Housing Economics: A Historical Approach

Book Preface

The cover illustration 1 depicts the Long Alley almshouses in what is now the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon; the almshouses were fi rst built in 1446 by two medieval guilds, the Fraternity of the Holy Cross and the Guild of Our Lady. 2 Th e former received a Royal Charter in 1441, although it appears to have been in existence as a voluntary organisation for much longer, whereas records of the latter date back to 1247. The Fraternity operated as a mutual self-help society with assistance provided to its members suff ering sickness or poverty; its objectives were partly religious, but also secular with an involvement in major civic infrastructure projects. A part of its Royal Charter mandate was to make provision for ‘thirteen poor sick and impotent men and women’ and Long Alley was built to meet the requirement. Th e Fraternity thrived through the fifteenth century, but both Guilds were suppressed and the assets seized shortly after the Reformation and Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. Nevertheless, only a few years later, in 1553, the lands were restored under a new Royal Charter to a secular governing body Christ’s Hospital, which took responsibility for the provision of relief to the poor in the town more generally in addition to those located within Long Alley. Christ’s Hospital remains the governing body today. The provision of social housing support therefore has a very long history. The first almshouses in Britain date to the tenth century, although by no means all provided the beautiful accommodation of Long Alley. Today, almshouses only account for a very small proportion of the total social housing stock, catering mainly for the elderly, but they illustrate that a duty to provide basic accommodation for the poor has been accepted throughout history, although not always with good grace. Next to Long Alley stands St Helen’s church, the earliest parts of which date to the thirteenth century and was originally the site of a Saxon church. Its Lady Chapel possesses a beautiful medieval painted ceiling. A few metres away lie East and West St Helen Streets; the former is made up of a very expensive, diverse mixture of primarily residential properties built between the fi fteenth and twentieth centuries. A plaque on number 28 denotes that William III stayed there in 1688 and the street also claims involvement in the English Civil War. The western branch, however, is made up of late-twentieth century residential and retail properties built on the site of a former clothing factory.

This example is, of course, not unique and countless other cases could have been chosen from across Britain but, within approximately 50m of the church, three housing submarkets exist, based on tenure and dwelling type. The question arises therefore whether mainstream urban economics alone can fully explain the richness and diversity of the urban environment, and particularly the dynamics of change, or whether it needs to be augmented by other disciplines, notably urban history, geography and social policy.

This book has had a long gestation period and was originally driven by the simple observation of diff erent housing markets existing very close together more generally with no obvious reasons for the boundaries. Our thinking was, fi rst, heavily infl uenced by research on social interactions modelling and, then, by recent tests of path dependent outcomes using long-run historical data sets. Th is literature implies that the ability to provide accommodation today and the overall urban structure are constrained by the decisions of earlier generations; even very large external events may not necessarily change the nature of housing markets. In the case of Long Alley, the Dissolution did not produce fundamental longrunchange; since the poor  remained and the state did not want to take on the responsibility, the re-establishment of a similar form of governance was the easiest option. Many of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital were dignitaries from the earlier Guilds.