The history of the provision of decent homes for all the people of the UK should be of interest to everyone. Prior to the 1914 - 1918 war, the working classes had hitherto been forced through extreme poverty, to live in the most appalling conditions. After the sacrifices suffered during the Great War, the population demanded to have decent conditions to live in and who could blame them? This universal demand was adopted as a useful political promise, summed up in that slogan "Homes for Heroes".

The standard of working class housing was indeed appalling, the government was very concerned and this resulted in the decision to do something about it. It has been suggested that the concern arose because it was felt that if the problem of housing continued to get worse there was a strong possibility that the situation could eventually lead to a revolution. A committee known as the Tudor Waters Committee was set up and produced a highly constructive report on the standards which working class housing should attain. Families on the lower income levels were still spending far too great a proportion of their total income on rents.

An immense number of houses were built in thousands of new roads, which pushed out the boundaries of our towns between the two wars. However, the core of bad housing conditions and overcrowding was not shrinking. Hundreds of thousands of the new houses were not designed or built for the people who most needed them; they were in fact built for speculative purposes and as such, were required to make a profit out of the rents charged. The vast majority could not afford to pay the high rents charged for these speculatively built properties.

Clearly measures had to be taken to beat the chronic housing situation of the lower paid working classes. One and a half million homes were built on behalf of and to be controlled by the Local Authorities throughout the U.K. The entrusting of Local Authorities with responsibility for housing was one of the positive measures, which came out of conditions immediately after the 1914 - 1918 war. Between the wars four million houses were built, of this number, two and a half million were built by business concerns, which were of course, only interested in making a profit.

The great efforts to provide cheap, decent housing, was made much more difficult by high building costs. Local Authorities however, could only embark on sufficiently ambitious building programmes if their financial loss could in some way be limited. This led to the first post-war government passing what was known as the Addison Act in 1919. This act provided that the state should pay any amount required for rehousing schemes in excess of the product of a penny rate. Although the provisions of the act were cancelled in July 1921, it was the first of several housing acts that were passed which resulted in the building of estates of working class houses like the ones in Moulsecoomb, Whitehawk and Manor Farm.

Written by Fred Netley.