Clement Close – how Council housing began here

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant.

 

Clement Close was the subject of a recent blog, about residents’ opposition to Brent’s proposed in-fill scheme for this Council housing estate. But how did this estate come to be here, surrounded by suburban homes in Brondesbury Park? The answer lies in another time of acute housing shortage.

 

 

Some prefab homes in Clement Way, 1950s. (Photo courtesy of Brent Archives)

 

Even though they were in the middle of a major conflict in 1942, some members of the Churchill’s National Government were thinking ahead to how they would rebuild the country after the war. Housing people whose homes had been destroyed would be a major problem. One solution they came up with was the idea of temporary factory-made houses, and by 1944 local Councils were instructed to consider how many they would need, and where to put them.

 

One of the sites identified in the Borough Engineer’s report to Willesden Council on 15 January 1945 was the playing fields at Okehampton Road, where he thought there would be space for 135 “prefabs”, as they came to be known. The Council ‘noted’ the objections received by residents adjoining the playing fields, to the erection of emergency housing there, at its meeting on 19 February 1945. Despite this, at the end of May 1945 the Council applied for a loan of £31k from the Ministry of Health, for a period of ten years, and accepted tenders from two local companies to prepare a number of sites, including the Okehampton Road playing fields.

 

News of German P-o-Ws clearing a site for prefabs near Roundwood Park.
(From “Willesden Chronicle”, 22 June 1945 – Brent Archives local newspaper microfilms)

 

Because of the shortage of workers, German prisoners of war were used as additional labourers for preparing the sites, and work was underway at Okehampton Road by mid-June 1945. They would have been brought to work by lorry, probably from a large P-o-W camp near Watford. The concrete bases for prefab homes were laid out along a new street, called Clement Road (possibly after the new Labour Prime Minister!), linking Okehampton Road and Milverton Road, and a shorter road called Clement Way which came off of it.

 

The Clement Road prefab estate, from a 1959 O.S. map. (Source: Brent Archives maps collection)

 

There were several varieties of prefabs, and Willesden Council had expressed a preference for the Arcon design. But they had to take what was available, and what the Ministry of Works supplied for Clement Road was a “flat-pack” bungalow, made of timber and chipboard, supplied by America under the wartime Lend Lease agreement. While they had “all mod cons”, they’d been designed as married quarters accommodation for large U.S. Forces bases in the south of that country, so were not ideal for the British climate.

 

An American wooden prefab at 70 Clement Road in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Irene Ottaway)

 

 Despite this, the prefabs on the Clement Road estate provided popular homes for around 130 local families, for far more than the ten years they were originally expected to last. As they were made of timber, it’s surprising that only two (as far as I know) were destroyed in house fires – but when a fire took, hold the effects could be devastating. These photos from Clement Road in the 1960s were taken by a schoolboy who lived there. What he did not know at the time was that a baby had died inside this burning prefab.

 

Firemen tackling a blaze at a Clement Road prefab in the 1960s. (Courtesy of, and © Brian Aris)

 

Families on the estate were gradually being rehoused into permanent Council homes, but as late as 1962, some were being relet to other families in housing need. Eventually, the prefabs at the northern end of the site were cleared, and the permanent Council homes of what was to be called Clement Close were built in the 1960s.

 

 

Mrs Maisey, in the back garden of her Clement Road prefab in the late 1960s,
with Clement Close homes in the background. (Courtesy of Irene Ottaway)

 

The Clement Road and Clement Way prefabs were finally removed by the early 1970s. Most of the Okehampton Road playing fields, which Willesden Council had requisitioned for post-war emergency housing in 1945, returned to their original use, but this time as additional grounds for the adjacent secondary school (now Queens Park Community College). The northern end, accessed from Milverton Road, was kept for Council housing, as Clement Close.

 

Philip Grant.

 

(With thanks to the former residents of the Clement Road prefab estate, who shared their stories and photographs with the Brent Archives “Prefabs Project” in 2011.)

 

Editor's Note:

If you are interested in the extent of the bombing locally during the London Blitz (7th October 1940 to 6th June 1941) that led to the destruction of many homes go to this interactive site. The information goes to street level.

Celebrating 100 years of Council housing in Brent

Drawing of new Council houses in a Close, from a 1921 Willesden Council booklet.
[Source: Brent Archives]

Guest post by Philip Grant

Last month, a Brent press release announced that work had begun on 149 new Council homes in Harlesden. It was welcome news, but a drop in the ocean compared with the need for affordable social housing for local people to rent.

Almost a year ago, I added a comment to a blog about the Council’s plans for the St Raphael’s Estate LINK, saying that Brent’s officers did not know their history, as they said that the estate was mainly built between 1967 and 1982. I can now share some more information about that history.

This year is the centenary of the 1919 Housing & Town Planning Act, seen by many as the start of Council housing in this country. In following up a local history enquiry on the subject*, I revisited a document I had seen in the Brent Archives collection a dozen years ago. And yes, Council housing in what is now Brent did begin 100 years ago.

In fact, Willesden Urban District Council had been considering building some homes for rent before the outbreak of the First World War. By November 1918, it had prepared plans for an estate at Stonebridge, an idea which had already been approved by the government under the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.

Although there was the promise of Government subsidies towards the cost of building these homes, the Council had to borrow money first. It asked the Norwich Union Life Assurance company, but they would not make loans for Council housing schemes. In fact, it was a loan of £20,000 from the National Union of Railwaymen which got their first estate started!

The site for “Brent’s” first Council housing estate, at Stonebridge Farm.
[Reproduced from the 1914 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25” to one mile map of Middlesex, Sheet XVI.1]

Work should have begun on the Brentfield Estate (so called after an ancient field name) in 1919. Interference by various government departments, and the need to redraw the plans after it was decided that the proposed North Circular Road would run right through the site, delayed the start until the following year. The Council’s own workforce began building the roads and sewers in February 1920, and the contract for the first phase of the planned 591 houses was signed in May, with work underway by July 1920.

All of the houses on the estate had three bedrooms, and every one included a bath (the larger ones in a separate bathroom!). They each had a garden, and each kitchen was fitted with a cooking range (chosen by a sub-committee of the three women on Willesden’s Housing Committee). Were the rents affordable? After a dispute between the Council (which wanted to charge less) and the London Housing Board, a compromise figure of 12/6 (twelve shillings and sixpence) was agreed.

You can read about the building of the estate, including plans and some pictures, online in a facsimile edition of a Willesden U.D.C. booklet, with an introductory note, “Homes fit for Heroes – Willesden Council’s Brentfield Housing Scheme, at the Brent Archives website LINK . 

The booklet was written for the official handover of the first 65 homes in June 1921. 32 families (chosen from more than 1,000 who had applied) had already moved into the first street to be completed. Priority was given to Willesden ex-servicemen, with families living in the most overcrowded conditions. The handover celebrations took place in the grassy square at the centre of the street, which was pictured in the booklet:-

Drawing of new Council houses in Square, from a 1921 Willesden Council booklet.
[Source: Brent Archives]

It is almost 100 years since local people moved into these first Council homes in what is now Brent. They were designed as good family homes, or as the slogan for the 1919 Housing Act proclaimed “Homes fit for Heroes”. Using information from the time, I have located these first homes, in Mead Plat, and they are still providing decent homes for families today:-

These original houses, in Mead Plat and Garden Way, are now part of the St Raphael’s Estate (the name for the Council housing on the west side of the North Circular Road comes from a Church of England  “mission church”, which opened in Garden Way in 1926). Let’s hope that as many as possible of Brent’s new Council homes will be family houses, with gardens, which will provide decent affordable housing for another century!

Philip Grant

* The local history enquiry that prompted my research came from Cllr. Janice Long, who has a real interest in Council housing. I was able to tell her that the first Council homes in the north of Brent had been Kingsbury U.D.C.’s High Meadow Crescent estate in 1924/25, and Wembley U.D.C.’s Christchurch / Lyon Park estate in the early 1930’s.