Nicholas Timmins - The Five Giants [New Edition] - A Biography of the Welfare State

Housing was not the government’s only building priority. Scarce men and materials were equally desperately needed to get Britain’s factories out of wartime and into peacetime products and to build schools, hospitals and the long-promised health centres. It was the last two categories that suffered, and suffered heavily. Slowly the situation improved as Bevan’s ministry showered local authorities with circulars – five a week in 1946. 25The figures rose from just 1000 houses and 10,000 pre-fabs completed by December 1945, together with 60,000 unoccupiably damaged homes repaired, to 55,400 house completions in 1946, 139,000 in 1947, and 227,000 in 1948. 26The 125,000 pre-fabs (which continued to be put up until 1951) added to these totals.

If the game, from the point of view of the politicians, the press and the homeless, was about numbers, Bevan had two equally important ends in view: standards and mix. Had his successors had the political courage to hold to those principles, Britain’s post-war housing problem might have been massively diminished. His stance did involve a painful trade-off between quality and quantity, but he held rigidly to the view that: ‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.’ 27And he held this line at the most difficult of times, when much real homelessness existed, not the 1970s redefinition of it as having nowhere suitable to live.

Bevan pushed up the old minimum standard for council housing from 750 square feet of room space to 900, with lavatories upstairs as well as down. He insisted that the Cotswold authorities be allowed to use the local stone, and that Bath be allowed to build stone terraces, despite the greater expense. And he wanted his new housing mixed. In 1948 he removed the requirement in pre-war legislation that housing should be provided only for ‘the working classes’. He had something close to a romantic William Morris aesthetic about housing, one of the few things he shared with Churchill. ‘We should try to introduce into our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.’ 28

He railed against ghettos, whether for the working class or the aged. ‘We don’t want a country of East Ends and West Ends, with all the petty snobberies this involves. That was one of the evil legacies of the Victorian era,’ he said. And ‘I hope that the old people will not be asked [by the local authorities] to live in colonies of their own – they do not want to look out of their windows on an endless procession of the funerals of their friends; they also want to look at processions of perambulators.’ 29As he was repeatedly urged to cut standards in order to boost numbers, he equally repeatedly refused, declaring it to be ‘the coward’s way out… if we wait a little longer, that will be far better than doing ugly things now and regretting them for the rest of our lives.’ 30The results of Bevan’s policy can still be seen in the quality and size of housing constructed in the 1940s despite the formidable odds. Dalton was to cut the standards in 1951, dubbing the fiery Bevan ‘a tremendous Tory’ for his views on the need for three-bedroom houses and extra lavatories. Macmillan was to cut them further, Bevan’s successors increasingly indulging in the numbers game at the expense of standards, diversity and social mix. The consequence proved not great new housing for the people, but too many great new slums.

Standards and housing layout were strictly as much the business of Lewis Silkin at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, but the two men fortunately got on. Silkin had been influenced by the Garden City movement, whose pioneer was Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the nineteenth century. 31Howard’s vision of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ was realised in the greenfield private development sites of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, which began building in 1903 and 1919 respectively. Letchworth was designed by Raymond Unwin, the architect also of New Earswick, the model village commissioned by Joseph Rowntree near his cocoa works in York. Unwin’s work heavily influenced the more human-scale and village-like developments of local authorities both before and after the Second World War. It was this legacy which the Town and Country Planning movement took over, bitterly resisting the ribbon development of the thirties, and combining it with a more right-wing plea for green belt legislation in order to protect the countryside from the repulsive encroachment of the lower middle classes and from the unplanned loss of good agricultural land. 32

In 1946, despite ‘no whisper of the new towns in the Labour manifesto’, 33the New Towns Act appeared. There were eventually to be twenty-five of them, housing two million people. Of the first fourteen, eight were built around London, surrounded by green belt to keep them free of the city: an extension to Welwyn, plus the new Crawley, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield, Stevenage, Harlow, and Basildon (later to become the home of Essex man). Six more went to regional development areas: Corby in Northamptonshire, Cwmbran in what is now Gwent, East Kilbride and Glenrothes in central Scotland and Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in Durham. Beveridge was appointed chairman of the last two and threw himself into the job with characteristic vigour; but he found their limited social mix of chiefly young skilled working class wearing. ‘The people are nice and the troops of children are lovely, but there’s no conversation,’ he was to complain. Macmillan eventually fired him in 1952 for being ‘too old’, earning Beveridge’s opinion that he was ‘a pompous ass’ with ‘no manners’. 34

Although the New Towns were mostly built on greenfield sites, in those that had village centres Silkin found himself pilloried by Home Counties residents with no more desire than the people of Hampshire in the 1980s and 1990s to allow even the skilled working-class decanted from the great city on to their patch. At Stevenage, Silkin was greeted with howls of ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Dictator’ and had sand put into the petrol tank of his car. Protesters later changed the signs at the railway station to ‘Silkingrad’. 35

The New Towns were to be one of the greater successes of post-war planning, but by the time Labour left office in 1951 most were still largely building sites, in part because just as the housing situation started to improve Labour faced its darkest hour. For the catastrophic winter of 1947 was followed by the convertibility crisis which shook the triumphant Labour Government to its core. As a condition of the $3.5 billion post-war loan, the United States had insisted that sterling held around the world should become convertible to dollars. That day was due on 15 July 1947. The big freeze had already crippled exports, the balance of payments deficit was soaring, and as convertibility bit millions of dollars from the loan drained away as investors swapped their pounds for dollars, rushing the country towards bankruptcy. In one month $700 million went, until in August the Americans agreed to convertibility being suspended – as it turned out, for eleven years. 36The final £25 million of the loan was drawn down in March 1948. Only the simultaneous promise of help from the Marshall Aid plan, conceived in the early summer of 1947 by the former United States general and finally agreed in April 1948, bailed Britain out, in part by funding European economic revival and thus stimulating a better market for British exports. The price of the crisis at home was spending cuts, implemented first by Dalton and then by the austere Stafford Cripps.