The cleaning of the previous laptop led to further complications resulting in my now having bought a new laptop – hence the two-week delay.
One misleading statement from my previous blog – the idea that East Yorkshire Council by building new cottages for some of its direct workforce would free-up these cottages for those in bad accommodation to take-up is often referred to as ‘filtering-up’ (although filtering down seems more appropriate).
In the inter-war years ‘the almost universal prevarication and ignorance of the pre-war years (as regards housing policy) gave way to a more mature and confident approach’ (quote from my thesis, p.103). Generally inter-war housing fell-into three types; private speculative housing, private subsidy housing and council housing. Incidentally, Cottingham Local History Society has been running a Facebook account of the ‘village’s’ inter-war housing stock with details of builders, architects etc. This has been very thoroughly researched and I hope will be available in hard copy sometime. Most of the housing identified fell-into the category of private speculative building, but some was private subsidy housing and some council housing.
Inter-war housing history was dictated by the policies of central government. Housing provision was a political issue and Conservative, Labour and National governments repeatedly reformed housing legislation to give priority to their respective philosophies this particularly so with private subsidy and council housing.
The 1918 Housing of the Working Classes Act (sometimes known as Addison’s Act, he being President of the Local Government Board and Lloyd-George still Prime Minister of the National government) stated that ‘Homes for Heroes’ were to be centrally funded, centrally organised and locally implemented, this being structured by dividing the country into Housing Regions, each with a housing commissioner and staff where local authority plans were scrutinised and given the go-ahead or not. County Councils established an architects department, or possibly had an arrangement with a local architect on a priority basis.
(to be continued)