Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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The experience of families entering dwellings such as Gerard Gardens was
quite variable. Some settled quickly and were able to retain community links to
familiar places and people. However, others found the blocks of flats unfriendly
in comparison with life in a terrace street and had difficulty adjusting to life on
the fifth floor. The blocks were built without lifts and for women with small
children the flats were not always convenient. The fact that rents were mostly
higher than had previously been paid in the private sector meant that many fam-
ilies took the smallest space possible, thus as families grew there was an acute
problem of overcrowding in some corporation properties. Thus the problems
associated with negotiating privacy in the restricted space of privately rented
rooms were transferred to the new corporation flats. Although well built in com-
parison with many private properties, blocks such as Gerard Gardens rapidly
attained a bad reputation in the post-war period.
79
In part associated with the
declining fortunes of the inner-city district in which they were situated, this was
exacerbated by the wartime expedient of using vacant corporation properties to
house families made homeless through bomb damage. Many of these families
came from good-quality privately rented and owner-occupied housing, and dis-
liked and resented life in the corporation blocks. Although most moved out as
soon as circumstances allowed, their complaints added to the declining reputa-
tion of inner-city tenements. By the s they were perceived as residual
housing for the very poor and the aged trapped in the inner city, and by the s
most had fallen into a state of disrepair. Gerard Gardens has been demolished,
but some similar blocks have been refurbished and sold into the private sector in
the s.
The development of public intervention in housing thus affected the form of
cities, the lives of tenants and the ways in which people used the urban space in
which they lived. There are also links to wider society. Most significantly, public
housing provision has been one of the most obvious expressions of expanding
welfare provision from the early twentieth century. This can be viewed in a
number of ways. In Marxian terminology this is an expression of the contradic-
tions of capitalism, as the state is forced to cover the imperfections of the private
market but does so in such a way that most public housing is perceived as infe-
rior and thus marginalised and stigmatised. For others, however, intervention has
been seen as a symbol of the growing dependency culture of the twentieth
century, where an increasing proportion of the population have come to rely on
the state for housing, health and welfare needs. This view gained ascendancy in
the s and has led to the widespread sale of council property into the private
sector. However, for many individuals corporation involvement in housing has
much less complex implications. Despite its imperfections, council housing has
Colin G. Pooley
79
Liverpool Council of Social Service, Wartime Bulletin of Information Vol ,No. ( November
).
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provided improved housing for many and, particularly in the case of suburban
estates, has continued to provide valued homes well into the late twentieth
century.
80
Examination of the links between the built form of cities and the social con-
struction of space in the past is not easy. Although reconstruction of the ways in
which urban structure changed over time is relatively straightforward, there is
little direct evidence as to how people used the spaces in which they lived,
worked or undertook social engagements. The extent to which changes in urban
structure altered people’s lives is often little more than conjecture. Much more
research is needed on the links between residential spatial structure and social
and cultural identity.
Patterns on the ground
80
K. Bassett and J. R. Short, Housing and Residential Structure (London, ), pp. ‒; D.
Harvey, ‘The political economy of urbanization in advanced capitalist societies: the case of the
U.S.’, in G. Gappert and H. Rose, eds., The Social Economy of Cities (Beverley Hills, Calif., ),
pp. ‒; P. Minford, M. Peel and P. Ashton, The Housing Morass (London, ); H. Dean and
P. Taylor-Gooby, Dependency Culture (New York and London, ); R. Forrest and A. Murie,
Selling the Welfare State (London, ); M. Kleinmann, ‘Large scale transfers of council housing
to new landlords. Is British social housing becoming more European?’, Housing Studies, (),
–.
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·
·
Land, property and planning
. .
T
proceeds from two beginnings, one dealing with the
overall shape and form of cities, and the other with property develop-
ment. These are then brought together through a study of late Victorian
and Edwardian land reform, which had important implications both for control
of urban development through town planning and for property relations.
Conditions in the interwar period are next discussed, and the chapter concludes
with a short account of the climactic period of planning during the Second
World War. While this reflected new concerns of the s, as well as those of
the war itself, it also brought to maturity conceptions of town planning and
property relations which had their origins in the nineteenth century. In turn,
these conceptions helped shape the context within which modern historical
research on urban form and landed estates began after the war.
(i)
It is only relatively recently that more sophisticated attempts have been made to
estimate the extent of urban land. Robin Best calculated from development plans
that c. about .m acres (, ha) of England and Wales lay in ‘core’
urban settlements of over , population. Even on the widest definition,
including most forms of development, urban land use accounted for only .m
acres (, ha) or . per cent of the whole area, and the comparative figure
in Scotland was . per cent. Best felt that ‘the tendency to exaggerate the sprawl
of urban areas is rife, and probably reflects the inherent dislike and even fear of
urbanisation which is felt by many people in this country’.
1
Outrage, the blast
against ‘subtopia’ published in , warned that ‘if what is called development
is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century, Great
1
R. H. Best, Land Use and Living Space (London, ), p. xv.
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Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire,
concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows’. It went on to attack the ‘suburban
ethos’ as drifting ‘like a gaseous pink marshmallow over the whole social scene’.
2
Best was able to take his calculations back to , when his estimate of urban
development in England and Wales, in the wide sense, was m acres (,
ha), plus , (, ha) in Scotland. During the first half of the twentieth
century, therefore, the extent of urban land by this measure had increased by
per cent.
3
Generally, the census statistics on the extent of urban land are of little
value, since administrative areas defined as urban contained large amounts of
agricultural land. However, exceptional statistics for , which allow such land
to be deducted, suggest an urban acreage by this measure of .m acres (,
ha) in England and Wales or . per cent of the whole area.
4
Further back it is
not possible to go, but urban populations were growing fast in the late nineteenth
century, and between and per cent of net additional dwellings were
located in the urban areas as defined by the census. In the face of such growth
the predominant reactions to prevalent urban form at the end of the nineteenth
century were very different from those expressed by Outrage, but equally intense
and wide-ranging. For Leo Chiozza Money ‘almost the entire area of the United
Kingdom is sparsely populated. It is an empty country dotted with small
crowded spots called towns.’
5
In the view of contemporaries, urbanisation was
often associated with the depopulation of the countryside, and the problems of
congestion in large cities: problems that included slums, overcrowding, the phys-
ical and moral health of the people and even political stability.
Public debate about trends in urbanisation and urban form has a long history
and has often taken polemical forms. From the end of the nineteenth century,
however, it took on a new significance in connection with the early origins of
modern town planning. In the official sense, this began tentatively within a
small-scale suburban framework, but it was promoted by concerns that were
much larger than those of the local environment. It was certainly connected to
most of the issues mentioned at the end of the last paragraph and indeed drawn
into contemporary politics through the ‘land question’, then at the height of its
importance. Ways in which such politics was linked to town planning will be
discussed in a later section, but it is important to bear in mind at the outset that
control of land and land uses involves deep cultural and social values, not just
matters of technical significance and detailed regulation. The concerns that built
around urban concentration and later around urban dispersal were linked in this
sense, that both tendencies were thought to be detrimental to existing catego-
ries of urban and rural, and to associated ways of life, and hence needed to be
controlled.
J.A.Yelling
2
I. Nairn, Outrage (London, ), pp. –.
3
R. H. Best, The Major Land Uses of Great Britain (Wye, ), pp. –.
4
PP , local taxation return for –.
5
L. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (London, ), p. .
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Processes of urbanisation also involved major shifts of economic value.
Victorian and Edwardian statisticians attempted to measure these using the
values of land and property that were calculated for the purpose of levying rates
and taxes. In – land had been assessed at £.m in England and Wales
and houses at £.m. By – the figures were respectively £.m and
£.m, reflecting urbanisation and agricultural depression.
6
The figure for
houses included both buildings and the land beneath them, but Sidney Webb
pioneered attempts to calculate this land value separately, as site rent.
7
More
recent figures by Colin Clark suggest that such site rent in England and Wales
rose from £m in , or . per cent of estimated national income, to £.m
in , by which time it comfortably exceeded the value of agricultural land
and reached a maximum of . per cent of national income.
8
Residential site
rents largely fell on the relatively small areas which were urban. They reached
their maximum when the debate on urban dispersal began to develop. Equally,
the later loosening of cities was accompanied by a reduction in the relative
weight of urban land costs, which continued until at least the early s.
Early industrial development promoted urbanisation at many scattered points
as well as in larger centres. Conurbations grew up, of which the Black Country
was a type example, formed by industrial concentration but composed of many
varied settlements, and with no clear separation of rural and urban. By contrast,
urbanisation in the late nineteenth century focused more on existing centres,
leading to the growth of major cities, but those cities were themselves less con-
centrated in form. Infilling, previously an important process, was becoming less
intense, while suburbs were being formed at lower densities. The process of sub-
urbanisation created an outward moving zone of maximum growth and conver-
sion of land, but the transformation of city centres into specialised commercial,
cultural and administrative areas was the crucial process which provided a con-
tinued focus for the city. Generally, this focus remained sufficiently strong in the
early twentieth century for cities still to be thought of in traditional terms,
despite much lower densities of outer growth and growing concern for the
urbanisation of the countryside at or beyond their fringe (Map .). As a result,
cities such as Birmingham can be depicted in a familiar way as consisting of a
central core surrounded by additive rings of development whose increasing
width reflects successively lower densities. This of course varies regionally and
locally, according to the development history of cities, so that for Glasgow, for
example, such a pattern of spatial expansion is less pronounced.
Land, property and planning
6
Sir J. Stamp, British Incomes and Property (London, ), pp. –.
7
PP , Committee on Town Holdings, appendix , p. .
8
C. Clark, ‘Land taxation: lessons from international experience’, in Acton Society Trust, P. Hall,
ed., Land Values (London, ), pp. –; figures for Scotland – are given in R.
Rodger, ‘Rents and ground rents: housing and the land market in nineteenth century Britain’, in
J. Johnston and C. G. Pooley, eds., The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities (London, ), pp.
–.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century writers such as Charles Booth
(), and R. M. Hurd () in the United States, claimed to have uncovered
the laws and principles governing the growth of large cities.
9
Cities were evi-
dently complex, but none the less large-scale generalisations could be made
about the zoning of land uses and values and their change through time. In their
work, the focus is no longer on a simple contrast between urban and rural.
Instead, there is a transition from the central business district through congested
working-class areas to low-density middle-class areas on the fringe. Correspond-
ingly, land values descended sharply from a peak in the central business district,
and then continued to decline outwards. As Booth observed, there was an appar-
ent paradox in that poorer populations (and with them most urban ‘problems’)
were located on the higher-value land. Social status and respectability increased
outwards or, as Avner Offer put it more recently, there was a ‘moral gradient’
J.A.Yelling
9
C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, vol. (London, ), pp. –; R. M.
Hurd, Principles of City Land Values (New York, ).
Developed in 1838
1838–70
1870–86
1886–1914
1914–38
Undeveloped 1938
5
01
234
miles
0
24
6
8 km
N
Map . The built-up area of Birmingham –
Source: redrawn from R. F. Broaderwick, ‘An investigation into the location of
institutional land uses in Birmingham’ (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham,
), fig. ., p. .
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which rose from the city centre out into the untouched countryside, inversely
to the land rent gradient.
10
Booth, like many contemporaries, was deeply concerned with the problem
of urban congestion, but by he took an optimistic view of the future.
Congestion, he thought, was a historical feature which failed to reflect the
current technical advances in communications. He based this view on his studies
of London’s expansion, and hence believed that decongestion was already under-
way, but that it should also be accelerated, for example through the planned use
of municipal tramways. Booth emphasised the reciprocal nature of urban devel-
opment. Growth pulses transmitted from the centre encouraged outward expan-
sion. Equally, outer development had effects which worked back into the centre.
It was this latter process which gave rise to his optimism over congestion.
Booth was largely concerned with long-term developments, and paid little
attention to another major feature of Victorian urban development, a pattern of
booms and slumps resulting from long cyclical movements in constructional
activity of some fourteen to twenty-one years duration. Particularly marked was
the long upswing in British building from the mid-s to a peak in the mid-
s, and another boom developing to a peak around the turn of the century.
The s and the period – were periods of lower activity, although with
much local and regional variation.
11
Subsequent study of these patterns has
shown that the mechanisms that linked different forms of development were
more complex than Booth imagined, but they have not contradicted his general
point about reciprocity. It seems likely that the various sectors of building – such
as industrial, commercial or residential – were essentially linked together in one
overall cycle, although with an uneven process of growth and decline, creating
leads and lags appropriate to each sector.
12
Moreover, in the case of London
(where exceptionally the cycle has been studied in relation to a city rather than
a region) conclusions have been reached similar to those of Booth. The build-
ing cycle was linked to major transport innovations, the (re)development of the
commercial core occurring together with the growth of suburban transport and
building.
13
One exception is that public and institutional building involving
more extensive land uses may show some counter-cyclical tendencies, or at least
be relatively more significant in periods of low activity.
14
Land, property and planning
10
A. Offer, Property and Politics, – (Cambridge, ), p. .
11
J. P. Lewis, Building Cycles and Britain’s Growth (London, ); S. B. Saul, ‘House-building in
England –’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –; R. Rodger, ‘Scottish urban house-
building –’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, ).
12
M. Gottlieb, Long Swings in Urban Development (New York, ), p. . Rodger, ‘Scottish urban
housebuilding’, pp. –.
13
Lewis, Building Cycles, pp. –; K. C. Grytzell, County of London Population Changes –
(Lund Studies in Geography, Series B , ).
14
J. W. R. Whitehand, The Changing Face of Cities (Oxford, ), pp. –; R. Rodger, ‘The
building cycle and the urban fringe in Victorian cities: a comment’, Journal of Historical Geography,
(), –.
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Britain’s industrial regions and cities developed around notoriously distinct
economies in the nineteenth century. In most cases various forms of industry,
rather than commerce, were the primary motor of local economic development,
and naturally the secular growth pattern of each industrial area impacted on its
associated urbanisation. The local business cycle affected building development,
but such pulses in growth were transmitted into a long building cycle through
complex interactions within a chain of development agencies. In the large and
volatile house-building sector rising wage rates generated by industrial growth
increased effective demand for building, but also increased the costs. Initially,
rent rises could be easily absorbed and profitability increased, drawing new
house-builders into an expanding cycle of activity. Eventually, however,
profitability was reduced as lower sectors of the market had to be tapped and rent
increases could no longer be passed on. Vacancies began to rise, but high levels
of activity frequently continued for some time. This might be attributed to mis-
taken expectations, but also land was in the development ‘pipeline’ and small
builders were unable to wait. The subsequent building slump was then much
affected by the degree of ‘overhang’ from the previous boom. Landlords tended
to resist downward pressure on rents, so probably helping to extend the period
of low activity.
Much interest attaches to the Edwardian building slump which was both
severe and prolonged. Various cyclical factors were probably at work. The pre-
vious boom had contributed a large ‘overhang’ particularly in London. Soon
after the slump began, there was a downturn in the economic cycle in –,
and afterwards political uncertainties at home and abroad helped to prolong the
slump. There is also, however, much interest in the possibility that secular trends
were at work.
15
The increasing cost of new buildings relative to incomes in the
late nineteenth century, itself partly the product of increased public regulation,
served to dampen effective demand. Increasing rates within urban areas had a
similar effect, whilst also reducing landlord profitability. More widely, the whole
economy was now mature, and awaiting fresh developments while, as argued
above, urbanisation itself was entering a new stage. It is not just knowledge that
was to come which provides the sense that this was a period of difficult
structural transition.
Work which brings together analysis of building cycle mechanisms with study
of how change was transmitted through the urban spatial structure is urgently
needed. It should help to clarify both the manner in which urban form devel-
oped in the late nineteenth century and how it was constrained by current polit-
ical economy. For it remains the case that there was a prolonged downturn in
activity in the period before when technological solutions to urban expan-
sion seemed available, and widespread overcrowding and sharing of houses
J.A.Yelling
15
Cyclical and secular trends are discussed in Offer, Property and Politics; Rodger, ‘Rents and ground
rents’, pp. –; M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City (London, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
remained. Contemporary politics excluded any direct attack on the problem.
Shifts within the burden of taxation were debated – from local rates to national
taxes, and within rates from buildings to land. They could at best have provided
partial solutions, and were never put to the test. Much the same is true of other
remedies, such as those suggested by Booth. However, some of these were later
to have an effect on urban form through their influence on nascent town plan-
ning. Essentially they involved an emphasis on decentralisation and low-density
living environments, contrasted with congestion, and a special focus on control
of land and land values.
(ii)
Property is involved in urbanisation in two obvious ways. The passage from rural
to urban land uses takes place within a framework of ownership which has its
own effects on development outcomes. These have been the subject of an
important historical debate. Secondly, urban development produced changes in
property ownership brought about in part by the requirements of the processes
involved and the demands of the users. In relation to housing, ‘the market in
land, and hence the market in housing was really a market in property rights . . .
The effect of housebuilding was to create new property rights and interests out
of existing ones.’ This was specially significant since land tenure was given
primacy in English law, and was ‘deeply embodied in the social and political
institutions of Victorian society’.
16
In this section these two aspects will be
treated successively. Finally, a theme of the last section will be recalled: while
changes at the urban fringe must retain attention, they should be conceived of
as part of a series of changes which involved the existing built-up area.
Writing in the early s, Donald Olsen called his study of the Bedford and
Foundling Hospital estates Town Planning in London in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries.
17
At its outset the architecture of these estates tended to be
viewed as standing apart from that of ordinary commercial building and, if not
directly attributable to aristocratic tastes, as John Summerson
18
had suggested,
then at least the ability of such estates to organise a planned and coherent devel-
opment seemed a plausible explanation of their particularity. These estates were
not only large and compact, but also developed on a leasehold system – that is
the land was not sold outright to builders or developers, but both land and build-
ings reverted to the estate at the end of the lease. This not only provided a mech-
anism of control through covenants in the leases, but also seemed to provide the
incentives for larger and longer-term objectives to be promoted over short-term
rewards. Outside such estates of exemplary development, the rest of late
Land, property and planning
16
J. Springett, ‘Land development and house-building in Huddersfield –’, in M. Doughty,
ed., Building the Industrial City (Leicester, ), p. .
17
D. J. Olsen, Town Planning in London (New Haven, ; nd edn, London, ).
18
J. Summerson, Georgian London (London, ).
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