William Dyce, set up a loom in it but was not successful. Altogether the Normal School did abnormally badly. Nor did the provincial branch schools, of which there were soon more than a dozen, do better. Another committee was set up to look into the results of the new school system and reported 'an utter and complete failure'. That was in 1846.

But in 1843 the Prince Consort had accepted the presidency of the Royal Society of Arts and now for a while under his guidance and that of that model Victorian, Henry Cole, it assumed the leading role in the promotion of British industrial art. Both men were probably equally important, Prince Albert for his high ideals, his sense of duty, his seriousness of purpose and his position, Cole for his unbelievable energy and tenacity. Between them they made the 1851 Exhibition and got the first conscious reformatory movement in industrial design going.

For, by the 1840s, some people at least had begun to realise that the aesthetic standard of English and, indeed, European, industrial products had gone down by leaps and bounds. The reasons which we can see quite clearly now, but which were yet obscure at the time, are manifold: pride in technical inventiveness regardless of whether it was applied to the construction of a comfortable invalid chair, or the imitation of the grain of wood by paint, or the moulding of Gothic ornament by machine; then ease of production which removed the healthy barrier between flights of fancy and execution by the human hand; cheapness of production which suddenly made so many products available to so many who were uneducated and aesthetically untrained, and, therefore, of necessity, more impressed by elaboration than by soundness; and finally, the lack of education and aesthetic training in the very manufacturers responsible for the making of the cheap things.

*

Henry Cole started from the right end, the production end. He had a few designs of his own carried out by reputable makers and sold in the West End. His pseudonym-for he was a civil servant—was Felix Summerly, and his products were called Art Manufactures. The enterprise started in 1845. In 1846 the Society of Arts returned to its former practice of offering awards for designs of 'useful objects calculated to improve general taste'. * Whose idea, we may ask ourselves, was this resumption of forgotten duties? Prince Albert's, who had told the Council of the Society that 'the department most likely to prove immediately beneficial to the public would be that which encourages most efficiently the application of the Fine Arts to our Manufactures'?* Or Cole's, who had joined the Society in 1846 and at once become a member of the Fine Arts Committee? Anyway, a tea-set produced for his Art Manufactures by Minton's received a Silver Medal that year. The prizes of 1846 were followed by a first exhibition of British manufactures, and then by Cole, in 1849, coming out with a magazine, the Journal of Design, intended to preach better standards to industry and the public. The six volumes of the Journal are worth close study.

What is most important for us in them and in the activities of the Society of Arts altogether is that evidently industrial art between 1750 and 1850 had become a completely different matter. In 1750 nobody queried the good taste of its products, nor had anybody much reason to query it. If education was urged, it was education in draughtsmanship for the workman, education of skill not of taste. Now the Society was asking for objects 'to improve general taste', and Prince Albert also wanted the Society to do things 'beneficial to the public'.

These are the sources of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and of the creation of the South Kensington Museum a few years later. The museum was intended to be used by manufacturers to improve the taste of their products. Some did it, but that alone could not be enough to create a new style.

To have done that, is the immortal merit of William Morris. But, in spite of it, Morris is not really part of the history of industrial design, for the simple reason that he hated industrial design and industry altogether. Here is his most interesting comment on the designer in a reformed, liberal, nineteenth-century industrial world:

'A highly gifted and educated man shall . . . squint at a sheet of paper, and

n.40

n.41

n.42

n.43

... the results of that squint shall set a vast number of well-fed, contented operatives... turning crank handles for ten hours a day... Well, from this system are to come threefold blessings-food and clothing, poorish lodgings and a little leisure to the operatives, enormous riches to the capitalists that rent them, together with moderate riches to the squinter on the paper; and lastly, very decidedly lastly abundance of cheap art for the operatives or crank-turners to n.44 buy'.*

n.45

Now what we can learn from Morris's splendid vituperation is that the designer by then was an accepted member of the production process. Indeed, the catalogue of the Great Exhibition is full of designers' names, although factories still disliked disclosing the names of their fully-employed studio designers. That was still the same when the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society started in 1888, one of the outcomes of Morris's teachings, and their insistence on showing the designer's name against every article cost them a good deal of support from some manufacturers.

Amongst other outcomes of Morris's doctrines was a new type of art school, first, I think, realised at Birmingham and then at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. They emphasised Arts and Crafts in their names, because they wanted to teach equally the Fine Arts and what Lewis F. Day, one of the leading designers of the late nineteenth century, has called the Arts Not-Fine.*

But the drawback of the Morris firm remained that neither their art nor their craft was in sympathy with industry. The new schools helped their students a lot by fostering a freer, more imaginative draughtsmanship and a truer understanding of materials and processes of making (by hand, of course), but they would not listen to the needs of the manufacturers. However, the story does not end there. For amongst those who had been impressed by Morris's noble style of designing, without being led astray by his medievalising and socialising theory, were some manufacturers and some artists, and they attempted to achieve a reform in industrial design proper. Among manufacturers I am chiefly thinking of Metford Warner of Jeffrey's, the wallpaper manufacturers, who got Walter Crane and +n.46 Edward Godwin, and a little later, Charles Voysey to design for him.* Voysey also designed textiles for Morton's, and carpets for Tomkinson's and for Ginzkey's of Maffersdorf. Concurrently Sir Ambrose Heal appeared with modern furniture. There were others as well, though admittedly not many as compared with the total of British industrial production.

After that the story leaves England and becomes familiar. The German Werkbund was founded in 1907 to join artists and architects with manufacturers and to work for higher standards of design. In England the DIA followed in 1915 (see p. ), and a little later in America, a new type of free-lance appeared who concerned himself with things, such as refrigerators and sewing-machines, and not only with pattern in the flat. Not that this new type of designer was an unmixed blessing. He called himself a stylist and styling is far from a guarantee of aesthetic value. 'The most important curve is the sales curve' is not only a manufacturer's but also a stylist's saying-to this day. Industrially made greeneryyallery of 1900, industrially made modernistic of 1925 and 1930, streamlining where no speed matters, and now splayed and tapered chair and table legs which trip you up, all that is created or condoned by the designers as willingly as by the makers. But that is the critic's concern, not the historian's.

The Architectural Review, XCIII, 1943

II

Early Working Class Housing

This is a documentary of the first twenty years of tenement house building for the working classes of London. As plenty of original evidence on a topic so much discussed at the time is still in existence, and as most of this evidence is buried in old volumes of architectural magazines, I have confined myself almost entirely to quotations from contemporary

sources.

The story which thus takes shape is one of equal historical and topical interest. Historically it introduces a number of buildings all but forgotten, yet by no means devoid of architectural merit, and certainly of an exceptionally high social significance. As for their topical importance, it lies in a development which over the twenty years here examined made of pleasant moderately-sized dwelling-houses the grim and grimy barracks of the poor which between the sixties and the eighties succeeded in destroying any chance for flats to become popular in England with the class for which they could be such a blessing.

(In the past few years important research has been done on the subject of this paper. Outstanding is J.N. Tarn's Housing in Urban Areas, 1840-1914, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1962. Dr Tarn has also published papers on the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, Peabody Trust housing, and housing at Liverpool and Glasgow, the latter in the Town Planning Review. In Victorian Studies, XI, 1967–8, is a long and fully annotated paper by H.J. Dyos on the Slums of Victorian London. In HenryRussell Hitchcock's Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, New Haven and London, 1954, part of Chapter XIV deals with working class housing, including the model cottages.)

THE SLUMS OF

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

The first five quotations are taken from the Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. It was written in 1842 by the secretary to the investigating committee, the great Edwin Chadwick, and based on evidence given by Dr Neil Arnott, James Phillips Kay (later Sir J. Kay Shuttleworth), Dr Southwood Smith, and others. It is the foundation of all slum clearance and re-housing endeavours.

THE SLUMS OF GLASGOW (DR ARNOTT)

'We entered a dirty low passage like a house door, which led from the street through the first house to a square court immediately behind, which court, with the exception of a narrow path around it leading to another long passage through a second house, was occupied entirely as a dung receptacle of the most disgusting kind. Beyond this court the second passage led to a second square court, occupied in the same way by its dunghill; and from this court there was yet a third passage leading to a third court, and third dung heap. There were no privies or drains there, and the dung heaps received all filth which the swarm of wretched inhabitants could give; and we learnt that a considerable part of the rent of the houses was paid by the produce of the dung heaps. Thus, worse off than wild animals, many of which withdraw to a distance and conceal their ordure, the dwellers in these courts had converted their shame into a kind of money by which their lodging was to be paid. The interior of these houses and their inmates corresponded with the exteriors. We saw half-dressed wretches crowding together to be warm; and in one bed, although in the middle of the day, several women were imprisoned under a blanket, because as many others who had on their backs all the articles of dress that belonged to the party were then out of doors in the streets. This picture is so shocking that, without ocular proof, one would be disposed to doubt the possibility of the facts; and yet there is perhaps no old town in Europe that does not furnish parallel examples.'

SEWERAGE AT LEEDS (MR BAKER)

'Numbers of streets have been formed and houses erected without pavement, and hence without surface drainage without sewers or if under drainage can be called sewers, then with such as, becoming choked in a few months, are even worse than if they were altogether without. The surface of these streets is considerably elevated by accumulated ashes and filth, untouched by any scavenger; they form nuclei of disease exhaled from a thousand sources. Here and there stagnant water, and channels so offensive that they have been declared unbearable, lie under the doorways of the uncomplaining poor; and privies so laden with ashes and excrementitious matter as to be unusable prevail, till the streets themselves become offensive from deposits of this description.'

SEWERAGE IN THE PARISH OF ST GILES (MR HOWELL)

'I would instance a recent case in my own parish, where I was called to survey two houses about to undergo extensive repairs. It was necessary that my survey should extend from the garrets to the cellars; upon visiting the latter, I found the whole area of the cellars of both houses were full of night-soil, to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools; upon being moved, the stench was intolerable, and no doubt the neighbourhood must have been more or less infected by it. I should mention that these houses are letting at from £30 to £40 a year each, and are situated in a considerable public thoroughfare.'

OVERCROWDING AT HULL, LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER (MR RIDDALL WOOD)

'In Hull I have met with cases somewhat similar. A mother, about fifty years of age, and her son, I should think twenty-five, at all events above twentyone, sleeping in the same bed, and a lodger in the same room. I have two or three instances in Hull, in which a mother was sleeping with her grown-up son, and in most cases there were other persons sleeping in the same room, in another bed. In a cellar in Liverpool, I found a mother, and her grown-up daughters sleeping on a bed of chaff on the ground in one corner of the cellar, and in the same corner three sailors had their bed. I have met with upwards of forty people sleeping in the same room, married and single, including, of course, children and several young adult persons of either sex. In Manchester I could enumerate a variety of instances in which I found such promiscuous mixture of the sexes in sleeping