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The municipal housing programme in Sheffield before 1914
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
The nineteenth century was a golden age for public architecture in Britain. Grand edifices such as Paxton’s Crystal Palace and innumerable lesser public buildings helped to engender in their patrons and in the public a sense of glowing civic and national pride. However, it is an irony of the laissez-faire Victorian era that, despite the vast creative energy expended upon such public buildings, so little architectural effort was spent in tackling the single severest problem faced by the municipal authorities — the generally appalling condition of working class housing. Indeed, even when, in response to the growing body of public health and similar legislation, the first urban improvement schemes were enacted, they tended to eschew progressive architectural ideas, being instead strictly sanitary and technical in nature, with often far from satisfactory results. It was not until the turn of century that architects and new architectural ideas began to have a widespread influence on the design of workers’ housing. This influence was demonstrated in such factory villages as Bourneville and Port Sunlight, and by the birth of the Garden City movement, but it was through the work of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, the first British architects to gain a widespread reputation for the design of workers’ housing, that the housing of the working classes became firmly established as an architectural as well as a social problem.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1987
References
Notes
1 These early improvement schemes are discussed in detail in Tarn, J. N., Five Per Cent Philanthropy (Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.
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14 Ibid.
15 These links are best demonstrated by the important municipal personalities who were leading members of both organizations. These included H. J. Wilson, several times Trades Council President and leader of the radical Lib-Lab Councillors ( Mathers, Helen, Sheffield Municipal Politics (1893-1926) (unpublished thesis, University of Sheffield, 1979), p. 156 Google Scholar) and W. F. Wardley, Trades Council President in both 1885 and 1887 and a Liberal Councillor later deeply involved in the housing debate (H. Keeble Hawson, Sheffield: The Growth of a City 1893-1926. (Sheffield. J. W. Northend, 1968), p. 212)).
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26 Howard’s famous prescription for the better non-urban existence, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, was first published in October 1898.
27 The Development of Suburban Areas, Report of the proceedings of a Representative Conference (Sheffield, 1905), p. 6.
28 Sheffield Medical Officer of Health, Annual Report (1899), p. 10.
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38 Ibid., Health Committee 25 February 1906.
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56 Unwin discussed at length the idea of dialogue in Town Planning in Practice (London, 1909).
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61 The Builder (August 1907), p. 167.
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65 Sheffield City Council Minutes, Estates Committee, 25 October 1909.
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67 Sheffield Telegraph, 9 April 1914.
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71 These proposals were not properly realized until the 1930s upon the completion of such huge estates as Shiregreen and Parson Cross.
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