Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

“Here I am,” she writes in another letter of about the same date, “head and ears deep in notices about dustmen, requests for lawyers to send accounts, etc., etc.... I’ve just come in from a round of visits to the nine houses; and somehow it’s been a day of small worries about all sorts of repairs, and things of that kind. It is only when the detail is really managed on as great principles as the whole plan, that a work becomes really good.” That last sentence holds the vital germ of Octavia Hill’s own philosophy, living on in the work of the Association that bears her name.

Instead of giving alms she gave herself. The student of her work cannot fail to note how sedulously she refrained from handing out money when that would have been the easiest thing to do. In 1869 she had read a paper before the Social Science Association on “The Importance of Aiding the Poor Without Alms-giving,” and on this point she was obdurate. Even her strong champion Ruskin was unwilling to go all the way with her in this policy, and he shrank from contact with the ugliness that she met to give it battle day after day.

The Artisans’ Dwelling Act in 1875 was a great parliamentary victory for housing reform, and it was in large part Miss Hill’s victory. Moreover, the Committee which investigated the operation of the Act five years later owed much to Miss Hill’s continued cooperation. This is the period of the specialized effort of Miss Hill in behalf of Open Spaces. When the bill for the artisans’ houses came up for its second reading in the House Miss Hill was present, tremulously eager of course to behold its reception and to know its fate. Suddenly, to her intense gratification, a speaker brought forward an article she had written for Macmillan’s Magazine.

“Instead of quoting dry facts and figures, he read aloud from it the description of the wonderful delight it gave me to see the courts laid open to the light and air.”

It may be remarked that no compilation of facts and figures will ever convey a fair idea of the work of Miss Hill or the work of the Octavia Hill Association.

By 1877 Miss Hill’s work had grown till it concerned the welfare of 3,500 tenants and the prudent husbandry of some $200,000 in trust funds. Lord Pembroke gave Miss Hill $30,000 to buy houses, and paid a worker. Then she had to go away to rest, and the years from 1878 to 1880 were spent chiefly in travel, that took her to the Levant, though she kept in contact with her ruling passion by intimate and affectionate correspondence.

Upon her final return she was asked by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to undertake the management of much of their property in Southwark. She accepted the charge. She began the successful movement which lasted six years, from 1883 to 1889, to add Parliament Hill, and a tract adjoining, to Hampstead Heath. This achievement must stand among her greatest benefactions to humanity. It meant obtaining $1,500,000 by private gift and municipal appropriation, and not merely saving a great playground of the poor but doubling its area.

She took charge of forty-eight houses in Deptford, in South London, in 1884, and in 1885 accepted the responsibility for seventy-eight more in the same region. In 1887 the number of tenants had increased to 5,000. The Red Cross Cottages and Garden in Southwark opened in June of this year are salient examples of Miss Hill’s magic wand in ousting ugliness and creating graciousness and beauty in its place. The hall, designed for music and other neighborhood entertainment, has unusual decorations by Walter Crane, representing just such actions of peaceful heroism as any one of us, at any time, might be called on to perform. The first picture was that of Alice Ayres, a servant girl, who saved children from a fire in Southwark. Since the heroine came from their own walk in life, and was known to some of them, the tenants felt a living link of interest with the painting.

The burden of the Deptford Cottages was progressively taken over by an enlarging number of assistants. Though many of these were volunteers, since Miss Hill never surrendered her belief in the system that brought women of refinement and leisure into contact with those whose lot was toiling poverty, the desirability of the service of professional supervisors was recognized, and over each group of houses as served by the volunteer assistants there was set a paid worker to direct the collection of the rents and all the diversified effort for the welfare of the tenants.

After a time these head women and their charges, while they never ceased to look to Miss Hill for guidance and inspiration, became more and more independent of her actual oversight, and as they gained confidence and knowledge the work became progressively decentralized.