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How the look of council estates has changed over a century

Those soldiers who made it back from the First World War were greeted by a p rime minister hoping to be returned to office by offering houses to anybody who might need one . Hundreds of thousands of “homes fit for heroes” were to be built, providing respectable dwellings for the people in Britain who would otherwise be doomed to squalor. This promise was given parliamentary accord in the Addison Act, passed 100 years ago today.In these new estates, the comfort of residents was essential. No more endless terraced slums. Streets were to be wider, houses larger and green space would be within easy access. The vast Becontree Estate in Dagenham was the most significant development built off the back of the Addison Act, providing 26,000 mainly semi-detached homes. While it was decried for being similarly dull and sprawling to earlier mass housing projects, Becontree and the estates built at the time undeniably offered residents a more comfortable life.A few decades later there came another devastating war, then another revolution in council housing. Despite their extraordinary reforms in healthcare and other social necessities, Clement Attlee’s Labour government wasn’t building homes fast enough. As the general election neared in 1951, Winston Churchill’s Conservatives knew that housing was the key to winning power.From extras.More homes were needed immediately with the demand largely in inner-city areas where land was scarce and the population was dense. The party gave housing “priority second only to national defence” and outbid the incumbent Labour government to promise 300,000 new council houses a year. In order to meet their ambitious target, the Conservatives employed a radical design that was then unheard of in Britain. Homes for hundreds of people would be built quickly, on a small plot of land, for a low price by simply piling the homes on top of one another. The tower block had arrived. Within months, the cathedral spires that had towered alone above cities across Britain for centuries were joined by council estates shooting into the sky.These two major revolutions in state provision of housing have made the towns and cities of Britain today unrecognisable to a person from 1919, not only in the layout and style of the buildings but in the benefit that mass council housing has brought to the people of Britain. Unfortunately, the state of council housing is unrecognisable even to a person from 1979, and so many of these homes are now privately owned and too expensive for the poor to live in.