Part 1 – “All is Solid Here”: Pioneer Model Housing in London 1840-1880

Lecture Summary:

During the 1840s a series of model housing schemes for working people was set up in London, in response to concerns about insanitary dwellings and disease in the wake of the 1830s cholera epidemic and a housing crisis exacerbated by clearances for railways and other development, which added to the public health risk through overcrowding. Calls for housing reform were met initially by charity and private initiative.

The talk will begin with the role of The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes (SICLC) and its architect, Henry Roberts, in the evolution of model housing. ‘All is solidhere’, one lodger reported to The Builder about his stay at the SICLC’s George Street “Model”’ for single working men, one of a range of experimental blocks which also included tenements or ‘model houses for families’. We will then turn to the work of other philanthropic schemes in London including that of the Peabody Donation Fund. Most of these projects were intended to turn a small profit on the ‘five-per-cent philanthropy’ model. Generally they were soundly builtand drained, well ventilated, and designed to prevent the spread of fire and disease, while also offering some of the comforts of the home or the club – models of their kind and for others to follow. Though the rents tended to be beyond all but the upper crust of the working class, thebuildings were a great improvement on most existing working-class accommodation. We will end on the larger-scale developments built in London under the provisions of the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Acts, 1875 to 1885, which permitted the clearance of unhealthy areas by compulsory purchase. While it was intended that model dwellings companieswould build the replacement housing, the metropolitan authority had to step in when co-operation with a philanthropic body could not be secured, thus marking the beginnings in London of municipal housing provision on a substantial scale.

Speaker: Rebecca Preston

Biography

Rebecca Preston is a historian with the English Heritage London blue plaques scheme. She has previously held posts with the Survey of London and in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she completed her PhD in Geography in 1999. Herpublications, often collaborative, are on the design and use of the built environment, landscape and gardens, and housing and the home in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain.