The origins

Like health and social care, housing provision for the poorer classes in the mid to late-19th century was not comprehensive. Conditions – particularly in cities like London – were cramped and dirty, and population growth had led to overcrowding. Diseases spread more easily and safety regulations were non-existent. (Malpass, 1998) The quote below gives some indication of the desperate state of housing in London before new model tenements began to replace slum dwellings.

“We do not say the condition of their homes, for how can those places be called homes, compared with which the lair of a wild beast would be a comfortable and healthy spot? . . . The buildings are in such miserable repair as to suggest the thought that if the wind could only reach them they would soon be toppling about the heads of their occupants. . . . Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two.”

Reverend Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 1883

Public concern and debate was growing over the lack of decent housing, but any improvements to housing conditions were usually carried out by charitable organisations, without government help. It was into this philanthropic system that The Guinness Trust was born, with the ambition of “the amelioration of the conditions of the poorer of the working classes”.

On 23 November 1889, Sir Edward Guinness and the Trustees met for the first time. They were the Honourable Secretary Lees Knowles, Lord Rowton and Rt Hon C T Ritchie MP, and their only action that day was to rent an office and hire a clerk and a boy, Mr Winch and Mr Gray (Malpass, 1998), who you’ll hear more about in Chapter 4. You can read the minutes from the first meeting below.

The Trustees met frequently and were extremely active as the Trust began its work, securing the land for its first scheme at Brandon Street, Walworth after an approach from the architect, N. S. Joseph in March 1890. The Deed of Trust was signed on 4 February 1890 and can be read below.

Sir Edward Guinness was not the first philanthropist to provide better housing for working class Londoners; at least 30 other charitable organisations, including the Peabody Trust, were establishing model estates and developments. But Guinness had the funding to move quickly, building eight tenement estates in the first 11 years, providing 2,597 homes for London’s working class.

The Trustees were also resolute that rent should be affordable for even the poorest families, with the Minutes of 24 July 1891 stating that, “preference should be given to working men earning about 20 shillings a week”.

The earliest estates were built with “health, morality and social stability” in mind. Red-brick blocks with four to six floors, they were associated tenements with communal sculleries and toilets. Glazed bricks and tiles were used to prevent disease spreading and tenants were expected to scrub the corridors and their own quarters frequently.

“It is not too much to say that the sanitary arrangements in the four sets of Guinness Trust dwellings are little short of perfection.”

The Times, 26 December 1893

You can find out more about early tenement living in Chapter 2.

By 1895 Guinness’s original capital had been spent on the considerable building work of the first six estates. The Trust borrowed money from the Union Bank and the Public Works Loans Board to fund the next two developments, paying them back quickly from 1903.