The woman in the picture

This week we look at the extraordinary urban legacy of the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill.

Ninety years ago this week, the Executive Committee of the newly formed National Trust met in central London. There are two strange facts about this otherwise ordinary gathering.

The first is that the meeting was captured for posterity in the watercolour you can see above by the painter Thomas Matthews Rooke.

The second is that one of the people in the picture wasn’t actually there. It’s the figure in the far left wearing a white bonnet and shawl, gazing somewhat inscrutably across the room.

That individual is Octavia Hill.

Significant women of the Victorian era are usually written out of history. Listen here to Malcolm Gladwell telling the neglected story of the painter Elizabeth Thompson.

It’s a testimony to the significance of Octavia Hill that, instead of being painted out of the picture, she was painted into the frame of historical remembrance. Even in her absence, she made her presence felt.

Hill is best known as a founder member of the Trust, a “key figure of Britain’s heritage movement”. Less well known is her role as the inventor and first advocate of neighbourhood management.

“The foulest dens in the district”

Hill became active as a social reformer in the 1860s. At this time, the vast majority of British city dwellers occupied unsanitary and overcrowded slums, cellars, and rookeries. Streets were open sewers, sanitation was rudimentary at best, and life expectancy was low.

Slums dwellings were either left to fester or knocked down by speculative developers to make way to more lucrative real estate. Demolition dispersed the population and made overcrowding elsewhere even worse.

A lucky few lived in the ‘model villages’ pioneered by philanthropic industrialists like Robert Owen in Lanark, Titus Salt in Bradford, and the Cadbury brothers in Birmingham. Conditions in these new settlements were far better than the slums, but they only ever accommodated a tiny proportion of the population.

As a young adult, Hill moved from the Fens in the East of England to Marylebone in West London. A writer for the local newspaper there warned his readers to “hold your handkerchiefs in your hands … You may require them. We are going into one of the foulest dens in the district.”

“No short-sighted benevolence”

Hill’s first venture into neighbourhood management was in a Marylebone courtyard officially called ‘Paradise Place’ but known locally, and certainly more accurately, as ‘Little Hell’. It was here that she developed and refined her three-pronged approach to the rehabilitation of people and place.

She showed that even the most blighted and notorious slums could be repaired and renewed. Without the need for demolition or the construction of new settlements that were dependent on philanthropic subsidy.

The first element was her detailed approach to the management of each property. She knew precisely the conditions in each part of Paradise Place and employed a small army of handy-people to clean stairways, fix broken windows, and ensure that standards of cleanliness were maintained.

The second was the relationship with her tenants. As well as fixing people’s homes, she developed an early form of social work; taking an active interest in the lives of her tenants and organising educational activities and support groups like savings clubs.

Hill combined this investment in personal and community development with a strict attitude to behaviour. Tenants who were rowdy, damaged property, or failed persistently to pay rent were evicted.

The third element was her commercial acumen. Hill convinced her friend the writer and philosopher John Ruskin to provide what today we would call seed capital to fund her purchase of Paradise Place. He did so on condition that she generate a 5% annual return on his investment.

As a missionary Christian she did not oppose the basic notion of charity. She was, however, unimpressed by the behaviour of ‘Lady Bountiful’ benefactors who wrote cheques for good causes without engaging with the root causes of social problems. This approach also fixed the poor as helpless recipients of largesse, entirely lacking in agency.

Treating tenants as individuals that were capable of working, running a good home, and managing their own finances made economic and moral sense. As Hill argued in the preface to the first edition of Homes of the London Poor, “[I] most heartily hope that whatever is done in building for the people may be done on a thoroughly sound commercial principle…the buildings erected ought to be remunerative; and I earnestly hope no short-sighted benevolence will ever deceive our legislators into losing sight of this.”

“Lady housing managers”

Hill’s approach was enormously effective. Ruskin received his five percent profit as Paradise Place was transformed into a safe and sanitary courtyard. Her team were able to “reverse grotesque landlord abuses, regain control and re-humanise almost bestial conditions.”

Nascent local authorities also had a model they could adapt or, in some cases, simply appoint Hill to replicate. She took on properties in Southwark, Lambeth and Walworth and by the end her career had between 3,000 and 4,000 tenants across the capital.

In the decades after her death in 1912, the role of local authorities as landlords grew enormously. The ‘council estate’ became a common sight in towns and cities. Many authorities paid lip service to Hill’s approach but prioritised the tasks of demolition and construction over the management of homes and the maintenance of safe, stable communities.

After both world wars, the magnified housing role of local authorities grew in exactly the opposite direction from the detailed and careful management that Hill had espoused.

Much the same happened at central government level. The Central Housing Advisory Committee called in 1935 for councils to employ “lady housing managers”. However, the 1930 Greenwood Act had given councils an additional subsidy for every slum property they cleared; they were incentivised to demolish and build, not to repair and rehabilitate.

During the long demolition drive from 1945 to 1980, neighbourhood management was almost entirely neglected. Fuelled by larger and larger subsidies, urban authorities locked themselves into a self-defeating cycle of demolition and displacement. As Patrick Dunleavy argues in The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975:

“Clearance would result in increased housing need; which in the closed urban land system in city areas would justify further clearance to provide land for housing waiting list applicants; which would worsen the housing situation and produce further development.”

By the early 1980s, cities had depopulated, losing millions of households to the suburbs and new towns. Council housing, once a step up the social ladder, was becoming a residual service for households with the greatest need and least choice.

It was clear to most that an alternative approach was needed. On the Tulse Hill estate in South London, for example, a group of tenant-activists created an updated model of neighbourhood management. They were inspired by a copy of Octavia Hill’s biography borrowed in Brixton Library.

With little to lose, given the condition of so many of the estates for which it was responsible, the Greater London Council agreed to support a trial programme of on-the-ground management. Within six months, with tenants in charge, “the estate was fully let; unbreakable glass was intact in the stairwells; lights were on at night; refuse was cleared twice a week to keep the chutes clear; open spaces were gradually reclaimed.”

Thoughts for the week

Three thoughts this week: on gender; resilience; and effectiveness.

First, it’s no coincidence that the people who re-discovered Hill’s housing legacy and catalysed the new wave of neighbourhood management were women. The council bosses, wealthy developers, and big-name architects who sought to impose their vision on British cities were almost all men, wielding power through the bulldozer and swing-ball.

In the wake such destruction, it was left to women to re-thread the strands of a torn and traumatised social fabric. There was a direct parallel in the US, where Robert Moses sought to remake neighbourhoods at will in the face of opposition from Jane Jacobs.

This gender divide in how we think about urban regeneration persists today. You don’t hear talk of “lady managers” any more, but the tasks of demolition and construction are still described as the ‘hard stuff’, with the macho overtones that such language implies. In contract to the seemingly optional, nice-but-not-essential ‘soft stuff’ of providing services and helping people to live happy, healthy and rewarding lives.

Second, resilience. A few years ago, I was commissioned by the National Association of Neighbourhood Management to conduct a ‘state of the nation’ assessment; had neighbourhood management survived austerity; how was it being funded and delivered; what impact was it having?

You can read the full findings here. In short, neighbourhood management had adapted to the challenge of austerity and the opportunity of devolution. As I argued in the summary:

“Instead of simply surviving despite austerity, neighbourhood management has evolved into something altogether more ambitious. Instead of places simply holding on to what they had, we found partners cooperating in delivery at the local level, through officers with a distinct and often authority-wide remit for locality working.”

Finally, millions of words have been written about neighbourhood management.

I’ve just added a few thousand more.

But only two matter: it works.

Thanks Octavia.

Image — ‘National Trust Executive Committee Meeting on 15 April 1912, painted by T.M.R in 1924’