Social Housing in Cologne, 1913-1933: Light, Air and Trees … and Modernism

05 Tuesday Aug 2025

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1920s, Cologne, Pre-1914

It’s claimed that Cologne built more social housing than any other German city in the 1920s. The city’s housing programme deserves study in own right therefore but it also provides a fascinating case study in the interwar evolution from an arts and crafts-inspired architecture to a more functionalist modernism. In Cologne, we see an explicit shift from the Gartenstadt to Neues Bauen – from the Garden City to a type of ‘New Building’ (sometimes termed New Objectivity) that emphasised simpler, plainer forms and modern materials. We’ll see this played out particularly in the career of the city’s leading architect, Wilhelm Riphahn.

Wilhelm Riphahn in 1932 © Die Photographische SammlungSK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Cologne had been an independent Free City until the French invasion of 1796, part of Prussia from 1815 and, from 1871, a city of the newly unified German Reich. In the nineteenth century, it grew exponentially as a commercial and industrial centre and railway hub; its population increased from around 42,000 at the beginning of the century to over 372,000 by its end and to almost 517,000 by 1914. This rapid urbanisation caused housing problems common to all European cities during the Industrial Revolution.

In the years leading up to the First World War, Cologne was governed by the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (the German Centre Party), a moderate Catholic political organisation; the city’s deputy mayor from 1909 was Konrad Adenauer. It was Adenauer who, in 1913, founded the Gemeinnützige Wohnungs-und Siedlungs-AG, a public limited non-profit housing and settlement company, generally known then and now as GAG. It was endowed with a share capital of around 1.22 million Reichsmarks (about £61,000 at the time), roughly half from private investors and half from the City of Cologne which controlled 52 percent of its shares. (1)

Bickendorf

In the year of its foundation, GAG organised an architectural competition to design a new eleven-hectare (27-acre), 600-home settlement in Cologne-Bickendorf. It was won by Caspar Grod, Lothar Kaminski and Wilhelm Riphahn with an entry titled (in dialect) ‘Lich, Luff un Bäumcher’ – light, air and trees.

Gussmannplatz, Siedlung Altenhof, a Krupps estate in Essen © Uwe Barghaan and made available through a Creative Commons licence

It took its initial inspiration from Britain’s Garden City movement. Ebenezer Howard had published Garden Cities of To-Morrow in 1902; the German Garden City Society was founded the same year though with a more practical emphasis on smaller garden settlements. The more immediate inspiration for the winning entry was the model housing provided for the workforce of the Krupps factories in Essen.

Early photographs of Bickendorf; photographer Hugo Schmölz

Construction of a planned 575 single-family houses began in 1914. Each was provided an ornamental front garden; more practical allotment-style plots were located to the rear. The timing – as the First World War erupted- was inauspicious and just 80 homes had been completed by 1918. Riphahn was entrusted with the completion of the settlement after the war and by 1921 a total of 544 houses had been built along eleven, suitably bucolically named, thoroughfares.

Grüner Hof

The GAG’s next project and Riphahn’s next commission was Grüner Hof (Green Court), built between 1922 and 1923. As the name suggests, the scheme maintained the organisation’s emphasis on light, air and trees but it took as its model contemporary Dutch social housing and a favoured residential courtyard form that arrayed housing blocks around green open space. JJP Oud’s Tusschendijken scheme, 1920-23, in Rotterdam is cited as a particular influence.

Tusschendijken, Rotterdam, 1921 © Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

In this, the Cologne estate anticipated Bruno Taut’s better-known Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Berlin, built between 1925 and 1927. In Cologne, the three courtyard spaces were interspersed between the estate’s four four-storey housing blocks in GAG’s first multi-storey development.

Blauer Hof, 2010 © Rolf Heinrich and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Oud is seen as an early exponent of the ‘New Building’ style; here in Cologne it can be recognised in the use of simple, often cubic, forms and new materials such as steel and concrete. In this respect, early modernism represented less a revolutionary break and more an evolution from existing forms. (3)

Bickendorf II/Rosenhofsiedlung

GAG’s next major scheme was a new estate built on the northern edge of the existing garden suburb of Bickendorf, sometimes known as the Bickendorf II, more often as Rosenhofsiedlung.

This was a large estate of over 1100 homes, of eleven types, built along gently curving roads radiating from a central square. Riphahn was once more in charge of the overall development while the painter and sculptor Franz Wilhelm Seiwert provided a unifying colour scheme, a palette of yellows and whites. The first houses built, along Akazienweg, followed established styles but later building took on a more functionalist form.

Rosenhofsiedlung; photographer Hugo Schmölz

Social housing in Germany at this time, as in Britain, was disproportionately confined to the better-off working class who could pay its relatively higher rents regularly. Rosenhofsiedlung also had a significant number of lower middle-class and middle-class tenants, including artists, doctors and academics. Strict selection criteria applied and even into the 1980s prospective tenants were interviewed personally by GAG’s board of directors. (4)

This was an ambitious and innovative era in European social housing in which new ideas and models were widely shared. In 1925, Riphahn travelled with twelve colleagues to the Netherlands where they met Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer and Willem Dudok, responsible for major schemes in Amsterdam and Hilversum respectively.

Blauer Hof

The influence of this visit might be seen in the layout of Blauer Hof (Blue Court), Riphahn’s next major work alongside his colleague Caspar Maria Grod, in its use of the courtyard arrangement typical of Dutch social housing. The local artist Heinrich Hoerle devised a colour scheme of coral red window frames on light grey facades.

At the time, a swathe of lower-income homes had been cleared to build the Mülheim Bridge over the Rhine completed in 1929. To cope with the new pressure on housing from those displaced, GAG had acquired 18 hectares (around 45 acres) of land in Kalkerfeld to the south of Mülheim. The site was convenient to Buchforst railway station and was planned to cater for a poorer, less mobile population that lived and worked on the Rhine’s right bank.

Small apartments, averaging 50 m² (540 sq ft) were another means of building more cheaply for this lower-income population. Whilst each home had an inside toilet, only the larger ones also included a bathroom. The north-south disposition of some blocks and the loggias and balconies provided for each apartment were intended to maximise the light and fresh air enjoyed by residents.

As the contest between modernist architects and their traditionalist counterparts sharpened, the scheme witnessed its own version of the Dächerkrieg (Roof War) that erupted notoriously in Zehlendorf, Berlin, in 1928. (On one street, Am Fischtal, pitched roof houses were built in direct challenge to their modern, flat-roofed counterparts on the other side of the road.) In Buchforst, Riphahn’s fellow architect Otto Müller-Jena was found, in Riphahn’s absence, adding pitched roofs to some of the architectural drawings before being hastily redeployed to another project. (5)

The vanguard of modernist design, however, was seen in the Dammerstock scheme commissioned by the City of Karlsruhe in 1928. Karlsruhe invited Germany’s leading housing architects, including Riphahn, to compete for the role of master planner; their entries were assessed by a prestigious jury including, amongst others, such leading modernists as Ernst May and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In the event, Walter Gropius and Otto Haesler were awarded the commission and Riphahn came third. Gropius had resigned his leadership of the Bauhaus School that year but its terraced (or row) housing model had already been pioneered in Dessau-Törten. Riphahn, now explicitly a follower of the Modernist Movement, had proposed just such a scheme in his own submission and it was this form that Gropius applied at Dammerstock. The scheme also emphasised the north-south disposition of blocks maximising sunlight favoured by Modernism, a Zeilenbau arrangement in German.

Weisse Stadt

Riphahn’s enhanced prominence ensured his next commission (once more with Caspar Maria Grod) from GAG – the design in unashamedly modernist form of what became known as Weisse Stadt (White City) in the Buchforst district of Cologne, largely built between 1928-29.

The principal feature of the new estate was a range of five-storey terraced blocks of flats, interspersed among generous shared green open space and deployed diagonally from the area’s main thoroughfares, Heidelberger Strasse and Waldecker Strasse. The flats, at around 80 sq m (860 sq ft) were larger than those in Blauer Hof and all enjoyed large balconies; those on upper storeys benefitted from roof terraces. This was a scheme, as André Dumont’s study of the new residents has shown, that was designed for disproportionately middle-class and professional occupation.

Weisse Stadt, five-storey blocks, 2023 © John Boughton

Weisse Stadt, townhouses facing five-storey blocks, 2023 © John Boughton

This commitment to social mix was amplified in the estate’s next phase of development, streets of terraced housing with private gardens. In a deliberate corrective to sometime criticism of the monotonous form of contemporary terraced schemes, these were juxtaposed in a 45-degree rotation to the five-storey blocks.

A range of shops was provided along Heidelberger Strasse to serve the local community. It’s a telling symbol of the divided politics of the Weimar Republic that two consumer cooperatives vied for trade; Eintracht was a Christian-conservative society, the KG Hoffnung socialist. (6)

Church of St Peter Canisius, 2023 © John Boughton

Beyond this, perhaps the visually outstanding feature of the estate is the Church of St Peter Canisius designed by Riphahn and Maria Grod in basilica form and in striking functionalist, modernist style and construction, completed in 1931.

A community centre including a restaurant, kindergarten, mothers’ advice centre and library was completed in 1932. This was destroyed in 1945 and not replaced. (The church, also heavily damaged in the war, was rebuilt in 1948.)

Early photograph of Weisse Stadt © Werner Mantz.

Divided politics and wartime destruction remind us that the Nazis came to power in 1933. Riphahn’s work was considered ‘undeutsch’ in the new totalitarian state and he was excluded from any public contract until 1938 when, due to the good offices of friends, he secured some commercial work and even, in suitably conservative form, some contracts for a GAG now led by Nazi placemen.

Riphahn came into his own again in the period of post-war reconstruction when he designed, amongst other schemes, the new French and British cultural institutes and, most notably, the new Cologne Opera House completed in 1957. He died, aged 74, in December1963. He deserves to be better known but his modest demeanour and practical focus ensured a relatively low profile even at the height of his success. As one contemporary noted, he was ‘the one who built the most and spoke the least’. (7)

Just two months before Riphahn’s death, Konrad Adenauer, who we met as a deputy mayor of Cologne and founder, in 1913, of GAG, had resigned as German Chancellor, a post he had held since 1949. Briefly imprisoned by the Nazi regime and suffering a form of inner exile during the war, Adenauer would play a key role in West Germany’s reconstruction and rehabilitation after it.

GAG survives. With some 600 employees and owning and managing around 45,000 properties of various types, it is the city’s largest landlord. The City of Cologne owns around 88 percent of its shares. In the city itself, there are some 40,000 social rent homes, down from over 100,000 in the 1990s. (8)

The quality and architectural significance of these interwar estates is now widely recognised and the well-maintained estates have been appropriately modernised. Blauer Hof, for example, was registered as an architectural monument in 1988 and completely renovated between 2006 and 2010. GAG itself provides excellent information on the architectural and social history of the estates both for residents and others who are interested. (This is something that councils and housing associations in the UK might usefully emulate).

Despite financial and political pressures common to the sector throughout Europe, social housing continues to be a dynamic, innovative and much needed force in modern Germany. We can nevertheless look back to the ground-breaking idealism of the 1920s as a Golden Age and a model to which we might aspire.

Sources

(1) Andreina Milan, ‘Wilhelm Riphahn in Cologne (1913–1963): Urban Policies and Social Housing between Innovation and Conservation’, Urban Planning, vol 4, no 3, 2019. Other detail is drawn from this source.

(2) GAG, Von der Gartenstadt zur Gartensiedlung and Die erste GAG-Siedlung

(3) KuLaDig, Siedlung ‘Grüner Hof’ in Mauenheim

(4) GAG, Ein blühender Ort für das Gemeinschaftsleben

(5) GAG, Wo der Himmel für alle da ist and Rheinische Iindustriekultur, Köln, Waldecker Str. | Dortmunder Str. | Kasseler Str. (Buchforst) Gemeinnütziger Wohnungsbau, GAG-Siedlung

(6) GAG, Fortschrittlichste Siedlung ihrer Zeit

(7) GAG, Architektur für die Menschen

(8) International Observatory of Social Housing, Cologne Social Housing- Tale of a Growing City (September 2015)

A History of Council Housing in Rochdale: Part III, from 1967 to the Present

22 Tuesday Jul 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Lancashire

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1960s, Regeneration, Rochdale

We left Rochdale in last week’s post contemplating the failure of its Ashfield Valley Estate, completed in 1968 and all but demolished by 1992. For the moment, let’s return to the heady days and high hopes of the later 1960s when council housing ambitions remained high and, as yet, unsullied.

Lower Falinge

As the Seven Sisters were completed, Rochdale Borough Council approved £1.8 million plans in November 1967 to build 750 flats in four-storey, deck-access flats in an area of Lower Falinge (pronounced Fay-linge) immediately to the north.

It’s necessary to record again the joy that these new flats brought to many of their first residents. Ann Doherty, aged 23 year with a three-year-old son, forced to leave a condemned two-up, two-down property, moved into a three-bedroom flat in the estate. Aged 72 and still resident on the estate, she recollected: (1)

It was heaven coming here. It felt brilliant because we didn’t have a bath in the old house or an inside toilet. Everything here was perfectly decorated. It was so lovely.

The estate, clad in composite panels (and looking grey on a grey day when I visited in April 2018), survived well enough for many years whilst all the time, subject to the stresses and strains that afflicted estates more generally as they aged and as their social and economic circumstances – and, of equal importance, popular and media perceptions – changed.

In October 2010, however, a bombshell hit – a sensationalist article in the Spectator headlined ‘Britain’s Welfare Ghettos’ (rehashed in the next day’s Daily Telegraph) declared it ‘England’s benefits capital’. It claimed 84 percent of its population were dependent on state benefits, 77 percent on out-of-work benefits alone. The ‘colour’ provided added to the prurient horror of the right-wing journal’s readership: the estate’s grocer informs customers that ‘milk tokens are accepted’; the other major retailer is a betting shop; a local cafe offers a £4.70 breakfast that includes a can of Stella. (The latter was a falsehood.) You get the picture. (2)

It described harsh realities, of course, and, broadly speaking, societal failure rather than personal failing. And there were complaints that the selective data included the residents of a local hostel whilst excluding an adjacent area of owner-occupied homes. But what counted was the label … which stuck.

David Cameron’s speech in January 2016 proclaiming a blitz on England’s worst 100 ‘sink estates’ led to a Guardian article referencing Government figures that ‘officially identified Falinge estate as the most deprived area in England – a mantle it had held for five consecutive years’. In 2013, 72 percent of residents were said to be unemployed; four out of five of its children growing up in poverty. (3)

Andy Littlewood, chair of the Lower Falinge tenants and residents’ association, later recounted the stigmatisation suffered by residents through such coverage, with many alleging that they had lost job opportunities as a result or been forced to lie about their home address.

In June 2017, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) announced simultaneous regeneration plans for College Bank and Lower Falinge – the demolition of four of the Seven Sister towers blocks as discussed in last week’s post and 244 flats in the latter’s four-storey blocks. Some 560 new homes were proposed in Lower Falinge. The plans as a whole proposed the loss of 720 primarily social rent homes and their replacement by 560 new homes of indeterminate tenure. (4)

A 2018 planning application provided more detail for Lower Falinge: 55 new homes (33 flats and 22 houses) and a new park and play space were to replace five existing blocks. Consultation – but no formal ballot of tenants’ views – revealed some in favour but a strong ‘Save Our Homes’ campaign emerged among many arguing that the proposals would see the loss of 128 social rent homes, including 64 three-bed and 64 one-bed, many with ground-floor access, as well as key community facilities, even as, campaigners pointed out, 22,000 languished on the local waiting list for social housing. (5)

In the end, it’s a common story. RBH claimed that the flats were dated and no longer fit for purpose yet problems of damp and condensation in the Pershore block, for example, have been successfully treated and it and some other blocks will remain. Yet again, a social landlord’s ‘vision’ confronts the interests of existing residents and their attachment to home.

There are good intentions. Rochdale’s 2021 planning statement for Lower Falinge is beguiling in its talk of ‘a better quality and mix’ of housing, better public space and better links with surrounding areas. It goes on to say that the ‘the delivery of market housing within this area is required to deliver this diversification and to ensure the sustainability of retained affordable housing in the area’ – a sentence containing the claim that a tenure mix of public and owner-occupied housing is a good in itself whilst also acknowledging contradictorily that affordable housing (how affordable?) is only possible by cross-subsidy from market sales. (6)

As of 2025, six blocks are set to be demolished; Zedburgh remains as Andy Roche – another former chair of the estate’s tenants and residents’ association – refuses to budge. Whilst the residents of the new homes are quite understandably thrilled by their move, Andy’s words to a local journalist capture the sensitivities involved: (7)

The new builds change the nature of our area. I have nothing against the new flats, but the new flats are very small in comparison to the old ones. We were never against regeneration fully, but we didn’t trust RBH. This area is fondly looked on by some but not others … the former Prime Minister David Cameron called us a sink estate in 2016, which was a bit offensive. He meant we were the poor people that can’t go anywhere else.

Another Rochdale estate planned at around the same time as Lower Falinge was the Freehold Estate built around a mile south-west of the town centre. Recent events have given it an unenviable reputation.

The Freehold Estate

The estate comprises nineteen housing blocks and a three-storey car park arrayed around a series of service roads and green open spaces. The Borough’s 1971 Official Guide described its ‘414 dwellings, 4 shops, a public house, a Welfare Centre for elderly and handicapped persons … ‘. Its deck access walkways were a significant feature, constructed so people could walk from any point in the estate to another without returning to ground level. (8)

It was prosaic architecturally but far more serious complaints about its build quality emerged within one year of the first tenants moving in in 1971. The Rochdale Observer reported residents’ complaints about damp in the flats, ‘paper-thin’ interior walls, intimidating antisocial behaviour on decks – everything felt substandard; tenants ‘complained they felt like “guinea pigs” in the corporation’s “trial and error” experiment’.

Later complaints focussed on crime and antisocial behaviour and by 2000 the Council had agreed to install more security cameras and remove some walkways ‘currently used as rat runs by criminals’. Pitched roofs were added to the blocks.

Awaab Ishak, aged two, and some of the mould in his home © PA and *Manchester Evening News*

The Estate became the focus of national attention in the aftermath of the tragic death of two-year old Awaab Ishak in December 2020. A coroner’s inquest concluded that he died of a severe respiratory condition resulting from prolonged exposure to mould in his home. The Housing Ombudsman’s Special Report on Rochdale Boroughwide Housing published in March 2023 was equally critical.

Awaab’s parents had first complained about damp and mould in 2017 but had found their complaints dismissed as did other tenants. A survey carried out by RHB after Awaab’s death found 80 percent of homes suffering damp and mould; 12 of the 380 properties surveyed were branded as Category 1 hazards under Health and Safety regulations)-. And yet when asked by the Ombudsman what it considered to be the main causes of damp and mould, RBH replied: (9)

Tenants’ lifestyle e.g. not heating the property adequately, insufficient use of ventilation provided, drying clothes and cooking in the home, not venting tumble dryers, ritual bathing.

Unsurprisingly, the Ombudsman’s conclusion was damning – and shaming:

Our investigation found that the root cause of service failure within Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was a propensity to dismiss residents and their concerns out of hand, with staff believing that they knew better and that the expectations of their residents were unreasonable … That attitude was then further exacerbated by a poor standard of customer service, when they did accept that action was required …

As someone who advocates for public housing, I find those words heartbreaking.

In response to a public campaign spearheaded by Awaab’s parents, ‘Awaab’s Law’ was passed in February 2025 requiring social landlords to investigate and fix damp and mould hazards within set timeframes, with emergency repairs addressed within 24 hours.

RBH was placed under Special Measures (removed in March 2025). The organisation says it has learnt lessons and necessary remediative action has taken place.

The Freehold Estate hasn’t quite escaped its unwanted notoriety. Crime, much of it drug-related, continued to plague the estate. In November 2024, Greater Manchester Police secured a three-month closure order that prohibited non-residents from congregating in stairwells, on landings, bridges and near bin chutes. Most residents of the estate welcomed the move whilst calling for stronger action to tackle the drug dealers directly. (10)

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, just as Rochdale was implementing these classic policies of large-scale clearance and redevelopment in the later 1960s, the Council cooperated with a Government-commissioned study of Deeplish, a so-called ‘twilight’ district of poor, predominantly owner-occupied housing, one mile south of the town centre. (In fact, Rochdale was selected for its relatively good record in the reconditioning of older properties.)

The report recommended financial support for housing and environmental improvements on an area basis. The Council followed up with a £6000 pilot scheme to cover Pullman, Pike, Penrith and Pomona Streets. In this way, Rochdale prefigured and pioneered a general shift, legislated in the 1969 and 1974 Housing Acts, towards the rehabilitation of areas often previously condemned and cleared as slum housing. (11)

Pomona Street after improvement works © *Manchester Evening News*

Well, Municipal Dreams are looking thin on the ground but let’s revisit and conclude this extended account of Rochdale’s council housing. Returning to the bigger picture, the County Borough of Rochdale had disappeared in a reform of local government in 1974 to become an enlarged Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale within Greater Manchester.

By the later 1970s, the new borough owned and managed around 21,500 homes on 82 estates. Of these, one-third had been built before 1939 and four-tenths between 1954 and 1964. Over a third of Rochdale’s council housing comprised three-bed houses and one-quarter two-bed houses. The numbers remind us that the vast majority of local council housing was not ‘modernist’ and did not suffer the alleged design problems of the multi-storey estates discussed in latter posts. (12)

Conversely, of course, council house tenants wherever they lived and in whatever form of housing did suffer the larger shifts affecting public housing in recent decades. A combination of well-meaning homelessness legislation (giving the right to a council home for those in ‘priority need’), Right to Buy allowing tenants to buy their homes and a near cessation of new build reducing council housing stock, and the sharp decline of employment in Britain’s traditional industries led to the residualisation of council housing. In other words, it became increasingly housing of and for our poorest citizens.

In 1984, the Borough Council reported its 21,000 tenants were ‘disproportionately unemployed/unskilled, single-parent families, elderly’. On the Kirkholt Estate – Rochdale’s flagship project of the 1950s and undeniably a step-up and decent housing for many thousands of its residents over many years – of its then 7000 population, 21 percent were unemployed and 12 percent were single-parents. Kirkholt became a Priority Estate within the Government’s regeneration programme of the time. (13)

Meanwhile both Conservative and New Labour governments were hostile (in varying degrees) to council housing (owned and managed by local authorities) as such. As noted earlier, Rochdale’s housing stock was transferred to Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, an arms-length management organisation (or ALMO) in 2002. Labour’s Decent Housing Standard enacted in 2000 required (rightly after years of cutbacks and neglect) massive investment in the public housing stock while public spending curbs restricted local authority borrowing. Housing associations could borrow as could ALMOs, created by the Labour Government as a ‘third way’ for councils reluctant to lose all control over their housing stock.

RBH, fittingly in the ‘Home of Cooperation’, became a mutual housing association in 2012 with a 13-strong board made up of six tenant members, four council members and three independent members. Sadly, that apparently progressive ethic has not shielded the organisation from the pressures and dynamics affecting the wider public housing sector and seemed to count for nothing in its treatment of Awaab Ishak.

RBH now owns and manages around 12,500 homes in the borough; there are almost 9000 on the local social housing waiting list. In 2023, around 200 families were living in temporary accommodation provided by the Borough.

Rochdale’s housing history reminds us of the huge contribution made by local government to providing decent and affordable housing to many millions over the years. That need and mission remain. But this account has amplified the first duty of social housing providers, that is to build well and manage effectively.

Sources

(1) Frances Perraudin, ‘The Rochdale estate challenging its “welfare ghetto” image’, Guardian, 6 July 2018

(2) Ed Howker, ‘Britain’s welfare ghettos’, Spectator, 9 October 2010

(3) Josh Halliday, ‘Poverty and pebble-dash on Rochdale “sink estate” – but is bulldozing the answer?’, The Guardian, 11 January 2016

(4) David Fenwick-Finn, ‘Rochdale regeneration or profit before people?’,The Meteor, 18 October 2017

(5) George Lythgoe, ‘I’m the last one in my block of flats and they’re bulldozing the others around me’, Manchester Evening News, 13 April 2025

(6) Rochdale Borough Council, Lower Falinge Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) Draft February 2021

(7) George Lythgoe, ‘I’m the last one in my block of flats and they’re bulldozing the others around me’,

(8) Lee Grimditch, ‘First people to live on infamous Greater Manchester estate ‘felt like guinea pigs‘, Manchester Evening News, 24 November 2024 and Borough of Rochdale, Official Handbook (1971), with thanks to Mike Ashworth and his impressive Flickr site.

(9) Housing Ombudsman, Special Report on Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (28 March 2023)

(10) See, for example, George Lythgoe (Local Democracy Reporting Service), ‘Rochdale residents speak out over three-month closure order’, 6 November 2024

(11) See The Deeplish Study Improvement Possibilities in a District of Rochdale (HMSO, 1966) and ‘Piloting Country on Course Out of the Twilight Zone’, Manchester Evening News, 13 August 2007

(12) Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, Report on Housing Policies, Part II (May 1977)

(13) Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, Rochdale’s Inner Areas Programme, 1985/86 Programme (November 1984)

A History of Council Housing in Rochdale: Part II, from 1945 to 1966

15 Tuesday Jul 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Lancashire

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1950s, 1960s, Rochdale

Although Rochdale had built on a large scale in the interwar period, as we saw in last week’s post, and although it had suffered little direct damage during the war itself, peacetime brought renewed challenge and increased expectation, reflecting both the persistence of slum housing in the town and popular demand for reform and reward.

Typical inner-city Rochdale housing, undated photograph

A survey of 18,375 houses in the borough in 1949 revealed 1600 back-to-back properties and 500 still reliant on pail closets or privies. A second survey four years later recorded 4388 substandard homes. (1)

But before the slum clearance programme begun in the 1930s could be renewed, there was an immediate housing crisis met in part in Rochdale, as elsewhere, by the erection of temporary prefab bungalows. Twenty of 67 were declared complete by December 1945; the Prefab Museum map shows a few more dotted around the borough. (2)

This was at best a temporary fix – the bungalows themselves were expected to last ten years though many survived longer – and planning for permanent post-war housing on a large and improved scale had begun early. Just two days after D-Day, as war still raged in Europe, the press reported that Rochdale was leading a Housing Sites Group comprising nine local councils to prepare for post-war construction. (3)

In February 1945, a special Council meeting to discuss housing, armed with a recent Ministry of Health circular empowering local authorities to prepare newbuild sites, proposed to build 538 houses in the first year of peace. New estates in Greave and Newbold were in the advance planning stage and the layout of what would be the borough’s early flagship project in Kirkholt was agreed. (4)

The pace of planning and its place in popular consciousness are shown by the Housing Exhibition the Council organised in the Old Baths on Smith Street in March. The plans for Kirkholt were exhibited and, in a very rare example of public consultation, attendees were invited to express their preference between two types of house (the exhibition provided ground floor prototypes) – one with a small kitchen and separate dining room, the other – which we might think more ‘modern’ – containing a large kitchen-diner and separate utilities room. (5)

Most feedback reportedly criticised the low ceiling height (just eight feet – an economising measure) of the proposed houses; a criticism endorsed by the Housing Committee in a letter to the Ministry of Health. The Committee, despite visiting the Ministry of Works’ demonstration site in Northolt, was also sceptical of permanent prefabricated housing but proceeded somewhat reluctantly with a proposed trial of some 50 to 60 such homes. (6) A larger number of BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) houses – of steel-frame construction with a characteristic steel sheet cladding on the upper storey – built on Waithlands Road earned the area the typical nickname ‘Tin Town’.

KIrkholt

It is the Kirkholt Estate, planned to house a population of 10,000, that captures the highest hopes of Rochdale’s councillors and best exemplifies post-war ideals. As Borough Surveyor WHG Mercer, observed: (7)

In the 1920s and 1930s, the housing estates were never larger than about 400 dwellings, and being on the fringe of existing developments, did not create communal problems … [But Kirkholt required] all the necessary provisions for day-to-day existence, namely schools for all ages, shops, public houses, churches, health clinic and a community centre.

This was the Neighbourhood Unit, championed by Patrick Abercrombie in his wartime plans for London and Plymouth, adopted in post-war official planning guidance, and exemplified by the London County Council’s Lansbury Estate built for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

German prisoners of war involved in the early layout of the Kirkholt Estate, 1945

The building of Kirkholt began in the summer of 1945 with German prisoners of war used to assist in the construction of roads and sewers. The first two houses completed (61 and 63 Queen Victoria Street) were occupied in July 1948; the first infant school in 1949; a junior school in 1952 and a secondary modern in 1956. The estate as a whole was completed in the late 1950s; the long-promised community centre and central parade of shops on The Strand were finally provided at around the same time. On completion, the estate housed almost one in twelve of Rochdale’s population. (8)

Early housing on the Kirkholt Estate, illustrated in the Borough’s 1952 *Official Handbook* @ Mike Ashworth

The Strand, Kirkholt, illustrated in the Borough’s 1971 *Official Guide* © Mike Ashworth

When you look at Kirkholt what you notice first of all is its layout – curving streets set among generous green space that hark back to the bucolic ideals of the earliest so-called cottage estates. Of those ‘cottages’, most are conventional, somewhat boxy, brick-built semi-detached houses although there were apparently some 15 or so housing types constructed and all ‘built in accordance with the recommendations of the Housing Manual of 1944, issued jointly by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Works’ according to the Borough’s 1954 Official Handbook. Thirteen three-storey blocks of flats were built but these proved less popular with tenants and unpopular with window cleaners and coalmen. (9)

Arkwright Way. Kirkholt, photographed in 2012 © Dr Neil Clifton and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Hogarth Road, KIrkholt. photographed in 2009 © whatlep and made available under a Creative Commons licence

There was another significant shift noted by Mr Mercer:

when slum clearance began to operate in 1930 it became obvious that there must be a greater variety of dwellings on each estate and … a number of one-bedroomed and four-bedroomed dwellings were erected.

The one-bedroom properties were bungalows reserved to elderly residents; in the 1950s almost one in five of Rochdale’s new council homes was of this type compared to one in twenty-five before the war.

The Borough’s Development Plan, produced under the terms of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and approved by Government in 1953, provides a good overview of the Council’s strategic vision. Its first five years were committed to meeting current housing needs, primarily by completing the Kirkholt Estate; a second 15-year phase envisaged redevelopment and slum clearance and the relief of central congestion. It aimed, reflecting the ambitions and ideals of its time, to create:

12 neighbourhood units (including existing estates) interspersed with green belts of land and separated from industrial areas which will be grouped within defined zones.

Ings Road, Brotherod, photographed in 2005 © Dr Neil Clifton and made available under a Creative Commons licence

Nook Housing Estate, an image from the Borough’s 1952 *Official Handbook*. The aerial view gives a powerful impression of the estate’s generous layout. @ Mike Ashworth

In simple numerical terms, Rochdale boasted 6688 council homes on 38 estates by mid-decade. At that point, Kirkholt (1855 homes) was by some way the largest; Brotherod (438), Turf Hill (424), Nook Farm (406) and Spotland (328) were next in order of size. (I’m aware that I probably throw out too many statistics – it’s just that they seem so telling when compared to the paltry numbers of genuine social rent homes being built today.)

And it’s maybe those numbers that allowed Rochdale’s mayor in 1966 to suggest: (10)

He did not think the Rochdale housing position was desperate. The actual number of people needing council houses, as opposed to those who simply desired them, was probably about two hundred and some on the list would be housed under clearance schemes.

He was defending the Council’s decision to build the ‘Seven Sisters’ – the nickname applied to the four 21-storey and three 17-storey point blocks that tower over Rochdale town centre. They were a significant departure in housing policy and were at the time one of the most innovative council housing schemes in the country.

College Bank

The Seven Sisters, photographed 1985. In the foreground, a statue of Rochdale son John Bright and the Touchstones Library and Museum. The image marks an artwork by Shirley Cameron, Monica Ross and Evelyn Silver, ‘Monument to Working Women’. Photograph Patsy Mullan.

The first plans for the College Bank scheme – to give it its official title – were unveiled in 1962 and the seven tower scheme – designed by Wimpey’s chief architect D Broadbent in conjunction with Borough Surveyor WHG Mercer – was officially approved the following year. They were built using no-fines concrete (that is concrete without fine aggregates or sand added to the mix) with posts and beams cast in situ. This was a form of non-traditional construction but here executed in sturdy and durable form.

Three show flats were presented to a viewing public on April 1965 and the first completed, 17-storey, block was opened by Richard Crossman, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Local Government, in October.

Mitchell Hey mural © Twentieth Century Society

Ceramic murals, provided by lecturers at Rochdale College of Art adorned the entrance halls. All but one were removed (with tenant agreement) in 1995; that by George and Joan Stephenson in the Mitchell Hey tower remains. (11)

The western range of the Seven Sisters viewed from the Memorial Gardens, photographed 2018

The flats were intended to attract professional people to Rochdale; they were let to those who applied on a separate waiting and those, primarily, who could afford its higher rents. Bedsitters renting at £2 9s (£2.45p – around £43 a week in today’s terms) and one-bed flats at £3 15s (£66) and £4 2s (£72.25p) let quickly; two-bed flats at £5 2s (about twice the rent of an equivalent council home – £90 a week contemporarily) a little less so but all proved popular. (12)

New residents included Tony McCormick, an art student, and his wife, from Hemel Hempstead (‘readily accepted by Rochdale people’, they said) and, from 1970, Karen and Kevin Quinn; Karen worked in admin, Kevin was a primary school teacher. Robin Parker, a social worker, moved in in 1974. Karen Quinn remembers:

It was quite posh at the time. We were quite proud to bring people there. Our friends thought it was wonderful.

Five of the Seven Sisters seen from the Town Hall balcony – an apt encapsulation of the borough’s municipal ambition, an image from Rochdale’s 1971 Official Guide @ Mike Ashworth

Fast forward to the present, the Seven Sisters still stand – an impressive architectural statement in the heart of Rochdale and, to my mind, as powerful a testament to municipal endeavour and aspiration as the town’s nearby town hall. But much has changed. In the slow evolution that affected council housing more broadly, the flats became less desirable, even, in some eyes, a ‘sink estate’. In Robin Parker’s view, the Council started re-housing people in the blocks ‘not suitable for high-rise living’ – a typical occurrence when the most vulnerable on the waiting list and those with least choice are allocated to so-called ‘hard to let’ estates.

In 2017, the tower’s new landlords, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) – an arms-length management organisation created by the Metropolitan Borough Council in 2002, transformed into a mutual housing association in 2012 – declared their intention to demolish the four 21-storey blocks, claiming Mitchell Hey, Dunkirk Rise, Tentercroft and Town Mill Brow were too expensive to refurbish. They would be replaced by 120 low-rise homes.

Established residents such as Audrey Middlehurst, a retired teacher who had lived in Mitchell Hey for 29 years, and Robin Parker, by now a former Labour councillor and erstwhile mayor of Rochdale, led a tenacious campaign to preserve their homes. It’s been a tortuous story (Robin Parker died, aged 78, in 2019; Audrey Middlehurst, aged 89, still lives in her College Bank flat) since then. It seemed the campaigners’ pleas had finally been met in March 2024 when RBH announced a deal with Legal & General that would fund renovation of the blocks. That deal collapsed in October 2024 and, as of now, the fate of the blocks remains uncertain. Residents’ lives, blighted by years of uncertainty, remain in limbo. (13)

For all their checkered history, the Seven Sisters remain. Another innovative but very different Rochdale scheme of the 1960s has been almost entirely demolished.

Ashfield Valley

The Ashfield Valley Estate was approved by the Council in 1966 and completed in 1968. It comprised 1014 flats in 26 deck-access slab blocks named in alphabetical order from Appleby to Zennor. (‘X’ was represented by Exton in case you were wondering.) It was built by Cruden Construction using the Skarne system – an industrialised building system developed in Sweden using precast concrete panels, some including built-in wiring and windows, assembled on-site.

The Council made much of the ‘linked walkways throughout the whole system, thereby ensuring maximum segregation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic’ and pointed to the provision of ‘adequate shopping facilities’ and children’s play areas ‘including a shallow pool constructed by reducing the depth of the Rochdale Canal for a length of some 600 yards’. (14)

Early residents such as Christian Wilkinson seemed happy with their new homes: (15)

In our old house on Merefield Street the kitchen was not big enough to swing a cat round. But my kitchen now is marvellous and the central heating is quite cheap. We never hear any rows or anybody moving about in the flats above or below us.

Ena Lindley said she like the decks – ‘I couldn’t do with corridors like the town centre flats’.

But, if there was a honeymoon period, it was very brief. By the mid-1970s, residents were complaining about an epidemic of vandalism, crime and antisocial behaviour. The estate’s caretaker, George Cartshore, quit in 1978:

More and more people are moving out of the Valley. More and more flats are standing empty and despite the best efforts of caretakers some blocks have deteriorated into an appalling and dangerous condition. Ashfield Valley will be a ghost town in five to ten years.

New residents were typically more vulnerable or more desperate, often housed under homelessness legislation and with least choice as to where they lived. As one long-term resident observed caustically:

This place is a dumping ground for has-beens and never-will-be’s. There are a lot of good people on this estate but we’re treated like a leper colony.

When Anne Power investigated ‘unpopular council housing estates’ in the early 1980s she noted how early blocks let well but by the time the Council reached Z, half the offers were turned down. By then, only 19 of the original tenants were still living on the estate and around a third of all tenants left each year Conversely, ‘it was said single male migrants from Donegal headed straight for the Valley having heard of the empty flats’. (16)

In 1983, a £3 million regeneration programme was completed that removed 37 decks and improved services, entrance facilities and landscaping but Ashfield Valley’s die was cast. It remained a tainted estate, avoided by would-be tenants and blacklisted by many local traders.

The availability – by official and unofficial means – of cheap accommodation did, however prove attractive to younger people and, like the Hulme Crescents, the estate became home to a thriving counterculture of bands, zines and informal artwork. Trevor Hoyle’s 1975 cult novel, Rule of the Night, is based on the estate. Simon Armitage’s poem, Xanadu, recalls his experiences as a probation officer working on the estate. (17)

Ashfield Valley sometime in the 1980s, unknown photographer

The final nail in the coffin of Ashfield Valley was the flooding of 15 of the 26 blocks in January 1987 as pipes thawed after a heavy freeze. After that, with some blocks already emptied and with no prospect of viable investment in the estate, demolition came to seem the only answer. Five blocks were razed in 1989; by August 1992, just three remained and these thoroughly renovated and rebranded as Stoneyvale Court. Sandbrook Park – home to an Odeon, Pizza Hut and MacDonalds and, with a lingering nod to an alternative heritage, the headquarters of the Co-operative Pharmacy – has taken its place.

Rochdale’s 1971 Official Guide poignantly described Ashfield Valley as ‘a triumph for contemporary planning and modern building techniques’ but, in 2025, it’s hard to see the scheme as anything other than an unalloyed failure, almost from inception. We should nevertheless avoid that ‘wisdom’ that comes with hindsight as we look at two other troubled estates that culminated Rochdale’s council housing efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s. We’ll examine Lower Falinge and the Freehold Estate and conclude this story in next week’s post.

Thanks

Especial thanks to Mike Ashworth for sharing some images and pages from his Flickr site, a wonderful archive of diverse historical records, too varied to list but well worth your time.

Sources

(1) Rebe P Taylor, Rochdale Retrospect (Corporation of Rochdale,1956)

(2) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 8 December 1945 and Prefab Museum map

(3) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 8 July 1944

(4) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 10 February 1945

(5) ‘Rochdale’s Houses’, Daily Dispatch, 23 March 1945. The exhibition was officially opened by Hartley Shawcross, then Regional Housing Commissioner, who would be elected Labour MP for St Helens in July 1945 and as Attorney General led the British prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials.

(6) ‘Current Topics’, Rochdale Observer, 6 June 1945

(7) Quoted in Taylor, Rochdale Retrospect

(8) Oldham Rochdale HMR Pathfinder Heritage Assessment, Kirkholt Final Report, March 2008

(9) This and the succeeding quotation are drawn fromTaylor, Rochdale Retrospect’

(10) ‘Housing Experiment in a Town’s Centre’, The Guardian, 3 October 1966. The mayor in question was Alderman Cyril Smith. Smith had been appointed mayor as a Labour member but resigned from the party in August 1966 in a protest against rent increases agreed by the Labour majority. (Labour lost its council majority as a result.) Smith was elected Liberal MP for Rochdale in 1970. Well-founded allegations of personal and political wrongdoing tarnished his later years.

(11) Twentieth Century Society, Murals, 24 George and Joan Stephenson, Ceramic Mural, 1966

(12) Joshi Herrman, ‘Towers on the hill: The dwindling life of Rochdale’s ‘Seven Sisters’, The Mill, 3 January 2021

(13) Ewan Gawne, ‘Deal to redevelop town’s “landmark” falls apart’, BBC News, Manchester, 23 October 2024

(14) Borough of Rochdale, Official Handbook, 1971 (with thanks to Mike Ashworth)

(15) ‘Well, it seemed a good idea at the time’, Manchester Evening News, 13 August 2007

(16) Anne Elizabeth Power, The Development of Unpopular Council Housing Estates and Attempted Remedies, 1895-1984, London School of Economics PhD, July 1985

(17) Damon Wilkinson, ‘Greater Manchester’s forgotten punk estate’, Manchester Evening News, 13 October 2018

A History of Council Housing in Rochdale: Part I, from the Industrial Revolution to the Second World War

08 Tuesday Jul 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Lancashire

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1920s, 1930s, Pre-1914, Rochdale

Rochdale Town Hall, completed in 1871 and recently restored to its founding glory, is a municipal dream in itself – a superb testimony to the vision and pride of our Victorian civic forebears. This post won’t ignore the town hall – how could it? – but it will focus on a more practical aspect of municipal enterprise that was probably unimaginable to those pioneers, the provision of municipal housing. At peak in the early 1980s, there were around 22,000 council homes in Rochdale and this series of posts will tell their story in all its (literal and figurative) highs and lows.

Rochdale can trace its history to the Domesday Book of 1086 in which it was recorded as Recedham. By the 1500s, it was already a textile town – woollen cloth at this time – and it was described by Celia Fiennes in 1698 as ‘a pretty neate town, built all of stone’. Steam power arrived in 1791; the cotton trade took off in the 19^th century. Its population grew from 8542 in 1801 to 83,114 one hundred years later. (Boundary extensions in 1900 and 1933 added to the borough’s size and population.) (1)

The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland’s account of the town in 1868 provides a succinct description of a typical Lancashire mill town of its day but its near tenfold growth in population growth ensured that Rochdale was less ‘pretty’ and ‘neate’ than it had been. (2)

There are about 160 factories, distributed in every available and accessible part of the town and neighbouring heights, where upwards of 11,000 persons are engaged in cotton mills and print works, where strong calicoes, fustians, and other coarse fabrics are made, and about 6,000 in flannel, baize, and other woollen factories. The power loom is now principally used, but there are still large numbers of handloom weavers. A considerable business is done also in the manufacture of machinery, at which about 1,150 are employed, and hat making is extensively followed.

The Improvement Commissioners, authorised by private act of parliament in 1825 and elected by the town’s ratepayers to ‘watch, light and cleanse’ the town, suggest an early attempt to impose some order on this breakneck growth. Rochdale’s accession to municipal borough status under the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act represented a significant step forward. Gas and water supply were taken under municipal control in 1844 and 1866 respectively and, after Rochdale became a County Borough (effectively a unitary authority) in 1888, electricity (1900) and the tram system (1902) were municipalised.

The interior of the newly restored Town Hall © The Manc Group

The Town Hall, designed by William Henry Crossland in Gothic Revival style, with the grand clock tower added by Alfred Waterhouse in 1887, speaks to this civic ambition. The council itself was dominated by the Liberal Party in its early decades. Labour acquired a small presence – six or seven councillors out of 48 councillors and aldermen in total – in the 1930s but even in 1945 the Liberals held 23 seats, Conservatives 16 and Labour 10. The first majority Labour administration was formed in 1963. The town is also naturally proud of those ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ who founded the country’s first modern cooperative society in 1844.

The pail closet system illustrated in AG Anderson, *Report of an Investigation as the Housing Conditions with a Discussion of their Correlation with the Chief Vital Statistics and Some Notes on Town Planning* (1911)

But this progressive politics did little to mitigate the growing evils of urban squalor and slum housing. It’s true that from 1868, thanks to the initial efforts of Edward Taylor, a local pharmacist, the borough did develop its eponymous ‘Rochdale System’. This replaced a basic hole in the ground privy with a hole with two buckets, one for household refuse, the other for human waste. By 1876, there were 5000 such privies in Rochdale and the borough had a remunerative sideline selling manure to local farmers.

A Rochdale court illustrated in AG Anderson, *Report of an Investigation as the Housing Conditions with a Discussion of their Correlation with the Chief Vital Statistics and Some Notes on Town Planning* (1911)

But the system – an innovative reform in its day – persisted; new installations were halted in 1909 but in 1911 79 percent of Rochdale’s homes were still using the pail closet system; 41 percent of local families shared toilet facilities; just 9 percent of homes were connected to mains sewerage. (3) It was further recorded that almost one quarter of Rochdale’s homes were ‘Houses not Through’, that is lacking any form of through ventilation; of these 3470 were true back-to-backs.

That’s a lot of numbers but allow me to share one more set of statistics. In 1908, Rochdale’s mortality rate (deaths per 1000 of the population) was 20.34; that of the so-called 76 Great Towns (of over 50,0000 population) 15.84 and that of England and Wales as a whole, 14.69.

AG Anderson, the town’s Medical Officer of Health who had compiled this data, called it ‘a wanton and inexcusable waste of life’.

Anderson called for an extension of the borough westwards (away from the pollution that blighted eastern districts) and thoroughgoing town planning:

It is only by such comprehensive and organised schemes where every part is in its proper place and co-ordinated with the whole, that we can very hope to attain unity of purpose and economy in house building; and at the same time secure that every house, however humble, shall be a sanitary house. For although every house must be built by someone, yet in a well-ordered community the ultimate responsibility for every house should, and must rest, with the Authority in whose sanitary area it exists.

In the same year, the Council itself expressed the view that ‘an improved type of house, with bath and not less than three bedrooms, was required for artisans in Rochdale’ but its hopes lay for the time being not in municipal provision but in the comprehensive town planning that Anderson advocated. In 1912, the Council forwarded a proposal to the Local Government Board for a 1300-acre (526 hectare) town planning scheme in Marland (well to the west of the town centre and partly in the neighbouring Urban District of Norden). (4)

But in discussing housebuilding it discussed options: private, municipal and cooperative. Existing council schemes in Manchester, Salford, Birkenhead, Sheffield and Brighton were examined but the councillors feared that financial constraints would force ‘the adoption of block or tenement dwellings which do not find favour in Rochdale’. Anderson advocated a scheme by which a cooperative society (acting as a public utility society) borrowed money from government to build on land provided at advantageous rates from the council. ‘It should not be difficult in Rochdale (the cradle of cooperation) for some such scheme’, he concluded. (5)

But, of course, it was. Finally, in October 1914, a Liberal, Alderman Collinge, proposed a resolution, passed by the Council, that the municipality itself should build the improved type of dwellings desired. The timing – three months after the outbreak of the First World War – was inauspicious. At first, the Council persisted. A more modest (43 acre) town planning scheme for Marland was approved in January 1915 and it became one of eleven across the country authorised by the Local Government Board.

No such plans would be implemented in the midst of total war but the prospect of war’s end and the growing sentiment that the sacrifice and service of war should be rewarded in peacetime led to renewed proposals, catalysed by the Local Government Board Circular 86/1917 ‘Housing after the War’ which promised ‘substantial financial assistance from public funds’ to local councils prepared to implement approved programmes of working-class housing.

In October 1917, the Liberal councillor Edward Thomas secured a Health Committee resolution that the Council build 250 council houses after the war ‘subject to Government financial assistance’: (6)

he hoped the Council would boldly face the difficult problems before them, remembering that man was greater than his surroundings, and that he could shape the destiny of his race.

And those town planning ideals remained. Patrick Abercrombie, the Lever Professor of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool and rapidly emerging as Britain’s leading town planner, was appointed to design Rochdale’s post-war housing scheme. Abercrombie’s proposed role was not universally acclaimed. Alderman Clarke spoke disparagingly of ‘some of the fancy schemes prepared by some of these fancy gentlemen’; Councillor Booth concurred, having: (7)

rather a dread of these experts, especially from the south, coming here to advise on housing because the garden cities and things that looked very nice in their districts were unsuitable in Rochdale.

Abercrombie, both born and at this time working in Lancashire, survived this censure. Meanwhile, the Council’s ambitions grew – it had acquired land in Spotland and now proposed to build 350 houses within three months and 650 more within a further six. That was unrealistic at any time but particularly so in a period of postwar inflation and labour shortage. Rochdale’s first four council houses were handed over to tenants in January 1921. Progress thereafter was more rapid and the Borough boasted 580 council houses by 1922. (8)

An image from the Council’s Official Guide to the Borough published in 1925. With thanks to Mike Ashworth for permission to use this image taken from his wonderful Flickr site.

The role of Abercrombie, who insisted he work in conjunction with local council architects and surveyors, appears to have been pretty light touch though, as ‘consulting architect’, he spoke to the Housing Committee in January 1920 on the subject of ‘concrete houses’. The Housing Committee travelled to Leeds to view two local forms being trialled in July 1920 but it doesn’t appear this interest was followed up. (9)

Verdun Crescent, photographed 2013 © Gene Hunt and made available through a Creative Commons licence. Other streets nearby in this early post-war era are evocatively named Marne Crescent, Jutland Avenue and Mons Avenue.

Nevertheless, Rochdale had made significant progress in difficult circumstances. Building costs had had increased threefold since 1914 and the Government’s ambitious programme – the 500,000 houses promised by prime minister Lloyd George to be delivered under its flagship 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act – fell victim to public spending cuts in 1921. The high cost of these new homes led to high rents: a three-bed, parlour home let at 16 shillings a week (about £38 currently) and was unaffordable to many in need.

Some form of state support remained essential however. A Conservative Government, with Neville Chamberlain as Minster of Health and Housing, passed a Housing Act in 1923. It hoped, however, that, suitably incentivised, private contractors would step into the breach with local councils building only where they could prove necessity. It was a sign of these changed political priorities that Rochdale proposed a housing scheme of 200 houses in 1923 of which 100 would be built by private enterprise and, of 100 built by the Council, half would be for sale. (10)

Turf Hill Estate under construction,1926 © Britain from Above, EPW016790

In Rochdale, as elsewhere, the 1924 Housing Act passed by the first Labour government provided a far bigger boost to council house building. Existing estates in Turf Hill and Clarke’s Lane were extended and in 1926 the Borough Surveyor was asked to prepare a plan to build 300 council homes a year over the next three years.

Turf Hill Road near Birkdale Road, photographed in 2013 © Ian S and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Conservatives, whilst grudgingly accepting the need for municipal building, continued to complain about the form and expense of contemporary council housing, particularly the additional living room or parlour favoured by housing reformers. Harry Wycherley, mayor and Housing Committee chair, remarked: (11)

Years ago when the earlier schemes were under discussion, it was pointed out that the Lancashire operative desires a cottage house. But the powers that be in London thought they knew much better and insisted upon a large proportion of parloured houses. Some of these are occupied by what are termed working-class families but many are tenanted by lower middle-class folk.

His fellow Conservative member, John Rhodes, commenting on a new contract for 128 houses on Albert Royds Street that would be built for £100 less than their predecessors and let at around 10s a week, congratulated the Council on providing ‘houses which the average working man could afford to occupy’. (12)

A visit by councillors to Derby in September 1926 to view newly built houses with ‘cast iron shells coated with cement rough cast, and asbestos lined interiors’ shows the hope that non-traditional methods might enable cheaper and quicker construction and lower rents. It seems, fortunately perhaps, that the Council did not pursue its initial interest. (13)

The second Labour Government’s 1930 Housing Act aimed to address some of the acknowledged failings of the first generation of council housing by specifically incentivising slum clearance and the rehousing of slum dwellers. Rochdale continued to develop new housing and estates – in 1934, it claimed 2834 council houses had been built: ‘probably one eighth of the entire population has been rehoused by the municipality since the war’. (14)

Holborn Street, Brimrod, photographed in 2013 © Dr Neil Clifton and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Of equal importance, however, was progress in slum clearance in which Alderman Wycherley averred ‘Rochdale might justly claim to be in the front rank as far as clearance areas were concerned’. In 1935, it was stated 19 slum areas had been cleared and 570 people rehoused. The new Brimrod Estate, south-west of the town centre, was built specifically for the: (15)

accommodation of persons dispossessed by the clearance schemes in the Whitehall Street area and other areas … a beautiful estate overlooking the green valley of the Roch towards Bury Road with the lump of Knowl Hill silhouette against the sunset’

That might seem press hyperbole but the quality of design and landscaping of the estate is rare among the estates built nationally for a predominantly poorer population in the 1930s.

New estates such as the Cutgate Estate to the far north-west of the town continued to be developed; Cutgate illustrating another increasingly important aspect of council housing provision in this era and beyond- accommodation for the elderly, bungalows that reminded a slightly effusive reporter of the ‘lovely old almshouses in our country villages’.

By 1939, Rochdale had built 3882 council homes on some twenty estates. The town suffered little from wartime bombing but the war itself created new challenges and new expectations. These will be dealt with in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Greater Manchester Museums, Revealing Histories, Remembering Slavery, Rochdale

(2) Genuki, Rochdale, Yorkshire, England. Geographical and Historical information from 1868.

(3) This and the succeeding discussion are drawn from AG Anderson, Report of an Investigation as the Housing Conditions with a Discussion of their Correlation with the Chief Vital Statistics and Some Notes on Town Planning, (Rochdale, 1911). With thanks to the online resources of the Wellcome Collection.

(4) ‘Rochdale Town Council, ‘The Housing Problem’, Rochdale Observer, October 6 1917

(5) AG Anderson, Medical Officer of Health Report 1912. With thanks to the online resources of the Wellcome Collection.

(6) ‘Rochdale Town Council, ‘The Housing Problem’, Rochdale Observer, October 6 1917

(7) Rochdale Town Council: The Housing Scheme, Rochdale Observer, December 7 1918

(8) ‘Rochdale in 1918: Municipal and General Review’, Rochdale Observer, 28 December 1918 and ‘Town Council’, Rochdale Times, 8 January 1921

(9) Building News23 January 1920 and‘Concrete Houses’, Rochdale Observer, 31 July 1920

(10) ‘Rochdale in 1923’, Rochdale Times, 29 December 1923

(11) ‘Rochdale’s Housing Needs’, Rochdale Observer, 3 February 1926

(12) ‘Corporation Houses at Hamer’, Rochdale Observer, 3 July 1926

(13) ‘Cast Iron Houses for Rochdale’, Rochdale Observer, 1 September 1926

(14) ‘Housing Progress in Rochdale’, Rochdale Observer, 7 July 1934

(15) Information on clearance areas drawn from ‘Rochdale in 1935’, Rochdale Observer, 28 December 1935. The quotation on the Brimrod Estate comes from the previous source.

The Hillcrest Estate, Highgate: ‘of a kind which many well-to-do people would very gladly inhabit’

01 Tuesday Apr 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, London

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1940s, Haringey

I’m very pleased to feature this week a guest by Ray Rogers who ha contributed previously with a fine account of Hornsey’s Campsbourne Cottage Estate. Ray is a conservation and historic buildings specialist with a long-standing interest in housing policy and design going back to his early experience of designing council housing in a London borough architects’ department. Now retired, he is conservation officer for the Hornsey Historical Society and a longer version of this article was first published in 2024 in HHS Bulletin 65.

North Hill is one of the most architecturally diverse streets in Highgate. As well as some fine 18^th century buildings there are examples of early social housing and interwar blocks of flats, the most famous of which are Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint blocks. It was into this setting that the Hillcrest Estate was built between 1946 and 1949.

The building of the Hillcrest Estate involved two principal players, Hornsey Borough Council and the architect Sir Thomas Bennett. Hornsey became an Urban District Council under the 1894 Local Government Act and achieved municipal borough status in 1903. Although the council came to be dominated by the Municipal Reform Party, which was a local form of Conservatism, it saw itself as modern and progressive. In 1903 Hornsey UDC had built some of the earliest council housing in the country, in Highgate and at the Campsbourne Cottage Estate in Hornsey and continued to build municipal housing in the interwar years.

Towards the end of the war the council drew up a shortlist of sites for new housing development as part of its contribution to the post-war housing programme. In December 1944, the borough agreed to buy the site of Park House, a large Regency mansion set in spacious grounds that by the mid-nineteenth century had been converted into an establishment for ‘the reception and ultimate reformation of penitent fallen women’ known as the Park House Penitentiary. In 1900 the building had been taken over by an Anglican female religious community and was known as the House of Mercy until it was closed in 1940. [1]

Fig 1 OS plan of 1936 showing the House of Mercy site on North Hill, with Lubetkin’s Highpoint One opposite (Haringey Archives, Bruce Castle)

A price of £22,500 was agreed for the House of Mercy site in May 1945 and a month later the Borough Engineer recommended the appointment of Thomas Bennett as architect. [2] T.P. Bennett was one of several firms recommended to the council by the RIBA in 1944 but perhaps it was also relevant that Bennett lived in Highgate village, just a few minutes’ walk from the site. Life president of Highgate Golf Club, Bennett lived in Highgate from 1928 until his death in 1980.

In the 1930s Bennett’s practice had designed some notable buildings including the Saville Theatre and the John Barnes department store in Finchley Road as well as private mansion blocks at Eyre Court in Finchley Road (1930-31), Hillfield Court, Belsize Park (1934), Dorset House, Marylebone (1934-5), Marsham Court, Marsham Street (1937) and Portsea Hall, Edgware Road (1938). These were all large-scale developments occupying a whole street block and sharing a common architectural language with more than a hint of art deco styling.

Fig 2 T.P. Bennett, photographed by Walter Bird in 1967 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Bennett was highly regarded for his planning of apartment buildings in London, especially in the layout and servicing of the individual flats. The Times obituary in 1980 recalled that Bennett’s ability to: [3]

assess the potential of a site, to prepare alternative schemes for its development and to produce meticulous figures for cost and return, gave him an enviable reputation with developers.

He therefore appeared to be a sound choice as architect for the new Hillcrest Estate as building in the immediate postwar period was problematic, with a shortage of materials and tight Government cost controls coupled with an especially harsh winter in 1947.

The site was not an easy one to develop and Bennett explored different layouts in attempting to cope with the sloping ground and the large number of mature trees, whilst trying to achieve the most cost effective scheme. Council minutes record that the architect was requested to give special care to the existing trees and in the planting of new trees and shrubs [4]. An article on the proposed scheme in The Builder in August 1947 gives a useful summary of the problem. [5]

Apart from the short frontage to North Hill, the site consists of a tableland with a central area sloping northwards, and with a sharp drop on the north and east sides down to the surrounding roads, in places as much as 25 feet. The perimeter, except on the North Hill frontage, has an unbroken and dense belt of large trees. Natural levels limit the possibility of road access to the site to the south end of North Hill, roughly coinciding with the old drive, where the general surface is level with the main road.

Plans for the site were finally approved by the Ministry of Health in May 1946, subject to a reduction in floor areas, and Bennett was instructed to proceed with working drawings for a total of 116 flats in a mix of four- and seven-storey blocks. The reduced floor areas meant that the kitchens in the taller blocks were smaller than planned for, leading to the proposed provision of communal laundry facilities for the estate in a separate building also housing child welfare accommodation and a clubroom

However, in June 1946 the Ministry revised the floor areas yet again, increasing the size of the three-bed flats from 800 up to 850 square feet. The scheme was redrawn once more with enlarged kitchen and dining areas. Council minutes record that ‘The alteration, which affects 3-bedroom flats only, will make it possible to enlarge the kitchens and dining recesses, which were somewhat cramped’. [6] As a result, the community provision was never built.

Fig 3 Site layout in May 1946 (Haringey Archives, Bruce Castle)

Tenders were agreed with Globe Contractors Ltd in July 1947 for a contract sum of £189,251 but just one week after works commenced further changes were required as described in the Council minutes of 22 July 1947. [7]

The Chairman of the Plans and Town Planning Committee has examined plans submitted by the architect, Sir Thomas Bennett, showing a flat roof to the four-storey blocks … in view of the latter’s opinion that owing to the siting and design of the blocks a flat roof would not be detrimental to the architectural effect, it has been agreed that this type of construction be adopted. The Ministry’s timber allocation in any case was insufficient to provide a pitched roof.

Fig 4 Aerial view of the scheme showing pitched roofs on the four storey blocks (*The Builder*, August 1947)

The finished estate consists of 116 flats in four 4-storey blocks and three 7-storey blocks all named after World War Two military commanders. The blocks have a reinforced concrete frame and are faced in Dorking multi-coloured bricks, the form of construction used by Bennett on his prewar mansion block at Portsea Hall. Each flat had electric hot water storage, gas ignited smokeless fuel fires to the living rooms and generous kitchen fittings. The floors were finished with deal blocks to the living rooms and dining recesses.

Fig 5 Final layout plan of the estate (*Architectural Design*, December 1948)

The design of Hillcrest eschews any art deco references, with the use of timber vertical sliding sash windows instead of the metal windows used on the mansion blocks. In March 1947 the Ministry was still requesting further economies in materials resulting in the loss of certain ‘architectural features’. This can be seen in the difference between the drawn elevations of the seven-storey blocks and the finished buildings. Instead of a carefully composed elevation comprising the classic convention of base, middle and top the built elevations are much simplified [8].

However, Bennett still managed to give special attention to the brickwork, with deeply rusticated brick bands running around the ground floor and around the top of the blocks (similar to that on his1930s mansion block at Eyre Court). The ground and first floor windows also have projecting brick keystones and feature a projecting brick panel, with mitred corners, below the first floor window cill level, a remarkable detail somewhat reminiscent of pre-war Dutch Expressionist architecture. The entrance doors are marked by curved concrete canopies and the staircases are lit by round porthole windows that contrast with the regular grid of the timber windows.

Fig 6 Mountbatten House on completion showing brickwork banding around the ground floor and the top of the building, and the paired arrangement of the windows and balconies (*The Builder*, July 1949).

Although Bennett’s pre-war housing had consisted of multi-storey blocks his low-rise blocks for the Hillcrest estate were equally innovative. There are two forms of the four-storey blocks. Montgomery House and Tedder House contain one- and two-bed flats. Alexander and Cunningham Houses, with a larger floor plan, each contain three-bed flats. Both types have symmetrical facades with an interesting balance of solid and void with the larger blocks using the refuse chutes as bold architectural features.

Fig 7 Detail of the brickwork at ground and first floor of the seven storey blocks (2022)

Fig 8 Montgomery and Tedder Houses (2022) Plan: *The Builder*, July 1949

Most interest focussed on the seven-storey blocks, named after Admiral Mountbatten, Air Marshall Dowding and General Wavell. These show the influence of Bennett’s prewar mansion blocks in both their design and planning. In particular, the paired arrangement of the windows and balconies and the horizontal emphasis given by the white-painted concrete slab edges and balcony coping, topped by metal railings, are remarkably similar in spirit to the design of the mansion block at Portsea Hall.

Fig 9 Alexander and Cunningham Houses (2022) Plan: *The Builder*, July 1949

The seven-storey blocks contain one-, two- and three-bed flats. The detailed layout of the individual flats also benefits from the influence of Bennett’s mansion block designs. In both the four- and seven-storey blocks the plan form ensures that all flats have a triple aspect. The flats all have separate kitchens with a dining recess forming part of the living space. Each flat has both a sun balcony and a utility balcony in the recessed corner of the blocks, with access to a refuse chute from the kitchens of the adjoining flats, very similar to the planning of Bennett’s pre-war mansion blocks.

Fig 10 Typical floor plan of the seven storey blocks (*The Builder*, July 1949)

The scheme was widely reviewed in the architectural press, receiving detailed appraisals in the Architects’ Journal (April 28^th 1949) and The Builder (July 8^th 1949). One article noted that: [9]

They (the blocks) are sited with the smaller type near the site entrance and the higher type well back, and are all in carefully considered positions in respect of aspect, vicinity of trees and shrubs, contours and effort to give every flat uninterrupted outlook from three sides.

The Financial Times carried a piece by the architect Trystan Edwards who wrote that Hillcrest was a new housing estate: [10]

which exemplifies a very high standard in the design of the flats for people of lower income levels. What is especially noteworthy … is that both in outward appearance and in the internal finish of the buildings, they are of a kind which many well-to-do people would very gladly inhabit.

In November 1949 the Architectural Review carried a long article by Lionel Brett (later to become Viscount Esher, a major figure in post-war urban planning) looking critically at the blocks of flats then being built in London after the war. Hillcrest was included in the review as the only important postwar example of the ‘star type’ block, following Swedish practice, but Brett criticised the architecture of the tall blocks: [11]

It would be interesting to know on what grounds the neo-Georgian style was chosen for these 7-storey blocks, whose inherently modern shape has often in the past been given an interesting contemporary expression.

A later Architects’ Journal article (January 1950) complimented the planning and layout of the Hillcrest site if not the style of the buildings: [12]

Finally Mr T P Bennett’s flats at Highgate – across the road from the celebrated Highpoint group – are included, in spite of their rather boring adherence to the stylistic convention of Georgian residences piled one on the other, because of the treatment of the site: the blocks are freely disposed on it to admirable effect, suggesting that the planning of flats is at last making its escape from enslavement to the road frontage and the enclosed court.

We cannot know exactly why Bennett adopted the ‘neo-Georgian’ style for Hillcrest but it could simply be that he decided to make a break from the pre-war art deco aesthetic. The post-war world was quite different and decisions over design and construction methods were heavily dictated by the availability of materials and imposed cost controls.

The Hillcrest Estate is 75 years old and now seems a good time to assess its success or failure and to ask the questions – how have the buildings performed and have people liked living there? In general, the Hillcrest blocks have performed well with none of the fundamental design faults that have plagued much post-war public housing. The heating system has been updated, a door-entry system installed and the windows have been replaced with like-for-like double glazed timber sash windows but apart from this the blocks are relatively little changed. The estate remains evidently popular with residents, both past and present, and the flat plans are well liked. [13]

Fig 12 Wavell House showing the recessed utility balconies and refuse chutes (2024)

Although the Estate has performed well in design and management terms there are some issues that need to be addressed. The buildings continue to need further investment to ensure that living conditions match 21^st century standards and expectations. For example, the lack of insulation means some flats can be cold. The estate suffers from reduced maintenance of the blocks and of the site as a whole and the landscaping, including areas of importance for nature conservation, has been less well maintained in recent years. Children’s play space provision remains an issue and the single estate road is heavily parked with cars and vans visually dominating much of the site. Perhaps the biggest single threat to the integrity of the estate was a proposal to infill part of the site with new blocks of flats as part of a move to densify existing estates to increase local housing provision. A proposal to infill the estate, instigated by Haringey council in 2014, was dropped following resistance from residents but may well be revived at some time in the future.

The Hillcrest Estate was a significant development in its time and remains a rare and complete example of the free grouping of high-rise blocks designed to respond to the character of a specific site. The generous space between the blocks has allowed the large forest scale trees to reach their full height and spread, resulting in a successful balance between the buildings and their landscape setting.

Fig 13 Dowding House showing the round staircase windows (2024)

The quality of its design was disputed at the time but can be more readily appreciated today, particularly in the three-dimensional modelling of the tall blocks, in the handling of the large elevations and in the care taken over the detailing of the brickwork.

Fig 14 Mature trees fill the landscape between the blocks (2024)

Hornsey Borough Council celebrated its postwar achievements in planning and development with the 1949 publication of the book Beauty and the Borough written by Councillor Frederick Cleary, with a Foreword by Thomas Bennett. The book is mainly concerned with improving the appearance of the borough after wartime bomb damage and dereliction but in a section on postwar council housing the ‘Hill Crest’ estate is proudly described as having been: [14]

acknowledged by the Ministry of Health in 1949 to be London’s finest Council housing scheme. In five and a half acres of woodlands overlooking London, the Council has provided blocks of modern flats in a delightful country atmosphere.

Fig 15 Dowding and Wavell Houses in their landscape setting (2022)

The Hillcrest estate remains a testimony to the architect, to the local council of the time and to the progressive housing policies of the postwar Labour government. At a time when we are once again aware of the need for good social housing the story of the Hillcrest Estate is something to be celebrated.

References

John Richardson, Highgate, 1983 p 132
Hornsey BC Committee Minutes 17 July 1945
The Times, Obituary of Sir Thomas’ Bennett, 31 January 1980
Hornsey BC Committee Minutes 21 January 1947
The Builder, 22 August 1947, p206-208
Hornsey BC Committee Minutes 25 June 1946
Hornsey BC Committee Minutes 22 July 1947
Hornsey BC Committee Minutes 18 March 1947 record that the Ministry of Health required further economies in material and costs, including ‘certain architectural and other features.’
Architectural Design, December 1948, p 261
Trystan Edwards, Financial Times, 28 September 1948
Lionel Brett, Post War flats in Britain, Architectural Review November 1949 p315-322
The Architects’ Journal, January 9, 1950, p79
I am grateful to Peter Purdie, formerly Housing Manager at Haringey Council, for helpful background.
Councillor Frederick E. Cleary, Beauty and the Borough, The Saint Catherine Press Ltd, 1949.

Book Review and Author Interview: Rob Clayton, Provision – Architecture of the Post-War Consensus

25 Tuesday Mar 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Book reviews

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1960s, 1970s

Rob Clayton, Provision – Architecture of the Post-War Consensus (Stay Free Publishing, 2025)

‘Provision’ might seem, at first glance, a modest, even a rather bland word but, as the text and photographs of Rob Clayton’s fine new book portray, here it captures an era when we thought it was the duty of the state to provide for the needs of the people. That broad consensus lasted some thirty post-war years but from the mid-1970s a new ideology arose that saw the ‘state’ as oppressive and ‘provision’ as a form of dependency. After four decades of neo-liberalism – austerity, privatisation, deregulation and a failing free market – we might have begun to think again.

To that end, Clayton’s book is not only a powerful evocation of past ideals and practice but a call to action. That is manifest, most powerfully, in the photographs themselves. As Clayton says in his introduction:

I make no apologies for portraying [the buildings] in heroic composition, in the best possible light, with reverence. This act of photography is my voice, my rebellion, my dissent. They are from a lost future where our country invested in us all – collectively we would triumph – a high point of social democracy …

Owen Hatherley’s contribution recalls the apposite slogan coined by of the modernist Sigfried Giedion in his 1929 advocacy of modernist design, Liberated Living: ‘light, air, and openness’.

Whilst some modern aficionados of Brutalism claim to revel in its grittiness and grime (thereby, of course, precisely echoing the criticisms of those who would condemn it), Clayton shows his subjects in a bright and sunny light, literally and figuratively. We see them pristine, anew and as new, and we better appreciate the ambition and aesthetic and impact of their creation.

Barnabas Calder’s endnote is more sombre, reminding us how far this expansive era of concrete and steel construction was predicated on seemingly endless supplies of cheap energy with no thought to global warming. Whilst we must build differently in the current climate emergency, his analysis also makes a powerful case against the needless and hugely energy inefficient demolition of our Brutalist landmarks.

Dollan Aqua Centre, East Kilbride, 1968: architect, Alexander Buchanan Cambell; Grade A-listed @ Rob Clayton

Another quality of the photography is its range, well summarised in the book’s sections – Housing, Education, Leisure, Worship, Civic, Transport and Commerce. In the latter sections, featuring a mix of public and private schemes, we see the extent and reach of this modernist wave as well as its geographic range across the regions and nations of the UK.

‘The Ziggurats’, University of East Anglia, Norwich,1967: architects, Denys Lasdun and Partners; Grade II*-listed @ Rob Clayton

Cable Wynd House, Edinburgh, 1965; architects, Alison and Hutchison and Partners. Grade A-listed @ Rob Clayton

In Housing and Education, we see state provision at its most direct and far-reaching – the millions of homes and the new schools and universities, all offering unprecedented opportunities to ordinary British people. Rob’s own words in my interview with him below capture the moment well:

I was a working-class lad from a poor part of an average British city, yet I felt the whole world of opportunity was waiting for me.

You’ll rightly enjoy the photographs and appreciate the architecture but this personal and political dimension is important to Rob and his project.

Birmingham Central Library, 1974: architect John Madin. Demolished 2016 @ Rob Clayton

Rob acknowledges too how all this might seem nostalgic and how easily earlier ambitions are labelled utopian. Those caveats are understandable in changed times but I think this book demonstrates how much can be achieved – was achieved – with optimism and political will: not a utopia but the fulfilled expectation of something better for all our people. From that we can learn.

Come for the photos, stay for the politics! This is a generous book, featuring some 160 buildings across 319 large-format pages. My thanks to Rob for providing the images from his book featured in this post and please read the interview below in which Rob talks very eloquently about his photographic practice and his intentions and hopes for the book.

Provision – Architecture of the Post-War Consensus can be purchased from Stay Free Publishing.

An Interview with Rob Clayton

Rob, what was the inspiration for your new book?

I have multiple inspirations for the book. I think one is a psychological one that goes back to childhood as the book is concerned with buildings built up until 1979 and I was born in 1966. As a child I was fascinated and excited when I visited big cities. Growing up in a small cathedral city, Worcester, with modest modernity (although historically it did receive extensive rebuilding in the 1960s), my childhood visits to places like Birmingham and Bristol are etched in my memory. They seemed cutting edge and monumental in scale – tall buildings, round buildings, flyovers, underpasses, airports – concrete and glass were shaping a new modern world and to me the bigger and more modern the better. It was exciting.

Many years later in my photographic career, I have come to understand this post-war era in a much deeper way, a socio-political one. The changing physical urban landscape I have witnessed in my life has transitioned from one of striving to ‘provide’, hence the book title, to a landscape of division. Buildings featured in the book, that were built for all of us, are a sharp contrast to my adult experience of the last thirty years of a more privatised, segregated landscape. For example, chapter one is ‘Housing’. Look at the incredible scope of buildings that were erected and the vast majority were local authority built to house working-class and lower middle-class people in better accommodation at an affordable, secure rent. This is worth celebrating and reflecting upon as recent generations have suffered a failure in government policy and even deception around housing, which, ultimately, has provided no solution to their housing needs, quite the opposite. I am inspired to retell a forgotten story – it is a story where political decisions were taken to attempt to build a better world for everyone, not just those that could afford it. Yes, ideas were utopian, but why not start with high ideals, even if some projects were less successful than others, then at least there was the ambition of a great outcome and many such outcomes were achieved. The spirit of ’45, through the Festival of Britain to the Race for Space – one couldn’t help believing better times were coming.

I have had conversations with young adults in their twenties and early thirties and explained that when I was a teenager in the 1970s there was very low homelessness, no queues at the hospital A&E, youth clubs everywhere, no food banks, free university education and grants and so on. I have looks and questions of disbelief like it never really happened – they don’t understand it existed.

Reading around the subject, an important book that inspired me to take this more seriously was Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism (Zero Books, 2008). Owen’s writing appealed to me as here was someone younger than myself also yearning for something missing – a lost futurism – and I realised I was not alone.

My book hopefully reminds people that this architecture was built to perform a function – progress and higher living standards for all. Government-delivered improvements in health, housing, education, travel and leisure and this was the architecture of that era and spirit of consensus, or at least a social contract existed. I am inspired to speak up and illustrate that there is a better way of doing things and all of us should benefit – solutions exist and are manifest in these buildings in this book.

Trinity Square Car Park, Gateshead, 1969: architect Rodney Gordon, Owen Luder Partnership. Demolished 2010 @ Rob Clayton

How did you choose which buildings to include in the book?

The internet and social media were an essential tool for research. After my initial inspiration with some locations and buildings already in mind, both famous e.g. the National Theatre and some not so, e.g. the Ferrier Estate in south-east London (now demolished), I began to research both online and in reading texts. The project was shot intermittently from 2009 to 2024 with Covid delaying it by a couple of years. The Trinity Square Car Park in Gateshead was a very early image and this was very typical of the time of building I was looking for; futuristic, dreamlike, monumental, novel. I sought buildings with this ability to almost fire the imagination, that they had somehow landed from another parallel world of advancement.

I read books extensively and researched online finding inspiration via Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts. There are around 160 buildings featured in the book and this was edited from maybe 220 photographed.

I wanted to evoke a spirit of those times so buildings that felt futuristic or ‘space age‘ were attractive to me, buildings that instantly have a wow factor or impact in a dramatic fashion were sought. Often when seeing a building for real, for the first time, I would know instinctively if it had to be included and I would work carefully to photograph it in the composition that would hopefully convey that emotion – one of my greatest joys of being a photographer are those rare moments when everything comes together and it is a joy to capture a vision for others to see – can my art trigger an emotion in the viewer? So the aesthetic appeal was vital; Provision offers ‘clean, bright, heroic shots of modernist buildings from (Clayton’s) travels, a kind of gazetteer of our distant space-age British past‘ as John Grindrod recently posted on viewing the book.

The project was a joy artistically, aesthetically and geographically but intellectually also as I felt I was seeking buildings to convey the deeper political narrative too of what this architecture represented. I was a partisan and I am unashamedly proud of promoting a lost future we achieved, for a while, and have seemed so readily willing to let go in the pursuit of individualism. Just look at what municipal local government, properly funded achieved in terms of housing, health, civic pride, education etc. and this was clearly a strong factor whilst editing the book.

Can you tell us something about the way in which you’ve photographed and portrayed them?

I have used a variety of techniques in this project. Firstly, clearly, every building is shot on a sunny day – why not use that technique as a riposte to traditional gritty atmospheric brooding images of brutalism? I think my images are realistic – providing it is a sunny day in the UK which I admit is not that often – but sometimes long summers do happen and to me my childhood had long hot summers and modernism seemed to be part of that – bright, light, hopeful and futuristic. Things were getting bigger, faster more powerful.

St John the Baptist Church, Ermine Estate, Lincoln, 1963: architect Sam Scorer; Clarke Hall, Scorer & Bright. Grade II*-listed @ Rob Clayton

Perhaps I am indulging my nostalgia for a bygone era, I’m sure I am but there is an important message and that is I was a working-class lad from a poor part of an average British city yet I felt the whole world of opportunity was waiting for me. The prevalent architecture of the new (1950s to 1970s) reinforced this idea – a brave new world was rising. Hence, I use monumentalism, brightness, I choose angles to avoid clutter and mess where possible – the idea is to try and portray them as they might have been viewed at the time. These buildings were exciting, pushing the boundaries of new materials, new forms and ideas, not seen before, hence my mission was to photograph them in their purest sense – not easy after decades of interference and the terminal additional street and wall clutter to them and their settings. When you see original RIBA architectural archive photography it is quite beautiful how most modernist building sat in pristine, minimal curtilages and the ravages of weather and poor maintenance were yet to come and so, therefore, the photographic technique was to try best I could to convey newness so that the viewer may imagine them better, as they may have appeared on their ‘unveiling’.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Enjoyment firstly – why not enjoy the journey through many aspects of post-war Britain’s rebuilding with dramatic, graphic and positive imagery, showing the buildings off at their beautiful best. Sunshine, blue skies, hope – they are in pretty short supply in Britain today, so open up Provision and dream of better times, perhaps the future will still arrive?

The stereotypical response expected of the British public is ‘concrete monstrosity’ (i.e. bad) but my photography aims to change that perception. I am defying anyone not to at least admire a good selection of the buildings in the book and to think again about what was achieved, what has been lost and be better informed about the built environment and what it is meant to do – a city should provide for its inhabitants, should it not?

During this post-war period, the main focus of architectural derogation was ‘Victorian Monstrosities’ aimed at the old, soot-covered, draughty and poorly maintained mass-produced Victorian architecture of the industrial cities and the new modern architecture was embraced on the whole, albeit nervously, due to its radical impact and change to the way of living. Today, 50 years on, that past new era of hope is being both being physically destroyed (like the Victorian buildings were until we realised there were excellent examples that should be saved) and ideologically destroyed also – a convenient political subterfuge is often recounted that the architecture was the problem, the causal factor of many social ills, but not so, I say.

My hope is that a younger audience will learn about the post-war settlement and give them some hope that a rich Western country, like the UK, can be politically run to benefit us all – it is a reminder that a generation or two did see a big rise in living standards and security so substantial that even after forty plus years of undermining its core, it still provides to some extent. Social cohesion, progress and happiness derives from enfranchising us all and our architecture is a reflection of our country’s priorities. So, I hope readers will reflect on our ability to organise and provide for each other and maybe the book will contribute to the idea we can organise a better way again, like we did before. Perhaps that 1960’s block of flats isn’t an eyesore after all, but actually a safe, nurturing, bright and spacious dwelling giving a family the shelter and certainty they need for a happy positive life. Although the degree to which consensus was in place is moot, it did exist and socialism built the modern world we have depended on for so long. It is time to preserve what is left of it and in the eye of the original project, perhaps time again to change direction and rebuild it too.

Provision – Architecture of the Post-War Consensus can be purchased from Stay Free Publishing.

Red Hill Petrol Station, Leicester, completed 1979 to late 1960s design; architect Eliot Noyes for Mobil. Grade II-listed @ Rob Clayton

Sceaux Gardens, Camberwell: ‘a Masterpiece of Good Planning’

04 Tuesday Mar 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing

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1950s, Camberwell, Southwark

In 1959, the South London Observer declared that ‘Camberwell must rank No. 1 in London housing progress at the moment’. This was more than local hype. By 1965, the year of its demise, Camberwell Metropolitan Borough Council had built 12,294 council homes since war’s end, ranking third (behind Wandsworth and Woolwich) among the capital’s 28 second tier authorities. (1) Sceaux Gardens was dubbed its ‘showpiece’. (2)

Lakanal House, Sceaux Gardens, 2024 © Thaddeus Zupančič

Camberwell Metropolitan Borough Council had been formed in 1900, a wedge-shaped district stretching from heavily working-class Camberwell and Peckham in the north to the leafy, predominantly middle-class, suburbs of Dulwich in the south. It had been firmly under Labour control since 1934 and would remain so until its abolition.

The Borough had been serious about housing reform since its inception but its efforts were given added urgency by the impact of the Blitz – 5705 Camberwell homes were destroyed during the Second World War and 8000 local families rendered homeless. Some 1131 temporary prefabricated bungalows (part of a national programme that would provide 156,623 across the country by 1949) were erected in the borough to address its immediate housing needs and a programme of permanent housebuilding began early. This was initially dominated by the London County Council (LCC) which built 2098 homes in Camberwell between 1945 and 1951 compared to the Borough Council’s 537. (3)

In 1951, the immediate housing crisis had been somewhat alleviated but a survey revealed 621 overcrowded dwellings in the borough. (3) Locally as nationally, slum clearance efforts, halted by the war and its aftermath, were renewed with the Metropolitan Borough Council and its ambitious chair of Housing, Wally Allen, anxious to take the lead.

FO Hayes, a photograph from the *South London Observer*, February 1958

One sign of this ambition was the appointment in May 1952 of FO (Francis – or Frank – Oswald) Hughes as Director of Housing. They took the appointment seriously: Hayes and other candidates were interviewed in full council and his appointment agreed by 34 votes to seven. In March 1953, Hayes was designated Director of Housing and Borough Architect at his suggestion since his previous title had failed to reference his wider responsibilities. Here, it is worth pausing to note that, beyond its substantial administrative staff and ‘Works Section’, Hayes’ department employed six architects. (4) This was an impressive complement at the time but it is one that is almost unthinkable now.

The aspirations were high, therefore. The Borough’s Medical Officer of Health thought that: (5)

if no further war holds up building activities, it is certain that, with the assistance of the Town Planning Scheme, Camberwell families will have far healthier conditions in which to live than they had in the years 1922 to 1952.

He thought, presciently, the ‘only criticism that may be made is that necessity will compel them to live in modern flats instead of houses with gardens’.

In the meantime, however, the lack of suitable land imposed a severe constraint on new housebuilding in Camberwell. In Hayes’ words, ‘the beam [the focus] was on bombed sites’, ordinarily of limited size, that had been cleared by the Luftwaffe. Then came – Hayes again – ‘a gift from heaven’. (6)

The two Ordnance Survey maps, the first from 1952 and the second from 1962, show how Sceaux Gardens was developed within the former grounds of Camberwell House. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Camberwell House Mental Hospital, a private institution, founded in 1846 in three Georgian houses on the north side of Peckham Road, closed in 1955. Camberwell moved quickly to secure the site by Compulsory Purchase Order. Some of its existing buildings were taken over by the Council but a large area of its substantial grounds were given over to housing. Plans for what became the Sceaux Gardens Estate were approved in 1957. Laing were appointed contractors.

First of all, we should clear up that name, given in honour of Sceaux (pronounced ‘so’), the Paris suburb with which Camberwell was twinned. The individual blocks were also given French names, those of individuals ‘chosen because of their association with Sceaux, but also with an eye to their being pronounced reasonably correctly by the man-in-the-street’. (7)

The French connection was further celebrated at the official opening of the new estate in May 1959 when the French Consul-General and a large delegation from Sceaux were present: (8)

Two show flats furnished by local traders were inspected, and then a typical English tea was enjoyed in a marquee by the French guests. In the evening. there was a dance at Dulwich Baths. sponsored by the Swimming and Social Club. Alan and Shirley Crane gave a display of ballroom dancing.

It was the retiring mayor of Camberwell, however, who got the ceremonial key to the estate, engraved with both boroughs’ coats of arms.

These photographs from a booklet published by the Council in May 1963 entitled ‘Recent Work of Camberwell Borough Council Carried Out under the Direction of the Borough Architect’, photographer Sam Lambert, also show the pride that it took in the new scheme. My thanks to Mike Ashworth for permission to use these images taken from his wonderful Flickr site.

Turning to the estate itself, in bald terms it comprised two fifteen-storey slab blocks, four six-storey blocks and two terraces of bungalows, arrayed within and around the former hospital grounds. Its overall design is usually credited to Hans Peter ‘Felix’ Trenton, Hayes’ deputy. Trenton was born Hans Tischler, a German Jew, in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) – not in Austria as often stated – in 1926 but escaped to Britain before the war. He went on to become Southwark Borough Architect where he is best known for designing the Aylesbury Estate. (9)

At Sceaux Gardens, it was the sensitive use of its existing terrain that was one of the things most commented on.

‘A masterpiece of good planning … much of the sylvan beauty of Camberwell House and its lovely gardens will be incorporated’, according to the perhaps partisan South London Observer. (10) But the Architects’ Journal also thought, in more measure fashion, that: (11)

The handling of the site shows great skill in the use of changes of level and the re-use of old materials found on the site. The mature gardens and trees already on site have been used to great advantage, and where these are shared by the new buildings and existing houses a rare feeling of integration has been achieved. The placing of the blocks of various heights and the formation of enclosed spaces is very satisfying.

Within this, tall blocks were necessary both to fulfil the density requirement of 136 people per acre stipulated in the 1943 County of London Plan, to make fullest use of the site, and to justify the expense of the extensive piling required by subsoil conditions. Indeed, Camberwell had originally proposed 20-storey blocks but these had been rejected by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. (12) A cross wall and slab method of construction was employed (i.e. a combination of internal load bearing walls and precast concrete slabs) ensuring a sturdy build.

Lakanal House and Marie Curie House, the two 15-storey blocks (14 storeys of accommodation above a ground floor service area), were so-called scissor blocks, an arrangement pioneered by the London County Council by which maisonettes, accessed from corridors on alternate floors, were designed in dual-aspect, cross-over form with bedrooms and bathroom accessed at the lower level where a staircase led upstairs and across to kitchens and living rooms on the other side of the block. Continuous balconies were provided on both sides for fire safety reasons but were too narrow to allow sitting out. Both blocks contained laundries; one contained a boiler house that powered the estate’s district heating system.

From the outside, all the blocks were adorned with colourful glazed panels affixed to aluminium-faced plasterboard; ‘one of the doubtful elements of the scheme’, the Architects’ Journal commented sniffily, ‘as this material gives considerable glare even without sunshine and imparts a metallic effect to the blocks’. (13) In my view, it adds to their attractiveness of the blocks but, as some of you will know, the blocks’ external panelling would become a far more than aesthetic matter later in their history.

Against the powerful presence of the tall blocks, the four six-storey blocks (Voltaire, Mistral, Fontenelle, Colbert) appear more ordinary but, conversely, the two terraces of bungalows (Florian and Racine), built to house older people, added a real charm and character. Paintwork and panelling in pale shades of green and bluish green complemented the green surrounds, ‘not yet complicated by the 1960s rage for massive car parks’, as Pevsner points out. Six shops, never fully occupied, completed the ensemble.

The estate won early plaudits. The Architects’ Journal declared it ‘the most interesting housing scheme to come from a Metropolitan Borough Architect’s Department … [one that] compares very favourably with the best of recent LCC work’. (14)

But maybe it’s a commentary from a 1963 documentary on The Changing Face of Camberwell that best captures the experience of early residents: (15)

A pleasant view from a small balcony looking down on to the tops of trees; a bright kitchen separated from the sitting room by glass; a built-in fridge and modern electric cooker; electric fires, central heating; no coals to carry or ashes to clear; all Mr Pawson has to do is to turn on a switch and, on the lower floor, through this grating comes hot air. It heats the bedrooms as well as rising up the stairs to heat the living room.

Ian Nairn, not easy to please, was also complimentary. He praised the estate (and another Camberwell scheme, The Denes) for: (16)

the individuality and sense of place for lack of which most LCC estates become abstract exercises … Sceaux Gardens is a good sensitive example of a conventional layout – high slabs, medium maisonettes and a few low houses.

Nevertheless, a 1964 study by the Architects’ Journal had found fault with estate, noting specifically criticisms of the lack of private balconies and the anonymity of the taller blocks’ long internal corridors. Some tenants complained that the cross-over maisonettes made it difficult to know who your neighbours were. (17).

Lakanal House in the foreground, Marie Curie House to the rear, photographed in 1982 © Miles Glendinning and the Tower Block Project

It’s interesting to note according to Glendinning and Muthesius that Camberwell ‘moved away from the LCC mixed development formula of freestanding high and low blocks, towards various kinds of medium-height agglomerations, ranging from slab blocks to complicated courtyard plans’ after Sceaux Gardens – applying lessons from some of the apparent failings of Sceaux Gardens (18)

In another contrast, Nairn was effusive about the estate’s setting:

What makes it special is the thick landscape which was taken over. It is not fenced in, either, but given over to the kids. So instead of geometry-and-lawns there is living undergrowth, and the concrete slabs peer out like prehistoric animals. The kids will beat it down in the end, I fear, but meanwhile magical transformation has happened, and an estate has turned into a place.

The Architects’ Journal piece, however, concluded:

the communal gardens provided were not very successful because of the draughts created by the high blocks and the absence of specially designed play areas and equipment for children.

As a result of Ministry cost-cutting, the estate had been provided just one tubular climbing frame.

The view between Colbert and Voltaire shows some more recent play equipment and Oliver Goldsmith Primary School, built by the London School Board in 1899, to the rear.

Nairn was undoubtedly a more free-wheeling spirit than the earnest commentator of the Architects’ Journal but the powers that be were beginning to take play more seriously. Sceaux Gardens was one of eleven estates studied for the 1973 Department of Environment report, Children at Play. The deluge of detailed data is hard to interpret but, though ‘the mature gardens had become overgrown’ (or perhaps because of this), they were judged ‘an integral part of the estate and more used, accounting for 12 percent of the observations [of children at play]’. The central pedestrian precinct, safely away from busy nearby roads, was also popular and one fifth of the children were seen with bicycles or wheeled toys that were readily stored in the estate’s tenants’ stores. (19)

Lakanal House shortly after the 2009 fire © *Evening Standard*

Later events were to cast the estate in a far more sombre light. As part of a major refurbishment in 2006-2007, new window panels made of compressed wood and resin were installed on the exterior of Lakanal House. On 3 July 2009, a fire broke out in a ninth-floor flat which spread to the exterior panelling; its occupant alerted the fire brigade but was advised to stay put. As the fire spread to the 10^th and 11^th floors, Catherine Hickman was one of six residents who tragically lost their lives. (20)

An inquest found that the flammability of the new panels (categorised as Class 3) had made the building less safe; class 0 cladding would have mitigated the spread of the fire though not wholly prevented it. It revealed deficient fire seals and fire stops (some removed in previous renovations) and a failure by Southwark Council to carry out a mandatory fire safety check. The coroner concluded that the fire revealed ‘a serious failure of compartmentalisation’ – preventing the spread of fire was held to be the primary means of securing residents’ safety in high-rise blocks – and urged further action from Government to prevent future tragedies. (21)

Most of you will know all too clearly that the lessons of Lakanal were not learnt. This failure on the part of the national and local state in conjunction with the cynical and mendacious cost-cutting agenda of contractors led directly to the entirely avoidable death of 72 people in the Grenfell fire in 2017. Class 0 cladding – misleadingly certified and already judged inadequate – helped cause the Grenfell catastrophe. Similar cladding placed on Lakanal prior to its renovation and re-opening in 2015 has been replaced.

After that, the longer-term issues facing council housing – the impact of Right to Buy, the huge decline in newbuild social housing, long waiting lists and families placed in temporary accommodation (around 10,000 households on waiting lists and 2000 in temporary accommodation in Southwark) – may seem less dramatic but these too, of course, affected Sceaux Gardens.

Racine, bungalows for elderly people, shown in 2020 with four-storey infill newbuild to the rear

At the end of an already lengthy piece of writing, I won’t go into the controversies surrounding Southwark’s housing policies in recent years. It’s been a very mixed record to put it mildly but the Council does make much of its plans to increase social housing stock. Using council-owned land and ‘densifying’ existing development is one key but contested way of achieving that. A plan to demolish the 33 bungalows in the Florian and Racine terraces (alongside some garaging) and to replace them with medium-rise blocks was approved by the Council in 2021. The Council promises all new homes will be social rent (with eight adapted for wheelchair use) and claims the scheme will increase communal amenity space. The work is ongoing. (22)

And perhaps that is a fitting point at which to stop – a neat illustration of changing means and possibilities even as the need for genuinely affordable and secure social rent housing – council housing as was – remains as pressing as ever. Sceaux Gardens stands as a monument to past ambitions and evolving and challenging circumstance. But, above all, it’s provided a good home to generations of south Londoners.

Sources

For additional reading on the Sceaux Estate, see also Stephen Lovejoy, The French Connection: The Sceaux Gardens Estate and the promise and peril of bringing L’Esprit Nouveau to south London, May 2023

My thanks to Thaddeus Zupančič, author of London Estates: Modernist Council Housing, 1946-1981, for use of his photographs.

(1) ‘Camberwell leads the home building race in London’, South London Observer, 21 May 1959. Wandsworth built 20,108 and Woolwich 13,371 council homes between 1945 and 1965. The statistics come from GLC, London Statistics, 1955-1964 cited in Michael Romyn, London’s Aylesbury Estate: an Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’ (2020)

(2) Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South (Yale University Press, 2002)

(3) Camberwell Medical Officer of Health Report, 1951. The statistic that follows is drawn from the same source.

(4) Camberwell Metropolitan Borough Council minutes, 22 May 1952 and 18 March 1953. My thanks to Thaddeus Zupančič for supplying this data.

(5) Camberwell Medical Officer of Health Report, 1951

(6) ‘Observer Portrait Gallery, no. 58 Mr FO Hayes’, South London Observer, 26 February 1958

(7) ‘Estate to Open at Whitsun’, South London Observer, 19 March 1959

(8) ‘An Estate’s Key Goes into Safe Keeping of the Council’, South London Observer, 21 May 1959

(9) For biographical details, see ‘Aylesbury Estate in Three Pieces’, Greyscape,

(10) ‘Observer Portrait Gallery, no. 58 Mr FO Hayes’, South London Observer, 26 February 1958

(11) ‘Housing at Sceaux Gardens’, The Architects’ Journal,7 January 1960

(12) ‘14-Storey Flats at Sceaux Gardens, Camberwell’, The Architects’ Journal, 21 May 1959

(13) ‘Housing at Sceaux Gardens’, The Architects’ Journal,7 January 1960

(14) ‘Housing at Sceaux Gardens’, The Architects’ Journal,7 January 1960

(15) The Changing Face of Camberwell written, produced and directed by Winifred Crum Ewing, Mandson Films, 1963

(16) Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (1966; republished by Penguin Modern Classics in 2014)

(17) ‘AA: Camberwell’s Housing Schemes’, The Architects’ Journal, 26 August 1964

(18) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (1994)

(19) Department of the Environment, Children at Play (1973)

(20) The other victims were Dayana Francisquini and her two young children, Thais and Felipe, and Helen Udoaka and her three-week-old daughter Michelle.

(21) Peter Apps, ‘Panels fitted on Lakanal House after fire will be replaced again due to shifting guidance’, Inside Housing, 2 September 2020; John Grindrod, Iconicon (2022)

(22) Southwark Council, Planning Statement: Sceaux Gardens, Version 1.0, 2021 and Southwark Council, Plans approved for 162 new council homes at two developments in Southwark, 4 November 2021

Poplar High Street: a Walk on the Municipal Side

07 Tuesday Jan 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in London

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Poplar, Tower Hamlets

This blog began twelve years ago and it began as a result of a walk in Tower Hamlets where I live. We were struck by just how much of what we saw was built by local government. That was true of housing most of all; unsurprisingly in Tower Hamlets where at peak in the early 1980s something over 80 percent of households lived in social rent homes. But there was much else besides – schools, libraries, health facilities, parks … the list could go on. Yet this seemed a neglected history, even an unfashionable one after decades in which we had been taught to condemn the local and national state and lionise the free market. So the blog was intended as a small corrective to this dominant narrative.

Let’s take another walk in Tower Hamlets in an area once known for its proud and militant municipalism; let’s walk the one kilometre from west to east of Poplar High Street. The juxtaposition with Canary Wharf’s commercial mammon just to the south (seen in many of the photographs below) makes this journey all the more poignant.

The first thing to note is that, despite its name, the road is now, in the words of the invaluable Survey of London, ‘a quiet backwater’, having declined commercially since its 1860s heyday. Pockets of the older street remain but interwar and post-war development and later housing in particular now predominate. (1)

We start with an odd hold-out though on the north side of the street at its junction with Saltwell Street – a wooden carving of a white horse on top of a tall post. It marks the former site of a pub of that name; the pub dating back to at least 1690, the sign believed to be 18^th century. It survived an attempt to remove it by an earlier form of London local government, the Metropolitan Board of Works, in 1874; the landlord complained that to do so ‘would be fatal to the business’. The sign was Grade II-listed in 1973; the pub it symbolised was demolished in 2003. (2)

The Birchfield Estate stretches to the north, built by the London County Council (LCC) and its successor, from 1965, the Greater London Council (GLC) between the later 1950s and 1970s. The area was heavily bombed during the Second World War and declared part of the Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area in its aftermath. Over the road lies the Dingle Lane Scheme built by the LCC and designed by its Architect’s Department in the late 1950s.

Heading east, we come first on the northern side to Our Lady of St Joseph RC Primary School, an attractive building with an all-weather play-space designed by Green Tea Architects and opened in 2014.

Opposite lies the sprawling Will Crooks Estate. It originated in the Sophia Street slum clearance scheme declared by the LCC in 1934, covering some 5.25 acres (around two hectares) and involving the displacement of 1465 residents. The scheme was sensitively implemented – a first tranche of residents rehoused elsewhere when clearance began with subsequent residents rehoused on-site as the new blocks were completed between 1935 and 1939– five blocks and around 220 tenements by the end of the decade. Corry, Devitt, Leyland, Wigram and Willis Houses are classic five-storey walk-up tenement blocks in the municipal neo-Georgian style of their day. (3)

Will Crooks’ headstone in Tower Hamlets Cemetery

Will Crooks was born in 1852 in Shirbutt Street immediately to the rear of the current estate. Born into extreme poverty, Crooks spent part of his young life in Poplar Workhouse. He was a leader of the1889 Dock Strike and was elected to the LCC as a Progressive member in the same year. Crooks would also serve as a member and reforming chair of the Poplar Board of Guardians (in charge of the local workhouse system), a Poplar Metropolitan Borough Councillor and MP for Woolwich from 1903 till his death in 1921.

Facing the Will Crooks Estate is four-storey Cruse House, completed by Poplar Metropolitan Borough Council in 1932. It was designed by Harley Heckford, Borough Engineer and Surveyor, to contain nine one-bedroom and two two-bedroom flats, reflecting the Council said the ‘considerable demand for accommodation of the smaller type of flat’. The scheme, however, was only approved by the Ministry of Health and Housing on the condition that the one-bed flats were let to ‘aged persons’. (The stipulation also enabled a supplementary grant from the LCC’s scheme offering financial support for elderly persons’ housing.) It’s an old-fashioned block, although it was modernised and modestly extended in 1968, with its original wooden sash windows and open iron railings. It was named after Edward Cruse one year after his death in 1939; a Labour councillor for Bow and Bromley from 1919 to 1939.

A patch of open ground follows and the first (modern) building of what is now New City College but once this swathe of land to the south and east contained the Poplar Workhouse, originally erected in 1819, substantially rebuilt in 1872, and progressively extended over many years. But these changes did little to overcome the fundamental shortcomings of the institution in terms of its location and regime. From the 1890s, the workhouse accommodated between 1300 and 1500 inmates – the institutional term is sadly appropriate. Some improvements occurred when Will Crooks and George Lansbury were elected to the Board of Guardians in 1892 and set about improving the diet, abolishing the uniform and putting an end to the ‘expensive and useless’ make-work tasks of oakum-picking and stone-breaking. Incredibly, a 1922 inquiry into the workhouse concluded critically that the institution was ‘regarded more as an almshouse than a workhouse’. The Guardians replied that they were ‘very glad indeed’ that this was the case. Mercifully, the Poor Law was reaching the end of its days. Administration of the system was transferred to local government – here the LCC – in 1930.

This Ordnance Survey map published in 1950 shows the extent of the former workhouse, then an LCC supplies depot. With thanks to the National Library of Scotland

LCC plans to further improve the facility were abandoned through the difficulty of the site and expense and wartime bomb damage that forced the removal of residents. The buildings were finally demolished in 1960. (4) Walking eastwards on the south side of the road, you first pass the Workhouse leisure centre (named for obvious reasons), designed by Proctor Matthews in 1999.

Just beyond is the looming bulk of what is now New City College. Its first and obviously modern element is the 2004 annex designed by Gibberd Limited, Architects.

Next along, the original building of what was then the London County Council School of Marine Engineering and Navigation (later the Poplar Centre for Further Education). Its roots lay in the plea of a ‘large and influential committee of local residents’ in 1895 to the LCC’s Technical Education Board to provide a permanent home for lectures being provided. Will Crooks and the Poplar Labour Party added their voices to the demand which was met in this building, completed in 1906 to the designs of the LCC’s chief architect, WE Riley (his assistant Percy Ginham probably did the hard graft), and built by its Works Department.

New City College, the former London County Council School of Marine Engineering and Navigation building

To quote Historic England’s description of this now Grade II-listed building: (5)

Restrained use of Classical-Renaissance orders and ornament to dress the principal openings which functionally express the interior, resulting in a classical design that is Norman Shaw inspired but owes more to Lethaby or Beresford Pite.

The ‘maritime putti of the overdoor’ at its western end reference the college’s purpose in training the personnel of the merchant marine.

If you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice how six first-floor semi-circular window openings in the Portland stone façade are succeeded by three upright neo-Georgian windows. This is an unobtrusive 1931 extension.

Just beyond, acquired by the college in 1957, is the former Poplar Central Library, erected (as the date on its doorway commemorates) in 1894. It followed, as was required then under the terms of the Public Library Acts, an 1891 poll of local ratepayers showing willingness to fund the venture. It’s a ‘tall and substantial but not particularly memorable building’, the Survey of London notes rather snippily, designed by local architect John Clarkson.

On the north side of the street is Meridian House, not at all municipal, but bearing the arms of the East India Company and dating to the early 1800s, now Grade II-listed.

The Offices of the Poplar Board of Works

Next to it on the corner with Woodstock Terrace is the Lansbury Heritage Hotel but let’s call it by its original name, the Offices of the Poplar Board of Works. The Poplar Board was one of twelve (alongside the London-wide Metropolitan Board of Works) created under the 1855 Metropolis Management Act to manage the public health and sanitary conditions of the district. The building was completed in 1870, an unloved product of an architectural competition: ‘terribly ugly’ according to the Builder but unsurprisingly so according to Building News as, after all: (6)

No one would expect to find in a Poplar Board of Works a brain capable of making the difference between Westminster Abbey and the Strand Musick Hall.

‘High Victorian free Gothic with some Venetian detailing’ according to its Grade II-listing.

In 1900, the building was taken over by the new Metropolitan Borough of Poplar to provide administrative offices and it later served as a housing office for Tower Hamlets Council before being sold controversially in 2011.

Across the road, there is a range of housing blocks built by the Presbyterian Housing Scheme The last built, Goodhope House, completed in 1955 and designed by Harry Moncrieff, lies immediately opposite. Potter down Simpson’s Road to see Winant House, completed in 1951 to the designs of Harry Moncrieff and Edna MI Mills of Co-Operative Planning Ltd. These flats were completed quickly, granted planning privileges that allowed them to be ready to serve as an outpost of the Festival of Britain Live Architecture Exhibition centred on the nearby Lansbury Estate. Both are modest three-storey, balcony-access blocks but they reflect the clean-lined modernism that would shape most post-war public housing.

Older-style tenement housing also from by the Presbyterian Housing Scheme is seen further down Simpson’s Road, firstly in Goodwill House completed in 1932; fifteen three-bed flats let at 12s 6d a week, built with grant aid from both the Treasury and the LCC, designed by T Phillips Figgis with ‘a distinctively Italianate air’ according to the Survey of London. Just around the corner lies Goodspeed House, also a Figgis design, but completed two years earlier to much plainer specifications.

Back on Poplar High Street and still heading east, you come to the Galloway Estate’s three- and four-storey Lubbock and Martindale Houses designed by the LCC’s Architect’s Department and built in 1956–7. They maintain the modest assemblage of lower-rise flat and maisonette blocks of this part of the street.

Looking north, there’s a building that looks like ‘a sweet little Arts and Crafts house in red brick with stone mullioned windows, gables, and moulded chimneystack’. (7) The signage tells you it is a Coroner’s Court and Mortuary. This was a hybrid building deriving from the 1891 Public Health Act that required the LCC to provide accommodation for inquests and the local sanitary authority (here at this time the Poplar District Board of Works) to provide a public mortuary. The designs were finally completed in 1909, led by the LCC Architect’s Department with Harley Heckford representing the Poplar Metropolitan Borough Council. It’s been adapted and extended since then and passed through the hands of various authorities. Oddly the present signage still commemorates its past role with the GLC.

St Matthias Estate, Cottage Street: Storey House lies to the left, Randall House to the rear

Along Cottage Street next and briefly fronting Poplar High Street is the St Matthias Estate, stretching to East India Dock Road. A bomb-damaged area of slum housing was progressively acquired by the LCC from the late 1940s with plans for the estate finalised in 1957. The seven-storey Storey House was approved in 1958. (8) Ten-storey Randall House, containing 60 social rent flats, was built on an infill, former garage site by Guildmore for Tower Hamlet Homes (the borough’s housing wing) in 2016. It was designed by CZWG and completed in 2016. It was originally clad with Grenfell-style, flammable cladding. This was said to have been removed in 2018 but a recent Council survey has revealed some remains and that further remediation is urgently needed. (9)

On the southern side is Norwood House, a striking, five-storey, red-brick block, designed by Trevor Dannatt for the LCC but completed by the Greater London Council (GLC) in the later 1960s. Its staggered design makes the most of a small, constricted site.

And next to it are two eye-catching public housing schemes of an earlier era, Holmsdale House and, easily missed down in Harrow Lane running south, Constant House. These are Poplar Metropolitan Borough Council schemes of the 1930s, designed by then Borough Engineer and Surveyor, Rees J Williams, and built by direct labour, the council’s own workforce.

What you’ll notice (in powerful contrast to the earlier Cruse House) is the modernist style adapted by the council in the later thirties, clearly seen in the blocks’ strong horizontal lines and curving white concrete balconies. Both blocks are also notable for their towering glazed International style staircase towers (though now with added lift shafts).

Collins, Carmichael and Commodore Houses, Poplar tenement blocks of the same era, maintain the theme on the north side of the street as you walk eastwards. Commodore House featured one unlikely innovation, however, the provision of twelve ‘ ‘baby balconies’ – south-facing, offering plenty of fresh air (perhaps not so fresh in the pre-Clean Air Act era) but not, unsurprisingly, a concept that survived.

That was not Poplar’s best idea but it was well-meaning and it was a tribute to the continuing reforming zeal of a radical Labour council – one that had made its name with the famous Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921 when 30 councillors, including George Lansbury himself and six women councillors, were gaoled for refusing to levy additional London-wide taxes on an impoverished borough. Their demand, as expressed by Sam March, mayor, from Brixton Prison was for:

the complete equalization of the rates of London for all services throughout the County of London, and provision out of National Funds of work or maintenance for unemployed throughout the land.

A modest terrace of shops and upper-storey maisonettes from the 1960s and newer development on the south take Poplar High Street to the A1206. Once upon a time as you gazed across the road to the north, you would have seen the looming presence of the western block of Robin Hood Gardens, now you see the New London vernacular of the new Blackwall Reach development. The eastern block of the estate survives (as of October 2024 when I took the photo below) but will be demolished imminently.

Robin Hood Gardens eastern block, October 2024

I’ve written extensively on Robin Hood Gardens, a GLC scheme of 214 flats in those two curving blocks awkwardly placed between two major highways, completed in 1972 to the plans of Alison and Peter Smithson. It divided opinion: beloved or at least respected by architectural enthusiasts who saw it as a key work of ‘street in the sky’ modernism by two of its leading exponents but criticised by many as ugly in appearance and uncomfortable in design. For Pevsner, commenting on it extant, ‘though impressively monumental, the scheme [was] ill-planned to the point of being inhumane’. (10) The Blackwall Reach development that replaces it is a typical developer-led scheme of its time; it will provide more housing but less that is truly affordable.

And that in literal and figurative senses is the end of the road. Poplar High Street and the history it reflects reminds us once more of the vital contribution to our lives and well-being made by proud municipalism. We need to unleash and empower our local councils to build and serve once more.

Sources

(1) Hermione Hobhouse (ed), ‘Poplar High Street: Introduction’, Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(2) Hermione Hobhouse (ed), ‘Poplar High Street: North Side’, Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(3) London County Council, London Housing (1933) and Hermione Hobhouse (ed), ‘Poplar High Street: Public Housing’, Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(4) Hermione Hobhouse (ed), ‘Poplar High Street: South Side’, Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994)

(5) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5 East (Yale University Press, 2005)

(6) Historic England, New City College, Tower Hamlets

(7) Pevsner, London 5 East

(8) Hobhouse (ed), ‘Between Poplar High Street and East India Dock Road: Woodstock Terrace and the Clippingdale, Griffiths and St Matthias Estates’, Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994); the University of Edinburgh, Tower Block website, Cottage Street

(9) Additional architectural detail from Thaddeus Zupančič, author of London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946–1981. Cladding story, Agatha Scaggiante, ‘Flammable Grenfell-style ACM cladding rediscovered in Tower Hamlets Council tower block despite assurances‘, The Slice, Tower Hamlets, 13 December 2024

(10) Pevsner, London 5 East

Council Housing in Wigan: Part III, the Post-War Years

17 Tuesday Dec 2024

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Wigan

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s

Last week’s post looked at interwar Wigan, an era when the borough embarked on a programme of large-scale housing construction and slum clearance and when, thanks to George Orwell, the town became a symbol of the squalor and mass unemployment afflicting Britain’s traditional industrial heartlands during the Great Depression. In this post, we examine Wigan’s large post-war rebuilding programme, one that contained both a continuation of earlier efforts and some radical departures.

The town fared relatively well during the Second World War; it received a few stray bombs from raids targeting nearby Liverpool but was little damaged overall and trade revived to meet the demands of total war. Perhaps because of that lack of damage, there was no ‘Wigan plan’ of the type that was devised for several hundred towns and cities across the UK to chart an improved post-war world.

The Norley Hall Estate in the 1950s. With thanks to Dennis Seddon and the Wigan World website.

But the need to build anew was obvious and pressing. In 1945, it was estimated the town needed 2000 new homes. In the largest projected scheme, 1500 houses, chiefly three-bedroom houses and maisonettes, were planned for the new Norley Hall estate in Pemberton, ‘the layout of which will be on modern town planning lines’. The latter was a modest reflection of the post-war emphasis on so-called ‘neighbourhood units’ that would compensate for some of the sterility of peripheral interwar estates that Orwell, amongst others, had identified. (1)

The preference of the Council, still firmly under Labour control, for direct labour – the use of the council’s own workforce to build housing – remained from its interwar politics. The use of German prisoners of war was refused since ‘Wigan men were signing on the employment exchange’ as war work ended.

Davidson Walk (misspelt on the banner), 1956, Worsley Hall Estate. What look like Tarran temporary prefabs (already beyond their planned ten-year life span) lie behind. With thanks to Ed Owens and the Wigan World website.

A pair of BISF houses in Thirlmere Avenue, Abram, one in original condition. A lot of BISF homes were built in this estate with streets named after Lake District locations; all those still in council ownership were modernised.

But, in a period of housing crisis, the necessity to employ non-traditional methods was unavoidable in Wigan as elsewhere. Some 200 temporary prefabs were ordered for erection in Whelley and Pemberton. At the same time, large numbers of permanent prefabricated homes – the steel-frame British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) houses with their characteristic upper storeys clad in light steel – were built in Whelley, Laithwaite and Abram. (2)

Two bungalows in School Way, Norley Hall Estate, adapted for use by people using a wheelchair, illustrated in a 1951 Council handbook. With thanks to Ron Hunt and the Wigan World website.

If the emphasis here lay on mass production, a concern for individual needs was manifested in two bungalows in School Way, Norley Hall, especially adapted for use by people with disabilities.

Construction continued apace in the later 1950s with the new Marsh Green Estate, two miles west of the town centre, beginning at Hunter Road and spreading beyond – all the streets named after British aircraft – into the 1960s.

Douglas House, 1987. With thanks to the University of Edinburgh and the Tower Block website.

This was a peripheral development but by this time there was a move towards higher-rise housing, in the inner cities where it was thought to provide necessary higher density, but in suburban estates too and aided by a subsidy regime (rewarding higher construction) implemented in 1956. Wigan approved its first tower block in 1960: eleven-storey Douglas House was built by Wimpey immediately east of the town centre in Scholes. (3)

Lower rise multi-storey was also widely adopted. Five-storey blocks of flats were approved for Dumbarton Green, Beech Hill, in 1961. Similar blocks and variants were built across the borough in the succeeding years.

In 1956, the journalist and future politician Wayland Young, in a conscious revisiting of Orwell, described a newly prosperous town. Wigan, he thought, had ‘changed from barefoot malnutrition to nylons and television, from hollow idleness to flushed contentment’. (4) Whether that was the experience of all Wiganers or not, growing economic affluence across the country led to a renewed focus on slum clearance, in fact a promise to eradicate slum conditions completely. In Wigan in 1960, 374 families, a total of 1288 individuals in all, were rehoused in ‘Corporation housing’, then a post-war peak, according to the Medical Officer of Health. (5)

Scholes in the midst of redevelopment in 1966. With thanks to Frank Orrell and the Wigan World website.

There was no doubt about the scale of the challenge in the borough. In the 1960s, the Council estimated that 24,000 local homes were unfit for human habitation. Efforts began in Scholes, judged to contain the worst of the borough’s housing with some 7000 homes in need of urgent clearance, in 1961. In all, the process took 14 years – with Compulsory Purchase Orders implemented selectively, it was said, in an attempt to maintain community spirit and with an assurance that displaced residents would be rehoused together in Marsh Green. (6)

Scholes tower blocks, 1987. With thanks to the University of Edinburgh and the Tower Block website.

Five 13-storey tower blocks adjacent to Douglas House in Scholes were approved in 1964. Lower-rise housing and flats spread to the east. In 1968, a further 13-storey block, Boyswell House, was built at this eastern end of the Scholes Comprehensive Development Area. Almost 500 slum houses, housing 566 families, were demolished that same year and 581 new council homes completed (in the same period private enterprise provided just 94 new homes in Wigan). (7)

This was the heyday of council-led clearance and redevelopment in the UK but the mood was shifting. The special subsidy for blocks over six storeys was abolished in 1967. A 1968 Government White Paper, tellingly entitled ‘Old Houses into New Homes’, marked a new emphasis on the rehabilitation of formerly condemned terraced housing that was consolidated in the 1969 Housing Act creating General Improvement Areas.

For the moment and with projects in the pipeline, Wigan’s redevelopment continued apace. Worsley Mesnes emerged as the Borough’s biggest scheme into the 1970s, an area of farmland and disused industrial land about a mile and a half south-west of the town centre. (‘Mesnes’ derives from a Norman term for a landowner’s holdings; it’s pronounced locally ‘mains’.)

Worsley Mesnes, 1987. With thanks to the University of Edinburgh and the Tower Block website.

Three sixteen-storey tower blocks were approved for the scheme in 1964. Their use of the Bison system – a form of prefabricated construction using load-bearing precast concrete panels – reflected another feature of the contemporary drive to build at scale and pace. The larger £1.34 million contract, won by J Gerrard & Son Ltd, a large Lancashire contractor (working on the towers with Concrete Ltd which owned the proprietary rights to the Bison system) was for 486 new homes and 186 garages. (8)

The blocks were named Dryden House, Thackeray House and Masefield House. Surrounding streets were similarly named. As Stuart Maconie, who grew up on the estate, observed, ‘we fought, drank and snogged amongst literary giants’. And Maconie offers another powerful perspective on Wigan’s working class but one that is in significant ways – and he should like this – better than Orwell’s, not a patrician view (however empathetic) from above but an authentic voice from the world he describes.

Born in 1961, he captures the moment: (9)

For we were powerful then; vast, grey, regimented council-house estates like mine were the citadels of ordinary men and women whose work conferred prestige and influence, the last of their kind to wield that kind of power …

They were good times to be working class. We had jobs, we had power, joy, fun, even seasons in the sun … in Blackpool and Butlin’s Skegness, in Torremolinos and Famagusta if you’d put in the overtime.

His view of the estate itself and its housing might surprise some too. He contrasts them to the ‘little terraces and cottages’ of his Wigan grandparents:

But to me, who’d come into a world of coal fires and larders, and houses built in the Edwardian era, my new home was not brutal but clean. It was stark, elegant, the future. I hadn’t a clue who Le Corbusier or Erno Goldfinger were, but they had an architectural ally in the ten-year old me, who loved having his own room and squares of grass to kick about on, and underpasses and arcades and balconies to run free on. I didn’t regard Eliot Drive as a Waste Land. I didn’t think Milton Grove was Paradise Lost. I thought it was paradise.

The estate will seem bland, unexceptionable now to most people and very much of its time: beyond the tower blocks, some low-rise blocks of flats and maisonettes and then streets of modernist terraced housing, much of it arrayed, semi-Radburn fashion, around footways and green open spaces. There are references to ‘Canadian houses’ and flat-roofed ‘Dutch houses’ too – foreign models, some using prefabrication, used to promote rapid construction.

Into the 1970s, the drive to rid Wigan of its substandard homes remained – in 1977 when the major programme of replacement homes had been completed, it was reckoned 9000 substandard homes remained. Large-scale plans to redevelop outer lying centres of population in Platt Bridge, Upper and Lower Ince and New Springs were formulated

But, by now, of course, we were on the cusp of a new era of housing politics. The election of a New Right Conservative government in 1979 and its hostility to public housing did not, however, come entirely out of the blue. By the mid-1970s, there was increasing criticism of the form and nature of some quite recent council housing; system-built housing and deck-access estates in particular, were said to be increasingly unpopular with residents and prone to antisocial behaviour.

Baucher Road, Worsley Mesnes, in the 1980s with soon to be demolished maisonette blocks. With thanks to Stuart Naylor and the Wigan World website.

In Wigan, the three- and five-storey walk-up maisonette blocks built across the borough were early examples of this trend. Blocks of this type in Worsley Mesnes were demolished as early as 1984; others followed into the later 1980s and 1990s. Dumbarton Green was dubbed by journalists the ‘housing estate where no one wants to live’ in 1988 when the Council took the decision to demolish it. (10)

So-called ‘upside-down houses’ (the bedrooms were on the ground floor) were demolished in the same period and the last of the three Worsley Mesnes tower blocks, Masefield House, was razed in 1991. In June 2020 further redevelopment of the estate was agreed with more low-rise blocks of flats cleared centrally and redevelopment entrusted to the private developer, Keepmoat Homes.

Derby, Mannion and Crompton Houses, Scholes Village, 2024

The high-rise blocks in Scholes have miraculously survived but in significantly altered and improved condition – the subject of ongoing improvement works and refurbishment since 2008 and, now safely and newly clad, recently rebranded Scholes Village.

The terrain of social housing – as it was now called – was changing in other ways too. The Conservatives’ hostility to council housing was shared to a significant degree by the New Labour governments in power from 1997. The 2000 Decent Homes Standard was a progressive measure but one that was financially unaffordable to many local authorities lacking borrowing powers.

Arm’s length management organisations (ALMOs) were created to allow spin-off bodies to raise finance – councils retained strategic oversight of housing but day-to-day management was devolved to these separate bodies. In 2001, the Borough of Wigan was one of the first eight councils in the country to create an ALMO when Wigan and Leigh Homes was established, having secured £58 million to improve its 26,000 homes.

Golborne Place, off Platt Lane, Scholes, 2024

In 2017, following a more established trend, Wigan brought the management of its social housing stock back in-house. A Council spokesperson said they expected to save £5.5 million by reducing duplicated services and ‘integrating teams into the council’. (11)

Right to buy – the right of sitting tenants to purchase their council homes at substantial discount introduced by the Conservatives in 1980 – has had a significant impact in Wigan as elsewhere. In 1981, at peak, Wigan Council owned and managed 37,505 homes. This was reduced by Right to Buy to 29,000 council homes in 1994. The number of social rented homes, after further sales, stands presently at 22,000; that is around 19 percent of total households, just a little over the national average. In Worsley Mesnes around 23 percent of households are social rented whilst 67 percent of residents are owner occupiers. (12)

Housing need remained desperate for many, however. In 2024, there were some 13,000 households on Wigan’s Housing Register (the waiting list for social rented housing) whilst almost 2000 households, with a statutory right to secure social housing, were living in temporary accommodation provided by the council. Between 2020 and 2024, Wigan Council spent £7.3 million to buy back 76 properties lost to Right to Buy. (14)

I hardly need to draw the lessons. For decades, we have sold off social housing and failed to replace it. Through our national failure to invest directly to meet housing need, local authorities are now obliged to pay higher private sector rents and charges just to meet their statutory obligations whilst thousands more languish on waiting lists.

There has been an uptick in affordable housing construction under the aegis of local authorities in recent years. A 2023 Council report records 1322 affordable homes delivered since 2018/19, including ‘social/affordable rented properties and low-cost home ownership options such as shared ownership, rent to buy and shared equity homes’. (15) This is housing provided by housing associations and through Section 106 agreements (by which private developers are obliged to provide some community infrastructure or benefit) as well as by Wigan Council’s direct delivery programme.

It is not clear how many new social rent homes have been built or are planned. It is a very different world to the one that existed into the 1970s when councils built social rent homes directly in their thousands by the simple and cost-effective means of central government grant and low-cost loans provided by the Public Loans Works Board. Our reliance on free market provision and public-private partnership means we build far fewer homes at far greater expense.

‘Council estates’ themselves have changed too, most obviously through Right to Buy but also through a process of residualisation – a piece of jargon meaning basically that social rent housing is increasingly confined to those in ‘priority need’ as defined by homelessness legislation.

It is a different world to the one celebrated by Stuart Maconie in an era when council housing was undeniably seen as a signifier of upward mobility for an increasingly affluent working class. Later, for a while as problems of antisocial behaviour increased, parts of Worsley Mesnes were nicknamed Beirut. It would be easy to fall into contemporary stigmatising stereotypes … but it would be wrong.

As Maconie writes, revisiting the present estate: (16)

Now there are small, neat houses; each has a cat, and rather smart cars in a few cases. It isn’t St Alban’s or Wells. But neither is it the feral swamp of underprivilege that you might fear and that the TV commissioning editors love to demonise. On its nice, newer fringe, now tower-less, it is essentially a homely suburban estate, with Previas and Focuses, and satellite dishes tilted to catch the warm, golden honey of the evening sun … It is just like where the nice ordinary people live. Because they are nice ordinary people.

That’s a modest conclusion, even an insipid one, to a dramatic council housing story given the needs, pressures, ideals and ambitions that informed it, and the turbulent, contradictory politics that shaped it. But maybe it’s exactly the conclusion we need.

Sources

(1) ‘Housing at Warrington and Wigan’, Liverpool Daily Post, 28 July 1945

(2) ‘Wigan’s Housing Mayor Officials Inspect’, Liverpool Evening Express, 22 September 1947

(3) University of Edinburgh, Tower Block UK website

(4) Wayland Young, ‘Return to Wigan Pier’, Encounter, June 1956, quoted in David Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951-57 (Bloomsbury, 2010)

(5) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1960

(6) Mike Fletcher, The Making of Wigan (2005)

(7) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1968

(8) Historic England Research Records, Dryden House

(9) Stuart Maconie, ‘Little Boxes’ in Kit De Waal (ed), Common People, (Unbound, 2019)

(10) ‘Estate’s Death Sentence’, Liverpool Echo, 4 October 1988

(11) Nathaniel Barker, ‘Wigan Council set to scrap ALMO’, Inside Housing, 15 February 2017)

(12) Wigan Council, Worsley Mesnes, Hawkley Hall and Goose Green Community Profile (ND)

(13) Nick Jackson, ‘Small, low impact developments’ for single people hailed as 13,000 queue up for social housing in Wigan’, Wigan Today, 10 April 2024.

(14) Will Grimond, ‘Millions of pounds spent buying back council housing in Wigan’, Wigan Today, 29 September 2024

(15) Wigan Council, Housing Delivery 2021/22: Delivering A Home for All(January 2023)

(16) Maconie, ‘Little Boxes’

Council Housing in Wigan: Part II, the Interwar Years and a Reckoning with George Orwell

10 Tuesday Dec 2024

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Wigan

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1920s, 1930s, Lancashire

Last week, we left Wigan, in the closing months of the First World War, anticipating peace and the desperately needed housebuilding programme pledged to follow. By November 1918, Prime Minister Lloyd George was promising 500,000 new homes. That would not be fulfilled but in Wigan, as elsewhere in the country, a council housebuilding revolution did take place between the wars. George Orwell’s road to Wigan pier in 1936 led him to some typically trenchant views on interwar council housing. We’ll be assessing those in today’s post and telling the broader story of Wigan’s council housing programme after 1919.

Slum housing in Wigan, illustrated in *Picture Post*, 11 November 1939

Wigan began planning early. The Council discussed possible sites for new council housing in the Whelley and Richmond Hill areas in late 1917. In March 1918, the Town Clerk (the council’s chief executive) discussed the Local Government Board’s latest proposals with its Housing and Insanitary Houses Committee. In April 1918, the Council purchased 15 acres of land for housing at Bottling Wood, near Whelley. Plans were made to build 158 houses at around 12 per acre. The Committee aimed to erect ‘500 houses immediately upon the conclusion of the war’ and resolved that ‘further schemes be prepared as the opportunity arises’. (1)

The 1919 Housing Act received its Royal Assent in July. Besides promising generous financial support from the Treasury and upholding the high standards set for post-war working-class housing by the Tudor Walters Report (including that density of 12 homes per acre that Wigan had already agreed), it required all local authorities to survey their district’s housing needs. Wigan appointed twelve temporary inspectors whose labours revealed 1781 houses in the borough occupied by more than one family as well as 202 back-to-back houses and 1375 further that lacked through ventilation. There were 8266 pail-closets and privies in the borough, requiring, in the dry words of the Medical Officer of Health, ‘conversion to the water carriage system’. (2)

The Borough Engineer concluded that 2500 new homes were needed – 1500 of the smaller ‘Type A’ three-bed room houses, 750 of the larger ‘Type B’ three-bed houses and 250 ‘Type B4’ four-bed houses. (It’s notable perhaps, presumably for reasons of economy, that Wigan eschewed the larger so-called ‘parlour’ houses featuring an extra living room that the Tudor Walters Report favoured.)

Such aspirations encountered a number of problems. One was the impact of wartime and post-war inflation: despite Wigan’s economising, these new houses cost three times more to build than pre-war equivalents. The best price offered by contractors for a Class A house was £905 (suspiciously ten of 13 tenders came in at exactly the same price suggesting what was called contemporarily a ‘builder’s ring’ – a form of cartel – was in operation). The new Ministry of Health and Housing, which approved loans and council building plans, judged these prices too high. Marginally lower prices from the Manchester Building Guild were accepted.

The plaque reads ‘In memory of and gratitude to Wigan and District’s miners. The men, women and children who served and helped to build our community. Their hardship and dedication must never be forgotten.’ A statuary group created by Steve Winterburn in 2021 for the the Wigan Heritage and Mining Monument group

The 1921 Census recorded 12,869 mineworkers in Wigan, almost 37 percent of its working population. Another point of contention specific to Wigan and similar mining districts related to the form of the new housing. Before pithead baths, miners washed at home after work. Wigan (alongside other mining area councils and the trades unions) pressed for a downstairs bathroom to prevent coal dust and grime being spread throughout the house. The Council also pressed for 9 ft (2.7 m) high ceilings to address problems of condensation caused by the amount of hot water used for washing. The Ministry conceded a compromise of 8 ft 6 in high ceilings in these special circumstances.

Despite these rather fraught negotiations, it’s not clear that these concessions were applied in what would be Wigan’s first post-war council estate in Beech Hill, arrayed around Thicknesse Avenue and Guildford Crescent, in which the bathrooms were upstairs. By December 1922, 135 houses had been completed. Wigan was anxious to build more – there were plans to build 160 houses in Pemberton and 106 at the Bottling Wood site – but the generous terms of the 1919 Housing Act had been withdrawn as a result of public spending cuts in August 1921.

Wigan sent a deputation to the Ministry urging continued subsidy and construction, an investment, the Housing Committee argued, that would ‘save money in preventing disease and unhealthiness in helping to preserve the lives and morals of the people’. In the event, Wigan was allowed to build 50 more houses under the 1919 Act.

In 1936, George Orwell met with Jerry Keenan, the chairman of Wigan Trades Council and Labour Party, at his council home in 51 Rose Avenue, Beech Hill (Keenan would help Orwell find the cheaper lodgings he wanted for his research). (3) A description of the house, taken as typical of those on the estate, that appears in The Road to Wigan Pier is worth quoting in detail: (4)

Downstairs. Large living-room with kitchener fireplace [a closed top range], cupboards and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway, largish kitchen. Up to date electric cooker hired from Corporation at much the same rate as a gas cooker.

Upstairs. Two largish bedrooms, one tiny one—suitable only for a boxroom or temporary bedroom. Bathroom, w.c, with hot and cold water.

Orwell thought the houses appeared ‘well-built and … quite agreeable to look at’ and the estate as a whole ‘well-kept’. He remarks upon the Council’s rules and restrictions and its high expectations of tenants’ conduct but concluded that Kennan was ‘very well satisfied with [the] house and proud of it’ and the Corporation was ‘good about repairs’.

His account seems to capture well both the form and quality of this early interwar housing and, to some degree – Orwell notes that this was a smallish family of four (parents and two children) with the ‘husband in good employ’ – the respectability of its tenants.

Though the first post-war council housebuilding programme had been cancelled, the need for more and better housing was as pressing as ever. The annual reports of Wigan’s Medical Office of Health made the case in pressing and poignant terms, describing, for example, a two-bedroom house in the borough occupied by three families. Two adults and four children lived and slept in one room; a fifth child born died at five months. (5)

Neville Chamberlain’s 1923 Housing Act had sought to encourage private sector building. No new council housing was built under its terms in Wigan and the need for direct state intervention remained. The election of the first (minority) Labour Government in 1924 and its Housing Act of the same year kick-started a new burst of council housebuilding. In Wigan, the return of its first majority Labour council in November added to the impetus to build.

Locally, there was also pressure for the council to build directly. Reflecting perhaps Labour’s growing power as well as his own professional judgement and interests, Wigan’s Borough Engineer had already urged the creation of a direct works department in 1923, reasoning that ‘no private tenderer was in a position to do the work better than it could be done by the Corporation’.

2-4 Chestnut Road and commemorative plaque

A plaque on nos. 2-4 Chestnut Road (now somewhat difficult to read) officially commemorates ‘the inauguration of the first direct labour scheme of the Corporation, 6^th October 1926’ – a scheme of 98 houses in Bottling Wood. Interestingly, the Borough Engineer’s tender for the housing came in at some £5200 more than the lower private tender.

We can return to Orwell again, remembering that he is writing ten years after the houses were completed, for an assessment of the Bottling Wood scheme that he names mistakenly as the Welly (rather than Whelley) Estate. He begins with a neutral description: (6)

Living-room 14 ft. by 10 ft., kitchen a good deal smaller, tiny larder under stairs, small but fairly good bathroom. Gas cooker, electric lighting. Outdoor w.c.

Upstairs. One bedroom 12 ft. by 10 ft. with tiny fireplace, another the same size without fireplace, another 7 ft. by 6 ft. Best bedroom has small wardrobe let into wall.

But he goes on to recount the tenants’ dissatisfaction.

Their complaints are: ‘House is cold, draughty and damp. Fireplace in living-room gives out no heat and makes room very dusty—attributed to its being set too low. Fireplace in best bedroom too small to be of any use. Walls upstairs cracking. Owing to uselessness of tiny bedroom, 5 are sleeping in one bedroom, 1 (the eldest son) in the other.

This is by no means a ringing endorsement of council housing or direct labour and there is much to unpack. We should, of course, take the criticisms of design and construction at face value. They reflect, at least in part, the decline in space and construction standards since the heady ambition (and generous spending) of the early post-war period. They may reflect failings specific to this house. But they also tell, in the mid-1930s, a larger story about council housing and the Wigan working class.

Orwell records of this household, ‘six in family, parents and four children, eldest son nineteen, eldest daughter twenty-two. None in work except eldest son’. His research notes record that ‘nearly all the people living in this estate are unemployed’. In the midst of the Great Depression, Orwell reckoned that over one in three of the Wigan population was dependent on the dole, around 30,000 people. He was told that a ‘steady core’ of around 4500 miners had been unemployed for seven years. (7)

Wigan Pier, illustrated in *Picture Post*, 11 November 1939

This was the background to Wigan’s continuing efforts to build council housing. The Borough had built 832 council houses between 1924 and 1932 but housing conditions remained dire with an estimated one in 47 of the town’s homes judged unfit for human habitation. (8) Nationally, as a result Labour’s 1930 Housing Act and subsequent legislation by the ‘National’ coalition government, there was also a renewed drive to demolish slum housing and to direct council housing, previously the preserve of the better-off working class, to the rehousing of slum dwellers.

In 1931, the Council adopted a five-year programme to build 1168 council houses, new homes required ‘for persons displaced from clearance areas, improvement areas and individual unfit houses, and to provide accommodation for persons residing in apartments’. (9) The following year construction began on 328 houses on the Worsley Hall site in Pemberton. By 1939, a further 1283 council houses had been built in the borough.

Mesnes Park, opened by the Corporation in 1878, photographed in the mid-1930s provided a green haven in the industrial town. With thanks to Cyril Barnett and the Wigan World website.

In terms of slum clearance, it was reported in 1938 that 1480 dwellings housing over 5600 people had been cleared and over 1000 families had been rehoused in the Worsley Hall and Beech Hill estates. (10) Efforts continued: in 1939 a further 320 slum houses were demolished and the Town Guide ‘anticipated that for housing purposes under the slum clearance schemes a further 390 houses will be required and for abatement of overcrowding 200 houses’. (12) The outbreak of war in September 1939 would quash such hopes.

Of course, there were those who didn’t see the new council housing, particularly that on the larger peripheral estates, as unalloyed progress. Let’s return to Orwell. He commented further on the Bottling Wood house: (13)

The tenant complained that the house was cold, damp, and so forth. Perhaps the house was jerry-built, but equally probably he was exaggerating. He had come there from a filthy hovel in the middle of Wigan which I happened to have inspected previously; while there he had made every effort to get hold of a Corporation house, and he was no sooner in the Corporation house than he wanted to be back in the slum.

Orwell recognises the idiosyncrasy of the tenant in question but he remained critical of these larger interwar estates:

In very many cases, perhaps in half the cases, I found that the people in Corporation houses don’t really like them. They are glad to get out of the stink of the slum, they know that it is better for their children to have space to play about in, but they don’t feel really at home. The exceptions are usually people in good employ who can afford to spend a little extra on fuel and furniture and journeys, and who in any case are of ‘superior’ type. The others, the typical slum-dwellers, miss the frowsy warmth of the slum.

You can unpick this yourself. I think it reflects quite widely observed and legitimately criticised failings of many of the newer estates – that they were more expensive to live in and lacked facilities and good transport links, particularly in their early years. They were often distant from former haunts as well as continued employment. We have seen elsewhere – in London’s Watling Estate, for example – that a significant proportion of residents did, for various reasons, move back to private rentals in the inner city. Orwell personally thought some of these out-ot-town estates ‘perched on treeless clayey hillsides and swept by icy winds, would be horrible places to live in’.

But, while Orwell is right about a better-off working class adapting more readily to the new estates, his words also contain a middle-class condescension to those he labels ‘typical slum dwellers’ and an implicit romanticisation of slum living. In this, he anticipated a number of influential post-war commentors such as Michael Young and Peter Willmott who, sharply critical of the London County Council’s new out-of-county estates, talked dubiously of the ‘sociable squash’ of London’s old East End. (14)

In the end, Orwell was too shrewd to succumb to wholesale nostalgia:

When all is said and done, the most important thing is that people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties. I have seen too much of slums to go into Chestertonian raptures about them. A place where the children can breathe clean air, and women have a few conveniences to save them from drudgery, and a man has a bit of garden to dig in, must be better than the stinking backstreets of Leeds and Sheffield. On balance, the Corporation Estates are better than the slums; but only by a small margin.

Chestnut Road, photographed in May 2024, belies Orwell’s earlier criticisms.

It feels, nevertheless, that the new estates are being damned with faint praise. I believe we can be far more positive about these interwar estates. Some – such as those in Wigan – were born into difficult circumstances; all required time for infrastructure to grow and neighbourliness evolve. Most, despite these early problems, became settled and more prosperous communities.

But their perceived successes and failures, alongside a renewed ambition to clear the slums and provide decent housing for all, informed the form and ambition of the huge housing drive that emerged after 1945 in Wigan and elsewhere. This will be the subject of next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in William Hudson, Welfarism Anew? Territorial Politics and Inter-War State Housing in Three Lancashire Towns, University of Liverpool PhD, 2002. Other early detail that follows is drawn from the same source unless otherwise stated.

(2) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1919

(3) See the account by ‘Long Lost Histories: George Orwell’s Lodgings, Wigan (The Road to Wigan Pier)’ in Thomas McGrath’s fascinating blog If Those Walls Could Talk.

(4) George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (first published by the Left Book Club, 1937)

(5) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1925

(6) Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

(7) Orwell’s notes on Wigan are provided online by the Orwell Foundation. The following quotations are drawn from the same source.

(8) ‘Overcrowding at Wigan: Housing and Health One House in Every 47 Insanitary’, Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1929

(9) ‘Wigan’s Housing Programme’, Manchester Guardian, 14 January 1931

(10) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1938

(11) County Borough of Wigan, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1939

(12) Quoted in Hudson, Welfarism Anew? Territorial Politics and Inter-War State Housing in Three Lancashire Towns

(13) Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

(14) Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

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An Interview with Rob Clayton

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