BOOKS
The Little Red Boxes
BY MALCOLM RUTHERFORD WE'RE all Socialists now,' may have worn a little thin shortly after 1951, but at least, twelve years later, we might argue with some justice that we have all become sociologists. The fact is in a way surprising, for it is not that the sociologists have done very• much to help us. It is not, after all, that many questions have been answered, but they have been raised and the sociological habit seems to be catching. Once tasted, once having learned that working-class families entertain a great deal less than middle- class, that the number of invitations to parties may be determined wholly by the position of one's house, or that there is an exhaustive study of matrilocality, then it is difficult to walk through a housing estate with the same oblivious- ness or unfettered imagination ever again. In an age of 'satire,' too, one should not underestimate the appeal of those thumb-nail sketches of self- portrait of the 'I'm not snobbish, but' variety in which the sociology books abound, sometimes up to three or four a page. 'Mothers and Daugh- ters' is no longer likely to be a tense, psycho- logical drama, but a series of replies to question- naires in middle-class Woodford. Sociology, in fact, is doing all it can to assuage, and to replace, the taste for fiction. As with fiction, the working- and middle-class genres are distinct : read them both, but doubt sincerely if this can be done with the same objectivity.
Having already had a go at Bethnal Green and Woodford, Dagenham, then, might be thought a sociologist's paradise, particularly as the great advantage of a series like this is that each new volume enables the author quietly to take back some of the conclusions drawn in the last. And certainly the Dagenham community is ripe for study. It was begun as a slum clear- ance area by the LCC as early as 1921, and was largely completed by 1930, the year before Ford moved in, so that the public identification of the estate with the motor company is not an altogether accurate one. It is the largest housing estate in the world, with a population of around 100,000, Many of the problems which are being worked out there now are likely to be faced by a hundred other estates and new towns some time in the future.
These problems are considerable: above all, there is that of the second-generation family, children who grew up on the estate, married and then found it impossible to find a house of their own anywhere near because no room was reserved for later, natural development. Again, there is the question of the space the children leave behind them: half of the Dagenham houses are now underpopulated, one-tenth are still overcrowded. Yet as often as not the old people have nowhere to move to. Such situations will continue to arise in council house estates, so long as preference is given to families with the most children, and who would willingly have it otherwise? This segregation of the generations is hardly desirable, but it has at least provided a short-term approach. The full long-term effects are still to be felt.
Not that Mr. Willmott's book* is designed to answer these questions; his purpose is more de- scriptive. Still less is he inclined to inquire what actual benefits the estate has brought. He is more concerned that a child who goes to grammar school should most often want to go away and live somewhere else, rather than to wonder how far the comparative spaciousness and comfort of the new estate has enabled the child to get there at all. Education, indeed, is scarcely men- tioned until the last chapters, when the author produces some figures about it in order to draw some conclusions. The question of how far im- proved material conditions raise people's sights to other interests is untouched.
Throughout the book runs the unproven as- sumption that Dagenham is an unhappy place. Mr. Willmott is unwilling to give this up, even though well over half the replies he quotes are either non-committal or actively satisfied with it. He is concerned about the lack of public amenities and the low membership of clubs, which in Woodford he found so flourishing. Yet even in Woodford just under half the inhabitants belonged to no group or organisation whatso- ever. One wonders really if this is any sort of way of judging a community's health; and whether it might not be equally reasonable to start from the opposite assumption. Similarly, his concern with the pubs, which are both fewer in number and larger in size than in the East End. There is no mention that some of the character change might be for the better, that the decor might be attractive, that a jazz band might play there, that the practice of mixed drinking is growing and that most of the pubs are also serving food. The betting shop arrived after the survey was completed. An interesting development in Dagenham is the combination of pub and coffee-bar surroundings, and the pub's popularity with the young of both sexes. This is an age-grqup which Mr. Willmott con- spicuously ignores. The result is that he is in constant danger of searching for a way of life that has been lost rather than exploring the new one which is growing up. He is able to tell us very little about what it feels like to grow up with material plenty. And, amid Dagenham's compara- tive private affluence, this, one feels, is the key.
It is clear that Mr. Willmott is using his criticism of the estate to cloak a much deeper criticism of a way of life. He dislikes instability of any kind, and Dagenham, which he admits is simply a large part of the East End trans- planted into new surroundings, naturally has its
* THE EVOLUTION OF A COMMUNITY. By Peter Willmott. A Survey by the Institute of Community Studies. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 21s.)
fair share of that, The other reason why Dagen- ham is so often quoted with displeasure is the estate's incomparable ugliness. Many of the criticisms of its living patterns must be stimulated on esthetic grounds alone, It is not that the planners have not tried to introduce some form of diversity into the houses, but that any sense of variation is lost amid the overwhelming uni- formity of the whole. There is a terrifying story in this book of a woman, shortly after she had arrived in the estate, going out for a walk and in the end breaking down in tears because she was unable to identify her own house. '
The community's endless flatness, of course, is also deadening. It seems somehow that the estate has taken its shape from the pattern of its factories, that the influence of the low-lying, widely-spaced buildings has spread over to the houses, as if -somehow space meant dignity and inoculation against ugliness. And the presence of industry is always felt in the constant passage of the heavy lorries alcing the main roads which carve up the estate. The effect of instability is there because the houses too con- sciously serve the needs of industry, and one cannot in this context too much welcome talk of the need for mobility of labour. In a way, the more facilities the place provides, the more deadening is the overall impression. Dagenham is full of planned recreation grounds: its Old Folk's Entertainment Committee is active. There is at the moment an Old Folk's Talent Com- petition : 'Can you sing, dance or entertain in any way? You may win up to eight pounds in prizes.' It is a compere society (imagine the compere in that), and one cannot help feeling it a peculiarly healthy sign that such activities are ill-attended.
Much of the value that emerges from the book lies simply in the dignity of some of the replies. I do not know how closely Mr. Willmott has been able to reproduce these, but the book is freer of the descriptive smears about the furni- ture and the implicit comment than the Wood- ford survey. It is reassuring that so many of the samples show such a perceptive understand- ing of the social changes going on around them, a fact, incidentally, which takes some of the significance out of the sociologist's work. Snob- bishness, `uppishness,' grammar schools are things to be lived with rather than discovered for the first time. Many of the inhabitants want to get out at the first opportunity. A useful test of patronage in class attitudes is to see how one reacts to their reasons for going. It is all right for the social critic to dismiss the estate as a monstrosity, but what happens when some of the tenants begin reacting in the same way, and complain themselves of the 'little red boxes,' the monotony of the estate, the people who are `not conversationalists,' and consequently move off to rather larger red boxes in Ilford?
A condemnation of this attitude is implicit throughout Mr. Willmott's book. It seems to me that not only does it diminish the value of his research, it frequently makes him ask.the wrong questions altogether. Too much of this book is descriptive, far too little genuine inquiry. Unless and until the sociologist is prepared to allow his research to come to its own conclusions, he cannot expect his influence with the planners to be very great. And the overwhelming conclusion of the research presented here is that Dagenham, as much as any middle-class housing estate, is still, in Mumford's phrase, 'the collective at- tempt to lead a private life.' Mr. Willmott should accept this and get down to telling us more about it. It is not so very terrible; what is more, it seems to be true.
Previous page
