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



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



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



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





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 whichhas 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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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."



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



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



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



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

- --



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



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



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



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

(\



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-

(


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



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.

(


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).



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,



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



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



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



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



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 .



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


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



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


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



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.



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


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



;

.-'

(/

--)

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


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



, ~ ~ ~ ' . ~ ' , ~

-.. - - ~ )

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


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



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.

81



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.

84 TALKING HOUSES 85



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

86 TALKING HOUSES ANARCHY OR ORDER? 87



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

88 TALKINGHOUSES ANARCHY OR ORDER? 89.



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

\




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




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




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.



98 TALKING HOUSES

II



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

100 TALKING HOUSES FREEDOM AND TH E BUILT ENVIRO!,[MENT 101



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

100 TALK INC HOUSES FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIROl'fMENT 101



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



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



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



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 '\



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

1lO TALKING HOUSES FREEDOM AND TH E BUILT ENVIRONMENT I I I



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



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



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



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


: ~ 1 emptying rent-controlled housing for redevelopment. Just



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


Eldonian Community Association in Liverpool, who I am



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



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



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



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


One of these strategies wa s the decentralisation of industrial

production into a local, self-employed, small workshop



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


entrepreneurs, or to drop out of industrial work almost



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



) 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.



) 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



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



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



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.



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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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

Documents

Ward, Colin - Talking Houses, Ten Lectures by Colin Ward