Domestic Architecture 1700 to 1960

11 Post-War Housing, 1945-1960s - Introduction

Another world war and another cessation in house building brought another watershed in British house design. House building slowed to a virtual standstill between 1939 and 1945. At the end of the war, slums remained a problem in many large towns and cities and through enemy action 475,000 houses had been destroyed or made uninhabitable. In many towns and cities, temporary accommodation was provided by pre-fabricated houses. Altogether 156,000 prefabs were assembled using innovative materials such as steel and aluminiumand proved a successful and popular house type. Although many well outlived their life expectancy, pre-fabs were only ever intended as a temporary measure and for the new post-war government the provision of new council housing was a top priority. Local authority house building resumed in 1946 and of the 2.5 million new houses and flats built up to 1957, 75% were local authority owned.
The building of council houses in the post war era was shaped by a new approach to town planning enshrined in the ‘Greater London Plan’ of 1944 - a blue print for post-war reconstruction by Professor Patrick Abercrombie (1879-1957). Out of this came the idea of neighbourhood units and the new town movement which revived the idea of the garden city which had been lost in the building of the inter-war council estates. In 1945 a New Towns Committee created government-sponsored corporations which were given power to acquire land within a defined, designated area, to establish new towns and the New Towns Act passed the following year provided the government with the power to implement these plans. The result was the creation of twenty two new towns between 1946 and 1972, many serving as satellite towns to Greater London.
The creation of new local authority estates and the new towns took place in a mood of optimism where Modernist architects were given the opportunity to demonstrate that their rational, planned architecture would create a bright new, Utopian world of clean, functional towns. Post-war house construction was also shaped by two housing reports: the Dudley Report of 1944 and the Parker Morris report, ‘Homes for Today and Tomorrow’ published in 1961. The post-war era also saw a sharp rise in property owning, rising from 26% of all householders in England and Wales in 1945 to 49% by 1970. In this period the gap between standards of housing between professional and manual workers narrowed and increasingly there was growing conformity between private and public house types in terms of space and amenities. Bungalows remained popular in the private sector: they came to typify post war suburbia in dormitory areas like the Wirral and in many coastal developments. Stylistically, there were still differences between the public and privately built houses. Inevitably, greater variety of styles and types of dwelling were to be found in private developments and now, some forty years on, houses of the 1950s and 1960s are beginning to acquire a period character of their own.
The post-war estate layout was founded on the principle of the ‘neighbourhood unit’ – a planning concept which promoted the development of self-contained communities. As a reaction to the social homogeneity and physical monotony of the typical pre-war council estate the neighbourhood unit was intended to incorporate a wider social mix and a greater variety of house types. It was hoped that the neighbourhood units would foster, ‘a co-operative spirit between the social classes...to overcome the social and civic difficulties from which the large city suffers’. Some neighbourhood units were built ‘phoenix-like’ out of the slums they replaced as part of urban regeneration schemes, whilst others – like many pre-war council estates - were built on new green-field sites on the edges of towns.
A greater variety of house types typified the neighbourhood unit and included blocks and flats as well as the three bedroom semi-detached house. Some houses were made of conventional brick construction but to reduce building costs, others were made of non-traditional methods of construction such as precast reinforced concrete. These were available as propriety brands – such as the ‘Cornish’, ‘Unity’, ‘Woolaway’ and ‘Reema’ - developed and marketed by different builders. Largely made from concrete panels reinforced with steel and either bolted together or made constructed with a steel frame. The design of the houses was generally plainer and simpler, roofs were pitched lower. Through the recommendations contained in the Dudley Report, post-war council houses were provided with more space and better services including better storage facilities. In some of the new towns and council estates built in the 1950s a new type of house layout known as the Radburn layout was introduced which aimed to separate vehicular and pedestrian access. The orthodox street frontage was abandoned in favour of the use of road access by cul de sacs with access to the front door by a pedestrian foot path across a small open grassed areas with no obvious boundaries between individual properties.