Model Estate (Routledge Revivals)

Planned Housing at Quarry Hill Leeds

Alison Ravetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135007102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Residential Architecture

Quarry Hill Flats, once both the pride and shame of its city of Leeds, was an iconic Modernist symbol of the 1930s. It marked the first use of a prefabricated building system for a large-scale council estate, replacing a notorious slum. But it lasted barely a generation – its complete demolition was announced as Alison Ravetz was finishing this study. First published in 1974, this book is unique in its use of all estate records from conception to destruction, as well as in its comprehensive approach, including aspects usually missing in council housing studies – notably the intimate experience of residents, and a fraught, long-drawn-out building period. Ravetz argues that the Flats' 'failure' was due not to social breakdown, as repeatedly alleged, but rather to a rigidity of design and management unable to accommodate gradual, incremental change. This has continuing implications for the operation of bureaucratically designed and controlled 'social housing' today.

Chapter 1 The City and the Poor: Inherited Constraints and Contradictions of Municipal Housing

The problem of housing the poor has, no doubt, always been with us: but in its recognisably modern form it took shape in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, when the unprecedented growth of population, and particularly urban population, gave it new and quite unforeseen dimensions. The problems then encountered, and the various solutions attempted, laid the basis for modern housing policy and municipal housing. The story of the explosive growth of towns and conurbations, the crisis of services and public health that followed, the belated awakening of public conscience, and the eventual growth of legislation and administration, has been told and must be sought elsewhere.¹ What is important for the purpose of this book is the degree to which they prompted and conditioned the idea and practice of the ‘model estate’.

The immigrants who flooded into cities around 1800 left an indelible impression on their physical structure, on public attitudes to urban life,and on national and local government. As the old commercial and residential centres were taken over by mills, workshops and labourers' housing, the well-to-do who had previously lived there retreated to newly created suburbs, away from the physical and social contamination of the centre. Where topography permitted, they were followed in successive waves by the less affluent, whose minuscule houses and gardens aped the villas and estates of the gentry. In the absence of cheap public transport the poor were tied to their workplaces, where they could inhabit only the chance stock of earlier buildings, or whatever the speculative builder chose to put up for them. Inevitably, their homes and neighbourhoods were easy victims of industrial growth and pollution, as well as the ‘improvements’ of the age, such as railways and viaducts, that might cut swathes through them. They became beds of endemic and epidemic disease, arising from poverty, malnutrition and poor sanitation, and contemporary observers were sure also that they were hotbeds of every kind of crime and immorality. The once fashionable uses of the city centre now survived only in the commercial thoroughfares, protected enclaves, or odd, stranded buildings whose function could not easily be changed.²

Although for the majority industrialisation and urbanisation may have offered improved standards of living and life chances the fact remains that the most outspoken witnesses of the process presented a pessimistic image of urban life as unhealthy, immoral and leading to anomie. Multitudes flocked more or less willingly to towns and found there a livelihood that was better in many respects than the one they left behind; but once there, they risked feeling alienated and dispossessed. An early mood of excitement with the new phenomenon of the giant industrial cities, such as was felt for Manchester in the 1820s, gave way in the following decades to appalled but measured indictments, such as Robert Baker's of the town of Leeds.³ This reaction, together with the unhappy folk-memory of a working class that was only half willingly urbanised, played an incalculable part in English social life. In popular imagination, the town remained an unpleasant necessity, in contrast to an image of the countryside that was not the less important because it was based on an idealised picture of the past.

The earlier administrative machinery of towns was totally unfit to deal with the new problems. Local reform began with the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835, but for many further decades responsibility for public health and what would now be called town planning remained in the hands of many different local commissions and other bodies whose divided responsibilities were far from clear, and who were frequently at war with one another. Action taken took the form of the belated correction of abuses, rather than constructive measures, and even then it was often prevented by the lack of adequate powers, by the political impossibility of drawing on the rates, and perhaps most of all by social philosophies that doubted the propriety of government interference in spheres that ought to be managed privately on a profit-making basis. In national government the need to protect the poor against the worst abuses of free enterprise for the general as well as their own good, was reflected in a growth of departments and professions in which local government, public health, housing and planning were inseparably connected.⁴

Unlike water, drainage, transport and other services, the provision of decent housing for those for whom the free market did not provide was not recognised as a necessary social service until after the first world war.⁵ From the 1850s local authorities had been empowered to build lodging houses and under the series of Torrens and Cross Acts of the 1860s and 1870s they were able to demolish ‘unfit’ houses or whole ‘insanitary’ areas. But such powers were permissive only and were for the most part unused, or applied on a very limited scale, unless purposes extraneous to housing needs, such as the construction of new thoroughfares, made it convenient to use the housing acts. Authorities were not enjoined to use their powers of clearing and providing new housing until 1885 and it was not until the consolidating Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 that some of the cumbersome and costly procedures were eased, so that it began to be common for the larger towns to undertake small exercises in municipal housing. Previous to that the only major English cities to undertake any significant amount of rebuilding after clearances were London, Liverpool and Manchester, and they did so only in default of private developers willing to undertake the task. The first serious campaign for council-provided housing was begun under the newly created London County Council in the 1890s and in the years leading up to 1914 London, Liverpool and Manchester were building tenements on a large scale.

The early attempts at municipal housing were able to make use of two distinct dwelling types. The least important at this time was the terraced or semi-detached cottage. Although much thought had gone into designing functional cottages for the labouring classes in the early years of the century, by this time new houses of that class must rather be considered as simplified derivatives of upper-class houses, with as many of the rooms, front and back yards and other appurtenances, as the budget would allow. Arguments for rehousing the metropolitan working class in suburban cottages appear around 1860, but for another forty or fifty years the absence of a cheap public transport system, as well as reluctance to buy and develop suburban land for this purpose, precluded this sort of development.

By far the commoner building form for municipal housing was the tenement block. Functionally derived from the large lodging-house blocks for single people built in the 1840s, blocks of family tenements had been built in considerable numbers by the philanthropic housing societies on land cleared under the housing acts in London and some provincial boroughs. Originally, the tenement block had had some arguments of social idealism attached to it and even after these were forgotten it was still apt to retain a moralistic flavour in its design and its rules of tenancy. At the beginning, the large blocks were thought to offer architectural as well as social potential, but it soon became clear that their form and character were dictated by the high cost of site acquisition and the need to rehouse as many people, if not more, as had previously been displaced. Partly because of reductions in standards of space and amenity — the result of attempts to bring such dwellings within reach of the poor — they rapidly acquired an indelible reputation for overcrowding, unhealthiness and repression, though this was not always deserved.⁶ The large pioneering estates of the LCC at Boundary Street and Millbank, around 1900, set higher standards of architecture and estate lay-out and served as examples to other authorities who were thinking of building tenements at this time.

No more than a tiny fraction of the urban working class, and perhaps none of the really poor, ever experienced model philanthropic or municipal dwellings, whether in the form of tenements or cottages. The dwellings that were built had much higher rents than slum tenants were able to afford, and there was serious public debate about the possibility of providing minimal dwellings of a lower standard at prices that would have been within their reach. The case for building dwellings that set a high standard won the day, though in practice standards were systematically debased by some of the housing societies. It was a central contradiction of housing reform that any replacement dwellings, however simple, dislodged and also outpaced the poorest sections of the population who most needed help. Most of those displaced for new housing, as for roads and railways, simply found accommodation elsewhere in the old stock of housing. For them, and for the majority who were undisturbed by slum clearance, improvement in conditions could only come gradually, through the cumulative correction of sanitary nuisances and through the influence of building bye-laws that from the 1860s onwards were ensuring that private builders built to better standards.

The years between 1900 and 1914 were important, not so much because of the actual building done by municipalities, but for the increasing concern of the Labour movement with housing reform, the crystallisation of the suburban ideal and the emergence of the town planning administration and profession that were needed to give practical substance to the ideal. All three were implicit in the first Town Planning Act of 1909. As Ashworth has shown, this was devised in a mood of reaction to uncontrolled suburban sprawl and the fear that new building would repeat the mistakes of the past. Its provisions related not to existing town centres, but to the design of new suburbs, and it was framed very much in the belief that ‘suburbanisation was to be the salvation of the town’.⁷ The model for such developments was already available in English tradition, in the planned suburbs resorts and parks of the mid-nineteenth century, and in the recent efflorescence of the industrial village tradition at Bourneville and Port Sunlight. There was now the additional stimulus of the Garden City movement which had founded Letchworth in 1904, and caught up in one way or another nearly all who were working for housing reform. As first conceived by Ebenezer Howard, the model Garden City was to achieve a clear demarcation of town and country, and his hypothetical plan with its bold geometry, comparatively high living densities and generous supply of public buildings was in the theoretical, Utopian tradition. As it was applied in practice, at Hampstead and in some scores of private, municipal and company ‘garden suburbs’ throughout the land, the urban qualities of Howard's ideal city were dissipated, although much of the social idealism remained.

The conjunction of the Town Planning Act and Garden City idea came at a critical time for municipal housing and by 1914 it is possible to detect its softening influence in some municipal suburbs, which had previously been built with high densities and rigid, bye-law lay-outs. The Labour movement wholeheartedly adopted the ideal of suburban house and garden (we find it, for instance, enshrined on the union banners of miners' lodges) and town planning and housing bodies kept up active propaganda throughout the war years, when it seemed to offer the very home that was ‘fit for heroes’. Lloyd George was echoing public opinion when, on viewing Letchworth in company with Seebohm Rowntree, he remarked, ‘In five years we will have a million people living in houses like this’.⁸ The Tudor Walters Report, which was largely the work of Raymond Unwin (co-architect with Barry Parker of Letchworth), gave official approval to the house type, density and lay-out, and ensured that the garden suburb became the dominant building form for municipalities between the wars.

In 1919 the housing problem was still at bottom the traditional problem of accommodating the poor in dwellings and localities where they could afford to live, but it was now overlaid with the unprecedented situation of a shortage of houses even for those who could afford to pay. All building had ceased for several years, and as well as the natural increase of population there had been an even greater rise in the rate of family formation. For the first time in memory the middle classes and ‘deserving’ working classes, who had previously been supplied by the private market, were without sufficient homes. At first it was supposed that a temporary intervention by the state was all that was needed until private builders returned to full production. The measure somewhat precipitately adopted in Addison's Act of 1919 was designed in naive expectation of this. Under this Act, all local authorities were obliged to provide for their housing needs, but their own contribution was limited to the proceeds of a penny rate, while the exchequer contribution was to cover all losses above this. The building industry had been in a state of slump in many parts of the country for several years before the war and it was unable to find the necessary materials and labour to satisfy the demand for houses. The result was an inflation in which prices rose rapidly to three times pre-war levels. The Act had to be hastily repealed, but it was clear that conditions were far from normal and that some form of subsidy would have to remain.

General subsidies remained, in fact, until 1933, and during this period, especially in the Labour movement, the idea of housing as a commodity gave way to that of housing as a necessary social service. The oscillations of different governments caused the subsidies to be directed now to private firms building houses for sale, now to the local authorities for the provision of housing for general needs. But although the energy with which national policies were applied in any locality depended on local politics and conditions,⁹ the obligation to provide houses remained mandatory. None of the acts particularly served the needs of the poor slum dwellers, most of whom would not have been able to afford the rents of new council houses even if housing managements had been willing to accept them as tenants. Only in London, Glasgow and Liverpool, did clearance and rehousing in tenements continue with little perceptible break from the pre-1914 period, and elsewhere council housing in the 1920s and early 1930s served the young white-collar workers, skilled artisans and young families with good prospects, rather than the unskilled, the casual labourers, the large families, the elderly and single, who constituted the traditional ‘poor’. Anti-slum legislation that Chamberlain had intended to introduce in the 1920s as a result of the findings of his Unhealthy Areas Committee, gave place to his own Housing Act of 1923, which favoured private builders. Through the rest of the decade the slums, though deplored, were tolerated as being better than no houses at all. It was held that the injection of new council houses, expensive as they were, would improve the condition of the poor, as people moving into them would create vacancies and the rest of the population would ‘filter up’ the housing scale. Unfortunately the idea of filtering up contained two fallacies: under the Rent Act of 1923, adopted as an encouragement to private builders and landlords, houses became decontrolled on vacation, so that anyone who moved must move into a house at a decontrolled rent. Further, many new houses were pre-empted by newly-formed families who did not release dwellings for the use of others.

By the end of the 1920s it was clear that the slums needed a new attack and this became one of the main issues of the general election in 1929. After a Labour government was returned, the necessary legislation was provided by Greenwood's 1930 Housing and Slum Clearance Act, which revised and eased clearance procedures and calculated the state subsidy according to the number of individuals displaced and rehoused, instead of the number of new dwellings provided as previously. This legislation, unused by most authorities, was given coercive force when, in 1933, the Conservative Minister of Health in the coalition government abolished the earlier general housing needs subsidy and enjoined authorities to prepare five-year programmes of slum clearance. Similarly peremptory legislation followed in 1935, to deal with the overcrowding of people in dwellings. This was another facet of slum life that had not always been clearly distinguished from the overcrowding of buildings on sites. The new pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration
• Tables
• Dedication
• Advisory Committee
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 The City and the Poor: Inherited Constraints and Contradictions of Municipal Housing
• Chapter 2 Working-Class Housing and Town Planning in Leeds up to 1940
• Chapter 3 The Genesis of Quarry Hill Flats
• Chapter 4 Experimental Building and its Consequences: The Mopin System in Practice
• Chapter 5 Social Functions of the Model Environment: The Estate Populations
• Chapter 6 Community by Design: Forms of Social Life on the Model Estate
• Chapter 7 Social Causes of Physical Change: The Devolution of the Model Estate
• Chapter 8 Private Lives and the Model Estate
• Chapter 9 Conclusions: Methods, Assessments and Futures of Model Environments
• Postscript January 1974
• Appendix I Quarry Hill Flats Tenants’ Association Proposals, 1949
• Appendix II The 1969 Survey of Quarry Hill Flats
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index