Social Housing of Ham - past, present and future

Presented with an offer like "This year's annual Ham United Group architectural tour will follow a walking route with Richard Woolf, architect and building historian, as your guide." I was always going to say yes. 

Architecture is a keen interest of mine, Ham is another and Richard is a superb guide; I think I have been on all of his previous walking tours.

In my frequent walks to find pictures to feed my Ham Photos blog I have walked through all the areas of social housing many times and I was interested to learn more about the history of their development.

Richard was well prepared, as always, and in addition to the leaflet he gave us all he had several large pictures to show us with photos of old street scenes and floor plans of houses.

He also had an assistant, David Williams, who as both the former leader of Richmond Council and a local historian was able to add stories about how the various local councils in the area were involved.

The pamphlet marked out our route which started with the alms houses in Ham Street, not social housing in the modern sense but a precursor. Along the way we saw housing from various periods and, because of that, of various designs.

Our final stop was at Ham Close, where I took the picture above which is both the most recent social housing development in Ham and also the site for a new development over the next decade or so.

Throughout the tour Richard explained the national politics and social history that drove the development of social housing in various waves, perhaps most famously in the "homes for heroes" policy after WWI.

There were recurring themes of housing the poor and of making profit, and clearly these themes were often at odds with each other. Thatcher got a few mentions, and rightly so.

The variety of housing, including a few recent infills, was particularly interesting to me and Richard was able to explain the thinking behind the designs, such as the medieval inspired terraces of four houses where the two end houses were side-on to form a [ shape. I also liked the story of a row of houses commissioned by the long gone Ham Council which were designed with vegetable gardens in front of the houses.

Over two hours we walked a little and learned a great deal. It was exactly my sort of thing.