From the Works in Progress newsletter, February 27:
A decade of Art Deco densification
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Between 1934 and 1939, at least 56,000 flats were built privately in London in over 300 blocks, the most significant period of such development before the 21st century. This boom started suddenly, after decades in which few private flats were constructed, and ended with the outbreak of war. It is almost entirely written out of history books including specialist housing tomes – as it was so at odds with the dominant planning ethos of the time, influenced as it was by the Garden City movement.
High density urban settings were seen at the time as synonymous with poor living conditions and the house, garden and town were emphasised as optimal. This was, after all, the era of the suburb and mass owner-occupation, when more than 300,000 mostly semi-detached homes were built speculatively each year on the edge of prosperous British cities, particularly London and in the Midlands.
Unlike the late Victorian mansion blocks – which had overwhelmingly been aimed at the upper-middle and upper classes and built in what are now the boroughs of Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Camden – these 1930s flats were more numerous, if more spread out. They appeared in a far wider range of areas and were designed for a much broader set of budgets, with almost 17,000 of them in Outer London. Private ‘luxury’ flats also appeared in the main cities outside London for the first time, notably in then-affluent Birmingham. As owning apartments individually was almost unknown at this time outside of Scotland, they were usually held by the investors that had financed them and rented out.
The rise of the flat
The purpose-built flat (historically ‘tenement’ if working class and ‘apartment’ if upmarket) has a short history in England. Although model tenements aimed at manual workers appeared slightly earlier – and in significant numbers in Merseyside and London – it was not until the mid-19th century that the first privately built blocks of flats were built in the capital, firstly around Victoria Street in Westminster and then further afield. The apartment was, by then, already well-established as an aspirational housing form in most cities on the continent, as well as in Scotland. Only the Low Countries displayed a similar aversion to this ‘horizontal living’.The earliest examples in Edinburgh predate those in London by over two centuries: there are several still surviving in the Old Town which date from the 17th century. A geographically constrained site, a more unruly countryside, and a land system which enforced an in perpetuity charge to the original landowner (the ‘feu’) encouraged higher, more dense development. Once these patterns were established in the Scottish capital, they became the norm in other Scottish cities as they developed, particularly as Scottish law from an early date enabled the purchase of parts of buildings, a notable difference with south of the border. The tenement became the urban housing form in Scotland, with similar facades hiding both grand middle-class apartments and overcrowded working-class rooms; there was much less distinction of housing by appearance. (As late as 1966, some 8 percent of all dwellings in England & Wales had been originally designed to share a common building; in Scotland the figure was 51 percent. Indeed, when Scotland did suburbanise, bungalows were unusually popular, reflecting the custom of one-storey living).
In contrast, English cities mostly lost their defensive function much earlier and suburbs with houses sprang up from the 18th century onwards. Many of these were developed on the great landed estates, such as Grosvenor and Bedford, which were often constrained in their ability to sell land by ‘strict settlement’. This aimed to prevent individual benefactors from selling land, to ensure the estate could be passed on to subsequent generations intact. This meant development proceeded by granting builders such as Thomas Cubitt a ‘building lease’ for a set period of time, after which the ownership would revert to the estate....
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