Beyond LiveWork by Frances Holliss

Author:Frances Holliss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317572503
Publisher: Routledge

Imposing a rigidly gendered division of labour

Discouraging and then prohibiting this working practice imposed a radical change of lifestyle on the many re-housed slum-dwellers who had been used to working at home. The family economy model was replaced by one of dependence on a male chief earner, who ‘went out to work’, leaving the wife to care for children and home. While a few occupations were fundamentally incompatible with a domestic setting, in general, this working practice had helped families stay above the breadline and allowed those with caring responsibilities, mainly women, to earn.

Howard’s ideas and the subsequent Garden City movement had a huge influence on early twentieth-century housing. Massive estates appeared, such as Becontree, where the London County Council (LCC) built 27,000 ‘homes for heroes’ around a small Essex village between 1921 and 1932 to house many of those displaced by slum clearance.21 This was built as a model ‘cottage-estate’:

… two-storey cottages, [were] built in groups of four or six, with medium or low pitched roofs and little exterior decoration, set amongst gardens, trees, privet hedges and grass verges and often laid out in cul-de-sacs or around greens.22

The houses were generally semi-detached or terraced, at a density of only twelve dwellings per acre, compared with 40 per acre for by-law housing23 or 80 per acre in the slums being demolished [Fig. 4.7].24 Spatially and in terms of amenity, they were far superior to those of the East End courts. Families used to the poor conditions of the East End were relocated on the clean and spacious Becontree estate, one family per fully serviced dwelling, with gas, electricity, hot and cold running water, an inside flushing WC and a fitted bath. Vera Andrews, resident of Downham, an LCC estate contemporary to Becontree, says:

FIG. 4.7 Becontree, later known as Dagenham, 1970

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