Unemployment, Taxation and Housing: The Urban Land Question in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

Nineteenth-century British radicals had a long-standing interest in land reform as a means of attacking the dominant social and political role of great landowners. But it was not until the 1880s that a number of factors coincided to bring ‘the land’ to the very centre of British politics. These included the prolonged agricultural depression and the protests it produced within rural society, the extension of the franchise to the working class in the counties in 1884–85 and the defection of most Liberal landowners to the Unionist alliance in 1886.¹ All these developments gave the Liberal party an incentive to promote rural land reform, both to attack their landed enemies and to gain the votes of the newly enfranchised agricultural labourers. The 1894 Local Government Act, which empowered parish councils to acquire land for allotments, and the 1907 Smallholdings Act were important parts of the programmes of the 1892–95 and 1905–15 Liberal governments.² But as rural land reform made an appearance on the national political stage, it brought into the limelight a number of arguments which were already gaining ground in local government and which suggested land reform could present a solution to some pressing problems of urban life. This was an attractive option to many Liberals, who were only too eager to blame landowners for all society’s ills; and while large landowners were obviously less prominent in complex and economically diverse urban societies than in the countryside, there were enough high-profile examples to make them plausible targets for radical enmity.³