5
During the time Howard was away in the US, and the time that he spent after his return at the House of Commons and LCC, others, engaged in the practicalities of providing housing in the UK, found much to do. The 1880s, in particular, were a period when the inadequacy of the housing that was available for the poor was much remarked upon. It was also a time when, despite emigration, particularly from Ireland, the population of the UK grew from 35 million in 1881 to 38 million by 1891, with most of the increase in English towns, particularly London which expanded from 4.7 million to 5.6 million during the same period. Typical of those expressing their concerns was George Sims, a journalist and playwright, who published How the Poor Live in Pictorial World and The Daily News in 1883. This was followed a few months later by The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, who was prominent in the London Congregational Union. To exert direct political pressure, there was a Land Nationalisation Society (1881) with offices at 432 Strand and the pioneering zoologist Alfred Wallace as its first President, and an English League for the Taxation of Land Values (1883). Originally established as the Land Reform Union following a UK speaking tour by Henry George, this held regular meetings in Trafalgar Square, one of which, in 1887, ended in a riot. Several of its adherents would be successfully elected in the inaugural London County Council elections of 1889.
In 1884, Prime Minister William Gladstone, having won an outright majority in the 1880 general election, noted the way the political wind was blowing, and established a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. With a membership that included Charles Dilke, (President of the Local Government Board and MP for Chelsea), the Prince of Wales, Lord Salisbury, (Leader of the Opposition), Lord Shaftesbury and Cardinal Manning, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and a keen advocate of social justice, this spent a year taking evidence, touring overcrowded urban areas and interviewing witnesses.(1) The outcome was the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1885), sponsored, in an openly bipartisan fashion, by Richard Cross in the House of Commons, and Salisbury in the House of Lords, after the formation of a minority Conservative administration. Importantly, the Act established the principle that local authorities could borrow money to address housing problems via the Treasury, using their local rates as security.(2)
For the while, though, the task of providing new homes remained something mainly carried out by privately funded, philanthropic, organisations. The Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company commenced construction of their 2,200-unit Noel Park Estate in 1883. Designed, like their predecessor at Queens Park, by Rowland Plumbe, it was named after their Chairman, Ernest Noel MP, and built in an area made accessible by the opening of the Seven Sisters-Wood Green railway. The aftermath of Gladstone’s Royal Commission and the raised public awareness about social justice and related issues that it generated also produced a wave of new providers of purpose-built social housing. These included the East End Dwellings Company, founded by Canon Samuel Barnett of Toynbee Hall, the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Society (1885, founded by Lord Rothschild), the Guinness Trust (1890, founded by the Irish philanthropist Edward Guinness), the William Sutton Trust (1894) and the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust (1901, from the bequest of an English moneylender). All of these built high-density, model estates to serve the rapidly increasing urban population.
In tandem with this came an improvement in how such properties were managed, mainly due to the efforts of Octavia Hill. A long-standing activist, she had originally worked with John Ruskin, who purchased 3 houses for housing the poor in Paradise Place, now Garbutt Place W1, in 1864. These were managed by Hill who, by using a team of women she specifically trained for this purpose, devised new methods of rent collection, tenancy and lettings procedures, resulting in her appointment to run the Ecclesiastical Commissioners’ housing estates in south London.
Alongside this the 1880s saw a boom in private house-building, most of which was undertaken by builders who built an average of 4 houses per development. Building for rent, rather than sale, was the model most commonly pursued, assisted by low land values, low labour costs, the low cost of materials, and the restrictive terms imposed by many lenders on would-be mortgagees. In the 1880s, new houses in the Victoria Park area of Hackney could be rented for between £40 pa (small house) and £100 pa (large house), £21,000 pa and £52,500 pa respectively in 2021. New suburbs were being created too. Bush Hill Park, developed by the Bush Hill Park Land Company over 700 acres, was started in 1872 and finally completed 20 years later after a station serving the area had been opened in 1880. By 1901 houses there were being rented for 6s 9d per week. At a time when typical average earnings were £69 10s per year (£1 6s 8d per week) this was 18% of an average income. (In 2021 this would imply £106 per week for a 3-bed house… £462 per month).
At the other end of the spectrum was Bickley Park Estate, designed by Ernest Newton and consisting mainly of very large, detached houses for the upper middle classes, built in what might be considered the emerging “English vernacular” style, a melange of Elizabethan and Queen Anne period detailing reproduced in Victorian red brick. The Woodgrange Estate in Newham was less grand, though much prized by families seeking a respectable neighbourhood. Developed in the 1890s, by Archibald Cameron Corbett, MP for Glasgow Tradeston, it provided well-built, spacious accommodation at 307 habitable rooms per hectare, which, had it been rolled out uniformly across a square mile, would have housed a total of 99,391 people. Walking through Woodgrange Park today it remains a well-planned, desirable area, with street trees, front and back gardens and long avenues of 2-storey houses. Although barely a third the density of Kensington and Chelsea 50 years earlier, it was popular with the public and the rejection of this model by Howard and his disciples in favour of far lower levels of density is striking.
As too is the way they distanced themselves from the structures that were set up in the late nineteenth century to improve public housing. Whilst Howard was patiently devising his network of new towns, presided over by “four gentlemen of undoubted probity”, successive governments were implementing financial and democratic legislation that would fundamentally change people’s lives. In 1888, Charles Ritchie, MP for Tower Hamlets and President of the Local Government Board in the 1886-1892 Salisbury government, presided over the passing of the Local Government Act. This established the London County Council and various County Boroughs elsewhere. Opposed by many in his own party, this was a very significant step forward, and, when combined with the powers introduced in the Housing of the Working Classes Act a few years earlier, led to the undertaking of very large-scale, new-build municipal projects. The same year that Sir William Harcourt proclaimed jocularly “We are all socialists now”, the inaugural LCC elections, in 1889, produced a majority for the Progressives, as the coalition of Liberal and Labour candidates was known.(3) An administration led by the Earl of Rosebery, later to be Prime Minister 1894-1895, took power in London, and quickly embarked on the construction of the Millbank Estate, on the site of the former Millbank prison, and the Boundary Estate, which swept away the Jago “rookery” in Shoreditch.(4) In social housing, then, as now, size mattered. The scale of the resources that the LCC could mobilise, and the amount of money it was allowed to borrow, meant that each of these was up to 7 or 8 times the size of the smaller schemes completed by the various companies set up by charitable benefactors. Tackling the Jago in particular was a much-praised objective. The area was notorious as a den of vice, and featured in fictionalised studies such as A Child of the Jago (Arthur Morrison, 1895) and, even after its demise, in The People of the Abyss (Jack London, 1903).(5)
Another practical alternative to Howard’s immaculate plans for the cities of the future came in 1890 when William Booth published In Darkest England and the Way Out. An observation of contemporary urban conditions, this stated, about the most wretched “…This submerged tenth – it is, then beyond the reach of the nine tenths in the midst of whom they live…” A Methodist, who moved to Congregationalism in the 1850s when he associated with John Campbell at Whitefield’s Tabernacle,(6) Booth had formed his own evangelical organisation, later known as the Salvation Army, by 1861. His book sold 10,000 copies on the day it was published and proposed solutions such as hostels for the homeless, waste recycling centres, skills workshops, job centres for the unemployed, access to banks and legal advice for the poor as well as women’s refuges. It appeared midway through the multi-volume Enquiry into Life and Labour in London 1886-1903, by his namesake Charles Booth, a Unitarian. An early example of social cartography this had been devised from travels around the city, the end result of which was an enormous map of the metropolis, with each street coloured to reflect the income and social class of its inhabitants. The level of detail provided by Charles Booth’s work makes for an interesting comparison with Howard’s sketches.
The cumulative effect of the legislation, and of the initiatives followed by the house-builders, philanthropists and nascent local authorities was to accelerate the emergence of a new, orderly, late-Victorian streetscape. An urban environment characterised by high-density terraces, blocks of mansion flats, main roads lined by shops with residential areas above, stitched together by electric trams (introduced in Leytonstone in 1882) and prototype commuter train services running to and from city centre stations. The quality of what was built varied, of course. Contrary to what many maintain, the standard of Victorian housing construction was not uniformly high. A lot of properties were built without damp courses, many others were built on unstable ground (clay, in particular) or on land that had not been properly filled in after use as brick fields or quarries. But much of it was solid, and some, like John James Burnet’s 1891 scheme at Charing Cross Mansions, in Glasgow, magnificent.
Further progress occurred in 1900 when Henry Chaplin MP, President of the Local Government Board in the 1895-1900 Salisbury government, established the London Metropolitan Boroughs, sweeping away the remnants of the vestries, only a few of which, such as St Leonard’s Shoreditch, had attempted to provide social housing.(7) The 28 newly created local authorities set about devising their own housing and slum clearance programmes. For the moment, though, the initiative remained with philanthropists, some of whom opened privately funded “model” developments similar to those envisaged by Howard.
Among these could be found George Cadbury, a Quaker and the owner of the confectionery manufacturers of the same name who developed Bournville from 1893. Built slowly, it had evolved by 1900 into the Bournville Village Trust. Eventually covering 1,000 acres and home to 23,000 people, it was planned at roughly 20% of the density of inner urban areas in the 1890s and designed by its architect, William Alexander Harvey, in the then prevailing “Arts and Crafts” style, which tended in practical terms to mean mock-Tudor. In keeping with the Cadbury ethos, there were no public houses in the development, something that remains true to the present day. One hundred and five miles north-west of Bournville, William Lever, a Congregationalist, built Port Sunlight. A scheme of 800 houses, completed between 1899 and 1914 it was designed by William Owen, and had much the same appearance visually as Cadbury’s scheme. Somehow, the ethos of a model settlement for workers at a cosmetics and toiletries factory seemed less serious than the endeavours of Cadbury, Peabody, Guinness and others. When added to Lever’s foibles – he ran Port Sunlight as his own private town, where joining in community activities was compulsory and changing your job to work elsewhere meant losing your house – this was noted by the wider public and satirised in the stage musical The Sunshine Girl, which ran at the Gaiety Theatre, London, formerly the Strand Music Hall, in 1912 and 1913.(8) Both Cadbury and Lever launched their schemes within a few months of Howard’s book, and, for practical reasons, both projects were much smaller than what Howard proposed.
Which is not to say that Howard was wrong to think on a grand scale. By the 1890s taxation on land was impacting on traditional landowners, to the point where Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) had Lady Bracknell stating “…What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land…” It followed that there was much agricultural land to be bought cheaply, and, in this context, it is of interest that Chaplin’s successor as President of the Local Government Board, Walter Long MP, who held the position from 1900 to 1905, later became leader of the Country Landowners’ Association in 1907, specifically to fight the devaluation of their main asset.(9)
Notes
1. Manning moved from the Anglican to the Catholic Church in 1851. His views on social teaching, in which the state has a duty toward the poor, later found expression in the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) by Pope Leo XIII, subsequently one of the key foundation blocks of European Christian Democracy, and via that, the European Union.
2. As a result of this, the Public Works Loans Board, which had expanded its remit to include lending money for the building of workhouses (from 1835), water supply and sewers (from 1848) and schools (from 1870) finally began to consider applications for housing schemes.
3. Harcourt, MP for Derby, made the quote in Fabian Essays, a collection edited by George Bernard Shaw.
4. Located in and around Old Nichol Street, the Jago was the only example of a historic London slum to be comprehensively redeveloped: the others changed over time as house-builders made inroads into their terrain. The London “rookeries” seem to have overlapped in area with preceding mediaeval “liberties”: self-governing areas that were independently administered and separate from the structure of parishes that existed elsewhere. Thus, the Jago included some of the Liberty of Norton Folgate, and the St Giles rookery was within the extended Liberties of Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Ely Rents and Ely Place, which contained a population of around 10,000 in the mid-nineteenth century. Liberties were finally abolished by the Local Government Act (1888) with two exceptions – the Inner Temple and Middle Temple in London which continue to be self-administering local government areas.
5. Among those elected to the LCC with Rosebery were John Burns, James Branch, John Benn (like Branch a Congregationalist, and grandfather of Anthony Wedgwood Benn) and Jane Cobden, daughter of Richard. The opposition Moderate Party included Thomas Corbett, brother of Archibald Cameron Corbett. The 1889 LCC had 2 current, 2 past and 23 future MPs.
6. Prominent from the 1830s, John Campbell helped established Congregationalism as a separate dissenting tradition from Methodism. A keen supporter of the abolition of slavery, he spoke with escaped slave Frederick Douglass at the Congregational Chapel in Finsbury Circus in 1846.
7. The Shoreditch Vestry built a total of 97 flats in 3 separate blocks in and around Provost Street in the final few years prior to their abolition. In comparison, the London County Council provided on the Boundary Estate 1069 flats, a laundry, 77 workshops and 188 retail premises in a scheme that completed in 1900.
8. Lever held, and lost, a referendum on banning the sale of alcohol in Port Sunlight.
9. Chaplin was a landowner too, owning extensive states in Lincolnshire.