Municipal Dreams

The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

John Boughton

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781784787400
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784787417
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Traversing the nation, Municipal Dreams offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, and in doing so offers an engrossing social history of housing in Britain. John Broughton asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics which has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society - as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.

1

‘How to Provide Housing for
the People’: Origins

You’ve battled your way through the crowds and past the hipster havens of Shoreditch High Street. There’s a busy road junction ahead and next to it the eighteenth-century St Leonard’s Church, not quite managing the dignified aloofness its impressive Palladian styling and spiritual calling seem to merit. But take a right, along Calvert Avenue, and the mood alters. It’s quieter, a wide street lined with imposing late Victorian tenement blocks and their store-front ground floors, and then, as you progress, there is an unexpected wooded green mound with what looks like a strangely displaced seaside shelter at its summit.

Climb the steps, sit down and take time to look around. Here’s that little oasis of urban calm that St Leonard’s churchyard can’t achieve. Broad streets radiate from this central circus and carefully deployed within them is a further set of those grand tenement blocks that could look forbidding; their sturdy proportions offset by a panoply of fine decorative Arts and Crafts detailing – pitched, dormer and mansard roofs, prominent gable ends of all shapes and sizes, stone quoined windows and pedimented doorways, tall chimneys reaching for the sky, glazed terracotta tiling and, most arrestingly, quirky, colourful, streaky bacon-style banded brickwork.

The Boundary Estate, Bethnal Green

It’s accomplished work, Grade II listed in fact, and good-quality housing. If you walk down nearby Brick Lane, you’ll see one of the two-bed flats advertised for rent. It’s expensive – £2,145 a month – but then, as the agent says, it’s so ‘perfect for a professional looking to be close to the City’.

This is the Boundary Estate, Britain’s first council estate, opened in 1900. It remains a small working-class redoubt but around 40 per cent of its homes were purchased under Right to Buy and most of those later sold on. The defences of this little island of social housing have been breached, firstly by gentrifi-cation and, more recently, by corporate money. New battle-lines are drawn out along Calvert Avenue, between the surviving old-fashioned corner shops and community laundry on the one hand and the boutique coffee shops, organic grocery and artisan workshops on the other.

Once the area was a place the wealthier classes avoided. Boundary Passage, a narrow walkway leading off the High Street to the rear of the estate, gives just a hint of something more dangerous. In the nineteenth century it led to the Old Nichol, the most notorious of London’s slum quarters. In 1863, the Illustrated London News had described the area as nothing ‘but one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty’.¹ Later, even Charles Booth, who sought to bring detached statistical rigour to his charting of Victorian social conditions, delineated it as of the ‘lowest class; vicious, semi-criminal’.

It was Arthur Morrison who most famously captured (and only lightly fictionalised) the Old Nichol in his 1896 novel, A Child of the Jago. Morrison’s lurid opening paragraphs, describing the ‘close, mingled stink – the odour of the Jago’ that ‘rose from foul earth and grimed walls’, were surely enough to send a frisson of alarm through his middle-class readers, but, if they dared to read further, the book held other terrors too.² Crime: Dicky Perrott, the novel’s protagonist, a pickpocket, steals the gold watch of the bishop come to celebrate the moralising efforts of his religious confrères. And death: no happy ending this time, Dicky suffers the fate ordained by his life in the Jago – he dies in a gang fight; do-goodery cannot save him.

The Old Nichol usually killed more insidiously, however, through disease and deprivation. Its death rates were over twice the London average; one in four newborns were likely to die before their first birthday. In 1891, just before its clearance, 5,719 people lived in the district, three-quarters of them in one- and two-room dwellings, in houses ‘built with “billy-sweet”, a mortar including street dirt which never dried out’.³ That, as well as fetid humanity, would explain the characteristic aroma which Morrison identified.

While the Old Nichol had achieved particular notoriety, such accounts could be multiplied. The world’s first Industrial Revolution had created its first urban proletariat. Taken together, they seemed to some in the upper classes to threaten the very material and spiritual foundations upon which the established order was built. Thomas Carlyle had first raised this ‘Condition of England Question’ in 1839 in response to the rise of Chartism. Frederick Engels had drawn the revolutionary moral more sharply (and more positively) in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England published six years later. Both graphically charted the ugly industrialism scarring the land and each, in their different ways, lamented its impact on our working people.

Engels, and many who followed, was a good example of another manifestation of Victorian materialism – its empiricism, the obsession with facts and measurement. Dickens satirised this in the heartless persona of Thomas Gradgrind in his 1854 novel Hard Times (dedicated in fact to Thomas Carlyle): ‘Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’⁴

But for every Gradgrind there was a reformer who wanted to use these data to effect progressive change. William Henry Duncan, ‘an intelligent physician resident at Liverpool’, gave evidence to the Commons Select Committee on the Health of Towns in 1840, and described the city’s 2,400 courts which housed 86,000 people, one-third of its working population (another 38,000 lived in cellars):

Very few have an entrance wider than four feet, and that is by an archway built over it; the width is from 9 to 15 feet between the rows; there is one only six feet. The backs of the houses in one court are built against the backs of houses in another court; at the further end there is generally an ash pit between two privies; they are in the most abominable state of filth.⁵

In response to further questioning (and, in further detail, in his 1844 pamphlet, On the Physical Causes of the High Rate of Mortality in Liverpool), Duncan went on to calibrate precisely the correlation between housing conditions, incidences of fever and premature death.

The committee concluded that such conditions were ‘constantly increasing’ – a testament to the breakneck speed of urbanisation and the ‘very profitable and tempting investment’ they represented to slum landlords. Similar circumstances were reported in the new industrial towns across the country. In 1889, a report by Dr John Thresh on a particularly noisome area of Ancoats, Manchester – the ‘shock city of the Industrial Revolution’ – detailed twenty-five streets, many less than seventeen feet wide, and housing, mostly over seventy years old. The area contained over fifty courts; one-third of houses were back-to-back. A death rate of over eighty per 1,000 of the population led to his dry statistical conclusion that ‘3,000 to 4,000 people [were] dying annually here in Manchester from remediable causes’.⁶

The medical men and sanitary campaigners provided evidence for a growing sense among the British upper classes that something should be done. And although the means by which disease was spread were little understood, the common misapprehension of the time – that it was spread through noxious ‘bad air’ (or ‘miasma’) – was helpful to the extent that it persuaded the middle class of their own vulnerability to the threat that such conditions posed.

They frequently found the alleged immorality of the slums almost equally alarming. The Reverend Andrew Mearns’ thirty-page pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in 1883, became an instant bestseller. Tellingly, Mearns’ first paragraphs tell of the slum-dwellers’ ‘Non-Attendance at Worship’. But, having described their living quarters – ‘pestilential human rookeries … where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship’ – he can only conclude that ‘immorality is but the natural outcome of conditions like these’. He even names what was often only darkly hinted at in such sensationalist Victorian accounts: ‘incest is common; and no form of vice and sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention’.⁷

William Booth, who had founded the Salvation Army on the streets of East London not far from the Old Nichol, produced the jeremiad In Darkest England in 1890. The title indicates his message: ‘As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley had found existing in the great Equatorial forests?’⁸ Such works offered searing images and gruesome detail of the lives of Victorian society’s poorest. They contributed to that mix of prurience and piety, fear and compassion, which fuelled the drive to housing reform.

In this, Liverpool led the way. The city’s 1842 Sanitary Act allowed magistrates to order landlords to clean any ‘filthy or unwholesome’ house they owned. They also set up a council Health Committee that policed this. Four years later, the Liverpool Sanitary Act – ‘the first piece of comprehensive health legislation passed in England’ – made the council responsible for drainage, paving, sewerage and cleaning. It also created the city’s (and the country’s) first Medical Officer of Health – Dr Duncan, no less – who set to work with a zeal, closing over 5,000 cellar dwellings declared unfit for human habitation in 1847 alone.⁹

At a time when the gods of the free market held almost unchallenged sway, national legislation dealing initially with sanitary matters followed only haltingly. The 1848 Public Health Act gave local authorities discretionary powers over drainage, water supply and the removal of nuisances. The 1866 Act sharpened responsibilities to deal with nuisance. The 1875 Public Act consolidated and extended these powers and imposed duties on the sometimes recalcitrant local bodies to enforce them.

As it touched more directly on the sacred rights of property, housing reform as such followed more slowly. The 1866 Labouring Classes Dwellings Act allowed municipalities to purchase sites and build and improve working-class homes. Unsurprisingly, Liverpool was the single authority to make use of the legislation. It built because the market wouldn’t. The Corporation (as such municipal authorities were frequently termed) had even instructed the City Engineer to draw up a model scheme in the vain hope that a private builder might develop it, but speculative building profits lay in the prosperous middle-class suburbs and not the indigent inner city.

Thus, in 1869, the St Martin’s Cottages, completed in Ashfield Street in Vauxhall, Liverpool, were the first council homes to be built in Britain. The ‘cottages’ were, in fact, tenements – 146 flats and maisonettes in two four-storey blocks, brick-built with open staircases and separate WCs placed on the half-landings; the result was so bleak that even the trade magazine The Builder concluded that those who built for the poor should ‘mix a little philanthropy with their percentage calculations’. The blocks were finally demolished in 1977. Only a blue plaque remains to mark this inauspicious beginning to one of our greatest social revolutions.

The Builder’s comment was a knowing one, as finance was key to the question of providing improved working-class housing. With hindsight, the great breakthrough of the 1866 Act was that it allowed local authorities to borrow at preferential rates from the Public Works Loan Commissioners – in effect, the first government ‘subsidy’ for public housing. At the time, however, the chief intended beneficiaries of this measure were the various private companies building ‘model dwellings’ for the working classes. The first, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, was founded in 1841. Others, such as the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company and the Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company, followed and by the 1870s there were said to be twenty-eight such concerns operating in London alone. This was the so-called five per cent philanthropy, named for its financial model which, by offering that guaranteed five per cent rate of return, appealed to the pocket books as well as the hearts of Victorian investors.

This philanthropic concern with the improvement of working-class housing (and the improvement of the working classes themselves) was evidenced too in the founding of the Peabody Trust, funded from the personal fortune of the London-based American banker George Peabody. The first Peabody Trust homes were built, not far from the Old Nichol, on Commercial Street in Spitalfields in 1864. One year later, the housing and social reformer, Octavia Hill, opened the first of her schemes. Hill, who eschewed the large block dwellings of five per cent philanthropy, nonetheless promised the same rate of return to her early investors, among them the leading Victorian art critic and social thinker John Ruskin.

Despite the hopes placed on them, most of these bodies struggled to pay their promised dividends and the sector as a whole was incapable of acting on the scale that contemporary conditions and even the modest scale of local authority slum clearance demanded. Furthermore, the ‘model dwellings’ themselves were unpopular, criticised for their austere, barracks-like appearance as well as the officious rules and regulations imposed on tenants. In any case, rents were too high for the slum working class in the most need. Typically, the model tenants were better-paid artisans, and even the salaried middle class.

Still, elite concern over working-class housing conditions continued and was expressed most dramatically by Tory leader Lord Salisbury in an article in the National Review in 1883. Salisbury’s critique of existing conditions broke no new ground and, in truth, his proposals were modest – increased government loans to the model dwellings companies, tighter regulation of speculative building and a suggestion that factory owners might provide housing for their workers. However, the immediate outcome of Salisbury’s article was a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes convened in 1884. Its membership was a roll call of the great and the good, including the Prince of Wales. Its published report – a record of 24,663 questions asked of 191 witnesses running to 1,300 pages – was the apogee of Victorian investigatory fact-finding.

But Salisbury’s article did contain one straw in the wind of unanticipated significance. He pointed to the destruction of working-class homes in parliamentary-approved improvement schemes for new roads and railways. Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, both completed in the later 1880s and each driven through swathes of slum housing, were notable examples of the former. ‘Under these circumstances’, he concluded, ‘it is no violation even of the most scrupulous principles to ask Parliament to give what relief it can.’¹⁰ The Pall Mall Gazette applauded this as ‘an unmistakable avowal that the help of the State may be legitimately invoked in order to provide houses for its subjects’.¹¹

By 1885, Salisbury was prime minister. An 1885 Housing Act, masterminded by his Home Secretary Sir Richard Cross (another member of the Royal Commission) strengthened local authorities’ sanitary powers but was otherwise largely a consolidation of existing measures. Cross’s own position had been made clear some years earlier:

I take it as a starting point that it is not the duty of the Government to provide any class of citizens with any of the necessaries of life, and among the necessaries of life we must of course include good and habitable dwellings … if it did so, it would in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ‘How to Provide Housing for the People’: Origins
• 2. ‘The World of the Future’: The Interwar Period
• 3. ‘If Only We Will’: Britain Reimagined, 1940–51
• 4. ‘The Needs of the People’: Council Housing, 1945–56
• 5. ‘Get These People Out of the Slums’: 1956–68
• 6. ‘Anti-Monumental, Anti-Stylistic, and Fit for Ordinary People’: 1968–79
• 7. ‘Rolling Back the Frontiers of the State’: 1979–91
• 8. ‘Thrown-Away Places’: 1991–7
• 9. ‘A Different Kind of Community’: 1997–2010
• 10. ‘People Need Homes; These Homes Need People’: 2010 to the Present
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration Credits
• Notes
• Index