Scotland's Homes Fit for Heroes: Garden City Influences on the Development of Scottish Working Class Housing 1900 to 1939

"It’s true—it’s often the voice of the tenants that gets left out of architectural history. Studies on the history of housing tend to be based on archival sources, on plans, blueprints and other architectural material. The voices of the people who lived there is absolutely captured by Sean Damer and is a really crucial element. Like me, Damer started working on housing in the 1970s. At the time there was a huge flowering of research into housing. It was a very contested area. In the social and economic crisis that the country was going through, housing was seen as a crucial element of the relationship between labour and capital. On top of that, under the 50-year rule the government papers, which had remained closed until then, became available. In my book, I was able to use all the ‘secret papers’ of government to really uncover what had motivated the government to introduce the 1919 Housing Act. But my work covered England and Wales—Scotland had its own story as I mentioned. I chose Lou Rosenberg’s book because it redresses that, looking specifically at Scotland. And again, it does so from a different point of view. He comes at the subject from a conservation angle. Rosenberg went around and looked at loads of projects across Scotland. “The aspiration after the First World War was to produce something that was fit for the heroes coming home.” His insights are based not on primary research involving documents in archives but more on getting out and seeing first-hand what was built. The result is a very revealing account of the contribution that council housing has made to Scottish towns and cities and even the countryside. We had in the region of 200,000 homes built by councils in Scotland between the wars and they include some of the best housing that exists even now—because the aspiration after the First World War was to produce something that was fit for the heroes coming home. It’s really powerful. Big houses, high building standards, bathrooms, indoor toilets and other creature comforts for their day. The garden city was an idea that was really developed in England. It originated with Ebenezer Howard, who came up with the idea in 1898, and it was then taken up and developed by Raymond Unwin, the architect and planner who designed the first garden city, at Letchworth. It then shifted towards the garden suburb. Hampstead Garden Suburb is the most famous, designed by Unwin who himself then moved into government—he designed a great deal of housing for munition workers during the First World War and then was chief architect for the housing program under the 1919 Housing Act. So essentially what local authorities were building under the 1919 Act is a municipal version of pre-war garden suburbs, and that’s the case in Scotland as much as elsewhere."