THE WORKING-CLASS OWNER-OCCUPIED HOUSE OF THE 1930s

The Over-Supply of Middle-Class Housing and the Added Pressure to Build Low-cost Homes.

At the same time as the builders were constructing more lower priced houses the market for the larger more expensive new home was proving to be difficult. The middle classes in the 1920s and 1930s were being housed in adequate accommodation which would have been of sound construction even though it would have been old. With the prices for the larger Edwardian and Victorian properties going down as a result of the attraction of the facilities offered by the new houses, the market for the more expensive house became difficult and new larger houses were left unsold with builders. The August and September 1935 issues of Estates Gazette have articles from surveyors commenting about the poor market for the larger Victorian villa. Chamberlain and Willows, estate agents, state in the BSG of February 1934 that 'Values of the larger pre-war house had dropped by 15 per cent to 20 per cent' (80). In Bellman's chairman's speech to the National Association of Building Societies meeting in Harrogate in May 1934, he says that 'The demand for funds from this quarter, however, is now dwindling and there is an increasing numbers of these middle-class houses in the market for sale' (81). Haymills, a builder of houses selling in the 1930s for around £1,000 at Park Royal in Ealing, even started a separate division to rent out their unsold houses and to take under management those houses which had been foreclosed upon by the building societies (82).

The schedule in Table C below shows how by the end of 1934 builders/developers were building more of the smaller houses to satisfy demand (83).

Source: The schedule was adapted from the figures of Marian Bowley, The British Building Industry: Four Studies in Response and Resistance to Change, (Cambridge, 1966), p. 366, table VIII

The builders/developers could sell the smaller house if the price was right, and there are few accounts of this market being saturated by the end of the decade. The buying of homes and the establishment of a significant capital-owning segment in the working classes and lower middle classes was to change the way in which these classes developed. Sir Harold Bellman spoke of 'F[rank] T[aylor]'s bloodless revolution - the £450 house' (84). These homes were to be sold to 'the better paid artisans, and building society experience has proved them to be a splendid type of borrower' (85). The only element of the price which all the advertisements in the newspapers of the time emphasise when promoting the cheaper house is the weekly payment. There are fewer references exalting people to 'live where nightingales sing' or to buy houses built 'on fine gravel soil' phrases commonly used in advertisements of the time when promoting the middle-class home selling at over £800. The direction of the advertisements towards the working classes became more evident after 1935, as there became a possibility that there might be more lower-priced houses than purchasers, even with all the inducements the societies were now able to offer. The advertisements became 'less strident and often angled towards those who could only just afford to buy' - that is, the working classes (86).

Estates were going up quickly in the mid-1930s as the initial caution shown at the start of the decade by many builders ebbed away. Many estates of one or two thousand houses were being erected by builders around London, and they needed to sell them as they were built on money borrowed from the banks rather than equity debt. Taylor Woodrow Limited did go public in 1935 and was capitalised at £400,000. George Wimpey Limited had floated the previous year to raise £500,000. They were the exceptions. Most companies stayed in private hands and raised money from the banks via debt.

(80) B.S.G. (February 1934), p. 159.
(81) BSG, (October 1934), p. 879.
(82)From the private papers of G. Cox the chairman of Haymills.
(83) The schedule was adapted from the figures of Marian Bowley, The British Building Industry: Four Studies in Response and Resistance to Change, (Cambridge, 1966), p. 366, table VIII.
(84) A. Jenkins, On Site:1921-71 (London, 1971), p. 20.
(85)H. Bellman, Bricks and Morals (Watford, 1949), p. 157.
(86)A. Jackson ,Semi-Detached London (London, 1991), p. 159.