Michael Gilson in Aeon Magazine: The Smiths had arrived on the Downham Estate, one of eventually 13 ‘cottage estates’ built by the London County Council in the interwar years as part of a huge social and economic transformation of Britain, partly fuelled by the demands of those back from conflict that they not return to the terrible inner-city living conditions they’d left behind. A little more than 100 years ago, the scale of poverty and deprivation in London’s inner-city slums was dramatic. Scarlet fever and TB claimed many lives, and 25 people died of starvation every year in the East End in the run-up to war. The prime minister David Lloyd George, looking over his shoulder at the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, believed new houses and (something often overlooked by historians) attendant gardens could be the emollient to soothe potential uprisings: ‘Britain would hold out against the dangers of Bolshevism, but only if the people were given confidence, only if they were made to believe that things were being done for them.’
Lloyd George’s ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ campaign would eventually lead to the building of 5 million new homes, more than 3 million in the private sector and more than 1 million in the public, before the outbreak of the Second World War. The majority of these came with approximately 400 square yards of something new householders and tenants had rarely had before… open space outside. And while this might seem a ‘nice add-on’ today, it was certainly not thought so at the time. The housebuilding campaign was primarily driven by disciples of the Garden City movement, which held that access to open space and land was vital for the health, physical and spiritual, of the population. New garden cities could bring people back to Mother Earth, a connection lost during two centuries of grinding industrialisation, while also protecting Britain’s rural idyll from overdevelopment.
Before we lose sight of them, let’s return briefly to Sandpit Road, six months after that bus trip, to see the Smiths in their newly situated land of milk and honey. Young John tells how he watched in amazement as his father, a bricklayer whose leisure time was extremely scarce, went to work on their tiny corner of this new Britain with gusto. In common with millions of others, what really motivated Mr Smith was creating a garden. And it was a particular kind of garden, one that would forever be snobbishly ridiculed and become associated with negative connotations that still haunt British suburbia. While the London County Council builders created small homes that new residents hitherto could only have dreamed about, what they also left outside was bare clay littered with building waste material. New dwellers of these cottage garden estates were thus confronted with an enormous new challenge. It did not deter them.
Here’s John again:
I remember him making a circular flower bed and ringing it with lumps of old stone and concrete that had been found among the building materials. I think my father took a few cuttings from the privet hedge and put them each side of the path leading to the front door, so that we had continuous privet hedge all round.
More here.
