There are three themes to this walk, housing, labour and capital. They will be interwoven into the fabric of the streets.
We will visit four housing estates built by the London County Council and so we will start with a little history.
1 The London County Council
A number of key determinants combined to facilitate the formation of the London County Council in 1889 (it began operations on 1st January 1890).
London had grown from a population of around one million in 1800 to over six million by the end of the nineteenth century. Across Europe, cities that had originated in the Roman Empire, developed through feudalism, mercantilism and absolutism, could no longer cope with the pressures and demands of such increases in people, industries and technologies.
Throughout the initial phases of industrialisation, London had been ‘managed’ by over 300 separate bodies, eventually bought together under the control of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Known as the Metropolitan Board of Perks because of widespread corruption.
This clunky mix of vestries, charities, philanthropists, guilds and indifference could no longer cope. Epidemics of disease, spread by germs and bacteria which knew no class differentials, distressing scenes in the streets outside gentlemen’s clubs and operas, the threat of vice, crime and sedition led to moralist puritanism, disgust, reform and embryonic socialism.
There were at least 20 major slums in central London. Stinking, miasmic threats of squalor, bare foot children covered in sores, lice and fleas.
By the 1880s a new phase of capital accumulation and expansion took place accompanied by electrification, advances in scientific understanding and increasingly complex technologies; thus was created the era of mass production.
Greater volumes of commodity-image-objects were produced at much faster speeds. An increasingly global system of production was forming, creating an intensification of competition between nation states and individual units of capital.
Mass production, bringing ever large numbers of workers into direct contact with capital, facilitated the growth of mass trade unions and mass socialist parties.
Slightly before the age of mass production, but of immense political importance was the Paris Commune of 1871. London never had its Commune but during the 1880s an increasingly combative working class crystallised, influenced by cooperation, trade unionism, anarchism, feminism, socialism, communism and the most dangerous ideas of all; Marxism.
The great change was not only in industrial production but also in construction, the means of transport, the means of communication and more. The multiple revolutions that Marx and Engels had defined in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 continued to spin ever faster.
Art and culture span too; and from these new combinations of mass, material, ideas and labour, came modernism in all its expressions.
If a brief history of political events in London is added, the reader may draw their own conclusions as to how much the development of the productive forces led to new conflicts and combats of class struggle.
There were riots in London in February 1886 when a demonstration organised by the Social Democratic Federation ended with window smashing of the Carlton Club and other ‘gentleman’s establishments’.
In November 1887, a demonstration against unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts was savagely attacked by the police leading to more rioting.
Marchers included William Morris, John Burns, Eleanor Marx, Annie Besant, Robert Cunningham Graham, George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Wilson (who founded the Freedom newspaper with Peter Kropotkin).
In the summer of 1888 women match workers went on strike at the Bryant & May factory in east London.
In March 1889, Will Thorne (helped by Eleanor Marx) began to organise a mass trade union of gas workers. One of the union’s first demands, for an eight hour day, was successfully won from the employers.
In the summer of 1889 dock workers struck across London, as did tailors in the East End.
Large groups of workers who had been considered impossible to organise had done just that, and in many instances won rises in pay, reduction in hours and trade union recognition.
Might London have its Commune yet?
One person who appears throughout the politics, ideas and practice of this time is William Morris.
There is a witty account of Topsy, as he was known to his friends, holding his great shaggy head in his hands and groaning while he tried to understand the more esoteric parts of Marx’s Capital.
Some of this book is quite indigestible but Morris took something immensely important from Marx and amplified it and made it his own. It remains central to the very idea of socialism and how life might be.
The call to arms from Morris was that the very essence of a person, their soul and spirit, was greatly formed by the labour they carried out, in the conditions and organisation of that labour.
What is made and how and why; and what role the worker’s hand, brain, heart and humour played in this process.
That beautiful and well crafted artefacts could be made instead of commodity-image-objects. That this approach would satisfy the spirit-essence of humans to create, create a pleasure of use and be intrinsically attractive to the senses.
Instead, workers labour to satisfy the avarice of an already wealth few. Their creativity becomes drudgery, the objects contain built-in obsolescence, a great mass of commodity-image-objects and yet poverty and want; ever new techniques and processes of production but huge amounts of waste. Nature becomes an enemy, to be conquered, slaughtered, exhausted.
Are workers to be simply chained to machines and wheels and conveyor belts (and today, keyboards)? Do they produce wealth to satisfy universal human needs for all, for the amplification of the joy of life; or do they produce wealth which takes alien forms and powers over and above their will and determination, and enslaves them?
Morris dreamt in real time and his proposals for a better world were never of the fantasy kind. Everything he wrote and said could be considered practical, the possibilities already there, if only the workers could organise to take what was due to them through their constant labour.
And many of those who went to work in the early iterations of the London County Council, or were active in the socialist movement had been tempered in these fires.
Architects were influenced by Morris and his belief that housing should be attractive; that art and craft was as essential to the building of housing. That housing should be surrounded by air, light, space and greenery.
London waits for its Commune still.
But there have been barricades here and there, now forgotten. Ideas have blown into alleys and back streets and disappeared into the grey and smokey London sky; but leave traces, that others unexpectedly discover, and consider, as they search these streets for keys to open the future.
The starting point of the walk is London Southbank University, Borough Road
2 London Southbank University, Borough Road
The origins of the university are in the South London Polytechnic Institute which was established in 1892. This was in the context of a much wider movement for reform in housing, health, culture, education, local government and many other realms of life.
The London School Board (LSB) had been set up in 1870 to sort out the incoherent provision of education in the capital and to provide good quality, universal education across the city. This it did, supported by well built, good quality buildings which are often still visible and in use today.
The LSB was run by a committee of elected members. Elections were the first to use the secret ballot, cumulative voting and allow women to vote on equal terms with men.
In 1893 the London County Council (LCC) set up a Technical Education Board and by 1904 this organisation had help to establish ‘eighteen new technical institutes and polytechnics’. These delivered vocational training, technical courses and evening classes to a rapidly expanding number of students.
The architect, architectural historian, writer and academic, William Lethaby was appointed as the Art Inspector to the Technical Education Board in 1894. Lethaby was a life long socialist who proposed that, ‘art, construction, architecture, they are all one’.
He worked to found the Central School of Arts and Crafts which opened in 1896. This was a major institution in spreading the ideas of arts and crafts and those of William Morris.
Part of the pressure was the demands of some types of capital that needed literate, skilled and technically capable workers.
Part of the pressure was from trade unions and workers who wanted opportunities for self-improvement, training and education and protested the loss of skill and dignity that great masses of workers experienced within capitalist production.
Part of the pressure was from architects, artists and designers who railed against the oppressive ugliness produced by the cost cutting that profit making demanded.
Once up and running the South London Polytechnic Institute offered lectures to the public from luminaries that included George Bernard Shaw, JA Hobson and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the atmosphere of the progressive thinking and practical idealism of the time, the artist Roger Fry was commissioned in 1911 to create seven murals in the student dining room. These were eventually sold to the Tate.
The current building is from 1930 and is a remodelling of the original building of 1892. It was a bold and confident move to put this institution here in the 1890s. The area was a dense conglomeration of slums and poorly regulated industrial production.
This photographic archive contains pre-1917 images
Cross Borough Road and to the left is Murphy House. This is the first example of the housing of the LCC on the walk.
3 Murphy House, Borough Road
Using the powers of the 1890 Housing of the Working Class Act, the new LCC embarked upon slum clearance. Murphy House and the surrounding blocks constitute some of that replacement housing.
Improvements included running water and inside toilets for each flat, replacing the shared communal toilets of the slums.
When this estate was built in 1889, half of London households did not have access to running water; although there were eight private water companies.
Running water and the building of housing that could be kept clean, supported by the early developments of universal health care led to substantial decreases in infant mortality and maternal deaths. Such basic things; so long in coming.
But even with all the technical advances in the past 100 years, and the huge increases in wealth, it is estimated that around 28 percent of the population of London still lives in poverty. In 1890 that figure was around 30 percent. The trickle down that’s promised is glacially slow.
At the end of the 19th century, London was a large industrial and manufacturing city and constantly being changed by the dynamics of capital accumulation.
In 1900 one in ten male workers was an office clerk involved in administrative and bureaucratic work. Quills gave way to pens. The mass production of typewriters from the 1890s onwards was to revolutionise white collar work.
Around the same time, the invention of the telephone and its rapid technical development led to it being more widely introduced into workplaces.
Not only did this revolutionise report writing and communications, it led to a change of the social composition of the workforce as more women were employed as office workers, typists and telephone operators.
Business classes ‘for girls’ began to be taught in the new polytechnics. Strange and oppressive elements of the patriarchy persisted however; if women workers at the LCC married, they had to resign their positions; (there was an exemption for teachers).
These changes helped to shape political demands and a layer of women workers at the LCC joined the National Union of Clerks and supported progressive causes such as the Suffragettes. They marched in their own blocks at national demonstrations in support of votes for women.
And so when we study this housing; consider that railway workers once lived here, and shop workers and office clerks and typists and telephonists, and that they often had radical, progressive and socialist ideas.
4 Hunter House, King James Street, London
This is part of the same development as Murphy House described above. It is in the Arts and Crafts style and nineteenth century working class domestic design. In shape and materials it is not so unlike the middle class apartment blocks in central London.
Turn left into Boyfield Street
5 Clandon House and Albury Building, Boyfield Street
Built in 1897 to a design by the architect Reginald Minton-Taylor. He worked in the ‘Housing for the Working Classes’ section of the LCC Architects Department. In the 1890s this was headed by Owen Fleming who went on to design the Boundary Estate.
The pot plants and flower boxes add a great touch of something very human, helping to turn the buildings into homes.
As you walk around these streets you will notice these two buildings dominating the skyline. Such buildings always do. They bully other buildings and have little connection with the way the area has developed over time. They break the unity and overall imagery of the London-brick housing. Is this deliberate?
The tower on the right in the photograph above is 133 Blackfriars Road which was completed in the 2010s. The developer was Great Portland Estate and it is controlled through a joint venture vehicle involving GPE and the BP Pension fund.
The marketing speak at the GPE website proclaims;
We unlock potential, creating sustainable space for London to thrive. We believe in the power of innovation and partnership to deliver a greater choice of adaptable, climate resilient places fit for London’s future, creating space for every London story.
It would be interesting to know what they think about working with BP and delivering ‘climate resilient places fit for London’s future’.
The tower on the right is 241 Southwark Bridge Road. Developed by Brockton Capital, founded in 2006. Its office locations include Tel Aviv which raises a question about what other sort of property it is interested in.
The public face of this capital appears to be Brockton Everlast Inc.
Their website is currently displaying the cover of The Clash album, London Calling. But avoids comment about turning rebellion into money.
6 Patrick Court, Webber Street
This block was selected at random. Any other block would produce the same basic points even if the figures might be slightly different.
It is not particularly well-designed but neither is the design poor enough to impact the sale and rental prices at the moment. It was only built around 20 years ago and yet already seems rather shabby.
In June 2026 a two bedroom flat was for sale in the block for £525,000. If a buyer had a 10 percent deposit; that is £52,500, they might be able to secure a 25 year mortgage at a current interest rate of 4.5 percent.
This would be a monthly payment of £2,625. The total interest (assuming the rate stays at 4.5 percent) would be £315,086 making the total cost of the flat to the buyer £787, 586.
There is also the service charge of around £2,500 a year to consider.
Assuming that the service charge doesn’t increase (which is unlikely) then the cost over 25 years will be another £62,500.
That brings the total cost of a two bedroom flat in the block to £850,086.
While this isn’t so good for people who want a home rather than an asset, it is favourable to those who want an asset rather than a home.
A one bedroom flat sold in September 2015 for £108,750. That same flat was sold in August 2025 for £405,000 which is an increase of 272 percent.
This is obviously a very lucrative trade for someone but it is unclear how it supports the developers mantra of ‘community, jobs, opportunity and sustainability’. Or could it be they tell a lie?
The average price of a two bedroom flat in this area is now £883,255.
Turn left into Rushmore Street and then right into Kings Bench Street and then left into Kings Bench Street.
The buildings on Pocock Street and the corners of Kings Bench Street and Rushworth Street are St Alphage House and were built in 1910 in an arts and crafts-ish style. This was parochial housing and offices for church workers.
7 Kings Bench Street
RIpley and Merrow Buildings are a single development in which the two main blocks are separated by a central courtyard. The two blocks were built between 1896 – 97 for the LCC in an Arts & Crafts style to a design by R Minton Taylor.
It could have been just a single brick facade but that would have created a warehouse or factory image. Instead an almost cathedral like form has been chosen which creates a great deal of dignity and gravitas.
When first built the contrast with the previous slum buildings would have been powerful. And this would have acted as a visual and practical statement of intent; that the provision of good quality, low rent, well designed housing for the working class was being taken seriously.
The influence of Arts and Crafts, and therefore William Morris, can be seen not just in the design but in the open space provided, the quality and the attention to craft detail.
The arched windows are delightful, particularly the top one which, a rusticated arch with voussoirs. This is actual architecture rather than just the eccentric glueing and bolting together of glass and steel.
Continue along Kings Bench Street and pause when you get to Pocock Street
8 Pocock Street
Pakeman House was built by the Corporation of London in the 1930s and remains part of their ‘South Bank Estates’.
A good detailed description of the conservation area around Rushworth Street, Pocock Street and Glasshill Street has been produced by Southwark Council.
This building was built by the Church as accommodation and offices in 1907. See the report above for more details.
Now turn right (from the top of Kings Bench Street) and right again into Glasshill Street.
9 Glasshill Street
These were built by the Drapers’ Company as almshouses for the poor in the 1820s.
EP Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class is a must read for this period. Thompson describes the fear and paranoia of the British ruling class, police spies and air of sedition at ground level.
A brief chronology helps to map out these times.
In 1816 a revolt in East Anglia and ongoing ‘disturbances’ against enclosures.
Between November and December 1816, the Great Reform demonstrations at Spa Fields.
In 1817 the suspension of Habeas Corpus, a year later the formation of the first Female Reform Societies.
In 1819, the Peterloo Massacre.
In 1820 a weaver’s rising in the Glasgow area; the same year, the Cato Street Conspiracy in London with plans to assassinate the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Between 1820 – 21, famine in Ireland. In the United States, the westward expansion of slavery.
The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were in place when this housing was built. This repressive legislation made it illegal for workers to organise and combine. They were not repealed until 1824.
But capital needs labour. Despite the anti-union laws and reactionary tracts, speeches and pamphlets, labour continued to grow and organise; even in those conditions.
Including building workers were central to this phase of capital accumulation as construction expanded.
One of the first things that carpenters did upon arriving at a new site was to make a wooden cabinet. And into that, put their top hat for safekeeping.
No matter how strong the power of capital then or now, it will never outshine that for sheer class.
Turn back on yourself into Pocock Street again and go through the main arch of Pakeman House. As soon as you are through the arch turn left and you will see a gate that opens on to Surrey Row.
Turn right into Surrey row and enter the small green space on the edge of Nelson Square
10 Nelson Square
The square was laid out from 1807 onwards and there is a short terrace of the original housing in the south east corner.
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin lodged at no. 26 for a few months between November 1814 and February 1815.
Alymer Rose, the Organising Secretary of the No Conscription Fellowship was living in the square in 1916. A member of the Independent Labour Party he was jailed for 18 months for being a conscientious objector.
The No Conscription Fellowship had been formed in 1914 by Lilla Brockway, a member of the Independent Labour Party and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
She opposed the First World War and in the opening weeks of the conflict exchanged letters with Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht. By October 1915 the No Conscription Fellowship claimed 5,000 members.
Most of the housing was destroyed by the Blitz in 1940.
The blocks of flats were built between 1956 to 1964 by the London County Council. They represent the sense of optimism and hope following the defeat of fascism and the big shift to the left in Britain.
There was an acute shortage of housing in London following the war and Southwark council, with a complete Labour majority, drew up plans for working class housing. The South London Press reported:
“Where Georgian dandies once strolled with their silver-knobbed canes, while a beadle chased urchins from their path, will rise streamlined, sun-trap homes for 1,300 Southwark people”.
The new blocks of flats were designed by the London architectural studio, Sydney Clough, Son and Partners.
There is a comprehensive history of the square at British History Online.
Head out of Nelson Square to Union Street. If you don’t have a map with you it works like this. Keep the square (the gardens and play area) to your left and head to the corner in the right hand side. You’ll see Union Street.
Cross over Union Street and into Gambia Street. On the left hand side is the Palestra office block. A small piece of trivia; I once worked there.
11 Railway Arches
Railway arches are visible throughout the walk. These are carrying commuter trains into Waterloo and Blackfriars stations. Waterloo was opened in 1848, the year of European revolutions. Blackfriars was opened in 1864.
It is the railway arches which interest us here.
In 2018 Network Rail sold 5,261 of rental spaces of which around 70 percent were railway arches.
A consortium called The Arch Company was set up by the Blackstone Group and Telereal Trillium (now TT). They paid £1.46 bn.
Blackstone Group bought out TT in 2025. The property portfolio was then worth £ 2bn.
This is all part of a long series of governments – both Labour and Conservative – selling off public assets, often at bargain prices, without much concern for long term economic viability.
Basically the books of the British economy don’t balance. There is more being spent than being earned and that is very problematic. Even Wilkins Micawber knew this.
And this continual selling of public assets shifts political power to capital, undermines the civic and moves risk to the public purse and profit to private interests.
This whole story of privatisation is a sorry tale of how the tax payer has been fleeced, prices have increased and provision has been degraded. Britain remains the only country in the world which has privatised its water, has the highest (and most complicated) train fares in Europe, and has created layers of expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy.
In the example of selling the railway arches there is the usual twist of privatisation; despite the total assets of the railway arches being valued at over £2bn, the overall responsibility for the maintenance of the bridges which they are part of ….is of course Network Rail, funded by the taxpayer.
And what of the small, often quirky (perhaps murky) and unusual businesses that quietly got on with car repairs, brewing beer, making furniture, selling flowers, processing film and such, that have used railway arches as cheap space for years? Many have faced substantial rent increases and have been forced to close.
The chief executive of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, is a long time friend and supporter of Donald Trump.
There are enough photographs of the ghastly Trump on the web and I am not going to add any more here. If you must see the two together try typing ‘orange turd covered in dollar signs’ into a search engine.
Continue along Gambia Street into the pedestrian part. It has what look to be small hillocks covered in mosaic. You will come out at Doblen Street. You will see a blue plaque in front of you that commemorates Mary Wollstonecraft.
12 Doblen Street
Mary Wollstonecraft lived here between from 1788 to 1791 and is where she began to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
She argued against the monarchy, military and church and for social equality.
It was also where she wrote her first published book, Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness.
This was a children’s book and the second edition, published in 1791, had illustrations by William Blake.
Turn right into Chancel Street and walk along. Note the development on the corner of Chancel Street and Nicholson Street.
13 Chancel Street
The site is 220 Blackfriars Road and is being developed by JTRE London and Southwark Charities.
JTRE London is the British section of JTRE Real Estate which was founded in Bratislavia in 1996.
The oldest component of Southwark Charities was established in 1605. Today it provides accommodation in almshouses and provides grants for those in need of housing.
The fatuous slogans on the fencing that surrounds these buildings are an attempt to mask what really goes on. The marketing suggests equitable and fair exchange. The workers do their work in a happy, contented workplaces with bean bags, potted plants and coffee machines.
The reality is exploitative relations of production and unequal exchange which the workers are essentially coerced into. It’s either that or homelessness and poverty.
Turn right into Burrell Street, cross over Southwark Street and into Hopton Street
14 Bankside Yards, Hopton Street
The walk finishes at Bankside Yards which is yet another combination of land, human labour power, raw materials, money and machines, being organised in such a way to represent the interests of a small number of investors.
It is yet another illustration of the alien power of capital over living labour, should we need more of these illustrations, which we don’t.
This development is soaking up an estimated £2.5 bn of capital investment and is expected to deliver a return of about £500 m, a 20 percent profit.
It will be a mix of luxury hotel rooms, luxury accommodation, luxury retail and new infrastructure.
There are four main developers involved:
Native Land was formed in 2003 and concentrates on property development across Britain.
Amcorp Properties Berhard was founded in 1965 in Malaysia as a property development company. It has grown into a conglomerate involved in property, financial services, engineering and renewable energy.
HPL Hotels and Resorts is a specialist hospitality and investment company founded in 1980 with its main headquarters in Singapore.
Temasek Holdings was set up in 1974 as a sovereign investment company and is owned by the Singapore state. It is one of the largest real estate owners and developers in Asia.
There are many, many social problems created by the intensification of capital within the built environment in this way.
Not least that land values are pushed up higher which makes it harder for public authorities to buy land; and if and when they do, that land is going to be expensive. Given the value of land in relation to housing costs, housing becomes more expensive.
This works to create conditions in which good quality, low-cost housing becomes nigh impossible to achieve.
There is an answer to this; that house building is de-commodified, it is paid for through general taxation, that the capital costs are written off on completion, that public housing is considered as a public utility (as roads are), that rents are to pay for maintenance and improvement over time, not as sources of profit.
Does this sound utopian and fantastical? Perhaps today, but exactly that approach, in different formulations was achieved all over Europe in the interwar period; in London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Berlin and many other cities and towns large and small.
But capital increasingly works beyond the reach of government and regulation. It flows into every forgotten space in city streets, between the gaps where the pavement covers the beach, into the basements where the revolutionary and anarchist press once worked.
And in the process capital doesn’t so much create ‘base and superstructure’ but weird entanglements, shrouded in obfuscations, where the spectacle works in invisible dimensions, where the contradictions never resolve but spin like fractal patterns into infinity.
And so peculiar has the land question become in London that the Qatari government now owns twice as much land in London as the British government (523 acres to 188 acres).
Qatar scores 25/100 in terms of democracy and human rights so it’s unlikely to be a standard bearer for housing rights.
It’s holdings in London include Harrods, Claridges and most of the Shard.
And so land and housing in London are now investments and assets. Places for sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, asset management companies, industrial conglomerates, oligarchs, kleptocrats, private equities and criminals to money launder, buy and sell; with one intention, that of profit making.
Those same dynamics are now shaping urban areas all over the world.
And the glass box towers are all the same; in London, New York, Tokyo, Lagos, Shanghai, Bogotá. They all look the same because they all represent the same thing.
The accumulation and expansion of capital; the power of capital. The organisation of society around the greed of the few at the expense of the needs of the many. The un-democracy of the kleptocrats, the anti-human rights positions of the absolutist monarchies, the anti-working class positions of the state capitalist regimes, the greed of private equity.
We can feel like the smallest ant while walking around these places. One ant is easily trampled underfoot by such powers. But millions of ants working together potentially have great power.
The question of that power we will explore on a future walk but for now our perambulation is over.
And that concludes this particular walk; although Radical Walks, like the revolution, never have an ending.
The walk is part of The Festival of the Oppressed organised by rs21
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