The story of social housing in Brighton after the First World War has been lovingly documented in a new post on the Muncipal Dreams blog.
The post, Brighton’s Interwar Council Housing Estates: ‘Housewives with empty larders’ tells how the Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk estates were built for the town’s working class population, who then lived in slum housing.
But even though they were intended as social housing, once finished the rents were set at a rate out of the reach of the poorest families.
Some properties were squatted, and tenants of others ended up moving back to the slums as they could not afford the rent.
A pity we couldn’t just have continued having the war!