The Making of Our Urban Landscape by Geoffrey Tyack

Author:Geoffrey Tyack [Tyack, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192511232
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

New working-class housing was usually put up piecemeal, often in cramped courts and yards behind street frontages. There was nothing new about such developments; what was new was their sheer number, seen in Ordnance Survey maps of the late nineteenth century which show virtually every square yard of inner-city areas covered with housing, usually interspersed with factories and workshops. Courts, yards and alleys were often lined with ‘blind-back’ housing built against walls, or back-to-backs, where two sets of houses shared a back wall. Given the intense and growing demand for accommodation, the eagerness of landowners to sell their land, and the reluctance of public authorities to interfere with the working of the market, large numbers of people continued to live in this kind of environment well into the twentieth century. Back-to-backs continued to be built in Leeds and other towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire until the very end of the nineteenth century, when they were made illegal;29 improved late nineteenth-century versions still survive in Bradford and elsewhere. Giving evidence in 1840 to a House of Commons Select Committee on the Health of Towns, Thomas Cubitt, one of the most successful builders in early Victorian London, described the purchasers of urban slum housing as ‘the little shop-keeping class of persons’ living on rentier incomes:30 men like the oleaginous Mr Casby in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.31 Many of them used the profits derived from the rents of slum properties to develop the outer residential suburbs, and in this way slums and the suburbs were symbiotically linked.32

From the 1820s onwards, it became increasingly common to build new housing in rows or terraces along streets rather than within courts. This allowed for the introduction of better street lighting and policing: an important consideration as the propertied classes took fright from the prospect of a growing and potentially dangerous urban working class, revealed in the Chartist movement of the late 1830s and 1840s.33 New housing developments usually began with the sale of land to a speculator, after which streets were commonly laid out in parallel lines or grid-fashion. Most houses were of two storeys, entered directly from the street, with two rooms on each floor; a front parlour, back kitchen-cum-living room and upstairs bedrooms. A yard behind gave access to the scullery and outside toilet: a layout that was not very different from that found in the cottages of rural labourers that were going up at the same time. The Jericho suburb in Oxford,34 to take one example, went up on low-lying ground on the banks of the Oxford Canal (1790) next to the new printing house of the Oxford University Press, opened in 1830. A grid of streets was then laid out on freehold land which had been sold five years earlier, and brick houses were put up piecemeal by small builders over the next twenty or so years, creating a superficially homogeneous townscape that has changed relatively little despite the exodus of the working-class population due to high property prices and subsequent gentrification.

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