What the tenants think of Kensal House: Experts' assumptions versus inhabitants' realities in the modern home

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 53, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 167-177

  Darling, Elizabeth ^a  

^a KINGSTON UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 1842751551     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/104648800564563     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. See, for example, Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Penguin, 1961)
2. and Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial (London: Hilary Shipman, 1990)
3. A useful survey of British practice may be found in Women's Design Service, The Good Practice Manual on Tenant Participation (London: Women's Design Service, 1997)
4. See Peter Malpass, "Professionalism and the Role of Architects in Local Authority Housing," Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 82 (1975): 6-29
5. and Marion Roberts, Living in a Manmade World (London: Routledge, 1991)
6. See Tim Putnam and Steve Newton, eds., Household Choices (London: Futures Publications, 1990)
7. Such a stance is implicit in Alice Coleman's approach to the subject of social housing. See Coleman, Utopia on Trial
8. Examples of the application of this new approach may be found in the papers in Putnam and Newton, Household Choices
9. and in Sally MacDonald and Julia Porter, Putting on the Style, Setting up Home in the 1950s (London: Geffrye Museum, 1990)
10. Daniel Miller, "Appropriating the State on the Council Estate" in Putnam and Newman, Household Choices, pp. 43-55
11. The "dialectic" between user and mass-produced object also fits the model of analysis that suggests that artifacts or buildings are both inscribed with the social practices their designers or patrons intend their users to reproduce, but also in the process of usage mass-produced objects are in turn inscribed by the society for which they were made. See Steven Moore, "Technology and the Politics of Sustainability," JAE 51 (1997): 23-31, for a useful discussion of other theories of users and meanings
12. There was some work carried out by sociologists in the 1930s, which investigated the social lives of families who had moved into the newly constructed municipal housing estates. See Ruth Durant, Watling: A Survey of Social Life on a New Housing Estate (London: P.S. King Ltd., 1939)
13. Marjorie Bruce Milne, What the Tenants Think of Kensal House, unpublished survey for the Gas, Light and Coke Company, 1942
14. and Ministry of Health (GB) Central Housing Advisory Committee, Living in Flats (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1952)
15. Between 1919 and 1934 approximately two and a half million new dwellings were constructed in England and Wales: J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 233
16. For more detail about the GLCC's commercial activity and history, see Stirling Everard, The History of the Gas, Light and Coke Company (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1949)
17. Anonymous, "Opening of Kensal House," Co-partners Magazine (Apr 1937): 181. Also see Gas, Light and Coke Company, "Minutes of the Directors' Court of the Gas, Light and Coke Company" (meeting held 3 Nov. 1933). Copies held at the London Metropolitan Archive, B/GLCC/54
18. Anonymous, "Kensal House," The (London) Times, 16 Mar. 1937, p. 13
19. Gas, Light and Coke Company, "Minutes of the Directors' Court of the Gas, Light and Coke Company" (meeting held 3 Nov. 1933)
20. Anonymous, "Opening of Kensal House," p. 181. The other members of the Committee were the architects, Robert Atkinson, C. H. James, Michael Tapper, and G. Grey Wornum
21. See Max Fry, Autobiographical Sketches (London: Elek, 1975), Chapter 10 for a description of this scheme
22. Max Fry, "Kensal House," in Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd., Flats, Municipal & Private Enterprise (London: Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd., 1938), p. 56
23. Elizabeth Denby (1894-1965) is the subject of my Ph.D. research. For coverage of R.E. Sassoon House, which was opened in Nov. 1934, see F.R.S. Yorke and F. Gibberd, The Modern Flat (London: The Architectural Press, 1937)
24. David Milne Watson quoted in "Opening of Kensal House," p. 182
25. I have taken Fry's comments from a taped interview with him, How Modern Architecture Came to England, which was produced for library use in 1975
26. Fry, Autobiographical Sketches, p. 143
27. Elizabeth Denby, "Kensal House, an Urban Village" in Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd, Flats, Municipal & Private Enterprise, pp. 61-64
28. Yorke and Gibberd, The Modern Flat, p. 99
29. Elizabeth Denby, "Kensal House," The Phoenix, June 1937, p. 12
30. Data on Kensal House tenants from Royal Borough of Kensington Council minutes, 5 April 1938 and list of tenants, dated 1939, held in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library, archives of the Kensington Housing Trust. Average working-class incomes from H. Llewellyn Smith, The New Survey of London Life and Labour (London: P. S. King Ltd., 1934)
31. S. C. Leslie, Kensal House, the Case for Gas Is Proved (London: British Commercial Gas Association, 1937), p. 4
32. Fry, "Kensal House," p. 58
33. No history of the Feathers Club Association exists. I have assembled an outline of its activities by examining surviving minute books from the 1930s and from its annual reports for the period
34. Denby, "Kensal House, an Urban Village," p. 62
35. Leslie, Kensal House, the Case for Gas Is Proved, p. 3
36. Fry, How Modern Architecture Came to England
37. National Smoke Abatement Society, Britain's Burning Shame (London: National Smoke Abatement Society, 1937). I am grateful to Tim Boon of the Science Museum, London, for lending me a copy of this pamphlet. The British Commercial Gas Association also produced a number of booklets and leaflets to advertize Kensal House
38. All quotations are taken from Britain's Burning Shame. That the women quoted were actual tenants of Kensal House has been possible to verify from the 1939 list of tenants (see n. 29)
39. Kensal House, directed by Frank Sainsbury, produced by the British Commercial Gas Association, 1937. All quotations are taken from the film
40. Milne, What the Tenants Think of Kensal House
41. Letter dated 21 Dec. 1942 from Marjorie Bruce Milne to A. E. Sylvester of the Gas, Light and Coke Company, attached to the copy of the report held by the British Gas Archive
42. Bruce Milne, What the Tenants Think of Kensal House, p. 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all the comments by tenants are taken from this survey
43. The problem of large families did not go unnoticed by management. The tenants list of 1939 (n. 29 and 38), has marks against those families who were too big, or about to become so, for their accommodation. Attempts seem to have been made to relocate such families to local authority accommodation nearby, but these may have been cut short, perhaps, by the outbreak of war
44. Malcolm Reading, "Screen Gems," Building Design, 729 (1985): p. 19
45. The Ministry of Health (GB), Central Housing Advisory Sub-Committee on the Social Needs and Problems of People Living in Flats was set up July 1950 and reported in Dec. 1951. Its discoveries were published as Ministry of Health (GB) Central Housing Advisory Committee, Living in Flats (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1952). See also the Committee's papers at the Public Record Office, papers HLG/37/89 and HLG/37/92
46. Central Housing Advisory Sub-Committee on the Social Needs and Problems of People Living in Flats, papers in HLG/37/89: "notes on visits already made, Kensal House."
47. Report on Kensal House by Miss J. C. Winnington-Ingram for the Capitol Housing Association, dated May 1946
48. Reading, "Screen Gems," p. 19
49. Elizabeth Denby was replaced by a Housing Manager, Miss Winnington-Ingram, of the Improved Tenements Association
50. Central Housing Advisory Sub-Committee on the Social Needs and Problems of People Living in Flats, notes on Kensal House, HLG/37/92
51. Minute books of the Feathers Club Association, 1952-63, record frequent appeals to likely benefactors
52. Annual Report of the Feathers Club Association, 1941
53. The debate about citizenship and social welfare is explored more adequately than I can do here in, inter alia: Abigail Beach and Richard Weight, eds, The Right to Belong, Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930-1960 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998)
54. I have explored this issue in connection to the social program of Kensal House in my paper, "Enriching and Enlarging the Whole Sphere of Human Activities: The Work of the Voluntary Sector in Housing Reform in Inter-war Britain" in Chris Lawrence and Anna-Katherine Mayer, Science, Medicine and Citizenship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming)
55. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, eds., First Year's Work by Mass-Observation, 1937-8 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), p. 8
56. M-O quoted in Angus Calder & Dorothy Sheridan, eds., Speak for Yourself, a Mass-Observation Anthology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), p. 11. This book offers a useful brief history of M-O
57. Mass-Observation, "Some Psychological Factors in Home Building," Town & Country Planning 11 (1943): 6-9. Harrisson was one of the founders of M-O
58. A critique exemplified in Ivan Illich et al., Disabling Professions (London: Marion Boyas Publishing Ltd., 1977)
59. Mass-Observation, "Some Psychological Factors in Home Building," p. 9