These Houses Are Ours
Co-operative and community-led housing alternatives, 1870-1919
Published February 2023
The
years before the First World War saw the development of a widespread
housing movement in Britain which delivered homes at affordable rents
through co-operative and community endeavour.
From
Cornwall to central Scotland, Suffolk to South Wales, working-class tenants
moved into their newly constructed homes and began to create communities.
As Birmingham housing reformer John Nettlefold put it in 1914,
tenants might not be able to say that they owned their individual houses but
they could nevertheless say that, collectively, ‘these houses are ours’.
Many of
the estates adopted ‘garden village’ principles as a radical alternative to
conventional urban streets of high-density housing.
Community meeting rooms, allotments, sports facilities and children’s
playgrounds were frequently included.
As
Andrew Bibby points out in his richly researched book, this almost forgotten
history mirrors uncannily current interest in bottom-up community-led
efforts to meet housing need. As we face a housing crisis once again in
Britain, and with council housing no longer the default means of providing
affordable homes, the alternative models for social housing developed more
than a century ago offer much that is relevant to us today.
“Andrew Bibby has written a very readable and informative study of the policies, politics and personalities of an unfairly neglected part of our housing history. His book is both a significant historical record and a primer for those who would learn from the past to democratise our current housing practice. - John Boughton, author, Municipal Dreams
"Andrew Bibby has become a specialist in rescuing important episodes in our co-operative past from the enormous forgetfulness of history – and we should be thankful for that." - Co-op News
Have a Look! Want to know if this book's one you'll want to buy? Have a look at these extracts from three of the chapters, together with the contents page and index for the book.
My guest post on the Municipal Dreams blog site with more information about the book was published on Feb 14 2023
Andrew Bibby draws lessons from the legacy of co-operative housing: interview in Co-op News, March 2023
ISBN 978-1-913625-08-5
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