Post-war social housing
already proven to be unsustainable, with millions living in squalid conditions, often with multiple families sharing two-story terraced houses (McInnes, 2019). All over London, large areas of poor quality Victorian terraced housing were designated as slums. As a result, it became apparent that the government needed to intervene in the housing market in order to facilitate the building of a substantial number of new homes: to replace those lost in the war, improve the existing stock in central areas of big cities (above all London) and build new housing for Britain’s growing population. This decision by Attlee’s Labour government coincided with, and was a part of, the new welfare state. The foundation of the welfare state had many roles in changing and restoring British society post-war. Kenneth Frampton, architectural historian, asserts that ‘ the class divisions which so bitterly divided the country . . . came to be partially alleviated by the welfare provisions of the Attlee Labour government ’ (Frampton, 1980 (A)). One of the core ideas of social housing was that new developments should be mixed tenure, providing homes for people and families from different backgrounds. This would help to deconstruct the rigid class structure which was so prevalent in the UK at the time, which reduced social mobility and resulted in a deeply unequal society. By removing one class barrier – that people of different classes tended to live in different, separate areas – the government could begin to reduce the concept as a whole.
In the decades after the war, the population in the capital began to shift from the centre to the outer regions, as shown in figure 1. As a result, considerable new development was needed to provide homes for the new families living in these areas. While in the centre, the predominant problem was the inadequate
Fig. 1: London's population over time ( Trust for London)
conditions of the existing housing stock, in the outer boroughs the problem was a lack of housing altogether. This coincided with Abercro mbie’s plan to take traffic away from the centre of the city, instead using a system of ring roads to move the stress points within the city (Sutcliffe, 2006).
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