When war ended in 1945 over 200,000 homes had been destroyed by enemy action and a quarter of a million more were so badly damaged as to be unliveable in. The immediate problem was to replace these and to provide homes for all the returning troops and their families.
Government was determined that there should be no repeat of the unrest which followed the First World War when 'Homes for Heroes' were slow in coming .Plans had already been made to make a start straight away, despite the shortage of materials, labour and money, by making use of the munitions factories to provide the unconventional temporary bungalows which soon came to be known as prefabs
Despite the plans and preparations the programme was bedevilled by delays. Local authorities were responsible for providing, laying out and servicing the sites, but the Ministry of Works were to be responsible for putting the prefabs up. The small town of Buxton in Derbyshire, for example, had prepared sites for 50 bungalows by June 1 1945 and were promised delivery of the houses by September, but only one had arrived by January 1946; delays were blamed on design changes, and on shortages of paint and internal fittings for the kitchens and bathrooms which were extremely well-equipped for the time. Imports of American prefabs had been halted when they proved unsuitable for the British climate. Councillors in Chapel en le Frith complained about the lack of availability, due to insuperable delays, of prefabs with solid fuel 'equipment'; electricity and gas were thought to be unsuitable and too expensive for their residents
When the first 4 prefabs were eventually completed in Buxton in July 1946 the event made front page news in the local press, with a long article extolling the virtues, (though not the outer walls of unpainted asbestos), of fittings 'on a lavish scale' which included 'numerous fitted-in cupboards', a gas copper for the laundry, 'elaborate electrical fittings' and space 'where a refrigerator will be fixed as soon as supplies are available'. The demand, or need, for rising standards in homes, (whether provided by public authorities or the private sector), over and above the need to demolish and replace the slums, was to be a constant theme of the next 25 years
Altogether about 125,000 temporary bungalows had been put up by the end of 1948 - a small dent in the assessed need for 2 million new dwellings to meet the governments stated aim of 'a home for every family which wants one'. To help fill the gap the government gave special help to encourage factory production of permanent 2-storey houses. About a quarter of a million of these had been built by 1954 using non-traditional materials such as asbestos, aluminium and steel but, most successfully it seemed, concrete
As early as 1942 the Committee of House Construction organised a study of all non-traditional post-1919 houses (most of which had been built in the first years after that war in similar conditions of shortage) and produced a list of recommended methods. System-built houses however were only - at best - no more expensive than brick and already there were doubts about maintenance. Bowley has pointed out that these were only worthwhile in areas where shortages of traditional materials were particularly acute and were especially prevalent in areas dependent on stone for building, or for rural council housing, the reason here being remoteness from pools of skilled construction workers. Bowley also attributed the relative lack of success of system building for houses to the 'pernickity' ideas of local authority architects who wanted to be able to vary internal layouts according to their own preferences. As an economist, she saw this as a sad failure to introduce much needed efficiency gains to the construction industry. Of course, she was writing in the mid-60s, when the scale of the structural problems with system-built houses, which emerged only years later and which led to the need to compensate tenants who had bought them under the Right to Buy, still less those which followed the attempts to use industrialised methods to provide mass housing in high-rise blocks, were yet to be realised
There was much concern that housing should not follow the ribbon pattern development of the 1930s and should not be allowed to take over good agricultural land. With food still short and imports by air from all over the world still a pipe-dream, this was an understandable concern. It was however a concern which conflicted with the traditional English dislike of living in overcrowded cities and with the preference for a more rural idyll. One solution adopted, which owed much to Ebenezer Howards ideas of the Garden City, was to contain development in defined areas. Eleven New Towns were quickly created in England under the New Towns Act of 1946, all but two of which were in the south east near London. The War-time belief in the efficacy of planning was carried over in to the Development Corporations which had wide-ranging powers to acquire land and to provide not just housing but also shops, offices and factories
New Town houses were of generally high quality, laid out at low densities in open plan streets; the cost of maintaining these communal open spaces was often added to the rent. But the low densities in themselves frustrated the idea of building compact, comprehensive communities with work and leisure close to home. Great care was taken in selecting families for the privilege of being removed from overcrowded London - prospective tenants were visited in their homes and poor standards of housekeeping might mark them as unsuitable - but this relative homogeneity may have contributed to New Towns generally acquiring a reputation as boring, lifeless places which reached its apotheosis with Milton Keynes and its concrete cows
New Towns also made only a small dent in the post-war housing problem, providing about 80,000 homes by 1958, but the new Labour Government were in no hurry to encourage the private sector to help fill the gap. A Councillor from Chapel en le Frith was quoted as saying that 'the Government is quite definitely doing all in its power to stop private enterprise building by putting a ceiling price on permanent houses well below the price it was going to charge local authorities for pre-fab houses'. There was a threat to requisition weekend cottages. A delegation had been to meet Aneurin Bevan who, in addition to the National Health Service was also responsible, as Minister for Health, for building the houses of the New Britain. He was reported as having told them that no encouragement would be given to the speculative builders, who built for sale, and that the responsibility would fall on the municipalities since building for rent was the overwhelming priority
Great emphasis was placed on the numbers of houses built - over 1 million in the six years of Labour Government after 1945 (compared with under million after 1918), more than four fifths for public authorities. This emphasis continued when the Conservatives came to power with an election promise of 300,000 houses a year. The 3-bedroomed semi for family occupation continued to be most peoples idea of a house, though economic stringency brought back the terrace and there was a growing tendency to provide 1- or 2-bedroomed maisonettes, particularly to meet the needs of what was by then recognised as a rapidly growing population of elderly households
Flats in general, and in high-rise blocks in particular, formed almost no part of the drive to meet the immediate post-war shortages; high rise had a very short-lived prominence during the sixties after emphasis was once again placed on slum clearance. It is fashionable now to put the blame for this brief-lived 'aberration' on a generation of architects seduced by the ideas of the Modern Movement. But one only has to read, for example, the work of Cleeve Barr, addressed to 'all whose work or interest bring them into touch with public authority housing' to realise the complexities of the problems with which they were grappling. And as modern commentators such as Holmans and Cooney have pointed out, the perceived shortage of land which was a major factor in the belief that we must build up rather than out, was a consequence of the ideas of Town and Country Planning rather than a geographic reality
Nevertheless, the momentum towards building high flats was there, and Englands first tall point block was opened in Harlow New Town in 1947. In 1950 a reorganisation at the London County Council brought a group of architects together who were soon responsible for schemes which were widely admired. From the first however it was not intended that tall blocks should be used for family housing; the new ideal of 'mixed development' together with the developing demographic trends meant that councils wished to provide accommodation for older couples without children, as well as for younger people, including professionals and semi-professionals, who increasingly wished to live independently before marrying and settling down. The old idea of working class estates filled with families with numbers of children had gone - indeed the words 'working class housing' had been dropped from legislation and from the numerous technical advice notes issuing from the housing ministry. It was thought that tall blocks for smaller, childless households would free space in such mixed developments so that some houses with gardens could be built even in the middle of the city
In the early 1950s building high, even in London, was generally limited to 100 feet or 11 storeys, which in itself presented new challenges which the long experience of building 5-storey blocks of 'working class' flats had not solved. At this height a brick cross-wall structure (in itself a replacement for the traditional spine wall method) proved the most economic, though it was not free of problems such as damp penetration. Attempts to introduce new methods involving light-weight steel frames and pre-cast concrete foundered because they generally proved too expensive, partly because of the high cost of providing protection from fire and because it proved difficult to provide adequate sound insulation between flats. Structures such as these were used for office-type buildings, but the experience gained could not easily be transferred to the different requirements of housing - in office buildings light weight, hollow floors provide an ideal space for the complex electrical etc services needed in a commercial building, but do not provide good sound insulation. Bricks could not be used above ? storeys, so reinforced concrete systems were adopted
All the early schemes ran into problems in ensuring that the walls stayed true, and in ensuring that the plaster stayed stuck to the wall panels. Solutions to these problems, involving the use of panels which could be lifted by the new mobile tower cranes, applied only to internal walls; problems remained with external walls and, as Cleeve Barr remarked 'a number of local authorities have learned to their cost [that] first-class workmanship is required if weather penetration is to be avoided at construction joints'. No universally satisfactory or reliable methods had been established when more local authorities became interested in building high after 1956. This was when the emphasis switched once more to slum clearance and the subsidy system changed so that the amount increased with the height of the building. It was also the year in which Duncan Sandys encouraged towns and cities outside London to consider introducing a Green Belt. In these circumstances it is tempting to conclude that virtually every block of flats or maisonettes erected between 1945 and 1970 was an experiment, using at least one untested element in its design or construction which brought in its wake a new problem of maintenance or management
Building high brought all sorts of new challenges to the construction industry, over and above those related purely to design, to do with the organisation and scheduling of the new methods of construction. As one small but telling example, Cleeve Barr quotes the difficulty of serving tea to workmen on the eleventh floor. Cleeve Barr shared Bowleys poor view of standards of training, management and productivity in the building industry. So there can be little doubt that designers, architects and builders did contribute, through the provision of unsatisfactory, damp, noisy or uncomfortable homes, to the social problems which later emerged on council estates
Even if the buildings themselves had been perfectly satisfactory however the types of layout adopted for the new mixed developments would have caused problems. Hindsight can point to the almost complete failure to realise the indispensable part that the car would come to play, even in the lives of council tenants. But the idea of providing 'towers in the park', that municipal housing could harmonise with 'the taste of eighteenth-century gentlemen [which] favoured parklands of wood and grass' as Cooney put it, or of 'LCC Housing and Picturesque Tradition' in the words of the title of an article by Pevsner, backfired. At a time when people were acquiring unprecedented privacy in their domestic lives, through the provision of unshared kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and WCs, they were having to learn to live with a new kind of shared external environment which at the least required new customs of courtesy and acceptable behaviour. The 'park' was neither truly public, open to non-residents in the same way as Hyde Park for example, nor truly the responsibility of the residents. Similar difficulties could arise in estates even of conventional house styles where open front gardens were not well delineated from access routes or childrens play areas and where there might be a general procession outside peoples windows. These problems would be exacerbated where developments were away from the city centre, or even in overspill estates far outside the city boundary, when tenants old and young cannot afford to travel to find entertainment. As the car, for those who could afford it, reduced the numbers of people walking about their business the parks became even more lonely and threatening and often windswept even on relatively calm days because of the effect of the tall buildings
With so much emphasis on the need to provide sheer numbers of dwellings, economic pressures inevitably led to cheeseparing in some areas, notably lifts. Lift technology was of course developing all the time, but innovation is expensive and even where adequate numbers of lifts were provided they did not always provide the best service. Some architects even disliked providing lifts because of the unsightly effects on roof top design. Lifts were by far the most expensive service mechanism and some authorities built 10- or 11-storey blocks with only one lift, despite the official recommendation for a minimum of two in buildings of over 6 storeys. Authorities were deterred not only by the capital costs however; servicing and maintenance were expensive too. The effect on the health and spirits of those who had to live in tower blocks with inadequate and often non-existent lift services are not hard to imagine
The problems were not just technical however as is shown by Cleeve Barrs complaint that 'Unattended lifts appear to have an innate capacity for arousing all the most anti-social tendencies in the human beast'; problems such as joy-riding by children, deliberate defacement, and urination were said to be occurring as early as 1958 on even the better-class estates. Some councils removed emergency stop buttons from lifts to prevent courting couples from making use of this facility. Social problems which affected design options were also recognised with more traditional types of housing; for example the back paths which had come to replace tunnel access in terrace housing were difficult to maintain, expensive to light and provided 'cover for bad characters'
The management of council estates often left much to be desired and this only added to the design problems. Housing management never acquired the professional status of architecture or planning, partly because elected councillors liked to play an active role in allocation of tenancies and other matters. There was an uncomfortable mixture of paternalism (even authoritarianism) and poor service, so that it is not surprising if tenants sometimes lost pride in an estate when they had no control even over details such as internal paintwork, still less the colour of the front door, repairs and maintenance or the installation, as time went on, of improvements such as fitted kitchens. Despite the post-war egalitarian ideals the wish to tell people how to live could crop up in surprising places. The Parker Morris report of 1961 set down generous space and heating standards for public authority housing; it also devoted time to discussing whether kitchens should be designed to cope with the distressing working class habit of eating meals there, or whether they should be kept deliberately small to force people into sitting down properly in a dining room. On the other hand an area in which the amount of direction which could be applied was never satisfactorily resolved was the movement of tenants to smaller homes, and the question of under occupation became a concern of the 1970s. It was of course inherent in the idea of mixed development that people should move out of larger houses with gardens once their children had grown up, but it is not surprising that few seriously wanted to follow through on the logic of this. Poor service was shown not just in unattended lifts, but in the gradual withdrawal of on-site staff such as caretakers and even rent collectors as growing street crime made this too perilous an occupation; such developments added to the difficulties of getting speedy repairs and led to a growing feeling of alienation among tenants
The reaction against high rise flats, even from within the architectural profession, was not slow in coming. Nicholas Taylor, in a 1967 article in The Architectural Review predicted that 'More slums are likely to be built in the next five years than in the past twenty' and after quoting D H Lawrence on real freedom and personal fulfilment, observed that 'taps and cupboards are only subsidiary means to this end'. It should be pointed out however that not all local authorities followed the fashion for building high; Manchester and Kensington for example. The former made a policy decision to avoid flats wherever possible because of the impossibility of observing the advice not to use them for families with children. Kensington were, scurrilously, supposed to wish to minimise the number of Labour voters living in their area
The Ronan Point disaster of 1968 is often taken as the beginning of the end of the high rise block, though in fact statistics show that numbers were already in decline. By 1970 less than 2 per cent of council dwellings were in blocks of more than 15 floors, and after 1975 blocks of even 10 floors were statistically invisible. Flats had never been popular in England and the Utopian vision, if such it was, did nothing to change that view. However the argument advanced by critics such as Coleman that the serious social problems which have emerged on some council estates would not have emerged if the design had been 'right' is difficult to sustain when one looks at the history of other areas. For example, Notting Hill which started as a genteel but cheap development in mid-Victorian England declined after 1945 into a byword for social evils; its rise and re-gentrification from the late 1960s onwards was not sufficient to ward off an outbreak of graffiti in the 1980s on what was obviously well-maintained private property. The relationship between built-form and social behaviour is clearly not one of simple determinism
By the 1980s the problems of maintenance and repair had become so overwhelming, on financial if not technical grounds, that blocks began to be demolished less than forty years, or in some cases less than twenty years after they were built. The story of council housing between 1945 and 1970 however is not one of failure only. Over 1 million tenants took advantage of the Right to Buy their home which was introduced in 1980; while some were undoubtedly ill-advised to do so, many acquired a valuable asset as well as freedom from heavy-handed or unresponsive management. Successful solutions to the housing problem were found and standards of housing, even in the worst blocks, are often way above what was offered in the private-rented sector as late as the 1960s. To say, as some have done in this year of celebrating the end of the War, that the prefab represented the ideal combination of factory methods and the traditional English cottage, is to see a cold reality through a rosy glow of nostalgia
