Private Planning and The Great Estates: Lessons from London (3/5)

Part III: Falling in and building up: adaptation and the leasehold system

(This is Part III of my publication that I have split into five for Substack.)

See: Part I, Part II, Part IV, Part V

London’s expansion was neither uniform nor managed:

London was expanding in the 1870s hand over fist, or rather in fits and starts. How was all that growth managed? Of planning in the modern sense of the word there was none to speak of, either physical or economic. London was still strictly laissez-faire; it had no extension or reconstruction plan of the kind that was starting to be favoured by or imposed upon continental cities. There was no active model of forethought for expanding the world’s biggest city, only an accumulation of passive constraints: building regulations, sanitary by-laws and covenants imposed by landlords.¹

In the context of the early twenty-first century it may be the dynamism rather than the mix of grandeur and grime that stands out most about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century inner London. While we may mourn the loss of Georgian or even Victorian London, the ability of past generations to build anew is staggering. It is perhaps because of post-war destruction and the consequent development of the conservation movement that new development has become so difficult. While the conservation movement is, of course, much older, its scale and power changed after the Second World War with the Town and Country Planning Act (1947) and the Civic Amenities Act (1967). Among other things, the former introduced a listing system for historic buildings, the latter the concept of conservation areas rather than specific buildings, allowing neighbourhoods to be protected. Similar efforts were made in the USA.²

New replacing old often emphasises grand destructions of civic or quasi-civic buildings or government-aided destruction and ‘renewal’. Firmly in the pantheon of conservationists’ anathema are: the destruction of Euston Station and the threat to St Pancras (and, in the USA, demolition of Manhattan’s Penn Station); the building of great highways dividing neighbourhoods;³ the destruction of neighbourhoods themselves through slum clearance. Widespread demand for historic preservation laws is relatively new – the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was only founded in the late nineteenth century. The Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians remade their cities with relatively little concern. Many buildings in Manhattan or central London replaced existing ones, including some whose loss shocked later generations. This was less the case away from city centres. The technological changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allowed cities to expand, so that generally the greater the distance from central London the newer the houses, most of which stand on former farmland.

Even before conservation rules, many areas on the great estates were kept intact, although others were systematically rebuilt after their initial building lease or later repairing leases expired. As land prices increased, many of the vast London seats of the aristocracy were demolished or adapted for other uses. In New York, the mansions of the gilded age met the same fate.

Perhaps the most important advantage of the great estates, as opposed to smaller freehold landholding, was that their size and the nature of reversionary leases gave them incentive and capacity for private planning. They could undertake comprehensive replanning and rebuilding. Many buildings in current conservation areas, such as the Queen Anne revival red-brick streets of the Grosvenor’s Mayfair estate and the Cadogan estate, are themselves replacements. Furthermore, even when not comprehensively rebuilt, Georgian streets were transformed through the application of ornamentation and terracotta tiling. The leasehold system allowed such changes at street, block or even wider level. The great estates could take advantage of economies of scale more easily – and do far more – than individual freeholders, and could reduce negative spillovers in a way that involved neither the direct incentive of freeholders nor the limited regulatory system. This capacity was, of course, constrained, and depended – as with public planning – on geography, features of the markets and even some degree of unforeseen good fortune.

As such, the system offered some of the benefits of both widely dispersed freeholds and later government controls. During the long period of the initial building lease – and any subsequent leases – the power of the estate was mostly limited to enforcing the restrictions set out in covenants. While rebuilding freehold land was more straightforward in this period before planning, the results were often less pleasing aesthetically than more uniform estate rebuilding. Other aspects of private planning, such as coordinating land use, were also more easily practised by the estates.

This chapter shows how in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the great estates responded to changes in the market. While they became wealthier as land values rose, this also led to their densifying holdings. It shows how this took place in different ways over time and within the economic, technological and social context that drove the market. The leasehold system allowed both regulatory control and market incentives. In response to market forces, great estates used leases to densify existing neighbourhoods incrementally with additional storeys and flats, updated architectural designs to changing tastes and sometimes comprehensively rebuilt areas.

Urban growth and change in the nineteenth century

It is nigh impossible to exaggerate the scale of urban change in the nineteenth century. For seven decades the average ten-year growth rate for the population of London varied between a low of 16 per cent and a high of 21 per cent.⁴ With figures like this the population grew from around 1m in 1800 to 6.5m by 1900.⁵ Indicative of the scale of growth is that roughly half those living in London in 1851 were not born there.⁶ It was not the scale alone that led to changes but also the form it took, enabled by new technologies.

In the first few decades of the early nineteenth century this growth, like all prior urban growth, was concentrated in the emerging city centres. Walking-speed provided a limit to the geographic spread of urban areas. Transportation advances over the century – railways, the underground and the shorter-range feeder transportation of omnibuses that allowed people to commute from their home to a station – enabled the extensive growth that pushed ever outwards. London quickly outgrew the confines of the City, filling in along the Thames towards Westminster before 1800, but it was really in the nineteenth century that it began swallowing up increasingly remote villages. Fashionable London shifted westward to surround Hyde Park rather than just abut its eastern side: Bayswater, Kensington, South Kensington, Knightsbridge and Belgravia joined earlier Mayfair to complete the rectangle around the park. In the process described in Part II, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell laid out Tyburnia on the Bishop of London’s lands near Paddington to the north-east of the park. In Belgravia, Thomas Cubitt did the same on the Grosvenor land. To the north, the efforts of John Nash and the master builders James and Decimus Burton pushed into Regent’s Park. And later the efforts of other private developers, small and large, increasingly turned agricultural land near London into suburban land.

Outside this ring the wealthier, who could afford the commute and wanted to escape the increasingly polluted core, moved to areas such as Clapham, Richmond and Hampstead⁷ and commuted by private carriage. Even before the advent and expansion of railways, horsedrawn omnibuses allowed those who could not afford a private coach to commute from greater distances. And for places out on the river, steamboats began running along the Thames in the early nineteenth century. With the coming of the railways the commutable area of London expanded dramatically. Though the countryside grew ever more physically remote as fields were filled in, railways allowed easier travel. Towns such as Brighton became not just holiday destinations for Londoners but far-flung suburbs. Such development at lower density absorbed more countryside around cities than was common on the Continent, but gave more people private gardens.

With this transport revolution alone, much of the farmland around London and the industrial cities of the north would have been converted to housing as the returns from building terraces rose above that of growing crops, but this was reinforced in the later nineteenth century by a dramatic fall in agricultural prices. This had a profound impact on the landed aristocracy, including some of those fortunate enough to have London estates. Within just 50 years the value of urban land and houses grew dramatically while that of agricultural land plummeted:

In 1850–1 land had been assessed at £42.8m in England and Wales and houses [including the land on which they stood] at £39.4m. By 1900–1 the figures were respectively £37.2m and £157.1m, reflecting urbanisation and agricultural depression.⁸

Thus agricultural depression and increase in commutable distances led to more and more of the countryside joining the commuter belt. Centripetal forces drew outsiders to the cities but centrifugal forces drew those who could afford the fares out towards the edge. Furthermore, workmen’s fares allowed cheaper commutes and therefore enabled more suburbanisation.⁹

The spread of the speculative builders enabled by the transport revolution is underemphasised in narratives of the creation of modern Britain. The scale of urbanisation and suburbanisation, in particular in London, was unprecedented. What may now appear quaint and sleepy suburbs of the sort popular in most developed countries were in fact innovatory and modern.

As Donald Olsen correctly stated: ‘the proliferation of scattered settlements [outside inner London] was a more significant portent than the development of terraces and squares … unprecedented in form and structure as well as astonishing in extent.’¹⁰ The nineteenthcentury spread of London was revolutionary and set the pattern later cities followed. Yet even while this extensive growth was occurring, land values in the centre were rising so much that taller and taller buildings were replacing existing ones, and open lands that survived within London were filled in.

These great changes were both caused by and the cause of sustained economic growth. People flocked to London; rail infrastructure was built and suburbs constructed to take advantage of the great productivity of the City of London and other commercial and industrial hubs. Agglomeration effects for these areas were bolstered by the improvements in technology that enabled more people to work together during the day while living outside these specialised districts. Estimates suggest that in the counterfactual without railways, London as a whole would have been over 50 per cent smaller.¹¹

Importantly, the laying of railway lines led to a transformation of the City of London and the West End, as well as the surrounding countryside. Transport speed determines the effective commuting radius of commercial centres. The increase in speed – and decrease in price – meant that workers could commute greater distances, but this only increased the importance of floorspace in the centre. Suburbanites may have fled from them each evening but they spent most of their day in the City or West End:

As commuting costs fall, workers become able to separate their residence and workplace to take advantage of the high wages in places with high productivity relative to amenities (so that these locations specialize as workplaces) and the low cost of living in places with high amenities relative to productivity (so that these locations specialize as residences).¹²

As commercial users outbid residential users, these factors combined to transform the City into the central business district known today. Existing City residents could do well for themselves by vacating, for:

the rooms formerly used as living rooms are more valuable as offices, and a citizen may now live in a suburban villa or even in a Belgravian or Tyburnian mansion, upon the rent he obtains for the drawing-room floor of the house wherein his ancestors lived for generations.¹³

The night-time population plummeted while the daytime population rose. New purpose-built commercial offices began to replace older terraces. Similar forces would push westward in the twentieth century as increasing portions of the great estates, such as Bloomsbury and Mayfair, became commercialised.

By contrast, in those places with high amenity values the rising cost of land led to the densification of housing, not commercialisation. The historical novelty of increasingly distant suburbanisation and commercial specialisation in a central business district should not distract from the natural residential densification that was occurring in inner London. Some of the densest residential areas of the UK, often denser than the post-war council estates, are in the parts of inner London built and rebuilt by the great estates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Adapting to a changing market through rebuilding leases

In the context of this growth and innovation, the flexibility of the leasehold system enabled rational rebuilding when leases fell in; that is, when they expired and all rights over the property reverted to the landowner:

It was only when the leases had expired and the landlord was once again in actual possession of the buildings that he could adopt a dynamic policy of change and adaptation. He might then choose either to reassert or to abandon the original plan. If he decided on the former, he would grant new repairing leases. If the latter, he would demolish the buildings and grant new building leases for their sites. Legally he was a free agent, no longer limited by the rights of subordinate leasehold interests.¹⁴

The following focuses on the ability of the great estates to alter the appearance of neighbourhoods and make other incremental changes; the next section looks at more substantial rebuilding efforts.

Architectural taste is not immune to the temporary fads and fashions that afflict other arts. The houses on the great estates, like most residential buildings, were rarely designed by the most prominent architects. The architectural language often lagged behind fashion, though much of it retains appeal. In the era before conservation areas or architectural listing, many attractive and important buildings were demolished – even buildings by the great John Soane were not spared.

Aesthetics

Estates responded to changing aesthetic taste in various ways. Some attempted to hold on to the existing designs; others added ornament to Georgian terraces so that stylistically they appeared more Italianate or Queen Anne. On the Bedford estate the changes of aesthetic taste away from the austerity of Georgian architecture – and the shift westward of the middle and upper classes – harmed the bottom line. Gower Street on the Bloomsbury estate or Harley Street on the Portland were touchstones for critics of Georgian architecture, much as the hulking modernist Trellick Tower in north-west London is for critics of brutalism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Bedford estate began moving towards fashionable architectural taste by requiring new tenants to apply terracotta to existing terraced houses and, at the turn of the century, building two ornate hotels on Russell Square, one of which, the Russell, still stands.¹⁵

Whereas the Bedford was seen as hopelessly old-fashioned, the Cadogan and Grosvenor estates attempted to lead taste by commissioning prominent architects.¹⁶ The aesthetic reprofiling of a neighbourhood was sometimes the result of the architectural tastes of the great aristocrats or their surveyors, but often simply the product of commercial interest. On the Grosvenor’s Mayfair and the Cadogan estates, whole areas – such as Mount Street and Hans Town respectively – were rebuilt in contemporary fashion and to a higher density. On others it was not economic to rebuild more fully, so the response to the market was aesthetic tinkering and other smaller changes. Without delving into details it is worth noting that these often diverged from prevailing architectural taste. Builders kept building what looked like Georgian buildings far after professional taste soured on them. The estates quickly integrated into their designs the gothic revival favoured by architectural elites but used it for churches more than residential buildings, with a few exceptions in St John’s Wood, Holland Park and Islington. While the gothic revivalists pilloried painted stucco, estates and speculative builders continued to use it, albeit in Italianate not Regency styles, until the red-brick and terracotta styles of the later nineteenth century became more prominent.

Requirements to update buildings to changing circumstances did not stop at aesthetics – the renewal of leases sometimes required additions or internal renovations. Two forms this took were the addition of storeys and the renovation of mews – as working-class housing in addition to stabling. Examples of more substantial efforts are given in later sections.

Additional storeys

It was common, as part of both renewal and new leases, for the estate as freeholder to require of lessees both aesthetic updating and the addition of storeys. Already, for instance, in the middle of the nineteenth century on the Grosvenor’s Mayfair estate:

The applicant had to sign a bond, often of over £1,000, to ensure the due performance of the works, which generally included the addition of a Doric open porch and sometimes a balustrade in front of the first-floor windows (both in Portland stone), cement dressings to the windows, and a blocking course, balustrade or moulded stone coping at the top. Sometimes an additional storey was to be built.¹⁷

In 1888, on the Portman estate, a similar requirement was imposed on ‘leaseholders wishing to renew in the more desirable properties’.¹⁸ Even earlier, on that estate, tenants were incentivised to add an additional storey through the practice of issuing 40-year leases rather than shorter ones.¹⁹

Mews intensification

Over time the land costs of a stable and the ease of first hiring coaches and then riding on newer forms of transportation led to fewer mews being built on newly laid-out developments.²⁰ Later this led to the conversion of stables into mews houses but at first the mews were mostly just modernised or replaced. At the smallest scale this could include adding housing above stables, such as for a married coachman and assistant; at the extreme, new residential buildings would be put up on mews streets.²¹ As the cost of running large houses increased, purpose-built small – sometimes called dwarf or bijou – houses were erected in mews and side streets behind taller houses, such as in Mayfair and on the Portland/Howard de Walden estate in Marylebone:

At about this time this process was taken a stage further by the occasional conversion of stables into dwelling houses, the first known example being at No. 2 Aldford Street in 1908; and in later years the size and quality of these equine palaces was such that many of them proved well suited for adaptation to domestic use for residents no longer able or willing to live in a great house in one of the fashionable streets.²²

Conversion to lateral flats

Throughout London, houses were divided as the price of land increased and potential residents were unable to afford a full terraced house. While often prevented by covenants aimed at maintaining the tenor of middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods, division was later sometimes achieved by estates on reversion. For instance, in Marylebone, Mayfair and Belgravia the changing circumstances of the neighbourhood led to deceptive continuity where lateral flats were built behind façades.²³

Commercial Mayfair

As in the City, changing factors could result in higher values from commercial uses. As discussed in Part II, there was a consumer preference for the separation of uses, for which the most capable estates provided via covenants of use. However, both Bloomsbury and Mayfair commercialised in the late nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth. Sometimes estates resisted, though ultimately they embraced commercialisation as the most valuable use of the land, while seeking to counter negative spillover effects by limiting the types of offices allowed.

Besides offices, estates increasingly encouraged shopping streets with purpose-built storefronts to replace the ground-floor shops in converted terraces. Armed with plate-glass windows, shops could now appeal far more. Increasingly attractive commercial streets – such as Woburn Walk, built in the early 1820s by Cubitt on the Bedford estate – led the way for later enclosed arcades.²⁴ Older portions of estates mimicked these designs when leases came up, improving and consolidating shops in areas or streets (e.g. Mount Street on the Grosvenor estate).

Greenspace

Just as in the original development, redevelopment would allow estates to assess the provision of green space. In Mayfair, for instance, the creation Mount Street Gardens and Brown Hart Gardens provided open-access greenspace. Furthermore, as with earlier garden squares, estates built restricted-access green space in the form of communal gardens.

As traffic and noise increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, internal communal gardens surrounded by buildings were preferred to garden squares. The Ladbroke estate built two such in Notting Hill, but interestingly the Grosvenor created two much smaller ones – Green Street Gardens and South Street Gardens – in the early twentieth-century redevelopment of Mayfair. By redeveloping blocks and creating internal communal gardens on land previously devoted to stables and garages, the estate increased the ground rent it could charge.²⁵

Comprehensive regeneration and model dwellings

One benefit of estates’ rebuilding when leases fell in was that whole neighbourhoods could be treated comprehensively: ‘A freeholder of an individual building could at best try to adapt it to the changing character of the neighbourhood. A large landowner could change the character of the neighbourhood itself.’²⁶ Nearly the whole of contemporary Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Chelsea is the product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite being originally developed in the eighteenth. This rebuilding was facilitated by the expiration of building leases (often of 99 years), but did not always occur purely by chance or as an inherent product of the leasehold system. Rather, over the nineteenth century, as the price of land rose, the benefits of widespread redevelopment increased and estates took action to coordinate leases to maximise their power to adapt to changing conditions. Even on the wealthy Grosvenor estate, the Second Marquess of Westminster was initially limited in his actions ‘as hitherto virtually no attempt had been made to make the leases of adjoining sites expire simultaneously’.²⁷ He did not repeat the mistakes of his father, and with costly and time-consuming efforts he and his staff ensured that renewal leases on neighbouring properties were strategically structured to come due at the same time and thus ‘phase the rebuilding of large parts of the estate over a number of years’.²⁸

Such estates were not representative, merely the most successful and consequently having the highest land values, wealth and power. The point is not that all estates engaged as they did, rather that this institutional framework led to densification in the most successful areas. This kind of strategic behaviour – not to mention the rebuilding itself – was costly but ultimately profitable, with benefits for the estate, residents and everyday Londoners.

Comprehensive rebuilding and intensification: Cadogan estate

In the 1770s the architect Henry Holland, on building leases from the Cadogan estate, developed Hans Town and built himself a large house with expansive gardens. By the 1870s the 99-year leases were expiring and the Cadogan estate decided to rebuild comprehensively. Red-brick Queen Anne revival style appears throughout the eastern part of the estate and on parts of Chelsea off it, but is most concentrated around Hans Place, Cadogan Square and along Pont Street.²⁹ The architectural historian Osbert Lancaster even coined the phrase ‘Pont Street Dutch’ to describe a subset of the style, with pointed gables breaking up the roofline of terraces and emphasising their individuality, as opposed to the composed singular façade of earlier Georgian designs or the heavy repetition of tall Italianate blocks with a single roofline that dominate nearby South Kensington.³⁰ Other buildings on this and other estates introduced newer, larger and grander forms, such as the mansion blocks described in more detail below. The effort was a success both aesthetically and financially.

Comprehensive rebuilding and intensification: Grosvenor estate, Mayfair

Within the West End some of the most comprehensive rebuilding in a new style took place in the north-western portions of the Grosvenor’s Mayfair estate. In particular the area around Mount Street was redeveloped ‘between 1870 and 1895, a project driven by the first Duke’s desire to significantly upgrade the architectural quality of the street and, ultimately, be able to raise ground rents’.³¹ The estate carefully structured new leases so that portions of the estate would revert at the same time, or worked with existing leaseholders to form consortia to rebuild an entire block. For instance, even before the Queen Anne rebuilding of Mayfair, the Grosvenor estate encouraged commercial lessees along Oxford Street to hire one architect and builder to carry out a rebuilding lease for a combined structure (this continued at scale in the Mount Street rebuilding). Or speculators with better financial means and expertise would carry out rebuilding leases and often rehouse displaced businesses after construction.³² These practices were even more prevalent in the later rebuilding efforts, and better represent those on other estates.

Many of the same ends described above in the section looking at additional storeys and similar were achieved at a greater scale in both architectural and urban design: what were once individual terraces became rows of purpose-built shops with purpose built middle-class flats above, and more isolated shops became consolidated on commercial streets.

Like a pointillist painting in which tiny brushstrokes compose a cohesive scene, comprehensive redevelopment relied on seemingly rudimentary individual contracting and rebuilding. Through discretion in fixed-term contracts, estates exerted control over how they changed. However, due to their interest they did not seek simply to freeze the achievements of the past, for good and ill. Like the Cadogan estate, the Grosvenor was a leader or at least early adopter in architectural taste. The red-brick and terracotta streets of Mayfair were lauded and helped the estate attract and retain the best tenants. As part of these efforts, it limited the types of work that could be carried out during the London season, when aristocracy would migrate from country seat to metropolis.³³

Combatting slums and providing model housing

Apart from the general incentive to densify, separate commercial uses and update the aesthetics of a neighbourhood, the falling in of leases also provided for adaptation to changing socio-economic circumstances. In the nineteenth century, increased attention was given to living standards of the urban poor. Often the results may have harmed the very targets of support by taking away options deemed unsuitable, while not providing sufficient alternatives. Even without public efforts at slum clearance and public works, such as Shaftsbury Avenue and Victoria Street, much of the existing housing stock was taken out by the building of railway stations and the private efforts of the estates. Some of this was replaced by charitable housing, a proportion of which was supported by the estates, most often through provision of land.

While the foundational housing unit of London was the terrace, working-class families often lived in a room or rooms rather than a whole house. The poorest lived in rookeries – dense and dirty collections of decaying terraces and pedestrian courts crammed inside blocks created by the streets and often occupying former gardens. Miasmatic-disease theory, among other things, suggested that the deprivation of the slums was the result of their physical attributes, in particular lack of ventilation caused by narrow streets and crowded buildings. This Chadwickian³⁴ and Dickensian London existed alongside that of squares and stucco; in fact because of transportation technology and the reliance of the upper classes on domestic labour, they often existed in close proximity.

Its location and the quality of its planning mostly guaranteed the Grosvenor estate the highest-quality tenants in Mayfair and Belgravia, but even within the former, towards the edge of the estate, the surrounding commercial thoroughfares and slums were perpetual issues. The estate kept the quality of working-class housing better than in many areas, investigating and banning actions that imposed costs on surrounding houses through covenants, as described in Part II. However, the worst areas were almost always on the dispersed freehold lands, on which even housing of ostensibly good quality was subdivided to the degree of overcrowding, exacerbated by structures built in gardens. Earlier leases on even the better-managed estates often failed to anticipate threats and inadequately restricted leaseholders, leading to, among other things, such building-over of gardens.

Insofar as this lowered the total value of the land by reducing that of neighbouring properties, it was inefficient. Because the estates had an interest in the whole rather than just single properties, they would attempt to limit leaseholders through covenants. Furthermore, they sought to curb the influence of surrounding areas to protect their own desirability and subsequent value. They frequently gave control of areas to charitable ventures, such as the Peabody Trust or the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company, which would ensure a higher quality of lower-income tenants.³⁵

The decision to turn the fraying parts of the estate over to specialised operators only occurred after the failure of earlier efforts to control decay, usually through the system of requiring repairs and dilapidations by existing tenants or rebuilding by potential ones (see Part II). It could also include such measures as limiting pubs and other potentially negative influences.³⁶

In other instances the estate would take a more direct role in the redevelopment. For example, in the late nineteenth century the Portland Industrial Dwellings Company, ‘a commercial venture independent of the Portland estate but set up by and partly owned by it’, redeveloped Grotto Place just off Marylebone High Street.³⁷ Like the efforts of other estates, including those that took a less active role in building, ‘the redevelopment followed several years of site acquisition, achieved through refusing lease renewals and bargaining with lessees by offering to waive rent and dilapidations.’³⁸

The intellectual appeal of model dwellings operated on multiple levels. Richard Dennis divides these into ‘model as ideal’ and ‘model as exemplary’.³⁹ The ideal model sought a physical solution to the problems of poverty and disease – especially cholera. Beyond this, the types of housing, social-control practices and outcomes of residents all served as examples others could emulate. This kind of venture was both charitable and selfinterested because the well-managed model dwellings would also provide a cordon sanitaire between commercial streets or slums, outside the control of the estate, and more genteel neighbourhoods.⁴⁰

Purpose-built middle-class flats

Whereas the working-class flats described in the previous section mostly replaced overcrowded terraced housing, the streets of Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Chelsea and similar parts of London adopted increasingly ornamented mansion blocks during the second half of the nineteenth century. One potential reason was to differentiate middleclass blocks from more austere charitable ones. In urban Europe the flat housed most of society, but when the non-charitable purpose-built flat did arrive in London, it largely came to the higher end. Prior to the invention of lifts, vertical segregation was effected within the same block. The poorest were at the top (often a roof storey), with progressively wealthier classes on the storeys closer to the ground and requiring fewer flights of stairs. The terraced house had provided the basic unit in London (and continued to dominate across the country until the rise of the semi-detached), but land prices in inner London led to the construction of middle-class mansion blocks in the late nineteenth century. Although regulations were brought in, the typical dimensions continued to grow, both in the early twentieth century and resuming in the 1930s, after the First World War and the slump.

Due to pre-existing cultural attitudes, the ready number of accessible suburbs and the similarity to working-class model dwellings (together with the density multi-storeyed terraces can achieve), flats still represented a small portion of the market. Olsen notes that ‘luxury “mansion flats” were going up all over London, although they were not yet regarded as providing proper homes for families, but rather as meeting a number of special circumstances.’⁴¹ Among these were their use as pied-à-terre for families who lived in London seasonally, or as bachelor flats near, for example, gentlemen’s clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘one of the early experiments designed to introduce French flats to a suspicious English public’ occurred on the Grosvenor’s Belgravia estate, near the recently constructed Victoria Station.⁴² Here Belgrave Mansion – later renamed Grosvenor Gardens House – was built in the late 1860s in a then-fashionable French style.

Less exclusive were purpose-built flats above shops on commercial streets. Whereas in the past the floors above a shop might house only its proprietor, and the physical structure of the shop would appear little different from the terraces on a residential street, new buildings in the nineteenth century would allow purpose-built storefronts with multiple flats above. Examples of this include the Duke Street Mansions and Audley Mansions on the Grosvenor’s Mayfair estate.⁴³ These slotted between mansion blocks and charitable housing in class. Upper-middle-class mansion blocks and purpose-built shops with flats were part of the variety of purpose-built structures that would proliferate over the nineteenth century, including pubs, theatres, shopping arcades, hotels and railway stations.⁴⁴ Through separate entrances, residents could ascend to their spacious flats above, whose exteriors became increasingly ornate, perhaps to differentiate them from the charitable flats.

The Grosvenor estate led in adoption of architectural styles but others soon followed. Just off Bedford Square on the Bedford’s Bloomsbury estate, middle-class flats were built on ‘sub-standard mews property’.⁴⁵ One of these was Bedford Court Mansions (pictured above). Later intensification efforts included Tavistock Court on Tavistock Square.

The northern portions of the Portman estate built mansion blocks, including Clarence Gate Gardens off Dorset Square near Marylebone Station, and Bickenhall Mansions south of Marylebone Road. The Portland estate added mansion blocks, including Scott Ellis Gardens.

Of course, this type of building did not just occur as redevelopment on estates. On freehold land, mansion blocks replaced terraces as land values appreciated, and estates built new areas consisting mainly of them. In Maida Vale,⁴⁶ for instance, the initial development of former farmland owned, in part, by the Church Commissioners was dominated by mansion blocks towards the Paddington Recreation Grounds. And to the south of Battersea Park, land controlled by the Crown Estate and managed by commissioners, as set out in an Act of Parliament, was filled with mansion blocks as the nineteenth century ended.

After a dramatic fall in land prices, the First World War and the subsequent economic slump, intensification began again in the energetic 1930s. While the period is known for the building of increasingly outlying mock-Tudor suburbs, there was also dense and even modernist mansion-block building in London. By this time the economic profits from building, alongside changing fashions for flat living, had led to the intensification of the Grosvenor’s Mayfair estate.⁴⁷ Similar developments took place on the Cadogan estate in the 1930s when leases fell in around Cadogan Place and Sloane Square, and earlier on Cadogan Square. The Howard de Walden estate rebuilt some of its portion of St John’s Wood, in north-west London, focused between St John’s Wood High Street and Primrose Hill to the east (an area previously known as Portland Town), as did the Eyre estate on their section of the area.

In the interwar years the detached villas of leafy St Johns Wood were joined by tall mansion flats as the Eyre estate decided not to renew long leases that came due but rather responded to the price signal. In doing so they had to weigh the potential economic risk to the existing market for expensive single-family houses by surrounding many of them with large buildings. Residents of villas to be demolished knew in advance that they did not own the freehold and had few means of stopping the densification. While the redevelopment necessarily meant change, it took place in a way that responded to market signals and allowed housing to be provided in the places that needed it most.

Conclusion

In contrast to the image of an absentee landlord – or professional manager – simply collecting revenues and running down existing housing stock, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide numerous examples of estates responding to changing conditions. The fact that landlords benefitted from value-creating actions (in the form of increased reversionary value and ground rent), their capacity for overcoming transaction costs associated with rebuilding through structured leases, their ability to capture spillovers – all these represent benefits associated with this system.

Some of the processes outlined in Part III were carried out in other institutional settings – including other parts of London – as the price of land increased. The point is not that other types of land management failed to respond with intensification, rather that the great estates managed to do so in a way that took a broader view. Public planning and regulation may help secure the benefits of cohesive management – such as rational planning, aesthetic coherence and long-term interest – without requiring concentrated ownership by individuals who receive unearned income as agglomeration effects increase the price of land. Consequently, the performance of the great estates offers an empirical comparison for later public planning.

Looked at from the twenty-first century, however, the attribute that is perhaps most difficult to comprehend is their ability to re-transform existing urban environments in response to changing market circumstances. Part IV details some of the changes in the political economy of housing that led to the current situation.

(This is Part III of my publication that I have split into five for Substack.)

See: Part IV

Part I, Part II, Part V

1. Andrew Saint, London 1870–1914: A City at its Zenith (London: Lund Humphries, 2021), p. 32.

2. Jacob Anbinder, ‘What Historic Preservation is doing to American Cities’, The Atlantic, May 2022; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/ historic-preservation-has-tenuous-relationship-history/629731.

3. Michael Dnes, ‘London’s Lost Ringways’, Works in Progress, April 2022; https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/londons-lost-ringways.

4. These rates are impressive but easily outpaced by the growth of the industrial cities in the north. Similarly, in the American context the rise of New York was spectacular but Chicago, San Francisco and other cities emerged seemingly ex nihilo.

5. Michael Hebbert, London: More by Fortune than Design (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), p. 34.

6. H. J. Dyos, ‘Greater and Greater London: Metropolis and Provinces in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History by H. J. Dyos, ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 49.

7. The great paintings of Hampstead Heath by John Constable, who in the era before widespread railways would summer in Hampstead, shed light on the extent of urban growth. He paints the Heath not as an island of wilderness but as the beginning of the countryside, with only far villages like Harrow visible beyond Hampstead and Highgate.

8. J. A. Yelling, ‘Land, Property and Planning’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 3: 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 469.

9. Simon T. Abernethy, ‘Opening up the Suburbs: Workmen’s Trains in London 1860–1914’, Urban History 42:1 (February 2015), pp. 70–8; https://doi:10.1017/ S0963926814000479.

10. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London: Batsford, 1976), p. 191.

11. Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm, ‘The Making of the Modern Metropolis: Evidence from London’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 135:4 (November 2020), pp. 2059–2133; https://doi:10.1093/qje/ qjaa014.

12. Heblich, Redding and Sturm, ‘Making of the Modern Metropolis’, p. 2061

13. Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 136, quoting Edward I’Anson, ‘On the Valuation of House Property in London’, in Papers Read at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Session 1872 (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1873), p. 40.

14. Donald J. Olsen, Town Planning in London: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 159.

15. Olsen, Growth of Victorian London, pp. 137–40.

16. Olsen, Growth of Victorian London, pp. 142–56.

17. F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volume 39, The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 1 (London: The Athlone Press/University of London, 1977), pp. 47–66, para. 16; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol39/pt1.

18. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 63.

19. Olsen, Town Planning in London, p. 166.

20. Saint, London 1870–1914, p. 39.

21. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 47–66, para. 85.

22. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 98–102, para. 13

23. Juliet Patricia Davis, ‘The Resilience of a London Great Estate: Urban Development, Adaptive Capacity and the Politics of Stewardship’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 11:1 (January 2018), p. 117; https://doi:10.1080/17549175.2017.1360378.

24. John Summerson, Georgian London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1945), pp. 219, 310.

25. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 67–82, para. 16.

26. Olsen, Town Planning in London, p. 160.

27. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 47–66, para. 10.

28. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 47–66, para. 12.

29. Patricia E. C. Croot (ed.), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 12, Chelsea (London: Victoria County History, 2004), ch. ‘Settlement and Building: From 1865 to 1900’, pp. 66–78, para. 16; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ middx/vol12/pp66-78#p16.

30. Osbert Lancaster, Pillar to Post (London: John Murray, 1938), p. 64.

31. Davis, ‘Resilience of a London Great Estate’, p. 117.

32. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 47–66

33. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 47–66, para. 34

34. Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: Clowes & Sons, 1842) was influential in public-health reforms in the middle of the nineteenth century, which took place in bursts following outbreaks of disease.

35. There was a range of charitable and quasi-charitable model-housing providers over the nineteenth century.

36. Philip Temple and Colin Thom (eds), Survey of London: Volumes 51 and 52, South-East Marylebone (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2017), ch. ‘West of Marylebone High Street’, p. 20; draft at https://www.ucl. ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/sites/bartlett/files/chapter04_west_of_marylebone_ high_street.pdf.

37. Temple and Thom, ‘West of Marylebone High Street’, p. 19

38. Temple and Thom, ‘West of Marylebone High Street’, p. 20.

39. Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 226.

40. Richard Dennis, ‘Modern London’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 3: 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 111; https://doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521417075.004

41. Olsen, City as a Work of Art, p. 93

42. Olsen, Growth of Victorian London, p. 144

43. Sheppard, Survey of London, pp. 98–102, para. 7; pp. 140–61, para. 15.

44. Olsen, Growth of Victorian London, pp. 87–127.

45. Olsen, Growth of Victorian London, p. 139

46. Maida Vale is now the densest section of the UK in terms of population per square kilometre – Feargus O’Sullivan, ‘Urbanist Lessons from the Densest Neighborhoods across Europe’, Bloomberg UK, City Lab, March 2018; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/urbanist-lessons-fromthe-densest-neighborhoods-across-europe.

47. Davis, ‘Resilience of a London Great Estate’, p. 115.