Historical Overview

PETER GUILLERY

The essays in this book investigate aspects of London’s recent history from 1850 to the present day, a period during which the city’s physical boundaries were much extended to accommodate massive population increase. London was already Europe’s biggest city (and among the world’s largest) in 1800 when its population was around one million. That had doubled by 1850 to make London the most populous city the world had known. The next half century saw a trebling, before further growth to a high around eight million in the 1930s. There was then gentle decline through the later twentieth century. That has turned back, for the figure to rise again to more than eight million by 2011. Here it must be remembered that the definition of London’s area was much enlarged in 1965; densities in the inner boroughs are now much lower than they were in the 1930s. Further population increase to above ten million by 2036 is anticipated.¹

The extraordinary rate of growth in the first half of the period examined here generated huge housing demand that was, perhaps inevitably, inadequately met. War and greater expectations in a more democratic society caused different pressures in the second half of the period; a difficult post-war housing crisis took 30 years to ease, even against the backdrop of an essentially static population. For a situation analogous to the present, with a grave housing shortage and rising population, it is necessary to look back to the nineteenth century. Campaigners then struggled with the seeming intractability of poor housing of which there are many famous representations. At the beginning of the Victorian period, Charles Dickens described, in Oliver Twist, the living conditions of Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey – ‘rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter’.² George Godwin, appointed editor of The Builder in 1844 when it was a new publication, established a readership and influence in large part through his insistence on housing reform. He helped expose overcrowding and other terrible deficiencies, and gathered a decade’s experience of the subject in a book, London Shadows: A Glance at the ‘Homes’ of the Thousands (1854). Despite widespread recognition of the problem, and significant public health improvements, there was a strong disinclination to interfere with the housing market on the part of those with power to do so. Change was painfully slow and completely incommensurate to the population pressures. Another 30 years on, in 1884, Godwin was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, established amid a crescendo of shame and anger about chronically appalling housing conditions. Legislation followed, but small steps forward always met resistance. Godwin died in 1888, not quite living to see the emergence of council housing. Reform takes time.

To step back: what was new in Victorian London was the scale of the problem and the outcry, rather than the existence of poor housing. Housing problems, crises even, were certainly not new to London in 1850. In this introductory context it is worth focusing on the history of attempts to solve London’s housing problems, more than on the history of housing tout court, and travelling back from the 1850 threshold to set the scene with a longer view.³ Inchoate growth, poor construction, high rents and inadequate supply went back many centuries. From 1580 to 1657, legislation attempted to constrain suburban building and, where developments were approved, to encourage the use of brick rather than timber, to reduce fire risks.⁴ But these interventions were limited in effect. Indeed, the possibility that unlicensed buildings would be cleared tended to encourage low-grade development. Efforts to prevent growth set alongside immigration exacerbated housing shortages and overcrowding. John Stow, author of the first Survey of London, looked back with tired nostalgia in 1598, bemoaning London’s growth out through Whitechapel, ‘both the sides of the streete bee pestered with Cottages and Allies’.⁵ In Clerkenwell people lived in reconfigured pigsties.

As if decades of war and visitations of plague were not supplementary complications enough, at a stroke in 1666 fire destroyed about 13,000 houses in the City and areas to its west – about a quarter of the capital’s housing stock. Recovery was rapid, though not as orderly or newfangled as enlightened commentators like John Evelyn and Christopher Wren proposed. Beyond the area burnt, there was much other necessary replacement, as well as growth. In the 1690s about 70% of the houses in London’s northern and eastern suburbs were only 30 or fewer years old;⁶ leases of that length or shorter were usual, and, like today, new buildings were not expected to last much longer than a generation.

Elsewhere, at what were then the margins, better capitalisation of leasehold development did bring regularity and well-built housing, particularly in the West End where large aristocratic landholdings facilitated building for the better off; there, long leases (99 years) became the norm. Even so, speculative builders often had to settle for less opulent occupants (and therefore lower rents) than those to whom they aspired, and for the subdivision of houses of forms, often in terraces, that were eminently suited to this kind of adaptation. Speculation was a risky but cannily flexible each-way bet accommodating what would now be called custom-build. Many small operators succeeded, benefiting from the bridge provided by peppercorn rents during construction; many others failed.

It would be misleading to suggest that Georgian London’s dwellings were all houses. As in other European cities of the time, there were plenty of buildings designed for, as well as used for, multiple occupancy, and only linguistic evolution or mythologisation can account for ‘tenements’ being a word not associated with London. Purpose-built industrial tenements – what might now be termed live/work units – characterised the generally poor silk-weaving district around Spitalfields, and there were many designedly divided houses in other working suburbs.

Westward shifts of affluence left erstwhile desirable places, for example the late seventeenth-century brick houses of the area around Seven Dials in St Giles in the Fields, to decline and multiple occupancy. Courts and alleys proliferated, especially east and south, and timber building was not effectively checked until after the London Building Act of 1774 which introduced rates in order to charge fees to pay for enforcement through district surveyors – that had nothing to do with housing reform. John Gwynn, a comprehensive redeveloper and gentrifier of his time, thought the capital was ‘disgraced with despicable cottages’. His recipe for housing the poor articulates naked elite justification for mixed tenure: ‘In settling a plan of large streets for the dwellings of the rich, it will be found necessary to allot smaller spaces contiguous, for the habitations of useful and laborious people, whose dependence on their superiors requires such a distribution; and by adhering to this principle a political advantage will result to the nation; as this intercourse stimulates their industry, improves the morals by example, and prevents any particular part from being the habitation of the indigent alone, to the great detriment of private property’.⁷ The ‘improvement’ advocated by the likes of Gwynn was, then as now (read regeneration), generally to the great disadvantage of the displaced poorest. People learned to be wary of the word and its outcomes.

In the war years around 1800 a credit squeeze, inflation, shifts in favour of contractors at the expense of tradesmen and the industrialisation of supply all combined to entrench greater standardised commodification in housing development, and brought a decline in standards.⁸ Deliberately short-life and shabby housing, run up by all manner of mean and minor profiteering speculators, was rife. Intensive development produced what came to be labelled ‘slums’. The first recorded use of the word to mean poor housing dates from 1825: ‘back slums lying in the rear of Broad St’ (in Soho).⁹

The emergence of a sense of collective or at least top-down social responsibility for London’s housing can, for convenience, be pinned to 1844 – not just for Godwin’s appointment, nor for the Metropolitan Building Act of that year which imposed the beginnings of drainage control (though little else of a reformist nature), nor even for the writing of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, which described the slums of St Giles and Bethnal Green (though it does serve as a reminder that the housing ‘question’ was always in large measure about the avoidance of revolution). In the same spirit – and for present purposes more significant – was the transformation that year of what had been the Labourer’s Friend Society into the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, to focus on housing, with Prince Albert as its president. Philanthropic in nature, the Society made a stumbling start with a court of cottage flats before, in 1850, putting up a five-storey block of ‘Model Houses for Families’ that is still extant as Parnell House on Streatham Street in Bloomsbury. By then there was also the more commercially minded Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, but these initiatives were not big enough to build on a large scale. Finance was the main impediment. The founding of the well-endowed Peabody Trust in 1862 was an important further marker in the emergence and effectiveness of philanthropic housing. Many large blocks of flats ensued, a story whose enduring legacy is taken up in Irina Davidovici’s chapter in this book.

A year later Sydney Waterlow set up the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, a commercial operation that promised 5% profits on its numerous developments of blocks of model dwellings. Its standard type was copied by the Corporation of the City of London at Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road of 1864–5; this six-storey block technically constituted the country’s first ‘council’ housing. That was a false dawn. To make projects profitable, higher densities were found to be necessary – as close by at the Farringdon Road Buildings of 1872–4. There George Gissing saw ‘vast, sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament; row above row of windows in the mud-coloured surface, upwards, upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of bareness, disorder, comfortlessness within … millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. Barracks, in truth; housing for the army of industrialism, an army fighting with itself, rank against rank, man against man, that the survivors may have whereon to feed.’¹⁰ Meanwhile, Engels wrote The Housing Question (1872), arguing that capitalism could not provide an answer.

By 1875 around 32,000 Londoners were housed in model dwellings – fewer than had lived on the ground the buildings occupied, and less than the annual increase in London’s overall population.

The projects were an achievement, but they were insufficient to the scale of the problem, and in any case unaffordable for many working people. In some districts the flats were hard to let simply because of the level at which rents were set. Legislation in 1866, 1868 and 1875 permitted limited public intervention, mainly in the shape of compulsory purchase and slum clearance, but effectively left others to follow through with the provision of housing. The East End Dwellings Company was formed in 1882 with the intention of housing the really poor as others had failed to do, but was soon forced to move upmarket. Octavia Hill pioneered another approach, ‘self-help’ and direct management, an important corrective to the notion (still prevalent today) that any amount of design or technology can lastingly improve housing if there is no follow-through to address maintenance.

This is all to focus on the housing ‘problem’. A wider, distinctly less negative and less well known context to the history of blocks of dwellings is set out in Richard Dennis’s chapter about residential flats and densification. It illustrates what a wide range of flat living there was in London in the decades either side of 1900, giving particular emphasis to mansion flats built for middleclass occupancy – not so much the top end in and around the West End, but modest lower middle-class solutions that, it is argued, have greater relevance to present-day needs.

Meanwhile, demand for housing overall was, as before, overwhelmingly met by speculative leasehold development, low-rise and low-density – ‘miles of silly little dirty houses’, as in the title of Colin Thom’s case study of different housing types in Battersea. Thom stresses that few working-class families occupied whole houses, as was also the case in many other places, even further out, as in South Acton where domestic industry was a factor (see Chapter Five). Few of Victorian London’s smallest houses survive; what does still stand are miles of somewhat less little houses, for the most part now far from silly (except perhaps in their price tags) or dirty, but rather spick and span. This eminently adaptable development has long outlasted the original lease periods. The durability of this type of housing is explored here by David Kroll and Sofie Pelsmakers with a focus on practical sustainability. It is also evident from Tanis Hinchcliffe’s study of the gentrification of mid-nineteenth-century middle-class housing in Canonbury.

Philanthropists and speculators were not Victorian London’s only suppliers of housing. Many working people did attempt to fend for themselves. Building societies and freehold land societies were important, as in both Battersea and South Acton. The Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company, a collaboration launched in 1867, built low-density owner-occupied suburban cottage estates in Battersea, Queen’s Park and Hornsey. In principle these offered community living underpinned by co-operation and self-help, but the houses were unaffordable to many, if only because of the cost of travelling to central London where work was to be found. In reality, the enterprise slid into conventional speculation.

There were also enlightened freeholders. The careful stewardship of landed estates that characterised the West End in the eighteenth century was brought up-to-date and directed at a less elite market on the Minet Estate in Lambeth. David Kroll’s case study in this volume presents a detailed investigation of who did what, illustrating adaptive evolution and diversity over a long period in housing that a century later has proved eminently sustainable. Other developers – for example Archibald Corbett around Ilford and Hither Green, and John Farrer around Muswell Hill and Crouch End – also made significant and long-lasting impacts. Corbett and Farrer both kept going, adapting their outputs well into the twentieth century. Our Battersea case study also shows that, as on the Minet Estate, there were explorations of purpose-built flat living in private developments, a subject covered more systematically by Richard Dennis.

Travel costs had limited the scope for working people to move out from central districts. The 1883 Cheap Trains Act was a landmark change. It provided for workmen’s fares of a penny a mile, making it easier for working-class people to escape inner slums. It opened the way to proliferation of the cottage flat (sometimes maisonette flat). This tenement type, commonly associated with Newcastle (the Tyneside flat), had been modestly revived in the 1870s by Matthew Allen, Waterlow’s collaborator, in Stoke Newington (see p83), and by Banister Fletcher in Pentonville. After 1883 it became a well-rooted vernacular housing form in London, and is readily found in two-storey terrace speculations in numerous then outer locations, from Hornsey, clockwise to Walthamstow, Leyton, Woolwich, Charlton, Catford, Battersea (see p41), Acton and Harrow, places where it was obvious houses would be immediately divided, and where rents for flats could be afforded by working families. Speculators frequently found whole houses difficult to sell so accepted that they were building for low-rent and working-class occupancy. This subject is raised in several chapters here and was directly addressed at our conference by David McDonald (this and other conference papers not in the volume are mentioned here because podcasts are available).¹¹ There were also private tenement developments, by entrepreneurs such as James Hartnoll and the Davis Brothers, as is discussed in Richard Dennis’s chapter, where he draws on Isobel Watson’s work. Housing for single women was a problem newly perceived and innovatively addressed around this time.¹²

The establishment of council housing is not a subject directly addressed in any of the chapters in this book. It should therefore be summarily explained here, if only because it is crucial to recognise how slowly and reluctantly public housing was arrived at. Following the disappointing impact of earlier legislation, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor of 1883 followed Engels in concluding that ‘without State interference nothing effectual can be accomplished upon any large scale’. As if in accord, the Royal Commission of 1884–5 concluded that housing needed to be handled as a matter of necessary social provision, not just as a market. An Act followed, but more effective was the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, passed largely thanks to the newly formed London County Council and its Progressive administration. Local authorities were now permitted to build and manage housing. The LCC’s first major initiative, the Boundary Street Estate of 1893–1900, seemed an exemplary start, but it was laid out at unrepeatable expense. And, as so often happens, clearance pushed the existing population out – only 11 of the 5,719 people evicted were re-housed on the redeveloped site, and overall density was actually reduced.¹³ Meanwhile new housing trusts started up, notably Guinness, Sutton and Samuel Lewis.

The second half of the nineteenth century had seen London’s huge housing problem shunted around, with some real improvements, but without any telling solutions. In Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898; reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902), Ebenezer Howard proposed a novel approach – the building of new towns away from London, beyond a green ‘belt’, an idea that was initially carried forth in Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire. On London’s then margins there appeared related co-operative and private initiatives, exemplified by the Brentham Garden Estate (Ealing), Northwood and Ruislip Garden Estate, the Bostall Estate (Bexley), Hampstead Garden Suburb and Aldersbrook (Redbridge). The LCC picked up the theme in its pre-1914 cottage estate suburbs at Totterdown Fields (Tooting), Norbury, White Hart Lane (or Tower Gardens, Tottenham) and the Old Oak Estate (East Acton).

After the First World War, house-building was given new stimulus in a campaign to provide homes ‘fit for heroes’, in Lloyd George’s resonantly demagogic slogan. Not for the first time, the threat of revolution or unrest (rent strikes) concentrated minds. England’s first full-scale programme of subsidised public housing was initiated by the Addison Act of 1919, to which town planning was seen as a necessary adjunct. This required local authorities to survey and provide for housing needs, and allowed central government to give financial assistance to local authority building programmes, adopting the low-density principles and generous space standards recommended by the Tudor Walters Report of 1918. Much of that had been written by Raymond Unwin, who with Barry Parker had been involved with both Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb, and whose writ now ran as Chief Housing Architect at the Ministry of Health. As Mark Swenarton pointed out in discussion at our conference, Unwin disliked cottage flats – which caused Frank Baines, who had been responsible for the wartime housing of munitions workers in the picturesque Well Hall Estate in Eltham, to resign from the Tudor Walters committee.¹⁴

Inter-war cottage estates, public and private, followed these precedents, and the influence of Howard, Unwin and Parker lasted. Between 1921 and 1935 the LCC built about 24,000 houses in Becontree – the world’s largest public-housing estate, outside the Council’s jurisdiction north of Dagenham – and there were other substantial overlapping projects at London’s outer margins, such as the Bellingham and Downham Estates south of Catford. This approach was only possible where land was available. The LCC was not alone; much was also done by borough councils, both inside and outside the LCC area. In the only Labour stronghold within the LCC boundaries that was not already largely built over, Woolwich Borough Council put up more than 4,000 cottage-estate homes across its southern parts in Eltham, maintaining an ideal of houses for all. Like many authorities, Woolwich built efficiently and productively through direct labour, establishing its own Direct Labour Organisation in 1923.

The inter-war period also saw enormous speculative development as London grew outwards, encouraged by the Conservatives who promoted building societies and owner occupation as a guard against socialism. Houses for sale were accessible only to the middle classes and the highest paid manual workers, yet the output of houses – which peaked at almost 73,000 in 1934 – overshadowed local authority house-building, which did not top 16,000 after 1927. Among the many firms that built in the thousands were the Metropolitan Railway Company’s Metropolitan Country Estates (Metroland) in the north-west; Richard Costain and Sons in the south and north: John Laing and Sons, mainly north-west; New Ideal Homesteads, mainly south-east; George Wimpey and Co., here and there; and Reader Brothers, mostly north-east. In some places, status was carefully guarded. Basil Scruby and Co. did not permit terraces or bungalows in Petts Wood, to keep standards up in a high-class suburb that was designedly quasi-rural. Consciousness of potential limitless sprawl, along with rural if not prelapsarian sensibilities, informed the designation of the Green Belt in 1938. This followed a process in which Raymond Unwin had been instrumental for the Greater London Regional Planning Committee, formed in 1927.

In older central districts, slums needed to be cleared. Space was tight and the LCC perforce built more densely – generally neo-Georgian brick walk-up blocks of flats and maisonettes, sometimes picturesquely laid out and detailed, as in Bermondsey’s Dickens Estate (recalling his account of Jacob’s Island), the Hughes Fields Estate in Deptford or the Holland Estate in Spitalfields. Finsbury Borough Council fought hard for generous space standards at the Margery Street Estate in the early 1930s, but cuts in subsidies and output pressures pushed this building type towards plain monotony, as at the LCC’s Honor Oak Estate. The LCC’s biggest housing project in the late 1930s was White City, Shepherd’s Bush, to house 11,000. There, garden-city principles were thoroughly abandoned in a tight array of five-storey blocks.

A similar evolution can be discerned in private developments. Abraham Davis had moved on from East End tenements to establish first London Garden Suburbs Ltd and then, in 1914, the Lady Workers’ Homes Company, which, at the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate in the mid-1920s, moved away from garden-city appearances for the sake of density. Similar bulky simplicity is evident in Costain’s Dolphin Square, a huge private development of service flats of the late 1930s. Through the inter-war period, inner London districts had seen the building of middle-class housing, mansion blocks and service flats of many types, much of it ‘mid-rise’ or walk-up, including – at the exclusive Modernist extreme – Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoints One and Two. Private speculation kept itself geographically distinct. As Tanis Hinchcliffe pointed out in her conference paper, middle-class enclaves resisted the building of council houses.¹⁵ Overall, a great deal was achieved between the wars to keep pace with London’s growing population, but one important background fact to be borne in mind is that, as difficult as London’s growth then was to manage, Britain’s imperial might and wealth meant that to a significant extent, living standards were achieved at the expense of large parts of the rest of the world in ways that are no longer possible. History is not a pattern book.

The war of 1939–45 and its bombs changed everything, catalysing huge shifts. In the short term there were prefabs, experimental in their materials, yet sometimes enduring much longer than intended (perhaps most famously at the Excalibur Estate in Catford). John Henry Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie’s influential London plans of 1943–4 proposed density bands or rings, declining with distance from the centre, and mixed development in terms of dwelling types to defuse arguments about flats versus houses. The Ministry of Health’s Dudley Committee Report Design of Dwellings (1944) advanced national standards and a housing manual, also encouraging socially mixed populations. Despite war losses and the undersupply of housing that was only in part a consequence, there were still slums to be cleared. At the same time further sprawl had been ruled out, and an egalitarian drive demanded improved living standards. Comprehensive Development Areas were handled by the LCC wherever possible, except at trusted Woolwich. ‘Decanting’ (eviction) was a huge difficulty, as were contested compulsory purchases, but post-war ‘comprehensive’ redevelopments were carried through with a firm eye on social justice, to provide better housing for ordinary people, with generous space standards that were maintained until 1980 following the Parker Morris Committee’s Homes for Today and Tomorrow (1961). This scene is set out more extensively in the Battersea and South Acton case studies in this volume, where much of the interest lies in the ordinariness of the places. More extraordinary (and celebrated) were some notable architectural successes, from the Scandinavian tones of the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, linked to the Festival of Britain, to the introduction of Corbusian slab blocks into a picturesque parkland setting at Alton West in Roehampton, on and out to new towns such as Harlow.

All these contexts are discussed in Simon Pepper’s chapter about the arrival of high-rise development, a complex subject the dynamics of which – in terms of housing need, construction economics, planning nostrums and aesthetic judgments that were passed on as imperatives – is explored in an account that moves from comparatively well-known sites, Churchill Gardens in Pimlico and Roehampton, to focus on less-known developments in Stepney and Poplar, mentioning on the way the High Paddington scheme of 1952, unachieved and an uncanny prefiguration of the Paddington Pole project that was scrapped in 2016. There can be little doubt that high-rise was imposed in many places where it was not wanted and where it need not have been, as is again true now when more than 400 high-rise buildings are in the pipeline. However, good high-rise (tower block or slab block) housing for council tenants is not an oxymoron, as David Roberts’s inspirational study of the Balfron Tower makes entirely clear. Its westerly sister, the Trellick Tower, was the subject of a paper at our conference delivered by Emma Dent Coad.¹⁶ London has many other council-housing exemplars, high-rise and low-rise (the last comparatively undersung), for which there is space here for no more than name checks: the work of Lubetkin, and his partners and successors in Finsbury, Paddington and Bethnal Green; Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar; the Pepys Estate in Deptford (see Owen Hatherley’s foreword); Dawson’s Heights in East Dulwich; Lillington Gardens in Pimlico; Central Hill in Upper Norwood; and a range of Camden projects exemplified by the Alexandra Road Estate.¹⁷

Pressure of demand and shortage of labour led to the adoption of system building, an early 1960s exemplar of which was the Morris Walk Estate in Woolwich (depicted on the cover). Especially once it coincided with centrally imposed cost-cutting, industrialisation did not prove to be the hoped for panacea; the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 was as much a symbolic as a practical failure. More fundamentally and widely, an inability to plan or provide for maintenance was a critical failing, arguably part of a more general naivety about money. Mark Swenarton’s study of the Alexandra Road Estate, presented at our conference and published elsewhere, examines the generally overlooked issue of how, following the economic downturn in the 1970s, politics enforced a narrowing of scope in the building of council houses at just the point when architects were beginning to get it right in terms of producing the kind of housing that many people wanted.¹⁸ In the minefield of unintended consequences that is housing history, tightness of money helped to reinforce a souring of attitudes to the welfare state. Representational tropes shifted from the ‘little palace’ to the ‘hell hole’, reprising earlier perceptions of slums or rookeries.¹⁹

Self-build housing is another important story not represented in the following chapters, and one that now has great resonance thanks to technological change and the development of custom-build. It is important because it avoids both the dirigisme of state provision and the money-grubbing of speculative development, while prioritising reception and use over design. Its history is not a London-centric story, if only because of land costs, but Walter Segal’s experimental timber modular and dry-jointed structural self-build system, flexible, cheap and simple, was granted a break-through in Lewisham. Colin Ward – anarchist, planner and writer – had floated the idea of the ‘Do-it-Yourself New Town’ underpinned by approval from a planning authority, and persuaded key figures in Lewisham to take up Segal’s approach on ‘gap sites’, provided that priority was given to families on the council’s housing waiting list brave enough to build for themselves. Segal Close (1977–82) and Walter’s Way (1983–7) followed: just 20 houses, expressing both variety and unity. Segal’s system was never an answer to housing shortages, and certainly was not suitable for all, but for primarily political reasons it was inadequately exploited. Lewisham colleagues Jon Broome and Bob Hayes founded Architype and followed on with 13 more houses in Woolwich in 1992–5, all built for themselves by members of Co-operative Housing in South-East London (CHISEL).²⁰ At Maconochie’s Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, 89 self-build houses went up in the late 1980s.

Other milestones of successful resistance to the state/capitalism, public/private binaries in the 1970s and 80s were the occupation of Tolmers Square, Coin Street Community Builders and the Bengali Housing Action Group. The decline of council housing after 1980 left a vacuum into which housing associations moved, gradually expanding into greater significance. In this sphere, the Peabody Trust represents continuity in the revival of the social (as opposed to public) housing of which model dwellings companies were the Victorian exemplars. The resurgence of Peabody is illustrated in Chapter Three, though without mention of the precariousness that the 2016 Housing and Planning Act has brought to the independent social landlord sector through the introduction of a ‘Right to Buy’.

The rise (and fall?) of housing associations, the impact of the conservation movement, Housing Action Trusts, the complex politics of tenure and the origins of regeneration are more than can be fitted into this brief introduction, as are other fascinating subjects such as warehouse conversions and live/work spaces, not to mention the success of Berkeley Homes, Section 106 Agreements and recent rather vexed attempts to relaunch council housing. The centrality of finance to matters of tenure emerges clearly from Tanis Hinchcliffe’s study of early gentrification in Canonbury: she highlights changes in the availability of mortgages as a crucial factor, helping to explain how housing was turned over from one class to another, also adumbrating how the disastrous ‘Right to Buy’ policy was transformed into the ‘right to sell’. At our conference, David Ellis spoke about gentrification in Islington in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention to campaigns to municipalise private housing to ward off gentrification. There is more on gentrification here in the Battersea chapter.

Meanwhile, via Oscar Newman’s ‘defensible space’ theory as absorbed by Alice Coleman, as well as through other routes, council housing had been stigmatised and residualised – ugly words for ugly processes that were in large measure slyly tied up with immigration. This is further explained in the context of South Acton, and has been investigated by Ben Campkin at the Aylesbury Estate.²¹ Thus was born the ‘sink estate’, a term of wide but dubious currency that Campkin unpicks thoroughly in his chapter here. Such uses of language – along with ‘Right to Buy’ and other manoeuvres – have contributed to the evisceration of public housing, also decried by David Roberts in Chapter Eight. That has served to legitimate gentrification as regeneration, leading to the unnecessary and disruptive demolition of sound housing and increasing London’s problems. The blaming of architecture for deeply entrenched social problems is a thread that runs through this book. It prompts recall of William Morris’s reminder that ‘as long as there are poor people they will be poorly housed’.²²

Addressing that has always, of course, been not a matter of architecture, but one of politics and ideology, especially in London. Not all great cities have had such contentious or commodified housing histories.²³ There is a simple overarching trajectory to housing politics in London across the period considered in this book. From 1850 it took about 40 years for the realisation to take hold that capitalism would not solve housing problems, and for the idea of public provision to gain acceptability. Another three decades passed before state supply settled down to being normative. For the next 60 years it held sway as the primary solution to housing want across a period of broadly static population and through a post-war crisis, and did end up neutralising housing as a major political issue. At the time of writing, all but another 40 years has passed, during which public provision has been abandoned, and capitalism or market ‘solutions’ that supported private ownership have been favoured. With a rising population, housing has returned to the top of the political agenda. What next?

This is history, not prophecy. Capitalism and state power are and have long been dominant forces, neither entirely benign, and neither now wisely looked to exclusively for salvation, in housing or any other sphere. Simplification is rarely helpful other than in an illusory or rhetorical sense. As complexity has long characterised London’s housing history, that, if nothing else, must be taken into account in addressing current problems.