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Part One: Why World War 2 saved us from tin baths.Prehistory - Rookeries and Model Dwellings
Before government got involved with housing, London’s poor could only dream of their own house. Most lived in “rookeries”, converted old townhouses and terraces (”Converted” in this sense meant “wood partitions thrown up to subdivide rooms”), with a family or sometimes two or three sharing a single room (and often bed). Plumbing was nonexistent, heating, light and cooking were all provided by a single fireplace - in almost every way they were worse off than medieval peasants. Rents per square foot were higher on Dorset Street, the worst of the rookeries (and home to two of Jack The Ripper’s victims) than they were in Mayfair.
Now with voracious landlords hoovering up every spare penny from the very poorest and leaving them in abject squalor, you might be tempted to draw a parallel here with the modern world. You’d be wrong though, because at least one rich Victorian gave a shit about the poor, in stark contrast to the present day. George Peabody wasn’t the first Victorian banker to salve his conscience with charity and philanthropy, but he was arguably the most effective - while others built libraries and concert halls, Peabody built houses. Not just small terraces, his “Model Dwellings” were designed to give families a proper home, of a higher standard than the majority of existing homes, and in massive numbers.
The picture above is of the largest of his developments, on Drury Lane - at the time considered one of the worst slums in London. These houses, for possibly the first time in history, gave the poorest in society an actual home of their own. Of course they’re now worth millions and inhabited by cunts but let’s not get bitter quite so early.
Peabody wasn’t alone - dozens of charities built similar buildings all across the country - but he cast an extremely long shadow.
Year Zero - Boundary Estate
The Boundary Estate *isn’t* the first council estate in the UK despite what people tell you - several developments as far afield as Glasgow have better claims to the title. However it was the first to use the word “estate” for a large-scale housing development for the poor, so it’s probably the best point for our baseline. Also if we wanna get really technical, the local authorities in those cases were “corporations”, but Boundary was built by the London County *Council*. So there. It’s here both to represent the beginning of the timeline for council housing, and to show just how much influence Peabody had over the social housing arena for almost 50 years.
These are brick-built mid-rise buildings, pretty much at the cutting edge of the technology at the time - the walls are almost a foot thick at the bottom to support the weight of the floors above, but only two courses thick at the top. Fun fact - they were the first social housing built with indoor plumbing from the start. This wasn’t an altruistic flurry by the architects though - it was based on hard-won experience from the Model Dwellings movement. Turns out if you give someone on the sixth floor an outside toilet, in times of, erm, urgency they won’t bother with the stairs and will just shit out of the window.
One quick note on terminology that often confuses people. “Low-rise” is a building with less than 4 storeys (or where the highest entrance to a dwelling is on the third floor/fourth storey). “Mid-rise” is between 5 and 8 storeys, and everything above that is a “high-rise”. The definitions come from the post-war building regulations and the reason for them is things like fire protection, provision of lifts (optional for low-rise, mandatory for mid-rise, two lifts mandatory for high-rise), as well as plumbing and other utility designs. Obviously pre-war mid-rises don’t have lifts although some have had them retrofitted.
The other lesson learned from Peabody is if you make a large number of buildings that are basically identical - particularly in a grid pattern - people coming home at night, in those gaslit times, could end up hopelessly lost trying to find their own place - made all the worse by the fact that of course in those days many poor people would have been illiterate, or close to. This is why the estate was laid out with the entrance of each building visually unique, although the last part was fucked up by post-war “improvements” to the estate that duplicated the brick patterns on two of the buildings facing the central park for some reason.
Between those features, and the fact that they put schools and a church on the estate too, you can definitely make a case that this estate, over a century old, somehow managed to avoid all of the pitfalls of later ones. To prove the Victorians weren’t perfect though, another “community facility” they included was a workhouse. And to prove what utter shits they were, the wages of the workhouse were set such that even if both husband and wife were working there, they would not be able to afford the rent on the estate, which was deliberately set to ensure that none of the inhabitants of the slums that once stood there could live there. Thus Boundary Estate manages not only to set the template for council housing for the 20th century, it also provided a template for deliberate social cleansing and forced gentrification for the 21st.
Similar - albeit smaller-scale - developments sprung up around the edge of the City in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, the buildings along Tooley Street on the south side of Tower Bridge being particularly fine examples.
Mansions
As mentioned, the LCC estates like Boundary were not open to the poorest in society, and housing for them still fell to the charities, who couldn’t possibly keep up with demand.
After WWI, and accelerating into the 1920s, the London County Council started to build large amounts of new low- and mid-rise buildings, demolishing rookeries and other slums and replacing them with a new style of housing - lower density than the Model Dwellings, with open space and even some parks and other greenery. They stuck to standard plans, which is why you can end up with a weird sense of deja vu in the inner city. You *have* seen that building before, except it was in Southwark, or Limehouse, or Fulham, or anywhere else with slums bad enough for the LCC to step in.
“Mansion flats” had been the name applied to the large blocks built in the West End for the Victorian landed gentry to stay in when they were up in town, and this name was applied to these new blocks first sarcastically and then with some pride as the working classes moved into them - and the name has stuck for this particular period of council housing. Incidentally a quick note on terminology here - “flat” originally referred to the fact that many of these buildings had flat roofs, an architectural touch not really seen in the UK before. They became known as “flatblocks”, and then the English language did its thing and they became known as “blocks of flats”, with the dwellings within thus becoming “flats”, which then spread to any single-family dwelling in a larger block.
Here are three blocks representing the beginning, middle and end of this period, and also neatly show the way the designs and building methods evolved over time.
These flats just off Brick Lane were among the first built - they retain the interior staircases and doors of the earlier tenements, but the houses themselves are larger and in smaller blocks to allow more windows. The Juliet balconies (and half-arsed stucco on the closest block) are later additions. They also have pointed roofs, just to make me out to be a liar - flat roofs are more expensive to build but cheaper to maintain, which is why most of these older blocks keep the traditional roof design. Another spotters guide thing - sometimes you’ll see blocks like this but with dormers (windows) in the roof - these are the (fairly rare) blocks still being built by charities and other private entities. The LCC specifically rejected dormers in their blocks because the dwellings were standardised and roof-level dwellings couldn’t meet those standards, and also because traditionally dormers were servant quarters - if the roof leaked nobody gave a shit if the servants clothes got ruined - and the LCC were deliberately rejecting this particular bit of historical classism.
Bonus things to tick off - the black glazed-brick house name signs are your guarantee of an early LCC building:
And pram sheds are a quintessential between-wars feature:
These little (normally 6”x6”x4”) lockups were a godsend in the days when prams were built like HMS Hood and you had nowhere to keep them even if you could get them up the narrow staircase to your flat. Most people either didn’t know, or pretended not to know, that they started life in the tenements and Model Dwellings as outside toilets, finding a new life when these buildings finally got indoor plumbing that was so useful that the feature was built into these new estates even though they came with a toilet and even - shockingly - a bath. No hot water though, that wouldn’t be standard until the 1960s. You did get a “copper” - a big but lightweight copper cauldron - to heat up water for washing though, so that was nice. Heating was still by coal, and lighting by gas - many of them not receiving electricity until the 1950s.
For the middle period, from around 1925 to 1935, we have these beauties just off Whitechapel Road:
The blocks are much larger but reflect the fact that nobody really wants to climb much above the fourth floor - it’s almost unheard of for LCC buildings to get taller than this until after the war. Architecturally there’s an obvious Art Deco influence, but most interesting is the construction. Notice that those balconies don’t have pillars supporting them - they’re a single reinforced concrete slab which actually makes up the entire floor. The pillars are internal (which makes for some awkwardly-shaped rooms) and the bricks outside are non-structural, supporting only their own weight. Some of these blocks had an extremely clever design that used the chimneys (still coal heating of course!) as their internal pillars, which pretty much doomed them because - to prevent the concrete being damaged by the heat - they were lined with asbestos.
Finally, the immediate pre-war years saw a few buildings like this one, on Vallance Road:
This is sort of a synthesis of the two styles. People liked having balconies but disliked having to share them, so they’re once more internal staircases but now with private balconies at the rear of the house. Those internal staircases were also the load-bearing structure for the concrete slab floors, solving the awkward room shapes, and allowing the flats to be laid out extremely efficiently. Fun fact - this building originally had a twin on the other side of the road, but it was demolished by one of the first V2s dropped on London - I wasn’t kidding when I said these buildings were solid, because the damage to this one was minimal despite the obliteration of the building opposite by almost a ton of explosives.
Were it not for World War 2 it’s likely that this would be the most common type of housing in London. Frankly we dodged a bullet there. The extremely efficient use of space of this design made retrofitting modern necessities like lifts and central heating extremely difficult, and the rooms are actually smaller than those earlier buildings. Some of the very last also had heating from gas instead of coal, which sounds like an improvement (especially to the poor bugger humping a hundredweight of coal up 5 flights of stairs) but as we were still using Town Gas - the extravagantly dangerous cocktail of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, sulphur dioxide and all the other nasties given off by the production of coke from coal - it was a mixed blessing, to say the least. Town Gas was of course used for lighting and cooking (and stained the shit out of everything it touched), but the gas fireplaces were a whole new level of unpleasantness and danger - able to fill a room to lethal concentrations of gas in minutes if they went out, something that might happen without being noticed, unlike a light or cooking flame.
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