With the election of a Labour government in July 2024, Phil Child’s new book is timely. Child sets out to challenge what he claims as “the dominant notion in urban history that the creation and re-creation of the urban environment is solely the outcome of rational, pragmatic decision-making or of bureaucratic incompetence” (12). Through a thorough reading of both archival left-wing and Labour sources and an extensive and varied secondary literature, he asserts instead the significance of “political cultures” (9) and, specifically, the ideas and values of Labour activists.
Child’s argument revolves around what he calls a “modern moment” (9) in which a variegated Labour ideology embraced planning, slum clearance, and council housing as an explicitly socialist and future-oriented project. His subtitle knowingly echoes both the title of Aneurin Bevan’s 1952 book (Bevan was Labour’s post-war Minister of Health and Housing), In Place of Fear, and the 1942 Beveridge Report’s assault on “squalor” as one of the “five giants” to be slain in the new welfare state. Given that more broadly shared ambition to build Britain anew after the Second World War, Child’s central contention may seem unexceptionable. The greater interest of his book lies in its close analysis of the tensions and contradictions that arose within Labour thinking between its competing wings and as policy evolved to contend with intractable realities on the ground.
Labour believed housing should be considered a “social service” and that council housing could and should serve a cross-section of the community. In practice, however, and particularly after the Conservative government’s 1956 Housing Subsidies Act that limited Treasury support to housing built only for slum clearance purposes, the question as to who council housing was for and, relatedly, what rents should be charged became a more difficult one. As Child recounts, party activists were split between those who favored lower rents (in effect, a universal subsidy) and those who advocated “economic” rents for those who could afford them and rebates for the less well-off. The Party’s National Executive Committee eventually, in 1968, favored the latter. A universal, means-tested system of housing benefit introduced by the Conservatives in 1972 put the matter to rest.
Similar divisions and pressures emerged on attitudes taken towards the private rental sector. Private landlordism was seen by Labour as inefficient and exploitative and Conservative legislation in the 1950s weakening rent controls was readily condemned. But Child outlines a major split within Labour as to whether landlordism should be managed by forcing repair and renovation or abolished through municipal take-over. Municipalization became official Labour Party policy in 1954 but the expense of acquisition and repair caused the policy to be dropped in 1962. In government after 1964, Labour merely opted for a modest policy of “fair rents.”
The Party’s ambivalence towards owner occupation was equally significant. Child points out the greater support it received from Labour’s revisionist wing, including proposals for state-provided mortgages. On the whole, however, it was council housing that remained for Labour, in Child’s words, “something of a ‘vanguard’ tenure, acting as an indicator of the socialist future to come” (77). Labour’s suspicion of owner occupation would be powerfully exploited by Margaret Thatcher’s New Right governments of the 1980s. Many in Labour feared that increased home ownership and rising living standards portended the embourgeoisement of the working class, particularly after a third successive election defeat in 1959. This joined with nostalgia for the close-knit working-class community allegedly found in the inner-city slums. A 1957 book, Family and Kinship in East London, written by Michael Young—a key Labour intellectual—and Peter Willmott, was a foundational text.
In fact, the quest for “Community”—supposedly lost in slum clearance and absent from the new council estates—was a mantra for post-war planners of all persuasions but it sat uneasily with Labour activists’ embrace of architectural modernism and high-rise living. Child, making good use of the work of Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: Individualism and the Search for Community in Post-war England (2019), concludes that “‘community’ as understood by Labour could not be located as it had never existed in the first place” (140).” There were, of course, practical pressures towards building at higher density in urban centers, but for many in Labour, the well-equipped modern flat was also a practical exemplar of a socialist future. The powerful backlash against tall blocks, emerging by the late 1960s, presented particular problems for Labour and metropolitan Labour councils.
Child’s book usefully discusses several topics of current relevance, such as New Towns and long-running and ongoing debates over how best to tax land or acquire it cheaply for social purposes. However, earnest discussions around land nationalization are unlikely to be replicated in our contemporary and more conservative politics.
In all this, one senses an approximate periodization that saw early post-war ideals buffeted by political adversity in the 1950s, revived by sixties’ technologism, and quashed by the economic travails and reaction against modernist overreach of the later 1960s. It feels, for all the useful corrective provided by Child, that ultimately a broader economic and political context was more determinant of housing policy than the ideology of Labour activists. The latter seem here a rather amorphous category, embracing both Labour-affiliated middle-class professionals whose thinking reflected much broader trends in post-war planning and an ill-defined “rank and file.” Labour councilors, arguably the activists par excellence and the people explicitly tasked with implementing (so far as they were able) party ideals and policy, seem somewhat underrepresented and the actual work of Labour councils too briefly referenced.
This is an interesting book providing a thorough and thoughtful analysis of Labour thinking and culture that has been neglected, as Child rightly argues, in much of the historiography. It will be valuable to urban historians, housing academics, and political scientists. Its academic form and pricing will likely preclude a wider readership, just as the ideological debates and practical challenges it describes assume greater relevance in a new era of Labour government.
