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Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: a History of Social Housing (Leicester Pioneer Press, 2025)
When I started this blog almost twelve years ago, council housing was a strangely neglected and too often stigmatised topic both in te...
Last week’s post examined Michiel Brinkman’s Justus van Effen Estate in Rotterdam, a 1920s’ pioneer of deck-access housing. Today, we look at the city’s second crucial contribu...
With two notable interwar schemes, the city of Rotterdam can justly claim to have shaped much of western Europe’s post-war social housing design – firstly in the Justus van Effen estate that pioneered the later fashion for ‘streets in the sky’, secondly in the Bergpolderflat building that established the classic form of the slab block. This week’s post will focus on the forme...
Gidea Park, now in the London Borough of Havering, has hosted two significant housing exhibitions. Both were held to promote housing reform and innovation, better homes for new times albeit with a very distinct focus on middle-class needs and aspirations. In 1911, as we saw in href="https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/gidea-park-the-1911-house-and-cottag...
Romford might be an unsung part of London but in Gidea Park, as host of two housing exhibitions – a competition in 1911 founding what was then known as Romford Garden Suburb and a Modern Homes Exhibition in 1934 – it contains some of the capital’s most historically interesting housing. This isn’t going to be a regular post celebrating local government’s contribution to that h...
