9
The reputation of Aneurin Bevan rests on his time as Minister of Health, during which he worked tirelessly to establish the National Health Service. The enduring appeal of the NHS, and the regard with which it continues to be held, ensures that, even today, he enjoys an almost legendary status as a totemic, all-wise, left-wing giant. MP for Ebbw Vale from 1929, his radicalism initially led him to align himself with Mosley’s economic proposals, though he quickly refused to follow Mosley out of the Labour Party in 1931. Later, his support, alongside many communists, for a Popular Front against Germany, Italy and Spain led to his expulsion, and that of Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, from the Labour Party in March 1939. Prior to this he had also inveighed against rearmament and conscription, enjoying an immense reputation for doing so with much of the party membership. The first of the trio to be readmitted (in December 1939), Bevan went into the 1945 general election proclaiming: “We enter this campaign at this general election, not merely to get rid of the Tory majority. We want the complete political extinction of the Tory Party, and twenty-five years of Labour Government.”
With no new Ministry of Housing and Planning set up, Bevan retained housing within his brief as Minister of Health. His view was that a National Housing Service should be formed, broadly comparable to the National Health Service… a kind of gigantic council housing department assembled from all the local authority housing in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of properties, millions of tenants and vast numbers of staff, working out of central, regional and local headquarters. The government would direct, and fund, a huge house-building programme that would completely transform the UK. As well as this there would also be, for those who still chose to buy or rent privately, government grants to ensure that every home was brought up to a good level of repair. In particular, Bevan wanted significantly better space standards for council housing than those used in the 1930s, even by Morrison’s LCC, and took his cue in this from the deliberations of the Dudley Committee.(1)
Produced by a committee established in 1944 by the Ministry of Health’s Central Housing Committee, the Dudley Report had concluded that local authorities were too much in hock to the space and design standards adopted in 1919, and largely drawn at that point from the ideas of Raymond Unwin. Dudley and his colleagues noted how adept 1930s house-builders had been at judging the type of home the average renter and buyer wanted, ie, how successful they had been at meeting the needs of the lower middle classes and upper working classes, and recommended that future council housing should reflect this, rather than what had been considered adequate around the time of the First World War.
Accordingly, Bevan wanted the idea that council housing was solely for the “working class” removed from official guidance and terminology, and in pursuit of higher standards lowered the guidelines for desirable municipal housing densities to 350 people per hectare, a reduction of 43% on typical densities within LCC estates pre-1939. As to what new housing developments should look like, he was unashamedly conventional, stating in 1949 “…We should try to introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of citizen … to see the living tapestry of a mixed community…”(2)
Not much modernism here, and an end point not at all dissimilar to that long advocated by Howard and Osborn. Bevan was also clear, as Howard had been before him, that quality was essential, stating in a speech in Margate in 1947 “…while we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build … we shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build…” What this meant in practice were homes with unprecedented refinements, such as two indoor lavatories. The average new 3-bedroom council house grew in size from 860 square feet (pre-1939) to 1,055 square feet (1951) as Bevan both increased the amount of space families had, and reduced the number of properties per hectare/acre to provide more open space.
As indicated in their election manifesto, Labour was not intending to build new homes solely within urban areas, or even via existing local authorities. Lewis Silkin, and his Ministry of Town and Country Planning, had been established in 1945, to provide the legislative and bureaucratic framework needed to ensure that “up to 20 new towns” would be built by the government. That these might fall short of the existing examples of Howard’s vision at Letchworth and Welwyn was noted as early as October 1945 by Osborn who asserted “…Among both the upper and middle classes the word ‘garden city’ stands for a working-class housing estate, with just a touch of philanthropy. It has therefore been something to approve but on no account to live in…” (3) His fears were allayed somewhat by an invitation to join the New Towns Commission chaired by Lord Reith, and set up by Silkin“…to consider the general questions of the establishment, development, organisation and administration that will arise in the promotion of New Towns in furtherance of a policy of planned decentralisation from congested urban areas; and in accordance therewith to suggest guiding principles on which such Towns should be established and developed as self-contained and balanced communities for work and living…”
Reith, Osborn and their colleagues duly concluded that there was a clear need to build new towns, with their construction being undertaken by development corporations funded and supported by central government. They also made recommendations setting out the basic design parameters that would be followed: developments should have a population of up to 60,000, should be built as far as possible on greenfield sites, should consist mainly of single-family homes built to a low density and be organised in neighbourhoods around a primary school and nursery schools, a pub and shops selling staple foods. They were also keen to endorse Howard’s original guidance about ensuring the population was actively employed locally, rather than just to create something that became a dormitory suburb of a larger urban area.
Officially, this became policy. But there were interesting variations on this theme appearing, now that it was clear that something radical would be done to sort out the UK’s housing issues. In Farewell Squalor: A Design for a New Town and Proposals for the Redevelopment of the Easington Rural District CW Clarke, surveyor to Easington Rural District Council (which despite its name, was actually quite an industrialised area) set out the case for building Peterlee, starting with an explanation that rather cut across the views later espoused by Bevan “…It is now generally accepted that a full social, cultural and educational life cannot be achieved with the village as a unit… Let us, therefore, close our eyes on the nineteenth century degradation and squalor, and let us only look with unseeing eyes on the sordid excrescence of the first decade of this century, let us blind ourselves to the septic and ugly building wens and ribbons perpetrated and planted on us between the wars, but let us open our eyes and look brightly forward and onward to the new town, the new living… Peterlee…”
To achieve this, the original intention in Peterlee was to house many of its incoming population in modern flats within multi-floor blocks designed by Berthold Lubetkin. The idea that new towns might provide a high proportion of their homes in blocks of flats, distributed at a low density, seems to have distressed Osborn, who began claiming, from 1946, that it was cheaper to build houses than flats, and invoking Raymond Unwin’s 1912 book Nothing Gained by Overcrowding by way of evidence.(4) The truth of this isn’t clear, even today. He needn’t have worried so much. In Peterlee, the National Coal Board objected to the depth of the foundations required by Lubetkin’s blocks. What was eventually built was much more conventional, which would have pleased Osborn who was eventually won around to the government’s proposals for how the new towns should be developed by the scale of the programme.
But it must be doubtful if his opposition, and that of the Town and Country Planning Association would have altered events anyway. By the mid-1940s the belief in planning was so strong, and the determination to rebuild post-war Britain so marked, that politicians – and via them the electorate – were being offered many variations of Howard’s original garden city design. If Peterlee was one such, another was Sir Charles Reilly’s Outline Plan of Birkenhead (1947) which built on Reilly’s own belief, expressed in language that chimed with that of Bevan, in “…a semi-new planning principle … that of houses round greens, as in pre-Industrial Revolution England, and the greens themselves arranged like the petals of a flower round a community building, the modern equivalent of the village inn…”(5) A book advocating this, Lawrence Wolfe’s The Reilly Plan was reviewed in Tribune by George Orwell, who remained somewhat sceptical, noting of some of the more radical proposals “If you prefer to live in a kitchen-less house, you can have all your meals delivered from the meals centre in thermos containers which are left on the doorstep like the milk, the dirty dishes being removed afterwards by the same agency. A town can be built up of as many Reilly ‘units’ as there is need and space for… the main idea of the plan is to split the town up into self-contained communities, practically villages, of about 1,000 people each”.(6) Reilly’s reversion to the mid-nineteenth century ideal of a substantial community building at the centre of a development, with a central eatery (an idea that was rarely, if ever, implemented) and a centralised heating system, for the entire development, required substantial amounts of land to make it work, resulting in low-density, sprawling schemes. The central, or “district” heating system would though become common to most of the larger post-war municipal estates.
The first new town to be designated was Stevenage, announced in 1946. It was followed by Crawley, Harlow, Hemel Hempstead, Newton Aycliffe and East Kilbride (all 1947), Hatfield, Welwyn, Peterlee and Glenrothes (all 1948), Basildon, Bracknell and Cwmbran (all 1949) and Corby (1950). Some of these self-selected: Howard’s (and Osborn’s) unfinished garden city at Welwyn was included, Newton Aycliffe and Cwmbran both had trading estates established in the 1930s, and Corby was the site of a pre-war steelworks that had expanded rapidly. In other words, this was not quite the beginning of a fresh initiative, rather it was a new government taking over and expanding existing projects, and utilising ideas that had been in the public domain by that point for over 50 years, as to how they should be carried out.
It is also commonly supposed that a degree of political consensus existed about this. If it did, it was absent from very early on, when a substantial legal battle had to be waged to get Stevenage started. Silkin addressed a public meeting there in May 1946 which quickly developed into a shouting match, with him saying “…It is no good your jeering: it is going to be done…” whilst the audience denounced him for using Gestapo tactics, let his car tyres down and erected signs at the local railway station telling travellers they were arriving at ‘Silkingrad’. Hostility proceeded from this via a Judicial Review (led by a distinctly right-wing Residents Association) stating that the public in the area hadn’t been properly consulted. Silkin fought and reversed a High Court decision to grant the review at the Court of Appeal and, eventually, the House of Lords. It was a messy process throughout, and even Ewart Culpin was an objector (he thought too many new towns were being grouped too close together in Hertfordshire, thus compromising Howard’s original vision). Silkin’s first choice to chair the Stevenage New Town Development Corporation, Clough Williams-Ellis, resigned in 1947 due to his inability to achieve anything.(7) Pressure was also brought to bear on Silkin in Parliament where he was challenged on the qualifications of those appointed to the Development Corporation.(8)
Some important arguments lurked beneath all the political and emotional point-scoring being made here. Stevenage was a small, established market town (early closing: Wednesday, market day: Saturday according to The AA Road Book of England and Wales, 1950) with a population of around 6,500. This was larger than either Letchworth or Welwyn when both were selected by Howard as garden city sites. The idea that an existing town would be greatly expanded (with the original inhabitants being subject to compulsory purchase) raised hackles, and, in truth, was not something that had ever been stressed in all the talk, over the decades, about building “new towns” of whatever type. Culpin’s objection was interesting. Was it necessary to have four of the new towns in one not very large county? Could not some of them have been in Kent? The problem that would arise by having them grouped thus would be not dissimilar to the issues new towns were supposed to address, namely ribbon-development. Whilst there would be a better regulated landscape, travelling through Hertfordshire might in time become like travelling through the sprawl of towns and suburbs between New York and Washington DC: passing rapidly from one low-density development to another via strips of wooded and farmed land. The Stevenage objectors made some reasonable points.
Politically, though, things were much simpler. Historically, Stevenage was part of Hitchin constituency, which had never previously been Labour. Its wartime Conservative MP, Seymour Berry, (Deputy Chairman of The Daily Telegraph) lost by only 346 votes in 1945 to the Labour candidate, Philip Jones. The Conservatives were well aware of the impact made by Herbert Morrison’s building programme on the political control of the LCC.(9) Was the Labour government now employing these same methods to ensure political control nationally? Some at least of them thought so, and, in terms of public perception, they were helped by the appointment of Monica Felton as Clough Williams-Ellis’s successor. Felton, reputed to be Silkin’s mistress, was extremely left-wing, and went as far as to visit North Korea after the outbreak of the Korean War, urging the UK government to withdraw from the conflict and send UK troops home. This won her the Stalin Prize for Peace, and dismissal from her position in Stevenage on her return.(10) By then Labour had lost the seat. Jones was beaten, in 1950, by Nigel Fisher, a centrist Conservative, who remained in situ until 1964, when Shirley Williams was elected. And even though Stevenage New Town hadn’t progressed very much by the time Attlee gave way to Churchill in 1951, sufficient land had been acquired, and contracts entered into, to ensure that it progressed unhindered. The Conservatives were well aware of the need to build more homes, and the popularity this would bring them, even if they were prepared to engage in specific local campaigns against selected projects, and individuals.(11)
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Building new towns was only one part of the new government’s housing agenda. It also concentrated resources in inner urban areas, where an immense amount needed to be done to address war damage, slum housing and overcrowding. If Lubetkin, who had arrived in the UK in 1931, found himself unwanted in Peterlee, there was much demand for his services in London. Heavily influenced by Le Corbusier he opened his account with the Finsbury Health Centre in 1938, after which his practice won the competition to provide a new housing estate at Spa Green.(12) Work on this finally began in July 1946, with Bevan laying the foundation stone. Originally limited (pre-war) to 5 floors, demand for housing after 1945 led to the main blocks being increased to 8 floors. Small, but symbolic, it provided 129 flats. Lubetkin’s ability to fit a lot of good quality housing onto difficult sites brought him and his colleagues commissions in Bethnal Green where, from 1953 to 1954, they built the Dorset Estate and the Lakeview Estate, both of which relied on height and reinforced concrete. They followed this with the Cranbrook Estate, which had 15-floor blocks and finally Sivill House (19 floors) in the mid-1960s. The Dorset Estate, and Sivill House, which provided between them 342 homes, were built on virtually the same site as Columbia Square and Columbia Market, Baroness Burdett-Coutts’s philanthropic venture of almost a century earlier.
Elsewhere, the London County Council produced high-density, medium-rise blocks, much influenced by pre-war housing schemes in Vienna, on the Woodberry Down Estate, Stoke Newington from a design by Sir Leslie Martin and Abercrombie’s colleague JH Forshaw. As with Spa Green, this had been around as a project since the 1930s (the LCC had purchased the land in 1934) but building work didn’t begin until 1949 and would stretch through until the early 1970s by which time 2,013 new homes in 57 blocks had been provided. Another development that lasted over several decades took place in a heavily bombed area between Brixton and Camberwell where Martin and his team built the Loughborough Estate. Here, from 1950, over 1,000 new homes were built, the most attractive of which were 11-floor blocks of flats and maisonettes. So attractively were these turned out that they drew praise from John Betjeman in The Spectator “…When one compares their open-ness, lightness, grass and trees, and carefully related changes of scale from tall blocks to small blocks, with the prison-like courts of artisans’ dwellings of earlier ages, one realises some things are better than they were… Maybe it has no place for someone like me, but it gives one hope for modern architecture…”
These were not views shared by Frederic Osborn, who complained “…the wholesale building of multi-storey flats at 40 an acre today in Stepney and Bermondsey is less enlightened than the building there of terrace houses at much the same density 100 years ago…” He also observed privately to Lewis Mumford that “…in London just now the local authorities are building eight and ten storey flats intended for families, though with an average floor area of only 650 square feet, compared to the 1,000 or 1,050 square feet for the current two storey house”.(13) Given the date of Osborn’s comments this may have been a swipe at Lubetkin. Certainly, by 1949 he was railing against the LCC’s proposal to increase density on the next stage of its Roehampton scheme, from 12 to 28 dwellings per acre. His friend Lewis Mumford noted that same year that planning in the UK appeared to have divided into two separate, and usually hostile camps, one (within which Osborn was counted) favouring “the suburban type of open plain” and the other, led by modernist architects producing “a barbarous Le Corbusier/London County Council type of overcrowding”. There was some truth in this observation. Osborn’s comments, though, failed to address how the LCC and the various Metropolitan Boroughs that made up London then, should have met housing need on small, irregularly shaped sites without abandoning development altogether. They also failed to consider, given costs and other competing priorities, whether any government ought, in effect, to restrict its housing programme so as to only provide properties built to very generous space standards. This argument, as voiced by Osborn, would be taken up and deployed by the Conservatives post-1951. The truth of the matter was that Lubetkin, Martin, Forshaw and many other architects were providing hundreds of thousands of urgently needed new homes on modern inner-city housing schemes across the UK during this period, very few of which would have happened had Churchill been returned as Prime Minister in 1945, relying as he did on temporarily housing people in “prefabs” until the private sector could re-commence its large-scale, 1930s-style building programmes.
There was action in the suburbs too. Taking its cue from Abercrombie’s London Plan, and Attlee’s electoral landslide, the London County Council embarked on its own programme of building mini-new towns. All of these, like its earlier Becontree Estate, were on sites outside its own boundaries and were often on land that had been purchased in the 1930s by Morrison or during the war by Charles Latham. By 1947, extensive new schemes had been started in Harold Hill, Aveley, Debden, Hainault, St Paul’s Cray, Borehamwood and South Oxhey, the latter two in Hertfordshire, thus adding to the impression that that county was rapidly becoming an adjunct of London. Each of these was a fully integrated community in its own right, with shops, offices, industrial estates, schools, leisure facilities, bus, train, and, in some cases, underground services.(14) Between 3,000 and 7,500 homes were built in each location. The fact that all of them were within the newly designated Metropolitan Green Belt did not cause significant problems: waivers to allow development were sought and granted. In appearance these were all Howard-style garden cities, albeit on a smaller scale, and with many modernist flourishes. Most of the homes were houses, everything was mainly low-rise, and density was not high. Nor was the idea of building beyond city boundaries confined to London. In 1949, Abercrombie produced a Clyde Valley Regional Plan which advocated moving 50% of the population of Glasgow outside the city, insisting this was the only way by which local housing shortages could be speedily addressed. In the event, a compromise was struck: by the 1960s Glasgow had opted for high-rise, Le Corbusier-style blocks to meet its housing targets, and these were built within the city boundaries, albeit on sites designated as green belt.(15)
The initial impact of all these new policies in the immediate post-war years was actually quite limited: London, for instance, remained a growing city and its population would peak at 8.2 million in 1951. The public knew, though, that something had shifted and a better future was coming. Despite all the arguing about space standards, or whether development should be in traditional cities or on new garden suburb sites miles away, the February 1949 Homes for London exhibition, sponsored by the LCC and warmly endorsed by Bevan, was exceptionally popular.(16) A couple of years later the Festival of Britain staged, in Poplar, a Live Architecture Exhibition showcasing the best of modern design and pointing out that the alternative was inadequately regulated private housing built to a lower standard. Those venturing to the Poplar site – and nearly 87,000 did – could visit a Town Planning Pavilion and tour newly completed properties on the Lansbury Estate, a massive project specifically highlighted in Abercrombie and Forshaw’s County of London Plan. Here new 3-bedroom flats cost £1 9s a week (£1.45p then, roughly £97.50p in 2021 prices). By the time it closed in September 1951, the Live Architecture Exhibition counted amongst its visitors 90 delegates from the International Federation of Town and Country Planning and the Duke of Edinburgh. It remained a popular example of post-war UK architecture for many years afterwards, Lewis Mumford claiming in 1953 “…I have not looked at all that Europe has to offer since the war, but I shall be surprised if Lansbury is not one of the best bits of housing and urban planning anywhere … the aesthetic results are remarkably good…”(17)
* * * * * *
The final part of the Attlee government’s housing triptych was the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. This codified and regulated UK town planning to a much greater degree than had previously been the case. It required virtually every type of development to be formally consented to via a system based on council planning committees. Most statutory bodies, and most governmental agencies retained powers to override local decisions (subject to judicial review), but in practice almost everything had to be done at local level. In time this developed into a system where there were frequent examples of schemes that were clearly desirable but were refused in some areas due to pressure on committee members from public lobbying and locally prominent campaigners. The degree of involvement by UK local politicians in planning applications after 1947 (and via that level of involvement, the degree of lobbying that they were subject to) was unprecedented compared to many other advanced economies, where, after determining priorities and setting them out in a local, borough, regional or even national plan, adjudicating on the applications was usually left to the paid employees of the state (local or national), subject to occasional legal overview. Whatever the benefits of such an intensely bureaucratic and highly politicised system, one outcome of the planning regulation operated by the UK after 1947 was that the country became noted for its protracted public enquiries into major infrastructure projects.
The 1947 Act also established a mandatory Green Belt around London and other major urban areas. Much talked about, its implementation prevented the continuation of the “ribbon development” that had been such a feature of the inter-war period and also curtailed the growth of Ramuz-style “plot lands” with their DIY bungalows and unadopted roads.(18) Both were welcome features. Less certain – over time – was why some of the land protected as “green belt” had been selected for that designation in the first place. The degree of inflexibility built into the Act was a subject of constant criticism, not all of it ill-founded.
The codifying of the planning system and the designation of a statutory green belt were both policies of which Howard would have approved, representing as they did a pushing back by the state against the laissez-faire liberties of the market. This was, however, as far as the Attlee government went. Absent from any legislative proposals, despite a lineage that stretched back at least 150 years, was land nationalisation. Mentioned as an objective in Labour’s 1945 manifesto, it vanished from UK politics at this point, never to be revived. A proposal for a 100% levy on the profits accrued by private owners from appreciating land values was equally short-lived. One item that did survive for a while – having been invoked as a wartime measure to regulate the use of materials and manpower – was the requirement placed on private sector builders to acquire a building licence prior to developing properties for sale. This had the effect of limiting how many homes for sale were built. But, with most large-scale private construction companies carrying out contracts to build the UK’s burgeoning council and new town estates it had little actual impact on their fortunes.
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With most of his time taken up by the establishment of the National Health Service, it is remarkable how much Bevan achieved in the housing field, and in particular how many new homes were built during his period in office. Despite restrictions on the availability of buildings materials (particularly bricks) and skilled labour, 1,192,000 new homes had been provided by 1951. This included 156,000 “prefabs”. Properties built for sale amounted to 189,000, 16% of the total, with private sector completions typically varying between 25,000 and 40,000 per annum. At 148,000, council house completions in 1947 were the highest ever recorded, and were even higher between 1948 and 1951, comfortably exceeding anything achieved in the 1930s. This was despite Bevan’s imposition of higher standards. Throughout this period, though, he remained under constant scrutiny and attack by the Conservatives who adopted the line that even more might have been done had space standards remained at previous levels. This was true, and had resonance with many of the electorate, particularly those who remained stuck in unsatisfactory private rented property waiting for a new council home of their own. Bevan bridled at such criticism, and it may have led to his famous utterance in July 1948 that the Conservatives were “lower than vermin”.
What was significant was the shift made by the Conservatives to embrace house-building as an electorally popular policy. Their manifesto for the October 1951 general election, which reflected decisions taken at their 1950 conference at Blackpool, contained the statement “…Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by overcrowded homes. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence. Our target remains 300,000 houses a year. There should be no reduction in the number of houses and flats built to let but more freedom must be given to the private builder. In a property-owning democracy, the more people who own their homes the better…” To achieve this, they kept the structures put in place by the Attlee government, adding to them a Ministry of Housing and Local Government, something Labour had planned but failed to implement. There was a consensus at the highest levels in UK politics that housing production and improvement was something that only the state could tackle effectively. Most of Howard’s vision had reached the statute books, and, remarkably, was being implemented via the generous availability of state funding. Because of this, the UK, even under a Conservative government, built more “new towns” in the 1940s and 1950s than anywhere except the Soviet Union.
Notes
1. This can be read online at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rGJNAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false The report is notable for its reliance on experts: out of a membership of 19, there was only one politician, Megan Lloyd George, Liberal MP for Anglesey. The committee was established by Bevan’s predecessor, Ernest Brown, Leader of the National Liberal Party.
2. The comment was made in an extensive speech by Bevan in the House of Commons on 16 March 1949, which can be read in full at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/mar/16/housing-bill The number of interruptions is of note, and typical of how Bevan was treated by the Conservative opposition.
3. Comments made in a letter from Osborn to Mumford, 21 October 1945. See The Letters of Lewis Mumford and Frederic J Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue 1938-1970 Hughes p106-110, and also quoted in Austerity Britain 1945-1951 Kynaston p174
4. Around this time (April 1946) Mumford attempted, without success, to interest Osborn in the work of the Polish architects and town planners Szymon and Helena Syrkus. Fully signed up supporters of a Le Corbusier-style approach, they presided over much of the reconstruction of Warsaw after 1945.
5. A copy of Reilly’s plan can be read at https://archive.org/details/outlineplanforthecountyboroughofbirkenhead Reilly was principally an architectural theoretician and teacher. He built little of his own work, but helped design part of Lever’s Port Sunlight scheme. In 1909 Lever sent him to the US to study methods of town planning there, and on his return he undertook St Barnabas Church, Shacklewell, London E8, the building for which he remains best known.
6. In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 p113-117.
7. Given his pedigree and involvement throughout his life with Portmeirion, Williams-Ellis might have seemed an odd choice: but in the 1930s he had supported modern architecture in his book Architecture Here and Now (1934, with John Summerson), and given Bevan’s views about modern villages may have seemed a perfect match.
8. For a full discussion of Silkin’s difficulties at Stevenage see https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/220156737.pdf and also Austerity Britain 1945-1951 Kynaston p161-162.
9. In 1931 the LCC elected 83 Conservative, 35 Labour and 6 Liberal councillors. This changed in 1934 to 69 Labour and 55 Conservative. By 1937, it was 75 Labour and 49 Conservative and in 1946 it was 90 Labour, 30 Conservative, 2 Liberal and 2 Communist. It was commonly believed that Morrison pursued the construction of large municipal housing estates in areas with Conservative representation to tilt these locations electorally toward the Labour Party. There is no proof of this and the statement ascribed to Morrison (that he would “build the Tories out of London”) appears to be an urban myth. No evidence of it can be found prior to the 1960s: it appeared at the time the Conservative Party were replacing the LCC with the GLC. An example of this quote being attributed to Morrison is Leo McKinstry, “Labour is stealing your country”, The Spectator, 24 July 2004, p. 20. In fact, although Morrison’s LCC built substantial numbers of homes, a large number were outside the County of London entirely.
10. Felton represented St Pancras SW on the LCC, 1937-1946. After this she was chair of Peterlee New Town Corporation, where she was the subject of scurrilous rumours about her relationships with male staff. Her visit to North Korea, which was followed by her broadcasting to the UK from Moscow, was debated in the House of Commons on 14 June 1951, with calls from the Conservative ranks that she be charged with high treason (which carried the death penalty). See: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1951/jun/14/mrs-felton-visit-to-korea The tone of the debate, with much innuendo and doubt about her qualifications (she had a PhD from the London School of Economics), was deeply sexist.
11. Although prepared to let most of the new town proposals proceed when they returned to power in 1951, the Conservatives did abandon one of the schemes, at Mobberley, Cheshire after opposition from local MP Lt Col Walter Bromley-Davenport MP. For some of the exchanges on this see: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/jun/28/new-town-mobberley
12. Lubetkin’s background is the subject of some debate. From Georgia, it appears that he fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, after which he studied and worked in Berlin and Paris. The birth certificate that he produced to gain entry to the UK appears to have been a forgery, designed to obscure his Red Army service. For more on his design for Spa Green Estate see: https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/municipal-housing/spa-green/index.htm
13. See Austerity Britain 1945-1951 Kynaston p332 for more in this vein, from Osborn, and others. Osborn was involved in increasingly bitter disputes with both the RIBA and the LCC and by 1950 had fallen out with Mumford over density levels.
14. Latham favoured expanding the LCC boundaries a considerable distance into the surrounding Home Counties. An entirely logical step, this reflected transport and commuting links as well as being in keeping with Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan. Taking an independent, long-term view of this type, however, was frowned on by many of his colleagues who assumed such an expansion would cost Labour its political control. Latham resigned on 15 July 1947 “for personal reasons”, being succeeded by Isaac Hayward, who had led the campaign against extending the LCC boundaries. Hayward was close to Herbert Morrison. It is interesting to speculate what might have happened had a Greater London Authority of Latham’s type been established by the Attlee government.
15. Abercrombie’s report was written to counter Glasgow Corporation’s First Planning Report (1945, written by Robert Bruce, City Engineer) which advocated a massive, Soviet-style reconstruction of Glasgow within its existing boundaries. This would have seen virtually the entire city demolished. For more on this see: https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/history/soviet-bloc-glasgow-plan-17033205
16. A film of the exhibition showing Bevan can be viewed at https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVA3CTFE3PIDQ8U5AIWDOM6NJ4YM-LV237/query/Bevan
17. For a full account of the housing component of the Festival of Britain see https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/pp212-223
18. The Ramuz plot-lands (and much of the inter-war ribbon development) were often built without planning consents of the type needed post-1947. All that was required to facilitate them was an agreement with the local parish vestry (or local council) on the arrangements for sewage, road access and lighting. In some areas not even this was required, particularly if what was being proposed was not deemed a permanent building: people just bought their own land and built a property, usually a chalet-style bungalow.