‘Unhealthy areas’: Town planning, eugenics and the slums, 1890–1945

Abstract

The value of planning in remedying slum problems in Britain was widely recognized by the outbreak of the Second World War. Indeed, the identification of planning with social progress underpinned the post‐war consensus. This broad agreement, however, was achieved in the face of apparently distinct and opposing views. From 1890 onwards, the sufficiency of environmental reform in ‘Unhealthy Areas’ was challenged by radical socialists on the one hand, and by the ‘eugenists’ of the social hygiene movement on the other. No one view, however, succeeded in eliminating the others before 1945. The issue at stake was whether differences in housing and health were the direct product of economic and environmental inequalities, or whether these differences resulted from a process of selective social mobility sorting out the ‘fit’ from the ‘unfit’. Much of the debate centred on overcrowding and its causes. Radical formulations of the slum problem, however, whether from the left or the right, offered no politically plausible solutions to government in Britain — politicians and civil servants sought other ways of typifying and delineating slums, manipulating their presentation of the problem until it appeared to be within their ability to solve. The nature of the debate about slums, eugenics and planning is discussed in three sections relating to the 1890s, 1920s and 1930s. Finally, the problematic route by which all parties came to accept an environmental approach is explored.

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