Housing in St Pancras before 1914: ‘the foulest parish in all London’

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Camden, Pre-1914, St Pancras

After 1945, St Pancras Borough Council built more council housing than any comparable London borough.  That achievement looked unlikely in the early years of local administration which saw St Pancras dubbed ‘the foulest parish in all London’ but by 1914 the Borough, against initial resistance, had built the foundations of a housing record second to none.

Goldington Court

To begin with, that resistance: the pre-reform St Pancras Vestry – which ruled locally until 1900 – was slow to respond to problems of slum housing among the worst in London, so bad that even the Prince of Wales urged reform after an incognito visit to one particularly notorious district.

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884 by the local Medical Officer of Health, Dr Shirley Murphy, showed just how pressing was that need although Murphy himself resigned just one year later, frustrated by the inaction of the Vestry’s Moderate (Conservative) majority. (He went on to become the London County Council’s first Chief Medical Officer of Health – a position he used to pressure St Pancras to act.) (1)

St Pancras Vestry, 1874. The map is oriented south on left to north (with Hampstead Heath) on right. Approximate locations marked for (A) Prospect Terrace, (B) Flaxman Terrace, (C) Goldington Buildings. Click on the map for an enlarged view.

Prospect Terrace, an area of poor Irish settlement, just to the east of Gray’s Inn Road, was the particular focus of concern – an area (almost uniquely in London) of back-to-back housing, with death rates twice the capital’s average.  It was nicknamed – for reasons which are unclear but certainly not complimentary – Cat’s Meat Square.  A contemporary newspaper comment that the ‘Cockney Irish…seem to have the dirty habits of the Irish and the English added together’ was more revealing of upper class callousness than of the hard lives lived by their poorest compatriots.

The Vestry, still unwilling to spend its own money and with a number of slum landlords among its members, at first pressed the London County Council to act under part I of the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act as it had in Shoreditch where the first council estate in the country, the Boundary Estate, was planned. The LCC refused and pointed to local resources and responsibilities

Slowly and reluctantly the Vestry did respond.  In 1896, it proposed its own scheme to clear Prospect Terrace – and Bantome Place to the east – and erect municipal housing on site. Belatedly, in 1898, it also agreed to build a new tenement block to the north (at the intersection of Great College Street and St Pancras Way) intended, in principle, to rehouse a greater number of the 1500 people to be displaced.

The Vestry’s response remained dilatory, however.  When John Burns, the Lib-Lab MP, visited Prospect Terrace two years later he could still declare it worse than the Shoreditch area: in St Pancras ‘a new element was growing up: men who were living on women – the lowest of the low’.

One year later, the radical and campaigning journal Reynold’s News declared: (2)

St Pancras appears to be the foulest parish in all London.  It is indeed a veritable slum….Shame on the disgraceful Vestry responsible for this outrage on civilisation!  The whole of London must point the finger of scorn at such a disreputable public body and ask if it is league with the loathsome and criminal house-sweaters and rack-renters, most of whom ought to be in gaol…St Pancras is the Filth-hole and Sewage-yard of London.”

In the event, it was the Vestry’s successor, the St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council – still predominantly a Conservative body – formed in 1900, which would complete these projects.  It resolved to construct its new northern tenement block first.

Goldington Court

The Goldington Buildings were built between 1902 and 1904.  Externally, the building had – and retains – a certain grandeur with its red- and yellow-stock brick, corner quoins, terra-cotta detailing, decorative gables and mansard roof.  The opening programme boasted of its ‘large courtyard’ and ‘covered playing place for children’. (2)

Internally, it was far better accommodation than that which it replaced but it was basic – comprising 56 dwellings, mostly three-room tenements containing WCs, sculleries and coppers for hot water but no baths.

Goldington Court courtyard

But though ‘housing for the working classes’ (as its foundation stone states), its rents were too high for most of the displaced slum-dwellers.  Cheaper two-room flats let more readily but the three-room (at between 9s 6d and 11s 6d a week) were affordable only to the better-off. (3)  Indeed one of the earliest residents, William Neave, was a commercial traveller and his daughter a short-hand typist…until she became better known (and renamed) as Ethel le Neve, Dr Crippen’s mistress.

Since then Goldington Court (also renamed) has been modernised several times over to suit higher standards and changing times.  Most of the flats, but not all, had baths by 1935.  A major 1964 refurbishment replaced that now ‘dreary asphalt courtyard’ with a garden and increased the number of one-bed flats. Now managed by Origin Housing, the most recent (£3.9m) renovation in 2011 increased the number of larger family-size flats: 21 of the 30 current flats are three-bedroom.

All that, I guess, is a tribute to the sturdiness of the original construction and the resilience and adaptability of social housing.

Flaxman Terrace

After building the Goldington Buildings, the Council cleared Brantome Place and built in its stead Flaxman Terrace – 84 flats and a caretaker’s lodge completed in 1908.  Designed by architects Joseph and Smithem, it makes it into Pevsner where it is described as: (4)

Six storeys with much consciously pretty detail: roughcast top floor, domed corner towers and Art Nouveau railings.

It’s the Grade II-listed caretaker’s lodge, later transformed into tenants’ meeting rooms and currently being renovated once more, which is perhaps most striking. The flats themselves were adapted in 1964 and again in the mid-1980s (from 85 flats to 48) to provide the larger accommodation then in demand.

Flaxman Terrace Caretaker’s Lodge

In 1906, almost twenty years after its demolition had first been mooted, and against the protests of residents who lacked alternative accommodation, Prospect Place was cleared. Its replacement, also designed by Joseph and Smithem, contained 34 two-bed and 36 three-bed flats and a shared bathhouse made available (at 2d or 4d a time including soap and towels) to other local residents.

The new flats were each contained a WC and a scullery doubling up as a kitchen, the latter: (5)

fitted up with a washing trough and an independent copper for washing clothes, a larder, dresser, coal bunk, a small gas cooking range, and also an improved form of range. By lifting up a shutter in the middle of this range the fire can be transferred into the living room which adjoins the scullery, so that the tenants need only light one fire, which will serve for cooking and heating purposes.

Bedrooms contained ‘a dress cupboard with shelves and pegs for hanging clothes’ and the buildings lit with ‘incandescent gas’.

With rents ranging from 7s (for two rooms on top floor) to 12s for three rooms with the best outlook, the new accommodation was mostly too expensive for the 621 residents displaced. As one local councillor declared on the tenements’ official opening in October 1909:

although they would not be able to take in the submerged tenth which were cleared out of them, of course a better class of working men and women would take them, and the others would be able to take their places.

This notion of ‘filtering up’ was common to advocates of council housing at this time but its practicality is debateable.  Most of those displaced in fact moved to slum housing in the adjacent streets or to another area of very poor housing just to the north in Somers Town.

The new Prospect Terrace did not survive, destroyed by German bombs during the Blitz on the night of October 15/16, 1940.  Thirty-two residents lost their lives and the buildings were rased.  After the War, the LCC took over the land for its Kingsway College which occupies the site presently.

St Pancras Municipal Borough Coat of Arms

The Council had built 210 dwellings by 1914 – a not discreditable total in an era when so little council housing was being built but, as is evident, much remained to be done.  That work would be tackled by more energetic councillors in the years to come when the responsibility of the local and national state to secure the decent housing of its people would be better recognised.  These early years, however, provide a contrast and context for a later period when St Pancras – and its successor authority, Camden – would be among the leading housing providers in the country.

Sources

(1) Stephen W Job, Cat’s Meat Square. Housing and Public Health in South St Pancras 1810-1910, Camden History Society (2012).  Other detail and later quotations, where not otherwise credited, come from the same source.

(2) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, Housing of the Working Classes:  Opening of Goldington Buildings, Great College Street NW By Alderman Thomas Howell Williams Idris (mayor) on Saturday 4 June 1904

(3) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1912

(4) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London: North (1998)

(5) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1909

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Regent’s Park Estate, St Pancras: ‘catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’

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1950s, Camden, Gibberd, St Pancras

Imagine knocking down some old Nash Regency terraces to build council houses.  If that idea fills you with horror, you should probably stop reading now.  If, on the other hand, it might capture a democratic moment, a time when we wanted to build houses for the people and cared less about the interests of the few, read on.

Derwent: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

This was the vision of Eric Cook in 1944.  Cook, a left-wing journalist, was the vice-chair of St Pancras Borough Labour Party.  (Elected to the Council in 1945, he died aged only 42 just three years later.) Admittedly, his idea had had some help from the Luftwaffe but the buildings were poorly built (‘by Regency jerry-builders’, he said) and thought at the time to be beyond repair.  Modern bulldozers, he went on, could easily create ‘one of the finest building sites in all Britain…the ideal site for the careful planning of a great sweep of working-class flats, catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’. (1)

Meanwhile, the Crown Commissioners, who owned the land, were planning luxury flats. (Does that sound familiar?)  To Cook, this was ‘a plan which must be fought and beaten’:

The people of St Marylebone and St Pancras and their borough councils must persuade the Crown Commissioners…that something better can be done with this site.  What an inspiration it would be for the hundred of thousands who come to Regent’s Park every year… if they saw, instead of a restricted number of luxury flats for the very wealthy, right around the ‘outer circle’ of the Park a magnificent sweep of modern flats where people like themselves, service couples and families, had their homes overlooking one of the loveliest of London’s parks.

These initial ideas were too radical and soon watered down but it’s a sign of the times that modified plans were supported by a public meeting of planners and architects held in the nearby headquarters of RIBA and endorsed by Patrick Abercrombie himself. (2)

The Gorell Committee established by the new Labour Government in 1946 to investigate the future of the Regency terraces was, as might be expected, a little less gung-ho.  It recommended seven of the terraces be preserved but accepted the demolition of Someries House (which would later become the site of Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians’ building), Cambridge Terrace (Nash’s least accomplished work, it said) and Cambridge Gate (a later, 1876, construction ‘of no architectural merit’).  The removal of the latter two would have the: (3)

advantage of opening up the Park for the immediate enjoyment of the inhabitants in a redeveloped area of terraced houses around Munster Square, Clarence Gardens and Cumberland Market [and] would remove a feeling of isolation and of living behind a barrier of more favoured property.

If you wander up the Outer Circle now, you’ll notice that those buildings survive and do, indeed, create a barrier separating the council estate behind from any view – indeed from any sense of adjacency to or ‘ownership’ – of the park which lies so close to hand.

The world wasn’t turned upside down after all.  Normal service was resumed; the privileges of the elite maintained.  Still, St Pancras Borough Council did build its Regent’s Park Estate and we’ll turn now to what was achieved.

The Crown Commissioners agreed to sell some of the land to the east of the Outer Circle and the Council acquired some 69 acres for clearance and redevelopment.  Two elements of Nash’s original scheme – Munster Square and Clarence Gardens, speculative housing for the middle classes gone bad and almost obliterated in the war – were demolished.

In their place the first plan, approved by the Council in 1946, envisaged, in classic Zeilenbau form, a ‘straight, uniform, high block system of flats spaced at intervals of approximately 55 yards’. (4)

Given that even the Council report approving the plan concluded ‘the whole effect is inclined to be one of regimentation’, it’s perhaps not surprising that this scheme was abandoned.  Frederick Gibberd was called on to design a revised lay-out and construction of the first phase of the Estate – Zone A with buildings designed by Gibberd himself – began in 1951.

Hawkshead: Gibberd, Zone A

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

These are the nine-storey T-shaped blocks running along Stanhope Street.  Interspersed among them – at a time when the principles of neighbourhood planning were running strong – were three-storey maisonettes, a nursery, two pubs and a small shopping centre.  The taller buildings were of reinforced concrete frame construction but Gibberd made some effort to add visual interest and variation, using brickwork facings in a chequer-board pattern as well as patterned tiling varied across the blocks.

Stanhope Parade: Gibberd, Zone A

The second phase south of Cumberland Market, along and off Robert Street – actually Zone C – was begun in 1954: 245 flats and six shops and three blocks of 11 storeys, all faced with yellow stock brick, designed by the Davies and Arnold partnership.

Borrowdale: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

The third phase (Zone B) – the work of Thomas Sibthorp, St Pancras Borough Architect – runs along the west side of Augustus Street: two six-storey blocks and one four-storey.

Kendal: Sibthorp, Zone B

Peggy Duff – chair of the Housing Committee from 1956 – later described the new buildings of the Estate as ‘horrible, barrack-type structures’ but most contemporary architectural opinion was kinder.  To the Times’ architectural correspondent, Sibthorp’s Zone C was the most disappointing of the scheme – ‘a step back even when compared with the 30-year-old work alongside’ but he praised other elements of the Estate as ‘far more agreeable’, particularly the designs of Davies and Arnold who had treated their façades more simply than Gibberd and been given greater latitude to vary building heights. (5)

Swallowfield: Armstrong and MacManus

It was the later phases of the overall scheme which most excited contemporary opinion.  Here Edward Armstrong and Frederick MacManus were given scope to depart ‘from the more usual open type of planning with rather loosely sited, separate blocks’, allowing them, it was said, ‘to regain the traditional character of English urban planning which gives a more compact and intimate environment’. (6)

Clarence Gardens: Armstrong and MacManus

The matter of council rents in St Pancras is a whole other story (we’ll write about it another time) but it’s worth noting one oddity here.  Labour had returned to power in St Pancras in 1953 (having narrowly lost to the Conservatives four years earlier), determined to revise the local differential rents scheme.  Its solution was to charge tenants two shillings more the higher their flat was above ground level.  Thus a tenant in one of the top-storey flats of Gibberd’s blocks was paying up to 18 shillings more than a tenant on the ground floor.  Even at a time when high flats were not as reviled as they later became, this seemed a perverse decision and it was abandoned in 1956.

Newby in foreground: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

If you live on the Estate, you can tell me different but it looks in good nick – well-maintained, and attractive overall with its mix of design and aspect and with the ‘touches of colour’ that the Times correspondent noted back in 1955 though enhanced more recently.  It does feel slightly cut off by the Regency terraces to its west and the rather desolate Hampstead Road to its east.  This was an unintended consequence of the failure to ‘knock through’ to the Park but it was taken then to some extent as a positive in creating a ready-made neighbourhood unit.

Of course, there have been many changes since the 1950s. The new Borough of Camden spent £1m on environmental and safety improvements in 1986. In 1990 a ‘£7m Swedish overcoat’ was used to insulate eight renovated blocks.  In 1994 – in a comic irony which probably escaped people at the time – the installation of new security doors was delayed by vandalism. (7)

Pangbourne: Armstrong and MacManus

Demographically, it’s a very different estate too with the ethnic mix you’d expect to find in an inner London borough and a more elderly population – one in five of residents are over 60 according to one sample survey.  Around a quarter of the Estate’s homes are now privately owned.

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

Most dramatically, the north-western corner of the Estate is threatened by the proposed HS2 development out of Euston.  A minimum of 168 homes face demolition to accommodate existing plans for new lines and station buildings; over 150 more are likely to be affected by the proximity of construction work.  In its opposition to HS2 at least, Camden can make common cause with those in the leafy shires similarly impacted. (8)

Silverdale: Gibberd, Zone A

There’ll be no elite outcry to save Eskdale, Ainsdale and Silverdale blocks in the Regent’s Park Estate from the planners and bulldozers as there was back in the 1940s to save Nash’s Regency terraces  but let’s imagine a world where housing for the ‘main bulk and backbone of our people’ was our first priority as it was briefly in 1945.

Sources

(1) Eric Cook, ‘Big Building Opportunities around Regent’s Park. Will they be seized?’ North London Press, November 24 1944

(2) ‘Development East of Regent’s Park.  Scheme to House 8000’, The Times, October 18 1945

(3)  Gorell Report quoted in CS Bainbridge and Frederick Gibberd, Plan for Saint Pancras (1947)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, ‘Regent’s Park Redevelopment Scheme, 1946. A report adopted by the Borough Council on 17 April 1946′

(5) ‘Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left (1971)and ‘Rebuilding In London: Efforts to Avoid Monotony’, The Times, November 28, 1955

(6) St Pancras Borough Council, The Story of the Regent’s Park Redevelopment Area (1955)

(7) London Borough of Camden, Press Releases, 8 September 1986, January 29 1990, 30 June 1994

(8) Camden Council, ‘Regents Park Estate HS2 proposals Regeneration profile’ (ND)

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras: ‘giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had’

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1920s, Camden, St Pancras

You’ll find Aldenham House and Wolcot House on a side road behind Euston station.  There’s nothing particularly striking about them at first glance – it’s the railways that dominate.  Back in the twenties, railways occupied about 16 per cent of the  built area of the Borough of St Pancras and almost one fifth of its male workforce worked in transport. 

Somers Town, 1936: Euston is centre left, the estate just above that. EPW046683 http://www.britainfromabove.org, © English Heritage

They would have been among the better-off working class but the district had pockets of severe poverty too. The 1921 census showed 11,000 people living more than three to a room in St Pancras.  In Somers Town, Little Clarendon Street (shaded black at centre-left in Booth’s map below) had been described by Charles Booth in his Survey of London in 1898 as:

a narrow thoroughfare of bad repute – the worst spot in the immediate neighbourhood and a good many prostitutes and amateurish thieves are living here. The local name for the street is ‘Little Hell’.

Little Clarendon Street was renamed Wolcot Street but its older designation, Little Hell, stuck.  In 1921, its 91 houses, now 120 years old, were described as ‘very dilapidated, neglected, insanitary, verminous and dangerous’ and scheduled for demolition by the council.

That council had been won by Labour in 1919 and in the immediate post-war years St Pancras was in the forefront of local authority building efforts.  Its largest scheme, the Brookfield Estate, was completed in 1922 and comprised some 205 flats, maisonettes and cottages.  But its rents – running from 19s 9d (99p) to 29s 3d (£1.46) – were said to be unaffordable to poorer local residents.

In 1922, reflecting national trends, St Pancras Labour lost 22 seats.  It would not regain power until 1945 and a new era of politics. The Municipal Reformers (the Conservative Party by any other name) took over.  Housing efforts slowed but the Aldenham and Wolcot House scheme was completed and it is arguable that the political complexion of the council lent an interesting cast to its completion.

Aldenham House from the corner of Eversholt Street

In total, the new development comprised four blocks – a fifth would be added later – providing 88 tenements: 24 two-room, 56 three-room and 8 four-room.  The blocks were placed, according to the scheme’s architect, AJ Thomas, ‘in such a manner as to admit the greatest amount of sunshine, with a free and open circulation of air and ample playing ground for children’.

Courtyard between Wolcot House and Aldenham House

They were constructed of London stock brick with red brick axed arches and quoins to windows and angles, blue Staffordshire plinths and artificial Portland stone bands, key stones and copings.  Boxed sash windows, described as ‘of the Queen Anne character’, were said to give the whole a ‘general effect of dignified domestic dwellings’.

Wolcot House, side view

Internally the kitchens were large.  They had to be as they accommodated ‘a larder, fitted dresser, gas stove, gas copper, bath and cover table, and a ten-inch deep sink with tile skirting’.  A central hall contained a separate WC and small coal bunker.  Living rooms contained a ‘convertible stove’ which could be used either as an open fire or a supplementary means of cooking and hot water supply.

Mr Thomas went on:

The scheme of decoration has been influenced by the desire to create cheerfulness and encourage cleanliness, all wood floors being stained creosote on the surface against vermin and decay.  The floors can be polished and easily kept clean, and the staining economises use of linoleum.

Stained creosote floors don’t sound particularly cheering but if they helped the housewives of the day keep their homes clean perhaps that was a sufficient reason to be cheerful.

Wolcot House, courtyard view

This is perhaps typical, though not advanced, municipal housing of the period. Some Labour activists inveighed against ‘barracks-like’ tenement blocks (see my earlier piece on the Wilson Grove Estate in Bermondsey) but in inner London –  where space was at a premium – they were generally seen as unavoidable.

A more interesting and unusual aspect of the scheme was the Council’s expressed desire to rehouse all those displaced by the area’s slum clearance. Alderman Collins, the chair of the Health Committee responsible for the development, stated:

in no instance in the Metropolitan area had the possibility of actual rehousing be carried out with such intensity of purpose; the actual persons unhoused had been provided for in every case, a result of which the Borough Council was most proud.

A few tenants, not accommodated on the estate itself, were provided houses on the London County Council schemes in Becontree, Downham and Burnt Oak.

In what might have been a not unjustified dig at his Labour opponents, he went on:

the Council believed that with perseverance and courage it would achieve something in giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had.  Borough Councils had built houses for the respectable, they attracted the nice people, and the people for whom the houses were intended never got there; but in this instance those who had lived in the old houses were now living in the new – a genuine transition.

We might pause here and note that characterisation.  It was the case that early council housing did overwhelmingly cater for the ‘nice people’ – the respectable working-class with, for the most part, steady if unspectacular incomes.  A council tenancy was seen as a sign of upward mobility, it might even promote a certain snobbery.  If we deprecate the latter, we might nonetheless embrace the idea of social housing as aspirational, as something more than a safety-net to catch a so-called ‘sink’ population.

Old and new signage

The commitment to rehouse poorer tenants, nevertheless, provided a challenge to the Council:

Wolcot Street tenants are not the class of tenant usually chosen for the Council’s flats, and hence the need for special consideration in surmounting the difficulties.  It must not be supposed that the tenants are bad; they are very hard-working people, struggling to make ends meet and accustomed to paying low rentals.

In fact, the rents – ranging from 13s 8d (69p) for two-roomed to 18s 8d (94p) for three-roomed tenements – were not that low and it was assumed rent collection would present difficulties.  The Council resorted to special measures – they appointed two ‘lady surveyors’, Mrs Irene Barclay and Miss Evelyn Perry.

Mrs Barclay, courtesy of the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, had been the first women in Britain to qualify as a chartered surveyor and would be a significant figure in social housing through her pioneering surveys and active involvement in local housing associations.

We must assume the choice of these two women represented a belief in a ‘woman’s touch’. The Council professed itself:

fully conscious that the experiment would necessitate patience and help on their part.  There could be no magic, for they realised how slow progress is when changes of so radical a nature were made in the lives of people who seemed to be content for so many years with the misery of their surroundings.

In a world where strong women were making their name in ‘caring’ roles in the domestic sphere – frequently as councillors with a special interest in infant welfare and the health of the mother, for example – we should overlook the peculiar mix of paternalism and sexism here.

Original signage on Wolcot House

The scheme was officially opened by Princess Mary, the daughter of the reigning monarch George V, on 25 July 1928. The local press reported how the new tenants ‘crowded the windows and balconies, and, by the display of flags and cheering, showed their loyalty and added to the general interest and enthusiasm’.

We should assume there was a genuine pride and patriotism on display here.  The tenants organised a whip-round to purchase their own bouquet for their distinguished visitor and a ballot was held to determine who would have the honour of presenting it – Mr and Mrs Crapper of no. 14 and Mr and Mrs Tippett of no. 18 were the lucky ones.

Naturally, the local great and the good were in attendance too.  The Metropolitan Police Band provided musical entertainment.  And Alderman Collins got to make the speech from which I have quoted extensively above.

 Sources

The detail and quotations above are taken from the programme published by St Pancras Borough Council to mark the ‘Official Opening of Aldenham House and Wolcot House, Somers Town, by HRH the Princess Mary, 25 July 1928’.

My thanks to Camden Local History Library for their help in locating this and other sources.

The Ossulston Estate, St Pancras: the English Karl Marx-Hof?

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1920s, 1930s, Camden, LCC, Multi-storey, St Pancras

If you’re anywhere near the British Library, do take some time to step just to the west where you’ll see one of the most remarkable council estates of the interwar period.

The English disdain for multi-storey living is well-documented and frequently lamented, not least by those for whom ‘modern’ ideas of planning and functionalism have held sway. So the Ossulston Estate constructed between 1927 and 1931 generated much excitement and is seen, even in retrospect, as a rare – though modest – British exemplar of the daring architectural ideas pioneered in the Karl Marx-Hof of Red Vienna. The truth is a little more complex but the concept and execution remain impressive.

Not the Ossulston Estate: the Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna (built 1927-1930) (c) Wikimedia Commons

In the massive wave of building that took place after World War One when ‘homes for heroes’ were demanded and social housing was seen as the only viable means of providing sufficient, most larger-scale development took place along ‘garden suburb’ lines. The view – widely shared and strongly held within the labour movement itself – was that workers’ families needed houses and gardens.

An estimable principle and one that was powerfully resurrected after the perceived failure of much of the high-rise housing of the 1960s. But a problematic one also. Such low density housing was not cost-effective and was generally expensive to rent. It worked well for the better-off working class in stable employment but did little to tackle the mass of slum housing which remained and less to address the needs – and means – of its inhabitants. The London County Council, under the leadership of the Municipal Reform (Conservative) Party from 1907 to 1934, in particular, was criticised by many for its dilatory approach to this vital issue.

This was one context for the Ossulston Estate. Another was the peculiarities of its site – 8.8 acres but awkwardly set out in a long ribbon of land, 450 yards long by 84 wide. The LCC’s chief architect, George Topham Forrest, concluded ‘the only way, in the circumstances, the full utilisation of the land can be obtained is by building higher than the normal five storeys.’

A contemporary view of the Estate which illustrates the difficult site. (The British Library can be seen at the top of the photo.)

But such higher rise accommodation also entailed additional expenditures (on lifts, for example – only one LCC development had needed a lift to date: a block in the Tabard Street Estate). Such expenditures might be offset by higher rentals but these, of necessity, could come only from privately rented shops, offices or flats.

Topham Forrest proposed just such a mixed-use, public-private development. It was a highly unusual concept at the time but one that also appealed to the politics of the Municipal Reformers.

And that, in typically pragmatic and idiosyncratic fashion was the genesis of what might have been ‘the first comprehensive redevelopment sponsored by a local authority, as well as the first high-rise council flats’ in Britain (1). The Ossulston Estate owed less to vision than practicality and, in the event, even the modest vision of its conception was compromised. But this isn’t a sneer; if anything it’s a celebration of pragmatism at a time when ideology was about to wreak the most terrible havoc in mainland Europe.

Topham Forrest’s original 1925 design envisaged ground floor shops, first floor offices, then two floors with ‘flats of a character superior to the ordinary working-class dwellings’ with five floors of working-class accommodation above. There were no fancy ideas of social mixing here. Topham Forrest continued:

It is an essential of this idea that the superior flats should be segregated from the shops and working-class flats. Each class of property should have its own entrance and the entrances should be as remote from one another as possible.

Central heating was also to be provided. (Another practical solution to a real-world problem – the difficulties of hauling up and storing coal and disposing of ash.)

Topham Forrest altered these plans in his 1927 scheme which did reflect his study of the Viennese examples. His crucial modification was to create a broken roofline by constructing blocks of three to six storeys with two nine-storey towers interposed – ‘the best way of giving the new accommodation the greatest possible supply of light and air’. A rooftop play area calculated on some formula to provide space for 1880 children was also part of the overall plan which would accommodate some 3054 persons in 492 flats at a cost of £400,000.

Neville Chamberlain who, had history been kinder, might be remembered as a reforming Minister of Health and Housing, laid the foundation stone of the first block (named then and now Chamberlain House) on 1 February 1928.

Cecil Levita, the chairman of the LCC’s Housing Committee who also gave his name to one of the blocks, spoke of ‘a noteworthy scheme which would mark a new departure in the construction of buildings’.

In the event, the law (government subsidies were not available to mixed-use schemes) and economics (private rental incomes were judged insufficient to cross-subsidise working-class accommodation) combined to torpedo the larger ideas. Private accommodation was omitted and six-story blocks of exclusively working-class flats constructed.

Levita House

Entrance to Chamberlain House originally intended as the entry to the premium flats

The Somers Town Pub: the Estate was quite unusual for the time in incorporating public houses

Walker House begun in 1929-30

Nevertheless, the treatment – steel-frame construction, unadorned rough-cast walls, reinforced concrete balconies and an overall aesthetic – remained modernist and exciting to an emergent generation of planners impatient with the conservatism of British design and aspiration (2).

Architecturally it is pleasing. The blocks stand in the form of a huge military cross, with big squares happy in the possession of trees. Windows look out on to the central courtyards and the outer sides are lined with balconies of reinforced concrete, approximating in design to the models in Vienna which have been so greatly admired.

It was a far cry from the ‘Municipal Neo-Georgian’ then typical of most local government architecture.

The courtyard to Walker House, completed in more traditional brick in 1937

The Estate is now Grade II listed but it’s enjoyed a chequered history. Long years of neglect led to tenants’ protests against ‘inhuman living conditions’ in 1982. Camden Borough Council – which inherited the complex from the GLC in the 1980s – acknowledged serious disrepair in 2004 and a £6m scheme followed which created 44 new homes ‘from 66 cramped damp and outmoded flats in the original building’.

The Camden press release, headlined ‘Making a “slum” into family homes again’, offers a stark reminder of changing fashions, heightening expectations and the depredations of time but it’s a mark too of the continuing struggle to provide affordable, good quality homes to the less well-off.

Sources:

(1) Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’

(2) The quote is from Hugh Quigley and Ismay Goldie, Housing and Slum Clearance in London (1934).

The major source for this piece is Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’ from the London Journal, vol 7, no 1 1981. Pepper also provides a commentary to the Twentieth Century Society page on the Estate.  Some photographs have been taken with permission from Andrew Amesbury’s thoughtful and interesting blog entry on the Estate. Listed building information on Chamberlain House and Levita House is available online.