Details of all my books are available on this website. I have also archived on this site a wide range of newspaper articles and reports which I have written over the years. This includes work undertaken for a number of international and national organisations and for UK newspapers including The Observer, The Independent, The Guardian and Financial Times. If you wish to access anything from this archived material, please go to my home page.
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Published February 2023
Have a Look! Want to know if this book is one you'll want to buy? Have a look at these extracts.
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
"What a fantastically researched and well written history of the co-operative housing movement, formed around the period from 1870 up until the 1919 Addison Act. Andrew Bibby is clearly a supporter and advocate for co-operative and community-led housing solutions, and this shows in the research and intricate detail of the book." - Journal of Co-operative Studies
"A book I would recommend for its painstaking research and also its endeavour to contextualise co-operative housing both in the lived experience and in the national framework of housing provision" - Family & Community History
"Uniquely detailed... Well worth a read" - Tom Chance, The Land magazine
"With this comprehensive and richly detailed work, Bibby has succeeded in his goal of emphasising the co-operative housing movement's contribution to the British urban environment. The book will be a boon to anyone wishing to learn of pre-council housing alternative tenure forms, and to the development of housing practice in general." - Scottish Labour History
"Andrew Bibby has shone a light on a neglected aspect of housing history as well as reminding us of the significance of co-operation and its influence on working class society before 1914." - North-West Labour History Journal
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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