‘Houses not People’
Tom Furber, Engagement and Learning Officer, London Metropolitan Archives
A map recording bomb damage sustained during World War Two is available – clicking the image above to visit.
The popular local history blog Isle of Dogs – Past Life, Past Lives begins a reflection on the post-war history of North Millwall with the following stark assertion:
‘In the 1960s, the London County Council (LCC) finished off the work started by the Luftwaffe twenty years earlier when it wiped away most of the old Island communities, completely changing the fabric and character of the place at the same time. That’s an enormously cliched statement but in this case it is entirely accurate and most appropriate.’
In an article more nuanced than this opening paragraph might suggest, we hear that reconstruction did bring material benefits, although it did so at great cost and without proper consultation with the ‘old islanders’.
To put this into context, in the years following World War Two, the London County Council (LCC) and later the Greater London Council (GLC) – alongside the London boroughs – sought not only to rebuild but also to socially re-engineer the capital through a wide-ranging programme of planning and works. The LCC in particular was a place where idealistic architects would seek to bring about social progress through new architectural forms. Their legacy, as the reflections quoted above attest, is mixed and at times bitterly controversial.
The issue of high-rise housing is a case in point. For some, it was a clear improvement on pre-war slums, while for others it dislocated established communities and led to the demolition of repairable homes. As a form of social housing, it is charged with directly causing crime and anti-social behaviour, while others point to neglect and wider socio-economic contexts as being the deeper causes of these maladies.
Still from The Changing Face of London, a film made in 1960 to celebrate the role of London County Council after World War Two. To watch, click on the image above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhTaqOeMrw
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) holds the collections of both the LCC and the GLC. One might hope that referring to these collections would be a simple way of testing the veracity of the controversies and cliches outlined above, but this is not the case. Institutional collections reflect the needs of the institutions themselves, not historians working in the future.
Records speaking to the first-hand experience of locals and tenants are not obvious from catalogue descriptions, and are not available remotely. If one were to sift through numerous records entitled ‘general papers’, there might well be some nuggets of gold but these are unlikely to be found by a non-specialist researcher, who instead will find numerous and readily accessible records that feature buildings, planners and architects. Arguably, this supports the view that the LCC cared more about houses than people but to do so risks overreaching the evidence. It seems more accurate to say that, at least at present, we have a gap in our collection.
Images of the Barkantine Estate in Millwall from Collage, the London picture archive managed by London Metropolitan Archives. Click on the image to visit the site. https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/
Typical catalogue descriptions from the London Metropolitan Archives. To visit, click on the image above.
