Page 30 - History 2020

cooperative. Practical by nature, she organised midday meals for her workers, visited

them when they were sick and also took them on nature-study walks around the
London commons. Through her mother’s connections she got to meet leading social
reformers and share their ideas. She eventually decided to acquire some workers’
houses of her own, and, by taking a smaller profit than usual (5% not 12) invest the
profits in improving and maintaining them and to benefit the community.

Octavia Hill went on to become Victorian Britain’s greatest evangelical philanthropist
and housing reformer. She devoted her energies to the setting up of housing trusts to

manage practical improvement projects in the London slums. Her portfolio grew to
3,000 tenancies. Reformers of the industrial poor (we’ll explore this topic later)
broadly fall into two schools: those who blame the poor, and those who blame the
system. The tradition, dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Law, was to blame the
th
poor. By the later 19 century, there was growing awareness of systemic factors.
Octavia Hill was a transitional figure who fell between the two. To her way of
thinking, as historian Tristram Hunt explains, “The difficulties facing the casual poor

were generally self-made and boiled down to questions of character and moral fibre.
Poverty and mass unemployment were not the issue; the challenge was to counter
the process of ‘demoralisation’, by training the poor in habits of punctuality, thrift
and responsibility through a series of highly controlled housing projects. The poor
needed to be helped to help themselves. Here in all their glory were the ‘Victorian
values’ of Thatcherite lore.”

But her combination of hands-on housing improvements and moral training – she

was a firm landlady and insisted that rents had to be paid on time, but also took an
interest in her tenants’ lives – not only nurtured mutual respect, but also gained the
recognition of later Victorian governments, even Tory ones like Disraeli’s and Lord
Salisbury’s, of the need to pass the first anti-slum housing acts. Queen Victoria sent
Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone a note saying how distressed she was by “all she
has heard and read lately of the deplorable condition of the Houses of the Poor in our

greatest towns.” Octavia Hill’s work also helped to spur on investigators like Charles
Booth (founder of the Salvation Army) to produce detailed sociological studies of the
realities of slum life.

Octavia Hill’s other great achievement was the foundation of the National Trust in
1895. The importance of providing and defending green spaces was a logical
extension of her interest in housing. She offered music lessons, cultural outings and
Gilbert & Sullivan performances to her tenants. In 1877, along wither her sister
Miranda, she formed the Kyrle Society, with the aim of bringing beauty, nature, arts

and music to everyone but she became aware of the need for open spaces for the