London County Council Research Articles

Herbert Morrison: the making of a politician

The article is devoted to the early stages of the political biography of Herbert Morrison, a British politician and one of the most prominent representatives of the Labour Party in its entire history. The author tells about the origin, family, education and the formation of socio-political views of the future leader of the Labor Party. Further, the development of Morrison’s political career is consistently characterized, including his work in the party and municipal bodies of London, in the House of Commons, in the British government (1929-1931), as well as Leader of the London County Council (1934-1940).

Water Supply and the Hygiene of the Poorest in G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion

ABSTRACT In Pygmalion, Shaw describes Eliza as extremely dirty. This article examines Shaw’s views on hygiene for the poorest in Pygmalion, those who were increasingly marginalized in modernizing London in the early 1910s. First, the article examines improvements in London in the first decades of the 1900s. Then, it explores the water schemes of two organizations: the London County Council in the 1890s and the Metropolitan Water Board in the 1900s up to the 1910s. The LCC’s schemes were deeply entangled with the Fabian Society, of which Shaw was a lifelong member. Examining the LCC’s proposals for water municipalization, this article argues that Shaw imbued Pygmalion with social criticism. With his descriptions of the short supply of water in Eliza’s lodgings, which resulted in her unhygienic body and clothing, Shaw ironically dramatized the problematic boundaries of class and gender identity in a social order commonly regarded as natural and even genuine.

A road scheme, the state, and the détournement of urban space: Henri Lefebvre and competing publics in postwar Hyde Park, London

Henri Lefebvre develops the term, détournement, to help analyse how certain events can make urban spaces more ‘plastic’ and uncertain and thus more readily malleable for appropriation by groups and organisations. In the literature, however, there has less been discussion about how events of détournement can lead to often intense dialogue and internal divisions within and between state departments, and between the state and groups in civil society about how these uncertain spaces can be moulded strategically to suit certain agendas and projects. This paper starts to fill this scholarly gap by applying Lefebvre's insights to examine the Park Lane Road Improvement Scheme in London, 1955–1962. This road scheme built a dual carriageway system between Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch and unintentionally generated a moment of détournement in the surrounding spaces. The paper explores how four distinct publics emerged around the road scheme to discuss and elicit support for their respective agendas on how these uncertain spaces might be ‘stabilised’ once more. The four publics were: a ‘civic public’ assembled by the London County Council; a ‘local amenities public’ created by the Royal Fine Arts Commission; a ‘national heritage public’ assembled by the Ministry of Works; and a ‘free speech public’ constructed by defenders of Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. The paper demonstrates how a road scheme can generate competing claims to publicness, which not only incorporate the state, but also open up strategic opportunities for progressive movements to extend and develop their rights to the city.

Dockers in Poplar: The Legacy of the London County Council’s Replanning of Poplar, East London

Using Sydney Harpley’s sculpture, <em>The Dockers</em>,<em> </em>installed in Trinity Gardens on the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, this article will examine the London County Council’s reimagining of a key centre in London’s East End. Installed in September 1962, these <em>Dockers</em> sit within the post-war planned vision of the capital and are, as Frank Mort describes, “cultural visions” of a new London. For hundreds of years, Poplar served as part of the Port of London’s industrial heartland. After the Second World War, the London County Council assumed the River Thames would continue to be the heartbeat of Britain’s industry. The Port of London was the country’s largest and busiest port. The London County Council recognised that, in London, the most depressed and congested areas with bad housing housed working people. However, by referencing one part of the culture of this part of London, the London County Council was relying on a homogeneity of experience, difficult to defend in 1960s London. Using the initial reception of <em>The Dockers</em>,<em> </em>as well as the sculpture’s subsequent vandalism and destruction, this article shall analyse how the London County Council’s vision for post-war Poplar changed through the rapid deindustrialisation of the 1980s, through to the rapid gentrification of the area in the 21st century.

Social Housing Provision in Rural Areas: Lessons learned from a Historic Analysis of Council House Building in a Small Town in Rural England

History shows that one successful method of addressing poverty and inequality is by providing social housing. In England during its post war peak, local authorities, such as borough, urban and rural district councils, built thousands of “council” houses. The common perception of the “council” estate is of huge developments such as in Beacontree built by the London County Council, but construction took place on a smaller scale in rural districts and much can be learned from studying how social housing was provided in these areas. Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire is an excellent example of council housing provision before and after WW2. Archival data was used to analyze and evaluate the council house-building program from 1919 to 1953. Beginning in 1919 with 10 workers cottages built under the powers of the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 and ending in 1953 with the erection of 164 “Wimpey” no-fines concrete houses, the Wycombe Rural District Council built 790 dwellings. By the time of the 1961 Census after the WRDC postwar building program effectively ended in 1953 council houses accoutned for about 40% of the homes in the town and the population doubled since 1921. Records show construction of the dwellings helped develop a thriving local construction economy fueled by procurement with local builders, constructing as few as two units. Only toward the end of the building period were contracts let in large quantities when non-traditional construction methods were adopted.

London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness, by Robert Ellis

Reviewed by: London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness by Robert Ellis Leslie Topp (bio) London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness, by Robert Ellis; pp. viii + 296. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $89.00 ebook. Scholars of Victorian asylums are often faced with archival and primary sources that are if anything too rich and interesting: case notes, daily logs, photographs, and inspectors' reports that bring these immense institutions to life in all their problematic human complexity. Robert Ellis, by contrast, has been brave enough to tackle a very different set of sources, much drier and more impenetrable. London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness is not, despite its title, directly concerned with the British capital's psychiatric institutions, but rather with the bureaucratic structures that oversaw them (and poor people's mental healthcare more generally) at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The sources that Ellis digests and deploys [End Page 512] are the products of administrative bureaucracy, above all the carefully compiled minutes of twenty-six-years' worth of committee meetings. The result of this herculean task is an account that, while requiring some effort and persistence to read, offers an original and compelling angle on the history of mental healthcare, particularly as it was affected by electoral politics. The Local Government Act of 1888 created the London County Council (LCC), setting up for the first time a municipal government for all of London. In one stroke, this new body became responsible for the institutional care and treatment of residents who were deemed to need confinement due to mental disturbance and who could not pay for their maintenance, a group of people who were still referred to throughout this period as "pauper lunatics" (10). The LCC took on responsibility for the management and funding of four existing asylums, completed one which had been in the planning stages, and built six further asylums. Altogether, by 1914, this group of institutions housed thousands of patients. The Local Government Act meant that for the first time in England, institutional mental healthcare was the responsibility of a democratically elected body. Ellis's decision to focus on London and the LCC results in an in-depth study of how this combination of democratic local politics and the provision for (and control of) this large, growing, and very vulnerable group worked in practice. London's exceptional status as a world city and capital of empire, and its vast scale, give his findings wide relevance. Central to Ellis's argument is his insistence that the sources show that mental healthcare in the period was not the "non-contentious" science-led area of public policy it was often presented to be later in the twentieth century (49). (Indeed, Ellis points out that the neglect of mental healthcare under the Conservative austerity politics of the 2010s in the UK shows that this area still cannot be separated from political positions.) The years covered by the book witnessed two distinct party-political regimes within the LCC: the Progressives, who were aligned with the Liberals at the national level, had a majority until they lost the 1907 election to the Municipal Reformers, who were aligned with the Conservatives. The contrasting approaches of the two parties allow Ellis to open up new key insights into why asylums and asylum-based practices developed in the ways they did. And, often, this had nothing to do with internal psychiatric debates. For instance, the Municipal Reformers had as a central plank of their platform control over spending and keeping taxes down. The very large asylums they built represented not an impressive commitment to a marginalized group, but, in the context of laws that compelled local councils to build asylums, an attempt at savings through economies of scale and a deprioritization of patients' and their families' needs to have institutions closer to their homes and accessible for visiting. Ellis also shows that the Council made itself aware (through impressive transnational networks) of international tendencies in asylum design toward the so-called villa asylum, but instead chose to persist with outmoded corridor-system designs in order to control budgets. Under the...

English architecture in 1963: a newly rediscovered view from Germany

This article provides an English translation of an unpublished German typescript found in the archive of the architect Julius Posener in the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin. Posener, a professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK), travelled with a colleague and fifteen students to England for a fortnight in March 1963. They met several prominent architects, saw a wide selection of their current and recently completed works, and attended events at the Architectural Association school. The typescript is an account of the trip that he wrote up from notes in his diary on 29 March, two days after their return. Posener, who had previously spent almost a decade teaching architecture in London, proves to have been a sympathetic observer of the scene, eager to compare and contrast what he saw in England with contemporary work in Germany; his account evokes subtle disagreements between himself and his colleague on conceptual and historical points, and gives us an insight into the day-to-day workings of Denys Lasdun’s office, the Architectural Association, the London County Council, and the Building Research Station in Garston.

A Township Complete in Itself: The London County Council Architects and the Building of Becontree, 1919–34

ABSTRACTBetween the first and second world wars, the London County Council (LCC) provided 82,000 working-class cottages and flats, of which 25,000 were built on the vast Becontree estate in the east of the metropolis. With these immense housing operations in hand, the LCC drastically increased its technical and administrative staff, becoming one of the largest municipal housing authorities in the world. This article sheds light on the organisation and functioning of the LCC Architect’s Department through analysis of the Becontree estate. Despite the extensive literature on municipal housing in the inter-war years, the council’s own architects during this period have remained almost entirely unknown. Contrary to the widespread preconception of the ‘official architect’, the LCC Architect’s Department evaluated and revised its organisational structure and managed to maintain a remarkable variety and complexity in its urbanistic approach — despite the overarching principles of standardisation and simplification, and despite its limited influence in relation to other departments within the LCC. Analysis of archival sources reveals the identity of these official architects and questions whether the organisational structure of the LCC Architect’s Department as a bureaucracy was reflected in the character of its housing estates.

Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain, 1933–1966

Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain, 1933–1966

Sir Frederick Edward Warner. 31 March 1910—3 July 2010

Frederick Edward (‘Ned’) Warner's childhood home was a London County Council flat in north London. He won a scholarship to Bancroft's School, where he was successful in both academic and sporting activities and was awarded an Exhibition to read chemistry at University College London. Following this chemistry degree he took a diploma in chemical engineering. Sport, debates and left-wing politics dominated his student years. Warner was at the forefront in developing health, safety, risk assessment and environmental policies, particularly in their implementation to chemical process plant; early professional experience in several chemical manufacturing companies and extensive wartime work associated with acid manufacture had driven this commitment. He was a leading figure in the creation of the consulting company Cremer and Warner, and was appointed court expert to the Court of Enquiry following the Flixborough explosion in 1974. As treasurer of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, he chaired three of its major projects: Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War; Pathways of Artificial Radionucleotides; and Radiation from Nuclear Test Explosions. His expertise in the environmental effects of radiation put him in a position to lead the first international team to Chernobyl after the reactor meltdown in 1986. Warner served on many governmental, professional and academic bodies, particularly the Institution of Chemical Engineers, of which he was president in 1966–1967. He was knighted in 1968 for services to chemical engineering, was elected to the Royal Society in 1976 and was a founder fellow of the Fellowship of Engineering (now the Royal Academy of Engineering). He died in 2010, aged 100.

イギリスにおけるイブニング・インスティテュートの成立と展開--1920年代のロンドン州議会の成人教育事業を中心に

イギリスにおけるイブニング・インスティテュートの成立と展開--1920年代のロンドン州議会の成人教育事業を中心に

The London Restaurant, 1840-1914, by Brenda Assael

Reviewed by: The London Restaurant, 1840–1914 by Brenda Assael Rebecca Earle (bio) The London Restaurant, 1840–1914, by Brenda Assael; pp. viii + 239. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $85.00. "Strip the United Kingdom of its foreigners, and our kitchens and bakers' shops would be next to empty," stated the British Journal of Catering (qtd. in Assael 158). This was not a warning prompted by the impending threat of Brexit, though many restauranteurs predict that it will have a disastrous effect on recruiting waiters, cooks, and other staff. The quote instead dates from 1889, when the large number of Italian and German restaurant staff working in London provoked complaints that these Europeans were depriving native-born Britons of employment. Victorian and Edwardian Londoners worried about restaurant dining rooms and kitchens that lacked adequate ventilation and so imperiled the health of workers and diners forced to breathe germ-laden and noxious air. At the same time, they relished other aspects of London's cosmopolitan food scene, which for instance allowed them to arrange for "a complete Indian dinner" to be delivered to their house from a restaurant in Hammersmith (166). It is impossible to read Brenda Assael's excellent study of the London restaurant in the Victorian and Edwardian eras without drawing comparisons to today's battles between mobile labor forces and xenophobic backlashes, anxieties about airborne viruses in enclosed restaurant spaces, and Uber Eats. At the same time, to read this study [End Page 121] solely as an exercise in historical continuity would do it a disservice. Instead, Assael inserts the London restaurant into our histories of labor and commerce in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. As she notes, studies of the British restaurant have tended to focus on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of dining out, to the neglect of these establishments as sites of labor or as economic ventures. Assael reminds us that restaurants were not simply loci for the display of social anxieties about unaccompanied women, or opportunities for conspicuous consumption. They were also the workplaces of tens of thousands of workers, created, as the proprietor of one vegetarian restaurant indignantly reminded patrons, "with a view to gain" (qtd. in Assael 149). Assael's focus on the commercial innovations of proprietors and the working conditions of waiters makes The London Restaurant, 1840–1914 not only fascinating but also pathbreaking. The study opens with a review of the restaurant scene, including the extraordinary success of restaurant chains such as John Pearce's British Tea Table refreshment rooms, which reportedly served fifteen thousand meals a day in 1896. The London Restaurant also features a remarkable glimpse into the small local eateries that constituted the majority of London restaurants and which provided sustenance for the growing number of city clerks and white-collar workers who staffed the offices of metropolitan London. One chapter focuses on the financial realities of running a restaurant, with attention to the challenges of managing supplies, the importance of technological innovations such as refrigerators or telephones (the latter facilitating advance reservations), the rise of employment agencies to assist with recruiting staff, and advertising. There follows an account of the varied experiences of waitstaff, with a particular focus on wages. As remains the case today, remuneration for waiters was precarious. Some waiters depended entirely on tips and might be asked to cover the costs of breakages or nonpayment by customers. In response, waiters formed mutual aid societies and, eventually, unions. In 1894 the Waiters and Waitresses and Licensed Victuallers' Employment Union stood several candidates for the London County Council in an unsuccessful attempt to ensure a minimum wage for waiters. Waiters also went on strike. In 1895, waitresses at the Lyons tea shops in Piccadilly and the Strand walked out in a (successful) attempt to reverse decreases in pay. Other chapters consider municipal regulation, which, Assael argues, demonstrates that scholarship on liberal governance in the Victorian era should pay more attention to "the power of commercial forces" (123) and the "gastro-cosmopolitanism" that prevailed in London restaurants (155). The latter phenomenon manifested not simply in the menus served but also in the clientele, restaurant staff, and ingredients. Contrary to the claims of some...

Red London

Red London Joshua B. Freeman (bio) Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London by Owen Hatherley Repeater Books, 2020, 266 pp. Few tourists strolling the south bank of the Thames in London realize that they are going through a carefully constructed showcase for what Owen Hatherley describes in his new book, Red Metropolis: the structures and programs put in place when the political left ran Great Britain’s largest city. On one end of the procession sits County Hall, the massive, longtime home of the London city government, until the national government eliminated home rule and sold off the building. At the other end is a new City Hall, designed by Norman Foster, housing the current incarnation of the London government. In between lies a series of city-built cultural venues—the Royal Festival Hall, National Film Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery, and National Theatre—and Oxo Tower Wharf, a mixed-use complex in an old power station, developed by a nonprofit cooperative with local government backing. Nothing is named after Marx, nor is the architecture a tip-off to the socialist vision behind it, but at least in its heyday, the South Bank announced to the world an alternative to capitalist urbanism. In recent years, as Washington swings between gridlock and reaction, U.S. progressives have looked to local government as an arena for attracting followers, trying out social programs, and improving the lives of constituents. Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage law seven years ago, followed the next year by Los Angeles (with both laws mandating phased increases), while the federal minimum remains a measly $7.25 an hour. The Chicago City Council now has a six-member socialist caucus. Next year’s election almost certainly will bring a crew of socialists to New York’s City Council as well. But there has not been much systematic thinking, at least in the United States, about the possibilities and limits of [End Page 142] municipal progressivism, let alone municipal socialism. Hatherley dives deep into the issue in his lively, opinionated account of what the left did when it had control over London’s government. It is an eye-opening story of extraordinary accomplishment. During long stretches since the late nineteenth century, leftists or left-liberal alliances have directed the administrative structure for London, the Greater London region, or the boroughs within it. With the capital city often at odds politically with much of the nation—never more so than now, with the Labour Party in firm control of the region but floundering elsewhere—municipal leftism not only filled a vacuum in social provision when Conservatives ruled nationally; it also served as a model for what socialists might do if they won control of Parliament. ________ Housing and architecture figure large in Red Metropolis. Hatherley has a longstanding interest in the relationship between politics and the built environment, evident in his earlier books, including A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings. But more importantly, from the late 1880s through most of the past century, housing has been at the top of the left agenda in London, as working-class families, generation after generation, have found it difficult or impossible to afford decent, sanitary living quarters. Though Hatherley’s purpose is ultimately political, he provides a wealth of information and insight about design and planning. (Red Metropolis includes many photographs of the buildings under discussion, but readers unfamiliar with London geography might want to keep Google Earth open as they read.) Hatherley begins with the Progressives, an assortment of liberals, trade unionists, and socialists, including George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, who prefigured the yet to be founded Labour Party. The alliance ran the elected London County Council from its creation in 1889 until 1907. Among the LCC’s legacy is what is considered by some the first municipal housing project anywhere, the Boundary Estate, a solidly constructed and architecturally distinguished cluster of buildings just a mile from the Bank of England. That project and others that followed were designed in-house by the LCC’s Architects’ Department and built by its Works Department, a publicly owned construction company...

The Un-Ideal Home: Fire Safety, Visual Culture and the LCC (1958–63)

Mounted annually at the Ideal Home Exhibition, a series of fire safety displays produced by the London County Council (LCC) in 1958–63 crystallized some of the key contradictions of the postwar consensus. The paper explores how the displays negotiate, in aesthetic and affective terms, two dissonant sets of concerns: on the one hand, the Ideal Home Exhibition’s celebration of homeownership and home-centred consumption; and, on the other, the LCC’s ‘high fire risk’ inspection programme, which focused on areas of multiple occupancy housing during a period when house fires were growing at an alarming rate. A visual-cultural history of the LCC displays demonstrates their contradictory testimony to a neglected history of housing inequalities. That history, it will be argued, was inseparable from the Conservative government’s so-called ‘property owning democracy’. At the same time, the LCC displays reveal the frictions and resistances inherent in this same moment.

‘I Am Convinced I Shall Achieve Something Valuable If I Can Brighten the Lives of the People Here’: Bombsites, Housing and Art in Lambeth

After the Second World War, artist Peter Laszlo Peri approached the London County Council with the idea of creating sculptural reliefs with a family theme in coloured concrete on two of Lambeth’s new housing estates. The results were three reliefs: ‘Following the Leader (Memorial to the Children Killed in the Blitz)’, 1949, on the Vauxhall Gardens estate and ‘Boys Playing Football’, 1951–52, and ‘Mother with Children Playing’, 1951–52, on the nearby South Lambeth estate. After the war, the reconstruction and improvement of housing were crucial. The London County Council planned for large areas of London to be rebuilt: including an ambitious programme of housing. This paper looks at these artworks within the context of the housing they sit amongst. I read these sculptural reliefs, created between 1949 and 1952, within the LCC’s post-war housing and community policies and as symbols of Lambeth’s renewal. This paper places these reliefs, and their settings, within the wider context of debates surrounding the post-war renewal of London, community participation and placemaking.

La Section urbanisme du département d’architectes du London County Council dans l’après-guerre. Élaboration, codification et transmission des savoir-faire au sein d’une grande structure publique d’architecture

Cet article s’attache à analyser les processus d’élaboration et de transmission de savoir-faire urbanistiques dans l’après-guerre au sein de la division d’urbanisme du département d’architecture du London County Council. Les nombreux documents de travail conservés dans les archives du Percy Johnson-Marshall témoignent de l'organisation interne du service. La lecture de ces documents rend aussi compte d’une claire volonté de ses cadres de codifier et de définir de nouvelles pratiques urbanistiques afin de pouvoir les transmettre en interne et les promouvoir.

Shankland and Cox at Cergy-Pontoise. Passing on British town planning working practices in France

ABSTRACTBetween 1967 and 1970, Bernard Hirsch, director of the Mission (town planning commission) for Cergy-Pontoise invited the architectural practice Shankland and Cox to assist the employees at the Mission in designing the new town. During the four years of their collaboration Shankland and Cox produced several reports and assisted the French in the creation of the planning briefs for the design of the new town. The correspondence between the Mission and Michael Welbank, who worked for Shankland and Cox, regarding the design of the préfecture neighbourhood in Cergy-Pontoise, as well as the internal notes at the Mission, in addition to the written testimony of Bernard Hirsch in his famous book Oublier Cergy (Forgetting Cergy), show how the employees at the Mission integrated the British methods and concepts into their work practices. Through their collaboration with Shankland and Cox, it was the working methods of the London County Council Architect’s Department planning division which were directly passed on to those creating new towns in France.

Progressive strategies of municipal trading: The policies of the London County Council Tramways c. 1891–1914

This article explores the role played by municipal traders in the development of fin de siècle London’s tramway system. Influenced by progressive politics, the Highways Committee of the London County Council developed a trading organisation that also had a social mission of improving living and working conditions for tramway users and employees alike. The Committee also enacted major urban change through the Kingsway Tunnel Project, which was an exemplar of their commitment to combining financial and social profit. We conclude that the committee’s mission reflected a deep commitment to social and economic improvement far beyond the transport sphere alone.

Helen Glew, Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55

Helen Glew, <i>Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55</i>

'The Lights of the Electric Octopus Have Been Switched Off': Visual and Political Culture in Edwardian London.

This article reconstructs the visual culture of politics in Edwardian London through a study of the 1907 London County Council election. It moves beyond the memorable account given in Graham Wallas's Human Nature in Politics to examine the actors, especially associations and newspapers, that participated in the election. Drawing upon newspapers, election addresses, cartoon, leaflets, and posters, the article argues that Edwardian London was a prime site in the application of new media for political communication. It shows, however, that new modes of communication could co-exist with, and intensify, established forms of public politics. It reveals a highly knowing visual culture of politics through which issues of authenticity and identity were contested, and recasts understanding of a controversial and critical election.