2
The bits of legislation passed between 1832 and 1835 were soon overwhelmed by events in the real world. They proved wholly inadequate to deal with the challenges that arose in the ensuing decade. A truly miserable period, the 1840s were marked by hunger, famine, pestilence and political upheaval. Further reforms were enacted, as a result of which the British state moved very slightly closer to having a government policy on housing – its provision, where it should be built, by whom, and for whom.
The driving force for this came from hunger, poverty and the threat of political turmoil. There were bad grain harvests every year, from 1839 onwards. The impact of these was felt most by those crowded into the UK’s growing towns and cities. The poor were denied the possibility of using grain imported from abroad, and the months of July andAugust 1842 brought extensive hunger riots with 2,000 troops (and 6 field guns) sent to Manchester to face down political opposition led by the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League. Manchester had been the birthplace of Edwin Chadwick, who, following an outbreak of cholera in 1838, began preparing, at his own expense, his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. This appeared in July 1842 and became one of the best-selling publications of its day. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, set up a Royal Commission on the Health of Towns, chaired by Chadwick, the following year. The work of this body, and the impact of Chadwick’s original report eventually produced the Public Health Act 1848 the first instance of a British government taking responsibility for the health of the population.(1)
The turmoil of the time, and the problems that ordinary people experienced as they tried to survive in such circumstances, were fruitful material too for novelists, as well as politicians and the authors of official reports. Those who enjoyed Charles Dickens would have noted his switch from the Henry Fielding-type picaresque adventures of The Pickwick Papers (1836) to Oliver Twist (1837) with its setting in a squalid London of criminal infested “rookeries”. Later works such as A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849) and Hard Times (1854), featured a gallery of heartless businessmen, oppressed families, cripples and orphans forced to live and work in a London where they endure a lack of proper living accommodation, crime, illness and poverty. Hard Times was also partly set in an industrial (and continually industrialising) metropolis in the north of England. The early to mid-Victorian state-of-the-nation novels included Sybil (1845) written by Benjamin Disraeli, whilst MP for Shrewsbury. Set in a northern town, with horrific living conditions, it reflected his belief that “two nations” existed within the UK, and showed some sympathy for some of the aims of the Chartists.(2) Disraeli’s book prefigured Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1849) and may have been an influence on Dickens’s Hard Times. All explored similar political and social themes. Mrs Gaskell set Mary Barton in Manchester and showed her main characters emigrating to Canada. Her later work, North and South (1854), like Sybil, argued that society was split, in this case by a difference in the social problems affecting the north of England as opposed to the south.
But, for all the awareness that the novelists of the time demonstrated, Disraeli only sold 3,000 copies of Sybil and Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, which appeared the same year in Germany, was not even published in the UK at the time. A minutely researched account of working people’s lives and circumstances in Manchester, it showed that industrialisation, and the way it forced people to live, had shortened life expectancy in comparison with how the same people had lived and worked a decade or so earlier.(3) Outselling everyone, including Dickens, was George W M Reynolds whose The Mysteries of London (1844) used urban squalor to provide lurid, almost gothic, entertainment set in a dirty city inhabited by a starving, ragged working-class and a small, corrupt aristocracy. A Chartist, and an ardent republican, Reynolds emphasised poverty, crime and violence, and, from 1850, ran Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, which, owned by the Co-operative Party lasted, as Reynolds’s News, until the 1960s.
As to what ought to be done, and how it should be paid for, the means to implement even the modest provisions of Chadwick’s Act only existed because Peel, Prime Minister after 1841, and much frustrated by the lack of a significant and reliable source of raising revenue, reintroduced income tax. Effective from May 1842, this was initially set at a rate of 7d in the £ for incomes above £150, and only applied to the relatively wealthy and above.(4) In an era when almost all politicians were independently wealthy, this appears as an interesting example of politicians voting against their own interests and agreeing to do what was best for the country. But, setting the tax at such a low rate only raised a limited amount, and initiatives aimed at improving conditions still tended for many years afterwards to come mainly from private or voluntary sources.(5)Typical of these were the Rochdale Pioneers, a group of artisans who decided to band together in 1843 to open their own store, which they accomplished a year later, selling food items, as a “co-operative”, that they could not otherwise afford as individuals. Similarly, the terrible living conditions faced by many who were forced to migrate to London in search of employment led to the founding of the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1844 by George Williams, who had arrived in the city from Dulverton in Somerset three years earlier. In Lord Shaftesbury they found a willing patron of the organisation.
The notion that something ought to be done was picked up too at the highest level. In 1845, Victoria Park was opened for the recreational use of those crammed into the teeming slums of the East End. Its origin lay in a mass petition to the Queen, asking that support be given to recommendations from epidemiologist William Farr, who argued that ill-health was determined by poor environment. The Queen acted: via the Crown Estate, 218 acres of derelict land, mainly spoil left over after gravel and clay had been extracted to make bricks used in the construction of the thousands of houses creeping out from London, was purchased and a large new park – Victoria Park – laid out.(6)
Finally, efforts were made, if only on a tiny scale, to build homes for those who couldn’t afford to buy the properties erected by private builders. In 1844, Shaftesbury’s Labourer’s Friend Society became the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, with Prince Albert, no less, as President. They engaged Henry Roberts as their architect and, within a few months, had built in Lower Road, Pentonville two narrow terraces designed to house “23 families and 30 aged women” in shared accommodation, different households occupying separate floors within each property.(7) Although an improvement on whatever the residents would have had as an alternative, this quickly turned out to be a far from ideal arrangement. A better plan was devised by Roberts, for the similarly named Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes. Run by Thomas Southwood Smith, a doctor, sanitary inspector and ally of Edwin Chadwick, the Metropolitan Association’s management board was extremely well connected politically, with a membership that included George Hamilton-Gordon (son of Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary), Viscount Ebrington (a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland) and George Howard (a former Chief Secretary for Ireland) as well as Thomas Gibson, a merchant and member of the Anti-Corn Law League. Founded in 1841, the Association took some while to prepare and build its first scheme, Metropolitan Buildings, Old Pancras Road. Opened in 1848, this was superior in every respect to Lower Road and contained 21 one- and 90 two-bedroom self-contained flats (each complete with their own flushing lavatories – a huge improvement in itself) in a five-floor block that by virtue of its shape quickly became known as Pancras Square. Solidly built, with pitched roofs, stairwells and long common balconies on each floor that gave access to the front doors of individual flats, it became, with few exceptions, the template for all subsequent blocks of British social housing. Rents were set at 3s 6d (17.5p) per week for a one-bedroom flat and 6s 6d (32.5p) per week for a two-bedroom flat. At a time when a labourer might earn £20 per year (7s-8s per week) this indicates that living in the Metropolitan Buildings either meant spending a very high proportion of one’s income on housing costs, or required one to be a highly paid artisan. But, in the complete absence of government subsidy of any type, it is hard to see what else Southwood Smith and his colleagues could have done. In every other respect they, and Henry Roberts, got the basics right and their development deserves to be better known and appreciated – had it not been destroyed by bombing in 1941, it probably would be.(8)
Slowly, prodded by the emergence of these self-help societies and the influence exerted by a small number of wealthy aristocratic figures, a cadre of architects was appearing who specialised in solving the dilemmas of rapid urban growth.(9) As to what new buildings and blocks should look like, it was clear that visual innovation was frowned on by some of the intelligentsia, and in terms of design, the preferences of many remained backward looking. The same year that Metropolitan Buildings opened, John Ruskin pronounced “…We want no new style of architecture…the forms of architecture already known to us are good enough for us…” Only 29 years old at the time, Ruskin expanded on this view a year later, after a tour of the continent, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which he argued that the designs executed in the thirteenth century (the “Gothic” style) were truer and more certain than anything subsequently produced. In doing so he was reinforcing the pre-eminence of Augustus Pugin, the leading exponent of what became known as “Victorian Gothic”, and a prolific designer of churches, colleges, presbyteries and country houses through the 1840s. Not content with these commissions, Pugin decried the functional appearance of many of the new workhouses of the time, advocating that such buildings should resemble instead mediaeval monasteries.(10) The views held by Ruskin and Pugin had influence by virtue of their connection to a wider artistic and cultural movement. Ruskin was heavily involved with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of painters and critics inspired by the clarity and beauty of the art produced before 1500, ie, before Raphael) whilst Pugin, a convert to Catholicism, something which resulted in a plethora of work for him in Ireland, advocated “a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages”.(11)
Ruskin’s essentially conservative opinions were not necessarily at variance with those held by significant figures within progressive politics, some of whom saw little to be gained by improving urban conditions, and much better prospects to be had by avoiding towns and cities altogether. Feargus O’Connor, formerly MP for Cork (1832-1835) and latterly as the Leeds representative of the London Working Men’s Association, promoted the idea that people should leave heavily overcrowded and insanitary industrial areas and live instead in a properly planned, low-density, rural setting growing their own food.(12) Essentially, people should revert to how they might have lived 50 or so years earlier. To facilitate this, he established the Chartist Co-Operative Land Society in 1845, which bought various pieces of land. One of these, near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, covered 100 acres, on which 35 detached houses, with adjoining plots of land were provided. It was called O’Connorville, later renamed Heronsgate, and members of the cooperative “won” their homes through a prizedraw, carried out whenever there were properties available. O’Connor was re-elected to Parliament in 1847, for Nottingham, only to have his plan declared illegal by Parliament a year later on the grounds that it was a lottery and he could never, because of this, reward all those who joined the Chartist Co-Operative Land Society.
It is difficult to understate the unfairness of this attack on the scheme. Parliament involved itself in investigating the National Land Company (as the Chartist Co-Operative Land Society became known) on the basis that complaints were made about how it operated, whilst at the same time a petition containing nearly two million signatures requesting that it be registered as a friendly society was rejected out of hand. Of course, it was true that at any one time there would be a queue of people waiting to win one of O’Connor’s lotteries, and that the only way that queue would “lessen” would be whenever another site was developed. But, on that basis, the Epsom Derby should have been declared illegal too, as it was only held once a year and not everyone who placed a bet could win it. The same predicament affected the early building societies too: the Leeds Permanent Building Society, formed in 1846, was originally intended to wind itself up once it had housed all its subscribers. It continued only because it became clear that people were opening accounts faster than the organisation could build houses.
Perhaps O’Connor should have been more adroit and allocated most of the properties according to housing need, only holding back a few for the prize draw. It is hard not to conclude that the reason his fellow MPs moved rapidly against his scheme was that none of them wanted politically aware (and radical) households rehoused in miniature towns, some of which might well have been in their constituencies. The notion that the Chartists might run their own house-building company, moving educated working men and their families into purpose-built developments was clearly something that alarmed them. O’Connor oversaw the development of six small schemes, one of which, at Dodford in Worcestershire, became relatively successful and proved to be an inspiration 40 years later to another generation of political radicals searching for a solution to urban overcrowding.(13)
* * * * * *
By the time the House of Commons rounded on O’Connor, Peel had departed as Prime Minister. As conditions worsened during his tenure, particularly in Ireland where, from 1845, the potato famine resulted in people being driven off the land, Peel decided, in response, that he had no alternative other than to repeal the Corn Laws. His party refused to back him and split, but the measure was carried out anyway in May 1846, after which his government collapsed. What replaced it was an administration led by Lord John Russell, and the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, refused any further assistance to Ireland. Russell and his colleagues promoted a kind of aristocratic, bombastic nationalism. There was a noisy attempt to outlaw the establishment of a Roman Catholic religious hierarchy in England, the dispersing, by force, of the last major Chartist demonstration and an attempted uprising in Ireland, together with various overseas adventures, including the annexation of the Punjab and a blockade of Greece.(14) Very little money was available for domestic improvement. Successive cholera epidemics killed 14,000 and 10,000 people respectively in London in 1849 and 1854, during a period in which the population of the city rose to 2.3 million. It continued to rise in the country too, albeit at a slower rate due to the famine in Ireland (which killed a million people) and increasing migration. The drift off the land and into towns and cities continued.
With the government far from engaged in dealing with the problems posed by rapid urbanisation, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, now emerged as a key sponsor of better housing. Unlike many of his ministers, he was aware that urban overcrowding, poverty, together with hunger and land shortages in rural areas, had provoked uprisings across Europe. Starting in Sicily in January, revolutionary upheavals moved across the continent via Paris, where Louis Philippe I abdicated in February, to Austria and much of Germany by March. Fearing that similar events could happen in the UK (and being related to some of the heads of state facing this turbulence on the other side of the Channel), Albert gave a speech on 18 May 1848 as President of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, stating his “sympathy and interest for that class of our community who have most of the toil and fewest of the enjoyments of this world” and declaring that it was the “duty of those who, under the blessings of Divine Providence, enjoy station, wealth, and education” to help those who would otherwise struggle.
His chosen method of doing so was via a “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”, organised by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, of which he was also President.(15) Bitterly opposed by many in Russell’s government, it opened in Hyde Park in May 1851, accommodated inside a gigantic iron and glass structure weighing nearly 10,000 tons, designed by Joseph Paxton, an eminent landscape architect and director of the Midland Railway.(16) Among the programme of works visitors could inspect was an example of a tiny block of model dwellings, known as Prince Albert’s Model Cottages, erected immediately outside Paxton’s huge glasshouse. Containing four, three-bedroom self-contained flats, it was designed by Henry Roberts, “by command of his Royal Highness, the Prince Consort”. At the conclusion of the Great Exhibition the small block was dismantled and re-erected (where it remains today) on the edge of Kennington Park – an ironic choice, as this had been the rallying point in April 1848 of the Chartist demonstration demanding electoral and constitutional reform. Anyone in Hyde Park curious about seeing another example of this type of housing could have visited Streatham Street Buildings (known now as Parnell House), also by Roberts and built in 1849-1850 on land leased from the Duke of Bedford, as part of a small-scale slum clearance project in an area of Bloomsbury then known as the St Giles “rookery”. Solidly built of brick with a pitched roof, it had five floors, with stairwells and access balconies to each, and provided 48 self-contained flats with self-contained kitchens and water closets. As with Metropolitan Buildings and Prince Albert’s Model Cottages it was built for the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes.
All this was welcome, but was only a tiny level of provision in comparison to actual housing need. Another modest attempt at speeding development and producing homes with better light and ventilation came in 1851 with the abolition of the Window Tax.(17) It remained the case throughout this period, however, that the preferred method of providing housing remained via private builder-developers, notably the Cubitt brothers whose streets, echoing their earlier Belgravia scheme, marched across Finsbury, Canonbury, Highbury and Barnsbury, culminating in their completion, in 1852, of King’s Cross Station, then the largest in the world.
Few would look back on the 1840s with any sentiment, but, during that justly maligned decade, viable designs emerged for both high-density city and suburban homes.
Notes
1. In this context it is useful to remember that the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel was from an industrial and manufacturing background in Lancashire, and familiar with the conditions described by Chadwick.
2. Disraeli’s own preference was for an alliance between enlightened members of the aristocracy and the working classes against the merchants and industrialists. In 1852, when Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the minority Lord Derby administration, he had unsuccessful discussions with John Bright, the radical Liberal MP for Manchester toward this end.
3. Engels’s family were wealthy textile manufacturers and owned a large mill in Salford (where disturbances among the workforce were recorded in 1842) to which they sent their son as manager. An English translation of The Condition of the Working Class in England only appeared in 1887.
4. 7d in the £ was equal to a tax rate of 2.9%, or only a seventh, approximately, of what it is now.
5. Income tax was reintroduced by Henry Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer. One of only 5 members out of a cabinet of 14 who sat in the House of Commons, Goulburn was a former slave owner with extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica.
6. The land had been previously owned by the Church Commissioners, as part of the grounds of Bishop’s Hall, the residence of the Bishop of Stepney. The purchase by the Crown, was, therefore, a moving of an asset between government departments rather than any expenditure on privately owned land.
7. The site is now occupied by the Action for Children play centre, in Cubitt Street WC1. It appears that the land for the project became available when the River Fleet, which passes directly beneath, was culverted.
8. It was located at what is now the north side of Chenies Place NW1. Again, in development terms, this was marginal land, with both the culverted River Fleet and the St Pancras Gasworks (opened 1823) only a short distance away. Metropolitan Buildings later had the extensive Midland Railway Somers Town Goods Yard built against its southern boundary in 1877.
9. Typical of these was Edmund Sharpe, later a significant figure in municipal affairs in Lancaster. A church architect, railway architect and sanitary engineer, Sharpe had been a childhood friend of Mrs Gaskell.
10. Pugin, whose work can be seen as a revolt against English utilitarianism, also carried out extensive alterations and extensions to Alton Towers, the country house of the Earl of Shrewsbury. (Now in use as a theme park).
11. Pugin often expressed libellous views of his contemporaries, and, after his death, was disowned by Ruskin.
12. One of O’Connor’s successors as MP for Cork was Daniel O’Connell. Both were part of the Repeal Association: they advocated repealing the 1800 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland with the restoration of an independent Irish Parliament. O’Connell, who held a rally at Clontarf in 1843 that attracted a million supporters, died whilst on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1847.
13. The National Land Company owned each of the settlements. Those allocated plots paid rent for them and could, in time, purchase them. However, in a poor year (or if the plot owner was less than competent at managing their holding) they fell into arrears and some were uninterested from the start in paying any rent at all: they wanted to own their own freeholds. There were, therefore, problems with both plot management and rent arrears on all the sites. Essentially a large and early version of a housing cooperative, the fact that such difficulties arose would come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of some such bodies in later years.
14. The Young Ireland movement, under William Smith O’Brien, took forward their objectives via an armed rising, which was easily suppressed in July 1848, a few months after O’Connor’s campaign for political reform via Chartism was abandoned following a gigantic demonstration on Kennington Common.
15. The inspiration for such an event appears to have been the Great Exhibition of Products of French Industry, held regularly in Paris from 1798 to 1849.
16. Paxton’s building was dismantled and re-erected in Sydenham in 1854 where it remained until destroyed by fire in 1936.
17. Introduced in 1696, and related to the beginning of a national debt and establishment of the Bank of England, the Window Tax was an ineffectual revenue-raising device that the government fell back upon when the notion of an income tax was held to be an intrusion into the privacy of the public. It mainly applied to houses with 10 or more windows: to avoid payment builders simply completed houses with less than that number, or with bricked up spaces where windows could be reinstated at a later date, whenever the tax was repealed.