REHOUSING AND ITS PITFALLS
BY R. C. K. ENSOR IN the year 1912 the London County Council had on its hands a property of 226 acres (177 in one con- tinuous piece) known as the White Hart Lane Estate, astride the boundary between the Tottenham, Edmonton, and Wood Green local authorities. Bought over ten years before for the building of working-class houses, it was still mostly vacant, when certain members of the Housing Committee, with perhaps a little more imagina- tion than their predecessors, persuaded the Council to reek, by. clauses in its annual Bill, new powers from Par- liament for dealing with it. Under existing powers it could do nothing with the .land but erect working-class dwellings upon it ; and their point was that to cover a solid block of 177 acres—over a quarter of a square mile— with nothing but working-class dwellings was a mon- strosity. Haphazard commercial development might indeed have done such things and worse, but as a deliberate municipal policy it should not be tolerated. The Council was therefore persuaded to seek powers to develop the property " on the lines of a garden suburb and not solely for the accommodation of the working classes," authority being included " to lease separate plots of land on the estate for the erection of better-class houses, on the condition that the plans of the houses to be erected shall be subject to the approval of the Council."
In June,1912, the clauses came before the Local Legisla- tion Committee of the House of Commons, which at the instance—practically the orders—of the Local Govern- ment Board struck them out. The Poard was then an exceedingly reactionary body, whose permanent head regarded himself as a sort of gamekeeper to stop local authorities from poaching. The officials of its housing branch had really less knowledge of their subject than those of the L.C.C., but they were childishly jealous of the latter. Three years before they had persuaded Mr. Burns to pass his Town Planning Act, which made town- planning in England a dead letter for over a decade. Now they killed a most hopeful opportunity—which has never recurred—of developing experimentally, within moderate compass and without the post-War hurry- scurry, a national system of large-scale municipal housing.
This history, momentous in a sense, but known to few and almost universally forgotten, as is the way with histories of Private Bills, comes back to one on reading the remarkable report on Becontree and Dagenham, published by the Becontree Social Survey Committee.* The Becontree Estate is simply White Hart Lane on a much vaster scale-2,770 acres instead of 226. The L.C.C. bought it in 1920 and 1922, when it was a flat featureless expanse, consisting of fields used for market gardens with few trees and poor hedges. By August, 1933, the population was 116,000, and by March of this year it was expected to be 120,000, which is within 10,000 of its possible total. It has been developed without the powers sought and refused in 1912, and it has entailed the results which it was then sought to avoid. The Council has had to develop it " solely for the accommo- dation of the working-classes " ; it had to plan not a community, but a working-class community. Of course it was obliged and permitted to make some provision for shops, and to allow some better-class private houses for a few indispensable people like doctors and clergy. But social workers and even teachers have, we are told, *Becontree and Dagenham : A Report made for the pilgrim Trust by Terence Young. With an Introduction by the Right Hon. Stanley Baldwin, M.P. (10a. ed.). found difficulty in obtaining cottages on the estate. The figures of the 1931 census show that about 96 per cent. of the inhabitants were " employees " ; while " owners, agents and managers," and " professional " were less than 3 per cent. taken all together. The incomes of adult men were found to be, with few exceptions, between £2 and £5 a week when in work. Thus you can wander about a town of over 4 square miles, with more population than Norwich or Huddersfield, and find practically nothing but endless little houses with rather poor working-class people in them. All those various and numerous better-off types, from which churches, for instance, are likely to draw their workers and their more substantial donations, scarcely exist in Becontree.
It is difficult to see how anyone can like or defend such a system of class-segregation—unless perhaps some fanatic of the class-war, who may value it as breeding class-consciousness ! But for that it would be unfair to blame the L.C.C., which has simply done the best that it can with the inadequate and misconceived powers that it possesses. In some other ways its intentions were better than what it has been allowed to achieve. What it designed was " a new township, complete in itself, a task of greater magnitude than had ever been attempted in the history of housing." For this the estate obviously needed a new local authority of its own ; and sites were in fact allotted for a town hall and other public buildings. Had it been given the constitution of a metropolitan borough under the L.C.C.---a non-contiguous extension of the County of Londcn —there would have been many advantages ; in particular, the L.C.C. could have shoul- dered the task of educating its tenants' children.
As the site was quite rural, Parliament might safely have allowed this ; Dagenham, within whose borders the larger part of it lay, was only a village with a parish council. But it was not done ; Dagenham was made an urban district in 1926, and the L.C.C.'s estate was left trisected between it and two other local authorities—Ilford and Barking. Thus the fine civic centre, for which the plan provided in the middle of the estate, has never materialized, and the tenants, instead of acquiring community sense as a unit of self- government, are dispersed between three such units, two of them at least with centres too remote from their por- tions of Becontree for the latter ever to feel more than their step-children. Meanwhile great expense—for elementary education in the Dagenham area and higher education everywhere—has been thrown on the Essex County Council by this L.C.C. enterprise conceived solely in the interest of Londoners. The whole story of the Estate's local government reflects the archaic and chaotic way in which the areas of British local government come about, and the lack of any central mapping authority with positive functions.
In itself the creation of such a colony-town presents many awkward problems. Take that of the children. At present nearly half the population of Becontree are children under school-leaving age. The first settlers were mainly young married couples, and in the first years the overwhelming need was for infants' schools. Now that they are growing up, there is a similar urgency for the provision of classes' for older children. But as time goes on, this too must shrink ; and eventually much of the school accommodation provided (which is said to have cost over £750,000 for buildings alone) may be expected to prove redundant. Take again the provision of shops, cinemas, public-houses, churches, clubs, and other necessaries of civilized urban existence. In small housing estates, accreted to existing urban or suburban centres, most of these need not be created ; they already exist near-by. In Becontree they all have to be new-made. Of course, that is so also in a Garden City ; but then a Garden City should contain rich as well as poor, and industries as well as residences ; so that it can more easily find the means. How are they to be found in Becontree, which is all poor-residential ? The answer seems to be that a certain amount has been done by the L.C.C., which. has to be defrayed out of its Housing Funds (i.e., ulti- mately out of the rents paid by its tenants, at Becontree and elsewhere) ; and a good deal by outside religious and social agencies, at the expense, to some extent, of their other work ; and some more falls on the tenants in various ways. For instance, the shops are relatively few and small, with slight variety of stock, and the re- sidents repair for not a little of their shopping to more or less distant centres elsewhere ; which, of course, is a tax on both their time and their purses. It cannot be said that any of these answers is really a solution ; and the same is true about a number of questions with which the author of the Becontree Report concludes his survey. Meanwhile the survey stands as a fertile source of thought and suggestion ; creditable alike to Sir Wyndham Deedes, Captain L. F. Ellis, and Sir Edmund Phipps, who launched it, to the Pilgrim Trust which financed it, and to Mr. Terence Young, who has carried it out.
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