Immediately after the Second World War, with a pressing need for accommodation of any kind, an increasing number of families became involved in large-scale squatting campaigns, particularly to make use of decommissioned military camps and other decommissioned dwellings. There was an acute shortage of properties for households leaving service life, and for those whose homes had been destroyed by bombing. Local ad hoc ‘committees’, often of ex-service personnel, installed homeless families in vacant houses under cover of night, there to remain until the absentee owners could initiate legal proceedings against them. In the following years, such action grew to include the forced occupation of hundreds of army and air force camps no longer needed for military purposes. Settlers in the Sheffield area formed a Squatters’ Protection Society and linked up with other pioneer squatters from similar urban areas like Scunthorpe. The government announced by October 1946 that 1,038 camps in England and Wales had been occupied by 39,535 people, and that 4,000 people had squatted in Scotland. Later in the year the Ministry of Works offered the Ministry of Health (then the department responsible for housing) an additional 850 former service camps to use.
Substantial numbers of permanent new dwellings were clearly essential, and the post-war government instigated an entire revised town planning regime as an integral element of what was sought from the new welfare state, with a programme for building new towns across the UK from the later 1940s onwards. In the new towns themselves, the ethos was substantially that housebuilding and neighbourhood development should be the responsibility of the local state and its local development corporations. Nevertheless, construction within the urban settlement areas during the 1950s and 1960s still saw contributions by private engagements through organised self-build groups where future residents pooled their trades and skills together for common benefit. The promotion of self-build plots in new towns was modest in scale, at times just targeted at attracting senior executive households into specific local areas – in later developments, like in Milton Keynes, more opportunities were included for self-build activity, as this had been receiving wider coverage in the public debate on housing opportunities at that time.
As the euphoria of the first new town developments began to wane and core political support began change, criticism of local authority competencies to manage and maintain the public sector housing stock became more strident. Opportunities were sought by council tenants to establish new tenant management organisations, set up to take over the direct management of local and neighbourhood housing services by local tenants themselves. Government assistance programmes in the 1970s and 1980s subsequently promoted grant finance towards the management of homes for low- and middle-income families from new housing co-operatives and other self-help housing organisations, at times set up as ‘short life’ co-operatives for temporary use of properties emptied under plans for wider urban redevelopment programmes or left under-used by absentee owners.
A further impetus to co-operative housing activity came in the 1960s with the promotion and development of co-ownership schemes – property built and managed by a collective group of residents, paying a monthly rental to redeem the mortgage originally borrowed to build their homes. The affordability of the tenure was in turn assisted by government tax relief on the mortgage loan. Over 40,000 co-ownership homes were built and operated up to the early 1980s. From the 1990s onwards, when state support began to diminish, larger housing associations become a more favoured social housing delivery mechanism, rather than through small bodies like the co-ops. Some co-operatives subsequently developed other independent means to raise building funds, such as innovative ideas for new loanstock arrangements.
The focus on doing things in common with others was also apparent within the 1960s and 1970s by a rising interest to create ‘alternatives’ to orthodox or mainstream social settings, informed not least by interest in the international ‘hippy’ movement. A classic (and stereotypical) feature of this time was the rise of communes as a basis for alternative communities between people sharing similar ideas and values, often as a means to avoid any adoption of conventional forms of individual ownership or property speculation (even drawing from precedents like the Diggers protests in the Jacobean age). As memorably summarised by Chris Coates in his two works Utopia Britannica and Communes Britannica, what developed from the 1960s onwards was a variety of permanent and transient communities in which families and groups explored the latest ideas about personal and social relationships and the impact of these upon political commitments.
Whilst substantial amounts of public housing were still built into the 1970s, it was also a time of growing political and social engagement with ideas to support private sector home ownership, an interest that can be seen to have initiated the present-day dominance by private sector developers and housebuilding firms over new supply. An individualistic appeal of building a new property for one’s own household grew in tandem with this, and independent self-build consultants found sites for small schemes on which groups of self-builders would collaborate and then purchase the properties on completion of the scheme. By the 1980s further initiatives for low-tech self-build (like the Segal simplified timber-frame technique) and community self-build schemes were set up in order to help households on lower incomes take part in such activity, with programmes of public grants being available to local groups and their development partners – usually local housing associations.
Community-led innovations continued to emerge during the 1980s and 1990s, and many local initiatives were progressed by new community development trusts that could function as the means to focus local concerns into activity that could bring commercial and financial benefits back to local communities. Concerns also emerged on how construction and development projects might reduce their impact upon the health of local people and upon the natural environment. Low-impact housing schemes promoted ‘green’ designs and eco-architecture, and proposals for large and holistic ecovillages emerged from groups of eco-minded professionals and prospective residents seeking to implement such ideals on significant scales. There was also the first successful examples of UK cohousing neighbourhoods, demonstrating the dynamics to be achieved from collaborative engagements between households at a slightly smaller scale.
Finally, now well into the 21st century, new initiatives continue to be explored, such as the community land trusts established by local communities seeking to secure affordable housing as a long-term local asset, or to be the vehicle for acquiring larger areas of land, such as the purchase of the island of Eigg by a community heritage body set up for that end.
The contemporary context
Initial response to the ‘financial crisis’ in western industrial societies during 2007 and 2008 brought forward a number of observations from political commentators on the apparent failure of international housing and finance markets to meet social needs in a sustainable, efficient or prudent way. The first months of that crisis included frank public criticism of the malevolent aspect of prevailing ‘market forces’, and how the actions of influential speculators had proved to be so destructively self-serving. Yet in a short space of time, a willingness to explore what could remedy the causes of a ‘failing market’ has been subsumed within an alternative focus and narrative of a ‘crisis’ in providing enough new properties, especially affordable and accessible properties, for the future. Even the Government White Paper from 2017 – starkly titled ‘Fixing Our Broken Housing Market’ – quickly moves from a critical stance on housing provision being unduly reliant on the dominant interests of volume housebuilders to a set of proposals for increasing future supply largely through a greater level of output from the same providers. The conclusions of that White Paper were that an increased number of new homes would be sufficient to transform the failing market and usher in a more affordable future, rather than the market needing more fundamental change.
This focus on a perceived crisis in delivery levels obstructs a real challenge being promoted on what could persist as underlying factors of the original market failure. Evidence continues to come forward of the shortcomings in conventional planning and construction undertaken by the same suppliers that are still courted by government policy. Among these shortcomings are the significant limitations in housing design and the poor quality of new neighbourhoods,3 where a lack of basic community facilities raises serious concern that such areas will in no way be ‘sustainable’