A New Vision for Housing

Christopher Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415360807
• eBook ISBN: 9781134236350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Residential Architecture

In 1945 the Labour Government set out to enable everyone to have a decent home, where people from all walks of life could live together. This dream was destroyed by a succession of avoidable mistakes and almost everyone now seems to believe that it is impossible to rediscover that vision. This book challenges that fatalism, tracing the policy mistakes that have given rise to this inequitable state fromthe folly of mass housing to the unfair tax privileges of many home owners. Holmes describes and advocates a new vision for the new millennium, finding solutions variously in development, planning, economic structures, social reform, and political reassessment to narrow the gap between rich and poor and enable people in all housing tenures to finally have a choice.

Chapter 1
Homes fit for heroes

A Victorian failure

For all its grand achievements the Victorian era left a scandalous legacy of slum housing. A road to reform was pioneered by a small number of philanthropists and enlightened employers, but against the scale of the problem the action was pitiful.

During the nineteenth century, England changed from being a largely rural society to a predominantly urban one. Millions of people flocked to the cities when the new factories were being built and many lived in overcrowded tenements with no proper sanitation.

A succession of enquiries documented the nature and extent of housing and public health problems.¹ Edwin Chadwick, the Secretary of the Poor Law Commissioners, wrote the first major report, the Report on the Condition of the Labouring Poor, in 1842. Prompted by a violent outbreak of fever in Spitalfields in the East End of London, the report demonstrated the link between poverty, bad housing and disease.

The central belief of the sanitary reformers was that they could improve the living conditions of the poor by reducing epidemic disease and that by restoring health they could raise earning power sufficiently to allow the renting of decent houses. Yet when cholera and typhus had been quelled by sanitation measures in all the cities, the housing situation was seen to have grown, if anything, worse.

The average number of people living in each house increased throughout the century, despite the efforts of the reformers. The number of people living in England and Wales grew from 1.6 million in 1801 to 4.3 million in 1871. However, over the same period the excess of families over the number of houses available had more than doubled, from 321,000 in 1801 to 790,000 in 1871.²

Between the 1850s and 1870s the demolition of homes to make way for the railways, the influx of new workers and rising rents made overcrowding still worse than ever. In the 1880s there were outbreaks of popular unrest, notably in London, Birmingham and Manchester, which shocked political leaders and middle class opinion, who feared the kind of revolutionary uprising which had taken place elsewhere in Europe. The Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Class was set up in 1885 as a response to this discontent. It took extensive evidence from different areas of the country, especially on conditions of overcrowding and rent levels:

It was common practice in London for each family to have only a single room for the rent, of which nearly half of them paid between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of their wages. A contributory cause was the existence of the disreputable middle man.³

In his powerful descriptions of poverty in London, Andrew Mearns, a leading Congregational Minister, captured the dreadful conditions endured by the poorest families.

Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children and four pigs! In another room seven people are living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Another apartment contains father, mother and six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet fever. In another nine brothers and sisters, from 29 years of age downwards, live, eat and sleep together.⁴

Octavia Hill is best known for her distinctive approach to housing management. With financial help from rich supporters, notably John Ruskin, she bought up houses and courts in the worst areas she could find, and sought to encourage tenants to take pride in their homes. As her reputation grew she took on and trained more female housing managers (always women!) who worked under her supervision. She did not compromise with tenants who did not meet her standards. She accepted for re-housing those who showed signs of wishing to improve their condition and took no further interest in those who did not.

As soon as I entered into possession, each family who would not pay, or who led clearly immoral lives, were ejected. The rooms they vacated were cleansed, the tenants who showed signs of improvement moved into them.⁵

In her groundbreaking study of the management of council housing Anne Power sums up Octavia Hill’s beliefs and legacy:

Octavia Hill cannot be readily classified as either a social reformer or as a successful businesswoman. Her main contribution was to develop a management technique, which brought slum property up to minimal standards for the day at a cost that the mass of slum dwellers could afford. She spoke out against displacement of poor people, against impersonal blocks, and against political control of landlord services. She advocated meticulous management, continuous repairs, tenants’ priorities for improvements, resident jobs, women’s employment, and tenants’ control over their own lives. But she did not understand that with over one million sharing households the relatively small scale of efforts would be overtaken and to a large extent devalued.⁶

Over the second half of the century a handful of reformers, philanthropists and enlightened employers embarked on a range of initiatives to provide decent homes for working class tenants.

Lord Shaftesbury’s Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes was set up in the 1840s, the first not-for-profit body seeking to provide new homes for working class tenants. The Four Per Cent Society was set up in 1852 by a group of Jewish philanthropists to relieve overcrowding in the East End of London, becoming the first housing trust to cater specifically for an ethnic minority.

The Peabody Trust was founded in 1862 with a generous donation from an American, George Peabody, who had made his fortune as a prosperous merchant in England. Dedicated to helping ‘the poor of London’ the Peabody Trust built blocks of tenement flats and by 1867 had provided over 5,000 dwellings.⁷ Several others, including Sydney Waterlow’s Improved Dwellings Company, the Guinness Trust and the Samuel Lewis Trust, followed its example. The densely built tenement flats built by these trusts later became the model for the London County Council’s walk-up blocks (typically four storey blocks of flats, with no lifts, and front doors opening off the balconies on each floor).

These associations funded their housing schemes by taking out loans and paying a dividend to investors of between 4 per cent and 5 per cent. They aimed to demonstrate that it was financially viable to provide self-contained flats for working class families. However, it was only the better paid artisans who were able to afford the rents. Even the homes of the charitable trusts were beyond the reach of the poorer labourers.

Gareth Stedman Jones has pointed out that the tenancy rules of Peabody excluded the poorest:

Despite the predominantly seasonal character of employment in London, rents had to be paid in advance and no arrears were allowed. Applications were not considered without a reference from an employer, although in the case of a casual labourer this was almost by definition impossible. A substantial number of the very poor were widows or deserted wives, or poor mothers of large families, who earned a small living as washerwomen, but Peabody rules dictated that washing could only be done in the laundry, and that it could only be the tenant’s own clothing.

All but the most prosperous of the working class living in the central area (of London) lived with their families in one room units. But Peabody rules did not permit more than one person to inhabit one room… The economic effect of these regulations was to put Peabody Dwellings out of reach of the casual poor.⁸

Most of the new Housing and Public Health Acts that were passed focused on sanitary provisions to prevent disease caused by severe overcrowding, polluted water and dangerous sewerage. The worst ‘rookeries’—the dense, urban slums—were cleared, but not replaced by new homes that the displaced residents could afford.

The number of new homes built for working class families was tiny in relation to the scale of housing need. Throughout the nineteenth century the dominant view was the rejection of state action in providing homes for working class tenants. Despite all the evidence of market failure, politicians and most reformers clung stubbornly to their reliance on private landlords and voluntary initiative.

One of the clearest statements of the prevailing ideology was a speech by the Earl of Derby, a leading member of the Conservative Party, made in Liverpool in 1871. After stressing the need for urgent action ‘to provide every man, woman and child with a clean, wholesome and decent lodging’, he went on:

It is vitally essential that this work we now have in hand should be done by private enterprise. Either it will pay or it will not. If it will not—but that is a hypothesis I do not accept for an instant—it is no light matter to require the local governing body of the town to provide homes for the poor at less than their cost price. For if a poor man, not being a pauper, has a right to be supplied with a home at less than it costs, why not the food also—the one is as necessary as the other—and then you come to nothing less than a system of universal outdoor relief.⁹

A small number of employers, notably several prominent Quakers, built settlements to house their workers. Port Sunlight, south of Birkenhead, was funded by W.H.Lever, as a demonstration of his vision of a profit-sharing company. Titus Salt built a model village next to his new factory at Shipley in West Yorkshire, with 800 cottages in long terraces but with a variety of styles and for different sizes of families, based on a survey of his employees’ needs. The Bournville village in Birmingham was not devised solely as a ‘company town’, but as a model village for residents from a range of backgrounds. Joseph Rowntree’s model village was built at New Earswick outside York (see Chapter 12).

The garden city movement, founded by Ebenezer Howard, developed the most ambitious new settlements. His vision was to create self-contained communities, with houses, factories and social facilities, to enable people to escape from the over-crowded urban slums. The first was built at Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, followed by the development at Welwyn Garden City. However, the absence of public subsidy meant that only middle class families were able to afford the prices of the new homes.

Hampstead Garden Suburb was a different form of planned new settlement, conceived by Henrietta Barnett in 1903. She was a well-known social reformer, a friend of Octavia Hill’s and married to Canon Barnett, the Warden of Toynbee Hall, the pioneering East End settlement.

Her vision was to build an integrated community for all social classes on the fringe of London. The cheaper cottages were built close to the newly opened tube at Golders Green, but, unfortunately, rising rents put the new homes beyond the reach of working class families. It soon became a highly desirable suburb, occupied only by affluent middle class residents.

The architect for Hampstead Garden Suburb was Raymond Unwin, who had also designed Letchworth and Welwyn with his partner Barry Parker. He was a committed socialist, whose thinking had been strongly influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris. Most of Unwin and Parker’s early architectural work involved designing rural houses for middle class families but they went on to design several of the first local authority housing estates.

The new developments were in striking contrast to the densely built city streets. In 1912 Unwin wrote a pamphlet Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, which argued that no new housing should be built at more than 12 houses per acre.¹⁰ Almost all the model settlements built by the employers and the garden city movement were houses with gardens.

It was not until 1890 that local authorities were given statutory powers to build new housing, but even then there was no duty on councils to do so.

The London County Council (LCC), Glasgow and Liverpool were the first councils to build directly. The first LCC homes were suburban estates on the edge of London’s built up area, starting with the Totterdown Fields Estate at Tooting, at the terminus of an LCC tramway, followed by White Hart Lane in Tottenham. One of the most successful was at Old Oak Lane estate in Hammersmith, where ‘the houses were built in a variety of groups and around small open spaces, which avoided both the monotony of the bye-law street and the somewhat artificial rusticity of the garden suburb’.¹¹

By the early years of the twentieth century the pressure for greater state action was increasing. The newly created Labour...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Homes fit for heroes
• Chapter 2: The rise of home ownership
• Chapter 3: The mass housing disaster
• Chapter 4: The changing nature of rented housing
• Chapter 5: Managing social housing
• Chapter 6: Building sustainable communities
• Chapter 7: Putting an end to homelessness
• Chapter 8: Creating socially mixed communities
• Chapter 9: Widening choice
• Chapter 10: Liverpool: A city reborn
• Chapter 11: London: A world city
• Chapter 12: Oases of excellence
• Chapter 13: Sharing housing wealth
• Chapter 14: A new vision for the future
• Notes
• Bibliography