Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Join Tess Pinto to hear about the Tory-led Greater London Council's 'Homestead' scheme.
In May 1977, the Conservatives took control of the Greater London Council. It was a decisive victory, won on a platform that pledged to revolutionise inner London housing. Led by the flamboyant politician Horace Cutler, the new administration implemented a raft of housing policies. Along with the provision of home loans and the reintroduction of council house sales, the GLC launched a flagship Homesteading scheme, which used a lottery system to give away old, dilapidated council-owned houses to aspiring homeowners. In return, with the help of grants and a deferred mortgage repayment, the ‘Homesteaders’ modernised and renovated their properties. Cutler’s GLC can be construed as a testbed for the urban approach that would come to define national policy in the following decade, with Homesteading itself a conduit for the kind of values that underpinned the Thatcherite approach to the city. And yet Homesteading was also the product of particular local circumstances: it was located within a political strategy that sought to redraw the entrenched lines of London’s electoral geography, and it tapped into long-running conceptual debates about the very nature of London itself. Using Homesteading as a case study, this presentation seeks to expound a multivalent and ambitious urban project and its architects, whose significance has thus far been overlooked.
Tessa Pinto is a TECHNE funded PhD student at Royal Holloway University, having previously worked as a senior conservation advisor for the Twentieth Century Society. The subject of this presentation comprises part of a doctoral thesis which explores the intersection of politics and the built environment in the work of the Greater London Council between 1965-1986.
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