Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Nearly as much of a non-starter, moreover, was the Fleming Report’s 1944 recommendation that public schools should voluntarily make available a quarter of their places to children from the state system. In practice there was a total lack of enthusiasm all round, whether on the part of the public schools themselves (once their fee-paying places started to fill up, as they quickly did), the Ministry of Education (which resisted the idea of state bursaries), the local education authorities (which had no wish to see their brightest pupils being creamed off) and working-class parents (naturally reluctant to have their children taken away to such an alien milieu). A 1946 play, The Guinea Pig, was soon afterwards turned into a successful film by Roy and John Boulting, starring the young Richard Attenborough as a 14-year-old cockney, Jack Read, sent to an ancient foundation. After early, heartrending scenes of bullying and unhappiness, the boy gradually adjusts and loses his accent, eventually winning a scholarship to Cambridge. ‘Gosh sir, jolly good show’ is his grateful response to the news.9. The film portrays a triumph of social mobility, but in reality the Fleming scheme never got off the ground, and private and state education continued to co-exist as two utterly separate systems inhabiting utterly separate worlds.

  The belief in 1945 that the public could match the private ran deep. Co-compiling that autumn a Report on Luton for the local council, Richard Titmuss ended the section on housing with a clarion call:

  There is evidence that the country is moving towards a wide acceptance of the principle that services provided by the people for themselves through the medium of central and local government, shall compare in standard with those provided by private enterprise. As it is with hospitals and clinics, so it should be with schools and houses. The council house should in the future provide the amenities, space and surroundings which hitherto have often been the monopoly of private building.

  This was a vision fully shared by Bevan, perversely enough responsible for housing as well as health, two immensely challenging tasks. His unambiguous policy was severely to restrict private house-building and instead to pour as many resources as he could muster into new local-authority housing. Although there had been a significant growth of such housing between the wars, this policy marked the beginning of a fundamental and long-term step-change, so that by the end of the 1970s as much as a third of the national housing stock was in the hands of local authorities.

  The most powerful historical critique of this strategy has come from Alison Ravetz. Noting that ‘the weight placed on local councils as housing authorities – as developers, owners and managers – turned them, for several decades, into virtually unchallengeable landlords,’ she particularly regrets Labour’s lack of enthusiasm for such alternative housing agencies as housing associations, housing co-operatives and self-build societies. As a result, and aggravated by the lack of subsidy for private rented housing, the post-war British housing system had ‘a distinctive, monolithic quality that set it apart from virtually all other European housing systems’ – a system that ‘befitted a centralised, collectivist, expertly advised and caring, but ultimately paternalistic, State’. To all of which one might add that there was also what now seems the glaring and obstinate refusal to admit that most people actually wanted to own their own homes. Yet was that true at the time? Tellingly, out of the Sunday Pictorial’s ‘100 Families’ in July 1946, only 14 were reported as either owning or buying (ie from private landlords) ‘the houses in which they lived’.10For most of the others, almost certainly, home ownership – in the middle of a serious national housing shortage – was simply not on the agenda.

  At the heart of the new vision of public housing was quality as much as quantity. Typically, Bevan had no time for prefabs, not recognising their popularity and contemptuously dismissing them as ‘rabbit hutches’. Instead, he wanted permanence and the highest standards possible, including lavatories upstairs and down as well as overall minimum room space increased from 750 to 900 square feet. ‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build,’ he declared. ‘We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.’

  Was Bevan’s hope, as with Wilkinson in education, that if the quality was good enough in public housing, then there would be no demand for private? It is impossible to know, but certainly he placed much faith in mixing the classes together. ‘You have colonies of low-income people, living in houses provided by the local authorities, and you have the higher income groups living in their own colonies,’ he complained in October 1945. ‘This is a wholly evil thing, from a civilised point of view . . . It is a monstrous infliction upon the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community.’ Subsequently, he invoked the ideal community as one where ‘all the various income groups of the population are mixed’ – an ideal that had once existed in some English villages, ‘where the small cottages of the labourers were cheek by jowl with the butcher’s shop, and where the doctor could reside benignly with his patients in the same street’.11What this might mean in practice, though, was another matter. Building council houses in districts dominated by homeowners? Persuading the doctor to live in a council house? The contrast with health, Bevan’s other responsibility, was painfully stark. In that area there was every chance of persuading the middle classes to embrace a nationalised health system, knowing that the medical-cum-financial benefits more than outweighed the temporary discomfort of a socially mixed doctor’s waiting room or even, if the worst came to the worst, hospital ward. A socially mixed 24/was, for all concerned, a very different prospect.

  In the short, quantitative term, faced by a daunting set of circumstances (including severe economic constraints, fiercely competing priorities for building materials which were in short supply anyway, and the immediate need for at least a million homes), Bevan made a patchy start, leading directly to the squatters’ movement in the summer of 1946. But he recovered sufficiently well to be able to announce by September 1948 that 750,000 new homes had been provided since the end of the war – a mixture of new permanent houses (almost half the total), temporary housing (including the despised prefabs), repaired housing and house conversions. However, a huge problem of unmet demand still remained. It was estimated that several million new homes would be required by the mid-1950s and that was even before the slum-clearance programmes, halted at the onset of war, were restarted.

  A survey of Willesden, conducted in late 1946 and early 1947, found 61 per cent expressing dissatisfaction with their present housing (dominated in that inner London suburb by decaying terraced houses), with ‘overcrowding’ and ‘lack of privacy’ as the most frequent complaints, followed by ‘inadequate amenities’. Moreover, 62 per cent (especially younger people) said that they would like to move from their present home in the next two or three years; of these, 72 per cent did not want to stay in Willesden, with a majority expressing a preference to live either in an outer suburb or outside London altogether. The makings, in other words, were already apparent of a great, essentially voluntary exodus – one already begun before the war – from the streets upon streets of substandard, nineteenth-century inner-city and inner-suburb speculative housing, most of it privately rented, that Bevan understandably viewed as the spur to a golden age of public housing.

  The Willesdenites were also asked what form their ideal new housing would take; as usual, only a small minority (15 per cent) opted for the self-contained flat. But by this time the government had already introduced new subsidy scales for local authorities that in effect gave them a significant financial incentive to build blocks of flats of four storeys or more, as long as they had lifts. ‘People would not consent to live in the clouds if land was available,’ complained one Labour MP in March 1946, describing the measure as ‘so much flat-doodle’; but it still went ahead. Woodberry Down estate in Stoke Newington and Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, each including blocks of at least eight storeys, were early responses: high enough in comparison with the standard four-storey LCC blocks of the 1930s but not
yet skyscrapers. Elsewhere in London, at East Ham, the attitude in 1946 of the local council mirrored that of several other Labour authorities in bombed-out districts, with a simultaneous reluctance to accept either blocks of flats or a significantly reduced population. In the end, firmly told by its experts (the Chief Housing Officer and the Borough Engineer) that these two policies were mutually exclusive, the council did agree in principle to allow flats, though only for single people or childless couples.12Overall, the majority of new council housing in the 1940s was along well-established ‘cottage’ lines, with (outside London anyway) few blocks of flats being built.

  For most architects, eager to get involved in rebuilding Britain, the economic circumstances were such that they had no alternative but to bide their time. Ernö Goldfinger, ultra-modernist and left-wing, was lucky, receiving a commission just after the war to convert a bomb-damaged Victorian warehouse in Farringdon into new premises for the Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker. A fractious process ensued – the builders objecting strongly to taking orders from someone palpably not English born and bred – during which Goldfinger stuck to his modernist guns by removing most of the Victorian mouldings. The end result won many architectural plaudits, but the journalists who had to work there every day soon identified two major flaws: the unpleasantly noisy main newsroom, built in a pioneering open-plan style, and the very low toilets, unrepentantly justified by Goldfinger on the grounds that the nearer one got to squatting Continental-fashion over elephant’s feet, the more complete the bowel evacuation. ‘The journalists,’ according to his biographer, ‘were not convinced.’

  ‘“Everybody” is talking Dispersal, Satellite Towns, Green Belts, Location of Industry, etc,’ Goldfinger’s old sparring partner, Frederic Osborn, noted with satisfaction in September 1945. That indeed was the spirit of the age – a planning zeitgeist that looked with dismay not just on the rundown inner cities but also on all the proliferating Acacia Avenues and Chestnut Groves. ‘The suburbs have generally developed as an unplanned growth,’ complained Coventry’s mayor, Councillor J. C. Lee Gordon, in August 1946. ‘In order to develop a social sense it is very necessary to divide the suburbs into definite zones, each with its own identity, and each with a social centre, or focal point, at which group activities may be carried on which are wider than the activities of a small family group.’ What Gordon envisaged, he explained to a local paper, was ‘a neighbourhood unit’ – the increasingly popular town-planning concept, imported from America, which ignored Dennis Chapman’s inconvenient Middles-brough findings and argued that community spirit would be fostered through the creation of zoned, residential-only neighbourhoods that each had its own school, church, community centre and so on.

  Later that year, J. M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, was broad-minded enough to put in a word for the much-maligned existing suburbs, pointing out that for all ‘the alleged deficiencies of suburban taste’, there was no denying ‘the appeal it holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen, an appeal which cannot be explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration’. But Richards’s short book, The Castles on the Ground (1946), was, he would recall, ‘scorned by my contemporaries as either an irrelevant eccentricity or a betrayal of the forward-looking ideals of the Modern Movement’. The notable exception was John Betjeman, who found in John Piper’s accompanying illustrations of ‘the fake half-timber, the leaded lights and bow windows of the Englishman’s castle’ what he called ‘a new beauty – the beauty of the despised, patronised suburb, the open heart of the nation’.13

  The time, though, was far from ripe for Metroland nostalgia. Another book, also published in December 1946, caught much better the prevailing mood: ‘Let us close our eyes on the nineteenth-century degradation and squalor, and let us only look with unseeing eyes on the sordid excrescences 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.’ Farewell Squalor was the work of C. W. Clarke, Easington Rural District Council’s Surveyor. Clarke called for a large development of new, better housing for Durham’s miners, to be named after their legendary former leader, Peter Lee. They certainly needed it, to judge by James Lansdale Hodson’s account shortly before of visiting a pit village near Bishop Auckland:

  Three long streets on a slight rise stood at right angles. We drove up one and down another, going very slowly, for the streets are unpaved, with small knolls of hard earth and cinders and runnels caused by rain. Patches of grass grew boldly. The streets were almost an unbroken line of miserable brick hovels, each street about 400 yards in length, most horrible and dreary. Our coming brought a few unkempt women and ill-clad children to the doors. Two hefty young men eyed us sullenly. It was nearer to hell, I thought, than anything I had seen since Belsen.

  ‘Yet it exists in 1946,’ reflected Hodson, ‘and hardly more than an hour’s journey from Newcastle-on-Tyne.’14

  Peterlee was one of 14 New Towns designated between 1946 and 1950. In line with the wartime County of London Plan, more than half were for Greater London – in order of designation, Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Hatfield, Welwyn, Basildon and Bracknell. The other six were Corby in Northamptonshire, Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in the north-east, East Kilbride and Glenrothes in Scotland, and Cwmbran in Wales. Developed partly to relieve the housing shortage but also with explicit brave new world ambitions, they would become emblematic of the whole 1945 settlement.

  The essential guiding spirit of these new towns followed on from Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city movement: they were to be economically self-contained and socially balanced communities that in national terms would stimulate decentralisation from the overcrowded big cities. Reporting in 1946 to the new Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, the Reith Committee (with Osborn a prominent member) placed particular stress on the need for a strong sense of community and highlighted the potential benefits of the neighbourhood unit – which indeed was the model explicitly used in 11 out of the first 14 new towns. As with his inter-war stewardship of the BBC, Lord Reith did not really embrace popular culture. He hoped that each new town would have ‘a civic cinema’, thereby counteracting the commercial cinemas with their ‘limited cultural range and American productions’; he did not mention commercial dance halls; and he specifically repudiated greyhound racing: ‘While there may be a demand, it would bring in its train consequences likely to be specially objectionable in a new town because displeasing to a large proportion of the residents.’

  How were these fun factories to be run? The Reith Committee canvassed various possibilities, but the New Towns Act 1946 which quickly followed its report came down decisively for government-funded, government-appointed public corporations, in the event called development corporations, with no directly elected element. It was a fundamental breach of the Howardian vision, which had involved the bottom-up creation of what have been called ‘self-governing local welfare states’. Not that this worried Silkin, whose much greater anxiety, he told the Commons in May 1946 in the course of moving his bill’s second reading, was that ‘the planning should be such that the different income groups living in the new towns will not be segregated’:

  No doubt they may enjoy common recreational facilities, and take part in amateur theatricals, or each play their part in a health centre or community centre. But when they leave to go home I do not want the better off people to go to the right, and the less well off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other, ‘Are you going my way?’ . . . Our aim must be to combine in the new town the friendly spirit of the former slum with the vastly improved health conditions of the new estate, but it must be a broadened spirit, embracing all classes of society.

  A final burst of eloquence, perhaps helping to produce the notably bipartisan spirit that characterised the passage of his bill, reached for the
sunlit uplands: ‘We may well produce in the new towns a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride.’15

  By this time Stevenage had already been publicly identified as the first new town, with its population of some 6,000 expected to increase tenfold. ‘How do you feel about it?’ a Mass-Observation investigator asked some of the indigenous residents. ‘It’s time this town was woken up,’ replied a 45-year-old signwriter. A 30-year-old coachbuilder agreed: ‘It’s progress, and it’s what we badly need here.’ So, too, a 50-year-old housewife: ‘I think it will be a benefit myself. If you’ve got a family, well, it’s a good thing to know there’ll be work for them.’ Those expressing definite opposition included a 60-year-old car-park attendant. ‘My great grandfather was here, and his father before him,’ he explained. ‘We belong here, and I shouldn’t like to see the beauty taken away . . . Have you seen the beauty of the place? That avenue of chestnuts up by the school and parish church? You should see it.’