March 28, 2024 – Social Housing in Britain Between the Wars

Speaker: Simon Pepper, Architect and Historian, Emeritus Chair of Architecture at the University of Liverpool

Interlocutor: Andrew Saint, Author & General Editor, the Survey of London

In the 1920s and 1930s Britain’s urban landscape was transformed by vast low-rise suburban housing developments and, in the inner-city, by multi-storey projects replacing slums on a scale far exceeding the efforts of Victorian or Edwardian city councils and philanthropists. It would be transformed again after 1945 in response to wartime bomb damage and the opportunity this presented for a fundamental re-think. Our focus will be on London and Liverpool between the wars, with sideways glances to the wartime developments which bookend the period. We will visit projects for munitions workers built during World War I at Well Hall (near London’s Woolwich arsenal) and Gretna (Scotland) and which served as prototypes for much that followed; the London County Council (LCC) developments at Becontree (1920s) and the White City (late 1930s); Liverpool’s “New Town” at Speke(planned before 1939 but finished after 1945). Inner city redevelopments with ambitioussocial or technical agendas include the experimental LCC high-rise project at OssulstonStreet (1920s) and the modernist Kensal House (built as employee housing for London’s largest gas company). We will end with a pre-view of the post-1945 social housing that emerged from the LCC’s reconstruction plan (1940-43) masterminded by Patrick Abercrombie.