ABSTRACT
This book forms part of a long-term study of slums and of the policies designed to counter them. It leads on directly from my previous account of Slums and slum clearance in Victorian London (1986), and will be followed by a further volume covering the period since 1945. The title Slums and redevelopment is meant to evoke several themes which together define the content of the book. In the narrowest sense reference is made to the process of slum clearance and the building of replacement dwellings. The 1930s are one of the three key periods in the history of this process in England, and over a million people were displaced and rehoused at this time. This therefore provides a core theme. However, slum clearance itself took a number of different forms. Most importantly, reconstruction sometimes took place on site, and at other times occurred through suburban building. In the latter case, slum clearance was connected to decentralization, and indeed at the beginning of the period the “decongestion” of cities was often thought of as more important in countering slums than the removal of unfit d wellings. In turn, the reconstruction of d wellings on site links with a wider theme of “redevelopment”, a term applied to larger-scale rebuilding of inner-city districts. Such redevelopment was still of a kind essentially directed to the improvement of housing conditions, but it involved larger considerations than the removal of unfit dwellings, considerations falling within the province of town planning equally with that of housing. If slum clearance clearly had its intellectual and practical origins in the nineteenth century, then inner-city redevelopment of this kind may be said to have originated in the 1930s.
