Mark Swenarton's Reading List

"John Boughton’s book is a really welcome publication. For a long time he’s been producing a blog called ‘Municipal Dreams’. It is a fantastic resource. He beetles around the country and researches dozens and dozens of local authority housing schemes. It’s that very detailed knowledge on the ground that feeds into his book. The book is an overview of the story of council housing over the last hundred and twenty years. But as the story progresses, the focus gets closer and closer. We get to the second world war, half way through the story, in about 50 pages, but then the next 250 pages are on the period since then, and particularly the last 30 years. What is so good about it is that he sets these quite recent developments into this continuous historical narrative. It’s very difficult for people operating in the world we live in today to have a historical perspective on what’s happening—you’re dependent on newspapers and those kind of accounts that don’t contextualise the subject at all. Boughton’s book brings the historical perspective right up to the present day. “He beetles around the country and researches dozens and dozens of local authority housing schemes.” The extraordinary things that were going on under New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for example, which actually built far less council housing than Margaret Thatcher had, are here brought out clearly. It’s therefore very enlightening to people who are trying to get just trying to get their heads around what’s going on in the housing situation that we have today. At times the debate around social housing was highly partisan, but equally at other times there was consensus. The Tories in the 50s built far more housing than Labour had done. It’s really to do with changing political perspectives. A decade ago to be arguing for council housing would have been regarded as a very left-wing position to take. Today, because of the undoubted failure of housing policy over the past decades to meet the housing shortage, it’s fairly widely agreed that if you’re going to tackle the housing shortage local authorities are the only institutions that have got the muscle to do so. Boughton writes with passion. He’s a great advocate of council housing, but he’s by no means uncritical. He can see where some things have been successful and other things not so successful. Also, he’s not he’s not saying everything that architects did was great, nor that everything architects did was terrible. He’s a social historian who takes a sensible and sober view of the whole thing."

"Scotland is a very interesting part of the whole story and in some ways is distinct from the rest of the UK. The five books I’ve chosen come from distinctive academic disciplines and distinctive sensibilities. Boughton is a historian. The Scheming book is written by a sociologist. Sean Damer’s interest, first and foremost, is in what was it like to be a family living in a slum which then got relocated to one of these new Glasgow Corporation housing schemes. That’s where the name of the book, Scheming comes from. In Scotland council housing projects are generally called housing schemes and, in a derogatory way, people who live on them are referred to as ‘schemies’. Damer’s research, carried out around 1990, involved interviewing people who had moved into these council schemes in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s and who were still living there. Those interviews are the meat of the book. It’s just fantastic to read about the experience that people had of relocating to these places and how they found them such an upgrade, their excitement at the facilities which they never had before such as bathrooms and running water and other facilities that today we take for granted. “It’s often the voice of the tenants that gets left out of architectural history.” The chapter on the Mosspark garden suburb—the scheme built by Glasgow Corporation under the 1919 Housing Act—is particularly revealing. What he shows was that although these may have been heroes, veterans from the war, that were living there they weren’t mere ‘squaddies’. These were heroes from the officer class, because these were highly sought-after homes. The rents were very high. There was pretty clear social exclusion operating even under this scheme. If you came from a rough neighbourhood originally, you wouldn’t be considered for tenancy. The Bowling Club was the centrepiece of social life on the estate and was full of businessmen, solicitors, surveyors—professional people in other words. That really brings it home that these stereotypes about council housing through the ages are not a true reflection of the historic reality. Here was a project that was basically housing middle-class people, because these were the best homes that you could get in Glasgow at that time."

"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."

"It’s no longer in print, I’m afraid, but well worth seeking out if you are looking into this subject. This was another product of that great explosion of interest in social housing during the 1970s. Stephen Merrett is an economist, so he comes to the subject from that point of view, giving a very succinct account of the political economy of local authority housing in the UK. This makes it an incredibly useful book—the facts and figures that he produces in the book are invaluable. The economics are a driving force of many of the changes we are discussing. For anybody who wants to know about the subject in the period from the early 20th century through to the 1970s, this is an essential reference manual."

"That’s true. The Norwich scheme is built to the Passivhaus standard, a very demanding standard that drastically reduces energy use by making the envelope of the building entirely airtight. But in the organisation of public and private space it is clearly indebted to Neave Brown. A gate at the end of the garden leads to a communal garden, which is a textbook case of a semi-private space. No one can get into it unless they have one of those gardens. So innovation of all kinds has been a continuing theme in the history of council housing and innovation in construction was part of the story right from the start. This book, N on-Traditional Houses, is part of that story. It is published by the Building Research Establishment (BRE), the successor to the Building Research Station, which was founded in 1919, because Raymond Unwin told the government that in order to build all these houses at a time of great scarcity, we’re going to have to use materials that have not been used before: alternatives to bricks for walls, alternatives to timber for floors, alternatives to plaster as there was a shortage of plasterers. So it was a matter of expediency. However, there was also the sense that if housing was really going to get sorted out we would have to bring to bear on it the latest most advanced scientific thinking. We would have to apply science to house building, which at that time was still a craft-based business. Then in the mid-1920s Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative politician, decided that if we were to build council housing we would have to undertake very significant research into building methods and so he pumped a huge amount of money into the Building Research Station to undertake this work. “As a council, if you own say 500 of these houses and they’re deteriorating, you need to know exactly what, and where, the cause of the problem is!” The Non-Traditional Houses book is an archetypal product of the Building Research Station, looking at the hundreds of new systems that were developed in response to this demand. Some of the systems were not successful at all—buildings that started deteriorating pretty fast. But others have lasted well. This book is an encyclopaedia of the housing systems that were used. When you look at a building from the outside, it may not be clear what they are made of: if the walls are rendered you can’t tell if it is built of concrete blocks, or timber, or what. As a council, if you own say 500 of these houses and they’re deteriorating, you need to know exactly what, and where, the cause of the problem is! All the different systems, materials and methods are explained in this encyclopaedic volume. Having identified any defects, you can work that back to the construction of the houses and act accordingly. There’s a CD that goes with the book, and this may be more easily found these days than the book itself. It’s a completely different take on the subject from that of a historian or economist. But if we’re going to understand social housing and build again in earnest—and the sense of crisis at the moment makes it increasingly likely that we’re going to have to involve local authorities—this kind of technical knowledge is essential. If there is a new era starting it’s going to involve local authorities. In the 1980s and 90s what were called ‘private-public partnerships’ were the mantra of the 80s and 90s but there has been a reaction against them as ultimately many such partnerships have saddled the public purse with huge debts. I think it’s more likely that local authorities themselves start to build on their own terms. That’s what we see happening with a good number of local authorities in London, for example, now building housing once again. That’s why we need to learn from the experience of the past hundred years. Absolutely. The Grenfell tragedy was a real wake-up call, the most appalling reminder of what happens if you neglect social housing. At the most basic level, it shows the need for proper systems of building control. If you can clad an apartment block with flammable cladding, what’s happened to the codes? After the Great Fire of London in 1666, building codes were introducing that forbade flammable materials on the outside of buildings, and yet here we are some 400 years later doing just that! The books I’ve selected I hope provide a remedy for that kind of blinkered view."