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House-ownership from Rate Books*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

M. J. Daunton
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Extract

Professor Marion Bowley, writing of the housing boom of the 1930s which was uniquely based upon sales to owner-occupiers, remarked that ‘we have no means of knowing statistically the extent of owner-occupation before the Great War…Actually, it is more important to know why the change occurred [in the inter-war period] than to know its actual size, and there is no need to be led astray in a futile search for non-existent statistics’. The same ban would seem to extend to analysis of investment ownership of housing before 1914. What I want to suggest is that it is indeed possible to obtain statistics relating not only to owner occupation but also to the overall structure of the urban housing market; and that far from leading us astray, it is in fact important to acquire precise figures in order to understand with more certainty the structure of the nineteenth-century housing market – something of which we have remarkably little knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 3 , May 1976 , pp. 21 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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Footnotes

*

This article is based upon a method used in my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Aspects of the social and economic structure of Cardiff, 1870–1914’ (University of Kent, 1974), which should be consulted for discussion of the results of the analysis presented here.

References

Notes

1. Bowley, M., Housing and the State 1919–1944 (1945), 85.Google Scholar

2. The use of Rate Books has also been discussed by Holmes, R. S., ‘Ownership and migration from a study of rate books’, Area, v (1973), 242–51.Google Scholar This appeared after my own researches were completed, and had been outlined in a seminar paper to the University of Kent in 1971.

3. I would like to acknowledge the kindness of Mr Tatham, of the City Rates Department, in making the Rates Books available to me.

4. Royal Commission on Local Taxation, Minutes of Evidence vol. 1 (P. P. 1898 XLI), QQ. 1164, 1326–8,1686–8, 6543–60,11420; Royal Commission on Local Taxation First Report (P.P. 1899 XXXV), 19.

5. Royal Commission on Local Taxation, Minutes of Evidence vol. 1 (P.P. 1898 XLI), QQ. 2090–7, 5063, 6913, 6973, 7699, 7885,11373; Royal Commission on Local Taxation, First Report (P.P. 1899 XXV), 13–14, 17.

6. Royal Commission on Local Taxation, Minutes of Evidence vol. 1 (P.P. 1898 XLI), QQ. 14–17, 18–20, 213–15, 221, 269–72, 1118–22, 1151–3, 1356–67, 1587–8, 1615, 2216, 2230, 2758–9, 3938, 4519, 4673, 4688–92; Royal Commission on Local Taxation, First Report (P.P. 1899 XXV), 7, 13–19, 21–2.

7. Bowley, op. cit., 51,79–80.

8. See National Library of Wales, Jevons MSS. IV, 126; Lewis, E. D., The Rhondda Valleys (1957), 226Google Scholar n. 5; Royal Commission on the Coal Industry 1919 (P.P. 1919 XI-XIII), Q. 25498; The Land: The Report of the Land Enquiry Committee, Vol. II, Urban (1914), 90–3Google Scholar; Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes (P.P. 1884–5 XXX), Q. 10598,10791–10980; Chapman, S. D. (ed.), The History of Working-Class Housing (1971), 238.Google Scholar

9. See comments in The Land, 89–93.

10. This thesis is expressed in Hennock, E. P., ‘Finance and politics in urban local government in England, 1835–1900’, Historical Journal, vi (1963), 212–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See Rex, J. and Moore, R., Race, Community and Conflict. A Study of Sparkbrook (1967), 36Google Scholar, and Thernstrom, S., Poverty and Progress. Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964), 115.Google Scholar

12. Saul, S. B., ‘House building in England 1890–1914’, Economic History Review, n.s.xv (1962), 119–37.Google Scholar