A century of overcrowded homes: How we reported the story of housing in the British Isles
The Great War was a pivotal point in the story of overcrowded housing in the UK. A new era of housing policy was born, under the auspices of the Housing Act 1919. The war years saw the first large-scale building programme for the masses: the war housing projects. More than 8,000,000 people lived in slums and makeshift housing in 1919, many of them displaced by wars and industrial revolution. The Housing Act, which established the National Health Service and national housing policies, set the stage for a rapid expansion of the UK population that continued right up to the beginning of austerity in the 1970s.
The Great War was a pivotal point in the story of overcrowded housing in the UK. A new era of housing policy was born, under the auspices of the Housing Act 1919. The war years saw the first large-scale building programme for the masses: the war housing projects. More than 8,000,000 people lived in slums and makeshift housing in 1919, many of them displaced by wars and industrial revolution. The Housing Act, which established the National Health Service and national housing policies, set the stage for a rapid expansion of the UK population that continued right up to the beginning of austerity in the 1970s.
But what of the rest of the story? In this special edition of our World War One and After series – The Lost Years – we take a look back at the role of the press in the aftermath of war.
The newspapers were to a large extent responsible for the growth of Britain’s wartime housing projects – both in the numbers of houses built and the diversity of their designs.
In 1921, The Times of London published a report on building work carried out in the East End of London during the war. This was the first time the newspaper spoke of the problem of overcrowding in the area. A ‘hundred-to-a-man’ system was being used to house people, but this meant that by the end of the war, nearly 40,000 people had
