From cottage estates to A Clockwork Orange

Blink and you missed it. Held as part of Clerkenwell design week, a photographic exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives, ‘Somewhere decent to live’, held in May, celebrated almost a century of council housing built by the London County Council.

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.

Built in the ‘arts and crafts’ style the Totterdown fields, White Hart Lane and Old Oak housing schemes were prototype council estates of two and three-bedroom ‘cottages’ with parlours, on the then fringes of London. The LLC got into its stride in the 1920s. Among its 90,000-odd new ‘homes fit for heroes’ in the inter-war period were Becontree – straddling the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, the largest council estate in the world.

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’.

In the LCC’s County Hall offices planners, surveyors, architects and even sociologist once bent over plans and models, toiling to convert their visions of the future into reality – aerial roads, walkways in the sky – nothing was off-limits.

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’.

By the 1970s, professionals were experimenting with h0using floor-plans that could be specified by tenants. But the tide was turning against them, especially after the Ronan Point explosion in 1968. Their utopian dreams were now portrayed as ‘high-rise hells’. Symbolically, Thamesmead was used as backdrop for Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian film, A Clockwork Orange.

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