Abstract

The White Hart Lane Estate: An LCC Venture in Suburban Development ROBERT THORNE HE EARLY HISTORY of local authority housing, a subject which only a decade ago looked as if it had been well taken care of, has turned out to be more contentious than those who first wrote about it can have foreseen. The historians who took for granted the duopoly in modern housing provision between council housing and owner-occupation had no difficulty in recognising the first municipal efforts in the field as being but the prelude to the great state-subsidised schemes of the inter-war years and later.l Equally it was possible, in their view, to regard those efforts as the inevitable outcome of the inadequacies in the Victorian housing market and the failure of other agencies, especially the philanthropic housing companies and trusts, to make a substantial contribution to the relief of overcrowding and its problems. The chronicle which made the building of the first council housing, so long anticipated, a triumphant episode in the progress towards a world in which over a third of the nation would be so housed flowed readily enough from historians who were used to government involvement in that sphere. Yet it