Victorian Housing in Bristol

Report on talk by Peter Malpass, professor emeritus of housing and urban studies at the University of the West of England, in January 2023. Report by Stephen Griffiths.

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. So begins Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. He could well have applied those words to Bristol. For the well-off; space, light, fresh air. For the poor; squalor. Dickens performed readings in the Victoria Rooms in Clifton, in which he would have vividly described the lives of poor Londoners. He visited and supported the newly built Muller Orphanages on Ashley Down . But the Victorians were nothing if not ‘improvers’, and improvements were on the way.

In pre-Victorian Bristol most people, well-off or poor, lived cheek by jowl in the relatively small city. Good houses interspersed with bad. As more workers came to the city, land owners built developments of cheap housing on the least-favoured parts, near rivers or smelly industries, where the poorest congregated. These were the Courts, often known in the day as ‘rookeries’. If you live in a ‘Court’ today then you may feel quite pleased with yourself. Thoughts of Versailles or Wimbledon come to mind. But if you take a tennis court and squeeze 20 so-called houses on to it then you begin to get the picture. No light, no ventilation, no sanitation. In 1845 one inspector came to the entrance of one of these Courts and promptly threw up because of the appalling stench.

By the 1850s something had to be done. The economy was growing. Most people had more money and there was a strong market for better housing. People wanted to escape the inner city squalor. The well-off looked to the airy heights of Clifton. But owners of low lying fields took the opportunity to develop long rows of working-class houses. Newtown (now swept away), between Lawrence Hill and Brislington, was the largest development in Bristol in the 1850s, the Bradley Stoke of its day. An apartheid system of separate new areas for upper-class and lower-class began, as people left the city centre to commerce and industry.

The working class houses followed a standard model. A 16-foot frontage contained one lower and one upper window and a doorway, with a flat parapet hiding the roof. Inside, a front and back parlour with two bedrooms upstairs. A single storey, half-width rear extension provided scullery and privy, discharging into a cesspit. There was no running water supply. Water was got from a communal well. The single storey extension was later increased to two storeys. It sounds OK(ish), until you consider that yours was probably not the only family renting the house.

As today, when people had more money they wanted nicer houses, and supply followed demand. Streets between rows became wider, giving room for a tiny front garden. Bay windows became the fashion, and roofs were no longer hidden behind a flat parapet. But, just as you ultimately ended up with six feet, so in life you still got the standard 16 feet. The 1890s saw a massive building boom with 10,000 houses built on the northern and eastern outskirts of Bristol. You may even have had running water, with a bathroom above the kitchen.

Bristol had been noted as one of the worst cities in the country for water supply. The council, being reluctant and prevaricating (surely not!), left it to private companies to provide water, but the required infrastructure, both for water supply and for mains sewerage, was not in place until the 1870s. Even then the mains emptied straight into the river Avon. (And did so, incredibly, until the 1960s, when processing plants were built.) Progress was gradual, many houses were built in the 1880s still without a bathroom.

By the end of the century the semi-detached had arrived, but that’s another story. Thanks to Peter for the virtual tour of Victorian houses.