Bedford, Part II from 1945: Postwar Planning and Innovative Development

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Planning

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1950s, 1960s

We left Bedford last week in the midst of war but, like many towns in the country, thinking ahead. Planning for a better Britain to emerge from the destruction and sacrifice of war was a motif of the time and in this Bedford’s civic leaders were typical. In the event, the grander aspirations of the era were rarely fulfilled but they left a significant mark in the town as did a broader post-war revolution in housing provision

In December 1942, the more energetic ambitions of Alderman SB Morling, the new chair of the Council’s Town Planning Committee were initially quashed, but a wider mood supporting progressive change was evoked in the eight lectures in the town organised by the University of Cambridge Board of Extra-Mural Studies in the following year. The celebrated housing expert, Elizabeth Denby, spoke on ‘Housing in Relation to Post-War Planning’.

Max Lock (1909-1988), photographed in 1946 by Howard Coster © National Portrait Gallery, London

In the same year, the voluntary Bedford Council of Social Service initiated a survey of the town. Max Lock, the principal of the Hull School of Architecture, an associate member of the Town Planning Institute and Royal Institute of British Architects, was invited to speak and the project culminated in an unpublished report and a public exhibition attended by 5000 local people in 1945. (1)

Meanwhile, the Council had approved the report of its Borough Engineer and Surveyor, CF Blakeway that focused on traffic congestion (it recommended a ring road and a new bridge over the Ouse) and future housing need. Blakeway estimated the town needed 6500 new homes and additional 2500 to replace existing unfit accommodation.

Housing would be the most pressing political issue of peacetime. Labour’s exhortation to ‘win the peace’ secured it its first parliamentary representation in Bedford when Thomas Skeffington-Lodge won the seat by just 288 votes in 1945 (he lost in 1950). The Party secured ten seats (of 28) in the borough elections later the same year but this would be its peak for several decades; Bedford remained a firmly Conservative council.

In the immediate aftermath of war, the necessity to provide sufficient new homes was a grittier and more immediate issue than the more high-flown ideals of planning. It was met in the first instance in Bedford by the erection of some 180 temporary prefab bungalows, part of the programme of 156,623 provided under a national scheme inaugurated in 1944. Requisitioning of unoccupied housing was another quick fix; by 1946, 123 Bedford families were living in 37 requisitioned houses. (2)

Modernised and unmodernised British Iron and Steel Federation housing on Blundell Place, 2024

Permanent prefabrication was another favoured method of providing houses quickly and efficiently at this time of housing crisis. A number of British Iron and Steel Federation (steel-framed, steel-clad) houses can be found – one unmodernised as of 2024 – in Blundell Place. The Council’s request to the Ministry of Health and Housing in 1947 to build precast reinforced concrete panel Wates houses was rejected for some reason. (3)

By 1951, the Council had built 158 ‘non-traditional’ and 651 conventionally built houses. Including the temporary prefabs and 42 requisitioned properties, it reckoned (in the bureaucratic language of the Medical Officer of Health) to have provided in all 1339 ‘additional units of accommodation’. (4)

Nearly all these new homes were provided adjacent to interwar estates on the town’s southern fringe. Labour Councillor AC Harrison berated this policy at a County Council planning meeting in 1950: (5)

At present, almost every house between Cardington Road and Elstow Road was a council house … As a result of pre-war planning, Bedford had been split into two. The Council had tried to segregate the Council houses from the areas housing the more well-to-do.

It was a charge echoed by another Labour councillor, CN Barrott, in an address to the Bedford Labour League of Youth later in the year when he asserted that the policy ‘”bred class distinction and was “bad for the community”’. (6)

It’s an interesting critique, one that reflects a broader contemporary Labour view that council housing should serve ‘general needs’ – a position legislated in the 1949 Housing Act and expressed more lyrically in the famous words of Aneurin Bevan invoking ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’. But it perhaps also reflects a Labour sense of beleaguerment in a predominantly middle-class town as well as, at the time, an undeniable spatial reality. As it happens, that would change to some significant extent in the forthcoming decade when new planning ideas were at least partially implemented.

Those ideas came principally from Max Lock who, in March 1950, was appointed by the Council to devise a new town planning report for Bedford. Lock moved to the town and set up a locally based teams of researchers. Their work, Bedford by the River, was published in 1952.

Lock’s hopes for this part of the riverside were only very partially realised.

Its recommendations were wide-ranging and ambitious, reiterating amongst other things the need for improved road links to reduce congestion and improved use of one of Bedford’s undervalued assets, the River Ouse – ‘few towns can boast of so beautiful a river flowing through the middle of the town’. (7)

But housing – and improved planning around it – loomed largest. The report proposed the demolition of 1300 of the ‘oldest and most decayed properties’ and suggested rehousing those displaced on new suburban estates and ‘by building at high density in clearance areas on the edge of the town centre’. It criticised existing ‘narrow houses with long deep gardens’ and urged …

The new estates should be laid out with wider house frontages, shallower gardens and more communal open space; flats should be provided among the houses, especially in the central areas where they can rise to several storeys.

Whilst some of the new housing would be built alongside the existing estates to the south, the report also proposed that 1500 households be settled in large new developments to the east in Goldington and to the north of the town centre.

This map illustrates Lock’s proposed new housing districts and the neighbourhood areas he envisaged.

In keeping with contemporary planning ideals (the Lansbury Estate was built as a prototypical neighbourhood unit as the report was being compiled), the authors divided Bedford, for planning purposes, into eight neighbourhoods. ‘Interwar extensions to the town, particularly on the south’, it averred, ‘have been developed simply as housing estates, without adequate neighbourhood amenities’.

Compared to the sweeping vision of the report what emerged was piecemeal, stymied by County Council objections and real-world complications, but much was implemented that did reflect its priorities, not least as Max Lock (whose architectural practice was now based in Bedford) was directly responsible for two of the town’s most notable schemes.

Lock’s initially proposed layout for Goldington in *Bedford by the River*

In 1953, the Council approved the Max Lock Group’s plans for a new, low-density scheme of around 400 homes to the east and west of Church Lane in Goldington. The completed scheme featured as an example of good practice in AW Cleave Barr’s Public Authority Housing five years later though his dry account of ‘houses … grouped around culs-de-sac, or around greens, across which service roads wind diagonally’, did little to evoke the unusual quality and attractiveness of its design. (8)

Those features are particularly apparent in a series of ‘walks’ on the estate’s eastern side reflecting another key ideal of postwar planning, so-called Radburn layouts separating people and traffic as well as Lock’s own earlier stated preference for ‘wider house frontages, shallower gardens and more communal open space’. On the western side, there is a wider variety of terraced street housing and some higher density two- and three-storey flatted blocks.

Meadway, Goldington West. If you look closely, you’ll see how the houses contain two ‘front doors’; one the main entrance, the other an entrance to the utility areas and back garden.

The Council had also acquired Goldington Bury, the local manor house, and its grounds in 1953. It was demolished sometime later and Bury Court, a twelve-storey block of 90 flats was built in 1967. You can see it in the photos below in its original state and after renovation work completed in 2025 providing new rainscreen cladding and double glazing.

Bury Court, 2008 © Paul Farmer and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Cleave Barr featured a second, smaller but equally innovative scheme by the Max Lock Group in Ashburnham Court. The eight-storey block, immediately across from the train station if you’re visiting the town, also made it into Pevsner, the 1958 edition of FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd’s Modern Flats, and was favourably mentioned by JM Richards in the Architects’ Journal as a ‘well-conceived local authority high-density housing scheme [with a] pleasantly human scale and more interest in modelling than is often the case’. (9)

A model for Ashburnham Court illustrated in *Bedford by the River*

In Bedford by the River, Lock had argued that new buildings should not comprise ‘inferior copies of past styles’ and should ‘honestly reflect their purpose’. Ashburnham Court’s form of construction, using a reinforced and pre-stressed concrete frame and panels, also fulfilled such modernistic thinking whilst its overall size reflected Lock’s belief in respecting the scale and alignment of existing buildings. (It replaced eight existing Victorian houses accommodating 32 families with 55 one- and two-bedroom flats.) (10)

The modest scheme reflected one final element of contemporary thinking – that ‘superior’, higher rental council homes might be made available to professional employees (key workers in one sense) and those who might not otherwise be eligible for council housing. At Ashburnham Road, schoolteachers were specifically mentioned.

I’m not sure of Mrs Taylor’s employment or her husband’s but she was delighted with their new home: (11)

We have waited three years for a home and we like this very much indeed. My daughter thinks it’s lovely with as much hot water as you want … as there are no fires to bother with and we are always warm. At first, I missed the coal fire but I’m used to [central heating] now.

One can’t complain about a thorough renovation (completed in 2023) that includes new (and safe) energy efficient cladding and sprinkler systems but it’s hard not to regret that the very ‘contemporary’ appearance achieved – as at Bury Court – conceals so much of the original clean design aesthetic of the building. You can judge for yourself in the ‘before and after’ pictures below.

Ashburnham Court, 2013 © Paul Farmer and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Council had been innovative in these two schemes; its Conservative politics stood out more clearly in its controversial policy agreed in 1954 to build council houses for sale – 250 of a total programme of 400. The chair of the Housing Committee reckoned they were affordable to those with a £9 weekly wage. (Thirty-six council-built houses on middle-class and suburban Putnoe Street were put on the market at prices ranging from £2205 to £2365 in 1958.) Labour, which held eight of 28 seats on the council, opposed the policy; the local Communist Party protested that just 330 households from the 2100 on the waiting list earned sufficient to buy them. (12)

However, in the renewed and expanded emphasis on slum clearance from the mid-1950s, the Council followed national trends and policies. A survey mandated by the Ministry of Health and Local Government in 1954 found 305 properties unfit for human habitation (nearly all concentrated in an area to the immediate north of the town centre). A five-year slum clearance programme was announced the following year. (13)

As an aside, the Medical Officer of Health also reported on the 226 lodging houses in the town in which by far the largest number of rooms – 829 in all – were let to Italians. They were part of a migrant wave, beginning in 1951, recruited from the impoverished towns of southern Italy to work in Bedfordshire’s brickworks. Currently some 14,000 people from a total local population of around 100,000 claim Italian heritage – the largest concentration of Italian families in the UK.

The proposed replanning of the town centre in *Bedford by the River*. The blue shaded area near the centre represents a new shopping precinct; the green and yellow mix to its left shows a proposed area of flats and open space as well as a new bus station in Greyfriars.

The Max Lock proposals and slum clearance combined in Bedford’s Central Redevelopment Area developed from the late 1950s. This was a major re-working of the Greyfriars district on the north-western edge of the town centre comprising a new bus station, new shopping parades, a new police HQ, and six multi-storey housing blocks.

The Central Redevelopment Area, Greyfriars, photographed in 1988 © Miles Glendinning, Tower Block UK, University of Edinburgh and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Beauchamp Court, Gwyn Court and Patershull Court were lower-rise five- and six-storey blocks; the latter two were demolished in 2010. The twelve-storey Roise Court, Priory Court and Beckett Court, completed in 1960, continue to provide a more commanding local presence with detailing that very much reflects the design aesthetics of their era of construction.

North Parade, Greyfriars, with its decorative elements and bowed balconies, is a good later example of the so-called Festival style popularised after the 1951 Festival of Britain

Bedfordshire County Council’s idea to meet post-war expansion plans by developing land to the north of Bedford in the Brickhill area was initially resisted by the Town Council which believed its clayey soil (in contrast to the river gravels to the south) unsuitable. By the late 1950s, demographic pressures dictated otherwise and large-scale private development ensued. The need for further affordable rental housing was met principally by the construction of the seven-storey Westbury, Upton, Leighton, Frampton and Evesham Courts completed in 1967.

The sixteen-storey Richbell, Chandos and Boswell Courts were completed one year later in what was officially designated Redevelopment Area No. 2 in an area of Bedford known more evocatively as Black Tom after a legendary early 19^th century highwayman who frequented the area.

These were the Council’s last multi-storey schemes, built as the tide turned more widely against high-rise construction – reflecting a move towards rehabilitation of older properties rather than their demolition and the emerging conclusion that tower blocks, whilst costly to build, did little to provide higher density.

The Council also continued to build a range of housing in a variety of forms in the south of the borough and in adjoining Kempston in schemes close to its earlier interwar estates, some reflecting Lock’s ideals, some indicative of a more utilitarian desire to build at higher density.

By 1970, Bedford owned and managed 5932 council homes. Four years later, the Borough of Bedford was enlarged by the (belated) inclusion of the contiguous Kempston Urban District and Bedford Rural District.

The expanded, Tory-controlled authority, however, was one of the first to take advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Housing Act when in 1990 it transferred its entire housing stock – then over 7000 homes – to the Bedfordshire Pilgrims Housing Association, modishly renamed in 1994 as bpha. The organisation now manages nearly 20,000 homes across eastern England.

Bedford Borough Hall, the former County Hall, designed by County Architect John Barker.

Meanwhile, Bedford continues to evolve. In 2009, the administrative county of Bedfordshire was replaced by three unitary authorities – Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton. County Hall in Bedford, a brutalist edifice built between 1965 and 1969, is now Borough Hall. The town itself has weathered the economic vicissitudes of recent decades better than most and now looks to benefit from its place in the planned East-West corridor and rail link between Oxford and Cambridge and – just announced – the arrival of the Universal Theme Park to be built south of Kempston, scheduled to open in 2031.

New jobs and a rising population will require new homes. In the last century, Bedford built council housing on a large scale to meet contemporary demand; much of it, in the early postwar period in particular, of notably high quality. Its latest iteration should be enabled and encouraged to build new social housing in such numbers and of such standard to meet current needs. In our more jaded times, we might also revisit the concept of planning. Drawing board visions may not always be fulfilled but the principle that the state and community might arrange things better – more equitably and efficiently – than the free market should be reasserted and practised.

Sources

(1) This and succeeding detail is drawn from Naoki Motouchi, Planning Rebuilding in the English County Town: Worcester and Bedford, 1939-1960, University of Luton PhD 2004

(2) ‘Mayor on Bedford’s Housing Needs’, Bedford Record, 7 May 1946

(3) See ‘Bedford’s B.I.S.F. Houses’, Bedford Record, 24 September 1946 and Motouchi, Planning Rebuilding in the English County Town: Worcester and Bedford, 1939-1960

(4) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1951

(5) ‘Councillor Alleges Class Segregation’, Bedford Record, 7 March 1950

(6) ‘Vast Council House Estates Condemned’, Bedford Record, 17 October 1950

(7) Max Lock Group, Bedford by the River (1952)

(8) AW Cleeve Barr, Public Authority Housing (1958)

(9) JM Richards, ‘Buildings of the Year: I955’, Architects’ Journal, 19 January 1956. The scheme is fully described in ‘Fkats in Ashburnham Road, Bedford’, Architects’ Journal, 7 July 1955.

(10) Christine Hui Lan Manley, ‘Building of the Month: April 2014 – Ashburnham Court, Bedford’, Twentieth Century Society and Cleeve Barr, Public Authority Housing

(11) Quoted in Motouchi, Planning Rebuilding in the English County Town: Worcester and Bedford, 1939-1960

(12) See ‘Communists and Bedford Housing Policy’, Bedford Record, 11 May 1954 and ‘Bedford Council Plans House Sales’, Bedford Record, 15 April 1958

(13) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1955

Bedford, Part I to 1945: Controversy and Construction

16 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Bedford, Housing

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1920s, 1930s

A joke about Bedford is that no-one, perhaps even some amongst its residents, is quite sure where it is. AI solves the confusion by telling us it is ‘located in the East of England region … the county town of Bedfordshire, lying in the southern Midlands about 50 miles north of central London’. All bases covered. The town attracts the mockery sometimes applied to such slightly unfashionable places but it has a fascinating history and some notable landmarks. This post and its follow-up will focus on its significant council housing history, not least the Council’s clash with Minister of Health and Housing Christopher Addison when it was found to be in default of the 1919 Housing Act.

Statues in the town commemorating two local heroes: John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of *The Pilgrim’s Progress*, who spent twelve years in Bedford Gaol, and John Howard (1726–1790), a later High Sheriff of Bedfordshire and prison reformer

The 1912 Report of Bedford’s Medical Officer of Health, FB Willmer Phillips, offers us a good starting point to understand the town’s history and development. At the time, the town’s population stood at just under 40,000: (1)

As a county town with a weekly market, in the centre of an agricultural district, Bedford is naturally the scene of many varied occupations connected with the land, but it may be broadly classed as a residential town mainly devoted to education.

The former town hall was originally the home of Bedford Grammar School, dating from 1550 and endowed by Sir William Harpur (whose statue adorns its frontage) from 1566. The present building dates to 1767 and it became the council’s head quarters in 1892.

That perhaps surprising emphasis on education is a reference to Bedford’s several private schools – a peculiar outcome of the charitable endowment made in 1566 by Sir William Harpur, a local man who had become a wealthy merchant tailor and Lord Mayor of London. Harpur’s endowment rested on 13 acres of land in then rural Holborn. London’s expansion and Victorian charitable reform funded the growth of prestigious fee-paying schools in Bedford and an associated middle-class in the later 19th century.

They gave the town its predominant politics. Bedford became a borough in 1166, a reformed borough in 1835, and a municipal borough in 1889. Kempston Urban District was a separate authority to the south-west of the Borough despite forming part, increasingly so, of a continuously built-up area.

Bedford council comprised principally ‘independent’ conservative members in earlier years and by 1938 a mix of ‘independents’ and declared Conservatives with nine Labour representatives providing about a third of elected members.

Nevertheless, there was a significant working-class presence in the town. The Medical Officer of Health’s report alluded to 1500 to 1800 local men working in factories manufacturing agricultural implements, electrical engineering plant, cranes and so on. Industrial employment in Bedford increased as light engineering and the local brickworks expanded in the 20^th century.

Housing standards were, for the time, generally high according to Willmer Philips:

The accommodation for the working classes is good; the houses contain, as a rule, a front parlour, a ‘living room’ furnished with a kitchen range, a washhouse and outside offices, and upstairs two, or generally three, bedrooms.

Tellingly, he acknowledged a shortage of good homes for ‘the labouring and poorest classes’ but concluded that they any potential council housing would be beyond their means and that the endeavour would incur ‘a loss that would have to be met out of the rates’.

Bedford, like most of the country, built no council houses before the First World War and was initially typical of local authorities in first appointing a Housing Committee in June 1919 to prepare postwar plans. The 1919 Housing Act (requiring all councils to survey housing needs and prepare a plan to meet them) created a legislative mandate to build.

However, Bedford’s detailed scheme for 400 houses proposed a higher density than the 12 per acre stipulated by the new Ministry of Health and Housing – the town argued that its many allotments already provided in the words of the Medical Officer of Health ‘many of the advantages sought in “Garden Cities”‘. (There really were a lot of allotments – around 578 acres-worth let to 4503 allotment holders.) (2)

When its plans were rejected on grounds of density and location by the Ministry, Council leaders argued, plausibly, that construction costs would be too high and consequent rents too expensive for many in the working class. They also contended, with what seems a wilful ignorance of the generous financial terms of the 1919 Act, that any scheme would place too heavy a burden on the Council.

Christopher Addison, Minister of Health and Housing 1919-1921

Impasse ensued and in April 1920, Bedford was declared in default of the legislation. In a fraught Whitehall meeting between Ministry and Council representatives, Christopher Addison, the Minister of Health and Housing, asked rhetorically: (3)

Why is Bedford in this conspicuous and discreditable condition all this time? You have had the same time and opportunity as everybody else has had in other districts, and yet you have not yet acquired an acre.

A headline from the *Bedford Record,* 4 May 1920

The Council’s response, denying deliberate obstruction, was to blame its inability to raise the money needed but the conflict had become highly political. The mayor claimed, ‘he had been receiving telegrams and letters from all over the British Empire imploring Bedford to hold fast’. A standing room-only public Town Hall meeting in May condemned the autocratic powers of the ‘Minister of Health [acting] as judge, jury and prosecutor’ and unanimously backed the Council’s stance. (4)

And then, quite quickly, things seemed to calm. A further Whitehall meeting took place mediated by the town’s Coalition Liberal MP Frederick Kellaway; he concluded ‘mistakes had been made on both sides’. The following day another meeting took place, with Kellaway present, in which Bedford’s representatives met Sir Frank Baines, Chief Architect at the Office of Works. Bedford’s financial liability was confirmed – as already clearly stated in the existing legislation – as limited to a penny on the rates. It was agreed this money could be raised by housing bonds. (5)

Disagreement ensued about the site of a possible housing scheme. The Council’s proposal for a scheme on an Elstow Road site was initially resisted by the Ministry’s Housing Commissioners but, with Baines’ support, it prevailed.

Bedford’s representatives declared Baines ‘a gentleman to deal with [who] showed every desire to help them’. It was:

agreed that the Office of Works should collaborate with the Council’s Architect and Engineer in Bedford and all work should be done through them without going through the office of the Ministry, and they would be clear of trouble with the Commissioners.

The following month, the Council’s Housing Committee agreed an ambitious programme of over 700 houses in total with an immediate start to some 410 on a site adjacent to Elstow Road on the southern fringe of the town, a mix of mostly three-bed parlour and non-parlour homes. (6)

Such ambitions soon confronted harsh post-war realities; having excavated sites for six houses, it was found that only eleven bricklayers were available to complete the work. Bedford was said to be one of only two towns employing direct labour to build their schemes. In August, Baines himself, alongside Bedford’s mayor and with the support of local building trades unions, addressed a public meeting urging operatives to work on the municipal scheme. (7)

In the event, broader dynamics including the national shift to austerity signalled by the ‘Geddes Axe’ spending cuts in August 1921 probably did greater damage to the programme. The Office of Works scheme, now comprising just 200 houses in total was completed and handed over to the Council in October 1922 – built at an average cost of £928 (about three times pre-war prices) and let at a high rent of 10s a week excluding rates. (8)

This was the so-called ‘White City Estate’ that acquired its nickname (as did a number of similar estates across the country) from the distinctive white rendering that characterised its housing. (8) A smaller number of houses were built on Rosamund Street. The high rents of this early housing led to Council to waive its rules regarding subtenancies.

Whilst Bedford avoided major clashes with central government going forward, its housing programme continued to reflect the town’s particular politics. Neville Chamberlain’s 1923 Housing Act, passed by the incoming Conservative Government, which aimed to promote affordable rental housing by subsidising private housebuilders, was embraced by the Council which eventually supported around 100 houses built under its terms. (9)

The 1924 Housing Act, passed by the first, minority, Labour Government, however, provided a more financially attractive means of building council housing as such. In September, the Council proposed a programme of 240 houses of which 140 were to be built by the Council and 100 under subsidy by private builders.

A first tranche of 20 houses was planned around Kathie Road, part of a larger estate to be developed, again on the southern fringe of the town, off London Road. In general, progress was painfully slow and the Council subject to much criticism.

Typical debates followed. Nothing came of a proposal to build prefabricated steel-framed houses. Councillors clashed on the need for parlour housing. Alderman Kirkman, reflecting and denying his class privilege, recalled his experience after university of renting and then buying a small house, working 12-14 hours a day: (10)

He was against the suggestion to build parlour houses. Frequently the extra room would be a place for artificial flowers and stuffed cats.

But discussion went beyond party lines, such as they were; other members stood up for parlour housing and Councillor FT Turner advocated the use of direct labour and a larger scheme.

By 1929, 78 council houses had been built in the London Road area, contributing to a total of 248 in all built under the terms of the 1924 Act. (11) At this point, a second Labour Government and the new 1930 Housing Act, targeting slum clearance and rehousing, triggered a new wave of council housebuilding.

In February 1930, proposals for 132 new houses on the London Road Estate were agreed – a mix of parlour and non-parlour houses and a few non-parlour flats. By mid-1931, the Council was proposing to complete 500 new houses by 1935, a further extension of the London Road Estate built almost entirely in the neighbouring Kempston Urban District. (11)

The new national focus on slum clearance and overcrowding marked by the 1930 and 1935 Housing Acts found only limited resonance in comparatively well-heeled Bedford; the Medical Officer of Health reported only 41 houses located in yards and courts and no back-to-backs. There was poor housing of course, albeit on a small scale; of 72 houses identified to the Ministry of Health as unfit in 1931, 58 had been demolished by 1937; two closed and 15 rehabilitated. (13)

This was an era of gradual progress for Bedford. For the most part, the town prospered gently, largely unaffected by the economic woes afflicting many more industrial towns, and grew only modestly.

Its most important expansion – at least so far as future prospects were concerned – was the Borough’s incorporation of the parish of Goldington and other smaller areas to the east, acquired from Bedford Rural District Council in 1934. This added 2749 acres to the town’s existing 2223 but added, at the time, a population of just over 2000 to bring the total to nearly 43,000. Kempston Urban District Council resisted entreaties to amalgamate, citing ratepayer concerns, and remained a separate entity till 1974.

Goldington brought 12 additional council houses to the Borough’s stock. In the later years of the decade, the Council built around 300-400 homes a year that brought its total council housing stock to 1137 by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Bedford was deemed a safe haven in the war. It suffered just one serious bombing raid, in July 1942, when ten people were killed. Conversely in the earliest months of the war, it received over 7500 evacuees from London. The town’s Medical Officer of Health referred to the ‘difficulties in the habits of many of the children, unaccustomed as they were to the surroundings of middle-class or better working-class households’ and less charitably to ‘the offscourings of the earth’ collected in ‘cosmopolitan cities’ such as London. Around 4300 remained even as the expected early aerial devastation of the capital failed to materialise. (14)

Glenn Miller, commemorated in this bust on the exterior of the Corn Exchange, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were among those who performed in the Corn Exchange (transformed into an events and concert venue in the early 20th century) during the Second World War.

Amongst other evacuees were many BBC staff and, safely anonymised as ‘Somewhere in England’, the town became the base of much of the Corporation’s religious and music services during the war.

But even at the height of the war, as early as 1943 when victory must have seemed uncertain and distant, thoughts were turning to the planning of a better Bedford in a new era of peace. Those plans, their outcome and Bedford’s later council housing history will be the subject of next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1912

(2) See Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report, 1919 and Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report, 1922

(3) ‘The Mayor and Ex-Mayor at the Ministry of Health’, Bedford Record, 27 April 1920

(4) ‘Bedford’s Housing Default: Town’s Protest Against Autocratic Action’, The Observer, 2 May1920 and ‘The Bedford Crisis’, Bedford Record, 4 May 1920

(5) This and succeeding detail are drawn from ‘Bedford Town Council: The Housing Question’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 14 May 1920

(6) ‘Housing Scheme for 700 Houses Adopted’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 18 June 1920

(7) See ‘Bedford Housing Scheme’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 20 August 1920 and ‘The Housing Scheme: Lack of Skilled Labour’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 27 August 1920

(8) See Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1925 and ‘Housing in Bedford’, Bedford Record, 25 November 1924

(9) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1925

(10) ‘Town Council’s Full-Dress Debate’, Bedford Record, 6 October 1925

(11) ‘Bedford Town Council’, Bedford Record, 12 November 1929

(12) ‘Bedford’s Southward Development’, Bedford Record,19 May 1931

(13) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report, 1937

(14) Bedford Medical Officer of Health Report,1939

The Kingswood Estate, West Dulwich II: ‘Something of a Paradox’

17 Tuesday Mar 2026

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, London

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Tags

1940s, 1950s, Camberwell, Southwark

In last week’s post, we examined both the opposition to the London County Council’s new Kingswood Estate in West Dulwich and the high hopes placed in it. Whilst new tenants experienced their new homes in the developing estate in generally positive terms, architectural commentators were almost universally critical.

In dry but telling detail, the LCC delineated the shape of the new estate: (1)

The total number of dwellings is 784, consisting of 690 flats and maisonettes, 92 cottages and two houses. The accommodation includes 26 3- and 4-storey blocks of flats of balcony and staircase access type; two 3-storey blocks with maisonettes and shops on the ground floor and maisonettes over; one three-storey block of maisonettes and flats, and three 2-storey blocks of flats.

What is most notable in that account is the preponderance of three- and four-storey (principally four-storey) tenement blocks. The restriction to four storeys reflected some sensitivity to the estate’s location – the lower-rise blocks situated on low-lying ground ensured that the estate could not be seen from College Road. But the exclusive use of low blocks restricted the possibility of genuinely mixed development of the type that the LCC had promised.

The area was zoned in the County of London Plan at 100 persons per acre with an assumption that blocks (with the lifts previously excluded in working-class housing) might rise to eight storeys. As Nicholas Merthyr Day has calculated, this formula permitted almost 56 percent of dwellings as houses. In Kingswood, by contrast, just 12 percent were houses and some 80 percent of homes were located in those three- and four-storey blocks. (2)

These modest semi-detached homes, part of a range along Bowen Drive, are just beyond the northern edge of the estate but feature in the estate plans shown in last week’s post.

As Merthyr Day concludes

The Kingswood Estate therefore failed to produce a high degree of ‘mix’ in the types of dwelling used, nor to exploit the relatively low overall density figure to achieve a high proportion of houses to flats. This resulted in a fairly monotonous layout dominated by four-storey blocks. This effect is only relieved by the mature trees and planting and the retention of Kingswood House in the middle of the estate to act as a community centre.

Beyond its overall form, many were critical of the style of the estate; it was, in essence and despite minor ‘modernising’ accretions, a reprise of by now very traditional interwar neo-Georgian tenement block design.

The architect David Freeman cried out that: (3)

Surely the time has come to break with the ‘naked Georgian’ devotional treatment? Why cannot the elevations be frankly modern? Why the small panel windows? Why the glazing bars?

The entrance archway at Beresford House is impressive but reminiscent of 1930s designs in nearby Southwark and Bermondsey

Whilst British public housing had been largely immune to Modern Movement influences from the Continent in the 1930s, planners and architects assumed that a post-war Britain breaking from its socially conservative past would embrace such innovation. The LCC’s early post-war housing came, therefore, as a great disappointment.

Though S. Howard (Housing Architect), J.W. Oatley (Senior Architect) and A.E. Long (Architect-in-charge) of the LCC’s Chief Architect’s Department were credited with the design of the Kingswood Estate, the actual villain of the piece was LCC Valuer Cyril Walker. Walker had had been appointed in November 1945, in combination with his existing role, Director of Housing and Chief Officer responsible for Housing Operations. The Council’s Chief Architect, JH Forshaw (co-author of the County of London Plan) was to report directly to Walker for a trial period of three years. (4)

The laudable intent was to rationalise planning and design functions and maximise housing output. The unintended (though arguably implied and accepted) consequence, given Walker’s cost-driven agenda and disdain for architectural ambition, was to build housing at scale in very conservative form. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors praised the scheme for having built some 18,000 permanent homes in severely straitened times. Architectural opinion was uniformly hostile.

Woodberry Down, begun in 1948, was one heavily criticised estate of the era. The Kingswood Estate, still largely unbuilt, was another. In Merthyr Day’s words, at Kingswood:

As at Woodberry Down, the architects in Walker’s Housing and Valuation Department produced an additive and derivative style that failed to be either consistently modern or traditional.

Matters came to a head with the LCC’s County Hall exhibition of post-war housing in 1949. The Architects’ Journal, always critical of the decision to sideline architectural expertise for obvious reasons, led the charge. JM Richards, its editor, decried it as: (5)

One of the biggest tragedies of our time that the great rebuilding opportunity we were faced with after the war is being frittered away by the substitution of a policy of mere expedience for proper planning and by sheer bad architecture.

And, whatever the quantity, there were very few prepared to defend the quality of the LCC’s housing output. Duly chastened, the LCC returned housing design to Forshaw’s successor as Chief Architect, Robert Matthew. In the 1950s, the LCC’s Architect’s Department became the largest and most prestigious architectural practice in the world.

Julian House on its Bowen Drive frontage

All this may have seemed largely academic to the new residents of the Kingswood Estate. By 1951, three blocks (Julian, Holberry and Kinsey Houses) were completed and some 180 families were in residence.

Mrs Simner, who had moved from Peckham with her husband and three children commented: (6)

It’s a bit lonely here at present but it will be different when all the houses and flats are up and occupied. We shall soon want a community centre and a bit more entertainment.

Another new arrival embraced the estate’s leafy surrounds: ‘The place is so spacious. All these lovely woodlands make the place so inviting’. Rents ranged from 26 shillings a week for a two-bed home (something over £40 a week in contemporary terms) to 37s a week for a three-bed home (around £60 a week).

The Seeley Drive shops in 1959 © Layers of London and the London Archives

The shops at Upper Norwood were said to be convenient which was just as well as the shopping parade wasn’t begun until the second phase of construction after 1950 and new leases ‘to complete the shopping centre’ were being advertised as late as October 1956. (7) The current depleted state of the parade marks more recent consumer trends.

The estate’s two new schools, designed by the Schools Division of the Architect’s Department, exhibited the LCC’s architectural prowess in a way that the estate itself had not. The first, a primary school catering for 700 pupils, opened in 1951 – a light and airy, steel-frame glass and concrete design featured in the Architects’ Journal. Marking its moment, the school incorporated two artworks from the recent Festival of Britain, ‘Plankton’ by Gerald Haltom and ‘Marmalade Cat’ by Katheen Hale. (8)

Kingsdale School, 1959 © Layers of London and the London Archives

Kingsdale School, opened in 1958, one of the first purpose-built comprehensive schools in the country, followed the same modernist design principles and demonstrated similar design ambition with its sunken floor assembly hall and a central ‘quad’ featuring William Turnbull’s ‘Sungazer’ sculpture. (An innovative and award-winning renovation of the building including a spectacular translucent ‘skin’ over the quadrangle occurred in the early 2000s.) (9)

But the estate’s centrepiece and the feature that made an otherwise unremarkable estate something special was Kingswood House. It was acquired by Camberwell Metropolitan Borough Council which established a library in the building, officially opened by Peter Ustinov in September 1956. Alderman GS Burden, the Council’s leader, celebrated the fact that: (10)

Kingswood House is now what it should be – a house for the community and not something reserved for one select and privileged family

In other respects, the use of the House was contested. An active tenants’ association wanted the building used primarily for its own welfare and recreational activities and opposed the inclusion of the licensed bar apparently sought by those who hoped it might function more as a social club. (11)

In fact, the estate stayed ‘dry’ until 1958 when an off-licence was permitted in the shopping parade. The first pub, named after former local resident Sir Ernest Shackleton, opened at 122 Bowen Drive in 1962. It was a popular local until its closure in 2006 and subsequent demolition.

Kingswood House, Grade II-listed, stands but in changing times its use remains problematic. Southwark Council, Camberwell’s successor in 1965, transferred the library to the nearby shopping parade in 2020. Kingswood Arts, a non-profit social enterprise that took over the venue as an arts centre in 2022, went into receivership last year. A re-formed organisation is currently running a reduced programme of events and activities. (12) The Friends of Kingswood House are working hard to maintain and increase access to the building at the current time.

Oldham House, one of the recently renovated five-storey blocks

The estate itself has grown old. A local press headline in 2022 marks a more recent history: ‘The “Pocket of Deprivation” West Dulwich Housing Estate plagued with Damp and Mould’. (13) Seven decades on from its creation, the estate’s need for some updating and renovation is obvious and acknowledged. Eight five-storey blocks have recently been upgraded to improve their appearance and energy standards. (14)

In the end, perhaps it is the Dulwich Society that has provided the most apt and empathetic assessment of the Kingswood Estate. It is, as they say, ‘something of a paradox’. Much care and attention went into its layout; it remains modestly pleasant and attractive. But it is also very much marked by ‘the austerity of the time’ and the straitened circumstances of its design. (15)

Kingswood isn’t a showpiece but – a council estate built in ‘the green heart of Dulwich’ – it captures a moment when the political imperative to house the people was at its height. And while its new homes received little praise from the architectural establishment, they were a godsend to the slum-ridden and blitzed families of post-war London.

Sources

(1) ‘LCC Housing Exhibition: Post-War Flat Types’, Architects’ Journal, vol 109, no 2833, 26 May 1949

(2) Nicholas Merthyr Day, The Role of the Architect in Post-War State Housing: A Case Study of the Housing Work of the London County Council 1939-1956, University of Warwick PhD 1988

(3) ‘LCC Housing’, Architects’ Journal, vol 109, no 2834, 2 June 1949.

(4) See, amongst other sources, Tim Lewis, Consensus and Compromise – the Rise and Fall of Britain’s Post-War High-Rise Housing Initiative, Birmingham City University PhD, April 2021

(5) JM Richards, ‘London Housing’, Architects’ Journal, vol. 109, no 2822, 10 March 1949. See also a follow-up post, ‘LCC Housing: the Need for a Critical Assessment’, Architects’ Journal, vol. 109, no 2823, 17 March 1949.

(6) ‘New Town Growing Up in Dulwich’, Norwood News, 24 August 1951

(7) Evening Standard, 29 October 1956

(8) ‘Primary School’, Architects’ Journal, 13 November 1952

(9) ‘Kingsdale School, c1958’, Layers of London, The London Archives

(10) ‘Mayor First to Use the New Library – To Find Out About Peter Ustinov’, South London Observer, 20 September 1956

(11) ‘It’s All A Matter of Drink’, Norwood News, 19 July 1957

(12) Evie Flynn, ‘Kingswood Arts in Dulwich Has Been Rescued After Original Owners Stepped in io Save It from Closure’, Southwark News, 12 December 2025

(13) Herbie Russell, ‘The “pocket of deprivation” West Dulwich Housing Estate Plagued with Damp and Mould’, Southwark News, 13 December 2022

(14) Constructing Excellence, SECBE Awards, Kingswood Estate Flat Roof Blocks (2025)

(15) Dulwich Society, Kingswood, Dulwich Society Journal, Autumn 2010

The Kingswood Estate, West Dulwich: ‘a New Dulwich ‘Village'”?

10 Tuesday Mar 2026

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, London

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1940s, 1950s, Camberwell, Southwark

The Kingswood Estate in West Dulwich, planned in the late 1940s by the London County Council (LCC) as a showpiece of its day, proved controversial in both inception and execution; the subject of initial hostility from some less than welcoming neighbours and latterly from an unenamoured architectural establishment. Why did this essentially modest estate attract such animus?

Its location in Dulwich provides an early clue. Dulwich, a rural village in the nineteenth century had become a salubrious suburb by the twentieth. Among its larger estates was Kingswood House, built for John Lawson Johnston, the creator of Bovril, in ‘rambling baronialised Victorian Tudor’ form in 1892. (1) The house and grounds were purchased by another food magnate, Sir William Vestey, later Baron Vestey, in 1919.

By far the largest local landowner, however, was Dulwich College, founded in 1619, re-founded in 1857 and rebuilt on grandiose scale to the designs of Charles Barry. The College Estate Governors owned 1500 acres of land, around one third of the Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell in which (from 1900 to 1965) it was situated.

The Metropolitan Borough itself was a curious hybrid – a long wedge stretching from the densely working-class areas of Camberwell itself and Peckham in the north to the affluent homes and green open spaces of Dulwich to the south. In class terms, the working class predominated; in 1951, 82 percent of the local workforce were employed in manual trades and just 13 percent in professional or intermediate occupations. (2) The Borough was firmly under Labour control from 1934 to its abolition in 1965, as was the LCC in the same period.

A map of Camberwell Metropolitan Borough, 1919. The boundaries were unchanged until the abolition of the borough in 1965.

The Second World War added to this combustible mix. It’s reckoned some one million homes in London were damaged or destroyed during the war; in Camberwell, around 5700 were completely destroyed and 8000 local families rendered homeless. The drive to rebuild and build anew was the social and political imperative of the era and planning for a new Britain (and, by common consent, a fairer, more equal Britain) to emerge from the ashes of war began early. The County of London Plan, published in 1943, testified to these post-war ambitions.

In the same year, the wartime coalition government initiated a funding scheme to compulsorily purchase underused land – music to the ears of Camberwell Metropolitan Borough Council which had long coveted parts of the Dulwich College estate. In March 1944, the chairman of the Estate Governors was summoned to a meeting at the Council offices and shown a map of Dulwich with large swathes shaded red – areas that the Council intended to acquire. (3)

In May 1946, the LCC revealed 16 sites in the borough, totalling 200 acres, that it planned to compulsorily purchase, including 37 acres around Kingswood Drive. (4) Opposition was soon mobilised. In an article dramatically headlined, ‘Fight for the Green Heart of Dulwich’, the College Governors expressed their fear that ‘amenities of Dulwich, carefully preserved for close on a century, will be sacrificed for the need to get as many houses built as quickly as possible’. (5) The Governors claimed to have their own plans to develop housing on the estate though these never seemed to assume concrete form.

A section of the Communities and Open Space Survey map in the *County of London Plan.* The South Bank at the top is shown as an industrial area. I have marked the approximate site of the later Kingswood Estate with a red arrow.

Freighted language aside, this was not an unreasonable fear. Wilfred Vernon, the Labour MP that even Dulwich elected in the landslide of 1945, stated his determination to ‘to use his influence in every direction to see that as many houses as possible are built in Dulwich as soon as possible’. Cecil Manning, Labour MP for Camberwell North and the Borough Council’s chair of housing, declared ‘if he were a dictator, he would transplant Dulwich Park, rhododendrons and all, to the crowded areas of North Camberwell, and build houses where the park now stands’. (6)

The public inquiry convened in April 1947 heard the apparently solicitous concerns of some local residents concerning lack of amenities and poor transport links (in fact Sydenham Hill Station was conveniently near at hand) but was unswayed. When the LCC pointed to the 280,000 families, representing around one million people, on its housing waiting list, the case to ‘to build at the earliest possible moment’ and house between 2000 and 2500 people at Kingswood seemed incontrovertible. (7)

Further resistance took a new direction in the attempt to shape satisfactorily the form of the new estate. Dulwich’s Conservative councillor on the LCC, Charles Pearce, a College governor, proposed ‘an all-cottage estate more in keeping with the surroundings’. He declared hopefully that: (8)

The Dulwich of tomorrow will be just as free of the trammels of so-called civilisation – night clubs, gin palaces, cinemas, dirt tracks and greyhound stadiums – as the Dulwich of yesterday!

Editorially, the main local newspaper took a more interesting line. The South London Observer urged that: (9)

the estate should not be developed entirely with ‘working-class’ property. It is a mixed development, where the professional man, the trader and the artisan live side by side, that is likely to produce the best results.

It returned to this argument four months later, invoking once more a close-knit village community where the doctor lived next door to the butcher and close to labourers’ cottages and ‘the house of the manager of the Co-op’. It suggested too that while single class council estates might once have been justified, now ‘local authority schemes constitute the greater proportion of the country’s house building, the position is different’. (10)

Whilst we might justifiably be cynical of much local opposition to the new Kingwood Estate, the Observer presumably had a wider readership and its position also reflected a more progressive moment – a time when many held a genuine belief in reduced class divisions and accepted the essential role of an interventionist social democratic state (with a nod to its consumer counterpart, the Co-op, which boasted around 10 million members in this period).

In this, of course, the Observer precisely echoed the ‘mixed development’ ideals (minimally a range of building forms meeting varied needs; maximally, greater social mixing) of post-war planners and the contemporary Labour Government and it closely anticipated the famous words of Aneurin Bevan, when introducing the 1949 Housing Act, invoking ‘the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages’ – the neighborliness the Observer had celebrated and what Bevan praised as ‘the living tapestry of a mixed community’.

For its part, the LCC promised a ‘mixed development of flats, maisonettes and cottages … [and] one block of one-roomed flats for old people’ – 783 homes in all. Fulfilling the other key planning ideal of the day, the Neighbourhood Unit, the Council planned a small shopping centre and set aside land for two schools and ‘two refreshment houses’.

Kingswood House surrounded by the later estate

It also agreed, apparently after successful campaigning by Wilfred Vernon MP and tenant representatives, to preserve Kingswood House as a community centre. It claimed ‘in laying out the estate, great care has been taken to preserve the features of the site, including the Pergola walk to Sydenham Hill Station and a large number of fine old trees’. (11)

Such was the promise. In next week’s post, we’ll examine how the estate developed, how it was experienced by its early residents and how it was viewed by architectural critics.

Sources

(1) Historic England, Kingswood House, Grade-II listing details

(2) Harold Carter, ‘Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945–1995’, The London Journal, vol 33, no 2, July 2008

(3) Paul Davis, Elisabeth Kendall, Ian McInnes, Catherine Samy, Dulwich: Mid-Century Oasis (2024)

(4) ‘London Site Owners May Be Forced to Sell’, Evening Standard, 24 May 1946

(5) ‘Fight for the Green Heart of Dulwich’, South London Observer, 12 July 1946

(6) Manning is quoted in an editorial, South London Observer, 25 October 1946

(7) ‘Kingswood Threatened Sylvan Glades for Building’, Norwood Press and Dulwich Advertiser, 4 April 1947

(8) ‘Flats in Dulwich’, South London Observer, 14 November 1947

(9) Editorial: ‘A suggestion for Dulwich’, South London Observer, 1 August 1947

(10) Editorial: ‘A New Dulwich “Village”’, South London Observer, 12 December 1947

(11) London County Council, A Survey of the Post-War Housing of the London County Council, 1945-1949 (1949)

Dutch Hofjes: ‘Small, surprising green oases’

20 Tuesday Jan 2026

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Almshouses, The Netherlands

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Hofjes are Dutch courtyard almshouses. As we’ll see, their detail may vary but their essential form is uniform: (1)

All hofjes comprise a garden surrounded by cottages … Some have two opposite rows of cottages; some rows of cottages are U-shaped or L-shaped. But there is always that rhythmic repetition of cottages, doors, windows, chimneys and dormer windows around a green oasis, the collective courtyard garden.

They are also, almost without exception, squeezed into existing plot structures within an already dense urban fabric. They are, in the words of their foremost chronicler, Willemijn Wilms Floet, whose words I have been channelling, ‘small, surprising green oases that counterbalance urban chaos and noise’.

They provided secure and usually free accommodation to their fortunate residents. Many of the hofjes gave regular doles of food, clothing and fuel, as well as direct financial support. Some offered health care and, when that failed, the means to a decent funeral.

The Hofje De Bakenesserkamer, Haarlem, founded in 1395. The current buildings date to the 17th century

Of the over 200 hofjes founded historically in the Netherlands, 110 survive today, still providing good homes to those in need. The first opened, in Haarlem, in 1395; the most recent, by the same charity in powerful tribute to the longevity and persistence of founding ideals, immediately adjacent in 2007.

They can be found in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Groningen and other Dutch towns and cities. In Leiden, there are 36 and in Haarlem, where there were over forty hofjes at their seventeenth century peak, 22 remain. It is these latter two that provide the examples – a modest selection – included in today’s post.

Many of the hofjes are open to view (while the housing, of course, remains private) and to visitors like me they offer living history and architectural interest. To their residents, they are home. Here we’ll try to explore both aspects – the appeal and the value of the model they have offered and their relevance today as we face (perennial) housing need and a rapidly ageing population.

We might begin, however, by examining what might seem anachronistic and perhaps questionable in their founding rationale. Put crudely but accurately for a time when belief in God and the beauties of Heaven and terrors of Hell were powerfully held, the wealthy patrons who funded the hofjes hoped they were guaranteeing a blessed and happy afterlife. Their deathbed charity might reflect a life well spent or a belated apology for mortal sins but in either case it was rooted in Christian hopes and fears.

Of course, the motivation and certainly the outcome was also philanthropic. The hofjes provided a safety net for those unable to support themselves. As usual in such private benevolence, those assisted generally belonged to the ‘noble poor’ – older people, usually women, those who were now unable to work; in other words, those whose destitution lay not in personal improvidence but in inescapable misfortune. The charities usually catered for a closely defined target group named in a founder’s bequest specifying age, gender, religion, etc.

An undated photograph of residents of Haarlem’s Frans Loenenhofje

A stringent analysis of Leiden’s almshouses and their founders by Henk Looijesteijn adds detail to these general points. He suggests that criteria of religion and ‘respectability’ excluded the poorest of Dutch society; rather the hofjes catered for two groups – the ‘lower middle class and wage dependents … those for whom old age might mean a loss of goods and status … who feared their lives would outlast their means’. (2)

Further study reveals the significance to the founders of their nearest and dearest – two groups (thus named) who Looijesteijn describes precisely as comprising, firstly, those sharing the family name or belonging to the wider kinship group and, secondly, close family members.

He concludes that at peak towards the end of the seventeenth century Leiden’s 34 functioning almshouses offered a total of 562 places that probably housed just under 10 percent of the eligible (elderly) population.

Maerten Ruychaever Meerman and his wife Helena Verburch, founders of Leiden’s Meermansburghof. Both portraits are attributed to Jacob Willemsz Delff and probably date to the time of their marriage in 1647. They are among 29 portraits retained in the Regents’ Room of the *hofje* they founded.

As to the founders, he describes them as belonging to a ‘social sub-elite, a layer lower than the city’s patrician families’ – the wealthy but not usually the super-wealthy. A disproportionate number were childless or had lost children meaning there was less pressure to pass on wealth to family members.

In Leiden, Pieter Gerritsz. van der Speck, founder of the almshouses bearing his name, was a carpenter but also a large-scale landlord. The municipal guide to Leiden’s hofjes notes rather disingenuously how ‘as a slum landlord [he] must have been acutely aware of how terrible the living conditions of poor elderly people often were’. (3)

However, the greater part of his wealth – and that of a number of other benefactors – came from shares held in the United Dutch East India Company. The Company made extensive use of slave labour in its plantations. The official website of the Dutch government reminds us how ‘slavery enabled the Netherlands to become an economic world power’; It also financed or helped finance the construction of many hofjes. (4)

In the longer term, once bequests and stipulations had been made, the governance of the hofjes lay in the hands of unpaid ‘regents’, people of the same class and status as their original founders entrusted to fulfil founding principles. Some schemes contain trustees’ rooms – boardrooms reflecting their role.

We’ll look now at the hofjes themselves and the phases of their history. In the first two centuries, they were according to Wilms Floet founded principally by ‘members of brotherhoods with a knightly background’. In this period, the hofjes took a simple and enclosed form – the classic garden and terrace form, usually hidden behind a plain closed wall. Some included a small chapel.

The very first, Haarlem’s Hofje De Bakenesserkamer, dating to1395, was founded by Dirck van Bakenes, a city administrator, to accommodate impoverished elderly women, originally with 20 kamer or rooms. The present buildings probably date from a substantial renovation in 1657.

Exterior and interior views of the Brouwershofje, Haarlem

The next in our coverage, also in Haarlem, is the Brouwershofje, founded by Jacob Roeperszoon and his sister Katharina in 1472 but managed by the Haarlem Guild of Brewers. It housed women formerly employed in the industry now too old or sick to work. It survived somewhat impecuniously over the years but after the city’s great fire in 1576, it was rebuilt with accommodation reduced from 22 houses to eight.

When all the guilds were disbanded by Napoleonic edict after the French invasion in 1796, the scheme was administered by a city-appointed committee and subsequently by Haarlem City Council. Twentieth-century renovations have created four modern houses in the courtyard let by the Ymere housing corporation.

Haarlem’s Hofje van Loo was founded in 1489 by Haarlem mayor Symon Pieterszoon van Loo and his wife Godelt Willemsdochter with 13 homes – a number deliberately chosen to echo the number of Christ and his disciples. It was once an enclosed courtyard but street widening in 1885 created its present open appearance. It’s still administered by a Board of Regents.

In 1588, seven Dutch provinces declared their independence from Spanish rule to establish the Dutch Republic and what became known as the Dutch Golden Age. Rooted as it was in colonialism that term has become controversial but, domestically, for the wealthy middle class, and culturally, the phrase rings true.

Naturally, this influenced the continuing history of the hofjes. New patrons were predominantly successful merchants and manufacturers (French-speaking protestants fleeing Antwerp – which remained under Catholic Spanish rule – were a particular subset within Leiden). City councillors, mayors and aldermen were another associated group. And there were those – often clergy in both the Protestant and Catholic churches – who sought to express their Christian piety in charitable works.

The new affluence also influenced the design of the hofjes. Increasingly, architects were commissioned in their design. The gateways, in particular, became grander and more monumental in tribute to the founder’s wealth and status. Facades become more elaborate and classical design features more frequent. Sometimes a so-called route architecturale was created – a promenade from gateway to trustees’ room to the still more modest homes themselves.

The Frans Loenenhofje, established in Haarlem in 1607, illustrates well that new monumentalism with its gate designed in Dutch Renaissance style by city architect Lieven de Kei in 1625. The housing itself is modest but more classically proportioned than earlier forms. Its founder, Frans Loenen, was an Amsterdam merchant and an Old Catholic, a Dutch strain critical of papal power. His almshouses were designed to accommodate eleven (later expanded to 16) poor Catholic women. After successive modernisations, it now provides housing for ten women aged 60 or over.

In contrast, tucked away down an alley and behind a modest doorway, the Bruiningshofje, presents a more modest appearance. Founded by the weaver Jan Bruininck in 1610, it was one of four belonging to Haarlem’s strictly protestant Mennonite community. Bruininck reserved some of the original six rooms for his daughters and the scheme was administered by his descendants until the end of the nineteenth century; it is now owned by the Bruiningshofje Foundation. It received running water and gas heating after a major modernisation in 1936 and its accommodation was reduced to four houses after further renovation in 1978.

The Hofje van Guurtje de Waal, around 1900 © Noord-Hollands Archief

A contemporary view of the Hofje van Guurtje de Waal © Tajsa and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Hofje van Guurtje de Waal also founded in Haarlem seven years later began modestly, established with just six houses by Guerte Jansdochter de Wael, daughter of a rich textile trader, for poor women of the Dutch Reformed faith. It was expanded in 1661 when Jan de Waal added a more elaborate entrance gate sporting the family’s coats of arms. It continued to be managed by principally female regents of the family until 1853 when the municipality took control. Remodelled in 1985 to provide just four houses, it’s the smallest of Haarlem’s hofjes and another now managed by the Ymere housing corporation.

The Pieter Gerritsz. van der Speckhofje, Leiden

The Pieter Gerritsz. van der Speckhofje in Leiden founded after a 4000-guilder bequest in the will of its founder (whose wealth was discussed earlier) in 1645 remains a more modest affair – eight houses built behind his house intended for older ‘poor, honourable, virtuous people’. After modernisation in 1977, four larger dwellings remain.

The Dutch Golden Age ended ignominiously in the so-called Rampjaar, or Disaster Year, of 1672 when the country was attacked by rival powers from all sides and collapsed internally. William the Orange emerged as leader and the country survived but never to recover its former dominance. The wealthy benefactors whose wealth survived or recovered ensured that the greater ostentation of this later generation of hofjes remained, with the schemes increasingly resembling (in outward form at least) the city palaces of their founders.

Exterior and interior views of the Meermansburghof, Leiden

Plan view of the Meermansburghof featured in Willemijn Wilms Floet, *Urban Oases: Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems*

This is very clearly the case in Leiden’s Meermansburghof founded in 1681 by a governor of the Dutch East India Company, Maerten Ruychaver Meerman and Helena Verburch, his wife. For all their wealth, the couple had lost four children in infancy. The hofje’s grand canal-side facade was designed by architect Jacob Roman and the internal courtyard housing – designated to ‘virtuous, sober widows or women of good reputation over the age of forty’ – by City Carpenter Anthony van Breetvelt. A ceremonial entrance provided rooms for the trustees and displayed the portraits of the founders and regents that remain. Wilms Floet’s plan view of the scheme gives a good impression of its classical formality and scale.

The 1683 Jean Pesijnhof in Leiden has a more complicated history rooted in the protestant politics of the time. From 1611, the area’s housing was occupied by English religious refugees, some of whom would leave on the Mayflower to America in 1620. The widow of a Walloon refugee, Jean Pesijn, bought houses after the death of her husband and daughter and, after her death, these were converted into a courtyard almshouse for the benefit of poor people of the Reformed religion. The twelve homes are still managed by the Jean Pesijnhof foundation

Plan view of the Proveniershof featured in Willemijn Wilms Floet, *Urban Oases: Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems*

The Proveniershof in Haarlem is an unusual scheme, founded in 1704 by the city council to cater for rent-paying male residents. It had larger houses and a larger courtyard alongside a staffed communal dining hall, bakery and butchers – the assumption was that men needed to be looked after while the usual female residents of the hofjes could cater for themselves. It survived in various iterations as essentially a care home for elderly men until 1866 since when its adapted homes have been let out at social rent.

Axonometric view of the Van Oorschothofje featured in Willemijn Wilms Floet, *Urban Oases: Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems*

The Van Oorschothofje in Haarlem was – to a point – more traditionally targeted but illustrates well the social and political dynamics of the day. It resulted from the 1768 bequest of Amsterdam merchant Wouterus van Oorschot to establish almshouses for poor elderly women of the Reformed faith, two of the houses being reserved for family members.

Wealthy city administrators who lived adjacent objected to the proposed scheme and demanded attractive gardens and a Rococo-style fence to better fit its prosperous surrounds. In the end, the additional expense was met by a 20,000 guilder grant from the city council that matched the original bequest of van Oorschot.

The Coninckshof in Leiden, founded by a bequest of 50,000 guilders from Cecilia Coninck in 1758 but built in 1773 to provide six houses for elderly women who belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. Despite the evident wealth of Coninck, an unmarried daughter of a wealthy local family, the city was poverty-stricken and the hofje is noted one of the few new buildings of its time.

Far fewer hofjes were founded in these years or in the new Dutch state established after Napoleonic occupation in 1815 though, as prosperity grew, many were rebuilt or renovated. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, responsibility for housing those most in need began to shift from private philanthropy to the state. The Dutch 1901 Housing Law marked this transition decisively and, in fact, new housing standards and codes led to the closure of many unreformed hofjes. A voluntary state pensions scheme initiated in 1919, made universal in 1947, and formally enacted in the 1957 General Old Age Pensions Act removed some of the perils of old age and one of the major drivers behind hofje formation.

Nevertheless, in terms of its social and environmental quality and in the context of an ageing population, the hofje model remains attractive. The Johannes Enschedé Hof in Haarlem, designed by Henk Döll (architect) in collaboration with Joost Swarte (graphic designer), was commissioned by the regents of the Bakenesserkamer and financed by the Ymere housing corporation. It’s a modest scheme of five two-storey houses and five one-bedroom flats (eight for women over 65, two for elderly couples) – a courtyard scheme in a modern idiom that pays tribute to the ideals and purpose of its inspiration.

In the Netherlands now there are around 100 independent almshouse foundations as well as housing associations performing a similar role, providing in total some 3000 homes. The almshouse model – while histories and regulatory structures differ – is stronger in Britain where 1602 independent almshouse charities administer 2546 schemes – almost 30,0000 homes on total housing around 36,000 people. (5)

We can’t replicate the past and wouldn’t wish to in many respects. The duty of the state to ensure decent housing for all should remain paramount. But the role and appearance of the hofjes remains appealing and, suitably adapted and supported, remains to provide a model of decent housing in changing and challenging times.

Sources

(1) Willemijn Wilms Floet, Urban Oases: Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems (naio10 publishers, TU Delft OPEN Publishing, 2022). Please note this book is available for free download at the link provided.

(2) Henk Looijesteijn, ‘Funding and founding private charities: Leiden almshouses and their founders, 1450–1800’, Continuity and Change, vol 27, no 2, 2012

(3) City Walking Tour of Leiden, Courtyards of Leiden (ND). For those confused by the name, Pieter Gerritsz. van der Speck, as I was, the full stop after Gerritz marks an abbreviation of Gerritszoon meaning ‘son of Gerrit’ but the fuller version is never used in Dutch.

(4) Government of the Netherlands, The History of Slavery in the Kingdom of the Netherlands

(5) Jenny Pannell and Alison Pooley, Almshouses: a Model of Community Housing for an Ageing Population (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, December 2020)

Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: ‘Reluctant Modernist’

16 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Book reviews, Housing, Wales

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Adam Voelcker, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist (University of Wales Press, 2025)

I’m not going to write much today as the real knowledge and expertise here lies with Adam Voelcker, an architect in Wales who has combined a career in private practice with writing on architecture – a cv that fits him perfectly to write a newly published book on the life and work of Sidney Colwyn Foulkes.

Foulkes (1884-1971) is an architect who deserves to be much better known. To quote from the publisher’s description, he was:

one of Britain’s most significant regional architects. His design work included schools, shops, churches and church halls, town halls, hospitals, cinemas, private houses and public housing schemes. Foulkes made a major contribution to buildings in his hometown of Colwyn Bay and its surrounds, and his influence extended across Wales and beyond.

Foulkes’ biography is worthy of study in its own right – the son of a bankrupted Colwyn Bay builder, his family’s sole breadwinner at the tender age of 16. His ‘first real break’, according to an online account, came in 1900 in the design and construction of ‘a demountable pierrot stand’. A steady stream of work thereafter secured him by 1914 the status and financial standing to secure a place at the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool with a scholarship granted by its director Charles Herbert Reilly. (1)

Palace Cinema, Conwy © Conwy Archive Service

Having qualified, Foulkes established his architectural practice in North Wales and took on the wide variety of commissions such local prominence brought – ranging from commercial premises to public works such as schools and hospitals. His Palace Cinema in Conwy won the prestigious Cinema of the Year award in 1936.

Foulkes did not design any council housing until, aged 60, in 1945. But the schemes that followed are, in my view, some of the most attractive in Britain. With housing a top priority as the country began to recover from the ravages of war, Foulkes was commissioned to design two new estates, one at Llanrwst and another in Beaumaris – both, as was typical in Wales, on difficult sloping sites. According to Voelcker, Foulkes professed himself terrified by the steep hillside setting of what became the Cae Bricks estate in Beaumaris.

Adam Voelcker, ‘A Council-House Architecture’, *Touchstone*, 2023, pp 30-35

Voelcker’s article in Touchstone, the annual journal of the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, provides an excellent account of the design and evolution of the Llanwrst estate – a fine summary of both the principles and exacting standards that Foulkes brought to his work and the constraints and pressures common to all architectural projects but perhaps particularly so to public housing. It’s a rare forensic account of the interaction between architect, local authority, national legislation and policy, and finance. You can read the article, ‘A Council-House Architecture’, here at the link provided (pdf).

The Cae Bricks Estate, captioned ‘Terrace on a Hillside’, in the *1949 Housing Manual*

A contemporary view of Ffordd Meigan, Cae Bricks © John Boughton

Cae Bricks was largely complete by 1948 (later extensions were built in the early 1950s) and the estate featured in the Ministry of Health and Housing’s 1949 Housing Manual as an example of good practice of building in terraces. Foulkes favoured terraced housing as more economical but it was also better adapted to Welsh terrain than more conventional semi-detached housing. Foulkes provided the homes wider frontages (allowing a front parlour) and lesser depth, features that maximised light and ventilation in the homes.

Ffordd Meigan junction, Cae Bricks © John Boughton

Aneurin Bevan, visiting the estate under construction, noted the below-regulation, 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 metre) ceiling heights – saving on bricks and heating costs – but was reassured by the quality of Foulkes’ designs. The height became the national standard in 1952.

Foulkes received another major council housing commission from Colwyn Bay Borough Council, the design of the Elwy Road Estate in Rhos-on-Sea, a scheme of 148 houses and 90 flats. It was built in two phases between 1952 and 1961 though its planning appears to have begun much earlier. Elwy Road is located on a more gently sloping site but is notable for its Radburn-style design separating cars and pedestrians – perhaps influenced by the pioneering Queen’s Park South Estate in nearby Wrexham, dating from 1950 – and the decorative touches that Foulkes brought to it. (2)

The Radburn influence is seen best in the two long terraces, one pastel-shaded, the other brown-rendered, and their rear service roads. Variety was provided by off-set, end of terrace brick houses and the three-storey blocks of flats. If you look beyond the open airy feel of the estate and its distant sea views, you’ll notice picturesque detail in the Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear-themed sculptural pediments provided, commissioned by Foulkes, with a little money to spare it is said, from his friend George Thomas Capstick.

The Mad Hatter featured in a doorway pediment © John Boughton

Frank Lloyd Wright, of Welsh extraction and in North Wales to receive an honorary degree from the University of Bangor, visited Elwy Road and declared it ‘perfectly charming’. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government later recognised it as of ‘outstanding quality’.

Other significant public housing commissions in Pentre Maelor (near Wrexham), Abergele and Neston (on the Wirral) are also fully detailed in Voelcker’s book. All bear his hallmark. As Voelcker’s chapter on housing concludes:

[Foulkes] had spent years struggling with changing space standards and budgetary constraints imposed by successive governments. With his determination to provide the housewife and her family with a satisfactory dwelling, he finally arrived at his wide double-fronted parlour house and was not going to lose it.

His housing designs perhaps illustrate what Voelcker describes as the blend of tradition and innovation that characterises Foulkes’ work. Many of his designs were broadly historicist but some – his cinemas notably and, unobtrusively, the housing estates are modernist in style. He was perhaps, as Voelcker terms him, a ‘reluctant modernist’.

Tafolog weir designed by Sydney Colwyn Foulkes as part of the expanded Dolgarrog hydro-electric power scheme © Jonathan Wilkins and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Voelcker’s books charts this fertile and accomplished career in richly illustrated detail. He considers Foulkes’ finest achievements to be his post-war estates and his designs in the developing field of industrial landscaping. His work for a number of public bodies was recognised in his being made a Fellow of the Institute of Landscape Architecture; his contribution as landscape consultant for the extension of the Dolgarrog power station won a Civil Trust Award in 1959.

It’s good to see this life and work fully recognised. As Voelcker states:

The book traces how, far removed from the metropolis like so many regional architects, Foulkes had to fight to produce good, ordinary architecture at a time of intense cultural and political change to define an architecture for the modern age.

Adam Voelcker, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist (November 2025),160pp, 16 colour and 49 black and white illustrations, is published by the University of Wales Press.

Notes

(1) Colwyn Bay Heritage Group, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes (1884-1971)

(2) I wrote about both the Elwy Road and Queens Park South schemes in my book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates (RIBA Publishing, 2022)

Book Review: Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester – a History of Social Housing

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Book reviews, Housing, Leicester

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Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: a History of Social Housing (Leicester Pioneer Press, 2025)

When I started this blog almost twelve years ago, council housing was a strangely neglected and too often stigmatised topic both in terms of academic study and popular discourse. And you can see from that first sentence just how easy it is to slip into distancing language. The point is, of course, that almost one third of households lived in council homes at peak in 1980; if you are a member of the early post-war generation, there’s a one in two chance that you spent part of your life in council housing. So, it’s our history and it deserves to be told well and respectfully.

I’m glad to say that much has changed since then. I’d like to think the blog (and a couple of books) played a small part in that but beyond that, in a time of housing crisis, many more people have come to realise just how vital social housing is – not only in providing accommodation to those in greatest need (which has become its reduced role) but in ensuring a housing market that works for private renters and would-be owner occupiers too. The centenary of the 1919 Housing Act – breakthrough legislation in terms of the requirement to build and build well and financial support to do so – provided a good opportunity for councils, tenants’ organisation and others to celebrate the story of their homes and estates.

Anyway, after that slightly self-serving introduction, the point of this post is to strongly recommend the new book written by Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing.

Homes built under the 1919 Housing Act: Nos 13-15 Deepdale, Coleman Road Estate, designed by Pick, Everard and Keay (Photo credit: Ned Newitt, 1992)

The first thing to say is that it’s hard to think of a person better qualified to write the book. Ned was a Leicester city councillor from 1984 to 2003, when he served amongst other things as chair of the Housing Committee. He is also a prolific chronicler of Leicester’s radical history with an active blog and many publications to his name.

As its opening words proclaim, the book:

celebrates the efforts and achievements of Leicester’s municipal housing pioneers. 100 years ago, they believed without good-quality housing, people’s life chances were dramatically reduced.

Whilst that truism sometimes seems forgotten today, it captures well the imperative then and now to provide everyone with a decent home and the benefit of that not only to the individual but to wider society.

But his succeeding words provide a dose of realism: ‘Unfortunately providing public housing was never going to be straightforward. From the outset it was beset by competing political agenda …’. And beyond those political conflicts, there were the good intentions gone awry – ambitious experiments that failed and changing circumstance that undermined founding ideals. It is a quality of the book that it charts this complex terrain thoroughly and judiciously.

The account begins – as does the wider history of council housing – in the slum conditions that blighted rapidly industrialising and urbanising Britain in the nineteenth century and the consequent need to provide the decent, affordable housing for working people that the private sector wouldn’t. Leicester’s first council housing was built in Winifred Street in 1900 (the tenements remain, converted into flats for elderly people in the 1960s). A local councillor and architect, John Tudor Walters, was a driving force behind the scheme.

The book describes many other individuals – for example, Labour councillors Herbert Hallam and Harry Hand in the early years – whose energy and ideals were crucial in getting housing built. Later, JS Fyfe, Leicester’s Housing Architect from 1920 to 1952, is prominent. The book does an excellent job in recounting the personalities that influenced the city’s housing policies and reminds us that, here as elsewhere, the drive and ideas of individuals shaped our council housing alongside national dynamics and legislation.

Nevertheless, it was the latter in our highly centralised state that were generally dominant, never more so than after the First World War when council housing in Leicester and the wider nation was shaped by the famous report on postwar housing by Tudor Walters, now a Liberal MP, and the 1919 Housing Act mentioned earlier.

This plan captures well the ideal of the post-First World War Garden Suburb: the layout of the Park Estate (Saffron Lane). (Image credit: Leicester City Council)

The ‘competing political agenda’ Newitt alluded to are never better illustrated by the back and forth of housing policy that he charts in the interwar period. Early idealism and generous investment were seen in Leicester’s first postwar estate, the Park (or Saffron Lane) Estate and, one of the city’s showpieces, the South Braunstone Estate.

Block of four parlour houses, Braunstone Estate, 1928 (Drawing by Ned Newitt from the original plans)

Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma.

Another war revived housing ambitions and, with especial force following the impact of the Great Depression, fired the belief that the new Britain to emerge from wartime destruction and sacrifice should be rationally planned. JS Fyfe’s report to the Special Leicester Reconstruction Committee in December 1942 is a fine example of the latter. It’s notable too – several years before Aneurin Bevan’s more famous strictures – that Fyfe criticised the ‘mistake’ that interwar estates had been ‘populated by people of one wage level’:

Socially this is bad and people of more than one wage level, and of varying cultural standards should be encouraged to reside together in close proximity.

‘Community Centre – western area’. This drawing showing the centre of the proposed New Parks Estate was displayed at the 1944 Post-War Reconstruction Exhibition. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)

An immediate postwar housing crisis was partially addressed by temporary prefabricated housing. Broader postwar aspirations were seen in the planning and construction of the New Parks (planned from 1943) and Eyres Monsell Estates.

A distinctive feature of Leicester was the emphasis on various forms of prefabrication and system building. So-called (concrete pier and slab) Boot Houses were built very extensively in Saffron Lane and other interwar estates. Easiform (cast in-situ concrete) and BISF (steel framed) housing, common across the country and, less commonly, Smith Houses of concrete slab construction were built in the early postwar years before another wave of prefabricated construction took off in the 1960s. According to Newitt, by 1986 46 percent of Leicester’s council housing was of non-traditional construction, compared to 15 percent in comparable authorities.

A yard off South Bond Street in 1936, showing the single tap providing the water supply. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)

Much of that prefabricated housing had subsequently to be demolished when it could not be renovated or repaired. But at the time it was a symbol of progress and a means, it was thought, of building efficiently and economically. Lest we judge too readily, the context here is vital. Newitt reminds us that even in 1971 30 percent of Leicester’s houses lacked an inside toilet; 11 percent had no bath or shower. The ambition was to finally eradicate the slums and provide modern well-equipped housing at scale.

Nevertheless that ambition could be overweening. Newitt describes the era of Konrad Smigielski, City Planning Officer, and Stephen George, City Architect, in the 1960s as ‘a period of frenzied development that changed the face of Leicester’. The city built only ten tower blocks, a relatively low number for a city of its size, but its new regime embraced the full range of modernist design and methods wholeheartedly – with mixed results.

Iffley Close, Rowlatts Hill, built with the Laing’s Easiform system, c1968. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)

Rowlatts Hill was built without subsidy to a particularly innovative design incorporating Radburn (traffic-free) principles for better-off tenants but came to face similar problems to other such mixed development estates across the country. St Leonard’s Court, a 11-storey point block completed in 1968 for middle-class occupation, was successful and has remained popular. The high-density four-storey deck-access and walkway St Andrew’s Estate, completed in 1971, was soon disliked. Goscote House, built for single people in 1973 (demolished 2023), morphed from the Hilton of Hillfields to ‘Hell on Earth’ according to local media.

Stephen George’s proprietary in-house battery casting process for concrete slab prefabrication used on the St Peter’s Estate of the late 1960s was a disaster and brought about the abolition of the unfortunate Direct Labour Organisation called upon to implement it.

This is a fascinating period in design and construction terms of interest beyond its Leicester borders. But Newitt is unsparing in his judgement of its local impact. Smigielski’s:

modernist adventure into housing was a disaster for the people who were housed on the estates he planned and it cost millions to rectify their deficiencies … Whilst much of the housing bult under Smigielski and George has now been demolished or rebuilt, the damage to the reputation of municipal housing in Leicester has been long-lasting.

Whilst Leicester’s travails were particularly striking, mood and policy were changing nationally with, from 1968, a clear preference for the rehabilitation of older properties rather than clearance and newbuild. By 1972 Leicester had declared 37 General Improvement Areas and its Housing Renewal Strategy came to be one of the most advanced in the country.

Newitt, who oversaw some of this work, considers it:

the most significant policy of the last 50 years. It not only succeeded in reversing inner-city decay, but it also channelled resources towards Leicester’s poorer communities. It did so without tearing down neighbourhoods …

By now, we are entering the new era of social housing (or lack of it) that we know so well from the 1980s onwards. According to Newitt, in 1979 at its peak Leicester City Council owned and managed 34,882 homes, housing around 30 percent of local households. By 2023, the figure stood at around 19,000, housing just under 15 percent of households. Leicester lost almost a quarter of its social housing stock between 1980 and 1991 to Right to Buy.

In the book’s concluding chapters, Newitt discusses amongst other things, the growth of housing associations and estate regeneration – familiar national stories with a local twist. More particular to Leicester, where now almost 60 percent of its population belong to one or other ethnic minorities, was the issue of housing equality. After years of racial discrimination, the ethnic make-up of the city’s social housing now almost exactly matches that of its wider population.

Finally, I would commend the book for its coverage of other topics – the role of tenants’ associations, controversies over rents in both public and private sectors, issues of provision for homeless people, to name just a few.

The book’s 300 pages therefore provide a comprehensive history of housing in Leicester. But I would recommend it to anyone interested in housing history as the book deftly combines an account of national dynamics and policies with the local peculiarities of people and place that should mark any genuine understanding of the topic. I’m sure it will find a deserved place on Leicester bookshelves but I think it is wider interest and relevance – to the general reader as well as students and academics in the field. I would add that it is also exceptionally well-illustrated with a range of images that complement the text at every turn. A small selection from the book is included in this post.

As we began this review with the book’s opening words, let’s also endorse its final sentence:

Although council housing has now shaken off the stigma that was attached to it in the 1980s, it has yet to be given the kind of priority and financial backing that it received in 1945.

Further details and purchasing information for the book can be found on the website of the Pioneer Press. It can be ordered from bookshops and online retailers.

How Rotterdam Shaped Social Housing: Part II, Bergpolderflat and the Prototypical Slab Block

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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Tags

1930s

Last week’s post examined Michiel Brinkman’s Justus van Effen Estate in Rotterdam, a 1920s’ pioneer of deck-access housing. Today, we look at the city’s second crucial contribution to social housing design, the Bergpolderflat scheme, completed in 1934, that provided the classic prototype of the postwar slab block.

In fact, the two schemes shared a significant lineage. Willem van Tijen, the chief promoter of the Bergpolderflat, declared it a: (1)

modern continuation of the ideas that inspired the design of the gallery building designed and executed by the late architect Brinkman in collaboration with [Engineer] Plate.

Left to right, Willem van Tijen, Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt

Michiel Brinkman’s son Johannes was, with Leendert van der Vlugt, a partner with van Tijen in the design of the building. City Engineer Auguste Plate was a co-founder with van Tijen of the company that promoted it.

Bergpolderflat, western aspect showing private balconies

Beyond its genuinely iconic form, the Bergpolderflat embodied a central, long-running debate within public housing provision around the necessity and the potential advantages of multi-storey accommodation. The felt imperative, then and now, was the need to build at higher density in central areas particularly where land was scarce or expensive. The claimed advantages were the fresh air and light that high-rise permitted and the freeing up of green open space between high-rise blocks. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the latter might mitigate the alleged advantages of higher density.)

A second, linked, proposition was that high-rise housing might be built more quickly, efficiently and inexpensively using standardised components and prefabrication. Then and now, there was a powerful drive to build more rapidly at greater scale using systems of mass manufacture. There is nothing particularly modern about what are nowadays called modern methods of construction.

In both aspects, the Bergpolderflat were intended as a demonstration project – one that trialled and, it was hoped, demonstrated the potential of new housing forms and new building methods. Coincidentally perhaps Walter Gropius had proposed just such a high-rise gallery access block at the third meeting of CIAM (the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in 1930. (2)

Parklaan © Wikifrits and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Willem van Tijen had founded NV Volkswoningbouw Rotterdam (a public housing limited company) with Plate in 1929 with the intention of pioneering new building types to house decently and efficiently a predominantly working-class population. As a prelude he put his innovative methods to the test in a small six-storey residential block designed for middle-class living (in fact he and his family were to occupy a penthouse apartment). Parklaan with its steel skeleton, glass curtain wall and novel internal configuration contained many of the features applied to the Bergpolderflat.

Both Parklaan and its later, larger counterpart embody in construction, form and ethos the characteristics of the prevalent modernist architectural ideology of the day known in Dutch as ‘Nieuwe Bouwen’ (New Building) or sometimes ‘Nieuwe Zakelijkheid’ (New Objectivity) – a functionalist style emphasising a building’s purpose should determine its form that eschewed unnecessary ornamentation. (3)

Bergpolder under construction showing steel frame and portal crane, illustrated in The Council for Research on Housing Construction, *Slum Clearance and Housing* (1934)

In Bergpolderflat, van Tijen used a steel-frame construction and a range of prefabricated components in the building’s internal structure. The steel skeleton enabled the non-load bearing predominantly glass curtain walls that are such a striking feature of the building. A portal crane (a shipyard crane that moved on rails) was used to facilitate its speedy building. (4)

The First Report for Research on Housing Construction (headed by the Earl of Dudley and a precursor of the 1944 Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings), prepared even as Bergpolderflat was under construction, declared: (5)

the completion of the steel-frame for the block of 72 flats in a total of 3½ weeks’ work … a remarkable demonstration of the increased speed made possible by modern construction.

The steel frame of Bergpoldergflat illustrated in illustrated in The Council for Research on Housing Construction, *Slum Clearance and Housing* (1934)

The block was nine-storeys tall with eight identical gallery access flats on each level, a communal basement space, and an extended entrance area with room for three shops. The 1.3-metre-wide access gallery ran along the building’s eastern side while the western side comprised private balconies. The northern end contained the scheme’s lifts and principal staircase; emergency stairs were located at the southern end.

The flats’ internal layout, illustrated in Sabine Ritter De Paris, Carlos Nuno L Lopes, ‘Housing Flexibility Problem: Review of Recent Limitations and Solutions’, *Frontiers of Architectural Research*, Volume 7, Issue 1, March 2018,

The internal layout was also striking. Firstly, with a floor area of around 550 square feet (51 square metres) the flats were small despite containing a living room, kitchen, shower room, separate toilet, and two bedrooms. As the floorplan illustrates, the apartments comprised two zones – a wider one containing the living room with the kitchen and services located on the gallery access side and a narrower one containing the two bedrooms – a children’s bedroom and a master bedroom that adjoined the private balcony.

Bergpolderflat, northern end entrance and stairway and lift

The potentially problems of this limited space were offset in a number of ways. Firstly, by the flat’s abundant natural light and moveable, part glass, partition walls and, secondly, reflecting a particular aspect of Nieuwe Bouwen thinking, the attempt to create a day/night cycle of space usage through the use of sliding partitions and folding beds.

Beyond this, there was a practical and ideological commitment to communal living. The basement area contained a laundry space with three shared washrooms and four drying rooms as well as an early electric washing machine, all free to use. It contained additionally storage space for bikes and prams as well as small individual storerooms for each flat.

To those who nevertheless criticised the small size of the flats, van Tijen countered that they were ‘mainly intended for young modern people who love simplicity, light and space’.

South-eastern aspect showing access gallery and emergency stairs

In other, sometimes surprising, respects, Bergpolderflat seems very much of its time. The central heating comprised one radiator (in the living room); this was apparently the Dutch standard of the day. Then, as van Tijen planned the flats to serve as affordable workers’ housing, there were cost cutting measures. The lifts opened on only every second intermediate landing leaving a half-flight of stairs up or down for every resident. As regards hot water, an internal supply was considered too costly; instead, tenants were entitled to 15 litres of free hot water daily picked up in buckets from the concierge.

The scheme received no government subsidy and was intended to be self-supporting. There was no upper income level set for residents and, despite those economising measures, the rents – set at 26 guilders a month for the lower floors and 31 guilders for the top five floors (the equivalent of around a quarter of an unskilled worker’s wage) – were too high for many. Many of the block’s new residents belonged to the middle-class.

There were also criticisms of the scheme’s appearance. The grandly named Dutch architect Marinus Jan Granpré Molière thought the block resembled a ‘a prison, where residents walk along the gallery in search of their “number”’. (6)

The Granpré Molière scheme at the junction of Abraham Kuyperlaan and Doctor de Visserstraat immediately opposite the Bergpolderflat

In fact, Granpré Molière designed his own housing scheme, completed in 1935, directly facing Bergpolderflat – a development of 282 workers’ houses in predominantly three-and four-storey terraces and a home for elderly people. For all his criticism of Bergpolderflat, his design echoed Nieuwe Bouwen themes both in its choice of materials (notably its yellow brick, steel window frames and glazed entrances) and some of its shared facilities.

In general, however, in architectural and housing circles at least: (7)

Bergpolder created a mild sensation in Europe. Leading periodicals devoted considerable space to the new Dutch “skyscraper”. Critics were generally united in praise.

One interesting demonstration of the widespread interest the scheme provoked was the 1939 report by the New Deal-sponsored Division of Foreign Housing Studies from which that quotation is drawn.

It concluded, reasonably considering the USA’s lead on such forms of construction, that the ‘average American observer will, at first, be inclined to see nothing startlingly novel in the so-called innovations’ but the report commended:

the synthesis of up-to-date developments in the various branches of building construction with several developments of their own into a rational whole that is of particular import. The synthesis was made according to one guiding principle: MECHANIZATION.

Frontispiece and illustration from Yorke and Gibberd, *The Modern Flat* (1937)

The block was also featured (and depicted in the book’s frontispiece) in FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd’s volume The Modern Flat, first published in 1937 – an influential attempt to promote modernist multi-storey housing.

In the Netherlands, as its later listing as a National Monument notes, it was (with apologies for the clunky translation): (8)

The first example of the application of the principle of large-scale assembly construction as well as of narrow galleries in high-rise buildings in public housing – in an elongated, block-shaped structure – and as such a prototype of the rational approach to the public housing problem, taking into account sunlight, optimal entry of light and air and sufficient surrounding greenery, by means of a public park; in this set-up also characteristic of the Nieuwe Bouwen.

Plaslaan © Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Zuidplein © Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Contemporarily, in Rotterdam, Bergpolderflat found early emulation in the Plaslaanflat designed along similar lines by van Tijen for higher income groups, and in the Zuidplein scheme commissioned by the city’s Municipal Technical Department in 1939 but built after the war in the late 1940s. (9)

Many other similar blocks would follow in the Netherlands where it became almost a standard form. But it will be familiar more widely to many of you – most notably in the schemes built in by the London County Council, in Edinburgh’s Cables Wynd House, and elsewhere.

Bergpolder interior entrance area, 2015, after renovation © Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh, and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Thoroughly renovated (and partly adapted as housing for elderly people) in 1989-1995 by the Netherlands’ then largest housing corporation, the Woningcorporatie Vestia, the Bergpolderflat looks as modern today as it did when first built.

As the American architect and architectural historian Talbot Hamlin noted back then, ‘the building has undeniable form: its pattern is clear, geometric, novel. It says what it has to say with terse vigor’. (10) Today, whilst the success of the scheme must stand or fall by the quality of its accommodation, it retains the capacity to excite and still exudes the promise of a housing revolution.

Sources

(1) Nicholas J Clarke, How Heritage Learns: Dutch Public Housing Heritage Evolution in Ecosystemic Perspective (2021)

(2) Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (2002)

(3) For full information on Parklaan, see Bewoners Organisatie Scheepvaartkwartier, Parkstraat 2, Parklaanflat

(4) The detailed information on the construction and form of Bergpolderflat is drawn from Rijksmonumenten.nl, Bergpolderflat in Rotterdam, architectuurgids.nl, Housing Block Bergpolder ,and Federal Works Agency, United States Work Projects Administration for the City of New York, the Division of Foreign Housing Studies, New Developments in Design and Construction of Housing Projects Abroad: An Account of a Housing Project in a Nine-Story Dutch “Skyscraper”, (October 1940)

(5) Slum Clearance and Housing, the First Report of the Council for Research on Housing Construction (1934)

(6) On-site signage

(7) New Developments in Design and Construction of Housing Projects Abroad …

(8) Rijksmonumenten.nl, Bergpolderflat in Rotterdam (Google Translate is responsible for the English form.)

(9) For further information on Plaslaan see Kokon, Plaslaan and for Zuidplein, see Platform Wederopbouw Rotterdam, Zuidpleinflat

(10) TF Hamlin, ‘Rotterdam’s Machine for Housing’, American Architect, October 1935

How Rotterdam Shaped Social Housing: Part I, the Justus van Effen Estate and ‘Streets in the Sky’

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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1920s

With two notable interwar schemes, the city of Rotterdam can justly claim to have shaped much of western Europe’s post-war social housing design – firstly in the Justus van Effen estate that pioneered the later fashion for ‘streets in the sky’, secondly in the Bergpolderflat building that established the classic form of the slab block. This week’s post will focus on the former.

A rare glimpse of older Rotterdam. The Delfshaven district was incorporated into the city in 1886 and escaped the heavy bombing that destroyed much of the central area.

Europe’s largest port had modest beginnings, a dam across the Rotte river in 1270 that gave an initially small fishing village its name. The settlement gained city status in 1340 and grew to become a significant trading hub. In the 17^th century, as the Netherlands experienced its so-called Golden Age, the city grew wealthy from international trade, including the trade in enslaved people. Commercial expansion followed and Rotterdam’s population grew from around 54,000 in 1800 to 379,000 by 1905.

Housing conditions in a confined inner city deteriorated sharply; cheaply built suburbs added to slum conditions. Rotterdam expanded its population and borders into surrounding polders (low-lying land reclaimed from river and sea) in initially unplanned fashion but in 1913 AC Burgdorffer, the City’s Director of Municipal Works, urged the Council to intervene. (1) The newly drained Spangen district was earmarked as an area of planned development.

There was, at the same time, a broader national trend towards housing reform: (2)

longstanding traditions of municipal autonomy and separate social provision by Catholic, Protestant and socialist organisations … fuelled what would soon become Europe’s most comprehensive system of arms-length housing provision, targeted firmly at the better-off working class.

Propelled by housing crisis and increased working-class organisation, the government passed a ground-breaking Housing Law (Woningwet in Dutch) in 1901 that promoted both housing reform (though building regulation and measures to tackle overcrowding) and public housing. For the latter, the structure and duties of non-profit housing associations were formalised and made subject to municipal regulation while the associations themselves were given access to low-cost public loans.

The urban plan of Spangen. The Justus van Effen Estate can be seen in the bottom left corner.

In 1916, Rotterdam set up its own Gemeentelijke Woningsdienst (municipal housing department) led by the civil engineer August Plate and architect JJP Oud. In the following year, the department formulated a masterplan for Spangen, intended as a model for future planning with a number of leading Dutch architects (including Oud himself) commissioned to complete different sectors. The district (3)

was a sign of promise. In its symmetric form, the neighbourhood of Spangen seems to bear witness to the optimistic mood of the era. It was assumed that the social misery accompanying early industrialisation had been overcome and a more balanced society, based on rational planning, would eventually emerge.

Meanwhile, contemporary politics enhanced the role of the national and local state. The Netherlands did not fight in the First World War but the war’s collateral economic and social impact led to the introduction of rent controls in 1918. Private sector and housing association construction dropped sharply as a result and municipal authorities stepped into the breach. In 1919, local councils built five times as many houses as the housing associations; by 1927, as conditions normalised, just twice as many.

In Rotterdam in 1918, Auguste Plate appointed Michiel Brinkman to design what became the Justus van Effen estate (named after an early 18^th century Dutch writer in case you’re wondering). Brinkman was an interesting choice, known principally for his design of factories, offices, and warehouses.

A drawing of the estate by Brinkman, 1922

He applied similar principles to his new commission; preliminary drawings indicated ‘the anticipated delivery routes of milkmen and local bakers and sketched out flows of garbage collection, energy supply, and foot traffic’. In architectural terms, this was classic functionalism – the belief that form should follow function and an associated commitment to plain, unornamented design. (4)

In Spangen, Brinkman designed a complex of 264 homes with one large block, 147m by 85m, encircling a courtyard containing some smaller residential blocks and a tall central service block that contained a central heating plant, baths, laundry, drying rooms and cycle storage. A public street enters through high arches and snakes through the complex. One commentary notes how: (5)

The massiveness and density of the exterior, which more or less consciously refers to the medieval city, fades inside, giving way to a garden city model.

The genius of Brinkman’s design lay in this combination of what the architect Joris Molenaar has called ‘garden-village development, whilst using a stacked construction’. The four-storey residential blocks comprised one-storey flats on first and second levels, each with ground level access and their own gardens, and above them two-storey maisonettes.

The crucial innovation that made this possible was the two-to three-metre-wide, one-kilometre-long access gallery that circled the estate at third floor level. Balcony access – as the ubiquitous tenement blocks of the London County Council testify – was a common enough device at this point, enabling multi-storey accommodation and reducing the need for expensive stairwells. In the Justus van Effen estate, there were ten stairwells overall though with the rare addition of two freight lifts permitting those trolley deliveries Brinkman had anticipated.

But this bovenstraat in Dutch (meaning upper street but more freely translated as a ‘street in the sky’) went much further. Practically, facing internally into the courtyard and of additional width, it was also both a private space and a space to socialise for the estate’s residents. Architecturally, it combined old and new styles of living – the traditional Dutch village was now integrated into the metropolis on top of urban tenements. (6)

Brinkman himself hoped that the gallery and shared facilities ‘would induce “a certain sense of solidarity” that would make this “experiment” a success’. (7)

Others, however, found the walkway (and the flat roof typical of modernism) alarming: (8)

That two-metre space would become an endless to-do of children playing, neighbours arguing and suppliers fighting. What’s more, the 264 families will share one big flat roof and Mr Verheul [architect and city councillor] was very much afraid that it would be used for orgies that would raise a blush in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Mr Verheul’s vivid imaginings were not borne out and the evidence suggests that the walkway, with its tiled railings and integrated flower boxes, became a popular and well-used feature.

Internally, the homes were modern, containing a living room, kitchen and toilet and three bedrooms. They were the first social rent homes in the Netherlands to be centrally heated.

Interior view with central service block to rear

Sixty or so years on, the importance of the estate was recognised by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands in 1985 when it was declared a national monument due to its ‘urban and architectural-historical value, as well as from the viewpoint of the development of public housing’.

But what was once modern had grown old. The estate had begun to look shabby; its flats were considered too small for contemporary tastes and needs. From the 1960s, better-off residents fled both the estate and the wider Spangen area to better and newer housing elsewhere. And typically, a new migrant population moved into the poorer and cheaper housing vacated. By the 1990s, Spangen was rated the most deprived neighbourhood in Rotterdam, noted for its ‘high unemployment, ethnic tensions [and] high incidence of mostly drugs-related criminality’. (9)

The first renovation of the estate took place between 1985 and 1990. The principal substantive reform was to create fewer, larger homes by merging smaller apartments – 264 homes were reduced to 164. Each home was provided its own shower and central heating. Some stairwells were blocked and the freight lifts decommissioned due to problems of antisocial behaviour.

An image of the estate after the first renovation

But this was, essentially, a cost-driven exercise paying little respect to the estate’s original design and ethos, as seen most crudely in the decision to paint over masonry interiors to conceal repair work. Within ten years, this botched refurbishment had failed both visually as the white painted facades deteriorated and socially as the estate’s reputation plummeted further.

The estate’s owners Woonstad, the city’s largest housing association, determined a second major renovation was needed but this time a restorative refurbishment that honoured the character and features of the original design. The work was completed in 2012. This was to be ‘100% MoNUment’ – a slogan that played on ‘nu’ (the Dutch word for now) ‘not only meaning a monument all the way, but also a monument of the present’. (10)

The restoration team – architectural practices Molenaar & Co. and Hebly Theunissen, and landscape architect Michael van Gessel – won the 2016 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize for its work. (11)

Contemporary office space (with thanks to Matthew Cook)

Stairwells were restored and lifts reinstated; yellow-and-red-brick facades were cleaned and repaired and woodwork was re-painted in original shades of white, green and ochre. Further reconfiguration of housing units reduced the overall total to 154 but the opportunity was taken to soundly insulate the whole estate to meet contemporary standards. The central service block was re-designed and currently contains a café, workspace and arts organisation.

That, of course, suggests a shift in the nature of the estate. Some of the new and restored homes were offered for sale and now only around 30 percent of the estate is social rented. There may be benefits to this greater income mix but, as Thomas Wemsing observes: (12)

the part-privatization of this iconic social housing project also reflects an unfortunate development in the once-progressive housing policies of the Netherlands.

In its earlier heyday, the estate was an inspiration to Le Corbusier (for whom the internal corridors of the Unité d’habitation represented a form of ‘streets in the sky’, the Smithsons in their designs for the Golden Lane Estate and Robin Hood Gardens, and the prime British exemplar of the concept, the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield.

As a contemporary visitor, the Justus van Effen estate in its fully restored state remains a superb illustration of both a principled, progressive vision of social housing and its skilled implementation. Its chequered history reminds us to avoid crude architectural determinism and those assessments of public housing that impute some original sin to its form and ethos and supposed elements of ‘design disadvantage’ whilst ignoring how estates and residents are so powerfully affected by broader circumstance.

The last word should go to the paean offered to the estate by Arie (AW) Heijkoop, a socialist alderman of the city, in a 1928 volume celebrating Rotterdam’s 600th anniversary. (He also noted the early death of Michiel Brinkman – ‘one of its younger masters’ – in 1925.) (13)

The great Brinkman plan, with its upper galleries 7m above street level and of approximately 800m length, on which the baker, the milkman and the greengrocer can wheel along their carts with ease, and access the ground floor door, without the housewife needing to walk downstairs, is an extraordinary example of modern public housing. These dwellings, provided with block heating and special refuse chutes, with neat built-in kitchen counters, appointed with modern ablutions, closely approach the ideals of urban housing. The gardens between the various blocks, the bath- and washing provisions in the centre, complete this neat complex, of which our city can justly be proud.

Postscript

I’m very grateful to Matthew Cook who supplied the following photographs taken this week having read the blog post. He commented – as will be seen from the images – just how successful the renovation has been and how well the deck is used.

Sources

(1) Stadsarchief Rotterdam, ‘Volkshuisvesting’

(2) Miles Glendinning, Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History

(3) Jack Burgers and Robert Kloosterman, ‘Dutch Comfort: Post-industrial Transition and Social Exclusion in Spangen, Rotterdam’, Area, December 1996, No. 4 Vol. 28

(4) Architectuual, Justus Van Effen Complex

(5) Hidden Architecture, The Spangen Quarter

(6) Wolfgang Sonne, Dwelling in the metropolis: reformed urban blocks 1890-1940. Project Report. University of Strathclyde and Royal Institute of British Architects, Glasgow, (2005)

(7) Charlotte van Emstede, Expired Experiment – Modern Monument: the Heritage Significance of the Justus van Effen Housing Complex as Driver for Urban Regeneration and Social Sustainability. (Paper delivered at the ICOMOS 17th General Assembly, Paris, December 2011)

(8) Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 17 April 1920

(9) Burgers and Kloosterman, ‘Dutch Comfort: Post-industrial Transition and Social Exclusion in Spangen, Rotterdam’.

(10) Charlotte van Emstede, Expired Experiment – Modern Monument: the Heritage Significance of the Justus van Effen Housing Complex …

(11) 2016 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize

(12) Thomas Wemsing, Glory of an Icon Restored, Architectural Record. February 2014, Vol 202, Issue 2

(13) Quoted in Nicholas J Clarke, How Heritage Learns: Dutch Public Housing Heritage Evolution in Ecosystemic Perspective (2021)

Gidea Park: the Modern Homes Exhibition, 1934

07 Tuesday Oct 2025

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Housing

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1930s, Havering

Gidea Park, now in the London Borough of Havering, has hosted two significant housing exhibitions. Both were held to promote housing reform and innovation, better homes for new times albeit with a very distinct focus on middle-class needs and aspirations. In 1911, as we saw in last week’s post, that meant, with the arts and crafts movement in full swing, a return paradoxically to more traditional and vernacular forms, at least superficially. The few neo-Georgian designs in the Exhibition were held by their advocates to represent something more ostensibly and practically modern. In 1934, the mandate was to embrace a whole-hearted modernism that rejected and superseded all past styles. Today’s post examines how far that ambition succeeded.

Sir Herbert Raphael, the chief instigator of the 1911 Exhibition, had died in 1924. His de facto successor in Gidea Park Ltd (the organisational force behind both exhibitions) was his nephew – not his son as mistakenly stated in Pevsner – Major RA (Ralph) Raphael. It was a conversation in 1933 between Raphael and architect and planner Raymond Unwin, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), that led to the new competition that would select the 35 houses to feature in the 1934 Modern Homes Exhibition.

For all the apparent radicalism of the later venture, there were distinct echoes with 1911. As in 1911: (1)

one of the primary objects of the Gidea Park Modern Homes Exhibition [was] to bring the architect and the speculative builder into closer working touch for the improvement of housing in general.

In the Exhibition guide, Raphael observed the ‘miniature towns … springing up with mushroom alacrity’ and decried the ‘machine-made rabbit hutches’ they comprised. Elsewhere, Unwin, as car ownership grew, arterial roads spread and speculative housebuilding boomed, condemned the ‘the ribbon development that disgraces this country’. His successor, as president of RIBA, Sir Gilbert Scott attacked the ‘housing schemes … put up by builders from a few “stock” plans … ruining many parts of England’. (2)

It was an approach that merged a sincere desire for better design and planning with an equally sincere concern for the professional standing and interests of architects.

Again as in 1911, there was a strong emphasis on labour-saving design and fittings, with lingering reference to the Servant Problem – the lack of working people willing to labour domestically for the upper classes – that had already alarmed the Edwardians. The competition entries would ‘demonstrate the most recent developments in all that pertains to British architecture, building, building materials, housing and garden accessories’.

In a clear contrast with the past, however, the new exhibition aimed to promote an explicitly modernist form of domestic architecture. Maxwell Fry, Britain’s leading modernist architect, put the case trenchantly in his contribution to the Exhibition guide entitled ‘The Changing World’:

Ridiculously enough, we have gone backward, for all these nice new family houses, gradually altering themselves within to suit our needs so well, are all pretending to look like houses built in Elizabeth’s time, or George I’s time, or Queen Anne’s time. How extraordinary!

Now architects are saying that we have no need to go backwards at all; that we are quite able to stand on our own feet and build houses that belong to us entirely and not to any past period of English history.

Raphael stated ambitiously the aim:

To combine the most modern British homes, as exemplified here, with the ideas of the public, in order to produce a house type which will indicate a general standard of domestic building throughout Great Britain.

It is by this measure perhaps that the success or failure of the Exhibition can best be measured.

An impressive 475 entries were submitted to the competition, judged by a panel of leading architects and planners that included Fry himself as well as SD Adshead, Ewart G Culpin, AE Beresford, Howard Robertson and W Harding Thompson.

The competition comprised five categories ranging the cheapest Class A and Class B semi-detached homes at £400 and £500 each, for which most entries were received, to Classes C, D and E made up of detached houses and garages costing from £650 to £900.

The judges themselves provided a handy checklist of the character of entries. There were some they described as ‘designs of traditional character’ (meaning here principally neo-Georgian); some they termed ‘mock moderns’ – demonstrating ‘the tricks but not the logic of good contemporary design’. A large group combined traditional materials and construction with modernist forms; ‘an intelligent compromise between old and new methods’, they thought. (3)

Finally, they singled out ‘two designs … offering a complete departure from traditions both in plan, construction, and consequently in general design’. We’ll come back to these but we’ll note for the time being how, in the judges’ words, in these houses the ‘“plastic” qualities of reinforced concrete … enabled the designers to plan on a basic of the exact functioning of the domestic machine’. The final phrase was presumably a knowing reference to Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (Towards an Architecture,1923).

Since:

The competition was expressly for modern homes … preference was given as far as possible to designs avoiding the hackneyed and stereotyped designs so universal in small house building.

The advert placed in the *Daily Telegraph*

Thirty-five winning entries were built and the Exhibition opened on 31 July 1934 and ran for three weeks. An advert in the Daily Telegraph provided a hard sell of all its claims and promises: (4)

The most remarkable show of its kind that you have ever seen! All the wonders of modern home-planning, building, furnishing, decoration – brought together in one fascinating full-scale exhibition.

With entertainment, excellent catering, good music, cheap tickets from Liverpool Street and ample parking and, finally, capturing something of the would-be glamour of the age, ‘Aeroplanes available for all wishing to see the Exhibition from the air’.

What did you see whether on the ground or from above? Internally, these were (almost entirely), to borrow Fry’s phrase, ‘servantless’ homes and that more informal middle-class lifestyle led to living rooms that combined formerly separate dining- and drawing-rooms. Kitchen and sculleries were also combined to create ‘a single domestic workshop equipped with gas or electric cooker, electric refrigerator, and other features of modern equipment.’ (5)

Externally, visitors would see a range of materials in use – concrete rarely, cream-coloured bricks more commonly, and tiles of different colours. Two-colour decoration was in vogue – contrasting shades on facing walls that ‘brought out unexpected beauties of light, shadow, and angle’. There were large, usually steel-framed windows too but the most obvious distinguishing mark and a cliché of modern architecture was the flat roof. (6)

The winner of the Class A category of cheapest semi-detached homes was an entry from JR Moore-Simpson built at 312 -314 Eastern Avenue East. They form a modest, brick-built pair; the Exhibition Guide comments that:

the materials have been selected for durability, and have been adapted in the design to suit modern requirements … Internally every effort has been made to provide an easily worked house and to reduce upkeep to a minimum.

It presumably represented what the judges had called ‘an intelligent compromise between old and new methods’

320-22 Eastern Avenue East, rear view, as depicted in the *Architects’ Journal*, 1934

But the one they got excited about in Class A and one of the two designs they had particularly noted, was 320-322 Eastern Avenue East designed by Holford, Stevenson & Yorke. (Pevsner incorrectly lists it as 328-30 Eastern Avenue.) No. 320 is now in a sorry state and its neighbour much modified. The Architects’ Journal critic called them a ‘very modern and quite delightful pair’. This was the first house designed by FRS Yorke, then aged 27, but he was already emerging as one of the country’s leading exponent of modernist design, the author of The Modern House in 1934 and, with Frederick Gibberd, The Modern Flat in 1937. (7)

Also arrayed along Eastern Avenue are the winning entries of the Class B category. (It’s perhaps not coincidental that the cheaper exhibition houses were located on what even then must have been a busy main road.) Scott, Chesterton & Shepherd’s design, now substantially altered, at 340-342 Eastern Avenue East came first. (Scott was Elisabeth Scott, the only female architect to feature in the Exhibition.) Further along 344-46 by Maxwell Allen and 348-50 by Andrews & Duke echo the compromise design seen in the Moore-Simpson pair described earlier.

Moore Simpson obviously hit a sweet spot of design finesse, sturdy construction and convenient living so far as the judges were concerned because his Class C detached home at 15 Brook Road was placed first in its category.

Other designs in the category – by Geoffrey Ransom at 13 Brook Road and Anthony Minoprio and Geoffrey Spencely at 18 Brook Road maintained a similar form with a more dashing and ostensibly ‘modern’ appearance though subsequent owners did much to modify them.

Moving to Category D, essentially a price point, LW Thornton White took first prize with his house at 3 Brook Road, seen above both in its original pristine form and currently. You can play Spot the Difference and judge for yourself the extent to which the original design has been improved (and perhaps it has for those living in the house) or corrupted.

Significant changes have also been imposed (it’s not fair to say ‘inflicted’ unless you’re an architectural absolutist) on 1 Brook Road in the same category designed by HS and FR Pite, ‘planned from the start to provide the largest possible living space, consistent with modern requirements of light and air’, according to the Exhibition Guide; ‘the living room and dining recess, which is fitted with an electric fire, will give a floor area considerably in excess of many much larger houses’.

If you are an architectural purist or a fan of serious modernism, I’ve saved the best till last. 64 Heath Drive, designed by Francis Skinner and Tecton, is the only (Grade II) listed house of the modern homes. It is the second of the two houses considered of special note by the competition assessors; one of the few constructed of reinforced concrete and uncompromisingly modern in appearance.

64 Heath Drive, depicted in the *Architects’ Journal*, 1934

Skinner, its principal architect, was just 26 when it was completed, already the closest associate of Berthold Lubetkin in the Tecton group the latter founded in 1932. Skinner, a Communist Party activist at this time, would be a significant contributor to public housing design in Finsbury in subsequent years. Here, ironically, this house, in the most expensive Class E category, was one of the few to have servant’s quarters though, in civilised fashion, these were ‘a maid’s domain, complete with bedroom and bathroom’. (8)

The architect and writer John Allan describes: (9)

Though still decidedly primitive in expression, detail and construction, an effort to master the Corbusian essentials is evident from the conscientious inclusion of piloti, strip fenestration, roof terraces …, proscenium screen opening and promenade stairway.

It also, to the untutored eye, just looks exceptional, especially since having been restored to something much nearer its original appearance (and repainted, I think, since my visit in 2024). With its L-plan form providing a sun terrace and enclosed garden, ‘it remains’, according to its Historic England listing, ‘a sophisticated, intelligent design, providing optimum levels of privacy and natural light’. (10)

It was also, as Pevsner reminds us, ‘designed for repetition along Heath Drive to form a continuous white-walled frontage, a daring idea and one alive to ideas of new forms of social housing rather than the one-off villa’.

That wasn’t feasible in the context of the 1934 Exhibition. Instead, its immediate neighbour 62 Heath Drive is an art deco-influenced design (including a rare pitched pantiled roof) by John Leach whilst 60 Heath Drive, by Chesterton & Shepherd, is more conventionally modernist in form whilst being brick-built.

As a final footnote, it’s worth travelling south of the main road to the Balgores extension of the Gidea Park estate. On Balgores Crescent, you’ll see a row of ‘suntrap houses’; ‘a tentative modernist offshoot of a speculative house building tendency that specialised in the mock-Tudor or ‘Jacobethan’ styles’, according to Joe Mathiesen, dubbed ‘bogus modern’ by some but, more evocatively, as ‘Jazz Moderne’ by John Betjeman. At any rate, they were a more popular and common feature of the London suburbs than the more purely modernist designs featured in the 1934 Exhibition. (11)

The advert for Geddy Court on the inside cover of the 1934 Exhiition guide

Nearby, there is Geddy Court, developed in 1934 by the same Gidea Park Ltd that had promoted the Modern Homes show. It’s condemned by Pevsner as ‘a completely spiritless block of flats’ and it is, in truth, undistinguished but it’s a modest example of the mansion blocks that were a booming form of middle-class accommodation in the 1930s.

Those preceding comments beg the question how successful was the Modern Homes Exhibition and to what extent did it fulfil its stated aim ‘to combine the most modern British homes … with the ideas of the public’. You probably feel you know the answer.

The anonymous critic of the Architects’ Journal, in an otherwise laudatory piece on 64 Heath Drive, perhaps touched on something essential: (12)

But still there seems to be something missing – a face, an expression. The fact is that a mass of new scientific knowledge and constructional methods, equipment, etc., has been available to architects for some time, and should now be well-known; but still their buildings appear to appeal to the public more on intellectual grounds, on self-conscious presentation of this knowledge, or these constructional methods, rather than on any real architectural beauty.

The reviewer in Country Life, less jaundiced than you might assume as he (presumably he) thought the Exhibition as a whole ‘a most commendable effort’, nevertheless questioned the predominance of the flat roof – as an accessible space, no better than a garden and ill-suited to the British climate: ‘Personally, I believe it to be more of a stunt than anything else’. (13)

The Observer, modelling a more forward-looking outlook, contended that the ‘young people love the modern concrete houses. Elderly people think the Tecton house would be like “living out of doors”’.

In general, as we have also seen in our long-running account of public housing, modernism made very little headway in interwar Britain. Those who sympathised with modernist methods and forms looked to the Continent and regretted that Gidea Park could not ‘touch either the Stuttgart or the Vienna Exhibitions, and purely because we have not gone far enough upon the road we are travelling’. (14)

Within the architectural profession, the benefits of architect-designed houses were asserted to have been amply demonstrated but the market – dominated by speculative builders with a trained eye for profit – suggested something else. The British middle-class, purchasing homes on an unprecedented scale in the building boom of the 1930s, preferred something that seemed to them more obviously homely, the stock designs lamented by Sir Gilbert Scott and the backward-looking pastiches of past styles condemned by Maxwell Fry.

Sources

(1) Gidea Park Modern Homes Exhibition Official Catalogue and Guide(1934)

(2) Unwin quoted in ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’, Architects’ Journal, 2 August 1934 and ‘Sir Gilbert Scott on the New Gidea Park Exhibition’, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1934

(3) ‘Competition News’, Architects’ Journal, 7 December 1933

(4) Advertisement, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 1934

(5) ‘An Exhibition of Modern Houses at Gidea Park’, Country Life, 4 August 1934

(6) ‘The Liveable House. Architects and New Conditions. Exhibition at Gidea Park’, The Observer, 19 August 1934

(7) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5 East (2005) and M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park, Architects’ Journal, 19 July 1934

(8) M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’

(9) John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (2013)

(10) Historic England, 64 Heath Drive

(11) See Joe Mathieson for Modernism in Metroland, Streamline in the Suburbs

(12) House at Gidea Park, Essex, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1934

(13) ‘An Exhibition of Modern Houses at Gidea Park’, Country Life

(14) M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’

The Modernism in Metroland blog has also written about the 1934 Exhibition and more broadly on Art Deco, Modernism and Brutalism in the suburbs of London and beyond.

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