Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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and among transport workers. Here networks based on kinship, patronage and
village ties eased the migrants’ passage into urban markets.
35
Why, then, did Irish immigrants fare so poorly? The concept of adaptation
inevitably has led some historians to look at the non-adaptive qualities of the
Irish themselves. While acknowledging that the Irish may have experienced
some discrimination, these researchers have also emphasised their fondness for
drink, their preference for leisure rather than work and the low expectations fos-
tered by the Catholic Church.
36
The similarities between this verdict and so
much contemporary commentary on Irish migrants may induce us to exercise
some caution before accepting it. Moreover, it is an interpretation that fails to
take account of the diverse experience of Irish immigrants. In an examination
of seven towns, Pooley found that between per cent and per cent of the
Irish population were in skilled or higher status occupations and so had access
to higher wages and better housing than the small majority in unskilled and
semi-skilled jobs. Similarly, in towns such as London, Cardiff and Bradford, the
Irish were spread widely through the city as well as clustered in notorious rook-
eries. Culturally Irish immigrants were a heterogeneous group with diverse
origins and included some who tried to break ties to Irish identity, others who
strove to transplant Irish culture in Britain, others who helped forge a hybrid,
church-oriented immigrant culture.
37
But though the image of the Irish as a population of unskilled and demoral-
ised slum dwellers can be seen to have been highly partial, it was not without real
effects.
38
In view of their reputation, it is easy to see why, disproportionately, the
Irish remained concentrated in low-skilled and low-paid employment. It is not
that they were regarded by employers and the middle-men of the labour markets
as unfit for work; rather, they were seen as fit for only a particular set of tasks.
Samuel Hoare, a Liverpool builder, told the Royal Commission on the Irish
Poor in England ‘They scarcely ever make good mechanics; they don’t look deep
into subjects...theydon’t make good millwrights or engineers, or anything
which requires thought. They don’t even make good bricklayers. This is not
because the want of apprenticeship is an obstacle . . . I attribute this not to edu-
cation but to difference of natural power.’
39
Employers’ prejudices also allow us
to make sense of the pattern of women’s work. For whereas Irish men were
simply disadvantaged when compared to both town- and country-born
Englishmen, the situation of Irish women was more complex. Their employment
David Feldman
35
Ibid., pp. –; on London see G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ), pp. –.
36
Hunt, British Labour History, pp. –; L. H. Lees, Exiles of Erin (Manchester, ), pp. –.
37
D. Fitzpatrick, ‘A curious middle place: the Irish in Britain, –’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley,
eds., The Irish in Britain, – (London, ), p. .
38
On this see J. Davis, ‘Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: the construction of the under-
class in mid-Victorian England’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones, eds., Metropolis London
(London, ), pp. –.
39
PP , Royal Commission on the Irish Poor in England, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
pattern was broadly similar to that of urban-born women, with a concentration
in semi-skilled jobs, whereas domestic migrants were overrepresented among
domestic servants. Significant here were both the reluctance of town-born girls
to go into service when there was better paid and more congenial work available
in factories and, despite difficulties in procuring domestic servants, employers’
evident reluctance to employ Irish women in their homes.
40
What was the impact of this massive movement of population, both within
Britain and from Ireland, on public policy and debate? The poor law was the
institution which most obviously took note of the mobile population and, in
this sense, converted mobility into migration. It did so because the parish set the
boundaries of entitlement to welfare. The Poor Law Amendment Act
retained two pillars of the old system of poor relief which continued to shape
responses to migration; first, the parish or township remained the unit for setting
and collecting the poor rate, and, second, the act retained the Law of Settlement
– a complex collection of statutes and precedents which determined where any
applicant was entitled to receive poor relief. Migrants did not acquire a new set-
tlement, in this sense of entitlement, simply by arriving in a new poor law juris-
diction; rather, they also had to satisfy other stringent residence or property
requirements.
41
As a result, at the beginning of this period many migrants were
not entitled to poor relief in the towns to which they had moved.
When migrants applied for poor relief they were examined to determine where
their settlement lay. If it was elsewhere they were classified as ‘strangers’ and liable
to be removed to their parish of settlement. Moreover, poor law authorities,
anxious to restrict the burden on the poor rates, saw these powers as an essential
bulwark against a flood of applications for relief. The Poor Law Commissioners
reported that during the depression of the threat of removal had
acted most beneficially as a test in preventing the disposition to become charge-
able. The Irish and the non-settled poor whom the fear of removal deterred from
applying for relief have suffered far the most. The obligation to relieve existed on
the spot, but the pauper knew that the receipt of relief would be followed up by
removal, and he preferred any extremity to this result.
42
Removal was expensive and time-consuming. As a result, until the mid-s,
in some parts of the country, a system of non-resident relief flourished in which
the parish of settlement met the bills sent to them for the relief of their non-
resident poor. For instance, about per cent of those relieved in the West
Migration
40
Anderson, ‘Urban Migration in Victorian England’, p. ; P. Horn, ed., The Rise and Fall of the
Victorian Servant (Dublin, ), pp. –.
41
M. E. Rose, ‘Settlement, removal and the New Poor Law’, in D. Fraser ed., The New Poor Law
in the Nineteenth Century (London, ), pp. ‒; J. S. Taylor, ‘The impact of pauper settlement
–’, P&P, (), –.
42
Cited in D. Ashforth, ‘Settlement and removal in urban areas’, in M. E. Rose, ed., The Poor and
the City (Leicester, ), p. .
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Riding, between and , were non-resident paupers.
43
But it was the
threat of removal which induced poor law authorities to cooperate in this way.
From , however, the residential qualifications for receiving poor relief were
gradually relaxed and by the requirement had been reduced to one year’s
residence. Equally significant was that in the unit of entitlement had been
extended from the parish to the considerably larger unit of the poor law union,
thus allowing a wider circle of mobility before entitlement to poor relief was
brought into question.
44
The poor law provides one example of the ways in which a mobile popula-
tion placed particular demands upon urban institutions. But, in general, migra-
tion provoked a fear which dared not speak its name. It was well understood that
the environmental crisis of mid-nineteenth-century cities had been created by
what one writer accurately described as ‘the rapid increase in population, its
concentration in towns, and the altered relative proportion of the agricultural
and manufacturing communities’.
45
But without bringing this process into ques-
tion, the difficulties arising from migration in general could not easily be
addressed. Instead, the problems were projected upon the most vulnerable frag-
ments of the mobile population: the inhabitants of lodging houses and the Irish.
Sanitary reformers picked out lodging houses as foci of contagious diseases,
on account of their filthy bedding, overcrowding and want of ventilation, and
as founts of moral depravation on account of ‘the indiscriminate intermixture
of sexes in the same sleeping apartments’ and the character of ‘the various orders
of tramps and mendicants’ who slept and caroused there.
46
In London alone, in
the early s the lodging houses contained, perhaps, , nightly occu-
pants.
47
Lodging houses were the resort of Britain’s itinerant population but they
were also home to tramping artisans, migrant workers and labouring families
down on their luck. But such was not the predominant view. The migrant
menace generally was presented as a burden imposed by an outcast, transient
population, marginal to the development of civilisation and commerce.
48
The other group destined to inhabit this role were the Irish. The Irish, like
the lodging house population, were widely presented as a fertile source of
medical danger and moral decay. The investigations and lamentations of urban
Britain produced in the s and s by writers such as J. P. Kay, Cornewall
Lewis, Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Engels repeatedly focused on the degraded
David Feldman
43
Rose, ‘Settlement’, pp. –.
44
Ibid., pp. –.
45
Anon., The Health and Sickness of Populations (London, ), p. .
46
PP , First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and
Populous Districts, Appendix, pp. –, , ; E. Chadwick, The Sanitary Condition of the
Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh, ), pp. –.
47
E. Gauldie, Cruel Habitations (London, ), p. .
48
PP , Second Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns
and Populous Districts, pp. –; PP – , Copy of a Report Made to the Secretary of
State for the Home Department by Captain Hay on the Operation of the Common Lodging-
House Act, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
and degrading state of the Irish population. A small number of Irish were thus
instated firmly as one of the main causes of the urban crisis of early Victorian
Britain.
49
This account of the way in which the phenomenon of migration was both
grasped and misrepresented by reformers might lead us to regard the Irish as the
inevitable scapegoats, the historic ‘other’, at hand to blame for the dislocations
caused by rapid urbanisation. This view of hostility to immigrants as natural and
predetermined underestimates the extent to which reactions to their presence in
British cities were shaped by institutional pressures and by the analyses and pro-
jects of urban reformers, as well as by individual political choices. This becomes
clear once we acknowledge that opinion over the Irish was divided. Employers
who wanted to continue to enjoy a flow of Irish labour claimed the reformers’
pronouncements were alarmist and inaccurate.
50
Moreover, not all medical
opinion spoke with one voice. Dr Lyon Playfair, for instance, produced a detailed
report on the impact of Irish immigration on mortality in Liverpool. He pointed
out, contrary to the claims of the town council, that since the immigrants were
largely composed of adults they obscured the impact of infant mortality in the
city. He wrote: ‘the proportion of the population to deaths is elevated by
migrants, and . . . Liverpool is thus rendered apparently more healthy than it
really is’.
51
Sectarianism too was a variable not an inevitable phenomenon, shaped by
different urban contexts even where there were large concentrations of Irish
immigrants. In Liverpool, at one extreme, city politics was dominated by
conflicts between organised Protestantism and Catholicism. Here the weakness
of nonconformity, liberalism and the labour movement, amidst a largely casual-
ised working class, left the field open to anti-Irish and anti-Catholic agitation.
In Glasgow, by contrast, despite a greater concentration of Irish immigrants,
organised anti-Catholicism struggled to make headway in the face of a liberal-
ism that thrived upon a firm base in the institutions of a skilled labour force –
the cooperative movement, trade unions and friendly societies.
52
(iii) C. ‒
In this period, in contrast to the preceding decades, the problem of migration
was conceived less often as a problem of urban order and more usually as a facet
Migration
49
For a survey see D. M. MacRaid, ‘Irish immigration and the “condition of England” question:
the roots of an historiographical tradition’, Immigrants and Minorities, (), –.
50
Ibid., .
51
PP Appendix – part to Second Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the
State of Large Towns and Populous Districts. Report on the Sanatory Condition of Large Towns
in Lancashire, p. .
52
J. Smith, ‘Class, skill and sectarianism in Glasgow and Liverpool –’, in R. J. Morris, ed.,
Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester, ), pp. –;
F. Neal, Sectarian Violence (Manchester, ); and see below, pp. , .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
of imperial competition. Rural depopulation, suburbanisation and the influx of
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were those aspects of mobility that were
seen to be saturated with significance for the nation’s imperial future.
In the late nineteenth century migrants left rural Britain at a slower rate than
over the preceding forty years. The moment at which the slackening rate of
movement was first registered varied. In southern and eastern counties it can be
detected from the s, in the case of Wales and the northern counties, the
s provided a fresh peak in migration from the countryside but with a sharp
diminution thereafter.
53
At the same time there was the beginning of a regional
shift in numbers from north to south. Some industrial areas – south-west
Durham, parts of east Lancashire and west Yorkshire, the Black Country and
the northern fringes of the South Wales coalfield – began to lose numbers.
There was also, in these years, a notable inflow to southern residential towns
and resorts such as Hastings and Eastbourne.
54
In part, the growth of these
places reflected a process of suburbanisation which had become so extensive that
it was contributing to the growth of discrete towns. But it was the movement
of people from city centres to suburbs that constituted the most significant facet
of mobility in this period. Of course, suburbs were not a new phenomenon in
the late nineteenth century. From the s the largest cities had all seen the
departure of the wealthiest of the middle classes from their centres. But it was
only in the s that the central districts of London, Glasgow and
Birmingham, for example, began to experience a net loss of population. By the
next decade, the fastest growing areas of England and Wales were four north
London suburbs.
55
The other facet of migration in this period which requires comment is immi-
gration; most notably, the immigration of ,–, Jews from Eastern
Europe.
56
Their impact was slight beyond a few pockets of London, Leeds,
Manchester and Glasgow. The public attention devoted to these immigrants,
however, was out of all proportion to their number. The problems of sweated
labour and of housing, the deterioration of the race and the emergence of a class
of violent and amoral criminals were all issues which came to focus on the effects
of Jewish immigration.
The attention lavished on Jewish immigrants illustrates, once again, that it was
not the sum of all mobility that contemporaries instated as the problem of migra-
tion. But it was not only Jewish immigration which received disproportionate
attention. For it was in these years, when the pace of migration from country to
David Feldman
53
Cairncross, ‘Internal migration in Victorian England’, pp. –.
54
Ibid., p. ; C. G. Pooley and J. Turnbull, ‘Counterurbanization: the nineteenth-century origins
of a late twentieth-century phenomenon’, Area, (), –.
55
The four were West Ham, Leyton, Tottenham and Willesden. A. S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum
(London, ), p. .
56
L. P. Gartner, ‘Notes on the statistics of Jewish immigration to England: –’, Jewish Social
Studies, (), –.
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towns was slackening, when, indeed, the decline in the agricultural labour force
was checked, that rural depopulation became a central issue in political debate.
Both Jewish immigration and rural depopulation were understood in terms of a
set of specifically imperial anxieties.
The idea that rural depopulation was at the heart of the social problem had
become a commonplace of political debate by the start of the twentieth century.
People differed on what to do about the problem, but not the diagnosis. The
latter was based on the theory of urban degeneration, which equally pervaded
analyses from the political right and the left. It was through the theory of urban
degeneration that the rural problem became an urban problem. In a series of arti-
cles for the Daily Express, later collected in two doorstep volumes titled Rural
England, Rider Haggard asserted ‘rural depopulation can mean nothing less than
the progressive deterioration of the race . . . if unchecked it may in the end mean
the ruin of the race’.
57
He attributed the reverses of the war in South Africa to
‘the putting of town bred bodies and intelligence, both of officers and men,
against country bred bodies and intelligence’.
58
He prescribed the protection of
agriculture and legislation to promote smallholdings. But this was not a fad of
tariff reform Conservatives. Similar diagnoses can be readily found in the Report
of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which saw one
possible solution in the garden city movement, and in the utterances of figures
such as Winston Churchill, Ramsay Macdonald and David Lloyd George, whose
land campaign drew on this conventional view of the relationship between
migration to cities and national strength.
59
Suburban growth fed these concerns in two ways. First, from the turn of the
century there was rising concern at the way the suburbs were robbing the nation
of its countryside; at the way in which ‘swelling hills and grass pastures’ were
replaced by ‘serrated lines of house tops and slated roofs’.
60
If the nation’s
strength lay in its fresh air and green fields then the relentless advance of terraced
houses was a part of the problem of deterioration. Rider Haggard identified in
the new verb ‘to maffick’ a troubling sign of the change and deterioration in
national temperament, and it was with the population of the suburbs that the
verb was most clearly associated.
61
Charles Masterman too believed that the
suburbs had a degenerative effect. Examining The Condition of England,
Masterman detected in the suburbs ‘a slackening of energy and fibre in a gener-
ation which is much occupied with its pleasures’. He dwelt on the intellectual
Migration
57
H. Rider Haggard, Rural England, vol. (London, ), p. .
58
Ibid., p. .
59
PP , Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, pp. –; R. R. James
ed., Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches,–, vol. (New York, ), p. ; B. Barker,
ed., Ramsay Macdonald’s Political Writings (London, ), p. ; Times, Nov. , p. .
60
S. M. Gaskell, ‘Housing and the lower middle class, –’, in G. Crossick, ed., The Lower
Middle Class in Britain, – (London, ), pp. –.
61
Haggard, Rural England, p. ; from the emotional demonstrations at the ‘relief of Mafeking’ in
.
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and moral debasement caused by a diet of the yellow press, vicarious sport and
gambling.
62
The change in the way migration was understood to be a problem can be
traced through the successive phases of response to Jewish immigration.
63
In the
s, Jewish immigrants were subject to investigation and debate in ways famil-
iar from preceding investigation of the Irish and lodging houses. In The
Lancet exposed the intensely overcrowded and insanitary working and living
conditions in the Jewish East End of London. Within two years the precise focus
of debate shifted from public health to sweated labour but more fundamental
continuities remained: first, the several public and private inquiries into the
problem drew impetus from the fear for public order in the capital during the
depression of the mid-s and, second, the consensual prescriptions of this
period, which found their way into legislation, extended public health inspec-
tion to small workshops. By contrast, at the turn of the century, debate among
politicians, social reformers and journalists was animated by the imperial conse-
quences of the immigration of a horde of physically and morally enfeebled Jews.
The fact that Jewish immigrants were ousting the native born within labour and
housing markets was seen by the opponents of immigration such as William
Evans Gordon, the MP for Stepney, as confirmation that in city conditions only
a degenerate type would flourish.
The Aliens Act, passed in with the aim of restricting Jewish immigration,
was a legislative landmark in the modern history of migration. Since , and
the repeal of legislation passed during the wars with France, there had been free
entry to the United Kingdom. In the intervening period, so far as the law was
concerned, migration was an internal and local problem; the issues of settlement
and removal arose from the local basis of welfare provision. The passage of the
Aliens Act was one pioneering (and cheap) contribution to the process through
which central government took increasing responsibility for welfare: a process
that was widely justified in terms of imperial efficiency. The gradual acquisition
by central government of responsibilities for welfare provision necessarily redrew
the boundaries of entitlement. Increasingly, it was the boundaries of the state
itself, not the parish or the poor law union, which determined the parameters of
entitlement. Beginning with the introduction of state contributions to national
health insurance in , every provision of government funds for welfare pay-
ments had to address the question of whether immigrants were eligible.
The development of state welfare had an important impact on the politics of
Jewish immigrants which further brings into question models of adaptation. In
the period following the introduction of the Aliens Act, and still more once
Lloyd George’s National Insurance Bill came into view, Jewish immigrants
David Feldman
62
C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, edn), pp. –.
63
The remainder of this section is based on the fuller account given in part of my book Englishmen
and Jews (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
organised within the political arena in unprecedented ways. In the case of the
National Insurance Bill they lobbied civil servants, MPs, ministers and Lloyd
George himself, to elicit a major concession for unnaturalised immigrants. This
degree of participation in the British political process was not the culmination
of years of integration and adaptation. Instead, it marked a radical discontinuity
with previous political habits and was stimulated by changes in the state itself.
Jewish immigrants entered the British political arena to pursue their interests as
Jews and immigrants, not as part of a flight from them. The more the processes
of British politics encroached on Jewish immigrants the greater was their par-
ticipation within them. Once again, we find not a process of adaptation to a
given set of circumstances but one in which immigrant behaviour was shaped
by circumstances that were themselves subject to change.
(iv) C . ‒
In these decades, migration continued to provide one focus for public debate
and policy. But there was a change in the terms in which the phenomenon was
understood. Discussion now concentrated on the decay of ‘community’ and the
decline of industrial Britain. By the end of the period these anxieties had come
together and were reflected in wartime and post-war regional and housing
policy.
If we look at the experience of individuals, the overall pattern of residential
mobility in these decades displays great continuities with the preceding hundred
years. Within this stable structure there were some changes. There was probably
less residential mobility than in the preceding century. At the same time, the dis-
tances moved were on average larger than hitherto, and there were also signs of
‘counterurbanisation’ – a current of movement from urban to rural England.
64
But despite these changes, it remained the case that most moves were over short
distances, either within the same settlement or to one of a similar size. However,
as we noted for the period –, measuring and mapping the dominant
pattern of residential mobility for individuals in terms of the size of settlement
they have moved to and from, and the distances they have moved, will not nec-
essarily reveal the ways in which migration has interacted most significantly with
the dynamics of urban change. In particular, the trend for the populations of
central urban districts to decline and for suburbs to grow accelerated in the inter-
war years. Between and , three-quarters of population growth accrued
to the suburbs of twenty-seven conurbations.
65
Moreover, the underlying con-
tinuity of residential mobility, at the same time as public debate underwent
Migration
64
Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, pp. , ; see M. Anderson, ‘The social implica-
tions of demographic change’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain,
vol. : People and their Environment (Cambridge, ), p. .
65
D. Aldcroft, The British Economy between the Wars (Oxford, ), p. .
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significant shifts, draws attention, once again, to the distinction between mobil-
ity and that portion of it which has been construed as migration.
The housing that was the stuff of suburban growth was erected from two
sources: municipal and private. Almost million houses were built between the
wars, per cent of them by private enterprise.
66
How are we to explain this
massive growth in the private housing stock? Certainly it was a response to a
demand created by the lack of building during the war, the decline in family
size, the changing composition of the labour force as the proportion of clerical
workers trebled between and and the number of supervisory workers
doubled, and rising living standards. But these reasons fail to explain why the
growth took the form that it did – that is a suburban growth; and not, for
example, the erection of modern apartments in the centre of town.
What we need to take account of here is not only the ‘natural’ force of
demand in pushing suburban migration but also utopian fantasies of suburban
life and, more materially, the role of the state. The desire for fresher air, larger
gardens and a degree of social exclusivity was long-standing. What distinguished
the interwar period was the combination of these with an embrace of moder-
nity. The themes, for example, were combined in this Underground advertise-
ment after the extension of the Northern Line in , which strove to convey
the attractions of both rusticity and technology:
Stake your claim at Edgware . . . The loaf of bread, the jug of wine and the book
of verse may be got there cheaply and easily and . . . a shelter which comprises all
the latest labour saving and sanitary conveniences. We moderns ask much more
before we are content than the ancients, and Edgware is designed to give us that
much more.
67
Suburbs rejected architectural modernism but embraced the modernity of
electrical and gas-powered gadgets which characterised the servantless middle-
class suburban home.
Further, this migration of the middle class to their domestic utopias would
have been impossible without the support of government. In part this was a
matter of helping to provide the utilities upon which suburban life depended.
The expansion of London suburbia for example was tied to the parallel expan-
sion of the Underground networks which, in turn, was enabled by Treasury
guarantees.
68
The attraction of the modern, gadget-rich life style of the suburbs
was enhanced by creation of the national grid and the resulting fall in the price
of electricity to domestic consumers.
69
Above all, a policy of cheap money
fuelled the housing boom of the s. As interest rates fell from , so the
David Feldman
66
J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing, nd edn (London, ), p. .
67
Ibid., p. .
68
T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport, vol. : The Twentieth Century to
(London, ), pp. , .
69
L. Hannah, Electricity before Nationalisation (London, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
amount of new mortgages advanced by building societies rose from £m per
year in to £m at the peak of the boom, and in the same period the level
of private house building more than doubled.
70
The other face of suburban growth was the vastly expanded provision of
municipal housing, generally on the principle of low-density cottage estates on
the outskirts of or beyond city limits. If they could afford the rents, which were
high, families took advantage of the new facilities because, as Herbert Morrison
put it, ‘people are seeking to live under conditions that they conceive to be more
pleasant with greater amenity and with more space and light and air about them,
and to get rather more modern than old-fashioned conditions’.
71
The new suburbs displeased many who lived beyond them; the middle-class
districts elicited contempt, while concern was reserved for the working-class
estates. Anti-suburban prejudice was a time-honoured and protean phenom-
enon.
72
However, in the interwar period a great deal of the hostility suburbs
aroused was on account of their privatised affront to ideals of collective life.
W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in this vein described suburban semis
as ‘isolated from each other like cases of the fever’. And architectural pundits
puffed the virtues of more communally oriented designs. In his Pelican paper-
back on Design Anthony Bertram decried suburbs and prescribed flats as the
alternative – ‘villages, as it were, with some dwellings on top of the others’.
73
According to social workers, women suffered particularly from the spiritual and
mental deprivation, and could succumb to ‘suburban neurosis’. In the case of the
working-class estates a stream of sociologists arrived to investigate and mourn
the absence of ‘community’. The classic study of this sort was carried out by
Ruth Durant at Watling in north London, and the genre reached its best-known
expression after the war with the publication of Michael Young and Peter
Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London. The problem as Durant saw it was
how to fashion a community from a diverse migrant population. She was dis-
appointed that after pursuing a vital associational life in the estate’s earliest years,
Watling residents ‘retreated into exclusive domesticity; they had again become
isolated human beings’.
74
These visions of the suburbs have too readily informed later assessments of the
lives of the migrants who went there. But eloquent expressions of distaste can
divert us from the degree of working-class satisfaction with the cottage estates.
This was revealed most clearly by the Mass-Observation study of People’s Homes,
Migration
70
S. Howson, Domestic Monetary Management in Britain, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
71
D. E. Pitfield, ‘Labour migration and the regional problem in Britain, –’ (PhD thesis,
University of Stirling, ), p. .
72
H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb (Leicester, ), pp. –.
73
Cited in P. Oliver, I. Davis and I. Bentley, Dunroamin (London, ), pp. , .
74
Durant, Watling, pp. –; M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London
(London, ).
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