Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Between the autumn of 1949 and that of 1950, a sociologist, K. C. Wiggans, surveyed living and working conditions in Wallsend, the shipbuilding town near Newcastle upon Tyne from which T. Dan Smith came. Most of the men surveyed lived in the riverside district, consisting ‘almost entirely of old houses, many of them condemned and overcrowded’. Wiggans highlighted one man, who ‘said that he, and eight others, were occupying a four-roomed upstairs flat, consisting of two bedrooms, a boxroom and a kitchen’:

  The subject and his wife, a son aged eight, and an unmarried daughter of eighteen slept in one room; a married son, wife and child, aged two, slept and lived in another, whilst a son, aged twenty-one, slept in the kitchen, and an old grandfather had the box room. There was no bath, no hot water, no electric light and the lavatory was down in the backyard. The ceilings and walls of the house were rotten with damp; in wet weather the rain streamed through the roof, with the result that no food could be stored for more than a day or two without going bad.

  ‘A very large proportion of the houses which were visited in this area,’ added Wiggans, ‘had these particular problems, to a greater or lesser degree.’

  Soon afterwards, John R. Townsend visited for the New Statesman the ‘huge, crazy entanglement of sooty streets sprawling over the southern half of Salford, from Broad Street to the Docks’. Focusing particularly on Hanky Park, the district that had been the setting for Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, he found ‘a fair, perhaps slightly worse than average, specimen of a northern city slum’:

  Blackened, crumbling brick, looking as if only its coating of grime held it together; streets so narrow that you need hardly raise your voice to talk to your neighbour across the way; outdoor privies in odorous back entries; dirt everywhere, and no hot water to fight it with; rotting woodwork which doesn’t know the touch of fresh paint; walls which often soak up the damp like blotting-paper – in short, nothing really exceptional.

  In Salford as a whole, out of the city’s 50,000 houses, no fewer than 35,000 were more than 60 years old, with the overwhelming majority having neither bath nor hot water. Would things change? After noting how in 1948 some Salford schoolchildren had been asked to write ‘about where they would really like to live’, with many expressing ‘wild longings to be away from Salford, in reach of the country, the sea, the mountains’, Townsend concluded pessimistically: ‘As things are shaping at present, it is hardly more than a hope that their children’s own children will avoid being born and bred in the back streets.’2.

  The housing situation was even worse in Scotland, where in 1950 it was estimated that around 1.4 million out of a population of some five million were ‘denied a reasonable home-life’ through having to endure overcrowding, squalor, lack of sanitation and so on. Glasgow above all remained a byword for dreadful housing. The 1951 Census revealed that a staggering 50.8 per cent of the city’s stock comprised dwellings of only one or two rooms, compared with 5.5 per cent for Greater London; while in terms of the percentage of population living more than two per room, the respective figures were 24.6 and 1. 7. Overall, Glasgow’s residential density in 1951 was 163 persons per acre – compared with 48 for Birmingham and 77 for Manchester, both of which English cities thought with good reason that they had major housing problems. Probably nowhere in Glasgow was the squalor greater than in the Hutchesontown district of the Gorbals. There the density was no fewer than 564 persons per acre, with almost 89 per cent of its dwellings (often part of pre-1914 tenements) being of one or two rooms, usually with no bath and frequently with no lavatory of their own. For Glasgow as a whole, it was reckoned by the early 1950s that as many as 600,000 people – well over half the city’s population – needed rehousing.3. It was a daunting (if to some invigorating) statistic.

  The majority of housing in the Gorbals was in the hands of private landlords, as in 1951 it was in the case of 51 per cent of the stock in England and Wales (compared with 57 per cent in 1938). Rented housing was, in other words, the largest single sector of the market, and it was a sector in deep, long-term trouble.

  ‘Never receiving any “improvements”, never painted, occasionally patched up in the worst places at the demand of the Corporation’ – such was the reality in 1950 of the privately rented housing that dominated the Salford slums. For, as Townsend explained:

  Owners say that on the present rents they cannot afford to pay to keep their property fit for habitation, and it is a fact that many of them will give you whole streets of houses for nothing, and ten shillings into the bargain for the trouble of signing the deeds, if you are stupid enough to do so. Some owners have merely disappeared without trace, leaving the rents (and the repairs) to look after themselves until the Corporation steps in.

  Soon afterwards, a senior Glasgow housing official confirmed the trend: ‘Forty years ago there were many empty houses but few abandoned by their owners. Today there are no empty houses yet many have been abandoned by their owners.’4.

  There were two principal reasons why the private landlord was, in some cities anyway, in almost headlong retreat. Firstly, a welter of rent-control legislation, going back to 1915 and involving a freezing of rent levels from 1939, was indeed a significant deterrent. ‘Before the war, people were willing to pay between one-quarter and one-sixth of their income on rent,’ noted the Economist’s Elizabeth Layton in 1951. ‘Now they are not so prepared because they have become accustomed to living cheaply in rent-controlled houses and do not appreciate that, while incomes have increased, rents have lagged behind what is required to keep old property in repair or to cover the annual outgoings of new houses.’ Undoubtedly at work was an instinctive, widespread dislike of the private landlord, and this sentiment particularly affected the second reason for the rented sector’s difficulties: namely, government reluctance to help much when it came to making grants for improvements and repairs. Bevan’s 1949 Housing Act did offer the promise of some assistance, but he was not a minister ever likely to embrace the landlord as one of his great causes. The hope – at least on the left – was that sooner rather than later huge swathes of urban slum clearance would in the process come close to finishing off the private landlord altogether.

  Not all rented housing was wretched, but it does seem that precious little of it was conducive to the good life. Away from the out-and-out slum areas, perhaps fairly typical of these immediate post-war years was the situation in which the Willmotts (Peter, Phyllis and baby son Lewis) found themselves in the early 1950s. Desperate for somewhere to live on their own, they landed up in Hackney, occupying (in Phyllis’s words) ‘the top two floors of a plain, yellow-brick Victorian house hemmed in on three sides by streets’, including a main road to Dalston Junction. They had two rooms and a kitchen on the first floor, and a large room on the floor above, but it was still a pretty dispiriting experience:

  The stairs were meagrely covered with well-worn lino; kitchen, bedroom and hall were painted in nondescript shades of beige, and in our sitting-room there was a depressing patterned wallpaper of pink and brown ferns. The landlord was proud of these decorative features and made it clear that he would not permit any changes to them . . . We had the use of the bath in the kitchen of the ground-floor tenants. We seldom exercised this right because it was too much trouble to fix a convenient time (and I was afraid of the explosive noises made by the very old geyser). We had to make do with hot water from a gas heater that the landlord allowed us to install over the kitchen sink – at our own expense. There was one shared lavatory on the ground floor, and shared use of the neglected patch of ground that could hardly be called a back garden but could be used to hang out the washing by tenants.

  It was much the same for another young family in Swansea. ‘It is a ground-floor flat in an ill-built house, rather too small and with no room to put anything,’ Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin in December 1949 from 82 Vivian Road, Sketty, Swansea, which for the previous few weeks had been home for himself, his wife Hilly and two small children, including the infant Mar
tin. ‘There are fourteen steps between the front-door and the street, and most of the time I am carrying a pram or a baby up or down them.’ Over the next year, the Amis family lived in three other rented places, including two small flats on Mumbles Road, before in early 1951 a small legacy enabled them to buy a house. ‘These were primitive places with shared bathrooms and in one case an electric cooker that guaranteed shocks for the user,’ notes an Amis biographer; he adds that they were the model for the Lewises’ flat in That Uncertain Feeling (1955) – a novel in which the Amis-like hero is in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with the censorious, small-minded Mrs Davis on the ground floor, where she converts her kitchen door ‘into an obstacle as impassable as an anti-tank ditch’.5.

  The growth area in housing by this time was undoubtedly the local-authority sector, a trend strongly encouraged by the Labour government. The figures alone tell the story: 807,000 permanent dwellings were built for local authorities between 1945 and 1951, compared with 180,000 for private owners. And the 1951 Census showed that, in England and Wales, 18 per cent of the housing stock was in the hands of local authorities – an increase of 8 per cent on 1938. As before the war, much of this new public housing was designated for lower-income groups, with councils expected to let it at affordable rents, but Bevan was determined that it should be of sufficient quality to attract the middle class as well in due course. Significantly, his 1949 Housing Act enshrined the long-term provision of local-authority housing for ‘all members of the community’, not just ‘the working classes’. This was not quite such a fanciful aspiration as it would come to seem, given that it has been estimated that in 1953 the average income of council-house tenants was virtually the same as the overall average income – a reflection in part of how most of the real poverty was concentrated in privately owned slums, in part of how predominantly working-class a society Britain remained.6. And of course, there was for most activators (whether national politicians, local councillors, civil servants, town planners or architects) a powerful urge to put public housing at the heart of the New Jerusalem.

  There already existed a flagship for the dream. ‘We believe we shall yet see roses growing on Quarry Hill,’ a Leeds alderman had declared in March 1938, opening the first section of an estate being built opposite the city’s bus station. ‘The Housing Committee make the bold claim for this estate that when completed, it will not only be the finest of its kind for wage-earners in this country but also in the world.’ Duly finished soon afterwards, the Quarry Hill estate comprised six-storey blocks of flats consciously modelled on the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, widely known as a paragon of working-class housing. Functioning lifts; the pioneering, French-designed Garchey automatic waste-disposal system; the revolutionary ‘Mopin system’ of prefabricated blocks of stressed steel and concrete – all were witness to a belief that municipal housing should be the best and the most modern.

  But by 1949 there were clear signs of dissatisfaction. ‘Quarry Hill Flats, many of its 960 families think, is a grey elephant,’ the local press noted somewhat sardonically in September. ‘Not exactly a white elephant, for the Corporation Housing Department collects a goodly sum in rents. But untended, neglected, discouraged.’ The specific context was a recent manifesto presented to the Housing Committee by the Tenants’ Association calling for a range of improvements – especially in terms of open spaces, garden plots and playgrounds – in accordance with the bold promises made at the opening ceremony back in 1938, as well as a variety of other facilities, such as a community centre, a health centre and shops. These proposals were submitted ‘as a basis upon which a vast improvement can be made in the condition of the Estate and by which it can become a real community dwelling of which the City can be justly proud’. Later that year, the local authority did bring in dustbins after the much-vaunted Garchey system had broken down, but generally its response to the tenants’ initiative was grudging and unimaginative.7.

  Nevertheless, it was almost certainly the case that most people living in Quarry Hill in the late 1940s and for quite a long time afterwards were broadly content to be doing so. And in general, in the tortuous, bittersweet, frequently controversial post-war story of public housing, so much would depend on external perceptions – perceptions often at odds with reality. Take Glasgow’s Blackhill estate. Built in the 1930s to rehouse slum-dwellers from the city’s east end, and set in a hilly area two miles north-east of the city centre, very near a gas plant and chemical works, it never remotely enjoyed flagship status. Here, the process of Glasgow-wide stigmatisation seems to have begun in early 1949, after nine residents had been fatally poisoned by illegal, homemade ‘hooch’ imbibed during Hogmanay celebrations. It quickly emerged – through a report in a local paper – that the cause was methyl alcohol, stolen by a Blackhill man from the chemical works. Thereafter, as a result of the story spreading across the city by word of mouth, the estate’s reputation was indissolubly linked with the episode. So much so that in 1950 one woman, hitherto living in an overcrowded single-end, became a tenant there only with the utmost reluctance. ‘There were bad things happening in it that we heard,’ she recalled (while still insisting on her anonymity) some 40 years later. ‘I’d heard they were running about with knives and hammers and a’ this carryon, and I said, no way am I going there.’ She went on:

  We had to take it [the house] because of the room-space, and I was only in it a year when I went away on holiday and closed the house up for a fortnight. And there was nobody touched it. And that’s when I realised that it was the name it had got . . . They can all say what they like but I reared, I reared the twins here – they were only thirteen months when I came here and I could put them up beside anybody . . .

  In short: ‘I came to stay and I found it was entirely different.’8.

  The only stigma that the nation’s owner-occupiers – responsible in 1951 for some 31 per cent of the housing stock – had to endure was the almost visceral anti-suburban bias of most progressive thinkers. The popular journalist and broadcaster Godfrey Winn had this stigma in mind when, being driven by his chauffeur along the Kingston bypass in 1951, he came off at Cortlands Corner and turned into Malden Road:

  In a moment, the roar of the traffic was hushed; in a moment, walking between the privet hedge that leads into the cul-de-sac, called Firgrove, I was in the very heart of suburbia, and isn’t life there considered by some to be the cemetery of all youthful drama, the burying ground of all ambition, the apotheosis, on the other hand, of all convention? And, in addition, a lonely tomb for all neighbourly and social intercourse.

  So the modern school of psychiatrists are never tired of telling us, yet I can only truthfully state myself that my first reaction as I examined the two dozen houses neatly laid out in rows, each with its own well-mown patch of front lawn, its flowering lilacs and laburnums, was that I could think of many far less pleasant places in which to be buried during one’s lifetime. Further, that first external impression became only enhanced, and most agreeably so, when I searched behind the façade to meet some of the family units inhabiting this hundred-yard-long road whose houses, built between the wars, originally each cost about a thousand pounds.

  Indeed, Winn found in Firgrove an almost suspiciously uniform near-blissful state of contentment, with entirely relaxed and amicable relations between the neighbours. The Peggs, living at number 20, were typical. He was a senior tax inspector who doubled as treasurer of the Green Lane Tennis Club; she was a homemaker (‘I can honestly say that I have never envied anyone anything – not even our neighbour’s show of tulips this year’); and their grown-up daughter Marion was teaching handicrafts at Wimbledon Art School and saving up for a Baby Morris. Winn joined them for supper, and afterwards there occurred the emblematic moment of his visit:

  The family produced a cable that had just arrived from their son, now married and doing splendidly as an engineer, in Australia. The cable had been sent in birthday greetings to Marion, from Turramurra. Whereupon, I found myself repeating
the name aloud, like a mystic invocation – Turramurra, Turramurra – as I asked the three remaining members of the family whether they were not eager to set forth on a visit to New South Wales themselves, to this far-off place with the strange and challenging name. We take the road to Turramurra.

  At once the father answered as though for them all: ‘I shall be very happy to spend the rest of my days in Firgrove,’ he said quietly.

  I can understand why now.9.

  ‘The morning’s session was dominated by the Housing question,’ noted Harold Macmillan in October 1950 during the Tory conference at the Empress Ballroom, Blackpool. ‘It is quite obvious that here is something about which everyone feels quite passionately. The delegates reflect not political but human feelings and in their demand for a target of at least 300,000 houses a year, they were really determined as well as excited.’ Against the misgivings of most of the front bench (Macmillan excepted), a highly ambitious annual target of 300,000 new houses was duly adopted – over 100,000 more than the current rate, as the Labour government struggled with the economic consequences of first devaluation and then the Korean War. Politically, it was an extremely effective way for the Tories to outflank Labour – but was it a realistic target?

  ‘We can do it,’ a foreman ganger, Mr C. Russell, told Picture Post. ‘I have faith in the present-day worker, but tax on extra work holds him back. It’s only natural when beer, cigarettes and cost of living is so high. Some tax-free incentive would do more to increase the rate of building houses than anything else I know.’ But a bricklayer, Mr G. Parlour, disagreed: ‘If raising this target means forcing the pace and putting one workman against the other, then we are against it. To us free enterprise means the pre-war system of piece-work. We won’t have that. Many targets before the war were too high for decent work.’10 The question of quality was indeed the great imponderable. Bevan had insisted on high minimum standards, including of space – an insistence that inevitably acted as a constraint on the rate of completions. With the Tories committed (initially anyway) to undertaking at least as high a proportion of public housing as Labour, one obvious way of hitting the bewitching 300,000 target would be through a slippage in those standards. Most people, though, simply wanted somewhere half-decent to live.