Building SOCIETIES
door for the first time. When he died he left £1.5 million (at least £200 million in today’s money) to build cheap, desirable homes for “the poor of London and other towns”. Everyone was absolutely stunned, not least because, although William was himself from humble stock, having set up his first business from the basement of his father’s City inn, he’d never shown the slightest interest in philanthropy. Overnight, he had created the wealthiest housing trust in England, dwarfing the likes of Peabody and Guinness. However, no one was more shocked than his now largely disinherited family, who angrily contested the will on the grounds that the work didn’t count as charitable. Add to that the opposition of property builders worried by the idea of people paying below-market rates and you can see why nothing was built for years after William’s death in 1900.
But when Sutton Dwellings did rise on Cale Street in 1912, on a patch of land bought for £85,000, it was built by the best Edwardian architects and to the latest specifications.
Replacing swathes of crowded housing and alleys on the triangular site to the west of the once-huge Chelsea Common, its blocks provided homes for 2,200 people. “They were built as an example as to how social housing should be,” explains Ian Henderson, chair of the Chelsea Association of Tenants and a Sutton Dwellings resident of 15 years.
It was the biggest estate ever built by a London housing trust. And with a quarter of Chelsea’s population considered to be in poverty just after the turn of the century, the small, smart homes were in huge demand. Each had a bath, fold-down worktops and more space than the tenements of London’s slums, which many residents had moved from. There were storage lockers for barrows and other working-class tools of the trade, and sheds for prams, which are still there today. “It was the first housing estate to have baths,” explains Ian. “They were in the kitchens. It was a little tin bath and it had a wooden flap. Some residents still remember them. That was quite a luxury in those days.”
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