CHAPTER II
Public Housing in Poplar
The dominance of public housing in Poplar's built
environment is a relatively recent phenomenon. (fn. a) Most of
it was built between 1950 and 1980, and by 1981, 97.6
per cent of all dwellings in the Borough of Tower Hamlets
(formed in 1965 and including Poplar) were owned by
local authorities. (ref. 1)
Despite the many working-class families in the area
and the poor condition of much of the housing, very
little public housing was built in Poplar during the
nineteenth century. The dock companies provided only
a minimal accommodation for their enormous workforce,
and none of the early philanthropic housing societies
built anything in the area. Some tenement blocks and a
few cottages were built in the 1890s and early 1900s by
the London County Council (LCC) in connection with
the building of the Blackwall Tunnel. After 1906,
however, the LCC concentrated its efforts on developing
cottage estates in outer London and built scarcely anything more in Poplar until the 1930s. With no state
housing subsidy, Poplar Borough Council found it
impossible to build any dwellings before the First World
War.
The government subsidies offered by the 1919 and
subsequent Housing Acts induced the Borough Council
to embark upon a housing programme extending throughout the 1920s, and comprising a mixture of cottage estates
and blocks of flats. In the 1930s the LCC changed its
policy and, as a result, both councils erected well over
twice as many dwellings as in the previous decade, almost
exclusively blocks of flats for rehousing as part of the
national drive against slums and overcrowded conditions.
The period immediately after the 1939–45 war was
taken up with providing sufficient temporary housing for
those made homeless during the war. Because of this and
the post-war economic crisis, construction of permanent
new housing did not really begin until the 1950s. Up to
about 1980, most of the older, nineteenth-century private
terraced housing was swept away and replaced by a series
of large council estates – a legacy of war damage and the
result of the local authorities' policy of comprehensive
redevelopment. These estates consisted mainly of blocks
of flats, although in contrast to some other parts of
London, there were relatively few high-rise blocks. This
great rebuilding reached a peak in the later 1960s and
early 1970s.
From the later 1970s the number of new council
dwellings declined drastically, and none has been built in
Poplar since 1983. Indeed, the 1980s saw a slight depletion
in the public housing stock, with some dwellings being
sold to their tenants. In 1985 all local authority housing
passed to the ownership of the London Borough of Tower
Hamlets, which became the sole housing authority for
the district. In the later 1980s attention shifted to improving the existing council housing, and an extensive programme of refurbishment and modernization – sometimes
involving the almost total transformation of exterior
appearances – is still under way in the 1990s.
Since the 1920s, various housing associations or similar
agencies have also built public housing in Poplar, but in
terms of quantity their contribution has been minor. The
balance shifted in the early 1990s, when the only public
housing being built in the area was under the aegis of
such organizations. The Housing Acts of 1988 and 1989
had aimed to establish housing associations, rather than
local authorities, as the prime instigators and managers
of public housing, but it is too early to say whether this
aim will be realized.