Part II – Debating Poverty: The Thinkers and their Arguments
Chapter 4 - Henrietta Barnett and the Redeeming Powers of Community
8. Housing as the Key to Social Salvation: Hampstead Garden Suburb
The project most firmly connected with the memory of Henrietta Barnett apart from Toynbee Hall doubtless is Hampstead Garden Suburb. The undertaking encompassed several of her central tenets in social reform, her insistence on personal development, her demand for restoration of the poor to industrial efficiency, her belief in the beneficial powers of nature, and most of all, her emphasis on community and close personal contact. “People cannot live by bread alone”, she wrote in an article on the Garden Suburb project. ”They need the stimulus of various interests, contact with nature and the neighbourhood of other classes to stir their minds and aspirations.”540 Hampstead Garden Suburb was designed to bring slum-dwellers closer to nature with all its beauties, and to offer them a plot of land to supplement their incomes. The physical labour in private gardens was supposed to improve the health and physique of the nation's poor. It also aimed at re-creating the tight social network connected in many people's minds with the image of the old rural village.
In 1904, the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, of which she was a leading member, acquired 240 acres at Hampstead Heath in order to transplant the idea of the model village along the lines of precedents such as Bournville or Port Sunlight into the city. The recent extension of the underground to Golder's Green had opened up the hitherto remote area for urban development. By 1908, the scheme of the Hampstead Garden Suburb was well under way with the architects Unwin and Parker building the first houses and streets in a manner carefully planned by the Trust members.
The new homes filled quickly with tenants from the middle and upper reaches of the metropolitan working classes as well as with members of the better-off sections of society who felt attracted by the natural beauty of the location. Ironically in view of the social reformist character of the original settlement, in today's London, Hampstead Garden Suburb caters mainly for house-owners of
538 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.149
539 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.171
540 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.73
wealthy middle-class origins or above. Constantine II, the last king of Greece, is among the residents, as is TV-presenter Jonathan Ross.
During her stay at Whitechapel, Barnett had come to realise the importance of housing in social reform. “A very short study of town life is enough to show that the dwellings of the people is one cause from which follows health or disease, happiness or misery, strength or weakness”541, she wrote in her article on Science and City Suburbs. The eugenicist Francis Galton, she related, had once suggested a study to see under which conditions gifted families arose and prospered most frequently. She demanded a similar study “showing the conditions under which have most frequently arisen the lazy, the vicious, the hopeless, the degraded, and the unemployable”542. She felt sure that such a study would immediately point to the deplorable state of slum tenements and the airless, lightless, spaceless set-up of poor neighbourhoods. The housing of the people, she held, was largely accountable for the evils – spiritual as well as physical – from which modern society suffered. “How can people persist in striving after the realisation of the spiritual life”, she asked,
“how can they rest in the knowledge of God when the normal decencies are denied to them, when their bodies are deprived of oxygen and their minds crushed by sordid surroundings?”543 Children grew up in these neighbourhoods surrounded by vice and temptation and familiarised with evil from early childhood. Adults lost the remnants of dignity, faith and conscience when all they saw was misery and crime.
Barnett quoted data gathered by the Medical Officer of Health at Finsbury, Dr. Newman, to illustrate the direct relation between the size of a tenement and the death rate. She cited his findings that for every one death in a three-room dwelling, three people died in a home of but one room.
While the overall infant mortality for England and Wales in 1906 was 196 children below the age of one in every 1000, in industrial Burnley, for instance, it was 229 in every 1000. And not only the high mortality alarmed Barnett. “Where the death-rate is high, there the vitality is low”, she concluded from the data available to her. “The people are tired, hopeless, fearful of adventuring either for work or for pleasure, disinclined to put forth effort, (...) falling into drunkenness, not so much from wilful wickedness as from dreariness, finding it (...) the cheapest method of escaping from the depressing influences of great cities and the unlovely barrack boxes or dirty alleys in which are situated the homes of the poor.”544
A series of physical examinations in conjunction with the Boer War had shown, she recounted, that out of 3000 potential recruits from industrial neighbourhoods, only about 1000 proved fit for
541 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.46
542 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.48
543 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.48
544 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.50f.
service in the army. She contrasted these results with observations from rural areas such as Craven in Yorkshire or the country parts of Cheshire to find that there, a much larger proportion of tall and strong men could be found than in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham or London. Town influences, Barnett believed, had brought many into the ranks of the unemployed because they were unemployable; and they would remain thus unless they were taken “one by one” and “by good air, regular food, firm discipline, and patient friendship lifted on to the plane from which they can survey themselves as clothed in self-respect”545.
Despite her critical appraisal of town life, however, unlike Booth, Barnett did not seek to undo recent social and economic developments. Rather, she adapted the myth of the countryside to accommodate the realities of industrialised England. Although she embraced many of the objects and beliefs of the back-to-the-land movement, she did not hold that the solution lay in a return to the romanticised ideal of the pre-industrial country village. The Industrial Revolution constituted a fact which could not be reversed; nor should it be undone, in Barnett's view. She firmly believed that industrialisation constituted a step forward in the history of mankind and therefore approached its side-effects of urbanisation and rural de-population with pragmatism. In Barnett's eyes, the best way to deal with these developments in the set-up of society was to eliminate their evil consequences and to maximise the benefits. Among the many possible tasks suggesting themselves to the social reformer, by 1904, town planning took precedence in Barnett's mind as one of the most urgent as well as promising areas of activity. She believed that urban growth required careful planning and the input of modern science, medical, technical and social, in order to avoid the mistakes made in the past. “Cities must grow”, she proclaimed. “The progress of mankind is from the Garden of Eden to the City of God.”546 Barnett hoped to redirect urban growth in a way that their citizens may have both the inspiration of the garden and the stimulus of a living urban community. In the idea of a Garden Suburb she saw an ideal combination of countryside and town-dwelling.
One of the objects of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust was to put within reach of a 2d fare from their respective places of work cottages with gardens at affordable rents for working men and their families. The Trust took care to avoid overcrowding by designing comparatively generous cottages of three to five rooms per family. The gardens, Barnett believed, would prove an economic asset to the occupants. Experience in George Cadbury's model village at Bournville had shown that an eighth of an acre of gardened land provided an average yield of fruit and vegetables of about 1s 11d a week547. Barnett welcomed the prospect of healthful recreation which working in the garden
545 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.52
546 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.74
547 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.63
would provide for the industrial population. It was for the children in particular that she rejoiced in the idea of a garden. Dirty, stunted and ill-nourished, playing in littered and noisy streets, they suffered from a neglect of mind and body, she felt, which would backfire in their adult years when physical and mental strength would prove vital to their sustenance548. “In imagination – let us transplant those children into a garden”, she suggested, “father working, mother watching, children helping, the land yielding with that generosity which under any climate seems to follow spade labour and personal interest.”549 Barnett anticipated countless benefits from such an arrangement;
the pennies, she believed, would no longer be needed for sweets as the gooseberries were enjoyed, relish and pickles would give way to vegetables, lettuce and fruit; most of all, the family would be able to take its pleasure together – the pleasure of tending to and watching over a garden and its returns produced by personal labour and physical effort550.
Barnett hoped that in cleaner, spacious and well-aired neighbourhoods with private gardens attached to every cottage, the people would develop a sense of home life and an interest in nature which, she believed, formed the best securities against the temptations of drink and gambling551. A paddling pond, play grounds, possibly a tennis court, public baths and other joint amenities would greatly contribute to the inhabitants' quality of life and provide opportunities for healthful pastimes and physical and mental restitution. “The health, the vigour and the alertness which wholesome recreation in the fresh air engenders are unattainable by town-livers, who indifferent to, because ignorant of, what they have lost, are content to be 'like beasts with lower pleasures, like beasts with lower pains'”552, Barnett advertised the advantages of her plan.
Barnett took pains to emphasise that Hampstead Garden Suburb was not intended as a philanthropic scheme. With the settlement, she hoped to return to a natural social community which the division into segregated neighbourhoods had destroyed. “It is the essence of the scheme”, she wrote, “that 'all sorts and conditions of men' should find homes in the suburb.”553 About a third of the 240 acres at hand was set aside for middle-class dwellings, and some of the best spots on the Heath reserved for mansions and villas of an annual rent of £100 or more. Slightly inflated rents on more desirable habitations, the Trust calculated, would help to pay for the roughly seventy acres designated to house the working classes.554 All inhabitants would share the church, the chapel, the public library, the lecture hall and the open space built into the settlement “not by forced, artificial methods, but as
548 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.64
549 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.65f.
550 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.65
551 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.57
552 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.57
553 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.69
554 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.71
inhabitants”555 of the same suburb. These joint institutions might, Barnett hoped, bring members of all classes together on a regular, possibly even daily, basis and produce shared memories which constituted the backbone of any living community. A common interest in gardening and “a love of flowers and fruit and growing”556 would bind them even further together and help break down the misunderstandings and misgivings between the various classes.
Barnett took her commitment to social variety very seriously. As part of the Garden Suburb, she planned dwellings for single working women and widows. She envisaged non-charitable alms houses for the aged poor where, equipped with a small pension or supported by their children, they might pass their remaining days not in the closed quarters of a workhouse, but in lovely surroundings “where they can see the sunset and hear the birds sing”557. “There will be”, she wrote,
“the convalescent home, the co-operative rest-house, the training school and the working lads' hostel – for a community should bear the needy and handicapped in daily mind.”558 She dreamed of a community where the better-off would not close their eyes against suffering and want and where the poor would be given a chance to rise to their highest selves.
Poverty, Barnett came to see in the course of her social commitment, was a problem which affected the individual as well as the community. Any solution to the problem of pauperism thus had to take into account the many facets, personal, cultural and economic, of destitution. Barnett proposed to meet the challenge by approaching the problem on various levels. Personal help and friendship between members of different classes alongside providing the means for self-enlargement and education would help the individual poor to find a new sense of self and to make the most of his or her resources. But there existed conditions which stood in the way of improvement which were beyond the influence of the individual and needed to be addressed by the community at large.
Society, Barnett had come to accept, had a very real interest in the alleviation of poverty. It cost the community dearly, in terms of both financial as well as social and cultural resources.
In the next chapter, I look at the social thought of Percy Alden who explored the national dimensions, repercussions and costs to the community of the problem of mass unemployment.
555 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.58
556 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.63
557 Barnett, Henrietta Octavia Rowland, Science and City Suburbs, 1906, p.70
558 Barnett, Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Octavia Rowland Barnett, Towards Social Reform, 1909, p.341