Semi-Detached London

Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900-39

Alan A Jackson, Richard J R Kirkby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351175128
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1973, Semi-Detached London looks at the great suburban expansion of London between the two world wars. The book covers all aspects of urban history, presenting an authoritative and balanced account of the Great Suburban Age, and the final uninhibited forty years before the Green Belt and Development Plan. The roles of the speculative builder, the estate developer and the local authorities receive careful attention and the author's special knowledge of London's transport systems ensures that the leading part they played is fully developed. Students of social, urban and transport history will find this book a valuable source of reference.

Chapter I

THE FERTILE GROUND

Railway Suburbs

At the close of Victoria’s reign the continuously built-up area of London extended only insignificantly beyond a circle drawn eight miles from Charing Cross and within that there was still much open land. Outside, for a further five to fifteen miles, the settlement pattern often showed distinct signs of metropolitan influence.

Although it owed something to early road services, this outer ring was largely a product of the steam railways which in the last forty years of the century had made it possible for those who could afford the time and cost of daily travel to work in town and live in pleasant rural surroundings. Yet the pattern of this dispersal was not always related in a straightforward way to the provision of railway facilities, for there were other factors at work, notably the attitudes of landowners and local authorities towards building development. Thus the opening of railways through areas seemingly ripe for suburban growth could sometimes bring disappointment to Victorian promoters, as along the South Eastern Railway’s Hayes branch and the Bexleyheath Railway.

On the map, middle-class suburbs such as Surbiton, Ealing, and Sidcup seemed to snuggle closely against their lifelines. Most of the houses would be within easy walking distance of the station, but the larger villas of the ‘carriage folk’ were a little farther away, perhaps on higher ground. Near the station would be cottages of the serving classes and a row or two of shops with accommodation above for their owners. Modest in population and entirely bourgeois in general character, these suburbs were laid out in fairly spacious fashion, with tree-lined roads and gardens of generous size. Privacy and seclusion were at a premium; the fine villas of the First Class season-ticket holders were hidden in elaborate nests of evergreen trees and shrubs, approached by sinuous gravel drives which not only dried quickly after rain, but provided convenient warning of visitors. Many of these places were to be found south of the Thames where there were a larger number of existing communities to act as foci for suburban development, most of them well served by the dense network of the four southern railway companies, for whom short distance passenger traffic constituted an important item of revenue.

Woods and fields were never very far away, and urbs mixed most harmoniously with rus. It was pleasant indeed to dwell in such places as Surbiton and Chislehurst, where the air was sweet and filled with birdsong, where the daytime quiet of tree-shaded roads was disturbed only by the occasional tradesman’s cart or modest carriage bearing a cosseted matron to ‘calls’.

A little lower down the social scale was the still relatively small group of middle managers, supervisors and better-paid clerks. These sometimes settled in the less expensive parts of the middle-class suburbs, but as they grew in number the closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the formation of new districts in which they predominated. Such people were well catered for by the Great Northern Railway, whose low-fare services from Kings Cross and Moorgate, complemented by the North London Railway’s trains out of Broad Street, offered a means of escape from their earlier ‘walking’ settlements in Hackney, Islington and Holloway. Although smaller, and closer together, their houses, in such places as Bowes Park, Palmers Green, Wood Green, Hornsey, Crouch End and New Southgate, offered more attractive and more sanitary alternatives to the older, inner area property, together with the opportunity, always eagerly grasped by this group, of improving social status.

Finally there was another, very different type of railway suburb, less attractive, less salubrious, quite lacking in any suggestion of rus in urbe. Tottenham, Edmonton, Walthamstow, Leyton and the southern parts of Wood Green, where artisans and clerks lived almost alongside the middle strata of the urban working class, had developed rapidly after 1870. Here most of the houses were in long terraces, standardised and depressingly dull to the eye, with back gardens distinctly minimal and front gardens merely nominal. Built to conform to the basic standards of the 1875 Public Health Act, they were crammed in tight at up to forty an acre. Trees were not much in evidence within the grid-iron street pattern, where houses stood ‘rank behind rank like soldiers at a military review’. An oppressive greyness pervaded the arid, unrelieved vistas of stock bricks and slates.

I London 1901: extent of the built-up area

This very distinct zoning of the upper and middle working class in the north-east (and to a smaller extent in the south-east) arose almost entirely from railway influences. In 1864, as an alternative to rehousing those displaced by the construction of its new City terminus and approach tracks, the Great Eastern Railway had accepted an obligation to run a train each morning and back again in the evening between Liverpool Street and Walthamstow and Edmonton at a fare of only 2d return. Although these trains barely paid their way, the GER in time ran far more than the Act required, and over greater distances, supplementing them with a large number of half-fare trains. By the end of the century there were fifteen 2d return trains, including seven from Enfield (:21

miles daily travel for 2d). At that time, some six million 2d return and four million half-fare passengers were being carried by the GER into Liverpool Street each year, all of them on trains arriving before 8 a.m.

It is clear from the Company’s evidence to various parliamentary and official committees and royal commissions that its generosity in this matter arose from a concern to concentrate the cheaper traffic in one part of their suburban territory, thus discouraging a wider spread which would have damaged other districts capable of yielding the much more lucrative normal traffic. Thus on the Loughton line, workmen’s tickets were not available outwards beyond Leytonstone and a higher number of First Class seats was provided on the trains at the expense of Third Class accommodation. On the main line, workmen’s tickets were not issued at stations further out than Chadwell Heath.

Statutory obligations similar to that imposed on the GER were accepted by other companies from 1860 onwards, and from soon after its formation in 1889, the London County Council was particularly vigilant in ensuring that workmen’s train provisions were included in legislation for new railways in its area. Some railway companies even provided workmen’s fares voluntarily. A year after the 1882 Select Committee on Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings, a Cheap Trains Act placed a general obligation on all companies in return for remission of Passenger Duty. A new era seemed about to dawn, but the 1883 Act proved ineffective because the Board of Trade took action only when complaints were received, and a legal ruling was obtained that the companies could not be forced to run cheap trains against their financial interest.

No other company was as liberal as the GER in the matter of cheap trains, and apart from the GNR and the Metropolitan District, no others ran half-fare trains. It was only in GER territory that there developed to any pronounced extent distinctive suburbs inhabited almost entirely by the poorer white collars and the better-off manual workers.¹

Those who travelled for 2d or 4d a day in an atmosphere of cheap shag and unwashed bodies were not the denizens of Shoreditch displaced by railway construction, but skilled workmen, shop and warehouse workers, and minor clerks who had made a voluntary move further out. In the central districts, where administrative and commercial expansion was forcing out residential accommodation, the overcrowding was becoming increasingly severe as the century drew to a close, with rents and land values responding accordingly. In 1892 it was estimated that if the law regarding overcrowding were to be rigidly enforced, some half a million people living in inner London would be displaced.² The limited facilities for cheap transport to the very few areas with low-rent housing were overtaxed, and it was clear that the railway companies had no enthusiasm for extending them any further. This was at a time when, to serve the burgeoning administrative and commercial activities of London, the ranks of the white-collar and distributive workers were steadily growing, intensifying the demand for modest homes within reasonable travelling distance of the centre. A precondition of the more extensive and dispersed suburban growth that in 1900 seemed so desirable was a widespread system of cheap and efficient local transport.

The agents for this expansion of settlement around London, the electric train and tramcar, and the motor omnibus, were standing in the wings.

A Surfeit of Transport

The development of London’s public transport, especially on the roads, in the first fifteen years of the century was impressive, and in view of its importance to suburban growth both immediately before 1914 and after World War I, it is useful to look at this in some detail.

Apart from a few mechanical oddities, London’s road transport was entirely horsedrawn at the opening of the century. The buses and trams that traversed the main roads in the built-up area had played at least as important a role in the outward growth of the city as the steam railways, but their influence faded beyond six miles from the centre. With their inherently low speeds and the necessity for changing or resting the horses, it took about an hour to get that far, and an hour each way was the more or less tolerable limit for the daily traveller.

Except in the West End, where they had been successfully repulsed by property interests, the horse-tramways were found on most of the main radial routes and also provided many important cross connections. Their ordinary fares were generally lower than those of the buses, which started later in the morning, making no effort to attract workmen’s traffic. Electric traction, which was greatly to extend the speed and range of street tramways, had been a practical proposition since the end of the 1880s, but new tramway construction by private companies had been effectively, if not deliberately discouraged by parliament. Whether promoters used the 1870 Tramways Act or private bill, they were obliged to obtain consents from frontagers and from the local and road authorities, and these tended to exact tribute by insisting that all sorts of often quite irrelevant improvements be carried out at the tramway company’s expense. Existing companies, operating under the 1870 Act, and therefore facing the possibility of early compulsory purchase at scrap values by the local authorities, were naturally reluctant to make the heavy investment involved in electrification and extension, the more so as many of the local authorities would insist on the costly conduit system of current collection. Those local authorities which possessed powers of compulsory purchase awaited the time when they could use them; whilst the weaker authorities in the tramless outer areas were usually reluctant, for financial and social reasons, to promote their own tramway schemes. In his evidence to the Royal Commission on London Traffic, Stephen Sellon suggested that the compulsory purchase provisions of the 1870 Act had delayed the electrification of London’s tramways by at least ten years and inhibited extensions to newly developed suburban areas.¹The light railway procedure, which avoided some of the difficulties mentioned, but introduced others, was not available until after 1896.

London’s first electric tramways were promoted in the face of many difficulties by the London United Tramways Company, led by their forceful managing director and engineer, James Clifton Robinson.¹ Legislative powers were obtained in 1898, and within the following decade an extensive system was laid out in the west and south-west suburbs. It might have been even larger, reaching well into Surrey and the Thames Valley, but after the first few lines had been opened, the demands for wayleaves and road and bridge improvements in return for consents became both heavier and more outrageous, forcing the abandonment of several important proposals. After inaugurating its first lines, from Shepherds Bush tube railway terminus and Hammersmith to Kew Bridge and Acton on 4 April 1901, the LUT went on to build tramways to Hounslow (1901) and Uxbridge (1904), then through Twickenham, Hampton and Teddington until Kingston-on-Thames and Surbiton were penetrated in 1906. Local routes were constructed in Kingston, and the Surrey town linked with the LCC boundary at Merton and Summerstown via New Malden, Raynes Park and Wimbledon, in 1907. Most of these lines were entirely new; only a small part, in the Hammersmith area, was converted from horse-tramways.

Between 1904 and 1911 another large private company, the Metropolitan Electric Tramways, established electric services along the main roads outwards through north London, operating largely over tracks constructed under the 1896 Light Railways Act and leased from the Middlesex and Hertfordshire County Councils. At several points the MET terminated in almost open country; the electric cars were at Edgware in 1904 (going on to Canons Park in 1907), Edmonton in 1905 (extended to Ponders End in 1907 and finally Waltham Cross in 1908), Whetstone in 1905 (on to Barnet, 1907), Wood Green in 1904 (Palmers Green, 1907, Winchmore Hill, 1908, Enfield, 1909), and Stonebridge Park in 1906 (on to Wembley in 1908 and finally Sudbury in 1910). These long radial routes were linked by lines from Tottenham to Wood Green (1904), from Wood Green to North Finchley (1906-9), from North Finchley through Golders Green to Cricklewood (1909–10), from Cricklewood through Willesden Green to Craven Park (1906–7) and from Harlesden to Acton, on the LUT Uxbridge line, in 1909. Contact with the London County Council’s tramways was established at Scrubs Lane, Harlesden, at Highgate, at Manor House, Finsbury Park, and at Stamford Hill.

In east London the electric tramways were constructed and operated by the local authorities. Services were started along the main streets of East Ham in 1901–3, Ilford in 1903, Barking in 1903–7, West Ham in 1904–12, Walthamstow in 1904–5 and Leyton in 1906, some of them over existing horse-tram routes. Municipal ownership was also favoured in the south-east, where the local council...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 THE FERTILE GROUND
• 2 SUBURBIA 1900–14
• 3 COUNCIL COTTAGES 1900–14
• 4 CASE STUDIES 1900–14 Ilford and Golders Green
• 5 SOME HOMES FOR HEROES 1919–25
• 6 SPECULATORS’ SUBURBIA 1923–39
• 7 BUILDING ESTATES 1920–39
• 8 HOMES FOR THE MORTGAGED The Suburban House and Garden 1920–39
• 9 COUNCIL COTTAGES 1920–39
• 10 LIFE IN THE NEO-GEORGIAN SUBURBS
• 11 SUBURBAN MONEY 1925–39
• 12 SELLING THE SUBURB
• 13 TRANSPORT FOR THE SUBURBS
• 14 NEO-GEORGIAN CASE STUDIES: (I) EDGWARE, THE UNDERGROUND SUBURB
• 15 NEO-GEORGIAN CASE STUDIES (2) SOUTHERN ELECTRIC STONELEIGH
• 16 NEO-GEORGIAN CASE STUDIES: (3) THE LCC COTTAGE ESTATES
• 17 HITLER STOPS THE SPRAWL
• EPILOGUE : OR PLANNING UNPLANNED
• Appendix
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX