Mona Gainer-Salim
This research piece is a companion to Loren Kaye’s photographic project Mayfair Exposed. Learning from Loren about Mayfair’s social housing blocks, I became interested in exploring what seemed to me an urgent question: what has been, and what ought to be, done about the fundamental human need for shelter in a volatile, unequal world? I wanted to follow the thread of this question as it pertained to Mayfair, tracing how it first came to be raised in the 19th century, how it evolved in the 20th and remains a highly contentious political issue in the early 21st.
With its luxury stores and opulent hotels, Mayfair may seem an unlikely place for social housing. Yet not only does it have its share of historic and modern examples, it also offers surprisingly fertile terrain for exploring the subject more broadly. As a 2014 planning document points out, Westminster council (which includes Mayfair) tends to produce housing at opposite ends of the spectrum: so-called ‘affordable’ housing (defined as at least 20% below market rate) and housing that costs in excess of £1 million. [1] As such, it is home to people with extraordinarily different housing situations and possibilities, from homeless people and rough sleepers to the owners of some of the most expensive properties in the world, as well as just about everyone in between: renters of social, ‘affordable’ and private flats, and both resident and absentee owners. As Loren’s photographs so eloquently show the overlooked faces of Mayfair, so this piece attempts to shed light on the underdocumented side of Mayfair’s housing story. As far as I’m aware, social housing in Mayfair is also a topic that hasn’t been treated independently elsewhere.
What follows is by no means an exhaustive account, and though I have made every attempt to draw judiciously on the work of historians and sociologists, blind spots undoubtedly remain. Despite the gaps, I hope this piece can be a valuable starting point for those interested in the intersection of Mayfair and Britain’s social housing history. I would be happy to hear from anyone who can help further fill in the picture.
The lay of the land
Mayfair’s identity as a fashionable, affluent area dates back to its very beginnings. The area’s development began in earnest in the 17th century, when mansions and grand homes were erected on the north side of Piccadilly, opposite the newly built and wealthy neighbourhood of St James’s. The area of St James’s itself had been recently adopted by the aristocracy after the twin disasters of the Plague and the Great Fire of London in the mid-1660s caused them to leave the City of London further east. From there, development in Mayfair spread roughly north-westwards. The north-west corner of Mayfair was the last to be built on, not long after the middle of the 1700s.
Unlike many London neighbourhoods, the area of Mayfair is clearly defined on all four sides, forming a roughly rhomboid shape. This is owed to the fact that it lies between two former thoroughfares out of London, shown as ‘The Road to Exeter &c.’ (now Piccadilly) and ‘The Road to Oxford, Worcester &c.’ (now Oxford Street) on Morden and Lea’s c. 1700 map of London. To the west, Mayfair is bordered by Hyde Park, which was acquired by Henry VIII in 1536 as a private hunting ground and subsequently opened to the public by Charles I in 1637. The east side was the last to be enclosed, when architect John Nash’s Regent Street was completed in 1820. This separated the fashionable area of Mayfair from the slums of Soho, reinforcing the social disparity between the two neighbourhoods through a physical boundary.
From the start, the development of Mayfair was led by the aristocracy, in the form of large hereditary estates which in at least one case retain ownership of large swathes of the area to this day. Some of Mayfair’s earliest mansions, along Piccadilly, were built for Lords Burlington, Clarendon and Berkeley; today Burlington House is known as the home of the Royal Academy of Arts. The Grosvenor Estate, which would play an important role in the development of early social housing in the area, occupies the north-west corner of Mayfair with Grosvenor Square at its centre. This area, called the Hundred Acres in some early deeds, is part of some 500 acres of property that passed to the Grosvenor family when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies, the daughter of a City scrivener (notary), in 1677. The Grosvenors, an ancient land-owning family from Cheshire, thus became the richest urban landlords in the country. This privileged position translated increasingly to political power, through advancements in the peerage that culminated in the dukedom of Westminster in 1874. Today, the title of Duke of Westminster is retained by Hugh Grosvenor, ‘the UK’s richest millennial’ in the words of one newspaper, with holdings estimated to be worth $13.1 billion as of November 2024 [2].
1849: THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIAL HOUSING IN MAYFAIR
Besides Mayfair’s upper-crust inhabitants, the area had a sizeable working-class population of shopkeepers, artisans and staff serving the grand houses of the aristocracy. The Survey of London’s highly informative 1980 publication on the history of the Grosvenor Estate identifies a tight cluster of mews just north of Berkeley Square as an area occupied, logically enough, by ‘coachmen, grooms and others involved with horses and carriages’, but also ‘domestic servants, building workers, victuallers and a variety of lesser tradesmen’.[3] Living conditions in the small houses and rooms above the stables and coachhouses were cramped, and disease was both a risk and a reality: in 1858, a local landlord was prosecuted for allowing dangerous overcrowding in his property. Many residents of these streets were recipients of relief, as is recorded in a charity book of nearby St George’s church. Today this area, centred around Bourdon Street, has a feeling of privacy and enclosure, very different from the bustling shopping streets which surround it. It is accessed by a number of passageways too narrow for cars, and the presence of several art galleries, including the world-famous Gagosian Gallery, is remarkably discreet. In one passageway, a public sculpture by Neal French portrays the model Twiggy striking a pose for photographer Terence Donovan while a passing shopper looks on (Donovan had his studio in Bourdon Street from the 1970s until his death in 1996).
It was St George’s Parochial Association, which later became the St George’s Workmen’s Model Dwellings Association, which in 1849 instigated the first ‘working-class dwellings’ on the Grosvenor Estate and, to my knowledge, in Mayfair as a whole. The two blocks the association built in the neighbourhood survive and are in fact both still reserved for social renters today. The first, built in 1853, was St George’s Buildings on Bourdon Street, facing a row of handsome gabled red-brick coach houses which have also survived intact. Set on a gentle rise, its tall buff-coloured side elevation immediately marks the building out as distinct. It provided sixteen neat two-room flats, arranged over four floors with open galleries facing the street. Each flat is quite touchingly entered through its own street-facing front door, a design choice that effectively demarcates the private realm, however modest, from the public. A fifth storey was added in the 1870s.
Between 1854 and 1858, John Newson, the builder who had completed St George’s Buildings for the parochial association, undertook to build his own block of workers’ flats, on a corner site less than a minute’s walk east down Bourdon Street. This robust five-storey building provided room for twenty-eight families. It was named Bloomfield Buildings, after the maiden name of Newson’s wife, and, while it was eventually replaced by a newer apartment block, the name lives on in the narrow passage linking the mews area to swanky New Bond Street: Bloomfield Place. Around the same time Newson built another block for workers, Oxford House, a five minutes’ walk north on part of the former site of the failed Grosvenor Market (locals preferred St George’s Market nearby). This building, however, was demolished in 1889, making room for the sumptuous showroom and factory of John Bolding and Sons, ‘Manufacturers of sanitary Appliances, Brass Founders, and Metal Merchants’, as an ornate plaque on the façade explains. These days the building is occupied by Grays Antique Market.
Back on Bourdon Street, St George’s added a fourth block, Grosvenor Buildings, in 1868–9 (extended in 1891–2). Rising to five stories, it is located between St George’s Buildings and the former site of Bloomfield Buildings. It appears more austere and massive than its neighbour, lacking the open galleries and banded with grey and red brick.
In keeping with the incipient Victorian ‘model dwellings’ movement – which I will discuss in more detail below – the new working-class flats were accompanied by several public amenities designed to cater for the sanitary and spiritual needs of the poor. Public baths and wash houses were installed in a former coach builder’s workshop to coincide with the construction of St George’s Buildings. In 1880–1 a modest church, St Mary’s, followed. Even a refuge for ‘fallen women’ was built on Bourdon Street in the late 1880s – with a chapel on the premises, naturally. Meanwhile, St George’s Institute, erected in 1883–4, provided a large hall, ‘a gymnasium, parochial kitchen, library, boys’ club, working-men’s club and small flats for parish workers’ [4] as well as an attached further block of working-men’s flats called Bourdon Buildings. This institute, like the church and public baths, was eventually demolished.
CHANGING TIMES
At the same time the first social housing initiatives were breaking ground in Mayfair, the country was undergoing a period of upheaval, if not of reckoning. The 19th century was a time of growing national concern about the plight of Britain’s poor, including housing conditions. Before the industrial revolution, when the pace of technological and societal change was slow and most of the population rural, the ruling class had little incentive to question the prevailing laissez-faire approach to economic and social problems, as described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Matters would sort themselves out, the thinking went, and government interference was considered to be both undesirable and unnecessary. [5] This complacency, however, became unsustainable faced with the dizzying growth of the industrial town, where thousands were coralled together in dangerously overcrowded, unsafe and polluted lodgings with paltry legal protections and no national social infrastructure whatsoever. Those who became unemployed or ill, grew old, were orphaned, or in the case of women were widowed, divorced or became pregnant outside of marriage, often had no other option but to enter the workhouse, a spectacularly cruel institution that separated families, forced inmates to labour for their keep and deliberately created terrible living conditions in order to ‘encourage’ inmates to seek employment. As John Nelson Tarn observes in Five Per Cent Philanthropy (1973), his fascinating study of urban housing in Britain between 1840 and 1914, by the mid-19th century all the former prestige of cities as elegant gathering places had given way to a mixture of fear and guilt:
The industrial town now fast assumed a predatory quality; people were afraid of the physical problems it engendered, afraid too of the uncontrollable mob, learning to speak with a unified voice through their first attempts at combination. In addition, there was from time to time a growing feeling of guilt which was a new reaction to such a situation. Had it been right for so long to treat the working classes, men, women and children, as sub-human fodder for the great machine, a class of person without feeling or any right to basic human dignity? Many began to feel uneasy about the way in which they had achieved their wealth and it was not only the fear of revolution, politically, but the rise of a queasy Christian conscience which caused some of them to feel a moral obligation to interest themselves in welfare work of various kinds. [6]
A parallel development was underway in the literary and academic spheres. Dickens, the literary superstar of the age, himself experienced the misery of Victorian poverty as a child when his father was sent to debtors’ prison and he was forced to help support his family by working in a boot-blacking factory. Later, he made working-class and poor people the protagonists of his work and became a powerful champion of children’s rights. From 1886 to 1903, Charles Booth undertook his seminal study of poverty in London, resulting in the publication of his colour-coded poverty maps in 17 volumes – the first time poverty was taken as an object of systematic investigation. Studying Booth’s map of Mayfair, one can see that among the yellow (‘Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy.’) and red (‘Middle class. Well-to-do.’) are numerous sections of light red (‘Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.’), though the blue to black colour range denoting poverty is absent. Though Booth still framed poverty in moral terms – qualifying the ‘Lowest class’ as ‘Vicious, semi-criminal’ – his work helped shift the conception of poverty away from one of individual moral deficiency (to be assuaged through ‘self-help’ or charity) towards that of a structural problem that could be addressed through social policy. Another influential study was undertaken in York by Seebohm Rowntree.
Britain’s elites may have conducted studies and nursed guilty consciences, but they also felt pressure from the country’s early labour movements, though not directly where housing was concerned. In the 19th century the urban workforce, the descendants of those who had first moved to the cities to work in the new factories, began to see themselves as a class with particular concerns and interests and, only too plainly, a glaring lack of political power. Karl Marx famously described this class’s relationship to the means of production in Capital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894. The nascent labour movements recognized that housing was a symptom of the way in which power was concentrated, guarded and perpetuated, and it was at this highly unequal distribution of power that they squarely aimed their campaigns. The Chartist movement, often considered the first mass labour movement in history, presented its People’s Charter to parliament in 1838, outlining six demands: suffrage for all men aged 21 and over (women, of course, were excluded), voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies, pay for MPs, an end to the property qualification for Parliament, and annual parliamentary elections. All but the final demand were eventually acceded to, though only in increments up to 1918. Simply put, 19th-century labour had bigger fish to fry than housing.
What aristocratic soul-searching, sociological research and labour organizing could not accomplish on their own was hastened by current events. War played a crucial role in expanding rights for poor and working people. From 1899 to 1902, the British Empire fought the Second Boer War in South Africa, a conflict notorious today for the war crimes committed by British troops, including the incarceration of Boers in concentration camps. While recruiting soldiers in Britain, it was discovered that a third of volunteers were medically unfit to serve. Concern about Britain’s military preparedness, especially in the face of a rising Germany, prompted a slate of social reforms aimed towards improving the health (and military calibre) of the population: the introduction of free school meals in 1906, old age pensions in 1908, National Health Insurance and Unemployment Insurance in 1911. It took a further war for these momentous reforms to be expanded to housing. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 marked a turning point in the history of housing in Britain and was a direct consequence of World War I, when a scarcity of materials and labour made building new housing unprofitable for private developers. There was also a new consensus that government ought to provide decent housing for those who had fought the war on its behalf. Thus, for the first time, local councils were placed at the helm of an ambitious national house-building programme.
FIVE-PERCENT PHILANTHROPY ON THE GROSVENOR ESTATE
Before 1919, some local councils – including Westminster, which encompasses Mayfair – undertook the odd social housing project, mostly to rehouse people displaced by public works projects. These, however, were few and far between, and the provision of housing for working-class or poor people was firmly in the hands of private enterprise, in the form of charitable trusts or ‘model dwellings companies’. These organizations operated on a model that came to be known as ‘five-percent philanthropy’, based on an understanding that five percent was an acceptable return on investment for shareholders. John Nelson Tarn described the charitable impulse behind five-percent philanthropy strikingly as ‘a peculiar Victorian habit, a penance for more fulsome success elsewhere’. [7]
The largest such company was founded by the American-born banker George Peabody, who grew up poor himself and whose name is still borne by the large Peabody housing association today. Almost as important, and especially in the context of Mayfair, was the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company (I.I.D.C.) founded by Sydney Waterlow in 1863. Waterlow was the son of a London stationer who together with his three brothers expanded the family business into a successful printing company. He entered politics as a city councillor in 1857 and six years later built a small block of flats in Finsbury intended for working-class occupants. The I.I.D.C. was founded on the strength of this well-received project. Its approach was concisely expressed by Waterlow as follows:
All I have endeavoured to show is that capital, expended in the erection of light, cheerful, healthy habitations for the industrial classes in crowded cities, may be made to yield a fair interest on its investment, if care is taken to avoid extravagance in external architectural decoration or loss by large management expenses. [8]
Lord Ebury, a senior member of the Grosvenor family, presided over the opening of Waterlow’s Finsbury flats in 1863, and a few years later the family approached the I.I.D.C. to build the first of its Mayfair blocks. (The family had been involved in organizing the construction of the earlier blocks by the St George’s association, but had yet to initiate and sponsor its own such project.) This was Clarendon Buildings on Balderton (then George) Street, built in 1871–72. A local reverend was charged with reviewing applications for the 38 new flats, which were intended for ‘mechanics and others’ earning within a certain wage range. [9] Rents were set relatively high, but there were still almost five times as many applicants as there were places – a situation that will be familiar to anyone applying for social housing in a large UK city today (the waiting time for a social flat in Westminster is 10 years at the time of writing).
The Grosvenor Estate and the I.I.D.C. were both eager to build more blocks: local clergymen had been fielding complaints about certain houses in the area, and Clarendon Buildings was evidently a great success, with one local reverend praising it in 1881 as ‘a great civilizer’ which had ‘exercised a very marked influence for good in the Parish’. [10] But finding suitable sites for new buildings proved difficult. In 1886 a large group of leases finally expired in a compact grid of streets just south of Oxford Street, bordered to the west by Balderton Street and to the east by Davies Street. When these sites became available, the Estate and the Company were ready with a comprehensive rebuilding plan that would result in nine new buildings offering room for some 332 families. The project promptly broke ground in 1886 and proceeded roughly from west to east, concluding in 1892 with the Moore Buildings named after the Company’s secretary James Moore, who largely directed the undertaking.
As before, the local reverend was consulted on the question of who should occupy the new ‘model dwellings’. In 1888 James Moore – with more than a hint of Victorian paternalism – proposed that the tenants of Clarendon Buildings, completed some 15 years prior, were good candidates for the new flats; Clarendon Buildings could then be used for new tenants ‘who had not been used to a model lodging house [and] would be gradually improved before moving into new buildings’. [11] In the end, the landlords settled on the obvious solution of offering the new flats to the tenants of the buildings that had just been demolished to make way for the new blocks. The tenants moved in gradually as building proceeded and in fact enjoyed a reduction in rent.
The nine handsome blocks built between 1886 and 1892 illustrate several typical features of late 19th-century housing philanthropy. Both the I.I.D.C. and George Peabody’s Trust were criticized for building not for the poorest in society, but for a more comfortable class often referred to at the time as ‘artisans’, ‘industrial classes’ or ‘labouring classes’ – people who were ‘thrifty – as opposed to thriftless’, as John Nelson Tarn memorably put it. [12] The reason for this lay in a mixture of economic constraint and prevailing moral attitudes. Lodgings constructed for the poor, which would have had to be offered at lower rents, would have struggled to reach the five percent rate of return expected by shareholders. To reduce costs, corners would have had to be cut in construction, resulting in buildings whose quality the philanthropists were loath to endorse. There was also a notion that good-quality housing would in some sense be wasted on the very poor. It was believed that ‘artisans’ were capable of being morally ‘improved’ by better lodgings; the very poor, however, were seen as being too mired in social problems for this to do them much good. Victorian urban philanthropy was a paternalistic enterprise. The rich, it was presumed, could perk up the moral character of the poor by building housing, churches and public wash houses. These freighted facilities were handed down from on high; the idea that communities might know best what they needed and should shape the design of their neighbourhoods, for instance, would have seemed absurd. Any modern account of the work of these Victorian philanthropists must contend with this troubling attitude and the assumptions behind it – without of course mistaking it as being confined to the past. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that between them these wealthy Victorians housed tens of thousands of people and genuinely improved lives – even as those in the most urgent need were left empty-handed.
The north-west Mayfair blocks – which all still stand today – are typical of the I.I.D.C’s buildings in other regards. The I.I.D.C. espoused self-contained flats with integrated lavatories and sculleries, unlike the Peabody Trust, which located these facilities in communal areas. It seems to have been generally agreed that the I.I.D.C.’s buildings, on the whole, were more agreeable to live in and look at. The flats were finished with plaster, had fireplaces and good ventilation. Because the I.I.D.C. had fewer resources than the Trust, its buildings tended to line the street, often replacing a dilapidated terraced row, while the Trust could afford to build whole complexes centred around large courtyards. The sheer bulk of the Trust’s buildings, combined with limited decoration on the façades, could make them appear austere. The I.I.D.C.’s buildings varied considerably (and in fact it did not employ a designated architect), but bay windows and open galleries facing the street, often rather graceful, were recurring features. Clarendon Buildings in north Mayfair has such galleries, flanked on either side by a fully enclosed section punctuated by large sash windows. Limited but effective ornament – wrought iron railings, various decorative scrolls and pilasters – allows the building to blend well with its surroundings.
The nine blocks added later were generally built in a more minimal style, but had their own attractions. Hugh Grosvenor, the newly created 1st Duke of Westminster, took an active interest in their aesthetic quality. At his request, whimsical gable features were set into the mansard roofs and the buildings were finished with red brick even though this was more expensive than the plainer brick originally proposed. The blocks were also arranged in a way that opened up private, relatively spacious courtyards between several buildings, some of which have today been verdantly planted. A public garden (now called Brown Hart Gardens) was opened directly next to the flats. All in all, these were good flats built to last, which still today offer hundreds of people the opportunity to live in the heart of central London at social rents.
THE ACTION MOVES ELSEWHERE
By the turn of the century, the heyday of Victorian housing philanthropy had passed, and in 1919, as a result of the landmark housing act, the government took over house building for the masses in a big way. State-sponsored social housing would become a vital sector of the UK’s housing landscape until, at its high point in 1979, 31% of people in England were renting from social providers, including councils and housing associations. [13] For Mayfair, on the other hand, the new national house-building programme ushered in a long period of relative dormancy in regard to social housing. In the inter-war years, urban councils focused intensively on what was then known as ‘slum clearance’ and today might be called ‘urban regeneration’. Post-WWII, social housing was increasingly built in suburban areas where land was available and, crucially, cheaper. Mayfair, as a densely built-up, affluent area lacking anything remotely resembling slums, was evidently exempt from such schemes.
It is still worth briefly examining the national picture, to understand how profoundly the country’s approach to social housing had changed by the time Mayfair’s story picks up again in the early 2000s. Some of the themes of 19th-century housing philanthropy persisted in Britain’s earliest state-sponsored social housing developments in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the first projects to break ground were many ‘garden estates’ located on the outskirts of cities. These were usually made up of three-bedroom houses, each with its own ‘generous size garden to encourage the tenants to grow their own vegetables, a privet hedge at the front and an apple tree at the back’. [14] Infrastructure in the form of shops and schools was provided – but not pubs, at least initially. For most renters, coming from overcrowded slum housing, these idyllic houses were a huge step up. Funding came from a combination of rents, local taxes and the Treasury. Though on the surface these garden cities didn’t resemble Victorian tenements, both shared a commitment to durable, quality housing, while also being intended for a working class clientele who could afford to pay the relatively high rents. The poor, again, were excluded from this new opportunity.
Over the course of the 1920s, the idealism of the garden estates gave way to a more pragmatic approach which finally allowed for some long overdue relief for poorer citizens. During this period, houses generally grew smaller, with some compromises on quality, though in general the standard remained high. The inter-war years also saw a strong emphasis on slum clearance, with many councils opting to build low-rise blocks of flats to replace derelict slum buildings. Owing to limited space and cost considerations, estates continued to be built in suburban areas. This meant that, while many poorer people previously excluded from decent housing were now able to afford it, they often had to sacrifice the significant benefits of urban life – community, street life, walkability, transport, proximity to shopping, services, culture and entertainment – that could not be easily replaced in the often rather sterile suburban environments into which they moved. A number of long-established working class communities were casualities of this chapter of social progress.
World War II effectively put a stop to house building as the country’s resources were directed to the war effort. After the war, the new Labour government made the large-scale provision of housing a priority. An expectant public, combined with widespread bomb damage, created enormous pressure to build, and built fast. To meet the demand, councils embraced new building techniques focused on speed and volume, such as factory-built, site-assembled ‘prefab’ homes and ‘PRC’ (pre-cast reinforced concrete) builds. ‘Prefabs’ were billed as temporary accommodation, intended to last only ten years, but proved so popular with some residents that an estimated 8,000 are still standing as of 2022, many of them lived in and some even listed. There is even a Prefab Museum run by and for enthusiasts of ‘post-war prefabs and prefab life’. Still, both prefabs and PRCs were stop-gap measures. PRCs in particular would cause problems later on, when their structural elements began to corrode while they were still being relied upon by residents and councils. For the time being, though, the urgent housing need that followed the war was alleviated.
In the post-war decades, housing demand continued to grow in tandem with the baby boom and the ongoing urbanization of Britain. The Conservative governments of this period on the one hand placed a greater share of the responsibility for house building back into the hands of the private sector, and on the other embraced a state housing policy that encouraged the building of high-rises. In the architectural community, utopian modernist ideas such as ‘streets in the sky’, inspired above all by Le Corbusier, resulted in the development of a style of estate that mixed low- and high-rise buildings, with integrated public areas and plans – sometimes unrealized – for shops and amenities. Between the 1950s and 1970s, estates continued to be built in city centres, but an increasing number were built in peripheral areas where infrastructure was poor and slow to develop. All this amounted to a somewhat chequered legacy for the social housing of this period. Too many estates were poorly built, or built according to grand ideals instead of the real needs of people. On the other hand, the innovatory spirit of architects at the time resulted in some intelligently conceived, iconic estates which are still popular with residents to this day, like the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate in Kilburn, North West London.
The Housing Act of 1980, passed by Margaret Thatcher’s government, changed everything. While councils had previously been allowed to sell off houses, they were now required to offer them to tenants at a discount under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. At the same time, investment in new council housing was curtailed, making it impossible to replenish council-owned housing stock. Some people benefitted enormously from Right to Buy, buying houses at up to 60% off market rate – houses which in many cases have increased tenfold in value over the last three or four decades. However, in macro-economic terms, the policy of selling off council housing without replacing it has been nothing short of disastrous. As many of the best houses were bought by tenants, councils were left with the least desirable, ageing housing stock which required expensive upkeep for which scant funds were made available. Even as low- and moderately priced state-sponsored housing became scarce, the need for it did not – on the contrary. Most renters had no choice but to weather an open market which offered them few protections, even as property values and rents skyrocketed. The policy succeeded in its goal of making council housing largely into a ‘residual’ service for the poorest in society, rather than a robust, integral part of the nation’s vision for housing. It is not surprising, then, that a stigma developed around social housing which is still alive and well in the 2020s.
THE AGE OF ‘AFFORDABLE’ HOUSING
Over the last three or four decades, a worsening shortage of social housing, coupled with a poorly regulated private rental market, has resulted in a permanent, ambient state of crisis. Council housing continued to be sold off throughout the 1990s, while governments focused on promoting home ownership and expanding the role of the private sector in housing provision.
Two main themes emerged in this period which characterize the housing situation in the UK today. The first is the rise of ‘affordable housing’, an attractive-sounding term which has become ubiquitous but whose meaning remains conveniently slippery. The attempt to formalize the term, in 2010, did not improve matters. Affordable housing was defined as housing rented at up to 80% of the local market rate – a far cry from traditional social rents, which are based on local incomes and tend to come in at around 50% of market rent. By ignoring the economic situation of the locals it is ostensibly for, ‘affordable’ has turned out to be a meaningless buzzword, a fig leaf for governments and developers who have little intent to pursue social housing in any serious way.
The second theme is the ever-increasing reliance on the private sector. Legislation from 1990 mandates that developers provide a certain proportion of affordable housing in projects of more than ten homes. Local authorities have generally set this requirement at 35–50%. However, in practice, this target is under constant assault from powerful developers who have become extremely skilled at negotiating a significantly lower proportion – often closer to 10% – by grossly underplaying their expected profits and exaggerating costs. This approach is applied without fail even though affordable housing does not represent a cost at all – merely a lower rate of profit. [15] In short, the affordable housing delivered by private developers is both scant and, for the most part, not affordable in any meaningful sense. Relying on them to provide it regardless has been a stunning policy failure.
Westminster council is aligned with the national trend, with a 35–50% affordable housing ‘target’ for private developments. [16] Still, as in other councils, this remains very much subject to negotiation. In 2021, a proposal to mandate affordable housing in new hotel developments was struck from the new Westminster City Plan [17] – a missed opportunity for Mayfair, which has several recent and ongoing luxury hotel developments, including the Mandarin Oriental opened in summer 2024 and The Chancery Rosewood being developed by the Qatari state’s real estate investment arm.
A local example of modern affordable housing can be found in Farm Street, not at all far from Bourdon Street. Here, an attractive five-storey block was completed in 2021 to fulfil the affordable housing requirement of the nearby luxury conversion Audley Square House. The building offers fourteen flats for key workers (people in essential professions like health, education and transport). Its architectural style is an example of the ‘New London Vernacular’, using brick to create a textured façade that references nearby historic buildings. In some ways, the building is clearly a positive contribution to the neighbourhood – adding a block with a strong identity of its own and avoiding the indignity of a separate entrance for social tenants. In other ways, it shows the limitations of the current system, which yokes affordable housing to luxury properties developed for private profit and capitalizes on the slipperiness of the ‘affordable’ label (it’s not clear whether any of the Farm Street flats are offered at social rents). It remains to be seen if the decade to come will bring policy changes that will finally allow for the expansion of desperately needed social housing in city centres and beyond.
[1] ‘Affordable Housing’, City of Westminster, December 2014, https://committees.westminster.gov.uk/documents/s9851/Affordable%20Housing.pdf
[2] Bloomberg Billionaires Index, https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/hugh-r-grosvenor
[3] ‘Bourdon Street and Grosvenor Hill Area’, Survey of London Vol. 40, p. 57–63, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol40/pt2/pp57-63
[4] Ibid.
[5] Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy, p. xiii, https://archive.org/details/fivepercentphila0000tarn/mode/2up
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 43.
[8] Ibid., p. 52.
[9] ‘Duke Street Area: Artisans’ Dwellings in the Duke Street Area’, Survey of London Vol. 40, p. 93–98, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol40/pt2/pp93-98
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy, p. 53.
[13] Cromarty and Barton, ‘Social rented housing in England’, p. 33, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8963/CBP-8963.pdf
[14] ‘The History of Council Housing’, UWE, https://fet.uwe.ac.uk/conweb/house_ages/council_housing/print.htm
[15] Oliver Wainwright, ‘Revealed: how developers exploit flawed planning system to minimise affordable housing’, The Guardian, 25 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/25/london-developers-viability-planning-affordable-social-housing-regeneration-oliver-wainwright
[16] ‘Planning Obligations and Affordable Housing SPD’, Westminster City Council, p. 13, 24–25.
[17] Alexandra Treacy, ‘Westminster removes affordable housing requirements for hotels’, Forsters, 14 May 2021, https://www.forsters.co.uk/news/blog/westminster-removes-affordable-housing-requirements-hotels