Municipal Dreams

What to do with unacceptable tenants?

We left Huddersfield in last week’s post in 1951 planning for the future.

We left Huddersfield last week poised to play its part, with plans to build 1200 new council homes, in the ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ promised by prime minister Lloyd George at the end of the First World War.

Huddersfield deserves to be better regarded.

The trustees of the Octavia Hill Birthplace Museum are disposing of its Harry Simpson Memorial Library in September, next month.

We left Bedford last week in the midst of war but, like many towns in the country, thinking ahead.

A joke about Bedford is that no-one, perhaps even some amongst its residents, is quite sure where it is.

In last week’s post, we examined both the opposition to the London County Council’s new Kingswood Estate in West Dulwich and the high hopes placed in it.

The Kingswood Estate in West Dulwich, planned in the late 1940s by the London County Council (LCC) as a showpiece of its day, proved controversial in both inception and execution; the subject of initial hostility from some less than welcoming neighbours a…

Hofjes are Dutch courtyard almshouses.

Adam Voelcker, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist (University of Wales Press, 2025) I’m not going to write much today as the real knowledge and expertise here lies with Adam Voelcker, an architect in Wales who has combined a…

Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: a History of Social Housing (Leicester Pioneer Press, 2025) When I started this blog almost twelve years ago, council housing was a strangely neglected and too often stigmatised topic both in terms of academic…

Last week’s post examined Michiel Brinkman’s Justus van Effen Estate in Rotterdam, a 1920s’ pioneer of deck-access housing.