State Housing in Britain

Stephen Merrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000325935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Städtische Soziologie

Originally published in 1979, this book was the first to provide a comprehensive political-economic analysis of the historical origins and 20th Century experience of state housing in the UK. The first part describes the growth of municipal housebuilding in the context of slum clearance before 1914 and the cycle of boom and slump between the wars. Part 2 covers 1945- 1980 with chapters on: site acquisition and residential densities; the housebuilding industry and its standards; the balance between rehabilitation and redevelopment and the rise and fall of the high-rise flat. Sources and costs of capital finance and the management of the stock of council dwellings is also discussed. The final part reviews the development of state housing policy since the War, within a broad political and macro-economic context.

Part I


History

ONE
Before 1914: accumulation, contradiction and reform

1 Cities and slums

For reasons which continue to be a matter of controversy, the rate of growth of the population of Britain accelerated after the mid-eighteenth century to a level which was without historical precedent. Whilst the population of England and Wales rose from perhaps 5¼ million in 1700 to 6½ million fifty years later, by 1801 it exceeded 9 million, by 1841 it stood at some 16 million and by 1901 it was twice as large again.¹

This absolute increase was accompanied during the course of the Industrial Revolution by a spatial concentration of people. The accumulation of productive capital, and thereby employment opportunities, took place predominantly in a relatively small number of urban areas because of the natural resource and climatic advantages of specific locations or because of the economies of proximity to existing suppliers and markets. As the great manufacturing towns grew, the labour supply generated by them itself then attracted new investment. For the first time in British history the working-class masses toiled together in industrial cities. In 1750 there were only two cities in Britain with more than 50,000 inhabitants; fifty years later the number stood at eight and then twenty-nine by 1851, when for the first time more people lived in the town than in the countryside. By 1881 two out of every five people in England and Wales lived in one of six conurbations: London, southeast Lancashire, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Merseyside and Tyneside.² The expansion of London was unmatched: one million inhabitants in 1801,2 million in 1841, and 5 million by 1881.

The towns were abominable places in which to live. There was the excrement of the industrial process to endure-the sulphurous smoke of the furnace, the stench of the slaughterhouse, the poisonous effluent of the dye factory. There was the absence or inadequacy of those preconditions of a healthy urban environment, the disposal of sewage and refuse and the provision of unpolluted water. And there were the workers’ dwellings themselves: by present standards the great majority were slums. De Tocqueville voiced the opinion of many contemporary commentators when, speaking of Manchester, he said:³ ‘Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.’

The working class lived in slums because they could afford nothing better. Since ‘slum’ is most familiar as a moral, legal or physical term, it is worthwhile justifying briefly why its political economic dimension is stressed repeatedly in this chapter. In capitalist society the level of real wages is determined by the average level of labour productivity and by the proportion of the total product appropriated for consumption or reinvestment by the classes which own the land and the means of production. Labour productivity in nineteenth-century manufacturing and agriculture was extremely low, fundamentally because in comparison with the 1970s the stock of capital per worker was small, technical processes were primitive and the potential skills of the labour force were still undeveloped. The result was that real wages were low. Indeed, they were considered by the great authors of classical political economy, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, to be barely sufficient for the subsistence of the working people. This was reflected in the quantity and quality of the entire range of commodities consumed by the workers, most palpably in the case of their dwellings.⁴

These were ill-lit, poorly ventilated, often without means of heating, bare of facilities such as water closets and sinks, with leaking roofs and bulging walls. Above all, they were overcrowded. Given the private ownership of the land and the structures thereon, it was necessary for the poor to pay a price ‘for the permission to inhabit the earth’.⁵ Low incomes imply weak effective demand for every commodity, and the most effective legal means for the indigent to assert their power in the housing market was by high-density living.⁶ Cellars, back-to-backs, huddled courts and, towards the end of the century, soaring tenement blocks were the devices of design for increasing the number of rooms per acre. Overcrowding raised the number of persons per room. Landlords were often sufficiently moved by the plight of the multitude to push out their existing tenants, middle classes, tradesmen, and so forth, in order to pack in the poor ‘in maggot numbers’ and simultaneously raise the rate of return earned on their capital. This possibility was most evident when the houses in question were close to markets for casual labour. ‘The crowding arises from the desire of the working population to be “near their bread”, as they express it; and the high rental of the tenements, averaging four shillings a room per week, arises naturally from this rush upon a particular spot.’⁷ In this case we have overcrowding not merely as a response to the inability of workers to pay the production costs of better homes but also to the spatial concentration of capitalist industry within the city driving up rents.

The sensation of these conditions at their worst can be conveyed to a degree by quoting the evidence of a city missionary on the public lodging houses:⁸

On my district is a house containing eight rooms, which are all let separately to individuals who furnish and relet them. The parlour measures 18 ft. by 10 ft. Beds are arranged on each side of the room, composed of straw, shavings, rags, etc. In this one room slept, on the night previous to my inquiry, 27 male and female adults, 31 children, and two or three dogs, making in all 58 human beings breathing the contaminated atmosphere of a close room. In the top room of the same house, measuring 12 ft. by 10 ft., there are six beds, and, on the same night, there slept in them 32 human beings, all breathing the pestiferous air of a hole not fit to keep swine in. The beds are so close together that, when let down on the floor, there is no room to pass between them; and they who sleep in the beds furthest from the door can, consequently, only get into them by crawling over the beds which are nearer the door. In one district alone there are 270 such rooms.

The slums consisted not only of existing structures in decay, although these were the worst. Slums were also built. Particularly in the first half of the century building was shoddy, foundations insecure and the materials used were unable to keep out the rain, in some cases new estates were built on sites still heaving with refuse, lightly cemented over to provide a surface which, if temporarily flat and dry, soon split to produce settlement cracks, rising damp, and unpleasant smells.’⁹ The attempt to use every scrap of available land produced veritable warrens.

Thus developed the stinking labyrinths of our great cities with their narrow streets, their courts heaped with human excreta and rubbish, their decrepit buildings groaning with humanity. James Smith’s account of Leeds—notorious Leeds—in the 1840s is worth repeating:¹⁰

But by far the most unhealthy localities of Leeds are close squares of houses, or yards, as they are called, which have been erected for the accommodation of working people. Some of these, though situated in comparatively high ground, are airless from the enclosed structure, and, being wholly unprovided with any form of underdrainage or convenience, or arrangements for cleansing, are one mass of damp and filth. In some instances I found cellars or underrooms with from two to six inches of water standing over the floors, and putrid from its stagnation in one case, from receiving the soakage of the slop-water standing in pools in the street adjoining. The ashes, garbage, and filth of all kinds are thrown from the doors and windows of the houses upon the surface of the streets and courts; and in some cases, where a gallery of entrance has been erected for the inhabitants of the second floor, the whole of the slops and filth are thrown over the gallery in front of the houses beneath, and as the ground is often sloping towards the doors of the lower dwellings, they are inundated with water and filth, and the poor inhabitants placed in a miserable and unhealthy condition. The privies, as usual in such situations, are few, in proportion to the number of inhabitants; they are open to view both in front and rear, are invariably in a filthy condition, and often remain without the removal of any portion of the filth for six months.

2 Health, productivity and violence

These developments in capitalist urbanisation contained certain contradictions for capitalism itself, that is, they nurtured from within the social formation threats to its growth and even its stability. In the first place the towns were dangerous to live in because of the hazards to health. This was first brought to the notice of a horrified public with unchallengeable force in the 1830s through the work of Edwin Chadwick, the first Secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners and by a continuing flow thereafter of documented reports, official and private.

Medical science, and medical opinion even more so, was at this time a terrain of great ignorance. For example, before Snow’s researches into cholera in 1848, the contagionists argued that it spread via contact with infected persons whilst the miasmatists argued that it had spontaneous origin in the putrescent gases thrown up by mounds of filth. Neither party understood that the disease was water-borne.¹¹ However, there soon developed a widespread acceptance of the view, whatever the scientific foundation, that polluted air, foul water supplies and high residential densities were together in large measure responsible for the appalling statistics on sickness and mortality. The resolution by the more prosperous members of society that something had to be done was probably stimulated most effectively by King Cholera, a malady without respect for social station. Unlike typhus, it struck in every residential quarter of the city. As if the misery of ill-health and untimely death were insufficient, Chadwick, a Benthamite, also expressed the argument against disease in the narrowest terms of cost and benefit to the middle-class ratepayer. Filth caused epidemics, epidemics brought the pauperisation of widows and orphans, and paupers meant increased taxation for poor relief.¹²

It is worth observing that it was in the middle decades of the nineteenth century that government policy on health and housing first became so entwined and examples without number could be cited to demonstrate this. For example, the first careful definition of the term ‘overcrowding’, drawn up by Dr John Simon, Chadwick’s successor at the Poor Law Board, illustrates well the perceived relation between housing conditions, the stench of the slum and the threat to health. Overcrowding existed where ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and graphs
• Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I History
• Part II The contemporary experience
• Part III Policy
• Appendices
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Name index
• General index