The suburbanization of the working‐class population of Liverpool between the wars

Abstract

Very few council houses were built in Britain before the introduction of housing subsidies in I9I9. In 1914 the vast majority of families 90 per cent rented their homes from private landlords and only i per cent of houses were publicly owned. Between the wars, however, local authorities in Britain became major suppliers of new housing and over a million subsidized houses were built; by 1939 the public sector accounted for io per cent of the country's housing stock. This unprecedented growth in council housing led to the creation of a new social phenomenon, the low-density, suburban council housing estate; local authorities, in accepting their role as large-scale house builders, took as their model the garden city movement. The standard of working-class housing rose and the urban landscape was transformed as thousands of families moved away from crowded inner-city areas to new low-density residential districts on the urban fringes. This paper examines the suburbanization of Liverpool's working-class population between the wars, a city which rehoused roughly I40,000 people, 15 per cent of its total population, in 33,355 new suburban houses during this period. An overview of inter-war housing legislation is given and then Liverpool's housing policy is analysed to determine the effect suburban council house building has had on working-class housing standards and the extent to which the quantity and quality of the houses reflected changes in policy. The social, economic and familial characteristics of the new suburbanites are investigated to establish which members of the community benefited from the various inter-war Housing Acts, designed to cater for different sections of the community. The new tenants' living standards are assessed, especially how they coped with their move away from highly urbanized areas to outlying districts.