Stevenage: home of the new town revolution
Stevenage was the first of the post-war ‘new towns’. As part of our coverage of the centenary of the Addison Act and the birth of council housing, Gavriel Hollander visits the town to see how it has changed. Photography by Tim Foster
Inside Housing is publishing a number of articles this month to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Addison Act, which paved the way for large-scale council housebuilding.
To understand the kind of place Stevenage is today, it is worth spending an hour or so at the town’s train station on a weekday morning.
In one direction, the platform is teeming with people waiting for the regular service to London – a journey of just over 20 minutes if you catch the express train. But coming the other way, there is barely a trickle of commuters.
“If anyone asks me what the population of Stevenage is, I say: ‘Do you mean the one at night or the one in the daytime, because they’re very different?’” explains Bob Bamber, a retired local man who, at 69, is almost exactly the same age as the town he has lived in for all but two years of his life.
Mr Bamber says the town has changed since he and his parents were among its first tenants, moving into a council-built house in the early 1950s. However, “it’s a subtle change”. He adds: “It’s like any other town – there’s good bits and bad bits.”
But in some ways, this heavily concreted part of North Hertfordshire is not like any other town. Stevenage was the very first settlement established as a result of the New Towns Act of 1946. In just two decades, the population expanded almost twentyfold from the few thousand who lived in what is now known as Stevenage Old Town.
The New Towns Act was a catalyst for a new era of housing publicly built and funded to help Britain’s inner cities – and their residents – recover from the destruction wrought by the bombing of World War II. Just like the so-called Addison Act a generation before, it would have a profound effect on how the country looks and lives.
Inside Housing visits Stevenage as part of our celebration of the centenary of the Addison Act and the birth of council housing – and to understand how the town came to be, how it has changed, and what the future might hold.
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Although the New Towns Act and the wave of post-1945, town hall-led development was a reaction to the devastation of the war, not everyone was in favour of seeing their part of the country given over to housing in such numbers.
Protests began in Stevenage Old Town as soon as the area was designated one of the first wave of new towns, nine of which were located within easy travelling distance of London, to attract some of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the Blitz.
In the town museum today, there are photos of the thousands of locals who congregated around the town hall in May 1946 to hear Lewis Silkin, minister for town and country planning, explain the project to them. The event was so oversubscribed, the speech had to be relayed to the crowd over loudspeakers.
Later that year, protesters painted over the town’s name at the train station, changing it to “Silkingrad” – the implications of the Soviet reference lost on no one.
Mr Bamber remembers other stories about local people putting sugar in the petrol tank of a police car escorting Mr Silkin and other dignitaries.
“It was a smaller town with a lot of community spirit and they saw it as spoiling their way of life,” he offers by way of explanation. “It had character, and any new town gets rid of that.”
Alan Ford, another lifelong Stevenage resident who works as a volunteer in the museum, says most objections came from “landowners and farmers”, although a Pathé News report from the time also shows unhappy business owners who feared being displaced.
Watch a Pathe video ’Mr Silkin goes to Stevenage’ from 1946 below:
However, once the town started being built and people began moving in, the mood seemed to have mellowed. “I don’t think there was any open hostility at all,” he says.
Nevertheless, opposition continued when the town grew outwards, first in the 1970s and again around the turn of the century. Complaints concerned expansion into the green belt and ‘Forster Country’, named after the Edwardian author EM Forster, whose childhood home, Rooks Nest House, was used as the model for the eponymous house in his masterpiece Howards End.
Bob and Thelma Sulzbach and their son outside one of the first houses built by the Stevenage Development Corporation in Broadview in 1958
The Stevenage Development Corporation was set up in 1949 and just two years later, the first tenants moved into a corporation-built house in Broadview on the Stoneyhall estate. They were Bob Sulzbach, a former sergeant in the US Air Force, and his English wife, Thelma. They qualified for housing as Bob had been working in the corporation’s architecture department.
The Sulzbachs’ home was in the Bedwell area – the first of six distinct neighbourhoods planned for the town. Today, the street signs in each neighbourhood sport a different colour: in Bedwell they are blue, while in leafy Pin Green to the north-east of the town, they are an appropriately vibrant green.
Greenery is something of a theme throughout Stevenage. On a sunny June morning, it is hard not to notice the abundance of open spaces, parklands and trees in each of the planned neighbourhoods. At the same time, despite the 42km of cycle paths built alongside the roads, the car is clearly king here, and the dual carriageways and plethora of roundabouts leave distinct traces of 1950s town planning ideals.
Mr Ford says that the town’s first residents could sometimes feel abandoned and out of place because of the design of their new homes.
“For the men, it was mostly fine, because they were going to work,” he explains. “But the reality was that the housing estates were a long way from shops. Some of the women missed their families and felt isolated.”
Stevenage had the first purpose-built pedestrianised shopping district in the UK
The shops were – and still are – concentrated in the town centre. It was the first purpose-built pedestrianised shopping district in the UK. Mr Bamber remembers seeing the Queen open it in 1959, when he was a cub scout. Six decades later, like many high streets around the country, it feels tired and in need of a facelift.
Many shops are shuttered and those that remain do not seem to be doing the briskest of trades on the Thursday morning when Inside Housing visits. According to Mr Ford at the museum, Stevenage has suffered because of one of its apparent strengths – the proximity to London.
“It is a commuter town and it was not designed for it,” he elaborates. “It was supposed to be somewhere people lived and worked.”
Stevenage Borough Council is limited in what it can do to arrest the decline of the high street, as it does not own the shops. Where it can make more of a difference is the housing estates.
Here too, however, the council has been somewhat hamstrung over the years since the town first sprung out of the ground. Stevenage Development Corporation built about 25,000 homes before it was disbanded in 1982, but the council now owns just 8,000 of these, thanks mainly to the Right to Buy.
Queen Elizabeth II visiting a Stevenage Development Corporation house at Wigram Way, during her official visit to open the new town on 20 April 1959. Also in the picture is Doreen Patterson, who lived there
This became a double-edged sword in Stevenage. At first, it enabled thousands of council tenants to fulfil the dream of homeownership, but it has since led to underinvestment in existing stock.
“What we found originally was that the community did not change,” says Ash Ahmed, assistant director of development at the council.
“People just switched from being council tenants to owner-occupiers. But what you found increasingly with Right to Buy is they became buy-to-let landlords, and so you get a mixed bag of landlords. Some estates, over a five-year period, became predominantly privately owned.”
That five-year period in the 1980s coincided with the slowing down of council-led development across the country. In many cases, existing housing transferred to housing associations, but this did not happen here. No major housing association ever emerged in Stevenage, although some national landlords cherrypicked some of the stock.
Indeed, the council even ended up buying back some stock from registered providers, while a short-lived experiment with an ALMO ended six years ago when management came back in house.
On the site of the former Twin Foxes pub in Bedwell is now a 40-home block split evenly between social and affordable rented flats (building on right)
Only in recent times have local authorities starting building for themselves again, with Stevenage no exception. Mr Ahmed’s housing development team has been working for four years and now numbers six staff.
The council put the team together as a response to the 2012 self-financing settlement between the Treasury and local authorities, which allowed councils to decide for themselves how to spend their Housing Revenue Account incomes.
That financial freedom is starting to bear fruit. There is a £45m refurbishment project in place for 550 council-owned blocks, which Mr Ahmed says will move them beyond the Decent Homes Standard and will involve work on the exteriors.
Meanwhile, there are plans to develop 500 rented homes by 2023, half at affordable, half at social rents. With market rent at around £1,000 a month for a two-bed flat, the difference between affordable and social rents is more than £250.
Mr Ahmed says the Labour council is committed to providing as much social rent as possible, even if it means reducing its income. “Members are adamant that they want properties to be genuinely affordable,” he adds. “It will be mixed with some affordable rent, as we have people who do work but struggle in the private sector.”
To deliver the programme, the council is also building around 200 homes for market sale and has launched a stand-alone housing company to keep open the option of retaining some units for the private rented market.
“If we rent them out through a housing company, they’re not subject to Right to Buy,” explains Mr Ahmed.
In Bedwell, Stevenage’s first ‘new’ community, the effects of this strategy are taking shape. On the site of the former Twin Foxes pub – which was once “a notorious ASB [anti-social behaviour] spot”, according to Mr Ahmed’s colleague Simon Nuttall – there is now a 40-home low-rise block, split evenly between social and affordable rented flats.
Sven Simonds, a private renter in Stevenage, likes that he can escape the “hecticness” of London
The contrast between the new homes and some of the more dilapidated, privately owned houses across the road is clear. Two streets along, Sven Simonds, a private renter, is taking advantage of a morning off work to mow his lawn. He says that his landlord gives him money off the rent in exchange for gardening jobs.
“The town is going to change in the next 10 years or so,” he tells Inside Housing. “There’s a lot of talk of refurbishments, but at the minute, there’s a lack of community funding.”
Mr Simonds, who has lived in Stevenage for four years, says he is happy, partly because it is near London but also because he can easily escape “the hecticness” of the capital.
There is no doubt that the ideals of the new town are under threat, as prices go up along with the influx of displaced Londoners. Mr Bamber, for example, says his son cannot afford to buy a family home in the town, as he was able to 40 years previously.
Yet the dream of escaping the capital is alive and well. As Mr Ford says of the original wave of arrivals: “The fact they had their own house with an indoor toilet – that was paradise.”
Over in Pin Green, Gillian Valenti is waiting for her daughter to pick her up to go to the town centre. She bought her home 40 years ago and loves it to this day.
“It’s a wonderful place to live,” she says as she climbs into her car.
“Better than London, anyway!”
100 Years of Council Housing: we want to hear from you
To mark the 100th anniversary of the act receiving Royal Assent in July, we have a month of special activities planned, including interviews with senior council housing figures, exclusive debate and comment, and investigations into what local authorities, past and present, are doing to help provide housing.
This will signal the start of a stronger focus on local authority housing issues over the coming months on www.insidehousing.co.uk and in our weekly print and digital editions.
We want to hear from you about your local authority is doing to mark the Addison Act and about the housing issues in your area, email: editorial@insidehousing.co.uk
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100 Years of Council Housing: what Inside Housing is doing
One hundred years ago, a piece of legislation led to the birth of council housing. Gavriel Hollander introduces Inside Housing’s celebration of the centenary of the Addison Act.
It is so ingrained in our national consciousness that it is hard to imagine just how radical the idea of local authority built and funded housing must have seemed a century ago. Before World War I, almost all housing in the UK was built by private developers (albeit with some notable municipal exceptions in major cities). Given this, it is unsurprising that both quality and consistency of delivery were variable.
The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of then-prime minister David Lloyd George – provide “homes fit for heroes”.
The so-called Addison Act – the very first housing act passed in this country, named after its sponsor Dr (later Lord) Christopher Addison – received royal assent exactly 100 years ago this month.
It may never have achieved its aspiration of delivering 500,000 homes (something that may sound familiar to modern-day watchers of government housing policy) but it was the start of a movement.
New estates began to crop up across the country, built in accordance with recommendations from the Tudor Walters Report, which was produced to parliament in November 1918. This built on the ‘Garden City Principles’ and suggested a number of improvements to the standard of public housing. These included limiting the length of terraced-housing blocks, mandating a minimum number of rooms and providing indoor bathrooms.
“The post-war introduction of subsidies for councils to solve the blight of slum estates was supposed to right a wrong and – in the words of the prime minister David Lloyd George – provide ‘homes fit for heroes’”
Although the abandonment of subsidy in 1921 and a change of government the following year curtailed the immediate growth of council-built housing, the seed had been sown.
This month Inside Housing celebrates the centenary of the Addison Act with a month-long series of articles looking at how it transformed the social fabric of the country and created the housing sector we know today.
Over the course of this month, we visit four estates, each symbolising a different era of council housebuilding. We also take a look at whether new-found financial freedom for local authorities could be the catalyst for a new generation of estates.
To kick off the series, acclaimed social historian John Boughton visits one of the first estates made possible by Lord Addison’s historic legislation: Sea Mills in Bristol. We then travel to Stevenage to look at how the damage to Britain’s inner cities during the Blitz led to the new town movement and a fresh wave of estates through the 1950s and 1960s.
Martin Hilditch, editor of Inside Housing, takes a trip to Hulme in Manchester to examine how the private and public sector had to work together in the 1980s to deliver a regeneration project, which is still thriving more than 30 years later.
Finally, we go to Nottingham and look at one council with grand ambitions to provide housing to a new generation of tenants.
There may still be myriad challenges to face when it comes to providing good-quality, genuinely affordable housing for those most in need, but without the passing of an act of parliament 100 years ago, the sector we work in today may never have come to exist. That alone is worth celebrating.
To read more about the act, go to: www.insidehousing.co.uk/AddisonAct
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Hulme: the redevelopment project that changed regeneration The redevelopment of Hulme in Manchester kick-started a new approach to regeneration in the UK – and the careers of some of housing’s best-known figures. Martin Hilditch joins them on a step back in time with lessons for today.
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Memories of council housing: the human legacy of the Addison Act As the centenary of the first council houses approaches, Peter Apps hears from some of the people who have lived in them in the decades since
Many of the sector’s current leaders began their journeys in council teams One hundred years of council housing has delivered a generation of sector leaders as well as millions of council homes, writes Mervyn Jones
Stevenage: home of the new town revolution Stevenage was the first of the post-war ‘new towns’. Gavriel Hollander visits the town to see how it has changed.
100 Years of Council Housing: your tweets from week one Inside Housing has been encouraging councils to say what they are doing to build homes and to mark 100 years of council housing. Here we feature a selection of your tweets
Kit Malthouse: 'Council housing is coming back with a vengeance' Housing minister Kit Malthouse tells Martin Hilditch why growing numbers of councils are looking to get back into development
Sea Mills: we visit one of the first estates to benefit from the Addison Act Social historian John Boughton visits a place in Bristol still cherished today
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Are new borrowing freedoms sparking a revival of council housebuilding? The Addison Act marked the birth of council housebuilding. A century later, could recent financial freedom spark a renaissance? Nathaniel Barker investigates.
How Cornwall is taking inspiration from Christopher Addison Cornwall Council is one of many keeping the legacy alive, writes Kate Kennally.
The Addison Act - celebrating 100 years of council housing This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Addison Act – which paved the way for council housebuilding on a large scale. Inside Housing has a whole month of special activity planned and we want to hear your stories
The 100-year anniversary of the Addison Act means it’s time to talk about council housing Let’s use the 100th anniversary of council housing as we know it to flag up some of the great work that’s been done – and kick-start a conversation about the future, writes Martin Hilditch
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