Reform & Revolution 1 - The 1949 Housing Act

Published by Ross Macmillan for 24dash.com in Featured and also in Housing

In 1945 poor housing was one of the five great evils identified by Labour politician Nye Bevan. He then led the challenge to put the right to a ‘quality’ home to rent at the forefront of Government policy when he became health minister.

Here, two Thrive Homes residents, who benefited from the post-war public house-building drive, describe how Bevan’s vision of a ‘village with a cross section of classes and wealth’ translated into reality.


Margaret Hibberd (Peggy)
21 Trevose Way
South Oxhey

My husband and I moved into the house in about 1953. He died when he was 63, but I’ve been in the same house for 60 years. I’m now 89.

We were both in the army during the war. That’s where we met, fell in love and got married. I got discharged because I fell pregnant and I had to go and live with my husband’s sister for a year in Harrow. We then got a flat at the Elephant and Castle for two years, before he came out of the army and we moved in here. The house was lovely and very big. When we first moved in there was no pavement, no roads, no nothing – just mud everywhere.

We were in the flat in Elephant and Castle for two years and it didn’t have a bathroom. We had to put a tin bath in front of the fire to wash. When we moved into this house it was so wonderful to have a bathroom. I’m one of the oldest tenants in these houses on the estate. There are about 40 houses in this style. They’re supposed to be Swedish. They are brick and block with wood inside. They’ve done lots of improvements to them since I’ve been here.

The house has three bedrooms – and when we moved in we had a coal fire, which we used to sit around in the winter when it got very cold.

Now the house is all centrally heated and I’ve had a new kitchen fitted which is lovely. We were very lucky to have such a nice house.

We did decorate when we moved in. We’d never done wallpapering before, but one night we put the children to bed and we wallpapered. The wallpaper had a pattern on it. You can guess what happened – we never matched any of it up. We had visitors coming in the next day – my husband’s sister and her husband and when he walked into the house he swore and said ‘what the bloody hell have you done here?’ 

The estate was predominantly working class. The neighbours were mostly Londoners who had moved here after the war after their houses had been bomb-damaged. We all got on very well. I had lovely neighbours. The majority of the men were working in the print industry in Watford, which was very big at the time. My husband worked for Waterlow and Sons in Watford. He used to print the Radio Times. He had a good job and he wasn’t short of money.

On the Queen’s Coronation we collected money to give the kids a good party on the estate. We all got together, somebody wheeled their piano out on to the green and we all had a lovely time. I only wish those neighbours were still here. But they’ve all passed on. They’re all new neighbours now and I don’t see much of them. I’ve got a good next door neighbour.

We had two children here and they both went to school on the estate. They were babies when we moved in. They then moved to Hampden School on the other side of the estate, which was a long walk away. I’d take them in and meet them when they finished. It was a two-mile walk.

The house was wonderful to bring the children up in because it was so big. My son was a musician. His group used to come here and practise because the house was so big and the neighbours loved it. Nobody every grumbled about it. It was lovely.

Frank and Susan Waller
43 Northwick Road
South Oxhey

I moved into South Oxhey with my parents in 1948 from Mordon in Surrey. We moved into what was meant to be a temporary house – they were supposed to have lasted 20 years. They were built for those whose properties that had been bomb-damaged during the war, but the houses are still on the estate today. They were like prefabs with corrugated roofs. They were very spacious and lovely. Considering what they were made out of, they were very warm.

Most of my neighbours were from London – a lot came from the Notting Hill area. We moved there so my father, who worked at Stonebridge Park, would be closer to work. My father was a sheet metal works manager. They made heating and ventilating equipment.

It was very much a mixed community on the estate. Our next-door neighbour was a baker, the one after that was a labourer, there was a commercial traveller – it was a really wide assortment. It was a cross section of the community. They built some houses on the estate about 10 years later called higher-income houses. You got more professional people in those but there weren’t very many of them. Everybody got on, mucked in and helped each other out. Having a baker next door was a dream, especially when it came to functions and cakes and things.

In 1968 I moved into the maisonette above a shop on the estate. It was brick and block and was nicer than the house I’ve got now because it had a hall and a lovely big kitchen. If it had been on the ground floor it would have been brilliant.

We then moved to the house I’m in now in 1969-70. This house is breeze block slab with render outside. This is a two up two down, with a large living room that backs out on to a garden.

I first saw the house I live in today when I was four years old. We were one of the first on the estate in 1948. My father took us for a walk one Sunday when these houses were being built and I remember seeing this house on the corner. I remember I wouldn’t walk across to the house because there was no concrete path. There was only a piece of wood. He went to have a look in the house and I remember there wasn’t any windows or any doors. I remember walking across the plank of wood and into this house, so it’s really rather strange that I should live here today.

There were six primary schools on the estate itself and one over the railway on the adjoining estate, so seven local primary schools and two secondary schools.

The community spirit revolved around the schools and churches because there wasn’t anything else. So you had the parent teachers associations and the church groups that were the lifeblood of the estate. I went to two of the schools and was secretary at Oxhey Wood School for 31 years.

1949 Housing Act – in a nutshell

This 1949 Housing Act (in addition to introducing improvement grants for poor quality private sector dwellings) removed the statutory restriction limiting public housing to the ‘working classes’ – breathing life into Nye Bevan’s vision of a truly universal sector expressed by his phrase the ‘living tapestry’ of a mixed community. Allocation was on housing need, with bombed out families and slum clearance in the cities the priority.

 1949 – what else was happening?

• Britain signs the NATO treaty on April 4th
• Germany splits up into East and West. In May 1949, America, Britain and France united their zones into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). 
• George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four is published
• Birth of legal aid in England and Wales.
• British Commonwealth of Nations renamed The Commonwealth