materiality and municipal suburbia: early twentieth-century council housing at tang hall, york

MATERIALITY AND MUNICIPAL SUBURBIA

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY COUNCIL HOUSING AT TANG HALL, YORK

Exam No. Y8160275

Submitted for the Degree of Master of Arts in Historical Archaeology

University of York Department of Archaeology

September 2013

Word Count: 19861

ABSTRACT

A materially-‐focussed approach to the study of council housing demonstrates the

aims behind, and residents’ responses to, two phases of council house building at

Tang Hall in York. Using data about houses and the designed environment,

conclusions are drawn about how social change was engineered through domestic

and urban planning, and how this relates to more recent changes in concepts of the

home and inequalities in current housing issues.

vi + 95 pages; 34 illustrations, 24 in colour; bibliography; appendix with tables and graphs; appendix with colour photographs.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract.....................................................................................................iTable of Contents.................................................................................iiList of Illustrations..............................................................................iiiAcknowledgements..............................................................................v

Chapter 1: Introduction......................................................................1# 1.1: Where the Project Originates...........................................................1# 1.2: Theoretical Considerations...............................................................3# 1.3: Scope of the Project............................................................................6# 1.4: The Issues................................................................................................8

Chapter 2: Research Context of the Project............................10# 2.1: Studies of Council Housing Between the Wars........................10# 2.2: Materially Focussed Approaches to Council Housing............17# 2.3: Existing Studies in Relation to this Project...............................20

Chapter 3: Council Housing in Context......................................22# 3.1: Changing Ideas about How People Should Live.......................22# 3.2: Model Villages and the Garden City Movement......................25# 3.3: The Garden City-Type as Standard Design...............................30

Chapter 4: Houses in Tang Hall: Two Phases of Development.......................................................................................33# 4.1: History of the Development at Tang Hall...................................33# 4.2: Council Houses Built at Tang Hall: “Homes fit for # Heroes”..........................................................................................................37# 4.3: Council Houses Built at Tang Hall after 1923...........................42# 4.4: From the Garden Suburb to the Council Estate?....................46

Chapter 5: Use and Re-Use..............................................................49# 5.1: Social Aims in Building the Tang Hall Estate.............................49# 5.2: Residents and Their Influence........................................................51

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia

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# 5.3: Alterations At Tang Hall Before 1980..........................................52# 5.4: Alterations At Tang Hall Since 1980............................................55

Chapter 6: Conclusion......................................................................60# 6.1: Concluding Thoughts At Tang Hall..............................................60# 6.2: Problematising Individualism.........................................................62# 6.3: Current Housing Issues in Britain.................................................63# 6.4: Evaluation and Further Research..................................................65

Appendix 1: Tables and Charts.......................................................67

Appendix 2: Photographs.................................................................72

Bibliography.........................................................................................84


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 0.1: Tang Hall Manor...................................................................................6

Figure 1.1: Workers’ housing at Saltaire........................................................24Figure 1.2: Plan of Saltaire..................................................................................25Figure 1.3: Bournville village.............................................................................26Figure 1.4: Houses at Port Sunlight..................................................................26Figure 1.5: Ebenezer Howard’s illustration of the garden city and the # # rural belt............................................................................................27Figure 1.6: Houses at New Earswick................................................................28Figure 1.7: Scullery of a Cottage at New Earswick....................................28Figure 1.8: Plans and elevations for houses at Poplar Grove, New # # Earswick.............................................................................................28

Figure 2.1: Ordnance Survey map of York showing Tang Hall................34Figure 2.2: Map showing phases of council development at Tang Hall # # ..............................................................................................................35Figure 2.3: ‘Experimental’ concrete house elevation.................................36Figure 2.4: Houses built of concrete at Tang Hall.......................................36Figure 2.5: Congreve Road, Well Hall Estate.................................................38Figure 2.6: Seventh Avenue, Tang Hall............................................................38Figure 2.7: Layout for phase one of the Well Hall Estate..........................38Figure 2.8: Plan and elevation for a terrace of four parlour houses, # # Tang Hall............................................................................................39Figure 2.9: Ordnance Survey map showing phase one of council # # development at Tang Hall............................................................41Figure 2.10: Map showing distribution of house types at Tang Hall.....42Figure 2.11: Etty Avenue, Tang Hall.................................................................43Figure 2.12: Wycliffe Avenue, Tang Hall.........................................................44Figure 2.13: Graph showing approximate average footprint for # # separate building phases at Tang Hall.....................................44Figure 2.14: Tudor Walters “type I” suggested layout...............................45Figure 2.15: Plan of type 15 house at Woolnough Avenue.......................45

Figure 3.1: Original plans for type 19 house.................................................52


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Figure 3.2: Ground floor plans for type 12 houses.....................................53Figure 3.3: Type 21 houses showing later insertion of first floor # # plumbing services..........................................................................53Figure 3.4: Type 21 end terrace showing later insertion of first floor # # plumbing............................................................................................54Figure 3.5: First floor plan of type 9 house...................................................54Figure 3.6: First floor plan of type 19 house................................................54Figure 3.7: Graph showing comparison of visible alterations between # # Sixth Avenue and Tuke Avenue...................................................56Figure 3.8: Window alteration and removal from type 17 house...........57Figure 3.9: Type 15 house with enlarged windows.....................................57Figure 3.10: Type 5 houses with bow windows inserted...........................57


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to:

Dr. Jonathan Finch

Dr. James Symonds

Duncan Hawley

Jane Burrows and the Tang Hall Local History Society

The residents of Tang Hall

City of York Archives staff

York Explore staff

Anthony Platts

Victoria Lloyd-‐Adams

Much of the research in this project has been made possible thanks to the Edina

Digimap project and Google Streetview.

NOTE ON THE IMAGES

All images and photographs used in the text and appendices are produced by the author unless otherwise attributed.


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MATERIALITY AND MUNICIPAL SUBURBIA

INTRODUCTION

This study aims to ask questions about people, which are as relevant to

current issues as they are to the historical areas being examined. It aims to explore

ideas about how people can make places to make people, and how we interact with

imposed environments. The project focusses on early twentieth century council

housing in Tang Hall, York, developed during the 1920s as a suburban low-‐density

estate for new council tenants, now home to a mixture of homeowners, private

tenants and council tenants since the introduction of the Right To Buy in 1980.

Through a focus on the material environment of the council estate, the houses

themselves, interior spaces and estate layout, conclusions will be sought about how

it was designed for what its creators saw as particular groups of residents-‐ the

working classes, both those who were aspirational and sought a more middle-‐class

way of life, and the traditional working-‐class poor who were deemed to require

improvement for the good of society.

The designed environment of the council estate embodies an expectation

about the residents who would live there, the social and moral lives that they

would lead once they moved there. An investigation of changes to the fabric of the

council estate brought about by residents in more recent years aims to uncover

how people have responded to this expectation. It will also demonstrate that whilst

people’s lives are transformed by the agency of the material world, people are also

able to exert their own agency over the material world to transform their lives.

1.1 WHERE THE PROJECT ORIGINATES.

The study of council housing has been a topic of discussion for a number of

related disciplines over the last century. Scholars of social policy have approached

the subject from the point of view of its perceived successes or failures, and how

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Introduction

1

they might apply to the development of existing policies (Merrett 1979). Social

historians have taken up the question of life on the council estate in direct

response to addressing issues of class, which appeared to be at once dissolving but

also in some respects to be reinforced in Britain by late twentieth century capitalist

society (McKibbin 1998). Others have seen the signieicance of Britain’s experiment

with state housing at a subsequent time of economic crisis, reelecting capitalist

society’s cohesiveness and its dependence upon elexibility in terms of housing

ideology (Swenarton 2002, 270).

Council housing in Britain was developed as a response to severe housing

shortage and a period of economic and social uncertainty after the First World War

(Bowley 1985; Swenarton 1981; Bowdler 1999). At a time when people are once

more questioning the success of capitalism, and some theorists are heralding the

end of the capitalist world system in the near future (for example, Wallerstein

1999, Wallerstein 2004), whilst economic issues are impinging upon the

aspirations and expectations of a majority of people in the western world, it is

perhaps relevant to think about our relationship with the everyday environment of

our houses and how we engage with housing resources.

Despite huge leaps forward in expectations of minimum standards of

housing in the last hundred years, newly built British homes are still perceived as

struggling to achieve the real standards of other countries (Commission for

Architecture and the Built Environment 2009). Caught between availability of

suitable and cost-‐effective development land, proeit margins demanded by the

construction industry and the need to build homes that people can afford to buy or

rent, housing standards are being squeezed as expectations remain high (Joyce

2011).

The expectation of high standards of housing and a high rate of

homeownership in the early twenty-‐eirst-‐century also hides a growing housing

crisis. Unlike in the 1920s and 1930s, housing shortage is no longer physically

characterised by obvious areas of poorly built houses, bad sanitation or noticeable

overcrowding. Homeless families are not now placed in the appalling temporary

homes of the 1930s as described by George Orwell (Orwell 1937), but rather in

supereicially more acceptable bed and breakfast accommodation, which makes

their situation and disenfranchisement less evident to wider society.

The policies of Thatcherism, in promoting individualistic values through

property ownership at the expense of a centrally controlled housing resource, has


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shifted the focus of the housing debate towards encouraging property ownership

rather than tackling inequalities. The shortage of affordable housing is reportedly

costing millions to the UK taxpayer, causing massive disruption to people’s social

lives and preventing children from achieving in education-‐ yet it appears more

acceptable for councils to pay to accommodate homeless families in the Travelodge

than for them to build social housing (Duggan 2013). Although government

statistics show that homelessness as a whole has fallen signieicantly since

2004/2005, it has increased again since 2010, with loss of rented accommodation

being an important factor amongst homeless families (Department for

Communities and Local Government 2012). Property ownership, whilst the

promoted ideal, is unattainable for a large minority whose options have been

reduced by curtailment of council housing, whilst at the same time people are

encouraged to think of ‘home’ in individualistic terms, as evidenced by popular

culture TV programmes ‘Changing Rooms' and 'Home Front', magazines like 'Ideal

Home' and shops such as 'IKEA' (Holloway and Hubbard 2001). These encourage

the perspective that the material and space of the home should conform to

residents’ requirements and expectations. This places social and rented houses in

opposition to the perceived ideal of the individual home, as spaces over which

tenants have less control, restricted ability to transform their material

surroundings and thus transform their everyday lives. Consequently, this project

considers how council housing was designed to transform people’s everyday lives,

and how residents have sought to regain agency over their home environments-‐ as

tenants and owners.

1.2THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The motivations for this project, as something relevant to current issues and

daily life, comes from a Marxist-‐ineluenced tradition of historical archaeology

characterised by Mark Leone and Randall McGuire amongst others. The Marxist

development of historical archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s demanded

deliberate political engagement by archaeologists in the form of praxis. This

recognises that archaeology has political ineluence, the power to change the world

in some way, whether archaeologists acknowledge it or not-‐ subsequently it is our

duty as archaeologists to consciously utilise this by engaging in radical and


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relevant research programmes. If archaeology becomes an intervention in the

present, a struggle to expose ideologies and inequalities both past and present by

addressing the material remains of the past (Palus et. al. 2006), then research

projects and theories must be scrutinized and justieied in terms of what they

contribute to wider society rather then purely satisfying a quest for knowledge; the

results should be clear to everyone (Leone 2010, 51). This study deals explicitly

with themes of class and the exercise of power by one group in society over

another, and how this relates to the present day.

Whilst the approach in this study might be Marxist oriented, it is also

strongly ineluenced by developments in the eield of material culture studies, of how

people both make and are made by the physical world around them. To this extent,

studies which make use of material evidence have to address the issues inherent in

how people relate to their surroundings, but the development of a specieically

“material culture studies” perspective might be of particular relevance when

dealing with entirely designed environments such as council estates.

Material culture studies, developed as a project by scholars as diverse as

Henri Latour, Daniel Miller and Ian Hodder, aims to access the social world through

the material world. Conceptualised by some of its pioneers as a eield of study in

itself, or an interdisciplinary project, material culture studies had a noticeable

effect upon the mainstream of archaeology (and anthropology) from the 1980s as a

result of the growing theoretical need to attribute different meanings to objects/

artefacts dependent upon social context. Irrevocably linked with the development

of post-‐processualism, the ‘material turn’ in archaeology required

acknowledgement that the meanings of material culture are not only socially

negotiated, but that material culture in itself can have agency, the ability to

ineluence the social lives of those surrounded by it.

Miller (2005, 2) has argued that in the capitalist world poverty “is deeined

as the critical limit to our ability to realise ourselves as persons, consequent upon a

lack of commodities”, that people with less economic power or material wealth are

not only disenfranchised in society but they are actually not able to fully come into

being (materialise) as people. Despite the obvious suggestion that state-‐sponsored

housing in the early-‐ or indeed the whole-‐ of the twentieth-‐century was an

experiment with socialist values, most studies (including this one) place British

council housing eirmly within the context of the capitalist system, arising partly


4

from needs created and exacerbated by market forces. If the working classes, who

were the designated beneeiciaries of council housing in the early twentieth-‐century,

were provided with everyday housing commodities which would allow them to

fully realise themselves as persons, the material culture approach suggests that we

should ask what kind of housing commodities were used to create which kinds of

persons.

This sort of question hinges upon the central concept of material culture

studies, which is material agency. There are differing views about the extent and

importance of material agency (that is, the way in which the physical world is able

to ineluence us and our decisions as human beings): ranging from that of Latour

(1994), who considers that the material world of ‘non-‐humans’ inevitably and

consistently ineluences human lives and decisions, even when we do not wish to

acknowledge it; to that of Hodder (2012) in archaeology, whose elucidation of

‘entanglement’ urges a reconsideration of the concepts ‘human’ and ‘thing’ and the

divisions between them, even if he does not completely break them down. Whilst

there are archaeologists such as Webmoor and Whitmore (2013) who, with the

concept of ‘symmetrical archaeology’, wish to break down the Cartesian divide

between the human and the material by employing the ideas of Latour and Actor-‐

Network-‐Theory, it should be considered that the wider discipline of archaeology

exists eirmly in the modernist world, which judges mind separate from matter.

Consequently this study will address the matter of material agency with an

approach not dissimilar to that of Hodder; considering that the material world (in

this case, the built environment) is separate from the human, although they each

have the ability, even the necessity, to ineluence each other’s existence.

Using this as a starting point, an understanding of how the material world

of the council estate affected and continues to affect residents’ lives can be reached

without the need to move away the modernist perspective. Things, the material,

may perhaps be considered as important as the human, the mind and the

immaterial: but they are not the same thing. This approach also helps to fuleil this

study’s aim of relevance to existing issues, as it makes it more accessible to those

who are not familiar with the detail of debates regarding material agency and post-‐

human perspectives.

The ineluence of buildings archaeology is also important to this project,

whilst the theories and motivations behind it might come from elsewhere, some of


5

the methodology is based in the study of historic buildings-‐ making use of the

English Heritage standard for recording buildings (English Heritage 2006, 14).

Whist buildings archaeology for the main part has concentrated on pre-‐nineteenth-‐

century structures, the work of Matthew Johnson in linking the material

surroundings of everyday domestic life to social and cultural transformation,

especially his articulation of domestic space of social reproduction (Johnson 2010,

159) has had an impact in shaping this study.

1.3SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

To some extent, theoretical considerations have already helped to suggest

the scope of the project and the nature of the research questions. A deeined

approach will highlight the way in which council estates in the early twentieth-‐

century created new, designed environments on an unprecedented scale, which

may not only have been intended to create safer and healthier surroundings

working classes to live in, but to change who the working classes actually were.

This study will consider previous work on twentieth-‐century inter-‐war

council housing from a range of disciplines, including history, human geography,

policy studies and architectural history. These approaches will be contrasted with

that outlined above in order to demonstrate the beneeits of a new, archaeological

and materially informed study on this topic.

This case study upon which this project focuses relates to council housing in

the Tang Hall area of York, almost a square kilometre of development built between

approximately 1919 and 1930. The

area, to the east of York’s city centre

and the former Foss Islands industrial

area, was rural land in the early

twentieth-‐century, much of which

belonged to the Tang Hall manor itself-‐

a large house demolished in the 1970s

(eig 0.1). The development is split into

two distinct areas: houses built under

the 1919 ‘Homes for Heroes’


6

Figure 0.1Tang Hall manor in its heyday. Image reproduced from Burrows et. al. (2006), 10

government subsidy scheme, strongly ineluenced by the Garden City movement;

and those built under subsequent and less generous subsidies throughout the

1920s. Tang Hall is an important example because it is the eirst large-‐scale

implementation of state subsidised housing in York, a city where housing

conditions had already come under widespread public scrutiny in the early years of

the twentieth-‐century as a result of Rowntree’s (2000) Poverty: A Study of Town

Life.

Literature on this inter-‐war period of council house building states that

standards of housing provision seriously decreased as a result of the removal of the

1919 housing subsidy (Bedale 1980, Melling 1980). However, previous studies

have not taken an archaeological approach or looked at the physical evidence of

state sponsored building development in the 1920s. An important research

question of this project is to consider how far the garden city-‐style environment

continued to be planned and developed after the withdrawal of the 1919 subsidy.

This includes changes both inside and outside of the house, considering elements

which make up the neighbourhood environment. This may tell a different story in

Tang Hall to the one that scholars have reported through documentary evidence

elsewhere.

Through investigating the size, appearance and layout of houses, as well as

the density and layout of development in relation to other examples (garden cities,

model industrial settlements, by-‐law housing) and examination of set standards

such as the Manual for the Preparation of State-Aided Housing Schemes (Local

Government Board 1919) and the recommendations of the Tudor Walters Report

(Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918), this study considers whether

Tang Hall provided an environment designed for particular residents, and to create

particular types of residents. By examining changes to the material environment of

the council estate (both inside and outside the houses) in more recent years,

following studies such as Dolan (1999) and Miller (1988), it is possible to construe

the extent to which these changes have been ineluenced by the environment that

was made for council residents, and how they have been able to re-‐shape the place

they live. This study aims to determine if social engineering through the built

environment can be discovered at Tang Hall, an investigation into how people

make places that make people, and how the residents might then re-‐make those

places themselves.


7

1.4THE ISSUES

This touches on a range of issues which have already been explored to a

greater or lesser extent in archaeology and other disciplines. The problems of

poverty and slums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have enjoyed a

wealth of explorations, from contemporary observers such as George Orwell,

reformers such as Charles Booth and B Seebohm Rowntree, to more recent

historical studies and archaeological excavations such as that carried out at

Hungate in York by York Archaeological Trust. Whilst there has been considerable

debate about the nature of slums and slum life in York and elsewhere in recent

years (Wilson 1996, Mayne and Murray 2001, Symonds 2011), it is important to

consider that ineluential people like Booth, Arnold Toynbee, Octavia Hill and

Rowntree in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries genuinely believed that

dense areas of inner city working class housing were a physical, social and moral

problem. As a result of massive housing shortage during and after World War I,

families who may not have considered themselves working-‐class were forced to

live in overcrowded conditions (Melling 1980, 18; Rowntree 1941, 274). Council

housing may have been initially a solution to keeping the white-‐collar worker out

of the slums, judging by the high rents it demanded and the carefully selected

tenants (Bowdler 1999, 108; Mckenna 1991), rather than as programme to remove

unsanitary housing and replace it in equal numbers. The existence of slums in the

1920s encouraged the development of council housing, but perhaps not as a

solution or a replacement.

A study of council housing in the early twentieth-‐century must also take

into account issues of working class identity, the beginnings of the Welfare State

and social change (much of which was catalysed by the First World War), the

question of social unrest and labour relations at a time when the Independent

Labour Party was coming to prominence , as well as questions about ideas of the

urban, development of suburbia and new ideas in town planning. As these issues

have been dealt with at length by academics and studies in various eields (Melling

1980; McKibbin 1998, 2010; Whitehand and Carr 1999, 2001; Sutcliffe 1981) no


8

full-‐length exploration will be attempted in this study-‐ although the importance of

their context should not be underestimated.


9

RESEARCH CONTEXT OF THE PROJECT

Existing research relating to the themes of this study falls into two main

categories: those which deal specieically with the issues of building and expanding

council housing between 1919 and 1939, usually from a policy studies or

documentary history perspective, and materially-‐focussed studies which are

concerned with designed environments created by the state. Both strands will be

evaluated in order to consider what new information this project can provide and

where it can beneeit from existing research. Finally, the research aims of this

project will be discussed in relation to existing studies.

2.1STUDIES OF COUNCIL HOUSING BETWEEN THE WARS

The majority of work that directly concerns itself with the study of council

housing during the inter-‐war period was produced in the 1970s and 1980s. The

main motivation for a elourishing of interest in the genesis of council housing was a

perceived failure of government policy in response to capitalist market forces, and

these studies focus on historical policy decisions and their outcomes in terms of

further policy action and reaction. The result is that although some authors have a

clear leftist or Marxist agenda, the working class people for whom council housing

was created are not fully realised. Policy-‐focus ends up taking more notice of those

in power, policy makers, rather than showing the experiences of those who were

disenfranchised in the housing market because they were too poor. Where the

focus is on local decisions made by individual local authorities, they are often

concerned with the administrative and economic issues rather than considering

the resulting impacts on and living conditions of those who would live on council

estates. Subsequently, decisions about and changes to the production of council

housing during the inter-‐war period are seen in the light of experimentation with

new ideas or reaction to economic circumstances. The difeiculty is that neither

concept gives a solid explanation for the established commitment to the garden

city form in the designed environment of council estates. An explanation which

relies on experimentation, action and reaction, is by its nature fragmentary, and

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Research Context of the Project

10

struggles to see continuity. Equally, fragmentation is not what we see in the built

environment of the 1920s. As Henry Glassie (1999) suggests, whilst the volume of

documentary evidence may have a prejudice towards showing us the lives of the

powerful, it is only through experiencing the material world that we might begin to

comprehend the whole picture.

Many studies on inter-‐war council housing which were published in the

1970s and 1980s owe a debt to Marian Bowley’s (1985) Housing and the State

1919-1944, which was written just prior to the end of World War II and eirst

published in 1945. Bowley describes the development of council housing between

the wars as a series of ‘experiments’, as attempts to control (or at least direct) the

inter-‐war economy via the housing, labour and construction markets. This is

problematic because it denies the existence of the antecedents to state housing

schemes upon which they themselves were based. It does not address privately

built model settlements such as Bournville or Port Sunlight, or signieicantly,

government developments such as the townships of Gretna and Eastriggs built for

munitions workers during World War I. Bowley’s work is a policy study aimed

directly at shaping ideas about what could be done after the end of the Second

World War, it is her aim to demonstrate the radical nature of inter-‐war intervention

in the housing and labour market, as it was clear that the post-‐World War II

intervention into working-‐class housing in particular would have to be both radical

and far-‐reaching in order to promote steady recovery (Bowley 1985, 230). Bowley

makes a direct comparison between the post-‐war situation in 1918 and what she

believed the post-‐World War II situation would be at a national policy level.

Concentrating on national government policy and decisions, there is some

acknowledgement that different local authorities had a variety of experiences in

implementing them, but no focus on the experiences of those who would einally

live in local authority built homes. As an economist, Bowley deals successfully with

the economic data, but does not relate it directly to changes in the everyday

experiences of council tenants.

Numerous studies in the 1970s and 1980s took up an economics-‐focussed

approach to council housing, seeking to address new agendas, rather than make a

direct comparison with contemporary issues. Renewed interest in the history of

the twentieth century housing industry may have stemmed from a growing unease

with capitalism in 1970s Britain. For the eirst time in a generation, economic


11

difeiculty, high inelation, unemployment, industrial unrest and political

ineffectiveness characterised the early 1970s, and later the rise of Thatcherism

resulted in radical changes to Britain’s industrial and social spheres; it was a

tumultuous time. As Swenarton (2002, 270) suggests, this catalysed academics into

questioning why capitalist societies still existed when capitalism itself was

apparently not working, and this included the “ideology of housing” (Swenarton

2002, 270). Council housing itself had suffered considerably in the 1970s, with the

perceived failure of grand modernist developments such as Thamesmead in

London, as well as the introduction of the Right To Buy scheme (eirst in London,

then nationally by the Housing Act of 1980). Studies written during this period

have a social conscience, they are predominantly Marxist-‐ineluenced, and are more

focussed on the experience of the council house tenant from the inter-‐war years.

They still portray social housing as part of a hierarchical structure, the ultimate

result of a series of decisions taken by government at different levels, rather than

as an environment which continued to exert an effect on those who lived (and still

do live) there.

Stephen Merrett’s (1979) State Housing in Britain is typical of the study of

council housing from this era, albeit from a national perspective, covering a wide

range of issues concerning the development of state housing programmes. For the

historical part, Merrett uses a range of sources and information from prominent

organisations and individuals which gives a top-‐down view of the development of

council housing. As a policy study, State Housing in Britain relies upon economic

data in order to convey its arguments, and in this it resembles Bowley’s work in

considering ‘a strategy for the future’(Merrett 1979). With an argument based in

economics, Merrett does not need to explain the existence of council housing

beyond “a substitute for the failure of private enterprise and philanthropic

capitalism” (Merrett 1979, 19), or that the expansion in local authority building

programmes between the wars should be attributed to anything other than

economic and labour market pressures. This is a perspective which other studies of

council housing (including this one) contest on the basis that it is simplistic in

relation to the manifestation of built environments created by these building

programmes. For the purposes of Merrett’s work, a further explanation of why

state-‐subsidised housing exists or the form that it takes is not required, just to set

out its history in terms of an argument for its continued existence.


12

More localised studies of the development of council housing have had more

room to devote to an understanding of the experience of life on the council estate

for those who moved there in the inter-‐war years. Some studies such as Finnegan’s

(1980) on development in Leeds, focus mainly on policy decisions at local

government level and their immediate outcomes. However, other authors have

focus on what changes in state housing policy meant for tenants at a local level.

Bedale (1980) successfully combines Marxist analysis and documentary evidence

concerning the allocation of council housing in inter-‐war Oldham to conclude that

council housing was a strongly controlled and select resource available to the

“cream” of the working classes (Bedale 1980, 67). Tenants did not see themselves

as recipients of mass housing for the poor and in fact experienced a level of

exclusivity in their daily lives.

Mark Swenarton became interested in the subject of early 1920s council

housing because of the distinctive, garden suburb form that it took. An

architectural historian, he was curious about the marked change in the planning of

the built environment which took place at this time, particularly with regard to

council housing which, as he saw it, deliberately and consistently “included

luxuries that had previously been found only in the houses of the well-‐to-‐

do” (Swenarton 1981, 2). This approach begins to consider how changes in housing

standards may have had an impact upon tenant’s everyday lives-‐ how the spaces

that they inhabited changed, so their lives changed around them. Although

Swenarton’s Homes Fit for Heroes (1981) partly focuses on policy, his discussion of

the evolution of state housing policy around the end of the First World War

highlights how decisions were taken about the arrangement of tenants’ daily

existence through the spaces which were to be provided. Through examination of

decisions regarding parlours, heating functions, placement of baths and bathrooms

as well as removal of cooking functions from the sitting room, Swenarton describes

how tenants’ living patterns, expectations and aspirations, would have been

different from living in ‘slums’ or even nineteenth century by-‐law housing.

However, Homes Fit for Heroes mostly concentrates on development and

implementation of housing policy in the immediate post-‐WWI years. As an

architectural historian, Swenarton is more concerned with how the built

environment took the form it did, rather than how this ineluenced social

conditions. Tang Hall in York is used by Swenarton as a case-‐study, to highlight the


13

optimistic uptake and then swift compromise of the eirst nation-‐wide state housing

programme.

Swenarton’s interest in the material form of early 1920s council housing

forces consideration of new reasons for the genesis of the garden-‐suburb council

estate. Unlike authors dealing only with documentary history or economic data, the

impact of material evidence shows the traditional interpretation of state housing

(arising as a result of the failure of private enterprise) as too simplistic, especially

with regard to the ‘Homes for Heroes’ housing programme of 1919-‐1921

(Swenarton 2008a). His argument that the post-‐war government saw the need to

provide high quality, aspirational housing to upwardly-‐mobile members of the

working classes in order to appease the workers, ‘insurance against revolution’, is

compelling, for its boldness and desire to discuss the importance of social rather

than just economic context. However radical Swenarton’s argument appears, his

evidence is powerfully presented. A broader focus would place this within the

context of the logical conclusion of early twentieth century ideas about sanitary

policy, long-‐running debates over the true nature of so-‐called progressive reforms

and class relations in the inter-‐war years. Swenarton’s hypothesis rests on the

assumption that garden-‐suburb ideals were irreconcilably compromised by

housing programmes which followed the axing of the 1919 Addison housing

subsidy (under which the ‘Homes eit for Heroes’ had been constructed), as there

was no longer a requirement to provide aspirational housing to safeguard the

nation in this way. But his work does not address the nature of housing built with

later subsidies, except in terms of how they pioneered new building methods

(Swenarton 2008b), and does not fully explain whether the strategy might have

worked, because its removal is seen as a failure.

Social historians have been successful in exploring the human experience of

the development of council housing, rather than just the decision making behind it.

Ross McKibbin (1998) is particularly effective in using evidence gleaned from oral

histories, information recorded and transcribed by social surveys of working-‐class

communities in the 1920s and 30s, to show the differences between the lives of

those living on new council estates and those still in more traditional inner-‐city

areas. This is more surprising given that McKibbin’s Classes and Cultures (1998) is

a work concerned with social experience of all classes and does not focus

particularly on the rise of council housing. It becomes clear that getting a council

house marked a “translation” (McKibbin 1998, 165) in the way in which people


14

married, raised families and organised their domestic life-‐ a translation according

to McKibbin, towards a more middle-‐class, leisure and consumption-‐oriented way

of living. The difeiculty that some residents had in adjusting to life on the new ‘out-‐

county’ council estates is implied to be connected to the nature of the planned

environment, but as an historian, McKibbin turns to an examination of the facilities

and organisations available to residents in order to consider “a new structure of

sociability” (McKibbin 1998, 192) rather than to look for clues through material

evidence. He is not able to fully explain why new residents had difeiculty adjusting,

or why the allegedly traditional suspicion of neighbours only resulted in a sense of

isolation once transposed to a suburban council estate (McKibbin 1998, 191).

Andrej Olechnowicz (1997) tackles social experience in his study of the

Becontree Estate in Dagenham, east London. As Becontree was built, in the 1920s,

on the outskirts of London, Olechnowicz describes how the majority of its

residents moved out of central London and still had to travel back there to work.

The economic pressures of higher rent and travel costs as well as social dislocation

and regular loss of time through travel comprise the eirst part of his work,

considering that “Change in the balance between work and leisure altered

household routines. Money was critical in limiting the possibilities” (Olechnowicz

1997, 49). Olechowicz is skilled at relating economic issues to the everyday lives of

the residents of Becontree, but consideration of services, committees,

organisations and clubs on the estate tends towards the top-‐down model, where,

like the earlier policy studies of council housing, the development and

implementation of policies dominates. This result from the sources which

Olechnowicz uses, unable to represent the experiences of the residents themselves.

However, there is a strong representation at Becontree of a largely futile attempt by

the middle-‐classes to shape and dictate the daily lives of the working-‐class

residents. In conclusion it is suggested that the perception of failure at Becontree

between the wars may have been the result of the inability of the middle classes to

gain the upper hand, whereas the residents of the estate were happier, being able

to adapt, and adapt to, their new environment and patterns of life (Olecnowicz

1997, 222).

These issues are also addressed by Alison Ravetz in Council Housing and

Culture (2001), where she suggests that the successes of council housing existed in

the spheres of the domestic and the immediate social even though the whole

project amounted to a colonisation attempt on the working classes by the middle


15

classes; “a vision forged by one sector of society for application to another, to

whom it might be more, or less, acceptable and appropriate” (Ravetz 2001, 5).

What Ravetz intimates is that through council housing, tenants were able to

appropriate areas of middle-‐class culture that they found desirable or useful,

although this did not actually result in them becoming middle-‐class. This was a

problem for the middle-‐class bid to manage the working classes, who then viewed

council housing as a failure. Ravetz argues that a tendency by the rest of society to

see the working classes as an homogenous group in the grip of poverty (however

arguable this might have actually been), meant that the working classes were not

regarded as consumers, and ended in council estates being designed without

adequate access to working-‐class consumer resources. In capitalist terms then,

working-‐class council tenants were forced to choose between consuming in a

middle-‐class manner, which was presented as an acceptable alternative, or

becoming ‘ghettoized’ by an inability to take part in the everyday world of

consumer capitalism. An additional problem for those who chose a middle-‐class

mode of consumption was that they might become, by behaviour and aspiration,

essentially middle class, but would remain working class by productive activity.

Ravetz’s describes of the development of state housing as a colonisation

attempt whilst also striking a balance by asserting that its origins lay in genuine

philanthropic intention by those in power towards the poorer in society. She notes

how the reformer Charles Booth believed that the very poorest people were

beyond redemption and ought to be dispersed into colonies so that they would not

corrupt the aspirational working class (Ravetz 2001, 17). Like Bowley, Ravetz

views state housing as an ‘experiment’ (a social, rather than economic one), the

implication being that its success or failure can and will be judged in overview by

the criteria for which it was created, instead of allowing for a consideration of how

an imposed physical and social environment has been subverted, appropriated and

adapted in ways which its creators never intended. It may be that it is difeicult to

judge this kind of success without consistent focus on the material environment,

which is where archaeological and material culture studies approaches to council

housing may be of use.


16

2.2MATERIALLY FOCUSSED APPROACHES TO COUNCIL HOUSING

Approaches which focus directly on material culture are sometimes able to

cut through conelicting and dominant narratives in traditional history in order to

tell stories which would otherwise be lost or never heard. Archaeologist Rodney

Harrison has suggested that in relation to the ‘classic’ Welfare State period (circa

1945-‐1975), the archaeology of state housing has a specieic contribution to make: an archaeological approach to the material world of public housing has the potential to

reveal not only the ways in which changing state ideologies are expressed through their design, but also the ways in which individuals have (and continue to) engage with their spaces and material culture to manage the conditions of everyday life, and how such places exist within counter-discursive urban and suburban worlds. (Harrison 2009, 1)

This may also be considered true for the earlier years of council housing

development, when people were only just beginning to experience the changing

nature of their lives through the council estate. It may be more important, as inter-‐

war council housing developments were used as comparables (by Bowley and

others) for the housing of the ‘classic’ Welfare State period, which itself as Harrison

points out, has now come to symbolise a “dystopian social cycle” (Harrison 2009,

1). Harrison, like Ravetz (2001), seeks to redress this dystopian view of mid-‐late

twentieth century state housing development in the light of curtailment of council

housing projects from the late 1970s and the effective limbo in which this has left

existing council estate residents today. Redressing a dystopian view may in fact

require challenging the conception that state housing was based to a large extent in

utopianism at all, and whilst it is not within the scope of this dissertation to discuss

the post-‐1945 Welfare State, it is relevant to address this with regard to the inter-‐

war era.

Human Geographers such as Whitehand and Carr (1999; 2001) have

focussed on suburbia and how the low-‐density inter-‐war suburban form developed

around growing requirements for self-‐contained households. Whilst municipal

housing developments form part of the wider picture of suburban expansion, the

concentration is on ineluences on private enterprise development, although this

includes consideration of the Tudor Walters Report (Housing (Building

Construction) Committee 1918) which provided the basis for council housing

developments (Whitehand and Carr 2001, 47). The emphasis is on the form of


17

suburban development and its ineluences rather than any discussion of ideological

elements or repercussions in lifestyle terms for new suburbanites.

On a more essential human level, Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’s (2001)

study of an abandoned council house demonstrates how close attention to material

culture, in combination with an archaeological approach, can illuminate hidden

social issues. Buchli and Lucas looked in detail at abandoned possessions, made

possible only due to the peculiar circumstances under which they were able to

conduct the investigation-‐ the recent hurried vacation of a local authority property

by a young mother and her children. Buchli and Lucas were able to draw

conclusions about how the spaces in the house were used in the period leading up

to its abandonment, which combined with contextual information about the

occupants and policies which affected them, offered an understanding of often

invisible social issues. This exact approach is not applicable to this project, but it

does highlight the power of combining material evidence with an understanding of

contextual information and policy decisions.

Another valuable study which deals with council housing, specieically the

kitchens of council tenants on a north London estate, is Daniel Miller’s

Appropriating the State on the Council Estate (1988). Miller considers that people

do not merely consume products in their homes but also consume spaces (literally,

use them) in a particular way. Council tenants in the late 1980s faced increasing

alienation from consumer society as they had less power to choose the living space

that they could consume (Miller 1988, 355). Miller’s work also rests upon the

assertion that in a consumer capitalist society, people increasingly need to assert

their identities through consumption-‐ something which has already been discussed

in anthropology and related disciplines (e.g. Douglas 1979, McKendrick 1982). The

conclusion of Miller’s work is that consumption is an authentic part of culture that

allows people to form and strengthen social relationships as well as identities,

rather than seeing consumption as a shallow materialism responsible for the

breakdown of ‘real’ community (Miller 1997). In his study of tenants’ kitchens,

Miller was able to access the nuances of interaction between people’s state-‐

prescribed, ‘alien’ basic living spaces and their own socially determined

‘inalienable’ material culture which made council elats into homes through building

human social ties.

Miller deals with life for council tenants which is contemporary with the

time of writing (in the 1980s), his work demonstrates the power of material


18

agency and how people both use and are affected by it in their daily lives. It

highlights the response to a fundamental issue-‐ that tenants at the time felt

disenfranchised, alienated, by the basic living spaces that they were provided by

the local authority, suggesting that the aims of councils providing housing and the

requirements of tenants living in them were mismatched. This raises questions

about what the aims of local authorities were with regard to how tenants should

consume the living space of council houses-‐ and with the aims of this dissertation

in mind, what this might have meant at a time (in the 1920s) when tenants were

subject to tight restrictions about alterations to property. Miller’s reelection upon

how the spaces that people inhabit might inform not only their experiences of the

world, but actively and reciprocally play a part in constituting them, is relevant to

the investigation of earlier council housing in Britain, especially since it has not

been considered in earlier studies.

John Dolan (1999) links the individualism of Thatcherism, which allowed

people to become owner-‐occupiers on former council estates, with the changes

and alterations carried out to their homes in the 1990s. By altering the space and

appearance of recently privatised houses, owners consciously or unconsciously

signal ownership, status and identity. Dolan demonstrates people imposing their

own agency on the physical environment which reelects and reinforces their new

requirements and expectations of a home. Like Miller, Dolan highlights the vital

role of the material in creating the social experience-‐ that of the homeowner, rather

than the tenant.

Another materially focussed work is David Crowley’s (2002) study of 1950s

and 1960s socialist housing in Warsaw, einding people’s everyday lives through

their domestic environment. Crowley demonstrates the divergence between the

aims of the Stalinist socialist state, which wanted to actively use the built

environment in an attempt to create the correct type of “cultured citizens” based

upon a belief in environmental determinism (Crowley 2002, 181), and the way in

which the residents needed to use their living spaces. Not only was space

compromised by the political requirements to create a specieic form of

representational architecture, but citizens were criticised for adapting new spaces,

for using them in a non-‐socialist, traditional manner. Crowley is able to begin with

the explicit understanding that the socialist state at one point deliberately tried to

mould ideal citizens through architecture and living spaces, something which it

would be difeicult to say about British council housing in the 1920s. The emphasis


19

in 1950s Warsaw appeared to be heavily on the demands of the state and economic

pressure, rather than the ‘real’ needs of the people (including consumption). Later

social housing in Warsaw was seen as potentially compromised because they

began to take these needs into account (Crowley 2002). The situation for early

British council housing is more ambiguous as the state did not have an outspoken

ideological programme in the same way as Stalinist soviet Poland. However,

Crowley’s study demonstrates how attention to the ‘sites of everyday life’ can

illuminate the way in which changing life patterns are a negotiation between ideas,

material culture and practices in the built environment.

2.3EXISTING STUDIES IN RELATION TO THIS PROJECT

# Policy and economic studies never aimed to reach the experience of council

housing for the new tenants of the 1920s, but in failing to approach this side of the

topic, scholars arguably missed a chance in the attempt to improve the venture of

council housing. A lack of attention to how tenants used their homes cannot have

helped the Marxist-‐inspired studies of the 1970s and 1980s in the face of the

dismantling of the council housing system at the hands of Thatcherite politicians.

Whilst the aim of this dissertation is not to suggest a way forward for state-‐

sponsored social housing, it is to throw light on how the experiences of residents

today might be related to the early developments in national council housing

projects. In order to achieve this, a focus on people rather than policies is clearly

required.

Approaches to council housing which have been grounded in social history

have succeeded in reaching the lived experiences of the people for whom it was

provided. They have revealed how people’s lives changed in their new

environments, how social tensions were played out, and how class, culture and

consumption played a larger part. However, many focus on policy and

administrative decision making rather than seeking human experience. As a

deliberate aim of this dissertation is to focus on people in order to provide

relevance, it is clear that whilst social history has provided valuable insights into

the subject, a further element is required in order to achieve this aim.


20

This may be provided by focussing the study specieically in the material

environment and how it shapes people’s lives. The theoretical basis for this

dissertation assumes that material culture has agency and can shape human lives

in the same way that people can shape the material world. Additionally, studies

which have approached the subject of social housing from a materially-‐focussed

perspective may in fact be considered the most successful at reaching the lived

experience of the residents. Architectural history provided new ideas at a time

when policy issues dominated, and archaeological and anthropological approaches

are able to link to wider issues in people’s social lives through the spaces that they

inhabit. Design history has demonstrated how the built environment is the site of

negotiation between sometimes conelicting ideas and living practices, expressed

through and by material culture, which create the social world.

From these ideas it is possible to fabricate an approach which has not

previously been applied to this subject. It will consider that council houses, as

living spaces, are consumed, as this demonstrates that tenants are active

participants in the negotiation which takes place there over how people should and

can live. It will consider that the state, the local authorities, and other interest

groups may have had particular aims in designing council housing in terms of the

kind of people that they expected the residents to be-‐ both before and after

becoming council tenants. However, this is not as clear as it might have appeared

for Stalinist Warsaw, so remains under consideration throughout the research. It

should be borne in mind that although it might appear that groups of people are

presented as existing within a particular social system (albeit a negotiated one),

individuals still retain the power to remove themselves from it. This will allow the

dissertation to consider how inter-‐war council housing was more than simply a

social experiment visited upon one section of society by another, or as the

expression of a utopian ideal, but a continuation of a negotiation about how people

should live and how society should function, albeit expressed in a new material

form.


21

COUNCIL HOUSING IN CONTEXT

Early twentieth century council housing has been categorised in a

number of ways; as a necessary intervention to solve a housing crisis, as a way to

control the housing and labour markets, as an insurance against revolution, as an

attempt by the middle classes to colonise the working classes, and as a social or

economic experiment. This chapter will explore these ideas within the context of

early twentieth century developments in town planning and concepts of the built

environment, as well as considering previous and parallel developments which

show that council housing was not a new idea, but an existing one applied in a new

way. It will be argued that appearance of council housing in the early twentieth-‐

century was the result of a wide range of ineluences and motivations. However, a

review of the material evidence will provide a new perspective on this issue.

3.1CHANGING IDEAS ABOUT HOW PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE

Housing standards, and their perceived link with moral and physical health

amongst the population, have been an issue for discussion since the nineteenth-‐

century. Social reformer Octavia Hill, writing in 1875, believed that residents of

London slums needed to be “made eit” before they could make use of better

housing (Hill 2010, 8). Her work was grounded in the contemporary concern for

slum clearance and improvement of the poor. Charles Booth’s lengthy and intricate

study of poverty in London, published in 1902, describes the physical environment

of poverty through the social circumstances that he found in it; a “very bad house”

is illustrated by a story of robbery and violence that happened there (Booth in

Fried and Elman 1969, 74). Booth was concerned with morality, his work

demonstrates belief in an inextricable connection between moral degeneracy in the

poor and the apparently inferior environment in which they existed. This forms

part of his scepticism about the missionary work of the Salvation Army in the East

End, which he describes in one instance as merely “a diversion” (Booth in Fried and

Elman 1969, 174) in the routine of the working people. Booth’s proposed solution

to alleviating

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Council Housing in Context

22

poverty (and the burden which he thought it placed on wider society) was to

physically remove the poor from the sites of their existing poverty:

to live as families in industrial groups, planted wherever land and building

materials were cheap; being well housed, well fed, and well warmed; and taught, trained and employed from morning to night on work, indoors or out, for themselves or on Government account; in the building of their own dwellings, in the cultivation of land, in the making of clothes, or in the making of furniture.

(Booth in Fried and Elman 1969, 297)

His proposal is essentially, to make colonists of the poorest in society. Both Booth’s

and Hill’s work demonstrate the attitude of reformers in the late nineteenth

century that even those whom they see as the most degenerate in society can be

improved, and that the physical conditions in which they exist must play a role in

this. Social reformers such as Booth, Hill, and also Rowntree in York, concentrated

on the material environment of what they perceived as poverty and its connection

to moral degeneracy, pointing to a change in the way in which the new middle-‐class

elite thought that people could, and should, live. From middle-‐class and often

industrial backgrounds, the lifestyles and attitudes of the reformers were far

enough removed from working-‐class life to be appalled by that which they found

most alien, but close enough to interpret links between poverty and problems in

wider society.

By the early twentieth-‐century, there were a number of models which could

be used to demonstrate how poverty might be improved. Since the advent of

industrialisation-‐ the process which led to the concerns of so many reformers and

planning pioneers-‐ manufacturers had built housing to cater for their working

populations. There were varying standards and concerns in its creation; from the

“unscrupulous land-‐exploitation” of Crawshay in eighteenth-‐century Merthyr

Tudful (Bell and Bell 1969, 176) to the carefully engineered conditions of New

Lanark where early nineteenth-‐century workers were provided with not only

houses but an “Institute for the Formation of Character”, a school, a bakery, a

communal wash house and a co-‐operative grocery store (Bell and Bell 1969, 182).

The more comprehensive, or model settlements, were often founded by

Nonconformist capitalists whose interests, for religious and social reasons, ran

deeper than a desire to persuade the workforce to reside in the vicinity of their

employment.


23

In Yorkshire, worker’s housing of this type was of a higher standard than

other contemporary working-‐class housing, as well as “architecturally more

distinctive” (Giles and Goodall 1992, 187). In 1853 the village of Saltaire was begun

near Shipley, Bradford, for the workforce of textile magnate Sir Titus Salt. As an

example of a model settlement, Saltaire is noteworthy not only because of its

attractive Italianate

appearance (eig 1.1)

but also the quality

of housing and social

composition of its

inhabitants.

Different types of

housing were built

to rent to different

types of workers;

boarding houses for

single persons,

family houses for

workers, “large, well-‐appointed houses” for overseers and mill executives (Giles

and Goodall 1992, 181). Worker’s houses at Saltaire completed in 1861 had a living

room and separate kitchen, as well as cellar space and two or three bedrooms

(Giles and Goodall 1992, 181), making them more spacious than houses which

Rowntree reported 62% of the working class population of York were living in at

the end of the nineteenth century (Rowntree 2000, 149-‐150). Local amenities were

provided for the population at Saltaire, including a bath house, a parade of shops, a

landscaped park, a school, an institute for adult education, two Nonconformist

churches and a hospital (though signieicantly, no public house). Saltaire was a

complete planned settlement, bounded by the turnpike road, the railway and the

mill complex itself (eig.1.2). Salt’s motivations combined the requirements and

practicalities of big business with a strong sense of Christian duty (James 2004),

Saltaire demonstrated that developers and philanthropists considered that

working people could, and indeed should, live differently to the urban conditions

available elsewhere.

Fig 1.1Worker’s housing at Saltaire, near Bradford. Image courtesy of englandthisway.com.


24

3.2MODEL VILLAGES AND THE GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT

The streets of Saltaire resemble densely-‐built terraces of late nineteenth-‐

century by-‐law housing; open spaces available only at the periphery and large

areas taken up by roads. By the turn of the twentieth century a new and ineluential

model for the improvement of people’s lives via the built environment emerged.

In the late nineteenth-‐century, planners and developers in Britain were

experimenting with the beneeits of low-‐density layouts for new settlements. Many

reformers were seriously concerned about the link between the physical

surroundings of inner city life and moral degradation, but late Victorians were

becoming equally concerned about the state of the countryside, where a


25

Figure 1.2Plan of Saltaire mills and village, showing the careful arrangement of the settlement and amenities in the vicinity of the mills. Image courtesy of bu.edu

supposedly healthy and wholesome way of life was giving way to extreme poverty

and mass out-‐migration as a result of agricultural depression (Aalen 1991, 32).

These concerns, coupled with the intellectual and aesthetic principles of the Arts &

Crafts movement, saw a change in views of how space should be distributed and

used within new settlements, as well as permanently altering the appearance of

new model villages and suburban developments. Since the eighteenth-‐century, the

middle classes had owned

residences on the edge of cities

(particularly London), but

Victorian suburbanisation was

typieied by ‘by-‐law’ housing-‐

densely packed terraces with

narrow frontages and long, thin

back yards rather than gardens

(Whitehand and Carr 2001, 3;

Ravetz 2001, 10).

In the 1890s, W H Lever at

Port Sunlight, on the Wirral,

and George Cadbury at

Bournville, Birmingham, both

developed low-‐density model settlements for their workers, adhering to traditional

architectural styles in an attempt to re-‐create the perfect English village. At

Bournville, contrasting rooelines along with gables, dormers and a variety of

materials and details provide the

heterogeneity of the picturesque (eig.

1.3), whereas at Port Sunlight a

number of architects designed in a

variety of styles, including the local

vernacular timber-‐frame (eig 1.4)

alongside classical, Dutch renaissance

and gothic (Port Sunlight Museum &

Garden Village 2008). This represents

and recreates, through the built

environment, a pre-‐industrial time

when people lived in apparent

Figure 1.3Picturesque houses in Bournville, built by George Cadbury for his workers. Image courtesy of bvt.org.uk.


26

Figure 1.4Cottages in a traditional Cheshire style, built to house factory workers at Port Sunlight.Image courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

synchronicity with nature and the worker was a craftsman with valuable, often life-‐

giving skills.

The change in the nature of model industrial settlements, ineluenced as it

was by political and social thought at the time, coincided with the birth of the

Garden City Movement through the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and his publication,

in 1898 of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (2010) and re-‐published in

1902 as the better known Garden Cities of To-morrow (1970). As the original title

suggests, Howard was elaborating a way in which he believed that social reform

could be brought about through changes to the built environment, or rather a

combination of built environment and managed countryside. Whilst Howard’s

vision distilled a range of reformist and utopian ideals (Beevers 1988, Aalen 1991),

he had a very clear material concept of how it should be achieved (eig. 1.5). Houses

situated on large plots, “very varied architecture and design” and large spaces for

public amenities are central to Howard’s “town-‐country” garden city (Howard

1970, 53-‐54). Although the result of a different tradition, this resembles the

industrial model settlements at both Port Sunlight and Bournville. Due to shared


27

Figure 1.5Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the garden city and the rural belt. Reproduced from Howard (1970), 52.

practical and social aims of Howard’s garden city and the model industrial

settlement, the two came together not only to einance and promote the Garden City

Movement (Aalen 1991,

34-‐35), but also to

produce the model village

of New Earswick, York,

under the ineluence of

garden city principles.

New Earswick was

designed, from 1902, by

Raymond Unwin and his

architectural partner

Barry Parker, who were

to be central to town

planning and the ongoing

Garden City Movement in

the twentieth century. Unwin, in particular, had been ineluenced by many of the

factors behind the Garden City Movement (in addition to social and urban

reformers), including William Morris, the Arts & Crafts Movement and Christian

Socialism, as well as reactions to Marxist, anarchist, and social-‐democratic thought

(Miller 1992, 14-‐18). At New Earswick,

Parker and Unwin were commissioned to

build a community for the “improvement” of

the working classes (Joseph Rowntree Village

Trust, quoted in Miller 1992, 36) which

provided the labour force for Joseph

Rowntree’s confectionary business. As with

Port Sunlight and Bournville, although less

eclectic in appearance, New Earswick draws

on traditional concepts of the English village,

with uncomplicated, but picturesque,

architecture (eig. 1.6). The ‘cottage’ plans

drawn up for workers at New Earswick are

attractive from the outside but practical and

basic on the inside, with the toilet accessible


28

Figure 1.6Houses at New Earswick designed by Raymond Unwin.

Figure 1.7Scullery of a cottage at New Earswick before modernisation, with the bath in the scullery. Reproduced from Murphy (1987), 22.

only from an exterior door and the bath in the scullery (eig. 1.7 and 1.8). This

created problems for residents, as the necessity of using the toilet and the coal

house was “not very pleasant during wintry weather” (New Earswick resident in

Murphy 1987, 22) and the dual role of the scullery caused practical and social

inconvenience (New Earswick resident in Murphy 1987, 22-‐23). Although the

layouts may have engendered frustration in the residents, the designs proved

economical and ineluential on a wider level, as Unwin was called upon to help

design municipal housing.


29

Figure 1.8Plans and elevations (from 1904) for houses built in Poplar Grove, New Earswick. Reproduced from Miller (1992), 43.

3.3THE GARDEN CITY-TYPE AS A STANDARD DESIGN

Whilst New Earswick was being designed and built, Unwin and Parker were

also involved with the design of Letchworth Garden city, intended as a realisation

of Ebenezer Howard’s vision (Hardy 1991). The founding of Letchworth involved

the founding of the Garden City Association (later the Town and Country Planning

Association), which worked as a pressure group to raise the proeile of low-‐density

design in a campaign that ineluenced the detail of the Housing, Town Planning Act

(1909) which was the eirst comprehensive legislation on the regulation of urban

development (Hardy 1991, 188-‐190). Letchworth Garden City, with a greater

emphasis on detached and semi-‐detached properties, intended for wealthier

residents than New Earswick, demonstrates that by the early twentieth-‐century,

improvement for all was sought through low-‐density development; ideas about

how people should live had changed, and this was enshrined in legislation. Unwin,

as a pivotal eigure in early twentieth-‐century town planning believed in civic design

as “the expression of civic life” (Unwin 1909), that the values of society should be

infused in the built environment, but equally that the planned town environment

could “stimulate its inhabitants in their pursuit of the noble end” (Unwin 1909, 11).

Like the Arts & Crafts movement to which his work owed so much, Unwin aimed to

change the character of everyday life through design.

Debate has been generated by the issue of how low density, garden city-‐type

layouts came to be the blueprint for the eirst national council housing campaign in

1919; ranging from its deliberate adoption as a measure to prevent social unrest

(Swenarton 1981), to the suggestion that a form atypical of earlier worker’s

housing is implicated in the ‘social experiment’ of council housing (Ravetz 2001). It

can also be demonstrated that by 1918, low-‐density design along garden city lines

had become the standard.

The garden city and town planning movements encapsulated a range of

social and practical concerns, requirements and aspirations of the built

environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Raymond Unwin was a central

eigure, vital to the success of not only low-‐density layouts but also simplieied,

picturesque architectural design being the standard by the end of the First World

War. Unwin’s designs at New Earswick and Letchworth were ineluential, and during

the First World War he was recruited by the Ministry of Munitions to create cost-‐


30

effective housing for workers at isolated sites such as Gretna in Scotland

(Swenarton 2010). Signieicantly, wartime conditions necessitated a large-‐scale

state subsidised intervention in the housing of workers. Following the tradition of

the industrial model village, it involved low-‐density layouts and some of the

architects and planners who had designed for factory owners.

At Gretna, Unwin and his collaborators honed a simplieied version of the

neo-‐Georgian picturesque style in order to attain more cost-‐effective results than

other wartime developers (Swenarton 2010, 23). The continued ineluence of this

design can be seen in the Tudor Walters Report, produced just before the end of

World War I, to which Raymond Unwin was an important contributor (Housing

(Building Construction) Committee 1918).

The strong ineluence of the industrial model village and the continued

ineluence of Unwin, alongside a powerful tradition of social reform which saw the

crowded nineteenth-‐century inner-‐city type of workers’ housing as synonymous

with moral depravity, should be understood as the context for the adoption of low

density, garden city prototype as standard for the massive building programmes of

the 1920s and 1930s. It fuleilled Charles Booth’s recommendation that the inner

city poor should be resettled, but it became a planning norm rather than a holistic

social concept as Howard had intended (Beevers 1988). Material form was given

precedence in delivering social outcomes.

Unwin argued that low-‐density housing should be regarded by developers

and tenants alike as better value for money than dense by-‐law designs, and that

tenants would greatly appreciate the use of new space (Unwin 1918), but there

was little focus on revolutionising the interior spaces of the home. Rejection on

grounds of cost, of alternate interior layout and design suggestions made by the

women’s housing sub-‐committee in 1918 (Local Government Board in Swenarton

2008b, 46-‐47), suggests that budget played a part in this. The Tudor Walters

report, laying the foundations for the eirst major council housing programmes,

recommended that building above accepted minimum standards was the only way

to ensure houses would remain eit for purpose by the end of the sixty year

construction loan period (Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918,

paragraph 27). Models presented in the report were houses of reasonable size,

approximate footprints averaging over 44m2, and the stated intention was that

houses should be provided with separate parlours in most cases (Housing

(Building Construction) Committee 1918, paragraph 86). Along with the


31

recommendation that bathrooms should be placed on the eirst eloor when the

house has a parlour (Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918, paragraph

91), this anticipates present and future tenants requiring more space than the

accepted minimum and using it differently, that is, spending more time away from

the working areas of the home and not requiring use of the bathroom upon

entering the house.

When the Tudor Walters Report was put into practice, with the 1919

Housing and Town Planning Act, the Manual on the Preparation of State-Aided

Housing Schemes (Local Government Board 1919) laid out recommendations and

examples for estate layouts, roads, planting, drainage, but fewer recommendations

on the houses themselves. The approximate average footprint for the

recommended models is in fact larger than the Tudor Walters Report (almost eifty

four square metres) but less than half the models are shown with parlours and

only two out of the seven urban models show eirst eloor bathrooms, indicating a

greater focus on exterior, rather than interior arrangement. As Swenarton (1981)

discusses, the eirst national council housing programme was devised to evidence

that a high standard of working class housing could be attained, rather than to

bring it within the reach of the majority of workers, and a focus on the appearance

and layout of estates supports this.

The appearance of a national council housing programme in the early

twentieth-‐century was a response to practical, social and ideological issues, taking

a form which had its origins in the industrial housing developments and social

reform visions of the nineteenth-‐century. The interaction of these different

ineluences dictated the einal form for the design of council housing, especially the

ineluence of the town planning and garden city movements, with their emphasis on

changing the experience of home and neighbourhood through estate layout and

exterior design rather than attention to the interior spaces of the home. Tracing the

origins of council housing from nineteenth-‐century middle class reform principles,

through model industrial settlements and wartime state interventions in workers’

housing demonstrates that council housing was no idealistic communitarian

experiment or hasty response to economic circumstance. Early twentieth-‐century

council housing was a “vision forged by one sector of society [the middle classes]

for application to another [the working classes]” (Ravetz 2001, 5), a deliberate and

well planned exercise of middle-‐class values with clear precedents.


32

HOUSES IN TANG HALL:TWO PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

Evidence from the council estate at Tang Hall in York will be appraised with reference to the previous studies of twentieth-‐century housing and the broader context of issues which resulted in its development, outlined in the earlier chapters. This will comprise of a brief history of the development, an explanation and comparison of the different types of houses and streetscapes created at Tang Hall during the period c.1920-‐1930, with reference to the Manual on the Preparation of State Aided Housing Schemes (Local Government Board 1919) and the Tudor Walters Report (Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918) which set the standard for council housing nationally during this period. Some conclusions will be brought about the differences between the ‘Homes eit for Heroes’ phase of building and the houses built there later in the 1920s.

4.1HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT AT TANG HALL

The area known as Tang Hall lies to the east of York city centre, between the

former industrial area at Layerthorpe and Foss Islands and the village of

Osbaldwick (eig.2.1; OS Grid reference SE 621 519). The name ‘Tang Hall’ is taken

from the historic manor of Tang Hall, which stood at what would become the

northern end of the council development, until it was demolished in the late 1970s

to make way for further residential development (Ordnance Survey 1982). The

land between Layerthorpe and the Tang Hall itself, bounded to the south by the

Derwent Valley Light Railway (which served the industrial area), was originally

earmarked for housing development by York City Council in 1914, when such a

scheme became necessary as part of the programme to clear the city’s slums

(Swenarton 1981, 178). Although the outbreak of war prevented the original plans

from taking shape, development went ahead after the armistice. By this time the

national focus of the housing campaign had changed from the requirement to

simply provide more houses to allay the ever growing housing crisis. Following the

1918 armistice, the government was under pressure to provide better conditions

for returning demobilised servicemen, and this principally manifested itself in the

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Houses In Tang Hall

33


34

Figure 2.1Ordnance Survey map of the city of York (1938) with the approximate extent of the Tang Hall estate highlighted. This includes some private enterprise development, although the majority is council development. Reproduced from Edina Digimap. Scale 1:15000.

1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, also known as the ‘Homes eit for Heroes’

campaign. This was accompanied by a generous subsidy, but by 1921 middle-‐class

opinion had begun to regard the housing campaign as proeligate, and the subsidy

was curtailed (Swenarton 2008a, 53). Despite the withdrawal of the original

government subsidy, York City Council continued to build at Tang Hall, eirst using

funding from the permissive 1890 Housing Act (Swenarton 1981, 182), and then

later government subsidies for the provision of social housing.

The area covered by the local authority development expanded to the east

and the south-‐ from just over a tenth of a square kilometre to over half a square

kilometre-‐ following the sale of the remaining estate belonging to the Tang Hall in

1926, as well as further purchases from the Church Commissioners (Carré 1982, 3)

(eig.2.2). This additional area is visibly distinct from the earliest phases, although

all the houses were designed by the city engineer. Open spaces were planned into

the design, such as allotments and playing eields as well as a public park at the

southern end. Amenities including shops and a school were provided, although no

new church buildings were available for the community until the 1930s. In the

mid-‐1920s, over 150 houses were built in concrete (Appendix one table one, type


35

Figure 2.2Map showing council development at Tang Hall: phase one (1919-‐22) is marked in red; ineill (1923) is marked in purple; phase two (1925-‐1930) is marked in blue. Map courtesy of maps.google.com.

19), beginning with a single

experimental example of a

terrace of four entirely

concrete dwellings (eig 2.3;

Appendix 2 eig. 2) and

culminating with the erection

of three streets of brick and

or render clad concrete

homes (eig. 2.4). According to

Ordnance Survey (1931), the

einal streets on the whole

council housing development at Tang Hall were not completed by 1929, although

existence of similar house types suggests that they were completed shortly

thereafter.

Private developers were also at work at Tang Hall throughout the 1920s and

into the 1930s. To the north-‐western side of the earliest council houses, on Fifth

Avenue, substantial semi-‐detached houses were built along garden city lines, and

by the 1930s rows of houses were being built in the area surrounding the newly

constructed St. Hilda’s Church, just off Tang Hall Lane. By the outbreak of the

Second World War the area had, to a major degree, taken the form it retains to this

day.


36

Figure 2.4Houses built around 1926 with concrete and brick facing, Rawdon Avenue, Tang Hall. Note the concrete architrave, lintels and passageway.

Figure 2.3‘Experimental’ concrete house elevation by the York city engineer, August 1925. From the York City Archives, PH

4.2COUNCIL HOUSES BUILT AT TANG HALL: “HOMES FIT FOR

HEROES”

There are two distinct phases in the council development at Tang

Hall: a contained ‘Homes eit for Heroes’ phase (hereafter called phase one), which

exists between Fifth Avenue and Melrosegate developed between 1919 and 1922;

and a more widespread, later phase developed between 1925 and 1930 (hereafter

called phase two) which covers the rest of the development (eig 2.2). According to

Swenarton (1981, 182) there was also an ineill phase during 1922-‐23 on the

original development, where houses of a lower standard were added to provide

more affordable housing, thus increasing the number of houses per acre. An

analysis of the house types in this earliest area of the development would suggest

this is the case, as the majority of houses have an approximate footprint, more than

45m2, but those identieied by Swenarton as ineill are smaller with approximate

footprints of 40 and 45m2 (Appendix one table one).

A level one (street-‐level) buildings survey of all the houses at Tang Hall

resulted in the identieication of twenty different types of houses (detailed in

Appendix 1 table 1)-‐ many with sub-‐types (semi-‐detached pairs, terraces of three,

four or six)-‐ and one example of blocks of elats (see Appendix 2 eigs. 1-‐21). Whilst

the basic form of house is similar across the whole development (square type,

usually with hipped roof, most frequently in terraces of four), architectural details

and decorative variations serve to create distinctions in different streets. Ordnance

Survey data, both current and historical, has helped to identify an approximate

average footprint for the different types of houses, as well as the density of houses

per acre in different parts of the estate, along with data comparing the street

widths and layouts.

The greatest variety of house types is found within the smallest area, on

phase one, the original development of the early 1920s (seven in approximately

0.1km2 ), resulting in a varied street appearance. Plain brick and the use of render

are also alternated, especially in streets where the types of houses are not so

varied, which together with an amount of staggering of the position of houses from

the street, create a suggestion of the idiosyncratic effect achieved at Well Hall for

munitions workers at the Woolwich Arsenal in 1915 (eigs. 2.5 and 2.6). However,


37

the street layout is grid-‐like (eig.

2.2), perhaps showing the lack of

experience by York Council in

terms of creating a picturesque

street scene along the lines of

architect-‐designed

developments such as Well Hall,

where streets follow a more

sinuous pattern (eig. 2.7).

According to Raymond

Unwin, well designed street

layouts were intended to

promote character in a locality

(as opposed to uniformity), this

notion being based on ideas of the

Austrian art historian and town

planner Camillo Sitté (Unwin

1909, 110-‐114). Swenarton

(1981, 184-‐186) notes York City

Council’s lack of architectural

achievements in this phase one,

‘Homes eit for Heroes’

development, which he attributes to disagreements between the council and the

Housing Commissioner over costs and design. However, the variations in


38

Figure 2.7Layout for phase 1 of the Well Hall Estate 1915, by Frank Baines and associates. Reproduced from Swenarton (2008), 18.

Figure 2.5Congreve Road, Well Hall Estate (now called the Progress Estate), Eltham. Built in 1915 to the design of Frank Baines and his associates, to house munitions workers from the Woolwich Arsenal. Image courtesy of maps.google.com.

Figure 2.6Seventh Avenue, Tang Hall, York. Image courtesy of maps.google.com.

architectural design as they exist (Appendix 2, eigs. 1 and 3-‐7) and variation in

coneiguration of house types, do serve to give the area a uniqueness of character,

which is enhanced by the use of tree planting and different sizes of roads and

verges.

The houses in phase one (excluding the ineill mentioned above) are larger

than the average recommendation of the Tudor Walters report (Housing (Building

Construction) Committee 1918) which set out the requirements for new housing

development after the First World War. The approximate footprint of each house

on phase one at Tang Hall is more than 45m2, end houses in terraces of three or

four are usually larger with the layout ‘turned’ around in comparison to the central

houses (eig. 2.8), two types having footprints of c. 60m2. Similar layouts are used

throughout phase one: larger houses were built with a substantial living room,

parlour and scullery downstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom with separate


39

Figure 2.8Plan and elevation of a terrace of four parlour houses from the eirst phase of building at Tang Hall (classieied in Appendix 1 Table 1 as Type 1 houses). Reproduced from Swenarton (1981), 181.

toilet upstairs. Smaller houses were provided with a living room, scullery and

downstairs bathroom in order to keep three bedrooms on the eirst eloor.

The description of ‘scullery’ for the room that modern householders would

refer to as the kitchen indicates changing perceptions about the uses of rooms in

early twentieth-‐century domestic environments. Originally the ‘scullery’ would

have been the place for wet work (washing up, laundry) and the eire in the living

room was used for cooking. The Tudor Walters Report indicates that by 1918 there

was a tendency for people to bring cooking and washing functions together in one

room and the report continues to refer to this space as a scullery, although it also

notes that some cooking might still need to be done in the living room (Housing

(Building Construction) Committee 1918, paragraph 87). The name ‘scullery’

differentiates it from a traditional kitchen, as a space where meals should not be

eaten. The Tudor Walters Report placed a moral weight on the proper use of rooms

(Ravetz and Turkington 1995, 156).

Phase one houses at Tang Hall are generous in size, and the largest provided

a parlour, a scullery, a living room almost the entire depth of the house, and an

upstairs bathroom alongside three bedrooms (eig 2.8). In effect this extra size and

use of space meant that the scullery was freed from the constraints of bathing in

order to become a proper kitchen, resulting in the living room being relieved of the

constraints of cooking and no longer a working space, whilst the parlour was a

space reserved for occasional use. The removal of working areas of the house to a

coneined space (the scullery, for cooking and laundry) points to a greater

expectation of the use of downstairs rooms for leisure activities rather than the

labour of the household. The inclusion of a parlour in the majority of these early

houses at Tang Hall (eive out of seven types of house) reelects the emphasis by the

Tudor Walters Report on providing parlours for a “large proportion” of council

houses, since the extra room would accommodate a number of essential social

functions (Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918, paragraph 86). This,

along with the removal of the bathroom from the working area of the household

(from the scullery or its vicinity, to the eirst eloor) suggests that the residents of

these houses were supposed to use the space and organise their lives in a different

way to that which they might have done previously in different homes. The major

spaces are arranged around leisure and social activities in the household (rather

than labour, such as cooking), and the inclusion of the bathroom on the eirst eloor

associates bathing with the rest and dressing functions of the bedrooms, rather


40

than the work functions of the scullery when the bath is placed on the ground eloor.

Thus these spaces then might be equated to creating a less working-‐class way of

life as the outlook of the house is weighted towards supporting leisure and social

activities, rather than supporting labour activities-‐ whether inside the house

(cooking, cleaning, etc) or providing a base for those that happen outside of the

home.

The density of housing in this area, standing at approximately 9 houses per

acre excluding those identieied as ineill, is well within the Manual for the

Preparation of State Aided Housing’s recommendation of no more than 12 houses

per acre in terms of ‘gross area’ (Local Government Board 1919, 21; Ordnance

Survey 1938). Even including later ineill, the approximate density is 11.3 houses

per acre, resulting in the area being characterised by large gardens and wide

streets with sizeable verges (such as Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue). The

development was also bordered by considerable amounts of open space (eig. 2.9),

some planned (such as a playing eield to the south east, and a large allotment area


41

Figure 2.9Ordnance Survey Map (1931) showing phase one of council housing development at Tang Hall as it would have appeared 1928-‐29, surrounded by considerable amounts of open space.

to the north west, both of which survive today) and some as the result of historic

land ownership (such as the area to the north which was later sold and developed).

4.3 COUNCIL HOUSES BUILT AT TANG HALL AFTER 1923

Following the purchase of further land at Tang Hall in the mid-‐1920s (Carré

1982), council housing was expanded to the south and east of the original

development, beginning with area around Alcuin and Constantine Avenues

(Appendix 2 eig. 22). This expansion was funded by the 1924 Housing (Financial

Provisions) Act, also known as the Wheatley Subsidy, which Bowley argues

established local authorities as part of the “permanent machinery for providing

working-‐class houses” (1985, 40-‐41). State sponsored housing became a social


42

Figure 2.10Distribution of house types at Tang Hall. Each colour/shade represents a different type. Map courtesy of maps.google.com.

service, and the high and standards of 1919 as set out in the Tudor Walters Report

(Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918) and the Manual for the

Preparation of State-Aided Housing Schemes (Local Government Board 1919) were

diluted as local authorities now had a long-‐term responsibility to provide large

amounts of low-‐cost housing to rent to people on low incomes. In York this

included the re-‐housing of those from historic slum areas, as in 1925 work began

clearing insanitary habitations at Walmgate (York Corporation 1925, 5). Whilst

there has been recent debate about the nature and representation of ‘slums’ and

‘slum life’ in York and elsewhere (Wilson 1996, Mayne and Murray 2001, Symonds

2011), it is certainly the case that people who came from Walmgate to live at Tang

Hall would have encountered very different surroundings to those of their previous

dwellings.

A level one survey of the houses built on this second major phase of

development at Tang Hall revealed a larger number of identieiable types than phase

one (eleven, plus one example of elats-‐ Appendix 2 eigs. 10-‐21), but spread over a

much wider area and with less variation on individual streets (eig. 2.10). As a

result, streets in this area have a uniform appearance and there is little or no

emphasis on diversieication of architectural or decorative detail, the result of

which could be described as monotonous (eigure 2.11). Uniformity also exists on

streets where several types of

houses are present , for

example Wycliffe Avenue

where three types of houses

are interspersed. Despite

some variation in materials,

window arrangement,

chimney, etc, the overall visual

impact is of homogeneity (eig.

2.12). Although York City

Council did what was required

aesthetically in this larger phase of building at Tang Hall,it was without “the insight

of imagination and generosity of treatment which would have constituted the work

well done” (Unwin 1909, 4). Garden city ideals had been overwhelmed by the mass

housing development. The residential area which, to the outsider, appears

monotonous and disinteresting, might produce similar feelings amongst residents


43

Figure 2.11Etty Avenue,Tang Hall. Categorised as type 18. Image courtesy of maps.google.com

as a material

agency which

would affect their

everyday lives. A

high proportion of

the houses in phase

two are north

facing, which,

according to

criticism by B

Seebohm Rowntree

in his second social

survey of York, has

signieicant impact

on residents' experience of home “in a country like England where sunshine is at a

premium” (Rowntree, 1941, 231).

The approximate average footprint of the house types on phase two is also

considerably smaller than that of the phase one (eig. 2.13). Of eleven house types,

just two have average footprints of above c.45m2 (Types 13 and 20-‐ but only the

end terraces). The most

widespread types (18 and

19) both have approximate

average footprints of 40m2,

and two others (Types 15

and 17) have typical

approximate footprints of

35m2 (Appendix 1 table one

and eigs, 1-‐3). In fact, with

an overall average

approximate footprint of

just under 40m2, the houses

in phase two fall well below the suggested sizes of the Manual on the Preparation of

State-Aided Housing Schemes, the smallest of which-‐ Class A no.3-‐ is 46.5m2 (Local

Government Board 1919, 58-‐59). These houses bear more similarities to the Tudor


44

0"

10"

20"

30"

40"

50"

60"

Phase"One"(Types"147)"

Infill"Phase"(Types"8"&"9)"

Phase"Two"(Types"10421)"

Approximate+Average+Footprint+(m2)+

Approximate"Average"Footprint"(m2)"

Figure 2.13Graph showing approximate average footprints for separate phases at Tang Hall.

Figure 2.12Wycliffe Avenue, Tang Hall, York. Three different types of houses: Type 11 in the right foreground; Type 12 to the left and centre and Type 15 in the right background. Image courtesy of maps.google.com.

Walters ‘type I’ and

‘type II’ designs (eig.

2.14), and it is

possible that the

smallest houses at

Tang Hall, like the

Tudor Walters type I,

accommodated the

bath in the scullery

(eig. 2.15). It supports

the assertion of

Swenarton (1981)

that there was a

greater ideological element in the 1919 campaign. As a result, the use of space

described above for the larger, parlour houses of the original development was no

longer realised; bathing facilities

remained next to or even in the working

area of the house and the living room was

considerably smaller than before. This

layout is cheaper to build as it is smaller

and does not require the introduction of

plumbing services to the eirst eloor,

however it can be seen as the cause of

many alterations which will be discussed

in chapter 5.

Although the appearance, size and

layout of the majority of houses in phase

two of council development at Tang Hall

might have declined from those of phase

one, map evidence (Ordnance Survey 2012) suggests that the density of houses per

acre did not reduce to any great extent. The average approximate density for

council houses built on the site between 1925 and 1930 is just over 13 houses per

acre, which, whilst transgressing the recommendation of the Manual, is not much

greater than the garden city ideal of no more then 12 houses per acre. The roads on

this phase two appear smaller than those of the eirst phase, but it is apparent that


45

Figure 2.15Plan of a Type 15 house at Woolnough Avenue, Tang Hall, York, which may have originally accommodated for the bath in the scullery (kitchen). Reproduced from MTS Architectural Services (2004)

Figure 2.14Tudor Walters “type I” suggested layout, footprint of this design is approximately 35.6m2. Reproduced from Housing (Building Construction) Committee (1918), paragraph 98.

many of them are intended for residential access rather than through trafeic. The

road layouts are considerably bolder, beginning with the striking shape of the

Alcuin Avenue area in 1926 (Appendix 2 eig. 22) and ending with the fan of Starkey

Crescent, Fourth and Cosmo Avenues in 1929-‐30. It is perhaps unfortunate that as

the street layouts began to incorporate curves the variation in architecture

alongside which could have created the distinctive street scene (Swenarton 2008,

18) noticeably diminished. As with phase one, the area is still characterised by

large gardens and signieicant access to open space, especially with the creation of

Tang Hall Park (now Hull Road Park) between Flaxman Avenue and Milleield Lane,

which contained sports and recreational facilities (Ordnance Survey 1938) as well

as a social club (Carré 1982, 4).

4.4FROM THE GARDEN SUBURB TO THE COUNCIL ESTATE?

In terms of aesthetic appeal, size and providing living spaces away from the

working areas of the house, standards changed in phase two of building at Tang

Hall. This is important for a number of reasons. It demonstrates that the aims of

phase one, the ‘Homes eit for Heroes’, council housing project at Tang Hall were

materially different from those of the the second phase. Equally, it means that the

types of living environments and neighbourhoods created were different between

the eirst and the second phases. Subsequently, the day-‐to-‐day experiences of people

living at Tang Hall might have differed in small but signieicant ways, between those

who lived on phase one of the development and those who lived on phase two.

From this it may be possible to deduce whether there was an ideology at work

behind the two phases, about the kinds of residents that the Tang Hall estate was

designed for.

From the evidence presented above, it appears that the eirst phase of

council housing at Tang Hall was aimed at giving residents a middle-‐class lifestyle

with a greater emphasis upon social space within the home, whether this was

achieved before or after coming to live on the estate. Bedale’s (1980) conclusions

for Oldham support this, that council housing in the early 1920s was an exclusive

and carefully controlled resource, available for only a select few tenants-‐ the

aspiring working class. This is reelected in the appearance of the area, the attempt


46

(more or less successful) to create an aspirational garden suburb with associations

of better living, optimism for the future and a return to pre-‐industrial values of

quality and design. The people at Tang Hall who lived in smaller, non-‐parlour

homes built during phase one could share in this, as their dwellings were built with

a similar level of architectural detail and attention (see Appendix 2 eig. 5), and they

were an integral part of the neighbourhood’s design. The development was created

with the intention of providing for a certain number of people who could not afford

the larger, parlour houses (Swenarton 1981, 179) but who would still be able to

take part in an aspirational community, demonstrating that there was an attempt

at social engineering through housing and neighbourhood design. The majority of

homes on phase one were built with the ‘artisan class’ in mind (Swenarton 1981,

179), people who were skilled workers and may not have considered themselves

working-‐class (Melling 1980, 18), and these were the values that the material

environment was designed to perpetuate.

Phase two of council housing development at Tang Hall focussed living

arrangements more strongly around the labour functions of the household. That

many more houses were built, undoubtedly cheaper, than on the eirst phase,

emphasises the mass housing requirement; these were no longer exclusive homes

designed for a select set of residents. However, this requires further explanation as

elements of garden city design were retained, and the homes were much higher

quality than those available previously to their eirst tenants (Rowntree 1941, 234).

Phase two represents a reconeiguration of the aims of the phase one in line with

new circumstances: different types of expected tenants; larger numbers of houses

required, needing to be built cheaper due to changing subsidies. The living spaces

in the houses are not focussed on social activities as the tenants, who may have

moved there from the ‘slums’, were not expected to want to use these spaces in the

same way as their aspirational neighbours on phase one. Consequently, garden city

design can be seen forming a sort of planning ‘baseline’ for housing development

during this period, with the relevant requirements added to or subtracted from the

basic design premise. Working-‐class housing on phase two at Tang Hall was built

with similarities to the more aspirational housing of phase one, giving it

aspirational connotations even though the living spaces provided were of a

different order.

This combination of aspirational garden city design with a range of

circumstances, ideological or otherwise, requiring its adaptation, had an impact


47

upon how these homes have been used and re-‐used in the eighty or so years that

they have been in existence. An assessment of the evidence for this can shed some

light on the experience of residents living at Tang Hall not only as council tenants,

but also more recently as owner-‐occupiers and private tenants.


48

USE AND RE-USE:HOUSES IN TANG HALL

The relationship of 1920s council estate design to model industrial

settlements and low density, garden city standards has been established. The

houses at Tang Hall have been examined with regard to differences in their design

and layout, particularly between the eirst building phase under the 1919 Housing

Act and the second phase built with later funding. Some discussion of material

agency with regard to the spaces provided by the houses has arisen, but further,

broader examination is required in order to draw conclusions about social aims

and intentions expressed through the built environment at Tang Hall. This can be

achieved through not only considering the estate as it was built, but by taking into

account the use and re-‐use of homes in Tang Hall. Examination of the estate as it

was built will illuminate the ineluences, aims and intentions of the builders, the

local authority, but evidence relating to how homes have been used and re-‐

modelled can illuminate the material agency of the place on people who live there,

as well as their agency over the spaces that they live in.

5.1SOCIAL AIMS IN BUILDING THE TANG HALL ESTATE

Since there is a deeinable difference between the houses of phase one and

two at Tang Hall, it is possible to make conclusions about the social aims behind

the building programmes. The majority of house types on phase one are

identieiable as parlour houses (Appendix 1 table 1, types 1-‐7), with the exception of

type 2 (the ‘experimental’ concrete house type) generally have average footprints

of c.45m2 and above, they are most similar to the larger models from both the

Tudor Walters Report (Housing (Building Construction) Committee 1918) and the

Manual (Local Government Board 1919). The Tudor Walters Report shifts the

emphasis signieicantly in providing this type of house, from a discussion of purely

practical necessity to one of social necessity, to a focus on how residents will use

larger houses to the beneeit of their social relationships (Housing (Building

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Use and Re-Use

49

Construction) Committee 1918, paragraph 86). Houses from the eirst phase of

building at Tang Hall were provided for respectable tenants who would spend

leisure time at home, and receive the kind of visitors who required the space of the

parlour (cf. Glassie 2006, 202). These houses were intended to encourage the

settlement of aspirational working class residents, the “cream” of the working

classes (Bedale 1980, 67) in new suburban surroundings, far away from the

physical and moral squalor of the overcrowded urban sprawl.

The local authority can be seen to have a social goal as the builder of the

eirst phase of council houses at Tang Hall. Backed by the aims of the government,

the council sought to realise the aspirations of certain sectors of the working class

by providing new modern homes that facilitated new ways of life. In the early

1920s, council housing was not common and was available to chosen few, subject

to strict selection, supervision and high expectation of their conduct as tenants

(Rowntree 1941, 240; Tudor Walters 1927, 31). Council tenancy in this period may

consequently have contributed positively towards social status (McKenna 1991,

182). The local authority was able to improve the physical environment of a

particular group of people, those who were perhaps most likely to appreciate a

beneeit in their material environment, to rise “to the level of the [new council]

houses in which they dwell” (Tudor Walters 1927, 31) thereby giving them

opportunity for material and social advancement.

For phase two of council development at Tang Hall, smaller houses with the

focus on work rather than social or leisure activities points to a subtly different

social aim. The practical requirement to build more, and more cheaply, in order to

accommodate slum clearance might have had an adverse effect on the size of these

homes, but this too can be seen in terms of social aims. Firstly, the scale of phase

two at Tang Hall (covering almost half a square kilometre, as opposed to just over a

tenth of a square kilometre on the eirst phase) can be interpreted as aiming to

remove as many people as possible from poor quality housing which would have a

detrimental effect on their moral character. Secondly, the intention to re-‐house

people from the ‘slums’ of Walmgate as well as addressing existing housing

shortage may have put additional pressure on the local authority’s resources, but

the density of the housing was not greatly increased. This suggests that, under

pressure, the focus on improving the lives of the residents had shifted to estate

layout at the expense of spaces inside the home. Like Octavia Hill (2010, 8) local

authorities may have believed that residents from slums were not eit for high


50

standards of housing (Bedale 1980, 66; McKenna 1991, 182-‐183; Rowntree 1941,

242-‐243), but they could still be improved through provision of a physical

environment as far removed as possible from high density inner city life; moving to

the low density estate.

It can be concluded that the intended use of the Tang Hall estate, from the

point of view of the local authority, who built it, and the government, who

instigated and einanced it, was for the physical, but also moral and social

improvement of people from the working classes. However, the two different

phases were aimed at different groups of working people, and carried out those

aims in a distinct manner.

5.2RESIDENTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE

It is difeicult to suggest how the eirst residents of Tang Hall might have

exerted agency over their home environment, because the way in which they

furnished their homes has long disappeared and strict tenancy rules meant there

would have been few opportunities for tenants to alter their homes in a way that it

is possible to see today. Observation and buildings survey of a number of different

types of houses at Tang Hall has suggested that an amount of built-‐in furniture was

provided in at least some of the houses as they were built, but residents would

have brought their own furniture (beds, chairs, tables, etc.) to meet their everyday

needs (Rowntree 1941, 236-‐237) although sometimes this was removed and

fumigated before they were allowed to move it in (McKenna 1991, 181).

More recent alterations to houses at Tang Hall can be considered, since

tenancy regulations have been relaxed and many homes have been purchased from

the local authority, sold on, or even rented privately. Having more freedom to

change the spaces of their homes, residents reveal their requirements and

expectations of what a home should be and how they want to use it.


51

5.3ALTERATIONS AT TANG HALL BEFORE 1980

It is important to consider that council housing and council estates were

physical spaces imposed upon working class tenants, who had little or no say in

how they were created (Ravetz 2001, 5). The Tudor Walters Report (Housing

(Building Construction) Committee 1918) incorporated a consultation which

involved potential council residents, but many of its recommendations were

altered or scrapped after 1923, such as the recommendation to provide a parlour. It

is difeicult to say whether the houses were able to meet residents’ needs and

expectations of a home, especially since there was little possibility for change if

they did not. If tenants found that a house was not completely adequate, they may

have been able to vote with their feet and move, as at New Earswick (Murphy 1987,

23), rather than change the space to their expectations.

By the later twentieth century many alterations were being made to houses

at Tang Hall, as the majority of residents became able to assert their changing

requirements on the fabric of the houses. As many houses from phase two at Tang


52

Figure 3.1Original ground eloor plans for the most common single type of house house at Tang Hall, classieied as type 19 in Table 1. This layout is probably typical for the majority of non-‐parlour types. (Spurr 1925).

Hall, and a number from phase one, would have originally had downstairs

bathrooms (eig 3.1) (or possibly baths in

the scullery, in the case of the smallest

houses), the most common alteration was

to move the bathroom upstairs. Many

council houses may have undergone

‘modernisation’ during the early 1970s,

like the Rowntree houses at New

Earswick (Green 1970, 354), where the

ground eloor interior arrangement was

changed to make the toilet accessible

from indoors, and to create more space

for the kitchen by removing the bath to

the eirst eloor and even removing the

downstairs toilet completely. At Tang Hall,

survey revealed various arrangements,

from the original layout (eig. 3.1) but with

the toilet made accessible from indoors,

to the complete removal of the toilet

and bath to the eirst eloor and

removal of the kitchen to the front of

the house, making a very large living

room (eig. 3.2). Insertion of a

bathroom on the eirst eloor was

usually evidenced by noticeable

addition of plumbing services on the

outside of the property (eigs. 3.3 &

3.4).

The removal of the

bathroom to the eirst eloor indicates

the acceptance of changing use of

space in the home, as it is likely that

many bathrooms were moved to the

eirst eloor whilst the houses were the


53

Figure 3.2Ground eloor plan of a house classieied as type 12 in Appendix 1 Table 1. The occupier described substantial alterations undertaken in order to remove the former coal house (and probably remains of former toilet/bathroom) and open up the rear of the house as a large sitting room, whilst moving the kitchen to the smaller area at the front of the house. Image reproduced from survey conducted 14/07/2013.

Figure 3.3Type 21 mid-‐terrace houses showing later insertion of plumbing services to the new eirst eloor bathroom on the front of the house.

property of the council as all the

council-‐owned homes recorded had

an upstairs bathroom. The

preference for an upstairs bathroom

seems to point to a shift in the focus

of the home, away from labour to

leisure (as described for the layout of

houses on phase one). In smaller

houses moving the bathroom

upstairs resulted in greater space on

the ground eloor, but a compromise

over space on the eirst eloor, as either

a whole bedroom was appropriated

to become the bathroom, or

bedrooms were partitioned in order

to squeeze in a eirst eloor bathroom

(eigs. 3.5 & 3.6). Family size in the UK peaked in the mid 1960s (Whiting, n.d.), so


54

Figure 3.4Type 21 end terrace house showing insertion of plumbing services to eirst eloor bathroom and further alteration associated with the doorway.

Figure 3.5First eloor plan of a type 9 house showing how the eirst eloor bathroom has been added by reclaiming space from a bedroom. Reproduced from Farrer Design (2010).

Figure 3.6First eloor plan of a type 19 house (original plan shown in eig. 3.1) where the third bedroom is converted into a new bathroom. This is an unusual arrangement as in other houses of a similar layout, the large front bedroom was partitioned instead. Image reproduced from survey conducted 27/05/2013.

this change in layout was happening at a time (early 1970s) when there may still

have been considerable pressure on sleeping space within the household. This

emphasises that social and leisure space had become the focus of the household,

over and above spaces associated with labour.

5.4

ALTERATIONS AT TANG HALL SINCE 1980

Since the introduction of the Right To Buy in 1980, privately owned former

local authority homes are more likely to have altered layouts than those still owned

by the council. However, a number of different house types surveyed revealed that

existing council houses have also been altered, and some privately owned homes

have little alteration from the original layout. In the last thirty years both owners

and tenants have taken decisions to alter their living spaces according to their

lifestyle expectations.

The differences in size and layout highlighted between the two phases of

building at Tang Hall, in addition to differences in the ways in which houses on

both phases have been altered and re-‐used might illuminate the continued

ineluence of 1920s council house design. A comparison of visible alterations from a

street level survey was carried out involving type 5 houses (Sixth Avenue, phase

one-‐ Appendix 2 eig.5), and type 15 and 17 houses (Tuke Avenue, phase two-‐

Appendix 2 eigs. 15 & 17)). All three house types are similar in original layout, they

are the smallest types from phase one and two, the type 5 houses averaging a c.

45m2 footprint and the type 15 and 17 houses averaging a c.35m2 footprint

(Appendix 1 table 1). They are distinguished by appearance and architectural

detail, the phase one type 5 houses on Sixth Avenue bearing the ineluence of

picturesque design, in comparison to the plainer type 15 and 17 houses on Tuke

Avenue.

Whilst a detailed analysis of alterations between all the house types on the

two phases would have been able to draw wider conclusions, the level of data

required was beyond the scope of this project. Examples of alteration may be found

for all the major house types, however (City of York Council n.d.). A comparison of

houses on Sixth and Tuke Avenues, drew conclusions about differences and

similarities in types of alteration between houses built on both phases of council


55

development at Tang Hall. It shows designs already identieied as associated with

either aspirational, or working-‐class uses of space are both adapted to the

requirements of more recent residents, who have had the ability to effect

permanent changes, but a divide remains between them.

Visible alterations to properties included those which might be considered

practically desirable-‐ built porches, loft conversions, built extensions and

conservatories-‐ and those which might be considered more as a symbolic stamp of

appropriation, signalling ownership (Dolan 1999), such as porch covers, stone

facing and new garden walls or fences. The comparison (eig 3.7) shows clearly that

the houses built on phase one are more likely to have alterations than those built

on phase two, with the signieicant exception of built extensions (one or two storeys,

but not including attached garages), which may be explained by the smaller size of

the phase two houses in the sample (c.35m2 average footprint, in comparison to c.

45m2 average for the phase one houses). No loft conversions were visible for the

phase two sample, this might indicate that these properties are unsuitable for loft

conversion and contribute to the rate of built extensions.

Alterations to windows are common on both Sixth Avenue and Tuke Avenue,

but detailed investigation shows a divergence in variety of alteration. Type 17

houses on Tuke Avenue (phase two) show limited resizing, and some removal of

windows which may be indicative of changing interior arrangement (eig. 3.8). Type


56

0"5"

10"15"20"25"30"35"40"45"50"

Facing"Added"(%)"

New"Garden"Wall/Fence"(%)"

Porch"Cover"(%)"

Built"Porch"(%)"

Window"AlteraCon"(%)"

Visible"LoH"Conversion"(%)"

Conservatory"(%)"

Built"Extension"(%)"

Separate"Garage"(%)"

Phase"One"

Phase"Two"

Figure 3.7Chart showing a comparison of visible alterations between Sixth Avenue (phase one) and Tuke Avenue (phase two). Phase one is clearly more altered than phase two.Sample sizes: Sixth Avenue, 31 houses; Tuke Avenue, 44 houses.

15 houses on Tuke Avenue (phase two)

have windows which have been

enlarged: two smaller windows

knocked into one larger window (eig.

3.9). On Sixth Avenue (phase one), the

predominant window alteration for

type 5 houses is the addition of a bow

window on the ground eloor (eig. 3.10).

These alterations, in particular the

introduction of a bow window, may

demonstrate aspiration, a wish on the

part of the resident to distinguish his

or her home from the original appearance of the estate. The frequency with which

the bow window alteration appears on Sixth Avenue suggests less that residents

want to distinguish their homes from one another’s, but perhaps acts as a

demonstration that the street has been subtly altered from its original purpose and

that, crucially, it is no longer council-‐owned property. Aspirational residents still

live in Sixth Avenue, but the nature of the aim in altering their properties has

changed. Owner-‐occupiers now wish to demonstrate their possession of property

and distinguish it from council housing, exerting agency upon their homes once

they have already realised the aspiration of no longer being council tenants.


57

Figure 3.8Window alteration and removal from type 17 houses on Tuke Avenue. Image courtesy of maps.google.com.

Figure 3.9Type 15 house on Tuke Avenue with enlarged ground and eirst eloor windows.

Figure 3.10Type 5 houses on Sixth Avenue with bow windows added.

Both streets show a trend away from fully enclosed front gardens towards

an open, paved parking area in front of most houses. New garden walls and fences

(instead of the original hedges with concrete posts and wooden gates) can also be

seen to mark a move away from the appearance of a council estate, providing a

permanent and practical solution to the demarcation of property as well as the

accommodation of an increasing number of vehicles. On Sixth Avenue (phase one)

the new walls and fences mark the boundaries between one house and the next,

but are not closed to the street, whereas on Tuke Avenue (phase two) they are

often enclosed and may incorporate a large gate for ease of parking. This difference

indicates a greater requirement in for residents in Tuke Avenue to mark their home

off from the street, rather than simply demarcate the extent of their property. As

part of phase two at Tang Hall, Tuke Avenue has more obvious associations with

mass working-‐class municipal housing, and perhaps owner-‐occupiers feel a greater

need to physically remove their property from the council estate.

Evidence which demonstrates the higher level of visible alteration occurring

to the houses from phase one of council development at Tang Hall, rather than

phase two, is intriguing because the phase two houses in the sample are much

smaller, and might be presumed not to cope so well with the changing

requirements of more recent residents. Larger houses may have been more

desirable under the Right To Buy, and so have been in private hands for longer and

had more time to accrue major alterations. Built as houses for aspirational tenants,

they have attracted aspirational owners who wish not only to expand the space

inside their houses through loft conversions and conservatories, but also to make

visible changes to demonstrate that their neighbourhood is no longer

predominantly council property.

The high level of alteration in general (at least 48% for the phase one

sample, and at least 36% for the phase two sample) demonstrate that residents at

Tang Hall now expect their homes to change to their requirements and

expectations, rather than shaping their lifestyles around the spaces as they found

them. This marks a shift in the way that people relate to a home, making it an

increasingly important base for social, leisure and even work activities which allow

residents to transcend traditional class stereotypes. Consequently, one type 21

house surveyed had undergone transformation from a basic three-‐bedroom house

with a downstairs bathroom and toilet accessed from outside, to a two bedroom

property with an upstairs bathroom, music room and conservatory, with ongoing


58

plans to add a workshop and an ofeice. This particular house demonstrates clearly

how spaces designed for servicing the basic necessities of life are now being

remodelled into places where leisure, work and necessity are required to come

together to provide a home.


59

CONCLUSION

Having discussed the research carried out at Tang Hall, the eindings will be

concluded and examined within the existing research context. Wider themes will

also be considered, particularly changing requirements, conceptions and

expectations of the home in relation to the current housing crisis. Finally, the aims

and outcomes of this project will be evaluated, along with suggestions for further

study.

6.1CONCLUDING THOUGHTS AT TANG HALL

Previous studies of council housing have focussed on economic and policy

issues, so this study has sought to address social concerns through an emphasis on

the material environment, ineluenced by the work of Daniel Miller (1998; 2005),

Rodney Harrison (2009), Buchli and Lucas (2001) and David Crowley (2002) and

John Dolan (1999) amongst others. The emergence of early twentieth-‐century

council housing, within the context of attitudes about the ineluence of the material

environment in producing physically and morally healthy citizens, and the

precedent of model industrial settlements and workers’ housing programmes,

continued the developments of the nineteenth century under state sponsorship.

Early twentieth-‐century council housing was neither a new kind of social

experiment nor a solution to an unprecedented economic situation; it was a

response to a complex variety of social, economic, material and moral concerns.

Council housing was a deliberate exercise of power over the working classes by a

dominant middle class, including the likes of Rowntree, Booth, Ebenezer Howard

and Raymond Unwin, who all had an ineluence in shaping its emergence as a

national programme after the First World War.

The case study of Tang Hall, York, highlights the difference between the eirst

phase of post-‐ World War I council housing development, ‘Homes for Heroes’, and

the second phase of council building in the later 1920s. Mentioned in earlier

studies as an effective segregation of the working classes (Melling 1980; Bedale

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Conclusion

60

1980), this has not been a developed theme. Bedale (1980) and Swenarton (1981)

indicate that early 1920s council housing was intended to play a part in removing

the aspirational working class from political action. Examination of the material

environment of Tang Hall reveals how changes in council housing programmes

created differing neighbourhoods on the same estate as the result of changing

social aims. Phase one at Tang Hall (1919-‐22) was intended as an aspirational

neighbourhood, with houses larger than the recommended standard at the time

(Local Government Board 1919), emphasis upon social and leisure space within

the home, low density estate layout, attention to architectural details which

attempted a picturesque character. Phase two (1925-‐30) focussed on mass

housing; compromises in interior spaces and layouts indicate how the houses

serviced residents’ living requirements without shifting the focus of the home away

from labour. Retention of a low-‐density estate layout for phase two shows the

continued aim of improving the residents, but it was a different order of

improvement from that of phase one. Residents of phase one and phase two at

Tang Hall inhabited separate physical and social environments as a result of these

differences.

A materialist approach should reelect how residents interact with their

environment; it is a two way process (cf. Hodder 2012; Miller 1988; Buchli and

Lucas 2001). At Tang Hall, evidence in the material environment for the agency of

residents prior to the major changes in housing policy and ideology brought about

by Thatcherism, are difeicult to eind. The local authority may have created an

aspirational or ‘improving’ environment by building the council estate, but whilst it

remained under local authority control there was little further opportunity for

residents to improve the material conditions of their home without moving from

the council estate, perhaps to become owner-‐occupiers elsewhere. The aspiration

was one of material progress, which tied to the individualism of the later

twentieth-‐century, resulted in the desire of residents not to live in a council house

but to own their own home and demonstrate ownership by changing the fabric and

layout to meet their individual needs and expectations of a home.


61

6.2PROBLEMATISING INDIVIDUALISM

Symonds (2011) has problematised the conception of ‘poverty’ in historical

archaeology in particular and the danger of unintentionally endorsing the idea of

material progress through narratives that aim to show the agency of “ordinary

people”. Council housing in the early twentieth-‐century has been placed eirmly

within the context of capitalism (Bowley 1985; Merrett 1979), and the provision of

housing commodities for the working classes, discussed previously as

‘improvement’, is also related to consumption. Miller (1988) considers that

residents consume living spaces through everyday use, and consumption deeines

the individual (Miller 2005). The provision of improved living spaces, the sites of

everyday life, for the working classes in the 1920s set the precedent for material

progress by the use of the material environment for the improvement of the

working classes. Material progress is inherent in the very provision of council

housing.

The problem arises in that council housing was designed by the middle class

elite in early twentieth-‐century, for whom the experience of material progress was

very real, to be applied to the working classes, many of whom would have found it

an alien concept (Symonds 2011). This raises the issue of class difference and

identity. Differences between classes, including sections of the working classes, are

successfully characterised in terms of culture, something which runs deeper than

the ineluence of a person’s material environment (McKibbin 1998; Ravetz 2001;

Olechnowicz 1997). When Ravetz (2011, 5) describes council housing as a cultural

transfer, the implication is that the middle class were attempting to change not just

the physical environment of the working classes, but also the attitudes, outlook and

modes of consumption of the council tenants. Working class residents were

encouraged to embrace the concept of material progress as they became council

tenants. It is difeicult within the scope of this study to conclude how successful this

cultural transfer was in the early twentieth century, as residents at Tang Hall could

not make permanent changes to their homes which might provide evidence for

this.

As Thatcherism gained ascendency in Britain from the late 1970s,

individualism and material progress were driven by changes in housing policy

which enabled residents to exert agency in terms of permanent changes to their


62

houses. This reelected the requirement to demonstrate individual possession and

change the material environment to new lifestyle needs and expectations (Dolan

1999). This is the moment that a cultural transfer to residents becomes visible in

the fabric council housing; signieicantly, when many council houses become

privately owned. A search for the agency of pre-‐1970s council tenants on the fabric

of their homes might be a search for an individualism which simply did not exist, or

even a search for a demonstration of material progress which is not appropriate.

This does not mean that residents did not have the ability to shape their homes to

their requirements in some manner, or that they should necessarily be represented

as powerless, trapped in an imposed environment. The key to tenants’ interaction

with the council estate before the 1970s may lie in a study of other types of

material culture which were part of their everyday lives.

6.3CURRENT HOUSING ISSUES IN BRITAIN

Individualistic concepts of the home are related to current housing issues.

The ideal of homeownership, which was also present during the early twentieth-‐

century (Melling 1980, 28) einally overcame the enterprise of state housing with

the Housing Act of 1980 which introduced the Right To Buy for council tenants all

over Britain. This study and others (Miller 1988; Dolan 1999) have shown that

residents require their homes to reelect their individual identities in some way,

whether it is by building a workshop for a classic car, decorating a kitchen with

memorabilia or giving the exterior of the house the appearance of a Spanish

hacienda. The Right To Buy served to further disenfranchise continuing council

residents with little control over their living spaces, as new owner-‐occupiers in

former council property were able to more fully materialise their individual

identities through major and permanent alterations to their homes.

State housing in the early twentieth-‐century came about to a large extent

due to the demands of the dominant middle class for the improvement of the

working classes. It was not a communitarian experiment; it was intended to create

aspirational neighbourhoods and encourage material progress, new modes of

consumption, amongst the less wealthy groups in British society. Council housing,

whilst a temporary solution to economic issues and severe housing shortage, was a


63

tool for the improvement of the working classes, rather than an end in itself. To this

extent, the introduction of the Right To Buy was the culmination of the project;

working class residents had been translated into homeowners, part of the

propertied class, able to fully participate in the individual drive for material

progress. This demonstrates the growing importance of the home as a site of

consumption and individual expression throughout the twentieth-‐century.

Homeownership as the ideal, seen to have been attained by many former

tenants, serves to mask an ongoing housing problem in Britain. The rate of

homeownership, as opposed to renting, steadily increased throughout the

twentieth-‐century, but whilst tenancy of social housing has decreased since the

introduction of the Right To Buy, private renting has increased in the last twenty

years (Ofeice For National Statistics 2013). In a consumer society, which focusses

on the home as a site of consumption and individual expression that should

conform to residents’ lifestyle requirements and expectations, tenants are

disenfranchised by their inability to consume the material environment of their

home in this way (Miller 1988). A growing rate of tenancy and, between 2001 and

2011 a decrease in the rate of home buying (Ofeice For National Statistics 2013),

suggests that due to current economic circumstances more people are becoming

disenfranchised by the inability to own their homes and, following Miller (1988;

2005), less able to materialise as fully active social beings in a society where

consumption constitutes authentic culture. They become less visible to the home-‐

owning, enfranchised majority, who themselves are unable to frame solutions to

housing problems in terms divorced from the ultimate goal of homeownership.

Council housing may have succeeded in changing the nature of working

class local authority tenants in Britain, but it has not offered a long-‐term solution

to people in need of housing; housing which today must necessarily perform more

functions for residents than servicing basic physical requirements. There is still

tremendous inequality surrounding housing issues, which the project of council

housing has in part participated in creating.


64

6.4EVALUATION AND FURTHER RESEARCH

The research aims of this project included presenting a Marxist-‐ineluenced

research programme which attempted to expose inequality with relevance to

current issues. Through a focus on the material environment, a clear aim to provide

improving and aspirational housing estates for different types of working-‐class

residents was determined in the development of early twentieth-‐century council

housing. Repercussions of this have been discussed with regard to existing housing

issues and consequent social inequalities in Britain. This study has demonstrated,

in response to questions about how people make places, in the case of the Tang

Hall estate, the local authority created an aspirational housing environment

through interior, exterior and layout designs, in which later residents demonstrate

aspirational attitudes through alterations to the fabric of their homes. This study

has determined that there was a change in the type of housing and estate layout

after 1923, and this was connected to changing aims behind the provision of state

housing. Following Harrison (2009), this project has addressed the way in which

changing state ideologies are expressed through the original design of the council

estate and how people have engaged with these spaces to manage conditions of

everyday life.

The outcomes of this study suggest some avenues of further research. These

include einding an approach to better access the everyday responses of early

council tenants to the imposed spaces of the council estate, which might be

achieved through social and oral histories as well as examination of photographic

evidence. A broadening of the scope of this study to consider larger municipal

housing projects could provide a greater variety of information; Tang Hall is a small

estate in comparison to much larger undertakings such as Wythenshawe on the

outskirts of Manchester or the Manor Estate in Shefeield. This would incorporate

council housing estates which are considered to have ‘failed’ at past and present

points in their existence (for example McCaffrey 2007), and be able to address

further current social issues such as anti-‐social behaviour. Incorporating council

housing built in the post-‐1945 ‘classic’ Welfare State period would be able to give

greater insight into changing expectations and uses of state housing by both

residents and government, at a time when unprecedented numbers of residents

became tenants of local authorities (Ofeice for National Statistics 2013). Finally, a


65

study which addresses the material environments created for private tenants and

new owner-‐occupiers in the large suburban expansions of private enterprise

building between the First and the Second World Wars, would not only provide a

comparison with themes highlighted in this study but would constitute a whole

new avenue of investigation in its own right (Swenarton 2002, 278).


66

APPENDIX 1Tables and Charts

Materiality and Municipal Suburbia Appendix 1

67

Table 1-Classieication of houses at Tang Hall from Level 1 survey, showing approximate footprint in m2 (data for which was gathered from Ordnance Survey-‐ 2012) and parlour or non-‐parlour types (data for which was gathered from City of York Council-‐ no date).

Type Description Phase of Building

Approx. Footprint (m2)

Parlour Type

Number of Houses

Type 1 Row of 3 or 4 with roofed gable on 'turned' end houses

One End houses 55, middle houses 45

Parlour 50

Type 2 Row of 4, entirely concrete with flared roof

Experimental

45 Non-Parlour 4

Type 3 Rows of 4 or 6 with end houses with gables becoming pitches at rear


Parlour 56

Type 4 Rows of 3 with turned gabled end houses, 'black & white' decorative detail

One 50 Parlour 12

Type 5 Rows of 2 or 4 with flared dropped roofed gable on end houses


Non-Parlour 50

Type 6 Rows of 3 or 4 with gabled 'turned' end houses


Parlour 17

Type 7 Rows of 3 or 4 with gabled 'turned' end houses


Parlour 69

Type 8 Rows of 2 or 6 square cottages

Infill 45 Non-Parlour 28

Type 9 Rows of 2, 3 or 4 with flared hipped roof

Infill 40 Non-Parlour 89

Type 10 Rows of 4 at end of cul-de-sac, angled bay windows, pitched roof

Two 40 Non-Parlour 16


68

Type 11 Rows of 2, 3 or 4, pitched roof and 'turned' end houses


Type 12 Row of 3 or 4 with hipped roof


Type 13 Row of 4 with angled bays,' turned' end houses,flared roof, gables on centre houses.

Two End houses 50, middle houses 45

Parlour 16

Type 14 Row of 4 with gabled, 'turned' end houses


Non-Parlour 24

Type 15 Row of 3 or 4 with pitched roof


Type 16 Flats in blocks of 8 imitating 4 houses


Type 17 Rows of 2, 3, 4 or 6 with 'turned' end houses that have doors to side

Two 40 but 35 in Tuke and Moore Aves.

Non-Parlour 162

Type 18 Rows of 2 or 4 with hipped roof


Type 19 Rows of 2 or 4 with square bay window. Approx. 174 of concrete construction


Type 20 Rows of 2 or 4 with angled bays only on turned end houses


Parlour 68

Type 21 Rows of 2, 3 or 4 with angled bay windows



69

Figure 1

0"200"400"600"800"

1000"1200"1400"1600"1800"2000"

Phase"One"(Types"137)"

Infill"Phase"(Types"8"&"9)"

Phase"Two"(Types"10321)"

All"Phases"

Number'of'Houses'

Number"of"Houses"

Chart showing number of houses built during each phase of development at Tang Hall. Types refer to those identieied in Table 1 and Appendix 2 eigs. 1-‐21.

Figure 2

0"

50"

100"

150"

200"

250"

300"

350"

400"

450"

Type

"1"

Type

"2"

Type

"3"

Type

"4"

Type

"5"

Type

"6"

Type

"7"

Type

"8"

Type

"9"

Type

"10"

Type

"11"

Type

"12"

Type

"13"

Type

"14"

Type

"15"

Type

"16"

Type

"17"

Type

"18"

Type

"19"

Type

"20"

Type

"21"

Number'of'Houses'

Number"of"Houses"

Chart showing numbers of each type of house built at Tang Hall. Types refer to those identieied in Table 1 and Appendix 2 eigs. 1-‐21.


70

Figure 3

0"

50"

100"

150"

200"

250"

300"

350"

400"

450"

Type

"1"

Type

"2"

Type

"3"

Type

"4"

Type

"5"

Type

"6"

Type

"7"

Type

"8"

Type

"9"

Type

"10"

Type

"11"

Type

"12"

Type

"13"

Type

"14"

Type

"15"

Type

"17"

Type

"18"

Type

"19"

Type

"20"

Type

"21"

Quan4ty"

Approximate"Average"Footprint"(m2)"

Chart showing relationship between quantity of houses built and the approximate average footprint of each type. Types refer to those identieied in Table 1 and Appendix 2 eigs. 1-‐21.


71

APPENDIX 2Photographs


72

Figure 1

Type 1 houses on Melrosegate.

Figure 2

Type 2 (experimental concrete) houses on Third Avenue.


73

Figure 3

Type 3 houses on Carter Avenue.

Figure 4.

Type 4 houses on Fourth Avenue


74

Figure 5

Type 5 houses on Fifth Avenue.

Figure 6



75

Figure 7


Figure 8

Type 8 houses on Fourth Avenue. These were identieied by Swenarton as ineill on the original building phase.


76

Figure 9

Type 9 houses on Bowes Avenue.

Figure 10

Type 10 houses on Scrope Avenue.


77

Figure 11

Type 11 houses on Giles Avenue.

Figure 12

Type 12 houses on Giles Avenue.


78

Figure 13

Type 13 houses on Fourth Avenue.

Figure 14

Type 14 houses on Tang Hall Lane.


79

Figure 15

Type 15 houses on Tuke Avenue.

Figure 16

Type 16 (elats) on Tuke Avenue.


80

Figure 17

Type 17 houses on Tuke Avenue.

Figure 18

Type 18 houses on Constantine Avenue.


81

Figure 19

Type 19 houses on Tang Hall Lane

Figure 20

Type 20 houses on Bad Bargain Lane.


82

Figure 21

Type 21 houses on Fourth Avenue.

Figure 22

Alcuin, Etty, Flaxman, Constantine and Burlington Avenues under construction in 1926 (facing north). The original development can be seen in the very top right, and the Tang Hall in the top centre of the photograph. Image courtesy of britainfromabove.org.


83

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materiality and municipal suburbia: early twentieth-century council housing at tang hall, york

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