Scotland's Homes Fit For Heroes

By Lou Rosenburg

(The Word Bank and Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, £14.99)

Reviewed by David Ross

IN a speech in Wolverhampton shortly after the 1918 armistice, Prime Minister David Lloyd George asked the question, “What is our task?” and promptly answered himself: “To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” Soldiers returning from the battlegrounds of Europe would inhabit “homes fit for heroes”.

Heroism there was aplenty, but within a few years, unemployment was soaring. Good houses were built, but far too few.

The official targets in Scotland were 120,000 new houses to address the general shortage, and the same again to deal with extreme cases of overcrowding. But under the shortlived financial support of the 1919 housing act, which was supposed to deliver heroes’ houses, Scottish local authorities only built 25,000 with another 500 coming from “public utility societies”.

However, Scotland’s Homes Fit For Heroes, by Lou Rosenburg, an honorary fellow at Edinburgh University’s Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, does much more than lament broken promises.

As Richard Rodger, Professor of Economic and Social History at Edinburgh University says in his Foreword: “For the first time we have a convincing explanation as to how the tenement form mutated into the distinctive council housing of Scotland in the inter-war years.”

Tenement building in Scotland was “an ancient tradition dating back to medieval times”. This in contrast to England, where higher density flats were “a relatively recent phenomenon”, often associated with philanthropic housing from the mid-19th century.

Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, seen by many as the "father" of modern town planning, said of tenements: “These are inhabited by the majority of the Scottish people: more than half of the whole population in fact, are in one- and two-room tenements – a state of things unparalleled in Europe or America, in fact in the history of civilisation.”

Many saw the answer for the working class and others in smaller units or cottages, forming new settlements with their own support systems. The book covers the hope invested in the development of this garden city movement, and the commitment of its early advocates to provide their fellow citizens with a better and healthier place to live, particularly those surviving the horrors of the battlefields.

The Scottish Veteran’s Garden City Association, for example, was founded by Edinburgh businessmen in 1915 to do just that. Intriguingly it was convened by the father of the celebrated actor Alastair Sim’s (a memorable Scrooge), Alexander Sim, who was a tailor in the capital.

Although no proper garden city was built north of the Border to match Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, examples of fine terraces shaped by the vision survive. Indeed they are proudly occupied today throughout Scotland from Callander to Longniddry; and Westerton to Pitlochry and Kinlochleven.

Frequently associated with employment for the Admiralty, mines airship and torpedo factories, the quality of the building remains impressive.

So this book should be read by any serious student of Scotland’s built environment, or indeed by those who just want to know a little more about the scale of the challenges faced by our forebears.