access to eden: an essay on arts & crafts values, garden city ideals, and the 1924 ’wheatley’ housing act

In Access to Eden, John Astley explores the influences that shaped the original public sector housing ideals in Britain. The essay surveys the cultural and legislative strands in a narrative that reveals the origins of public sector housing with company housing (such as Port Sunlight), the Arts and Crafts movement, with architects such as Baillie Scott, the Garden City pioneer Ebenezer Howard, and urban planners such as Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. In light of these background perspectives, the author considers (in the the aftermath of the 1914-18 War) the impact of the Housing Acts of the 1920s that empowered local authorities of the day to take action on the housing front with a mission to build ＂Homes for Heroes＂. As a case study, the John Astley selects the Merry Oak housing development in Bitterne, Southampton, to examine the practical outcome of the innovative legislation that had been established, and in particular by the 1924 Housing Act of John Wheatley. The author concludes his essay with a brief look at public sector housing in the present era, and finds a landscape of lost opportunities and a failure to learn from the hard-won lessons of the past. Public sector housing, the author finds, now seems to be seen as social housing as a system of ’distributed Welfare’. . . Is it really too late, though, for local government to regain the moral high ground and deliver quality public sector housing? After reading Access to Eden, you will not be able to look at a house - any house - in quite the same way again. JOHN ASTLEY is a sociologist, lecturer, and writer - and a frequent contributor to journals, conferences, and radio talks. As a sociologist of culture, he is the author of three volumes of collected essays: Liberation and Domestication, Culture and Creativity, and Professionalism and Practice - as well as his well-known monograph on The Beatles phenomenon from a cultural studies perspective Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? In recent years, his essay Herbivores an Carnivores (2008) looked at the struggle for democratic values in post-War Britain. In 2010, the first edition of Access to Eden appeared as an examination of the rise and fall of public sector housing ideals in Britain. After many years living and working in Oxford, John Astley is now based in Devon.