Planning 1930s Suburbia

How the pre-war planning acts encouraged suburbia and killed off the terraced house

The 1930s changed the look and feel of England like no other decade since. A huge housebuilding boom increased the built-up area of Britain’s cities by an estimated 50%, with the impact skewed towards the Midlands and South-East of England. This created a swathe of mostly semi-detached houses which look very similar whether they are in Carlisle or Southampton – a sort of downgraded Arts and Crafts style satirised by the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster as ‘by-pass variegated. The world’s first country to urbanise became, perhaps, the first to suburbanise, creating a new aesthetic of respectability and normality.

Osbert Lancaster, “By-pass variegated” (“If an architect of enormous energy, painstaking ingenuity and great structural knowledge had devoted years of his life... it is just possible, although highly unlikely, that he might have evolved a style as crazy as that with which the speculative builder has enriched the landscape on either side of our great arterial roads.”)

The reason for this expansion was a housebuilding boom of unprecedented and unrepeated scale. Over 300,000 new homes were built each year, overwhelmingly by the private sector (although this statement itself requires some qualification, as it was the vast programme of state-funded arterial road building that made development possible, thus the ‘by-pass’ part of ‘by-pass variegated’). Unlike earlier terraced houses, which had significant regional variety and used local materials, these homes were remarkably standardised nationally in both layout and appearance.

The boom is beloved by many contemporary think tanks and housing reformers, for whom it demonstrates what could be achieved if the private sector is let loose to provide what people want, where they want it. Since 1947, this has been prevented by the Town and Country Planning Act; its rationing of land, its nationalisation of development rights and the discretionary system it (allegedly) introduced, are the reasons why Britain has such a marked housing crisis today. They point to the fact that, as a percentage of the stock, private housebuilding has been permanently depressed compared to pre-war levels. They argue that a radical liberalisation is necessary if (some would even go as far sufficient for) development is to increase markedly. Personally, I tend to agree with the less strident forms of this argument, although the situation is more complicated than is sometimes portrayed.

But dig into the detail, though, and it’s not quite right to say – as is often said – that before 1947 landowners and developers could build what they wanted. There were, in fact, a number of planning acts before the Second World War. They are often dismissed as unimportant as they were unable to prevent development; councils were liable for compensation to landowners for any loss to land value produced by restricting building. (This was supposed to be balanced by a charge on the ‘betterment’ in land values for owners benefitting from the scheme, but this proved unworkable).

But they did impact and regulate the form of housing that was delivered and were important in spreading “by-pass variegated” suburbs across England. That was achieved partly by providing clear guidelines on where arterial roads would go and where development therefore would be easily served by utilities and amenities; partly by providing density zones (see below); and partly through restricting commercial development in residential areas.

As one of the few academic books to delve into this period explains: “The [pre-war] Planning Acts proved most relevant to the large-scale suburban development of London and cities such as Birmingham. Their value was not so much in restricting private building – there was little or no desire on the part of those councils to preserve agricultural land, especially where they could purchase public open-space compulsorily. Rather, such planning schemes were promoted essentially to improve local-authority control over the detail of building, particularly of housing density and road layout.” (Ward, 1994)

In any case the originators of the pre-war system had very little interest in preserving the countryside or rationing land (although this would become more of a theme as the scale and nature of development in the thirties became clear.) They were housing reformers, not landscape preservers. They wanted to provide better and more spacious housing and living conditions for ordinary people. They aimed to ensure the provision of more of what they saw as healthy, morally uplifting houses, and to prevent the development of the denser terraced housing they abhorred.

The system born in the 1909 act was designed to co-ordinate, shape and enable, not to inhibit. Development control - now (rather perversely) synonymous with ‘planning’, even though it is in itself nothing of the sort – was not a major part of the original system, although it would come to become more important well before the 1947 act.

While there were court cases where attempts to fix building lines led to compensation claims, the 1932 Planning Act introduced a long list of areas where owners were not necessarily able to claim – including “space about buildings, the number of buildings, and the site, height, design or external appearance of buildings”. But “it did not allow the prohibition or permanent restriction of building, except on the grounds of danger or injury to health, or the excessive expenditure of public money in the provision of roads, sewer, water supply or other public services…. It was impossible, therefore, without the risk of the payment of enormous sums. to limit the growth of a town or provide a green belt.” (Crow, 1996)

The key documents for the schemes were the ‘model clauses’ issued by the Ministry of Health at various points over the decades in question. These suggested the segregation of land into classes for different uses and the separation of residential from commercial uses, and the use of ‘density zones’ to regulate housing development. The advised guidelines were between 6 and 12 dwellings per acre – equivalent to 15 to 30 dwellings per hectare. These are exactly the densities found in inter-war suburbia.

(Excerpts from the 1937 Model Clauses)

The development of planning schemes was enormously slow, suggesting that their impact was minor. By 1935 – the height of the housing boom – only 71 schemes had been formally approved by the Local Government Board or the Ministry of Health. These covered 152,193 acres, a tiny fraction of the country, although there was a high concentration in the fast-growing Home Counties and Midlands. Reports from the Department of Health do actually show how this land was zoned for density – the below is from the 1936/7 version.

Of land zoned in the 5 years to 1936/37, the largest slice (35%) was in the 8 units per acre - spacious semi-detached and detached suburbia - with a further 33% at the slightly higher 12 per acre. Virtually nothing was zoned at 20 per acre - the starting point for terraced housing. In contrast, roughly 15% had been earmarked for much less dense development at 1 to 4 dwellings per acre.

It could be argued that these density zones were, given the nature of the early system, in line with what the market wanted to do anyway. And there is certainly some truth to this, but there is also significant evidence of the state actively preventing builders from developing at different densities to those proposed in the model clauses.

For example, one builder, Thomas Blade, was successfully prosecuted by Enfield Council for building two terraces on Broadlands Avenue. These were in contravention of the planning scheme and were an ‘unauthorised house type’. It is very evident, then, that the state was, often indirectly, promoting semi-detached and detached homes, and discouraging terraces. (The planning schemes mostly applied only to ‘greenfield’ areas and it was only later that they were considered for existing urban areas, mainly in response to the growth of flats in the late 1930s).

Control, however, was more extensive than the figures on plan coverage suggest. By March 1936, a further 700,000 acres were subject to ‘Preliminary Statements’ that outlined the broad parameters of the intended scheme, with a further 1.3m acres already through that process and subject to published draft plans. These increasingly had a status not far off that of an adopted scheme. Furthermore, a further 16.8m acres – not far off a third of Britain – had resolved to produce a planning scheme, which gave them powers of ‘Interim Development Control’. In total, all these measures covered 73% of England and 36% of Wales at the time.

The origin of Interim Development Control goes back to the way planning schemes were drawn up and enforced from 1909 on. Once a scheme was approved by Parliament, it had the force of national law. So, while owners had six months to claim for ‘injurious’ impacts, once the scheme was in place, any non-conforming building within the area could be demolished without compensation. It also, remarkably, applied retrospectively.

As the process for producing schemes was complicated and slow (and potentially expensive), this created a huge issue for landowners and developers. If they began building, there was the risk that the local authority could introduce a scheme later and their work would be demolished without payback.

The result was the origin of the system of planning application and consent, introduced by the 1922 General Interim Development Order, which applied to councils who had declared they were going to develop a scheme. Developers would submit plans; and if they were in line with the local authority’s intentions, they would be granted permission and would therefore be immune from demolition. The rules applied were presumably guided by the model clauses.

There was also a system for appeal if the council refused permission. In this case, it went to the local government board and later, the Minister of Health. The Ministry of Health reports provide some details of appeals, providing some insight into the attitudes and actions of the state.. Most are quite trivial, but there are a few that show builders appealing over density provisions (and the placement of industry, shops or pubs in residential area) and being dismissed, demonstrating the force of the norms in the model clauses. (The same reports also show councils trying to introduce green belts, in vain).

Indeed, appeals were more likely to be dismissed without compensation than anything else. Looking over the 1934/5 and 1935/6 financial years, there were some 1,637 appeals; the largest slice (166) was due to developers attempting to erect shops in residential areas; the next largest (121) was a result of them proposing building at an inappropriate density. During the 1935/6 financial year, 810 appeals were received; 136 were upheld, 271 dismissed, 220 withdrawn after agreement between the parties, and the remainder had lapsed or were still under consideration. If an appeal was refused, by the way, there was no automatic compensation, although there could be at ministerial discretion.

One paper concludes that “developers gradually recognised that these town planning schemes, and preliminary statements provided a positive land use framework. Some even advertised the fact that their housing estates complied with the requirements of the local schemes. This may explain why only a small number of planning appeals were lodged against their provisions. And the even smaller number that were upheld.” In other words, in most cases, and for various reasons, developers decided it was not worth their time or money to fight regulations, even if their chances were higher than under later planning regimes.

Why is the period so misunderstood? Firstly, the sources for this period are diffuse, often held by local authorities in obscure archives, and academic research is really rather sparse. Secondly, most of the literature on the acts dates from a time when urban densities were still abhorred. Those writing still-browsed tomes on planning history, academics like Peter Hall – a garden cities enthusiast - just accepted suburban-style development as a natural and normal thing, and did not question the form of individual schemes, rather the lack of effective plan at regional or national scale. In today’s climate, with a greater acceptance - and interest - in ‘gentle density’, it’s wroth revisiting the whole story.

Admittedly the whole system was helped, of course, by the fact that the schemes were ‘going with the grain of the market’. Many people wanted to leave the crowded, polluted inner cities for more spacious environments; it is hard to appreciate today what London, or other cities must have been like before slum clearance and the clean air acts. The contrast between the old urban and new suburban Britain must have been very stark indeed. Moreover, people were encouraged to leave by all sorts of imagery, not least on the London Underground.

To be fair, though, the market had also been shaped by the activities of the state in the 1920s. The Tudor Walters report had produced minimum standards for council homes and had mandated a ‘cottage estate’ layout. Earlier flatted social housing schemes – the Boundary Estate or the Peabody blocks – would no longer be permitted. Although this would be relaxed over the next decade, the scale of the 1920s ‘cottage estates’ provided a very visible new benchmark for ordinary houses. Owner-occupiers would inevitably demand something that appeared to have a higher status. (In fact, many privately built houses were slightly smaller than the equivalent council houses but often had larger gardens and the all-important bay window as a marker that they were not local authority homes, which were flat-fronted).

So what was the net result of the whole process? The model clauses created a standard template for suburbia, one that was applied in planning schemes and preliminary statements and, presumably, used by councils and ministers to decide on the appropriateness of proposals. The speculative builders of the era developed a house type that both fitted that template and appealed to the lower-middle and upper-working class buyers who were now able to access finance for the first time. This included the segregation of commercial uses into “parades” of shops, a feature of those early planning schemes. There was little motivation to deviate.

I am not trying to suggest that there is any sort of equivalence between the pre- and post-war systems in terms of directive or compulsive power. It was clearly a much weaker system, and there is plenty of evidence, especially in the 1920s, of landowners being given compensation for what appear to be layout-related issues, and appeals being supported by the Minister. It was clearly a much more tentative and cooperative approach. But it went both ways; the state was also shaping outcomes, based upon the ideology that earlier housing reformers had produced.

The next part of this piece will look at how that ideology became planning normality, and the central role of one architect-planner in bringing that about. Raymond Unwin was probably more influential in shaping the aesthetics of contemporary Britain than anyone else in history. His principles of “Open Development” - effectively the design aesthetics of the garden city - opposed the sense of enclosure that comes from more traditional environments. It would become mainstream in Britain for most of the 20th century.

Adverts in a Bristol local newspaper, 1937

I will finish with a sort of disclaimer. The aim here, and in subsequent pieces, is not to ‘have a go’ at this form, which has many merits. These suburbs and the houses they comprise provided a huge increase in the standard of living for many ordinary working people. Many have largely stood the test of time and remain understandably desirable today; these areas are much more than suburbs in some other countries, notably the United States. If well-maintained they remain attractive, although in some locations they can feel a little bleak and windswept.

While they set the scene for the rapid growth of car use in the 50s and 60s (notably with the widespread use of easily concretable front gardens, an unforeseen legacy of garden city design ideals) they were mostly based around tram or tube lines and were designed for walking.

I grew up in such a house, not in the Home Counties heartland of the boom but in the main regional nexus, Birmingham. it was very comfortable – although I was always annoyed by the low ceilings compared to friends’ Victorian houses and particularly the grand rooms of one friend’s Regency house in Edgbaston. In their unextended form they are actually quite small, smaller than many better-quality terraced homes, particularly in London. This is because the dominant residential design ideas of the time demanded longer frontages and shallow, rather thin homes, in contrast to the narrower, longer form of earlier terraces.

It is rather to ask why it happened as it did, why the layout and typology of the thirties housing boom was so universally similar, whether on the South Coast or Newcastle. It’s important to ask why there was so little diversity, as the wholesale adoption of this form – with the exception of the odd block of flats – meant that it became the standard for development in Britain for the subsequent seven decades, until the ‘flat boom’ of the late 1990s.

It was also qualitatively different from what had gone before. Until the 1930s most ordinary housing was built by speculative builders for small-time local landlords on leases from larger-scale landowners. This time it was driven by two new forces; a rapidly expanding mortgage market and the rise of a speculative housebuilder, who would buy the land and then sell individual houses to individual families. Britain changed from a nation of renters to a nation of owner-occupiers. The 3-bed 1930s semi came into being alongside mass owner-occupation and the new idea of respectability outlined above; the three would become inseparably linked for the remainder of the 20^th century.

These houses were, then, a sociological as well as an economic phenomenon. They were mainly bought by better off ordinary people moving out of the inner cities, which were then intensely smoky and crowded to a degree that is hard today to imagine. In time, they provided a whole new model of upper working/lower middle-class respectability. A semi-detached home with a car outside became a metaphor for that normality, re-asserting and intensifying a desire for privacy and single-family living that had always been there in England in particular.

I suspect some of the enthusiasm for the form in some quarters stems from a nostalgia for those elements, and their associations, presumably viewed as lost or under attack in modern Britain. Despite greater variability since, it perhaps explains why, despite their popularity in the second-hand market, relatively few new terraced homes are built, and why Britain has such difficulty in building mid-rise flats – the ‘gentle density’ dreamed of by some writing about urban design.