Yorkshire Almanac Praise for Leeds’s slum clearance schemes

30 August 1935: Praise for Leeds’s slum clearance schemes

Spectator. 1935/08/30. The City Enterprise of Leeds Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

The comprehensive schemes of slum-clearance and rehousing adopted by the Leeds Corporation is causing some uneasiness to cautious persons in that city, but it may well be that in ten years’ time it will be recognised that the Corporation in thus boldly adventuring has taken the most economical as well as the most imaginative course. In providing for the present it is providing also for the future. In six years 80,000 houses are to be demolished, and substitute dwellings provided. That is unquestionably desirable. But Leeds does not consider it enough merely to destroy slums and provide houses; those houses must also be habitable ten years hence in accordance with the standards of living ten years hence; and they should form part of a township or suburb which has adequate transport facilities, central baths, schools, and markets. Should such desiderata be provided now, when they can be fitted into a general plan from the start, or later, when there will be a clamour for them, and second-best expedients have to be devised? Leeds will no doubt make many mistakes in its bold efforts. But it is setting an example of municipal enterprise in getting rid of the remains of a discreditable past, and building up a civilised city worthy to be prosperous. And its latest experiment, the grant to its transplanted tenants of facilities for acquiring beds and bedding (to replace their old and probably verminous possessions) on easy hire-purchase terms gives evidence of both humanity and imagination.

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Which party controlled the council at this stage?

Something to say? Get in touch

Comment

Which party controlled the council at this stage?

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

18 February 1934: Leeds Labour triggers the first rent strike against a council by announcing higher rents for well-off tenants and the prospect of free housing for ex-slum-dwellers

23 August 1933: John Betjeman witnesses the opening of the Leeds Civic Hall

2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

12 April 1924: The Bloomsbury Group’s Amabel Williams-Ellis finds little art for art’s sake in Leeds

7 November 1959: The last tram scheduled in Leeds, no. 181 or 187, runs from Cross Gates to Kirkgate or Swinegate

26 March 1662: The Leeds corporation appoints a cook

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

21 February 1835: The Spectator sketches the preoccupations of Leeds’s Tory and Whig establishments – respectively, partying, and preventing implementation of the child labour provisions of the Factory Act

14 December 1892: Experts tell the High Court that electromagnetic interference from Leeds’s 1891 overhead electric tramway to Roundhay – the nation’s first – has brought down the local telephone service

Reproduction through the blind benevolence of Leeds Other Paper (RIP).1 April 1979: Amid motorway mania in Leeds, West Yorkshire Council is today to reveal plans to link Chapeltown and Woodhouse by a ¼-mile suspension bridge across Meanwood Beck

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

Comment

Via Remember LOP, a feed by Tony Harcup which pays tribute to some splendid local journalism, unimaginable today.

Council sources claim the scheme was a victim of the first wave of cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher following her General Election victory a month later.

Something to say? Get in touch