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Peri‐urban informal housing development in Victorian England: the contribution of freehold land societies

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02665433.2010.481188

1466-4518

Robert Home,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Abstract Self‐help housing in peri‐urban areas (usually outside municipal boundaries) is a feature, not only of rapidly urbanizing countries now in the South, but was also in Victorian England, where it was often initiated by freehold land societies, created by the Chartist movement in order to expand the franchise. These bodies bought and subdivided land for sale to their members, and laid out roads, using legal powers conferred upon the building societies. The societies made a significant contribution to housing for the urban working class, and preceded the garden city and town planning movement promoted by Liberal politicians. A case study is presented of one successful provincial society, the Ipswich and Suffolk Freehold Land Society. Keywords: freehold land societiesperi‐urban self‐help housingIpswich Freehold Land SocietyVictorian urban development Notes 1. Including: Edesio Fernandes and Anne Varley, eds., Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries (London: Zed Books, 1998); Robert Home and Hilary Lim, eds., Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Titling and Peri‐Urban Development in Africa and the Caribbean (London: Cavendish, 2004); Peter M. Ward, ed., Self‐Help Housing: A Critique (London: Alexandrine Press, 1982). 2. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (London: Basic Books, 2000); and The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 3. David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns 1774–1967 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1980); Martin Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working‐Class Housing 1850–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). For other housing movements, see Johnston Birchall, 'Co‐partnership Housing and the Garden City Movement', Planning Perspectives 10, no. 4 (1995): 329–58; Keith Skilleter, 'The Role of Public Utility Societies in Early British Town Planning and Housing Reform, 1901–36', Planning Perspectives 8, no. 2 (1993): 125–65. 4. Kevin Cahill, Who Owns Britain? (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001). 5. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1951). 6. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958), 50–122. 7. Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 8. R.J. Olney, 'The Politics of Land', in The Victorian Countryside, ed. Gordon Mingay (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981), 59; Ian Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906–1914 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2001). 9. Robert Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–54 (London: Frank Cass, 1969, repr.). 10. Quoted in John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 39. 11. A.M. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (Aylesbury: Square Edge Books, 2000, first published 1970). The National Land Company created five land settlements, at: O'Connorville (Hertfordshire), Charterville (Oxfordshire), Snigs End (Gloucestershire), Great Dodford (Bromsgrove) and Lowbands (Gloucestershire). 12. J. MacAskill, 'The Chartist Land Plan', in Chartist Studies, ed. Asa Briggs (London: Macmillan, 1959), 304–41. 13. Quoted in Harry Browne, Chartism (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), 49; O'Brien quoted ibid., 49. 14. Browne, Chartism, 87. 15. Esmund John Cleary, Building Societies (London: Dent, 1958), 49–53. 16. This compared with the 2000 building societies in existence by 1869. Early freehold land societies were founded in Wolverhampton, Dudley, Stourbridge, Kidderminster, Worcester and Stafford (www.uplands-stroud.fsnet.co.uk). Titus Salt was active in a Bradford society, before transferring his energies to his model industrial village at Saltaire. For the society in East Oxford, see Anne Skinner, 'What Price Democracy and Justice? A Study of the Politics of Protest and Planning', Planning Perspectives 23, no. 2 (2008): 171–96. For societies in London, see J.M. Rawcliffe, 'Bromley: Kentish Market Town to London Suburb, 1841–81' in The Rise of Suburbia, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 28–91; Michael Jahn, 'Suburban Development in Outer West London, 1850–1900', ibid., 94–156. 17. The Ipswich Building Society, its successor institution, holds a collection of deeds, plans, record books and memorabilia, and the author acknowledges the help of its archivist, Margaret Hancock. The main sources for this section are the society's three anniversary celebration publications: Ian Howlett, One Hundred and Fifty Years On (Ipswich: Ipswich Building Society, 1989); Jubilee of the Ipswich & Suffolk Freehold Land Society (Ipswich: East Anglia Daily Times, 1899); Ipswich & Suffolk Permanent Benefit Building Society: Centenary Brochure 1849–1949 (Ipswich, 1949). 18. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (London: Dent, 1881), quoted in Kenneth Starr, Americans and the Californian Dream 1850–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 140. 19. David Dymond and Paul Northeast, A History of Suffolk (Chichester: Phillimore, 1995); H. Fearn, 'Chartism in Suffolk', in Chartist Studies, ed. Asa Briggs (London: Macmillan, 1959), 147–73. 20. Frank Grace, Rags and Bones: A Social History of a Working‐Class Community in Nineteenth‐Century Ipswich (London: Unicorn, 2007). 21. Ipswich, Jubilee, 29. 22. The President was R.D. Alexander (d. 1865), a member of a large Quaker business family. Joseph Pearce became secretary of the Society until his death in 1877. 23. The initial purchase price worked out at £50 per acre, with additional costs of £175 in surveying fees, £26 for 'staking out', £480 for making roads, £212 for redemption of land tax and £87 as solicitor's charges (Ipswich, Jubilee). With the high price of bricks at the time, many of the new houses were built with stone and pebbles. 24. Starr, Californian Dream, 134–41. 25. Ipswich, Jubilee, 16. 26. The polished mahogany ballot box and numbered balls are still displayed in the Ipswich Building Society offices. 27. Ipswich, Jubilee, 51. 28. The Sou‐Sou Land movement in the Caribbean has similarities: see Charisse Griffith‐Charles, 'Trinidad: "We are not Squatters, We are Settlers"', in Demystifying the Mystery of Capital, ed. Robert Home and Hilary Lim (London: Cavendish, 2004), 98–119. 29. For example, Cottage Grove (Beeston), Fulwood (Preston) and Gibson Gardens (Stoke Newington, London): www.beestoncivicsociety.org.uk and www.locallocalhistory.co.uk (accessed July 24, 2009). There are other references to freehold land society developments in local history sources, such as those in Kidderminster (www.uplands-stroud.fsnet.co.uk), and Longton (www.thepotteries.org.uk).