The history of social housing in Tower Hamlets

Nineteenth-century philanthropists

The first attempts to react to the crisis of overcrowding and insanitary housing in the mid-nineteenth century were by philanthropists who set up housing organisations. The Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Poor opened a lodging house for 300 men in Spicer Street in 1850. The philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts had Columbia Square built in Bethnal Green. In 1864 the Peabody Trust opened flats in Commercial Street. Many blocks in what is now Tower Hamlets were built by the East End Dwellings Company. The Four Per-Cent Industrial Dwellings Company was founded by Sir Nathaniel Rothschild in 1885 to provide homes for Jewish refugees fleeing from persecution in eastern Europe.

Peabody Square, Shadwell, 1867. Copyright Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

The beginnings of local authority housing

Under the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act of 1875, the Metropolitan Board of Works was empowered to clear houses from areas unfit for human habitation and replace them with improved dwellings. Many schemes under this act were carried out locally including several in Whitechapel as well as in Cable Street and Tench Street in Wapping. The Metropolitan Board of Works was succeeded by the London County Council. The first major project of slum clearance and rebuilding undertaken by the LCC was in an infamous area of Bethnal Green known as “the Nichol”. The LCC built the Boundary Estate on the 15 acre site: 23 blocks containing a total of 1,069 flats. The estate is now a conservation area.

Plan of the Boundary Estate, Bethnal Green, c 1900

The three borough councils of Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney also started to provide housing schemes in the early twentieth century. One of the most innovative was Poplar Council’s Chapel House Estate on the Isle of Dogs, a cottage estate in the “Garden City” spirit. Poplar was also responsible for strikingly modern flats such as Providence House in Limehouse Hole, with its almost unbroken series of concrete balconies wrapping around the building. Stepney Borough Council’s schemes included the prestigious Riverside Mansions in Wapping and the ultra-modern John Scurr House in Ratcliff. Bethnal Green’s first scheme was the Bethnal Green Estate of 1922-24, four neo-Georgian blocks around a central courtyard.

Providence House, Poplar, 1935. Copyright Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

For more historic images of social housing in Tower Hamlets visit the Digital Gallery at the Idea Store website: http://www.ideastore.co.uk/en/articles/information_digital_gallery