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Transcript of Ward, Colin - Talking Houses, Ten Lectures by Colin Ward
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Freedom Press84b Whitechapel High Street, London EI 7QX
© Colin Ward and Freedom Press 1990
First published September 1990
Cover designed by Donald Rooum
Printed in Great Britain by
Aldgate Press, London El 7QX
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Contents
The Do-I t -YourselfNew Town 7
What Should We Teach About Housing? 36
Dismantling Whitehall 47
:"-
Until We Build Again ' 56J
Direct Action for Working-Class Housing 65
Anarchy or Order? The Planner's Dilemma 81
Freedom an d the Built Environment 99
City People Housing Themselves /fJ 113
An Anarchist Approach to Urban Planning 123
Being Local 133
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Foreword
/Th e request for "something new about housing" fills me with
dismay for the very simple reason that I have nothing new to
say about housing. I began writing about housing forty-five
years ago in the anarchist press and have seen the results of
housing policies of both Labour and Conservative govern
men ts ever since. Any comments I make on the opportunities
or obstacles provided by ever-changing government legisla
tion and administrative decisions an d endlessly changing
rules among the providers of housing finance would be
ou t-of-date before they wer e printed.
Any observations I make about homelessness, or about
exploiting landlords, or about collapsing council flats or the
plight of mortgage-holders faced by rising interest rates, are
better provided by feature-writers an d beautiful grainy
pho tographs in all the posh newspapers. As an anarchist
pro pagandist over such a long period I would have been
foo lish if I did not reflect on the nature of effective an d
ineffective propaganda. Th e application of anarchist ideas to
the basic need of human shelter is dweller control and it is
evident to me that people draw their inspiration from what
other people actually succeed in doing. No t the affluent, who
take dweller control for granted because they have freedom of
choice, bu t ordinary fellow citizens facing every kind of
difficulty because the system doesn't cater for their
aspirations.W e have had a century of government involvement in the
provision of housing and th ere is a great deal to learn from it.
This century has seen at least three revolutions in housing
expectations. The first is the revolution in tenure. Before the
first world wa r the norm, for both rich and poor alike, was
renting in the private market. This applied to 90 per cent of
hou seholds. Today the norm is owner-occupation. This
7
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8 TALKING HOUSES ;
applies to about 65 per cent of households. I t varies greatly in
different parts of Britain, and the sad truth is that those places
with the biggest proportion of bad housing are those with the
largest proportion of housing in the hands oflocal authorities.
I t is easy to see how useful this fact is for Conservative
governments in wa r against local councils bu t at the
same time the revolution in tenure means that owneroccupation is the mode of tenure against which any other
method of householding is judged .
A second housing revolution is concerned with services an d
with housing densities. Domestic service was an astonishingly
enormous industry until the first world war, even until the
second . I t always amazes us how far down the social scale the
habit of having a young girl, or at least some live-in female
relative, to light the fires, boil the water, peel the potatoes, an d
do the washing an d endless cleaning, penetrated. Everywhere,
these were the tasks of the wife an d mother. Th e growth of
mechanical services, access to water, power, light, heat and
domestic machinery, dismissed as mere gadgetry by malephilosophers, represent a partial liberation from servitude .
Housing densities in the poor areas of British cities were
incredibly high a century ago an d astonishing forty-five years
ago. Charles Booth found in 1890 that a quarter of a million
Londoners were "crowded together at a density of one room
per family". In Glasgow in 1945 there were inner city areas
with population densities of well over 900 people per acre.
Both demographic changes an d decentralisation have had a
liberating effect, since I have never met anyone who did not
aspire to the modest hope of a room of one's own. For the third
housing revolutiQn has been in the nature of households. For a
century the provision of housing assumed the nuclear family:
Mum, Da d and the kids. Today they are a minority of
households.
Now all through this century people on the political Left
have invested all their moral energy in one form of housing
provision: local authorities as landlords with the aid of one or
another of a complex variety of subsidies from central
government. For a great part of this century this has been a
FO REWORD 9
bi-partisan policy pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm
by councils an d by central governments of both political
com plexions . . .One big tragedy about this is that, as anyone who has been
at either side of it knows, the landlord-tenant relationship has
never, all through history, been a happy one. Quite obviously
they are on opposite sides of the fence. Councils took it over/ unchanged, except that there is something even more
humiliating to have to go to the back door of the council offices
to talk through a hatch to a poor clerk who has learned to hate
tenants because of their endless moans, when all you want is
an essential repair or a transfer. Th e situation is' actually
worse. The grotesque centralisation of policy in Britain makes
council tenants sitting ducks for the willing or unwilling
imposition of central policy by local councils. Hence the
situation of the 1980s when council tenants were in some areas
subsidising the general rate fund or paying in their rents for
street-lighting charged elsewhere to general income.
My propaganda about housing has always been based oncurrently observable facts an d on people's own efforts to
discover alternatives. At the same time there is a doctrine of
revolutionary purity which urges that there can be no solution
to people's housing problems until the social revolution which
will change e v e r y t h i n g . M a r x i ~ t theorists on ~ h e p o l . i t ~ c . a l Leftprove that housing co-operatlves or self-buIld actIVItIes ~ r e actually the ultimate triumph of the process of capItal
reproduction. "The capitalist class has reduced production
costs by ensuring that the proletariat even has to house itself
at its own cost, with its own time an d its own l?-bouri '
I keep away from these views as they solve no problems for
me or anyone else. I think that the ordinary human attributes
of self-help and mutual aid were the foundations, not only of
ordinary experience everywhere bu t also of the Labour
movement an d its history in Britain. I t isn't my fault that
bureaucratic managerialism took over socialist politics so
that, in the climate of disillusion, slogans like self-help an d
mutual aid were left around to be exploited by the party of the
privileged. .Whatever kind of political regime rules us, people need to
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10 T ALKI NG HOUSES
be housed, and I see a certain prudence in trying Y? protect
yourself from the politician's use of housing p o l i c y . is only
the homeless who suffer. And they are ignored by both sides.
They are the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of housing
activity by central an d local g o v e r n m e n tMy connection with the housing industry, although I can't
remember not being interested in the way people shaped an dadapted their environment, has always been mostly accidental
an d marginal. I speak with no kind of expertise. I n ~ , when I was 15 , my second job was for the Borough Surveyor
of Ilford, Essex. Among my tasks was sorting the dockets that
came in about repairs and maintenance to that council's
housing estates. Some got repairs. Others were pu t on a
second pile. Some tenants were favoured. Others were not . I
had stumbled, without realising its implications, on one of the
unmentioned facts about housing management. The whole
sad history has been carefully chronicled by Anne Power. 1 Insupport of her interpretation of housing history I must cite the
opinion of a lifelong socialist, Tony Judge, writing of hisexperience as chairperson of the Greater London Council' s
Housing Management Committee. He declared that "The
impression, often confirmed as accurate on deeper examina
tion, is of a vast bureaucracy concerned more with
self-perpetuation than with either efficiency or humanity".2
I first wrote about housing in 1945 an d 1946 when it fell to
me to report in Freedom on the post-war squatting campaign
when 40,000 people occupied empty military camps as the
only way to get a roof over their heads. I assembled the
accumulated material into a pamphlet which no-one was
interested in publishing. Many years later my crumbling
carbon copy was printed in Anarchy in 1963 an d reprinted by
the London Squatter's Campaign which was instigated by just
two people, Ron Bailey an d Ji m Radford, in Ilford in 1969.3
Squatting has been a feature of the London housing scene ever
since, an d it has been my task to point out to the "official"
housing world that some of the outstandingly successful
housing co-operatives began their life as squats.4
In the 1950s I was actually involved in the housing industry
to the extent that I was working for private architects whose
FOREWORD 11
clients were public housing authorities. I remember standing
one day in 1952 on a site in Deptford, part bombed, part
derelict, poring over the large-scale pre-war Ordnance maps
of the little streets of 2-storey houses with the architect Peter
Shepheard. He calculated that the number of dwellings that
could be provided by rebuilding the old street pattern was the
same that we could provide in the mixture of3-ston:y walk-upflats and five-storey blocks with lifts that our clients, the
London County Council, required. He raised the matter with
both the Director of Housing and with the chairwoman of the
housing committee, but of course was told that the Council's
policy had been determined, and that it was up to the
architects to follow it.In the 1960s, when I was editing the Freedom Press
monthly Anarchy , I included Uanuary 1968) a long article of
my own called "Tenants Take Over: A new strategy for
council tenants". This argued that the right solution to the
malaise oflocal authority housing was to transfer estates from
councils to tenant co-operatives. This article attracted somea ttention outside the private world of anarchist propaganda,
and I was asked by the Architectural Press to expand it into
book form,5 and I found myself addressing meetings of
tenants' associations, housing managers, councillors and
academics, presenting them with what I saw as an anarchist
approach to housing. I would have been a lone voice, bu t for
the fact that an anarchist friend, the architect John F. C.
T urner, who had returned to this country after many years in
Latin America an d the United States , with a message, that the
firs t principle of housing (cited twice in the collection of
lectures before you) is dweller control; summed up my own
conclusions better than I could myself.6
As a result of Tenants Take Over I was asked to compile a
Freedom Press book ou t of thirty years of writing and talking
ab out housing, an d spent hours in the photocopy shop an d a
family holiday in Norfolk cobbling it together. This was
Housing: an anarchist approach (1976, reprinted 1983). Then in
the early 1980s I was approached by Richard Kuper of the
then Pluto Press, to write a little book about a radical attitude
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14TALKING HOUSES
anarchism has no relevance to current daily issues, I thrust
my books in their hands.
I would like to have a pile of similar books about dozens of
other current topics of ordinary life to push onto enquirers an d \
into the wider debate. I keep wondering why they aren't '"around.
My thanks are due to the audiences who patiently listened
to these lectures an d who questioned an d discussed the issues
afterwards. Some of them are spattered with source notes,
which I have retained, simply because listeners often asked,
an d I hope readers will too, where the information I was
retailing came from and what they should read to learn more .
References
I . Anne Power: Property Before People: the management oj wentieth-century councilhousing (Allen & Unwin 1987)
2. Tony Judge: "The Political and Administrative Setting" in Hamdi andGreenstreet (eds) Participation in Housing (Oxford Polytechnic 1981)
3. Nicolas Walter: "The new squatters" (Anarchy 102, August 1969),reprinted in A Decade of Anarchy (Freedom Press 1987)
4. Colin Ward: "Self-help in urban renewal", talk given on 27 January 1987to the Town & Country Planning Association conference on "Ourdeteriorating housing stock: financing and managing new solutions",printed in The Raven, No 2, August 1987.
5. Colin Ward: Tenants Take Over (Architectural Press 1974, paperback1976)
6. John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (eds): Freedom to Build (CollierMa cmillan 1972), John Turner: Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
7. Colin Ward: "By me, no more meetings" New Society 17 July 1980
8. Andrew Wood: Greentown: A case stu4J oj a proposed alternative community(Open University Energy and Environment Research Unit 1988)
1. The Do It Yourself
NewTown
Th e New Towns movement in Britain, sparked off at the turn
of the century by Ebenezer Howard's book Garden Cities of
Tomorrow an d built into post-war planning legislation and
policy, has had its successes an d its failures. The successes are
there for all to see, an d as for the f ai lures - well it always
seems to me that the New Towns policy is criticised for the
wrong reasons. On e of the criticisms of the New Town
ideolQgy which- has d e v e l o in the last few-y-ears is t4at J he
New Towns P ' ! . v t h e i s c e s ~ . " ' ~ ! ! ~ P ! . . . ? the.
urban o ~ ; : a ~ d that . they ~ r e consequently irrelevant to real Important Issues hke SOCial
justice. It has been rather amusing to watch this notion
spiralling round the academic chat-shows , getting cruder and
more dogmatic all the while, since it was launched in 1972. It
is already beginning.JQ, a f f e c t ~ l i c y . in h L . ! i t i e ~ . It.is adifficult argument to come to gnps WIth because sometImes
people say a lot of different an d contradictory things at the
same time. How often one hears the giant fringe housing
estates like Thamesmead, or Chelmsley Wood, or Kirkby or
Cantril Farm, described as New Towns, when of course they
are not. If you point out that the Ne w Towns_h.ll_lf_absorbed
only a small E . ! : . ~ ! : i the n o r m O J 1 S outwa,rd _mpvementf r c i t i e s (only l e o f the movement from
London), or if you take the example of Milto.p_ IS..eynes which
has provided 16,000 jobs of which a little over a thousand
came from London, while 12,000 people have moved there
"
Lecture given at the Garden Cities/New Towns Forum at Welwyn Garden Ci0'on 22 October 1975 and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on 19
February 1976
15
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16 TALKING HOUSES
from London, then th e critics say that the New Towns have
become irrelevant. I f you point ou t that t h e ~ T.9J:Yilli have
p r o v i d e d ~ ~ n d f9 .L L<l:rge n u m b ~ r ~ o r k i n g ~ l a s s e : w J ~ ! ? , y Q l J l d not e n a b l e d otherwise to get . l!lore \
ample. l.ife .out of. the city il) the way that middle class people
~ < ; . . f ! ! . ~ ~ l , they reply that the New Towns have d o ~ e nothing for the really under-privileged or deprived. Well, I' m
delighted to see the pundits of planning emerging as the
champions of the inner city poor. I t makes a change when you
consider what the planning orthodoxy of the last twenty years
has done to inner city London, Glasgow, Liverpool or Cardiff.
Of course I recognise that t h e n ~ is a large element of social
snobbishness in the deprecators of the New Towns. Some
people can't stand the upward social mobility of the skilled
worker. And then we ha've to carry like a cross the Marxist
intelligentsia who can't bear to think of the working class
being lost to the class struggle and developing a taste for
wall-to-wall carpeting. They are like the people who would
like the poor to be starving in the slums so as to hasten the dayof revolution. Apart from our moral distaste for such an
outlook, life never happens that way.
What we are talking about is the missing half of Ebenezer
Howard's formula . He wanted dispersal in order to make
possible the humane redevelopment of the inner city. He
thought, seventy years or more ago, that once the inner city
had been "demagnetised", once large numbers of people had
been convinced that "they can better their condition in every
way by migrating elsewhere" the bubble of the monopoly
value of inner-city land would burst. "But let us notice," he
wrote in his chapter on The Future of London, "how each
person in migratin from L Q ! ! g . o ~ ) V Y E ! ! ~ I ! l < ! . ~ i n g the burden of
s : ! : ? ~ ~ m k s s . heav:.y- w c those. _wha. '"wiIL ( unless
there IS some C h ! 1 . l J ~ a . k ~ the burden of rates on; p ~ ~ o C L Q Q d o n Y - ~ ! iI'e' 1hoi:;ght- that the
change in the inner city would be effected "not at the expense
of the ratepayers, bu t almost entirely at the expense of the
landlord class".
Now of course it hasn't happened that wa y because of our
continued failure to cope with the problem of land valuation.
TH E Do- IT- YOURSELF NEW TOWN 17
We can hope, if without much conviction, that th e
Community Land Ac t an d the temporary collapse of the
property boom will bring us closer to the situation that
Howard envisaged.
Last year in Swindon, a town rescued from decay by the
T own Development legislation, I was talking to a post office
. worker who told me of the conditions his wife and children
had had to endure living in two rooms in Islington. Th e mon
out of London of the department of the post office in which he
worked had dramatically improved the conditions of life fur
h is family. Funnily enough, it is likely that the very house he
moved out of has become part of the humane, d e n s i t v r e i . ~ f . l h ~ In.n.eL.9.ty_th,[QJ}·gnJh,e process known.asgentrificatioQ.. Perhaps instead of four families sharing the
same ilapidated house with one WC in the backyard, one
family now lives there and the immaculately painted house
has central heating and a bathroom while the backyard has
changed its name to the patio an d is full of grapevines an d
fr isbies. Th e old WC houses a Moulton bicycle. The occupantis probably an ecologically-conscious planner who leads a
busy and blameless life crusading for the urban poor. S for decent livigg is s o t h i n g . . t h a L m . o . r u ; . y ~ l Afrw years ago Sir Frederic Osborn was invited to attend a
meeting ofthe Covent Garden Community in central London.
"Wha t should the Odhams Press site be used for?" he was
asked . "Why, a public open space of course" he replied, and
everybody laughed. Yet a few years later, thanks to the
tem porary collapse of property speculation in London, the
Community itself has built a garden on that site -
fantastically heavily used during the long hot summer last
year. And interestingly enough, in the analogous district of
Paris, Les HaIles, where the vegetable market again has been
m o v e ~ the suburbs, the President has decided that the site
is to be90me a public open space.
All this is simply a necessary introduction to the approach
to the idea of a New Town which I want to propound. Inner
City an d Ne w Town are not rivals, they are two sides of the
same policy, or should be.
My real purpose is to look at the New Town movement
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18 TALKING HOUSES
through anarchist spectacles, defining anarchism as the socialphilosophy of a non-governmental society. Th e philosopher
Martin Buber begins his essay Sociery and the State with an
observation from the sociologist Robert Maciver that "to
identify the social with the political is to be guilty of thegrossest of all confusions, which completely bars any
understanding of either society or the state". Th e politicalprinciple, for Buber, is characterised by power, authority,
hierarchy, dominion. He sees the social principle wherevermen link themselves in an association based on a common
need or a common interest. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin
(and you will see that his view is different from that of
Marxism and of social democracy) believed that "The State
organisation, having been the force to which the minorities
resorted for establishing and organising their power over the
masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these
privileges", and he declared that "the economic and political
liberation of man will have to create new forms for its
expression in life, instead of those established by the State".He thought it self-evident that "this new form will have to be
more popular, more decentralised, and nearer to the folk-mote
self-government than representative government can ever be",
reiterating that we will be compelled to find new forms of
organisation for the social functions that the state fulfills
through the bureaucracy, and that "as long as this is not done,nothing will be done".
Now you may wonder why I have chosen to inflict on youthis slice of anarchist theory an d speculation. Well, if I asked
you who were the f o u ~ of the town n n i n g movement in
this country, you would unquestionably reply Ebenezer
!ioward_an d Patrk;k ~ d c L e s . One of the interesting thingsabout this pair of sages, since we have all been brainwashed
into thinking of planning as a professional mystery or
amalgamation of mysteries, is that neither of them would be
accepted today as a member of the Royal Town Planning
Institute. (Howard was a stenographer. A major preoccupa
tion of his was the invention of a shorthand-typing machine.
Geddes was a biologist.) Nor would they have been accepted
into the academic world. Geddes was regarded with great
THEDo-IT-YouRsELF NEw TowN 19
suspicion in academic circles, failed to get any of the jobs heapplied for and was finally made a professor because a
philanthropist endowed a chair especially for him. As for
Howard, his biographer remarks that his book did not
"receive any recognition by those who specialised in political,
economic or sociological matters. Those very factors whichenabled him to see clearly with eyes unbiased by
preconceptions, in particular his lack of academic back
ground, kept him out of the charmed circle of the
Establishment."
I t is salutory to be reminded of these facts, bu t to me the
most striking thing about both Howard and Geddes issomething different. In the Osborn-Mumford correspond
ence, FJ O remarks about Howard that "He had no belief in
'the State"'. He had no belief in the State. Does this mean he
was an anarchist? No it doesn't. As Lewis Mumford remarked
about him, "With his gift of sweet reasonableness Howard
hoped to win Tory and Anarchist, single-taxer and socialist,
individualist and collectivist, lover to his experiment". But itdoes mean that Howard did not believe that the State was the
only means, or the most desirable means with which to
accomplish social ends.
Th e same thing is true of Geddes. His most recentbiographer Paddy Kitchen in her book A Most Unsettling Person
(Gollancz 1975) says, "Intellectually he was closest to
anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul and Elisee
Redus, all of whom he knew well", while his earlier
biographer Philip Mairet remarks that "an interesting bookcould be . written about the scientific origins of the
international anarchist movement, an d if it were, the name of
Geddes would not be absent" .·There were in fact innumerablecross-currents between the ideologists of planning and the
ideologists of anarchism at that time. Th e Reclus family made
several of the exhibits in Geddes' Outlook Tower in
Edinburgh. Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops (to my
mind a book full of significance for our contemporary
dilemmas)"came out at the same time as Howard's Tomorrow:
A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. When Howard's book was
re-issued under its more familiar title of Garden Cities ofI
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20 TALKING HOUSES
Tomorrow, an d when Kropotkin's book was re-issued in an
enlarged edition, each paid tribute to the other's work. When
Thomas Adams, the first secretary of the Garden Cities
Association, an d later the first secretary of the Town Planning
Institute, wrote his book Garden City and Agriculture in 1905, he
based it on Kropotkin's work. There are similar cross
influences with Raymond Unwin, Lewis Mumford, rightdown to the astounding book Communitas by Paul and Percival
Goodman, which after its publication by the University of
Chicago in 1947, led a kind of underground existence until its
re-appearance as a paperback in the '60s. I t is on sale in thiscountry an d I would recommend it to you as the most
significant book in our field since Howard's.
Well these are merely literary crosscurrents of course. But
when First Garden City Limited was started it was not
conceived as a forerunner of action by the governmental
machine, it was conceived as the forerunner of what F. J.
Osborn called, summarising Howard, "progressive experi
mentation in new forms of social enterprise". An ordinarycompany in its structure , it had the important feature of
dividend limitation an d the famous provision that "any
balance of profit" was to be devoted "t o the benefit directly or
indirectly of the town or its inhabitants". In its planner it was
fortunate to have Raymond Unwin with those great qualities
that Nicholas Taylor summed up as "his acute practical sense
of the complexity of everyday life, and also his political stress
on co-operative management as the means of bringing the
good life to the many". When Howard found that his
working-model failed to inspire others, he embarked, at 69, on
his second garden city, having succeeded in borrowing less
than one-tenth of the purchase price of the site. Staggering
foolhardiness. Ca n you imagine such an enterprise today?
Now we know from the recollections of people like C. B.
Purdom and Frederic Osborn and from the anecdotes of early
residents that there was a kind of gaiety an d a sense of high
adventure in the pioneering of Letchworth and Welwyn, that
was absent from the early days of the postwar New Towns.
Some people would deny this of course, an d say that it is all a
matter of the transforming power of time. FJ O says that at
' fHED o-IT-YOURSELFNEWToWN 21
Letchworth, the people who had been there from the start
eight years before he arrived told him he'd missed the golden
age. But listen to him reminiscing about Welwyn an d the
fantas tically difficult balancing ac t of choreographing the
arrival of people, basic services and jobs, on a shoestring and
by himself. A task which would employ a vast staff in a
modern New Town.But behind the rosy reminiscence, isn't it true that the
grumbles and the New Town Blues that we used to hear in the
fifties, did not have their equivalents in the early years bf the
two garden cities, just because people were conscious of being
pioneers and of having to do their own things if they wanted
some thing done?
Now once the building of New Towns, after years of
cam paigning, had become a governmental enterprise, the
mechanism of the Development Corporation followed the
pattern set by Lord Reith (in the BBC) in the 1920s, or by
Her bert Morrison (in the London Passenger Transport
Board) in the 1930s, or by the boards of the nationalisedindustries set up at the same time in the 1940s. We know that
the style of the Development Corporation has proved itself
adap table to many other circumstances than that of the
original green-field New Towns. Th e trouble is that the style
has not changed, even though our ideas about many other
forms of social organisation are changing and are going to
change still more in the future. Mr Tony Wedgwood Benn
who )ten years ago was using government funds to enforce
shot-gun weddings among giant capitalist concerns to enable
them to compete with the European giants, is by now an
advocate of using government funds to enable workers'
c:o-operatives to take over ailing capitalist enterprises. He
embarrasses us all by conducting his education in public, bu t
other people too are looking back to see where we went wrong
in our theories of social organisation. At what stage in the
evolution of our administrative ideology did we go wrong?
Some people would say it was back in the thirties when the
Labour Party opted for the vast public corporation as the
v hide for social enterprise. Other people would say, in
onnection with housing, that it was the time of the Tudor
'1
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22 TALKING HOUSES
Walters report in 1918, which froze out all other forms of
social housing in favour of direct municipal provision. Today,
with public housing policy in collapse, we are suddenly
discovering the virtues of co-operative housing - a notion
dear to the heart of Howard and Unwin which has been
neglected for sixty years, even though if you go to a country
like Denmark where a third of housing is in the hands oftenant co-operatives they say to the English visitor, "W e oweit all to your Rochdale Pioneers".
Today, when people are urging, in the name of democracy
that New Town housing should be transferred to the local
authorities, at least one Development Corporation Chairman
has approached the Minister to ask whether he will make
some stipulation about allocation procedures, since in his area
the allocation of council, as opposed to development
corporation housing has been delegated from the council
meeting to the party meeting of the ruling party. He isinterested in tenant control because he sees local democratic
control as worse than the paternalism of his corporation.
I think that the watershed in the development of social and
socialist ideology came much further back. It was possible for
one of the earliest Fabian Tracts to declare in 1886 that
"English Socialism is not yet Anarchist or Collectivist, not yet
defined enough in point of policy to be classified. There is a
mass of Socialistic feeling not yet conscious of itself as
Socialism. But when the unconscious Socialists of England
discover their position, they also will probably fall into two
parties: a Collectivist party supporting a strong central
administration an d a counterbalancing Anarchist party
defending individual initiative against the administration."
Well the Fabians rapidly found which side of the watershed
was theirs, and the Labour Party long ago finally committeditself to that interpretation of socialism which identified it with
the unlimited increase of the State's power and activitythrough its chosen form: the giant managerially-controlled
public corporation.
Now in putting forward the notion of a do-it-yourself New
Town, I am not saying that, in ou r kind of society, the public
authorities have no role. They have an indispensable role,
' l' II E Do-IT-YOURSELFNEWToWN 23
which for short we call site and services. !fyou are familiar with
the phrase it is because you have been watching the unfoldingdra ma of housing in the cities of the Third World. For if thecities of the rich world lack the income to maintain their
expensive infrastructure, it is not surprising that in the'xploding cities of the poor world, transportation, water
supply, sewerage and power supplies cannot cope, and stillless can medical, educational or housing services. Th e
European visitor is appalled by the miles and miles of
shanty-towns which surround the capital, often not shown on
the map or included in the population statistics, even though
the unofficial inhabitants may outnumber the official
po pulation.People with a historical sense are reminded of the
mushroom growth of our own industrial cities in the early
nineteenth century, bu t there is a significant difference. Here
industrialisation preceded urbanisation: there the urbanisa
tion precedes industry. The anthropologist Lisa Peattie once
to ld me of her puzzlement in Bogota, where there was noeconomic base to sustain the exploding population, bu t where
no one looked ill-nourished and everyone was shod. She
rea lised eventually that beside the official economy that
figured in the statistics there was an unofficial, invisible
economy of tiny enterprises and service occupations whichprovided purchasing power for the unofficial population
whose squatter settlements evolved over time into fully
servi.ced suburbs.
There is a perceptible pattern of population movement: the
peasant makes the break with his village firstly by moving to
some intermediate town or city as his first staging post, then
moves on to the inner city slums of the metropolis, usually to
some quarter occupied by families with the ~ a m e place oforigin. Finally, wised-up in city ways, he moves on to a
squatter settlement, usually on public land on the periphery of
the city. In favourable circumstances, his straw shack
develops over the years into a house: he has turned his labour
into capital and has a modicum of security in the urban
economy. Thisnappens quickly in a city of rapid economicgrowth like Seoul. I t does not happen in a city of negative
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24 TALKING HOUSES
economic growth like Calcutta, where people are born and diein the street.
This is why English architects like John Turner and Pat
Crooke who have worked for years in the shanty-towns of
Latin America see them as something quite different from the
official view an d that of the rich visitor which is as
breeding-grounds of crime, disease, social an d familydisorganisation. They see them as a triumph of self-help an d
mutual ai d among people who would gain nothing from the
usual expensive official housing programme. They point out
that what begins as a squatter settlement can become through
its own efforts in fifteen years a fully functioning community of
adequate, properly serviced households.
In their chapter contributed to the recent book The
Exploding Cities they contrast two examples of evolving
dweller-controlled housing, one in Barcelona an d one in
Dar-es-Salaam an d conclude:
These two superficially different cases show how ordinary people use
resources and opportunities available to them with imagination andinitiative - when they have access to the necessary resources, andwhen they are free to act for themselves. Anyone who can see beyondthe surface differences between the many forms of dwelling placespeople build . or themselves is bound to be struck by the oftenastonishing economy of housing built and managed locally, or fromthe bottom up, in comparison with the top-down, mass housing,supplied by large organisations and central agencies. Contrary towhat we have been brought up to believe, where labour is aneconomy's chief asset, large-scale production actually reducesproductivity in low-income housing. The assumed "economies ofscale" are obtained at the expense of reduced access to resourceslocal owners and builders would otherwise use themselves, and ofthe inhibition of personal and community initiative.
I fyou have a lingering belief that this is simplyromanticising other people's poverty, I ought to remind you
that the poor of a poor country in an efficiently administered
city like Lima have not been deprived of the last shred of
personal autonomy and human dignity like the poor of a rich
and competently administered city like London. They are nottrapped in the culture of poverty.
Just imagine that we were a poor country. Suppose
TH E Do -IT-YOURSELF NE W TOWN 25
Dockland were Dar-es-Salaam, or Liverpool were Lusaka,
and we adopted the policy of "aided squatting" which in some
Third World cities has replaced the pointless an d wicked
governmental persecution of squatters. Following the advice
of people like Turner an d Crooke an d D.]. Dwyer, the World
Bank is ceasing to aid grandiose housing projects, though
many governments are refusing to take this advice. Theywould rather pay large fees to Western planning consultants,
for they cannot believe that what poor people do for
themselves can be right. The World Bank is now sponsoring
ten "site an d services" programmes around the world.
Wilsher and Righter report that these experimental projects"encompass a wide variety of space allocations, financial
assistance, provision of utilities, types of tenure, construction
standards, and participation of private enterprise, bu t its
officials are already convinced that the approach holds out a
good deal of promise" (The Exploding Cities 1975).
Now suppose we applied such a policy to some of the
derelict inner city districts in the man-made wastelands.
Provide roads an d services and a service core: kitchen sink,
bath, WC and ring-main connection, pu t up some party walls
(to overcome the fire-risk objection) and you will have long
queues of families anxious to build the rest of the house for
themselves, or to employ one of our vast number of
unemployed building workers to help, or to get their
brother-in-law or some moonlighting tradesman or the
Community Industry to help, within the party walls. Such a
carnival of <;onstruction would have important spin-offs in
other branches of the social problems industry: ad hoc jobs
and training for unemployed teenagers, turning the localvandals into builders, and the children into back-yard
horticulturalists. Why, it would be like those golden days atLetchworth!
Why, we already have experience of a do-it-yourself New
Town on the site-and-service principle . I f I announce that I
am referring to Pitsea an d Laindon: the precursor of Basildon
New Town, people in the planning profession will groan an d
say, "Well, precisely, an d we don't want that particular
expensive muddle to mop up again!" Bu t look at it in a
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26TALKING HOUSES
different light and you will see why some-one with my point of
view cherishes Basildon with particular affection . There the
dwellers got their sites but had to wait many years for the
services. I f you don ' t know the Basildon epic (which I have
already told at the ICA in the symposium on squatter
settlements on 23 May 1972) let me re-tell it as briefly as I
can.Th e ~ u i l . d i n g the London-Tilbury-Southend Railway in
1888 cOInCIded With a period of agricultural depression, an d
several farmers around Pitsea and Laindon in Essex sold to an
astute land agency which divided the land into plots for sale.
They advertised these as holiday or retirement retreats and
organised excursion trains from West Ha m an d East Ha m at
the London end of the line, with great boozy jaunts to the
country (large hot els were built at the stations), an d in the
course of the outings plots of lands were auctioned. Some
people returned home without realising that they were now
landowners an d these remained undeveloped, or perhaps werebuilt on without title by someone else .
In the period up to the end of the nineteen -thirties other
agents or the farmers themselves sold plots in the area
sometimes for as little as £3 for a 20-foot frontage. A lot of
ex-servicemen dreaming of a good life on a place of their own
sank t h ~ i r gratuities after the first world war in small-holdings
(for which there could hardly be a less satisfactory soil than
that around Pitsea) or in chicken farming. Most of them soon
failed: they lost their money but they had some kind of cabin
on the site, an d the return fare from Laindon to Fenchurch
Street was Is ;2d in 1930. Th e kind of structures people built
ranged from the typical inter-war speculative builder's
detached ~ o u s e or bungalow, to converted buses or railway
coaches, With a range of army huts, beach huts and every kindof timber-framed shed, shack or shanty.
During the second world war, with very heavy bombing inEast London, especially the dockland boroughs of East Ha m
and West Ham, many families evacuated themselves or were
bombed out, and moved in permanently to whatever foothold
they had in the Pitsea, Laindon an d Vange districts, with the
TH E Do- lT-YOURSELF NE W TOWN 27
result that at the end of the war the area had a settled
population of 25,000.There were some 8,500 existing dwellings , over 6,000 of
them unsewered. There were 75 miles of grass track roads,
main water in built-up areas only with standpipes in the roads
elsewhere. There was no surface water drainage apart from
ditches and old agricultural drains. Only fifty per cent ofdwellings had mains electricity. There were about 1,300 acres
of completely waste land of which 50 per cent had no known
owner. Th e average density was 6 persons to the acre . Of the
8,500 dwellings, 2,000 were of brick an d tile construction to
Housing Act standards , 1,000 were oflight construction to the
same standard, 5,000 were chalets an d shacks and 500 were
described as derelict, though probably occupied. The average
rateable value was £5.In 1946 the New Towns Act was passed and various places
were designated by the government as sites for New Towns.
In many cases there was intense local opposition, not only
from residents an d landowners but also from the localauthorities. In the case of the place we are considering, and
Basildon was unique among the New Towns in this, the
Minister was petitioned by the Essex County Council an d by
the local council to designate the area as a New Town. They
were joined by the County Borough Councils of West Ha m
and East Ha m who saw the place as a natural overs pill town
for their boroughs - many of whose former citizens were now
living there. Th e argumen t was that there was no other wa y of
financing the infra-structure of essential municipal services.
At the first round the application was turned down. Harlow
was chosen as the first Essex New Town and there was talk of
Ongar as the second. After a further delegation to the
Minister, Basildon was accepted.Th e New Town was planned. to start from a nucleus at the
village of Basildon itself, expanding eastwards an d westwards
to incorporate Laindon and Pitsea . Th e first general manager,
Brigadier W. G . Knapton, set out his policy in 1 9 ~ 3 . thus:
"Any solution which includes the wholesale demolitiOn of
sub-standard dwellings cannot be contemplated. However
inadequate, every shack is somebody's home, probably
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28 TALKINGHousEs
purchased freehold wth hard-earned savings, an d as often as
not the area ofland within the curtilage is sufficient to provide
garden produce and to house poultry, rabbits, an d even pigs.
To evict the occupier and to re-accommodate him and his
family in a corporation house, even on such favourable terms
as the Act may permit, will probably cause not only hardship,
bu t bitter feelings. Th e old must be absorbed into the newwith the least detriment to the former an d the greatest
advantage to the latter.
His successor, Mr Charles Boniface, adopted the same
humane and sensible attitude. He remarked that "the
planners' task here is like a jigsaw puzzle, with the new fitting
into the old instead of being superimposed upon an d
obliterating it". This is in fact the policy which has been
followed, an d the grid-iron pattern of the grass-track roads
has been incorporated into the fully-developed New Town
plan. Mr Boniface has always maintained (against some
opposition) that "existing residents and allotment owners
have as many rights as incomers or the corporation itself'.
Let us zoom in on one particular street in the Laindon end
of Basildon. It probably has a greater variety of housing types
than any street in Britain. I t starts on the right with two late
Victorian villas - a sawn-off bit of errace housing stuck there
hopefully when the railway was first built. On the left is a
detached house with a porch embellished with Doric wooden
columns, like something in the Deep South of the United
States. Then there are some privately-built houses of the
1960s, an d next a wooden cabin with an old lady leaning over
the gate - a first world war army hu t which grew. On the
other side of the road is some neat Development Corporation
housing: blue brick, concrete tilehanging and white trim . Here
is a characteristic improved shanty with imitation stone
quoins formed in cement rendering at the corners of the
pebbledash. Most of the old houses have some feature in the
garden exemplifying Habraken's remarks about the passion to
create and embellish. This one has a fountain, working. This
one has a windmill about five feet high painted black an d
white like the timber and asbestos house it adjoins. The sailsare turning. Here's one with a pond full of goldfish.
THEDo-IT-YouRsELFNEW TowN 29
And now we see an immaculate vegetable garden with an
old gentleman hoeing his onions. He was a leather worker
from Kennington, who bought the place 43 years ago for
week-ends and then retired down here. No, he wasn't the first
occupier, who was a carpenter from Canning Town who
bought three 20-foot plots for £ 18 in 1916" ,giving a site 60ft by
140 ft. In the post-1918 period when, accdrding to MrC,Syrett,the present owner, the banks were changing their interiors
from mahogany to oak, the carpenter brought down bits and
pieces of joinery from Fenchurch Street and built his dream
bungalow. After Mr Syrett had bought it it was burnt down
except for the present kitchen an d Mr Syrett himself built the
present timber-framed house. Later he had it rendered, an d
although he is now 85, he has been making improvements ever
since. For example he has recently cu t ou t the mullions of his
1930-type windows to make them more like the ones in the
Development Corporation houses opposite.I showed him a description of the area as a former "vast
pastoral slum". He denied this of course, remarking that most
people came down here precisely to get away from the slums.
But what was it like before the road was made up? "Well, you
had to order your coal in the summer as the lorry could never
get down the road in wintertime." But there was a pavement.
"People used to get together with their neighbours to buy
cement and sand to make the pavement all the way along the
road." Street lighting? No, there was none. "Old Granny
Chapple used to take a hurricane lamp when she went to the
Radiant Cinema in Laindon." Transport? "Well, a character
called Ol d Tom used to run a bus from Laindon Station to the
Fortune of Wa r public house. And there were still horses an d
carts down here in those days. They used to hold
steeplechases on the hill where the caravan site is now." In thesame road lived Mr Budd, who died last year at 97 . He was a
bricklayer by trade an d every time he had a new grandchild
would add a room to his house .Mr and Mrs- Syrett's house is immaculate - large rooms
with all the attributes of suburban comfort . The house was
connected to the sewer an d electricity mains in the 40s an d got
gas 15 years ago. Th e urban district council made up the road
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30 TALKINGHousEs
under the Private Street Works Act, charging £60 in road
charges. Th e road was recently made up again to a higher
standard by the Development Corporation. Th e rates are £12
a half year, an d as old age pensioners they got a rate rebate.
They live happily within their pension, they assured me. No
rent to pay, some fruit and vegetables from the garden and the
greenhouse. I t is a matter of pride for them that they are notobliged to apply for ~ u p p l ~ m e n t a r y benefits whIch they regard
as scroungmg. I t IS qUIte obvious that Mr Syrett's real
investment for his old age was this one -time substandard
bungalow which today has all the same amenities an d
conveniences as the homes of his neighbours. The truth of this
can be seen if you look in the estate agents' windows in Pitsea,
where houses with the same kind of origin are advertised at
prices similar to those asked for the spec builder's houses of
the same p e r i o ~ l . Th e significant thing is that their original
owners an d buIlders would never have qualified as building
society mortgagees in the inter-war years, any more than
people wit? eq.uivalent incomes would today. The integration
of shacksvI.lle mt? new development has been outstandingly
s u c c ~ s s f u l m B a s I l ~ o n b ~ ~ .the same upgrading of dwellingsan d Improvement m faCIlItIes happens in the course of time
anywhere - further down the line at Canvey Island for
example - without benefit of New Town finance . What the
New Town mechanism has done of course is to draw the
sporadic settlement together into an urban entity an d provide
non-commuting jobs through the planned introduction of
industry. Pitsea and Laindon could be called do-it-yourself
New Towns, later legitimised by official action.
But the c h e a ~ l , ! ~ i s h e d kind of m e n t th...at g i v e 1 : ! n d e q l l " i : ~ 6 k g e c f , ! - o w n has
a v a I l a b l e . In the 1939s, aesthetic critics deplored thiskina ofa eve opinent as growth" and so on though
the critics themselves ha d a grea:t--deal more f r e ~ d o m of
manoeuvre in buying themselves a place in the sun . I t is
interesting that Si r Patrick Abercrombie in th e Grea ter
London Plan of 1944 said, "I t is possible to point with horror
to the jumble of shacks and bungalows on the Laindon Hills
and Pitsea . This is a narrow-minded apprecIation of what was
(
THE Do-I T-YOURsELFNEW TowN 31
as genuine a desire as created the group oflovely gardens and
houses at Frensham and Bramshott". This may be obvious
today, bu t it was unusually perceptive in the climate of
opinion then.What in fact those Pitsea-Laindon dwellers had was the
ability to turn their labour into capital over time, just like the
Latin American squatters. Th e poor in the third world cities- with some obvious exceptions - have a freedom that the
poor in the rich world cities have lost: three freedoms, in John
Turner' s words: "the freedom of community self-selection; the
freedom to budget one's own resources and the freedom to
shape one's own environment". In the rich world the choices
have been pre-empted by the power of the state, with its
comprehensive law-enforcement agencies and its institutional
ised welfare agencies . In the rich world as Habrake.2.y uts it,
no longer_l?:oJl§...es ]:limself: he is housed" .You might observe of course that some of the New Town
and developing towns have - more than most local
authorities have - provided sites and encouragement to
self-build housing societies. But a self-build housing
association has to provide a fully-finished product right from
the start, otherwise no consent under the building regulations,
no planning consent, no loan. No-one takes into account the
growth and improvement and enlargement of the dwelling
over time, so that people can invest out of income and out of
their own time, in the structure .
Now when Howard wrote his book, the reason why it
appealed to so many people was that the period was receptive .
This was the period of Kropotkin's Fields Factories and
Workshops, of Blatchford's Merrie England, an d ofH. G. Wells's
Anticipations. Certain ideas were in the air.
Now we are once again in a period with a huge range ofideas in the air, especially among the young. There is the
enormous interest in what has become known as alternative
technology. There is, for obvious reasons, a sudden burst of
interest in domestic food production, an d there is an~ ~ ! p ' ~ f o n l l s Q L ~ i n g , Qnce
a g a i i o u s re(isons: a vast numbers of people
whose faces or lifestyles don't fit in either the Director of
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32TALKING HOUSES
H o u s i n g ' ~ ~ ~ __Q . g . i . l 2 ?_o_cl ety offIce, an d who are
S .<?Ilsequently v i ! of the fTude duopoly o{ housing which,i ~ h o u t intending. tQ, .we have created.
There are large numbers of people interested in alternative
ways of making a living: looking for labour-intensive
low-capital industries, because capital-intensive industries
have failed to provide them with an income. Qo.mi1lJl!!ity
Land Trust was set up last year (no connection with the Act of
a- simliar ' name, though the Act may be the essential
prerequisite in providing land for the site-and-services
do-it-yourself New Town). A_ Ne_:::: V i l l , ! g ~ - t \ § ' ~ c i ~ ! i \ f . a s set up recently
. r ~ o ; t i n u a l l y amazed by the growth of interest in
alternative energy sources, especially since I was writing on
the themes of solar power an d wind power exploitation in the
anarchist paper Freedom twenty years ago. Nobody at all
seemed to be interested in those days . Last month a county
librarian identified this as one of the areas in which there was
the largest demand for books last year. Hugh Sharman, who
runs the undertaking called Conservation Tools an d
Technology told me that they get hundreds of enquiries every
week. Th e National Centre for Alternative Technology in
Wales was opened to the public in July 1975 an d by the end of
last year had had more than 15,000 visitors. One of the
essen ials of a do-it-yourself N ew Town would be a relaxation
of building regulations to make it possible for people to
experiment in alternative ways of building an d servicing
houses, and in permitting a dwelling to be occupied in a most
rudimentary condition for gradual completion. This is
virtually impossible at the moment, and people here with an
interest in that field will recall that Graham Caine and the
Street-farmers had to dismantle their experimental house atEltham last October because their temporary planningpermission expired.
I ought to say something about the density of dwellings .
Some advocates of more intelligent land-use policies advocate
high densities rather than what they think of as suburban
sprawl, in order to conserve those precious acres of
agricultural land. A worthy motive bu t a wrong conclusion.
(
TH E Do- IT-YOURSELF NEW TOWN 33
Th e agricultural industry is interested in maximum
productivity per man. But with limited land we ~ u g h t tointerested in maximum productivity per acre. SIr Fredenc
Osborn always argued that the produce of the ordinary
domestic garden, even though a small area of gardens is
devoted to food production, more than equalled in value the
produce of the land lost to commercial food production.Surveys conducted by the government and by university
departments in the 1950s proved him right. Some people will
remember the enormous contribution made to the nation's
food supply by domestic gardens an d allotments during the
war years. (The facts of the argument were set out by Robin
Best andJ. T. Ward in the Wye College pamphlet The Garden
Controversy in 1956.) I would simply say that 19'Y:.Q.t':.H§J!yh o u ~ i n g is the best way of c o n s la!!,.d. Perhaps I can
rllikethcpoint l 5 e s t ~ by gomg one stage further than the
do-it-yourself New Town to Mr John Seymour's views on
self-sufficiency. He says in the new edition of his book The Fat
of the Land:
There is a ma n I know of who farms ten thousand acres with three
men (and the use of some con ractors) . Of course he can only growone crop - barley, and of course his I ? ~ o d u c t i o n p.er acre is very lowand his consumption of imported fertIhser very hIgh. He b u . r n ~ allhis straw, puts no humus on the land (he boasts there Isn t afour-footed animal on it - bu t I have seen a hare) and he knowsperfectly well his land will s u f f ~ r ! n th.e end. He d?esn't care - i.t willsee him out. He is already a mIllIOnaIre several times over. He IS the
prime example of that darling of the agricultural economist - thesuccessful agri-businessman.
Well I don't want to preserve his precious acres for him, an d
John paints a seductive alternative:
Cut that land (exhausted as it is) up into a thousand plots of tenacres each, giving each plot to a family tr.ained to use it, and within
ten years the production coming from It would be enormous . It
would make a really massive contribution to the balance of
payments problem. The motorist with his News of 4e World w o u l ~ n . ' t have the satisfaction oflooking over a vast treeless, hedgeless praltIe
of indifferent barley - bu t he could get out of h!s car for a c h a ~ g e and wander through a seemingly huge area of dIverse countrysIde,orchards, young tree plantations, a myriad small plots of land
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34 TALKING HousEs
growing a multiplicity of different crops, farm animals galore, and
hundred3 of happy and healthy children. Even the agricultural
economist has convinced himselfof one thing. He will tell you (if he
is any good) that land farmed in big units has a low production of
food per acre but a high production of food per man-hour, and thatland farmed in small units has the opposite - a very poor
production per man-hour but a high production per acre . He will
then say that in a competitive world we must go for high productionper man-hour and not per acre . I would disagree with him.
And so would I, an d though I am arguing for an experimental
town rather than an experiment in land settlement, his
argument holds good. Self-sufficiency is not the aim, bu t an
opportunity for people to work in small-scale horticulture as
well as in small-scale industry is. I recently edited a new
edition of Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops and foundit extraordinarily relevant.
The late Richard Titmus used to say that social ideas "may
well be as important in Britain in the next half-century as
technical innovation". One of these ideas it seems to me is the
rediscovery of Howard's garden city as a popular an d populistnotion.
I t may have to happen . There may be no other wa y of
rescuing inner Liverpool. There may be no other way of
rescuing some of the Development Corporations faced with a
diminishing rate of growth . Perhaps Milton Keynes is
destined to become an agri-city, a dispersed city of intensive
horticulturists. Perhaps the right idea to offer participants in
the Letchworth competition is that the Letchworth Garden
City Corporation should sponsor New Letchworth at Milton
Keynes or in Central Lancs, to develop an area with waivers
on the planning an d building legislation. I t should be possible
to operate some kind of usufruct, some kind of leasehold with
safeguards against purely cynical exploitations, which would
enable people to house themselves an d provide themselves
with a means of livelihood, while not draining immense sums
from central or local government .
Some people had the hope in the very earliest days of the
New Towns that this kind of experimental freedom would
apply there. Peter Shepheard, for whom it was my pleasure to
work for ten years, worked in the one-time Ministry of Town
(
THEDo-IT-YouRsELFNEW TowN 35
and Country Planning on the early plans for Stevenage. He
once recollected:
I remember that when first working at Stevenage we felt it vital not
only to get the New Town Corporation disconnected entirely fromthe treasury, but from the whole network of central government,
by-laws and so on . Th e idea was to build in ten years, a new
experimental town . . . One of the early technicians at Stevenageactually proposed that we should write our own by-laws. Th e idea
was to have no by-laws at al l. (AA Journal Ma y 1957)
Well some hopes he had, a quarter of a century ago or more
ago, of developing an anarchist New Town. And after its
stormy early years, you might say "Well, what's wrong with
Stevenage. Some aspects of that town are the admiration of
the whole world".
And a lot of people in the town-making business: chairmen,
general managers, an d all their hierarchy, have had a
marvellous an d fulfilling time, wheeler-dealing their babies
into maturity. They have been the creators, the producers.
Th e residents, the citizens, have been the consumers, therecipients of all that planning, architecture and housing: not
to mention the jobs in the missile factory . Now we are
twenty-five years or more older, wiser and humbler. A new
generation is turning upside down all those cherished
shibboleths about planning, architecture an d housing, not to
mention the ones about jobs. We have to change the role of the
administration from providers to enablers. We have to change
the role of the citizens from the recipients to participants, so that
they too have an active part to play in what Lethaby called the
great game of town building . What was it that old Ben
Howard said to young Frederic Osborn? "M y dear fellow, if
you wait for the government to act, you'll be as old as
Methusaleh before they start. Th e only way to get anything
done is to do it yourself."
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2. What Should We
Teach AboutHousing?!iousing.is an ~ s p e c t of a variety of school subjects. Obviously
It enters mt o hIstory and geography and home economics and. . ,mto vanous attempts to impart a few handy hints on life skills
like how a domestic ring main works or replacing a tap was he;
or a ball valve. But there are few aspects of what we teach
about housing which don't bring us face to face with the
political controversies surrounding the provision of thiselementary necessity of life.
During ~ h e late 1970s when I was working at the TCPA, I
was the dIrector of the Schools Council Art and the BuiltEnvironment Project. Eileen Adams and I were concerned
with t ~ e place of Art as a school subject, in environmental
ed.u.catlOn. were concerned with the visual, sensory,
cntical appraisal of ~ h e env.ironment, and of course, like any
teacher concerned WIth envIronmental education, we insisted
that "t?e environment" meant your surroundings, and no t
somethmg you go on a field trip to explore in Wales or North
Yorkshire.
In the early stages of ou r project we were often rebuked by
teachers for our concern with superficialities with the look of
things, instead of the underlying political, social and economic
realities. We would reply that in that period or two in the
weekly timetable labelled Art, one of the few areas of the
curriculum where personal, subjective and aesthetic judge-
ments ~ r e supreme; it. was ' very important indeed to explore
the enVironment withm the ethos of the subject and its own
Lecture given at an Urban Studies course for teachers, Looking at Housing, atthe Polytechnic of he South Bank, London on 28July 1981.
36
WHAT SHOULD W E TEACH ABOUT HOUSING? 37
particular disciplines. We would also stress the enormous
significance of people's visual and symbolic imagery of house
an d home, by asking what is the highest praise a local
authority tenant can give to his home. Th e answer, if you
didn't know is, " It doesn't look like a council house".
Indeed, one of the things which several groups of students
in ou r project undertook was to examine the way in whichpeople alter, embellish and modify their houses, and to
enquire what design influences were at work, or where the
occupants ha d been for their holidays. This of course, was
particularly in evidence when they considered the embellish
ments that sitting tenants purchasing their council houses
from local authorities, ha d made.
This, even though the approach is aesthetic and perceptual,
brings us straight into the arena o f current political
controversy. I ought perhaps to stress that in looking at the
ordinary domestic environment, we were no t concerned with
inculcating any notions of ou r own about standards of "taste"
or of "good taste" in design. We were concerned with
developing the seeing eye and the reflective mind.
But of course we were, quite incidentally, causing students
to look at the demagogic speeches of the politicians in a quite
different light. Unless in their view there was something holy
about the original architecture of the estate, wouldn't they
wish, as I would certainly wish, that every tenant had that
opportunity to devote all that care and energy to their homes,
that has been granted to that small proportion who have
bought their houses from the council? I used to have the view
that selling off individual houses to individual tenants would
be an appallingly divisive factor in the estate. What invidious
distinctions would be made manifest as people chatted over
the fence when hanging out their washing? In fact (and it isn ~ c e s s a r y r e ~ i n d you. tha.t S e l } i ? ~ ~ y ~ ~s i t ~ i n . B " tep.antsdId no t ? e ~ m ~ I t h tpe ~ g o v ~ r n m e n t . it has been goingon for many years under both Labour and onservative local
authorities, sometimes approved ~ n d sometimes disapproved
of5y cenTral govern-mentCin fact, -the opposite has been true.
The improvements, even though they may be merely
cosmetic, that have resulted, have, I would insist, lifted the
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38 TALKING HOUSES
morale of the estate, in places as far apart as Mid Clamorgan ,
Derbyshire an d Roehampton. Without any assistance from
the Council, an d in some places, in opposition to itspaternalistic determination that no-one should change a
washer or oil a hinge, except its own employees, tenants have
R.u!. ~ ~ ~ ~ ' ! personal investment into the upgrading of
thelrn omes. -
At this point I need to remind you of the dramatic changes
in housing, an d in our expectations of housing which have
occurred during the last 65 years. In 1914 ab0l.!.! 9 peLcent of
h o ~ ~ i n in CLea t I i t a i ! l - : . in Q Y i l l . ~ . r ; : . p c c u p a t i o n , less than 1per cent was n t e d f r o m a J ~ u b 1 i c ! 1 . t h aiId .ninety per
cent of farp.ilies, ricl! Qr poor, rented their accommodation
from a private landlord. By 1980 (and of course we need the
i n f o r ~ a t i o n fromJ he 198t ;;ensus ,to make these guesses more '
accurate), 54 per cent of families were in owner-occupied.
property, 33 cenL in housing rented from public
au t : > ~ i t i e s , .<ljld,_say,_13 per we re privately renting. I f
there IS an odd one per cent, it is explained in the belated
growth of housing associations an d housing co-operatives in
the last ten years.
These changes represent a drafIlatic revolution in the
provisions for an d ~ . . £ ~ .E,o_using which _ ! h e r is
scarcely tIme to discuss, bu t they do emphasise that the norm
against w -icho lGe forIDS ..Qf tenure are evaluated, is 'that ofo " " ' " , . , . . ~ - - -..-. .--- .......---- ., ---.- - .........--
owner-Qc<;:ll.patlOn , ,
-I t is quite beside the point whether our theoretical opinions
about private property happen to coincide with this norm. In
fact, in the so-called people's democracies of eastern Europe,
owner-occupation is encouraged, simply through a semantic
difference: the home is regarded as personal property, like a
toothbrush, rather than as real property, like the property ofthe absentee landlord. This is the distinction that Proudhon
made, nearly a century and a half ago, when he made the two
contrary utterances: Property is Theft and Property is
Freedom.
My own view is that the whole tragedy of housing policy
since the end of the last century, has been that local
authorities have taken over the landlord role, lock stock-an d
/
(
WHAT SH OULD W E TEACH ABOUT HOUSING? 39
barrel, ~ . Q 1 ' ! - ' p ' . ! d l o r d the. jirst w9rld
war, housed ninety £U.he..E£_ U I < ; t t l O or po <> r.The landlOrd- tenan t relationship has never been a happy one.
I t has always been accompanied by mutual suspicion, an d by
an unhappy syndrome of dependency an d resentment. By a
historical accident there was an unspoken coalition at the end
of the last century between the Fabian socialists of the London
County Council an d the radical conservatives , like Joseph
Chamberlain in Birmingham, that local councils should take
over the role of landlords for the poor. This view became
increasingly the progressive creed amongst all parties, and it
was regarded as a great triumph in the wartime legislation of
the coalition government, that the phrase "housing of the
working classes" disappeared in their legislation , so that
theoretically, publicly provided housing became something
for which, theoretically, the whole population was eligible. I t
is noticeable that those whose incomes or prospects gave them
a freedom of choice, did not take up thi s theoretical option. It
is noticeable too, though NOBODY ever mentions it , that,
given the physical s t a n d a r 9f housing then accepted ,very p0Q.LJ?eop!e, in those_days < ctllally had a freedom . 9f
choice in the days of private landlordism which they nolollger
have when we have replaced a multiplicity_oflandlords by one
n o p o l y landlord: the council.This monopolistic character of local authority landlordism
is one of the explanations of the fact that drives directors of
housing and members of housing committees up the wall with
anger and frustration: that while they have huge waiti r;g l i ~ t s , the people on them will not accept the first, s e c o n thIrd
offer, because they know that once they are in th a-ruard-to-Iet
dwelling, their chances of getting a transfer are nil. I yearn for
the day when a genuine tenants' charter really gives tenants
the freedom to move.And yet, even as I say this, I have the sinking feeling that
behind the counter in the housing office will be the same
harassed junior officer of the local authority, hardened by
continually hearing the hard luck stones every day in opening
hours that even this hope may be misapplied.
M e ~ n w h i l e we have a situation where m the municipal
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40 TALKING HOUSES
housing sector we have empty flats and houses which no-one,
not even people in great housing need will occupy, because of
the stigma which has attached itself to them. In London we
have the spectacle of couples queueing up all night to take up
tenancies of GL C flats which no-one on the housing list is
willing to occupy. I could take you to a street where the
housing on one side of the street is being demolished as unfit
for habitation by council tenants while on the other side it is
being snapped up by middle-class home improvers . I have
pointed out to audiences in the housing world a hundred timesthe paradox that you can observe in every British city. On one
side of town is the very expensive Parker-Morris municipal
housing which is despised by its inhabitants and deteriorates
at a terrifying rate, so that like the notorious towers of
Birkenhead it is obsolete and uninhabitable more than forty
years before the money borrowed to pay for it has been paid
back. On the other side of town is the sub-Parker Morris
ticky-tacky speculative builder's estate which is improved and
enhanced from the moment it is occupied, is painlessly
updated so that its value increases as the years go by. Surelythere is something to be learned from this?
Meanwhile, long before the end of the seventies we had the
situation in several local authorities where the average cost
per dwelling of management and maintenance exceeded the
rent income. I ~ s k e d at the time how long this situation could
continue. We have pu t our faith in bureaucratic paternalism
masquerading as socialism, an d it is going to explode in our
faces. And in the total disarray of housing policy today, this is
what is happening. At a time when you might expect a radical
rethink from the Housing Problems Industry, they simply
bleat about the right-wing backlash against council housing,
because they have somehow brainwashed themselves intoequating municipal paternalism with a socialist housing
policy.
When Lord Goodman was chairman of the Housing
Corporation, he used to talk, correctly in my view, of the
Byzantine complexity of our housing legislation, though he
seems to have done nothing to unravel it. On the conference
circuit, he always used to get long an d boisterous applause
WHAT SHOULD W E TEACHABOUT HOUSING?41
from the oflicers of central and local government an d from the
academics of the housing problems industry, whenever he
remarked, as he did often, that, "I t is only in a society where
we have a government working day and night on our behalf
that the housing problems are insoluble".Now you and I, from no doubt, different perspectives, agree
with him, bu t we too are, or think we are, powerless to reshape
public intervention in housing in such a way as to ,reward the
propensity of self-help and mutual aid.Of course, the whole owner-occupation sector is an example
of self-help. Certainly, historically the origins of the building
societies were in mutual aid an d self-help. Government
encourages this kind of self-help of course, through the tax
exemption of mortgage interest repayments.' an d for. t?at
matter with the special fiscal arrangements wIth the bUIldmg
societies over interest payments on deposits. I suppose that
the origins of this are in some assumption that these d e p o ~ i t s are intended for house purchase. Now that owner-occupatwn
is the majority mode of tenure, an a since our political masters
depend on the marginal owner-occupier's vote in the m a r g i n ~ l owner-occupation constituency, none of them want to commIt
political suicide by doing anything to remove or diminish this
subsidy to the owner occupier. .In the name of social justice, as well as in that of makmg a
better use of the nation's stock of housing, let alone in order to
remove from the public purse the dreadful cost of
management and maintenance, and of vandalism, in local
authority housing, it is a matter of great urgency to extend the
freedoms that are enjoyed by the owner-occupier to the
councilor private tenant.
As a long-term advocate of tenant co-operatives, I have
been delighted to pick up a few allies in the last decade. You
will know that the former minister for housing Reg Freeson
was one of the very few labour politicians who didn't think
that co-operatives were some kind of middle-class c o P : O t l tAnyone here in the housing field will know of the appalling
difficulties faced,by tenants of co-operatives precisely because
we have surrounded housing with a thicket of legislation
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42 TALKING HOUSES
which does not reward the propensity for self-help and mutual
aid.
Whichever way I look at it, I find that the potential forself-help an d mutual aid in housing, is continually thwarted
by the people and institutions which ought to be leaning over
backward to encourage it.We have failed to come to terms with the fact that our
publicly-provided services, just like our capitalist industries
(also propped up by taxation), are dearly bought. This wasless apparent in the past when public services were few and
cheap. Old people who recall the marvellous service they used
to get from the post office or the railways, never mention that
these used to be low wage industries, which, in return forrelative security, were ru n with a military-style discipline to
which not even the army, let alone you and I, would submit
today.
My friend Kenneth Campbell, who used to be chief housingarchitect for the Greater London Council, always says that the
decline of public housing in London coincided with the
decline of the Royal Navy. All those Chief Petty Officers wholeft the service in middle age would take on the job of resident
caretaker in LCC blocks of flats, and ru n the place in a
ship-shape way - seeking, as they say, a happy ship. Since
then, of course, the GLC was driven into the appalling
expedient of employing mobile caretakers, and the one thing
you can be sure of about a mobile caretaker is that he won't
take care.
One of the virtues of the principles of housing which I
derive from the work of John Turner is that they do take into
account the ordinary humdrum realities of the way housing is
provided, managed and maintained, as opposed to the
theoretical ideals of the public provision of housing . Turner'sSecond Law is that the important thing about housing is not
what it is but what it does in people's lives. Turner's Third
Law is that deficiencies an d imperfections in housing are
infinitely more tolerable if they are your responsibility than if
they are somebody else's. These are psychological truths
about housing. Turner's First Law is also a social an d
economic truth. He and Robert Fichter phrase it thus:
WHAT SHOULD WETEACHABOUTHOUSING?43
When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make t h e ~ r own contribution to the design, construction or management.ofthelr
housing, both the process and the environment produced stlmulate
individual and social wellbeing. When people h ~ v e no control over,nor responsibility for key decisions in t ~ e housmg process , the
other hand, dwelling environments may mstead become a barner topersonal fulfillment an d a burden on the economy.
This is a carefully worded statement of what is to my mind,
the most important principle in hou.sing, a ~ d you measure
the disasters of postwar housing polIcy agamst It you can see
its validity. I f we want to get v a ~ u e for .money and gr.eaterdweller satisfaction in future housmg polIcy, I am convmced
that the touchstone or yardstick is the principle of dweller
control. ...Now I began by mentioning the ~ i n d cntlclsms we w:re
making ten years ago of public housmg pohcy. IfMr Heseltme
were here he would ask "Well, haven't you got what youwanted?" 'The housing cost yardstick system has g ~ n e , the
Parker Morris standards have gone, councils have gIven up
building those appalling blocks of flats. In fact they. have
almost given up building anything at all . "We have ~ n t t e n " he would claim, "the principle of dweller .control, mto our
Tenants' Charter, by offering tenants the nght to take over,
and become owners of their houses ."Now I think that the position of the opposition is just full
of half truths as that ofMr Heseltine. First of all, t ~ : s p l ~ a l decline in new housing activity by local a u t h o n ~ l e s dldn t
begin with the Thatcher .government. ~ o o k mto. y?ur
mouldering piles of press cuttmgs and you ':111 see that It las
all happening in the W i l s ? n / C a l l a g h ~ n pen?d. Secondly,£ he
opposition !.rguments ag.amst the se.llmg pohcy ~ e e m to ry . tobe spurious. The natIOn's housmg s t o c ~ IS not ,?em.g
diminished by a single brick, by the sales pohcy. The nationIS
all of us, it doesn't consist of the housing bureaucracy and the
councillors. You could even pu t forward the argument . t h ~ t selling council, houses to tenants enhances the. nation s
housing stock. In the owner-occupation sector the:e IS no ~ u c ? thing as obsolescence or a l i m i t e ~ li.fe to h ~ ) U s m g . ~ h l S IS
confined to the public sector. I t IS mterestmg that m the
- --
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44 T ALKINC HOUSES
mid-seventies there was an odd coalition of opinion between
Peter Walker on the right an d Frank Field on the left, both of
them taking the view that it would be sensible to give council
housing to its tenants . The council house sales argument is not
a new issue. I discussed it years ago in my book Tenants Take
Over, in a chapter which had to my mind the significant title
"One By On e or AllTogether", simply because
Iwas
advocating a co-operative take-over. Bu t I am not hostile to
individual sales to tenants. Wh y should I enjoy what in our
society are the undoubted advantages of owner-occupation,
and seek to deny them to my council-tenant neighbour. Does
he, in addition to his continual rent rises also have to be the.
bearer of rrry social conscience?
What we are really disconcerted about is that with the
retreat from the ideology of the direct public provision of
housing, we have not seen the growth of the mutual-aid,
self-help, co-operative sector.
But of course we have in another sense. The nineteen
seventies saw a heroic effort by lone veterans of co-operative
housing like Harold Campbell, an d by a new generation of
devoted pioneers, to set up the institutional framework, from
scratch, and to make it work. I t is worth reminding ourselves
that until the mid-70s they were met with indifference and
hostility, not only in the Labour Party, bu t even in the
traditional co-operative movement itself. As recently as 1975
for example, invited to address a public meeting organised by
the Co-operative Party here in the London Borough of
Wandsworth, where I then lived, John Hands and I, as
advocates of co-operative housing, were me t with bitter
antagonism, not by the audience, bu t by the co-operative
chairman, who at that time was also chairman of the local
housing committee, an d by, of all people, the PoliticalSecretary of the London Co -operative Society.
By one of those rare strokes of political good luck we
actually had at that time a Minister of Housing, Reg Freeson,
who understood what co-operative housing was all about. He
rebuked those members of his own party who had the usual
sn.eers that co-operative housing was a bi t of trendy
mIddle-class self-interest by pointing out that the then most
WHAT SHOULD W E TEACH ABOUT HOUSINC?45
successful co-operatives were those whose members were very
poor tenants of housing taken over from private landlords in
Liverpool, or actually homeless people who h o ~ s e d them
selves through the Holloway Tenant Co-operative m London.
And he criticised local authorities an d housing associations for
not taking the trouble to find out how. many tenant.s an d
applicants for housing were interested m the formatIOn of
tenant co-operatives. He also set up in 1976 a C o - o ~ e r a t i v e Housing Agency, though his own government closed It dow?
again and absorbed it into the Housing Corporation. ThIS
Corporation itself is in difficulties today as i t ~ source of.central
government finance dries up. However, s t a r t l I ~ g from VIrtually
nothing, and from a lamentable lack of expenence .on h o ~ todo it we have at the moment 290 housing co-operatIves WIth a
,
total membership of 14,000 people.Th e figures are pitifully small, bu t this is simply a reflection
of our total neglect for many decades of this form of tenure .
But the tenant take-over is the only conceivable change to halt
the spiral of decline in our local authority housing stock. I
read in New Society last month (4 June 1981) that there areover 135,000 empty council properties in England and Wales,
and over a quarter of a million that councils classify as "hard
to let".Back in the 1960s I gave hundreds of lessons on the facts
about housing, mostly for day-release apprentices whose
interest was far from academic. They wanted the facts because
they saw themselves very shortly becoming not merely
householders bu t house-owners. But as the figures piled up on
the blackboard, the g4P between the credit-worthiness o.f ayoung ma n with a craftsman's wage, and the price of the .kmd
of house he imagined himself buying, became depressmgly
obvious.My method was first to elicit from the class t h ~ w a y ~ in
which a couple could ge t themselves a home, whIch boIled
down to three modes of tenure only; council tenancy, owner
occupation and private tenancy. In t ~ o s e days Lewis" )Waddilove discovered that the range of chOIce m thIS country
was smaller than that in any European country except Greece,
Ireland, Portugal an d Romania . We would then investigate
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46TALKING HOUSES
the relative proportions of the three an d the contrast with the
situation before the first world war: the rise of owner
occupancy an d publicly provided housing an d the continuous
decline of the private landlord. It was about owner occupation
that they had come to hear - they were impatient with the
exposition of the other two categories which may have been
the lot of their parents but was not going to be theirdes tina ion.
But faces grew longer as we calculated the incomes my
students would have to earn to make the typical mortgage
repayments for somewhere to live in this South London
borough. There would be hollow laughs when I pointed out
that the building societies were not profit-making bodies, but
an exploration of other possible sources of finance showed
~ h e m to be no cheaper. So we would turn back with grudging
mterest to look at the council's waiting list an d the jungle of
the Rent Acts. What was I to say to these apprentices? Get
yourself the kind of job that would make you better
mortgage-fodder? Save an d save at a rate that keeps pace with
the inflation, not only of currency, but of house prices? Move
to some part of the country where it is easier to buy or rent?
I used to think in those days that their situation was
gloomy. It is a lot worse today. Th e issues are not at all
simple. They are obfuscated, rather than clarified by the
preconceptions we all bring to what we teach. Bu t I think we
do no service to our students in pushing out a version of their
future housing situation which sees them as inert an d passiveconsumers of some-one else's welfare paradise.
We have tried all that and it didn't work.
3. Dismantling Whitehall
I want you, councillors an d local government officers alike, to
take a brief rest from the dreadful day-to-day dilemmas of
local administration today, and to think instead of the
ur ierlying political, an d indeed philosophical, issues behind
the present crisis of local government. . .You will know that at the conferences of the pohtIcal
parties, anyone who senses that interest is flagging has only t o
evoke the name of some revered figure from the past, to get an
automatic round of sentimental applause. The names that
trigger off such a response at Labour Party deliberations are
those of people like Keir Hardie or George Lansbu:y. At
Conservative conferences, ministers get a cheap cheer If theymention Disraeli, a second generation immigrant whose right
to take part in British politics is challenged by legislation
recently hurried through Parliament, though some members
of that party, now excluded from government, might bring up
the name of Walter Bagehot, who at least had the virtue of not
being a statesman. At the Liberal assemblies it is ordinary
good manners to bring in a reference to Lloyd George, an d at
a meeting of the Social Democratic Party, a rousing cheer
would, no doubt, be won by the mention of any of them,
indiscriminately. .
Understandably, past politicians are always p r e f e r a b l ~ to
present ones. Bu t there is one thing that unites these vanous
skeletons or ikons from the party cupboards. These people
had all formed opinions on the question of the appropriate
level at which decisions, an d the allocation of resources,
should be made. They had some notion in their heads about
which things were, or were not, the concern of central
Lecture given at the National Conference oj he Town and Country Planning
Association on "Central Control versus Local Life" on 1 December 1981.
47
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48TALKING HOUSES
government. This is not surprising, since none of them would
h a ~ e q ~ a l i f i e d for a degree in political science from any British
unIverSIty today. Th e contrast with current political leaders is
that the new breed have no notion that the tension between
local a ~ d central i ~ p o r t a n t at all. Ifsomething needs doing,they thmk, we wIll Just push it through, regardless.
People with less education will realise, almost intuitively
that local administration is much older than central
administration, that its roots lie deep in the history of any
people in the world, an d that even the words we use to
describe it in various languages, express a notion of the idea
that decisions are made locally, however tragically wide is the
gap b e t w e ~ n idea and reality. There is an echo in the very
word counczl of the word commune, variously spelt in the Latin
languages, or the word Gemeinschaft in German, or the ancient
word mir or, with a heavy irony, the word soviet in Russian, or
the phrase town meeting in America, which expresses the idea of
a community making decisions, raising the revenue for them
an d implementing them, for itself. '
Central government, for the greater part of recordedhistory, has represented some butcher, bandit or warrior chief
who has managed to intimidate local communities to
surrender their sovereignty and manpower to him to gather
the revenue to conduct foreign wars. This is the historical
truth, and it is also a truth relevant to our own times as
Richard Titmus showed in his study of "War an d S;cial
P?licy". Since no-one can contradict this interpretation of the
h I s ~ o r y of the ~ u r o p e a n nations (with the exception of
SWItzerland) I wIll turn to the issues which face us today.
A couple of months ago, the journal The Economist, which is
not out of sympathy with the alleged economic aims of th e
present government, remarked in a leading article,1
that localgovernment in this country "has been swatted by Margaret
Thatcher's cabinet like an irritating fly". I t observed that M r
!feseltine "like all his predecessors, entered office pledged to
m c r e a s ~ local ~ r e e d o m an d has spent his time curtailing it".
You wIll notIce that The Economist referred to all M r
Heseltine's predecessors, because I would like you to think
back just a few years, before the days of the present central
D ISMANTLING WHITEHALL 49
administration. Politics prospers on short memories. There
must be some people here who can remember that Mr Shore,
Mr Crosland an d Mr Walker, to name but a few, were just as
high-handed (sometimes a little more successfully) with local
authorities, as Mr Heseltine. Every change in the allocation of
funds from the central treasury to local authorities, in the
bewildering changes of nomenclature since the 1950s has
reduced their ability to decide for themselves. General Grants,
Block Grants or Rate Support Grants have each been
heralded by sales talk about more local discretion, bu t in fact
each, while apparently giving greater freedom to local
authorities, has been used to reduce their freedom of
manoeuvre an d their ability to select their own priorities.These priorities might often be misguided, bu t so might
those of central government. We all know the defects an d
inadequacies of the rating system. This morning you
discussed "Financial Control the Key to the Problem?". I for
one am sure that it is the key to the problem. The Royal
Commission on Local Government years ago now, stressed
the need for additional local taxes, an d pointed to the view ofthe Royal Institute of Public Administration that this country
should adopt a system of local income tax, an d has also urged
local taxes on vehicles an d fuel. No doubt you will have
discussed already the Swiss example of the wa y that the
ordinary objections to such a tax system have been overcome.
Th e best news I ever heard from that country is the way that
the central administration is continually embarrassed by the
way in which local administration starves it of funds. In this
country, just as much as in Switzerland, people live an d work
an d generate wealth locally, and when these functions are
performed in different places, there are several Swiss
principles like "75 per cent to the authority where you live, 25per cent to the one where you work".
Whatever theories you may have absorbed about the
principles of taxation an d about the difference between the
taxes which are thought to be regressive or progressive, the
plain fact is that all of us, rich or poor, pay a third of our real
incomes in tax. Whether we get that much in return for our
enforced expenditure is a quite different issue, but whether it
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50 TALKING HOUSES
is levied nationally or locally is not. In any re-allocation, the
people with the task of pushing the forms around would be the
same, though, for example, it was the conclusion of the Royal
Institute of Public Administration in the nineteen-sixties, that
"the transfer to local government of taxes generated by motor
vehicles would not only be cheap to administer, but would
reduce exchequer grants from 47 per cent to 14 per cent of the
income of local authorities".2
Now of course, every trend in government policy in Britain,
pushed perhaps to extremes by Mr Heseltine's current efforts,
while smarting from his recent rebuke from the courts, is to
take away from local authorities the right to determine how
their rating powers are to be used. I know an d you know, that
in the conceivable future, central government, not only its
political office-holders but its impregnable civil service
establishment, will never surrender its powers of tax
gathering to local authorities.
There is an unspoken assumption in the attitude of central
government to local government, held by both ministers and
the administrative grade of the civil service, that localgovernment is, politically, dominated by small minded local
entrepreneurs, or else by irresponsible left wing rabble, and
professionally conducted by petty pen-pushers who weren't
good enough to join the clerical grade of the civil service. It
isn't my business to contradict this stereotype, bu t I am
concerned to point out that their self-image, whether as
politicians or public servants, is equally far from the truth.
I t is a mistake to think that central government is
dominated by an all-wise, urbane and magnanimous concern
for the public welfare. At an administrative level It is
dominated by the urge to close ranks, cover one's tracks and
yield nothing to anyone. At a political level there is a macabrefrivolity about the way the departments are shared out. I read,
for example, on the front page of the first issue of The Times
Hea lth Supplement a month ago, that the DHSS "was created by
Sir Harold Wilson in 1968 more to give Mr Richard Crossman
a job that would keep him 'under control' than out of any
profound regard for efficiency or social purpose" :l
Mr Crossman's own contempt for local authorities is
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 51
obvious to anyone who bothers to read his diaries. But this
contempt is shared by every politically-minded person when
encountering a local authority whose councillors pursue a
policy other than his own. We see this today when Mr
Heseltine is making war on local councils who are, in his view,
sabotaging his policy on the sale of council houses to sitting
tenants, an d we saw this during the Wilson administration,
when Ministers an d top civil servants, who themselves bought
education for their children in the private sector, were
enforcing a policy of comprehensive secondary education on
councillors who believed otherwise. I mention these two
contentious issues on which we all have opinions, just so that
you can look into your hearts an d ask to what extent you
believe in local self-determination.
Th e best account I ever read of the philosophy of local
government, was written in a hurry ten years ago (because of
the Royal Commission an d the subsequent re-organisation of
local government) by Mr loan Bowen Rees, the then clerk to
the county of Pembrokeshire. I t was called Government by
Communiry an d is probably out of print.4Mr Bowen Rees (whom I don't know and have never met)
is a ma n very close to my heart, because he is a citizen of his
Welsh parish and of the whole world an d is not impressed by
the hierarchy of power and authority in between. His mind
has been shaped, not just by Welsh parochialism bu t by Swiss
federalism an d by two great French thinkers, the aristocrat De
Tocqueville and the peas ant Proudhon. From the first of these
he derives the maxim that "The strength of free peoples
resides in the local community" and the observation from De
Tocqueville's enquiry into Democracy in America that "I do not
think one could find a single inhabitant of Ne w England who
would recognise the right of the government of the state tocontrol matters of purely municipal interest".
Here is a remark, which, whether or not it was true when its
author visited the United States in the eighteen-forties, calls
the bluff, not just of Mr Heseltine or Mr Shore but of any
other contender for political power. And it leads Mr Bowen
Rees to enquire, not just whether a Department of Education
(\
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52 TALKING HOUSES
has any real function, bu t whether we actually need a Director
of Education at a county level?
He was intent on exposing what he calls the "will 0 ' the
wisp of size": the notion that there is a minimum size for the
efficient performance of any public function, an d he shows
how the authors of the Redcliffe Maud Report ignored the
evidence that it had itself commissioned in research studies,
evidence which of course was ignored even more blatantly
when re-organisation actually happened. But his best
contribution was in polarising two fundamentally different
approaches to local administration. He said:
Is it not ou r trouble in the United Kingdom that we have been
conditioned to looking at local government - and practically everyother facet of society - from the top down?
Actually, there are two fundamentally different ways oflooking atlocal government, from the top down and from the bottom up.Those who look from the top down consider that the whole authority
of the state is concentrated at the centre, To them, the centre is theonly legitimate source of power: it is from the central government
that local authorities receive their powers: indeed the central
government actually creates the local authorities, dividing up thestate into more or less uniform divisions in the process. The central
government does this for the more efficient and economic provisionof its services. It involves the leading citizens of every locality in the
business of government, not so much in order to hear their views, asin order to embrace them and make them identify themselves with
the system. This school of thought might be called the classicalschool oflocal government. It is more interested in efficiency than indemocracy, in uniform standards than in local responsibility; it
regards the citizen more as consumer of services than participant in
government. Even at its best, it is ap t to be patronising.
Th e opposite is true of the other school, the romantic school, as it
might be called or, in some countries, the historical school. This
school sees the state itself as a conglomeration of localities, each of
which has, it is true, surrendered much of its authority to the cen'tre,
bu t each of which retains some authority in its own right as well as abasic identity of its very own. The romantic school places the
emphasis on local authorities as nurseries of democratic citizenship,revels in diversity an d local initiative, is impatient of central control
and wishes to involve the citizen in government, not so much to ,bring him into contact with the state as to foster his self-reliance.5
Well, just suppose that his romantic or historical school
were dominant, and shaped our practices in local administra-
(
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 53
tion. We would have the counties begging the districts for a
more generous morsel of tax income, just as the cantons in
Switzerland have to beg from the communes, an d we would
have central government begging the county councils for a
bigger income, just as the federal authorities have to in
Switzerland . Th e boot would be on the other foot, so far as Mr
Heseltine, or his shadow, Mr Kaufman, or his alternative
shadow - should I suggest Mr David Alton - is concerned.
No doubt a lot of people would enjoy the fall of the mighty
that such a prospect envisages. But nagging in people's minds
would be the element of redistribution that the existence of an
overall central authority (since it is assumed that the whole is
greater than the parts) would involve.
I t is taken for granted that the state exercises this
redistributive function. I f you are old enough you will
remember that in the inter-war period, we had what were
then, with commendable honesty, called "depressed areas"
and later were known as "special areas" and have been
described by a variety of other euphemisms ever since. But in
spite of a great number of allegedly redistributive measures,
conducted by a variety of government departments, it is
obvious, at an ordinary, visual, level, today that the parts of
the country which were especially poor then, are especially
poor today. At an ordinary city level, you will remember that
it is sixty years since George Lansbury and his fellow
members of Poplar Borough Council, went to jail rather than
pay a poor rate which was higher than that of much richer
boroughs.
In case you think that this particular episode relates to the
primitive past, and that more sophisticated redistributive
techniques are now applied, I would draw your attention to
the study, just published, of The Inner City in Context, the finalreport of the study directed by Professor Peter Hall for the
Social Science Research Council. He describes the Rate
Support Grant as "a very blunt weapon", and he comments
that
It tends to be based on past expenditure, so that a well-off authority
with high spending on (say) education simply attracts more grant.
There is no allowance for quality of service , provided, or for
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54 TALKING HOUSES
cost-of-living variations between authorities. After 1974 the formulawas altered to the benefit of metropolitan districts and above all the
Lon?on borous-hs. But t h ~ aid did not pass to the poorer boroughs.Hanngey, EalIng, H a v e n n ~ an d ~ e w h a m - all boroughs withareas .of stress - lo s t grant Income In 1979, while Westminster and
K e n s I n ~ t o n / C h e l s e a gained. I n e q u i ~ a ~ l e as this may have seemed,the arbItrary formula that replaced It m 1981 promises to be muchmore SO.6
In other words, using the best techniques anyone knows
about, the redistributive functions of central control do not
actually function. Th e primary justification for a c e ~ t r a l i s e d system does no t work. Do we actually know that a federation
of local authorities would produce results which are anyworse?
So great is ou r unthinking deference to th e centralised state
that w.e ~ a k e it for granted that central government a p p o i n t ~ commISSIOns to enquire into th e functioning of local
government, or th.e departme?t of the environment reporting
on the way counctls fulfil theIr housing functions an d telling
them ~ h a t they ~ a y and may not do, or the department of
educatIOn an d SCIence reporting on schools, that we never,
ever, even consider the likely conclusions if th e schools
reported on the DE S an d th e Inspectorate an d its functioning
and .usefulness, or of local authorities reporting on the
effecttveness of central governm.ent control of housing policy,or of local government reportIng on th e utility of central
government an d the deluge of circulars an d directives which
descend from Mondays to Fridays from government
departments to those of county an d district councils.
Do you, for m o m e n ~ , imagine that local housing
departments, hOUSIng committees and, in particular, tenants,
would countenance for a minute the continued existence of
central g o v e ~ n m e n t direction of housing policy, where wesurely recogmse that the wrong directives have been issued forat least thirty years? Why did local authorities increase
densities, wh y di d they get involved in the disasters of the
~ o w e r - b l o c k syndrome? Th e answer is that they were
Inexorably steered into it by central government policy an d itssubsidy structure.
(
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 55
What do you imagine the opinion of education committee
members an d teachers would be about the disappearance of
the Department of Education an d Science? Would they feel
they ha d lost anything? I t wasn't me, bu t Lord Vaizey, the
author of the standard work on the economics of education,
who suggested that the DES really had no function at all.
Ispeak only
ofgovernment departments
Iknow something
about. I have no doubt that farmers an d the NF U would
regard the disappearance of the Ministry of Agriculture with
horror, bu t you will be bound to notice that the present
government's determination to reduce the scope of central
government activity is all a little one-sided, and of course will
be resisted by the civil service every inch of the way . In the
civil service view, and in practice, in the view of political
appointees, local authorities are just no t to be trusted.
Marxists insist that the council is simply "the local state" and
that the parade of local democracy is mere eyewash.) I t isn't
only the present government, bu t any other government we
can think of, which, in practice, agrees with them.
At the opening of th e current session of Parliament, it was
indicated that the government intends to publish a Green
Paper outlining a number of possible alternatives to the rating
system. I think that the time is over-ripe for people who
believe in local government to issue their own Green Paper,
not only on a viable system of finance for local government,
bu t since central government has ha d so many commissions
concerned with the affairs of local government, on the extent
to which the dismantling of the autonomy of Whitehall can
begin. A "Local Commission on Central Government" could
be th e first tentative step towards re-ordering ou r national
priorities.
References
1. "Swatting the town-council fly" The Economist 3 October 1981.
2. S. Hildersley an d R. Nottage:- Sources of Local Revenue , London 1968.
3. David Loshak: "Labour plans to split the DHSS down the middle" TheTimes Health Supplement No I, 30 October 1981.
4. loan Bowen Rees: Govermilent by Community (London: Charles Kinght &Co, 1971).
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56 TALKING HOUSES
5. ibid.
6. Peter Hall (ed) The Inner City in Context (London: Heinemann
Educational Books 1981)
7. M. Boddy and C. Fudge (eds) The Local State: Theory and Practice (Bristol:SAUS Working Paper 20, 1981)
4. Until We BuildAgain
As I look at the names of my fellow speakers an d at people I
know at this conference, I reflect that most of them are
supporters of the Left, in its infinite variety, and must have
been dismayed by the result of the general election. I think of
myself as a person of the Left too, bu t in electoral terms, I
belong to the second biggest party of all: the non-voters. The
major actions of governments - of any complexion - are
abhorrent to me, andI
don't have a great deal of faith in theirminor an d peripheral activities, like housing policy, either.
On the other hand, I do believe in pressure groups for
specific purposes, an d I think that the single-issue pressure
group can be high ly effective an d useful, both in affecting the
climate of opinion among citizens, an d making just a few
pebbles or boulders in the mountain of legislation work in
what we would regard as the public interest. Of course we are
all familiar with the phenomenon that the legislation that
people have lobbied for, can b e c o ~ e when drafted and
enacted, something far short of what they sought, or so
wrapped around by civil service or local government
procedures, checks an d balances, as to be ineffective. Within
the voluntary housing movement, for example, is anyone
actually happy about the role of the Housing Corporation,
including its own employees?
I used to work for a very venerable environmental pressure
Lecture given at the Shelter National Housing Conference, University oj
Nottingham, on 16 July 1983.
(
/
UNTIL WE BUILD AGAIN57
group, the TCPA, f()unded in the last century as ~ h ~ G a r ~ e n Cities Association, to propagate Ebenezer Howard s m ~ e n t I ~ m of the garden city idea, a governmental version of whIch w<:ts
finally brought into effect as the Ne w Towns Act of 1946 and
the whole programme of New Towns which followed . Just
because there are many misconceptions about this, an d as
there are people whose particular scapegoat for .the current
plight of inner cities is the dispersal of p o p u l a ~ l O n to New
Towns, there are two things I should say. One IS that, most
particularly in connection with New Town assets, there are
great differences between Howard's concept an d the New
T O W l l ~ ? - c t u a l l y got. The other is that in Howard's mind
the whole purpose of depopulating the cities was to break t.he
capitalist land valuation system so that, after the s c a ~ ~ ~ y value resulting from the gross overcrowding of the old CItIeS
had been lowered through the outward movement of p e o p ~ e , the lowering of the rental value and rateable value ~ i t y lan.dwould enable their redevelopmeJ!.t at humane dens1tles. ThIS
of course hasn ' t happened. Urban land keeps its price long
after its true value has declined, an d we are all obliged to havea vested interest in these make-believe valuations because of
the massive purchases by local a u t h o r i t i e ~ , . i n s ~ r a n c ~ companies and pension funds. In the current p o h t l c a ~ c h m a ~ e , none of the parties has the political will to tackle thIS crUCIal
issue ofland valuation, nor is there an effective pressure group
at work on this nagging, complicated an d tedious issu.e.But I mentioned Howard and his successors for a dIfferent
reason. They understood the need for single i n ~ e r e s t p r e ~ s u r e groups to appeal right across t ~ e , ; 0 l 1 : v e n t ~ o n ~ 1 pohtlcal
spectrum . As Lewis Mumford pu t It, WIth hIS gIft of sw:et
reasonableness Howard hoped to win Tory and AnarchIst,
single-taxer an d socialist, individualist an d collectivist, over to
his experiment. An d his hopes were ~ o t . a l ~ o g e t h e r discomforted' for in appealing to the Enghsh mstmct forfinding com:Uon ground he was utilising a solid political
tradition." Among our legislators, who are expected to be
authorities on everything from lead in petrol to ~ a s t y video-films, only a small proportion, in the nature of t h I ~ g s , have any real interest in the issues of planning and housmg,
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58 TALKING HOUSES
and they aren't necessarily the ones who get ministerial office.
Exactly the same thing is true oflocal government, despite the
continuing efforts of the central departments to ensure that
councillors have an ever-narrowing sphere in which they can
actually decide anything.
To the extent that a pressure group is a lobby on
government, it needs to have something for everyone. For a
very long period there was a general consensus between the
politicians of right an d left about housing, which, leaving the
rhetoric apart, continued through the greater part of this
century. For years the two major parties played the numbers
game about how many hundred thousand houses "they"
claimed to have provided every year. This consensus has now
been broken. Although I have to remind you that the
run-down was apparent during the Wilson and Callaghan
periods, the last administration made a decisive break with
what had been a bipartisan approach to housing policy, in
adopting a philosophy akin to that of classical liberalism in itscrudest form. If I belonged to a housing lobby, seeking to
influence the present government to steering more resourcesin the direction of housing, the language I would use would be
loaded with phrases like "self-help", "mutual aid", "standing
on your own two feet" an d so on, an d especially the phrase
used by Mr Ia n Go w in moving the second reading of the
current Bill on 5 July, urging that "wherever possible the
individual should enjoy greater freedom an d choice an d
should accept the responsibility that went with it".
Th e political Left has, over the years, committed an
enormous psychological error in allowing this kind of
language to be appropriated by the political Right. If you look
at the exhibitions of trade union banners from the last
century, you will see slogans like Self Help embroidered allover them. I t was those clever Fabians and academic Marxists
who ridiculed out of existence the values by which ordinary
citizens govern their own lives in favour of bureaucratic
paternalism, leaving these values around to be picked up by
their political opponents.
There is of course one genuine problem for councils that the
tenants' right to buy imposes. In their housing revenue
(
UNTIL WEBUILDAGAIN59
accounts they operate a pooling system of rents and subsidies
so that their older properties, let at figures way above the
economic rent or historic cost rent, subsidise the newer ones
built at astronomical cost in the 1970s. In other words, the
tenants of old council property, who may well have lived there
for many decades , are subject to a continually rising rent to
help keep down the rents of tenants in new c.ouncil property.
Under no conceivable ethical system can thIS be conSIderedjust, and it presents not an argument against sales bu t an
argument for changing the system of housing finance. No
private landlord could get away with such a policy. A rent
officer would tell him that his investment in new property was
not his old tenants' concern. I f old tenants were acquainted
with the facts ofthe way in which the housing revenue account
was manipulated, they would lobby for a total ban on new
council building.I am desolated, if unsurprised, by the response of the
authoritarian Left to the crisis. of housing policy, and its
extraordinary willingness to equate public ownersip with
socialism, especially when hardly a week goes by withoutsome council deciding to demolish, as spectacularly as
possible, housing it built at enormous cost w i t ~ i n the l a ~ t twenty years an d which it won't have finished paymg for untIl
well into the next century, while a continual series of reports,
like Anthony Fletcher's Homes Wasted, published by Shelter
last year, draw attention to the very large n u m b ~ r . of
dwellings, empty an d decaying, belonging to local authorItIes.
In the end we ma y feel some relief that the Thatcher
government has halted the consensus on housing policy. I t
gives us a certain moratorium to think about how we would
construct a housing programme if starting from scratch.
There was a phrase used about Gandhi by Vinoba Bhave. He
said, "Gandhiji used up all the moral oxygen in India an d the
British raj suffocated" . In the same way we might say that the
direct provision of housing for rent by local councils used up
all the inventive capacity for evolving a sustainable housing
policy, an d the alternatives never got a chance, . they were
suffocated. Now is the time to nurture the alternatIves, to pu t
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60TALKING HOUSES
their lessons before the public and to exploit the rhetoric of the
present g o v e r n m ~ n t as an argument for financing them.
Th e mtroductIOn to a recent massive volume on urban
history! c ~ n t a i n s the terse little comment: "having demolished
slums whIch stood for a century, we constructed homes which
las.t: d a. ~ e c a d . e " . U ~ f a i r ? Untrue? Most people in most
Brltlsh CItIes wIll readIly thmk of examples which meet this
d e s c r i ~ t i o n . The authors declare that "damp, boredom,
vandalIsm and garbage undermined the urban vision" an d the
evidence is available for all to see. Bu t another factor needspondering.
In the context of the wise husbanding of housing resources
we have to admit that we squandered our resources when we
thought we were rich and have only partially absorbed the
~ e s s o n s for now that we think we are poor. The missing factor
IS that of dweller control: the ability of residents to make their
own contribution to their domestic environment. We have
plenty of evidence of the consequences when this crucial
attribute is excluded. Can anyone conceivably imagine that
any of the g r e ~ t ~ o u s i n g disasters of he last thirty years wouldhave been bUIlt m the first place if the potential residents hadbeen in control?
I think myself that what we, with our belated wisdom, seeas grotesquely unsuitable housing structures could be
redeemed by the resourcefulness of the occupants. Reflect, for
example, on that familiar phenomenon of the fifties and
sixties, where Authority, represented by a clerk from the
s u r v e ~ o r s ' or M ? ~ department in the passenger seat of a
counCIl car, was tIckmg off the houses destined for demolition
some t h e ~ regarded as "little palaces" by the o c c u p a n t ~ and theIr neIghbours. Or reflect on the wisdom of some local
authorities in deciding to sell off, for whatever they could get,
tower blocks of flats, rejected as a squalid, vandalised dump
by the p o ~ r , bu t c ~ p a ~ l e of resuscitation with answerphones
an d a umformed Jamtor, by wealthier families anxious to .
conserve their resources by living closer to the city centre.
Most of us are familiar with the paradox that the life or
death of b ~ i l d i n g s was decided by a line drawn on a ma p on
the centrelIne of a road. On one side houses were demolished
UNTIL WE BUII.DAGAIN 61
as unfit for human habitation, an d were eventually replaced
by flats that declined from the moment they were occupied.
On the other, identical houses were sold off on the private
market and improved by their purchasers, making use of
improvement grants an d DIY. There was no magic about
their success. I t depended upon access to resources an d upon
the opportunity to use one's own resourcefulness, which is the
concomitant of the dweller being in control.Housing policy since its origins in the last century as
council slum-clearance has been based on the implication that
a municipal Lady Bountiful or Octavia Hill takes over the
landlord role, with all its overtones of dependence an d
resentment. Very slowly, an d to my mind unwillingly, wehave begun to absorb the lessons from the attempts to develop
alternatives. Al l tne assumr.tions _ofhousing policy in the p a ~ t have depende'"d upon an i m a g e gratefuG ec.i£ients wJ:1o pay ·
tIle rent bu t dOii'i-aream of makingtheir 0;-0 imprint on the
ftiUy-finished, fully=8ervicecf (accoroing to' tliestandards of the
day) housing. SomE-of us- can a ctually remember the days
when tenants were told to strip off their unauthorisedwallpaper and replace the council's pea-green distemper.
Any council nOw i!:daYli ~ o Q . I ~ be QIllL!OO p ~ e a § e d t o pass
over to the tenant " he cost of maintenance and improvement,
just because heavy-handed e x ~ e r n a l l y - i m p o s e d updating is
ruinously expensive an d inappropriate. Some people do want
their vitreous-enamelled cast iron bath replaced by a pink
fibreglass one with an infinitely shorter life. Others see this
kind of improvement programme as grotesquely irrelevant to
expressed needs.
Fortunately we have by now a whole range of one-off
examples which display a variety of alternative approaches
which do draw upon the resourcefulness of residents. (And I
do have to remind you that this capacity for making the most
of one's resources is taken for granted in the majority mode of
tenure, owner-occupation, in this country. Th e scandal is that
it is also taken for granted that a different breed of human
lives in the other forty-five per cent of British households.)
My first example is the well-known, not to say hackneyed
one of the Black Road, Macclesfield. We all know about it and
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62 TALKING HOUSES
it still retains the distinction of being the only Clearance Area
to become a Conservation Area. I say this only to denigrate
the crude, official designation of places. But it has the added
distinction of being one of the few example s of a rehabilitation
scheme where members qualifying for grant were able to
manipulate the financial arrangements so as to share the
benefits with elderly neighbours to give them whatever
particular improvements met their aspirations. Th e mixture
of grant aid an d community resourcefulness is symbolised by
the way in which the employed building workers left their
plant on Friday nights at the most convenient places for the
residents to take it over at weekends. I f his were typical of the
rehabilitation scene, we wouldn't have to keep harking back tothe Black Road redevelopment.
Very slowly local authorities have been resolving to pu t
modernisation of council houses an d flats in the hands of their
tenants. Glasgow corporation's "tenant's grant scheme" has
been taken up by more than ten thousand of the city's tenants,
96 per cent of those to whom it has so far been offered, and the
results, according to Jane Morton, have "startled even thosewho argued for it in 1979 by its cost-effectiveness and
popularity".2 Glasgow's change of heart has extended to the
sponsorship of management co-ops , as well as to promoting an
experiment in urban homesteading at Easterhouse in some of
the abandoned and boarded-up three-storey walk-up flats
there. Discounted freeholds together with rehabilitation
grants have been offered to families willing to take them on.
Th e co-operative housing movement has started, virtually
from scratch, in the last ten years, and in spite of the same
economic constrictions that have affected every kind of
publicly funded housing, in spite of the bureaucracy of the
Housing Corporation as the channel for funding. Contrary tothe stereotype of those people who believe that co-op housing
is a mere diversion from the need to revive the direct provision
of housing by local authorities, most co-ops are no t composed
of privileged people grasping the newest trend, bu t of poor
people in housing need or in need of long-delayed home
Improvements.
For the opportunity it gave to people from the housing
UNTIL W E BUILD AGAIN 63
waiting list of an inner London borough, actually to build
their own houses of a very high standard, the Lewisham
Self-Build Housing Association, worth studying by everyone,is so-far unique, m o r e significant is the change of
heart in Liverpool. The city council resolved that the
provision of new housing was best achieved by providing the
funds, in the words of Nick Wates, to enable people in need
"to organise the design, construction and management of itthemselves through self-generating self-reliant co
operatives".3He explains that , " Local authority tenants living
in slum clearance areas or deteriorating tenements organise
themselves into groups - so far ranging from 19 to 61 family
units - and obtain the management services of one of
Liverpool's co-operative development agencies: Co-operative
Development Services, Merseyside Improved Houses or
Neighbourhood Housing Services. With its assistance they
register as a 'non-equity' housing co-operative with limited
liability, locate a suitable site a n ~ negotiate to buy it. (So far
nearly all the land has come from Liverpool City Councilor
the Merseyside Development Corporation.) They then selecta firm of architects with whom they design a scheme which is
submitted to a funding body. The scheme is then submitted to
the DO E for subsidy an d yardstick approval . . . When the
houses are built, the co-op members become the tenants of
their homes, paying standard fair rents, bu t they are also
collectively the landlord, responsible for management and
maintenance."
I t was reported only last week by David Lawrence, head of
GLC Professional Services that "there is mounting pressure
from an increasing number of London's tenants' groups
demanding public money so that they can hire architects to
improve their estates". (AJ 6 July 1983).
We thus have something today which was n o n - e x i ~ t e n t a
! ? : . ~ i . e 2 f · · ~ l t e n ) . a t i . v . . e s jIlJ )ousing,
pn?'.Y iing a RI(!'cr •Jo r .. o p l e sown . r ~ ~ o q r ) ; l p . e s s a n d s e l f - h e l p ~ T ake the case of a .secondary co-op like Solon
Co-operative Housing Services in London, servicing a variety
of co-op initiatives ranging from former squatter groups,
short-life rehab groups, even small business or industrial
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64 TALKING HOUSES
co-op groups of immigrants usmg premises for living and
working.
I t is not a bi t surprising that many of these new initiatives
have faced, like the Lewisham self-builders, heartbreaking
delays an d difficulties because the regular sources of housing
finance don't fit their style of activity. Often the inner city
local politicians who should have been their allies are
suspicious or hostile because their particular vision of thesocialist commonwealth involves everyone being beholden to
the housing committee an d the housing department.
People like that are playing into the hands of the hard men
of the present government. They are also out of touch with
popular aspirations. Everybody here represents in one way or
another, what we call the housing lobby. Since we are
lobbying a government which expresses its beliefin its version
of Victorian values, let's face them with those Victorian values
of self-help and mutual aid. But let's address our fellow
citizens with the range of alternatives in housing which don't
perpetuate the unloved image of municipal landlordism.
References
1. Derek Fraser and An tho ny Sutcliffe (eds ) The Pursuit of Urban H istoryEdward Arnold 1983
2. Jane Morton: "Tenan t takeover " Ne w Sociery 16 June 1983
3. Nick Wates: "The Liverpool Breakthrough: or public sector housingPhase 2" Arch itects Journal 8 September 1982
5. DirectAction for
Working- ClassHousing
I have been re-reading Proudhon, or attempting to do so,
spurred on by the conferences of the parties of the Left in their
attempts to formulate a policy towards housing, to match that
of the Conservatives, whose "right to buy" legislation has
undoubtedly been an electoral success. I am certainly not
opposed to the right to buy an d I think the opposition
arguments against it are based on fallacies, but I am opposed
to the legislation as it is one more nail in the coffin of local
autonomy.
As an alternative, the Labour Party has been debating The
Right to a Home an d the SDP has been discussing its Green
Paper A Choice for All. Every such document has to be acompromise between interest groups within these parties an d
their compilers' assessment of what will actually win votes.
From the tenants' point of view we have actually slid into a
situation where, all over the country, council rents are
subsidising the rates, something never envisaged by those who
believe that council landlordism is to be equated with
socialism.
But I find that the attitude of Marxist academics opposed to
the right to buy is not to do with the present plight of tenantsbu t to a dictum of Engels from well over a century ago in a
polemic called The Housing Question, where he said that "As
long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it
Lecture given in the "stream" on Anarchism and the British Labour Movement
at the 18th History Workshop, Leicester, 18 November 1984 .
65
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66 TALKING HOUSES
is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing
question affecting the lot of the workers . Th e solution lies in
the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the
appropriation of all the means of subsistence and the
instruments of labour by the working class itself." He was
replying to various forgotten socialists of the kind he labelled
as "utopian" and to disciples of Proudhon who is not
forgotten, bu t is certainly , for good reason, unread.
Th e one thing we all know about him is his slogan Property
is Theft, an d some of us remember it painted in letters three
feet high by the temporary occupants of 144 Piccadilly in
London in September 1969, an d some of us know that he also
said Property is Freedom, just showing how inconsistent the
anarchists are . He himself remarked once, "Odd, that after
waging war against property for fifteen years, I am perhaps
destined to save it from the inexpert hands of its defenders",
and his editor George Woodcock explains that his original
slogan "was to hang like a verbal albatross around its
creator's neck" an d that
his boldness of expression was intended for emphasis, an d by"property" he wished to be understood what hc later called "the
sum of its abuses" . He was denouncing the property of the ma n who
uses it to exploit the labour of others without any effort on his ow n
part, property distinguished by interest an d rent, by the impositionsof the non-pfOducer on the producer. Towards property regarded as"possession", the right of a ma n to control his dwelling an d the land
an d tools he needs to live, Proudhon had no hostility; indeed, heregarded it as the cornerstone of liberty, an d his main criticism of
the Communists was that they wished to destroy it.
With his sympathy with peasants and independent artisans,
Proudhon seemed to Marx an d Engels to be an absurd
survivor from the preindustrial age. Engels declared that" . . .
the ownership of house, garden and field, an d the security of
tenure in the dwelling-place, is becoming today, under the
rule of large-scale industry, not only the worst hindrance to
the worker, bu t the greatest misfortune for the whole working
class, the basis for an unexampled depression of wages belowtheir normal level . . . "
Fo:.. most non-Marxists this is an inexplicable point of view
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 67
which in any case has been by-passed by history. Yet its
shadow still haunts the political Left. One modern
commentator, Hugh Stretton, wishing to rescue socialism
from itself, claims that
Socialists ought to welcome the growth of the home-owning,
do- it-yourself sector of production . . . the second industrial
revolution may be seen as making Marx and Engels wrong abouthousehold ownership an d production, and Proudhon right . . . And
in practical politics, socialists would no longer have to appear, as
they have too often appeared in capitalist an d communist countries
alike, as enemies of ownership and of free, unalienated domestic
productivity - enemies who threaten to confine the working classfor ever, no matter how affluent it becomes, to a constricted
existence in rented, landless battery housing. \-
Th e worst irony is that the dreadful errors in housing policy "'-.1\""';''''' "'"""
were made in times of what now seems like full employment, fl.:.. .".,,';:,:1when levels of investment in the urban fabric were high an d ,
when poor people ha d relatively ~ o r e disposable income and,
consequently, more freedom of manoeuvre than is now the
case. In the expansive 1950s our social prophets were urgingus to sever, at last, the connection between employment and
income. In those days John Kenneth Galbraith was arguing
for what he called "cyclically graduated compensation" - a
dole which went up as the economy took a downturn, so that
people's purchasing power could be maintained, and which
went down when full employment approached. "One day",
Galbraith forecast, "we shall remove the economic penalties
an d also the social stigma associated with involuntary
unemployment. This will make the economy much easier to
manage." But, he added, a decade later, "We haven't done
this yet".
And today, when the collapse of employment for millions
makes the need for such policies far more urgent, the political
climate is even less recepti ve to them. Hence the popularity of
the Reagan an d Thatcher governments among the members
of the employed majority who don't feel an obligation to
provide an income for those who can't get a jo b an d are never
likely to have one. Hence too, the campaigns against "social
parasites" in the Soviet Union .
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68 TALKING HOUSES
Andre Gorz is a French socialist who warns us that our
failure to separate purchasing power from employment isgoing to lead to a society where the majority will be
"marginalised by an unholy alliance of un onised elite workers
with managers and capitalists". And he argues that the
political Left has been frozen into authoritarian collectivistattitudes belonging to the past:
As long as the protagonists of socialism continue to make centralisedplanning (however much it might be broken down into local an d
regional plans) the lynchpin of their programme, and the adherence
of everyone to the "democratically formulated" objectives of theplan the core of their political doctrine, socialism will remain an
unattractive proposition in industrial societies. Classical socialistdoctri?e finds it difficult to .come to terms with political and socialplurahsm, understood not sImply as a plurality of parties and trade
union.s ~ ) U t as t ~ e c o - e x i s t e ? c ~ of various ways of working, producingand hvmg, vanous and dIstmct cultural areas and levels of social~ x i s t e n c e .: . Yet this k!nd. of pluralism precisely conforms to the
hved e x p e n e n c ~ and aspIratIOns t.he post-industrial proletariat, aswell as the major part of the tradItIOnal working class.
How on earth, he asks, has the socialist movement got itselfinto the position of dismissing as petit-bourgeois individual
ism all those freedoms which people actually value: everything
that belongs to the private niche that people really cherish?
He means that niche which can be represented by "f amily life,a home of one's own, a back garden, a do-it-yourself
w o r ~ s h o p , a boat, a country cottage, a collection of antiques,
mUSIC, gastronomy, sport, love etc". And he goes on to assertthat "a n inversion of the scale of priorities, involving asubordination of socialised work governed by the economy to
activities constituting the sphere of individual autonomy, is
underway in every class within the over-developed societies
and particularly among the post-industrial neo-proletariat".I t may seem like a bad joke to talk of some of the categories
in Gorz's private niche, like that boat, country cottage and
collection of antiques, in the context of the new pauper class in
Britain. What kind of post-industrial neo-proletariat does he
imagine we have, either in Britain or France? But the point heis making is valid enough. With family life, a home of one's
own, a back garden, a do-it-yourself workshop, you can get
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 69
by, as generations of poor people since Proudhon's day have
found. David Donnison and Claire Ungerson are wise in their
Penguin on Housing Policy to reflect on the increasing
importance of house and home in a society in which wellunder half the population is employed outside the home, and
in which even employed people spend longer each week at
home than at their place of work. They observe that
Neglect of the domestic economy and the informal economy has ledplanners, architects and the makers of housing policy under widely ·different regimes to undervalue space - indoors and outdoors -an d the scope which people can be given to extend and adapt their
homes and gardens. They have instead been too reluctant to givetenants a stake in their homes or any scope for changing them, and
too prone to admire the inflexible, unresponsive bureaucracies
which too many housing authorities have made of themselves.
I am sure they are right to e n v i s ~ g s : future in \yhich thedecline of manufacturing industry-"as a source of employment
is bound to imply a growth in the informal and domestic
economy, especially as even the service economy, wqi..cQ...Y_s
thoughta p a b l ~
oft ~ k i n g ~ ' L e r
the employing function, isbeing replaced by a self-service economy (e.g. the domestic
washing machine taking over from the laundry and even from
the launderette). A future where an increasing proportion .of
goods and services are provIded either in the home or the
neighbourhood, c.9-11s for flexible, adaptable, low density
housing with outdoor as well as indoor space. The
once-despised by-law street of the late 19th century as well as
the suburban street of the first half of this century, are
well-adapted to change to accommodate new patterns of
living. ~ o high-density housing, whether high or low, is
not.However, all through life I have kept hearing of working
class families who have managed to build their own without
even building skills, and with little or no access to capital.
Everyone today is so completely dependent upon the housing
supply system, whether renting in the public sector or buying
in the private sector, that we find it hard to believe that peoplecan house themselves. Worse than that, we assume that they
are in some way abnormal or obsessional or heroic, so that
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70 TALKING HOUSES
instead of changing the system to make it easier for others to
do the same, we make it harder for anyone to emulate them .
Suppose, for the first time in the history of the Left's
discussion of housing, we were to celebrate their achievement?
Take the case of Walter Southgate. He, along with
Emmanuel Shinwell, is one of the last two survivors of the
Labour Representation Committee, the body which founded
the Labour Party, and for decades was a street-corner agitatorand trade union activist. Later in his long life he was one of
the people who established the Museum of Labour History in
Limehouse. After the first world war he and his wife bought
two-and-a-halfacres ofland near Ongar in Essex. Back home
in Hackney he first made a carpenter's bench an d then built in
s:ctions a two-roomed wooden hut. Th e following Easter they
hIred a Model T Ford van and transported their shed to erect
on the concrete footings they had spent ages building. Their
first lesson in brickwork had been in building the fireplace.
Th e four-day holiday gave them time to erect their eight-foot
by si;cteen-foot shed an d set it up on the footings bu t Jot to
bolt Itdown,
before it wastime
to cyclethe
20 miles bick toAdley Street, opposite Hackney Marshes. That week a gale
blew it off its foundations, bu t they levered it back and used it
for several years at weekends while plotting to build apermanent house.
We knew from the start that it would be a gamble and disastrousshould I fall sick or unemployed at a stage when the walls were halfway up . . . Our estimate of the cost without labour was around £358and we had nowhere near that sum. We just hoped to get throughthe final stages of building our bungalow by working in slow motionon my monthly salary. So it came about a few days before theGeneral Strike was declared in May 1926 that we sent off our firstorder to the local gravel pits to deliver 30 yards of ballast and 20yards of sand at 8s a cubic yard. The die had been cast and there
could be no going back. It now meant work, hard work, for everyweekend and holiday period over the following two and a halfyears . . .
They finished the building in September 1928 an d lived
there on the small-holding they developed over the years, until
1955. Over the years they produced every kind of fruit and
vegetable, kept poultry, rabbits an d geese, grew a variety of
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 71
trees including a coppice of 650 saplings and in fact made
their holding far more productive than any farmer could. Was
this a triumph of escapist individualism? Well, not exactly, for
Mr Southgate spent a long life in every kind of socialist
organisation an d at the 1978 National Conference was
honoured for "outstanding voluntary service to the Labour
Party".
In the course of our research into the "plotlands" of SouthEast England, Dennis Hardy and I met dozens of people who,
with no capital an d no access to mortgage loans, had changed
their lives for the better. Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Gifford
had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London and a hard
an d uncertain living as a casual dock worker. His plot ofland,
40 feet wide by 100 feet deep, cost him £10 in 1934. First he
pu t up a tent which his family used at week-ends, an d he
gradually accumulated tools, timber and glass which he
brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled down
from London. For water he sank a well in the garden, though
as with Mr Southgate's house, main services were eventually
connected. His house is called "Perseverance".
Mrs Elizabeth Granger and her husband were caretakers in
an LCC block of flats. In 1932 she saw in the evening".paper
land at Laindon advertised at £5 for a plot 20 feet wide by 150
feet deep. She took her unwilling husband on the
one-and-twopenny return trip from London and was advised
that they should buy two plots if she wanted to build a
bungalow. She paid the deposit with a borrowed pound.
When she could afford it she bought a first world war army
bell tent, laboriously got it to the site, an d she and her
husband would go there on their day off, taking their drinking
water with them and straining rainwater through an old
stocking for washing . They used to rent the tent at week-ends
to parties of boys from the estate, using the money to buysecond hand bricks at 35s a thousand, three yards of sand for
ISs and cement at 2s 6d a bag. They reared chickens, geese
an d goats, bought a pony and trap, and Mrs Granger's
husband got a transfer to a job at Dagenham. Unlike Mr
Nichols, they didn't stay for a lifetime in the house they had
built with so much labour, bu t were enabled to move "up
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72 TALKING HOUSES
v ~ j \ N.,.:. \) never had a mortgage for any of the houses where we have.~ o ' " Ived.ITeel so sorry for young couples these days, who don't
market" as people would say, from their very modest
beginnings - a borrowed pound in fact. She remarks, "W e
( \ ,... ? . r- ~ A , . C \ g ~ n ~ e R i n d of ~ h a n c e we ha d:" . .
__ ( fJ" ... • Th e second world war, an d the overwhelming powers to
control development given to planning authorities by the 1947
Town and Country Planning Act an d its successors, as well asthe stringent enforcement of building regulations, have put an
end to this kind of self-help housebuilding in Britain. True,
there are people who manage it, bu t it is not my business to
inform on them. We certainly have our self-builders, both
individual an d collective, an d they usually build houses of a
much higher quality than they could buy. Bu t they have to
provide a fully-finished, fully-serviced house right from the
start. There is no longer any room for the improvised dwelling
that is improved from earnings over time, simply because it
would not get planning permission, approval under
building regulations, an d certainly no t a mortgage loan for the
cost of the site an d materials. A whole new profession has
grown up of people who act as "fixers" for self-build housing
groups, simply because of the complexity of the regulations
and legal stipulations they have to meet.
Our planning an d building legislation, in fact, operate as
Jo n Gower Davies remarked, as "a highly regressive form of
indirect taxation". Th e rich can get by, bu t the poor are
penalised. Contemporary planning legislation would auto
matically outlaw the building of the homes of Mr Southgate,
Mr Nichols an d Mrs Granger. (I t being axiomatic that land inthe country is sacrosanct for farmers to grow unwanted cereals
for the subsidy, an d to pick up another subsidy for grubbing
up hedges an d trees for this purpose.) Contemporary buiiding
regulations would certainly ensure that their building costswere prohibitive. Their houses mayor may not have been
built to the standards of the pre-war model bylaws and Public
r ' /"';- Health Acts. They probably were, since these were simple an d
--' comprehensible to the layman. But the post-war building
•. - - - - - regulations are not only incomprehensible, so that even
architects employ structural engineers, at their client's
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKIN(;-CLASS HOUSING 73
expense, to design the simplest foundation, beam or roof, bu t '
are administered in a way that ensures that all the District
Council's officers will be insured in perpetuity against the >remotest liability for any building failure. Ol d buildings last
for centuries without benefit of all this expertise, bu t
widespread defects of public housing in the last twenty years,
all built to comply with the regulations, turn out to be <--..
nobody's responsibility . Bu t if you have the temerity to wan!:---- - - >to build for yourself, watch out! -
I f you are disinclined to take these comments on trust yo
should ask any architect of your acquaintance . Bu t you ma y
also feel that because of the instances I have mentioned from
years ago of people who broke out of urban landlordism into
the country, I have evaded the issue of those families who
from necessity or choice wanted to remain city dwellers, an d
that of contemporary realities. Post-war housing in the cities
has of course been dominated by local authorities, who,
presented by the war with b o m ~ sites, adopted the policy of
comprehensive redevelopment which fitted their unques-
tioned belief that large-scale problems could only be met bylarge-scale solutions. When they ra n out of bomb sites they
made themselves a second blitz. Colin Jones has shown how
the self-confident rush to destroy the past in Glasgow an d
Liverpool has resulted in a net housing loss and Graham
Lomas demonstrated in 1975 how in London more fit houses
had been destroyed than had been built since the war.
Two young architects from the London borough of
Newham, Graham Bennett and Stuart Rutherford observed
that at a time when the borough was claiming that it had run
out of sites, it was, like any other inner-city borough,
pockmarked with small vacant plots. They decided to make a
detailed investigation. On foot an d by bike they surveyed,
street by street, two half-kilometre-wide strips of land, from
north to south an d from west to east, straddling the borough,
an d noted each vacant site. Then they excluded al l sites of more
than halfan acre, any sites in wholly industrial areas, an y sites
which, although not used for anything in particular, were part
of recent local authority housing proposals an d an y sites
within a declared local authority redevelopment area.
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74 TALKING HOUSES
They concluded on the basis of this survey that, within the
borough as a whole, there was enough land in the sites left
over to house, at a conservative estimate, 3,000 to 5,000
people in single-family houses. When they reported their
findings to officers of the council, they were told that all these
small an d scattered plots were useless, so far as the council
was concerned. Given the local authority's procedures, it
would be uneconomic to develop them. Bennett andRutherford were not happy with this answer because they felt,
as I do, that the very scale of local authority developments
was part of the malaise of public housing. So they took their
argument further in a detailed report, supported by quantity
surveyors' costings, in 1979. They pointed out that house
prices in Newham were below those of neighbouring
boroughs . Turn-of-the-century houses were selling for around
£9,000, an d only reached that figure because of the influx of
people who could only just qualify for a mortgage.
Co.nsequently s p ~ c u l a t i , : e developers could not sell ~ w l y bUIlt houses at pnces whIch would show what they c o n s i d e ~ d as an adequate return on capital. So the building of new
houses was monopolised by local authorities or housing
associations.
In consequence, the two architects claimed, "the consider
able contributions which householders can make have never
been fully appreciated an d utilised". Public participation has
been seen as a politically necessary nuisance or as just another
load on administrative costs. But, they argued, "Until local
authorities acknowledge that their bad experiences with
participation on large-scale developments have been a
product of working on too large a scale, and give consideration
to small partnership arrangements for small sites, these sites
will remain unuseable". They point out that all the other
social needs for land in depressed urban areas - schoolshospitals an d recreational open space - need large sites. '
~ h e o n e - f ~ m i l y house.is on !he other hand, uniquely suited to smallSItes and IS the most mtensIve use of land. A typical terrace housepl<;>t ?f, say, 15 feet by 70 feet can be, for the family living there, achIld s play space, a vegetable garden, a thing of beauty, the site for
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 75
a hobby or small business, as well as a place o f shelter and security.As such it tends to be well cared for and supervised.
We don't have to look far, they argue, to see how the benefits
of small-scale management and enterprise could be harnessed
to developing idle sites in depressed districts:
In all except the coldest winter months, the residential str eets of our
survey borough are dotted with builders' skips, as local people add akitchen, bathroom or bedroom to their houses, make a loftconversion, create a "through lounge" or build on a new front porch.They do so by managing the project themselves, often with the aid ofa draughtsman from the local estate agency.
Bennett an d Rutherford were putting the case for extending
this kind of enterprise to prospective householders. They
envisaged a situation where a local authority would be
empowered with central government funding to advertise the
opportunity to develop these small sites among families on
their housing waiting list. Someone would decide to apply,
lease the land at a peppercorn rent, appoint an adviser, while
as building work proceeded payments would be made in
stages. The council would use its allocation of funds to write
off40 per cent of the capital cost an d would grant the low-paid
householder an option mortgage for the rest. Their proposal
was simply a rearrangement of procedures in a new way, bu t
as they said, "the greatest impediment to our proposal is
simply that many professionals with an interest in, an d a
c.ontrolling hand on, housing have come to believe that
housing is a sophisticated process well beyond the
comprehension of the uninitiated.
Needless to say, their scheme was not adopted in Newham.
But the good news is that another London borough has
sponsored a scheme which combines their approach with that
of the plotland self-builders, and has provided housing of highquality giving immense satisfaction to the residents, who
claim that the experience has enormously enriched their lives.
This is the Lewisham Self-Build Housing Association. As an
experiment in dweller-built public housing (something which
a decade ago would have sounded like a contradiction in
terms) it took a long time to come to fruition, an d would have
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76 TALKING HOUSES
been smothered at birth had it not been for a few people's
willingness to pu t aside the assumptions about the politics of
housing which they had accumulated over the years.Walter Segal is an architect, born in Switzerland in 1907
who quite early in life was fascinated by the structural
simplicity and economy of the traditional American
"balloon-framed" timber house. He has practiced in this
country for almost fifty years, giving a direct personal serviceto his clients, but increasingly at odds with the planning and
building control system.
Whenever a new project came along there was this brief honeymoon
with the design, then the long drawn-out fight with the controlapparatus. The client ha d to adjust himself to this. And then there
was the final business of building, and there it was harder and
harder. When you administer a client's resources you have a moral
obligation to him. I built 30 houses in London before 1962 bu t it wasbecoming so difficult that it was really warfare - and I "ha d ~ e c o m e in consequence a much less amiable person than I am now. Ireally quite ap unpleasant person to meet professionally. \
I t was in that year that he decided to rebuild his own house
and to erect a temporary building in the garden to house the
family during the building work. He used lightweight
materials in standard sizes so that they could be reused
elsewhere, held together by a simple frame standing on no
foundation other than concrete paving slabs. The building
was so cheap, quickly-built and comfortable (as well asdurable: it is still there today) that in the 60s and 70s when the
mainstream of British architecture was steadily losing the
respect of the public, Segal had a series of commissions t6
build houses on the same principle in different parts of thecountry, refining the system with each job. There was no
contract6r, just a plumber, an electrician and a carpenter, Mr
Wade, who followed him around from jo b to job. Anincreasing proportion of the building work was being done bythe owners .
One of the most interesting aspects of his approach is that it
blurs the expected roles of architect, tradesman and client.They aren't at the points of a triangular relationship, they are
all mixed up in the middle in the adventure of building. "As I
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 77
see it", he says, "buildings are there to be a background ~ o r people, against which they move, a background whIchenvelopes them, protects them, gives them pleasure, and
allows them to add a little bit of themselves".By 1975, having built 25 structures of this kind, Segal was
yearning to find a local authority willing to take the plu.n.gean d sponsor housing built by his method for and by famihes
on its housing waiting list. At that time the assistant borougharchitect was Brian Richardson, seeking alternatives to what
he regarded as the failure of the usual, e x p ~ n s i v e c o ~ n c i l housing procedures. Th e chairman of the housmg commItteewas Ron Pepper, a comprehensive school headmaster, and the
chairman of the planning committee was Nicholas Taylor,
author of a brilliant book The Village in the City, who knows agood housing idea when he meets one. Naturally these four
people had different responsibilities and different. approac?es
to housing, and to the role of local ~ ~ t h o n t l e s . .Bnan
Richardson an anarchist, comments that If the Lewisham
Labour G r ~ u p has a fault, it is the conviction that if a thing is
worth doing at all, it is worth the council doing it for you".Taylor on the other hand, speaks of "Lewisham's lib:rta:ian
vision of a socialism which is neither of the managenal nght
nor of the authoritarian left, bu t which uses state intervention
to release the creative energies of ordinary people".In 1976, by a single vote, Lewisham council decided to
explore the possibility of promoting a self-b.uild scheme.' ?ased
on Segal's system of lightweight constructlOn, for famIlies on
the council's waiting or transfer lists, using those pockets of
land which because of their size or their sloping nature, couldnot in their view, be used in the borough's own housing
programme. The council advertised a public meeting and lot
of people expressed an interest: 168 attended a first meetmg,
78 a second, and finally 14 families were s u c c ~ s s f u l in a draw
for places for the first scheme. "They were a m i ~ c e l l a n e o , ! s bunch of ordinary south Londoners who were alIke only m
their passionate desire to escape from their present ~ o u ~ i n g conditions . . . into something that would make theIr hves
more generous and free . . .There followed two-and-a-half years of delay, enough to
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78 TALKING HOUSES
dishearten the most persistent of would-be builders. Th e
scheme was "totally entangled in a complicated bureaucratic
maze through conflicting demands by local authorities an d
the government", it wa s reported in August 1978. I t took five
months to obtain planning permission an d further difficulty
with the GLC and the DIstrict Surveyor because of the
unorthodox structure. Th e families formed themselves into an
association, an d in order to qualify for subsidy, they
contracted to build the houses for the council which would
then grant them 99-year leases an d 50 pe r cent mortgages.
Th e other 50 per cent of th e house would be "rented" from the
councii bu t would be purchasable in installments to enable
the resIdents eventuafly to own the whole property. The value
of the labour in building the houses would be assessed an d se t
against th e mortgage.
This ingenious scheme survived, with difficulty, as first t ~ e DOE demanded as a condition of loan sanction that t h ~ : ~ should be a fixed price an d fixed time contract, an d secondly
the Inland Revenue demanded that th e self-builders should be
taxed at th e standard rate for their labour as though it wereincome. During the long period of waiting, the members
taught themselves to build. Walter Segal recalls,
An evening school was arranged which ran for six months to showthem how to use very simple tools. It was mainly cutting, drillingand measuring. What was so utterly astonishing was the patience,the incredible patience which these people displayed in waiting solong for an oppo rtunit y to get on the site. In the end even the councilthought it was expecting too much and it was mainly Ron Pepperwho said he would take it on himself tolet them go and cl ear the site;and later on he authorised the first two houses to be done.
Although they were using Segal's precisely-calculated
structural system the internal design of each house was
determined by each family. Ke n Atkins explains that
We must be the first council tenant s who have been involved withanarchitect in the design of our own homes. The architect used graphpaper to help us get it to represent the modular concept of two feettwo inches and asked us to draw a house within cash limits. Thiswas about 100 square metres. We did this as a group and then wentto Walter Segal's house. He took all the ideas and drew up 50 to 60
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 79
difterent house plans and then we went back as individual families tochoose and adapt our design . . . Every ,:"all is n ~ m - l o a d b e a r i n g soit's adaptable and changeable. At any time dunng t h ~ process ofbuilding or after I've lived in it, if ! feel I want to change It I can takeout any wall and change it.
Anyone who has seen a videotape of the Open Door TV
programme about Lewisham, The House that Mum and Dad
Built, (the BBC 2 presentation brought over a thousandenquiries) will have been struck by the members' testimony
about the effect that this adventure has had on their lives:
The one thing that's left me immensely proud is the co-operativespirit on the Brockley site. A wife had a baby the o!her week. !hebuntings were out and the balloons . . . If some reqmre a babySItter. . . if someone's working on a car . .. or the communal garden theyget help. They pay a pound a week to a communal fund. They'velandscaped the gardens last year. No-one tells them to do that, theydo it themselves because they have control over where they areliving and they contribute. They've got a say in what actually goeson there and because they have a say they contribute . . .
For the professionals involved it was an equally liberating
experience. Brian Richardson says it was the most important
architectUl al experience of his life, an d Walter Segal, an old
ma n who has seen a dozen architectural fashions come an d go,
says "O n th e day when the first frame stood it was an
astonishing feeling. I wa s immensely happy, like a child,
almost."
Many self-build housing schemes organised in a c o ~ v e ~ tional way rely, believe it or not, on a system of penaltIes II I
case some member does not pull his or he r weight. Segal
recalls the creativity that wa s revealed in Lewisham by not
pushing people around.
Help was to be provided mutually and voluntarily - there wer.e no
particular constraints on that, which did mean t ~ a t the good wIll ofpeople could find its way through. The less you tned to control themthe more you freed the element of good will - this was astonishinglyclear. Children were of course expected and allowed to play on thesite. And the older ones also helped if they wished to help. That wayone avoided all forms of friction. Each family were to build at theirown speed and within their own capacity. We had quite a number ofyoung people but some that were sixty and over who also managed
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80 TALKING HOUSES·
to build their own houses . . . They were told that I would notinterfere with the internal arrangement. I let them make their owndecisions, therefore we had no difficulties.
He noted with pleasure rather than with irritation, the
"countless small variations an d innovations an d additions"
that the self-builders made. "I t is astonishing that there isamong the people that live in this country such a wealth of
talent. "All this fuss about fourteen houses! Why has it not been
followed up elsewhere, apart from a second Lewisham scheme
where, working with Broome, Segal is supervising another
tenant group building 13 more? Th e answer is in the
inflexibility of the housing supply system which was never
designed to liberate that astonishing wealth of talent. In
Scotland, Stirling District Council is proposing to adopt a
scheme devised by Rod Hackney for a serviced plot system
where ground floor slabs with service ducts through the ~ a b s will be poured and the individual sites then sold to
self-builders. Th e housing committee chairman says that he
council "would do everything possible to assist potentialowners to arrange mortgages, and in certain cases the councilmight be prepared to give a loan themselves".
But, even in 1984, many Labour councillors still share the
view of the leader of another London council when he
concluded his visit to Lewisham, "We're not going to turn ourtenants into little capitalists".
6. Anarchy or Order? The
Planner's Dilemma
I am particularly grateful for your kind invitation to deliver
the third Sharp Memorial Lecture, because it enables me to
ponder on the huge shift in our attitudes to planning since
Thomas Sharp wrote his pioneering books in the 1930s an d
1940s. It was here, in Newcastle, that I attended one of the
most interesting an d stimulating of all the many public events
of the 1970s where we attempted to work ou r way through the
changing approach to planning. This was the Planning for
People conference, set up here by the organisation Tyneside
Environmental Concern on 21 October 1972. And you will
note the date, which was a few months before the energy crisisof 1973 changed all our perceptions about our futures.
I found that an extraordinarily stimulating meeting and
anyone of the themes that arose from it could have been the
subject of a conference in itself. In the chair was the splendid
Dr David Bellamy, who warmly supported the proposal by
Robert Allen for an exercise in popular long-term strategic
planning which he called "N E 2073 - a Future for the
North-East" suggesting that anybody and everybody in the
region, professionally or privately, should collaborate in
drawing up such a plan, which would become the yardstick
against which what aCtually happened and what was actually
proposed by people with power, an d what was actuallyplanned by the statutory authorities was measured.
Mr Ken Galley, City Planning Officer for Newcastle, in
describing his council's rehousing policy, remarked that
"there has been a quiet revolution in the Civic Centre" and he
The third Sharp Memorial Lecture, given at the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November 1985.
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82 TALKING HOUSES
exemplified this by talking about the redevelopment of Byker.
Dr Roy Gazzatd won headlines in the next day's press by
suggesting that the kind of urban and rural pattern that was
actually going to emerge in the next few decades was that of
prole ghettoes in the cities, hemmed in by their green belts,
with free-range rural fascists in their Land-rovers, living it up
in the secure countryside.
He raised a laugh of course, an d we said, "Well, that's Roy,with his picturesque exaggerations", bu t thirteen years later
we can surely see the point he was anxious to make.
When my turn came, I spoke about the conflict between
residents' own aspirations an d the futures dictated to them by
planning authorities, whether they were the people officially
designated as "planners" or whether they were directors of
housing, environmental health officers or medical officers of
health; pointing out that in the pecking order of departments
in city halls, it wasn't always the planning officers who
necessarily planned. Planning . was a victim of its own
pretentions.
I cited the evidence of several, then recent/ detailed studiesof the impact of planning, here in the N6ith East: the two
books by Norman Dennis on re-housing in Sunderland/ the
book by Jo n Gower Davies, The Evangelistic Bureaucrats2 about
planning in the Rye Hill district of Newcastle, an d the piece of
work that was being done at that time by Peter Malpass in
this university, studying the topic of "professionalism in
architecture and the design of local authority houses" by way
of the housing at South Benwel1.3 Malpass found that
Instead of meeting his client face to face, getting to understand
clients' needs and preferences, and devising an appropriate solution,the local authority architect in Newcastle encounters council tenants
only by chance. Th e clients' needs and preferences are mediated byother departments and by the central government, all of whom areequally innocent of any systematic contact with tenants.'
How could we explain the vast gap between the planners
and the planned? Th e explanation I used at the time, was
derived from Richard Sennett's book The Uses oj Disorder" in
which he remarked that "Professional planners of highways,
of redevelopment housing, of inner-city renewal projects, have
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 83
treated challenges from displaced communities or community
groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a
natural part of the effort at social reconstruction". What this
really means, says Sennett, is that planners have wanted to
take the plan, the projection in advance, "as more 'true' than
the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time
of human lives".
To illustrate this contention I used the rather obvious caseof the Category D villages in County Durham, where over
twenty years earlier the villages were graded from A to D
according to predictions or projections made then about their
future economic viability. I remarked that
A village in Category A, like Escomb,. has be.en r e ~ a b i ~ i t a t e d sensitively and intelligently, without aVOIdable dlslocatlOn m the
lives of its people, bu t Category D villages like Witton Park, with an
absolute ban on new buildings and on improvement grants, have
been left to die without regard to the wishes of the inhabitants or tochanging prospects of local e m : p ~ o y m e n t . Officially d e a ~ , bu t
unwilling to die, the Category D VIllages have fou&ht for surVIval. Afew have been upgraded, bu t most have been kept m the condemned
cell, even though, as at High Spen, new industry has provided morejobs than the closed colliery. The officials who assumed the rol.e of
God in dividing the sheep from the goats have themselves long smcemoved to greener pastures, but their decisions of t w e ~ t y years agoremain more "true" to Durham County CounCIl than the
subsequent activities and aspirations of the people who live in the
villages sentenced to death.
In the thirteen years since I spoke, there have of course
been more shifts an d changes both in real life and in planning
policy, bu t my remarks were true then. I was working in those
days as environmental education officer for the Town and
Country Planning Association, with the assumption that
environmental education was the prerequisite for the public
participation in planning envisaged in the Skeffington Report.
But remarks like mine used to cause difficulties for David
Hall, then as now the tireless Director of the Association,
because he used to get indications from local authorities that
they could find it hard to justify their support for the
Association when their policies were openly criticised by its
employees. Needless to say, David Hall always supported me.
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I mention my recollections of that meeting all those years
ago here in order to stress that our present misgivings an d
dilemmas about the role of planning in society are not the
product of the energy crisis, no r of the collapse of the jo b
market, nor of the present government's ideology. They go
back to fundamental differences in the world view of those
whose version of the origins an d functions of planning is that it
is a popular movement associated with non-professionals likeEbenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes an d F.] . Osborn an d the
whole garden cities movement that evolved with the TCPA,
an d those wh o see it as an extension of the sanitary reforms of
the last century an d governmental intervention in the housing
market, with a hierarchy of professional expertise in local an d
central government administering the very comprehensive
legislation for controlling land use that ha s accumulated since
1947.
There are of course those wh o have always believed that the
role of the professional planner is greater than this. Only te n
years ago Dr David Eversley was claiming that the role of the
professional planner wa s nothing less than "that ofmaster-allocator of the scarcest resources: land, an d capital
an d current expenditure on the built environment and the
services which are offered to the community".6 I don't believe
that there ca n be a single planning officer today who would
make such a claim. Since the job of Chief Planner in the
Department of the Environment wa s ~ t l y advertised, an d
since, for all I know, the successful candidate is here tonight, I
want to remind you of the important shifts over time in the
opinions of holders of that office. Take Sir Wilfred Burns, a
former city planning officer for Newcastle. In 1963, he
declared that
the dwellers in a slum area are almost a separate race of people, withdifferent values, aspirations and ways ofliving . . . Most people wholive in slums have no views on their environment at all.
Furthermore, he went on to say that
when we are dealing with people who have no initiative or civicpride, the task, surely, is to break up such groupings even though the
ANARCHY OR ORDER?
people seem to be satisfied w i ~ h t?ei: m i s ~ r a b l e e n v i r < : m ~ e n t ard
seem to enjoy an extrovert SOCIal lIfe m theIr own localIty.
We may smile, bu t no-one here can deny that policies based
on precisely such assumptions were p u r s ~ e d in every city.in
Britain. Each of us has his or her ow n partIcular horror stones
from a variety of places. I t is all summed up in Bruce Allsop's
comment that
it is astonishing with what savagery planners a ~ d architects ar.etrying to obliterate working-class cultural and SOCIal patterns. Is It
because many of them are first generation middle-classtechnosnobs?8
Wilfred Burns, as Chief Planner in the Department of the
Environment, summed up many years later, the way the scene
ha d changed. At a seminar I attended in 1978 he said,
People have many different perspectives on the.ir ~ n v i r o n m e n t andon community life but only now are we begmmng to see thesearticulated. I t is not all that many 'years ago since people trustedlocal or central government to analyse their problems and prescribe
the solutions. Those were the days when people accepted that newand exciting developments were bound to be better and whenchange seemed to be welcomed. We then moved into a p e r i o ~ whenunique prescriptive solutions. gave way to the. presentatIOn ofalternatives so that the publIc could express ':'Iews bef<?re ~ n a l decisions were taken. Today we face a dIfferent SItuatIOn.Community groups, voluntary o r g a n i ~ a t i o n s of ~ : : n y kinds, andindeed individuals now demand a say m the defimtIOn of problemsand a role in deter:nining and then implementing solutions. Even inthe professional field that we normally think of as part of theestablishment there are various movements concerned withreinterpreting or changing the p r o f ~ s s i o n a l s ' role. Self-help groups ofmany kinds have sprung up, s o m e t I m ~ s around. a pr<?fessIOnal, or at
least, advised or guided by a p r o f e s s I O ! l ~ l . It IS q U l t ~ clear that a Inumber of people believe that the tradItIonal professlOnals ~ r e not
able adequately to communicate with people in a way that WIll helpthem solve their problems or make their wishes known to those whotake the decisions.9
This carefully-worded admission that planning would never
be the same again, came from the government's Chief
Planner, as I mentioned, in 1978. Thomas Sharp died in that
year, "spared at least" as Gordon Cherry pu t it in the second
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Sharp Memorial Lecture, "from having to make an
adjustment, late in life, to a new set of political philosophies
which seemed to pu t planning under fiercely criticalscrutiny" .
Sharp would certainly have understood Professor Cherry's
comment that "professional practice somehow failed to live up
to its promise, and environmental regulation degenerated into
process without purpose".10I t
was the kind of criticism hefrequently made himself. Bu t he would never have understood
the most deadly an d devastating criticism of the profession to
which he devoted his life, which was expressed by Jo n Gower
Davies in his observation that
Planning in our society . . . is in essence the attempt to inject aradical technology into a conservative and highly inegalitarian
economy. Th e impact of planning on this society is rather like that of
the educational system on the same society: it is least onorous and
most advantageous to those who are already well off or powerfulan d it is most onerous and least advantageous to those who a r ~ relatively powerless or relatively poor. Planning is, in its effect on the
socio-economic structure, a highly regressive form of indirecttaxation."
I t isn't that Sharp lacked sympathy with poor people an d
their aspirations. He came himself from a Durham mining
town, and he wrote, at the outbreak of the last war, "For
fifteen years an d more in places like Rhondda, J arrow and
Bishop Auckland, hundreds of thousands of Englishmen have
been eating their hearts out in squalid, dole-supported
unemployment spent among fouled landscapes an d filthyslum-built towns with hardly a hand lifted to help them".12
The trouble was that when ordinary people's aspirations were
fulfilled, whether it was in the garden city density of twelve to
the acre, or in the semi-detached suburban house or
bungalow, or in the Austin 7 an d the-week-end trip to a chaletor shanty site on the coast, Sharp with his vision of order, logican d dignified formal seemliness, despised them for it. "For
what hope", he asked, "in the modern world, can spring from
a chaos of individualism . . . a romantic individualism in
which every ma n glories, an d is encouraged to glory, in hisself-sufficiency an d separateness?"13
He admitted that "No one can blame those who seek to
escape from the awful prisoning streets in which they and
their parents have dragged out their terms of hard labour. On
the contrary it is admirable that they should do so; they woul d
be beyond hope if they didn't." But, he went on immediately,
the pity of it is that their new places are ~ a r d l y mo.re civilised tha.nthose from which they are in h ~ a d l o n g flight. T h e ~ r new r?mantlc
villas and bungalows with theIr pebble-dash, theIrh a l f - t m : b e r ~ d
gables, their "picturesque" leaded-light windows? are certamly mstriking contrast to the terrace houses of theIr old conges.tedquarters. But the contrast is merely between one type of barbansm
and another.14
\ \ . . ~ N ' ' ' $ Sharp feared that with
a growing use of the car . . . all the land in the country c:an be
regarded as building land and c o ~ s e q u ~ n t l y .all. the land m the
country is being laid ou t as a gIgantIc bmldmg estate to be
developed at a density of not more than 12 houses ver ac:re . . . E ~ e r y little owner of every little bungalow in every roadSIde nbbon thmks
that he is living in Merrie England because he has those "rosesround the door" and because he has Sweetwilliam and Michaelmas
daisies in his front garden. An amazing conception, bu t ~ m e thatexists everywhere . . . In addition to this fixed populatlOn that
drifted out of the town to live "i n the country", motor transport
created a liquid, fluctuating, weekend-and-fine evening population
that moved over all parts of the country, and that had to be c a t e ~ e d for man and machine by refreshment places, garages, petrol fillmg
, , d · 15
stations, telephone boxes and other accommo atlOns . . .
Now a year after Sharp's book Town and Countryside, from
which I have been quoting, appeared , J. B. Priestley made his
English Journey, an d he too, has an evocation of the changing
landscape of the 1930s, the new territory of
arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that looklike exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes,
bungalows with tiny garages, cocktai! bars, "Yoolw.orths, motorcoaches, wireless, hiking, factory gIrlS lookmg hke a c t r e s ~ e s , greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everythmg
given away for cigarette coupons . . . 6
But for Priestley, with all its brashness that so offended
Thomas Sharp, the new England was "essentially democra
tic" an d he hoped that there would be more, not less of it. In
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Priestley's eyes, England was fast becoming a land without
privilege, where suddenly everything was becoming accessibleto everyone. He rejoiced that
The young people of this new England do not play chorus in anopera in which their social superiors are the principals . . . they geton with their own lives. 17
There is a quite fundamental difference of approach here,
and it runs through all Sharp's castigations of the disorder,
chaos and anarchy of the English scene. Take the obvious caseof Peacehaven. For Sharp
The reductio ad absurdum of the garden city is its extension toabsurdity, and of this, unfortunately, innumerable examples exist.The worst in England is Peacehaven, which has rightly become anational laughing-stock . . . It is indeed a disgusting blot on thelandscape. 18
I refrain from quoting the OpInIOnS of old residents of that
place, because you can find them in the book that Dennis
Hardy and I wrote about the plotlands,t9bu t John Seymour I
think, makes a reasonable comment when he says,
Peacehaven is the place most people love to hate. I try my best, butreally I cannot find anything so terrible about a township knockedup by ex-soldiers after 1918, with their pathetic little gratuities, ino r ~ e r to have. somewhere to live away from noise and violence, ofwhIch they presumably had enough.20
There are, as you will know, passionate defenders of the
suburb, of the semi-detached house, and of all the aspects of
the interwar environment that drove Thomas Sharp into
despairing rage. An d they are to be found, not among the
ignorant an d benighted, but from within the architectural and
planning professions. Sharp'S objections were primarily on
aesthetic grounds. But they are simply 'pursuing a differentaesthetic. Fo r tastes change.
I was the director of a curriculum development project for
the Schools Council, which sought to explore the place of Art
as a school subject in environmental education. We
continually met an initial response from teachers which
assumed that our task was to teach children what they ought
to like. I used to respond by urging them to consider teapots.
In the 1930s an d 1940s, design education in school often
meant bringing into the classroom a collection of teapots and
attempting to persuade the class to despise their parents'
teapots as well as their houses, an d agree that this product of
the Staffordshire trade was bad (all that meaningless
machine-made decoration), that this teapot shaped like a
thatched cottage, with the roof coming off as a lid an d the
chimney as the knob on top, was intrinsically bad anddishonest, while this third teapot was an OK Bauhaus
designed functional sphere, with a few necessary excrescences.
That same teacher, now retired, has of course long since
abandoned the Bauhaus tea-pot (its virginal white surface
disfigured by tannin-stains an d chips) an d has on the shelf
such an amusing an d valuable collection of tea-pots designed
to look like something else. 21
None of us is immune to these changes of sensibility and
aesthetic preference, not even Thomas Sharp. Kathy
Stansfield, in her absorbing essay on him mentions the
difference between the 1936 an d the 1950 editions of his
English Panorama:By the time the second edition was published .. . Sharp hadchanged the emphasis from the formal qualities of urbanarchitecture to the informal beauty of the mediaeval town . . . PureRenaissance towns, he said in the second edition, were meremonuments . . . The mediaeval town was by contrast "a livingtown" and one which should provide inspiration for the future.
She also notes how he had to admit in the second edition that
the "old balance between town an d country had gone an d willnever return". 7
This is particularly interesting because, of all the jeremiads
or denunciations, thundering flights of oratory or tirades (we
can choose ou r phrases for them) that we like to savour fromThomas Sharp, the most extreme concern the separate entities
of town an d country. You will know the passages I am
thinking of from his book Town and Countryside:
The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer b e a ~ t y , t ~ e richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countrysIde, WIllbe debased into one sterile, hermaphroditic beastliness . .. The
\
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town is town: the country is country: black and white: male andfemale. Only in the preservation of these distinctions is there anysalvation: only through the preservation of the town as town can thecountryside be saved; and only through the limitation of rurality tothe country can the town be preserved. 23
These assumptions, modified a little by reality, have guided
a great deal of post-war planning policy. They explain green
belts, New Towns, key villages an d a great deal else. But what
these policies were about in a different sense was the abolition
of the differences between town and country in terms of
amenities, facilities an d access, while retaining that visual
difference that was important for Sharp. He like all planners
deplored most of all the areas we define as the urban fringe.
This distaste has its origins in psychology an d aesthetics
rather than in land use analysis. Like Sharp, we all acquire in
childhood the perception that town is town and country is
country an d that the two are distinct, an d we carry this
purified image of desirably separate places into adulthood,
even though most of us live in the suburbs, so despised by
Thomas Sharp.
Above a certain level of affluence, access to both town andcountry have always been automatic. Th e rich had their town
house and their country seat. An d of course in antiquity and
in mediaeval times the city was bounded by an actual wall, an
immensely potent psychological symbol which recurs all
through the literature of planning, from More's Utopia to the
Essex Design Guide. But the attempt to impose a statutory
wall through land use controls in the twentieth century, with
the best of intentions in taming the speculator, in fact
penalises the poor while preserving the environment of the
rich . I t is perilously like the situation described by Roy
Gazzard at the conference I mentioned.
There was a time in the earlier y e a ~ t h i s century, theperiod when Sharp despaired at the desecration of our
environment, when as Dr Anthony King explains in his book
about The Bungalow,
A combination of cheap land and transport, pre-fabricatedmaterials, and the owner's labour and skills had given back, to theordinary people of the land, the opportunity denied to them for Over
two hundred years, an opportunity which, at the time, was stillavailable to almost half of the world's non-industrialisedpopulations: the freedom for a man to build his own house. It was afreedom that was to be very short-lived .24
I t was indeed. And one of the most powerful an d influential
voice.s for the imposition of order upon this individualist
anarchy was that of Thomas Sharp. He wrote before the war
thatAs one who for the last fifteen years has toiled at preparing schemesunder the Town Planning Acts, my own deep conviction is that notonly is the present position hopeless but any extension that I can seealong present lines of control is obtainable only by d o i n ~ two t h i n ~ s . First, by the establishment of a central Board of Planmng that Willplan and control not only housing and roads, but agriculture,industrial location, and every kind ofland utilization, in one efficientNational Plan. Second by the nationalisation of the land. 25
An d a year or two later, in his very widely circulated
wartime Penguin book on Town Planning, he declared that
It is no overstatement to say that the simple choice betweenplanning and non-planning, between order and disorder, is atest-case for English democracy. A Nationa l Plan is essential. Localplans are no longer sufficient. It is no use sentimentalising over thetradition of local government . . . Planning, as we have said, mustbegin at the top and work downwards. 26
Poor Sharp! He was the victim of the oldest of illusions in
the catalogue of misconceptions of those who believe in
authority an d in government. Disillusioned by the dreadful
hamfisted things that the local authorities were proposing to
do to his beloved city of Durham and to the villages of the
region, he thought that central government would do better,
because he assumed that it was bound to have the same
sensitive appreciation of townscape as he had himself. I t is a
common illusion, bu t it is really like the Russian peasant whocan't believe that his little father, the Tsar, knows how bad his
oppressors are, an d once told, will step in to pu t things nght.
Or like those Welsh miners who were comforted in the 1930s
through being assured by the Prince of Wales that
"Something must be done".
We had, in those wartime years, a Ministry of Town an d
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Country Planning, an d we have ha d innumerable statements
by central government about the very National Plan that
Sharp was calling for. What good has it done anyone? He
himself must have had a jolt of disillusionment at his faith in
central government when he worked as Joint Secretary with
Dudley Stamp on the Scott Report on Land Utilisation in
Rural Areas, for Kathy Stansfield tells us that
His report on villages was almost suppressed by the Ministry whorefused to publish it, and it took 18 months of pressure to ~ l l o w Sharp to publish it in a form in which it would not be assoClatedwith the department. 27
Eventually it became his Penguin book The Anatorrry of the
Village.
As an anarchist, of course, I am in the opposite camp to
Sharp. I f we have to polarise our attitudes between order and
disorder, I fear order most, because I know that the order that
will be imposed is the order of the secure an d privileged.
Socialist planners like Sharp thought that they were
restraining the disorder of get-rich-quick capitalist entrep
reneurs, when in fact they were trampling on the invisibleorder of those wh o just want a chance, as J. B. Priestley pu t it,
to "get on with their own lives". To illustrate the planners'
dilemma of anarchy or order, I have to turn, not to
Proudhon's paradoxical claim that "anarchy is the highest
form of order", bu t to Norman Dennis's two devastating
books about Sunderland. He shows how, just because we have
accepted Sharp's - an d everybody else's - opinion that
planning must begin at the top an d work downwards,
planning has indeed become a form of regressive taxation.
Of all the illustrations I could choose to demonstrate this, Ihave to choose once more his reference to the two ways of
looking at a particular district of Sunderland. Within the firstframe of reference, he says, "Millfield, for example, is a
collection of shabby, mean and dreary houses, derelict back
lanes, shoddy-fronted shops an d b r ~ e n pavements, the whole
unsightly mess mercifully ill-lit". ,
But, Mr Dennis goes on, with a second frame of reference,
that of, say, a sixty-year-old woman living there,
Millfield is Bob Smith's which she thinks (prob ably correctly) is thebest butcher's in the town; George McKeith's wet-fish ~ h o p andPeary's fried-fish shop about which she says the same W I t ~ equaljustification; Maw:s hot pies. and 1?eas, p r e p a r e ~ on the premIses; .theWillow Pond publIc house, In whIch her favounte nephew orgamsesthe darts and dominoes team; the Salvation Army band in a nearbystreet every Sunday and waking her with carols on Christmasmorning; her special claim to attention at t h ~ grocers b e c ~ u s e ~ e r niece worked there for several years; the spacIOus cottage In whIchshe was born and brought up, which she now owns, has improved,and which has not in her memory had defects which have c a u ~ e d either her or her neighbours discernible inconvenience (but whIchhas some damp patches which make it classifiable as a "slumdwelling"); the short road to the cemetery w h ~ r e ~ h e cares for thegraves of her mother, father and brother; her sIster s cottage acrossthe road - she knows th at every week-day at 12.30 a hot dinne r willbe ready for her when she comes ~ r o m work; t ~ e bus route which willtake her to the town centre In a few mInutes; the homes ofneighbours who since her childhood have h . e l ~ e d her a ~ d wh?m shehas helped, church, club and workplace WIthIn five mInutes walk;and, in general (as is said) "every acre sweetened by the memory ofthe men who made US".28 .
When I quote this passage to people in the world of local
government, they respond with the same kind of embarrass
ment that greets my quotation from Sir Wilfrid Burns. They
are too polite to say so, bu t they feel that I am evoking images
of the past, that times have changed, that planners aren't so
arrogant an y more, no r victims so pathetic. An d they point to
the new solicitude for small business, self-employment,
workers' co-ops, or community architecture, as well as to
genuine efforts to facilitate th e participation of the public in
decisions about the environment.
They also point out that very little of the time of planning
departments, or of other local authority departments a ~ t i n g inwhat is in fact a planning capacity, is spent in destroymg the
habitat of ol d ladies or theJivelihood of self-employed welders,
or in persecuting people who bu y new aluminium "georgian"
windows for their little old houses in conservation areas. They
would also point out that in most of the matters that go to a
public inquiry, local amenity societies an d planning
departments are on the same side of the argument.
A most interesting case in point was the 22-day public
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inquiry held here earlier this year relating to the Tyne and
Wear green belt. It is discussed in the current (November
1985) issue of The Planner, by Greg Smith under the title "How
Green is my County?" He carefully avoids discussion of the
coming abolition of the metropolitan county counCils, bu t hislast words are that "i t is really beyond doubt that without theCounty Council there would have been relatively little in the
way of green belt in Tyne and Wear". It is also clear that thetypical objector was not a 70-year-old smallholder anxious to
build a house for the daughter and son-in-law who will
succeed him. The typical objectors were in fact the House
Builders Federation and a major building firm. Th e planners'
dilemma here was the usual one of having to meet mutually
incompatible requirements. As Mr Smith says,
Judgement on the appropriate tightness of fit of the green beltaround the urban areas pivoted on the respective degrees of risk: tooloose and the main strategic objectives would be lost; too tight an d
the principle of strong green belt protection could be undermined byad hoc encroachment.
It's another particular way of expressing the dilemma ofanarchy and order. Thomas Sharp was a man of order, an d
many of his disappointments arose from his inability to
compromise. Development control itself is a compromise
between Sharp's ideal of land nationalisation and the
free-for-all of market forces in land and land use. Th e trouble
is that a tight-fit green-belt policy, however admirable in
intention, serves the afIluent very well, an d penalIses peoplewith fewer environmental choices. Dennis Hardy and I found
this time and time again when exploring the plotlands of south
east England. Where these unofficial settlements were
retrospectively included in green belt areas, and their owners
were denied the opportunity of improving, enlarging orupdating them in the hope that they would somehow
disappear, great hardship and injustice were done. When
residents went to the length of appealing against planning
deCisions they usually won JKcir appeals, and policy wasslowly and grudgingly modified as a result. In places where a
loose-fit, live-and-let-Iive planning policy was applied, these
settlements gradually upgraded themselves over time
something that has happened all through history without
benefit of planning.Peter Hall showed in his formidable work on The
Containment rif Urban England, how planning policy had so
pushed up land prices that new developments at the humbler
end of the housing market were built at a relatively high
density with tiny gardens and often in very inconvenientplaces for the journey to work, and compare badly in theserespects with the ordinary prewar estate, so despised byThomas Sharp.29 Policies, sensible in themselves, have had
consequences, originally unforeseen, which have, it seems tome irredeemably tarnished the reputation of planning in wayswhich the pioneers of the planning movement in Britain could
never have envisaged.
This is why, while no supporter of the present government,
I actually welcome its relaxation of planning controls. I don't
know whether or not this relaxation will stimulate enterprise,
bu t I would also like to see an experiment in "housing
enterprise zones" as advocated many years ago in thewell-known paper by Peter Hall and others, "Non-plan: an
experiment in freedom"30 If the result was a success, we would
all learn from it. If it was a disaster, the advocates of evermore draconic planning legislation would have made their
point.
Planning began as a movement, not as a library of
legislation, and its future would be much more assured and
much more hopeful if t could recover its popular and populist
image. We have had valuable initiatives in the last twelve
years or so on t he se li nes - advocacy planning, theenormously useful growth of planning aid, and our gropings
towards the idea of community planning and a parallel,
overlapping concommitant of community architecture. We're
a long way after Skeffington, and the days when Planning
Officers used to say to me, "We tried a participation exercise .
It was very expensive and it didn't work." I used to reply that
it would take twenty years to bring about effective public
participation in planning, because it must start, not withcurrent crises but in a continuous involvement of Citizens.
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References
1. Norman Dennis: People and Planning (Faber 1970), Public Participation and
Planners' Blig ht (Faber 1972).
2. Jo n Gower Davies: The Evangelistic Bureaucrat (Tavistock 1972)
3. Peter Malpass: Professionalism in Architecture and the Design of Local Authority
Housing (Newcastle University thesis 1973)
4. Peter Malpass in RIBAJoumalJune 1975
5. Richard Sennett: The Uses of Disorder (Allen Lane 1970)
6. David Eversley: The Planner in Society (Faber 1973)
7. Wilfred Burns: New Towns fo r Old (Leonard Hill 1963)
8. Bruce Allsop: Towards a Humane Architecture (Frederick Muller 1974)
9. Wilfred Burns at the seminar of the Artist Placement Group, RoyalCollege of Art, 1978
10. Gordon E. Cherry: Thomas Sharp: the man who dared to be different (RoyalTown Planning Institute Northern Branch 1983)
II. Jon Gower Davies: op cit
12 . Thomas Sharp: Town Planning (Penguin 1940)
13. Thomas Sharp: English Panorama (Dent 1936)
14. Thomas Sharp: "The North-East - Hills and Hells" II I CloughWilliams-Ellis (ed) Britain and the Beast (Dent 1938)
15. Thomas Sharp: Town and Countryside (Oxford 1932)
16. J. B. Priestley: EnglishJoumey (Heinemann 1934)
17 . ibid
18 . Thomas Sharp: Town and C o u n t ~ (Oxford 1932)
19. Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward: Arcadia fo r Al l (Mansell 1984)
20. John Seymour: The Companion Guide to the South Coast (Collins 1975)
21. Eileen Adams and Colin Ward: Ar t and the Built Environment (Longman
1982)
22. Kathy Stansfield: "Thomas Sharp" in Gordon Cherry (ed) Pioneers in
British Planning (Architectural Press 1981)
23 . Thomas Sharp: Town and Countryside (Oxford 1932)
24. Anthony King: The Bungalow (Routledge 1984)
25 . Thomas Sharp: "The North-East . .. " op cit
26 . Thomas Sharp: Town Planning (Penguin 1940)
27. Kathy Stansfield: op cit
28. Norman Dennis: People and Planning (Faber 1970)
29. Peter Hall: The Containment of Urban England (Allen and Unwin 1973)
30 . Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price: "Non-plan:an Experiment in Freedom", New Society (20 March 1969)
31. Peter Green, introduction to Patrick Geddes: City Development (IrishUniversities Press 1973)
32. Quoted in John Turner: Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
33/ Philip Boardman: The Worlds of Patrick Geddes (Routledge and Kega n
Paul 1978)
7. Freedom and the Built
Environment
I Evidence of anarchy
You have to blame our hosts for the title of my talk today.They know that I' m an anarchist and that I wrote a book
called Anarchy in Action, which was published in the United
States as a Harper Torchbook paperback and which is
available in most European languages, and in Japanese. Your
local alternative bookshop will have the newest Englishreprint published by Freedom Press in London.!
I don't really need to apologise for blatantly publicising my
own writings. I f you don't persuade other people to read your
books, who do you expect to read them?
But of course, here in Boston, where the State of
Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti sixty years ago, I
have to begin with the perspective on freedom and the built
environment given by Bartolomeo Vanzetti. "I n short", he
said, "freedom is, for each and all things of the universe, to
follow their natural tendencies - and to fulfil their own virtues,qualities and capacities".2
Lectures from a series at the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 18-20 November 1987
99
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I think that Vanzetti expressed my view better than I could.
Anarchism, like many other political ideologies, grew out of
the ferment of deas from the time of the French and American
revolutions . And like all the other movements of the Left, the
anarchists inherited the splendid catchphrases, j berty,
Equality an d Fraternity. These resounding aspiratIOns may
go marve ously well orr-FTench postage stamps, bu t in real
life, inside or outside the anarchist movement, most of ourideological arguments relate to the differing emphases we pu t
on each of these values, an d to our perception of the different
obstacles in the way of getting closer to them . Anarchism,
with its dual origins, philosophically, as either the ultimate
destination of socialism or that ofliberalism, is not immune to
this dilemma of emphasis.
Anarchism originates as a word in the Greek phrase
meaning ' : c ? ? t r a r y ~ o au!ho!.'itY'{and as an ideology it seeks aj self-orgamsmg SOCIety, a n e t ~ o r k of autonomous free
\ aSsOc iations gathered together for the satisfaction of human
I eeds. Pu t in that minimal way, I suppose that every variety
of anarchist would agree with this minimal definition as well
as a lot of people who would never dream of calling themselvesanarchists. I t is when we come to the problems ofliving in the
actual world that our difficulties an d differences arise. As
individuals we make every kind of compromise between what
we believe in and the way we get by in, and influence, the
organised system of the way the society we actually live in
operates.
( But it's because I am an anarchist L t e v ~ in w ~ l l) c,Ql)tr 1, or what you would call 1lst r _ut0I!0[l1y m h o u ~ l t l g . There's a new book about to be published in Britain called
Community Architecture by . Nick Wates an d Charles Knevitt
(about which I am sure to have something to say tomorrow)
which argues that
Yesterday'S radical alternative has become part of today'sconventional wisdom. The community architecture movement isnow supported and promoted by people from all walks of life andfrom across the political spectrum: by anarchists, libertarians, thetraditional and radical Left, the Green movement, social democratsand free marketeersj
Just to get our subject in perspective we should remind
ourselves that through ninety per cent of human history
people ~ j lQ.!:l§.ed themselves, an d that the marvellousingenuity and creativeness of the way they did it has never
ceased to be a source of admiration for architectural
historians. Since people have to find a way of getting housed,
whether they live in a desert or a swamp, a speculator's
jungle, a people's democracy, a fascist dictatorship or ananarchist paradise, how they manage it is a matter of
universal interest. Th e most widely used building material in
the world toda,y is_gra,.s_s 9r straw, an d the second most widelyus-e'douilal;;g material -earth or mud. There are vast areas of
the Southern hemisphere, Latin America, Africa and South\
East Asia, where the great majority of homes are built by their I
occupiers with these materials an d with the recycled detritus \
of modern industry: packing cases, steel sheet, cardboa. "i v£ \
oil drums. Most of the world's inhabitants are self:b_uiJaet:S.
Even in the U n i t e d S t a t ~ 0 h e t h e world, at
least twenty pe r cent of housing is built by owner builders.
In tnc-n ineteenthcentury the people- in the Western world
who were left out, an d denied the natural human task of
applying self-help and mutual aid to housing themselves.
because by that time the space, the materials and the means of
subsistence all belonged to someone else, emigrated to the
cities in search of the means of livelihood, just as they do in
huge numbers in the poor world today. I want to give you twoquotations from nineteenth century writers describing the
result. They are both lamenting the alienation of the dweller
from the dwelling; an d I want you to guess their authors.
In the large towns and citieswhere civilisation especiallyprevails, the number of those
who can own a shelter is a verysmall fraction of the whole.The rest pay an annual tax forthis outside garment of all,become indispensable summerand winter, which would buy avillage of Indian wigwams, butnow helps to keep them poor as
long as they live . . . on the oneside is the palace, on the otherare the almshouse and "silent
poor". The myriads who builtthe pyramids to be the tombsof the Pharoahs were fed ongarlic, and it may be were notdecently buried themselves.The mason who finishes thecornice of the palace returns atnight perchance to a hut not so
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I think that Vanzetti expressed m y view better than I could.
Anarchism, like many other political ideologies, grew out of
the ferment of deas from the time of the French and American
revolutions. An d like all the other movements of the Left, the
anarchists inherited the splendid catchphrases, c!=jberty,
Equality an d Fraternity. These resounding aspirations-may
go marVellOUsly werron -FTe9ch l?ostage stamps, bu t in real
life, inside or outside the anazchlst movement, most of ourideological arguments relate to the differing emphases we pu t
on each of these values, an d to our perception of the different
obstacles in the way of getting closer to them. Anarchism,
with its dual origins, philosophically, as either the ultimate
destination of socialism or that ofliberalism, is not immune to
this dilemma of emphasis.
Anarchism originates as a word in the Greek phrase
meaning " c o n t r a r y , . ? - u t h o r i t y " , an d as an ideology it seeks a
( s ~ r ~ ~ ~ i society, --'a - network of. auto.nomous free
\ associatIOns gathered together for the satIsfactIOn of human
J needs. Put in that minimal way, I suppose that every variety
ofanarchist would agree with this minimal definition as well
as a lot of people who would never dream of calling themselvesanarchists. I t is when we come to the problems ofliving in the
actual world that our difficulties and differences arise. As
individuals we make every kind of compromise between what
we believe in an d the way we get by in, an d influence, the
organised system of the wa y the society we actually live in
operates.
But it's because I am an anarchist that I believe in dweller
-' )cSlntm l, or what you would .call J ~ . t r Q l Y in h o u ~ i f i g . There's a new book about to be published in Britain called
Community Architecture by , Nick Wates an d Charles Knevitt
(about which I am sure to have something to say tomorrow)
which argues that
Yesterday's radical alternative has become part of today'sconventional wisdom. The community architecture movement isnow supported and promoted by people from all walks of life andfrom across the political spectrum: by anarchists, libertarians, thetraditional and radical Left, the Green movement, social democratsand free marketeers/
Just to get our subject in perspective we should remind
ourselves that through ninety . per cent of human history
people.._ " y ' ~ u § . e q . therpselves, and that the marvellousingenuity an d creativeness of the way they did it has never
ceased to be a source of admiration for architectural
historians. Since people have to find a way of getting housed,
whether they live in a desert or a swamp, a speculator's
jungle, a people's democracy, a fascist dictatorship or ananarchist paradise, how they manage it is a matter of
universal interest. Th e most widely used building material in
the world t o c l a , y : § l > QU:>traw, an d the second most widdy
us-e'a "builcn ;;g material earth or mud. There are vast areas of
the Southern hemisphere, Latin America, Africa and South\
East Asia, where the great majority of homes are built by their ioccupiers with these materials an.d with the recycled detritus Iof modern industry: packing cases, steel sheet, cardboa.'i v1 Ioil drums. M ~ s t ( ! J : 1 e .. } : Y g r l . 9 n h ! l b ! ~ . b . u i J q e r . sEven in the United States, the richest country in the world, at
least twenty pe r"cent of housing is built by owner builders .In tliF"iiineteenth -century-thepe ;ple- lnth-e r e ; t e r " n ~ o r l d
who were left out, an d denied the natural human task of
applying self-help and mutual aid to housing themselves.
because by that time the space, the materials an d the means of
subsistence all belonged to someone else, emigrated to the
cities in search of the means of livelihood, just as they do in
huge numbers in the poor world today. I want to give you two
quotations from nineteenth century writers describing the
result. They are both lamenting the alienation of the dweller
from the dwelling; an d I want you to guess their authors.
In the large towns and citieswhere civilisation especiallyprevails, the number of those
who can own a shelter is a verysmall fraction of the whole.The rest pay an annual tax forthis outside garment of all,become indispensable summerand winter, which would buy avillage of Indian wigwams, butnow helps to keep them poor as
long as they live . . . on the oneside is the palace, on the otherare the almshouse and "silent
poor". The myriads who builtthe pyramids to be the tombsof the Pharoahs were fed ongarlic, and it may be were notdecently buried themselves.The mason who finishes thecornice of the palace returns at
night perchance to a hut not so
102
good as a wigwam. It is a
TALKING HOUSESFREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 103
the framework of regulation and control of the city's master plan
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mistake to suppose that, in acountry where the usual evidences of civilisation exist, the
conditions of a very large body
of the inhabitants may not beas degraded as that of savages.
Ma n is regressing to the cavedwe.lling, bu t in an alienated,malIgnant form. The savage in
his cave (a natural element
which is freely offered for hisuse and protection) does not
feel himself a stranger; on the
contrary he feels as much at
home as a fish in water. But the
cellar dwelling of the poor man
is a hostile dwelling, "an alien,constricting power which only
(
surrenders itself to him in
exchange for blood and sweat"
He cannot regard it as hishome, as a place where he
might at last say, "here I am athome". Instead , he finds himself in another person's house, thehouse of a stranger who lies in
wait for him every day and
evicts him if he does not pay
the rent.
lowe this interesting parallel to Professor Staughton Lynd,4
a n ~ you may have guessed, on stylistic grounds, who wrote
whIch of my two quotations, bu t you will agree that they both
say the same thing. The first was from Henry David
Thoreau's Walden an d the second was from Karl Marx's
"Economical an d Philosophical Manuscripts", both written in
t e l850s.
Now governments are invariably based in cities: whoever
Heard of a nation state ruled from a village? Such is the
immense s e ~ f - i m p ~ r t a ~ ~ e of governments that very often theyactually buIld theIr CItIes to house themselves: Washington,
Ottawa, Canberra, New Delhi, Chandigarh and Brasilia are
examples. And isn't it significant that visitors to such cities
who want to sample the real life of a nation have to escape
from the city of the politicians, technocrats an d bureaucrats in
order to do so? They have, if they want to taste what they see
as Brazili an food or hear Brazilian music, to go ten miles from
Brasilia to the Cidade Libre (the Free Town) where the
building workers live. They built the "City for the Year 2000",bu t are too poor to live there, an d in their own home-made
city, it used to be reported, "a spontaneous wild west
shanty-town life has arisen, which contrasts with the formality
of the city itself, an d which has become too valuable to bedestroyed". In Chandigarh, Madhu Sarin concluded that
excludes a wide range of activities which are nothing more than anexpression of the socio-economic reality ofIndia today . . . the result
is the additional victimization and harassment of the most
underprivileged sections of th.e city:'s population who have . littlemore than their labour to sell In a Clty where surplus labour IS the
rule. Even the limited potential for saving and accumulation isjeopardized through frequent eviction, resettlement or other forms of
disruption. All this is in direct contradiction t ~ e s t a t e ' ~ o ~ n open
commitment to removing poverty and redUCIng InequalIty.
Indeed, if you want to find examples of what are in my
terms, self-organising, anarchist cities, you would have to go
to t h ~ .. § . . q u a t t e r . h e l t A f ~ i c a n , A s i a n ~ . L a t i n A m e r c a n cities. Th e official perceptIOn of these settlements for many
was that they are the breeding-grounds for every kind
of crime, disease, vice, social an d family disorganisation. John
Turner, an anarchist architect, who has done more than most
people to change the way we perceive unofficial cities, remarks
that
Ten years of work in Peruvian barriddas indicates that s u c ~ view isgrossly inaccurate: although it serves ~ o m e vest.ed polItIcal and
bureaucratic interests it bears little relatlOn to realIty . . .Instead of
chaos and d i s o r g a n i s ~ t i o n , the evidence p<;Jints to h i ~ h l y o r g a ? ~ s e d i n v a s i o ~ . 2 L p - l ! - l : > l i c land in the face of vlOlen t p O ~ l C e OppOSItIon, ..
i r i f political o ! g a n i s a , t i ~ n with yearly loc<l:l ~ J e c t l O ? s , t ~ p u s a ~ d s oC-people living ~ o g e t h ~ r In an o ~ d ~ r l y fashlOn WIth no polIceprotection or publIc servIces. The ongInal.straw h o u s ~ s c o . n s t r u c ~ e d "during the invasions are converted. as rapIdly as p o ~ s l b l e l?t? bnckand cement structures with an Investment totallIng mIllIons ofdollars in labour and materials. Employment rates, wages, literacyand educational levels are all higher than in central city slums (fromwhich most barriada residents have escaped) and higher than the
national average. Crime, juvenile d ~ l i n q u e n c y , . p ~ o s t i t u t i o n <l:nd
gambling are rare, except ~ o r petty thIevery, the .Inc!dence of whIchis seemingly smaller than In other parts of the cIty.
Andrew Hake, after spending many years in N a i r ~ b i , reached similar conclusions. I t is, he says, a two-faced CIty,
with a modern face to the outside world, bu t a growing
number of people in the backyard. And he argues that the
backyard inhabitants are "a n immense potential for c r e a ~ i v e development which will determine the future shape of the CIty,
an d contribute enormously to the country's well-being" . Th e
104TALK NC HOUSES
self-help city, he claims, "provides income and a measure of
FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 105
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status for hundreds of thousands who would otherwise be in
even greater deprivation in over-populated rural areas". 7 By
(
1971 a third of ~ J a i ~ o ~ i ' ~ population was living in
unauthorised housing. They had, says Hake, "probably
created by that time something over 5Q).Q9JUops \)'hich did not
appear in any official statisti cs. They had built many elements
of an urban i n f r a s t r u c ~ and had created patterns of social
organisation to maintain the fabric of the self-help society . . .!h e self-help city is now building more houses, creating more
Jobs, absorbing more people, and growing faster, than the
modern city". And not only this, it is also less vulnerable to
~ , ~ e fluctuations of the official capitalist economy, and, he says,It can expand without too much difficulty to absorb the
casualties of the modern development process". ..
What an extraordinary tribute to the capacity for self-help
and mutual aid of poor people defying authority. Anyone who
is familiar with Kropotkin's Mutual Aid which is now in print
again,S is bound to be reminded of his chapter in praise of the
mediaeval city, where he observes that
W h ~ r e v e r I?en had found, or expected to find, some protectionbehmd their town walls, they instituted their co-jurations, theirfraternifies, their friendships, united in one common idea, and boldlymarchmg towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. Andthey succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they hadchanged the very face of Europe.
Kropotkin is not a romantic adulator of the free cities of the
middle ages. He knows what was wrong with them too. But
modern scholarship tends to support his interpretation of their
evolution. Walter Ullmann for example remarks that they
"represent a rather clear demonstration of entities governing
themselves" an d that "I n order to transact business, the
community assembled in its entirety . . . the assembly was no
'representative' of the whole, but was the whole". And very
recently an anarchist author Murray Bookchin has traced the
decline of municipal autonomy, from the Greek polis to the
American town meeting, arguing that the nation state~ - - - ..........- - - - ~ parasitizes __community, denuding it of its resources and its
potential for development. It does this partly by drainingcommunity of its material and spiritual resources; partly too, bysteadily divesting it of its power. Indeed, o f its legitimate right toshape its own destiny.1O
This implies certain assumptions about the size an d scale of
communities, an d Kropotkin again, in his Fields, Factories andWorkshopsll argues on technical grounds for dispersal, for the
integration of agriculture and industry, an d for (as Lewis
Mumford puts it) "a more decentralised urban development
in small units, responsive to direct human contact, an d
enjoying both urban an d rural advantages". Kropotkin's
contemporary Ebenezer Howard, in Garden Cities of Tomorrow l2
asked himself two simple questions. How can we get rid of the
grimness of the big city an d the lack of opportunities in the
country (which drove people to the cities)? How on the other
hand can we keep the attractiveness of the country and the
opportunities of the city? His answer was not only the garden
city, but what he called the social ciry, the network of
communities. Th e same message came much later from Paul
and Percival Goodman in Communitas: means of livelihood and
ways of lije,l3 where the second of their three communityparadigms, The Ne w Commune, is what Professor Thomas
Reiner calls "a polynucleated city, mirroring its anarcho
syndicalist premises". And the same message is to be found in
Leopold Kohr's essay "The City as Convivial Centre"14 where
he finds the good metropolis to be "a polynuclear federation of
cities" just as his city is a federation of squares.
One of the strands of thought among these decentralist
thinkers arose with the emergence of new movements arising
from the "ecological", energy-conscious mood of the 1970s.
Thus, like Kropotkin, the..BluepriTJ:1.i2!".§y'1Jj.0..al, best-sellingeco-volume:of 1972, saw {he goal as "a decentralised society of
1 "" ,_ . ' / I<_ "'- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'W>
small communities h e r e indl}stries are s m a ! l e n o u g ~ t9 beresponsive to each comm,lmity.'s needs"·. And long before the
energy crisis hi t 'people's consciousness, Murray Bookchin in
his essay "Towe.rds a Liberatory Technology" (which I
published in Anarchy in 1967, an d is now incorporated in his
book Post-Scarciry Anarchism argued the energy case for the
polynuclear city:
106 TALKING HOUSES
To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and
FREEDOM AND THE BUlLT ENVIRONMENT 107
8. Peter Kropotkin Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) (Freedom Press
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petroleum. By contrast, solar energy, wind power and tidal energyreach us mainly in small packets. Except for great dams and
turbines, the new devices seldom provide more than a few thousand
kilowatt-hours of electricity. It is hard to believe that we will ever beable to design solar collectors that can furnish us with the immense
blocks of electric power produced by a great steam plant; it is
equally difficult to conceive of a battery of wind turbines thatprovide us with enough electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island.
I fhomes and factories are heavily concentrated, devices for usingclean sources of energy will probably remain mere playthings; but if
urban c o m m ~ e s are reduced in size and widely spread over the
land, there is no reason why these devices cannot be combined toprovide us with all the amenities of an industrial civilisation. To usesolar, wind and tidal power effectively, the giant city must be
, dispersed. A new type of community, carefully tailored to the nature
'rand resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts oftoday.15
There is thus a broad band of agreement on the desirable
scale of urban settlements between anarchists of the
Kropotkin - Goodman - Bookchin strain, an d non-anarchist
decentralist urban thinkers like Howard an d Mumford and
their successors.
References
1. Colin Ward: Anarclry in Action (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1974,London: Freedom Press 1982)
2, M. D. Frankfurter and G. Jackson (eds) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti
(New York: Viking Press 1928)
3. Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: Community Architecture (London:Penguin 1987)
4. Staughton Lynd: Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York:Pantheon 1968)
5. Madhu Sarin "Urban planning, petty trading, and squatter settlementsin Chandigarh" in Bromley and Gerry (eds) Casual Work and Poverty in Third
World Cities (John Wiley 1979). See also Madhu Sarin Urban Planning in the
Third World (Mansell 1982)
6. William P. Mangin and John C. Turner "Benavides and the Barriada
Movement" in Paul Oliver (ed) Shelter and Society (Barrie and Rockliff 1969) .See also John Turner Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
7. Andrew Hake African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City (SussexUniversity Press 1977)
1987)
9. Walter Ullmann Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages
(Longman 1961)
10. Murray Bookchin The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship
(Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1987)
11. Peter Kropotkin Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) new edition editedby Colin Ward (Freedom Press 1985)
12.
EbenezerHoward Garden Cities of Tomorrow
(1898) new edition edi ted byF. J. Osborn (Faber 1945)
13. Paul and Percival Goodman Communitas: means of ivelihood and ways of ife
(Chicago 1947) (Vintage Books 1960)
14. Leopold Kohr "The City as Convivial Centre" (Tract No 12 Summer
1974)
15. Murray Bookchin Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Wildwood House 1974)
II User autonomy
If we equate user autonomy or dweller control with
owner-occupation of dwellings, we have to recognise that it is
a growing trend. Th e landlord-tenant relationship has never
been a happy one throughout history, even if, or perhaps
especially if, the landlord is a public body, not profiting from
the relationship. People get out of this relationship if they can.
This is why in Great Britain 62 per cent of households are
owner-occupied, and why in the United States the most recent
figure I have (for 1983) is 65 per cent.In most other countries, both in the rich and the poor )'
world, and both in the ideological West an d the ideological ,
East, the lesson of experience is that public landlordism is the )
~ o s t expensive and inefficient way of formulating a housing \
policy, precisely because it combines paternalism with a (
denial of people's personal input in the adventure of housing
themselves:1
'
Th e architect of several of Britain's new housing
co-operatives, David Innes Wilkin, visited Cuba last year just
when a huge ideological shift had occurred in housing policy
there. He says that
Under Cuba's 1985 General Housing Law, almost every existing
108 TALKING HOUSES
home and those to be built in the future will become the occupant's
FREEDOM AND THE BUlLT ENVIRONMENT 109
tions which are by now incomprehensible to the layman? Ho w '\
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personal property. After 26 years of revolutionary socialism, thispolicy breaks new ground in Cuba . . . O v ~ r halfof all new dwellings"are now being achieved through self-help with various amounts or "~ ~ a t e ~ u p p o r t . I
An account of shifts in housing policy in the Soviet Union
says the same thing. Shann Turnbull reports that
During the last decade the Soviet authorities have embarked on aprogramme of selling government-owned apartments to tenants,assisted by the provision of very low-interest mortgage finance. The
)
soviet initiative is based on the realization that owner-occupation ofdwellings p r o v i d e s ~ most efficient m e t h o ~ of maintaining and
, improving the housing stock . . . Owner occupiers are in the bestposition and have the greatest incentive to enhance both theirstandard ofliving and their equity through their own labour. Indeedon a global basis, this is how the majority of the world's housingstock has been created and maintained.2
The most obvious c.ollective form of user autonomy in . the
built environment is the housing co-operative, and the most
interesting an d impressive examples In'-Britain of what we
have come to call community a r ~ h i t e c t u r e are in the recent
experience of hOllsing co-operatives. But to what extent is the
knowledge that community groups need to be described as
architectural? In Britain we have an Association of
Community Technical Aid Centres which accuses the
Community Architecture Group of the Royal Institute of
British Architects
of hijacking the movement for user-control over the environment byI promoting the term community architecture and concentrating on theI role of the architect in the process. 3
\ And indeed the kind of services an d know-how actuaUy
needed by local residents seeking to rehouse themselves or to
improve their housing and its surroundings are not usuallythose which call for the capacity for design which is associated
, with the education and training of architects. What they need
is a guide through the thickets of legislation an d regulations
lthat stand in the way of anyone doing anything. How do we
get our aims through the local authority planners? Through
the building control department which administers regula-
can we qualify for impro,,:ement grants? How can we win a J
loan from the Housing Corporation? Ho w can we pu t together
a package of mortgage loans from the various sources of
housing finance, which might include that body and the local
authority, and an insurance company or a building society?
How do we qualify for any of that urban aid money that c o m e ~ from central government under a bewildering an d ever
changing series of initials an d acronyms? Ca n we use an y of
that free, job-creating labour provided by the Manpower
Services Commission to massage the unemployment statis
tics?This kind of know-how is not at all architectural, it is mor:,e
akin to that of the : ~ in Eastern Europe, who gains aliving from his k n o w l e d g e ~ f _The System an d Ho w to
Manipulate It. Architects themselves can be as innocent as
'babes in the wood when they first get involved in its
intricacies. And it demands a certain sophisticated cunning
rather than radical commitment. It also demands an
old-fashioned conception of what it means to be a member of a
profession, givi ng a direct and personal service to one's client.A tenants' association on an inner-city housing estate had
been steered into the situation of qualifying for an assemblage
of grant aid to build a community hall, using the labour of
young unemployed and disadvantaged teen-agers. Their
committee then had the hitherto unimaginable task of
selecting their own architect for the job. Three people were
recommended an d interviewed by the committee. The first
listened to their brief an d said "I can see that what you need is
a kind of shed". This was his verbal shorthand for a simple
and easily erected structure, an d he was of course right. Bu t
the committee members replied that they knew all about
sheds already,and asked
for the next candidate.Th e second
was an enthusiast and wanted to stress that he felt part of the.j
building team. He would "get dirt under his finger-nails", he
explained. Th e committee responded with the reflection that
it would be very expensive dirt. Th e third, who was given the
job, was a very experienced architect, deliberately a one-man
firm, whose political standpoint, I would guess, is far from
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that of the Left. He addressed the tenants' committee with
exactly the same demeanour and tone of voice that he would
use with any other client, described the various difficulties
that he thought might arise on this particular jo b an d the
ways in which they might be overcome. Problems did arise,
bu t the work was successfully completed. This architect
believes that the phrase community architecture is patronis
ing . He gives the same direct personal service to all his clients,and the same courteous a t t e n t i ~ n to their description of . heir
needs. Precisely the same p o i n ~ w a s made by the late Walter
Segal, whose work for the uewisham Self-Build Housing
Association seems to many of us to epitomise the aims of
community architecture, bu t who firmly disclaimed any such
f label. He too worked on his own, for he used to say that he had
\ always avoided being a wage-slave and saw no point in
'-I slaving to pay wages to others.
I have come to the conclusion that it is this e ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 9 " y j . element that is more important to these new-style clients than
anything that resembles the activity as a creative d e s i g ~ e r that
is supposedtO
b e- '
fhe'"mark of the architect.
I t
was aconsciousness of the grotesque gap between the architect's
vision of public housing in the 50s an d 60s, and ordinary
people's expectations of house an d home that led to the idea of
a direct relationship between architect and tenant. But most
people, whether rich or poor, never expect to live in a house
especially designed for their needs, an d most realise that their
housing needs change over the family life cycle. I have never
in fact met any rich family who lived in houses purpose-built
for their neeqs. Even the architects I know live in converted
barns or mills, or in lovingly restored farm houses or ancient
cottages. What all these people have had is the know-how and
access to finance to make-over these structures to meet their
own changing needs.Given the propensity to move, which paradoxically, is
easier in the ownet-occupation sector of the housing market
than in the publicly rented sector, it seems to me unimportant
to stress that any dwelling with an assumed life of sixty years
or more should be designed for or by]ack and Jill today. Are
they aged 25 or 55?
I make this point only for simpletons, because it in no way
diminishes the argument for dweller control of house
planning. When potential residents actually are in control of
the planning of their future homes, they invariably make
choices which reflect not only immediate needs, bu t other
people's future needs. Thus the members of the Weller Streets
Housing Co-op in Liverpool, steering the architect they had
chosen, decided on a completely uniform appearance for theirhomes. 4 Their architect would have been only too happy to
provide for the personalisation of individual dwellings in the
way that happened, under a similar degree of dweller control
at the Hesketh Street Housing Co-op up the road .5
The
architects of both these exemplars of community architecture
would be the first to agree, with their clients, that the
enterprise was a learning experience for both parties.Tom Woolley's study of dweller satisfaction in three tenant
co-operatives convinced him that architects have a lot to learn
about the techniques of participatory design. They ~ , J revealed a higher degree of dweller sa tisfaction (using, the )
DOE "Housing Appraisal Kit"). They all displayed great '
loyalty to their chosen architects. He stresses that
user satisfaction was related more strongly to the degree of control
which the clients exercised over the projects . In the most successfulone, the Liverpool case, the tenants ha d taken the initiative, ha d
retained control of the direction and management of the project an d
were willing to take on an d fight all comers to ensure a successfulcompletion. This created a general sense of solidarity and common
purpose among the co-operative members which I am convinced isreflected in the higher levels of satisfaction.
6
He believes that
the credit for the success of such projects should go much more tothe clients an d the way they organised themselves rather than to the
architects in view of the limited nature of the design participationactivi ies .
Woolley also observes that
architecture is not necessarily the central concern of a community
group - the control, location or funding of the development,
whether housing or community huildings, ma y be much more vital.'
112 T ALKI NG H OUSES
M any years ago J ohn T urner, the architect helping squatter
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self-builders in Peru reached a similar conclusion. H e wasted
a lot of time designing for their needs , when they were
perfectly capable of designing and building . He remains
suspicious of the image of the professional as saviour,
remarking that
the implications of words like "harnessing" and "mobilising" tend to
reinforce an elitist assumption that underlies and even motivatescertain self-help lobbies. The elitist assumption is that the resourcesof "the people" or "the masses" is in their hands and the strength oftheir bodies. Their heads, by implication, are rathe r small . . . So thereformed image of government housing action and urbandevelopment can be caricatured as that of a small minority ofswollen-headed but manually incompetent officers ordering aboutan army of the s t r o n ~ e d but pin-headed masses.s
It's a serious point, an d it isn't only relevant to the poor world
or to self-building. Th e question we should be asking
ourselves is why the simple human task of housing oneself an d
of adapting an d improving one's immediate environment,
should have been made tortuous an d complicated, when it
ought to be simple an d natural. What a time it has taken forthe penny to drop!
References
1. David Innes Wilkin "Cuba: A Socialist Path to Home-ownership" atShelter Conference, .York, July 1986
2. Shann Turnbull "Access to Land" in Paul Ekins : The Living Economy
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986)
3. Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: Community Architecture: How People are
Creating their own Environment (London: Penguin Books 1987)
4. Alan McDonald The Weller Way: The Story of the Weller Streets Housing
Co-operative (Faber and Faber 1986, new edition forthcoming from HilaryShipman Ltd)
5. Nick Wates "The Liverpool Breakthrough or Public Sector HousingPhase 2" Architects Journal 8 September 1982
6. Tom Woolley "Community Architecture" Paper given at the Institute ofCommunity Studies Housing Co-ops Research Seminar 22 November 1986
7. Ruth Owens "Participation Panacea" Architects Journal 11 June 1986
8. John F. C. Turner "Issues in Self-Help and Self-Managed Housing" inP. M. Ward (ed) Self-Help Housing: a critique (Mansell 1982)
8. City People HousingThemselves
Of our many human failings, the most universal is that of
nostalgia. It takes a variety of forms. There is nostalgia for
what we see in retrospect as the golden age of childhood with
its simhlicities an d certainties, or for the golden age of rural
life or for the golden age of the city . This golden age was
always in our infancy, or in the years just before we were born,
or j us t before our grandparents were born.
Ladies an d gentlemen, I bring you, not the painful
realisation, bu t the pleasurable reassurance, that there never
was a golden age. Th e great industrial and commercial cities
of Europe and North America expanded like overnight
mushrooms in the 19th century, just like the cities of Latin
America, Africa an d South-East Asia in ou r own day. An d .at
the very heyday of their prosperity, when heavy industry w ~ s loaded with orders, when the docks were full of ships, when
the steel mills of Pittsburgh were earning incredible sums for
the captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie an d Henry
Clay Frick,Jhe cities of the United States, and of Britain, were
bywords for insanitary, desperately overcrowded, slmlls,
hunger, crime, high mortality rates, prostitution awl
destitution . Perhaps our nostalgia for an imagined past when
city life was simple and happy draws on the fact that 19tb
century cities were no t plagued by drug ~ b 1 } s e ,or AIDS. We
forget that they had a s u ~ c e s s i o n of plagues an d fevers fromcholera and typhus to syphilis an d tuberculosis. In the last
three decades of the last century an d the first decade of the
Lecture given at the conference on Remaking Cities (Second InternationalConference on Community Architecture, Planning and Des ign), Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, 2- 5 March 1988.
113
114 TALKING HOUSES
present century countless witnesses on both sides of the
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 115
Ladies an d gentlemen, we are deeply equivocal in our
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Atlantic investigated, described an d analysed the condition of
the great cities. Their work was recently re-appraised b.y
Professor Andrew Lees of Rutgers University who describes
how
e c ~ ~ o m i s t s sociologists novelists, clergymen and a variety of socialreformers provided a b u ~ d a n t documentation of want in th e midst ,of
plenty. Slum ~ s i n g , low wages, and ~ n e m p l o y m e n t s t r ~ c J -numerous men and women as all-too pervasive features of City hfe,not only in East London and on the Lower East Side, bu t also if!many other urban areas, from Berlin, Paris and York to Boston and
Chicago. In their view, the denizens of urban slums suffered froJIlunacceptably low levels of material well-being that stemmed not
from their own inadequacies as individuals bu t instead from theeconomic and physical environment in which they lived. ' '
On e of the most thorough an d intensive of these studies ever
made was The Pittsburgh Survey supported by the Russell
Sage Foun9ation an d published between 1909 an d 1914 in six
large volumes edited by Paul Kellogg which described wages,
working conditions, budgets an d domestic life in the homes of
steel workers, health and sanitation, crime and theadministration of ustice, playgrounds and recreation, schools ,
and other social institutions. 2 Professor Lees, relating the
Pittsburgh Survey to the dozens of other investigations of t h ~ city in Europe an d America, remarks that
It emerged clearly that many Pittsburghers worked up to twelvehours per day, that wages were calculated. according to the. f.1eeds of I
single men {ather than to those of responsible heads of famlhes, and
that the wages of women averaged between one-half and one-third ofwhat the me n received. Th e extraordinary pressures of work, tht;preva!ence o(preventable disea.ses, ~ n d the high .toll of i n d u s t r ~ a l accidents all undermined family hfe and contnbuted to SOCial
pathology in other ways as well. Pittsburgh stood out .as an
American Coketown, a city in which short-range and shortsightedconsiderations of costs and profits by the agents of absentee
capitalists wreaked havoc in the lives of the great mass of the
population.3
But exactly the same conclusions could be drawn from the
same kind of careful survey in any industrial city in the United
States, in Britain, France or Germany.
interpretation of the golden age of British, European or
American industry. Ou r hosts invite us to take a tour of
Pittsburgh's industrial valley, winding through "the mill
towns that stand as a testament to the strength of a bygone
era". In 1892 the journalist Hamlin Garland described
Homestead, one of the steel mill towns of the Carnegie Steel
Company. He said
The streets were horrible; the buildings were formed of sharp-edgedstones like rocks in a river bed. Everywhere the yellow mud oIstreets .
' lay kneaded into sickly masses, through which groups of pale, lean
men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and dirt of themills. The town was as squalid as could well be imagined, and the
people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found
everywhere where labor passed into the brutalizing stage of
severity.'
That description of the employed underclass of the golden age
of heavy industry was written almost a century ago. Ou r own
conference programme tells us that "A half century ago
Pittsburgh was in the headlines . . . because environmentally
it was 'hell with the lid of f ".5 This is a reminder that the effortto do something about the cities, both in Europe an d America
is not new. The zeal for reform arose before the first world wa r
as a result of all those meticulous social surveys, and it has
re-emerged continuously since the second world war. I f we
assume the working lifetime of the highly educated
professional and administrative working classes as 40 years,
we can say that it has been plenty of people's life work. In a
few more decades we will run out of verbs, adjectives an d
nouns to describe it. We had, for example, the phrase UrbanRenewal. Bu t a whole series of investigators from Jane Jacobs
and Robert Goodman onward demonstrated to us that this
was a euphemism for pushing the poor ou t of town. A greatdeal of money was spent in the United States an d in Europe
pursuing the aims of urban renewal.
We then had a period labelled Fight Back, punctuated by
urban riots, which concentrated the minds of central
governments on this issue an d provided us with more
sophisticated guidelines. I, as an outsider, value the work of
116 TALKING HOUSES
Saul Alinsky and Shelley Arnstein's immensely useful
C ITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 117
over their future . I'm delighted that Tony McGann of th e
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yardstick in the form of her "Ladder of Participation".
After this period we have several new uses of language to
describe ways of approaching the dilemma of the old cities
whose economic base has withered away. We have words like
"regeneration" or "revitalisation" or we talk, as we are today,
about "remaking" cities. There has been a huge ideological
shift on both sides of the Atlantic which worries me, as no
doubt, it worries you. A recent book The State and the Ciry by an
Anglo-American pair of authors,6 spells out its implications:
Te d Gurr and Desmond King remark that
There is some lower threshold of public provision below whichpeople will no longer be willing or able to live in cities. There is noway of saying where that threshold is in the abstract: it has already
been passed for many of the hundreds of thousands of people whohave migrated away from the centres of old industrial cities. There is
no contemporary precedent, nor any fully documented historicalones, to tell us what is likely to happen after all those who can leavehave done so, leaving such cities populated only by a dependent
underclass . The triumph of market forces will be complete when thelast emigrants from Toxteth and the East Bronx pause on their way
out, not to turn ou t the lights, bu t to strip the crumbling buildings oflight fixtures and wiring for sale as scrap.7
I think this is very well put. I t expresses the logic of current
approaches to the dilemmas of the cities which grew at a
terrifying rate in the last century an d have declined at the
same rate in this one. But, like you, I am sure, I have watched
this process happening. A priest, Father Slavin, took me to
watch his 12 to 14 year old truants ripping the last saleable
metals from a tenement building in central Glasgow,
Scotland, and an unemployed teacher introduced me to the
culture of recycling in Toxteth, Liverpool, while a primary
school teacher in Cardiff in South Wales guided me through
the derelict landscape populated by her class.This was, however, a long time ago, back in the 1970s. A
different scale of values has been asserted in British cities tocontradict those free market assumptions. In Glasgow, for
example, a huge turnaround in policy has pu t some people in
control of their own housing. In Liverpool we have had
absolutely heroic efforts to assert the rights of the inhabitants
Eldonian Community Association there, is here in Pittsburgh
to talk about his association's efforts to ensure work as well as
housing in Vauxhall, Liverpool, an area totally written off by
the law of the market.
Now I'm a complete stranger to the United States. I have
the usual Huckleberry Finn, get up and go, European picture
of the land of opportunity. Bu t even from this primitive
standpoint it is possible to make some observations about
remaking cities. We are urged to learn from the experience of
.Boston, Massachusetts. Behind this recommendation there is
an implied comparison with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Just let me, as an ignorant outsider, make a few comments
on the implied comparison. Th e first is that those cities which
bore the brunt of the industrial revolution, those primary
producing cities whose workers, in the heroic age, lived in
squalor, are the very cities, whether in Britain, France,
Germany or the United States, which bear the hardest
burdens of late 20th century deindustrialisation. Those cities
which diversified, just through geographical accidents, are
those most able to adapt.We know (or do we not know?) that some places are
automatically favoured by central government spending in
high technology, which is usually a euphemism for Defence
spending, and that this is usually a long way from Pittsburgh,
just as it is a long way from Lille in France, Duseldorf in
Germany or Sheffield in Britain. I found it interesting to learn
the other day that
Boston has become the archetypal post-industrial public city in theUnited States, with half its population and personal income directlydependent on government spending. s
This is not exactly the message we are supposed to learn from
those cities which have been enabled by government to make
the great leap into the post-industrial world. That proportion
of governmental expenditure would have totally changed the
future of Pittsburgh, or of Sheffield, or of any of those cities
which have not had the luck to be the recipients of new
118 TALKING HOUSES
technology research an d development spending nor of defence
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 119
: ~ 1 emptying rent-controlled housing for redevelopment. Just
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contracts.""" I confine myself to a consideration of housing, and what I
learn is that economic success can perfectly well imply
housing displacement. In London, for example, there is adistrict picturesquely called the Isle of Dogs in the part of the
East End of the city which we have now learned to callDocklands because it contains acres of docks, dating from the
time when London was the busiest port in the world, and
which of course have been closed for several decades.Local people were rehoused in minimal, system-built tower
blocks by the local authorities. Anyone else who wanted to
house themselves there learned that the quaintly-named
BJtilding Societies, the normal source of housing finance inBritain, had "red-lined" the area. That is to say they had pu t
a ring on the ma p to indicate that mortgage loans would not
be available. After decades of neglect Mrs Thatcher's
government installed a Docklands Development Corporation,
loaded with cash, to override the local councils, with their
dismal record, an d redevelop the whole area, including a new
___ '\.. rail system to make it accessible.From_ an investment point of view this has been an
extraordinary success. I t is one huge building site. But fromthe point of vi'ew of local families, anxious to get out of theirrun-down housing, an d forming themselves into Self-Buildhousing societies, it has been a disaster. The District Valuer,
the government officer charged with the task of putting avaluation on sites, raises his figures continually, basing it on
the upwardly spiralling prices of new housing there, much of
which is seen by its purchasers as a speculation rather than ahome, safer than the stock market. Th e poor have been
effectively squeezed out. I would have seen this as a peculiarlyBritish abberation of urban renewal, bu t for my experience in
Boston an d Cambridge last November. I arrived in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, just in time to talk to thedemonstrators at Tent City and to learn that they, just liketheir predecessors at Tent City in Boston, a generation earlier,were mutely protesting that the landlords (in this case, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were ignoring the law
because of the success of urban renewal the land had becometoo valuable to be devoted to the ordinary aspirations of
ordinary people. In Boston I was assured by ProfessorReinhart Goethert that the median annual income is $23,000while the median house sale price is $186,000, an d while thesupply of rental housing at affordable rents dwindlescontinually.
There are winners an d losers in the remaking of the cities )and we have to ask ourselves continually Who Gains? Who {Loses? People here who are familiar with the British housing
scene will know that the rivate rental sector has been
declining through most of this c e n t u by now houseso rii"y- ll per cent of ~ o ! l s ~ h o l d s , and that we have a rather
crude duopoly oC housing with R er cent in owner
q ~ c u p a t i o n an d 27 per cent rented from local authorities. (I
believe that comparable figures for the United States as awhole would be 65 per centand 4 per cent with a much higher
figure for the survival of the private landlord in America.)In Britain the whole issue of housing has been a political
football kicked around between the two major parties, each ofwhich has a strongly held ideological stance, private or public.But to my mind by far the most significant innovations in
remaking cities in Britain in the last fifteen years have been
the exampIes of e l l e L : . . . ! l t r o l t h s i n g __ j !l j ia ! , : ~ springing up from below. Statistically they are insignificant.You could travel the length and breadth of British citieswithout even noticing their existence. But they have asignificance far beyond their numbers. Firstly because theyare examples of inner city poor: housing themselves, of the
remaking of cities from below. Secondly because theyexemplify the basic truth about housing, tirelessly stressed forat least 20 years by John Turner, who I am happy is here
today. Just in case he fails to stress it himself, let me repeat it
once again. Turner set it ou t thus many years ago:
When dwellers control the major decisions an d are free to make their
own contribution to the design, construction or management of their·
housing, bi"tth the_Pl:ocess.an d the. env.ir:onment produced stimulate
~ n d i v i d u a l and social wellbeing. When people have no control over,
120 TALKING HOUSES
nor responsibility for key decisions in the housing process, on the
other hand, dwelling environments may instead become a barrier to
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 121
Eldonian Community Association in Liverpool, who I am
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personal fulfilment an d a burden on the economy.9
Th e whole truth about housing, whether in the poor
countries of the southern half of the world or in the rich
countries of the north, is expressed in that utterance.
The third reason for the significance oftheiBritish examples
of city people housing themselves is important for this
conference: the direct involvement of architects with the
potential residents. Th e fourth reason is that, just as Turner
says, the process as well as the environment produced stimulate
individual an d social wellbeing. Glasgow is one of the
hardest-hit cities in Britain through the collapse of itstraditional heavy industries. I t is also a city with a huge
inheritance of publicly owned an d declining housing. I spent
half a lifetime gaining the impression that Glasgow
Corporation was one of the most heavily paternalistic of all in
its approach to its tenants. Yet the scene is changing most of
all in Glasgow with its large-scale sponsorship of "community
ownership" and of tenant co-operatives. Last year Glasgow's
then director of housing declared that
Ou r greatest resource is no t ou r 171,000 council houses, bu t the
tenants. The potential is there, waiting to be released.
He was right. It's one of the sad by-products of a century of
public housing in Britain that it has convinced not only the
professionals an d the politicians, bu t also the tenants
themselves, that they weren't capable of housing themselves .
When the potential is released - trying to bend the normal
systems of housing provision and finance to fit a different
conception of housing - people have even astonished
themselves . Thus 2 y ~ . o the ~ s k ~ t h Street Housing
Co-op i!!-Liverpool 8 says "We've proved to the Council and
G o v e r ~ f ! 1 e n t an d ~ . I ! y 1 . ? < ? d y else. li_ tening that ' if people are
given the reins, get the right help and are c o ~ m i t t e d , they can
come up with a really excellent, viable housing scheme that
people want to live in". The members of the Weller Streets
Co-op say the same thing. 1O Happily, here at this conference
you have the opportunity to meet Tony McGann of the
sure will tell you not only of the incredible political and
bureaucratic difficulties his association has had to combat. He
will, I am sure, stress that the successful establishment of a
housing co-operative is not the end, bu t the beginning of the
remaking of the city.
Several of the successful housing co-ops in British cities
have grown out of the squatters' movement. Thus the
Seymour Co-op in West London grew from a group of
squatters who "took on the management of short-life property
an d then evolved as they gained experience and confidence,into the promotion of long-life co-op s" 11 Similarly the Black
Roof Housing Co-operative in Lambeth in South London
evolved from a squat by people who were convinced that
housing allocation policy was discriminatory - surveys
conducted by the Commission for Racial Equality showed
that their conviction was correct. Jheni Arboine, Black Roofs
secretary says that
The days when white middle class people determined the needs of
black people are over so far as we are concerned. Groups like ours
are going some way toward destroying the "old boy network" thatexists in housing . . . Black people are now prepared to take on their
own housing problems and we no longer want or need white
missionary types to treat us like poor people with problems that
we're not capable of solving for ourselves. 12
We also have in Britain an emerging network of self-build
housing associations in the cities, not of affiuent people with
the usual access to credit who happen to have chosen this
particular method of housing provision, but of poor city
dwellers with very few options. Th e Zenzele Self-Build
Housing Association in Bristol was formed by twe lve people
unemployed, mostly unskilled an d aged round about 20 an d
black, who felt themselvesexcluded
fromnot
onlythe
officialhousing world, but that of the unofficial alternatives. Many
people here must have met the late Walter Segal, the architect
who developed a--system of light-weight timber construction
based on American balloon-frame housing, whose last
achievement was the Lewisham Self-Build Housing Associa
tion, promoted by the London Borough of Lewisham. Ken
122
Atkins of that association reflected on what he called the
"indescribable feeling that you finally have control over what
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you are doing" 13 Segal himself, in the con text of the universal
gloom about housing in Britain was overjoyed to have helped
to prove in the most convincing way imaginable "that there
is" (as he pu t it) "among the people that live in this country
such a wealth of talent", and he found it unbelievable that this
creativity continued to be denied an outlet.
I share this feeling. The examples I have mentioned arestatistically insignificant. They can be paralleled by similar
initiatives in the cities of the United States and other
countries. They have all experienced incredible difficulties
an d delays just in getting ou t of the ground. Yet they have all
been triumphant successes. Ou r task, I think, is to engineer
that huge shift in opinion that makes the direct participation
of ordinary citizens in the remaking of cities, the normal way
and not the remarkable exception.
References
1. Andrew Lees: Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and AmericanThought, 1820-1940 (Manchester University Press 1985)
2. Paul U. Kellogg (ed) The Pittsburgh Survey (Russell Sage Foundation
1909-1914)
3. Lees: op cit
4. Hamlin Garland, 1892, cited in Milton Meltzer: Bread and Roses (AlfredA. Knopf 1967)
5. Remaking Cities Conference Brochure 1988
6. Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King: The State and the City (Macmillan1987)
7. ibid
8. ibid
9. John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter: Freedom to Build: Dweller Cont?ol ofthe Housing Process (Macmillan 1972)
10 . Alan Macdonald: The Weller Way : The Story of he Weller Streets HousingCo -operative (Faber and Faber 1986)
II . See for example Colin Ward: When We BuildAgain, Let 's Have Housing thatWorks! (Pluto Press 1985, Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: f?ommunityArchitecture: How Peop le Are Creating Their Own Environment (Pengum 1987)
12. Roof Nov-Dec 1986
13. See Ward op cit
9. An AnarchistApproach to Urban
PlanningForty years ago, when the Rivista Volonta was edited in Naples
by my friends Giovanna Berneri an d Cesare Zaccaria, they
published an article about housing and planning by a young
architect Giancarlo De Carlo, which I laboriously and, no
doubt, inaccurately, translated for the English anarchist
journal Freedom.
Then, as now, anarchist propaganda has been impeded by
its insistence that nothing can happen until everything
happens . Th e destruction of both capitalism an d the state
were the prerequisites for the building of a free society. Th eproblem is that neither De Carlo nor me, nor the millions of
people actually involved, then or now, can actually wait for
these revolutionary changes. Ask yourself whether they are
nearer or further than they were forty years ago.
In looking for alternative approaches, he examined building
co-operatives, tenants' co-operatives, rent strikes, and
"squatting", the illegal occupation of empty houses. Now we
have seen over these 40 years since 1948 that everyone of
these techniques of direct action by poor citizens, whether in
Italy, Britain or the United States, has led to a wider
involvement in urban planning. And in the part that citizens
can demand.All those years ago, De Carlo went on to consider the
possible anarchist attitudes to town planning:
Address to ajoint seminar with Giancarlo De Carlo, of Co.s.A. (architectural
students' centre) and the Centro Studio Libertari G. Pinelli, Milan, 17
September 1988.
123
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126 TALKING HOUSES
poor. Planning is, in its effect on the socio-economic structure ahighly regressive form of indirect taxation.' '
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 127
The word "renewal" , having been discredited, is replaced
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there grew up a new 1960s ideology of "participation"
whIch was populist, socialist, an d to a small bu t important
extent, rediscovery, by people who had never heard of
anarchism, of anarchist values. On e of the most important
attempts to measure the actual worth of these e x e r c i s e ~ in
participati?n was made by an American planner, SherryArnstem, m what became known as Arnstein's Ladder of
Participation.6 The rungs of her ladder, climbing up from the
bottom, were:Citizen Control
Delegated,Power
PartnershipPlacation
ConsultationInforming
Therapy
Manipulation
Ihave
always found Arnstein'sLadder
a very usefulmeasuring-rod which enables us to get behind the barrage of
propaganda and decide whether any particular exercise in
"public participation" is merely manipulation or therapy, or
often deception (which found no place on Arnstein's ladder -
bu t should have done).
N a t ~ r a l l y the anarchist aim is the very top rung of
ArnsteIfo1's .Ladd er, that o f F ~ 1 l Citizen Control. It's something
worth. aImmg at, wh.atever kmd of society we live in. We may
not wm the economIC battles, bu t we can sometimes win the
environmental battles! There have been histories of success in
the cities of the United States, of Britain, an d ofItaly, as well
as exhausting failures.
But we do have to ask ourselves whether "participation"
was one of those words of the 1960s an d 1970s, which has been
quietly abandoned in the 1980s. You will know that the
governments of both Britain an d the United States, with their
ideology of the New Right, when they talk about the c i t i e ~ at
all, talk in terms of "partnership" of business an d government.
They do not speak of "participation" of ordinary citizens.
by new equivalents, like "regeneration" and "revitalisation" .
We are all invited to see the regeneration of the cities of the
United States. I was invited to a conference in Pittsburgh,
USA on the theme of "Remaking Cities" . There was one
speaker there, Alan Mallach of Ne w J ersey, who addressed
himself to the issue that concerns you an d me . He said,
The concept of a public/private partnership as a relationship, between two sectors - government and the private market - is
flawed by its exclusion of a third, essential actor - the residents of ''',the c o ~ m u n i t v affected. Self-congratulatory messages abut entrep- /reneunal successes and the proliferation of shiny downtown office lbuildings obscure the reality that many people do not benefit fromall this success, and many are deeply and permanently harmed.'
In other words, the battle for local citizen participation has to
be fought continually, everywhere. Giancarlo De Carlo was
right, all those years ago.
But there is a different aspect of the city that needs to be
discussed from an anarchist point of view. Anarchism has
shared ~ i t h other political ideologies of the Left, certain
assumptIOns about the growth of the modern industrial cityand the modern industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels,
whatev:r the virtues or defects of their concept of history,
based It on the first country, Britain, to experience the
industrial revolution: the mushroom growth of industrial
cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or Glasgow, and
the proletarianisation of the displaced peasantry and so on :
To fit the real world into this theory, they minimised the
survival of the English equivalent of the European peasant
economy,8 an d dismissed the huge small-workshop economy
as a tedious survival of the "petty trades" of the middle ages.
Kropotkin, in his book Fields, Factories and Workshops,
attempted to correct this view an d to remind us that the vastindustrial city was a temporary phenomenon, which
happened to begin in Britain. Thus he argued in 1899 t h a tdecentralisation was both inevitable an d desirable: '
The scatte:ing of industries over the country - so as to bring thef a c ~ o r y .amIdst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profitswhIch It always finds in being combined with industry and to
128 TALKING HOUSES
\ produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work - is
{ surely the next step to be taken . . . This step is imposed by the
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 129
One of these strategies wa s the decentralisation of industrial
production into a local, self-employed, small workshop
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necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of theirlives in manual work in the free air; and it will be rendered the morenecessary when the great social movements, which have nowbecome unavoidable, come to disturb the present internationaltrade, and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for herown maintenance. 9
Now K r o p ~ t k i n was, like me, an optimist. Bu t he ha d grasped
a big truth about the industrial city an d about industrial
employment.
About the industrial city, Kropotkin's contemporary, the
Garden City pioneer, Ebenezer Howard, declared in 1904 that
I venture to suggest that while the age in which we live is the age ofthe great closely-compacted city, there are already signs, for thosewho can read them, of a coming change so great and so momentousthat the twentieth century will be known as the period of the greatexodus . . . 0
Whether or not it happened in the way that Howard
anticipated, ordinary demographic statistics of British cities
support his view. A British economist, Victor Keegan,
remarked a few years ago that
the most seductive theory of all is that what we are experiencing nowis nothing less than a movement back towards an informal economvafter a brief flirtation of 200 years or so with a formal one. I
Th e huge industrial city, the vast concentrated factory with
its army of the proletariat, are a brief episode in the history of
cities, in the history of production an d in the history of work.
You have only to visit the dying industrial cities of Britain or
the United States to become convinced of this.
We have a characteristic Anglo-American divide in
discussing this particular Italian economic miracle. Fo r
example, a British author, Fergus Murray, provides anabsorbing account of the recent changes in Italian industry
with the explanation that
In the late 1960s labour militancy in many Italian industriesreached levels that directly threatened firm profitability, and
management undertook a series of strategies designed initially toreduce the disruptiveness of militant workers.12
economy. So we ca n see this whole recent evolution as a
conspiracy by the ca p italists.
Predictably the same industrial changes were seen quite
differently from the United States. Th e American architect
Richard Hatch, whom both Giancarlo De Carlo an d I
remember as a pioneer of participatory planning in that
toughest of all environments, Harlem, New York/ 3 w r ~ t e much more recently that, .
A new form of urban industrial production in Italy is giving newmeaning to its historical form. I t is based on a large number of verysmall, flexible enterprises that depend on broadly skilled workersand multiple-use, automated machinery . Essentially intermediateproducers, they link together in varying combinations and patterns
to perform complex manufacturing tasks for widening markets .These firms combine rapid innovation with a high degree of
democracy in the workplace . They tend to congregate in mixed-useneighbourhoods where work and dwelling are integrated. Their
growth has been the objective of planning policy, architecturalinterventions, and municipal investment, with handsome returns insustained economic growth and lively urban centres. 14
Well of course, lively urban centres are one of the aims of
the urban planning profession, an d which it has been
singularly unskilled in providing, ever since the 1940s. Those
of us who ar e concerned with urban planning have every
reason to observe what is happening in Italy.
There was, fo r example, an Italo-American anarchist, the
late George Benello, who found in the "industrial renaiss
ance" of north-eastern an d central Italy,.a model that worked, creating in less than three decades, nothundreds but literally hundreds of thousands of small scale firms,out-producing conventionally run factories, and providing work
which called forth skill, responsibility, and artistry from itsdemocratically organised workforces .15
I learn from the same source, that Benello w<is
amazed at the combination of sophisticated design and productiontechnology with human scale work-life, and by the extent and
diversity of integrated and collaborative activity within thisnetwork. Small cities, such as Modena, had created "artisan
130 TALKING HOUSES
villages" - working neighbourhoods where production facilitiesand living quarters were within walking or bike range, where
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 131
entrepreneurs, or to drop out of industrial work almost
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technical schools for the unemployed fed directly into newly createdbusinesses, and where small firms using computerized techniques,banded together to produce complex products.16
By this point I am sure that many people here, whether
they are anarchists, workers, or urban planners, will be
acutely embarrassed at the idealised picture I have given youof Italia artigianata an d will complain that daily reality has
little relation to this view. Well, I have to embarrass you one
stage further, since my subject is an anarchist approach to
urban planning. George Benello's own conclusion was that
Italy has taught the world perhaps more than any other nationabout urban life and urban form. Once again it is in the forefront,creating a new economic order, based on the needs of the city and onhuman scale. 17
, Now, even making allowances for sentimental Anglo-
/ American I talophilia, there is a sense in which this comment
is absolutely true. Go, not to the cities of northern Italy, bu t to
those of Britain an d the United States, an d you will certainlyfind the ruins of a factory culture of monopolistic employers
who have fled or diversified, an d of work-forces dependentI upon social security . ha bd-outs, or upon the various
: alternatives to work devised for British or American cities:
)
garden festivals, museums of oUJ industrial heritage, or
shopping malls and aquaria. Anything,- Tn - fact, except the
opportunity to be involved in productive work.
Comparing the experience of ca r workers in, say Coventry
or Birmingham, and Turin, I was told by a British historian
that in ' English factories, a third generation of skilled
industrial workers have been "moulded in worker-resistance
toindustrial capitalism", knowing nothing except employ
ment for big capitalists, whereas in Torino, with its high
"generation-turnover" of new industrial workers from the
South, the artisans an d peasants who moved north were no t
"crushed by factory capitalism", an d have consequently founq
it easier to become self-employed workers, or members of
co-operatives or employees of small-scale, high-technology
completely and pick up a living from small-scale horticulture.
Now we anarchists are not Marxists. We belong to a
different tradition from the one which saw the steam-engine
and the consequent concentration of industrial production as
the ultimate factor in human history. We belong to a different
tradition which includes, for example, Proudhon's faith in the
self-governing workshop and Kropotkin's concern with thedecentralisation of production an d its combination with
horticulture.
It is our tradition which corresponds more closely to the
actual experience, both of our grandparents and of our
grandchildren. One of the people from a different tradition
who has thought seriously about this issue is Andre Gorz, who
argues that the political Left has been refrigerated in
authoritarian collectivist attitudes that belong to the past . Hesays that
As long as the protagonists of socialism continue to make centralisedplanning the lynch pin of their programme, and the adherence ofeveryone to the "democratically formulated" objectives of their planthe core of ' their political doctrine, socialism will remain anunattractive proposition in industrial societies. Classical socialistdoctri?e finds it difficult to come to terms with political and socialp l ~ r a h s m , understood not simply as a plurality of parties and tradeu m o n ~ ~ u t as t h ~ e x i . s t ~ n c e of various ways of working, producingand hvmg, vanous dIstmct cultural areas and levels of social~ x i s t e n c e .: . Yet this kind of pluralism precisely conforms to thehved expenence and aspirations of the post-industrial proletariat aswell as the major part of the traditional worki,ng class . S ' •
Now this would be perfectly well understood in the urban
fringe of Torino, or of Modena or Bologna or in all the
workshop-villages of Emilia-Romagna , or , I imagine, here inMilano.
An d of course it has its implications in the world of thephysical planning of the environment. It implies a plan which
is modest, tentative and flexible, which assumes dweller contro l
as the first principle of housing an d which also assumes that
the householder has access to a garden, whether this garden is
used for horticulture or as a playspace for the children, or as a
workshop or a commercial asset. An d I take it for granted that
there is a nursery an d ajunior school close at hand, and room
132 TALKING HOUSES
for self-governing workshops all around. These are such
simple demands that even as anarchists in a society which is
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) hostile to anarchism, we should be able to achieve them!
References
1. Giancarlo De Carlo "The Housing Problem in Italy Freedom 12June and19 June 1948.
2. Colin Ward Housing: An Anarchist Approach (Freedom Press 1976, 1983).
3. Johnston Birchall Building Communities, The Co-operative Way (Routledge &Kegan Paul 1988).
4. Robert Goodman After the Planners (Simon & Schuster 1972) Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House 1961).
5. John Gower Davies The Evangelistic Bureaucrat (Tavistock Publication1972).
6. Sherry R. Arnstein "A Ladder of Citizen Participation in the USA"
Journal of the American Institute of Planners July 1969.
7. Alan Ma llach, talking on the final da y of the "Remaking Cities"Conference organised by the Ame rican Institute of Architects and the RoyalInsti tute of British Architects, Benedum Theatre, Pittsburgh, 5 March1988.
8. Mick Reed "The Peasantry of Nineteenth-Century England : a NeglectedClass?" History Workshop: a journal of socialist and femin ist historians No 18,
Autumn 1984.
9. Peter Kropotk in Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898), Campi, fabbriche,
officine (Edizione Ant istato 1974) .
10. Ebenezer Howard, at the London School of Economics 18July 1904.
II . See Co lin Ward "Anarchism and the informal economy" The Raven No
1, 1987.
12. Fergus Murray "The Decentralisation of Production - the Decline of
the Mass-Collective Worker?" in R. E. Pahl (ed) On Work: Historical,Comparative and Theoretical App roaches (Basil Blackwell 1988).
13. C. Richard Hatch Associates Planning for Change (Ginn & Co andArchitects' Renewal Committee for Harlem 1969)
14. C. Richard Hatch "Italy's Industrial Renaissance: Are American CitiesReady to Learn?" Urban Land January 1985.
15. C. George Benello, quoted in Changing work: a magazine about liberatingworklife No 7, Winter 1988.
16 Len Krimerman "C . George Benello: architect of liberating work" inChanging Work ibid.
17. C . George Benello, quoted, ibid.
18. Andre Gorz Farewell to the Working Class: an essay on post-industrial socialism(Pluto Press 1982).
10. Being Local
TWo years ago I was flattered to be asked to address the
annual conference of the Association of Community TechnicalAid Centres in the Pre-Raphaelite grandeur of Manchester
Town Hall. I chose to talk about the stolen vocabulary,
referring to the fact that there are resonant phrases such as
"self-help" an d "mutual aid" which described the endless
series of organisations like friendly societies, building
sodeties, sick clubs, coffin clubs, clothing clubs an d huge
enterprises like the co-operative movement and the trade
union movement, created from nothing in the 19th century by
the organised working class in Britain.
My argument was that worship of the machinery of the
state had led the political Left, from Fabians to Marxists, todespise this popular an d humble inheritance in favour of the
provision of everything by the state and its bureaucracy. The
political right had ridden into power on a wave of populist
sentiment about 'i freeing the people from the heavy hand of
the state" an d so on.
The current ruling party were picking up a language, I
called it the stolen vocabulary, which the Left had discarded
on their way to their version of the socialist utopia. Th e
political right at the same time has ensured, to the absolute
joy of the top civil servants of the state, that the sphere oflocal
decision-making in politics has been reduced to an incredible
extent. They were of course following a well-known Labour
Party precedent. Th e Fabians in their early days were derided
as gas-and-water socialists.It's an irony that today the last thing any councillor has any
Keynote address to the conJerence on Technical Aid and Future Partnership oj
the Association oj Community Technical Ai d Centres, at the Oval House
Theatre, Kennington, London SE1, 12 July 1988.
133
I
13+ TALKING HOUSES
control of is gas an d water. In a very interesting article in New
Statesman and Society for 17 June, Steve Platt points to the
observations of Don Simpson, borough housing
BEING LOCAL
the concept of a pu blic / private partnership between two sectors -government and the private market - is flawed by its e ~ c l u s i o n of athird essential actor - the residents of the commumty affected.
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) officer forRochdale.
Simpson made a list of the functions of his own authority back in1906, none of which remain the council's responsibility today. Theseincluded the police service, highways and tramways, water supplyand drainage, gas manufacture and distribution and electricitygeneration and distribution.
He could have gone further, bu t my point is that most of
these responsibilities were taken away from his borough, not
by the ogress Thatcher, bu t by Labour governments, yearsago.
And what happens to Labour politicians when they make
their mark in local government? All through this century -and the list is overwhelming - they move on to the House of
Commons in the hope of becoming part of the next central
government, an d its endlessly centralising process. The most
recent harvest, obviously, includes people like David
Blunkett, Bernie Grant or Ken Livingstone. Th e last example
was particularly interesting to outside advocates of cooperative housing like me, since there was an obvious plot todispose of the sitting Labour member in this safe seat, RegFreeson, about whom I know nothing except that he was theonly minister responsible for housing throughout my lifetime,to have the slightest understanding of what co-op housing isabout an d why it is important.
Now, I have the good luck to be an anarchist, with abuilt-in hostility towards politicians. I don't suffer fromdisillusionment because I don't have any illusions about
them. I believe in using them as far as we can, because I knowthat they have no hesitation about using us.
This conference, for example, is called "Technical Aid /Future Partnership", partnership being a word in vogue at the
moment. I went earlier this year, at the expense of my hosts,to a conference at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Remaking
Cities, an d I heard this word partnership continually used by
speakers from both sides of the Atlantic. For me the last word
was said by Alan Mallach of New Jersey, who remarked that
S e l f - ~ o n g r a t u l a t o r y messages about entrepreneurial successes andthe proliferaton of shiny downtown office buildin$s obscure thereality that many people do not benefit from all thIS success, andmany are deeply and permanently harmed.
You and I know this truth all too well, an d I just hope that
we are cunning enough to exploit the chinks in the armour of
the politicians. Let's for example, make use of the present
government's Housing Bill, knowing that behind the scenes inthe Department of the Environment, and in the Housing
Corporation, there are people trying to make it useful for us.You don't have to support them: just use them.
I absolutely deplore the tendency to blame everything on
the present cynical bunch of office-holders. For example, if
there were a magical change of government tomorrow, would
you actually want to re-instate the Greater London Council?Would you reverse the forthcoming break-down of the Inner
London Education Authority? Or would you be localists and
urge us to learn from the evolution of Switzerland?
In that particular ancient democracy the supreme body isthe Commune, usually far smaller than any London borough,
which runs its own affairs and levies taxes. Grudgingly it pays
over an agreed sum to the Canton, with severe reservations,and the Canton, after referendums, pays a minimal revenue tothe Federal Council, which of course endlessly grumbles
about the mean-spiritedness of the Communes and Cantons.
Nobody has ever heard of a Swiss Prime Minister, since such
an office doesn't really exist. The equivalent is the person
currently in the chair of the Federal Council, whose powersare minimal an d are usually rotated among members. It's likebeing in the chair of the parish council: a necessary chore that
has to be endured rather than welcomed.I've never been told that Switzerland is an unsuccessful
democracy, and I mention the Swiss example for two reasons.Th e first is that it is an absolute reversal of our British
centralist image, loved by politicians of right and left alike.For when British councils collect their Community Charge
136 TALKING H O U S E ~
they will find that they are still dependent on central
government for the greater part of their revenue. Centralism,
an attitude taken totally for granted by our politicians of all
- - - - - - - - ~ - - - - - -
BEING LOCAL 137
the ground-swell of popular activism springing up from below.
Th e obvious comment on this is that the ground isn't
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parties, isn't affected by changes in local income. I adore
Switzerland just because it is a nation that contradicts
everything that is taken for granted here.
Yly second reason for mentioning Switzerland is because it
provides a warning that local self-government is no guarantee
that attitudes cherished by people like you an d me arecherished there. I'm open to correction, bu t I don't believe
that that particular country has a good record on issues like
sexism, racism, or the rights of immigrants, the disaffected
young or the otherwise undesirable.
Having the right political system is no guarantee that
you're going to get the right social attitudes. Bu t this very fact
reminds us that we can't wait for the electoral racket to swing
our way. We have to pursue the ideas that are important for
us without regard for who is in power. But this implies using
every loophole in their legislation for our purposes. In exactly
the same way, of course, that other interest groups in society
employ lawyers to scrutinise every clause an d sub-clause in
the statutes.
It is quite important to realise that, in spite of the way we
talk about it, government is not monolithic. Whether we are
talking about politicians, administrators or Quangos, it
contains people who within their field, are concerned to
promote particular interests that happen to be ours, in making
the legislation work. People in this audience who are
"inside-dopesters" know, for example, that inside the
Department of the Environment, are people plotting to make
the Housing Bill work effectively for housing co-operatives, or
that insiqe the Housing Corporation there are people plotting
to pu t tqgether what they undoubtedly will call a financial
package or partnership of public an d private finance to make
self-build housing a feasible option for poor people as well as
relatively affluent an d secure people.
What should the attitude of community activists be towards
these officially-salaried allies? I have heard their initiatives
described as an attempt to co-opt an d contain, even to defuse,
noticeably swelling, an d it is equally feasible to see these
straws in the wind as a governmental attempt to prod the
ground into swelling.
Because there is a political no-person's-land which Mrs
Thatcher and her advisers are colon sing from the Right, and
which you an d I are colonising from the Left. Don't be
disconcerted about this. Th e wilderness is a good place to be,just because it's a location for initiative, experiment, wild
hopes an d lost causes. Without much effort on my part, bu t
with my willing co-operation, my address to your Manchester
conference, about the stolen vocabulary, was printed in
various forms in a variety of journals: The Guardian, a liberal
newspaper, The Raven, an anarchist quarterly, The Bulletin of
Environmental Education, a publication for teachers, an d The
Chartist a bi-monthly journal of one, among many, factions in
the Labour Party. I haven't yet been approached by the
Salisbury Review or by Marxism Today, bu t I never turn down
the chance of a different audience. All I was doing was voicing
an interpretation of history which is becoming increasinglypopular.
I rejoice in this because I know that the Thatcher period
won't last for ever, an d because its very arrogant extremism
has obliged a lot of people to think again about their own
political attitudes. It's like the effect of the Blitz in 1940 in
destroying our much-loved British slums. The problem is that
it might have the same results. Planners (whether physical,
economic or social) ma y say, "Thatcher's bombs have done
more for us than years of government reports". They may
envisage a post-Thatcher reconstruction based on large-scale
urban renewal just as we had in the wake of the real Blitz.
You an d I, in between garnering what we can from current
legislation (since as we all know, everyone involved in the
so-called voluntary sector spends most of his or her time,
sniffing around the official sector for grants and loans),
between all this, are involved in redefining community action,
rebuilding an ideology oflocalism an d local responsibility. In
1994, ten years after Orwell, we will be coping with local
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140 TALKING HOUSES
autonomous activity based on self-help and mutual aid in the
past.
Ou r contemporary dependence on decisions made in
BEING LOCAL 141
members for two years to negotiate their way through sources
of finance. A site was obtained from the local authority with a
provisional loan from the Housing Corporation. A very
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Whitehall is the direct result of a century of faith in
governmental politics which made local and popular
initiatives irrelevant. We can't undo this instantly. We have to
exploit every chink an d loophole, every way of working our
way into the system that is imposed from above. This is what
we are discussing today as "Future Partnership".As always, there are people around who will say, "But effort
like this doesn't touch the real homeless", the implication
being that the policies they recommend actually do. So I have
to mention the experience of the forlorn Yorkshire port of
Hull. Forty-seven per cent of the housing stock there belongs
to the council, yet at least 3,500 families are officially
described as homeless, an d this minimal figure ignores the
young, single an d footloose, an d all those teenagers obliged to
leave home after a marriage breakdown or a family row, or
because to stay in the parental home is for one reason or
another, intolerable.
In 1985 young, unemployed Reg Salmon borrowed enough
in small loans from trusting friends to get a mortgage on a
small house which, together, they set about renovating. With
that house as security they got a bank loan to buy a second
house. Then, with the help of Humberside Co-operative
Development Agency, they set up a building co-operative,
Giroscope Ltd, whose other directors were also under 25 and
unemployed. Th e aims of the co-operative are "the purchase,
renovation, modernisation an d furnishing of houses in poor
condition", and "the renting out of these houses to
unemployed people an d to other disadvantaged groups such
as single parents and disabled people". When I last met them
at the end of 1988, the co-operative owned eight houses
accommodating about 30 young unemployed people an d 4children .
In Bristol, the Zenzele Self-Build Housing Association was
formed by 12 unemployed young people, mostly black,
unskilled and aged around 20. It was inspired by a local
magistrate, Stella Clarke, an d a steering group helped the
important agreement was won from the DSS that the
members would work on their two-storey block of 12 flats
while continuing to draw social security payments. An
individual mortgage for each member was provided by the
Bristol and West Building Society and a general foreman was
engaged to train the members an d supervise the work.It took 14 months for the members to build their flats,
longer than was expected, as some members got jobs and
could only work in the evenings an d at weekends. All the
members eventually found work, mostly as a result of the skills
they had acquired. They inspired several other ventures. InBirmingham, for example, Abdul Bahar of the Neejesshow
Self Build Housing Association says,
We visited the Zenzele scheme and were inspired by what we saw.We came away thinking, those people did something, so why can'twe? This will be the first activity of its kind in the Bengalicommunity - it hasn't happened before because we lackedinformation and proper advice.
In the last twenty years, with the steady decline of the
public housing industry under governments of both political
complexions, we have seen a slow growth in the interstices of
the sterile duopoly of owner-occupation versus council
housing, and in the face of an increasingly hostile financial
climate, of a rich variety of new experiments an d initiatives.
My biggest fear is that when we actually get a change of
government, this experience will be swept away as
unimportant. We'll go back to the notorious numbers game of
the 1950s when the politicians rivalled each other in telling us
how many hundreds of thousands of houses they intended to
build. I actually fear the political approach to housing that I
have heard all my life, with all the . talk about "treating
housing like a military operation" an d the usual faith in
large-scale mass solutions, with big contracts for the big
contractors, an d with the dismissal of the idea that the
occupants should be involved in housing themselves as some
142 TALKING HOUSES
kind of sentimental time-consuming side-issue that we can't
waste time on.
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Bluff, realistic chaps will pose for the photographers,
wearing yellow hard hats with Wimpey or Barrett stencilled
on top, an d will tell the TV interviewers, "What the homeless
need is a roof over their heads, an d we are going all out to
provide it. All the resources of modern high-tech industry are
being brought to bear on the problem." They will peddle a
mass solution, just as they always have in the past.
What I want to see is not a mass solution, bu t a mass of
small, local, small-scale solutions that draw upon the
involvement, the ability an d the ingenuity of people
themselves . There will be muddle an d confusion, duplication
of effort, wasted cash an d misappropriation offunds. But what
makes you think this hasn't happened in the days of big,
public solutions? I t will be nothing compared with the
enormous waste of money an d resources in the mass housing
drives of the 50s an d 60s, an d the residue of misery and
disillusion that they have left behind. This is one of the
hard-won lessons of a century of housing history.
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IN
ACTION
by Colin Ward
The author in his new introduction to the third printingwrites:
"This book was no t intended fo r people who hadspent a lifetime pondering the problems of anarchism,but for people who either had no idea of what the
word implied, or knew exactly what it implied and
rejected it , considering that it had no relevance fo r
the modern world.
My original preference as a title was the more
cumbersome bu t more accurate 'Anarchism as aTheory of Organisation' because, as I urge in my
preface, that is what the book is about. It is no t about
strategies fo r revolution and it is no t involved in
speculation on the wayan anarchist society ,would
function. It is no t about the ways in which people
organise themselves in any kind of human society,
whether we care to categorise those societies asprimitive, traditional, capitalist or communist ...152 pages ISBN 0 900384 £5.00