The Wimpey No-fines House was a construction method and series of house designs produced by the George Wimpey company and intended for mass-production of social housing for families, developed under the Ministry of Works post-World War II Emergency Factory Made programme. "No-fines" refers to the type of concrete used – concrete with no fine aggregates. [1]
A rapid increase in the birth rate compounded by the loss of city centre housing during the Blitz meant demand for accommodation in post-World War II Britain was particularly intense. Skilled labour and materials were in short supply and commanded high prices. Local government around the country commissioned large building projects to meet the demand, and innovative designs like the no-fines house gave private contractors like George Wimpey, and later the Corolite Construction Company, a compelling proposition to give the state. Wimpey's houses could be produced rapidly and cheaply, minimising the need for in-demand skills like bricklaying.
From the early 1920s, around 1000 of these 'clinker' aggregate or 'no fines' houses were built in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester, with 650 being built in Manchester starting in 1924 and taking 3 years to complete. In 2010, the south Manchester suburb of Burnage still displays fine examples of no-fines, clinker construction. Wimpey's design was particularly successful and many thousands were built in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the late 1950s, the emphasis for public housing moved to high-rise accommodation.
Designed to a Ministry of Works specification, no-fines houses focused on functional design for family life. There are only a handful of variations in the houses built, and typically all variants are found on each estate:
Many examples are accompanied by a single-storey brick-built outbuilding, either in semi-detached arrangement set behind the house, or linking one house to the next.
By today's standards the houses are set in large plots of land intended to allow the occupants to engage in domestic vegetable production. This was achieved through siting in low-cost locations.
No-fines houses were built with a ten-inch (254mm) concrete shell cast in situ. [1] The concrete for the entire outer structure was cast in one operation using reusable formwork. The ground floor was either concrete or traditional timber joists and floorboards; the first floor was made with traditional timber joists and floorboards. Interior walls were sometimes a mixture of conventional brick and blockwork construction or timber studs and plasterboard (9mm), with load-bearing studs to suit first floor joist spans. To weatherproof the structure, the external facade was rendered. [2]
The regular, grey finish of the houses has led some to criticise the estates as having a bleak, concrete jungle aesthetic. This is accentuated by the layout of the pronounced geometric structure of many of the estates on which they were built. In more recent years (particularly since many were sold into private hands following the Housing Act 1980) no-fines estates have taken on a more varied look with most examples being painted (often in light pastel colours) and modified with porches or extensions.
By the 1980s, political opinion had swung against social housing, and those living in it seemed to experience a relatively low quality of life and poor health. There were also concerns about the long-term structural soundness of the houses due to their novel construction. Parliament commissioned a report into the design of the houses and its impact on the occupants. [3] It found that the health issues were due to poor windows and poor heating; the insulating properties of the no-fines walls were adjudged reasonable compared to single skin buildings of the same period. It concluded that the buildings were structurally sound. Subsequent improvements to windows and heating facilities have brought the houses broadly up to modern living standards and the design is now seen as largely vindicated. Most lenders will consider these for mortgage purposes without issue.
No-fines houses were typically built in estates of a few hundred separate dwellings. Examples are found throughout the UK, and include:
England
Scotland
Wales
Gamesley is a residential area within the Borough of High Peak in Derbyshire, England, west of Glossop and close to the River Etherow which forms the boundary with Tameside in Greater Manchester. Gamesley is a ward of the High Peak Borough Council. It had a population of 2,531 at the 2011 Census.
An apartment, flat, or unit is a self-contained housing unit that occupies part of a building, generally on a single storey. There are many names for these overall buildings. The housing tenure of apartments also varies considerably, from large-scale public housing, to owner occupancy within what is legally a condominium, to tenants renting from a private landlord.
A housing estate is a group of homes and other buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country.
Park Hill is a housing estate in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. It was built between 1957 and 1961, and in 1998 was given Grade II* listed building status. Following a period of decline, the estate is being renovated by developers Urban Splash into a mostly private mixed-tenure estate made up of homes for market rent, private sale, shared ownership, and student housing while around a quarter of the units in the development will be social housing. The renovation was one of the six short-listed projects for the 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize. The Estate falls within the Manor Castle ward of the City. Park Hill is also the name of the area in which the flats are sited. The name relates to the deer park attached to Sheffield Manor, the remnant of which is now known as Norfolk Park.
A semi-detached house is a single family duplex dwelling house that shares one common wall with the next house. The name distinguishes this style of house from detached houses, with no shared walls, and terraced houses, with a shared wall on both sides. Often, semi-detached houses are built in pairs in which each house's layout is a mirror image of the other's.
Chelmsley Wood, sometimes called just Chelmsley, is a town and civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, West Midlands, England, with a population of 12,453. It is located near Birmingham Airport and the National Exhibition Centre. It lies about eight miles east of Birmingham City Centre and 5 miles to the north of Solihull. The town is also close to both Coleshill and Water Orton in Warwickshire, the county the area was historically part of.
George Wimpey was a British construction firm. Formed in 1880 and based in Hammersmith, it initially operated largely as a road surfacing contractor. The business was acquired by Godfrey Mitchell in 1919, and he developed it into a construction and housebuilding firm. In July 2007, Wimpey merged with Taylor Woodrow to create Taylor Wimpey. Wimpey was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1934.
Cranhill is an inner city district and housing scheme in the north east of Glasgow, Scotland. Cranhill was developed from public funding in the early 1950s and was originally, chiefly composed of four-storey tenement blocks surrounding a patch of grassland, which became Cranhill Park. Later development saw the building of three tower blocks, surrounded by rows of terraced maisonettes. In more recent years, a number of semi-detached and detached homes have been built. The area also hosts some shops, two primary schools and nurseries, a community centre and the Cranhill water tower.
Cottage flats, also known as four-in-a-block flats, are a style of housing common in Scotland, where there are single floor dwellings at ground level, and similar dwellings on the floor above. All have doors directly to the outside of the building, rather than into a 'close', or common staircase, although some do retain a shared entrance. The name 'cottage flats' is confusing as before the mid-1920s cottage housing referred to a single house, normally semi-detached, which contained living accommodation downstairs and bedrooms above. These were phased out by most urban local authorities as wasteful of space and economy after central government subsidies were reduced in the 1924 Housing Act.
Multifamily residential is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex. Units can be next to each other, or stacked on top of each other. A common form is an apartment building. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects. Sometimes units in a multifamily residential building are condominiums, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single apartment building owner.
Bogany Flats was a multi-storey block of flats in Castlemilk, Glasgow. The flats were built in 1966 by George Wimpey Ltd, the last of the nine tower blocks Wimpey built throughout the city in the sixties. The building was 20 stories high and contained 114 dwellings; locally it was known as 'The Hilton'.
Prefabs were a major part of the delivery plan to address the United Kingdom's post–Second World War housing shortage. They were envisaged by war-time prime minister Winston Churchill in March 1944, and legally outlined in the Housing Act 1944.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the construction of numerous brutalist apartment blocks in Sheffield, England. The Sheffield City Council had been clearing inner-city residential slums since the early 1900s. Prior to the 1950s these slums were replaced with low-rise council housing, mostly constructed in new estates on the edge of the city. By the mid-1950s the establishment of a green belt had led to a shortage of available land on the edges of the city, whilst the government increased subsidies for the construction of high-rise apartment towers on former slum land, so the council began to construct high-rise inner city estates, adopting modernist designs and industrialised construction techniques, culminating in the construction of the award-winning Gleadless Valley and Park Hill estates.
The Southgate Estate was a modernist public housing project located in Runcorn New Town and completed in 1977. The estate was designed by James Stirling, and comprised 1,500 residential units intended to house 6,000 people. The estate was demolished between 1990 and 1992 and replaced with another housing development, known as Hallwood Park, based around more traditional design principles.
A byelaw terraced house is a type of dwelling built to comply with the Public Health Act 1875. It is a type of British terraced house at the opposite end of the social scale from the aristocratic townhouse but a marked improvement on the pre-regulation house built as cheap accommodation for the urban poor of the Industrial Revolution. The term usually refers to houses built between 1875 and 1918.
Cressingham Gardens is a council garden estate in Lambeth. It is located on the southern edge of Brockwell Park. It comprises 306 dwellings, a mixture of four, three and two-bedroom houses, and one-bedroom apartments. It was designed at the end of the 1960s by the Lambeth Borough Council Architect Edward Hollamby and second architect Roger Westman, and built at the start of the 1970s. In 2012 Lambeth Council proposed demolishing the estate, to replace the terraced houses by apartment blocks. Most of the apartments would then be for sale to the private sector. The residents, those in Lambeth who wish to prevent the gentrification of the borough, and those who want to conserve what they believe to be important architectural heritage, are campaigning to prevent its demolition.
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.
A council house or council flat is a form of British public housing built by local authorities. A council estate is a building complex containing a number of council houses and other amenities like schools and shops. Construction took place mainly from 1919 after the Housing Act 1919 to the 1980s, with much less council housing built since then. There were local design variations, but they all adhered to local authority building standards. The Housing Acts of 1985 and 1988 facilitated the transfer of council housing to not-for-profit housing associations with access to private finance, and these new housing associations became the providers of most new public-sector housing. The characterisation of council houses as 'problem places' was key for leading this movement of transferring public housing stock to the private arena. By 2003, 36.5% of the social rented housing stock was held by housing associations.
In the United Kingdom and Ireland, a flat-roofed pub is a public house with a flat roof, often located on housing estates. They are frequently of concrete construction, with flat roofs rather than more conventional pitched roofs.
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