Episode 64. ‘These Houses Are Ours’: The Co-operative Housing Movement, 1870-1919

SYNOPSIS

For those who know how to decode the signs, the evidence of early co-operative interest in house-building is all around, in street names the breadth of Britain.

As to such landmarks, the episode starts with a brief allusion to three of these pioneers who appear as street names in co-operative estates: John Ludlow, the friend and associate of the Christian Socialist, F D Maurice, the atheist agitator George Holyoake, and the barrister and co-operative funder, Edward Vansittart Neale. Their personal engagement in co-operative ventures is representative of the redirection of thwarted political impulses when the Chartist agitation for universal male suffrage failed in 1848, and soon the need for decent housing for ordinary people emerged as an urgent need.

The Rochdale Pioneers, the lodestar for the developing co-operative movement, engaged in small-scale house-building, and their initiative was taken up by other entrepreneurial groups which experimented with different legal forms: some promoting owner occupation and others community-owned schemes for rent. The movement was profoundly influenced in the Edwardian period by the garden city movement and the model villages for employees that were built by the Quaker chocolatiers, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees. Two Influential architects Parker and Unwin brought an arts-and-crafts aesthetic to bear. Yet these pre-WW1 initiatives proved to be the high watermark of the cooperative movement, as from 1919 successive governments chose to prioritize municipal housing.

GUESTS

Andrew Bibby is a writer and journalist, with a particular interest in co-operative history. In a voluntary capacity, he has been active in his local Community Land Trust. These Houses Are Ours was published in 2023. Andrew lives in the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, the home of a successful Victorian Co-operative mill about which he wrote in All Our Own Work, 2015.

Simon’s interview with Andrew Bibby was recorded online on 1 April 2025.