St Mary’s Tower Flats, Woolwich: ‘a stupendous piece of pioneering work’

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1950s, Multi-storey, Woolwich

Demolition of Trowbridge Estate, Hackney, 1985

The story of council housing in the postwar period is, most notoriously, the story of high-rise which had once seemed to offer a modern and comprehensive solution to the problem of housing the masses.  Well, that didn’t go so well – though the reality is more mixed than popular perceptions allow.  This post looks at one council’s move to high-rise – the ideals and pressures behind it and how it turned out.

Between the wars, Woolwich Borough Council took pride both in a building programme unequalled among London boroughs and in its commitment to direct labour.  The Council had built 4000 homes, notably at the Page Estate in Eltham, using its own workforce.  These were, in the language of the day, ‘cottage homes’ – houses with front and back gardens – built in extensive suburbs.

A large-scale drive to redevelopment – slum clearance – began in the 1930s, with Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act and the 1934 Housing Act.  After the Second World War and, particularly in heavily-bombed Woolwich, this imperative was strengthened – in Woolwich, most powerfully in St Mary’s, a bomb-scarred area of ‘small, undesirable dwellings, narrow, badly-arranged streets and few, if any, amenities.’ (1)

Kingsman Street, St Mary’s, 1959

The site had already been earmarked for redevelopment in 1935. By 1939, 11 acres had been identified for clearance.  It was planned to demolish 317 houses and build 15 four-storey and eight two-storey blocks for a population of 2309. Woolwich resisted tenement blocks.  The London County Council – the planning authority – responded that it had already made concessions to Woolwich’s open development preferences by proposing four- rather than its usual five-storey blocks.(2)

The War intervened and the plan stalled.  By 1945, Woolwich had 9739 families on its council house waiting list but it was able, at first, to maintain its ideals.  The Coldharbour Estate in Eltham, begun in 1947, was a cottage suburb comprising 1800 homes.  But the writing was on the wall. It was already clear to Woolwich’s civic leaders that it was ‘henceforth necessary to knock down before putting up’.

William Barefoot Drive, Coldharbour Estate, in the 1950s

Here, typically, Woolwich was ambitious. As attention focused once more on St Mary’s, Town Clerk David Jenkins sent a plan devised by Wallace Gimson, the Borough Engineer, to the LCC.  It identified a 75 acre site as the ‘St Mary’s Neighbourhood Reconstruction Area’ – such areas, though not this particular one, had been designated in the 1943 County of London Plan – and proposed a twenty-year programme which would house 5000.

The LCC was wary of delegating the planning powers it enjoyed under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.  But Woolwich had one thing, apart from chutzpah, in its favour: its Direct Labour Organisation, 1000-strong, could build 400 homes a year – this at a time when the Lansbury Estate development in Poplar was hamstrung by the problem of multiple private contractors.

The LCC made Woolwich take full financial responsibility and refused assistance with rehousing but conceded Woolwich’s power to build houses rather than blocks.  St Mary’s became the eighth and last Comprehensive Development Area to be listed in the County of London Development Plan and the only one delegated to a borough.

Woolwich began building work on the project – which it described as a stupendous piece of pioneering work’ – in July 1952 but it was slow-going. Construction took place on an ad hoc basis as sites became available – firstly with a three storey block of 18 flats on St Mary Street.

St Mary Street

At this point, Woolwich remained committed to a maximum build of three storeys but even this meant that most of the development would be flats and it left a problem of numbers – not all the displaced residents could be rehoused.  The LCC proposed five 11-storey blocks be included in the plans on Frances Street.

I’ll spare you the back and forth but by 1955 Woolwich had yielded to the necessity of the LCC proposal. The final twist came with the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act which increased central government subsidies the higher the building.  The 11-storey blocks were upped to 14 and a block on Kingsman Street was raised to nine storeys.  It was further agreed to replace the houses planned for the south side of Kingsman Street with a four-storey block.

Kingsman Street block

The new point blocks were technically a bridge too far even for Woolwich’s highly capable in-house team.  The Council appointed Norman & Dawbarn, who had worked on the Lansbury Estate and Harlow New Town, as architects.  Wates were appointed as the building contractors.

St Mary’s Towers under construction, using Wates’ tower crane, innovative at the time

Photographed in 1962

All this might be taken as a defeat for the Council and, in some ways – through force of circumstance – it was.  But the Survey of London hails the ‘architectural panache’ of the new buildings – the only ones, it says, to be written up in the architectural press.  And they do look striking.

The 138 feet blocks were designed on a butterfly-plan to maximise light and constructed of reinforced-concrete frames with pinkish flint-lime brick infill panels and patterned cast-concrete panels under the windows. Internally, as estate agents would say, they benefitted from under-floor heating – though this proved problematic – and electric panel fires in living rooms.  Each block had two lifts and communal laundries in basements.  In the first instance, four 14-storey blocks were built – a fifth was added in 1965 – containing 159 two-bed and 60 one-bed flats.

Born out of necessity – the drive to rehouse and the pressing lack of space to do so – they had come to represent modernity and innovative design.  A show flat was furnished by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society – ‘furnished to dream specifications…graceful contemporary furniture, sumptuous carpets, dazzling curtains. And every single item available from any RACS store’.(3)

On 11 May 1962 the flats were formally opened by Princess Margaret – she opened the notorious Woolwich Autostacker on the same day but that’s another story – and the Council celebrated its achievement: (4)

The area is now being transformed by the Woolwich Council into a pleasant, well laid out neighbourhood with open spaces, shopping centres and other amenities.  The new buildings have been appreciated greatly by the former residents of the area and these new tower flats, with a commanding view over the River Thames, are a further stage in the scheme.

On the whole, that seems justified.  At that point, some 600 properties had been demolished and 718 families rehoused.  In 1970, when the St Mary’s scheme was completed – on the schedule outlined twenty years earlier – 1434 new homes had been built.

The Frances Street blocks were refurbished for Greenwich Council – Woolwich disappeared in the local government reorganisation of 1965 – and they, and the area, look pretty good.

Sources

(1) Woolwich Borough Council, Programme of the Visit of HRH Princess Margaret on the occasion of the completion of the St Mary’s Tower Flats and Council’s Multi-storey Garage, 11 May 1961

(2) Much of the detail of this piece is taken from the draft chapter, available online, of the London Survey on Woolwich St Mary’s.

(3) Kentish Independent, 12 May 1961

(4) Woolwich Borough Council, Programme of the Visit of HRH Princess Margaret on the occasion of the completion of the St Mary’s Tower Flats

British Pathé has newsreel of the official opening ceremony.

Thanks again to the Greenwich Heritage Centre and its helpful staff.  Original images above are used with permission from their collection.

The Page Estate, Eltham: ‘Results for the People not the Profiteers’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Eltham, Woolwich

I wrote about Woolwich a couple of weeks ago – its interwar health services were among the most comprehensive in the country.  But its housing programme was, if anything, more ambitious, particularly for a borough council in London where generally the County Council took the lead.

The Estate from the south-west, 1931. EPW035575 from Britain from Above, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/ © English Heritage

The Page Estate in Eltham was formally inaugurated in February 1920 by then Minister of Health, Christopher Addison.  Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act epitomised the drive of immediate post-war plans to build improved housing for working people on a massive scale.

He resigned in 1921 when the programme was axed but in 1920 he could praise Woolwich’s ambitions – ‘the largest housing scheme undertaken by any Metropolitan Borough’ – and urge that the ‘work be got on quickly’.(1)  To Woolwich’s Labour councillors, the need for pressing action was obvious.  A 1918 survey had concluded that over 2000 new homes were needed in the borough.  The Eltham scheme was designed to provide 2700.

Woolwich had identified a site one year earlier – 344 acres of land bisected by the Southern railway, served by two stations and by LCC tramways to the east and south.  Of these, 85 acres, unsuitable for building, would be set aside for open space and recreation.

Woolwich had a model of high quality working-class housing immediately adjacent in the Progress Estate. Whilst the Council’s own designs could not match this – finances were always tight for building on such scale and constant battles were fought with the Ministry of Health regarding government subsidies – the Page Estate represented an earnest attempt to implement the influential garden suburb ideals of the day.

Lynsted Gardens, 1929

Lynsted Gardens today

The Estate’s layout included large open greens and smaller greens as children’s playgrounds.  Most of the houses were semi-detached, each with front and back gardens, and all were provided with a bathroom and scullery.  Housing density was around 12 per acre which came close to garden city ideals.

The first 448 houses were built by private contractors but the Council believed it could build more cheaply and to better quality itself.  It was also quite certain that building workers’ conditions and trade union rights were better safeguarded by a Labour council. ‘Results for the People not the Profiteers’ was its slogan.

In 1923, Borough Engineer, John Sutcliffe, was appointed architect to the next stage of the programme – 60 houses to be built by direct labour. The trial was so successful that the 1618 houses which completed the Estate were all constructed by the Council.

Of these, 862 were built under Laing’s Easiform system – a form of concrete construction intended to be quicker and cheaper than traditional brick building.  Whilst some of the system-building of the day has not survived the test of time, these seem to have stood up pretty well.(2)

The smallest houses on the Estate and the most numerous – 1446 with a living room and three bedrooms – were to be let at 14/4 (71.5p).  Larger houses with a parlour and three bedrooms and a parlour and four bedrooms were let at 16/8 (83.5p) and 19/0 (95p) respectively.

In November 1929, the then Labour Minister of Health, Arthur Greenwood, formally opened the 2186^th house on 49 Kidbrooke Lane. It was a suitably festive occasion – the house itself bore ‘a gay and festive appearance’, flags streamed across the roadway.  A British Legion band provided musical accompaniment.(3)

Greenwood flattered his hosts by pointing out that the Council had built one-fifth of the total built by London’s 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils – though he added that Woolwich had building land which others lacked.  He knew also, as did local councillors, that this massive effort was not enough – 3900 applicants remained on the waiting list. Still, for the moment, the Council could take some pride in what it had achieved.

Wendover Road, 1929

Wendover Road today

This was an all-electric estate – the electricity generated and supplied by none other than Woolwich Borough Council, of course.  The Council was on hand to hire out electric cookers, irons and radiators at genuinely reasonable rates.  This was a time, remember, when Woolwich believed its Electrical Supply Department was ‘Another great health service!’ in keeping homes ‘free from dirt, dust and fumes’.

At the same time, more direct healthcare was planned by the provision of a Council health centre on the Estate, opened in February 1931.

And, in a period when progressive local councils felt that they had the duty and to some extent the power to promote the overall wellbeing of their people, the unemployed were not forgotten either.  £17,000 was secured from the Unemployment Grants Committee to employ local men without work in levelling and draining Harrow Meadow, the main open space.

Keynsham Gardens, 1929

Keynsham Gardens today

The total cost of the Estate was £1,144m, a sum including the four new LCC schools constructed.  The only thing lacking in the Estate’s early days were shops but a terrace of shops was operating by 1929.  These included a bakers, a fishmongers and a chemist but the flagship, naturally, was a branch of the locally powerful Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.(4)

When our lives are dominated by the private sector and the myth of its virtue, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for this era when working people were creating through collective means and collective power an alternative and improved world which placed their needs and rights uppermost.

And, in fact, the Council didn’t rest on its laurels.  Arthur Greenwood was back again in February 1931 and, once it was ascertained he was a union member, he was allowed to cut the first sod of the new Middle Park Estate.(5)

It comprised 1740 dwellings on its completion in 1936 at which point the Council started work on the adjacent Horn Park Estate.  This would not be finished until the 1950s.  Both were built on land purchased from the Crown Estate belonging to the former Eltham Palace.

In total, at the point at which its efforts were interrupted by war, the Council had built 4473 houses and flats – 2995 by direct labour and 1478 by contract. The figures speak for themselves.

Westhorne Avenue

Today the Estate still looks in pretty good nick – in some respects, but for the added greenery of mature vegetation, not so different from it did in the interwar period.  About 60 per cent of it is still rented from the Council.

The health centre was destroyed with some loss of life in March 1941 and not replaced.  In the 1950s, Westhorne Avenue was designated part of the new South Circular arterial road in line with Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan but – fortunately maybe –  a major upgrade was never completed.  The A2 Rochester Way Relief Road, opened in 1988, which drives through Eltham is less kind.

On 22 April 1993 Stephen Lawrence was murdered in Dickson Road on the eastern edge of the Page Estate.  I’ve thought long and hard about how to incorporate this senseless, brutal act into my analysis and have, in a way, decided not to.

SE9 – a racist identifier for some – doesn’t need any more people parachuting in and pronouncing on its racism or otherwise.

This blog celebrates the practical idealists of Woolwich’s Labour council who were building a new and better world for working people.  The struggle continues.

Sources:

(1) ‘New Houses for Eltham’, Eltham Times, February 6, 1920

(2) Collier Stevens Chartered Surveyors, ‘Laing Easi-Form Housing‘

(3) ‘Opened by the Rt Hon Arthur Greenwood’, Eltham Times, December 6 1929

(4) John Kennett, ‘Municipal Housing‘, SEnine, June 2010

(5) ‘The New Estate, Houses, Schools and Trams’, Eltham Times, 20 February 1931

My thanks to John Kennett and the Eltham Society for his help in preparing this article.

Thanks again to the Greenwich Heritage Centre and its helpful staff.  Original images above are used with permission from their collection.

Much has been written on Eltham and Stephen Lawrence’s murder.  Perhaps the most thoughtful pieces are by Darryl on his 853 blog, by Collective Invective, by Bob from Blockley, by London Masala and Chips and by Sunder Katwala.

Woolwich’s Interwar Health Centres: ‘monuments to man’s achievement and to his folly’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Woolwich

This isn’t a party political blog but if you’re looking at Woolwich an understanding of the history and role of the local Labour Party is essential.

November 1919 Election flyer

The town – as many still preferred to call it – was home to a skilled and highly-organised working class.  Its Labour Party was the first in the country to enrol individual members and it was the largest local party in the country – averaging between 4000-5000 members – for most of the interwar period.

This was a relatively affluent working class and one with generally moderate politics.  You won’t come across the soaring socialist rhetoric that was a feature of Bermondsey politics, say.  What you will find is a solid commitment to fair wages and proper recognition of trade union rights and a practical concern for those essentials of decent living – health and housing.  We’ll look at the former today.

Woolwich Town Hall, opened by Will Crooks MP in 1906

Labour had first won control of the Borough Council in 1903, winning 25 of the 36 seats. One of its first actions was to establish a milk depot to supply sterilised milk at affordable prices to nursing mothers unable to breast-feed. By 1908, the depot was serving 328 infants – 12 per cent of the Borough’s total.   But Labour had lost control in 1906 and the cost of the scheme – and its taint of ‘municipal trading’ – led to its closure by local Conservatives.(1)

After this false start, the interwar period would see Labour secure its hold on local power – excepting a three-year blip from 1931 – and implement a comprehensive health programme for the Borough.

The environment would be improved by providing good quality housing and open space.  Ill-health would be curtailed by education from health visitors, classes and exhibitions. Sickness would be treated by health professionals working as a team.  And all would occur within a democratic framework mobilising individual self-help and supplying collective means.(2)

They didn’t bother much with jargon then but if we were to apply our own this was an impressively holistic approach and, indeed, the very model of joined-up government.

There’s much to say but we’ll focus on just a few elements here.

The Council’s first health visitor – primarily concerned with expectant and nursing mothers and their children – had been appointed in 1906.  By 1935, 97 per cent of infants under one year were visited by a much expanded team.(3)

From 1925, the Council ran a Health Exhibition in the Town Hall in conjunction with an annual Health Week.  The first was attended by 25,551 people; in the two succeeding years, some 10,000 attended the week’s lectures and talks.(4)  I’ll try not to overwhelm you with figures but they are a beguiling indicator of solid achievement and were, naturally, much touted by the Woolwich powers that be.

Accompanying brochures and later handbooks advertised the full range of Council services.  In 1937, the Library notice promoted ‘Healthy Minds – A mind biased and cluttered with half-truths is as useless as an unhealthy body’.

The advert for the Council’s in-house electricity supply department proclaimed: ‘Another great health service! A clean home, free from dirt, dust and fumes is a great asset to good health’.

I told you it was an holistic approach.

In bricks and mortar terms, the flagships of the Council’s agenda were its health centres.  In 1915, one infant welfare centre was operating; by 1935 there were eight.  These were initially regular clinics convening in ad hoc premises but the Council increasingly moved to build comprehensively-equipped and dedicated buildings.

The Eltham Health Centre on Westhorne Avenue, sited in the midst of the Council’s massive Eltham housing estate, was the first of these.  Opened by Arthur Greenwood, the Labour Minister of Health, in February 1931, this was the first infant welfare centre to also incorporate the London County Council’s schools medical service on its premises – allowing children to be monitored and treated from birth through to 14.

The Centre housed GPs’ and dental clinics, weighing rooms, a dispensary and a lecture room seating 120. To Greenwood, it was all a ‘wonderful temple’:(5)

a very beautiful building and it appealed to him because it was a source of health work. To him politics was concerned with the day-to-day life of men, women and children.

Miss Crout, chair of the Health Committee, urged local mothers to use it.  (Mabel Crout had first been elected to the council in 1919. She would serve over fifty years – as councillor and alderman – in  total.)

Typically for Woolwich, the Centre was a triumph of direct labour – designed, by Borough Engineer, J Sutton in collaboration with Medical Officer of Health, Dr Macmillan, and built by council employees at a cost of £5500.

The maternity and infant welfare centre in Plumstead was enlarged and expanded in the following year and Woolwich’s second purpose-built centre was opened in Market Street in January 1939.

Market Street Health Centre architect’s drawing

In the Council’s circumspect words, this was: (6)

A solid building in keeping with its predecessors, yet thoroughly modern and up-to-date in its planning…one which is eminently suitable for the ever-increasing health services of a metropolitan borough.

The Health Centre today

Woolwich wasn’t flashy.   Architecturally, there’s no comparison with the modernist Finsbury Health Centre of the same period.  The Centre was an in-house enterprise, designed once more by the Borough Engineer and built, at a cost of £18,066, by direct labour.

With the exception of the six consultants, its staff were council employees too.  It’s a lengthy list but worth giving as a flavour of the range of the Centre’s provision: five part-time medical officers, four assistant medical officers, an anaesthetist, six part-time vaccination officers, three part-time dental officers, a  part-time public analyst, 17 sanitary inspectors, 12 health visitors, three TB visitors, 16 clerks and a dispenser.

Main entrance

The building itself incorporated maternity and infant welfare services alongside the LCC’s schools medical service.  Additionally it housed orthopaedic and electro-therapy rooms.  Whilst infant life and mothers’ welfare were the overwhelming focus of the municipal medical provision of the day, the latter – alongside a chiropody clinic – also catered for adult males.

Ground floor plan

The Centre contained one new feature: air raid shelters – two 3ft 6in wide trenches constructed of reinforced concrete entered, in sad juxtaposition, from the pram sheds.  This and the date puts the comments of Lord Horder, the leading physician who opened the building, into context:(7)

If such a magnificent centre had been provided in any other country than this the propaganda minister and his satellites would see to it that the world knew what was being done…Woolwich now had the last word in health centres.  What they were doing in Woolwich would make the pomp of dictators look ridiculous.

Councillor Darby added that the centre was ‘a monument to man’s achievement and to his folly’:

While they marvelled at man’s ingenuity, they should ponder on the grim necessity of the concrete trenches which formed the air raid shelters. He expressed the hope they would not be needed…

But they were.  Woolwich – a military and armaments centre – suffered heavily in the war.  In fact, the Market Street Health Centre survived; that in Eltham was destroyed by bombing in 1941 and not rebuilt.

But in the meantime the centres and Woolwich’s wider health efforts had saved lives.  By the 1930s, infant mortality rates had halved – from 106 per 1000 in 1918 to 42 per 1000 in 1930.  Neo-natal deaths (within four weeks of birth) fell from 109 per 1000 to 44 in the same period.  Such rates were falling generally in the interwar period but detailed analysis supports the common-sense view that Woolwich’s generous provision made a difference.(8)

The Labour administration could justly conclude:(9)

the result of all this work, organised scientifically to proceed with regularity through the year, is that Woolwich can now claim, despite its great industrial areas, to be one of the healthiest boroughs in the kingdom.

Woolwich – as you would expect given its defence connections – was a patriotic borough but it is fitting that it chose to commemorate the death of the monarch in 1936 by issuing a pamphlet on The Care of the Mother and Child during the Reign of King George V.  

For the council, the preservation and betterment of life, and particularly that of its most vulnerable citizens, was its central concern.

Sources:

(1) Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London (1996)

(2) As Esyllt Jones argues in ‘Nothing Too Good for the People’: Local Labour and London’s Interwar Health Centre Movement, Social History of Medicine, vol 25, no.1, February 2012

(3) Data from Marks, Metropolitan Maternity

(4) Woolwich Labour Party, Twelve Years of Labour Administration, 1919-1931 (1931)

(5) Eltham Times, 20 February 1931

(6) Programme marking the opening of the Central Health Centre, Market Street, 14 January 1939 by Rt Hon Lord Horder

(7) Quoted in the Kentish Independent, 15 January 1939

(8) As concluded by Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity, p124

(9) Woolwich Labour Party, Twelve Years of Labour Administration, 1919-1931 (1931)

Original images above are from the wonderful local history collection of the Greenwich Heritage Centre and are used with their permission.  A big thank you to the helpful staff of the Centre.