Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London

J.A. Yelling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135681432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

First published in 1986. Victorian London is a classic site of the slum. This study looks at the process of slum clearance. It covers the development of policies and programmes from their initiation through Cross's Act (1875) to the abandonment of clearance by the London County Council at the end of the Victorian period in favour of a suburban solution. It is concerned with the manner in which such policies related to the nature of the slum and its place in the urban structure. The discussion ranges from contemporary understanding of such matters to the detailed content and repercussions of policies, which required the designation of unfit houses, the compensation of property owners, the displacement of tenants, and the rebuilding of sites.

1Introduction

Victorian London is a classic site of the slum. Its notorious presence in the capital of the world’s most economically advanced country stimulated the first discussions of that since recurrent problem of ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’. Projects formed in response to that presence, ranging from redevelopment to suburban municipal estates and Ebenezer Howard’s new towns, were themselves to become internationally important landmarks in the development of modern urbanism.

Not surprisingly, these events and conditions have already been the subject of notable modern works by Dyos, Stedman-Jones, Wohl, and others.¹ My own point of entry into this much discussed world is made through a closer study of the process of slum clearance. It covers the development of policies and programmes from their initiation through Cross’s Act (1875) to the abandonment of clearance by the London County Council at the end of the Victorian period in favour of a suburban solution. It is concerned with the manner in which such policies related to the nature of the slum and its place in the urban structure. The discussion ranges from contemporary understanding of such matters to the detailed content and repercussions of policies, which required the designation of unfit houses, the compensation of property owners, the displacement of tenants, and the rebuilding of sites.

London forms a favourable context for such a study in that it allows the focus of investigation to be shifted easily from national policies through to the operations of the executive authorities at the whole London level, and to the detailed analysis of particular areas and clearance operations. In the Victorian period, government policy regarding the slum was shaped mainly in relation to the capital, and the two principal pieces of housing legislation, the Acts of 1875 and 1890, notably reflect this. Social writers of the period also gave principal attention to London, and the work of Charles Booth in Life and Labour of the People in London is especially significant for this book.² Victorian London was a city close enough at hand for reference to contemporary conditions to be made in some detail, yet it possessed extensive scale and varied urban structure. On the one hand, notorious slums reflected the intense particularity of its various districts; on the other hand, slums and slum clearance were also related to a larger geographical organization reflected in land values, workplaces, and transport.

‘Slum’ is here treated as a term in the discourse of politics rather than science. It carries a condemnation of existing conditions and, implicitly at least, a call for action. Such action need not, of course, involve slum clearance, and even if it does that clearance may vary enormously in form and meaning. The reason for this variety lies in the range of conditions to which the term ‘slum’ may be applied – both in nature and degree – and also in the range of remedies that can be offered. The possible combinations of problem and remedy soon build, so that even at a given time and place there is no uniform view. However, for given places there exists in most periods a paradigm strategy which incorporates dominant views of the nature of the slum, and of the remedies which should be applied. Cross’s Act embodied such a strategy for the late Victorian Age.

It should be re-emphasized that the term ‘paradigm’ is here applied to a political not a scientific activity. It is useful in underlining the fact that a strategy involves a way of seeing the slum, of selecting and emphasizing some aspects and not others. It is a problem-selecting as well as a problem-solving device. Moreover, as a relatively concrete entity it is necessarily built up from a combination of ideological and empirical referents. These embrace not only the nature of the slum but also the nature of the proposed remedies. For if the view of the slum shapes the remedies, it is also true that the nature of the remedies shapes the view of the slum. Whether in the general approach to the slum or in the detailed complexity of, say, the compensation question, this relationship is central to policy outcomes.

Such a strategy is thus a complex; it cannot be explained by tracing any single line of derivation either from ideology or from urban structure. Its plausibility depends on success in drawing certain key strands of argument together, so that they may be seen to fit into a coherent framework. A concentration on this ‘fit’, and on unravelling the strands thus woven together in the rationale of the strategy, should enable a deeper penetration into the thought and action concerning Victorian slums and slum clearance. For from the central nub of strategy it is possible to connect on the one hand with more abstract frameworks of political and economic philosophy and on the other with the structure and workings of the urban system.

The term ‘slum clearance’ is used here in its official sense, and therefore signifies government intervention. As such, an ideology which stuck rigidly to non-intervention could not incorporate it, and this was, of course, especially significant in the Victorian period. At a very general level, this period was characterized by attempts to deal with social problems thrown up by the distributional workings of a relatively pure market economy, coupled with an equal stress on the avoidance of any intervention which involved transfer of resources from one social group to another. Such an equation made any straightforward progress unlikely, and although policies might be justified on pragmatic grounds, they were shaped by ideological considerations which drew greater attention to some matters than others, and made it easier to part in certain directions than others. Slum clearance was one of these favoured directions. The Victorian period was, indeed, marked by its attention to what Booth called ‘the quagmire underlying the social structure’.³ Social and environmental deterioration might be arrested and reversed by taking action at the base, where conditions were most easily presented as special cases requiring special treatment. Hence, the slum might be regarded as a moral and sanitary problem, and those within its borders, both tenants and landlords, depicted as distinct from their counterparts in the rest of society.

Political strategies such as that embodied in Cross’s Act are not, however, the result of any profound reworking of empirical referents according to clear-cut ideological criteria. Instead, they are eclectic, covering the variety of points to which any concrete strategy must necessarily refer by drawing on existing strands of thought and action, each with its own history. The first function of a strategy is persuasion, without which there would be no adoption, and for this a certain coarseness is an advantage, reconciling different interests, and enabling difficulties to be glossed over. Particular attention is concentrated on the defects of existing arrangements. Thus, although strategies were built up over a period of time, and were not simply opportunistic, the presence of logical weaknesses or inadequacy of empirical foundations does not prevent their advocacy or acceptance. Such weaknesses and inadequacies are inevitably incorporated into any strategy, and in the case of Cross’s Act were of a serious nature, and immediately revealed on implementation.

The experience of implementation thus provides points around which counter-strategies may be formed. Contradictions are revealed, whereas success itself may diminish the apparent need to continue in the same direction. The notion of paradigm is again useful here in that it underlines the point that damaging experiences do not necessarily give rise to any immediate abandonment of an existing strategy. It may simply be modified, or changed in its scale of application as expectations are lowered. Scope exists for such modification because of the relatively loose binding of the parts, and this is an important aspect of strategies. Thus, although initial enthusiasm will have dulled as difficulties are encountered, the option may well be to carry on within the existing strategy unless an attractive alternative is available. I shall argue that this is what happened with Cross’s Act. For although rooted in the experience of the previous strategy, an alternative does not gain acceptance simply by direct assault on propositions previously accepted. It also relies very much on a switch of attention, on providing other interests and objectives. If policy makers at the turn of the century had been confined to the same view of ‘slum’ as their mid-Victorian predecessors, they would have prescribed much the same kind of remedy.

A suburban solution thus came to prominence not just because of the failure of previous remedies but because of an emphasis on new aspects of ‘slum’ for which different remedies seemed to be appropriate. Indeed, I shall argue that it involved a distinctly different conception of the historico-geographical development of the slum. At the same time, public intervention directed towards urban expansion implied less concern with discipline and control. Characteristically, new paradigms take some time to build up, but they win acceptance in a relatively short period of time as one way of seeing things becomes replaced by another. The acceptance of a suburban solution at the end of the Victorian period fell very much into this pattern. Although events at that time may be important in aiding the final breakthrough, the replacement of one strategy by another obviously requires a wider form of explanation, in both political and technical directions.

Because of the manner in which policies developed, the new strategy cannot be regarded as a straightforward advance onto new ground. For one thing, it was not completely new, but involved a reworking of old and new elements into a distinctive and original combination. For another, the factors which the old strategy had attempted to grapple with had been bypassed rather than overcome. Much the same applies in detail to the developments and shifts of emphasis which occurred within strategies. Any advance in one direction frequently threw up difficulties in another. At best, forward movement could be achieved only in a crablike manner, and relatively slowly.

In the first part of the book the emphasis is on policies and programmes. In Chapter 2 the concern is with the rationale of Cross’s Act and the manner in which it was established as a paradigm strategy. That chapter finishes with a section concerning the initial difficulties of implementation. In the third chapter it is shown how the strategy was then recast in a less adventurous form, and a narrative of events is given, culminating in the eventual abandonment of clearance by the London Progressives in favour of a suburban solution. Then, in the final chapter in Part I, I review these developments and examine how the alternative rationale of a suburban solution was established. Special attention is given to the writings of Charles Booth and William Thompson.

The concern in Parts II and III is with two key areas in the application of slum clearance programmes. Slum property needs to be identified and separated from other types. Rules have to be drawn up for compensation which must effect the cost of schemes, the designation of property, the level of payment to different types of proprietor, and thus ultimately the politics of clearance itself. Similarly, the characteristics of tenants affected by clearance schemes need to be considered in relation to the objectives of schemes, rehousing operations need to be assessed in relation to costs, rents, and building standards, and the fate of the tenants and the effect of schemes on subsequent slum formation needs to be examined.

Although the focus of interest in Part I is on policies and programmes, in the second and third Parts I strike more deeply into the contemporary structure and workings of urban economy and society. Certainly, most detailed argument involving manipulation of data is to be found in these latter parts. However, the concern is not solely with the empirical side of the implementation of policies. Some aspects of policy which require lengthier treatment are also dealt with there, and above all the aim is to examine how policy and empirical referents fitted together. Thus, although the predominant movement of argument is from Part I to Parts II and III, the latter sections are also intended to add to the discussion of the rationale and development of strategies with which the book begins.

Archival sources

Only a few Home Office papers survive at the Public Record Office (PRO), so that the following account depends particularly on the archives of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and the London County Council (LCC), both housed at the Greater London Record Office. In addition to the printed minutes of the Board and the Council, minutes and presented papers are available for the committees which handled housing operations. For the Board this was the Works and General Purposes Committee (WGP), and for the Council the Housing of the Working Classes Committee (HC), although this name undergoes some variation. In addition, the Board’s records include reports of Home Office local inquiries into schemes, and the awards of arbitrators, as well as a series of printed reports bearing on general policy. The Council’s dealings with compensation are mainly documented in the HC Presented Papers, and it also made a collection of more general housing papers (HSG). Outside of these official archives, one source that should be mentioned is the Booth Collection at the British Library of Political and Economic Science, which includes the unpublished notebooks of the Booth survey.

Notes

1Dyos, H.J. 1982. The slums of Victorian London. In Exploring the urban past, D. Cannadine and D. Reeder (eds), pp. 129–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dyos, H.J. and Reeder, D. 1973. Slums and suburbs. In The Victorian city, H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds), vol. 1, pp. 359–86. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Jones, G. S. 1971. Outcast London: a study of relationships between classes in Victorian society. London: Macmillan; Wohl, A. S. 1977. The eternal slum: housing and social policy in Victorian London. London: Edward Arnold. For other works relating particularly to rehousing operations see Chapter 8.

2Booth, C. 1889–1903. The life and labour of the people in London. 17 vols. London: Macmillan.

3ibid., 1902–3 edn, vol. 1, p. 176.

Part I

POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES

2A new policy against the slum

The Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act introduced by Cross in 1875 aimed to remove slums and put new working-class dwellings in their place. The midwife for this operation was to be the local authority, which would designate the site, compensate the owners, clear the land, and sell it to private developers. One geography would be replaced by another. Needless to say this programme, simple in outline and modern in conception, bristled with difficulties of all sorts. These arose in detail in the practical application of each stage of the operation. More fundamentally, they reflected problems in aligning the desired reconstruction with prevailing economic and social structures and processes. Despite this, Cross’s Act, modified in detail, was to form a persistent framework for clearance in our period, and the manner of its introduction warrants close attention.

A necessary precondition was the existence of a relatively favourable political climate for the reception of such proposals. Disraeli, whose Conservative government took office in February 1874, had seen the need to extend his party’s rural base into the towns, and to widen the social range of its appeal in the light of the extension of the franchise in 1867.¹ He accepted a link between social reform and sanitary improvement and extended the latter to include housing. Sanitary policy could be presented as beneficial to all, and it was a now traditional field of state intervention to which new initiatives could b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Policies and Programmes
• 2 A new policy against the slum
• 3 Slums and administrative responsibilities
• 4 Slums and suburbs
• Part II Property and Compensation
• 5 Compensation and land use
• 6 Compensation and ownership
• Part III Tenants and Rehousing
• 7 Slum tenants and social policy
• 8 Rehousing and dispersal
• 9 Review
• Index