The folly of garden cities

In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with an actor who’d bought a house in Finlay Street, Fulham for £15,000. Osborne, having lived on the same street in the 1930s when properties there changed hands for £300, was astonished by the sum. Yet, as Simon Matthews notes in House in the Country, £15,000 was then only 3.5-3.75 times the average national earnings, while to buy a house on Finlay Street today you’d need £2,136,667 – which works out at 69 times the current average annual salary. In the light of the government’s recent proposal of a ‘benefits to bricks’ scheme to ‘reinvigorate the council housing Right to Buy programme’, this book is timely, offering a decent primer on how we’ve ended up where we are when it comes to housing.

Matthews begins his survey in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, when food riots erupted over the inflated price of grain in Ely and Littleport in Cambridgeshire. He ends by considering issues such as land registers and government subsidies to stimulate a rebirth of the kind of social housing provisions that successive Conservative and Labour postwar governments were committed to before 1979. Along the way, he examines the emergence of paternalistic model villages like Saltaire and Port Sunlight, and philanthropic urban estates sponsored by the American banker George Peabody. The first of these estates was built in Shoreditch in 1863, followed two years later by the first local authority-owned housing in the UK in the form of Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road.