I have often walked past the Sutton Dwellings on Plough Way in Rotherhithe and wondered about their history. Thankfully, there is an ornate panel fixed to one of the grand red-brick blocks bearing the name of the benefactor and providing some historic context.
William Richard Sutton (1836-1900) had made his fortune transporting parcels, hence the epithet ‘carrier’. Sutton & Co Carriers took advantage of the railway boom to link up the country’s emerging manufacturing concerns, moving their products up and down Victorian Britain.
Subsequent investments in brewing, distilling, bottling and property development left Sutton with a significant fortune which, upon his death, was left to set up a trust:
for the purpose of supplying the poor in London and other populous places or Towns in England with proper and sufficient dwelling houses or lodgings at such rents (however low) as my Trustees shall in their absolute discretion consider the tenants can afford to pay
Alongside Rotherhithe (completed in 1915), there are other extant Sutton Dwellings located in Chelsea (1912), Islington (1924), Old Street (1911) and Bethnal Green (1909). The blocks were designed by architect E.C.P. Monson, well-known for his municipal housing estates, in a modest Queen Anne style. However, the architect incorporated some decorative flourishes: brick quoining, stone detailing and typography, as well as circular and diamond motifs adding some variety to the gable ends.
The Sutton Dwellings in Chelsea, a larger development with a parade of shops at ground floor level, includes a grand arched entrance with stone swags and column capitals, in line with the more affluent surroundings.
Passing the Sutton Dwellings, one is transported back to a time before the welfare state, when the vast majority of housing provision was left to the market, and a complex web of landowners, lessees and sub-letters created some notorious slums. Those networks of haphazard rookeries and courts, linked by menacing alleyways, which were so vividly described by Charles Dickens and George Gissing.
In an attempt to remedy this dire situation, charities and trusts funded by wealthy philanthropists stepped in and set up ‘model dwellings’. Figures like Octavia Hill, George Peabody and Edward Guinness were motivated by a desire to raise the living standards of the working poor. Model dwellings promised decent accommodation at a price that workers could afford, and within walking distance to their places of work. And to the investors, who had provided the upfront capital, a modest return was to be expected – they came to be known as ‘five-percent philanthropists’.
Taking their cue from industrialists like Titus Salt and the Cadbury family, who developed settlements to house their workforce, the model dwellings were also sites of social control and moral improvement. The philanthropists were strict, their blocks were often compared to barracks and workhouses, staffed by forbidding characters prone to interfering into the lives of their tenants. Rents were tightly controlled based on definitions of poverty, and residents were vetted to ensure they met certain standards of behavior; any breaches of the rules were punishable by eviction.
No such rules and regulations are mentioned in Sutton’s will, an omission which would result in legal troubles and stymied progress when the trust entered the housing market.
William Sutton had shown no inclination for philanthropy or charity during his lifetime, therefore it must have come as a shock to his family and his business associates when he left such a monumental sum to provide housing for the poor. By way of comparison, the Trust was endowed with more than £2 million, a sum equivalent to £100 million in today’s money, making its initial assets four times larger than the Peabody Trust and ten times those of the Guinness Trust.
However, it seems that Sutton underestimated the complexity of administering such a vast sum and putting it to use. In her history of the trust The Conduct of Philanthropy, Patricia Garside describes the legal obstacles that the trustees had to negotiate in the early years.
Unlike other such trusts, the terms of the Sutton bequest were vague and indiscriminate. Minimum rents were not specified, nor were the types of people permitted to enter into a tenancy, and the trust was only expected to break even.
In this way, the trust was seen to undermine the notion of the ‘deserving poor’, and it was feared that the provision of good quality housing at low rents, without any kind of profit motive, would attract undesirables and foster a culture of dependency.
At the same time, the London County Council (LCC) were fearful that these cheap and desirable dwellings would lower the rents that neighbouring landlords could charge, with the twin effects of disrupting the housing market and driving down income derived from rate-payers.
As a result, the trust was held in the Court of Chancery until 1927 and its operations were severely limited. These obstacles took up precious time and resources in the early years, and explain why the first building in Bethnal Green was not completed until 1909.
By 1927, the Trust had built over 3,000 dwellings across London, and despite the limitations imposed by the courts, Sutton’s aim to house the poor had in part been achieved. However, the fact that there were relatively few Sutton Dwellings built in London reveals something of the shift in housing provision for the poor at the turn of the 20th century.
Here we return to the LCC, an elected body first established in 1889, which would transform London’s housing landscape. The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act had put increased emphasis on government and local authorities to take responsibility for slum-clearance and housing replacement. And under the control of the Progressive leadership (a coalition of Liberals with a distinctively proto-Labour Party edge, in power from 1889-1907), the LCC entered a systematic project of rehousing Londoners, dwarfing the work of charities and model dwellings trusts.
Many of the early developments such as the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch and the Millbank Estate in Pimlico are still standing. Their distinctive Arts and Crafts style and leafy surroundings, typical of the the LCC Architects Department under Owen Fleming, owes something to the philanthropic blocks of the previous century in style and proportions.
In 1900, after a parliamentary amendment to the 1890 Act was passed allowing the LCC to erect working class tenements on green field sites beyond its boundaries, the focus shifted to cottage estates on the peripheries of London. An early example is Totterdown Fields, laid out on a 39 acre site in Tooting between 1901-1911, which housed a population of 8788 people in 1,229 cottages.
The early peripheral estates continued the LCC’s preference for the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, however the low density is a significant break with the past, and one which would continue apace in the inter-war period with large scale cottage estates completed in Downham and Becontree, re-housing tens of thousands of Londoners.
The expansion of the tube network and development of cheap tram fares under the Progressive LCC, meant that the centrally located and multi-story tenement blocks proposed by such organisations as the Sutton Dwellings fell out of favour. Municipal authorities, now the main centres of housing provision, could expand outwards, developing sprawling estates and providing families with their own piece of Britain, complete with front and back gardens.
Streetscapes 