Hope after the horror

The failures and triumphs of the interwar years offer many lessons for housing professionals today. Then as now poor housing conditions were causing ill health. Then as now policies intended to improve people’s lives sometimes backfired. Then as now planners and policy makers looked to the Modernists and the Garden City movement for answers.

“That we need to learn is to have hope.”

During the interwar period, housing in England was for many at crisis point alongside wider public health problems of planning, drainage, infectious disease and vermin control. Poor physical conditions, including structural problems, major disrepair and lack of amenities combined with chronic levels of overcrowding presented the most fundamental of challenges to councils. The Sanitary Journal from 1918 reflects on living environments and childhood development, the vexed problem of overcrowding leading to disease, mortality, drunkenness, vice and a lack of privacy. It’s of no surprise that infectious disease like TB was rife.

Some councils such as Bermondsey and Stepney were particularly pioneering, despite of the sheer numbers of slums faced by their overworked sanitary inspectors. In other areas relocation to new developments was favoured, for example Becontree and St Helier estates. Sociological studies later found housing interventions sometimes broke family and kinship ties leaving people lonely and isolated. Orwell argued the new housing lacked humanity. This continues to challenge housing redevelopments, as does the ‘relocation’ of some homeless households to distant, unknown places.

We can learn much from the modernists like Le Corbusier, Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry, Lubetkin and Elizabeth Denby who had a completely new vision about how we might live. They designed for community living in apartments also providing social and cultural facilities to add to quality of life, such as at Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove. Should we revisit Le Corbusier’s ideal that a house should be a machine for living in? Or rethink model estates and urban villages for the modern day? Denby’s ideas involved rehousing from the tenants point of view, something we could focus on far more now particularly in deprived areas and in how we decide what ‘need’ means, and to whom.

Planning processes became paramount to develop garden city ideas further as the likes of Tudor Walters had set in motion requirements for better quality housing, densities and space standards. The ‘revival’ of the garden city movement for example at Ebbsfleet, Dartford offers a modern day version of the garden city, although prices remain out of reach for many. With continued calls for a more evidence based approach to how we intervene, we can draw from lessons in history and understand housing and health better. Perhaps though at a time of housing crisis when for some decent housing seems so far out of reach, the main lesson is that we need to learn is to have hope.

Jill Stewart is the author of Housing and Hope and a senior lecturer at Middlesex University