Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

42
relief; some paid nothing. Over 34,000
people were re-housed between 1933 and
1940. ‘Garden suburbs’ were created on
the outskirts of the town. These were lowdensity
housing estates, where each house
had a garden with hedges and one tree.
The first one was built at Gipton in 1934,
followed by Seacroft, Sandford, Halton
Moor, and Belle Isle. Jenkinson was keen
that houses should match the individual
needs of the tenants. Each estate had a
mixture of 2, 3 4 and 5 bedroom houses,
flats for the elderly and ‘sunshine houses’
for those with special medical needs.
The means test brought in by Labour in
1934 ruthlessly exposed the pressures
on the council tenants. It tore apart
their pretence at a shared sense of
identity and class. Their resistance in the
1934 Leeds rent strike can be seen as
a last ditch attempt to create a shared
class consciousness among a rapidly
disintegrating working class.
Despite the improvement in housing and
living conditions, the residents of the new
estates missed the close-knit communities
of the slums. They missed being near the
pubs, clubs, cinemas, and shops of the
city centre, and resented having to pay for
transport to their place of work
To bring working class housing back to
the city centre the Housing Department
built Quarry Hill Flats. Quarry Hill Flats
were perceived to be one answer and
the Director of Housing R A Livett and C
Jenkinson visited France and Vienna to
inspect workers flats including the massive
Karl Marx Hof a massive block of flats
in Vienna. These flats contained facilities
for tenants, such as laundries, shops,
kindergartens, courtyards, playgrounds
and gardens.
Another delegation including Livett was
sent to look at an estate in Drancy in
France to look at a revolutionary new
construction technique designed by Eugene
Mopin, who was commissioned to come
up with a plan for a structural design for
Quarry Hill flats. The technique comprised
of a steel frame encased in pre-cast
concrete units and were then filled with
concrete. All this was to be made at the
Quarry Hill site in a purpose built factory.
Originally the plan was to have eight
hundred dwellings, but the flats were
increased in height and the dwellings to
nine hundred and thirty eight consisting
of between one and five bedrooms. The
original design included a community
hall able to accommodate five hundred
and twenty people and included a stage.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TEN