Ercall Gardens
Ercall Gardens, completed in 1925, was the second of Wellington Urban District Council’s post-war estates and the first built under the 1924 Housing Act. It consisted of 28 ‘non-parlour’ type houses and 12 ‘parlour’ properties, which the local authority hoped to offer to a dozen ‘owner-occupiers’ — this, claimed the Wellington Journal, would make it the first in the country to build and sell its own homes.
Background
By the mid-1920s, the nation’s economy was long in the grip of recession. Any lingering hopes that private builders could resume making up the shortfall in local housing stock had largely been extinguished: just ten of the 83 houses constructed in Wellington in the year to May 1925 were built privately according to Dr White, the district’s Medical Officer of Health. ‘There appeared no lack of applicants for the council’s housing’ he observed in his annual report, noting ‘there was no doubt that the deficiency due to the absence of private building and since the war by the private builder had not yet been overtaken and that many houses would be required. It seemed fairly obvious that councils would in future require to become the providers of dwellings for the industrial population of the area’.
Building Under the New Act
The 1924 Housing Act was enacted by Britain’s newly-elected Labour government. It restored the substantial grants that had been available to councils under the original 1919 Act but, in offering a subsidy of £9 per house per year over forty years, with more generous terms. However, Council documents dating from the end of 1924 show the Wellington authority still expected to make a loss of £3 on every house it built at Ercall Gardens. Councillor John Wesley Clift’s ‘big idea’ was that it could sell twelve ‘parlour’ properties to private tenants, presumably to make up some of the shortfall.
The 1917 Tudor Walters report set down guidelines for council house building that were largely adhered to for much of the Twentieth Century. It suggested that ‘superior houses’ should have a parlour ‘as this was a reasonable expectation for the artisan class’. However, the 1924 Act maintained the reduced space standards of the previous year’s Chamberlain Act, leading to a nationwide proliferation of ‘non-parlour’ properties — Wellington Urban District ordered 22 alone at Millfields in February 1925. The addition of new ‘parlour’ properties was clearly regarded as something more exclusive. Indeed, the Journal reported that expressions of interest in eight of the twelve houses at Ercall Gardens had already been made before the estate was even finished.
A Market Value
The market value of the properties at Ercall Gardens was estimated at £450 each (or around £26, 900 today). Wesley Clift’s plan was to ask buyers for a 10% deposit and put the outstanding amount on a long mortgage. Some of his colleagues, however, were unconvinced. Councillor Sturges thought it ‘defeated the purpose’ of the Housing Act to offer homes for sale, adding that a £45 deposit would also put the properties beyond the means of many working people.
With the exception of medieval Ludlow, Wellington was the most densely populated urban area in Shropshire (the county average was 2.3 people per acre; in Wellington it was 11.6) and the problem of re-housing poorer tenants remained on the agenda in 1925. In October, the council heard proposals for the formation of a new sanitary committee to deal with slum housing in the Chapel Lane area, off High Street. However, in the absence of enough new homes to accommodate exiting tenants, the request was denied, ‘the feeling of the committee’ being, as the Wellington Journal reported, that the properties ‘should be made decently habitable at the minimum cost’. In the event, it was the 1930 Housing Act that finally put the onus on local authorities to remove all remaining slums, while providing subsidies to re-house their tenants permanently.
