Freedom Press

84b Whitechapel High Street, London EI 7QX

Contents
© Colin Ward and Freedom Press 1990 l. The Do-I t -Y ourselfN ew Town 7
First published September 1990
2. What Should We Teach About Housing? 36
Cover designed by Donald Rooum
3. Dismantling Whitehall 47
Printed in Great Britain by
Aldgate Press, London El 7QX :"-
4. Until We Build Again '. 56
J
5. Direct Action for Working-Class Housing 65

6. Anarchy or Order? The Planner's Dilemma 81

7. Freedom and the Built Environment 99

8. City People Housing Themselves /fJ 113

9. An Anarchist Approach to Urban Planning 123

10. Being Local 133

Foreword
/ The request for "something new about housing" fills me with
dismay for the very simple reason that I have nothing new to
say about housing. I began writing about housing forty-five
years ago in the anarchist press and have seen the results of
housing policies of both Labour and Conservative govern-
ments ever since. Any comments I make on the opportunities
or obstacles provided by ever-changing government legisla-
tion and administrative decisions and endlessly changing
rules among the providers of housing finance would be
out-of-date before they were printed.
Any observations I make about homelessness, or about
exploiting landlords, or about collapsing council flats or the
plight of mortgage-holders faced by rising interest rates, are
better provided by feature-writers and beautiful grainy
photographs in all the posh newspapers. As an anarchist
propagandist over such a long period I would have been
foolish if I did not reflect on the nature of effective and
ineffective propaganda. The application of anarchist ideas to
the basic need of human shelter is dweller control and it is
evident to me that people draw their inspiration from what
other people actually succeed in doing. Not the affluent, who
take dweller control for granted because they have freedom of
choice, but ordinary fellow citizens facing every kind of
difficulty because the system doesn't cater for their
aspirations.
W e have had a century of government involvement in the
provision of housing and there is a great deal to learn from it.
This century has seen at least three revolutions in housing
expectations. The first is the revolution in tenure. Before the
first world war the norm, for both rich and poor alike, was
renting in the private market. This applied to 90 per cent of
households. Today the norm is owner-occupation. This

7
8 TALKING HOUSES ;
applies to about 65 per cent of households. It varies greatly in
different parts of Britain, and the sad truth is that those places
with the biggest proportion of bad housing are those with the
largest proportion of housing in the hands oflocal authorities .
It is easy to see how useful this fact is for Conservative
governments in t~ war against local councils but at the
same time the revolution in tenure means that owner-
occupation is the mode of tenure against which any other
method of householding is judged.
A second housing revolution is concerned with services and
with housing densities. Domestic service was an astonishingly
enormous industry until the first world war, even until the
second . It always amazes us how far down the social scale the
habit of having a young girl, or at least some live-in female
relative, to light the fires, boil the water, peel the potatoes, and
do the washing and endless cleaning, penetrated. Everywhere,
these were the tasks of the wife and mother. The growth of
mechanical services, access to water, power, light, heat and
domestic machinery, dismissed as mere gadgetry by male
philosophers, represent a partial liberation from servitude.
Housing densities in the poor areas of British cities were
incredibly high a century ago and astonishing forty-five years
ago. Charles Booth found in 1890 that a quarter of a million
Londoners were "crowded together at a density of one room
per family". In Glasgow in 1945 there were inner city areas
with population densities of well over 900 people per acre.
Both demographic changes and decentralisation have had a
liberating effect, since I have never met anyone who did not
aspire to the modest hope of a room of one's own. For the third
housing revolutiQn has been in the nature of households. For a
century the provision of housing assumed the nuclear family:
Mum, Dad and the kids. Today they are a minority of
households.
Now all through this century people on the political Left
have invested all their moral energy in one form of housing
provision: local authorities as landlords with the aid of one or
another of a complex variety of subsidies from central
government. For a great part of this century this has been a
FO REWORD 9
bi-partisan policy pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm
by councils and by central governments of both political
com plexions . . .
One big tragedy about this is that, as anyone who has been
a t either side of it knows, the landlord-tenant relationship has
never, all through history, been a happy one. Quite obviously
they are on opposite sides of the fence . Councils took it over
/ unchanged, except that there is something even more
humiliating to have to go to the back door of the council offices
to talk through a hatch to a poor clerk who has learned to hate
tenants because of their endless moans, when all you want is
an essential repair or a transfer. The situation is' actually
worse. The grotesque centralisation of policy in Britain makes
council tenants sitting ducks for the willing or unwilling
imposition of central policy by local councils. Hence the
situation of the 1980s when council tenants were in some areas
subsidising the general rate fund or paying in their rents for
street-lighting charged elsewhere to general income.
My propaganda about housing has always been based on
currently observable facts and on people's own efforts to
discover alternatives. At the same time there is a doctrine of
revolutionary purity which urges that there can be no solution
to people's housing problems until the social revolution which
will change everything. ~Marxi~t theorists on ~he pol.it~c.al Left
prove that housing co-operatlves or self-buIld actIVItIes ~re
actually the ultimate triumph of the process of capItal
reproduction. "The capitalist class has reduced production
costs by ensuring that the proletariat even has to house itself
at its own cost, with its own time and its own l?-bouri '
I keep away from these views as they solve no problems for
me or anyone else. I think that the ordinary human attributes
of self-help and mutual aid were the foundations, not only of
ordinary experience everywhere but also of the Labour
movement and its history in Britain. It isn't my fault that
bureaucratic managerialism took over socialist politics so
that, in the climate of disillusion, slogans like self-help and
mutual aid were left around to be exploited by the party of the
privileged. .
Whatever kind of political regime rules us, people need to
10 T ALKI NG HOUSES
be housed, and I see a certain prudence in trying Y ? protect
yourself from the politician's use of housing policy. ~ t is only
the homeless who suffer. And they are ignored by both sides.
They are the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of housing
activity by central and local government ~
My connection with the housing industry, although I can't
remember not being interested in the way people shaped and
adapted their environment, has always been mostly accidental
and marginal. I speak with no kind of expertise. In~,
when I was 15, my second job was for the Borough Surveyor
of Ilford, Essex. Among my tasks was sorting the dockets that
came in about repairs and maintenance to that council's
housing estates. Some got repairs. Others were put on a
second pile. Some tenants were favoured. Others were not. I
had stumbled, without realising its implications, on one of the
unmentioned facts about housing management. The whole
sad history has been carefully chronicled by Anne Power. 1 In
support of her interpretation of housing history I must cite the
opinion of a lifelong socialist, Tony Judge, writing of his
experience as chairperson of the Greater London Council's
Housing Management Committee. He declared that "The
impression, often confirmed as accurate on deeper examina-
tion, is of a vast bureaucracy concerned more with
self-perpetuation than with either efficiency or humanity".2
I first wrote about housing in 1945 and 1946 when it fell to
me to report in Freedom on the post-war squatting campaign
when 40,000 people occupied empty military camps as the
only way to get a roof over their heads. I assembled the
accumulated material into a pamphlet which no-one was
interested in publishing. Many years later my crumbling
carbon copy was printed in Anarchy in 1963 and reprinted by
the London Squatter's Campaign which was instigated by just
two people, Ron Bailey and Jim Radford, in Ilford in 1969. 3
Squatting has been a feature of the London housing scene ever
since, and it has been my task to point out to the "official"
housing world that some of the outstandingly successful
housing co-operatives began their life as squats. 4
In the 1950s I was actually involved in the housing industry
to the extent that I was working for private architects whose
FOREWORD 11
clients were public housing authorities. I remember standing
one day in 1952 on a site in Deptford, part bombed, part
derelict, poring over the large-scale pre-war Ordnance maps
of the little streets of 2-storey houses with the architect Peter
Shepheard. He calculated that the number of dwellings that
could be provided by rebuilding the old street pattern was the
same that we could provide in the mixture of3-ston:y walk-up
flats and five-storey blocks with lifts that our clients, the
London County Council, required. He raised the matter with
both the Director of Housing and with the chairwoman of the
housing committee, but of course was told that the Council's
policy had been determined, and that it was up to the
architects to follow it.
In the 1960s, when I was editing the Freedom Press
monthly Anarchy, I included Uanuary 1968) a long article of
my own called "Tenants Take Over: A new strategy for
council tenants". This argued that the right solution to the
malaise oflocal authority housing was to transfer estates from
councils to tenant co-operatives. This article attracted some
attention outside the private world of anarchist propaganda,
a nd I was asked by the Architectural Press to expand it into
book form,5 and I found myself addressing meetings of
tenants' associations, housing managers, councillors and
academics, presenting them with what I saw as an anarchist
approach to housing. I would have been a lone voice, but for
the fact that an anarchist friend, the architect John F . C.
T urner, who had returned to this country after many years in
Latin America and the United States, with a message, that the
fi rst principle of housing (cited twice in the collection of
lectures before you) is dweller control; summed up my own
conclusions better than I could myself.6
As a result of Tenants Take Over I was asked to compile a
Freedom Press book out of thirty years of writing and talking
about housing, and spent hours in the photocopy shop and a
family holiday in Norfolk cobbling it together. This was
Housing: an anarchist approach (1976, reprinted 1983). Then in
the early 1980s I was approached by Richard Kuper of the
then Pluto Press, to write a little book about a radical attitude
 12 TALK INC HOUSES
to housing as part of the run-up to the 1983 general election. I
beg~n writing it, but it became more and more a polemic
agamst the hou~ing ideologists of the political Left, and their
fatal concentratIOn on the Thatcher government's "Right to
Buy" policy.
Even I, who have never voted for the Labour Party, or any
other party, could recognise that Labour was out of touch
with the a~tual experience of tenants . (My own approach was
expressed m my chapter "One by one, or all together?" in--
Tenants Take ~ver.) N.0t wanting to be a part of internal Labour
Party polemIcs, t withdrew, but after that election had been
lost, I was asked again to write the book When We Build Again
(Pluto Press 1985) which is still available at an absurdly
increased price from the present owners of Pluto.
Then ~n 198~ a~ award was advertised in the press for a
b~ok on mn~r CIty Issues. Not wanting the wrong things to be
saId yet agam, I applied for it, travelled endlessly at other
people's expense, and wrote Welcome, Thinner City (Bedford
Square Press 1989) . Pursued by Freedom Press for something
new. to add to Housing : an anarchist approach for yet another
reprmt, I had. a sinking feeling. That book expressed,
unaltered, the VIews I had expressed on housing and planning
between 1945 and 1975. This is some kind of a record in
~ontin,uity . If I was wrong the evidence is there. If I was right
It should be seen as a vindication of my version of an anarchist
viewpoint.
There was nothing I could do but to offer instead a
coll~ction of yet more public addresses given to a variety of
alldlences. Even this presents me with difficulties. I am not a
natural public speaker and I always bring a prepared text.
And as I have just a few simple ideas to propagate, I endlessly
repeat. the same examples and quotations from other people,
t~ audIences who could have read them in the first place. I am
dIsmayed by the sheer number of times that I have been on a
platform talking housing in the last fifteen years, and I even
had th: arrogance ten years ago to write an article announcing
my re~Irement fr~m ~alking in public.1 It did me no good: I
was still pursued m CIrcumstances when it would be harder to
refuse than accept.
FOREWORD 13
M y best meetings, or at least the ones which affected me
most, were those set up by the secretaries of tenants'
associations with the optimistic faith that the visiting speaker
can crystallise the issues they are struggling with. My
proudest moment as a writer came when the chairholder of a
tenants' co-operative in Liverpool held up a copy of Tenants
Take Over, falling to bits in his hand, and said, "Here's the
man who wrote the Old Testament, but we built the New
Jerusalem!" That occasion justified, for me, a lifetime of
recycling other people's experience of housing themselves.
Alas, my attempts to get off the meetings circuit only
resulted in the meetings becoming grander and more
widespread. The least repetitive ten of them are printed here
as originally delivered, but with duplicated quotations from
other people cut as far as possible.
They were prepared for particular audiences in particular
places . The first dates from the mid-1970s and is important to
me simply because it actually influenced various community
ventures. 8 It was also a harbinger of the book that Dennis
H ardy and I were later enabled to write, Arcadia for All: the
lega.cy of a makeshift landscape (Mansell 1984).
The remaining nine lectures were given in the 1980s,
attempting to adapt the message to the interests and localities
of the people who were there. Perhaps I should apologise for
endlessly repeating a few simple truths . I certainly don't have
any new insights to offer about housing. I do think there is
much for us all to learn.
But the experience of talking housing over all these years
leads me to two reflections . The first is that although for
decades we have listened to a barrage of sociological analysis
of mass media and instant communications, people rely on
some kind of contact with the propagators of ideas . This is my
experience and it is certainly that of propagandists I support
like the National Federation of Housing Co-operatives and the
Walter Segal Self-Build Trust. The second is that I never set
out to be a housing pundit and in fact I have carefully
described my total lack of qualifications for this role. In any
case we anarchists have a profound and absolutely justified
mistrust of expertise. However, if anyone tells me that
 14 TALKING
anarchism has no relevance to current daily issues, I thrust
my books in their hands.
I would like to have a pile of similar books about dozens of
other current topics of ordinary life to push onto enquirers and \
into the wider debate. I keep wondering why they aren't '"
around.
My thanks are due to the audiences who patiently listened
to these lectures and who questioned and discussed the issues
afterwards. Some of them are spattered with source notes,
which I have retained, simply because listeners often asked,
and I hope readers will too, where the information I was
retailing came from and what they should read to learn more.
References
I. Anne Power: Property Before People: the management oj twentieth-century council
housing (Allen & Unwin 1987)
2. Tony Judge: "The Political and Administrative Setting" in Hamdi and
Greenstreet (eds) Participation in Housing (Oxford Polytechnic 1981)
3. Nicolas Walter: "The new squatters" (Anarchy 102, August 1969),
reprinted in A Decade of Anarchy (Freedom Press 1987)
4. Colin Ward: "Self-help in urban renewal", talk given on 27 January 1987
to the Town & Country Planning Association conference on "Our
deteriorating housing stock: financing and managing new solutions",
printed in The Raven, No 2, August 1987.
5. Colin Ward: Tenants Take Over (Architectural Press 1974, paperback
1976)
6. John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (eds): Freedom to Build (Collier
Macmillan 1972), John Turner: Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
7. Colin Ward: "By me, no more meetings" New Society 17 July 1980
8. Andrew Wood: Greentown: A case stu4J oj a proposed alternative community
(Open University Energy and Environment Research Unit 1988)
HOUSES
1. The Do It Yourself
NewTown
The New Towns movement in Britain, sparked off at the turn
of the century by Ebenezer Howard's book Garden Cities of
Tomorrow and built into post-war planning legislation and
policy, has had its successes and its failures. The successes are
there for all to see, and as for the failures - well it always
seems to me that the New Towns policy is criticised for the
wrong reasons. One of the criticisms of the New Town
ideolQgy which- has develo~d in the last few-y-ears is t4at J he
New Towns P'!.v~_wo_n~theiu>us.ces~_~t ."'~!!~ .~ P.~!l~_(':_...?f the.
urban -po~~:_~~ ~~e-~~_~~.;:~~l: ~~~, a~d that . they ~re
consequently irrelevant to real Important Issues hke SOCial
justice. It has been rather amusing to watch this notion
spiralling round the academic chat-shows, getting cruder and
more dogmatic all the while, since it was launched in 1972. It
is already beginning.JQ, affect~~licy. in thL.!itie~. It.is a
difficult argument to come to gnps WIth because sometImes
people say a lot of different and contradictory things at the
same time. How often one hears the giant fringe housing
estates like Thamesmead, or Chelmsley Wood, or Kirkby or
Cantril Farm, described as New Towns, when of course they
are not. If you point out that the New Towns_h..ll_'lf_absorbed
only a small E.!:.~Q,!:!,i(;m..2f the J~normOJ1S outwa,rd _mpvement
from .JJ1.s: . ~cities (only l3_~L ~en Lof the movement from
London), or if you take the example of Milto..p_ IS..eynes which
has provided 16,000 jobs of which a little over a thousand
came from London, while 12,000 people have moved there
"
Lecture given at the Garden Cities/New Towns Forum at Welwyn Garden Ci0'
on 22 October 1975 and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on 19
February 1976
15
16 TALKING HOUSES
from London, then the critics say that the New Towns have
become irrelevant. If you point out that the~ T.9J:Yilli have
provided~h~~~nd j£~~s f9.L L<l:rge numb~r~.o(w_orking.::~lass
p:?p~ e :wJ~!?,},yQlJld not J~,e ~enabled otherwise to get .~.' l!lore
ample. l.ife .out of. the city il) the way that middle class people
t~<;..for < gra!!.~~l, they reply that the New Towns have do~e
nothing for the really under-privileged or deprived. Well, I'm
delighted to see the pundits of planning emerging as the
champions of the inner city poor. It makes a change when you
consider what the planning orthodoxy of the last twenty years
has done to inner city London, Glasgow, Liverpool or Cardiff.
Of course I recognise that then~ is a large element of social
snobbishness in the deprecators of the New Towns. Some
people can't stand the upward social mobility of the skilled
worker. And then we ha've to carry like a cross the Marxist
intelligentsia who can't bear to think of the working class
being lost to the class struggle and developing a taste for
wall-to-wall carpeting. They are like the people who would
like the poor to be starving in the slums so as to hasten the day
of revolution. Apart from our moral distaste for such an
outlook, life never happens that way.
What we are talking about is the missing half of Ebenezer
Howard's formula. He wanted dispersal in order to make
possible the humane redevelopment of the inner city. He
thought, seventy years or more ago, that once the inner city
had been "demagnetised", once large numbers of people had
been convinced that "they can better their condition in every
way by migrating elsewhere" the bubble of the monopoly
value of inner-city land would burst. "But let us notice," he
wrote in his chapter on The Future of London, "how each
person in migratin from LQ!!:g.o~)_VYE!!~ I!l<!.~ing the burden of
s:!:?~~~.:.ImjLkss.. heav:.y- w c those. _wha...re.~in) '"wiIL (unless
there IS some Ch!1.lJ~jlt.th01!\\:J,. m,a.k~ the burden of rates on
th~ r~t;p~~oCLQQdon~ Y-~!_h~.ayi~r'~- iI'e' 1hoi:;ght- that the
change in the inner city would be effected "not at the expense
of the ratepayers, but almost entirely at the expense of the
landlord class".
Now of course it hasn't happened that way because of our
continued failure to cope with the problem of land valuation.
THE Do- I T- YOURSELF NEW TOWN 17
We can hope, if without much conviction, that the
Community Land Act and the temporary collapse of the
property boom will bring us closer to the situation that
\ Howard envisaged.
~ Last year in Swindon, a town rescued from decay by the
T own Development legislation, I was talking to a post office
. worker who told me of the conditions his wife and children
had had to endure living in two rooms in Islington. The mon
out of London of the department of the post office in which he
worked had dramatically improved the conditions of life fur
his family. Funnily enough, it is likely that the very house he
moved out of has become part of the humane, 12_~._densitv
rei.~elc?l~m ~nt of.lh~, In.n.eL.9.ty_th,[QJ}·gnJh,e process known.as
gentrificatio.Q.. Perhaps instead of four families sharing the
same ilapidated house with one WC in the backyard, one
family now lives there and the immaculately painted house
has central heating and a bathroom while the backyard has
changed its name to the patio and is full of grapevines and
frisbies. The old WC houses a Moulton bicycle. The occupant
is probably an ecologically-conscious planner who leads a
busy and blameless life crusading for the urban poor. ._S£~~
for decent livigg is som..kthin g..thaLm.o.ru;.y_~l!Y.
Afrw years ago Sir Frederic Osborn was invited to attend a
meeting ofthe Covent Garden Community in central London.
"What should the Odhams Press site be used for?" he was
asked . "Why, a public open space of course" he replied, and
everybody laughed. Yet a few years later, thanks to the
temporary collapse of property speculation in London, the
Community itself has built a garden on that site -
fan tastically heavily used during the long hot summer last
year. And interestingly enough, in the analogous district of
Paris, Les HaIles, where the vegetable market again has been
move~o the suburbs, the President has decided that the site
is to be90me a public open space.
All this is simply a necessary introduction to the approach
to the idea of a New Town which I want to propound. Inner
City and New Town are not rivals, they are two sides of the
sa me policy, or should be.
My real purpose is to look at the New Town movement
18 TALKING HOUSES
through anarchist spectacles, defining anarchism as the social
philosophy of a non-governmental society. The philosopher
Martin Buber begins his essay Sociery and the State with an
observation from the sociologist Robert Maciver that "to
identify the social with the political is to be guilty of the ~
grossest of all confusions, which completely bars any
understanding of either society or the state". The political
principle, for Buber, is characterised by power, authority,
hierarchy, dominion. He sees the social principle wherever
men link themselves in an association based on a common
need or a common interest. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin
(and you will see that his view is different from that of
Marxism and of social democracy) believed that "The State
organisation, having been the force to which the minorities
resorted for establishing and organising their power over the
masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these
privileges", and he declared that "the economic and political
liberation of man will have to create new forms for its
expression in life, instead of those established by the State".
He thought it self-evident that "this new form will have to be
more popular, more decentralised, and nearer to the folk-mote
self-government than representative government can ever be",
reiterating that we will be compelled to find new forms of
organisation for the social functions that the state fulfills
through the bureaucracy, and that "as long as this is not done,
nothing will be done".
Now you may wonder why I have chosen to inflict on you
this slice of anarchist theory and speculation. Well, if I asked
you who were the fou~~r~ of the town p!a~nning movement in
this country, you would unquestionably reply Ebenezer
!ioward_and Patrk;k G-~~dcLes. One of the interesting things
about this pair of sages, since we have all been brainwashed
into thinking of planning as a professional mystery or
amalgamation of mysteries, is that neither of them would be
accepted today as a member of the Royal Town Planning
Institute. (Howard was a stenographer. A major preoccupa-
tion of his was the invention of a shorthand-typing machine.
Geddes was a biologist.) Nor would they have been accepted
into the academic world. Geddes was regarded with great
THE Do-IT-YouRsELF NEw TowN 19
suspicion in academic circles, failed to get any of the jobs he
applied for and was finally made a professor because a
philanthropist endowed a chair especially for him. As for
Howard, his biographer remarks that his book did not
"receive any recognition by those who specialised in political,
economic or sociological matters. Those very factors which
enabled him to see clearly with eyes unbiased by
preconceptions, in particular his lack of academic back-
ground, kept him out of the charmed circle of the
Establishment."
It is salutory to be reminded of these facts, but to me the
most striking thing about both Howard and Geddes is
something different. In the Osborn-Mumford correspond-
ence, FJO remarks about Howard that "He had no belief in
'the State"'. He had no belief in the State. Does this mean he
was an anarchist? No it doesn't. As Lewis Mumford remarked
about him, "With his gift of sweet reasonableness Howard
hoped to win Tory and Anarchist, single-taxer and socialist,
individualist and collectivist, lover to his experiment". But it
does mean that Howard did not believe that the State was the
only means, or the most desirable means with which to
accomplish social ends.
The same thing is true of Geddes. His most recent
biographer Paddy Kitchen in her book A Most Unsettling Person
(Gollancz 1975) says, "Intellectually he was closest to
anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul and Elisee
Redus, all of whom he knew well", while his earlier
biographer Philip Mairet remarks that "an interesting book
could be . written about the scientific origins of the
international anarchist movement, and if it were, the name of
Geddes would not be absent" .·There were in fact innumerable
cross-currents between the ideologists of planning and the
ideologists of anarchism at that time. The Reclus family made
several of the exhibits in Geddes' Outlook Tower in
Edinburgh. Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops (to my
mind a book full of significance for our contemporary
dilemmas)"came out at the same time as Howard's Tomorrow:
A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. When Howard's book was
re-issued under its more familiar title of Garden Cities of
I
20 TALKING HOUSES
Tomorrow, and when Kropotkin's book was re-issued in an
enlarged edition, each paid tribute to the other's work. When
Thomas Adams, the first secretary of the Garden Cities
Association, and later the first secretary of the Town Planning
Institute, wrote his book Garden City and Agriculture in 1905, he
based it on Kropotkin's work. There are similar cross-
influences with Raymond Unwin, Lewis Mumford, right
down to the astounding book Communitas by Paul and Percival
Goodman, which after its publication by the University of
Chicago in 1947, led a kind of underground existence until its
re-appearance as a paperback in the '60s. It is on sale in this
country and I would recommend it to you as the most
significant book in our field since Howard's.
Well these are merely literary crosscurrents of course. But
when First Garden City Limited was started it was not
conceived as a forerunn er of action by the governmental
machine, it was conceived as the forerunner of what F. J.
Osborn called, summarising Howard, "progressive experi-
mentation in new forms of social enterprise" . An ordinary
company in its structure, it had the important feature of
dividend limitation and the famous provision that "any
balance of profit" was to be devoted "to the benefit directly or
indirectly of the town or its inhabitants". In its planner it was
fortunate to have Raymond Unwin with those great qualities
that Nicholas Taylor summed up as "his acute practical sense
of the complexity of everyday life, and also his political stress
on co-operative management as the means of bringing the
good life to the many". When Howard found that his
working-model failed to inspire others, he embarked, at 69, on
his second garden city, having succeeded in borrowing less
than one-tenth of the purchase price of the site. Staggering
foolhardiness. Can you imagine such an enterprise today?
Now we know from the recollections of people like C. B.
Purdom and Frederic Osborn and from the anecdotes of early
residents that there was a kind of gaiety and a sense of high
adventure in the pioneering of Letchworth and Welwyn, that
was absent from the early days of the postwar New Towns.
Some people would deny this of course, and say that it is all a
matter of the transforming power of time. FJO says that at
' fHED o-IT-YOURSELFNEWToWN 21
Letchworth, the people who had been there from the start
eight years before he arrived told him he'd missed the golden
age. But listen to him reminiscing about Welwyn and the
fantas tically difficult balancing act of choreographing the
arrival of people, basic services and jobs, on a shoestring and
by himself. A task which would employ a vast staff in a
modern New Town.
But behind the rosy reminiscence, isn't it true that the
grumbles and the New Town Blues that we used to hear in the
fifties, did not have their equivalents in the early years bf the
two garden cities, just because people were conscious of being
pioneers and of having to do their own things if they wanted
something done?
Now once the building of New Towns, after years of
campaigning, had become a governmental enterprise, the
mechanism of the Development Corporation followed the
pattern set by Lord Reith (in the BBC) in the 1920s, or by
Herbert Morrison (in the London Passenger Transport
Board) in the 1930s, or by the boards of the nationalised
industries set up at the same time in the 1940s. We know that
the style of the Development Corporation has proved itself
adaptable to many other circumstances than that of the
original green-field New Towns. The trouble is that the style
has not changed, even though our ideas about many other
form s of social organisation are changing and are going to
change still more in the future. Mr Tony Wedgwood Benn
who )ten years ago was using government funds to enforce
shot-gun weddings among giant capitalist concerns to enable
them to compete with the European giants, is by now an
advocate of using government funds to enable workers'
c:o-operatives to take over ailing capitalist enterprises. He
embarrasses us all by conducting his education in public, but
other people too are looking back to see where we went wrong
in our theories of social organisation. At what stage in the
evolution of our administrative ideology did we go wrong?
Some people would say it was back in the thirties when the
Labour Party opted for the vast public corporation as the
v hide for social enterprise. Other people would say, in
onnection with housing, that it was the time of the Tudor
'1
22 TALKING HOUSES
Walters report in 1918, which froze out all other forms of
social housing in favour of direct municipal provision. Today,
with public housing policy in collapse, we are suddenly
discovering the virtues of co-operative housing - a notion
dear to the heart of Howard and Unwin which has been
neglected for sixty years, even though if you go to a country
like Denmark where a third of housing is in the hands of
tenant co-operatives they say to the English visitor, "We owe
it all to your Rochdale Pioneers".
Today, when people are urging, in the name of democracy
that New Town housing should be transferred to the local
authorities, at least one Development Corporation Chairman
has approached the Minister to ask whether he will make
some stipulation about allocation procedures, since in his area
the allocation of council, as opposed to development
corporation housing has been delegated from the council
meeting to the party meeting of the ruling party. He is
interested in tenant control because he sees local democratic
control as worse than the paternalism of his corporation.
I think that the watershed in the development of social and
socialist ideology came much further back. It was possible for
one of the earliest Fabian Tracts to declare in 1886 that
"English Socialism is not yet Anarchist or Collectivist, not yet
defined enough in point of policy to be classified. There is a
mass of Socialistic feeling not yet conscious of itself as
Socialism. But when the unconscious Socialists of England
discover their position, they also will probably fall into two
parties: a Collectivist party supporting a strong central
administration and a counterbalancing Anarchist party
defending individual initiative against the administration."
Well the Fabians rapidly found which side of the watershed
was theirs, and the Labour Party long ago finally committed
itself to that interpretation of socialism which identified it with
the unlimited increase of the State's power and activity
through its chosen form: the giant managerially-controlled
public corporation.
Now in putting forward the notion of a do-it-yourself New
Town, I am not saying that, in our kind of society, the public
authorities have no role. They have an indispensable role,
' l' II E Do-IT-YOURSELFNEWToWN 23
which for short we call site and services. !fyou are familiar with
the phrase it is because you have been watching the unfolding
drama of housing in the cities of the Third World. For if the
cities of the rich world lack the income to maintain their
expensive infrastructure, it is not surprising that in the
'xploding cities of the poor world, transportation, water
supply, sewerage and power supplies cannot cope, and still
less can medical, educational or housing services. The
European visitor is appalled by the miles and miles of
shanty-towns which surround the capital, often not shown on
the map or included in the population statistics, even though
the unofficial inhabitants may outnumber the official
population.
People with a historical sense are reminded of the
mushroom growth of our own industrial cities in the early
nineteenth century, but there is a significant difference. Here
industrialisation preceded urbanisation: there the urbanisa-
tion precedes industry. The anthropologist Lisa Peattie once
told me of her puzzlement in Bogota, where there was no
economic base to sustain the exploding population, but where
no one looked ill-nourished and everyone was shod. She
realised eventually that beside the official economy that
figured in the statistics there was an unofficial, invisible
economy of tiny enterprises and service occupations which
provided purchasing power for the unofficial population
whose squatter settlements evolved over time into fully-
servi.ced suburbs.
There is a perceptible pattern of population movement: the
peasant makes the break with his village firstly by moving to
some intermediate town or city as his first staging post, then
moves on to the inner city slums of the metropolis, usually to
some quarter occupied by families with the ~ame place of
origin. Finally, wised-up in city ways, he moves on to a
squatter settlement, usually on public land on the periphery of
the city. In favourable circumstances, his straw shack
develops over the years into a house: he has turned his labour
into capital and has a modicum of security in the urban
economy. This nappens quickly in a city of rapid economic
growth like Seoul. It does not happen in a city of negative
24 TALKING HOUSES
economic growth like Calcutta, where people are born and die
in the street.
This is why English architects like John Turner and Pat
Crooke who have worked for years in the shanty-towns of
Latin America see them as something quite different from the
official view and that of the rich visitor which is as
breeding-grounds of crime, disease, social and family
disorganisation. They see them as a triumph of self-help and
mutual aid among people who would gain nothing from the
usual expensive official housing programme. They point out
that what begins as a squatter settlement can become through
its own efforts in fifteen years a fully functioning community of
adequate, properly serviced households.
In their chapter contributed to the recent book The
Exploding Cities they contrast two examples of evolving
dweller-controlled housing, one in Barcelona and one in
Dar-es-Salaam and conclude:
These two superficially different cases show how ordinary people use
resources and opportunities available to them with imagination and
initiative - when they have access to the necessary resources, and
when they are free to act for themselves. Anyone who can see beyond
the surface differences between the many forms of dwelling places
people build .for themselves is bound to be struck by the often
astonishing economy of housing built and managed locally, or from
the bottom up, in comparison with the top-down, mass housing,
supplied by large organisations and central agencies. Contrary to
what we have been brought up to believe, where labour is an
economy's chief asset, large-scale production actually reduces
productivity in low-income housing. The assumed "economies of
scale" are obtained at the expense of reduced access to resources
local owners and builders would otherwise use themselves, and of
the inhibition of personal and community initiative.
If you have a lingering belief that this is simply
romanticising other people's poverty, I ought to remind you
that the poor of a poor country in an efficiently administered
city like Lima have not been deprived of the last shred of
personal autonomy and human dignity like the poor of a rich
and competently administered city like London. They are not
trapped in the culture of poverty.
Just imagine that we were a poor country. Suppose
THE Do-I T- YOURSELF NEW TOWN 25
Dockland were Dar-es-Salaam, or Liverpool were Lusaka,
and we adopted the policy of "aided squatting" which in some
Third World cities has replaced the pointless and wicked
governmental persecution of squatters. Following the advice
of people like Turner and Crooke and D.]. Dwyer, the World
Bank is ceasing to aid grandiose housing projects, though
many governments are refusing to take this advice. They
would rather pay large fees to Western planning consultants,
for they cannot believe that what poor people do for
themselves can be right. The World Bank is now sponsoring
ten "site and services" programmes around the world.
Wilsher and Righter report that these experimental projects
"encompass a wide variety of space allocations, financial
assistance, provision of utilities, types of tenure, construction
standards, and participation of private enterprise, but its
officials are already convinced that the approach holds out a
good deal of promise" (The Exploding Cities 1975).
Now suppose we applied such a policy to some of the
derelict inner city districts in the man-made wastelands.
Provide roads and services and a service core: kitchen sink,
bath, WC and ring-main connection, put up some party walls
(to overcome the fire-risk objection) and you will have long
queues of families anxious to build the rest of the house for
themselves, or to employ one of our vast number of
unemployed building workers to help, or to get their
brother-in-law or some moonlighting tradesman or the
Community Industry to help, within the party walls. Such a
carnival of <;onstruction would have important spin-offs in
other branches of the social problems industry: ad hoc jobs
and training for unemployed teenagers, turning the local
vandals into builders, and the children into back-yard
horticulturalists. Why, it would be like those golden days at
Letchworth!
Why, we already have experience of a do-it-yourself New
Town on the site-and-service principle. If I announce that I
am referring to Pitsea and Laindon: the precursor of Basildon
New Town, people in the planning profession will groan and
say, "Well, precisely, and we don't want that particular
expensive muddle to mop up again!" But look at it in a
 26 TALKING HOUSES
different light and you will see why some-one with my point of
view cherishes Basildon with particular affection . There the
dwellers got their sites but had to wait many years for the
services. If you don ' t know the Basildon epic (which I have
already told at the ICA in the symposium on squatter
settlements on 23 May 1972) let me re-tell it as briefly as I
can.
The ~uil.ding o~ the London-Tilbury-Southend Railway in
1888 cOInCIded With a period of agricultural depression, and
several farmers around Pitsea and Laindon in Essex sold to an
astute land agency which divided the land into plots for sale.
They advertised these as holiday or retirement retreats and
organised excursion trains from West Ham and East Ham at
the London end of the line, with great boozy jaunts to the
country (large hotels were built at the stations), and in the
course of the outings plots of lands were auctioned. Some
people returned home without realising that they were now
landowners and these remained undeveloped, or perhaps were
built on without title by someone else .
In the period up to the end of the nineteen-thirties other
agents or the farmers themselves sold plots in the area
sometimes for as little as £3 for a 20-foot frontage. A lot of
ex-servicemen dreaming of a good life on a place of their own
sank th~ir gratuities after the first world war in small-holdings
(for which there could hardly be a less satisfactory soil than
that around Pitsea) or in chicken farming. Most of them soon
failed: they lost their money but they had some kind of cabin
on the site, and the return fare from Laindon to Fenchurch
Street was Is ;2d in 1930. The kind of structures people built
ranged from the typical inter-war speculative builder's
detached ~ouse or bungalow, to converted buses or railway
coaches, With a range of army huts, beach huts and every kind
of timber-framed shed, shack or shanty.
During the second world war, with very heavy bombing in
East London, especially the dockland boroughs of East Ham
and West Ham, many families evacuated themselves or were
bombed out, and moved in permanently to whatever foothold
they had in the Pitsea, Laindon and Vange districts, with the
THE Do-lT- YOURSELF NEW TOWN 27
result that at the end of the war the area had a settled
population of 25,000.
There were some 8,500 existing dwellings , over 6,000 of
them unsewered. There were 75 miles of grass track roads,
main water in built-up areas only with standpipes in the roads
elsewhere. There was no surface water drainage apart from
ditches and old agricultural drains. Only fifty per cent of
dwellings had mains electricity. There were about 1,300 acres
of completely waste land of which 50 per cent had no known
owner. The average d ensity was 6 persons to the acre . Of the
8,500 dwellings, 2,000 were of brick and tile construction to
Housing Act standards , 1,000 were oflight construction to the
same standard, 5,000 were chalets and shacks and 500 were
described as derelict, though probably occupied. The average
rateable value was £5 .
In 1946 the New Towns Act was passed and various places
were designated by the government as sites for New Towns.
In many cases there was intense local opposition, not only
from residents and landowners but also from the local
authorities. In the case of the place we are considering, and
Basildon was unique among the New Towns in this, the
Minister was petitioned by the Essex County Council and by
the local council to designate the area as a New Town. They
were joined by the County Borough Councils of West Ham
and East Ham who saw the place as a natural overs pill town
for their boroughs - many of whose former citizens were now
living there. The argument was that there was no other way of
financing the infra-structure of essential municipal services.
At the first round the application was turned down. Harlow
was chosen as the first Essex New Town and there was talk of
Ongar as the second. After a further delegation to the
Minister, Basildon was accepted.
The New Town was planned. to start from a nucleus at the
village of Basildon itself, expanding eastwards and westwards
to incorporate Laindon and Pitsea. The first general manager,
Brigadier W. G . Knapton, set out his policy in 19~3. thus:
"Any solution which includes the wholesale demolitiOn of
sub-standard dwellings cannot be contemplated. However
inadequate, every shack is somebody's home, probably
/
28 TALKING HousEs
purchased freehold wth hard-earned savings, and as often as
not the area ofland within the curtilage is sufficient to provide
garden produce and to house poultry, rabbits, and even pigs.
To evict the occupier and to re-accommodate him and his
family in a corporation house, even on such favourable terms
as the Act may permit, will probably cause not only hardship,
but bitter feelings. The old must be absorbed into the new
with the least detriment to the former and the greatest
advantage to the latter.
His successor, Mr Charles Boniface, adopted the same
humane and sensible attitude. He remarked that "the
planners' task here is like a jigsaw puzzle, with the new fitting
into the old instead of being superimposed upon and
obliterating it". This is in fact the policy which has been
followed, and the grid-iron pattern of the grass-track roads
has been incorporated into the fully-developed New Town
plan. Mr Boniface has always maintained (against some
opposition) that "existing residents and allotment owners
have as many rights as incomers or the corporation itself'.
Let us zoom in on one particular street in the Laindon end
of Basildon. It probably has a greater variety of housing types
than any street in Britain. It starts on the right with two late
Victorian villas - a sawn-off bit of terrace housing stuck there
hopefully when the railway was first built. On the left is a
detached house with a porch embellished with Doric wooden
columns, like something in the Deep South of the United
States. Then there are some privately-built houses of the
1960s, and next a wooden cabin with an old lady leaning over
the gate - a first world war army hut which grew. On the
other side of the road is some neat Development Corporation
housing: blue brick, concrete tilehanging and white trim . Here
is a characteristic improved shanty with imitation stone
quoins formed in cement rendering at the corners of the
pebbledash. Most of the old houses have some feature in the
garden exemplifying Habraken's remarks about the passion to
create and embellish. This one has a fountain, working. This
one has a windmill about five feet high painted black and
white like the timber and asbestos house it adjoins. The sails
are turning. Here's one with a pond full of goldfish.
THE Do-IT-YouRsELF NEW TowN 29
And now we see an immaculate vegetable garden with an
old gentleman hoeing his onions. He was a leather worker
from Kennington, who bought the place 43 years ago for
week-ends and then retired down here. No, he wasn't the first
occupier, who was a carpenter from Canning Town who
bought three 20-foot plots for £ 18 in 1916" ,giving a site 60ft by
140 ft. In the post-1918 period when, accdrding to MrC,Syrett,
the present owner, the banks were changing their interiors
from mahogany to oak, the carpenter brought down bits and
pieces of joinery from Fenchurch Street and built his dream
bungalow. After Mr Syrett had bought it it was burnt down
except for the present kitchen and Mr Syrett himself built the
present timber-framed house. Later he had it rendered, and
although he is now 85, he has been making improvements ever
since. For example he has recently cut out the mullions of his
1930-type windows to make them more like the ones in the
Development Corporation houses opposite.
I showed him a description of the area as a former "vast
pastoral slum". He denied this of course, remarking that most
people came down here precisely to get away from the slums.
But what was it like before the road was made up? "Well, you
had to order your coal in the summer as the lorry could never
get down the road in wintertime." But there was a pavement.
"People used to get together with their neighbours to buy
cement and sand to make the pavement all the way along the
road." Street lighting? No, there was none. "Old Granny
Chapple used to take a hurricane lamp when she went to the
Radiant Cinema in Laindon." Transport? "Well, a character
called Old Tom used to run a bus from Laindon Station to the
Fortune of War public house. And there were still horses and
carts down here in those days. They used to hold
steeplechases on the hill where the caravan site is now." In the
same road lived Mr Budd, who died last year at 97 . He was a
bricklayer by trade and every time he had a new grandchild
would add a room to his house.
Mr and Mrs- Syrett's house is immaculate - large rooms
with all the attributes of suburban comfort. The house was
connected to the sewer and electricity mains in the 40s and got
gas 15 years ago. The urban district council made up the road
()
 30 TALKING HousEs
under the Private Street Works Act, charging £60 in road
charges. The road was recently made up again to a higher
standard by the Development Corporation. The rates are £12
a half year, and as old age pensioners they got a rate rebate.
They live happily within their pension, they assured me. No
rent to pay, some fruit and vegetables from the garden and the
greenhouse. It is a matter of pride for them that they are not
obliged to apply for ~uppl~mentary benefits whIch they regard
as scroungmg. It IS qUIte obvious that Mr Syrett's real
investment for his old age was this one-time substandard
bungalow which today has all the same amenities and
conveniences as the homes of his neighbours. The truth of this
can be seen if you look in the estate agents' windows in Pitsea,
where houses with the same kind of origin are advertised at
prices similar to those asked for the spec builder's houses of
the same perio~l. The significant thing is that their original
owners and buIlders would never have qualified as building
society mortgagees in the inter-war years, any more than
people wit? eq.uivalent incomes would today. The integration
of shacksvI.lle mt? new development has been outstandingly
succ~ssful m BasIl~on b~~ .the same upgrading of dwellings
and Improvement m faCIlItIes happens in the course of time
anywhere - further down the line at Canvey Island for
example - without benefit of New Town finance . What the
New Town mechanism has done of course is to draw the
sporadic settlement together into an urban entity and provide
non-commuting jobs through the planned introduction of
industry. Pitsea and Laindon could be called do-it-yourself
New Towns, later legitimised by official action.
But the cheap~~l,!n<La~~ished kind of de~Qp-ment
th...at give~.th~1:!ndeqll"i:~6kgecf . a .p!,!-~ QftheU:~own has ~~.!!~d
toJ?~avaIlable. In the 1939s, aesthetic critics deplored this
kina ofa eve opinent as "!)U~id growth" and so on though
the critics themselves had a grea:t--deal more fre~dom of
manoeuvre in buying themselves a place in the sun. I t is
interesting that Sir Patrick Abercrombie in the G reater
London Plan of 1944 said, "I t is possible to point with horror
to the jumble of shacks and bungalows on the Laindon Hills
and Pitsea. This is a narrow-minded apprecIation of what was
THE Do-I T-YOURsELF NEW TowN 31
as genuine a desire as created the group oflovely gardens and
houses at Frensham and Bramshott". This may be obvious
today, but it was unusually perceptive in the climate of
opinion then.
What in fact those Pitsea-Laindon dwellers had was the
ability to turn their labour into capital over time, just like the
Latin American squatters. The poor in the third world cities
- with some obvious exceptions - have a freedom that the
poor in the rich world cities have lost: three freedoms, in John
Turner's words: "the freedom of community self-selection; the
freedom to budget one's own resources and the freedom to
shape one's own environment" . In the rich world the choices
have been pre-empted by the power of the state, with its
comprehensive law-enforcement agencies and its institutional-
ised welfare agencies . In the rich world as Habrake.l2.y uts it,
~ no longer_l?:o.Jl§...es ]:limself: he is housed" .
You might observe of course that some of the New Town
and developing towns have - more than most local
authorities have - provided sites and encouragement to
self-build housing societies . But a self-build housing
association has to provide a fully-finished product right from
the start, otherwise no consent under the building regulations,
no planning consent, no loan. No-one takes into account the
growth and improvement and enlargement of the dwelling
over time, so that people can invest out of income and out of
their own time, in the structure.
( Now when Howard wrote his book, the reason why it
appealed to so many people was that the period was receptive.
This was the period of Kropotkin's Fields Factories and
Workshops, of Blatchford's Merrie England, and ofH. G. Wells's
Anticipations. Certain ideas were in the air.
Now we are once again in a period with a huge range of
ideas in the air, especially among the young. There is the
enormous interest in what has become known as alternative
technology. There is, for obvious reasons, a sudden burst of
interest in domestic food production, and there is an
~t~!p'_~~ive. fonlls_ QLh~u~ing, Qnce
agai~lor ~b"yious re(isons: th.e~~ ar~ vast numbers of people
whose faces or lifestyles don't fit in either the Director of
 32 TALKING HOUSES
Housing'~Q~~~__Q.~.Jl~iJ.g.i.l2·g ?_o_cl ety offIce, and who are
S .<?Ilsequently vi~!!.ms of the fTude duopoly o{ housing which,
~i~hout intending. tQ, .we have created.
There are large numbers of people interested in alternative
ways of making a living: looking for labour-intensive
low-capital industries, because capital-intensive industries
have failed to provide them with an income. ~ _ Qo.mi1lJl!!ity
Land Trust was set up last year (no connection with the Act of
a - simliar ' name, though the Act may be the essential
prerequisite in providing land for the site-and-services
do-it-yourself New Town). A_ Ne_,:::: Vill,!g.~-t\§'~.Q.ci~!ign _\f.as
set up recently .
. r a~ ~~o;tinually amazed by the growth of interest in
alternative energy sources, especially since I was writing on
the themes of solar power and wind power exploitation in the
anarchist paper Freedom twenty years ago. Nobody at all
seemed to be interested in those days . Last month a county
librarian identified this as one of the areas in which there was
the largest demand for books last year. Hugh Sharman, who
runs the undertaking called Conservation Tools and
Technology told me that they get hundreds of enquiries every
week. The National Centre for Alternative Technology in
Wales was opened to the public in July 1975 and by the end of
last year had had more than 15,000 visitors. One of the
essen tials of a do-it-yourself New Town would be a relaxation
of building regulations to make it possible for people to
experiment in alternative ways of building and servicing
houses, and in permitting a dwelling to be occupied in a most
rudimentary condition for gradual completion. This is
( prime example of that darling of the agricultural economist - the
virtually impossible at the moment, and people here with an
interest in that field will recall that Graham Caine and the
Street-farmers had to dismantle their experimental house at
Eltham last October because their temporary planning
permission expired .
I ought to say something about the density of dwellings .
Some advocates of more intelligent land-use policies advocate
high densities rather than what they think of as suburban
sprawl, in order to conserve those precious acres of
agricultural land. A worthy motive but a wrong conclusion.
THE Do- IT-YOURSELF NEW TOWN 33
The agricultural industry is interested in maximum
productivity per man. But with limited land we ~ught to ~e
interested in maximum productivity per acre. SIr Fredenc
Osborn always argued that the produce of the ordinary
domestic garden, even though a small area of gardens is
devoted to food production, more than equalled in value the
produce of the land lost to commercial food production.
Surveys conducted by the government and by university
departments in the 1950s proved him right. Some people will
remember the enormous contribution made to the nation's
food supply by domestic gardens and allotments during the
war years. (The facts of the argument were set out by Robin
Best andJ. T. Ward in the Wye College pamphlet The Garden
Controversy in 1956.) I would simply say that 19'Y:.Q.t':.H§J!y
hou~ing is the best way of cons ~rv0g la!!,.d . Perhaps I can
rllikethcpoint l5est~ by gomg one stage further than the
do-it-yourself New Town to Mr John Seymour's views on
self-sufficiency. He says in the new edition of his book The Fat
of the Land:
There is a man I know of who farms ten thousand acres with three
men (and the use of some con tractors) . Of course he can only grow
one crop - barley, and of course his I?~oduction p.er acre is very low
and his consumption of imported fertIhser very hIgh. He bu.rn~ all
his straw, puts no humus on the land (he boasts there Isn t a
four-footed animal on it - but I have seen a hare) and he knows
perfectly well his land will suff~r!n th.e end. He d?esn't care - i.t will
see him out. He is already a mIllIOnaIre several times over. He IS the
successful agri-businessman.
Well I don't want to preserve his precious acres for him, and
John paints a seductive alternative:
Cut that land (exhausted as it is) up into a thousand plots of ten
acres each, giving each plot to a family tr.ained to use it, and within
ten years the production coming from It would be enormous . It
would make a really massive contribution to the balance of
payments problem. The motorist with his News of t4e World woul~n.'t
have the satisfaction oflooking over a vast treeless, hedgeless praltIe
of indifferent barley - but he could get out of h!s car for a cha~ge
and wander through a seemingly huge area of dIverse countrysIde,
orchards, young tree plantations, a myriad small plots of land
34 TALKING HousEs
growing a multiplicity of different crops, farm animals galore, and
hundred3 of happy and healthy children. Even the agricultural
economist has convinced himself of one thing. He will tell you (if he
is any good) that land farmed in big units has a low production of
food per acre but a high production of food per man-hour, and that
land farmed in small units has the opposite - a very poor
production p er man-hour but a high production per acre. He will
then say that in a competitive world we must go for high production
per man-hour and not per acre . I would disagree with him.
And so would I, and though I am arguing for an experimental
town rather than an experiment in land settlement, his
argument holds good. Self-sufficiency is not the aim, but an
opportunity for people to work in small-scale horticulture as
well as in small-scale industry is. I recently edited a new
edition of Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops and found
it extraordinarily relevant.
The late Richard Titmus used to say that social ideas "may
well be as important in Britain in the next half-century as
technical innovation". One of these ideas it seems to me is the
rediscovery of Howard's garden city as a popular and populist
notion.
It may have to happen. There may be no other way of
rescuing inner Liverpool. There may be no other way of
rescuing some of the Development Corporations faced with a
diminishing rate of growth . Perhaps Milton Keynes is
destined to become an agri-city, a dispersed city of intensive
horticulturists. Perhaps the right idea to offer participants in
the Letchworth competition is that the Letchworth Garden
City Corporation should sponsor New Letchworth at Milton
( the role of the citizens from the recipients to participants, so that
Keynes or in Central Lancs, to develop an area with waivers
on the planning and building legislation. It should be possible
to operate some kind of usufruct, some kind of leasehold with
safeguards against purely cynical exploitations, which would
enable people to house themselves and provide themselves
with a means of livelihood, while not draining immense sums
from central or local government.
Some people had the hope in the very earliest days of the
New Towns that this kind of experimental freedom would
apply there. Peter Shepheard, for whom it was my pleasure to
work for ten years, worked in the one-time Ministry of Town
THE Do-IT-YouRsELF NEW TowN 35
and Country Planning on the early plans for Stevenage. He
once recollected:
I remember that when first working at Stevenage we felt it vital not
only to get the New Town Corporation disconnected entirely from
the treasury, but from the whole network of central government,
by-laws and so on. The idea was to build in ten years, a new
experimental town .. . One of the early technicians at Stevenage
actually proposed that we should write our own by-laws. The idea
was to have no by-laws at all. (AA Journal May 1957)
Well some hopes he had, a quarter of a century ago or more
ago, of developing an anarchist New Town. And after its
stormy early years, you might say "Well, what's wrong with
Stevenage. Some aspects of that town are the admiration of
the whole world".
And a lot of people in the town-making business: chairmen,
general managers, and all their hierarchy, have had a
marvellous and fulfilling time, wheeler-dealing their babies
into maturity. They have been the creators, the producers.
The residents, the citizens, have been the consumers, the
recipients of all that planning, architecture and housing: not
to mention the jobs in the missile factory . Now we are
twenty-five years or more older, wiser and humbler. A new
generation is turning upside down all those cherished
shibboleths about planning, architecture and housing, not to
mention the ones about jobs. We have to change the role of the
administration from providers to enablers. We have to change
they too have an active part to play in what Lethaby called the
great game of town building. What was it that old Ben
Howard said to young Frederic Osborn? "My dear fellow, if
you wait for the government to act, you'll be as old as
Methusaleh before they start. The only way to get anything
done is to do it yourself."

2. What Should We
Teach About Housing?
!iousing.is an ~spect of a variety of school subjects. Obviously
It
. enters. mto hIstory and geography and home economics , and
mto vanous attempts to impart a few handy hints on life skills
like how a domestic ring main works or replacing a tap was he;
or a ball valve. But there are few aspects of what we teach
about housing which don't bring us face to face with the
political controversies surrounding the provision of this
elementary necessity of life.
During ~he late 1970s when I was working at the TCPA, I
was the dIrector of the Schools Council Art and the Built
Environment Project. Eileen Adams and I were concerned
with t~e place of Art as a school subject, in environmental
ed.u.catlOn. ~e were concerned with the visual, sensory,
cntical appraisal of ~he env.ironment, and of course, like any
teacher concerned WIth envIronmental education, we insisted
that "t?e environment" meant your surroundings, and not
somethmg you go on a field trip to explore in Wales or North
Yorkshire.
In the early stages of our project we were often rebuked by
teachers for our concern with superficialities with the look of
things, instead of the underlying political, social and economic
realities. We would reply that in that period or two in the
weekly timetable labelled Art, one of the few areas of the
curriculum where personal, subjective and aesthetic judge-
ments ~re supreme; it. was' very important indeed to explore
the enVironment withm the ethos of the subject and its own
Lecture given at an Urban Studies course for teachers, Looking at Housing, at
the Polytechnic of the South Bank, London on 28 July 1981.
36
WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH ABOUT HOUSING? 37
particular disciplines. We would also stress the enormous
significance of people's visual and symbolic imagery of house
and home, by asking what is the highest praise a local
authority tenant can give to his home. The answer, if you
didn't know is, "It doesn't look like a council house".
Indeed, one of the things which several groups of students
in our project undertook was to examine the way in which
people alter, embellish and modify their houses, and to
enquire what design influences were at work, or where the
occupants had been for their holidays. This of course, was
particularly in evidence when they considered the embellish-
ments that sitting tenants purchasing their council houses
from local authorities, had made.
This, even though the approach is aesthetic and perceptual,
brings us straight into the arena of current political
controversy. I ought perhaps to stress that in looking at the
ordinary domestic environment, we were not concerned with
inculcating any notions of our own about standards of "taste"
or of "good taste" in design. We were concerned with
developing the seeing eye and the reflective mind.
But of course we were, quite incidentally, causing students
to look at the demagogic speeches of the politicians in a quite
different light. Unless in their view there was something holy
about the original architecture of the estate, wouldn't they
wish, as I would certainly wish, that every tenant had that
opportunity to devote all that care and energy to their homes,
that has been granted to that small proportion who have
bought their houses from the council? I used to have the view
that selling off individual houses to individual tenants would
be an appallingly divisive factor in the estate. What invidious
distinctions would be made manifest as people chatted over
the fence when hanging out their washing? In fact (and it is
n~cessary t~ re~ind you. tha.t Sel}i?_g_~~y~~. s t~~it~in.B" tep.ants
dId not ?e~m ~Ith tpe R!~~~.t _gov~rnment. it has been going
on for many years under both Labour and onservative local
authorities, sometimes approved ~nd sometimes disapproved
of5y cenTral govern-mentCin fact, -the opposite has been true.
The improvements, even though they may be merely
cosmetic, that have resulted, have, I would insist, lifted the

38 TALKING HOUSES
morale of the estate, in places as far apart as Mid Clamorgan,
Derbyshire and Roehampton. Without any assistance from
the Council, and in some places, in opposition to its
paternalistic determination that no-one should change a
washer or oil a hinge, except its own employees, tenants have
R.u!. a~~~~o'!.s personal investment into the upgrading of
thelrnomes. - of the last century between the Fabian socialists of the London
At this point I need to remind you of the dramatic changes
in housing, and in our expectations of housing which have
occurred during the last 65 years. In 1914 ab0l.!.! 9 peL cent of
ho~~in in CLeat BIitai!l-v~:.as in QYill.~.r;:.pccupation, less than 1
per cent was ~nted from_ aJ~ub1ic _e,.!1.thQri!y, aiId .ninety per
cent of farp.ilies, ricl! Qr poor, rented their accommodation
from a private landlord. By 1980 (and of course we need the
infor~ation fromJ he 198t <;; ensus ,to make these guesses more '
accurate), 54 per cent of families were in owner-occupied.
property, 33 ~ r_ cenL in housing rented from public
aut :>~ities, .<ljld,_say,_ 13 per ~t we re privately renting. If
there IS an odd one per cent, it is explained in the belated
growth of housing associations and housing co-operatives in
the last ten years.
These changes represent a drafIlatic revolution in the
provisions for and exp ~c~..£~ .E,o_using which__ !her~ is
scarcely tIme to discuss, but they do emphasise that the norm
against w -icholGeforIDS ..Qf tenure are evaluated, is ' that of
o""'",.,..~- . - -..-. ...- - -....... - - - -., ---.'- - .........--
owner-Qc<;:ll.patlOn, ,
-It is quite beside the point whether our theoretical opinions
about private property happen to coincide with this norm. In
fact , in the so-called people's democracies of eastern Europe,
owner-occupation is encouraged, simply through a semantic
difference: the home is regarded as personal property, like a
toothbrush, rather than as real property, like the property of
the absentee landlord. This is the distinction that Proudhon
made, nearly a century and a half ago, when he made the two
contrary utterances: Property is Theft and Property is
Freedom.
My own view is that the whole tragedy of housing policy
since the end of the last century, has been that local
authorities have taken over the landlord role, lock stock-and
WHAT SHOU LD WE TEACH ABOUT HOUSING? 39
barrel, f~.Q1'!-'p'ri;:a~ la.!1dlord~~ ~~~i! the. jirst w9rld
war, housed ninety peu~nt £U.he..E£_ UI<;ttlO~: nc~ or po<;> r.
The landlOrd- tenant relationship has never been a happy one.
It has always been accompanied by mutual suspicion, and by
an unhappy syndrome of dependency and resentment. By a
historical accident there was an unspoken coalition at the end
County Council and the radical conservatives, like Joseph
Chamberlain in Birmingham, that local councils should take
over the role of landlords for the poor. This view became
increasingly the progressive creed amongst all parties, and it
was regarded as a great triumph in the wartime legislation of
the coalition government, that the phrase "housing of the
working classes" disappeared in their legislation, so that
theoretically, publicly provided housing became something
for which, theoretically, the whole population was eligible. It
is noticeable that those whose incomes or prospects gave them
a freedom of choice, did not take up this theoretical option. It
is noticeable too, though NOBODY ever mentions it, that,
given the low~r physical standar9~ 9f housing then accepted ,
very p0Q.LJ?eop!e, in those_ days <actllally had a freedom ..9 f
choice in the days of private landlordism which they nolollger
have when we have replaced a multiplicity_oflandlords by one
~~nopoly landlord: the council.
This monopolistic character of local authority landlordism
is one of the explanations of the fact that drives directors of
/
housing and members of housing committees up the wall with
anger and frustration: that while they have huge waitir;g li~ts,
( the people on them will not accept the first, secon~or thIrd
offer, because they know that once they are in tha-ruard-to-Iet
dwelling, their chances of getting a transfer are nil. I yearn for
the day when a genuine tenants' charter really gives tenants
the freedom to move.
And yet, even as I say this, I have the sinking feeling that
behind the counter in the housing office will be the same
harassed junior officer of the local authority, hardened by
continually hearing the hard luck stones every day in opening
hours that even this hope may be misapplied.
Me~nwhile we have a situation where m the municipal

40 TALKING HOUSES
housing sector we have empty flats and houses which no-one,
not even people in great housing need will occupy, because of
the stigma which has attached itself to them. In London we
have the spectacle of couples queueing up all night to take up
tenancies of GLC flats which no-one on the housing list is
willing to occupy. I could take you to a street where the
housing on one side of the street is being demolished as unfit
for habitation by council tenants while on the other side it is
being snapped up by middle-class home improvers . I have
pointed out to audiences in the housing world a hundred times
the paradox that you can observe in every British city. On one
side of town is the very expensive Parker-Morris municipal
housing which is despised by its inhabitants and deteriorates
at a terrifying rate, so that like the notorious towers of
Birkenhead it is obsolete and uninhabitable more than forty
years before the money borrowed to pay for it has been paid
back. On the other side of town is the sub-Parker Morris
ticky-tacky speculative builder's estate which is improved and
enhanced from the moment it is occupied, is painlessly
updated so that its value increases as the years go by. Surely
there is something to be learned from this?
Meanwhile, long before the end of the seventies we had the
situation in several local authorities where the average cost
per dwelling of management and maintenance exceeded the
rent income. I ~sked at the time how long this situation could
continue. We have put our faith in bureaucratic paternalism
masquerading as socialism, and it is going to explode in our
faces. And in the total disarray of housing policy today, this is
what is happening. At a time when you might expect a radical
rethink from the Housing Problems Industry, they simply
bleat about the right-wing backlash against council housing,
because they have somehow brainwashed themselves into
equating municipal paternalism with a socialist housing
policy.
When Lord Goodman was chairman of the Housing
Corporation, he used to talk, correctly in my view, of the
Byzantine complexity of our housing legislation, though he
seems to have done nothing to unravel it. On the conference
circuit, he always used to get long and boisterous applause
WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH ABOUT HOUSING? 41
from the oflicers of central and local government and from the
academics of the housing problems industry, whenever he
remarked, as he did often, that, "It is only in a society where
we have a government working day and night on our behalf
that the housing problems are insoluble".
Now you and I, from no doubt, different perspectives, agree
with him, but we too are, or think we are, powerless to reshape
public intervention in housing in such a way as to ,r eward the
propensity of self-help and mutual aid.
Of course, the whole owner-occupation sector is an example
of self-help. Certainly, historically the origins of the building
societies were in mutual aid and self-help. Government
encourages this kind of self-help of course, through the tax
exemption of mortgage interest repayments.' and for. t?at
matter with the special fiscal arrangements wIth the bUIldmg
societies over interest payments on deposits. I suppose that
the origins of this are in some assumption that these depo~its
are intended for house purchase. Now that owner-occupatwn
is the majority mode of tenure, ana since our political masters
depend on the marginal owner-occupier's vote in the margin~l
owner-occupation constituency, none of them want to commIt
political suicide by doing anything to remove or diminish this
subsidy to the owner occupier. .
In the name of social justice, as well as in that of makmg a
better use of the nation's stock of housing, let alone in order to
remove from the public purse the dreadful cost of
management and maintenance, and of vandalism, in local
authority housing, it is a matter of great urgency to extend the
freedoms that are enjoyed by the owner-occupier to the
councilor private tenant.
As a long-term advocate of tenant co-operatives, I have
been delighted to pick up a few allies in the last decade. You
will know that the former minister for housing Reg Freeson
was one of the very few labour politicians who didn't think
that co-operatives were some kind of middle-class coP:Otlt~
Anyone here in the housing field will know of the appalling
difficulties faced,by tenants of co-operatives precisely because
we have surrounded housing with a thicket of legislation

42 TALKING HOUSES
which does not reward the propensity for self-help and mutual
aid.
Whichever way I look at it, I find that the potential for
self-help and mutual aid in housing, is continually thwarted
by the people and institutions which ought to be leaning over
backward to encourage it.
We have failed to come to terms with the fact that our
publicly-provided services, just like our capitalist industries
(also propped up by taxation), are dearly bought. This was
less apparent in the past when public services were few and
cheap. Old people who recall the marvellous service they used
to get from the post office or the railways, never mention that
these used to be low wage industries, which, in return for
relative security, were run with a military-style discipline to
which not even the army, let alone you and I, would submit
today.
My friend Kenneth Campbell, who used to be chief housing
architect for the Greater London Council, always says that the
decline of public housing in London coincided with the
decline of the Royal Navy. All those Chief Petty Officers who
left the service in middle age would take on the job of resident
caretaker in LCC blocks of flats, and run the place in a
ship-shape way - seeking, as they say, a happy ship. Since
then, of course, the GLC was driven into the appalling
expedient of employing mobile caretakers, and the one thing
you can be sure of about a mobile caretaker is that he won't
take care.
One of the virtues of the principles of housing which I
derive from the work of John Turner is that they do take into
account the ordinary humdrum realities of the way housing is
provided, managed and maintained, as opposed to the
theoretical ideals of the public provision of housing. Turner's
Second Law is that the important thing about housing is not
what it is but what it does in people's lives. Turner's Third
Law is that deficiencies and imperfections in housing are
infinitely more tolerable if they are your responsibility than if
they are somebody else's. These are psychological truths
about housing. Turner's First Law is also a social and
economic truth. He and Robert Fichter phrase it thus:
WHAT SHOULD WETEACHABOUTHOUSING? 43
When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make the~r
own contribution to the design, construction or management.ofthelr
housing, both the process and the environment produced stlmulate
individual and social wellbeing. When people h~ve no control over,
nor responsibility for key decisions in t~e housmg process, o~ the
other hand, dwelling environments may mstead become a barner to
personal fulfillment and a burden on the economy.
This is a carefully worded statement of what is to my mind,
the most important principle in hou.sing, a~d i~ you measure
the disasters of postwar housing polIcy agamst It you can see
its validity. If we want to get va~ue for .money and gr.eater
dweller satisfaction in future housmg polIcy, I am convmced
that the touchstone or yardstick is the principle of dweller
control. ...
Now I began by mentioning the ~ind o~ cntlclsms we w:re
making ten years ago of public housmg pohcy. IfMr Heseltme
were here he would ask "Well, haven't you got what you
wanted?" 'The housing cost yardstick system has g~ne, the
Parker Morris standards have gone, councils have gIven up
building those appalling blocks of flats. In fact they. have
almost given up building anything at all . "We have ~ntten"
he would claim, "the principle of dweller .control, mto our
Tenants' Charter, by offering tenants the nght to take over,
and become owners of their houses ."
Now I think that the position of the opposition is just ~s full
of half truths as that ofMr Heseltine. First of all, t~: spl~al ~f
decline in new housing activity by local authon~les dldn t
begin with the Thatcher .government. ~ook mto. y?ur
mouldering piles of press cuttmgs and you ':111 see that It las
all happening in the Wils?n/Callagh~n pen?d. Secondly, £ he
opposition.!.r guments ag.amst the se.llmg pohcy ~eem to ry . to
be spurious. The natIOn's housmg stoc~ IS not ,?em.g
diminished by a single brick, by the sales pohcy. The nation IS
all of us, it doesn't consist of the housing bureaucracy and the
councillors. You could even put forward the argument .th~t
selling council, houses to tenants enhances the. nation s
housing stock. In the owner-occupation sector the:e IS no ~uc?
thing as obsolescence or a limite~ li.fe to h~)Usmg. ~hlS IS
confined to the public sector. It IS mterestmg that m the
- ---'

44 T ALKINC HOUSES
mid-seventies there was an odd coalition of opinion between
Peter Walker on the right and Frank Field on the left, both of
them taking the view that it would be sensible to give council
housing to its tenants . The council house sales argument is not
a new issue. I discussed it years ago in my book Tenants Take
Over, in a chapter which had to my mind the significant title
"One By One or All Together", simply because I was
advocating a co-operative take-over. But I am not hostile to
individual sales to tenants. Why should I enjoy what in our
society are the undoubted advantages of owner-occupation,
and seek to deny them to my council-tenant neighbour. Does
he, in addition to his continual rent rises , also have to be the
.
bearer of rrry social conscience?
What we are really disconcerted about is that with the
retreat from the ideology of the direct public provision of
housing, we have not seen the growth of the mutual-aid,
self-help, co-operative sector.
But of course we have in another sense. The nineteen-
seventies saw a heroic effort by lone veterans of co-operative
housing like Harold Campbell, and by a new generation of
devoted pioneers, to set up the institutional framework, from
scratch, and to make it work. It is worth reminding ourselves
that until the mid-70s they were met with indifference and
hostility, not only in the Labour Party, but even in the
traditional co-operative movement itself. As recently as 1975
for example, invited to address a public meeting organised by
the Co-operative Party here in the London Borough of
Wands worth, where I then lived, John Hands and I, as
advocates of co-operative housing, were met with bitter
antagonism, not by the audience, but by the co-operative
chairman, who at that time was also chairman of the local
housing committee, and by, of all people, the Political
Secretary of the London Co-operative Society.
By one of those rare strokes of political good luck we
actually had at that time a Minister of Housing, Reg Freeson,
who understood what co-operative housing was all about. He
rebuked those members of his own party who had the usual
sn.eers that co-operative housing was a bit of trendy
mIddle-class self-interest by pointing out that the then most
WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH ABOUT HOUSINC?
45
successful co-operatives were those whose members were very
poor tenants of housing taken over from private landlords in
Liverpool, or actually homeless people who ho~sed them-
selves through the Holloway Tenant Co-operative m London.
And he criticised local authorities and housing associations for
not taking the trouble to find out how. many tenant.s and
applicants for housing were interested m the formatIOn of
tenant co-operatives. He also set up in 1976 a Co-o~erative
Housing Agency, though his own government closed It dow?
again and absorbed it into the Housing Corporation. ThIS
Corporation itself is in difficulties today as it~ source of.central
government finance dries up. However, startlI~g from VIrtually
nothing, and from a lamentable lack of expenence .on ho~ to
do it , we have at the moment 290 housing co-operatIves WIth a
total membership of 14,000 people.
The figures are pitifully small, but this is simply a reflection
of our total neglect for many decades of this form of tenure .
But the tenant take-over is the only conceivable change to halt
the spiral of decline in our local authority housing stock. I
read in New Society last month (4 June 1981) that there are
over 135,000 empty council properties in England and Wales,
and over a quarter of a million that councils classify as "hard
to let".
Back in the 1960s I gave hundreds of lessons on the facts
about housing, mostly for day-release apprentices whose
interest was far from academic. They wanted the facts because
they saw themselves very shortly becoming not merely
householders but house-owners. But as the figures piled up on
the blackboard, the g4P between the credit-worthiness o.f a
young man with a craftsman's wage, and the price of the .kmd
of house he imagined himself buying, became depressmgly
obvious.
My method was first to elicit from the class th~ way~ in
which a couple could get themselves a home, whIch boIled
down to three modes of tenure only; council tenancy, owner
occupation and private tenancy. In t~ose. days Lewis" )
Waddilove discovered that the range of chOIce m thIS country
was smaller than that in any European country except Greece,
Ireland, Portugal and Romania. We would then investigate
 46 TALKING HOUSES
the relative proportions of the three and the contrast with the
situation before the first world war: the rise of owner-
occupancy and publicly provided housing and the continuous
decline of the private landlord. It was about owner occupation
that they had come to hear - they were impatient with the
exposition of the other two categories which may have been
the lot of their parents but was not going to be their
des tina tion.
But faces grew longer as we calculated the incomes my
students would have to earn to make the typical mortgage
repayments for somewhere to live in this South London
borough. There would be hollow laughs when I pointed out
that the building societies were not profit-making bodies, but
an exploration of other possible sources of finance showed
~hem to be no cheaper. So we would turn back with grudging
mterest to look at the council's waiting list and the jungle of
the Rent Acts. What was I to say to these apprentices? Get
yourself the kind of job that would make you better
mortgage-fodder? Save and save at a rate that keeps pace with
the inflation, not only of currency, but of house prices? Move
to some part of the country where it is easier to buy or rent?
I used to think in those days that their situation was
gloomy. It is a lot worse today. The issues are not at all
simple. They are obfuscated, rather than clarified by the
preconceptions we all bring to what we teach. But I think we
do no service to our students in pushing out a version of their
future housing situation which sees them as inert and passive
consumers of some-one else's welfare paradise.
We have tried all that and it didn't work.
3. Dismantling Whitehall
I want you, councillors and local government officers alike, to
take a brief rest from the dreadful day-to-day dilemmas of
local administration today, and to think instead of the
ur ierlying political, and indeed philosophical, issues behind
the present crisis of local government. . .
You will know that at the conferences of the pohtIcal
parties, anyone who senses that interest is flagging has only to
evoke the name of some revered figure from the past, to get an
automatic round of sentimental applause. The names that
trigger off such a response at Labour Party deliberations are
those of people like Keir Hardie or George Lansbu:y. At
Conservative conferences, ministers get a cheap cheer If they
mention Disraeli, a second generation immigrant whose right
to take part in British politics is challenged by legislation
recently hurried through Parliament, though some members
of that party, now excluded from government, might bring up
the name of Walter Bagehot, who at least had the virtue of not
being a statesman. At the Liberal assemblies it is ordinary
good manners to bring in a reference to Lloyd George, and at
a meeting of the Social Democratic Party, a rousing cheer
would, no doubt, be won by the mention of any of them,
indiscriminately. .
Understandably, past politicians are always preferabl~ to
present ones. But there is one thing that unites these vanous
skeletons or ikons from the party cupboards. These people
had all formed opinions on the question of the appropriate
level at which decisions, and the allocation of resources,
should be made. They had some notion in their heads about
which things were, or were not, the concern of central
Lecture given at the National Conference oj the Town and Country Planning
Association on "Central Control versus Local Life" on 1 December 1981.
47
-..I.
 48 TALKING HOUSES
government. This is not surprising, since none of them would
ha~e q~alified for a degree in political science from any British
unIverSIty today. The contrast with current political leaders is
that the new breed have no notion that the tension between
local a~d central ~s i~portant at all. Ifsomething needs doing,
they thmk, we wIll Just push it through, regardless.
People with less education will realise, almost intuitively
that local administration is much older than central
administration, that its roots lie deep in the history of any
people in the world, and that even the words we use to
describe it in various languages, express a notion of the idea
that decisions are made locally, however tragically wide is the
gap betwe~n idea and reality. There is an echo in the very
word counczl of the word commune, variously spelt in the Latin
languages, or the word Gemeinschaft in German, or the ancient
word mir or, with a heavy irony, the word soviet in Russian, or
the phrase town meeting in America, which expresses the idea of
a community making decisions, raising the revenue for them
and implementing them, for itself.
Central government, for the greater part of recorded
history, has represented some butcher, bandit or warrior chief
who has managed to intimidate local communities to
surrender their sovereignty and manpower to him to gather
the revenue to conduct foreign wars. This is the historical
truth, and it is also a truth relevant to our own times as
Richard Titmus showed in his study of "War and S;cial
P?licy". Since no-one can contradict this interpretation of the
hIs~ory of the ~uropean nations (with the exception of
SWItzerland) I wIll turn to the issues which face us today.
A couple of months ago, the journal The Economist, which is
not out of sympathy with the alleged economic aims of the
present government, remarked in a leading article, 1 that local
government in this country "has been swatted by Margaret
Thatcher's cabinet like an irritating fly". It observed that Mr
!feseltine "like all his predecessors, entered office pledged to
mcreas~ local ~reedom and has spent his time curtailing it".
You wIll notIce that The Economist referred to all Mr
Heseltine's predecessors, because I would like you to think
back just a few years, before the days of the present central
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 49
administration. Politics prospers on short memories. There
must be some people here who can remember that Mr Shore,
M r Crosland and Mr Walker, to name but a few, were just as
high-handed (sometimes a little more successfully) with local
authorities, as Mr Heseltine. Every change in the allocation of
funds from the central treasury to local authorities, in the
bewildering changes of nomenclature since the 1950s has
reduced their ability to decide for themselves. General Grants,
Block Grants or Rate Support Grants have each been
heralded by sales talk about more local discretion, but in fact
each, while apparently giving greater freedom to local
authorities, has been used to reduce their freedom of
manoeuvre and their ability to select their own priorities.
These priorities might often be misguided, but so might
those of central government. We all know the defects and
inadequacies of the rating system. This morning you
discussed "Financial Control the Key to the Problem?". I for
one am sure that it is the key to the problem. The Royal
' Commission on Local Government years ago now, stressed
the need for additional local taxes, and pointed to the view of
the Royal Institute of Public Administration that this country
should adopt a system of local income tax, and has also urged
local taxes on vehicles and fuel. No doubt you will have
discussed already the Swiss example of the way that the
ordinary objections to such a tax system have been overcome.
The best news I ever heard from that country is the way that
the central administration is continually embarrassed by the
way in which local administration starves it of funds. In this
country, just as much as in Switzerland, people live and work
and generate wealth locally, and when these functions are
performed in different places, there are several Swiss
principles like "75 per cent to the authority where you live, 25
per cent to the one where you work".
Whatever theories you may have absorbed about the
principles of taxation and about the difference between the
taxes which are thought to be regressive or progressive, the
plain fact is that all of us, rich or poor, pay a third of our real
incomes in tax. Whether we get that much in return for our
enforced expenditure is a quite different issue, but whether it
50 TALKING HOUSES
is levied nationally or locally is not. In any re-allocation, the
people with the task of pushing the forms around would be the
same, though, for example, it was the conclusion of the Royal
Institute of Public Administration in the nineteen-sixties, that
"the transfer to local government of taxes generated by motor
vehicles would not only be cheap to administer, but would
reduce exchequer grants from 47 per cent to 14 per cent of the
income of local authorities".2
Now of course, every trend in government policy in Britain,
pushed perhaps to extremes by Mr Heseltine's current efforts,
while smarting from his recent rebuke from the courts, is to
take away from local authorities the right to determine how
their rating powers are to be used. I know and you know, that
in the conceivable future, central government, not only its
political office-holders but its impregnable civil service
establishment, will never surrender its powers of tax-
gathering to local authorities.
There is an unspoken assumption in the attitude of central
government to local government, held by both ministers and
the administrative grade of the civil service, that local
government is, politically, dominated by small minded local
entrepreneurs, or else by irresponsible left wing rabble, and
professionally conducted by petty pen-pushers who weren't
good enough to join the clerical grade of the civil service. It
isn't my business to contradict this stereotype, but I am
concerned to point out that their self-image, whether as
politicians or public servants, is equally far from the truth.
It is a mistake to think that central government is
dominated by an all-wise, urbane and magnanimous concern
for the public welfare. At an administrative level It is
dominated by the urge to close ranks, cover one's tracks and
yield nothing to anyone. At a political level there is a macabre
frivolity about the way the departments are shared out. I read,
for example, on the front page of the first issue of The Times
Health Supplement a month ago, that the DHSS "was created by
Sir Harold Wilson in 1968 more to give Mr Richard Crossman
a job that would keep him 'under control' than out of any
profound regard for efficiency or social purpose" .:l
Mr Crossman's own contempt for local authorities is
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 51
obvious to anyone who bothers to read his diaries. But this
contempt is shared by every politically-minded person when
encountering a local authority whose councillors pursue a
policy other than his own. We see this today when Mr
Heseltine is making war on local councils who are, in his view,
sabotaging his policy on the sale of council houses to sitting
tenants, and we saw this during the Wilson administration,
when Ministers and top civil servants, who themselves bought
education for their children in the private sector, were
enforcing a policy of comprehensive secondary education on
councillors who believed otherwise. I mention these two
contentious issues on which we all have opinions, just so that
you can look into your hearts and ask to what extent you
believe in local self-determination.
The best account I ever read of the philosophy of local
government, was written in a hurry ten years ago (because of (
the Royal Commission and the subsequent re-organisation of \
local government) by Mr loan Bowen Rees, the then clerk to
the county of Pembrokeshire. It was called Government by
Communiry and is probably out of print.4
Mr Bowen Rees (whom I don't know and have never met)
is a man very close to my heart, because he is a citizen of his
Welsh parish and of the whole world and is not impressed by
the hierarchy of power and authority in between. His mind
has been shaped, not just by Welsh parochialism but by Swiss
federalism and by two great French thinkers, the aristocrat De
Tocqueville and the peasant Proudhon. From the first of these
he derives the maxim that "The strength of free peoples
resides in the local community" and the observation from De
Tocqueville's enquiry into Democracy in America that "I do not
think one could find a single inhabitant of New England who
would recognise the right of the government of the state to
control matters of purely municipal interest".
Here is a remark, which, whether or not it was true when its
author visited the United States in the eighteen-forties, calls
the bluff, not just of Mr Heseltine or Mr Shore but of any
other contender for political power. And it leads Mr Bowen
Rees to enquire, not just whether a Department of Education
52 TALKING HOUSES
has any real function, but whether we actually need a Director
of Education at a county level?
He was intent on exposing what he calls the "will 0' the
wisp of size": the notion that there is a minimum size for the
efficient performance of any public function, and he shows
how the authors of the Redcliffe Maud Report ignored the
evidence that it had itself commissioned in research studies,
evidence which of course was ignored even more blatantly
when re-organisation actually happened. But his best
contribution was in polarising two fundamentally different
approaches to local administration. He said:
Is it not our trouble in the United Kingdom that we have been
conditioned to looking at local government - and practically every
other facet of society - from the top down?
Actually, there are two fundamentally different ways oflooking at
local government, from the top down and from the bottom up.
Those who look from the top down consider that the whole authority
of the state is concentrated at the centre, To them, the centre is the
only legitimate source of power: it is from the central government
that local authorities receive their powers: indeed the central
government actually creates the local authorities, dividing up the
state into more or less uniform divisions in the process. The central
government does this for the more efficient and economic provision
of its services. It involves the leading citizens of every locality in the
business of government, not so much in order to hear their views, as
in order to embrace them and make them identify themselves with
the system. This school of thought might be called the classical
school oflocal government. It is more interested in efficiency than in
democracy, in uniform standards than in local responsibility; it
regards the citizen more as consumer of services than participant in
government. Even at its best, it is apt to be patronising.
The opposite is true of the other school, the romantic school, as it
might be called or, in some countries, the historical school. This
school sees the state itself as a conglomeration of localities, each of
which has, it is true, surrendered much of its authority to the cen'tre,
but each of which retains some authority in its own right as well as a
basic identity of its very own. The romantic school places the
emphasis on local authorities as nurseries of democratic citizenship,
revels in diversity and local initiative, is impatient of central control
and wishes to involve the citizen in government, not so much to ,
bring him into contact with the state as to foster his self-reliance.5
Well, just suppose that his romantic or historical school
were dominant, and shaped our practices in local administra-
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 53
tion. We would have the counties begging the districts for a
more generous morsel of tax income, just as the cantons in
Switzerland have to beg from the communes, and we would
have central government begging the county councils for a
bigger income, just as the federal authorities have to in
Switzerland. The boot would be on the other foot, so far as Mr
( Heseltine, or his shadow, Mr Kaufman, or his alternative
shadow - should I suggest Mr David Alton - is concerned.
No doubt a lot of people would enjoy the fall of the mighty
that such a prospect envisages . But nagging in people's minds
would be the element of redistribution that the existence of an
overall central authority (since it is assumed that the whole is
greater than the parts) would involve.
It is taken for granted that the state exercises this
redistributive function. If you are old enough you will
remember that in the inter-war period, we had what were
then, with commendable honesty, called "depressed areas"
and later were known as "special areas" and have been
described by a variety of other euphemisms ever since. But in
spite of a great number of allegedly redistributive measures,
conducted by a variety of government departments, it is
obvious, at an ordinary, visual, level, today that the parts of
the country which were especially poor then, are especially
poor today. At an ordinary city level, you will remember that
it is sixty years since George Lansbury and his fellow
members of Poplar Borough Council, went to jail rather than
pay a poor rate which was higher than that of much richer
boroughs.
In case you think that this particular episode relates to the
primitive past, and that more sophisticated redistributive
techniques are now applied, I would draw your attention to
the study, just published, of The Inner City in Context, the final
report of the study directed by Professor Peter Hall for the
Social Science Research Council. He describes the Rate
Support Grant as "a very blunt weapon", and he comments
that
It tends to be based on past expenditure, so that a well-off authority
with high spending on (say) education simply attracts more grant.
There is no allowance for quality of service , provided, or for
 54 TALKING HOUSES
cost-of-living variations between authorities. After 1974 the formula
was altered to the benefit of metropolitan districts and above all the
Lon?on borous-hs. But th~ aid did not pass to the poorer boroughs.
Hanngey, EalIng, Havenn~ and ~ewham - all boroughs with
areas .of stress -lost grant Income In 1979, while Westminster and
KensIn~ton/Chelsea gained. Inequi~a~le as this may have seemed,
the arbItrary formula that replaced It m 1981 promises to be much
more SO.6
In other words, using the best techniques anyone knows
about, the redistributive functions of central control do not
actually function. The primary justification for a ce~tralised
system does not work. Do we actually know that a federation
of local authorities would produce results which are any
worse?
So great is our unthinking deference to the centralised state
that w.e ~ake it for granted that central government appoint~
commISSIOns to enquire into the functioning of local
government, or th.e departme?t of the environment reporting
on the way counctls fulfil theIr housing functions and telling
them ~hat they ~ay and may not do, or the department of
educatIOn and SCIence reporting on schools, that we never,
ever, even consider the likely conclusions if the schools
reported on the DES and the Inspectorate and its functioning
and .usefulness, or of local authorities reporting on the
effecttveness of central governm.ent control of housing policy,
or of local government reportIng on the utility of central
government and the deluge of circulars and directives which
descend from Mondays to Fridays from government
departments to those of county and district councils.
Do you, for ~ momen~, imagine that local housing
departments, hOUSIng committees and, in particular, tenants,
would countenance for a minute the continued existence of
central gove~nment direction of housing policy, where we
surely recogmse that the wrong directives have been issued for
at least thirty years? Why did local authorities increase
densities, why did they get involved in the disasters of the
~ower-block syndrome? The answer is that they were
Inexorably steered into it by central government policy and its
subsidy structure.
DISMANTLING WHITEHALL 55
What do you imagine the opinion of education committee
members and teachers would be about the disappearance of
the Department of Education and Science? Would they feel
they had lost anything? It wasn't me, but Lord Vaizey, the
author of the standard work on the economics of education,
( who suggested that the DES really had no function at all.
I speak only of government departments I know something
about. I have no doubt that farmers and the NFU would
regard the disappearance of the Ministry of Agriculture with
horror, but you will be bound to notice that the present
government's determination to reduce the scope of central
government activity is all a little one-sided, and of course will
be resisted by the civil service every inch of the way. In the
civil service view, and in practice, in the view of political
appointees, local authorities are just not to be trusted.
Marxists insist that the council is simply "the local state" and
that the parade of local democracy is mere eyewash.) It isn't
only the present government, but any other government we
can think of, which, in practice, agrees with them.
At the opening of the current session of Parliament, it was
indicated that the government intends to publish a Green
Paper outlining a number of possible alternatives to the rating
system. I think that the time is over-ripe for people who
believe in local government to issue their own Green Paper,
not only on a viable system of finance for local government,
but since central government has had so many commissions
concerned with the affairs of local government, on the extent
to which the dismantling of the autonomy of Whitehall can
begin. A "Local Commission on Central Government" could
be the first tentative step towards re-ordering our national
priorities.
References
1. "Swatting the town-council fly" The Economist 3 October 1981.
2. S. Hildersley and R. Nottage:- Sources of Local Revenue, London 1968.
3. David Loshak: "Labour plans to split the DHSS down the middle" The
Times Health Supplement No I, 30 October 1981.
4. loan Bowen Rees: Govermilent by Community (London: Charles Kinght &
Co, 1971).
}

56 TALKING HOUSES
5. ibid.
6. Peter Hall (ed) The Inner City in Context (London: Heinemann
Educational Books 1981)
7. M. Boddy and C. Fudge (eds) The Local State: Theory and Practice (Bristol:
SAUS Working Paper 20, 1981)
( there are people whose particular scapegoat for .the current
4. Until We Build Again
As I look at the names of my fellow speakers and at people I
know at this conference, I reflect that most of them are
supporters of the Left, in its infinite variety, and must have
been dismayed by the result of the general election. I think of
myself as a person of the Left too, but in electoral terms, I
belong to the second biggest party of all: the non-voters. The
major actions of governments - of any complexion - are
abhorrent to me, and I don't have a great deal of faith in their
minor and peripheral activities, like housing policy, either.
On the other hand, I do believe in pressure groups for
specific purposes, and I think that the single-issue pressure
group can be highly effective and useful, both in affecting the
climate of opinion among citizens, and making just a few
pebbles or boulders in the mountain of legislation work in
what we would regard as the public interest. Of course we are
all familiar with the phenomenon that the legislation that
people have lobbied for, can beco~e when drafted and
enacted, something far short of what they sought, or so
wrapped around by civil service or local government
procedures, checks and balances, as to be ineffective. Within
the voluntary housing movement, for example, is anyone
actually happy about the role of the Housing Corporation,
including its own employees?
I used to work for a very venerable environmental pressure
Lecture given at the Shelter National Housing Conference, University oj
Nottingham, on 16 July 1983.
UNTIL WE BUILD AGAIN
57
group, the TCPA, f()unded in the last century as ~h~ Gar~en
Cities Association, to propagate Ebenezer Howard s m~entI~m
of the garden city idea, a governmental version of whIch w<:ts
finally brought into effect as the New Towns Act of 1946 and
the whole programme of New Towns which followed . Just
because there are many misconceptions about this, and as
plight of inner cities is the dispersal of popula~lOn to New
Towns, there are two things I should say. One IS that, most
particularly in connection with New Town assets, there are
great differences between Howard's concept and the New
TOWll~ ~e_?-ctually got. The other is that in Howard's mind
the whole purpose of depopulating the cities was to break t.he
capitalist land valuation system so that, after the sca~~~~y
value resulting from the gross overcrowding of the old CItIeS
had been lowered through the outward movement of peop~e,
the lowering of the rental value and rateable value o~ ~ity lan.d
would enable their redevelopmeJ!.t at humane dens1tles. ThIS
of course hasn' t happened. Urban land keeps its price long
after its true value has declined, and we are all obliged to have
a vested interest in these make-believe valuations because of
the massive purchases by local authoritie~,. ins~ranc~
companies and pension funds. In the current pohtlca~ chma~e,
none of the parties has the political will to tackle thIS crUCIal
issue ofland valuation, nor is there an effective pressure group
at work on this nagging, complicated and tedious issu.e.
But I mentioned Howard and his successors for a dIfferent
reason. They understood the need for single in~erest pre~s.ure
groups to appeal right across t~e ,;0l1:vent~on~1 pohtlcal
spectrum . As Lewis Mumford put It, WIth hIS gIft of sw:et
/
reasonableness Howard hoped to win Tory and AnarchIst,
single-taxer and socialist, individualist and collectivist, over to
his experiment. And his hopes were ~ot. al~ogether
discomforted' for in appealing to the Enghsh mstmct for
finding com:Uon ground he was utilising a solid political
tradition." Among our legislators, who are expected to be
authorities on everything from lead in petrol to ~asty
video-films, only a small proportion, in the nature of thI~gs,
have any real interest in the issues of planning and housmg,
58 TALKING HOUSES
and they aren't necessarily the ones who get ministerial office.
Exactly the same thing is true oflocal government, despite the
continuing efforts of the central departments to ensure that
councillors have an ever-narrowing sphere in which they can
actually decide anything.
To the extent that a pressure group is a lobby on
government, it needs to have something for everyone. For a
very long period there was a general consensus between the
politicians of right and left about housing, which, leaving the
rhetoric apart, continued through the greater part of this
century. For years the two major parties played the numbers
game about how many hundred thousand houses "they"
claimed to have provided every year. This consensus has now
been broken. Although I have to remind you that the
run-down was apparent during the Wilson and Callaghan
periods, the last administration made a decisive break with
what had been a bipartisan approach to housing policy, in
adopting a philosophy akin to that of classical liberalism in its
crudest form. If I belonged to a housing lobby, seeking to
influence the present government to steering more resources
in the direction of housing, the language I would use would be
loaded with phrases like "self-help", "mutual aid", "standing
on your own two feet" and so on, and especially the phrase
used by Mr Ian Gow in moving the second reading of the
current Bill on 5 July, urging that "wherever possible the
individual should enjoy greater freedom and choice and
should accept the responsibility that went with it".
The political Left has, over the years, committed an
enormous psychological error in allowing this kind of
language to be appropriated by the political Right. If you look
at the exhibitions of trade union banners from the last
century, you will see slogans like Self Help embroidered all
over them. It was those clever Fabians and academic Marxists
who ridiculed out of existence the values by which ordinary
citizens govern their own lives in favour of bureaucratic
paternalism, leaving these values around to be picked up by
their political opponents.
There is of course one genuine problem for councils that the
tenants' right to buy imposes. In their housing revenue
UNTIL WEBUILDAGAIN 59
accounts they operate a pooling system of rents and subsidies
so that their older properties, let at figures way above the
economic rent or historic cost rent, subsidise the newer ones
built at astronomical cost in the 1970s. In other words, the
tenants of old council property, who may well have lived there
for many decades , are subject to a continually rising rent to
( help keep down the rents of tenants in new c.ouncil property.
Under no conceivable ethical system can thIS be conSIdered
just, and it presents not an argument against sales but an
argument for changing the system of housing finance. No
private landlord could get away with such a policy . A rent
officer would tell him that his investment in new property was
not his old tenants' concern. If old tenants were acquainted
with the facts ofthe way in which the housing revenue account
was manipulated, they would lobby for a total ban on new
council building.
I am desolated, if unsurprised, by the response of the
authoritarian Left to the crisis. of housing policy, and its
extraordinary willingness to equate public ownersip with
socialism, especially when hardly a week goes by without
some council deciding to demolish, as spectacularly as
possible, housing it built at enormous cost wit~in the la~t
twenty years and which it won't have finished paymg for untIl
well into the next century, while a continual series of reports,
like Anthony Fletcher's Homes Wasted, published by Shelter
last year, draw attention to the very large numb~r. of
dwellings, empty and decaying, belonging to local authorItIes.
In the end we may feel some relief that the Thatcher
government has halted the consensus on housing policy. It
gives us a certain moratorium to think about how we would
construct a housing programme if starting from scratch.
There was a phrase used about Gandhi by Vinoba Bhave. He
said, "Gandhiji used up all the moral oxygen in India and the
British raj suffocated" . In the same way we might say that the
direct provision of housing for rent by local councils used up
all the inventive capacity for evolving a sustainable housing
policy, and the alternatives never got a chance, . they were
suffocated. Now is the time to nurture the alternatIves, to put
 60 TALKING HOUSES
their lessons before the public and to exploit the rhetoric of the
present .governm~nt as an argument for financing them.
The mtroductIOn to a recent massive volume on urban
history! c~ntains the terse little comment: "having demolished
slums whIch stood for a century, we constructed homes which
las.t:d a. ~ecad.e". U~fair? Untrue? Most people in most
Brltlsh CItIes wIll readIly thmk of examples which meet this
descri~tion. The authors declare that "damp, boredom,
vandalIsm and garbage undermined the urban vision" and the
evidence is available for all to see. But another factor needs
pondering.
In the context of the wise husbanding of housing resources
we have to admit that we squandered our resources when we
thought we were rich and have only partially absorbed the
~essons for now that we think we are poor. The missing factor
IS that of dweller control: the ability of residents to make their
own contribution to their domestic environment. We have
plenty of evidence of the consequences when this crucial
attribute is excluded. Can anyone conceivably imagine that
any of the gre~t ~ousing disasters of the last thirty years would
have been bUIlt m the first place if the potential residents had
been in control?
I think myself that what we, with our belated wisdom, see
as grotesquely unsuitable housing structures could be
redeemed by the resourcefulness of the occupants. Reflect, for
example, on that familiar phenomenon of the fifties and
sixties, where Authority, represented by a clerk from the
surve~ors' or M?~ department in the passenger seat of a
counCIl car, was tIckmg off the houses destined for demolition
some o~ the~ regarded as "little palaces" by the occupant~
and theIr neIghbours. Or reflect on the wisdom of some local
authorities in deciding to sell off, for whatever they could get,
tower blocks of flats, rejected as a squalid, vandalised dump
by the po~r, but c~pa~le of resuscitation with answerphones
and a umformed Jamtor, by wealthier families anxious to.
conserve their resources by living closer to the city centre.
Most of us are familiar with the paradox that the life or
death of b~ildings was decided by a line drawn on a map on
the centrelIne of a road. On one side houses were demolished
UNTIL WE BUII.DAGAIN 61
as unfit for human habitation, and were eventually replaced
by flats that declined from the moment they were occupied.
On the other, identical houses were sold off on the private
market and improved by their purchasers, making use of
improvement grants and DIY. There was no magic about
their success. It depended upon access to resources and upon
the opportunity to use one's own resourcefulness, which is the
concomitant of the dweller being in control.
Housing policy since its origins in the last century as
council slum-clearance has been based on the implication that
a municipal Lady Bountiful or Octavia Hill takes over the
landlord role, with all its overtones of dependence and
resentment. Very slowly, and to my mind unwillingly, we
have begun to absorb the lessons from the attempts to develop
alternatives. All tne assumr.tions_ofhousing policy in the pa~t
have depende'"d upon an image'~f gratefuG ec.i£ients wJ:1o pay ·
tIle rent but d Oii'i-aream of makingtheir 0;-0 imprint on the
ftiUy-finished, fully=8ervicecf (a ccoroing -to' tliestandards of the
day) housing. SomE- of us- can a ctually remember the days
when tenants were told to strip off their unauthorised
wallpaper and replace the council's pea-green distemper.
Any council nOw.i!:daYli ~oQ.I~ be QIllL!OO p~ea§.edto pass
over to the tenant "the cost of maintenance and improvement,
just because heavy-handed ex~ernally-imposed updating is
ruinously expensive and inappropriate. Some people do want
their vitreous-enamelled cast iron bath replaced by a pink
fibreglass one with an infinitely shorter life. Others see this
kind of improvement programme as grotesquely irrelevant to
expressed needs.
Fortunately we have by now a whole range of one-off
examples which display a variety of alternative approaches
which do draw upon the resourcefulness of residents. (And I
do have to remind you that this capacity for making the most
of one's resources is taken for granted in the majority mode of
tenure, owner-occupation, in this country. The scandal is that
it is also taken for granted that a different breed of human
lives in the other forty-five per cent of British households.)
My first example is the well-known, not to say hackneyed
one of the Black Road, Macclesfield. We all know about it and
 62 TALKING HOUSES
it still retains the distinction of being the only Clearance Area
to become a Conservation Area. I say this only to denigrate
the crude, official designation of places . But it has the added
distinction of being one of the few examples of a rehabilitation
scheme where members qualifying for grant were able to
manipulate the financial arrangements so as to share the
benefits with elderly neighbours to give them whatever
particular improvements met their aspirations. The mixture
of grant aid and community resourcefulness is symbolised by
the way in which the employed building workers left their
plant on Friday nights at the most convenient places for the
residents to take it over at weekends. If this were typical of the
rehabilitation scene, we wouldn't have to keep harking back to
the Black Road redevelopment.
Very slowly local authorities have been resolving to put
modernisation of council houses and flats in the hands of their
tenants. Glasgow corporation's "tenant's grant scheme" has
been taken up by more than ten thousand of the city's tenants,
96 per cent of those to whom it has so far been offered, and the
results, according to Jane Morton, have "startled even those
who argued for it in 1979 by its cost-effectiveness and
popularity".2 Glasgow's change of heart has extended to the
sponsorship of management co-ops, as well as to promoting an
experiment in urban homesteading at Easterhouse in some of
the abandoned and boarded-up three-storey walk-up flats
there. Discounted freeholds together with rehabilitation
grants have been offered to families willing to take them on.
The co-operative housing movement has started, virtually
from scratch, in the last ten years, and in spite of the same
economic constrictions that have affected every kind of
publicly funded housing, in spite of the bureaucracy of the
Housing Corporation as the channel for funding. Contrary to
the stereotype of those people who believe that co-op housing
is a mere diversion from the need to revive the direct provision
of housing by local authorities, most co-ops are not composed
of privileged people grasping the newest trend, but of poor
people in housing need or in need of long-delayed home
Improvements.
For the opportunity it gave to people from the housing
UNTIL WE BUILD AGAIN 63
waiting list of an inner London borough, actually to build
their own houses of a very high standard, the Lewisham
Self-Build Housing Association, worth studying by everyone,
is so-far unique, -b~t;ve'nmore significant is the change of
heart in Liverpool. The city council resolved that the
provision of new housing was best achieved by providing the
funds, in the words of Nick Wates, to enable people in need
"to organise the design, construction and management of it
themselves through self-generating self-reliant co-
operatives".3 He explains that, " Local authority tenants living
in slum clearance areas or deteriorating tenements organise
themselves into groups - so far ranging from 19 to 61 family
units - and obtain the management services of one of
Liverpool's co-operative development agencies: Co-operative
Development Services, Merseyside Improved Houses or
Neighbourhood Housing Services. With its assistance they
register as a 'non-equity' housing co-operative with limited
liability, locate a suitable site an~ negotiate to buy it. (So far
nearly all the land has come from Liverpool City Councilor
the Merseyside Development Corporation.) They then select
a firm of architects with whom they design a scheme which is
submitted to a funding body. The scheme is then submitted to
the DOE for subsidy and yardstick approval . .. When the
houses are built, the co-op members become the tenants of
their homes, paying standard fair rents, but they are also
collectively the landlord, responsible for management and
maintenance. "
It was reported only last week by David Lawrence, head of
GLC Professional Services that "there is mounting pressure
from an increasing number of London's tenants' groups
demanding public money so that they can hire architects to
improve their estates". (AJ 6 July 1983).
We thus have something today which was non-exi~tent a
d~~~ ag!?:.~i.e 2 f 2.~m~~s··oL~lten).ati.v..es jIlJ)ousing,
pn?'.Yi iing a RI(!'cr • Jor .. p~ople sown ..,r~~oqr~~ej);lp. ess ~and
"self-help~:- T a ke the case of a .secondary co-op like Solon
Co-operative Housing Services in London, servicing a variety
of co-op initiatives ranging from former squatter groups,
short-life rehab groups, even small business or industrial
64 TALKING HOUSES
co-op groups of immigrants usmg premises for living and
working.
It is not a bit surprising that many of these new initiatives
have faced, like the Lewisham self-builders, heartbreaking
delays and difficulties because the regular sources of housing
finance don't fit their style of activity. Often the inner city
local politicians who should have been their allies are
suspicious or hostile because their particular vision of the
socialist commonwealth involves everyone being beholden to
the housing committee and the housing department.
People like that are playing into the hands of the hard men
of the present government. They are also out of touch with
popular aspirations. Everybody here represents in one way or
another, what we call the housing lobby. Since we are
lobbying a government which expresses its belief in its version
of Victorian values, let's face them with those Victorian values
of self-help and mutual aid. But let's address our fellow
citizens with the range of alternatives in housing which don't
perpetuate the unloved image of municipal landlordism.
References
1. Derek Fraser and An thony Sutcliffe (eds) The Pursuit of Urban H istory
Edward Arnold 1983
2. Jane Morton: "Tenant takeover" Ne w Sociery 16 June 1983
3. Nick Wates: "The Liverpool Breakthrough: or public sector housing
Phase 2" A rchitects Journal 8 September 1982
5. Direct Action for
Working- Class
Housing
I have been re-reading Proudhon, or attempting to do so,
spurred on by the conferences of the parties of the Left in their
attempts to formulate a policy towards housing, to match that
of the Conservatives, whose "right to buy" legislation has
undoubtedly been an electoral success. I am certainly not
opposed to the right to buy and I think the opposition
arguments against it are based on fallacies, but I am opposed
to the legislation as it is one more nail in the coffin of local
autonomy.
As an alternative, the Labour Party has been debating The
Right to a Home and the SDP has been discussing its Green
Paper A Choice for All. Every such document has to be a
compromise between interest groups within these parties and
their compilers' assessment of what will actually win votes.
From the tenants' point of view we have actually slid into a
situation where, all over the country, council rents are
subsidising the rates, something never envisaged by those who
believe that council landlordism is to be equated with
socialism.
But I find that the attitude of Marxist academics opposed to
the right to buy is not to do with the present plight of tenants
but to a dictum of Engels from well over a century ago in a
polemic called The Housing Question, where he said that "As
long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it
Lecture given in the "stream" on Anarchism and the British Labour Movement
at the 18th History Workshop, Leicester, 18 November 1984.
65
66 TALKING HOUSES
is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing
question affecting the lot of the workers . The solution lies in
the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the
appropriation of all the means of subsistence and the
instruments of labour by the working class itself." He was
replying to various forgotten socialists of the kind he labelled
as "utopian" and to disciples of Proudhon who is not
forgotten, but is certainly, for good reason, unread.
The one thing we all know about him is his slogan Property
is Theft, and some of us remember it painted in letters three
feet high by the temporary occupants of 144 Piccadilly in
London in September 1969, and some of us know that he also
said Property is Freedom, just showing how inconsistent the
anarchists are . He himself remarked once, "Odd, that after
waging war against property for fifteen years, I am perhaps
destined to save it from the inexpert hands of its defenders",
and his editor George Woodcock explains that his original
slogan "was to hang like a verbal albatross around its
creator's neck" and that
his boldness of expression was intended for emphasis, and by
"property" he wished to be understood what hc later called "the
sum of its abuses" . He was denouncing the property of the man who
uses it to exploit the labour of others without any effort on his own
part, property distinguished by interest and rent, by the impositions
of the non-pfOducer on the producer. Towards property regarded as
"possession", the right of a man to control his dwelling and the land
and tools he needs to live, Proudhon had no hostility; indeed, he
regarded it as the cornerstone of liberty, and his main criticism of
the Communists was that they wished to destroy it.
With his sympathy with peasants and independent artisans,
Proudhon seemed to Marx and Engels to be an absurd
survivor from the preindustrial age. Engels declared that" .. .
the ownership of house, garden and field, and the security of
tenure in the dwelling-place, is becoming today, under the
rule of large-scale industry, not only the worst hindrance to
the worker, but the greatest misfortune for the whole working
class, the basis for an unexampled depression of wages below
their normal level ... "
Fo:.. most non-Marxists this is an inexplicable point of view
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 67
which in any case has been by-passed by history. Yet its
shadow still haunts the political Left. One modern
commentator, Hugh Stretton, wishing to rescue socialism
from itself, claims that
Socialists ought to welcome the growth of the home-owning,
do-it-yourself sector of production ... the second industrial
revolution may be seen as making Marx and Engels wrong about
household ownership and production, and Proudhon right ... And
in practical politics, socialists would no longer have to appear, as
they have too often appeared in capitalist and communist countries
alike, as enemies of ownership and of free, unalienated domestic
productivity - enemies who threaten to confine the working class
for ever, no matter how affluent it becomes, to a constricted
existence in rented, landless battery housing. \-
The worst irony is that the dreadful errors in housing policy "'-.1\""';''''' "'"""
were made in times of what now seems like full employment, fl.:.. .".,,';:,:1
when levels of investment in the urban fabric were high and ,
when poor people had relatively ~ore disposable income and,
consequently, more freedom of manoeuvre than is now the
case. In the expansive 1950s our social prophets were urging
us to sever, at last, the connection between employment and
income. In those days John Kenneth Galbraith was arguing
for what he called "cyclically graduated compensation" - a
dole which went up as the economy took a downturn, so that
people's purchasing power could be maintained, and which
went down when full employment approached. "One day",
Galbraith forecast, "we shall remove the economic penalties
and also the social stigma associated with involuntary
unemployment. This will make the economy much easier to
manage." But, he added, a decade later, "We haven't done
this yet".
And today, when the collapse of employment for millions
makes the need for such policies far more urgent, the political
climate is even less receptive to them. Hence the popularity of
the Reagan and Thatcher governments among the members
of the employed majority who don't feel an obligation to
provide an income for those who can't get a job and are never
likely to have one. Hence too, the campaigns against "social
parasites" in the Soviet Union.
68 TALKING HOUSES
Andre Gorz is a French socialist who warns us that our
failure to separate purchasing power from employment is
going to lead to a society where the majority will be
"marginalised by an unholy alliance of un ionised elite workers
with managers and capitalists". And he argues that the
political Left has been frozen into authoritarian collectivist
attitudes belonging to the past:
As long as the protagonists of socialism continue to make centralised
planning (however much it might be broken down into local and
regional plans) the lynchpin of their programme, and the adherence
of everyone to the "democratically formulated" objectives of the
plan the core of their political doctrine, socialism will remain an
unattractive proposition in industrial societies. Classical socialist
doctri?e finds it difficult to .come to terms with political and social
plurahsm, understood not sImply as a plurality of parties and trade
union.s ~)Ut as t~e co-existe?c~ of various ways of working, producing
and hvmg, vanous and dIstmct cultural areas and levels of social
~xistence .: . Yet this k!nd. of pluralism precisely conforms to the
hved expenenc~ and aspIratIOns o~ t.he post-industrial proletariat, as
well as the major part of the tradItIOnal working class.
How on earth, he asks, has the socialist movement got itself
into the position of dismissing as petit-bourgeois individual-
ism all those freedoms which people actually value: everything
that belongs to the private niche that people really cherish?
He means that niche which can be represented by "family life,
a home of one's own, a back garden, a do-it-yourself
wor~shop, a boat, a country cottage, a collection of antiques,
mUSIC, gastronomy, sport, love etc". And he goes on to assert
that "an inversion of the scale of priorities, involving a
subordination of socialised work governed by the economy to
activities constituting the sphere of individual autonomy, is
underway in every class within the over-developed societies
and particularly among the post-industrial neo-proletariat".
It may seem like a bad joke to talk of some of the categories
in Gorz's private niche, like that boat, country cottage and
collection of antiques, in the context of the new pauper class in
Britain. What kind of post-industrial neo-proletariat does he
imagine we have, either in Britain or France? But the point he
is making is valid enough. With family life, a home of one's
own, a back garden, a do-it-yourself workshop, you can get
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 69
by, as generations of poor people since Proudhon's day have
found. David Donnison and Claire Ungerson are wise in their
Penguin on Housing Policy to reflect on the increasing
importance of house and home in a society in which well
under half the population is employed outside the home, and
in which even employed people spend longer each week at
home than at their place of work. They observe that
Neglect of the domestic economy and the informal economy has led
planners, architects and the makers of housing policy under widely ·
different regimes to undervalue space - indoors and outdoors -
and the scope which people can be given to extend and adapt their
homes and gardens. They have instead been too reluctant to give
tenants a stake in their homes or any scope for changing them, and
too prone to admire the inflexible, unresponsive bureaucracies
which too many housing authorities have made of themselves.
I am sure they are right to envis~gs:._a future in \yhich the
decline of manufacturing industry-"as a source of employment
is bound to imply a growth in the informal and domestic
economy, especially as even the service economy, wqi..cQ...'Y_a s
thought ~apabl~ of t~king_ ~'Ler the employing function, is
being replaced by a self-service economy (e.g. the domestic
washing machine taking over from the laundry and even from
the launderette). A future where an increasing proportion. of
goods and services are provIded either in the home or the
neighbourhood, c.9-11s for flexible, adaptable, low density
housing with outdoor as well as indoor space. The
once-despised by-law street of the late 19th century as well as
the suburban street of the first half of this century, are
well-adapted to change to accommodate new patterns of
living. ~od ~rn high-density housing, whether high or low, is
not.
However, all through life I have kept hearing of working
class families who have managed to build their own without
even building skills, and with little or no access to capital.
Everyone today is so completely dependent upon the housing
supply system, whether renting in the public sector or buying
in the private sector, that we find it hard to believe that people
can house themselves. Worse than that, we assume that they
are in some way abnormal or obsessional or heroic, so that
70 TALKING HOUSES
instead of changing the system to make it easier for others to
do the same, we make it harder for anyone to emulate them .
Suppose, for the first time in the history of the Left's
discussion of housing, we were to celebrate their achievement?
Take the case of Walter Southgate. He, along with
Emmanuel Shinwell, is one of the last two survivors of the
Labour Representation Committee, the body which founded
the Labour Party, and for decades was a street-corner agitator
and trade union activist. Later in his long life he was one of
the people who established the Museum of Labour History in
Limehouse. After the first world war he and his wife bought
two-and-a-half acres ofland near Ongar in Essex. Back home
in Hackney he first made a carpenter's bench and then built in
s:ctions a two-roomed wooden hut. The following Easter they
hIred a Model T Ford van and transported their shed to erect
on the concrete footings they had spent ages building. Their
first lesson in brickwork had been in building the fireplace.
The four-day holiday gave them time to erect their eight-foot
by si;cteen-foot shed and set it up on the footings but Jot
to
bolt It down, before it was time to cycle the 20 miles bick to
Adley Street, opposite Hackney Marshes. That week a gale
blew it off its foundations, but they levered it back and used it
for several years at weekends while plotting to build a
permanent house.
We knew from the start that it would be a gamble and disastrous
should I fall sick or unemployed at a stage when the walls were half
way up ... Our estimate of the cost without labour was around £358
and we had nowhere near that sum. We just hoped to get through
the final stages of building our bungalow by working in slow motion
on my monthly salary. So it came about a few days before the
General Strike was declared in May 1926 that we sent off our first
order to the local gravel pits to deliver 30 yards of ballast and 20
yards of sand at 8s a cubic yard. The die had been cast and there
could be no going back. It now meant work, hard work, for every
weekend and holiday period over the following two and a half
years . . .
They finished the building in September 1928 and lived
there on the small-holding they developed over the years, until
1955. Over the years they produced every kind of fruit and
vegetable, kept poultry, rabbits and geese, grew a variety of
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 71
trees including a coppice of 650 saplings and in fact made
their holding far more productive than any farmer could. Was
this a triumph of escapist individualism? Well, not exactly, for
Mr Southgate spent a long life in every kind of socialist
organisation and at the 1978 National Conference was
honoured for "outstanding voluntary service to the Labour
Party".
In the course of our research into the "plotlands" of South
East England, Dennis Hardy and I met dozens of people who,
with no capital and no access to mortgage loans, had changed
their lives for the better. Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Gifford
had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London and a hard
and uncertain living as a casual dock worker. His plot ofland,
40 feet wide by 100 feet deep, cost him £10 in 1934. First he
put up a tent which his family used at week-ends, and he
gradually accumulated tools, timber and glass which he
brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled down
from London. For water he sank a well in the garden, though
as with Mr Southgate's house, main services were eventually
connected. His house is called "Perseverance".
Mrs Elizabeth Granger and her husband were caretakers in
an LCC block of flats. In 1932 she saw in the evening".paper
land at Laindon advertised at £5 for a plot 20 feet wide by 150
feet deep. She took her unwilling husband on the
one-and-twopenny return trip from London and was advised
that they should buy two plots if she wanted to build a
bungalow. She paid the deposit with a borrowed pound.
When she could afford it she bought a first world war army
bell tent, laboriously got it to the site, and she and her
husband would go there on their day off, taking their drinking
water with them and straining rainwater through an old
stocking for washing. They used to rent the tent at week-ends
to parties of boys from the estate, using the money to buy
second hand bricks at 35s a thousand, three yards of sand for
ISs and cement at 2s 6d a bag. They reared chickens, geese
and goats, bought a pony and trap, and Mrs Granger's
husband got a transfer to a job at Dagenham. Unlike Mr
Nichols, they didn't stay for a lifetime in the house they had
built with so much labour, but were enabled to move "up
 72 TALKING HOUSES
Yov~j\
market" as people would say, from their very modest
beginnings - a borrowed pound in fact. She remarks, "We
~o'" ~
N.,.:. \) never had a mortgage for any of the houses where we have.
Ived.ITeel so sorry for young couples these days, who don't
( \ ,...'? . r- ~A,.C\ g~n~eRind- of ~hance we had:" . .
__ ( fJ".... • The second world war, and the overwhelming powers to
control development given to planning authorities by the 1947
Town and Country Planning Act and its successors, as well as
the stringent enforcement of building regulations, have put an
end to this kind of self-help housebuilding in Britain. True,
there are people who manage it, but it is not my business to
inform on them. We certainly have our self-builders, both
individual and collective, and they usually build houses of a
much higher quality than they could buy. But they have to
provide a fully-finished, fully-serviced house right from the
start. There is no longer any room for the improvised dwelling
that is improved from earnings over time, simply because it
would not get planning permission, approval under ~
building regulations, and certainly not a mortgage loan for the
cost of the site and materials. A whole new profession has
grown up of people who act as "fixers" for self-build housing
groups, simply because of the complexity of the regulations
and legal stipulations they have to meet.
Our planning and building legislation, in fact, operate as
Jon Gower Davies remarked, as "a highly regressive form of
indirect taxation". The rich can get by, but the poor are
penalised. Contemporary planning legislation would auto-
matically outlaw the building of the homes of Mr Southgate,
Mr Nichols and Mrs Granger. (It being axiomatic that land in
the country is sacrosanct for farmers to grow unwanted cereals
for the subsidy, and to pick up another subsidy for grubbing
up hedges and trees for this purpose.) Contemporary buiiding
regulations would certainly ensure that their building costs
were prohibitive. Their houses mayor may not have been
built to the standards of the pre-war model bylaws and Public
r ' /" ' ; - Health Acts. They probably were, since these were simple and
--' comprehensible to the layman. But the post-war building
• .----- regulations are not only incomprehensible, so that even
(~ architects employ structural engineers, at their client's
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKIN(;-CLASS HOUSING 73
expense, to design the simplest foundation, beam or roof, but '
are administered in a way that ensures that all the District ~
Council's officers will be insured in perpetuity against the >
remotest liability for any building failure. Old buildings last ~_
for centuries without benefit of all this expertise, but th ~>
widespread defects of public housing in the last twenty years, ~
all built to comply with the regulations, turn out to be <--..
nobody's responsibility. But if you have the temerity to wan!:------>
to build for yourself, watch out! - ~_
If you are disinclined to take these comments on trust yo
should ask any architect of your acquaintance. But you may
also feel that because of the instances I have mentioned from
years ago of people who broke out of urban landlordism into
the country, I have evaded the issue of those families who
from necessity or choice wanted to remain city dwellers, and
that of contemporary realities. Post-war housing in the cities
has of course been dominated by local authorities, who,
presented by the war with bom~ sites, adopted the policy of
comprehensive redevelopment which fitted their unques-
tioned belief that large-scale problems could only be met by
large-scale solutions. When they ran out of bomb sites they
made themselves a second blitz. Colin Jones has shown how
the self-confident rush to destroy the past in Glasgow and
Liverpool has resulted in a net housing loss and Graham
Lomas demonstrated in 1975 how in London more fit houses
had been destroyed than had been built since the war.
Two young architects from the London borough of
Newham, Graham Bennett and Stuart Rutherford observed
that at a time when the borough was claiming that it had run
out of sites, it was, like any other inner-city borough,
pockmarked with small vacant plots. They decided to make a
detailed investigation. On foot and by bike they surveyed,
street by street, two half-kilometre-wide strips of land, from
north to south and from west to east, straddling the borough,
and noted each vacant site. Then they excluded all sites of more
than half an acre, any sites in wholly industrial areas, any sites
which, although not used for anything in particular, were part
of recent local authority housing proposals and any sites
within a declared local authority redevelopment area.
 74 TALKING HOUSES
They concluded on the basis of this survey that, within the
borough as a whole, there was enough land in the sites left
over to house, at a conservative estimate, 3,000 to 5,000
people in single-family houses. When they reported their
findings to officers of the council, they were told that all these
small and scattered plots were useless, so far as the council
was concerned. Given the local authority's procedures, it
would be uneconomic to develop them. Bennett and
Rutherford were not happy with this answer because they felt,
as I do, that the very scale of local authority developments
was part of the malaise of public housing. So they took their
argument further in a detailed report, supported by quantity
surveyors' costings, in 1979. They pointed out that house
prices in Newham were below those of neighbouring
boroughs. Turn-of-the-century houses were selling for around
£9,000, and only reached that figure because of the influx of
people who could only just qualify for a mortgage.
Co.nsequently sp~culati,:e developers could not sell ~wly
bUIlt houses at pnces whIch would show what they conside~d
as an adequate return on capital. So the building of new
houses was monopolised by local authorities or housing
associations.
In consequence, the two architects claimed, "the consider-
able contributions which householders can make have never
been fully appreciated and utilised". Public participation has
been seen as a politically necessary nuisance or as just another
load on administrative costs. But, they argued, "Until local
authorities acknowledge that their bad experiences with
participation on large-scale developments have been a
product of working on too large a scale, and give consideration
to small partnership arrangements for small sites, these sites
will remain unuseable". They point out that all the other
social needs for land in depressed urban areas - schools
hospitals and recreational open space - need large sites. ' quality giving immense satisfaction to the residents, who
~he one-f~mily house.is on !he other hand, uniquely suited to small
SItes and IS the most mtensIve use of land. A typical terrace house
pl<;>t ?f, say, 15 feet by 70 feet can be, for the family living there, a
chIld s play space, a vegetable garden, a thing of beauty, the site for
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 75
a hobby or small business, as well as a place of shelter and security.
As such it tends to be well cared for and supervised.
We don't have to look far, they argue, to see how the benefits
of small-scale management and enterprise could be harnessed
to developing idle sites in depressed districts:
In all except the coldest winter months, the residential streets of our
survey borough are dotted with builders' skips, as local people add a
kitchen, bathroom or bedroom to their houses, make a loft
conversion, create a "through lounge" or build on a new front porch.
They do so by managing the project themselves, often with the aid of
a draughtsman from the local estate agency.
Bennett and Rutherford were putting the case for extending
this kind of enterprise to prospective householders. They
envisaged a situation where a local authority would be
empowered with central government funding to advertise the
opportunity to develop these small sites among families on
their housing waiting list. Someone would decide to apply,
lease the land at a peppercorn rent, appoint an adviser, while
as building work proceeded payments would be made in
stages. The council would use its allocation of funds to write
off40 per cent of the capital cost and would grant the low-paid
householder an option mortgage for the rest. Their proposal
was simply a rearrangement of procedures in a new way, but
as they said, "the greatest impediment to our proposal is
simply that many professionals with an interest in, and a
c.ontrolling hand on, housing have come to believe that
housing is a sophisticated process well beyond the
comprehension of the uninitiated.
Needless to say, their scheme was not adopted in Newham.
But the good news is that another London borough has
sponsored a scheme which combines their approach with that
of the plotland self-builders, and has provided housing of high
claim that the experience has enormously enriched their lives.
This is the Lewisham Self-Build Housing Association. As an
experiment in dweller-built public housing (something which
a decade ago would have sounded like a contradiction in
terms) it took a long time to come to fruition, and would have
 76 TALKING HOUSES
been smothered at birth had it not been for a few people's
willingness to put aside the assumptions about the politics of
housing which they had accumulated over the years.
Walter Segal is an architect, born in Switzerland in 1907
who quite early in life was fascinated by the structural
simplicity and economy of the traditional American
; "balloon-framed" timber house. He has practiced in this
country for almost fifty years, giving a direct personal service
to his clients, but increasingly at odds with the planning and
building control system.
Whenever a new project came along there was this brief honeymoon
with the design, then the long drawn-out fight with the control
apparatus. The client had to adjust himself to this. And then there
was the final business of building, and there it was harder and
harder. When you administer a client's resources you have a moral
obligation to him. I built 30 houses in London before 1962 but it was
becoming so difficult that it was really warfare - and I "had ~ecome
.-'
in consequence a much less amiable person than I am now. I ~s
(/
really quite ap unpleasant person to meet professionally.
It was in that year that he decided to rebuild his own house
and to erect a temporary building in the garden to house the
family during the building work. He used lightweight
materials in standard sizes so that they could be reused
elsewhere, held together by a simple frame standing on no
foundation other than concrete paving slabs. The building
was so cheap, quickly-built and comfortable (as well as
durable: it is still there today) that in the 60s and 70s when the
mainstream of British architecture was steadily losing the
respect of the public, Segal had a series of commissions t6
build houses on the same principle in different parts of the
country, refining the system with each job. There was no
contract6r, just a plumber, an electrician and a carpenter, Mr
Wade, who followed him around from job to job. An
increasing proportion of the building work was being done by
--) the owners .
One of the most interesting aspects of his approach is that it
blurs the expected roles of architect, tradesman and client.
They aren't at the points of a triangular relationship, they are
all mixed up in the middle in the adventure of building. "As I
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 77
see it", he says, "buildings are there to be a background ~or
people, against which they move, a background whIch
envelopes them, protects them, gives them pleasure, and
allows them to add a little bit of themselves".
By 1975, having built 25 structures of this kind, Segal was
yearning to find a local authority willing to take the plu.n.ge
and sponsor housing built by his method for and by famihes
on its housing waiting list. At that time the assistant borough
architect was Brian Richardson, seeking alternatives to what
he regarded as the failure of the usual, exp~nsive co~ncil
housing procedures. The chairman of the housmg commIttee
was Ron Pepper, a comprehensive school headmaster, and the
chairman of the planning committee was Nicholas Taylor,
author of a brilliant book The Village in the City, who knows a
good housing idea when he meets one. Naturally these four
people had different responsibilities and different. approac?es
to housing, and to the role of local ~~thontles. .Bnan
Richardson an anarchist, comments that If the Lewisham
\
Labour Gr~up has a fault, it is the conviction that if a thing is
worth doing at all, it is worth the council doing it for you".
Taylor on the other hand, speaks of "Lewisham's lib:rta:ian
vision of a socialism which is neither of the managenal nght
nor of the authoritarian left, but which uses state intervention
to release the creative energies of ordinary people".
In 1976, by a single vote, Lewisham council decided to
explore the possibility of promoting a self-b.uild scheme.' ?ased
on Segal's system of lightweight constructlOn, for famIlies on
the council's waiting or transfer lists, using those pockets of
land which because of their size or their sloping nature, could
not in their view, be used in the borough's own housing
programme. The council advertised a public meeting and ~ lot
of people expressed an interest: 168 attended a first meetmg,
78 a second, and finally 14 families were succ~ssful in a draw
for places for the first scheme. "They were a mi~cellaneo,!s
bunch of ordinary south Londoners who were alIke only m
their passionate desire to escape from their present ~ou~ing
conditions ... into something that would make theIr hves
more generous and free ... "
There followed two-and-a-half years of delay, enough to

78 TALKING HOUSES
dishearten the most persistent of would-be builders. The
scheme was "totally entangled in a complicated bureaucratic
maze through conflicting demands by local authorities and
the government", it was reported in August 1978. It took five
months to obtain planning permission and further difficulty
with the GLC and the DIstrict Surveyor because of the
unorthodox structure. The families formed themselves into an
association, and in order to qualify for subsidy, they
contracted to build the houses for the council which would
then grant them 99-year leases and 50 per cent mortgages.
The other 50 per cent of the house would be "rented" from the
councii but would be purchasable in installments to enable
the resIdents eventuafly to own the whole property. The value
of the labour in building the houses would be assessed and set
against the mortgage.
This ingenious scheme survived, with difficulty, as first t~e
DOE demanded as a condition of loan sanction that th~:~
should be a fixed price and fixed time contract, and secondly
the Inland Revenue demanded that the self-builders should be
taxed at the standard rate for their labour as though it were
income. During the long period of waiting, the members
taught themselves to build. Walter Segal recalls,
An evening school was arranged which ran for six months to show
them how to use very simple tools. It was mainly cutting, drilling
,~~~ and measuring. What was so utterly astonishing was the patience,
'.~ the incredible patience which these people displayed in waiting so
',~ long for an opportunity to get on the site. In the end even the council
thought it was expecting too much and it was mainly Ron Pepper
who said he would take it on himself to let them go and clear the site;
and later on he authorised the first two houses to be done.
-... --~)
Although they were using Segal's precisely-calculated
structural system the internal design of each house was
determined by each family. Ken Atkins explains that
We must be the first council tenants who have been involved with an
architect in the design of our own homes. The architect used graph
paper to help us get it to represent the modular concept of two feet
two inches and asked us to draw a house within cash limits. This
was about 100 square metres. We did this as a group and then went
to Walter Segal's house. He took all the ideas and drew up 50 to 60
DIRECT ACTION FOR WORKING-CLASS HOUSING 79
difterent house plans and then we went back as individual families to
choose and adapt our design ... Every ,:"all is n~m-loadbearing so
it's adaptable and changeable. At any time dunng th~ process of
building or after I've lived in it, if! feel I want to change It I can take
out any wall and change it.
Anyone who has seen a videotape of the Open Door TV
programme about Lewisham, The House that Mum and Dad
Built, (the BBC 2 presentation brought over a thousand
enquiries) will have been struck by the members' testimony
about the effect that this adventure has had on their lives:
The one thing that's left me immensely proud is the co-operative
spirit on the Brockley site. A wife had a baby the o!her week. !he
buntings were out and the balloons ... If some reqmre a babySItter
... if someone's working on a car . .. or the communal garden they
get help. They pay a pound a week to a communal fund. They've
landscaped the gardens last year. No-one tells them to do that, they
do it themselves because they have control over where they are
living and they contribute. They've got a say in what actually goes
on there and because they have a say they contribute ...
For the professionals involved it was an equally liberating
experience. Brian Richardson says it was the most important
architectUl al experience of his life, and Walter Segal, an old
man who has seen a dozen architectural fashions come and go,
says "On the day when the first frame stood it was an
astonishing feeling. I was immensely happy, like a child,
almost."
Many self-build housing schemes organised in a co~ve~­
tional way rely, believe it or not, on a system of penaltIes III
case some member does not pull his or her weight. Segal
recalls the creativity that was revealed in Lewisham by not
pushing people around.
Help was to be provided mutually and voluntarily - there wer.e no
particular constraints on that, which did mean t~at the good wIll of
people could find its way through. The less you tned to control them
the more you freed the element of good will - this was astonishingly
clear. Children were of course expected and allowed to play on the
site. And the older ones also helped if they wished to help. That way
one avoided all forms of friction. Each family were to build at their
own speed and within their own capacity. We had quite a number of
young people but some that were sixty and over who also managed
80 TALKING HOUSES·
to build their own houses ... They were told that I would not
interfere with the internal arrangement. I let them make their own
decisions, therefore we had no difficulties.
He noted with pleasure rather than with irritation, the
"countless small variations and innovations and additions"
that the self-builders made. "It is astonishing that there is
among the people that live in this country such a wealth of
talent. "
All this fuss about fourteen houses! Why has it not been
followed up elsewhere, apart from a second Lewisham scheme
where, working with Broome, Segal is supervising another
tenant group building 13 more? The answer is in the
inflexibility of the housing supply system which was never
designed to liberate that astonishing wealth of talent. In
Scotland, Stirling District Council is proposing to adopt a
scheme devised by Rod Hackney for a serviced plot system
where ground floor slabs with service ducts through the ~abs
will be poured and the individual sites then sold to
self-builders. The housing committee chairman says that he
council "would do everything possible to assist potential
owners to arrange mortgages, and in certain cases the council
might be prepared to give a loan themselves".
But, even in 1984, many Labour councillors still share the
view of the leader of another London council when he
concluded his visit to Lewisham, "We're not going to turn our
tenants into little capitalists".
6. Anarchy or Order? The
Planner's Dilemma
I am particularly grateful for your kind invitation to deliver
the third Sharp Memorial Lecture, because it enables me to
ponder on the huge shift in our attitudes to planning since
Thomas Sharp wrote his pioneering books in the 1930s and
1940s. It was here, in Newcastle, that I attended one of the
most interesting and stimulating of all the many public events
of the 1970s where we attempted to work our way through the
changing approach to planning. This was the Planning for
People conference, set up here by the organisation Tyneside
Environmental Concern on 21 October 1972. And you will
note the date, which was a few months before the energy crisis
of 1973 changed all our perceptions about our futures.
I found that an extraordinarily stimulating meeting and
anyone of the themes that arose from it could have been the
subject of a conference in itself. In the chair was the splendid
Dr David Bellamy, who warmly supported the proposal by
Robert Allen for an exercise in popular long-term strategic
planning which he called "NE 2073 - a Future for the
North-East" suggesting that anybody and everybody in the
region, professionally or privately, should collaborate in
drawing up such a plan, which would become the yardstick
against which what aCtually happened and what was actually
proposed by people with power, and what was actually
planned by the statutory authorities was measured.
Mr Ken Galley, City Planning Officer for Newcastle, in
describing his council's rehousing policy, remarked that
"there has been a quiet revolution in the Civic Centre" and he
The third Sharp Memorial Lecture, given at the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November 1985.
81
82 TALKING HOUSES
exemplified this by talking about the redevelopment of Byker.
Dr Roy Gazzatd won headlines in the next day's press by
suggesting that the kind of urban and rural pattern that was
actually going to emerge in the next few decades was that of
prole ghettoes in the cities, hemmed in by their green belts,
with free-range rural fascists in their Land-rovers, living it up
in the secure countryside.
He raised a laugh of course, and we said, "Well, that's Roy,
with his picturesque exaggerations", but thirteen years later
we can surely see the point he was anxious to make.
When my turn came, I spoke about the conflict between
residents' own aspirations and the futures dictated to them by
planning authorities, whether they were the people officially
designated as "planners" or whether they were directors of
housing, environmental health officers or medical officers of
health; pointing out that in the pecking order of departments
in city halls, it wasn't always the planning officers who
necessarily planned. Planning . was a victim of its own
pretentions.
I cited the evidence of several, then recent/ detailed studies
of the impact of planning, here in the N6ith East: the two
books by Norman Dennis on re-housing in Sunderland/ the
book by Jon Gower Davies, The Evangelistic Bureaucrats2 about
planning in the Rye Hill district of Newcastle, and the piece of
work that was being done at that time by Peter Malpass in
this university, studying the topic of "professionalism in
architecture and the design of local authority houses" by way
of the housing at South Benwel1. 3 Malpass found that
Instead of meeting his client face to face, getting to understand
clients' needs and preferences, and devising an appropriate solution,
the local authority architect in Newcastle encounters council tenants
only by chance. The clients' needs and preferences are mediated by
other departments and by the central government, all of whom are
equally innocent of any systematic contact with tenants.'
How could we explain the vast gap between the planners
and the planned? The explanation I used at the time, was
derived from Richard Sennett's book The Uses oj Disorder" in
which he remarked that "Professional planners of highways,
of redevelopment housing, of inner-city renewal projects, have
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 83
treated challenges from displaced communities or community
groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a
natural part of the effort at social reconstruction". What this
really means, says Sennett, is that planners have wanted to
take the plan, the projection in advance, "as more 'true' than
the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time
of human lives".
To illustrate this contention I used the rather obvious case
of the Category D villages in County Durham, where over
twenty years earlier the villages were graded from A to D
according to predictions or projections made then about their
future economic viability. I remarked that
A village in Category A, like Escomb,. has be.en re~abi~itated
sensitively and intelligently, without aVOIdable dlslocatlOn m the
lives of its people, but Category D villages like Witton Park, with an
absolute ban on new buildings and on improvement grants, have
been left to die without regard to the wishes of the inhabitants or to
changing prospects of local em:p~oyment. Officially dea~, but
unwilling to die, the Category D VIllages have fou&ht for surVIval. A
few have been upgraded, but most have been kept m the condemned
cell, even though, as at High Spen, new industry has provided more
jobs than the closed colliery. The officials who assumed the rol.e of
God in dividing the sheep from the goats have themselves long smce
moved to greener pastures, but their decisions of twe~ty years ago
remain more "true" to Durham County CounCIl than the
subsequent activities and aspirations of the people who live in the
villages sentenced to death.
In the thirteen years since I spoke, there have of course
been more shifts and changes both in real life and in planning
policy, but my remarks were true then. I was working in those
days as environmental education officer for the Town and
Country Planning Association, with the assumption that
environmental education was the prerequisite for the public
participation in planning envisaged in the Skeffington Report.
But remarks like mine used to cause difficulties for David
Hall, then as now the tireless Director of the Association,
because he used to get indications from local authorities that
they could find it hard to justify their support for the
Association when their policies were openly criticised by its
employees. Needless to say, David Hall always supported me.
84 TALKING HOUSES
I mention my recollections of that meeting all those years
ago here in order to stress that our present misgivings and
dilemmas about the role of planning in society are not the
product of the energy crisis, nor of the collapse of the job
market, nor of the present government's ideology. They go
back to fundamental differences in the world view of those
whose version of the origins and functions of planning is that it
is a popular movement associated with non-professionals like
Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes and F.]. Osborn and the
whole garden cities movement that evolved with the TCPA,
and those who see it as an extension of the sanitary reforms of
the last century and governmental intervention in the housing
market, with a hierarchy of professional expertise in local and
central government administering the very comprehensive
legislation for controlling land use that has accumulated since
1947.
There are of course those who have always believed that the
role of the professional planner is greater than this. Only ten
years ago Dr David Eversley was claiming that the role of the
professional planner was nothing less than "that of
master-allocator of the scarcest resources: land, and capital
and current expenditure on the built environment and the
services which are offered to the community".6 I don't believe
that there can be a single planning officer today who would
make such a claim. Since the job of Chief Planner in the
Department of the Environment was ~tly advertised, and
since, for all I know, the successful candidate is here tonight, I
want to remind you of the important shifts over time in the
opinions of holders of that office. Take Sir Wilfred Burns, a
former city planning officer for Newcastle. In 1963, he
declared that
the dwellers in a slum area are almost a separate race of people, with
different values, aspirations and ways ofliving . .. Most people who
live in slums have no views on their environment at all.
Furthermore, he went on to say that
when we are dealing with people who have no initiative or civic
pride, the task, surely, is to break up such groupings even though the
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 85
people seem to be satisfied wi~h t?ei: mis~rable envir<:m~ent ar d
seem to enjoy an extrovert SOCIal lIfe m theIr own localIty.
We may smile, but no-one here can deny that policies based
on precisely such assumptions were purs~ed in every city.in
Britain. Each of us has his or her own partIcular horror stones
from a variety of places. It is all summed up in Bruce Allsop's
comment that
it is astonishing with what savagery planners a~d architects ar.e
trying to obliterate working-class cultural and SOCIal patterns. Is It
because many of them are first generation middle-class
technosnobs?8
Wilfred Burns, as Chief Planner in the Department of the
Environment, summed up many years later, the way the scene
had changed. At a seminar I attended in 1978 he said,
People have many different perspectives on the.ir ~nvironment and
on community life but only now are we begmmng to see these
articulated. It is not all that many ' years ago since people trusted
local or central government to analyse their problems and prescribe
the solutions. Those were the days when people accepted that new
and exciting developments were bound to be better and when
change seemed to be welcomed. We then moved into a perio~ when
unique prescriptive solutions. gave way to the. presentatIOn of
alternatives so that the publIc could express ':'Iews bef<?re ~nal
decisions were taken. Today we face a dIfferent SItuatIOn.
Community groups, voluntary organi~ations of ~::ny kinds, and
indeed individuals now demand a say m the defimtIOn of problems
and a role in deter:nining and then implementing solutions. Even in
the professional field that we normally think of as part of the
establishment there are various movements concerned with
reinterpreting or changing the prof~ssionals' role. Self-help groups of
many kinds have sprung up, sometIm~s around. a pr<?fessIOnal, or at
least, advised or guided by a professIO!l~l. It IS qUlt~ clear that a I
number of people believe that the tradItIonal professlOnals ~re not
able adequately to communicate with people in a way that WIll help
them solve their problems or make their wishes known to those who
take the decisions. 9
This carefully-worded admission that planning would never
be the same again, came from the government's Chief
Planner, as I mentioned, in 1978. Thomas Sharp died in that
year, "spared at least" as Gordon Cherry put it in the second
 86 TALKING HOUSES
Sharp Memorial Lecture, "from having to make an
adjustment, late in life, to a new set of political philosophies
which seemed to put planning under fiercely critical
scrutiny" .
Sharp would certainly have understood Professor Cherry's
comment that "professional practice somehow failed to live up
to its promise, and environmental regulation degenerated into
process without purpose".10 It was the kind of criticism he
frequently made himself. But he would never have understood
the most deadly and devastating criticism of the profession to
which he devoted his life, which was expressed by Jon Gower
Davies in his observation that
\ \..~N'''
Planning in our society . .. is in essence the attempt to inject a
radical technology into a conservative and highly inegalitarian
economy. The impact of planning on this society is rather like that of
the educational system on the same society: it is least onorous and
most advantageous to those who are already well off or powerful
and it is most onerous and least advantageous to those who ar~
relatively powerless or relatively poor. Planning is, in its effect on the
socio-economic structure, a highly regressive form of indirect
taxation."
It isn't that Sharp lacked sympathy with poor people and
their aspirations. He came himself from a Durham mining
town, and he wrote, at the outbreak of the last war, "For
fifteen years and more in places like Rhondda, J arrow and
Bishop Auckland, hundreds of thousands of Englishmen have
been eating their hearts out in squalid, dole-supported
unemployment spent among fouled landscapes and filthy
slum-built towns with hardly a hand lifted to help them".12
The trouble was that when ordinary people's aspirations were
fulfilled, whether it was in the garden city density of twelve to
the acre, or in the semi-detached suburban house or
bungalow, or in the Austin 7 and the-week-end trip to a chalet
or shanty site on the coast, Sharp with his vision of order, logic
and dignified formal seemliness, despised them for it. "For
what hope", he asked, "in the modern world, can spring from
a chaos of individualism ... a romantic individualism in
which every man glories, and is encouraged to glory, in his
self-sufficiency and separateness?"13
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 87
He admitted that "No one can blame those who seek to
escape from the awful prisoning streets in which they and
their parents have dragged out their terms of hard labour. On
the contrary it is admirable that they should do so; they would
be beyond hope if they didn't." But, he went on immediately,
the pity of it is that their new places are ~ardly mo.re civilised tha.n
those from which they are in h~adlong flight. The~r new r?mantlc
villas and bungalows with theIr pebble-dash, theIr half-tm:ber~d
gables, their "picturesque" leaded-light windows? are certamly m
striking contrast to the terrace houses of theIr old conges.ted
quarters. But the contrast is merely between one type of barbansm
and another.14
$ Sharp feared that with
a growing use of the car ... all the land in the country c:an be
regarded as building land and co~sequ~ntly .all. the land m the
country is being laid out as a gIgantIc bmldmg estate to be
developed at a density of not more than 12 houses ver ac:re .. . E~ery
little owner of every little bungalow in every roadSIde nbbon thmks
that he is living in Merrie England because he has those "roses
round the door" and because he has Sweetwilliam and Michaelmas
daisies in his front garden. An amazing conception, but ~me that
exists everywhere ... In addition to this fixed populatlOn that
drifted out of the town to live "in the country", motor transport
created a liquid, fluctuating, weekend-and-fine evening population
that moved over all parts of the country, and that had to be cate~ed
for man and machine by refreshment places, garages, petrol fillmg
, , d · 15
stations, telephone boxes and other accommo atlOns . ..
Now a year after Sharp's book Town and Countryside, from
which I have been quoting, appeared , J. B. Priestley made his
English Journey, and he too, has an evocation of the changing
landscape of the 1930s, the new territory of
arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look
like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes,
bungalows with tiny garages, cocktai! bars, "Yoolw.orths, motor-
coaches, wireless, hiking, factory gIrlS lookmg hke actres~es,
greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everythmg
given away for cigarette coupons ... 16
But for Priestley, with all its brashness that so offended
Thomas Sharp, the new England was "essentially democra-
tic" and he hoped that there would be more, not less of it. In
 88 TALKING HOUSES
Priestley's eyes, England was fast becoming a land without
privilege, where suddenly everything was becoming accessible
to everyone. He rejoiced that
The young people of this new England do not play chorus in an
opera in which their social superiors are the principals ... they get
on with their own lives. 17
There is a quite fundamental difference of approach here,
and it runs through all Sharp's castigations of the disorder,
chaos and anarchy of the English scene. Take the obvious case
of Peacehaven. For Sharp
The reductio ad absurdum of the garden city is its extension to
absurdity, and of this, unfortunately, innumerable examples exist.
The worst in England is Peacehaven, which has rightly become a
national laughing-stock ... It is indeed a disgusting blot on the
landscape. 18
I refrain from quoting the OpInIOnS of old residents of that
place, because you can find them in the book that Dennis
Hardy and I wrote about the plotlands,t9 but John Seymour I
think, makes a reasonable comment when he says,
Peacehaven is the place most people love to hate. I try my best, but
really I cannot find anything so terrible about a township knocked
up by ex-soldiers after 1918, with their pathetic little gratuities, in
or~er to have. somewhere to live away from noise and violence, of
whIch they presumably had enough. 20
There are, as you will know, passionate defenders of the
suburb, of the semi-detached house, and of all the aspects of
the interwar environment that drove Thomas Sharp into
despairing rage. And they are to be found, not among the
ignorant and benighted, but from within the architectural and
planning professions. Sharp'S objections were primarily on
aesthetic grounds. But they are simply 'pursuing a different
aesthetic. For tastes change.
I was the director of a curriculum development project for
the Schools Council, which sought to explore the place of Art
as a school subject in environmental education . We
continually met an initial response from teachers which
assumed that our task was to teach children what they ought
to like. I used to respond by urging them to consider teapots.
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 89.
In the 1930s and 1940s, design education in school often
meant bringing into the classroom a collection of teapots and
attempting to persuade the class to despise their parents'
teapots as well as their houses, and agree that this product of
the Staffordshire trade was bad (all that meaningless
machine-made decoration), that this teapot shaped like a
thatched cottage, with the roof coming off as a lid and the
chimney as the knob on top, was intrinsically bad and
\
dishonest, while this third teapot was an OK Bauhaus-
designed functional sphere, with a few necessary excrescences.
That same teacher, now retired, has of course long since
abandoned the Bauhaus tea-pot (its virginal white surface
disfigured by tannin-stains and chips) and has on the shelf
such an amusing and valuable collection of tea-pots designed
to look like something else. 21
None of us is immune to these changes of sensibility and
aesthetic preference, not even Thomas Sharp. Kathy
Stansfield, in her absorbing essay on him mentions the
difference between the 1936 and the 1950 editions of his
English Panorama:
By the time the second edition was published .. . Sharp had
changed the emphasis from the formal qualities of urban
architecture to the informal beauty of the mediaeval town ... Pure
Renaissance towns, he said in the second edition, were mere
monuments ... The mediaeval town was by contrast "a living
town" and one which should provide inspiration for the future.
She also notes how he had to admit in the second edition that
the "old balance between town and country had gone and will
never return". 27
This is particularly interesting because, of all the jeremiads
or denunciations, thundering flights of oratory or tirades (we
can choose our phrases for them) that we like to savour from
Thomas Sharp, the most extreme concern the separate entities
of town and country. You will know the passages I am
thinking of from his book Town and Countryside:
The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer bea~ty, t~e
richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countrysIde, WIll
be debased into one sterile, hermaphroditic beastliness . .. The
90 TALKING HOUSES
town is town: the country is country: black and white: male and
female. Only in the preservation of these distinctions is there any
salvation: only through the preservation of the town as town can the
countryside be saved; and only through the limitation of rurality to
the country can the town be preserved. 23
These assumptions, modified a little by reality, have guided
a great deal of post-war planning policy. They explain green
belts, New Towns, key villages and a great deal else. But what
these policies were about in a different sense was the abolition
of the differences between town and country in terms of
amenities, facilities and access, while retaining that visual
difference that was important for Sharp. He like all planners
deplored most of all the areas we define as the urban fringe.
This distaste has its origins in psychology and aesthetics
rather than in land use analysis. Like Sharp, we all acquire in
childhood the perception that town is town and country is
country and that the two are distinct, and we carry this
purified image of desirably separate places into adulthood,
even though most of us live in the suburbs, so despised by
Thomas Sharp.
Above a certain level of affluence, access to both town and
country have always been automatic. The rich had their town
house and their country seat. And of course in antiquity and
in mediaeval times the city was bounded by an actual wall, an
immensely potent psychological symbol which recurs all
through the literature of planning, from More's Utopia to the
Essex Design Guide. But the attempt to impose a statutory
wall through land use controls in the twentieth century, with
the best of intentions in taming the speculator, in fact
penalises the poor while preserving the environment of the
rich. It is perilously like the situation described by Roy
Gazzard at the conference I mentioned.
There was a time in the earlier yea~this century, the
period when Sharp despaired at the desecration of our
environment, when as Dr Anthony King explains in his book
about The Bungalow,
A combination of cheap land and transport, pre-fabricated
materials, and the owner's labour and skills had given back, to the
ordinary people of the land, the opportunity denied to them for Over
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 91
two hundred years, an opportunity which, at the time, was still
available to almost half of the world's non-industrialised
populations : the freedom for a man to build his own house. It was a
freedom that was to be very short-lived.24
It was indeed. And one of the most powerful and influential
voice.s for the imposition of order upon this individualist
anarchy was that of Thomas Sharp. He wrote before the war
that
As one who for the last fifteen years has toiled at preparing schemes
under the Town Planning Acts, my own deep conviction is that not
only is the present position hopeless but any extension that I can see
along present lines of control is obtainable only by doin~ two thin~s.
First, by the establishment of a central Board of Planmng that Will
plan and control not only housing and roads, but agriculture,
industrial location, and every kind ofland utilization, in one efficient
National Plan. Second by the nationalisation of the land. 25
And a year or two later, in his very widely circulated
wartime Penguin book on Town Planning, he declared that
It is no overstatement to say that the simple choice between
planning and non-planning, between order and disorder, is a
test-case for English democracy. A National Plan is essential. Local
plans are no longer sufficient. It is no use sentimentalising over the
tradition of local government ... Planning, as we have said, must
begin at the top and work downwards. 26
Poor Sharp! He was the victim of the oldest of illusions in
the catalogue of misconceptions of those who believe in
authority and in government. Disillusioned by the dreadful
hamfisted things that the local authorities were proposing to
do to his beloved city of Durham and to the villages of the
region, he thought that central government would do better,
because he assumed that it was bound to have the same
sensitive appreciation of townscape as he had himself. It is a
common illusion, but it is really like the Russian peasant who
can't believe that his little father, the Tsar, knows how bad his
oppressors are, and once told, will step in to put things nght.
Or like those Welsh miners who were comforted in the 1930s
through being assured by the Prince of Wales that
"Something must be done".
We had, in those wartime years, a Ministry of Town and
92 TALKING HOUSES
Country Planning, and we have had innumerable statements
by central government about the very National Plan that
Sharp was calling for. What good has it done anyone? He
himself must have had a jolt of disillusionment at his faith in
central government when he worked as Joint Secretary with
Dudley Stamp on the Scott Report on Land Utilisation in
Rural Areas, for Kathy Stansfield tells us that
His report on villages was almost suppressed by the Ministry who
refused to publish it, and it took 18 months of pressure to ~llow
Sharp to publish it in a form in which it would not be assoClated
with the department. 27
Eventually it became his Penguin book The Anatorrry of the
Village.
As an anarchist, of course, I am in the opposite camp to
Sharp. If we have to polarise our attitudes between order and
disorder, I fear order most, because I know that the order that
will be imposed is the order of the secure and privileged.
Socialist planners like Sharp thought that they were
restraining the disorder of get-rich-quick capitalist entrep-
reneurs, when in fact they were trampling on the invisible
order of those who just want a chance, as J. B. Priestley put it,
to "get on with their own lives". To illustrate the planners'
dilemma of anarchy or order, I have to turn, not to
Proudhon's paradoxical claim that "anarchy is the highest
form of order", but to Norman Dennis's two devastating
books about Sunderland. He shows how, just because we have
accepted Sharp's - and everybody else's - opinion that
planning must begin at the top and work downwards,
planning has indeed become a form of regressive taxation.
Of all the illustrations I could choose to demonstrate this, I
have to choose once more his reference to the two ways of
looking at a particular district of Sunderland. Within the first
frame of reference, he says, "Millfield, for example, is a
collection of shabby, mean and dreary houses, derelict back
lanes, shoddy-fronted shops and br~en pavements, the whole
unsightly mess mercifully ill-lit". , public inquiry, local amenity societies and planning
But, Mr Dennis goes on, with a second frame of reference,
that of, say, a sixty-year-old woman living there,
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 93
Millfield is Bob Smith's which she thinks (probably correctly) is the
best butcher's in the town; George McKeith's wet-fish ~hop and
Peary's fried-fish shop about which she says the same WIt~ equal
justification; Maw:s hot pies. and 1?eas, prepare~ on the premIses; .the
Willow Pond publIc house, In whIch her favounte nephew orgamses
the darts and dominoes team; the Salvation Army band in a nearby
street every Sunday and waking her with carols on Christmas
morning; her special claim to attention at th~ grocers bec~use ~er
niece worked there for several years; the spacIOus cottage In whIch
she was born and brought up, which she now owns, has improved,
and which has not in her memory had defects which have cau~ed
either her or her neighbours discernible inconvenience (but whIch
has some damp patches which make it classifiable as a "slum
dwelling"); the short road to the cemetery wh~re ~he cares for the
graves of her mother, father and brother; her sIster s cottage across
the road - she knows that every week-day at 12.30 a hot dinner will
be ready for her when she comes ~rom work; t~e bus route which will
take her to the town centre In a few mInutes; the homes of
neighbours who since her childhood have h.el~ed her a~d wh?m she
has helped, church, club and workplace WIthIn five mInutes walk;
and, in general (as is said) "every acre sweetened by the memory of
the men who made US".28 .
When I quote this passage to people in the world of local
government, they respond with the same kind of embarrass-
ment that greets my quotation from Sir Wilfrid Burns. They
are too polite to say so, but they feel that I am evoking images
of the past, that times have changed, that planners aren't so
arrogant any more, nor victims so pathetic. And they point to
the new solicitude for small business, self-employment,
workers' co-ops, or community architecture, as well as to
genuine efforts to facilitate the participation of the public in
decisions about the environment.
They also point out that very little of the time of planning
departments, or of other local authority departments a~ting in
what is in fact a planning capacity, is spent in destroymg the
habitat of old ladies or the Jivelihood of self-employed welders,
or in persecuting people who buy new aluminium "georgian"
windows for their little old houses in conservation areas. They
would also point out that in most of the matters that go to a
departments are on the same side of the argument.
A most interesting case in point was the 22-day public
94 TALKING HOUSES
inquiry held here earlier this year relating to the Tyne and
Wear green belt. It is discussed in the current (November
1985) issue of The Planner, by Greg Smith under the title "How
Green is my County?" He carefully avoids discussion of the
coming abolition of the metropolitan county counCils, but his
last words are that "it is really beyond doubt that without the
County Council there would have been relatively little in the
way of green belt in Tyne and Wear". It is also clear that the
typical objector was not a 70-year-old smallholder anxious to
build a house for the daughter and son-in-law who will
succeed him. The typical objectors were in fact the House
Builders Federation and a major building firm. The planners'
dilemma here was the usual one of having to meet mutually
incompatible requirements. As Mr Smith says,
Judgement on the appropriate tightness of fit of the green belt
around the urban areas pivoted on the respective degrees of risk: too
loose and the main strategic objectives would be lost; too tight and
the principle of strong green belt protection could be undermined by
ad hoc encroachment.
It's another particular way of expressing the dilemma of
anarchy and order. Thomas Sharp was a man of order, and
many of his disappointments arose from his inability to
compromise. Development control itself is a compromise
between Sharp's ideal of land nationalisation and the
free-for-all of market forces in land and land use. The trouble
is that a tight-fit green-belt policy, however admirable in
intention, serves the afIluent very well, and penalIses people
with fewer environmental choices. Dennis Hardy and I found
this time and time again when exploring the plotlands of south
east England. Where these unofficial settlements were
retrospectively included in green belt areas, and their owners
were denied the opportunity of improving, enlarging or
updating them in the hope that they would somehow
disappear, great hardship and injustice were done. When
residents went to the length of appealing against planning
deCisions they usually won JKcir appeals, and policy was
slowly and grudgingly modified as a result. In places where a
loose-fit, live-and-let-Iive planning policy was applied, these
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 95
settlements gradually upgraded themselves over time
something that has happened all through history without
benefit of planning.
Peter Hall showed in his formidable work on The
Containment rif Urban England, how planning policy had so
pushed up land prices that new developments at the humbler
end of the housing market were built at a relatively high
density with tiny gardens and often in very inconvenient
places for the journey to work, and compare badly in these
respects with the ordinary prewar estate, so despised by
Thomas Sharp.29 Policies, sensible in themselves, have had
consequences, originally unforeseen, which have, it seems to
me irredeemably tarnished the reputation of planning in ways
which the pioneers of the planning movement in Britain could
never have envisaged.
This is why, while no supporter of the present government,
I actually welcome its relaxation of planning controls. I don't
know whether or not this relaxation will stimulate enterprise,
but I would also like to see an experiment in "housing
enterprise zones" as advocated many years ago in the
well-known paper by Peter Hall and others, "Non-plan: an
experiment in freedom"30 If the result was a success, we would
all learn from it. If it was a disaster, the advocates of ever
more draconic planning legislation would have made their
point.
Planning began as a movement, not as a library of
legislation, and its future would be much more assured and
much more hopeful if it could recover its popular and populist
image. We have had valuable initiatives in the last twelve
years or so on these lines - advocacy planning, the
enormously useful growth of planning aid, and our gropings
towards the idea of community planning and a parallel,
overlapping concommitant of community architecture. We're
a long way after Skeffington, and the days when Planning
Officers used to say to me, "We tried a participation exercise.
It was very expensive and it didn't work." I used to reply that
it would take twenty years to bring about effective public
participation in planning, because it must start, not with
current crises but in a continuous involvement of Citizens.
96 TALKING HOUSES
This is where I find some of the earlier propagandists of the
town planning movement a better guide than Sharp. Patrick
Geddes for example, must have been an equally difficult
person to deal with, but had a surer understanding of the need
to root planning in popular aspirations. Thomas Sharp is a
pleasure to read, even when you disagree with him. Patrick
Geddes is a pain to read, even when you are absolutely on his
side in the argument. His unread book Cities in Evolution is
really a manual on the environmental self-education of the
ordinary citizen. When Peter Green came to edit a new edition
of Geddes' book City Development, which is actually a study of
parks and gardens in the small Scottish manufacturing town
of Dunfirmline, he found that Geddes,
anticipated by some fifty years the idea that the average citizen has
something positive to contribute towards the improvement of his
environment. Geddes was convinced that each generation has the
right to inbuild their own aspirations into the fabric of their town . In
order to achieve this a basis of civic understanding had to be created
through education. Geddes canvassed schools, societies and
associations and attempted to draw them into making surveys and
plans of their locality; creating play-spaces, planting trees, and
painting buildings . He seized on any vehicle to expose people to
situations in which they had to make judgements. 3 1
This is precisely the faith of our current local enterprises in
environment involvement, not least amongst them the
Newcastle Architectural Workshop, and Town Teacher, and
other Newcastle InItIatives like VIVA - Voluntary
Initiatives for Vacant Areas. Similarly John Turner, our
foremost advocate of dweller control as the first principle of
housing, draws sustenance from a chance remark made by
Geddes in 1912: "For fulfilment there must be a reabsorption
of government into the body of the community. How? By
cultivating the habit of direct action instead of waiting upon
representative agencies."32 This decentralist, I could almost
say anarchist, approach permeates his thought. Let me quote
from an oration of Geddes' at th~nd of the first world war:
The central government says, "Homes for heroes? We are prepared
to supply all these things from Whitehall; at any rate to supervise
them; to our minds much the same thing." But are they? Can they?
ANARCHY OR ORDER? 97
With what results, what achievements? At present we have the
provinces all bowing to Westminster, where they are granted doles;
so the best people leave for London. They send their money to
Westminster, which (after ample expenses have been deducted) is
returned to some of them in the alluring form ofa grant. But why not
use this money themselves in the first place? Why not keep your
money, your artists and your scientists, your orators and your
planners - and do up your city yourselves?33
Now here, leaving aside the rhetoric, G~ddes is touching
upon a key issue, as important in 8ur day as in his. We are
conditioned to look at local government and practically every
other facet of society in this country from the top down.
Indeed, I have quoted Thomas Sharp's dictum that planning
"must begin at the top and work downwards". Geddes,
Ebenezer Howard, and all those totally unqualified planners
who saw town planning as a popular movement, looked from
the bottom up. The excuse for central government and for
central revenue-gathering is that it can equalise and
redistribute the differences of income generated by different
regions. But daily observation shows that, with the most
sophisticated system of revenue-gathering, it doesn't happen.
Poor regions, like poor people, stay poor. And the very last
thing that central government will yield to the regions, the
counties or the districts, is the right to revenue gathering and
to making decisions locally as to how that revenue shall be
spent. The present government, for all that its White Paper on
the planning machinery is called Lifting the Burden, has
immeasurably tightened its grip on local authority spending.
Let's look at this with a long-term perspective. The
planners of the first generation sought a popular franchise.
The second generation of planners, like Sharp, sought a
comprehensive legislative framework. The third generation of
planners used these legislative powers without popular
support. Chastened by the experience that we all should learn
from, the planners of the fourth generation have to relearn
their function as enablers and as advocates for the modest and
humble hopes of ordinary citizens.

98 TALKING HOUSES
References
1. Norman Dennis: People and Planning (Faber 1970), Public Participation and
Planners' Blight (Faber 1972).
2. Jon Gower Davies: The Evangelistic Bureaucrat (Tavistock 1972)
3. Peter Malpass: Professionalism in Architecture and the Design of Local Authority
Housing (Newcastle University thesis 1973)
4. Peter Malpass in RIBAJoumalJune 1975
5. Richard Sennett: The Uses of Disorder (Allen Lane 1970)
6. David Eversley: The Planner in Society (Faber 1973)
7. Wilfred Burns: New Towns for Old (Leonard Hill 1963)
8. Bruce Allsop: Towards a Humane Architecture (Frederick Muller 1974)
9. Wilfred Burns at the seminar of the Artist Placement Group, Royal
College of Art, 1978
10. Gordon E. Cherry: Thomas Sharp: the man who dared to be different (Royal
Town Planning Institute Northern Branch 1983)
II. Jon Gower Davies: op cit
12 . Thomas Sharp: Town Planning (Penguin 1940)
13. Thomas Sharp: English Panorama (Dent 1936)
14. Thomas Sharp: "The North-East - Hills and Hells" III Clough
Williams-Ellis (ed) Britain and the Beast (Dent 1938)
15. Thomas Sharp: Town and Countryside (Oxford 1932)
16. J. B. Priestley: EnglishJoumey (Heinemann 1934)
17 . ibid
18. Thomas Sharp: Town and Count~ (Oxford 1932)
19. Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward: Arcadia for All (Mansell 1984)
20. John Seymour: The Companion Guide to the South Coast (Collins 1975)
21. Eileen Adams and Colin Ward: Art and the Built Environment (Longman
1982)
22. Kathy Stansfield: "Thomas Sharp" in Gordon Cherry (ed) Pioneers in
British Planning (Architectural Press 1981)
23 . Thomas Sharp: Town and Countryside (Oxford 1932)
24. Anthony King: The Bungalow (Routledge 1984)
25 . Thomas Sharp: "The North-East . .. " op cit
26. Thomas Sharp: Town Planning (Penguin 1940)
27. Kathy Stansfield: op cit
28. Norman Dennis: People and Planning (Faber 1970)
I
I
29. Peter Hall: The Containment of Urban England (Allen and Unwin 1973)
30. Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price: "Non-plan:
an Experiment in Freedom", New Society (20 March 1969)
31. Peter Green, introduction to Patrick Geddes: City Development (Irish
Universities Press 1973)
32. Quoted in John Turner: Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
33/ Philip Boardman: The Worlds of Patrick Geddes (Routledge and K egan
Paul 1978)
7. Freedom and the Built
Environment
I Evidence of anarchy
You have to blame our hosts for the title of my talk today.
They know that I'm an anarchist and that I wrote a book
called Anarchy in Action, which was published in the United
States as a Harper Torchbook paperback and which is
available in most European languages, and in Japanese. Your
local alternative bookshop will have the newest English
reprint published by Freedom Press in London.!
I don't really need to apologise for blatantly publicising my
own writings. If you don't persuade other people to read your
books, who do you expect to read them?
But of course, here in Boston, where the State of
Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti sixty years ago, I
have to begin with the perspective on freedom and the built
environment given by Bartolomeo Vanzetti. "In short", he
said, "freedom is, for each and all things of the universe, to
follow their natural tendencies - and to fulfil their own virtues,
qualities and capacities".2
Lectures from a series at the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 18-20 November 1987
99
 100 TALKING HOUSES
I think that Vanzetti expressed my view better than I could.
Anarchism, like many other political ideologies, grew out of
the ferment of ideas from the time of the French and American
revolutions . And like all the other movements of the Left, the
anarchists inherited the splendid catchphrases, j berty,
Equality and Fraternity. These resounding aspiratIOns may
go marve ously well orr-FTench postage stamps, but in real
life, inside or outside the anarchist movement, most of our
ideological arguments relate to the differing emphases we put
on each of these values, and to our perception of the different
obstacles in the way of getting closer to them. Anarchism,
with its dual origins, philosophically, as either the ultimate
destination of socialism or that ofliberalism, is not immune to
this dilemma of emphasis.
Anarchism originates as a word in the Greek phrase
meaning ':c??trary~o au!ho!.'itY'{and as an ideology it seeks a
j self-orgamsmg SOCIety, a net~ork of autonomous free
\ a'SsOciations gathered together for the satisfaction of human
I needs. Put in that minimal way, I suppose that every variety
of anarchist would agree with this minimal definition as well
as a lot of people who would never dream of calling themselves
anarchists. It is when we come to the problems ofliving in the
actual world that our difficulties and differences arise. As
individuals we make every kind of compromise between what
we believe in and the way we get by in, and influence, the
organised system of the way the society we actually live in
operates.
( But it's because I am an anarchist th1:~ L3yt:li. ev~ in d_w~ll_er
) c,Ql)tr 1, or what you would call 1lstr _a ut0I!0[l1y m hou~ltlg.
There's a new book about to be published in Britain called
Community Architecture by . Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt
(about which I am sure to have something to say tomorrow)
which argues that
Yesterday'S radical alternative has become part of today's
conventional wisdom. The community architecture movement is
now supported and promoted by people from all walks of life and
from across the political spectrum: by anarchists, libertarians, the
traditional and radical Left, the Green movement, social democrats
and free marketeersj
FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRO!,[MENT 101
Just to get our subject in perspective we should remind
ourselves that through ninety per cent of human history
people h~ye jlQ.!:l§.ed themselves, and that the marvellous
ingenuity and creativeness of the way they did it has never
ceased to be a source of admiration for architectural
historians. Since people have to find a way of getting housed,
whether they live in a desert or a swamp, a speculator's
jungle, a people's democracy, a fascist dictatorship or an
anarchist paradise, how they manage it is a matter of
universal interest. The most widely used building material in
the world toda,y is_gra,.s_s 9r straw, and the second most widely
us-e'douilal;;g material i~ -earth or mud. There are vast areas of
the Southern hemisphere, Latin America, Africa and South\
East Asia, where the great majority of homes are built by their I
occupiers with these materials and with the recycled detritus \
of modern industry: packing cases, steel sheet, card boa. "i v£ \
oil drums. Most of the world's inhabitants are self:b_uiJaet:S.
Even in the United ' Stat~0herlch~st' cou;ti~the world, at
least twenty per cent of housing is built by owner builders.
In tnc-nineteenth century the people- in the Western world
who were left out, and denied the natural human task of
applying self-help and mutual aid to housing themselves.
because by that time the space, the materials and the means of
subsistence all belonged to someone else, emigrated to the
cities in search of the means of livelihood, just as they do in
huge numbers in the poor world today. I want to give you two
quotations from nineteenth century writers describing the
result. They are both lamenting the alienation of the dweller
from the dwelling; and I want you to guess their authors.
In the large towns and cities long as they live ... on the one
where civilisation especially side is the palace, on the other
prevails, the number of those are the almshouse and "silent
who can own a shelter is a very poor". The myriads who built
small fraction of the whole. the pyramids to be the tombs
The rest pay an annual tax for of the Pharoahs were fed on
this outside garment of all, garlic, and it may be were not
become indispensable summer decently buried themselves.
and winter, which would buy a The mason who finishes the
village of Indian wigwams, but cornice of the palace returns at
now helps to keep them poor as night perchance to a hut not so
 100 TALK INC HOUSES
I think that Vanzetti expressed my view better than I could.
Anarchism, like many other political ideologies, grew out of
the ferment of ideas from the time of the French and American
revolutions. And like all the other movements of the Left, the
anarchists inherited the splendid catchphrases, c!=jberty,
Equality and Fraternity. These resounding aspirations- may
go marVellOUsly werron -FTe9ch l?ostage stamps, but in real
life, inside or outside the anazchlst movement, most of our
ideological arguments relate to the differing emphases we put
on each of these values, and to our perception of the different
obstacles in the way of getting closer to them. Anarchism,
with its dual origins, philosophically, as either the ultimate
destination of socialism or that ofliberalism, is not immune to
this dilemma of emphasis.
Anarchism originates as a word in the Greek phrase
meaning "contrary ,~Q,. ?-uthority", and as an ideology it seeks a
( s~r~~~ising - society,--'a - network of. auto.nomous free
\ associatIOns gathered together for the satIsfactIOn of human
i needs. Put in that minimal way, I suppose that every variety
J of anarchist would agree with this minimal definition as well
as a lot of people who would never dream of calling themselves
anarchists. It is when we come to the problems ofliving in the
actual world that our difficulties and differences arise. As
individuals we make every kind of compromise between what
we believe in and the way we get by in, and influence, the
organised system of the way the society we actually live in
operates.
But it's because I am an anarchist that I believe in dweller
-' ) cSlntm l, or what you would .call J}~.tr~_~rtt·<m~~QlY in hou~ifig.
There's a new book about to be published in Britain called
Community Architecture by, Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt
(about which I am sure to have something to say tomorrow)
which argues that
Yesterday's radical alternative has become part of today's
conventional wisdom. The community architecture movement is
now supported and promoted by people from all walks of life and
from across the political spectrum: by anarchists, libertarians, the
traditional and radical Left, the Green movement, social democrats
and free marketeers/
FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIROl'fMENT 101
Just to get our subject in perspective we should remind
ourselves that through ninety . per cent of human history
people.._ ~"y'~,J1Q.u§.eq ..therpselves, and that the marvellous
ingenuity and creativeness of the way they did it has never
ceased to be a source of admiration for architectural
historians. Since people have to find a way of getting housed,
whether they live in a desert or a swamp, a speculator's
jungle, a people's democracy, a fascist dictatorship or an
anarchist paradise, how they manage it is a matter of
universal interest. The most widely used building material in
the world tocla,y:j s~ gra.§l> QU:>traw, and the second most widdy
us-e'a "builcn ;;g material i~ earth or mud. There are vast areas of
the Southern hemisphere, Latin America, Africa and South\
East Asia, where the great majority of homes are built by their i
occupiers with these materials an.d with the recycled detritus I
of modern industry: packing cases, steel sheet, cardboa.'i v1 I
oil drums. M~st ~(!J:1e.. }:Ygrl.9~.lnh!lbi!~~.~~"df:.b.uiJqer.s ,
Even in the United 'States, the richest country in the world, at
least twenty per"cent of housing is built by owner builders .
In tliF"iiineteenth -century-thepe ;ple- lnth-e ~re;ter"n '~orld
who were left out, and denied the natural human task of
applying self-help and mutual aid to housing themselves.
because by that time the space, the materials and the means of
subsistence all belonged to someone else, emigrated to the
cities in search of the means of livelihood, just as they do in
huge numbers in the poor world today. I want to give you two
quotations from nineteenth century writers describing the
result. They are both lamenting the alienation of the dweller
from the dwelling; and I want you to guess their authors.
In the large towns and cities long as they live ... on the one
where civilisation especially side is the palace, on the other
prevails, the number of those are the almshouse and "silent
who can own a shelter is a very poor". The myriads who built
small fraction of the whole. the pyramids to be the tombs
The rest pay an annual tax for of the Pharoahs were fed on
this outside garment of all, garlic, and it may be were not
become indispensable summer decently buried themselves.
and winter, which would buy a The mason who finishes the
village of Indian wigwams, but cornice of the palace returns at
now helps to keep them poor as night perchance to a hut not so
 FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 103
102 TALKING HOUSES

good as a wigwam. It is a contrary he feels as much at the framework of regulation and control of the city's master plan
mistake to suppose that, in a home as a fish in water. But the excludes a wide range of activities which are nothing more than an
country where the usual evi- cellar dwelling of the poor man expression of the socio-economic reality ofIndia today .. . the result
dences of civilisation exist, the is a hostile dwelling, "an alien, is the additional victimization and harassment of the most
conditions of a very large body constricting power which only underprivileged sections of th.e city:'s population who have . little
of the inhabitants may not be surrenders itself to him in more than their labour to sell In a Clty where surplus labour IS the
as degraded as that of savages. ( exchange for blood and sweat" . rule. Even the limited potential for saving and accumulation is
He cannot regard it as his jeopardized through frequent eviction, resettlement or other forms of
home, as a place where he disruption. All this is in direct contradiction ~o t~e state'~ o~n open
Man is regressing to the cave might at last say, "here I am at commitment to removing poverty and redUCIng InequalIty.
dwe.lling, but in an alienated, home". Instead, he finds him-
malIgnant form. The savage in Indeed, if you want to find examples of what are in my
self in another person's house, the
his cave (a natural element house of a stranger who lies in terms, self-organising, anarchist cities, you would have to go
which is freely offered for his wait for him every day and to th~ .. §..quatter.~ helt~of.~Af~ican,_ Asian _ and~. Latin Amer~can
use and protection) does not evicts him if he does not pay cities. The official perceptIOn of these settlements for many
feel himself a stranger; on the the rent. - d~ca~f;s was that they are the breeding-grounds for every kind
of crime, disease, vice, social and family disorganisation. John
lowe this interesting parallel to Professor Staughton Lynd,4 Turner, an anarchist architect, who has done more than most
an~ you may have guessed, on stylistic grounds, who wrote people to change the way we perceive unofficial cities, remarks
whIch of my two quotations, but you will agree that they both
that
say the same thing. The first was from Henry David
Thoreau's Walden and the second was from Karl Marx's Ten years of work in Peruvian barriddas indicates that suc~ ~ view is
"Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts", both written in grossly inaccurate: although it serves ~ome vest.ed polItIcal and
bureaucratic interests it bears little relatlOn to realIty ... Instead of
t e l850s.
chaos and disorganis~tion, the evidence p<;Jints to hi~hly orga?~sed
Now governments are invariably based in cities: whoever invasio~.2Lp-l!-l:>lic . land in the face of vlOlen t pO~lCe OppOSItIon, ...
Heard of a nation state ruled from a village? Such is the irif~l political o!ganisa,ti~n with yearly loc<l:l ~JectlO?s, . t~pusa~ds
immense se~f-imp~rta~~e of governments that very often they oC-people living -~ogeth~r In an o~d~rly fashlOn WIth no polIce
actually buIld theIr CItIes to house themselves: Washington, protection or publIc servIces. The ongInal. straw hous~s co.nstruc~ed
"during the invasions are converted. as rapIdly as po~slble l?t? bnck
Ottawa, Canberra, New Delhi, Chandigarh and Brasilia are and cement structures with an Investment totallIng mIllIons of
examples. And isn't it significant that visitors to such cities dollars in labour and materials. Employment rates, wages, literacy
who want to sample the real life of a nation have to escape and educational levels are all higher than in central city slums (from
from the city of the politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats in which most barriada residents have escaped) and higher than the
order to do so? They have, if they want to taste what they see national average. Crime, juvenile d~linquency,. p~ostitution <l:nd
gambling are rare, except ~or petty thIevery, the .Inc!dence of whIch
as Brazilian food or hear Brazilian music, to go ten miles from is seemingly smaller than In other parts of the cIty.
Brasilia to the Cidade Libre (the Free Town) where the
building workers live. They built the "City for the Year 2000", Andrew Hake, after spending many years in Nair~bi,
but are too poor to live there, and in their own home-made reached similar conclusions. It is, he says, a two-faced CIty,
city, it used to be reported, "a spontaneous wild west with a modern face to the outside world, but a growing
shanty-town life has arisen, which contrasts with the formality number of people in the backyard. And he argues that the
of the city itself, and which has become too valuable to be backyard inhabitants are "an immense potential for crea~ive
destroyed". In Chandigarh, Madhu Sarin concluded that development which will determine the future shape of the CIty,
and contribute enormously to the country's well-being" . The
 104 TALK INC HOUSES
self-help city, he claims, "provides income and a measure of
status for hundreds of thousands who would otherwise be in
even greater deprivation in over-populated rural areas". 7 By
1971 a third of )~Jai~o~i'~ population was living in
unauthorised housing. They had, says Hake, "probably
( created by that time something over 5Q).Q9JUops \)'hich did not
appear in any official statistics. They had built many elements
of an urban infrastruc~ and had created patterns of social
organisation to maintain the fabric of the self-help society .. .
!he self-help city is now building more houses, creating more
Jobs, absorbing more people, and growing faster, than the
modern city". And not only this, it is also less vulnerable to
~,~e fluctuations of the official capitalist economy, and, he says,
It can expand without too much difficulty to absorb the
casualties of the modern development process". . country (which drove people to the cities)? How on the other
What an extraordinary tribute to the capacity for self-help
and mutual aid of poor people defying authority. Anyone who
is familiar with Kropotkin's Mutual Aid which is now in print
again,S is bound to be reminded of his chapter in praise of the
mediaeval city, where he observes that
Wh~rever I?en had found, or expected to find, some protection
behmd their town walls, they instituted their co-jurations, their
fraternifies, their friendships, united in one common idea, and boldly
marchmg towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And
they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had
changed the very face of Europe.
Kropotkin is not a romantic adulator of the free cities of the
middle ages. He knows what was wrong with them too. But
modern scholarship tends to support his interpretation of their
evolution. Walter Ullmann for example remarks that they
"represent a rather clear demonstration of entities governing
themselves" and that "In order to transact business, the
community assembled in its entirety ... the assembly was no
'representative' of the whole, but was the whole". 9 And very
recently an anarchist author Murray Bookchin has traced the
decline of municipal autonomy, from the Greek polis to the
American town meeting, arguing that the nation state
~---.......... ----~
parasitizes th~e__community, denuding it of its resources and its
FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 105
potential for development. It does this partly by draining the ~)
community of its material and spiritual resources; partly too, by
steadily divesting it of its power. Indeed, of its legitimate right to
shape its own destiny.1O
This implies certain assumptions about the size and scale of
communities, and Kropotkin again, in his Fields, Factories and
Workshopsll argues on technical grounds for dispersal, for the
integration of agriculture and industry, and for (as Lewis
Mumford puts it) "a more decentralised urban development
in small units, responsive to direct human contact, and
enjoying both urban and rural advantages". Kropotkin's
contemporary Ebenezer Howard, in Garden Cities of Tomorrow l2
asked himself two simple questions. How can we get rid of the
grimness of the big city and the lack of opportunities in the
hand can we keep the attractiveness of the country and the
opportunities of the city? His answer was not only the garden
city, but what he called the social ciry, the network of
communities . The same message came much later from Paul
and Percival Goodman in Communitas: means of livelihood and
ways of lije,l3 where the second of their three community
paradigms, The New Commune, is what Professor Thomas
Reiner calls "a polynucleated city, mirroring its anarcho-
syndicalist premises". And the same message is to be found in
Leopold Kohr's essay "The City as Convivial Centre"14 where
he finds the good metropolis to be "a polynuclear federation of
cities" just as his city is a federation of squares.
One of the strands of thought among these decentralist
thinkers arose with the emergence of new movements arising
from the "ecological", energy-conscious mood of the 1970s.
Thus, like Kropotkin, the..BluepriTJ:1.i2!".§y'1Jj.0..al, best-selling
eco-volume:1of 1972, saw {he goal as "a "'"decentralised society of
~ ,_. ~ 'W>
'/I<_ "'- ...............
small communities ~.here indl}stries are sma!l _ enoug~ t9 be
responsive to each comm,lmity.'s needs"·. And long before the
energy crisis hit 'people's consciousness, Murray Bookchin in
his essay "Towe.rds a Liberatory Technology" (which I
published in Anarchy in 1967, and is now incorporated in his
book Post-Scarciry Anarchism argued the energy case for the
polynuclear city:
 106 TALKING HOUSES
To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and
petroleum. By contrast, solar energy, wind power and tidal energy
reach us mainly in small packets. Except for great dams and
turbines, the new devices seldom provide more than a few thousand
kilowatt-hours of electricity. It is hard to believe that we will ever be
able to design solar collectors that can furnish us with the immense
blocks of electric power produced by a great steam plant; it is
equally difficult to conceive of a battery of wind turbines that
provide us with enough electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island.
If homes and factories are heavily concentrated, devices for using
clean sources of energy will probably remain mere playthings; but if
urban comm~es are reduced in size and widely spread over the
land, there is no reason why these devices cannot be combined to
provide us with all the amenities of an industrial civilisation. To use
solar, wind and tidal power effectively, the giant city must be
, dispersed. A new type of community, carefully tailored to the nature
'rand resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts of
today.15
There is thus a broad band of agreement on the desirable
scale of urban settlements between anarchists of the
Kropotkin - Goodman - Bookchin strain, and non-anarchist
decentralist urban thinkers like Howard and Mumford and
their successors.
References
1. Colin Ward: Anarclry in Action (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1974,
London: Freedom Press 1982)
2, M. D. Frankfurter and G. Jackson (eds) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti
(New York: Viking Press 1928)
3. Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: Community Architecture (London:
Penguin 1987)
4. Staughton Lynd: Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York:
Pantheon 1968)
5. Madhu Sarin "Urban planning, petty trading, and squatter settlements
in Chandigarh" in Bromley and Gerry (eds) Casual Work and Poverty in Third
World Cities (John Wiley 1979). See also Madhu Sarin Urban Planning in the
Third World (Mansell 1982)
6. William P. Mangin and John C. Turner "Benavides and the Barriada
Movement" in Paul Oliver (ed) Shelter and Society (Barrie and Rockliff 1969) .
See also John Turner Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976)
7. Andrew Hake African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City (Sussex
University Press 1977)
FREEDOM AND THE BUlLT ENVIRONMENT 107
8. Peter Kropotkin Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) (Freedom Press
1987)
9. Walter Ullmann Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages
(Longman 1961)
10. Murray Bookchin The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship
(Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1987)
11. Peter Kropotkin Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) new edition edited
by Colin Ward (Freedom Press 1985)
12. Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) new edition edited by
F. J. Osborn (Faber 1945)
13. Paul and Percival Goodman Communitas: means of livelihood and ways of life
(Chicago 1947) (Vintage Books 1960)
14. Leopold Kohr "The City as Convivial Centre" (Tract No 12 Summer
1974)
15. Murray Bookchin Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Wildwood House 1974)
II User autonomy
If we equate user autonomy or dweller control with
owner-occupation of dwellings, we have to recognise that it is
a growing trend. The landlord-tenant relationship has never
been a happy one throughout history, even if, or perhaps
especially if, the landlord is a public body, not profiting from
the relationship. People get out of this relationship if they can.
This is why in Great Britain 62 per cent of households are
owner-occupied, and why in the United States the most recent
figure I have (for 1983) is 65 per cent.
In most other countries, both in the rich and the poor )'
world, and both in the ideological West and the ideological ,
East, the lesson of experience is that public landlordism is the )
~ost expensive and inefficient way of formulating a housing \
policy, precisely because it combines paternalism with a (
denial of people's personal input in the adventure of housing
themselves:1 '
The architect of several of Britain's new housing
co-operatives, David Innes Wilkin, visited Cuba last year just
when a huge ideological shift had occurred in housing policy
there. He says that
Under Cuba's 1985 General Housing Law, almost every existing
 108 TALKING HOUSES
home and those to be built in the future will become the occupant's
personal property. After 26 years of revolutionary socialism, this
policy breaks new ground in Cuba ... Ov~r half of all new dwellings
"are now being achieved through self-help with various amounts or "
c~~ate ~upport. I
An account of shifts in housing policy in the Soviet Union
says the same thing. Shann Turnbull reports that
During the last decade the Soviet authorities have embarked on a
programme of selling government-owned apartments to tenants,
assisted by the provision of very low-interest mortgage finance. The
soviet initiative is based on the realization that owner-occupation of
dwellings provides~most efficient metho~ of maintaining and
), improving the housing stock ... Owner occupiers are in the best
position and have the greatest incentive to enhance both their
standard ofliving and their equity through their own labour. Indeed
on a global basis, this is how the majority of the world's housing
stock has been created and maintained. 2
The most obvious c.ollective form of user autonomy in . the
built environment is the housing co-operative, and the most
interesting and impressive examples In'-Britain of what we
have come to call community ar~hitecture are in the recent
experience of hOllsing co-operatives. But to what extent is the
knowledge that community groups need to be described as
architectural? In Britain we have an Association of
Community Technical Aid Centres which accuses the
Community Architecture Group of the Royal Institute of
British Architects
~ of hijacking the movement for user-control over the environment by
I promoting the term community architecture and concentrating on the
I role of the architect in the process. 3
\ And indeed the kind of services and know-how actuaUy
~. needed by local residents seeking to rehouse themselves or to
improve their housing and its surroundings are not usually
those which call for the capacity for design which is associated
, with the education and training of architects. What they need
is a guide through the thickets of legislation and regulations
lthat stand in the way of anyone doing anything. How do we
get our aims through the local authority planners? Through
the building control department which administers regula-
FREEDOM AND THE BUlL T ENVIRONMENT 109
tions which are by now incomprehensible to the layman? How '\
can we qualify for impro,,:ement grants? How can we win a J
loan from the Housing Corporation? How can we put together
a package of mortgage loans from the various sources of
housing finance, which might include that body and the local
authority, and an insurance company or a building society?
How do we qualify for any of that urban aid money that come~
from central government under a bewildering and ever-
changing series of initials and acronyms? Can we use any of
that free, job-creating labour provided by the Manpower
Services Commission to massage the unemployment statis-
tics?
This kind of know-how is not at all architectural, it is mor:,e
akin to that of the .,:~~~ in Eastern Europe, who gains a
living from his knowledge~f _The System and How to
Manipulate It. Architects themselves can be as innocent as
'babes in the wood when they first get involved in its
intricacies. And it demands a certain sophisticated cunning
rather than radical commitment. It also demands an
old-fashioned conception of what it means to be a member ofa
profession, giving a direct and personal service to one's client.
A tenants' association on an inner-city housing estate had
been steered into the situation of qualifying for an assemblage
of grant aid to build a community hall, using the labour of
young unemployed and disadvantaged teen-agers. Their
committee then had the hitherto unimaginable task of
selecting their own architect for the job. Three people were
recommended and interviewed by the committee. The first
listened to their brief and said "I can see that what you need is
a kind of shed". This was his verbal shorthand for a simple
and easily erected structure, and he was of course right. But
the committee members replied that they knew all about
sheds already, and asked for the next candidate. The second
was an enthusiast and wanted to stress that he felt part of the
.j
building team. He would "get dirt under his finger-nails", he
explained. The committee responded with the reflection that
it would be very expensive dirt. The third, who was given the
job, was a very experienced architect, deliberately a one-man
firm, whose political standpoint, I would guess, is far from
 1lO TALKING HOUSES
that of the Left. He addressed the tenants' committee with
exactly the same demeanour and tone of voice that he would
use with any other client, described the various difficulties
that he thought might arise on this particular job and the
ways in which they might be overcome. Problems did arise,
but the work was successfully completed. This architect
believes that the phrase community architecture is patronis-
ing. He gives the same direct personal service to all his clients,
and the same courteous attenti~n to their description of .t heir
needs. Precisely the same poin~was made by the late Walter
Segal, whose work for the uewisham Self-Build Housing
Association seems to many of us to epitomise the aims of
community architecture, but who firmly disclaimed any such
f label. He too worked on his own, for he used to say that he had
\ always avoided being a wage-slave and saw no point in
'-I slaving to pay wages to others.
I have come to the conclusion that it is this e~~~~~.9"yj.s~ "
element that is more important to these new-style clients than
anything that resembles the activity as a creative desig~er that
is supposed tOb e-'fhe '"mark of the architect. It was a
consciousness of the grotesque gap between the architect's
vision of public housing in the 50s and 60s, and ordinary
people's expectations of house and home that led to the idea of
a direct relationship between architect and tenant. But most
people, whether rich or poor, never expect to live in a house
especially designed for their needs, and most realise that their
housing needs change over the family life cycle. I have never
in fact met any rich family who lived in houses purpose-built
for their neeqs. Even the architects I know live in converted
barns or mills, or in lovingly restored farm houses or ancient
cottages. What all these people have had is the know-how and
access to finance to make-over these structures to meet their
own changing needs.
Given the propensity to move, which paradoxically, is
easier in the ownet-occupation sector of the housing market
than in the publicly rented sector, it seems to me unimportant
to stress that any dwelling with an assumed life of sixty years
or more should be designed for or by] ack and Jill today. Are
they aged 25 or 55?
FREEDOM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT III
I make this point only for simpletons, because it in no way
diminishes the argument for dweller control of house
planning. When potential residents actually are in control of
the planning of their future homes, they invariably make
choices which reflect not only immediate needs, but other
people's future needs. Thus the members of the Weller Streets
Housing Co-op in Liverpool, steering the architect they had
chosen, decided on a completely uniform appearance for their
homes. 4 Their architect would have been only too happy to
provide for the personalisation of individual dwellings in the
way that happened, under a similar degree of dweller control
5
at the Hesketh Street Housing Co-op up the road . The
architects of both these exemplars of community architecture
would be the first to agree, with their clients, that the
enterprise was a learning experience for both parties.
Tom Woolley's study of dweller satisfaction in three tenant
co-operatives convinced him that architects have a lot to learn
about the techniques of participatory design. They an~,J
revealed a higher degree of dweller satisfaction (using, the )
DOE "Housing Appraisal Kit"). They all displayed great '
loyalty to their chosen architects. He stresses that
user satisfaction was related more strongly to the degree of control
which the clients exercised over the projects . In the most successful
one, the Liverpool case, the tenants had taken the initiative, had
retained control of the direction and management of the project and
were willing to take on and fight all comers to ensure a successful
completion. This created a general sense of solidarity and common
purpose among the co-operative members which I am convinced is
reflected in the higher levels of satisfaction. 6
He believes that
the credit for the success of such projects should go much more to
the clients and the way they organised themselves rather than to the
architects in view of the limited nature of the design participation
activi ties .
Woolley also observes that
architecture is not necessarily the central concern of a community
group - the control, location or funding of the development,
whether housing or community huildings, may be much more vital.'
112 T ALKI NG H OUSES
M any years ago J ohn T urner, the architect helping squatter
self-builders in Peru reached a sim ilar conclusion. H e wasted
a lot of time designing for their needs, when they were
perfectly capable of designing and building. He remains
suspicious of the image of the professional as saviour,
remarking that
the implications of words like "harnessing" and "mobilising" tend to
reinforce an elitist assumption that underlies and even motivates
certain self-help lobbies. The elitist assumption is that the resources
of "the people" or "the masses" is in their hands and the strength of
their bodies. T heir heads, by implication, are rather small . . . So the
reformed image of government housing action and urban
development can be caricatured as that of a small minority of
swollen-headed but manually incompetent officers ordering about
an army of the stron~ed but pin-headed masses.s
It's a serious point, and it isn't only relevant to the poor world
or to self-building. The question we should be asking
ourselves is why the simple human task of housing oneself and
of adapting and improving one's immediate environment,
should have been made tortuous and complicated, when it
ought to be simple and natural. What a time it has taken for
the penny to drop!
References
1. David Innes Wilkin "Cuba: A Socialist Path to Home-ownership" at
Shelter Conference, .York, July 1986
2. Shann Turnbull "Access to Land" in Paul Ekins: The Living Economy
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986)
3. Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: Community Architecture: How People are
Creating their own Environment (London: Penguin Books 1987)
4. Alan McDonald The Weller Way: The Story of the Weller Streets Housing
Co-operative (Faber and Faber 1986, new edition forthcoming from Hilary
Shipman Ltd)
5. Nick Wates "The Liverpool Breakthrough or Public Sector Housing
Phase 2" Architects Journal 8 September 1982
6. Tom Woolley "Community Architecture" Paper given at the Institute of
Community Studies Housing Co-ops Research Seminar 22 November 1986
7. Ruth Owens "Participation Panacea" Architects Journal 11 June 1986
8. John F. C. Turner "Issues in Self-Help and Self-Managed Housing" in
P. M. Ward (ed) Self-Help Housing: a critique (Mansell 1982)
8. City People Housing
Themselves
Of our many human failings, the most universal is that of
nostalgia. It takes a variety of forms. There is nostalgia for
what we see in retrospect as the golden age of childhood with
its sim hlicities and certainties, or for the golden age of rural
life or for the golden age of the city. This golden age was
always in our infancy, or in the years just before we were born,
or j ust before our grandparents were born.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you, not the painful
realisation, but the pleasurable reassurance, that there never
was a golden age. The great industrial and commercial cities
of Europe and North America expanded like overnight
mushrooms in the 19th century, just like the cities of Latin
America, Africa and South-East Asia in our own day. And .at
the very heyday of their prosperity, when heavy industry w~s
loaded with orders, when the docks were full of ships, when
the steel mills of Pittsburgh were earning incredible sums for
the captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie and Henry
Clay Frick,Jhe cities of the United States, and of Britain, were
bywords for insanitary, desperately overcrowded, slmlls,
hunger, crime, high mortality rates, prostitution awl
destitution. Perhaps our nostalgia for an imagined past when
city life was simple and happy draws on the fact that 19tb
century cities were not plagued by drug ~b1}se ,or AIDS. We
forget that they had a su~cession of plagues and fevers from
cholera and typhus to syphilis and tuberculosis. In the last
three decades of the last century and the first decade of the
Lecture given at the conference on Remaking Cities (Second International
Conference on Community Architecture, Planning and Design), Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, 2- 5 March 1988.
113
114 TALKING HOUSES
present century countless witnesses on both sides of the
Atlantic investigated, described and analysed the condition of
the great cities. Their work was recently re-appraised b.y
Professor Andrew Lees of Rutgers University who describes
how
ec~~omists sociologists novelists, clergymen and a variety of social
reformers provided abu~dant documentation of want in the midst ,of
plenty. Slum ~sing, low wages, and ~nemployment . str~cJ­
numerous men and women as all-too pervasive features of City hfe,
not only in East London and on the Lower East Side, but also if!
many other urban areas, from Berlin, Paris and York to Boston and
Chicago. In their view, the denizens of urban slums suffered froJIl
unacceptably low levels of material well-being that stemmed not
from their own inadequacies as individuals but instead from the
economic and physical environment in which they lived. ' ' people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found
One of the most thorough and intensive of these studies ever
made was The Pittsburgh Survey supported by the Russell
Sage Foun9ation and published between 1909 and 1914 in six
large volumes edited by Paul Kellogg which described wages,
working conditions, budgets and domestic life in the homes of
steel workers, health and sanitation, crime and the
administration of justice, playgrounds and recreation, schools ,
and other social institutions. 2 Professor Lees, relating the
Pittsburgh Survey to the dozens of other investigations of th~
city in Europe and America, remarks that
It emerged clearly that many Pittsburghers worked up to twelve
hours per day, that wages were calculated. according to the. f.1eeds of
single men {ather than to those of responsible heads of famlhes, and
that the wages of women averaged between one-half and one-third of
what the men received . The extraordinary pressures of work, tht;
preva!ence o(preventable disea.ses, ~nd the high .toll of industr~al
accidents all undermined family hfe and contnbuted to SOCial
pathology in other ways as well. Pittsburgh stood out .as an
American Coketown, a city in which short-range and shortsighted
considerations of costs and profits by the agents of absentee
capitalists wreaked havoc in the lives of the great mass of the
population. 3
But exactly the same conclusions could be drawn from the
same kind of careful survey in any industrial city in the United
States, in Britain, France or Germany.
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 115
Ladies and gentlemen, we are deeply equivocal in our
interpretation of the golden age of British, European or
American industry. Our hosts invite us to take a tour of
Pittsburgh's industrial valley, winding through "the mill
towns that stand as a testament to the strength of a bygone
era". In 1892 the journalist Hamlin Garland described
Homestead, one of the steel mill towns of the Carnegie Steel
Company. He said
The streets were horrible; the buildings were formed of sharp-edged
stones like rocks in a river bed. Everywhere the yellow mud oIstreets .
' lay kneaded into sickly masses, through which groups of pale, lean
men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and dirt of the
mills. The town was as squalid as could well be imagined, and the
everywhere where labor passed into the brutalizing stage of
severity.'
That description of the employed underclass of the golden age
of heavy industry was written almost a century ago. Our own
conference programme tells us that "A half century ago
Pittsburgh was in the headlines ... because environmentally
it was 'hell with the lid off ".5 This is a reminder that the effort
to do something about the cities, both in Europe and America
is not new. The zeal for reform arose before the first world war
as a result of all those meticulous social surveys, and it has
re-emerged continuously since the second world war. If we
assume the working lifetime of the highly educated
I professional and administrative working classes as 40 years,
we can say that it has been plenty of people's life work. In a
few more decades we will run out of verbs, adjectives and
nouns to describe it. We had, for example, the phrase Urban
Renewal. But a whole series of investigators from Jane Jacobs
and Robert Goodman onward demonstrated to us that this
was a euphemism for pushing the poor out of town. A great
deal of money was spent in the United States and in Europe
pursuing the aims of urban renewal.
We then had a period labelled Fight Back, punctuated by
urban riots, which concentrated the minds of central
governments on this issue and provided us with more
sophisticated guidelines. I, as an outsider, value the work of
116 TALKING HOUSES
Saul Alinsky and Shelley Arnstein's immensely useful
yardstick in the form of her "Ladder of Participation".
After this period we have several new uses of language to
describe ways of approaching the dilemma of the old cities
whose economic base has withered away. We have words like
"regeneration" or "revitalisation" or we talk, as we are today,
about "remaking" cities. There has been a huge ideological
shift on both sides of the Atlantic which worries me, as no
doubt, it worries you. A recent book The State and the Ciry by an
Anglo-American pair of authors,6 spells out its implications:
Ted Gurr and Desmond King remark that
There is some lower threshold of public provision below which
people will no longer be willing or able to live in cities. There is no
way of saying where that threshold is in the abstract: it has already
been passed for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who
have migrated away from the centres of old industrial cities. There is
no contemporary precedent, nor any fully documented historical
ones, to tell us what is likely to happen after all those who can leave
have done so, leaving such cities populated only by a dependent
underclass . The triumph of market forces will be complete when the
last emigrants from Toxteth and the East Bronx pause on their way
out, not to turn out the lights, but to strip the crumbling buildings of
light fixtures and wiring for sale as scrap.7
I think this is very well put. It expresses the logic of current
approaches to the dilemmas of the cities which grew at a
terrifying rate in the last century and have declined at the
same rate in this one. But, like you, I am sure, I have watched
this process happening. A priest, Father Slavin, took me to
watch his 12 to 14 year old truants ripping the last saleable
metals from a tenement building in central Glasgow,
Scotland, and an unemployed teacher introduced me to the
culture of recycling in Toxteth, Liverpool, while a primary
school teacher in Cardiff in South Wales guided me through
the derelict landscape populated by her class.
This was, however, a long time ago, back in the 1970s. A
different scale of values has been asserted in British cities to
contradict those free market assumptions. In Glasgow, for
example, a huge turnaround in policy has put some people in
control of their own housing. In Liverpool we have had
absolutely heroic efforts to assert the rights of the inhabitants
C ITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 117
over their future . I'm delighted that Tony McGann of the
Eldonian Community Association there, is here in Pittsburgh
to talk about his association's efforts to ensure work as well as
housing in Vauxhall, Liverpool, an area totally written off by
the law of the market.
Now I'm a complete stranger to the United States. I have
the usual Huckleberry Finn, get up and go, European picture
of the land of opportunity. But even from this primitive
standpoint it is possible to make some observations about
remaking cities. We are urged to learn from the experience of
.Boston, Massachusetts. Behind this recommendation there is
an implied comparison with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Just let me, as an ignorant outsider, make a few comments
on the implied comparison. The first is that those cities which
bore the brunt of the industrial revolution, those primary-
producing cities whose workers, in the heroic age, lived in
squalor, are the very cities, whether in Britain, France,
Germany or the United States, which bear the hardest
burdens of late 20th century deindustrialisation. Those cities
which diversified, just through geographical accidents, are
those most able to adapt.
We know (or do we not know?) that some places are
automatically favoured by central government spending in
high technology, which is usually a euphemism for Defence
spending, and that this is usually a long way from Pittsburgh,
just as it is a long way from Lille in France, Duseldorf in
Germany or Sheffield in Britain. I found it interesting to learn
the other day that
Boston has become the archetypal post-industrial public city in the
United States, with half its population and personal income directly
dependent on government spending. s
This is not exactly the message we are supposed to learn from
those cities which have been enabled by government to make
the great leap into the post-industrial world. That proportion
of governmental expenditure would have totally changed the
future of Pittsburgh, or of Sheffield, or of any of those cities
which have not had the luck to be the recipients of new
 118 TALKING HOUSES
technology research and development spending nor of defence
contracts.
""" I confine myself to a consideration of housing, and what I
~ learn is that economic success can perfectly well imply
housing displacement. In London, for example, there is a
district picturesquely called the Isle of Dogs in the part of the
East End of the city which we have now learned to call
Docklands because it contains acres of docks, dating from the
time when London was the busiest port in the world, and
which of course have been closed for several decades.
Local people were rehoused in minimal, system-built tower
blocks by the local authorities. Anyone else who wanted to
house themselves there learned that the quaintly-named
BJtilding Societies, the normal source of housing finance in
Britain, had "red-lined" the area. That is to say they had put
a ring on the map to indicate that mortgage loans would not
be available. After decades of neglect Mrs Thatcher's
government installed a Docklands Development Corporation,
loaded with cash, to override the local councils, with their
dismal record, and redevelop the whole area, including a new
___ '\.. rail system to make it accessible.
~ From _ an investment point of view this has been an -
extraordinary success. It is one huge building site. But from
the point of vi'e w of local families, anxious to get out of their
run-down housing, and forming themselves into Self-Build
housing societies, it has been a disaster. The District Valuer,
the government officer charged with the task of putting a
valuation on sites, raises his figures continually, basing it on
the upwardly spiralling prices of new housing there, much of
which is seen by its purchasers as a speculation rather than a
home, safer than the stock market. The poor have been
effectively squeezed out. I would have seen this as a peculiarly
British abberation of urban renewal, but for my experience in
Boston and Cambridge last November. I arrived in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, just in time to talk to the
demonstrators at Tent City and to learn that they, just like
their predecessors at Tent City in Boston, a generation earlier,
were mutely protesting that the landlords (in this case, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were ignoring the law
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 119
:~1 emptying rent-controlled housing for redevelopment. Just
because of the success of urban renewal the land had become
too valuable to be devoted to the ordinary aspirations of
ordinary people. In Boston I was assured by Professor
Reinhart Goethert that the median annual income is $23,000
while the median house sale price is $186,000, and while the
supply of rental housing at affordable rents dwindles
continually.
There are winners and losers in the remaking of the cities )
and we have to ask ourselves continually Who Gains? Who {
Loses? People here who are familiar with the British housing
scene will know that the rivate rental sector has been
declining through most of this centu~y-~~d by now houses
o rii"y - ll per cent of ~o!ls~holds, and that we have a rather
crude duopoly oC housing with R er cent in owner
q~cupation and 27 per cent rented from local authorities. (I
believe that comparable figures for the United States as a
whole would be 65 per cent and 4 per cent with a much higher
figure for the survival of the private landlord in America.)
In Britain the whole issue of housing has been a political
football kicked around between the two major parties, each of
which has a strongly held ideological stance, private or public.
But to my mind by far the most significant innovations in
remaking cities in Britain in the last fifteen years have been
the exam pIes of ~~elleL:..co.!ltrolte.L.h@_sing__ j !lj tia tiy.!,:~
springing up from below. Statistically they are insignificant.
You could travel the length and breadth of British cities
without even noticing their existence. But they have a
significance far beyond their numbers. Firstly because they
are examples of inner city poor: housing themselves, of the
remaking of cities from below. Secondly because they
exemplify the basic truth about housing, tirelessly stressed for
at least 20 years by John Turner, who I am happy is here
today. Just in case he fails to stress it himself, let me repeat it
once again. Turner set it out thus many years ago:
When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their
own contribution to the design, construction or management of their·
housing, bi"tth the_Pl:ocess.and the. env.ir:onment produced stimulate
~ndividual and social wellbeing. When people have no control over,
120 TALKING HOUSES
nor responsibility for key decisions in the housing process, on the
other hand, dwelling environments may instead become a barrier to
personal fulfilment and a burden on the economy.9
The whole truth about housing, whether in the poor
countries of the southern half of the world or in the rich
countries of the north, is expressed in that utterance.
The third reason for the significance oftheiBritish examples
of city people housing themselves is important for this
conference: the direct involvement of architects with the
potential residents. The fourth reason is that, just as Turner
says, the process as well as the environment produced stimulate
individual and social wellbeing. Glasgow is one of the
hardest-hit cities in Britain through the collapse of its
traditional heavy industries. It is also a city with a huge
inheritance of publicly owned and declining housing. I spent
half a lifetime gaining the impression that Glasgow
Corporation was one of the most heavily paternalistic of all in
its approach to its tenants. Yet the scene is changing most of
all in Glasgow with its large-scale sponsorship of "community
ownership" and of tenant co-operatives. Last year Glasgow's
then director of housing declared that
Our greatest resource is not our 171,000 council houses, but the
tenants. The potential is there, waiting to be released.
He was right. It's one of the sad by-products of a century of
public housing in Britain that it has convinced not only the
professionals and the politicians, but also the tenants
themselves, that they weren't capable of housing themselves .
When the potential is released - trying to bend the normal
systems of housing provision and finance to fit a different
conception of housing - people have even astonished
themselves . Thus ~lan. H2y~.of the H.~sk~th, Street Housing
Co-op i!!-Liverpool 8 says "We've proved to the Council and
Gover~f!1ent and .~.I!y1.?<?dy . else. li_stening that ' if people are
given the reins, get the right help and are co~mitted, they can
come up with a really excellent, viable housing scheme that
people want to live in". The members of the Weller Streets
Co-op say the same thing. 1O Happily, here at this conference
you have the opportunity to meet Tony McGann of the
CITY PEOPLE HOUSING THEMSELVES 121
Eldonian Community Association in Liverpool, who I am
sure will tell you not only of the incredible political and
bureaucratic difficulties his association has had to combat. He
will, I am sure, stress that the successful establishment of a
housing co-operative is not the end, but the beginning of the
remaking of the city.
Several of the successful housing co-ops in British cities
have grown out of the squatters' movement. Thus the
Seymour Co-op in West London grew from a group of
squatters who "took on the management of short-life property
and then evolved as they gained experience and confidence,
into the promotion of long-life co-ops" . 11 Similarly the Black
Roof Housing Co-operative in Lambeth in South London
evolved from a squat by people who were convinced that
housing allocation policy was discriminatory - surveys
conducted by the Commission for Racial Equality showed
that their conviction was correct. Jheni Arboine, Black Roofs
secretary says that
The days when white middle class people determined the needs of
black people are over so far as we are concerned. Groups like ours
are going some way toward destroying the "old boy network" that
exists in housing ... Black people are now prepared to take on their
own housing problems and we no longer want or need white
missionary types to treat us like poor people with problems that
we're not capable of solving for ourselves. 12
We also have in Britain an emerging network of self-build
housing associations in the cities, not of affiuent people with
the usual access to credit who happen to have chosen this
particular method of housing provision, but of poor city
dwellers with very few options. The Zenzele Self-Build
Housing Association in Bristol was formed by twelve people
unemployed, mostly unskilled and aged round about 20 and
black, who felt themselves excluded from not only the official
housing world, but that of the unofficial alternatives. Many
people here must have met the late Walter Segal, the architect
who developed a--system of light-weight timber construction
based on American balloon-frame housing, whose last
achievement was the Lewisham Self-Build Housing Associa-
tion, promoted by the London Borough of Lewisham. Ken
122
Atkins of that association reflected on what he called the
"indescribable feeling that you finally have control over what
you are doing" .13 Segal himself, in the con text of the universal
gloom about housing in Britain was overjoyed to have helped
to prove in the most convincing way imaginable "that there
is" (as he put it) "among the people that live in this country
9. An Anarchist
such a wealth of talent", and he found it unbelievable that this
creativity continued to be denied an outlet.
Approach to Urban
I share this feeling. The examples I have mentioned are
statistically insignificant. They can be paralleled by similar
Planning
initiatives in the cities of the United States and other
countries. They have all experienced incredible difficulties
Forty years ago, when the Rivista Volonta was edited in Naples
and delays just in getting out of the ground. Yet they have all
by my friends Giovanna Berneri and Cesare Zaccaria, they
been triumphant successes. Our task, I think, is to engineer
published an article about housing and planning by a young
that huge shift in opinion that makes the direct participation
architect Giancarlo De Carlo, which I laboriously and, no
of ordinary citizens in the remaking of cities, the normal way
doubt, inaccurately, translated for the English anarchist
and not the remarkable exception. journal Freedom. I
Then, as now, anarchist propaganda has been impeded by
References its insistence that nothing can happen until everything
1. Andrew Lees: Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American happens . The destruction of both capitalism and the state
Thought, 1820-1940 (Manchester University Press 1985)
were the prerequisites for the building of a free society. The
2. Paul U. Kellogg (ed) The Pittsburgh Survey (Russell Sage Foundation
1909-1914) problem is that neither De Carlo nor me, nor the millions of
people actually involved, then or now, can actually wait for
3. Lees: op cit
these revolutionary changes. Ask yourself whether they are
4. Hamlin Garland, 1892, cited in Milton Meltzer: Bread and Roses (Alfred
A. Knopf 1967) nearer or further than they were forty years ago.
In looking for alternative approaches, he examined building
5. Remaking Cities Conference Brochure 1988
co-operatives, tenants' co-operatives, rent strikes, and
6. Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King: The State and the City (Macmillan
1987) "squatting", the illegal occupation of empty houses. Now we
have seen over these 40 years since 1948 that everyone of
7. ibid
these techniques of direct action by poor citizens, whether in
8. ibid
Italy, Britain or the United States, has led to a wider
9. John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter: Freedom to Build: Dweller Cont?ol of involvement in urban planning. And in the part that citizens
the Housing Process (Macmillan 1972)
can demand.
10. Alan Macdonald: The Weller Way : The Story of the Weller Streets Housing
Co-operative (Faber and Faber 1986)
All those years ago, De Carlo went on to consider the
possible anarchist attitudes to town planning:
II. See for example Colin Ward: When We Build Again, Let's Have Housing that
Works! (Pluto Press 1985, Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt: f?ommunity
Architecture: How People Are Creating Their Own Environment (Pengum 1987) Address to ajoint seminar with Giancarlo De Carlo, of Co.s.A. (architectural
students' centre) and the Centro Studio Libertari G. Pinelli, Milan, 17
12. Roof Nov-Dec 1986 September 1988.
13. See Ward op cit
123
 TALKING HOUSES
It is possible to adopt a hostile attitude: "The plan must necessarily
emanate from authority, therefore it can only be detrimental.
Changes in social life cannot follow the plan - the plan will be the
consequence of a new way of life.
Or, he suggested, an attitude of participation could be
adopted: "The plan is the opportunity for liquidating our
present social order by changing its direction, and this
changed aim is necessarily the preliminary for a new social
structure" .
The first main attitude is based on two principle arguments. Firstly
that authority cannot be a liberating agent - perfectly true;
secondly, that man [and of course today he would say man and
woman] can do nothing until he is free - a mistaken view. Man
cannot be liberated, he must liberate himself, and any progress
towards that liberation can only be the conscious expression of his
own will. The investigation of the full extent of the problems of
r region, city and home, is such an activity. To find out the nature of
, the problems and to prepare their solutions is a ~oncrete ~x.ample of
direct action, taking away the powers of authonty and glvmg them
back to men [and women].
' The attitude of hostility that really means "waiting for the
revolution to do it", does not take into account the fact that ~he
social revolution will be accomplished by clear heads, not by Sick
and stunted people unable to think of the future because of the
problems of the present. It forgets that the revolution beg~~s in the
elimination of these evils so as to create the necessary condlUons of a
free society.
Giancarlo De Carlo was arguing two important proposi-
tions. Firstly that whatever kind of society they live in, it is
important for the anarchist to push forward those approaches
to personal and social needs which depend on popular
initiatives and which present alternatives to dependency on
capitalism and the state. Secondly that "urban planning can
become a revolutionary weapon if we succeed in rescuing it
(', from the blind monopoly of authority= and, in_making it a
l./ \ com, ~~~n,' al orga?o~ r;,searcl} and investigation into the real
~,\ pro_blems,.Q.(.$~0liit,l~hfe.
, , --For me, this point of view from forty years ago, has always
been important and helpful, because I am convinced, and I
am still, that one of the tasks of the anarchist propagandist is
to propagate solutions to contemporary issues which, howev~r
dependent they are on the existing social and economIC
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 125
structures, are anarchist solutions: the kind of approaches that
would be made if we were living in the kind of society we
envisage. We are much more likely to win support for our
point of view, in other words, if we put anarchist answers
which can be tried here and now, than if we declare that there
are no answers until the ultimate answer: a social revolution
which continually disappears over the horizon.
Let me take the first of Giancarlo's points of 40 years ago:
the importance of the Squatter's Movement: the illegal seizure
of empty housing. At the time when he was writing, we had
been through the post-war eruption of squatting in Italy, in
Britain and elsewhere. Its history and its lessons were
forgotten. Then, many years later, in the 1960s, it became
important again, in Turin, in London, in Berlin and in
Copenhagen, and in dozens of European and American cities.
Not only was the squatters' movement successful as a tactic
for housing oneself, it was also a political education. 2 And it is
a fact that the most successful of the housing co-operatives
that have flourished in Britain in the past decade, started life
as illegal "squats".3
A second point of interest in his argument of 1948 was his
use of the phrase "an attitude of participation". Now the word
"participation" was not part of the vocabulary of arch{tects
and planners in the 1940s, nor in the 1950s. It crept into the
language after the ppase of post-war reconstruction in the
cities of Britain and the United States which was known as
"urban renewal".
As we all understand by now, "urban renewal" meant in
practice, "driving the poor out of town", and it also meant the
destruction of the traditional working class culture of the
cities. We have a huge library of books on the implications of
this. There are the famous American studies by Robert
Goodman and Jane Jacobs 4 and there are English equivalents,
of which just one was the work ofa socialist councillor, not an
anarchist, who declared that
Planning in our society is in essence the attempt to inject a radical
technology into a conservative and highly inegalitarian economy.
The impact of planning on this society is rather like that of the
education system on the same society: it is least onerous and most
advantageous to those who are relatively powerless or relatively
126 TALKING HOUSES
~
poor. Planning is, in its effect on the socio-economic structure a
highly regressive form of indirect taxation.'
~o there grew up a new 1960s ideology of "participation"
whIch was populist, socialist, and to a small but important
extent, rediscovery, by people who had never heard of
anarchism, of anarchist values. One of the most important
attempts to measure the actual worth of these exercise~ in
participati?n was made by an American planner, Sherry
Arnstem, m what became known as Arnstein's Ladder of
Participation.6 The rungs of her ladder, climbing up from the
bottom, were:
Citizen Control
Delegated,Power
Partnership
Placation
Consultation
Informing
Therapy
Manipulation
I have always found Arnstein's Ladder a very useful
measuring-rod which enables us to get behind the barrage of
propaganda and decide whether any particular exercise in
"public participation" is merely manipulation or therapy, or
often deception (which found no place on Arnstein's ladder -
but should have done).
N at~rally the anarchist aim is the very top rung of
ArnsteIfo1's .Ladder, that ofF~1l Citizen Control. It's something
worth. aImmg at, wh.atever kmd of society we live in. We may
not wm the economIC battles, but we can sometimes win the
environmental battles! There have been histories of success in
the cities of the United States, of Britain, and ofItaly, as well
as exhausting failures.
But we do have to ask ourselves whether "participation"
was one of those words of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been
quietly abandoned in the 1980s. You will know that the
governments of both Britain and the United States, with their
ideology of the New Right, when they talk about the citie~' at
all, talk in terms of "partnership" of business and government.
They do not speak of "participation" of ordinary citizens.
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 127
The word "renewal" , having been discredited, is replaced
' by new equivalents, like "regeneration" and "revitalisation" .
We are all invited to see the regeneration of the cities of the
United States. I was invited to a conference in Pittsburgh,
USA on the theme of "Remaking Cities" . There was one
speaker there, Alan Mallach of New J ersey, who addressed
himself to the issue that concerns you and me. He said,
The concept of a public/private partnership as a relationship
, between two sectors - government and the private market - is
l
flawed by its exclusion of a third, essential actor - the residents of ''',
the co~munitv affected. Self-congratulatory messages abut entrep- /
reneunal successes and the proliferation of shiny downtown office
buildings obscure the reality that many people do not benefit from
all this success, and many are deeply and permanently harmed.'
In other words, the battle for local citizen participation has to
be fought continually, everywhere. Giancarlo De Carlo was
right, all those years ago.
But there is a different aspect of the city that needs to be
discussed from an anarchist point of view. Anarchism has
shared ~ith other political ideologies of the Left, certain
assumptIOns about the growth of the modern industrial city
and the modern industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels,
whatev:r the virtues or defects of their concept of history,
based It on the first country, Britain, to experience the
industrial revolution: the mushroom growth of industrial
cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or Glasgow, and
the proletarianisation of the displaced peasantry and so on :
To fit the real world into this theory, they minimised the
survival of the English equivalent of the European peasant
economy,8 and dismissed the huge small-workshop economy
as a tedious survival of the "petty trades" of the middle ages.
Kropotkin, in his book Fields, Factories and Workshops,
attempted to correct this view and to remind us that the vast
industrial city was a temporary phenomenon, which
happened to begin in Britain. Thus he a rgued in 1899 that~
decentralisation was both inevitable and desirable: '
The scatte:ing of industries over the country - so as to bring the
fac~ory .amIdst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits
whIch It always finds in being combined with industry and to
 128 TALKING HOUSES
\ produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work - is
{ surely the next step to be taken ... This step is imposed by the
necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of their
lives in manual work in the free air; and it will be rendered the more
necessary when the great social movements, which have now
become unavoidable, come to disturb the present international
trade, and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for her
own maintenance. 9
Now Krop~tkin was, like me, an optimist. But he had grasped
a big truth about the industrial city and about industrial
employment.
About the industrial city, Kropotkin's contemporary, the
Garden City pioneer, Ebenezer Howard, declared in 1904 that
I venture to suggest that while the age in which we live is the age of
the great closely-compacted city, there are already signs, for those
who can read them, of a coming change so great and so momentous
that the twentieth century will be known as the period of the great
exodus ... 10
Whether or not it happened in the way that Howard
anticipated, ordinary demographic statistics of British cities
support his view. A British economist, Victor Keegan,
remarked a few years ago that
the most seductive theory of all is that what we are experiencing now
is nothing less than a movement back towards an informal economv
after a brief flirtation of 200 years or so with a formal one. II
The huge industrial city, the vast concentrated factory with
its army of the proletariat, are a brief episode in the history of
cities, in the history of production and in the history of work.
You have only to visit the dying industrial cities of Britain or
the United States to become convinced of this.
We have a characteristic Anglo-American divide in
discussing this particular Italian economic miracle. For
example, a British author, Fergus Murray, provides an
absorbing account of the recent changes in Italian industry
with the explanation that
In the late 1960s labour militancy in many Italian industries
reached levels that directly threatened firm profitability, and
management undertook a series of strategies designed initially to
reduce the disruptiveness of militant workers.12
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 129
One of these strategies was the decentralisation of industrial
production into a local, self-employed, small workshop
economy. So we can see this whole recent evolution as a
conspiracy by the capitalists.
Predictably the same industrial changes were seen quite
differently from the United States. The American architect
Richard Hatch, whom both Giancarlo De Carlo and I
remember as a pioneer of participatory planning in that
toughest of all environments , Harlem, New York/ 3 wr~te
much more recently that, .
A new form of urban industrial production in Italy is giving new
meaning to its historical form. It is based on a large number of very
small, flexible enterprises that depend on broadly skilled workers
and multiple-use, automated machinery. Essentially intermediate
producers, they link together in varying combinations and patterns
to perform complex manufacturing tasks for widening markets.
These firms combine rapid innovation with a high degree of
democracy in the workplace. They tend to congregate in mixed-use
neighbourhoods where work and dwelling are integrated. Their
growth has been the objective of planning policy, architectural
interventions, and municipal investment, with handsome returns in
sustained economic growth and lively urban centres. 14
Well of course, lively urban centres are one of the aims of
the urban planning profession, and which it has been
singularly unskilled in providing, ever since the 1940s. Those
of us who are concerned with urban planning have every
reason to observe what is happening in Italy.
There was, for example, an Italo-American anarchist, the
late George Benello, who found in the "industrial renaiss-
ance" of north-eastern and central Italy,
.
a model that worked, creating in less than three decades, not
hundreds but literally hundreds of thousands of small scale firms,
out-producing conventionally run factories, and providing work
which called forth skill, responsibility, and artistry from its
democratically organised workforces. 15
I learn from the same source, that Benello w<i s
amazed at the combination of sophisticated design and production
technology with human scale work-life, and by the extent and
diversity of integrated and collaborative activity within this
network. Small cities, such as Modena, had created "artisan
 130 TALKING HOUSES
villages" - working neighbourhoods where production facilities
and living quarters were within walking or bike range, where
technical schools for the unemployed fed directly into newly created
businesses, and where small firms using computerized techniques,
banded together to produce complex products.16
By this point I am sure that many people here, whether
they are anarchists, workers, or urban planners, will be
acutely embarrassed at the idealised picture I have given you
of Italia artigianata and will complain that daily reality has
little relation to this view. Well, I have to embarrass you one
stage further, since my subject is an anarchist approach to
urban planning. George Benello's own conclusion was that
Italy has taught the world perhaps more than any other nation
about urban life and urban form. Once again it is in the forefront,
creating a new economic order, based on the needs of the city and on
human scale. 17
, Now, even making allowances for sentimental Anglo-
/ American I talophilia, there is a sense in which this comment
is absolutely true. Go, not to the cities of northern Italy, but to
those of Britain and the United States, and you will certainly
find the ruins of a factory culture of monopolistic employers
who have fled or diversified, and of work-forces dependent
I upon social security . hab d-outs, or upon the various
: alternatives to work devised for British or American cities:
garden festivals, museums of oUJ industrial heritage, or
shopping malls and aquaria. Anything,- Tn - fact, except the
) opportunity to be involved in productive work.
Comparing the experience of car workers in, say Coventry
or Birmingham, and Turin, I was told by a British historian
that in ' English factories, a third generation of skilled
industrial workers have been "moulded in worker-resistance
to industrial capitalism", knowing nothing except employ-
ment for big capitalists, whereas in Torino, with its high
"generation-turnover" of new industrial workers from the
South, the artisans and peasants who moved north were not
"crushed by factory capitalism", and have consequently founq
it easier to become self-employed workers, or members of
co-operatives or employees of small-scale, high-technology
AN ANARCHIST ApPROACH TO URBAN PLANNING 131
entrepreneurs, or to drop out of industrial work almost
completely and pick up a living from small-scale horticulture .
Now we anarchists are not Marxists. We belong to a
different tradition from the one which saw the steam-engine
and the consequent concentration of industrial production as
the ultimate factor in human history. We belong to a different
tradition which includes, for example, Proudhon's faith in the
self-governing workshop and Kropotkin's concern with the
decentralisation of production and its combination with
horticulture.
It is our tradition which corresponds more closely to the
actual experience, both of our grandparents and of our
grandchildren. One of the people from a different tradition
who has thought seriously about this issue is Andre Gorz, who
argues that the political Left has been refrigerated in
authoritarian collectivist attitudes that belong to the past. He
says that
As long as the protagonists of socialism continue to make centralised
planning the lynch pin of their programme, and the adherence of
everyone to the "democratically formulated" objectives of their plan
the core of' their political doctrine, socialism will remain an
unattractive proposition in industrial societies. Classical socialist
doctri?e finds it difficult to come to terms with political and social
pl~rahsm, understood not simply as a plurality of parties and trade
umon~ ~ut as th~ co- exi.st~nce of various ways of working, producing
and hvmg, vanous dIstmct cultural areas and levels of social
~xistence .: . Yet this kind of pluralism precisely conforms to the
hved expenence and aspirations of the post-industrial proletariat as
well as the major part of the traditional worki,ng class .IS ' •
Now this would be perfectly well understood in the urban
fringe of Torino, or of Modena or Bologna or in all the
workshop-villages of Emilia-Romagna, or, I imagine, here in
Milano.
And of course it has its implications in the world of the
physical planning of the environment. It implies a plan which
is modest, tentative and flexible, which assumes dweller control
as the first principle of housing and which also assumes that
the householder has access to a garden, whether this garden is
used for horticulture or as a plays pace for the children, or as a
workshop or a commercial asset. And I take it for granted that
there is a nursery and ajunior school close at hand, and room
 132 TALKING HOUSES
for self-governing workshops all around. These are such
simple demands that even as anarchists in a society which is
) hostile to anarchism, we should be able to achieve them!
References
1. Giancarlo De Carlo "The Housing Problem in Italy Freedom 12June and
19 June 1948.
2. Colin Ward Housing: An Anarchist Approach (Freedom Press 1976, 1983) .
3. Johnston Birchall Building Communities, The Co-operative Way (Routledge &
Kegan Paul 1988).
4. Robert Goodman After the Planners (Simon & Schuster 1972) Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House 1961).
5. John Gower Davies The Evangelistic Bureaucrat (Tavistock Publication
1972).
6. Sherry R. Arnstein "A Ladder of Citizen Participation in the USA"
Journal of the American Institute of Planners July 1969.
7. Alan Mallach, talking on the final day of the "Remaking Cities"
Conference organised by the American Institute of Architects and the Royal
Institute of British Architects, Benedum Theatre, Pittsburgh, 5 March
1988.
8. Mick Reed "The Peasantry of Nineteenth-Century England : a Neglected
Class?" H istory Workshop: a journal of socialist and feminist historians No 18,
Autumn 1984.
9. Peter Kropotkin Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898), Campi, fabbriche,
officine (Edizione Antistato 1974) .
10. Ebenezer Howard, at the London School of Economics 18July 1904.
II. See Colin Ward "Anarchism and the informal economy" The Raven No
1, 1987.
12. Fergus Murray "The Decentralisation of Production - the Decline of
the Mass-Collective Worker?" in R. E. Pahl (ed) On Work : Historical,
Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (Basil Blackwell 1988).
13. C. Richard Hatch Associates Planning for Change (Ginn & Co and
Architects' Renewal Committee for Harlem 1969)
14. C. Richard Hatch "Italy's Industrial Renaissance: Are American Cities
Ready to Learn?" Urban Land January 1985.
15. C. George Benello, quoted in Changing work: a magazine about liberating
worklife No 7, Winter 1988.
16 Len Krimerman "C . George Benello: architect of liberating work" in
Changing Work ibid.
17. C . George Benello, quoted, ibid.
18. Andre Gorz Farewell to the Working Class: an essay on post-industrial socialism
(Pluto Press 1982).
10. Being Local
TWo years ago I was flattered to be asked to address the
annual conference of the Association of Community Technical
Aid Centres in the Pre-Raphaelite grandeur of Manchester
Town Hall. I chose to talk about the stolen vocabulary,
referring to the fact that there are resonant phrases such as
"self-help" and "mutual aid" which described the endless
series of organisations like friendly societies, building
sodeties, sick clubs, coffin clubs, clothing clubs and huge
enterprises like the co-operative movement and the trade
union movement, created from nothing in the 19th century by
the organised working class in Britain.
My argument was that worship of the machinery of the
state had led the political Left, from Fabians to Marxists, to
despise this popular and humble inheritance in favour of the
provision of everything by the state and its bureaucracy. The
political right had ridden into power on a wave of populist
sentiment about 'ifreeing the people from the heavy hand of
the state" and so on.
The current ruling party were picking up a language, I
called it the stolen vocabulary, which the Left had discarded
on their way to their version of the socialist utopia. The
political right at the same time has ensured, to the absolute
joy of the top civil servants of the state, that the sphere oflocal
decision-making in politics has been reduced to an incredible
extent. They were of course following a well-known Labour
Party precedent. The Fabians in their early days were derided
as gas-and-water socialists.
It's an irony that today the last thing any councillor has any
Keynote address to the conJerence on Technical Aid and Future Partnership oj
the Association oj Community Technical Aid Centres, at the Oval House
Theatre, Kennington, London SE1, 12 July 1988.
133
 13+ TALKING HOUSES
control of is gas and water. In a very interesting article in New
I
Statesman and Society for 17 June, Steve Platt points to the
) observations of Don Simpson, borough housing officer for
Rochdale.
Simpson made a list of the functions of his own authority back in
1906, none of which remain the council's responsibility today. These
included the police service, highways and tramways, water supply
and drainage, gas manufacture and distribution and electricity
generation and distribution.
He could have gone further, but my point is that most of
these responsibilities were taken away from his borough, not
by the ogress Thatcher, but by Labour governments, years
ago.
And what happens to Labour politicians when they make
their mark in local government? All through this century -
and the list is overwhelming - they move on to the House of
Commons in the hope of becoming part of the next central
government, and its endlessly centralising process. The most
recent harvest, obviously, includes people like David
Blunkett, Bernie Grant or Ken Livingstone. The last example
was particularly interesting to outside advocates of co-
operative housing like me, since there was an obvious plot to
dispose of the sitting Labour member in this safe seat, Reg
Freeson, about whom I know nothing except that he was the
only minister responsible for housing throughout my lifetime,
to have the slightest understanding of what co-op housing is
about and why it is important.
Now, I have the good luck to be an anarchist, with a
built-in hostility towards politicians. I don't suffer from
disillusionment because I don't have any illusions about
them. I believe in using them as far as we can, because I know
that they have no hesitation about using us.
This conference, for example, is called "Technical Aid /
Future Partnership", partnership being a word in vogue at the
moment. I went earlier this year, at the expense of my hosts,
to a conference at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Remaking
Cities, and I heard this word partnership continually used by
speakers from both sides of the Atlantic. For me the last word
was said by Alan Mallach of New Jersey, who remarked that
BEING LOCAL
the concept of a pu blic / private partnership between two sectors -
government and the private market - is flawed by its e~clusion of a
third essential actor - the residents of the commumty affected.
Self-~ongratulatory messages about entrepreneurial successes and
the proliferaton of shiny downtown office buildin$s obscure the
reality that many people do not benefit from all thIS success, and
many are deeply and permanently harmed.
You and I know this truth all too well, and I just hope that
we are cunning enough to exploit the chinks in the armour of
the politicians. Let's for example, make use of the present
government's Housing Bill, knowing that behind the scenes in
the Department of the Environment, and in the Housing
Corporation, there are people trying to make it useful for us.
You don't have to support them: just use them.
I absolutely deplore the tendency to blame everything on
the present cynical bunch of office-holders. For example, if
there were a magical change of government tomorrow, would
you actually want to re-instate the Greater London Council?
Would you reverse the forthcoming break-down of the Inner
London Education Authority? Or would you be localists and
urge us to learn from the evolution of Switzerland?
In that particular ancient democracy the supreme body is
the Commune, usually far smaller than any London borough,
which runs its own affairs and levies taxes. Grudgingly it pays
over an agreed sum to the Canton, with severe reservations,
and the Canton, after referendums, pays a minimal revenue to
the Federal Council, which of course endlessly grumbles
about the mean-spiritedness of the Communes and Cantons.
Nobody has ever heard of a Swiss Prime Minister, since such
an office doesn't really exist. The equivalent is the person
currently in the chair of the Federal Council, whose powers
are minimal and are usually rotated among members. It's like
being in the chair of the parish council: a necessary chore that
has to be endured rather than welcomed.
I've never been told that Switzerland is an unsuccessful
democracy, and I mention the Swiss example for two reasons.
The first is that it is an absolute reversal of our British
centralist image, loved by politicians of right and left alike.
For when British councils collect their Community Charge

136 TALKING HOUSE~
they will find that they are still dependent on central
government for the greater part of their revenue. Centralism,
an attitude taken totally for granted by our politicians of all
parties, isn't affected by changes in local income. I adore
Switzerland just because it is a nation that contradicts
everything that is taken for granted here.
Yly second reason for mentioning Switzerland is because it
provides a warning that local self-government is no guarantee
that attitudes cherished by people like you and me are
cherished there. I'm open to correction, but I don't believe
that that particular country has a good record on issues like
sexism, racism, or the rights of immigrants, the disaffected
young or the otherwise undesirable.
Having the right political system is no guarantee that
you're going to get the right social attitudes. But this very fact
reminds us that we can't wait for the electoral racket to swing
our way. We have to pursue the ideas that are important for
us without regard for who is in power. But this implies using
every loophole in their legislation for our purposes. In exactly
the same way, of course, that other interest groups in society
employ lawyers to scrutinise every clause and sub-clause in
the statutes.
It is quite important to realise that, in spite of the way we
talk about it, government is not monolithic. Whether we are
talking about politicians, administrators or Quangos, it
contains people who within their field, are concerned to
promote particular interests that happen to be ours, in making
the legislation work. People in this audience who are
"inside-dopesters" know, for example, that inside the
Department of the Environment, are people plotting to make
the Housing Bill work effectively for housing co-operatives, or
that insiqe the Housing Corporation there are people plotting
to put tqgether what they undoubtedly will call a financial
package or partnership of public and private finance to make
self-build housing a feasible option for poor people as well as
relatively affluent and secure people.
What should the attitude of community activists be towards
these officially-salaried allies? I have heard their initiatives
described as an attempt to co-opt and contain, even to defuse,
--- - ---- --~-------
BEING LOCAL 137
the ground-swell of popular activism springing up from below.
The obvious comment on this is that the ground isn't
noticeably swelling, and it is equally feasible to see these
straws in the wind as a governmental attempt to prod the
ground into swelling.
Because there is a political no-person's-land which Mrs
Thatcher and her advisers are colon ising from the Right, and
which you and I are colonising from the Left. Don't be
disconcerted about this. The wilderness is a good place to be,
just because it's a location for initiative, experiment, wild
hopes and lost causes. Without much effort on my part, but
with my willing co-operation, my address to your Manchester
conference, about the stolen vocabulary, was printed in
various forms in a variety of journals: The Guardian, a liberal
newspaper, The Raven, an anarchist quarterly, The Bulletin of
Environmental Education, a publication for teachers, and The
Chartist a bi-monthly journal of one, among many, factions in
the Labour Party. I haven't yet been approached by the
Salisbury Review or by Marxism Today, but I never turn down
the chance of a different audience. All I was doing was voicing
an interpretation of history which is becoming increasingly
popular.
I rejoice in this because I know that the Thatcher period
won't last for ever, and because its very arrogant extremism
has obliged a lot of people to think again about their own
political attitudes . It's like the effect of the Blitz in 1940 in
destroying our much-loved British slums. The problem is that
it might have the same results. Planners (whether physical,
economic or social) may say, "Thatcher's bombs have done
more for us than years of government reports". They may
envisage a post-Thatcher reconstruction based on large-scale
urban renewal just as we had in the wake of the real Blitz.
You and I, in between garnering what we can from current
legislation (since as we all know, everyone involved in the
so-called voluntary sector spends most of his or her time,
sniffing around the official sector for grants and loans),
between all this, are involved in redefining community action,
rebuilding an ideology oflocalism and local responsibility. In
1994, ten years after Orwell, we will be coping with local
138 TALKING HOUSES
authorities acting as agencies of central government, drawing
their revenue from the Poll Tax and a standard business rate,
but most of all, still, from hand-outs decided and
circumscribed from Whitehall. Who, apart from loyal Rotary
Club members, determined to put a mayorial chain round
their necks, will be willing to serve?
I'm always put in mind of a poem by Bertholt Brecht which
said in effect "I didn't like it where I've come from. / I don't
like it where I'm going. / Why am I so impatient / While the
driver is changing the wheel?"
Just take the area of public policy closest to most people
here: housing. I don ' t think that anyone here will now claim
that the role oflocal authorities is that ofa direct provider. We
have been through that syndrome for several lifetimes, and it
has taken the present government to break the connection,
using thoroughly dishonest slogans about "setting the people
free". But the issues which gave rise to local council
involvement in housing haven't evaporated, and local
councils, however chastened, aren't going to disappear. If
they were ground into extinction we would have to re-invent
them on the Swiss pattern. In the meantime we have to
develop for them a new role as enablers rather than providers.
This is not a minimal role, since one of the residual powers
of local councils is as planning authorities, and because of the
failure of our predecessors, after a century of agitation, to
change the basis of land valuation, by devising ways of
manipulating the planning system and the rules of land
valuation to enable socially useful but market-incompatible
projects to get out of the ground. The Mulberry Housing
Co-op at Coin Street in South London is an obvious and
classic example of this: the most useful thing the late GLC
sponsored in its dying days. Having said this, I have to stress
that I belong to that minority on the Left as opposed to that
majority on the Right, who do not regret the demise of the
Greater London Council. I just wish that we had people
around with the imagination and historical sense to devise a
restructuring of local administration in London in the Swiss
pattern: that is to say that the Communes of Bermondsey,
Brixton, Kensington and Kennington and all the other
BEING LOCAL 139
villages, should federate for particular purposes into the
Canton of London.
Students of the history of London government, like Gerald
Rhodes or Ken Young, will tell you that a centralised state
will never tolerate powerful local government in its huge
capital city. This is why Vienna never came into its own until
the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered. It would
have been better for London if Britain had had an
administrative capital, like Ottawa or Canberra, located in
say Stevenage, so that the ancient cities could go their own
way.
You need to forget all that nonsense you have been reareq
on about France. Britain is the most unitary, which is to say,
centralised, state in Europe, with a few exceptions like
Romania or Albania. All political factions are to blame for
this. The Left, intoxicated by the idea of conquering state
power, rejoiced in being able to override reactionary local
authorities. The Right, in spite of a tradition dating back to
Edmund Burke, which exalted the local over the central, is
equally intoxicated by its current success in finding one way
after another of ensuring that local government can be
brought to heel by innumerable small administrative
measures intended to destroy those Labour Party fiefdoms
which it has expanded into an Enemy to be eliminated.
I find this very sinister indeed, and my reaction is to look,
not to the political opposition but to the social opposition: all
those people who are building up from below, community
action to meet local needs, whether in building work
opportunities, housing opportunities or opportunities for
children and the young. I'm exactly like anyone else here: I
am thrilled by the successes and I put the failures under the
carpet. But you and I can learn from both.
Members of the Association of Community Technical Aid
Centres have to be impatient while the driver is changing the
wheel. The support of that gr,e at public out there is won by the
achievements which have been won by exploiting every
opportunity provided by new or existing laws. The very fact
that we are reduced to waiting for modifications of the
Housing Bill shows what we lost by the failure to develop local
140 TALKING HOUSES
autonomous activity based on self-help and mutual aid in the
past.
Our contemporary dependence on decisions made in
Whitehall is the direct result of a century of faith in
governmental politics which made local and popular
initiatives irrelevant. We can't undo this instantly. We have to
exploit every chink and loophole, every way of working our
way into the system that is imposed from above. This is what
we are discussing today as "Future Partnership".
As always, there are people around who will say, "But effort
like this doesn't touch the real homeless", the implication
being that the policies they recommend actually do. So I have
to mention the experience of the forlorn Yorkshire port of
Hull. Forty-seven per cent of the housing stock there belongs
to the council, yet at least 3,500 families are officially
described as homeless, and this minimal figure ignores the
young, single and footloose, and all those teenagers obliged to
leave home after a marriage breakdown or a family row, or
because to stay in the parental home is for one reason or
another, intolerable.
In 1985 young, unemployed Reg Salmon borrowed enough
in small loans from trusting friends to get a mortgage on a
small house which, together, they set about renovating. With
that house as security they got a bank loan to buy a second
house. Then, with the help of Humberside Co-operative
Development Agency, they set up a building co-operative,
Giroscope Ltd, whose other directors were also under 25 and
unemployed. The aims of the co-operative are "the purchase,
renovation, modernisation and furnishing of houses in poor
condition", and "the renting out of these houses to
unemployed people and to other disadvantaged groups such
as single parents and disabled people". When I last met them
at the end of 1988, the co-operative owned eight houses
accommodating about 30 young unemployed people and 4
children.
In Bristol, the Zenzele Self-Build Housing Association was
formed by 12 unemployed young people, mostly black,
unskilled and aged around 20. It was inspired by a local
magistrate, Stella Clarke, and a steering group helped the
BEING LOCAL 141
members for two years to negotiate their way through sources
of finance. A site was obtained from the local authority with a
provisional loan from the Housing Corporation. A very
important agreement was won from the DSS that the
members would work on their two-storey block of 12 flats
while continuing to draw social security payments. An
individual mortgage for each member was provided by the
Bristol and West Building Society and a general foreman was
engaged to train the members and supervise the work.
It took 14 months for the members to build their flats,
longer than was expected, as some members got jobs and
could only work in the evenings and at weekends. All the
members eventually found work, mostly as a result of the skills
they had acquired. They inspired several other ventures . In
Birmingham, for example, Abdul Bahar of the Neejesshow
Self Build Housing Association says,
We visited the Zenzele scheme and were inspired by what we saw.
We came away thinking, those people did something, so why can't
we? This will be the first activity of its kind in the Bengali
community - it hasn't happened before because we lacked
information and proper advice.
In the last twenty years, with the steady decline of the
public housing industry under governments of both political
complexions, we have seen a slow growth in the interstices of
the sterile duopoly of owner-occupation versus council
housing, and in the face of an increasingly hostile financial
climate, of a rich variety of new experiments and initiatives.
My biggest fear is that when we actually get a change of
government, this experience will be swept away as
unimportant. We'll go back to the notorious numbers game of
the 1950s when the politicians rivalled each other in telling us
how many hundreds of thousands of houses they intended to
build. I actually fear the political approach to housing that I
have heard all my life, with all the . talk about "treating
housing like a military operation" and the usual faith in
large-scale mass solutions, with big contracts for the big
contractors, and with the dismissal of the idea that the
occupants should be involved in housing themselves as some
142 TALKING HOUSES

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ANARCHY
IN
ACTION
by Colin Ward

The author in his new introduction to the third printing

writes:

"This book was not intended for people who had

spent a lifetime pondering the problems of anarchism,
but for people who either had no idea of what the
word implied, or knew exactly what it implied and
rejected it, considering that it had no relevance for
the modern world.
My original preference as a title was the more
cumbersome but more accurate 'Anarchism as a
Theory of Organisation' because, as I urge in my
preface, that is what the book is about. It is not about
strategies for revolution and it is not involved in
speculation on the wayan anarchist society ,would
function. It is not about the ways in which people
organise themselves in any kind of human society,
whether we care to categorise those societies as
primitive, traditional, capitalist or communist ... "

152 pages ISBN 0 900384 £5.00