SOUTH ESSEX: PITSEA AND LAINDON
Essex is becoming the dustbin of London.
(James Wentworth Day. The Book of Essex)
In the mid-1930s, a well-known broadcaster of the period, Filson Young, took a trip by aeroplane to look at the expansion of London into the surrounding counties:
Turning south-east from Hatfield, we crossed the end of Epping Forest and the North Circular Road, and what I think is called the Eastern Avenue. We looked down upon a world that crowded along even these great arteries; they had been established so that men could escape from crowded populations, but the arteries were themselves becoming choked. Over places like Wanstead and Leytonstone, over Stratford and West Ham, one was flying over a world of houses so dense that it was no case of ribbon roads, but roads so choked that it was almost impossible to follow them or mark their direction.
This was the ordinary suburban expansion, following first the railway network and later that of the new arterial roads. It was deplored for aesthetic, social or merely snobbish reasons, but it had, for the local authorities concerned, at least the advantages that come from increasing rateable values thus financing the urban services for which its existence had created a need. But in the plotland settlements further out, just as in any sparsely settled rural district, there was very little rate income to finance public services, and very little potential income to encourage gas and electricity undertakings to install power lines.
The town planner Sir Colin Buchanan characterises the Essex plotland belt as one of 'sporadic eruption' pock-marking the Brentwood-Southend-Tilbury triangle, and he recalls that:
It was the author' s misfortune in the early nineteen-thirties to have the task of recording much of this development for insertion on the ordnance maps. lt was queer, lonely work, tramping up and down deserted drives and over derelict fields... A half-finished building estate is a depressing place, but infinitely worse is the estate that obviously will never get finished, will never have the shopping centres, cinemas, churches and schools so optimistically marked on the plan.
The principal entrepreneur behind the settlements that Colin Buchanan dolefully surveyed in the 1930s was Frederick Francis Ramuz Mayor of Southend, whose activities are described in Chapter 4. In Southend itself, his developments overcame original doubts to become the most desirable parts of the town, though in the corridor of depressed farmland between suburban Essex and the sea they took much longer to mature.
The decline in the fortunes of agriculture, already discernible in the 1870s, and hastened by a series of wet summers and poor harvests, became the belated subject of a Royal Commission in 1893. An Assistant Commissioner was appointed to enquire into the desperate situation of South-East Essex, the area bounded by the Blackwater to the north, the Thames to the south and a line drawn through Billericay and Stanford-le-Hope in the west. He reported that 13 per cent of the farmland in this area had gone out of cultivation between 1880 and 1893 and that much more was bound to follow The heavy clay, known to farmers as 'three-horse land', was hard to work even in good times, and while more suited to wheat than to any other crop, was no longer suited to this purpose since it was wheat which had been most affected by cheap overseas imports. 'In the 1890s the technical knowledge of most farmers was limited, and attempts to make the land suitable for agriculture again were mostly unsuccessful' The land rapidly reverted to rough pasture and then to self-sown scrubland.
At the some time the whole area had been brought within easy reach of the metropolis by railway building. The London, Tilbury and Southend railway from Fenchurch Street had been opened ln the 1850s, and in the 1880s the company had obtained authority to run a shorter, direct line to Southend, avoiding Tilbury and posing through Laindon and Pitsea. At the same time the Great Eastern Railway Company constructed a branch line from its East Anglian service from Liverpool Street, to reach Southend via Rayleigh. The rival companies undercut each other's fares, and in both cases these were about half the national average per mile.
Landowners along the new railway routes were often shareholders or board members of the railway companies, and could expect to profit not only from their diminishing asset of farmland recovering some value as building land, but also from the expectation of increasing railway traffic that any development would bring.
From the late-1870s onward there were continual farm sales in South Essex, often by orders of the liquidators in bankruptcy or 'under distress for rent'. The only incoming tenants that landlords could find were immigrant Scots hoping to convert to dairy-farming, though as Lord Petre's agent reported to the Royal Commission in 1893:
My own opinion, and that of practical men, based on experience, is that a very large portion of the arable land of Essex is unsuitable for the purpose.
Purchasers, when they were to be found, bought at knock-down prices.
They were speculators who, either on their own account or as investment agents for others, were content to exploit whatever market could be developed over time for subdivided portions of this land. The dominant individual was Frederick Francis Ramuz, whose firm The Land Company, in addition to its coastal sites, acquired land at Rayleigh, Rochford, Pitsea, Basildon, Vange, Laindon, Wickford, Langdon Hills and Stanford-le-Hope. Its many thousands of acres represented at least a third of several of the South Essex parishes.
Having acquired all this land, Ramuz and other purchasers had to find a market for it and had to avoid flooding the potential market with too much land. Speculative builders were already buying land for development in suburban Essex at one end of the railway line and at Southend at the other. While this was the most advantageous market, disposing of large lots at one time to people willing to take on the risks of development was not easy. When, for example, in October 1893 the Laindon Estate, consisting of 365 acres of land at Laindon, Langdon Hills, Dunton and Little Burstead, was offered for sale in five lots, not one of them was sold But if land could not be sold en bloc, some of it could at least be sold as individual plots, typically with a frontage of 20 feet and a depth of, say 100 feet, on a notional gridiron of roads pegged out among the thistles and scrub - and some customers could be persuaded to buy several adjacent plots.
Two firms of auctioneers, Protheroe and Morris, operating from the same addresses in London and Southend as The Land Company, and Henry W. Iles, also of London and Southend, whose firm still exists as estate agents in South Essex, developed techniques of wooing potential buyers with free railway tickets or cheap fares refunded to purchasers, with food and drink served in a marquee, as the plots were auctioned.
'Plot sales on the Estate' was the technique which Ramuz claimed to have pioneered at his seaside estates, and the festive atmosphere of these 'champagne auctions' was vividly remembered by many East London families who went for a cheap outing to the country and came back as property owners.
Ramuz had an interest in the large station hotels built outside the small stations along the railway to Southend, and it was the land closest to these stations which was first put on the market in several series of auction sales. At three sales in the summer of 1891, 859 plots were offered at the Station Estate, Pitsea. In the following summer, 1881 plots were offered at the Laindon Station Estate, and in the same year more plots were auctioned north of Billericay Station. Ten years later the Rayleigh Station estate was similarly put on sale by auction at the Golden Lion Hotel, Mr Iles drawing attention to the fact that there were 'fast trains communicating with the City in sixty minutes at only 10d. per day, season ticket rate, affording a good opportunity for City gentlemen to make this their home'.
The technique of plot sales continued well into the present century and is part of the folklore of South Essex and the East End of London, rather than that of the City gentlemen. Flushed and weary, the family would return to Stepney, Poplar, Bromley-by-Bow, East Ham, West Ham and Barking. The title deeds to the plot were put behind the clock on the mantlepiece or in a drawer, and quite often forgotten. To this day, the local authorities, the Basildon Development Corporation, and indeed, the present writers, receive enquiries from solicitors acting for clients who have ultimately inherited sites on roads which, if they ever existed, have long since disappeared, asking what had become of their inheritance.
What were the motives of the purchasers? They ranged from people who intended to settle and commute to London by rail; people who wanted a weekend retreat and who could finance the purchase by renting to others; people with back-to-the-land and simple-life ambitions; and would-be shareholders who were attracted by the larger sites offered very cheaply in the areas more than two mites from the railway stations. The advocates of alternative ways of living, just like anyone else, were attracted by the lure of inexpensive land reasonably accessible by rail.
George Lansbury, a much-loved Labour politician from Poplar, was, like so many other East-Enders at the turn of the century, a rural immigrant who completely understood and respected his fellow citizens' aspirations for a taste of country life, and forty years after his death is referred to by plotlanders as 'Mr Lansbury'. We have noted his connection with Jaywick Sands. He also had a continual interest in the efforts of Londoners to make a more ample life for themselves in the abandoned farmlands of South Essex, and when leader of the Labour Party in 1934 declared, do just long to see a start made on this job of reclaiming, recreating rural England.
The advertising campaigns of The Land Company sought to attract every kind of back-to-the-land aspirant:
Toiling, rejoicing, onward he goes,
He has land of his own and fears no foes
says the Company's 1906 Catalogue. And it also persuades its readers that 'Land is the basis for all wealth. Even an acre leads to independence'. Anxious not to dismay those who only aspired to a plot : for weekends: and holidays, it includes an article on ‘The Ideal Summer Holiday' urging readers that there were preferable alternatives to seaside resorts, and that 'A piece of land with a small bungalow on it would be the ideal solution'. The family man was encouraged to think of the pleasure of seeing his 'wife and little ones enjoying themselves revelling in the fresh air, feeding on healthy country produce. It would be without doubt a home from home'.
At about the same time, another entrepreneur, Mr H. Foulger of Laindon, issued his brochure called A Guide to Lovely Laindon, in which he envisaged the decline of the great metropolis, declaring that:
Thousands are taking up residence in the country and sooner or later you will do so too. The question for you to decide is will you pay Laindon a visit and do so now, or will you wait until land values are so enhanced that the benefits to be derived are merely physical, and not financial as well?
Land values were slowly enhanced on the more desirable sites, though on others, where little demand could be stimulated, they actually declined for years. There were a few instances where Ramuz could realise more for a plot than he originally paid per acre. He had bought Highlands Farm at Pitsea for £2,900, just over £21 per acre. In May 1890 an excursion train brought 250 people to Pitsea Junction, from where they were driven for a mile to the auctioneers' marquee.
'Here a sumptuous repast was spread, at which the health of Mr George Ramuz was drunk with much enthusiasm, congratulations pouring in upon him on this, his first appearance as an auctioneer'. Villa plots realised from £5 to £9 and shop sites from £11 to £14. However, at a later auction on the Highland Estate in March 1899, some of the plots offered fetched as much as £30 and £22 apiece, and probably in better weather these prices would improve' That sale realised about £700. The some sum was reached at another auction that year on the Wooton Park Estate, where a large number of plots, 20 feet by 150 feet, were sold for £4 each.
In 1899 the Board of Trade held an enquiry into the application of the Laindon Gas and Water Co Ltd to extend the limits of its water supply area and to supply gas. Giving evidence at the inquiry, Mr G.W. Usill said that the population of Laindon had risen to 700. Some 2,700 plots of land had been purchased, but the owners would not erect buildings until they could see that they were in a fair way to obtain water. When the power was granted, he estimated that the population would soon rise to 14,000. The Rev. H. Carpenter said that people were having to drink pond water. That summer the plot-holders on the Station Estate at Laindon decided to form a Plot Owners' Protection Society, with the intention of summonsing people who grazed cattle on their land and to prosecute gypsies. It was agreed that the grass on unfenced plots would be sold to raise funds for the Association. Mr E.
Collings, who was elected secretary, declared that 'All that is wanted to make this charming estate go ahead is water and the tithe redemption'.
They, like Mr Ramuz, were confident that:
A real garden city without the aid of philanthropists and on a perfectly sound basis, is likely to be created.
By 1896 Great Gubbins Farm was acquired for the Laindon Racecourse, to be built by the Croydon Race Company, with provision for cricket, football, archery and golf. In 1907 the Vange Golf Club was actually opened: 'the greens are not bad for the first year and hard clay...' .
The plotland settlements that emerged all over South Essex, but particularly in the areas of the Rochford and Billericay Rural Districts, were of three kinds. The first, on those estates near the railway stations, had the familiar gridiron of grass or mud tracks and the beginnings of basic services. The second was a single unmade road with plots on either side, and the third comprised isolated plots in twos or threes, where a farmer had simply sold or leased the corner of a field to raise a little money. In the backlands many estates were pegged out but never sold and reverted to agricultural use during the two world wars, when national need overrode the ordinary economics of farming.
The dwellings ranged from ordinary suburban villas, meeting the requirements of the Public Health Acts, to the familiar range of sheds, shanties or old railway coaches, used only for weekends and holidays.
There was very little supervision by the local authorities for obvious reasons:
Each authority had only one building inspector to encompass a wide rural area, and there were the added disadvantages of bad communications and wilderness areas of scrub which hid so many of the shacks. Large areas never saw a building inspector, and building permits, or refusals were easily ignored. Where building inspections were made it was then difficult to trace the often temporary occupants. The hundreds of substandard shacks offered little in the way of a tax base for the local authorities to provide basic utilities. Furthermore, with so many temporary occupants and squatters it is clear that over whole areas of 'plotland' rates were never paid.
The occasional instances of plot-owners being summonsed for not submitting building notices to the local authorities, illustrate this and also show their places of origin. 'In September 1914 at Vange, a woman was allowed to build and occupy a hut on land she had been sold, an "empty shell of boxes'' estimated to be worth thirty shillings; she was always excused rates'. ln 1907 William Wrene of Barking was brought to court by the surveyor to the Rural District Council for not depositing plans of a timber-built dwelling house on the bistable Hall Estate, Basildon. A line of f1 was imposed, with 5s. costs. Several of the defendants pleaded that they were unaware that it was necessary to submit plans and that they understood there were no restrictions whatever as to the building of houses there' (22|. In 1922 William Lawrie of Poplar was summonsed for not giving notice of the building of 'Dundonald Drum' on Pitsea Marshes. It consisted of two rooms, each eight feet square, lined with boards from old packing cases . In 1924 the Billericay magistrates heard several charges of the some kind, of eroding temporary buildings which were used as dwellings. The people concerned come from Stratford, Canning Town and Custom House, and were each fined £1 'These cases were brought as a warning.
Planning controls were, of course, non-existent. The first perception of the Essex plotlands as a planning problem, calling for planning measures to control them, came in 1931 in Professor Stanley Adshead's South Essex Regional Planning Scheme . He remarked that, as the most easily reached county with a coastline, Essex had become the inevitable outlet for London's overcrowded population. Its urbanisation and expansion during the first thirty years of this century had been as dramatic as that of Lancashire throughout the whole of the nineteenth century. Starting as a virgin county, it had been colonised, rather than developed.
For the colonists themselves, he, like many a planner since, could not withhold a grudging admiration. 'These enterprising people', he called them. Who were these enterprising colonisers whose new-found land was one which had ceased to be viable for agriculture, who made their homes without capital, mortgages or loans?
PLOTLAND PEOPLE
Mr Syrett of Worthing Road, Laindon, was 85 when we interviewed him in 1972. He was a leather worker from Kennington who had bought the place in 1929 to use at weekends and subsequently retired there. He was not the first occupier of the site, the original occupant being a carpenter from Canning Town who bought three 20-foot plots for £18 in 1916, giving a site 60 feet by 140 feet. ln the post-1918 period, when the London banks were changing the decor of their interiors from mahogany to oak, the carpenter brought down bits and pieces of abandoned bank joinery from Fenchurch Street and built his dream bungalow. After Mr Syrett had bought it, the bungalow was burnt down in a fire, except for that part of the structure which was the kitchen and Mr Syrett had built onto it a timber-framed house. Later he had it rendered and had been making improvements ever since. For example, he had recently cut out the mullions of his 1930- type windows to make them more like those of the Development Corporation houses opposite.
We showed him a description of the area as a former 'vast pastoral slum'. He denied this of course, remarking that most people had come down to South Essex precisely to get away from the slums. But what was it like before the road was made up? Well, you had to order your coal in the summer as the lorry could never get down the road in wintertime. But there was a pavement. ‘People used to get together with their neighbours to buy cement and sand to make the pavement all the way down along the road'. Street lighting? No, there was none. 'Old Granny Chapple used to take a hurricane lamp when she went to the Radiant Cinema in Laindon'. Transport? 'Well a character called Old Tom used to run a bus from Laindon Station to the Fortune of War public house. And there were still horses and carts down here in those days. They used to hold steeplechases on the hill where the caravan site is now'. Down the same road had lived Mr Budd who died in 1971 aged 97. He was a bricklayer by trade, and every time he had a new grandchild, would add a room to his house.
Mr and Mrs Syrett's house was immaculate - large rooms with all the attributes of suburban comfort. The house had been connected to the sewer and gas and electricity mains in the 1940s and 1950s. The Urban District Council had made up the road under the Private Street Works Act, charging £60 in road charges. More recently when Basildon Development Corporation began building on vacant plots in the road, they made it up again to a higher standard. The rates at that time were £12 a half year, and as old age pensioners they got a rate rebate.
They lived happily within their pension, they assured me. No rent to pay, some fruit and vegetables from their garden and greenhouse. It was a matter of pride for them that they were not obliged to apply for supplementary benefits. It was quite obvious that Mr Syrett's investment for his old age was this one-time substandard bungalow which in the end had all the same amenities and conveniences as the homes of his neighbours . The truth of this could be seen by looking in estate agents' windows, where houses with the same kind of origin were advertised at prices similar to those asked for normal speculative builders' houses of the same period.
The significant thing is that their original owners and builders would never have qualified as building society mortgagees in the inter-war years, any more than people with equivalent incomes would today.
Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Gifford is in his seventies. He had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London, and a hard and uncertain life as a casual dock worker. His piece of land cost him £10 in 1934. lt is 40 feet wide by 100 feet deep. First he put up a tent which his family used at weekends, and he gradually accumulated tools, timber and glass which he brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled down from London. For water he sank a well in his garden. His house is calls 'Perserverance' (sic). In the course of time it was connected for mains water, gas and electricity, though the road is still unmade and unsecured.
Mrs Elizabeth Granger of Hockley was, with her first husband, caretaker in a block of London County Council flats In 1932 she saw land at Laindon advertised in the evening paper at £5 for a 20 feet by 100 feet plot. She took her unwilling husband on the one-and-twopence return trip to Laindon, and they were advised bv the agent to buy two plots if they wanted to build a bungalow. She paid the deposit with a borrowed pound. As soon as she could afford it she bought a First World War army bell tent, laboriously got it to the site, and her plotland odyssey had begun. She and her husband would go there on their weekly day off, taking their drinking water with them and straining rainwater for washing through an old stocking. They would rent the tent at weekends to parties of boys from the estate, using the money to buy cement at 2s 6d a bag, three yards of sand for 15s and secondhand bricks at 35s a thousand.
Slowly they built their bungalow and Mrs Granger's husband got a transfer to a job at Dagenham. They reared chickens, geese and goats and bought a pony and trap. Eventually gas was connected. As their family grew they bought a second house in an incomplete state for £180 and, with the bombing of London, relations stayed in their original house which they subsequently sold for £400. Ultimately they moved to a third plotland house which they improved and finally sold to the Basildon Development Corporation for £650. Since then Mrs Granger has lived in several other houses in Essex, enabled to move 'up market' as a result of her borrowed pound. She remarks, 'We never had a mortgage for any of them. I feel so sorry for young couples these days, who don't get the kind of chance we had' .