Council housing changed the lives of many people and for the better

From dark, damp, stinking and overcrowded courts and yards and tumbledown cottages to some of the best council homes in the country. Derek James looks back on a century of council housing in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Just imagine having no lights to switch on, no heating to click on, not having water on tap, and a shared outside loo. More than a century ago this was the way many lived and can you imagine these appalling conditions? Life was a daily struggle.

Families were existing in ‘one-up, one-down’ hovels, many in yards around Norwich and at Ipswich, in our market towns and coastal communities, while conditions in villages and isolated places were no better.

The one downstairs space was a living room, dining room, kitchen and laundry for the entire family, while upstairs was the room supposed to serve as a bedroom for all.

Decency, and overcrowding forced some to sleep in the overused downstairs room. Some families had many children. In the yards there was a standpipe outside, which often froze in the winter, which was the water supply for all the homes. An average of about 20.

There was a row of ‘privies’ at the end of the yard; washing hung outside. The dank smell of ‘life’ hung in the air.

While the children played in the filthy streets, mothers become old before their time trying to keep their squalid homes clean, while many men took to drink.

At the time of the industrial revolution some of the bosses considered these homes adequate for ‘manual workers’ – they were living in a very different world.

Then the First World War came along.

Many proud husbands, fathers and brothers went off to fight, while the women took over the factories as well as looking after their families.