A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  The pressure for new housing reflected not only the rise in population and the desire for a better lifestyle, but also the multiple shifts in economic fortune. Shift, however, seems a neutral word when employed to describe some of the harsh and difficult changes that occurred. People not only moved off the land, but also migrated from declining industrial regions. Areas, such as north-east England and south Wales, that were collectively the nineteenth-century ‘workshop of the world’, became in large part industrial museums and regions of social dereliction, designated as problems requiring regional assistance, as under the Special Areas Act of 1934. In fact, this Act provided only limited assistance, leading to criticism by a group of radical young Conservatives, such as Harold Macmillan (1894–1986), who advocated ‘One Nation’ Conservatism, and, more loudly, by Labour politicians, notably Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960).

  During the slump of the 1930s, the urban fabric in depressed industrial regions was devastated, as communities were squeezed and businesses shut. Unemployment in Sunderland, a major centre of nineteenth-century industry, rose to 75 per cent of shipbuilders and half of the working population, and was associated with serious hardship and higher rates of ill-health. Jarrow, another shipbuilding town in north-east England (in this case on the Tyne), also had unemployment levels of over 70 per cent, following the closure of Palmers Yard, the main employer in the town – a plight clearly described in The Town that was Murdered (1939) by the MP Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), ‘Red Ellen’, and one that led to the Jarrow March, of unemployed workers, to London in 1936.

  More generally, unemployment and poverty sapped much of the population, leading to malnutrition and poor housing. Many people lacked adequate food, clothes, housing and sanitation, and they were frequently cold and wet. Public health was badly hit and tuberculosis became a more serious problem.

  People moved from towns affected to areas of greater economic opportunity, mostly in the Midlands and south-east England. There was migration within industries, as when Scottish coal miners moved to Nottinghamshire pits, and between them, as with the large-scale movement of workers from South Wales to the new industrial centres in the Thames Valley, especially Dagenham, Hounslow and Slough. The Welsh collieries, which employed 272,000 men at the beginning of 1920, had only 126,000 miners by 1934. Internal migrants left fossilized townscapes and helped create new sprawling suburbs where they moved.

  Aside from the new-build on greenfield sites, there was a major assault on slum (crowded and substandard) housing. The ‘Greenwood’ Housing Act of 1930 gave local authorities powers and subsidies to clear or improve such housing. Thus, the responsibility of central government for the availability and quality of housing was established in the inter-war period. Much was achieved thanks to the availability of labour, materials and low interest rates. In 1931–9, local authorities cleared 250,000 slum properties and built over 700,000 houses. Most house building, however, was private and in the new suburbs, for example along the Northern Line in London from Golders Green to Edgware.

  House building was linked to a marked shift in the world of things, as industry focused on consumer demand. A National Grid for electricity, to be developed under the control of the Central Electricity Board, had been established under the Electricity Supply Act of 1926, and household electricity supplies expanded greatly, replacing coal, gas, candles and human effort as the major source of domestic power. Electricity was seen as clean and convenient, and as a way to improve the environment, so that power, heat and light came to be increasingly dependent on it. Refrigeration, which relied on electricity, had a major impact on food storage and longevity, and thus on the range of food available in households with fridges. It was unnecessary to have cold pantries separate from the kitchen.

  The housing boom meant that there were many houses that had to be equipped, and the percentage of homes wired for electricity rose from 31.8 in 1932 to 65.4 in 1938. This rise had a major impact on the consumption of power and on the sales of electric cookers, irons, fridges, water heaters and vacuum cleaners. This demand helped industrial expansion, notably in the south and Midlands, which, particularly the former, were also the areas of greatest house building.

  Such expenditure reflected, and helped to define, class differences. Whereas radios, vacuum cleaners and electric irons were widely owned, in part thanks to the spread of hire purchase, with payments spread out over a long period, electric fridges, cookers and washing-machines were largely restricted to the middle class. These differences were linked to an aspect of the major social divide between those who employed others (increasingly, however, an occasional daily help, rather than the less numerous full-time domestic servants) and the employed.

  The poor were also unable to participate fully in the new leisure society. Most lacked radios, and thus were unable to listen to the BBC, and they could not afford the cinema, let alone holidays in the new Butlin’s holiday camps, such as the large ones outside Minehead and Skegness. Nevertheless, by 1939, 71 per cent of British households had radio licences and, that year, Birmingham alone had 110 cinemas, and Britain close to 5,000. In 1934, out of a population of 46 million, 18.5 million went to the cinema on a weekly basis.

  Concern about the rate of the spread of suburbia and the threat to the environment, combined with a growing willingness to accept government control, led to legislation. A Town and Country Planning Act of 1932 was followed by the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act of 1935, which attempted to prevent unsightly and uncontrolled development along new or improved roads, and the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act of 1938.

  Housing

  The Second World War lent pace to the pressure for change and regulation, notably because there was serious wartime damage to the housing stock due to German bombing, especially in London, as well as a very low rate of wartime construction. Expectations of a better life after the war were also encouraged by the Labour Party, which came to power in 1945. These expectations resulted not only in large-scale house building, notably in the 1950s, but also in the belief in more comprehensive planning that led to the Town and Country Planning Acts of 1944 and 1947, and the New Towns Act of 1946.

  The New Towns were intended to be ‘balanced communities for working and living’. Especially prominent round London, they were designed to complement the Green Belt and to provide housing for the displaced, bombed-out, residents of the metropolis. Stevenage was rapidly followed by Harlow, Hemel Hempstead, Crawley, Bracknell, Basildon, Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City. The London Green Belt was finally secured with an Act of 1959. There were other New Towns elsewhere, including Skelmersdale for Liverpool, and Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingston in Scotland. In Wales, Cwmbran, designated in 1949, was an overspill town, while Newtown (1967) was an attempt to encourage economic activity in mid-Wales.

  In addition to New Towns, there was large-scale rebuilding in the cities. The Conservatives saw the shortage of houses as an electoral opportunity, and, in the election of 1951, which they won under Churchill, made much of a promise to build 300,000 houses a year. Helped by a higher allocation of government resources, cooperation with house builders, and reducing the housing standards for council houses, the Conservatives, who remained in power until 1964, achieved their target in 1953, and this success permitted extensive rehousing in the 1950s. The key political figure, Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government from 1951 to 1954, was to earn much credit for this and he became Prime Minister in 1957. The 1950s’ buildings, many of which were low-rise and fairly generous with space, should be distinguished from the system-built tower blocks largely built in the 1960s, although the latter were also seen from the 1950s.

  Many of the new houses provided people with their first bathrooms and inside toilets. The dynamics of family space, and the nature of privacy, changed as a result. The consequences can be seen in 20 Forthlin Road, a National Trust property that is very different to their usual stately homes. This Liverpool house is on the Mather
Avenue estate, which was built by the council in 1949–52, and it had an inside toilet. It was the home of the McCartney family, who had earlier lived in a prefabricated bungalow intended as a temporary home, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote songs in the living room.

  Within existing cities, concern about urban sprawl, and the practical constraints of Green Belts, encouraged higher-density housing, which contributed to high-rise development. Prefabricated methods of construction ensured that multi-storey blocks of flats could be built rapidly and inexpensively, and local councils, such as Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle in the 1950s and 1960s, took pride in their number, size and visibility. Glasgow Corporation began to rebuild the Gorbals as a high-rise district in 1951 and, by the early 1970s, one home in every three being built in Scotland was in a block of six storeys or more.

  New estates, such as Park Hill in Sheffield, an estate of concrete inner-city tower blocks built in 1957, were designed as entire communities, with elevated walkways called ‘streets in the sky’. Most, however, were failures, not only because they were poorly built, but also because they did not contribute to social cohesion. Kirkby on Merseyside, for example, was associated with unemployment, crime and vandalism, and, by the 1970s, Park Hill was in part a concrete slum. The decision of English Heritage in 1998 to list it as an architectural masterpiece was widely deplored by the tenants.

  There was also a brutal rebuilding of many city centres, for example Birmingham, Gateshead, Manchester, Plymouth and Newcastle, as well as parts of central London. The availability of low-cost concrete was important in encouraging the new brutalism: redbrick and stone were discarded, as were the styles associated with them, notably neo-Georgian. Professional planners played a major role alongside architects in this process, which sought both to cope with traffic congestion and to provide modern images for cities. Yet, together, developers, planners and city councils, convinced that the past should be discarded, and in some cases, notably Newcastle, with shared financial interests, embarked on widespread devastation and poor-quality rebuilding. In Newcastle, most of Eldon Square made way for a shopping centre. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1969 was less valuable in offering protection to the townscape than the economic downturn that followed the massive 1973 oil price hike.

  Planning was not the sole sphere for legislation. There was also political contention over attempts to control the ownership of land in order to ensure that planning was a more proactive process. The Attlee government (1945–51) nationalized the value added by the development of land, but the Conservatives repealed the legislation. Labour then considered the bringing of all rent-controlled housing under the control of local councils before establishing, under the Wilson governments (1964–70, 1974–6), a Land Commission in order to ensure the availability of sufficient building land. This measure proved a failure.

  Environmentalism

  Green Belt and Clean Air legislation represented major advances in the principle of national responsibility and the practice of government intervention, while the establishment in 1949 of the National Parks Commission and of Areas of Outstanding Beauty was also important. Yet, despite greater interest in planning from the 1940s, such moves were not part of a coherent strategy, and the Clean Air Act of 1956, in particular, was a response to a specific crisis created by a very bad smog in London in 1952. The nightmarish quality of a smog was captured in Patricia Wentworth’s (1878–1961) novel Ladies’ Bane (1954), which was set in London:

  It was rather like a slow motion picture. There was the fog of course. Nothing could really move in a fog like this. The buses would be stopped – and the cars – and the people who were abroad would crawl like beetles and wish to be at home again – and the watches and clocks would all slow down and time too.

  Smog also encouraged respiratory illnesses, especially bronchitis. In response, there was legislation for particular cities, legislation that dramatically changed their feel, sight and sound. The first smokeless zone legislation was introduced in the Manchester Corporation Act of 1946, and smoke emissions in Newcastle were controlled from 1958.

  Greater public awareness of environmental degradation as well as the fashionability of environmental concern led, from the 1960s, to more consistent and insistent government intervention. The Countryside Commission was founded in 1968 (a year after the Scottish Countryside Commission), and the Department of the Environment was established in 1970. The decline in the industrial base also contributed to a change in the character of pollution. Moreover, the conversion to smokeless fuel led to an atmosphere that was no longer acidic nor heavy with sooty smuts and helped ensure that cities such as Leeds and Newcastle became cleaner and brighter. Yet, other particulates and chemicals became more significant in the environment, in part as a consequence of more traffic, and concern grew about the levels of gases such as carbon monoxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen dioxide.

  In 2009, the European Commission began legal action that could end in a fine against Britain over its poor air quality. Pollution in London is particularly bad and frequently breaches limits recommended by the World Health Organization. Road transport has been the major culprit.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the environment was more clearly a political issue than it had been at the outset. What, in 1987, became the Green Party was founded in 1975, and in 1989 it won 15 per cent of the vote in the elections to the European Parliament. This was exceptional, but environmental consciousness and activism became more pronounced, as environmental science became both alarming and fashionable. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace enjoyed much support in the 1990s, while the mainstream political parties then and in the 2000s presented themselves, with different degrees of success, as being the ‘pro-environment party’. For example, in his efforts to modernize the Conservative Party and broaden its appeal, its leader, David Cameron (1966–), stressed his green credentials in 2008.

  Environmental consciousness took a number of forms. In particular, public concern about the fate of wildlife became more pronounced from the 1960s, and it also had a powerful impact in children’s literature, with works such as Richard Adams’ (1920–) novel about rabbits, Watership Down (1972). Indeed, wildlife was badly affected by human action, notably more intensive agricultural methods such as mechanization, the large-scale use of pesticides, in particular organophosphates, and the destruction of hedgerows. The last affected birds, which found fewer places in which to build their nests, small mammals and other animals, as well as insects such as bumblebees. There were also fewer of the wildflowers from which the latter sip their nectar. By 2009, two bumblebee species had died out, seven were threatened and only six were buoyant, a situation which was a threat to plants that need them for pollination.

  The diminution (and even disappearance) of the dawn chorus in several parts of the country and the decline in the number of butterfly species have been particularly poignant indicators of loss due to changes in land use. In 2009, a survey of rivers indicated that the majority did not meet European Union standards for cleanliness, with serious consequences for wildlife such as otters. There was a major release of cyanide from a water sewage treatment plant into the River Trent in October 2009.

  At the same time, there have also been indications of improvement, notably with the return of fish to some rivers, especially the Thames, where the first salmon for a century was caught in 1974; improvement that owes much to de-industrialization. In September 2009, it was announced that lampreys, fish intolerant of pollution, had been spotted in the Sussex Ouse for the first time in decades. As a reminder of the ambiguities of developments, the smell of jobs (i.e. from factories) was gone from towns where factories had been closed.

  Less benign change in wildlife was the marked increase in the numbers of urban rats, squirrels, seagulls and foxes, attracted by the volume of rubbish. Indeed, with the decline in inshore fishing, seagulls moved inland. Moreover, assumptions about appropriate attitudes towards animals ensured that the reperto
ire of means hitherto available for action against vermin was markedly restricted, with limitations on the poisons that could be used.

  The destruction of hedgerows led, from the 1950s, to the replacement, especially in East Anglia, of the earlier patchwork of small fields bordered with dense hedges by large expanses of arable land. These expanses were more convenient for agricultural machinery, which was increasingly large-scale, for example combine harvesters, helping ensure that fewer workers were required to produce the same quantity of food. Partly as a result, where the countryside is not the base for commuting or retirement communities, it has become depopulated, or, at least, agricultural employment has declined dramatically. Mechanization also hit wildlife.

  There was also a major change to the woodlands of Britain. The abrupt disappearance of long-established, semi-natural, forest contrasted with earlier patterns of generally stable management, with its emphasis on regular cutting or coppicing. Although forestry led to an extension of woodland in upland areas, often in regimented, gloomy plantings, there are now fewer trees in heavily farmed lowland areas. Not all the decline, however, can be attributed to agricultural change, as Dutch elm disease, caused by a fungus, hit elms hard from the 1960s.