ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the twentieth century the traditional mechanisms for the control of urban development were coming under sustained attack. The private landed interest which had been responsible for much of the finest domestic architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was increasingly seen as making money at the expense of the middle classes and the industrious working classes. The Liberal Land Enquiry Committee, reporting in 1914, listed six objections to the leasehold system by leaseholders. These included the fact that improvements were appropriated by the landlord at the end of the lease, that renewals were difficult except on exorbitant and ‘unjust terms’, and that lessees were subject to controls and charges that were often perceived as unreasonable. In addition there were objections on public grounds. These concerned the difficulties of structural deterioration towards the end of the lease, the problems of ‘fagend’ leases and the effects on rental levels of landlords’ exaction (Acland, 1914, pp. 408–409). These points do, of course, do no more than reiterate criticisms which had been growing in the later nineteenth century. But what is striking in general is the way in which these criticisms reveal a loss of any belief that landlords might be acting in a general long-term public interest as well as to their own advantage.
