undertake the building of dwellings for labourers as an ordinary matter of
business. It appears... that it rarely happens that such undertakings produce a
higher dividend than five per cent. . . . and... it can hardly be expected that
dwellings will be provided in anything like sufficient numbers, until they can be
made to produce such a return as will compensate a builder for investing his
capital in this kind of property, attended as it is with so much more risk and
trouble than houses of a superior kind.'

The Builder, XXIII, 1865, pp. 88 and 251. Mr Akroyd is the Yorkshire manu-
facturer who built the working-class suburb of Akroydon at Halifax. The other names
have already been mentioned.

THE FIRST MUNICIPAL WORKING-CLASS FLATS

If therefore better dwellings for the poor were needed-and it was well enough known
that they were they had to be supplied by public authorities out of public funds. This,
however, nobody recognized. Yet, as a pointer in the right direction, and a decidedly
promising last item in this anthology, the second outcome of Waterlow's enterprise must
be quoted:

'CORPORATION BUILDINGS, FARRINGDON ROAD. The necessity for providing 34-36
accommodation for the large number of the poorer classes displaced by street
improvements and other great public works in the City, has for some time past
occupied the attention of the Corporation; but it was not until 1862 that any
positive steps were taken to erect improved dwellings. At the close of that year
Mr Alderman Waterlow drew the attention of the Common Council to the
subject,... the Corporation realized its obligations, and has discharged them.
A piece of freehold land in the Farringdon Road was at once appropriated, and
a pile of buildings... containing accommodation for 168 families. . . erected

31-33

at a further cost of £37,000. The buildings are similar in design to those erected
in 1863 by Mr. Alderman Waterlow, in Finsbury. . . . The rents range from
4s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. per week. . . . These buildings were built from the designs, and
under the superintendence, of the City Architect, Mr Horace Jones.

The Builder, XXIII, 1865, p. 484. Horace, later Sir Horace, Jones (1819-1887)
is the architect of the Smithfield Markets and Tower Bridge.

So here the Corporation of the City of London appeared for the first time as a house
building authority. The venture was possible under the Lodging Houses Act of 1851.
But such ventures remained exceptional until much later. The Metropolitan Board of
Works did not start on slum clearance until 1875. And these cleared areas were handed
over to the Peabody Trust, the Artizans', Labourers' and General, or similar com-
panies for erecting new houses. The London County Council was founded in 1889. The
Housing of the Working Class Act became law in 1890. This at last altered things
fundamentally. The L.C.C. had fresh social ideas and fresh ideas on architectural style
and domestic comfort too. It realized that nothing adequate could be achieved, unless the
notion of private profit was abandoned and housing recognized as a public duty. And it
also realized that flats would never be really welcome to the London workmen unless
they were made much more cheerful. So the Neo-Georgian of the L.C.C.—an outcome
of the style of the Shaw school-replaced the grim austerity of the earlier blocks. These
had been there is no question about that a great improvement on the slums of Chad-
wick, Alton Locke and Tom-all-Alone's. But they are-this is equally undeniable-
the slums of today, a little more hygienic perhaps than Bethnal Green cottages (I say
perhaps, because a tenant stopped me, while I was making notes in the court of one block
of c. 1860 not here illustrated, and probably taking me for a surveyor-confided to me
that she never got a rest from them bugs'), but far more harsh and depressing. Their
blackness has made it extremely difficult for architects to this day to enlist amongst the
working class any sympathy with rehousing in flats. Nor has the necessary campaign for
flats been made easier by these very architects of today building blocks of ten and twenty
storeys, thereby creating a new aversion among those to be re-housed, over and above the
old one.

36 Corporation Buildings: on the top floor, crests of the City of London

Architectural Press, London, 1951

III

High Victorian Design

n. I

n.2

n.3

n.4

the most intelligent and knowledgeable description of the Crystal Palace which we possess, Mr Morton Shand* writes: [The building is] a precept inspiring as the Parthenon, an exemplar vital as the Pont du Gard, . . . as important as Stonehenge or Ely Cathedral'. The exhibits shown inside the building on the other hand, Miss Yvonne ffrench in her competent monograph on the Great Exhibition* calls 'examples of the hideous and the debased . . ., of a bastardization of taste without parallel in the whole recorded history of aesthetics'. Are these two statements true? And do they correspond to the reactions of distinguished visitors to the building and the exhibition?

If for the building we choose Ruskin as our guide, we hear this:*

'The quantity of bodily industry which the Crystal Palace expresses, is very great. So far it is good. The quantity of thought it expresses is, I suppose, a single and admirable thought... probably not a bit brighter than thousands of thoughts which pass through [its designer's] active and intelligent brain every hour—that it might be possible to build a greenhouse larger than ever greenhouse was built before. This thought and some very ordinary algebra are as much as all that glass can represent of human intellect.'

Now after Ruskin on the building, Tennyson on its contents:

.. lo! the giant aisles

Rich in model and design;
Harvest-tool and husbandry,
Loom and wheel and enginery,
Secrets of the sullen mine,

Steel and gold, and coal and wine,

Fabric rough or fairy-fine...

And shapes and hues of Art divine!

All of beauty, all of use,

That one fair planet can produce.*

There are obviously problems in these four quotations which need some thought. The contrast in the reaction to the architecture and the design of 1851 amongst critics of a hundred years ago is as puzzling as that amongst critics of today.

To understand a spirit which can express itself in the Crystal Palace as well as in the style of the objects shown in it, it may be useful to look for a moment at the pre-history of the Great Exhibition. Its originators were Henry Cole and Prince Albert. Henry Cole was born in 1808, Prince Albert in 1819. At the time of Albert's wedding with Queen Victoria, Cole was a promising young civil servant. He worked first on the preservation and storing of public records, then

on the introduction of penny postage, then on the propaganda for unified railway gauges. He was instrumental in bringing about the establishment of docks at Grimsby, and he edited illustrated railway charts with geological and antiquarian notes. These he followed by a series of children's books illustrated by such well-chosen painters as Mulready, Horsley, Richard Redgrave and Linnell, and another series, also for children, with pictures from Holbein, Dürer, Raphael and even Giotto. He thought out a box of terracotta bricks for children and had it made by Minton's, published the first Christmas Card ever issued (designed by Maclise), and finally entered the market of art applied to industry by designing a tea-set which Minton's made and which was exhibited at the Society of Arts in 1846. Of this society he was a member and Prince Albert was the president. The set was given a prize and proved commercially successful over a long period. It was followed by a beer-mug (designed by H. J. Townshend) and other objects for everyday use. On their quality of design more will be said later. Cole produced them under the pseudonym Felix Summerly and called them Art Manufactures. Prince Albert in his presidential address to the Society of Arts in 1846 spoke of the urgent necessity to encourage 'most efficiently the application of the Fine Arts to our manufactures' in order 'to wed high art with mechanical skill'.*

Out of these ideas shared by the Prince Consort and Cole and out of an energy and tenacity also shared by the two men, the Great Exhibition was born, the first international exhibition ever held. A Royal Commission was appointed, and in due course a building committee, consisting of the architects Sir Charles Barry of the Reform Club and Bridgewater House, C. R. Cockerell of the Ashmolean Museum and the Monument on Calton Hill at Edinburgh, and Professor C. L. Donaldson, and the engineers Robert Stephenson, designer of the Conway Tubular Bridge and son of George Stephenson of The Rocket, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of the Clifton and Saltash Bridges and the Great Eastern, and engineer to the Great Western Railway, and William Cubitt. For a long time they could not agree. Finally a compromise was accepted—a long building of brick with a central glass dome somewhat wider in diameter than that of St Peter's in Rome. It would have been costlier than had been budgeted for and would have taken a long time to erect.

This is when Joseph Paxton (1801-65) appeared on the stage. He was superintendent of the gardens of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, and by 1850 a celebrated horticultural expert and an ingenious designer of glasshouses. He challenged, first in private conversation, the soundness of the building committee's design and took it on himself to produce something better, cheaper and more practical. The fundamental idea for the Crystal Palace was first scribbled on a piece of blotting paper during a tribunal of the Midland Railway at Derby which Paxton had to attend. The scribble is now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was converted into proper drawings in the course of a week by Paxton's Chatsworth staff and then presented. The building committee was of course unwilling to scrap its own solution in favour of that of an outsider, but Paxton forced its hand by allowing the publication of his project in the Illustrated London News. It appeared on July 6, 1850, and its boldness and novelty captured popular opinion at once. Punch christened it the Crystal Palace, and it was. accepted on July 15.

It was a triumph of logical construction, wholly independent of any architectural traditions. The two governing problems were fearlessly faced and solved without compromise. How can the best lighting be obtained for an exhibition building? And how can a building, 1,848 feet long by 408 feet wide, be constructed most speedily? The answer was complete reliance on iron and glass as building materials, and on standardization of parts. The whole plan of the building was worked out on a twenty-four-foot grid. The parts, according to a lecture which Paxton himself delivered at Bakewell near Chatsworth in the winter of 1850-51, were to be 6,024 columns all 15 feet long, 3,000 gallery bearers, 1,245 wrought-iron girders, 45 miles of standard length sash-bars and 1,073,760 square feet of glass. With these parts the putting together should work as with 'a perfect

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