It’s a rich
and varied tradition. Set up in 1889, the LLC used its powers under the
Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 to create housing schemes on
newly-cleared slum sites.
Opened in 1900, the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green (shown in the exhibition) housed 5,000 people in five-storey tenement blocks, with shops, a laundry and a club-room. This high-density housing model, not for poorest but for those on artisans’ incomes, had already been demonstrated by the Peabody Trust. But, assisted by government subsidies from 1919, the LCC was to become a far larger and bolder landlord than the philanthropic housing charities of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Opened in 1900, the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green (shown in the exhibition) housed 5,000 people in five-storey tenement blocks, with shops, a laundry and a club-room. This high-density housing model, not for poorest but for those on artisans’ incomes, had already been demonstrated by the Peabody Trust. But, assisted by government subsidies from 1919, the LCC was to become a far larger and bolder landlord than the philanthropic housing charities of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Inspired by
the Greater London Council’s Home Sweet Home exhibition of 1973, ‘Somewhere
decent to live’ combined photographs of newly-completed developments with
continuous projection of films made by the LCC and, from 1965, the GLC. The touchingly
dated films advertise their now anachronistic aim ‘to relieve overcrowding and
to make sure that people who have no real home are decently housed, as soon as
possible’.
By the
1950s, the LCC’s architects’ department, called ‘the hothouse’ was the largest
in the world. Its professionals had scoured the continent for inspiration. They
found it in the workers’ housing of socialist Vienna, in Scandinavian modernism
and even in Le Corbusier’s later derided ‘ville radieuse’ (which found a faint
echo in the Loughborough Road estate in Lambeth).
Daring to hope
for a better world and to embrace the new, LCC and GLC architects changed
London’s streetscapes irrevocably with their neo-Georgian walk-up blocks,
modernist slabs and points and scissor-section maisonettes. They built
ambitious overspill housing schemes in Andover,
Haverhill, Huntingdon and Thetford. In Thamesmead, from 1965, they even aspired to create a ‘town of the
future’.
Once
neo-Liberalism came to dominate the political landscape, state institutions and
their architecture could only be disregarded. London’s strategic authority was
abolished in 1986 just before its centenary. County Hall became a hotel and the
GLC’s proud architectural heritage was discredited and largely forgotten.
In an age
in which dreams are derided, only bad things are thought to come from Europe
and communal responsibility to the poor has been replaced by rampant
individualism, it was good to be reminded, in these quaint photographs and
films, if only for three days, that things were once different.
Somewhere
Decent to Live London’s Council Estates in Photographs, 1895 to 1975, 24 to 26
May, London Metropolitan Archives
