed appropriately.  Once relocated: (4)

every house [was] inspected a short time after occupation and careful notes made as to the manner in which it is kept, its cleanliness, condition of furniture, conduct of children, state of decoration, condition of garden, shed, etc.

Naturally, grading followed.  Grade A tenants could ‘obviously be left alone’, Grade B were visited annually but Grade C people were ‘visited frequently and rendered help and assistance wherever possible’.  Any council tenant falling into serious arrears was brought personally before the Housing Committee.  You can decide if all this represents heavy-handed paternalism or compassionate support to those in need.

Slum clearance and the relocation of its residents also raised the question of disinfestation of furniture and bedding.  Typically, for Norwich (Labour-controlled from 1933) this was taken in-house – the council employing a team of four, operating a van large enough to contain the household effects of three families, ‘hauled by a mechanical horse’.  I’m guessing that looked something like this Borough of Wood Green example.  It’s a sign of lost innocence that Mr Allerton can casually name the Hydrogen cyanide gas used for the purpose, manufactured in Germany by IG Farben – Zyklon B.

These ‘slum clearance’ estates were located on the then periphery of the city; they became viewed as both geographically and socially marginal.  As we’ve seen in the case of Knowle West in Bristol, a complex process of stigmatisation can emerge in these circumstances, something both conferred and assumed.  This is true of the Larkman in Norwich, labelled with all the usual ‘Chavtown’ epithets you can imagine (or, if you can’t, a quick Google search will satisfy your curiosity). (5)

‘The Larkman Lane Estate, good in design and materials’ according to the 1945 City of Norwich Plan so not blighted in its conception

Back in 1938, Mr Allerton expressed the opinion that ‘the people of this part of the country may have become somewhat individual’ – ‘their characteristics certainly show a very strong antipathy to any suggestion of herding, such as is so evident in some of the larger cities of the country’.  (That’s ‘doing different’ in bureaucratese.)   He was convinced, therefore, that:

large blocks of working-class flats, such as are erected in some towns, would be very unpopular here and would be vacated as soon as opportunity presented itself.  The ingrained desire is for a separate dwelling and garden.

It’s an interesting view and one that would be powerfully tested in Norwich’s post-war building efforts.  Even at the time, Norwich had taken small steps – deemed necessary where they allowed ‘elderly people to be housed nearer their old interests and where employed people on early or late shifts can be near their work’ – in flat construction.  In 1935-1936, the city’s first tenement blocks were built in Barrack Street and Union Street.

Council flats, Union Street, 1939 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1939, the Council had built 7603 homes in the city (while private enterprise supplied just 3228 built).  Of these, around 44 per cent were built to rehouse those displaced by slum clearance.  That progress was vitiated by wartime bombing which destroyed 5000 homes in the city though many, it’s true to say, were overdue for demolition – scant consolation for the 340 that lost their lives.

To meet the huge and urgent post-war need for replacement housing, 350 ‘prefabs’ were erected in the city.  Expected to serve ten years, the last surviving prefab home – on Magpie Road – was removed in 1976. I can remember passing it on my way to Carrow Road in those days and it always looked as Mr and Mrs Miller, its last tenants, treasured it.

Prefab homes on Kett’s Hill, 1962 © George Plunkett http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Additionally, in 1946, the City built 150 British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) houses, mainly in West Earlham, some in Tuckswood, intended for quick erection using non-traditional materials. People didn’t much like the appearance but their facilities were generally reckoned good.

‘Steel’ houses on the Tuckswood Estate © Paul Shreeve and made available under a Creative Commons licence

All this was a quick fix.  Like London, Plymouth and a number of other cities, Norwich too prepared a visionary blueprint for the rebuilding of the city along modern lines.  The 1945 City of Norwich Plan is a fascinating document, representative of some of the planning ideals of the day but challenging of others.

It proposed – sorry, Mr Allerton – that the ‘limited amount of residential redevelopment’ in the central areas (‘within the walls’) ‘should be in the form of flats or a combination of flats and maisonettes’.  It suggested that ‘obsolescent areas’ beyond ‘should be redeveloped as densely as good planning and amenities permit and not on what has come to be known as “Garden City” lines’.  This, it argued ‘should ensure real urban development’ [the emphasis is in the original]. (6)

‘A sketch of the redevelopment considered appropriate for the obsolescent areas outside the city walls’ from the 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Across the wider city, the Plan sat four-square with the planning mantras of the day with its call for the development of neighbourhood units.  It praised the Corporation’s interwar housing efforts but criticised their shortcomings too:

these housing schemes, in common with those in other places, had inherent faults; for apart from the fact that they catered largely for one class or income group, communal facilities and necessary to make the new estates into self-contained neighbourhood units in which a full life was possible, were lacking.

The Heigham and Westwick Redevelopment area from 1945 City of Norwich Plan

Twenty-five neighbourhood units were proposed which, dependent on size (varying according to the city’s topography), were to contain the prescribed range of shops, schools and facilities.  That’s a conventional (for its time) attempt to create or safeguard community but the wider contextualisation of the proposal is more interesting.  The Plan went to argue that:

Segregation of classes or income groups is a social evil which should be discouraged; it hardly exists in the small towns and villages and these should be the models for the neighbourhood units of tomorrow.  We have much to learn from one another and this can best be achieved by mixing in our leisure time with those whose income, education and outlook might be quite different from our own.

This was an unconscious prefiguring of Nye Bevan’s famous plea for ‘what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the…labourer all lived in the same street’ – ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’ as he called it.  It was, note, not a demand that working-class areas be improved and ‘uplifted’ by affluent middle-class incomers (as contemporary regeneration would have it).  It was rather a vision of social democratic classlessness and it was given brief expression in Labour’s 1949 Housing Act which promoted council housing for general needs.

The working out of such idealism was prey to far larger forces than the will of Norwich City Council, let alone that of the City Architect, Leonard Hannaford, but they would do their best to implement some of these ideas.  A scheme of 224 three-storey flats and 38 houses was built in the Southwell Road area to the south of the city centre – of a similarly conventional design as the adjacent housing built at the same time and with Moderne balconies which (despite the epithet) harked back to the later thirties. (7)

Southwell Road flats

The new West Earlham Estate was begun in 1947 and by 1950 the Council had built 1469 permanent new homes. Some of these were state-of-the-art such as the Ministry of Fuel and Power-sponsored homes in West Earlham which were specially insulated and enjoyed ‘whole-house’ (or central) heating. The residents professed themselves satisifed with the five radiators.

The ‘whole-house heating’ trial homes in West Earlham

In 1954, when post-war restrictions on building had finally ended, the City began construction of the Heartsease Estate on its north-eastern outskirts, planned to contain 2500 homes on completion.

Terraced and semi-detached houses in the Heartsease Estate, 1956

Hannaford was a distinguished architect, an assistant to Sir Edward Lutyens both before 1914 and in his post-war work in New Delhi.  By 1955, when he retired, around 6000 houses and flats had been designed and built under his direction.  These were dignified homes on cleaner, more modern lines than the arts and craft styles or stripped-down neo-Georgian that predominated before the War but, to some, they lacked flair.

His successor, David Percival, ‘entered this scene like a breath of fresh air’ according to Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius. (8)  We’ll examine some of the most innovative and exciting council housing in the country built under Percival’s visionary leadership next week.

Sources

(1) JJ McLean, ‘A Fine City, Fit for Heroes?’ The Rise of Municipal Housing in Norwich, 1900-1939. An Historical Perspective (ND)

(2) Harry Harrison, Stephen Mullin, Barry Reeves and Alan Stevens, Non-Traditional Houses. Identifying Non-Traditional Houses in the UK, 1918-1975 (2012); Shaun Lowthorpe, ‘Last post sounds for concrete homes’, Eastern Daily Press, 21 January 2006

(3) Sarah Housden (ed), Norwich Memories (Norwich Living History Group, 2009)

(4) Mr RJ Allerton, Estates Surveyor, City Engineer’s Department, Norwich, ‘Housing in Norwich’, Annual Conference of Institute of Housing, September 1938

(5) Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, ‘Welcome to “Monkey Island”. Identity, Community and Migration Histories in Three Norwich Estates’, Sussex Migration Working Paper no. 38, University of Sussex, July 2006

(6) City of Norwich Plan 1945. Prepared for the Council by CH James and S Rowland Pierce (Consultants) and HC Rowley (City Engineer), City of Norwich Corporation, 1945.  For more on the City of Norwich Plan see the post here.

(7) ‘Post-War Building at Norwich’, Official Architecture and Planning, May 1954 and ‘New Housing at Norwich’, Official Architecture and Planning, May 1956

(8) Miles Horsey and Stefan Muthesius, Provincial Mixed Development, Norwich Council Housing 1955-1973 (1986)

As credited, a number of the images above are taken with permission from the collection of photographs taken by George Plunkett between 1931 and 2006.  If you’re interested in Norwich (and Norfolk) past and present, do visit the wonderful website put together by his son.