Negotiating with nuns and new housing schemes: development director reflects on 50 years at a suffragist landlord

She even ended with a song, one written for her by a colleague to mark her 20 years at Women’s Pioneer. It was a parody of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music, featuring dry rot, double glazing and rising damp: “All the things that I escaped from in asset management when I moved back into development.”

It will be a difficult transition into retired life, she admits, but she says “it’s a good time to step off the roundabout”.

And she leaves behind a physical legacy, scattered across west London. “I worked out that there isn’t a property in the organisation’s stock that I haven’t had something to do with, whether it’s acquiring, converting or repairing.”

That legacy is still being built, in the form of two developments Women’s Pioneer is due to complete later this year, one in Ealing and one in Hammersmith. These blocks of flats will provide a combined 162 new social and intermediate rent flats for women.

For much of Ms Hockett’s near-50 years with Women’s Pioneer, new home development has taken a back seat. But increasing supply has always been the core mission of the organisation.

“If we were going to fulfil our purpose, we ought to get back to creating additional homes as well as looking after the ones that we [have], because nobody else was doing it for our client group,” Ms Hockett says.

Women’s Pioneer was founded specifically with the goal of providing homes for single, professional women, who faced discrimination in the housing market and were not a priority in the post-World War I government’s Homes for Heroes programme.

As founder Etheldred Browning wrote in 1921: “Because a woman supports herself and stands more or less alone, is this any reason that she must spend her days in a hostel or a bed-sitting room, and never arrive at the dignity of a home?”

Inside Housing reported in 2018 on the uncovering of Women’s Pioneer archives, which revealed a treasure trove of meeting documents and financial accounts from the organisation’s early years.

The Women’s Pioneer Housing Prospectus 1924 reads: “Unless some special effort was made on a co-operative basis to provide suitable housing at reasonable rents, the professional woman would be hampered in her career for want of a proper home and would see her standard of life and comfort reduced to vanishing point.”

The housing association began buying up old Victorian homes and converting them into affordable flats. The conversion, alterations and repairs works were led by Gertrude Leverkus, one of the first three women to become an elected associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), who had a key role in the post-war housing development of Crawley and Harlow new towns.

By 1930, Women’s Pioneer provided more than 300 flats across 39 houses, and in 1935 it purchased three purpose-built blocks that could be offered at cheaper rates to women with low-paid jobs, such as waitressing and laundry work.

Gwen Winterson, a tenant in one of these blocks from 1936 to 2001, wrote: “Ours was the very best landing. My neighbour Joyce had a wind-up record player and every Sunday morning she’d play Harlem. The minute we heard it we rushed out in our petticoats to dance around the landing.”

In 1974, the Housing Act made housing associations eligible for public grant for new homes. “If you had an acquisition, if you had a conversion, if you had a repair, you could get money for it, and Women’s Pioneer decided that it wanted to join the party,” Ms Hockett says. That’s what led the organisation to place an ad for a new employee.

‘Another job, any job’

When Ms Hockett graduated from the Keele University in 1977 with a degree in sociology and American studies, she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. All she knew was that she didn’t want to go back home to Leeds.

“Now I think it’s a lovely place, but I didn’t think that aged 18, when I couldn’t wait to escape.” In fact, she and her partner moved back there three years ago.

She moved to London and got a job as a play leader at an adventure playground, where the teenagers were far from interested in her finger-painting activities. After three months, she saw a Women’s Pioneer advert with no job description, and applied even though she had missed the deadline. Six weeks later, when the appointed candidate dropped out after a week, she received a short notice call for an interview.

“I went on my way to the adventure playground in a very worn pair of jeans, a lumberjack shirt and my favourite green duffel coat, which had had the sleeve ripped off and sewn back on with brown cotton,” Ms Hockett recalls. “That’s how I turned up for the interview: no preparation, just enthusiasm for getting another job, any job.”

She later found out that three words had been written on top of her application to summarise her: “Bit rough, Northern.”

The job remained vague once Ms Hockett started the role. “I joined to be the chief executive’s handbag-holder, she didn’t know what she wanted.”

But Ms Hockett’s role quickly became supporting then-chief executive Nona Grosstephan with the sourcing of development opportunities that had opened up since the 1974 Housing Act, and “she soon decided to just let me get on with things”.

A number of old, fairly shabby hotels in London were selling up, so Ms Hockett negotiated prices and then obtained grant to renovate them into flats. “Not bad for a 25-year-old,” she jokes.

Was it hard, I ask, entering the development world as a young woman? Ms Hockett says that from the beginning, the tone was set by the “headmistress-like” chief executive, Ms Grosstephan. “From the beginning, I was accompanied by this terrifying woman, and all the men on site were scared of her,” she says.

Ms Hockett “was occasionally patronised but mostly the constructors I met were just nice to me”.

“They cleaned the chair before I sat down, and they turned the naughty girl calendars to the wall,” she adds.

“When doing the early developments, I was the person they had to deal with,” she says, although that has shifted in more recent years. “When we started up again, I would go to site meetings with Andrew [Richards, development and new business manager], and they would address him. I think they thought ‘why has this man brought his granny?’ But he was always careful to say ‘this is my boss’, and so people got used to it.”

She speaks with great admiration of the women who are leading the construction and project management of the new Women’s Pioneer developments: “They work hard to be taken seriously in what is still a man’s world.”

Would 22-year-old Ms Hockett have called herself a feminist, back in 1977? “No, no, no,” she laughs. “But then I bought into it when I saw the practical examples of the difference that we could make and the inequalities that women face in the housing market.”

“Coming to work when you believe in it is quite a powerful motivator, and I haven’t lost that”

While she led on development, Ms Hockett says she still ended up picking up jobs that saw her interact with tenants, from collecting rent to housing needs assessments, and saw the impact of Women’s Pioneer’s work.

“Coming to work when you believe in it is quite a powerful motivator, and I haven’t lost that,” she says.

So when the 1988 Housing Act reduced the public grant available to housing associations, putting a stall on Women’s Pioneer’s new building projects, Ms Hockett moved into asset management.

“One of the things that I miss about working in a small organisation is that I have always somehow been involved in other areas of the business,” she says. “And that really helped when I came to be a director, because I know how everything links.”

Over the years, in the role of head of property services, and then director of property services, Ms Hockett began to pick up some development work again. Notably, in 1997, Women’s Pioneer built a new convent for The Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Missions in Harrow, as part of a deal for land to build 20 social rent flats.

“The nuns were a delight to deal with. They were strong, civilised women,” she says, with a laugh. “And that was the first collaborative deal we did, and it made me see that partnerships are usually the way forward for a small organisation like us.”

But while the financial conditions of the 1990s and 2000s didn’t create a climate for much expansion, Ms Hockett always felt that Women’s Pioneer needed to find a way back to its original mission. In 2012, the association began its ‘hidden homes programme’, building small individual extensions on its existing properties, to eke out extra units.

Ms Hockett admits that “it was a small endeavour”, only yielding about 20 homes, but it was vital for building confidence in the organisation.

“It built a relationship with the board that they had some confidence that we could do something on the development front that wasn’t overly risky. It wouldn’t bust the association, but would build some skills internally,” she recalls.