7
Despite widespread popular belief to the contrary, no one in British politics actually said “homes fit for heroes to live in”. The phrase has stuck, though, as evidence of a different time, back in our grandparents’ (or great-grandparents’) days when priorities were different and, after the making of immense sacrifices, a grateful state gave something back to the people. However, as with many misremembered memories, urban myths and so on, there is truth in the recollection. The words may be wrong, but something of that type did happen at the end of the First World War.
Having secured an armistice with Germany on 11 November 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George immediately requested a dissolution of Parliament, so that a general election could be held on 14 December. During the ensuing campaign, he stated on 24 November “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in”. No mention of homes there, but, in fairness, how the UK’s domestic arrangements could be improved had exercised him for some while. In July 1917, he had established a Ministry of Reconstruction to take forward proposals for reform of the civil service, Irish devolution, women’s suffrage, additional employment rights and significant housing improvements. The latter were based on a paper put forward by a committee led by garden city advocate Seebohm Rowntree. This recommended that 300,000 new houses should be built by local authorities who would either be reimbursed after three years for the cost they incurred in doing so, or given a grant beforehand by the government to pay for the construction. The incoming Minister of Reconstruction, Christopher Addison, modified this further, by increasing the target to 500,000 new homes and confirming that the government would provide a grant equal to 75% of the cost incurred by the local authority. The remainder was expected to be covered by the local authority increasing their annual rates by 1d (0.42p then, £82.32p today). If, however, the gap between central government and local government funding could not be closed by doing this, then the government would cover the shortfall. It was a revolutionary proposal.
After Lloyd George’s overwhelming election victory, the task of implementing this fell to Addison. Appointed President of the Local Government Board by Lloyd George, he stayed in post a few months later when this department was expanded and renamed the Ministry of Health. By 1919, it had been calculated there was a shortage of 610,000 homes, because house-building ceased during the war. To address this, Addison sponsored the Housing Act 1919, which put into law the subsidy arrangements approved by the Ministry of Reconstruction and fixed rents for the new homes local authorities would build at the level tenants would have paid in 1914. As to what the new homes should look like, and whether houses were preferred to flats, he relied heavily on the input of Raymond Unwin, who had been appointed Chief Town Planning Inspector at the Local Government Board in December 1914. Unwin produced a Housing Manual, illustrated with model house types, including three that he (and Parker) had built at New Earswick for Rowntree. Thus, when local authorities began building, much of what they provided on their new estates closely resembled Howard’s pre-1914 garden cities.
In the early stages of implementing the legislation it was popular and bipartisan. The Labour Party, now the official opposition,(1) supported the measures, and produced, via Averil Furniss and Marion Phillips, The Working Woman’s House, a book suggesting specific design improvements so that housework, child care and the business of running one of the new homes would be as convenient as possible for women.(2) Among the many developments that appeared because of Addison were Northfield, Edinburgh, designed by Reginald Fairlie, schemes in Portsmouth and Weybridge by Henry Lanchester(3) and a significant estate in Whiston, Lancashire by Herbert Rowse(4). A total of 213,000 new homes were directly provided by the legislation, and a large number of these were completed in 1922. By then, though, their anticipated cost had risen from £385 per unit to £910 (approximately £72,000 to £171,000 in 2021 prices).(5) In a coalition government where 73% of the MPs were Conservatives, questions were quickly raised about Addison’s competence and whether he and his department were getting value for money. He was replaced as Minister of Health by Alfred Mond in April 1921, and, after hanging around for a few months as Minister without Portfolio, resigned completely from the government in July.(6) But though trimmed and much criticised, his system of subsidies survived.
In the first flush of optimism about building a country fit for heroes to live in, Welwyn was presented by Howard, Purdom and Osborn as part of the solution, ideally as one of 20 “satellite” towns surrounding London. A shrewd Herbert Morrison, by that point serving as Mayor of Hackney, pointed out that “satellite town” was a US term, describing places like Cambridge, Massachusetts or Oakland, California. Whether this observation was intended as a reproach wasn’t clear, but doubts of whether or not low-density garden cities ought to be the primary objective would grow steadily from this point onward. Howard’s trump card remained his rejection of government funding, and his reliance on well-connected board members. For Welwyn that meant a company with a membership that included Lord Lytton, whose family seat was at Knebworth House, and who would later be appointed Governor of Bengal. The land for Howard’s second scheme, some 2,400 acres, included 700 acres purchased from Lord Salisbury, with the total acquisition cost before any building had started coming to £100,000 (£16.5m in 2021 money). To try and recoup some of this Howard went fundraising among wealthy UK expatriates on the French Riviera, without much success. As a result, work at Welwyn proceeded slowly, and at a markedly slower pace than that on most of Addison’s estates. This was despite the terms offered to those who wanted to live there being quite advantageous: a house at Welwyn could be purchased for £765 (£144,000 today), and modest homes were available to rent at 3s per week (15p then £28.20p today). Attracting private sector employers to Welwyn proved difficult, though, and in its early years most of the employment within Welwyn was in the administration and statutory services that the town relied on and provided to itself. A cyclical relationship developed: people moved there to rent or buy a home, worked for the company that ran the town, the company paid them their wages, and they then paid back most of that to the company via rent, mortgage payments or domestic utility bills. It was not unlike Pullman, Chicago: a “company town”, and one with which Howard would have been familiar.(7) Welwyn, however, by virtue of the UK’s tangled system of local government, could at least claim to be democratic, with its electors participating in elections to Welwyn Rural District Council and Hertfordshire County Council.
As had been the case with Letchworth, and almost every other similar development, the town only really took off after Welwyn Garden City got its own railway station in 1926. The year before this Howard had visited the US, where he tried to persuade Henry Ford to fund garden cities, having heard that Ford had built homes for his workforce on the outskirts of Dearborn. It transpired that Ford wasn’t interested in any wider investment in housing, particularly overseas.(8) During his visit Howard spoke in New York about how the US had provided him the inspiration for his garden city plan, confirming “…I have lived long enough in America to know that the people of this great country… have, among other qualities, the somewhat extraordinary power of conceiving and following out new ideas… I feel that civilisation is on a new threshold, and that possibilities lie before us which the Americans will do more to point out to the other nations of the world than has ever entered into the minds of any of us…”(9) He was knighted in 1927, at the age of 77, whilst planning a visit to Radburn, New Jersey where a new model of low-density housing was being created, and died a year later. It fell to Frederic Osborn to take his ideas forward, initially as manager of Welwyn Garden City, and later, through to the 1960s, via his involvement with the Town and Country Planning Association.
Howard accomplished much in what can only be considered an extraordinary life. He was living at a time when a consensus had already been formed in some circles that cities and towns were best avoided, and living instead in the country, with all its perceived health attributes, was to be preferred. As well as this, he was living when migration from the UK was running at a very high level, and played a key role in shaping public views about the ideal type of property one ought to aspire to own. In the century between Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and the German invasion of Belgium, it has been estimated that 22.6 million people left the UK and Ireland to live abroad. The overwhelming majority of these (62%, or an average of 140,000 per year, every year) headed toward the US, with the remainder dispersed between Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A small minority (3.5%) opted for South Africa, possibly because it had already been settled by the Dutch. Apart from civil servants, soldiers, sailors, administrators and a handful of significant commercial figures almost nobody chose to migrate to the remainder of Africa, India and the extensive imperial realms further east.
This migration was driven by several factors, including unemployment, under-employment and poor pay caused by cyclical depressions, together with brutal land clearance programmes in Scotland and Ireland. Virtually every family in the UK and Ireland was affected. Although some migrants, like Howard, did return (and it is calculated that about 35%-40% were doing so, especially in the latter part of this period), most left for good, and most did better in their new countries than they would have done had they stayed at home. Having relatives who lived in the US, or what became known as the white settler Dominions, was quite normal. And they might well have their own house in a new suburb or a completely new town, be in somewhat better paid employment and – relatively speaking – free of the class assumptions (and restrictions) that were typical back home. What Howard devised, in the eyes of many, was a way to avail oneself of these opportunities without having to leave the UK.(10)
Politically, Howard was regarded as being progressive, and even possibly an early type of socialist. Certainly, he came out of a cooperative, internationalist tradition that was common within non-conformism. However, he never really identified with the growing labour movement and, as has been shown, he thought that many trade unionists were expending their energies on fruitless class struggle, rather than trying to build a new, hermetically sealed, Jerusalem of their own at home. What seems to have been the case is that he recognised from very early on, probably from his many years minuting the deliberations of Parliament and the London County Council, the importance of obtaining the support of powerful establishment figures. Once he had achieved this in the 1890s, though he was happy to continue an association with the likes of the Cadburys, Rowntrees and Lever, he moved on quite quickly from having any direct connections with the political left.
As to why he was so successful, raising the funds to commence two garden cities and spawning many imitators, one needs to consider how much the public identified with his idyll, as part of a wider trend that normalised the culture of America, and the rather similar white settler regions of the British Empire. It wasn’t just the fact that, throughout the nineteenth century, most middle-class and working-class families had members who had migrated away from the UK. Many of the upper classes and aristocracy had married into US money during this period too. On top of this, came the increase in US culture helped by the rise of the cinema, and the increasing availability of a number of gadgets (the telephone, radio, the motor car and so on) that became common after they had first been made available to the wider public in the US. The notion that building US-style suburban developments in the UK was incongruous, and best avoided, probably wouldn’t have occurred to most people.
Howard insisted on avoiding government funding for his projects. Initially he was probably wise to do so: in the 1890s there was no tradition of the state funding house-building in the UK, and not too much activity from local authorities either in terms of providing it. But after 1919 it was wrong to maintain this stance. In fact, all the examples of suburban and garden city schemes in the UK from the mid-nineteenth century onwards were bedevilled by their reliance on private funding. Most took quite some time to complete as the developers and house-builders reined in work whenever an economic downturn occurred. Letchworth and Welwyn were no different in this respect. Nor did they provide, in sufficient volume, the numbers of new properties required either to ensure that all households had a reasonable home of their own, or to replenish and increase the number of homes fit for human habitation as earlier, older dwellings continued their decline. They were a niche product, for a niche group of consumers.
The arguments that Howard made for well designed, pleasant streets of spacious housing, would, as noted, have puzzled the likes of Archibald Cameron Corbett who from the 1890s onward built many of the eastern suburbs of London with far less fanfare than attended Howard. Comparing and contrasting the two it is not clear how significant the advantages of Howard’s garden city actually were. However, one thing is certain: they came with two significant flaws. The first of these concerned the governance of the development. The company overseeing the garden city raised money via rents, ground rents and selling leases. After it had deducted administrative expenses and the cost of maintaining the communal facilities that “sold” the scheme to the public in the first place, whatever profit was left remained with the company who could use it to build more homes, or to provide a wider range of non-housing benefits. This was fine, and in the early years both Letchworth and Welwyn did that as far as they were able. The problem was, although the company directors were no doubt publicly spirited in the early years of the development, there was no guarantee they (or their successors) would be 50 or 60 years later. They might be inclined to sell-up, or they might seek to alter the complex articles of association of the company to make them more advantageous to themselves. It was never clear how democratic or accountable they really were.(11) The second problem came with the extent of the maintenance required by the design itself. Garden cities were noted for an abundance of open space, verges, grassed areas, flower beds, trees, ornamental shrubs and other features. Keeping all of this in pleasant condition became an increasingly expensive process. The later replication of these design features in new towns post-1945 eventually created significant environmental problems. It should be noted that, although we might cut Howard some slack by pointing out that the problems of the consumer society and its throwaway culture were probably not foreseen in the 1890s, other types of urban and suburban development being built then, and subsequently, avoided this future problem by restricting the amount of public space to the highway, pavement and traditional open spaces, such as parks. It can be argued that this was, ultimately, more sustainable.
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Addison’s departure from the government was part of a gradual rightward shift. By the autumn of 1922, the Conservatives, who had a majority within Parliament as well as within the government, ended Lloyd George’s coalition. In the ensuing general election, they won an overall majority of 75 and their leader, Andrew Bonar Law became Prime Minister. Found to be dangerously ill with cancer only seven months later, Bonar Law gave way to Stanley Baldwin. In December 1923, Baldwin called a general election on whether to introduce trade tariffs across the British Empire that restricted foreign imports or continue with free trade. The result was a hung Parliament, in which the Labour Party, with 191 MPs were now the official opposition. Baldwin resigned on 22 January 1924 and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister of a minority Labour government.
In the early 1920s, UK politics were fairly chaotic in comparison with the monolithic two-party system that had prevailed prior to that, and the changes that ensued – such as Ramsay MacDonald entering Downing Street – reflected the extension of the franchise that had been introduced by Lloyd George in late 1918. Commonly this is regarded as the point at which women were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. But this is only partially true. From 1918 women over the age of 28 could vote (age equality with men, 21, was only introduced in 1928), but the more important factor introduced then was the abolition of the property qualification for all electors. The historic requirement to be a freeholder and/or ratepayer before you were entitled to vote disappeared. Thus, in 1918, all adult men over 21 were enfranchised. Before that date, with most men either renting or living as lodgers, virtually all working-class males had been disenfranchised. Lloyd George’s 1918 Representation of the People Act actually tripled the electorate and gave as many working-class men votes as it did women of all classes. In electoral terms this produced huge gains for the Labour Party, and led within a few years to the first Labour government.
John Wheatley, MP for Glasgow Shettleston, was appointed Minister of Health in Ramsay MacDonald’s first administration. A fiercely intellectual Irish Catholic, Wheatley was the author of Eight Pound Cottages for Glasgow Citizens (1913) which advocated using the profits generated by the Glasgow municipal tramways to subsidise council house-building, with the completed dwellings available at a rent of £8 per year, 3s 9d per week. (£50.41p per week today). An elected member of Lanarkshire County Council from 1909, he had studied local government finance in some detail and quickly introduced a Housing (Financial Provisions) Act. This reinstated Addison’s system of subsidies, and increased them to a level of £9m a year (£1.168bn today). It also set up training schemes to produce qualified building workers in collaboration with the appropriate trade unions. Under Wheatley’s Act, local authorities were given subsidies over a period of 40 years, to build council housing, and guaranteed against any losses. It aimed to increase council house-building from 135,000 per year (Addison’s Act had built a maximum of 110,000 in 1921-1922) to 450,000 per year over a ten-year period, thus solving the UK’s housing shortage. The properties were to be built to a high standard, suitable for skilled workers and were aimed primarily at the prosperous working class, rather than the destitute or homeless.
Although Wheatley’s Act was tinkered with and scaled back by successive Conservative governments, around 500,000 new homes were built because of it. The London County Council used it to build the bulk of the Becontree Estate and to commence Downham Estate, both “cottage estates” that owed a lot to Howard’s approach.(12) The effect of the legislation sponsored by Addison and Wheatley, combined with the political enfranchisement of working-class men and women was to make the provision of housing an issue that remained at the forefront of politics, and of importance to all governments, in a way that had not been so marked pre-1914. In practice a bipartisan attitude prevailed and, significantly, a particularly large number of new council homes were built in 1927-1928, when Neville Chamberlain was Minister of Health in the Baldwin government.(13)
Although the provision of council housing was now an accepted part of the political agenda, in terms of overall numbers, the private sector continued to lead the way. In fact, it would be during the inter-war period that it built more homes than at any other time, before or since. By 1924, construction numbers were running at 120,000 a year and they rose steadily, peaking at 294,000 in 1935-1936. Between 1930 and 1940 private builders completed 2.9m homes, with local authorities adding a further 0.78m during the same period. In effect, there was a house-building boom driven by the continued low cost of land, low wages, the low cost of living, the low cost of materials, low interest rates and a large pool of labour. To maintain costs at an acceptable level, developers built out from town and city centres, spreading networks of new streets to either side of existing main roads, many of which acted as “arterial roads”, ie, the local authority provided mains services beneath them which the developer could access to facilitate rapid, efficient development. One consequence of this trend was that the population of all the old northern towns declined throughout the inter-war period as suburban development on their outskirts accelerated.
Howard would have recommended much of this and traditional examples of his oeuvre duly appeared at Townhill Garden City, Swansea and Swanpool Garden Suburb, Lincoln.(14) These were limited in size, however, and grander examples, now regarded as synonymous with this era, came in what would be called “Metroland”: the parts of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire that adjoined the commuter route into Baker Street. Developed by the Metropolitan Railway, prior to their absorption into London Transport, these were “garden suburb” schemes built along its route by its subsidiary company Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited. Operating in partnership with builders they launched the Harrow Garden Village (213 acres, 1928) and Rayners Lane (250 acres, 1931)(15). Nor did the demise of the Metropolitan Railway end this. In 1934 De Havilland sold the Stag Lane airfield (in Edgware) to Laing Homes, and a scheme of 1,000 houses and 150 shops was quickly erected. Queensbury Station was built to service this.
What the Metropolitan Railway did throughout the 1920s was an embellished version of what Cameron Corbett had been doing in the 1890s, greatly assisted by private landowners on the fringes of London and other cities selling tracts of agricultural land to housebuilders. In 1927, for instance, the Rector of West Wickham (Kent) sold the glebe lands before he retired to a builder. A decade later several square miles of these had been built over with houses available at up to £2,500, five times the price of a smaller inter-war house at that time. Less expensive, but much larger in scale, was the immense sprawl of property completed by the builders New Ideal, Wimpey and Wates around Bexleyheath in the 1930s. In fact, between 1925 and 1940, a huge phalanx of new housing was completed, connecting Woolwich with Dartford and stretching around, through Kent and Surrey, to Croydon.
In terms of what this looked like, it was definitely Howard-lite. A type of “English vernacular” housing, often mock-Tudor, that bowdlerised the earlier careful designs that had characterised Letchworth and other pre-1914 schemes. Density remained fairly low and some of the accoutrements of garden suburbs were retained (streets lined with fruit trees remained popular) but this was definitely house-builder territory, a product that could be built rapidly. Not that these aesthetic distinctions mattered overmuch, as typical inter-war housing was popular both politically and with the public. A new 3-bedroom house in the south-east of England cost £500 in 1935 (£350-£400 elsewhere), the equivalent of £77,000 today. Land values were typically only £200 per plot, equivalent to £30,000 in 2020, by which point, due to house price inflation, they were usually 3-4 times higher in real terms. In the 1930s you could buy a property if you had a satisfactory reference from your bank and a 5% deposit, (£25 then, £3,850 now). In practice, though, with mortgages much more difficult to arrange at this time, many of the homes were built for rent and were a good investment for their owners, because of cheap money and low interest rates.
The impact of this was spotted by JB Priestley in English Journey (1934) “This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools and everything given away for cigarette coupons… You need money in this England, but you do not need much money. It is a large-scale, mass-production job with cut prices”. The way such development advanced along main roads was also caught by George Orwell in his Road to Wigan Pier Diary, where he noted on 2 February 1936 “Walk from Wolverhampton to Penkridge (10 miles) very dull and raining all the way. Villa-civilization stretches almost unbroken between the two towns”. The prospect of say, London and Birmingham becoming connected via continuous “ribbon-development” along the A41 seemed very real, and a desire to prevent the rapid spread of suburbia was one of the factors in the foundation of the Campaign to Protect Rural England by town planner Patrick Abercrombie in 1926. Which is not to suggest that Abercrombie was against garden cities. Rather, he supported properly planned developments of this type, and wanted ersatz-Howard variants curtailed. A similar view was taken by architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who wrote about the dangers of unregulated house-building in his books England and the Octopus (1928) and Britain and the Beast (1937), the latter a collection of essays that he edited. A firm advocate of the arts and crafts ethos, Williams-Ellis provided suggested designs for many of the garden suburbs that emerged just before and after the 1914-1918 war. Mainly, though he specialised in small terraces of cottages in rural locations. From 1925 he gradually designed and built his own village, Portmeirion, in mock-Italian village style. It took 50 years to complete, but was sufficiently advanced by the 1930s to be visited by George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and Noel Coward. This is the philosophy of Howard, Osborn and Purdom taken to extremes: a fantasy place, well executed but essentially an exercise in “retro-architecture” and leading inexorably to Disneyland, which is Portmeirion on a massive, highly commercial scale.(16)
The reservations expressed by Abercrombie, Williams-Ellis and others eventually bore fruit in the findings of the Barlow Commission. Established by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in July 1937, this was an official endorsement of much of Howard’s philosophy and owed much to lobbying by Osborn and the Town and Country Planning Association. Reporting in 1940, it recommended that manufacturing be dispersed around the UK rather than concentrated in old industrial areas, and that properly planned new towns and cities should be built to accommodate its required workforce.(17)
Similar views were also coming to the fore in the US. Here Lewis Mumford, an intellectual within several disciplines and a friend of both Frederic Osborn and Frank Lloyd Wright, argued that urban sprawl was bad and that existing suburbs were unsatisfactory. His ideal was a city built to a recognisably human form and scale, in a way that respected existing social structures and values. Mumford was heavily influenced by Patrick Geddes, a major figure in UK zoology, botany, sociology and town planning from the 1890s, whose views, had in turn, guided Raymond Unwin.(18) By the 1920s, then, a US-UK consensus seemed to have emerged about the most beneficial and desirable type of development. An example of this transatlantic approach had been built at Radburn, New Jersey, in 1929. Covering 149 acres, this eventually housed just over 3,000 people, making it low-density, but by no means at the bottom of that scale. Its key features were its geometrically laid out terraces of housing that were separated from each other by abundant grass verges and planted areas, and only accessible via footpaths. A limited number of broad public highways were provided within the scheme, but otherwise a lot of walking within its interior was required. The object was somehow to contain the prevalence of motor vehicles whilst accommodating them and leaving safe areas for pedestrians, especially children. Known as “the Radburn layout” it quickly became the classic US suburban design. Architect Clarence Stein produced additional examples in Chatham Village, Pittsburgh (from 1932) and in two locations within Los Angeles (by the 1940s), but its greatest success under his auspices came via the New Deal-funded schemes at Greenbelt, Maryland, Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio from 1935. The plan for Greenbelt, which was built on government-owned land, was approved in person by President Roosevelt, a level of official endorsement most architects and planners (outside of the Soviet Union) would have died for, and much of the town was designed to operate as a cooperative. Prospective residents were carefully selected: it was located in a part of Maryland that was racially segregated and early plans to allow part of the town to be occupied by African American families were quickly jettisoned as too controversial. Applicants had to be married couples, earn between $800 and $2,200 per year (roughly between £26,000 and £88,500 now) with the husband, specifically, employed. Female-led households were not entertained.
Greenbelt was the subject of considerable publicity efforts, and features in the latter half of the 1939 documentary, The City. Devised by Lewis Mumford, and with a score from Aaron Copland, this provides an extremely polished view of how the problems experienced in densely populated cities (particularly with traffic congestion) could be overcome by rigorous planning and high-quality design. Greenbelt is shown as new, in bucolic settings and with a healthy, fit, all-white population clearly enjoying life. In its early years the community hosted many visitors, anxious to see for themselves how a planned environment of this type worked in practice. Raymond Unwin came in March 1938 and was extremely impressed, noting that many of the houses with pitch roofs resembled designs found in Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities. In time, the Greenbelt concept was widely exported, and was adopted for public housing in Canada, Australia and the UK, despite the fact that, when coupled with other political and planning decisions, its low density and extensive maintenance requirements led to issues with antisocial behaviour and environmental decline. Today, Greenbelt, Maryland covers 6.3 square miles and houses 23,000 people, a density only 10% that of a typical inner London/inner city area.
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Not all utopias took the form of garden suburbs, however. In fact, it was possible to be inspired by William Morris and his use of high-quality art and design and end up in a very different place to Howard, Osborn and Mumford. One figure who emerged in the 1920s with a markedly different take on geometric layouts, traffic issues and how best to enhance green space was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. Born in Switzerland, and originally apprenticed to a watchmaker, he had built his first house by the time he was 18. By 1910, he was living and working in Germany alongside Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius as an assistant at the practice of Peter Behrens during a period when Behrens undertook many commissions for immense industrial buildings. Arriving in Paris in 1917, he worked initially as an artist, adopting the name Le Corbusier (“the crow-like one”), and finally arrived at town planning with his 1922 design for a city of 3 million people: Ville Contemporaine de trois millions d’habitants. At this stage there were still parallels with Howard. Neither had any formal architectural qualifications and both were proposing large, geometrical designs. Unlike Howard, however, Le Corbusier had a background in the practicalities of building and development and had spent 17 years working his way through various drawing positions in architects’ offices. More importantly, unlike Howard (and Morris), Le Corbusier sought his solutions by looking to the future, rather than replicating an idealised past. And he was aware of the need to use space effectively when trying to accommodate rapidly increasing populations within countries that were not particularly large.
Unashamedly high-density, the Ville Contemporaine aimed to prevent congestion in city centres via a network of broad new roads, and like Mumford’s ideas (but on a much larger scale) provided landscaped green space in any area not required by blocks of flats, offices, roads, public facilities (schools, churches, administrative buildings) and transport infrastructure. Visually, some of this looks rather like the accounts of the cities of the future that featured in HG Wells’s works a decade or two earlier. Le Corbusier’s city has 24 immense tower blocks (each with 70 floors and housing 5,000 to 8,000 people each) surrounded by a great many 17-floor “medium-rise” blocks housing around 2,500 people. The ground-floor space in all of these residential buildings would be occupied by shops, cafes and launderettes, with swimming pools and nurseries on the roof. Rapid construction was favoured, almost exclusively in concrete and glass, with prefabricated sections being slotted into place wherever possible.
Ville Contemporaine was theoretical, the work of a dreamer planning a new world. In 1925, sponsored by his friend Gabriel Voisin, a car and aircraft designer, Le Corbusier went a step further with Plan Voisin, a specific design for completely rebuilding part of Paris. The objective here was the debourgeoisification of the city by bringing the working classes back to the centre (where the affluent had always lived) from the unsatisfactory accommodation they inhabited on the fringe. Phalanxes of high-rise flats dominated Le Corbusier’s vision, for which immense amounts of demolition and clearance would have been required. In normal peace-time situations few countries would wish to undertake such a radical project. One that did, and where the democratic difficulties encountered by widespread demolition were no obstacle, was the Soviet Union. Here, where his promise had been noted some years earlier, Le Corbusier built the Tsentrosoyuz building, the HQ of the Central Union of Consumer Co-operatives. A hugely ambitious structure that used substantial amounts of reinforced concrete, it was completed in 1933, following shortages encountered during the first Five Year Plan. By then Le Corbusier had added a couple of urban housing projects to his portfolio: the Cité de Refuge, in Paris and Immeuble Clarté, in Geneva, both 1932-1933. The former was a Salvation Army hostel, one of several such schemes that he undertook on behalf of the philanthropist and socialite Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac.(19) The latter, a scheme of 45 apartments, was his first large residential scheme to be built to completion. An earlier commission, the Cité Frugès, on the outskirts of Bordeaux (ironically in a suburb), had been aborted in 1926 when only 25% complete.
In the midst of this gradually burgeoning reputation, he published his manifesto, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1929), a widely praised work that brought him to the attention of the English-speaking world. Reviews were particularly favourable in the US where The Nation stated “…Le Corbusier ranks with Freud, Picasso, and Einstein as a leading genius of our time. The only great architect alive, he has turned his attention from the individual house to town-planning. And the result is ‘The City of Tomorrow’, a book not for the aesthetes but for statesmen…” Writing in The New York Evening Post, Edgar Johnson was equally fulsome “…M. Le Corbusier’s extremely important book is an analysis of the problem of the city and a solution. It sidesteps none of the issues, admits the inevitable growth in population, the need for speed and centralization, and provides a reasoned and thorough overcoming of the difficulties. This book is, both practically and artistically, a work of vision…”
It made less impact in the UK, where, with the exception of Maxwell Fry, unashamedly modernist architects were a rarity. But, examples of modern residential developments did, nevertheless, begin to appear: Cropthorne Court, Maida Vale, by Giles Scott, (who later did Battersea Power Station) in 1928; the Isokon Building, Lawn Road, Hampstead and Embassy Court, Brighton, both 1934-1935, by Wells Coates; and Appleby Lodge, Manchester, which had 100 flats, by Peter Cummings in 1939. Le Corbusier never built anything in the UK, and his influence, initially, was quite restricted. A more obvious determining factor, for those interested in resolving the problems of high-density urban living, came from the study of how European cities provided housing in medium-rise blocks of flats.
Council housing pre-1939 was typically built to a density of 615 people per hectare. This is equivalent to 249 people per acre, against Howard’s preference for 3-4 in his original garden city plan, and 23 in Bournville. On paper this looked as if horribly dense and antisocial schemes were being developed by local authorities. In practice, they worked perfectly well. Under Herbert Morrison, from 1934 the LCC built many estates made up of high-density, 5-floor blocks, these being complimented in Housing and Slum Clearance in London (Quigley and Goldie, 1934) thus “…The new estates built by the LCC in Kennington and Stamford Hill… come as close to perfection in their type as anything in Germany, Holland or Austria, and they definitely surpass the most expensive block of flats built in the West End of London…”(20) Like Patrick Abercrombie, the LCC also recognised the problems posed by ribbon development and, in August 1935, introduced its own “green belt” to try and curb this.
The LCC, and other major urban local authorities, were also much exercised by slum clearance. They were able to act effectively in this area because of Arthur Greenwood MP, Minister for Health in the second Labour government, who passed the Housing Act 1930. This provided extensive subsidies for slum clearance, and related them to how many people were rehoused, rather than how many properties were demolished. Thus, it became popular, and financially viable, to knock down much of the housing in multiple occupation within which a significant proportion of the working classes lived, and replace it with purpose-built, self-contained new homes. Between 1934 and 1939, using these powers, 250,000 properties were demolished, more than had been achieved in the previous half-century. It was a tribute to the politicians of this period that, even after Greenwood had left office in 1931, his legislation remained intact and was retained by Neville Chamberlain and Sir Edward Hilton Young, the latter being particularly vigorous in its execution.(21)
The descent of much nineteenth-century (and earlier) housing into poorly maintained multiple occupancy had long been noted. It was particularly obvious in London where decline affected many streets and squares in what are today fashionable areas. To address this, a Royal Commission into London Squares was established in 1927, to protect them and to prevent further deterioration. Some parts of London, like Somers Town, were in notably poor condition, and as a result benefitted from concerted improvement efforts, in this case the Ossulton Estate (310 flats) built by the LCC between 1927 and 1931 and the Sidney Street Estate (250 flats) built from 1935 by the St Pancras House Improvement Society.(22) Elsewhere in London, concern about slum conditions in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill Gate – where many once grand buildings and squares had declined dramatically – led to the founding of the Kensington Housing Trust in 1926. Chaired by Lord Balfour of Burleigh, it acquired early on a swathe of property from the Great Western Railway, and even promoted its work on film. Kensington Calling, an 8-minute-long silent with captions appeared in 1930, with footage of a grossly overcrowded 5-floor house in the area that was lived in by 48 people.(23)
The use of cinema as a medium led to Housing Problems (1935), made by John Grierson and Edgar Anstey. Shot in black and white on 35 mm sound stock, it was widely shown in cinemas as part of a full evening’s entertainment, as well as separately at film clubs, universities etc. Over 13 minutes it firmly sets out the case for slum clearance, with replacement housing coming via modern methods of construction, including the use of concrete and steel framing in blocks of flats. A model of Quarry Hill Estate in Leeds is shown. This was subsequently built in 1938 and consisted of 938 flats in blocks between 6 and 8 floors high: so high, for the time, that lifts were fitted, an almost unique occurrence in a social housing estate. Inspired by the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, Quarry Hill came with its own bus station.(24) On garden cities Housing Problems restricts itself to a mere 12 seconds of coverage, cautiously admitting “…where there is enough room, and where the price of land is not too high, it’s possible to build cottage estates and give each house its own garden…” The message in both films was almost the opposite of what Howard would have wanted: houses should be retained and refurbished, new flats should be built in high-density developments, and demolition and landscaping (on the scale Howard envisaged) avoided. It is interesting to compare how Howard’s efforts in publicising the housing solutions of the future – via elaborate slide shows in church halls, targeted at a specially invited, rather well-to-do audience – contrast with the films used to promote good housing in the 1930s. These were seen and appreciated by millions of ordinary people via cinema, the mass medium of its time.
The UK’s sustained private sector house-building boom lasted through to 1940. Thanks to Greenwood and his subsidies, 1939 was also a good year for council housing. Adding together both council and private house-building, the years from 1935 to 1939 saw 350,000 completions annually, a remarkable figure, and it was in this period that London reached a population of 8.1 million. There was also additional legislation. In 1936, the minimum size of a “habitable room” was defined (at 50 square feet) meaning that landlords could not legally class anything smaller than this as a bedroom. The rise of new social landlords was also facilitated with legislation passed allowing seven or more residents of a block or street to form a “Housing Society”. By the end of the decade spending on official housing in the UK was calculated as being £37.3m per annum (£12.645bn in 2020 money) with the parliamentary grant for housing being £4m (£1.356 bn in 2020 money).(25) In terms of overall numbers there was no shortage of dwellings in the UK in 1939, though many, as noted by Grierson, Anstey and others, were in deplorable condition.
This was the state of play in 1936, the year that Frederic Osborn took over the Town and Country Planning Association, when – according to him – garden cities were in danger of going out of fashion. It was clear that the future could well involve a clash between two competing approaches to meeting the UK’s need for more and better homes.
Notes
1. The 1918 general election produced a Parliament in which – on paper – 18 different parties were represented. In practical terms, though, 11 different groupings emerged. Lloyd George remained Prime Minister, supported by 526 MPs: 380 Conservative, 127 Liberal, 13 Labour, 3 Labour Unionists, 2 National Party and 1 Independent. The opposition consisted of 181 MPs: 73 Sinn Fein, 61 Labour, 37 Liberal, 7 Irish Nationalist and 3 Independents. Sinn Fein refused to participate, and set up their own legislature in Ireland, meaning that Labour became the official opposition to a Lloyd George government that had a majority of 418. However, Lloyd George was entirely reliant on the large bloc of Conservative MPs, who could have formed a majority government without him.
2. It can be viewed on line at http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs=1614277601751~982&locale=en_US&metadata_object_ratio=10&show_metadata=true&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/singleViewer.do?&preferred_usage_type=VIEW_MAIN&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=10&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true
3. Lanchester, whose first major commission was the Bovril Factory at 148 Old Street EC1, was noted for producing a major town planning scheme for Delhi as well as extensive bungalow suburbs in Rangoon and Zanzibar.
4. Rowse’s finest residential architecture is considered to be an estate at Woodchurch, Birkenhead, work on which started in 1945. The land had been purchased as far back as 1926, when it was intended to accommodate a local authority-owned garden city, an idea that the council abandoned in the 1930s.
5. Note that in 1921-22 the Public Works Loans Board lent nearly £49 million for housing, equivalent to roughly £12bn today. Actual UK spend today is £2bn. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59032791 25th October 2021.
6. The financing for the house-building programme was made available by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain. Addison had begun his career as a doctor at Barts Hospital, and was originally a key political ally of Lloyd George. He lost his seat in Parliament in 1922 (he was MP for Shoreditch) and subsequently joined the Labour Party, serving as a senior minister in Attlee’s 1945-1951 government.
7. George Pullman, the US railway and engineering tycoon purchased 4,000 acres south of Chicago in 1880 where he built his main factory and a town for its workers. The latter – housing 8,000 people at a density Howard would have approved of – was completely controlled by Pullman, with no democratic structures to gainsay his arrangements. In 1893, after an economic downturn, he laid off staff without reducing the rent due on their housing. When rioting began following evictions, he secured the use of the US Army to maintain order. After 34 people were shot dead, Pullman was later annexed by the city of Chicago. See https://www.nps.gov/pull/learn/historyculture/a-brief-overview-of-the-pullman-story.htm
8. In 1919-1920, Henry Ford built 250 homes near his main automobile plant at Dearborn, Michigan.
9. Quote from Robert Beevers The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard p177.
10. The cost of migrating was £3-£4 in 1850, about 2 years’ pay. In 1910 a steerage class ticket on Cunard from the UK to New York was priced at $37.75c, or at the exchange rate then £7 16s (£2,550 now).
11. In early 1956 the directors of First Garden City Limited – the body that owned and administered Letchworth – voted to abolish the limits on the dividend they could award themselves. A specific act of Parliament, the Letchworth Garden City Corporation Act, passed in 1962, was required to amend this and ensure that the city continued to function in the manner prescribed by Howard.
12. Becontree, which was outside the LCC area, was built between 1921 and 1937, eventually containing 26,000 homes housing 115,000 people. Addison presided over an opening ceremony in 1935. Downham, built between 1924 and 1930, was smaller with 6067 properties. Covering 522 acres, this was equal to 11-12 homes per acre, a level slightly higher than that preferred by Howard.
13. As with the earlier involvement of Austen, his half-brother, Neville Chamberlain was always aware that he was following in the footsteps of his father Joseph Chamberlain, and like him had been Mayor of Birmingham.
14. Townhill was designed by Raymond Unwin pre-1914, but was only completed after Addison’s subsidies became available in 1919. Swanpool Garden Suburb was an attempt, in 1919 and 1920, to build privately funded accommodation for the employees of Ruston and Hornby, a local engineering works. It was abandoned after 113 of the projected 3,000 homes had been completed.
15. On Metroland see: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/57/1/Ian_Dunsford_MPhil_TP_Dissertation.pdf
16. Lewis Mumford was an early visitor to Portmeirion, commenting “…In a sense, Portmeirion is a gay, deliberately irresponsible reaction against the dull sterilities of so much that passes as modern architecture today… It is prompted by the impulse… to reclaim for architecture the freedom of invention – and the possibility of pleasurable fantasy – it had too abjectly surrendered to the cult of the machine…” Whatever one’s views of them, both Disneyland (as a leisure destination) and facsimile-style housing of the Portmeirion type, are popular. Portmeirion itself was later the setting for the 1967-1968 fantasy sci-fi TV series The Prisoner as well as one of the locations used for Brideshead Revisited, the 1981 Evelyn Waugh adaptation.
17. Chaired by Sir Clement Anderson Barlow, formerly Conservative MP for Salford 1910-1923. It proposed a planned industrial strategy, in which the dispersal of industry was partly regarded as a civil defence measure to minimise bombing damage in the event of war, with new towns being built to facilitate this. Published in 1940, most of its findings were implemented after 1945.
18. Geddes, who had no formal qualifications in either town planning or architecture, corresponded with Unwin extensively over a period of 40 years. In 1914, they were appointed by Dublin Corporation to comment on proposed new housing schemes. Geddes’s approach was informed by his sociological theories derived from his study of zoology (under Huxley) and an interest in eastern religion. He produced plans for the redevelopment of Bombay and Tel Aviv, the latter of which was built.
19. Winnaretta Singer, an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, emerged as a patron of the arts in France in the 1890s. She funded the construction of many Salvation Army hostels in Paris from 1910, hiring Le Corbusier to work on several of these.
20. Co-author Hugh Quigley was a prominent economist in the 1930s, during which period he ran the XYZ Club, introducing Keynesian economic theories to the Labour Party.
21. Young served as Minister of Health from 1931 to 1935, having, like Addison, originally entered politics as a Liberal supporter of Lloyd George. He was also associated with the Bloomsbury group and a friend of John Maynard Keynes.
22. St Pancras House Improvement Society later became St Pancras Housing Association and still exists today as part of Origin Housing. It was founded by Basil Jellicoe, a prominent figure in the UK’s small Anglo-Catholic branch of Anglicanism, who persuaded Edward, Prince of Wales to become an early supporter of his efforts. Somers Town also contains Oakshott Court, designed in 1976 for the GLC by Peter Tabori, on the site of Polygon Buildings, 288 Midland Railway tenement dwellings dating from 1894, which in turn replaced The Polygon, a 1784 development that once housed Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens and others: much of the history of housing development in London compressed here onto one single site.
23. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciw8Ww6Gx4c For background on the early Kensington Housing Trust block Crossfield House, see: https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/pdf/Delegated%20Decision%20Report%20Sept%202012%20Appendix%203.pdf
24. Quarry Hill Estate was built using some steel-framing and pre-cast concrete elements, an early example of this type of construction, and, as used here in prototype, one not without problems. Leeds City Council took a decision to demolish it in 1973, at a time when refurbishment of such schemes remained unfashionable. Karl Marx Hof still exists in Vienna. A flat within it was used as the apartment of Max (Dirk Bogarde) in the 1974 film The Night Porter.
25. Quoted in David Edgerton The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History p232-233.