Octavia’s is a remarkable story, the pioneer of social housing, founder of the National Trust, the first clean air campaigner for London and, more than anything, a visionary who really understood that housing regeneration was as much about people as buildings.

The work of Octavia Housing and Care follows on from the foundations laid by Octavia Hill in the mid 19th Century. Octavia was a pioneer in that she opened a new way of approaching the management of Homes of the London Poor, the title of a series of essays published in 1883.

Octavia Hill's ideas

Many of the ideas and principles which Octavia Hill developed are still relevant today.

Collecting rents on time

It was a fundamental principle of Octavia’s that the rent had to be paid every week in full by each tenant. In her writings, Octavia Hill explains that the weekly rent visit was an important part of the whole management process in terms of giving responsibility to tenants and in ensuring that investors could be paid a return for purchasing the properties. She saw the regular payment of an economic rent as part of a package of rights and responsibilities and agreed that ensuring rent was paid on time was fundamental to the contract. More than this, the weekly contact that came with rent collection was an opportunity for Octavia and her workers to assist the tenants.

"If the rent is not ready, notice to quit must be served. The money is then almost always paid, when the notice is, of course, withdrawn. Besides this inexorable demand for rent (never to be relaxed without entailing cumu­lative evil on the defaulter, and setting a bad example, too readily followed by others)” Homes for the London Poor 1869

Gold star service

This is an approach that has been around for over 100 years. Octavia Hill was realistic in that she knew she could not help everyone – only those willing to help themselves. But part of her system was that a budget was set aside for the repair and improvement of each dwelling. To the extent that, in any year, the budget was not spent, the tenants were able to spend the money on improvements. Hill found work for tenants and did additional repairs and improvements and used the allocation of properties all as mechanisms for achieving change.

Valuing mixed communities

Hill realised that in creating a “happy household” it was necessary to take care with how individual properties were let. She recognised the damage that could be done to communities by careless lettings policies. Writing in 1871 She said:

“ ... Amongst the many benefits which the possession of the houses enables us to confer on the people, perhaps one of the most important is our power of saving them from neighbours who would render their lives miserable. It is a most merciful thing to protect the poor from the pain of living in the next room to drunken, disorderly people. “I am dying,” said an old woman to me the other day: “I wish you would put me where I can’t hear S? beating his wife. Her screams are awful. And B? , too, he do come in so drunk. Let me go over the way to No. 30.” Our success depends on duly arranging the inmates (sic): not too many children in any one house, so as to overcrowd it; not too few, so as to overcrowd another; not two bad people side by side, or they drink to­gether; not a terribly bad person beside a very respectable one?” Octavia Hill 1871

Open spaces

Octavia Hill knew that open spaces played an important role in improving lives. She argued for open spaces across London. She advocated the development of the “green belt” and was instrumental in getting Parliament Hill Fields bought for the benefit of Londoners, raising part of the money from the local authority and the rest – some £54,000 in private fundraising. Octavia’s campaign for small, open spaces for urban areas, which would bring “the healthy gift of air and joy of plants and flowers” ultimately led to the start of the National Trust in 1895.

Housing was not enough

Although housing was fundamental to the work that was being done, Octavia Hill recognised that improving the properties alone was simply not going to have the desired effect of changing behaviour. She knew the value of employment – for example, giving tenants basic repair jobs to do when they were not able to work, finding jobs for some of the young people, paying teenage girls to keep the corridors tidy etc.

She also recognised the value of organising activities for young people and, in Southwark, established the Southwark Cadet Company in order to introduce the boys of the slums of that area to the virtues of what she described as order, cleanliness, teamwork and self-reliance. The present conception of the Army Cadet Force as a voluntary youth organisation, helped and inspired by the Army, really stems from that time and has continued throughout ACF’s history.

All of these themes resonate with best practice in regeneration projects that are now underway. The familiar stories of properties being upgraded or replaced without community input and deteriorating quickly thereafter are examples of a potential problem which Octavia Hill recognised long ago.

Clean air

After a visit abroad Octavia recognised the problems caused by the smoke in London. She understood that some 70% of all energy was wasted and that it was creating health risks. In South Kensington, she organised a clean air meeting at the site of the 1851 Exhibition attended by representatives from all over the country demonstrating the value of smokeless fuel and smokeless grates and campaigned to make these available to all. “The saving ought to be enormous” she said, “some scientific men say that as much as three million out of five million tons used annually flies away in smoke and so does harm and not good.”

Her actions in this area were less successful and writing in the 1940’s her biographer says “We still await someone with Octavia’s force to carry out the reforms she so widely foresaw and so greatly desired.”

Regeneration and people

Octavia’s real skill was in what we would today call “regeneration”. Properties were initially acquired in an awful state. Letters published by Octavia Hill describe the state of some of the dwellings and the conditions that existed at the time.

Hill’s method was initially to bring the properties to a decent standard and to improve them subsequently as the tenants demonstrated that they were able to look after the homes. She was respectful of the rights of tenants and would enter properties only with their permission. Her approach was basically one of “modelling” the right sort of behaviour that she wanted to encourage. She ensured that communal areas were clean and that corridors were scrubbed and rubbish removed, that all rents were paid on time and regularly, even if it meant several visits in a week. She also helped to provide work where necessary when tenants were out of employment, to ensure that they were all able to pay for the rent.

Valuing individuals

Writing in 1869, Octavia Hill said:

“Any persons accustomed to visit among the poor in a large district would, I believe, when confining themselves to a much smaller one, be led, if not to very unexpected conclusions, at least to very curious problems. In dealing with a large number of cases the urgency is so great one passes over the most difficult questions to work where sight is clear; and one is apt to forget Sissy Jupe’s quick sympathetic perception that per­centage signifies literally nothing to the friends of the special sufferer, who surely is not worth less than a sparrow. The individual case, if we cared enough for it, would often give us the key to many.“

Finally, there was her whole attitude and antipathy towards alms which create a benefit dependency. This is a much more challenging area of her work for those of us brought up on the idea of the state providing for those least able to care for themselves. Octavia Hill concluded that there were real problems that ill considered state aid on alms would have on eroding an individual’s sense of responsibility for his or her own wellbeing.

These are just some examples. Elsewhere in her writings are references to anti-social behaviour, the problems of overcrowding, the need to keep the role of the state to that of enabler (perhaps, a forerunner of arms length management ideas) rather than provider and the need for savings clubs (financial services for those on low incomes). There are even references to who should bear the costs of clearing away the slums before re-building took place – which closely resembles market renewal issues in the North of England.