Part 3 – Social Housing in Britain between the Wars

Lecture Summary:

In the 1920s and 1930s Britain’s urban landscape was transformed by vast low-rise suburban housing developments and, in the inner-city, by multi-storey projects replacing slums on a scale far exceeding the efforts of Victorian or Edwardian city councils and philanthropists. It would be transformed again after 1945 in response to wartime bomb damage and the opportunity this presented for a fundamental re-think. Our focus will be on London and Liverpool between the wars, with sideways glances to the wartime developments which bookend the period. We will visit projects for munitions workers built during World War I at Well Hall (near London’s Woolwich arsenal) and Gretna (Scotland) and which served as prototypes for much that followed; the London County Council (LCC) developments at Becontree (1920s) and the White City (late 1930s); Liverpool’s “New Town” at Speke(planned before 1939 but finished after 1945). Inner city redevelopments with ambitioussocial or technical agendas include the experimental LCC high-rise project at OssulstonStreet (1920s) and the modernist Kensal House (built as employee housing for London’s largest gas company). We will end with a pre-view of the post-1945 social housing that emerged from the LCC’s reconstruction plan (1940-43) masterminded by Patrick Abercrombie.

Speaker: Simon Pepper

Biography

Simon Pepper PhD is an architect and historian whose career includes teaching posts at the AA, the University of Virginia and the University of Liverpool where he holds an Emeritus Chair of Architecture. He has worked on housing and urban renewal in private practice and on secondment to the UK Government’s Department of the Environment. He has authored or co-authored books on housing rehabilitation, Renaissance military architecture (his dissertation topic) and British public libraries. He is currently researching the reconstruction plan for London (1940-3).