Bright, Breezy, Bracing Bridlington: Part 1

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1920s, 1930s, Bridlington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature the first of two new guest posts from Peter Claxton recounting Bridlington Borough Council’s significant council housing programme and its vigorous efforts to promote the town as a seaside resort. (Peter has contributed earlier posts on the history of council housing in Cottingham.) He now focuses most of his research time on Kingston upon Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire during the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century with particular emphasis on public health and housing.

Bridlington in winter is a silent place, where cats and landladies’ husbands walk gently down the middle of the street.

T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – in his observations on 1930s ‘out of season’ Bridlington, highlighted a problem that beset – and still does to this day – many of our seaside resorts, the lack of year-round employment. (1) Twenty years earlier when the borough council first contemplated the provision of housing, the Medical Officer of Health laid bare the problem to be faced: (2)

The Corporation will have to be very careful in tackling this question in the future. As Bridlington is a seaside resort the majority of the working classes do not desire workmen’s houses but larger ones, so that their income may be largely increased by taking in visitors.

The task was further complicated by the fact that Bridlington was a town divided, as the old Local Board had noted: (3)

The Old Town is mostly residential and takes the bulk of the labouring classes, whilst The Quay is chiefly occupied by lodging houses and private residences.

Bridlington 1849-50, National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

The arrival of the railway in 1846 came to represent more than just a delineation on a map, it influenced the fortunes of each part of the town. Bridlington Quay was no longer a ‘harbour of refuge’ for the coastal trade or the port through which much of the East Riding’s agricultural produce – predominantly malt – was shipped. And as a result, the Old Town to the north-west slipped into an interminable decline. Within a decade of the railway’s arrival the 600-year-old market was in a state of atrophy. The residences and offices of solicitors, bankers and merchants, intrinsic elements of a former vibrant agrarian economy, were by the end of the nineteenth century, but marcescent reminders of its former standing as a market town. Attestation to the area’s demise was further evidenced by a plethora of insanitary working-class dwellings.

Conversely , as a late nineteenth-century trade directory noted: (4)

Bridlington Quay a mean and insignificant village at the commencement of the present century, [is] now a small but handsome town and seaside resort, with all the comforts and conveniences which [a] luxurious age demands …

The Alexandra Hotel (built 1866), North Bay, 1928 (EPW023341) ©Britain from Above

The Quay, to the south-east of the railway, was the new face of Bridlington, offering entertainment for those that came ‘for the day’ or ‘stayed a week.’ It was, ‘the seaside resort nearest to most of the great centres of population of the West Riding.’ (5) It also attracted the commuter and by 1921, more than 2,800 Bridlington residents worked in Hull or the West Riding, with many residing in villa style houses that populated the new roads close to the seafront. (6)

Cardigan Road

As such, the work of the district council – declared a borough in 1899 – differed at each side of the railway, and by the outbreak of war in 1914, it had erected new housing in the Old Town, and at The Quay, entered the world of entertainment and leisure.

Poster c1913, © Science Museum made available under a Creative Commons licence

Following a visit to Joseph Rowntree’s model village of New Earswick in 1913, it was suggested at a council meeting that: (7)

Rowntree’s cottages in York, they were no doubt excellent in many ways but they could not be erected by the council at anything like the price … Garden Cities – they were not always suitable or satisfactory or cheap.

Words that clearly identified the problems to be faced by the borough council. There was no local benefactor ready to fund provision; agricultural wages were depressed, and other forms of employment predominantly seasonal. These issues would be reflected in the design and size of properties erected. Maximum weekly rents were to be in the region of five shillings (25p) per week, in fact the council hoped that smaller properties might be let at less than four shillings (20p).

Also, there were members on the council associated with the building trade, evidently nervous of the possibility of stepping away from traditional methods of construction. Letchworth was cited as an example, where as well as standard brick construction, alternative build techniques had been introduced. It was noted that ‘many were becoming cracked and [were] generally too-well ventilated.’ (8)

By 1914, the council had built 35 terraced houses – with ten allocated to employees working at the town’s power station – and twelve bungalows. Yet it suffered criticism regarding rents and in particular, the bijou nature of the bungalows for ‘old couples and widows.’ At 300 foot super the three-roomed dwellings were exceedingly small. As a councillor insensitively questioned, ‘How on earth was a fat woman to turn in a scullery such as was proposed …’ (9)

With the town’s sleeping population often quadrupling during the summer months, the sub-letting of rooms became an imperative for many families. (10) The council signalled acceptance of the practice confirming: (11)

[It] had no objection to the taking in of visitors. If they could make a little money that way it would help to pay their rents.

This was a perennial problem for both council and tenants. The council saw the wisdom in building smaller houses, thereby reducing the risk of unpaid rents during the winter months. Tenants were keen on larger properties to augment their income during the summer.

Watson’s Balk (Avenue)

Marton Road

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Ashville Street – council employee housing

Portland Place – council employee housing

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Indeed, there were opportunities galore for those with spare room to let. The privately built New Spa south of the harbour attracted 80,000 visitors within a month of opening in 1896. (12)

© East Riding Archives – made available under a Creative Commons licence

The council responded to the lack of amenities on the North Shore in 1904, erecting a glass and iron Floral Pavilion adjacent to the bandstand on the Royal Princes Parade.

The Floral Pavilion and Bandstand – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Two years later it built the Grand Pavilion at the north end of the Royal Princes Parade. With a seating capacity for 2000, it was in the popular ‘oriental end of pier’ style favoured at many seaside resorts.

The Grand Pavilion – Bridlington Local Studies Library

Everything of course changed in August 1914. A provincial weekly publication summed up the town’s plight perfectly: (13)

But the place had a strangely deserted appearance, where it was usual to see thousands, there were only hundreds. You may write to half-a-dozen boarding houses, and find that any one of them can spare you a room or rooms…  

The town’s Medical Officer of Health’s comments were far more revealing: (14)

Owing to the outbreak of war in August the season proved a failure, … there is no doubt that many spinsters and widows, who rely upon their income and livelihood to come from visitors, are on the verge of starvation.

In 1919, the council’s intentions were made clear when it purchased the 1907 Spa Theatre and Opera House, as well as the original 1896 Spa. The future of the town and its residents, rested with the development and promotion of the resort.

Spa Theatre and Opera House

North-west of the railway, municipal attention turned once more to the town’s permanent residents. But the vagaries of employment in both agriculture and leisure remained. The local Master Builders’ Association continued its crusade for larger properties: (15)

What is needed in a seaside resort is a house of a rather larger type, with sufficient accommodation to enable tenants to augment their income by taking visitors during the season.  

The council’s vision of the way forward, was however, diametrically opposed to that of local builders. There were to be no lavish plans for an inordinate number of large council houses each with spare rooms to rent out. A perceptible change in the ‘holidaying habits’ of those that came to stay for a week  had been noted. Visitors were starting to choose, ‘… camp sites for cheaper holidays free from the irksome rules of boarding houses.’ (16) The age of the tent, converted railway carriages or buses, ex-army huts or wooden bungalows had arrived. (17).

A photograph taken by R. Hartley in the 1930s

In tandem with private provision, house building gradually brought the two parts of the town together. Following a modest build of twelve houses in 1921 on the aptly named Borough Road, construction of the Postill estate began two years later. By the middle of the decade the council had erected approximately 200 properties.

Bridlington, 1926. National Library of Scotland, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Borough Road

Postill Estate

Postill Estate

Sadly, an attempt to promote home ownership during the 1920s failed to gain traction. A proposed ‘purchase out of rent’ scheme attracted a mere six inquiries and was swiftly shelved by the council. (18) At the same time, a briefing document regarding the regeneration of the seafront reiterated: (19)

Apart from the fishing industry there are no established industries in the Borough which is purely a health and pleasure resort for the large industrial populations …

The document informed that visitor numbers arriving by train ‘during the season’ had risen from 216,000 in 1922, to 320,000 by 1925, (20) and the town had to move with the times. Visitors were now seeking, ‘… music and entertainments as evidenced by the popular craze for dancing.’ (21) It would take a substantial amount of money, approximately £100,000, and the council was convinced that this was the way forward.

Disappointingly, no matter how busy the seafront was during the summer, it could never sustain the whole town through the winter months. But, as we shall see in a follow-up blog, efforts to increase year-round employment proved contentious. And when ambitious plans for the regeneration of the seafront failed to come to fruition, a subsequent appointment by the council proved fortuitous.

References

(1) R. Knowles and P. Clabburn, Cats and Landladies’ Husbands: T.E. Lawrence in Bridlington (The Fleece Press, 1995)

(2) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1911, wellcomecollection.org

(3) District of Bridlington Local Board & Urban Sanitary Authority Report for 1893, wellcomecollection.org

(4) T. Bulmer & Cos., Directory of East Yorkshire, 1892

(5) D. Neave, Port, Resort and Market Town: A History of Bridlington (Hull Academic Press, 2000)

(6) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction to its History and Buildings (Smith Settle Ltd., 2000)

(7) ‘The Housing Problem’, Bridlington Free Press, 31 January 1913

(8) ibid

(9) ‘12 Cottages to be built’, BFP, 20 March 1913

(10) Neave, Port Resort

(11) ’Visitors and Workmen’s Houses’, BFP, 26 September 1913

(12) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An introduction

(13) ibid

(14) Borough of Bridlington Medical Officer of Health Report, 1914

(15) ‘Boarding-Houses Preferred’, BFP, 1 March 1920

(16) D. and S. Neave, Bridlington: An Introduction

(17) ibid

(18) ‘Purchase out of rent scheme’, Hull Daily Mail, 28 April 1927

19. Seafront regeneration briefing document, East Riding Archives, BOBR/2/15/4/518

(20) ibid

(21) ibid

Council Housing in Llandudno: Part I, to 1939

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1920s, 1930s, Llandudno, Pre-1914

My apologies for the lack of recent posts – I’m busy writing a second book. The blog will continue to be updated and, in the meantime, I’m very grateful for (and continue to welcome) guest contributions such as this. Matthew Evans, the principal author, works in communications within local government and has been assisted in research and writing by his father, Philip Evans, who has been a councillor on Aberconwy Borough and subsequently Conwy County Borough councils since 1976 and was twice Mayor of Llandudno, in 1983/4 and 2006/7. Many of the details of council minutes, personal details and recollections in this piece come from him. Most photographs (unless otherwise credited) have been kindly taken by the author’s sister, Kimberley Evans.

The context of Llandudno

Llandudno is today a popular resort town of 20,000 or so residents, known for its unique setting between the headlands of the Great and Little Ormes and its wealth of Victorian architecture. It is situated halfway along the coast of North Wales and lies around 45 minutes from Chester and under an hour and a half from the major cities of the North West of England; cities on which its economy has largely depended for 150 years.

It was the growth spurred by the Industrial Revolution and the income that generated – enabling people to enjoy leisure time and vacations – that led to the founding of the modern town in what had up until then been a small copper mining and farming village on the lower slopes of the Great Orme. This small village overlooked marginal grazing land on the isthmus separating the mountain from the mainland and which included the legendary marsh of Morfa Rhianedd. This marsh famously features in the ancient Welsh poem, The Tale of Taliesin, as the place from where the poet prophesied that a ‘monster’ would rise and ‘bring destruction on Maelgwyn Gwynedd’, the ancient King of Gwynedd. This marsh, now drained, is where much of modern-day Llandudno – and its council housing – is located.

The land around Llandudno had been owned by the Mostyn family of Mostyn Hall in Flintshire since around 1460, when Hywel ab Ieuan Fychan had married Margaret ferch Gruffydd, the heiress of the Gloddaeth estate, which lies about a mile outside the present town. Following this, the land around Llandudno lay largely undisturbed as an obscure and remote part of the Mostyn lands for hundreds of years. Only a few writers remarked on the place, most notably the travel writer Thomas Pennant, who in his ‘Tour in Wales’ of 1778 commented on the ‘beautiful half-moon bay of Llandudno’.

The seafront, Llandudno © John Boughton

All this changed in 1848 when a Liverpool Surveyor, Owen Williams, stranded in Llandudno during a storm, saw the potential of the landscape and setting for a new resort for the newly wealthy middle classes. He shared his ideas with Lord Mostyn, who leapt at the idea, and the two set about building a planned model resort, and obtained the necessary Act of Parliament to start. Within 50 years, and greatly accelerated by the arrival of the railway in 1858, central Llandudno had become essentially the town we see today, with wide, well-planned streets incorporating all the architectural styles of the latter half of the 19^th century. The original plan called for a formal grid of streets, where the height of any building was not allowed to exceed the width of the street. Perhaps mindful of the poor living conditions of the big cities, no court or basement dwellings were permitted and the plan stipulated that ‘the town that is to be shall resemble, as far as practicable, the country’.

Llandudno Town Hall, designed for the Urban District Council by Silcock & Reay and opened in 1902 © John Boughton

All of these measures created an attractive, fashionable town that had many of the grandest hotels, shops and entertainment venues that the Victorian and Edwardian holidaymaker could find anywhere in the UK. But all of these pleasures depended on having a large working population close at hand to work in the hotel and hospitality industries. It was this need, both to ensure a large pool of labour, but also to house them in a way that befitted the town – and was in accordance with the rules of development – that led the local authorities in Llandudno to create the earliest social housing in Wales. A provision of housing for local need that has endured to the present day.

The first council houses

Llandudno can lay claim to having built the first council homes anywhere in Wales. The first 19 ‘workmen’s dwellings’ were built in Council Street, Llandudno in 1897 at a cost of £210 each.

The Minutes of Llandudno Urban District Council (UDC) give the background to the development and how events progressed, and they give an idea of the process involved in building council housing at this time. At a meeting of the Council held on June 17, 1896, the Minutes notes that members ‘Resolved that Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 be, and is hereby, adopted within the Urban District of Llandudno.’

The Local Government Board then held an enquiry in June 1896 to consider the Council’s request for approval to borrow money for the building of the homes. Construction was started in September 1896 and the Local Government Board queried why work had commenced prior to the loan sanction having been applied for. They required a fresh resolution to apply for the loan sanction.

This further resolution read: ‘That application be made to the Local Government Board for sanction to borrow £4357 for the purpose of carrying into effect Part 3 of the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1893 (sic) by the erection of 19 cottages in accordance with the plan and estimates prepared by the Surveyor and approved by the Council.’

In November 1896 the sanction was approved and the contractor was a Mr Hassell.

The scheme was not without its controversies however. The Minutes of the Workmen’s Dwelling Committee of February 22, 1897 record the Surveyor, E. Paley Stephenson, reporting on a series of accusations in the chamber from a Councillor John Owen, relating to the houses. The report states that Councillor Owen had clearly gone public on his criticisms and these comments were also printed in the Llandudno Directory and caused some outrage. The report and minutes note his concerns (all wording and punctuation as original):

They were as follows:-

1. That the fire-places were of common bricks.
2. That the floors were not concreted.
3. That the beam filling in party walls and eaves was not done.
4. That the roof is not water-tight, and that snow and rain would get through.
5. That the doors were ‘made in Canada.’
6. That the windows were bad and appeared as if ‘coming from the Transvaal.‘

The surveyor rejected or explained all these issues and noted there was ‘no liability on the contractor to get them [the doors] made in Llandudno, and they are good’. He seemed confused by the reference to windows from the Transvaal, observing: ‘though I do not know where they were made [they] are of fair workmanship’.

The Committee then paid a visit to see the claims for themselves and the next Committee Meeting of February 27 notes:

After a minute examination of the houses the Committee came to the conclusion they could not endorse the statements made by Mr. Councillor Owen, at the last meeting of the Council. On the contrary, they are of the opinion that the erections and workmanship contrasted very favourably with other property in Llandudno. Although inspected on a stormy day, after 12 hours almost incessant rain, the houses shewed no sign of rain having penetrated.

After this firm rejection of Councillor Owen’s criticisms, the Committee’s only other resolution that day was: ‘That the Council, as an experiment, be recommended to fit up ten of the dwellings with penny in the slot gas meters.’     

View of Council Street, now Norman Road. Though appearing modern the structures are original, but have been extensively re-rendered twice © John Boughton

These first council properties were refurbished and converted into warden-controlled flats in the late 1970s. This involved re-rendering and each dwelling was converted into two flats, one accessed from the original front door of each property and the upper flat being accessed from the back, up a stairway. At that time the street was re-named Norman Road. The former name had become unpopular as the houses had declined over time and the houses on one side of the road had never, in fact, been council properties. However, the former name lives on in the western extension of the road, which is a light industrial area called Council Street West. 

Despite the criticisms of the likes of Councillor Owen and the press reports of debates on the council, the Council Street scheme was just the start of social housing building as Llandudno looked towards the Edwardian era. On October 28, 1896, the Workmen’s Dwellings Committee dealt with negotiations to buy land for further housing from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Terms were subsequently offered by the Commission and accepted by the UDC to buy land for 69 cottages at a total cost of £13,661. This was a scheme in Alexandra Road, West Shore, but this part of the street was subsequently renamed as part of King’s Road.

 

The part of King’s Road constructed as an extension to Alexandra Road in 1897, 1900 and 1902

On January 28, 1897, the Workmen’s Dwellings Committee notes a Surveyor was authorised to arrange for a memorial stone with the following wording to be fixed in a convenient part of the building: ‘Workmen’s Dwellings erected by the Urban District Council of Llandudno 1897’

In May 1900, the Surveyor put forward a further scheme for erection of 28 houses and in April 1902 tenders were presented for a further 28 houses in Alexandra Road.

Homes Fit for Heroes

The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, commonly known as the Addison Act after the Minister of Housing Christopher Addison, laid the foundation for the large rise in council housing the country saw after the First World War. This was part of the call for ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ made by Prime Minister David Lloyd George towards the end of the war. Llandudno Urban District Council moved quickly into action and decided to build further houses in West Shore. Llandudno was perhaps further spurred into action by the fact that David Lloyd George was the local MP for Caernarfon Boroughs (of which Llandudno was part). The first section of King’s Road was completed in 1920, with a commemorative stone laid on 8th October 1920 by Dame Margaret Lloyd George, wife of the Prime Minister; and Mrs E. R. Woodhouse, wife of the Chairman of Llandudno UDC.

The foundation stones of the houses built in 1920 laid by Dame Margaret Lloyd George and the wife of the Chairman of the UDC

The building of new council housing continued throughout the 1920s and 30s mainly in the West Shore area, in Maesdu (where the majority of council housing would take place after the war) and up the Great Orme itself.  Rather than large estates, council developments at this time were mainly one or two roads in size, such as the adjoining Lees Road and Knowles Road. These streets were named after the Conservative politician, philanthropist and supporter of social housing and the Guinness Trust, Sir Lees Knowles, who died in 1928. In 1926 and 1934 Marian Road and Marian Place were built alongside the railway line around the same time that the UDC constructed its new bridge over the tracks linking Deganwy and Llandudno and replacing the level crossing that had hampered communications in the peak holiday season when Llandudno could see over 100 hundred trains a day passing in and out. The bridge also gave its name to the Bridge Road estate built around the same time. In 1934 Cwm Place was built, a development that would later be surrounded by the Tre Creuddyn estate, but which when built was somewhat isolated from the urban area of the town. The full list of developments at this time – always referred to as ‘workmen’s dwellings’ in the council minutes – shows the almost continuous building activity that took place:

• 1920 King’s Road
• 1922/23 Dyffryn Road
• 1923 Mowbray Road
• 1924 Knowles Road & Trinity Avenue
• 1925 Knowles Road
• 1925 Marian Road
• 1926 Maesdu Road & Maesdu Place
• 1927 Lees Road, King’s Avenue, King’s Place
• 1929 Bridge Road
• 1930 Ty’n y Coed
• 1933 Llwynon Road
• 1934 Cwm Place 33 houses and 3 flats
• 1935 Cwm Place 16 houses and 16 flats
• 1934 Marian Place
• 1935 Maesdu Road

The architecture of this housing evolved over the interwar years. Given the difficult economic context of the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the housing of 1920 in King’s Road housing is plain and simple, semi-detached houses with flat fronted and pebbledash render. By the middle of the 1920s, as can be seen in the following images, the houses became larger. The author’s grandmother, known to all her 13 grandchildren by her surname as ‘Nanna Breeze’, lived in a typical 1923 house of this type in Mowbray Road, indicated in the picture, from around 1970, until her death in 2006.

Houses in Mowbray Road, built in 1923, much of the interwar housing was of this type and standard – the author’s grandmother lived in the house left centre of the picture.

This house had a bay window with a recessed entrance porch, substantial lawned gardens front and back, three bedrooms, inside toilet and separate bathroom, kitchen, large hall with a staircase with 90-degree return, and a front parlour and separate back living room. I recall, even in the late 1980s when I was a child, the front room overlooking the road was reserved for special visitors and completely out of bounds for us children, even though visitors of sufficient quality for entry were few and far between. The back room, where all family life was conducted, faced south and used to become unbearably hot during the summer when, with our parents at work, my sister and I had to go and spend most days in the school holidays with our grandmother.

This picture shows my grandmother Sybil Breeze sitting in the Chairman’s Chair in the Llandudno Council Chamber when my dad was made a Freeman of the Town of Llandudno in the early 2000s. From this seat many of the decisions to build council housing in the town would have been taken.

She was a cleaner in a seafront hotel by that point (well over 70 years of age), but the management allowed my sister and I to sit and play in the guest lounge while she completed her morning cleaning shift. In the afternoons, back at her house, she would naturally have a nap and I would then often sneak quietly into the cool, north-facing front room – unknown to her and in total contravention of the visitors-only rule – to escape the stifling heat in the back room. Sorry Nanna!

A further style of house in Mowbray Road with front door at the side

Such was the quality of this housing that my Nanna recalled having been told by several residents that the houses had been built by a private developer that had gone bankrupt and had to sell his privately built houses to the council for social housing. This was a myth, however, as the Council minutes are clear that this high-quality housing was all planned and built by the UDC itself for working people.      

Houses in Knowles Road showing the 1920s houses in the background compared to infill council housing from the 1960s in the foreground

All of this shows that by the eve of the Second World War, Llandudno had made great strides in rehousing substantial numbers of people within good quality housing, with genuine commitment and a pioneering attitude from local councillors and officers. After the Second World War, the inevitable pressures of housing need and changing styles would mean that housing was less substantial and generous in style than before the war. The continuing story will be told in next weeks post.

You can find Matthew Evans on Twitter @MattEvans170

Four Council Cottages at Mickleton: Rural Council Housing in Gloucestershire before the First World War

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Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to host a new post by Chas Townley. He has written previously on the pre-First World War council housing of Dursley in Gloucestershire. Chas is a Labour District Councillor on Stroud District Council, a ‘no overall control’ authority in the county. He was chair of the Housing Committee. Chas has formerly worked in housing for both councils and housing associations and previously managed the Supporting People Programme in a unitary council. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.  He is a local historian and genealogist and has written on a variety of subjects including Chartism, Cooperatives, land clubs and building societies, and the Poor Law and pre-NHS health provision.  Chas has recently started a PHD at the University of Bristol exploring the provision of working-class housing before the Great War.

Four houses at Mickleton are the sum total of Campden Rural District Council’s provision of houses before the Great War but they were the first council housing built in Gloucestershire under the Housing of the Working Classes Acts.

Campden was a rural district created in 1894 for administrative convenience from the Gloucestershire parishes within the Shipston-on-Stour Poor Law Union. As the Poor Law Union also had parishes in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, Shipston-on-Stour and Brailes Rural Districts were also created. The offices of the three districts plus the Poor Law Union were at the workhouse in Shipston with the same officers serving the four bodies. Members served a dual mandate as both Rural District Councillor and Poor Law Guardian.

Shipston-on-Stour Poor Law Union map

The Mickleton Parish Council was exploring ways of providing houses and August 1910 discussed information from the Local Government Board on the terms loans for housing schemes could be provided to District Councils – 3 ½% over 80 years for land and 60 for buildings. The report extensively reports Charles Coldicott, who served as both Chairman of the Parish Council and the District Councillor for the Parish. Another quoted was Mr Dixon, a barrister and later a Justice of the Peace for both Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. (1)  

The newspaper report noted that ‘A lengthy discussion took place with regard to the probable cost of erecting four houses and the amount of rent to be charged’.  But one parishioner, Mr J Taylor, offered to give £600 towards the cost of the scheme providing that the rest of the cost could be raised and that houses became the property of the Parish Council – this wasn’t legally possible. Part of Taylor’s argument is enlightened self-interest:

They [the landowners and ratepayers] could not do without the working-man. He should not be in the position he was today if it was not for the men. It was their business and duty as Christians to see that the working-man was better housed.

The outcome of the meeting was that Dixon and Taylor were deputed to consult the ratepayers to see if they would assent to a voluntary rate for the houses.

At this point the Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 was in its infancy and the potential for the Act to deliver the improvement of homes in disrepair and the construction of new housing was largely untried in rural areas – even in four exceptional rural areas which had struggled through the barriers of earlier legislation to provide housing in their local areas.

Earlier housing in Mickelton © David Stowell and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Mickleton was undeterred and the Parish Council meeting in September made application to the Campden Rural District Council to ‘respectfully put into operation the Housing and Town Planning Act’.  The Cheltenham Chronicle account suggests this was due to both a housing shortage as well as the poor condition of existing housing. This led to a wider debate at the District Council about the work needed to put into force the systematic inspection of existing homes under the Act. As to the question of the new housing they set up a joint committee with the Parish Council to look at the provision of new housing in Mickleton. (2)

The Chronicle carried a short article later in the year giving an account of progress noting:

The promoters of the scheme have met with considerable difficulty one way or another, and some members of the Council have seemed reluctant to work under an Act which they know little or nothing about, as was shown by the discussion which took place at the meetings.

It also commented ‘but Mickleton people were persistent in their demand and their representative on the Rural Council (Mr Coldicott) threatened to appeal to the Local Government Board, if the Council refused to do that which was asked of them’. (3) Given that the legislation was a Liberal initiative and Charles Coldicott’s persistence to encourage the use of the new Act, it is easy to assume he was a Liberal but he was the leading Conservative in the village. (4)  

The procedure of the Act provided that four residents of a parish or the Parish Council itself could lay a complaint before the Local Government Board enabling them to intervene and order the District Council to provide housing in a parish. Before intervening the board had to consider the ‘necessity for further accommodation’ as well as ‘the probability that the required accommodation will not be otherwise provided‘ as well whether it is prudent to do so ‘having regard to the liability which will be incurred by the rates’. The Act also provided default powers for the County Council to act instead of the rural district. Compulsion by way of writ of mandamus could result in a range of sanctions including imprisonment for continued default. (5)

If there was a will to avoid building there was a way, as a defect in the legislation left the Local Government Board powerless to intervene beyond persuasion and coaxing unless there was a formal complaint. By the end of the 1912-1913 financial year, only 37 Rural Districts out of 661 had applied for a loan to build housing.  Consequently, by the eve of the Great War frustrations by the Liberal Government with rural districts were leading to an emerging policy of the state taking over the building of housing rather than leaving it to private enterprise and councils. (6) 

The belligerence against rural districts also extended to smaller urban districts and during 1917 and 1918 Addison’s Ministry of Reconstruction advocated for another option of transferring of housing powers to the counties, leading to Lord Salisbury to comment in reaction to Local Government Board proposals, ‘For reasons which we have stated over and over again we believe that the County Council is a far sounder authority’. (7)

By the spring of 1911 Campden were ready to apply to the Government for a £600 loan to build the four cottages, having agreed to lease a site for a period of 99 years from Mr SG Hamilton. (8) The inquiry was held by Major CE Norton, a Local Government Board Inspector. It was left to Charles Coldicott to present the case to the inspector, suggesting this was still very much a local Mickelton scheme rather than one owned by the District Council as a whole. In part this was a consequence of the funding mechanism as any deficit on the scheme was to be met from Mickleton’s ratepayers rather than the District rate.

Coldicott’s evidence recounted a Parish Meeting held the previous year which had resulted in a 40 to 2 vote in favour of the project. He claimed that many cottages had been demolished in recent years and none built. The main industry of the parish was agriculture and market gardening and some of the farm labourers were having to live a considerable distance out of the parish. The suggested rent for the cottages was 3s 6d (17.5p).

Dr Finlay, the Medical Officer of Health, gave evidence that there were no empty cottages in the village and only a day or two ago a family had to go out of the village because the cottage had been bought. He also knew of men who worked in Mickleton who lived in Quinton, three miles away across the border in Warwickshire.

It was left to Charles Gander, the Council’s surveyor and sanitary inspector, to go over the plans which showed ‘a good back living room, scullery, joint washhouse for each pair of cottages, three bedrooms (two large and one small) and separate coal houses and domestic offices’. The selected site was small and Gander justified the lack of garden ground on the basis that ‘all the cottagers rented allotments in the parish’. (9)  

Three opponents, supported by a petition signed by 28 ratepayers, spoke on the grounds that whilst there was an urgent need for housing in the village they thought the site selected was unsuitable. One of them suggested an alternative site which they considered more suitable owned by a Mr Box. The Inspector concluded the hearing by remarking that some alterations would need to be made to the plans before the Local Government Board would give its sanction to the scheme which would defer the matter for some time. Whilst it is not clear from the reports, the construction was probably solid brick rather than a cavity wall and this construction is assumed by the modern energy performance certificates for the properties – although cavity wall construction started in late Victorian times.

Walter Runciman (left) and Sir Ashton Lister (Lister image © Dursley Glos Web and Richard Buffrey)

Walter Runciman, then President of the Board of Agriculture and actively interested in small holdings and rural housing, visited Mickleton in December 1911, accompanied by Sir Ashton Lister, then Chairman of the County Small Holdings Committee and subsequently ‘Coupon’ Liberal MP for Stroud.  A description of the visit provides an account of the challenge for the County Council to provide affordable smallholders cottages alongside the newly developed council smallholdings: (10)

 At Mickleton we came face to face with the rural housing problem in its most acute form. The soil is remarkably fruitful, and lets readily for market-garden cultivation at £4 an acre without buildings. Land which was down at grass a few years ago has been let by the County Council to men who are probably obtaining as much as £4 for every £1 raised from the soil hitherto, or, to use a classic phrase, making four blades of grass grow where only one grew before. Yet there are not enough houses for the people to live in. A two roomed cottage nearly a mile from the occupier’s small holding fetches, it is true, only £4 per year, but in this very cheapness lies the root of the difficulty. ‘The County Council’, Mr Runciman explained, ‘couldn’t put up cottages with three bedrooms which is the standard size, for less than £400 the pair. They couldn’t let them at less than £10 a year each. If such a cottage were on your holding, would you be willing to take it?’.  ‘Well’, was the reply ‘that needs a deal o’ thinking on. Ten pound is a lot o’ money’.  Plainly if the Cottage Bureau should lead to the discovery of that dream of many a reformer, the satisfactory hundred-pound cottage, it will be the salvation of such villages as Mickleton.  

Sir Ashton Lister later noted at a Council meeting that one of the disadvantages for the Council was the fifty-year maximum loan period available for small holding buildings. (11)  This compared to a sixty-year period allowed for the construction of dwellings under the Housing of the Working Classes Acts. It clearly mattered not how the house was used but under what legislation it was provided. 

In another article was a more detailed explanation of the Cottage Bureau proposal that Runciman was developing, which was to ‘gather from all sources – whether English, American, or Continental – plans and specifications of modern-built country cottages, together with the details of the actual cost’. Very soon after in February 1912 Runciman appointed a Departmental Committee on the Equipment of Small Holdings which, when it reported a year later, included details of cottages suitable for rural labourers to be built as council housing. Whilst these developments did not directly benefit Mickleton they did ensure that model plans were available for other councils working to provide council housing in rural areas before the Great War. (12)

Returning to the development of four houses in Mickelton, by July 1911 work to resolve the perceived problems with the scheme had taken place and a new site owned by Mr Dixon was under consideration with a sixty-year lease on ‘nominal terms’ with a continuing lease for 999 years. The Local Government Board were willing to sanction the new site subject to the approval of revised plans. A sticking point appeared to be the design of the outbuildings which were considered to darken the scullery if placed too near the houses. (13)

Whilst we cannot be certain, it appears as if the original scheme was tendered before an application for a loan was originally made as in September the District Council had received an amended tender from the proposed contractor George Adams which was higher than the original taking account of the additional work required to assess the changes. Adams was part of a long-standing building firm based in Shipston-on-Stour and had undertaken other work for the Guardians in the past. (14)

Charles Coldicott was deputed to find out the views of the proposed tenants on a ‘small increase’ in the rent for the properties. This suggests that the properties had also been pre-let when the original plans were developed. At the October District Council meeting the revised tender of £674 was approved as a ‘fair charge’ for the work and formal application for a loan sanction of £700 was submitted to the Local Government Board.

Map showing Back Lane housing site

Mr Gander, the surveyor, reported to the April 1912 meeting of the Council that the difficulty of draining the newly erected cottages had been overcome by connecting with the drains of the cottages opposite by agreement with the Sladden and Collier brewery of Evesham (eventually becoming part of the Whitbread brewing combine) who ran the Butchers Arms in the village.  The Surveyor had also taken water samples from the well supplying the cottages. There is a later report stating that the well was ‘quite unfit ‘ – but this could be a misprint as the cottages were occupied by the May meeting, suggesting that any problems were quickly resolved with the Chairman saying they should be celebrated in a proper manner as the first council housing in the area. (15)

The Back Lane housing

Mickleton like many rural villages in Gloucestershire acquired mains water and sewerage late in the day. A water supply project was completed in 1927 and, in 1933 when the Granbrook Lane council houses were developed, the council resorted to installing a septic tank. There was still no public sewerage system when planning took place for post-Second World War reconstruction. (16)

Granbrook Lane

Who were the first tenants? 

That’s a very difficult question to answer as the records for that period are scant. We know for certain who was resident at the time of the 1939 National Registration giving four families with three of the four having close links to agriculture. One couple, George and Elizabeth Norton, at the time of the 1911 census, were agricultural carriers and had been resident in a cottage close to Charles Coldicott’s farm.

Their cottage was clearly overcrowded with ten living in four rooms – which would have included the living room.  They had been married for 17 years and had nine children, two of whom had died before 1911 and the remaining seven were all still living at home in a four-room cottage. Also living with them was ‘paralysed’ Samson Margretts aged 58. His original head of the household entry had been deleted and relegated to ‘boarder‘, perhaps suggesting he was the tenant of the cottage. But another household – again Norton – in 1911 had been living with members of three other concealed households in addition to their own children.

There is, however, a twist in the tale as all four properties appear to have ceased to be council housing by 1972. One of the properties is in private ownership having been auctioned off in 1972 with the other three owned by a local charity named after the person who leased the land to the Council in 1912. Whilst it is disappointing to find that the first council homes built in Gloucestershire are no longer providing affordable social rented homes, three continue to provide rented housing in the village.

This one scheme at Mickleton was not the end of Campden Council’s entry into the world of housing provision before the Great War as work had begun on developing a scheme of eight homes at Moreton in the Marsh. Despite the scheme having progressed a long way with a site ready to be purchased, plans drawn and loan terms accepted from the Government, paradise was postponed, like so much else, for the duration of the War, in October 1914.

Hill View Close

Within Mickleton a further six council homes were provided on Stratford Road under the ‘homes fit for heroes‘ housing scheme in  1921. (17)  Subsequently, during the late 1920’s and 1930s the provision of more homes took place along Granbrook Lane. (18) More housing followed in the post war period in Cedar Road but the direct provision of council housing ended with the decision of Cotswold District to cease being a landlord in 1997.  And the village was the beneficiary of 15 new social rent homes granted permission at Hill View Close in 2000, one of the first schemes completed by Fosseway Housing – the Cotswold District Council stock transfer association – now swallowed up into the 40,000 home Bromford Housing Group. (19)

Sources

(1) Evesham Standard, 13 August 1910, p5

(2) Cheltenham Chronicle, 8 October 1910, p8

(3) Cheltenham Chronicle, 10 December 1910

(4) Evesham Standard & West Midland Observer, 8 February 1919; Gloucestershire Echo, 4 January 1902 reports him being re-elected as Grand Master of the Mickleton Lodge.

(5) Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 Section 10

(6) The Central Land and Housing Council, The Liberal Land and Housing Policy: Rural Housing, circa 1914.

(7) National Archives Letter by Lord Salisbury Chairman Ministry of Reconstruction Housing Panel circulated to War Cabinet by Christopher Addison. CAB 24/44/76

(8) Sidney Graves Hamilton (1856-1916), born in Dublin and resident in Malvern is described as Lord of the Manor of Mickleton in the report of his will. Cheltenham Chronicle 20 January 1917. See also 1911 Census Class: RG14; Piece: 17650; Schedule Number: 13. The Lloyd George Survey also shows that he owned substantial holdings in the village and one of his farm tenants was Charles Coldicott.

(9) Cheltenham Chronicle, 25 March 1911

(10) Gloucester Journal, 23 December 1911, p9

(11) Gloucester Journal, 13 January 1912

(12) Departmental Committee on the Equipment of Small Holdings, Chaired by Christopher Turner March 1913, Cd 6708

(13) Evesham Standard, 15 July 1911

(14) There is an extensive archive of Adams Builders, Shipston-on-Stour covering the period 1796 to 1968 at Warwickshire Archives which may throw further light on this project.  Ref: 03887

(15) Cheltenham Chronicle, 20 April 1912; Evesham Standard, 18 May 1912

(16) Cheltenham Chronicle, 2 July 1927; The Tewkesbury Register and Agricultural Gazette, 21 January 1933. Gordon E Payne, Gloucestershire: A Survey – A Physical, Social and Economic Survey and Plan (Gloucestershire County Council, 1945)

(17) Gloucestershire Echo, 15 October 1921, p6 – report of Campden RDC meeting

(18) The Tewkesbury Register and Agricultural Gazette, 31 January 1931. This is an advert to complete 12 partially completed properties.

(19) Cotswold District Council planning files 98.02408 Construction of 15 dwellings for affordable housing, Meon Hill Nurseries, Nursery Close, Mickleton.

A Housing History of Barrow-in-Furness, part I to 1918: the ‘English Chicago’

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Pre-1914

In 1843, Barrow comprised some 143 people and 28 houses. The Furness Railway arrived three years later; by 1881, the town’s population had reached 47,259. With the arrival of what became the Barrow Haematite Steel Company in 1859 and the opening of its first major dock – the Devonshire – in 1867, the town’s impressive but troubled industrial history had begun. And, with that, a fascinating housing history perhaps unique in the country. That history was shaped by the local economy, in early decades to an unprecedented degree, and particularly – until the belated arrival of council housing – by its dramatic vicissitudes.

A map of Barrow in 1843 © Cumbria Archive and Local Studies Centre, Barrow-in-Furness

Barrow was incorporated in 1867 and became a County Borough in 1889. But it was most marked by what some have described as the ‘aristocratic paternalism’ of the Cavendish family – not so paternal here as the Devonshires (as the eponymous dock suggests) were most concerned with money-making – and the power of leading industrialists; Barrow ‘suffered from the lack of a strongly established middle-class element, and was virtually ruled by an industrial junta’. (1)

An image of the Barrow Haematite Works in 1865

Sir James Ramsden

The key figure here was James Ramsden, managing director of both the Furness Railway Company and the Barrow Haematite Steel Company from 1866 as well as the town’s first mayor from 1867 to 1872. Ramsden also devised the first plan for what was essentially a new town though that, in truth, was soon overtaken by Barrow’s breakneck growth.  This was the ‘English Chicago’ with, in the less complimentary words of one account, ‘a combination in appearance of Birkenhead and a goldfinders’ city on the edge of one of the western prairies of America’. (2)

To retain a new workforce drawn from across the UK, employers built company housing. The so-called Barrow Island Huts built for navvies and shipyard workers in the 1870s were among the first – 349 wood or brick prefabs arranged like an army encampment, serving a population of up to 3000 and of such squalor that they were condemned by the council in 1877 though they survived into the 1880s.  

An early image of the Scotch Buildings in Hindpool

Far more substantial were the Scotch Buildings, built in 1871 for the employees of the adjacent steel, flax and jute works in Hindpool – tenement blocks built on ‘the Scotch principle’, appropriately it was felt as most of the workforce was Scottish.

The Devonshire Buildings

The more monumental Devonshire Buildings, with their corner octagonal towers, were completed on Barrow Island by the Barrow Shipbuilding Company in 1874.  Though designed by Lancaster architects Paley and Austin, their style – and the builders, Smith and Caird from Dundee – point again to this rare adoption of Scottish forms south of the border. Similar tenement blocks just to the south – a mix of brick and craggier sandstone – were completed in the early 1880s, again designed by Paley and Austin and built by Dundee contractors on what have since been rebranded the ‘Maritime Streets’. 

Maritime Streets blocks

The one- and two-bed flats provided a living room and scullery and basic sanitary facilities but, despite their relatively spacious rooms, this was no philanthropic venture. Ramsden, emphasising the bottom line, pointed out they cost £25 less to build per room than Peabody tenements whilst also offering slightly lower weekly rents – 1s 6d (7.5p) a room compared to Peabody’s 2s (10p). (3)

Maritime Gardens

The Scotch Buildings are, as we’ll see, long gone but the refurbished Devonshire Buildings survive, listed Grade II*, part of the Cavendish family’s Holker Estate holdings. The Maritime Streets blocks, Grade II-listed, are now advertised as modern serviced apartments, their proximity to Barrow’s major employers still a key selling point.

South Row, Roose

That was also the case with the Roose Cottages, provided in the hamlet of that name to the west of Barrow in the mid-1870s by the Barrow Haematite Steel Company to serve the predominantly Cornish workforce of its new iron ore workings at Stank.  (That Cornish influence – 80 percent of the population was listed as coming from the county in the 1881 Census – is allegedly responsible for the soft ‘s’ pronunciation of the district’s name which replaced the hard ‘s’ previously favoured by locals.) The 196 cottages in two parallel blocks were again built by Cairds of Dundee, a testament to the relative ease of employing Scottish contractors and workers in what seemed to many a remote corner of England.

Given the national and local politics of the day, it’s no surprise that there was no municipal housebuilding at this time though, in fact, the private 1873 Barrow-in-Furness Corporation Act had empowered the council to build artisans’ cottages. In the event, the cost to ratepayers of ancillary sewerage and street works ensured the question would be shelved for some time.

Returning to 1881, that 47,259 population was crammed into 6789 houses, an average of 6.96 persons per house. That made Barrow, after London, the most overcrowded town in England.  An economic slowdown in the 1880s eased matters temporarily but the purchase by Vickers of the Naval Construction and Armaments Shipyard in 1897 led to renewed growth. By 1900, the town’s Medical Officer of Health lamented: (4)

There has been no adequate provision to relieve the congested condition of the town … I believe that 1000 additional houses would have been filled at once so great seems the overpopulation of nearly every working man’s house

Vickers’ workforce and 13-acre site on Walney Island doubled in size as cruiser orders filled its books and the company, like its predecessors, resorted to the provision of company housing to attract and retain its employees.  In 1899, Vickers took over the Walney Island Estates Company (which was attempting to develop mixed housing and a seaside resort on the island) and promised a ‘marine Garden City’ of its own, Vickerstown. By 1904, the construction of the first phase of Vickerstown, comprising around 950 homes, was largely complete.

Vickerstown housing plans

The solid well-built, predominantly terraced housing that emerged – complete with flush toilets, running water and its own electricity supply – was of good quality though its layout reflected few of the Garden City principles claimed to inspire it.  

Niger Street, Vickerstown (named after ships built in Barrow yards)

It was also rigidly socially segregated: Class A houses (the majority) offered more basic houses for ordinary workers at around 6s (30p) a week; Class J, for skilled workers and foremen provided larger rooms and, if you were lucky, a bathroom at 7s (35p) a week; commodious Class L houses – rented at 9s (45p) a week – were designed for administrative staff and lower management whilst the houses with sea views on the scheme’s fringes were intended for the elite. As Trescatheric suggests, ‘what Vickerstown more closely resembled was the older and less visionary concept of an industrial model village’.

Mikasa Street, Vickerstown (named after ships built in Barrow yards)

These were also, of course, tied houses; it was said you needed a foreman’s recommendation to be considered for housing and the loss of a Vickers job would see you evicted. Rents were deducted from wages and the company retained direct financial control of all the housing and amenities provided. The appointment of Lord Dunluce as Estates Manager from 1901 to 1909 (he moved to take up a post as secretary of the Peabody Housing Trust) reinforces the heavy paternalism on display. (Vickers’ hard-headed approach is even better illustrated by their construction of the new Walney Bridge, opened in 1908, to serve the shipyard and its mainland workforce: tolls were charged for all traffic including pedestrians until 1935 even after protesting riots in 1922.) (5)

Despite or more probably because of that paternalism, Alex McConnell – a Vickers employee, a Scot steeped like many of his fellow-workers in trade union and socialist traditions – was elected Walney Island’s first Labour councillor in 1905. By 1914, with all three seats held by Labour, Bram Longstaffe, the secretary of the local party, could refer to ‘the Fortress of Walney which is secure for Labour’.

Conversely, local trades unions were also pushing home ownership. In the context of company housing, high rents and no prospect of council housebuilding, this made sense. As the Trades Council argued in 1904, provided a would-be purchaser could raise a £10 deposit (no easy matter, of course), a monthly mortgage repayment of 12s (60p) compared well with rents averaging a £1 a month. 

For all Vickers’ growth and perhaps reflecting the impact of the company’s housebuilding, by 1909 the town’s Medical Officer of Health – in a new time of local slowdown, was concluding that:

The housing of the working-classes question has no significance in the town. There has never been any difficulty except on rare and temporary occasions for the workers to find houses for their wives and families.

That complacency would soon be challenged.  Barrow’s population rose from 65,257 in 1911 to over 75,000 in 1914, By some estimates, it reached 90,000 in the next few years. ‘The rare and temporary occasion’ this time, of course, was the rearmament drive in the years leading to the First World War and the war itself.

As Barrow industry expanded to meet war’s demands, the housing shortage became devastating. Vickers provided a further 1000 houses before and during the war but its workforce had expanded from around 16,000 in 1914 to 35,000.  Conditions for many single men sharing lodgings were described by a shipwright who had arrived in the town in 1913: (6)

We were working seven days a week in the yard for most of the war and the beds were never cold. As one left bed the next lot moved in—night shift and day shift, and it was like that all the time!

Other testimonies described shocking conditions for families

Father and mother, eight children, two of whom a boy and girl was over seventeen years of age, all living in one room. The mother was confined after, with child in this same room.

Elsewhere, sanitary inspectors reported 12 adults and seven children occupying a three-bed house in Melbourne Street while a family of six paid 7s 6d (37.5p) for a single bedroom in a house let at 4s 6d (22.5p) a week.

Class tensions strengthened; the perception that the town’s middle-class were evading the attempts of the Central Billeting Board to accommodate workers in their larger homes led to protest meetings at Vickers and the withdrawal of Labour representatives from the Board. At the same time, dilution (the use of unskilled or semi-skilled labour in jobs previously demarcated as skilled) added to trade union grievances and led in May 1917, to strike action, one of a number in munitions centres across the country, not least in Clydeside with which Barrow had close connections.  The Government appointed a Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest. (7)

Female munitions workers at Vickers

It reported on Barrow in August, describing conditions in the town as ‘a terrible indictment … against the Rulers and Governors’. Housing – or the lack of it – formed the major part of this indictment:

For nearly three years the population of this important working centre has been constantly increasing and there was no evidence before us that either the government or the Municipality had up to now taken any practical step to deal with the problem that has been urgent at all times and has now become a crying scandal.

Despite the criticisms of its Labour members, the Council blamed this inaction on the Government and, belatedly, the latter acted promptly. In October 1917 the Ministry of Munitions announced a scheme of 500 semi-permanent and 500 permanent houses to be built simultaneously and completed by March the following year.  Salthouse Road was selected by the Ministry as the site of the Roosecote Estate’s semi-permanent housing; it was said to have ‘natural leanings … towards a rough and unthrifty class of tenant’. The better-quality permanent homes were allocated to a greenfield site in Abbotsmead.

Holcroft Hill, Abbotsmead

Delays and controversy followed and neither were completed before war’s end; neither would be judged satisfactory.  But this takes us to next week’s post which will conclude this chapter and tell the new story of Barrow’s first council housing and that which followed.

Sources

(1) John Duncan Marshall and John K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester University Press, 1981)

(2) Quoted in Bryn Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built (Hougenai Press, 1985). Much of the information here and particularly that on later council housing, which is little documented elsewhere, is drawn from this invaluable source by Barrow’s leading historian.

(3) Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Working-Class Housing in Barrow and Lancaster 1880-1930’ Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol 127, 1978

(4) Quoted in Trescatheric, How Barrow Was Built

(5) Caroline Anne Joy, ‘War and Unemployment in an Industrial Community: Barrow-In-Furness 1914-1926’, University of Central Lancashire PhD, 2004

(6) From the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest (1917), quoted in Roberts, ‘Working-Class Housing in Barrow and Lancaster’ and Joy, ‘War and Unemployment in an Industrial Community’

(7) David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain: The Politics of Housing Reform, 1838-1924, University of Warwick PhD, 1979

The more recent research of Peter Schofield – Industry and Society: A Study of the Home Front in Barrow-in-Furness during the First World War, University of Central Lancashire PhD, 2017 – offers additional information and insight into the dynamics of Barrow’s wartime housing situation.

Council Housing in Greenock, Part I to 1918: the ‘Unhealthiest Town in Scotland’

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Pre-1914

Greenock’s geography was both a blessing and a curse. Its location on the Firth of Clyde made it a major port and shipbuilding centre. The first harbour was constructed in 1711, Scotts shipbuilders were established one year later and Greenock prospered from the Atlantic trade (and slave economies) of sugar and tobacco. But the town’s situation – a narrow strip of flat land to the shore backed by steeply rising hills to the south – made expansion difficult and helped bring about some of the worst housing conditions in Scotland. The first response was simply to build housing at density; a later one was high-rise. Both, as we shall see, were found wanting.

This 1856 map of Greenock gives some idea of its confined topography

In 1800, Greenock’s population approached 18,000; by 1901, it was 67,645. Its commercial wealth and elite ambition were demonstrated in the burgh’s Municipal Buildings, completed in 1886, whose Victoria Tower stands 75 metres tall – a proud one metre higher than Glasgow’s own City Chambers. The £197,000 cost was enormous – the debt was finally cleared in 1952 – but political responses to the town’s slum housing problem were far more dilatory.

The Municipal Buildings and Victoria Tower (to right) and Mid Kirk © Dave Souza and made available under a Creative Commons licence

That problem was well documented. In the 1860s, when its crude death rate was peaking at 420 per 10,000, the Registrar-General described Greenock as the ‘unhealthiest town in Scotland’ with the highest numbers dying from diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera, and ‘Fever’ (typhus and typhoid) in the country.  Cowgate, in central Greenock, was described by the Workingmen’s Sanitary Association, founded in 1865, as: (2)

one continuous privy from one end to the other. One could hardly believe its disgusting state. Literally it would be difficult to walk on the foot pavement without soiling one’s feet with human ordure.

The Association found half the homes it surveyed comprised one room with an average of six occupants.

This image of a backcourt in West Quay Lane dates from 1935 but serves to illustrate the continuing appalling housing conditions suffered by those living in inner Greenock

Official responses were, as we shall see, legion but often equivocal. A 1864 Privy Council report prompted by a typhus epidemic believed it: (2)

fair to say that there is every disposition of the part of the authorities to do something to remedy the sanitary evil. It so happens that their very prosperity has produced a state of things that has caused the high mortality. The increase in population in fifteen years is more than 30 percent. In spite of this increase there has scarcely been any rise in the number of registered poor, but no proportionate increase of houses for working men.

An 1865 report from Dr Buchannan, a Government Inspector, blamed ‘excessive mortality’ on the ‘deaths of children … produced in Greenock in remarkable numbers’ and the outbreak of typhus on ‘overcrowding and the dirty habits of the people’.  A ‘Ladies Sanitary Association’ proclaimed its mission ‘to redeem the humbler classes from low tastes and squalid habits’.

We might forgive those alleged dirty and squalid habits given that Buchannan’s own figures estimated 9414 people crammed onto 20 acres in Greenock’s Mid Parish, the equivalent of 300,000 per square mile. (As a point of comparison, the figure for Manilla, currently the world’s most densely populated city, is around 120,000.)

The overcrowding at least was real and government legislation – albeit permissive and largely ignored – was emerging to deal with the problem of urban conditions nationally. The 1866 Labouring Classes Dwellings Act allowed municipalities to purchase sites and build and improve working-class homes. It also allowed councils and philanthropic housing associations to borrow money at preferential rates from the Public Works Loan Commissioners.  These powers were strengthened in the 1875 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act. Greenock itself had secured a private Police and Improvement Act in 1865.

Morton Terrace

The political disposition of those who ruled the Burgh of Greenock was to favour private provision through the model dwellings promoted by philanthropic housing associations and their patrons.  The foundation stone of the first tenement built by the Greenock Provident Investment Society was laid by builder and Burgh Provost (mayor) James Morton in 1865. The impressive terrace that emerged was named after him. (The local football club also took the name Morton, either in recognition of Morton’s early patronage or because many of its earlier players lived in the terrace.)

Octavia Cottages

Another benefactor was Sir Michael Robert Shaw-Stewart: a baronet, heir to the local Ardgowan estate – still in family hands – and Conservative MP for Renfrewshire until 1865. Shaw-Stewart feued* land at Hillend at the low rate of £16 an acre for the erection of 28 cottages on East Crawford Street. In the event, most of the Octavia Cottages (presumably named after his wife, Lady Octavia Grosvenor) soon ‘came to be owned and occupied by those in a higher position in life than the working classes they were intended for’. (3)

Shaw-Stewart also supported a scheme of ‘six divisions of self-contained cottages of brick, English-style, with a small garden and green attached’ at Bridgend in east Greenock. This too, despite larger ambitions, failed to develop from small beginnings. However ‘model’ the dwellings, it was obvious that philanthropic housing could not build housing either at the scale or in the form required by those who needed it most.

In 1877, the Burgh became the first in Scotland to apply the slum clearance and rebuilding provisions of the 1875 Act although it did so with some reluctance. The land acquired for slum clearance was unsuccessfully offered for private redevelopment leaving the council with no option but to undertake the scheme itself which commenced in 1886.  Twenty-one blocks were built in Dalrymple, Shaw, Duff, and Brynmer Streets containing 197 one- to three-room tenements, 290 rooms in total. With WCs shared by up to three families, washhouses by six to twelve, this was by even the normal standards of the day basic housing – but housing conditions in Greenock were far from normal. (4)

An early image of the Royal Naval Torpedo Factory

Those standards came under further unexpected scrutiny in 1910 as a result of what some dubbed ‘the English invasion’. Due to a Government decision to centralise production (and presumably reflecting fear of the growing military might of Germany), the Royal Naval Torpedo Factory was opened in Greenock in 1910. This involved the transplantation of around 700 workers from the Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London. The incomers, it was said by one local historian: (5)

brought many prejudices with them. Prejudices about our Churches, our climate, our habits and customs and, perhaps most of all, about our houses.

A Woolwich View of Greenock published in 1910 would seem to confirm their negative views at least: (5)

many of the so-called houses … are, in our view, quite unfit for habitation by our people. We think for our purposes they may be considered non-existent. The great number of bare-footed and bare-headed children who frequent the streets at all hours of the day and late and night was, to us, a pitiful sight.

The Greenock Telegraph replied that ‘Scots boys nearly all run barefoot in the warmer months of the year’ and, with less sympathy to the hardiness of working-class natives, that ‘our slumdwellers are not always the poor, to a large extent they are the improvident’.

The Admiralty acknowledged the genuine discontent existing among its transplanted workers – the undeniable shortage of housing of all sorts and the reality, as one commentator noted mildly, of ‘the tenement system of the district not meeting with the southern ideas’ – but hoped initially that the private sector and housing associations might fill the breach. (7)

Around 56 two-storey houses were built by the Scottish Garden Suburb Tenants Limited and the Gourock and Greenock Garden Suburb Tenants Limited before the war but, objectively, as the town’s population reached 75,000, the housing crisis remained severe. Of 14,500 occupied homes, just 30 were vacant and some 686 were acknowledged – presumably by standards lower than those of the Woolwich workers – unfit. An estimated 1373 new houses were required.

Serpentine Walk

In 1911, the Corporation resolved to build new homes and 41 were completed in a large tenement block on Serpentine Walk by 1913. Pressure to improve and build was maintained by a Workers’ Housing Council formed in 1912 and, with the greater powers and resources of officialdom, by a Royal Commission on Scottish Housing instituted in 1912 and a Housing Enquiry into Greenock carried out by the Local Government Board in 1914.

The latter found 780 currently occupied houses (accommodating 3300 people) unfit for human occupation and some 469 so-called ‘back properties’ or ‘backlands’ – infill development to the rear of already overcrowded and substandard tenement homes. It called on the Burgh to renew its housebuilding programme by committing to a further 250 new homes immediately with 250 built annually in succeeding years.

Roxburgh Street housing in the 1960s, part of the Kennedy Collection at the McLean Museum  © Inverclyde Libraries, McLean Museum and Inverclyde Archives

The outbreak of war in August 1914 and the priority given to military production generally stymied such ambitions but the significance of Greenock as a naval supplier secured it favourable treatment. A new municipal housing scheme opened in east Greenock in November 1916 featuring ‘houses of the cottage type’ at around 13 to the acre.  The Government paid 12 percent of the scheme’s total cost with the stipulation that the 144 houses on Roxburgh Street (since demolished) would be let to Admiralty employees for at least two years. Further homes on the site were promised after the war. (8)

Grenville Road, Gourock © Thomas Nugent and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In 1916-17, 200 more houses and flats were built in Greenock and neighbouring Gourock at the instigation of the Local Government Board for Scotland, half of them directly provided by the Government’s Office of Works in the Reservoir, Rodney and Grenville Road areas of Gourock. The latter took their inspiration from the larger ‘Garden City’-style development sponsored by the Admiralty in Rosyth where a new naval dockyard had been established in 1908. Among these were the first houses built directly by central government, a precedent fulfilled on far greater scale under the pressures of total war by the 1000 new homes built in 1915 on the Well Hall Estate in Eltham to accommodate the expanded workforce back in Woolwich’s Royal Arsenal. (9)

The promise to build anew at war’s end was one that would be fulfilled and its implementation – in Greenock and across Britain – would owe something to the example of the burgh before and during the First World War. We’ll follow the ongoing story of Greenock’s council housing in the interwar period in next week’s post.

* The Scottish system of feu holding, eventually fully abolished in 2000, required that those who acquired land were required to pay an annual sum for its use to its original owner. Feu duties in Greenock, ranging from £20 to £70 per annum, were – in a reflection of the shortage of suitable land for construction – unusually high which caused additional problems for new housebuilding.

Note

My thanks to the McLean Museum and Art Gallery of Greenock for permission to use the image of Roxburgh Street.

Sources

(1) This quotation and other details are drawn from TW Hamilton, How Greenock Grew (James McKelvie and Sons, 1947); the statistic and causes of death from Michael Anderson, Corinne Roughley, Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today (Oxford University Press, 2018).

(2) Robert Murray Smith, The History of Greenock (Orr Pollock and Co, 1921). An online edition has been provided by Inverclyde Council Libraries, Museums and Archive Service.

(3) Smith, The History of Greenock and the report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Industrial Population of Scotland Rural and Urban (1917)

(4) William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (National Housing Reform Council, 1903)

(5) Hamilton, How Greenock Grew

(6) Republished in Greenock Housing Conditions, 1885-1914 (Jordanhill College 1978). The responses of the Greenock Telegraph are drawn from the editions of March 24 1910 and October 28 1912.

(7) Ewart G Culpin, The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date (The Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, 1913)

(8) ‘Greenock Municipal Housing’, Daily Record, 22 November 1916

(9) On Greenock and Rosyth, see Henry Roan Rutherford, Public Sector Housing in Scotland, vol 3 1900-1939, University of Glasgow PhD 1996

The Campsbourne Cottage Estate, Hornsey: ‘a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country’

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Hornsey, Pre-1914

I’m delighted to feature another guest post today, this by Ray Rogers. Ray is a conservation and historic buildings specialist with a long-standing interest in housing policy and design going back to his early experience of designing council housing in a London borough architects’ department. He is currently writing a series of conservation area appraisals and management plans.

The Campsbourne Cottage Estate in Hornsey, north London, is an early example of council housing built following powers granted to municipal authorities by the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890. The first part of the Campsbourne estate pre-dates the London County Council’s better-known cottage estates such as Totterdown Fields in Tooting and Tower Gardens in Tottenham.

Nightingale Lane

The design and detailing of the houses and the quality of materials and workmanship give the estate its distinctive character. Apart from some bomb damage sustained in World War Two and some recent alterations to individual houses, the estate remains substantially unchanged in appearance and is exceptionally well preserved. However, it is the story behind the creation of the Campsbourne estate that illustrates the pioneering nature of such developments in responding to the housing issues of their time.

Early housing legislation such as the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875 gave local authorities powers to clear entire areas of ‘insanitary’ buildings but few municipalities (with the exception of major cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool and the London County Council) fulfilled the requirement to replace housing lost through slum clearance, and those that did so mainly relied on philanthropic bodies such as the Peabody Trust to undertake rebuilding.

Most new housing was provided by private speculative builders and in Hornsey as elsewhere these houses were aimed at the emerging lower middle classes. It was the skilled working class that was most directly affected by cyclical slumps in speculative building and the rising cost of housing, and advocates of housing for working people made the case that: (1)

working men of all grades and occupations have been unable to get a decent cottage to live in and have had to choose between occupying part of expensive and overcrowded houses, quite unsuitable for more than one family, or occupying a dilapidated and insanitary dwelling … commonly described as slums.

From the last decade of the 19^th century a new type of municipal housing emerged, not just replacing ‘unhealthy’ housing lost through slum clearance but providing a net addition to the housing stock. This was given statutory basis by Part III of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. The new Urban District Councils, created under the Local Government Act of 1894, were well placed to take advantage of these new powers and Hornsey U.D.C. lost little time in implementing the opportunities offered by the 1890 Act, following its adoption by the authority in 1896.

Northview Road corner with Nightingale Lane

Hornsey is now part of the London borough of Haringey but until the late 19^th century it was a historic settlement straddling both sides of Hornsey High Street. Development of the surrounding open fields proceeded rapidly following the opening of Hornsey station in the late 1860s. Twenty-four acres of land north of the High Street were acquired in 1866 by the British Land Company which laid out an estate of speculative terraced houses that followed the grid iron street pattern and narrow fronted houses typical of ‘by-law’ housing.

Further development was delayed until after 1896 when the Priory estate was sold, of which four and a half acres of land to the west of Nightingale Lane, on the southern boundary of Alexandra Palace, was acquired by Hornsey U.D.C. in 1897. By 1899 the council had built 108 cottages in Nightingale Lane and in Northview and Southview Roads. Another six acres were bought in 1902 and a second scheme of another 140 cottages was started in 1904. (2)

Hornsey is an exceptionally healthy and well-managed urban district in the northern suburbs of London, contrasting very favourably with other urban districts further eastwards. Realising that ‘prevention is better than cure’ the Council and its officers have endeavoured to prevent the growth of new slum areas by themselves establishing a good supply of model cottages for workmen rather than have their district unduly disfigured and deteriorated by the objectionable and overcrowded products of the jerry-builder.

An early photograph of Nightingale Lane

Both schemes (and a third scheme in Highgate) were overseen by Edwin J Lovegrove, the Borough Engineer and Surveyor, who had designed an earlier cottage development for Richmond Town Council, the ‘Richmond Municipal Cottages’, regarded as one of the first successful cottage developments and described in detail by William Thompson in his Housing Handbook of 1903. Thompson also describes the Hornsey cottages development, then known as the Nightingale Lane scheme, with special attention given to the costs and financing of the project, resulting in a self-financing development with rents considerably lower than those in the private rental market and with no impact on the local rates. On reviewing the Campsbourne schemes in 1905 James Cornes wrote: (3)

No wonder that, with so much knowledge of this subject, he (Lovegrove) has been able … to rear a colony of self-contained workmen’s dwellings unsurpassed in the country. This for London is a revolution in cottage building, and clearly indicates the thought, care, and real ability that the Surveyor must of necessity have put into this work. The Housing Committee and Corporation must be congratulated upon the excellent results of this undertaking, and for the splendid example they have been able to set to other municipalities.

On the east side of Nightingale Lane, the Campsbourne School, opened in 1897, was contemporary with the cottage estate. Designed by Thomas Chatfield Clarke, architect to Hornsey School Board, the school buildings are a good example of a late Queen Anne style Board school.

Northview Road

The first Campsbourne scheme had two classes of houses, Class A having a sitting-room, living room, scullery and three bedrooms and Class B having similar accommodation but smaller and with two bedrooms. The sitting room was in fact the ‘front parlour’ and the living room was the kitchen with scullery attached.

The second scheme was more ambitious in the range and size of cottages provided. There were four classes of dwelling: Class A had a sitting room, living room, scullery and four bedrooms; Class B the same but with three bedrooms and Class C had two bedrooms. Class D contained a living room, small scullery, bathroom and two bedrooms. The innovation in this scheme was the use of Cornes and Haighton’s combined range, copper and bath in each cottage. The bath could be covered when not in use. The Class A cottage provided for the larger family, as described with typical Edwardian moral condescension by James Cornes in 1905: (3)

… attention should be given to the highest rented cottage in the scheme, providing as it does four bedrooms and a larger sitting room and living room, let to the working man with a wage earning family, thus keeping in a comfortable home grown-up sons and daughters who, too frequently, are turned out into the world and, as a result, contract early and undesirable marriages which might have been avoided had the home surroundings been of a different character.

Second scheme – Class A cottage

The completed cottage estate consisted of four streets of two storey houses arranged in short terraces of six to eight houses each. The houses are built in red brick with shallow brick arches over window and door openings. Each of the end of terrace houses are stepped forward slightly and have large projecting gables with barge boards, with two smaller gables within the terrace. The houses have flat street fronts and there are no bays or other projections apart from some porches on the second phase of building.

Northview Road

The plain uniformity of the terraces is lightened by the use of simple repetitive detailing in the brickwork. All of the houses have a scalloped brick relief panel set beneath each window cill and a course of dog tooth brickwork set between two projecting brick courses runs along the full length of each terrace.

Southview Road

The houses in Nightingale Lane, Northview Road and Southview Road formed the first phase of development. On these houses the dog-tooth band course runs across each elevation at first floor window cill level. On Nightingale Lane and Northview Road the large chimney stacks also have a dogtooth detail. Northview Road, together with the Nightingale Lane frontage, is the best-preserved of the two streets as Southview Road was affected by bomb damage in World War Two.

Beechwood Road

Hawthorn Road and Beechwood Road comprised the second phase of the development and show some changes in form and materials, although still based on terraces each of six or eight houses. The main difference is the use of yellow London stock brick for alternate terraces on both sides of the road, giving the street frontage a more varied and picturesque appearance than in the first phase. The dogtooth band course is retained on the red brick terraces but it runs in a continuous band midway between ground and first floor instead of at window cill level.

Hawthorn Road

On some of the yellow brick terraces the dogtooth detail was replaced with a continuous projecting band of dentilled brickwork in red brick and a similar detail can be seen on some terraces in the LCC’s Tower Gardens estate. The window arches and scalloped relief panel are also all in red brick. Five of the later terraces have paired porches either side of the projecting party wall with a lean-to slate roof and small paned windows.

Hawthorn Road

Hawthorn Road

By 1914 the rest of the land south of Alexandra Palace and to the west of Nightingale Lane had been developed by private builders, completing Northview, Southview, Hawthorn and Beechwood Roads with speculative terraced housing, some using the eclectic pattern book of local architect John Farrer and others in the form of ‘Tyneside’ flats, in which the street frontage has two front doors, one leading to a ground floor flat and the second leading directly to a staircase to a first floor flat.

1914 Ordnance Survey map showing the extent of the cottage estate with Alexandra Park to the north

Building in Hornsey stopped in 1914 and after the war councillors could not agree on the need for further council housing in the borough, with many feeling that adequate provision had been made pre-war. The council resisted complying with the Housing and Town Planning Act (the Addison Act) of July 1919, which charged local authorities with building more working-class homes with controlled rents, even though poor housing and insanitary conditions, particularly in the Campsbourne area, had been brought to the attention of its Public Health Committee. An editorial in the Hornsey journal of 7^th February 1919 said: (4)

Inasmuch as Hornsey is not altogether what is superficially described as a “working-class” area, it will be seen that the Town Council have not lagged in the provision of workmen’s dwellings. The first of the four schemes was completed in 1898 and the last in 1912. We have reason to believe that the dwellings are almost exclusively occupied by men who actually earn their living in the borough – the local police, the postmen, municipal employees, and others.

The Council can say with the strictest veracity that they have provided for a considerable number of families, but that no further accommodation is needed is not so incontrovertible. Is there no overcrowding in Hornsey? Is there no “unsuitable accommodation”? Are the artisan and the labouring the only classes for whom cheap provision should be made?

Beechwood Road

Towards the end of 1919 the council eventually gave in to pressure and instructed Edwin Lovegrove to draw up plans for 79 houses to be built on land that had been requisitioned during the war for allotments. However, the housing scheme was never progressed, being dropped on grounds of cost, and the land was bought by the council in 1923 as part of the newly laid out Priory park. This marks the end of a chapter in the pioneering of council house building in Hornsey.

Hawthorn Road

The Campsbourne Cottage estate makes no pretensions to great architecture or town planning, being barely touched by the influence of the early Garden City movement, but nevertheless it remains a significant milestone in the provision of affordable housing for working class families and when compared to the housing typical of the time this was no mean achievement. (3)

… Within a few miles of the heart of London he (E J Lovegrove) has succeeded in building a self-contained cottage with a forecourt, garden at the rear and four rooms including a bath and every other modern convenience, to let at 6s. 6d. per week inclusive rental.

The houses are still much valued today. The estate was designated as a conservation area in 1994. A conservation area appraisal and management plan has recently been prepared and it is hoped this will assist the planning authority in controlling some of the piecemeal changes being wrought by ‘home improvements’ that are beginning to detract from the unified appearance of the estate.

Notes

If you’re interested in learning more of Hornsey’s local history, do visit the website of the Hornsey Historical Society.

Sources

(1) William Thompson, quoted in The Lowestoft Journal, 25 February 1899

(2) William Thompson, The Housing Handbook (1903)

(3) James Cornes, Modern Housing in Town and Country (1905)

(4) Janet Owen, Hornsey’s Post-War Housing Problem, Hornsey Historical Society

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

Tags

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 Holborn, Part I: Early Council Housing to 1945

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Holborn, Pre-1914

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

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

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

An early engraving of Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Road

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

Cranley Buildings

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

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

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

The Bourne Estate

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

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

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

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

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

Betterton House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) See Sean Creighton (Labour Heritage), Labour in Holborn in the 1930s and 1940s. A transcript of Frank Dobson’s obituary of Marcousé published in The Guardian, 9 April 1990, can be found in the online archives of Woolverstone Hall School (an out of London boarding school founded by the LCC in 1951 where she was a governor until 1986).

 

Council Housing in Shrewsbury, Part I: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914

Tourists might know Shrewsbury as a town with over 660 listed buildings, ‘full of higgledy-piggledy streets with names you want to say out loud’. (1)  As a working town and somewhere to live, council housing has been equally important to its past and present and the council took an early, innovative role after some initial hesitation. This first post looks at this history up to the Second World War and the controversies surrounding it.

A contemporary aerial view of Shrewsbury. Ditherington lies to the north beyond the Severn loop enclosing the town centre.

In 1901, with a population of around 23,300, Shrewsbury was a medium-sized county town – an administrative and trading centre, not untouched by the Industrial Revolution (indeed Ditherington Flax Mill, built in 1797, was the first iron-framed building in the world) but still predominantly traditional in form and make-up.

Politically, this was reflected in a local politics largely ‘based on personality rather than ideology’. The town’s first Labour councillor, John Kent Morris of the Shrewsbury Trades Council (a trade union body) was elected in 1903 but the dominant figure was the Conservative Alderman Thomas Pidduck Deakin, a baker and hotelier. (2)

This (literally) picture postcard image of Shrewsbury, taken c1900, belies the reality of working-class housing in its courts and passages.

That tradition was also reflected in slums – not the Victorian terraces of industrial England but in the words of the borough’s Medical Officer of Health in 1927:

small, isolated groups, scattered throughout the town in the form of small houses, huddled together in enclosed and shut-in courtyards, approached through a dark alley leading off the main street.

Back in 1907, the then Medical Officer of Health estimated there were 200 houses in Shrewsbury unfit for human habitation. A resolution that the Council adopt Part III of the 1890 Housing Act (allowing it to acquire land to build council housing) followed.  The debate that ensued is worth examining in some detail as representative of the arguments of the day.

Some councillors professed simple shock at the conditions suffered by many of the working class: Councillor Franklin: (3)

had no idea that there were such places for human beings to live in as there were in Shrewsbury … some houses were entirely devoid of light, others filthy in the extreme, and some without any back door; houses which were really a disgrace to civilisation.

From the left, Councillor Morris drew what seemed to him the inescapable conclusion:

The evils of the present system were so great that they could not be tolerated any longer, and he hoped the Council would step into the breach and say that the people must be properly housed at rents which they could afford to pay. If it would not pay private enterprise to provide such houses, then the municipality must undertake the responsibility.

To many, it won’t seem that too much has changed.

But some – as was common then and now – blamed the poor for their squalor of their homes. Councillor Pace, a Liberal, was ‘afraid in some cases the people themselves caused a great deal of the unpleasantness that existed by their own actions’. If just one drain and service pipe per group of dwellings were demanded, he suggested, the private sector would provide all the housing required.

Councillor How, a Conservative, decried municipal housing as ‘the road to socialism’. But his party colleague, Councillor Bromley, spoke to a  rival tradition of Tory Democracy that professed a concern for working-class conditions:

Mr How told them that the proposal might be ruinous to the country but was it not ruinous to the country to have an enormous infantile death-rate caused very largely by insanitary dwellings, and to permit the existence of slums which were undermining the health of the people. They were told that what they proposed was Socialism. If that was so then he was a Socialist – and he was among the Conservative Socialists because the Conservatives passed that act in 1890.

In the end, the motion was passed but, for the moment, the resistance to council housing prevailed. A few existing homes were declared unfit but in general efforts focused on reconditioning rather than demolition.

Raymond Unwin

Agitation renewed with the formation of a Shrewsbury Housing Reform Council in 1911.  A public meeting in February 1912 – described as ‘one of the most important and representative gatherings in the history of Shrewsbury’ and addressed by Raymond Unwin, the leading housing reformer of the day – seems to have decisively swung opinion. (4)

Wingfield Gardens

The Council appointed a Housing Committee and purchased land north of Ditherington Mill. Wingfield Gardens was completed in April 1915 – 63 solid family homes arrayed around a generous green open space: ‘Shrewsbury’s first garden suburb’.  Alderman Deakin, now chair of the Housing Committee though previously sceptical towards municipal housebuilding, spoke of ‘an enormous demand for houses’ and concluded ‘the Corporation would have to provide other garden suburbs’. (5)

Wingfield Gardens

As a token of the seriousness of the Council’s intent, sanction was received for a further housing scheme in 1916 though without, in wartime, much prospect of it being built in the near future. However, thoughts were turning to war’s end and, perhaps in response to the Local Government Board’s circular of July 1917 ‘Housing after the War’, in October that year, the Council sought permission to build 400 houses. (6)

Deakin, whose conversion to municipal housebuilding was now complete, observed that building small houses for private let had ceased being profitable for at least ten years before the war and he became the driving force behind the Council’s interwar programme.  It’s a reminder that an uptick in council housebuilding began in the run-up to the First World War though its aftermath and the demand for ‘Homes for Heroes’ proved decisive.

The Council bought 19 acres of land in December 1918 and a further 38 acres at Coton Hill in March 1919 and was described, justifiably, as ‘one of the most forward in respect to its housing schemes’. (7)

That advanced thinking was evident in its detailed planning too. The new homes were:

to be on garden city lines – not more than ten to the acre, and the lay-out includes such amenities as village institutes, bowling greens, and open spaces, while tree planting is to be a feature of the two estates now being developed.

Naturally, the new homes included ‘such domestic facilities as a gas boiler and gas cooker’.  The location of the bath – in a cubicle off the scullery – caused some debate but the Housing Committee concluded that ‘that the balance of convenience for the working housewife [was] to have the bath downstairs’.

Longden Green

The Longden Green Estate was completed in 1922, the first stage of the Coton Hill Estate one year later.  The plans of both were closely based on the 1919 Housing Manual (written appropriately in a Shrewsbury context by Raymond Unwin) which accompanied Addison’s celebrated housing act of the same year. How, still a Conservative member of the council, now an alderman, was angry that the houses designed by ‘certain faddy architects in London’ cost £1000 each; Deakin countered ‘the ship should not be spoilt for a ha’p’orth of tar’.

Sultan Road

Those high prices were a problem though, not least in rents affordable to only the most affluent workers. The generous funding regime of Addison’s legislation was axed in 1921; Longden Green’s community hall was not built. And the Council determined that their next building scheme would be built more economically at rents that lower paid workingmen could afford. The 70 houses built on Sultan Road cost around £370 each but the scheme was widely criticised for its austerity.  The 204-home Monkmoor Estate, built on land purchased in June 1925, reverted to garden suburb ideals.

White House Gardens

Nationally, the 1930s marked a shift to slum clearance and the targeted rehousing of slum-dwellers. Shrewsbury made small progress in this regard; in 1939, there were still 221 houses in town judged unfit for human habitation including 29 homes in Fairford Place deemed insanitary since the 1850s. However, the council’s building continued apace in smaller schemes at Judith Butts, White House Gardens, Wingfield Close (adjacent to the council’s first housing), New Park Road and Close, and Old Heath.

New Park Road

The Council’s 1000^th home was opened in March 1937 – a proud record. The historian Barrie Trinder reckoned by this time that ‘the better-paid workman had been very nearly catered for’ but he acknowledged that many who were less well-off in Shrewsbury remained in squalor. (9)

The renewed housing drive after a second world war and its commitment to provide decent housing for all will be examined in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Original Shrewsbury website

(2) This detail and the following quotation are drawn from WA Champion and AT Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, IHR, 2014)

(3) ‘Shrewsbury Town Council. The Housing of the Poor’ and ‘Local Notes’, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 13 September 1907

(4) Champion and Thacker (eds), A History of Shropshire, vol VI, Part 1 Shrewsbury General History and Topography

(5) ‘Shrewsbury’s Garden Suburb’, Liverpool Daily Post, 9 April 1915

(6) ‘The Housing of Shrewsbury Workers’, Birmingham Daily Post, 9 October 1917

(7) This and following quotations are drawn from ‘Shrewsbury Housing Schemes. Garden City Developments’, Kington Times, 14 June 1919

(8) Barrie Trinder, Beyond the Bridges: the Suburbs of Shrewsbury, 1760-1960 (2008)

ECP Monson: A Thoughtful and Proudly Municipal Architect

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Bethnal Green, Islington, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to feature another guest post from Andrew Parnell who wrote an earlier post on Charles Dickens House in Bethnal Green. Andrew is a walking tour guide with Footprints of London and East London on Foot who leads walks on architecture and housing history in Tower Hamlets. These include walks in Bethnal Green which take in buildings designed by ECP Monson. More information and tickets for Andrew’s walks can be obtained from the Footprints of London website. 

The architect Edward Charles Philip Monson (1872-1941) designed over 25 London housing estates in the first half of the twentieth century. He worked in private practice but dedicated his life to public building, the overwhelming majority of it housing. In a period when housing provision for the less-well-off grew from its 19^th century philanthropic beginnings to the inter-war surge in local authority building, he worked for a variety of housebuilding bodies which reflect that progression.

ECP Monson

Monson remains relatively unsung in architectural circles, his work overshadowed by that of more celebrated, sometimes flamboyant, figures who came to prominence later in the century. His practice – in partnership with his brother Harry and son John – has been described as ‘capable, prolific but perhaps rather stolid.’ That may be true, but his work can also be seen as highly accomplished, adapting stylistically to changing trends and tastes whilst placing residents’ needs – practical and psychological – before architectural display.

After starting off professionally working in the practice of his architect father, Monson set up in his own right in 1904. Among his early commissions were several of the early estates built by the William Sutton Trust, a philanthropic body founded in 1900 with a huge monetary endowment by a wealthy benefactor. It joined a group of similar housing bodies formed by wealthy individuals in the mould of the Peabody Trust which had been operating since the mid-19^th century. The estates Monson designed were ‘grand and impressive places,’ in a relatively mellow, decorated style which distinguished the Sutton Trust’s work from that of the other philanthropic bodies which were variously criticised as ‘barrack-like’, ‘cliff-like’ and ‘prison-like.’ At the Sutton Estate in Chelsea, completed in 1913, for example, he used rustication, stone wreaths, swags and Corinthian colonnades to add ‘liveliness’ to the massive five-storey blocks. According to one resident, ‘the pointing [of the estate] was said to be so perfect that people used to come specially to see it.’

Sutton Estate, Chelsea

An attempt by the current owner to demolish most of the century-old Chelsea estate’s buildings was fended off by residents and others in 2018 on the basis not only of their architectural but also of their historical significance as early examples of large-scale social housing. That case brought to light another, much earlier conflict which arose around the time the estate was built between the Sutton Trust and the London County Council (LCC) which was then the ‘new kid on the block’ in the housebuilding world. The LCC criticised what it saw as the low level of spending, and the consequent basicness of the accommodation, created by the Trust which was operating under the financial constraints of a ‘no-profit’ approach. The fledgling local authority had levelled this criticism at the work of other philanthropic bodies – which it saw as competitors – and it was referred to in the recent case by the would-be demolishers to question the merits of the estate’s design.  

Sutton Estate, Chelsea, rear view

The argument failed when the context of the tension between the LCC and the philanthropic bodies was taken into account. The housing Monson designed for the Trust may have been very simple but it was intended to be affordable: by keeping building costs down, rents could be kept down. Ironically, the LCC in its first great housing project – the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green – found itself obliged by financial pressures to charge high rents to recover its relatively lavish expenditure on building the estate with the result that the new buildings were occupied not by residents of the slums they replaced but by more affluent tenants. The Chelsea Sutton Estate, whatever its limitations, continues to provide 383 badly-needed social housing units (compared with 237 which the proposed redevelopment would have included).

After World War I, the rate of house-building by London’s Metropolitan Boroughs increased substantially, boosted by the introduction of housing subsidies and other measures contained in the Housing Act 1919. Monson attached himself to the Metropolitan Boroughs in two areas: Bethnal Green and nearby Stepney, both later absorbed into the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End; and Finsbury and next-door Islington, which later merged to become the single London Borough of Islington, in North London. He would go on to design a stream of estates for these councils in the 1920s and 30s.

One of Monson’s early projects for Bethnal Green, which was known as the Parmiter Estate during construction, gave rise to an amusing controversy when, as it was nearing completion in 1927, the left-wing (part-Communist) council voted to call it the Lenin Estate.

At the Parmiter Estate, Monson’s style had moved on from the gigantic blocks of the philanthropic period to a version of the neo-Georgian style widely used by the LCC and other local authorities by that time: simple, orderly and well-proportioned with windows taller than they are wide. However, at Parmiter Monson added decorative flourishes, such as venetian windows in the gables, which were uncharacteristic of this ‘house style.’ This may have reflected the Bethnal Green council’s desire to make a splash with the first estate to be designed by its ‘own’ architect. A splash it certainly made, with right-wing newspapers expressing outrage at the extravagance of ‘luxury’ flats built with public money by a left-wing council.

Parmiter Estate, Bethnal Green

In fact, during his career Monson adopted, or showed touches, of a variety of styles, reflecting latest trends, but sometimes seeming to jump back and forth across time, perhaps reflecting his clients’ preferences, or what they thought residents would prefer, or his own perception of what would be appropriate. As well as Neo-Georgian, the labels Queen Anne (itself a sort of potpourri of past styles), Arts and Crafts, Edwardian Renaissance/Baroque, Art Deco and Modernist have been used in relation to his various works.

For example, later in Bethnal Green he produced the Delta Estate (1936-7), a gem of a building which, with elegant curved-ended balconies and semi-circular concrete door canopies, discreetly adopts elements of the Art Deco-influenced style, used by other local boroughs in the 1930s, which they sometimes called ‘Moderne’ (everything sounds better in French!). Delta has what the architectural bible Pevsner calls ‘jazzy Expressionist brickwork’ over the doorways.

Brickwork and balconies on the Delta Estate, Bethnal Green

Lively brickwork can also be seen in another of Monson’s Bethnal Green projects, the Digby and Butler Estates (1936 and 1938), which, like the Delta Estate, have the wide windows (wider than they are tall) characteristic of the 1930s.  

The Butler Estate, Bethnal Green

However, another of his Bethnal Green works of the 1930s, Claredale House (1931-32), has windows which would look more at home in the old neo-Georgian style and even features a high brick archway entrance which seems to hark right back to the huge, stern archways found in some philanthropic blocks of earlier decades.  

Arches at the Sutton and Claredale Estates

In Bethnal Green and the other boroughs he was associated with, Monson worked for some radical councils implementing a huge social programme of public housebuilding. But from the limited information we have, it is hard to imagine he was a socialist firebrand. His photo shows him with big moustache, pince-nez spectacles and wing collar, looking every inch the Edwardian bank manager or solicitor. His curriculum vitae lists memberships of just about every relevant professional body, to many of which he devoted copious amounts of time voluntarily in committee and executive work, including as President of the Institute of Structural Engineers. A keen and senior member of the Territorial Army, he was also, as his father had been, a prominent Freemason.  

Whatever we may think of these associations, it should not detract from the fact that his professional life was overwhelmingly focused on what contemporaries referred to as ‘the Housing of the Working Classes.’ The output of estates by his small firm would have done credit to the whole architects’ department of a local authority.

Islington was the area where Monson was most prolific. His work there shows a variation and progression of styles, as in the East End. But there is one estate which, for me, represents an epitome or culmination of Monson’s work. The Brecknock Road Estate (1938-9) was recently added to Islington’s Local List of Historical Assets. It was nominated as being:

an evocative example of a thoughtful and proudly municipal conception of modern architecture.

By this late stage of his life and career, Monson had visited Europe and seen how some designers of mass housing there (for example in the Weimar Republic and ‘Red Vienna’) were adopting a modernist approach. At Brecknock Road, Monson used this style, but in a characteristically restrained manner. By this time, he may well have been working with his brother and son who continued the practice under his name after his death.  

The Brecknock Estate, Islington

Modernism at Brecknock Road can be seen in the rectangular balconies which now have 90 degree corners (no curves) and in corner windows at 90 and 135 degree angles in the two-faceted and three-faceted bay windows. The horizontality of long balconies and rows of windows is cut through by the vertical lines created by the bay windows and rubbish chute ‘chimneys.’ But this modernism is tailored to its context. The estate – comprising 225 flats in 16 perimeter blocks around two internal courtyards – makes a virtue of the sloping topography and irregular shape of the site. The blocks have stepped rooflines and their arrangement is not entirely symmetrical, so they occupy the space ‘in a relaxed way.’ The slate roofs are not flat – as strict modernism would dictate – but slightly pitched to match the Victorian roofs of surrounding streets. Between the blocks are glimpses into the attractively planted sloping courtyards. The outward-facing sides of the blocks are predominantly red brick punctuated by the white rendered balconies. The inward-facing sides are predominantly white and pale green, producing a light, airy feel.  

Brecknock Estate, Islington, rear view

Altogether this creates an environment in which you feel that people can live comfortably. One resident and (art) critic has written that the blocks are not monolithic but each ‘is a knowable community,’ and the lack of grand and large-scale effects mean residents can ‘feel more entitled to be there.’ It has a ‘sense of refuge and quiet.’ For an architect of social housing, those comments, coming from a resident of one of his estates, could be seen as the highest praise, an accolade as satisfying as a Grade I listing.

Monson’s work now stands in the shade – physical and critical – of that of more radical individuals with perhaps greater socialist credentials such as Denys Lasdun (whose Keeling House of 1957 in Bethnal Green towers over Monson’s Claredale House across the road) and the emigres from eastern Europe Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger. But Monson’s comparatively quiet, gentle and sensitive approach, expertly using changing styles but without letting any design imperative stand before the wellbeing and contentment of residents, could be said to have produced housing that has stood the test of time and fulfilled its primary function at least as well.

Sources

Royal Institute of British Architects, Biographical Files: Edward Charles Philip Monson and Edward Monson (father)

‘E. C. P. Monson, English Architect’, The Structural Engineer, October 1932, p 413

P. L. Garside, The Conduct of Philanthropy: William Sutton Trust 1900 – 2000 (Athlone Press, 2000)

Letter from The Victorian Society to The Planning Inspectorate re: William Sutton Estate, Cale Street and Ixworth Place, London, 28 March 2018

Ian Hunt, ‘Modernism for sociable living’, Journal of Islington Archaeology & History Society, Spring 2013, Vol 3, No.1

London Borough of Islington Planning Committee Recommendation, Brecknock Road Estate, 4 December 2012

P. Garside and T. Hinchcliffe, ‘E. C. P. Monson in Islington: local authority housing in 1919-65’,  London Architect, October 1982, pp 8-9

Modernism in Metro-Land, In House – Part 4: Islington, April 2017