Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
property-based electorate after . In some cases, such as museums (),
washhouses () and libraries (), new services could only be undertaken
after a plebiscite of ratepayers, and the Borough Funds Act, , required
approval from a public meeting of owners and ratepayers before seeking a private
bill. These procedures could lead to resistance from ‘economists’, but they also
had the virtue of indicating consent to new forms of spending.
87
It also proved
possible to create a new form of cross-class alliance, with what Szreter has called
a ‘neo-patrician political leadership’.
88
As Morris argues, the period from about
to was marked by voluntaristic agencies: schools, hospitals, libraries
were provided by charities which held public meetings and published accounts,
offering membership to anyone who paid a subscription; and paving, lighting
and poor relief were supplied by a variety of ad hoc agencies and trusts, with their
own independent rating powers. From about , the emphasis shifted to
municipal activity, which took a larger role alongside voluntary associations,
moving to the centre of urban culture. Although the growth of municipal activ-
ities did not simply ‘crowd out’ voluntarism, in the later nineteenth century, a
larger number of prosperous businessmen started to seek public office as a mark
of honour and dignity, and the culture of voluntary associationalism moved into
the municipality. Richard Trainor points out that the involvement of middle-
class men in local office was astonishing in the late Victorian period. The munic-
ipal arena became the space within which all interests in the town could seek
influence, and the municipalities entered a new phase in providing parks, librar-
ies, art galleries, town halls or water works. As Morris remarks, ‘the word
“municipal” was closely associated with notions of local pride, of improvement
and of achievement’. The corporate or civic culture of the eighteenth century,
which was disrupted in the era of reform, re-emerged in the s and s in
a new guise of an active municipal culture. The new world of free trade and cir-
culation was not simply about individualism; it was also about moralism, about
responsible participation in a community or (in the words of J. S. Mill) an
‘Athenian democracy’ of charities, clubs, friendly societies, unions and public
office.
89
The change was the result of a combination of forces. In part, dissenters and
evangelicals transferred their energies from voluntary societies to the municipal-
ity, as in the case of Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham who was elected to the
council when it seemed that it would take responsibility for elementary educa-
tion. In part, it was the result of economic self-interest, for investment in the
Martin Daunton
87
J. Prest, Liberty and Locality (Oxford, ), pp. , , –.
88
J. Davis and D. Tanner, ‘The borough franchise after ’, HR, (), ‒; Szreter,
‘Economic growth’, .
89
Below, pp. –, ‒; E. F. Biagini, ‘Liberalism and direct democracy: John Stuart Mill
and the model of ancient Athens’, in E. F. Biagini, ed., Citizenship and Community (Cambridge,
), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
infrastructure was often good business sense in securing supplies of cheap water
for industrial processes or, more generally, increasing the efficiency of the urban
economy at a time when many firms relied on ‘externalities’, a point to which
we shall return. Small, competitive family firms had weak internal managerial
hierarchies, and relied on external bodies to provide training or marketing, to
deal with labour relations and to cope with social welfare. As a result, a plethora
of institutions developed, from Chambers of Commerce to civic universities,
from Boards of Conciliation to voluntary hospitals. This myriad activity pro-
vided the basis for a strong municipal culture.
90
Practical action depended on the availability of funds. The willingness of
councils to spend might well depend on the availability of cheap loans offered
by the central government. Tension was likely to exist here, between the urban
authorities and the Local Government Board which favoured low interest rates
and long periods for repayment, and the Treasury which wanted stricter terms.
The larger authorities had more freedom, by turning to the capital market and
issuing bonds. As interest rates dropped in the later nineteenth century, large
capital schemes became possible, until the rise in interest rates and the flow of
funds overseas from choked off investment in the urban infrastructure.
91
The central government needed to have a sense of trust in the municipalities;
and the local electors also needed to be confident that the huge schemes were
justified and economical. A balance had to be drawn between controls which
were too strict and frustrated activity and the need to establish the legitimacy of
public action by establishing transparency, accountability and trust. During the
second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, the central state created a
much greater sense of trust in taxation, by establishing a set of clear accounting
rules which ensured that every item of expenditure was voted annually by par-
liament, with complete transparency; the aim was to prevent expenditure from
running out of control, and to establish trust in the integrity and honesty of
government. The same project was carried out in local government.
Investment in the urban infrastructure was private as well as public, which
posed serious problems for Victorian cities. Utilities such as gas, water, trams and
electricity required large amounts of capital. They did not fit into the norm of
control and ownership by a family or partnership, and they might therefore be
perceived as unaccountable and ‘corrupt’, using their power against the consu-
mer without the discipline of competition or political accountability. Utility and
railway companies diverged from the model of ‘personal capitalism’ and were
Introduction
90
On Chamberlain, Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons; on the reliance on externalities and weak inter-
nal managerial hierarchies, see, for example, W. Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor
(Cambridge, Mass., ), and H. F. Gospel, Markets, Firms, and the Management of Labour in Modern
Britain (Cambridge, ).
91
Millward and Sheard, ‘Urban fiscal problem’, –; A. Offer, ‘Empire and social reform: British
overseas investment and domestic politics, –’, HJ, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
open to the same criticism as the East India Company and the railway compa-
nies, that they were self-interested monopolists with the power of ‘taxation’ of
consumers through high charges, without representation. One response to the
power of gas companies was to establish rival ‘consumer’ companies, in which
customers and shareholders controlled the concern in the same way as subscrib-
ers to voluntary associations or members of cooperatives. Another response was
to limit the power of the companies by pitting one against the other, which did
not succeed for understandable economic reasons: entry costs were high, and
companies formed monopolies to supply a town or (in the case of London) a
distinct territory.
92
John Stuart Mill expressed deep unease about the outcome,
arguing that monopolistic companies were not accountable. In theory, share-
holders had power over the directors of companies; in practice, he feared that
their input was minimal. By contrast, government agencies were more account-
able to electors. As Mill saw it, any ‘delegated management’ was likely to be
‘jobbing, careless and ineffective’ compared with personal management by the
owner, but the likelihood of these faults was greater in the case of large compa-
nies than the state. Despite the dangers that a powerful bureaucracy would keep
citizens in a child-like condition, Mill felt that the threat posed by company
control of gas and water was still greater: the companies were more irresponsible
and unapproachable than the government, and had the power to levy what was,
in effect, a compulsory tax. What was needed, therefore, was strict regulation
over private companies, to control their prices and profits or to give the right of
public purchase at fixed intervals. On such a view, the companies were a threat
to a freely competitive market, and control was needed as a complement to the
removal of the heavy hand of the state in the regulation of trade through customs
duties or chartered monopolies.
93
The politics of regulation of public utility companies was a serious issue
throughout the period. The Gas Works and Water Works Clauses Acts of
laid down that the dividend paid to shareholders should be limited to per cent;
when this level was reached consumers could apply to the Quarter Sessions for
a reduction in price. In the s, it was usual to add a maximum price, with
the right of the company or corporation to seek a variation by applying to arbi-
trators appointed by the Board of Trade. There was, in other words, concern to
limit the ‘taxing’ powers of the utilities, and to empower consumers. In the case
of gas, the ‘maximum dividend’ system was increasingly replaced from the mid-
s by sliding scales by which gas prices and dividends were automatically
adjusted: a fall in the price of gas by d. would permit an increase in the divi-
dend of . per cent, and vice versa. The aim was to create a common interest
Martin Daunton
92
For example, D. A. Chatterton, ‘State control of public utilities in the nineteenth century: the
London gas industry’, Business History, (), –.
93
J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (st edn, London, ; last major revision, London, ),
ch. of Book .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
of shareholders and consumers in efficiency and improvements in productivity,
which would obviously have deleterious effects on wages and workers. In the
case of railways, the government created a commission to protect customers
against discriminatory pricing, and in required companies to provide cheap
trains in order to encourage dispersal of workers from the congested areas of
London. The use of private companies to deal with urban social problems caused
serious difficulties. Railway companies resented providing unprofitable services
which might drive away other middle-class commuters, at a time of mounting
costs and pressure on profit margins. The result was a conflict with trade unions
over wages and recognition. The development of tramways and electricity relied
on Mill’s alternative method of control by establishing the public’s right to a
‘reversionary profit’. The Tramways Act of and the Electricity Act of
gave power to local authorities to grant a licence for a fixed interval of twenty-
one years, with the right to purchase at ‘then value’ when the term expired; the
period was increased to forty-two years in for electricity. A similar system
was introduced for telephones in , with licences expiring at the end of
when the postmaster general had the right to purchase. There was, therefore, a
deep-seated concern about the powers of these ‘natural’ monopolies, and the
need to create methods of democratic accountability in cases of ‘delegated
management’.
94
Municipalisation became increasingly common from the middle of the nine-
teenth century, as is shown in Millward’s chapter. The explanation was, in part,
that regulations limited the ability of companies to pursue efficient economic
strategies, by reducing their profitability and the long-term security of invest-
ment. Above all, the problem facing the utilities was political: consumers were
largely coterminous with the voters within a municipality. It seemed to many
consumers that the best way of creating participation and democratic account-
ability was through municipalisation. Such an outcome was attractive because
of the shift to a representative municipal corporate structure from , so that
the urban resident was a tax (rate) payer and consumer. Municipal ownership
offered a resolution of the problems of democratic accountability or informed
Introduction
94
See T. L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies (London, ). There is an extensive literature: see
Hassan, ‘Growth and impact of the British water industry’; D. Matthews, ‘Laissez-faire and the
London gas industry in the nineteenth century: another look’, Ec.HR, nd series, (),
–; Chatterton, ‘State control of public utilities’; PP , Select Committee on Gas
Undertakings (Statutory Prices); R. Millward, ‘The emergence of gas and water monopolies in
nineteenth-century Britain: contested markets and public control’, in J. Foreman-Peck, ed., New
Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy (Cambridge, ), pp. –; J. P. McKay, Tramways and
Trolleys (Princeton, ); J. Foreman-Peck and R. Millward, Public and Private Ownership of British
Industry, – (Oxford, ); J. R. Kellett, ‘Municipal socialism, enterprise and trading in
the Victorian city’, UHY (), –; Falkus, ‘Development of municipal trading’; on tele-
graphs and telephones, Perry, Victorian Post Office; on railways, F. Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy
(Cambridge, ), ch. . See below, pp. , , , .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
consumer control, by making the consumer coterminous with the owner and
offering an opportunity, through council elections and meetings, to participate in
management.
Ownership of utilities also appealed for a further, related, reason: it offered a
solution to the limited tax base of local government, by taking profits from
private shareholders and making them available for public purposes. The income
might be used in order to reduce rate demands and so circumvent the threat of
a ratepayers’ revolt; or it might be devoted to other purposes, such as in
Birmingham where the profits from the gas undertaking were channelled into
the provision of an art gallery. Indeed, Joseph Chamberlain was able to portray
municipal ownership as a form of accountable and efficient joint-stock company
or voluntary association, where the interests of all were in harmony, and the
opportunity of ‘corruption’ removed:
The leading idea of the English system of municipal government is that of a joint-
stock or co-operative enterprise in which the dividends are received in the
improved health and the increase in the comfort and happiness of the community.
The members of the Council are the directors of this great business, and their fees
consist in the confidence, the consideration, and the gratitude of those amongst
whom they live. In no other undertaking, whether philanthropic or commercial,
are the returns more speedy, more manifest or more beneficial.
95
Where utilities did survive in private hands, the explanation, as Millward indi-
cates, was partly the existence of alternative sources of revenue for the council,
and low levels of population growth. The explanation was also in part political:
a lack of identity between the area served by the company and the limits of the
local authority. This was most obviously true in London, where companies
covered a larger area than any single vestry or metropolitan borough, and public
ownership required national political action. In other cases, the utility covered
adjacent authorities, which would need to combine to negotiate terms and
administer the service – an outcome which usually defeated jealously indepen-
dent municipalities.
96
London posed particular difficulties, as a result of the
conflict between metropolitan boroughs and the London County Council and
central government concern at the massive scale of utilities in the metropolis. As
a result, the Metropolitan Water Board in , the Port of London Authority
in , and London Passenger Transport Board in adopted a new organ-
isational form of public corporations, with members appointed by the govern-
Martin Daunton
95
Quoted in L. Jones, ‘Public pursuit of private profit? Liberal businessmen and municipal politics
in Birmingham, –’, Business History, (), –.
96
Foreman-Peck and Millward, Public and Private Ownership; R. Millward and R. Ward, ‘The costs
of public and private gas enterprises in late nineteenth-century Britain’, Oxford Economic Papers,
(), –; R. Millward and R. Ward, ‘From private to public ownership of gas under-
takings in England and Wales, –: chronology, incidence and causes’, Business History,
(), –; Millward and Sheard, ‘Urban fiscal problem’; below, pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ment, unlike the normal pattern in provincial cities of ownership and control by
democratically elected councils.
The new form of public corporations reflects a growing unease with the reli-
ability of local democracies, and the mounting concern for the viability of local
revenues. At some point, the autonomy of local government started to decline,
and the strength of the active municipal culture started to recede. The hostility
of Mrs Thatcher to local government, cited by John Davis, was merely an
extreme version of a general phenomenon of impatience or even alarm at the
doings of politicians in the town halls. The creation of a powerful, municipal
culture and expenditure on the urban infrastructure was again disrupted towards
the end of our period. We return to this point in the final section of the
Introduction.
(iv)
The scale of investment in the infrastructure of urban services – roads, railways,
sewers, water, gas, electricity – was huge, and created major problems both of
collective action and of regulation of private enterprise. Still greater was invest-
ment in residential and commercial buildings. At the beginning of the period,
specialisation of property had still not developed very far, and housing often
combined residence with shops and workshops. In , a large part of indus-
try still consisted of retail-producers and handicrafts supplying local markets,
reflected in the polarity of the industrial structure noted by Richard Rodger and
David Reeder.
97
Many merchants and professional men ran their business from
their own house. The division of home and work was far from complete in ;
by the end of the century, housing had changed in form and stood in a new rela-
tion to work and other elements of the urban environment.
Most middle-class housing in English cities at the beginning of the period was
terraced, often with garden squares shared with neighbours, a sort of semi-
private space rather than an entirely private garden. The houses were usually ver-
tical in style, stacking rooms on top of each other from a semi-basement for
services and servants, to a raised ground-floor dining room, a first-floor drawing
room, with bedrooms on the higher levels, with servants in the attic. Space was
gendered, with the dining room a male and the drawing room a female preserve;
in the largest houses, children and guests also had their delineated areas. From
the middle of the nineteenth century, new middle-class housing took a different
form. Although terraces continued for modest middle-class housing up to the
First World War, the communal garden square gave way to entirely private, indi-
vidual gardens. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the density of build-
ing fell and the urban environment became less ‘hard’, less dominated by roads
Introduction
97
E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change (Cambridge, ), pp. –; below, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
and railings, with narrower roads, small front gardens with privet hedges, lilac
trees and laburnum. Houses were less vertical, with greater depth. These middle-
class houses were run by a vast army of female servants, usually young and single;
the flow of women from one part of the country to the other resulted in skewed
demographic structures, as shown by David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall,
Feldman, and Szreter and Hardy. More prosperous middle-class families were
able to build larger, detached villas, with space for a carriage and male servants.
By the interwar period, the general style for middle-class housing shifted to semi-
detached houses, less often with servants and with a greater reliance on ‘labour
saving’ equipment. Of course, Scotland differed from England in the style of
middle-class housing, especially before . Many middle-class families lived in
tenements, usually in defined areas such as the West End of Glasgow. These solid,
stone-built, tall buildings produced a completely different built environment
from England, more akin to the large cities of continental Europe.
98
The housing density of English cities was low and strikingly suburban com-
pared with most European cities. Even in London, few middle-class families
lived in apartments, unlike Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where the prosperous middle
class continued to live close to the city centre.
99
Despite the existence of music
halls, theatres and cinemas, the centre of many English cities had a ‘dead’ feel
after offices and shops closed. To some critics, suburbs were the curse of England,
the subtopia condemned by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood of semi-
detached houses ‘isolated from each other like cases of the fever’, where house-
wives suffered from suburban neurosis. Contempt is easy, but not everyone
would prefer Isherwood’s exciting life in Weimar Berlin, or would share the
belief of Anthony Bertram that flats created a greater sense of community.
100
For
most residents, the slightly mocking yet affectionate poems of Betjeman were
closer to the mark. Suburbia was a place of peace and order to shelter wives and
children from the stresses of the city, and for men to return to a haven of tran-
quillity at the end of the day, from the competitive strains of the working world
to cultivate a garden or to socialise in a way that was not intrusive or a threat to
privacy. By the s, suburbs were largely owner-occupied, an investment and
an expression of pride. The availability of cheap and abundant mortgages, a fall
in land prices as a result of agricultural depression, and higher real wages for
those in work, led to a housing boom and the emergence of new, large-scale
developers and builders.
101
Women had a large role in maintaining the social
Martin Daunton
198
There is a large literature on the patterns of construction and finance, but less on the social life
of suburbs: see Dyos, Victorian Suburb; F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester,
); F. M. L. Thompson, Hampstead (London, ); on Glasgow, below, pp. –, M. A.
Simpson, ‘The West End of Glasgow, –’, in M. A. Simpson and T. H. Lloyd, eds.,
Middle-Class Housing in Britain (Newton Abbot, ), pp. –; on building cycles, see S. B.
Saul, ‘House-building in England, –’, Ec.HR, nd series, (); on the changing
design of housing, S. Muthesius, The English Terraced House (London and New Haven, ).
199
Olsen, City as a Work of Art.
100
See below, p. .
101
See below, pp. ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒ and Plate .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
fabric of the suburbs, centred on the activities of children, on tea-parties and
coffee mornings. Tennis and golf clubs, whist drives and bridge evenings, church
fêtes and jumble sales, created a sense of social connectedness. And it was always
possible to get a bus or tram to town in order to shop, visit a café or catch a
matinee at the cinema.
102
Working-class housing in English cities became less cellular and promiscuous
in its use of space, and increasingly self-contained in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century. Courts and alleyways gave way to a more open grid of ‘by-
law’ housing with separate yards or small gardens, rear access in order to empty
privies or ashpits, and individual sanitation. The change was only partly
explained by the imposition of stricter controls by local authorities. There was
also a fall in land prices as British farmers and landowners felt the full force of
competition from foreign grain. Free trade therefore had a significant impact on
cities, not simply in providing urban consumers with cheap food but also in
reducing the supply cost of land. The result was both a higher level of migra-
tion to British towns than in France, as Feldman points out, and an outward
march of suburbia on to cheap land. A large part of the unprecedented rise in
working-class standards of living after went on higher quality housing.
Unlike most other prices, rents rose in the later nineteenth century, reflecting
higher quality accommodation rather than an increase in the profit margin of
landlords.
Despite the overall increase in housing standards, and the consequent improve-
ments in urban health and the growth of a more domesticated existence, huge
variations remained between towns, both in rents and in the style and quality of
accommodation. As with so many other variables, there was a very marked
difference between towns. At one extreme was Leicester, where only . per cent
of the population lived in overcrowded accommodation in (over two
persons per room); at the other extreme was Gateshead, with . per cent of
the population overcrowded. In , the index of rent in Leicester was
(where London was ), and wages of skilled building workers ; in Gateshead,
rents were higher at and the wage index lower at .
103
Standards of sanita-
tion also varied. In Leicester, about two-thirds of houses had water closets by
, and the council obtained powers to require owners to replace remaining
privies and pail closets in order to prevent a recurrence of the typhoid epidemic
of /. The task was largely completed by , with the assistance of public
subventions. In Nottingham – another town in the East Midlands with a similar
economic base – water closets were still under half the sanitary conveniences in
the city in , and the medical officer of health estimated that the incidence
of typhoid in houses with pail closets was four and a half times as great as in
houses with water closets. These variations in housing standards contributed to
Introduction
102
See R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England (Oxford, ), on patterns of sociability and
recreation.
103
Daunton, House and Home, pp. , , .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
the divergence in mortality, not only in the case of typhoid and ‘summer diar-
rhoea’, but also in tuberculosis where overcrowding was an important factor in
transmission. Of course, Scotland had its own distinctive style of tenemented
accommodation. In Glasgow, the level of overcrowding in was . per
cent, and the bulk of property had only two rooms, with shared sanitary and
laundry facilities on common staircases or courtyards. The Scottish house style
created great problems of management for owners and the council, in ensuring
the cleanliness of communal areas.
104
Despite the undoubted improvement in urban housing in the later nineteenth
century, problems certainly remained. A large part of the population still lived
in poor quality, densely packed housing of the Industrial Revolution, and dem-
olition for new commercial buildings or roads and railways meant that the pop-
ulation was simply packed into the remaining stock. The poor could not afford
higher quality by-law housing, and occupied property vacated by the middle
class in their move to newer suburbs. In areas such as Islington, single-family
houses built in the first half of the nineteenth century were subdivided, with
shared sanitation and all the problems of deterioration resulting from multi-
occupancy. The process could be applauded as ‘filtering up’, allowing the poor
to leave squalid slums for newer, better-built houses. Reality could be less com-
forting, not least after the First World War when rent control removed the incen-
tive to maintain property. In the s, some authorities (for example, Glasgow
in ) obtained private acts to demolish inner-city housing, and in the
Cross Act gave local authorities general powers of demolition in order to cut out
‘plague spots’. The medical metaphor was significant, suggesting that destruc-
tion of areas with a high incidence of disease and death would create a healthy
urban environment. The slums were not understood in terms of the current
structure of urban society, of low wages or casual labour markets, but rather of
past error which could be swept away. A number of points followed. One was
that the owners of the slums should be compensated at market value as unwit-
ting legatees of the mistakes of an earlier generation. The second was that recon-
struction should be left to private or philanthropic bodies. Problems were soon
to emerge. The cost of compensation proved high, for many slum districts in
fact contained valuable commercial property such as public houses or work-
shops. The high price of cleared land meant that private enterprise was not
attracted to redevelop, so that philanthropic bodies, model dwelling companies
or local authorities stepped into the gap. The emergence of council housing on
a modest scale after the Housing of the Working Classes Act of was to trans-
form British cities between the world wars.
105
Martin Daunton
104
Ibid, pp. –, –, –, –; R. Rodger, Edinburgh and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-
Century City: Land, Property and Trust (Cambridge, forthcoming).
105
Wohl, Eternal Slum; Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance; C. M. Allan, ‘The genesis of British urban
redevelopment with special reference to Glasgow’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The urban environment was intensely political. As we have seen, access to
space was contested, and by the end of the century land itself was a political issue.
Rather than compensating the owners of slums, many reformers and radicals
argued that public investment increased property values, and owners should
therefore pay a ‘betterment’ levy to the council. Many radicals claimed that the
system of short leases found in many towns resulted in slums as the leases came
to their close: owners of houses had no incentive to maintain property which
reverted to the ground landlords. They also argued that large landowners could
impose monopoly prices, holding land off the market and forcing up its price.
Of course, these points were contested by ground landlords who argued that the
provision of land for a low annual charge encouraged building by speculative
builders who were short of capital to purchase sites outright. Owners of land
claimed that they were investing in roads and drainage, making land available
ahead of demand, rather than constraining the supply. By the turn of the century,
the case against landowners widened to claim that all increases in land values
were socially created by the enterprise of the community, and that the burdens
of local taxation should be passed to the owners of urban sites. The land cam-
paign appealed to Lloyd George as a political response to the Liberals’ need to
retain middle-class support and at the same time to respond to the challenge of
Labour, by creating a common identity as active producers versus parasitical
landowners. This policy was intended both to solve the fiscal problem and to
force land on to the market for housing and industry. The approach assumed that
more land should be made available, at a cheaper price, for housing and indus-
try, and the first Town and Country Planning Act of created the frame-
work for coherent development of land around towns.
106
The policy had more rhetorical force than practical outcome, for rent for land
was a small and declining share of national income, and did not offer a large
source of revenue. The taxation of land values soon failed, both because of prac-
tical problems in assessing the value of sites and because Lloyd George was
dependent on Conservative support in the coalition government. Interest in the
land question did survive within the Labour party, especially in large urban
authorities, and resurfaced in the Second World War with the Uthwatt report.
As Jim Yelling shows, this report recommended that the state should be able to
withhold permission for development without compensation to the owner;
where permission was given, any gain should be taxed away. The Town Planning
Act of showed both continuity and a change in emphasis from the
Edwardian policy. It continued the Liberal attack on the ‘unearned increment’,
imposing a per cent tax on property development. But it moved away from
the earlier assumption that more land should be available for builders. In the
Introduction
106
Below, pp. –, –; D. Reeder, ‘The politics of urban leaseholds in late Victorian
Britain’, International Review of Social History, (), –; A. Offer, Property and Politics,
– (Cambridge, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008