Housing the Person: The Personalism of Octavia Hill's Southwark Cottages

Housing the Person: The necessity of Personalism to an understanding of Octavia Hill's Southwark Cottages

Philip Jackson – January 2013

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This essay is a response to those social and architectural theories which assert that Octavia Hill's work has a

technique to teach us, and that her life is divisible into tidily replicable methods in housing design and

management.

I will appeal to Personalism, a description of the universe given a clarity of articulation by Emmanuel Mounier,

which I believe to be the tacit basis for Hill's integrated approach to alleviating poverty in 19th century London. I

will argue that her housing was far more importantly a vehicle for the export of this affirmation of personhood,

than it was an end in itself. And thus, if there is anything to admire and emulate in her works and effects, we must

first wrestle with her presuppositions, her motivating force and her equipping power.

'Personal', as I will use it in this essay, intends no affectation of sentimentality, it hopes in no way to conceal the

mechanics of existence, but rather it is an assertion regarding the very substance of the human adventure in

which all the persons we know are each singularly irreducible wholes, Personalism's “central affirmation being

the existence of free and creative persons.”1 I will contrast 'personal' with 'impersonal' to establish a dichotomy

which commends the personal as a legitimate mode of politics, as a reading of the universe, as justification for art,

as a framework for social action, etc. I wish to appeal to the coherence of the total world-view of Personalism, so

to establish that it is a valid framework to diagnose the causes of problems such as London's poverty. And then I

would hope to appeal to the relative success of Hill's housing to argue that such a world-view is also a practicable

and good, realistic and exciting way to seek to live out solutions.

The Personalism through which I want to understand Octavia Hill is an understanding of the human person as

irreducible and intersubjective, and it makes this claim exclusively (to the exclusion of an impersonal

hypothesis) and therefore combatively. I will expand these four themes. Personalism is the antithesis of

individualism2 which believes the individual to be abstract and self-made, whereas Personalism considers the

person to be irreducible and relational. If the person is irreducible they are unabstractable and worthy of

consideration and value apart from class or demographic category. Hill took it upon herself to engage just such

detailed work for her 'friends amongst the poor'3.

Jones observes that she approached all of life in this way, closely considering the very thereness of the reality into

which she was thrown: “True to Ruskin, Octavia Hill saw drawing and the arts as rooted in close observation of

the world, and hence scrutiny of its fabric and composition.”4 And saying elsewhere how politically counter-

cultural such concern for the specific is:“Rather than taking the conventional political tack of following an ideal

1 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxvi 2 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p18:

“Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and institutions in which individuals can be organised by theirmutual isolation and defence. ... man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of aliberty unlimited and undirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication ...It is the very antithesis of personalism and its dearest enemy.”

3 Hughes, Kathryn: Octavia Hill and the values of the home in “To the utmost in her power...”: The EnduringRelevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p117

4 Jones, Samuel: Introduction in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of Octavia Hill (Ed.Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p25

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of what might be, she saw problems around her and set herself to the task of doing something about them. 5 Her

concern for the actual and irreducible is stated plainly in a late speech, where she hoped the inheritance she left

would be more “ the quick eye to see” 6 rather than any technique or principle of housing management.

Hill would contrast the observation of irreducible qualities over against the projection of speculative qualities in

utopian solutions to the housing problem. Such abstraction reduces a person to an idealised image, a two-

dimensional hypothesis; rather as market-economy-based solutions to housing reduce the person to a

commodity-consumer, a lowest common denominator.

These modes of abstraction erode the potential for dialogical relationality, as the structures of mass housing

blocks, by their impersonality, “cast the gaze of the Other in necessarily adversarial terms”7 Whereas, by contrast

to the unrelational and defensive 'narcissist'8 which Sennett observes in individualism, Personalism considers the

person to profit by their intersubjectivity thus: “..the person is only growing in so far as he is continually

purifying himself from the individual within him. He cannot do this by force of self-attention, but on the contrary

by making himself available and thereby more transparent both to himself and to others.”9 So Octavia's

approach, in emphasising authentic personal encounter, has been described thus by Siegel: “In the mid-Victorian

contest between a bountiful charity and a restrained one, few programs required so complete an identification

between the volunteer worker and the poor.”10 A contemporary example of such compassionate and personal

housing is found in Emmaus (a network of communities formed for the homeless11) who similarly state the

necessity of relationality in their affirmation of personhood:“Emmaus starts from the belief of the absolute value

of each individual, but it is the person within the wider society that has meaning.”12


6 Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill (Civitas,1998)p26: “When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system,...what we care most to leavethem is not any tangible thing, however great, not any memory, however good, but the quick eye to see, … themighty issues of the new and better days to come...”

7 Wilson, Rob: Common Ground: Mediating Thresholds Between Public and Private Space in UK Housing Design inAD Home Front: New Developments in Housing (AD Vol 73 No4 July/August 2003) p42 “In Modernist schemesthe underlying but irreconcilable ideal is of each person in his or her own panopticon, raised up on piloti, affordedspace and light … Such a concept, whilst unattainable, also casts the gaze of the Other in necessarily adversarialterms, meaning that even the potentially benign gaze of a neighbour becomes obtrusive.”

8 Wilson, Rob: Common Ground: Mediating Thresholds Between Public and Private Space in UK Housing Design inAD Home Front: New Developments in Housing (AD Vol 73 No4 July/August 2003) p41“This in turn means thatanything seen as impersonal – traditionally public life – is increasingly perceived as something of no value andmeaningless, effecting: 'the effacement of the res publica by the belief that social meanings are generated by thefeelings of individual human beings.' (2) Sennett argues that this increasing state of what he terms 'narcissism' hasaffected key areas of our social life, including an increased understanding of our homes as reflections of ourselves”

9 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p1810 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio

University Press 2012) p12811 http://www.emmaus.org.uk/ 12 Thompson, Lucy: Emmaus: Homes for the homeless in Community, Empowerment, and Sustainable Development

(Ed. John Blewitt) (Converging World, Green Books, 2008) p137

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Because Personalism advocates an understanding of the human at variance with the hegemony of impersonal

individualism, a conflict must arise. Accordingly, “the Personalism of Mounier has been variously described

as ... 'a philosophy of combat,' 13” Thus Personalism is a fight , but it not so much an attack on a particular giant,

empire or collective security as it is on the notion of giganticism, empires and welfarism altogether. Personalism,

at all scales, is typically an affront to the vested interests of the majority, unsettling the soupy monism of the

impersonal status quo. And, being neither comfortably left wing nor right wing, this position draws fire from both

sides.

The definition of Personalism as a fight is important to understanding Octavia Hill, both in the active challenge

she pursued in enacting a personal method and in the challenge of appraising her against more materialist

historiographies.

For Mounier, the fight of Personalism is historically pitched against “the city” 14 in which the majority are

absorbed; against this abstract collective, the person is an anomaly, even a blemish. He observes this Greek's

virtue of the impersonal collective as a notion flourishing today in the growth of the liberal State, and he calls for

resistance, not of violent revolution, but of a socialism which grows up amongst and against capitalism15. This

comportment towards the impersonal is paralleled in Hill's forceful pursuit of of what Himmelfarb has called “an

extreme form of [philanthropic] visiting”16 Siegel sees Octavia Hill mounting a challenge against charitable

systems of the sort which force a social worker to be concealed within a an impersonal code.17 If Hill resisted the

government socialisation of housing with one hand, she equally stood against the callous disregard for the

individual apparent in the free-market monopoly of collectively reckless and capricious slum landlords18.

13 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pviii

14 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxx “The man of antiquity is absorbed in the city and the family, subservient to adestiny that is blind, nameless and stronger than the gods themselves. Slavery does not shock the foremost spirits ofthose days. The philosophers value only impersonal thought and its static order, which is the order of nature as wellas of ideas. To them the singular appears as a blemish...”

15 Mounier, Emmanuel – Personalism –http://www.archive.org/stream/personalism031987mbp/personalism031987mbp_djvu.txt (accessed 14th Jan2013)“Capitalism cannot be replaced by some new, fully-fledged regime: economic evolution is too continuous forthat. It is within the full-grown body of capitalism itself that the embryonic forms of the socialist world first appear”

16 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (OhioUniversity Press 2012) p106 “Himmelfarb emphasizes the link between settlement and home visitation, describingthe work of Barnett and Hill as “an extreme form of visiting...with the social worker not only visiting but actuallyresiding among the poor.” Himmelfarb, Gertrude: Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the LateVictorians (Vintage Books, 1992) p202

17 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (OhioUniversity Press 2012) p107 “both Barnett and Hill mounted challenges to the kind of charity that allowed and evenforced the social worker to conceal herself within a system.”

18 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (OhioUniversity Press 2012) p120 “The will to power suggested by such as passage may seem a forfeiture of Hill's moreegalitarian ideals. And yet the landlady's power was an intractable fact of working class life. Hill meant not toestablish “rule” as a new principle but to challenge the sort of rule that operated by sporadic first of license andrepression. She would miss not opportunity to attack the ordinary run of slum landlords who, in her account,governed their tenants recklessly and capriciously.”

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Finally, by way of introducing Personalism, the 'fight', as it were, is brought about by the exclusive nature of its

claims regarding human ontology. In any one moment, within any one approach to housing, there is only room for

one understanding of the human, there is no scope for synthesis. Either the human is a soul, or they are a statistic;

either they are a potential 'Thou' or an inevitable 'It'. So Personalism changes the framework utterly, for, to be a

person is a distinct, binary and holy category, and it is partly due to the fact that there are no shades or degrees in

the category, which make it so offensive, so anathema, so baffling to more capitalist estimations of the human.

Personalism makes exclusive claims, on which basis it hopes exclusive ambitions, and, I will argue, it bears

exclusive results. Octavia Hill claimed absolutely that“we are not directed from above like mere tools” 19, and this

is an expression of the mutually exclusive division which her mentor Ruskin describes:“You are put to a stern

choice. … You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. If you will have

that precision out of them … you must unhumanize them.”20 Personalism is such an exclusive claim, without

room for compromise. This leads to Hill's bold claims regarding what modes of housing are commensurate with

the unique, limitless, irreducible soul of even the economically poor person.

On this basis, Hill would claim “the only cure for the ills of society lies in the conversion and education of

individual men and women.” 21 And this attention to individual men and women leads her to a mode of

landladying quite different to that of other housing agencies:“.. the only way that I know of getting hold of [the

drunken destructive man] is buying up the house in which he is, exactly as it is, and making him profit by his own

care..”22 And thus it was on account of considering the person as valuable and considering a Personalist approach

as the necessary and a sufficient means of helping them, that meant that while “Peabody would take an artisan

class of working class poor, only Octavia would take the ‘tenants nobody else would touch” 23

The degree to which she believed that a personal approach was the only way is evidenced also in her absolute

opposition to socialised forms of provision which she feared would fan the flames of an impersonal mythology of

the State: “..there is a sort of wild hope abroad amongst [the poor] and they have a sort of indefinite idea of the

‘State’ as having money independently of the collective body of taxpayers, and that things can be done without

anybody paying for them”24 - the fear is of the loss of the person or 'anybody'.

19 Jones, Samuel: Introduction in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of Octavia Hill (Ed.Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p13 – quoting Hill, Octavia: Letter to Fellow Workers “The principle of modern lifein free countries, that we are not directed from above like mere tools, but have to think out what it is best to do eachin his own sphere.”

20 Ruskin, John Stones of Venice: Volume II, chapter VI, section 12 :“You are put to a stern choice. . . .You must eithermake a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men are not intended to work with the accuracyof tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make theirfingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.”


22 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, PP 1884-5, XXX, 8864, 8866 and 8934 in Whelan,Robert: Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill (Civitas,1998) p5

23 Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill (Civitas,1998)p16


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A similar sentiment is observed in her contempt for Mearn's book: The Bitter Cry of Outcast London:An Inquiry

into the Conditions of the Abject Poor (1883) – a book which was an impassioned call for state intervention, that

she labelled as propaganda for the 'prominent poor'. Siegel notes that in Hill's view, the well-intentioned book

exacerbates the problem of escapist and damagingly asymmetric, co-dependence-creating philanthropy because in

its prose a passive poor are described as the vague victims of an impersonal abstracted poverty, all observed by an

invisible journalistic voice.25

I have tried to outline the coherence Personalism and to show that Hill held such a outlook, I will now go on to

expand the ways her Southwark Cottages evidence the goodness of such a Personalism. I will first frame this with

a context of contemporary criticism which motivates this reassessment, from critics who, by their lack of

apprehension of her Personalism conclude, at best, with damning-by-weak-praise and so neglect her holistic

approach and vainly seek to derive a techniques or styles from her methods.

Historians Wohl, Owen and Tarn vary in the degree of sympathy they afford Hill and her project, but they will

grant her praise thus: “..she did much individual good,”26 “Her achievements were formidable..”27 “Her ideals

may have worked as philanthropy on a small scale..”28 “Octavia Hill “had considerable success on a limited

scale”29 Against this, they will then accuse her of being romantically anachronistic30 which leads her to poor

diagnoses of the true complexity and scale of the slum problem.31 As a result “..her efforts were palliatives in

reality,” 32 and hence,“Octavia Hill was not in the vanguard of the main army but ... in charge of a diversionary

operation.”33 And so, particularly owing to the unfortunate popularity of her inadequate method, they will assess

that she “did general harm.”34

25 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (OhioUniversity Press 2012) p104

26 Wohl, Anthony: The Eternal Slum (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) in Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension:Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p117

27 Owen, David: English Philanthropy, 1660-1960.(Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1964)p387 in Boyd, Nancy: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale: Three Victorian Women Who ChangedTheir World (Macmillan: London, 1982) p121

28 Hindes, Grahame: Octavia hill's influence on social housing today in “To the utmost in her power...”: The EnduringRelevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p107

29 Tarn, John Nelson: Five Percent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1914.(London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974) in Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill and the SocialHousing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill (Civitas,1998) p20

30 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (OhioUniversity Press 2012) p117 : “[Her work] never outgrew their origins in the local and the personal. Her emphasison particular cases has often be labelled anachronistic; she is seen to have offered a simple, individualistic solutionto a complex economic problem.”

31 Wohl, Anthony: The Eternal Slum (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) p197, 194-195 in Siegel, Daniel: Charity andCondescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p117: “MissHill never seemed to have realized that the slums were not just minor aberrations”


33 Owen, David: English Philanthropy, 1660-1960.(Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1964)p387 in Boyd, Nancy: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale: Three Victorian Women Who ChangedTheir World (Macmillan: London, 1982) p121

34 Wohl, Anthony: The Eternal Slum (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) in Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension:Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p117 - “For while she didmuch individual good, she also did general harm..[H]er contributions was, after all, a negative one.”

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This criticism can be distilled to a complaint concerning the scale of her work, which did not correspond to the

sheer scale and complexity of the total mass of economic poverty. This is a reading of history which understands

poverty primarily by its quantity, rather than its quality. Such a purely numerical assessment of poverty will

necessarily seek a mechanically reproducible solution to match the mechanically produced problem of the

industrial city, without ever questioning the goodness of unmoderated unfettered mechanical reproduction.

This criticism also concerns the scalability of her 'method' – that is, not only did she work at a 'miniaturist'35 scale,

but her small works were unreproducible, being uncodifiable and irreducible into any policy document or law.

Jones states emphatically: “Octavia Hill's interventions worked on the small scale, but would not – even her day –

have worked on a national scale. Ethics, as well as practicality, prevent the simple transposition of her

approach.”36 This assessment implies simplistic scaling and it excludes the imaginative possibility for organic

multiplication of her approach by the recruitment of persons inspired by such a compassion as one cannot legislate

– much in the way that Mounier's personalism “does not lend itself to any final or definitive schematisation.” 37

Aware of these critiques, Grahame Hindes, now responsible for the 'Octavia' housing trust, goes in search of a

close imitation of what he calls the “original personal touch”38. He, similarly, considers contemporary Octavian

practice as impossible. In the quote below, there is a fatalism mixed with chronological snobbery, that considers

that impersonality must necessarily win out, and assumes that delegating to disinterested specialists was in some

way less of a temptation for Hill in her work at her time. Neither Hill nor Mounier would state 'broad social

progress' as an end for which they were content to employ impersonal means, such is a hope in utopia which

Mounier opposes in Huxley (below), as seen in the model dwellings which Hill opposed in Peabody.

“The simplicity of the early scheme stands in stark contrast to the complexity of current provision, which is both

more comprehensive in scope and has more sophisticated standards, but in turn has become atomised and

distributed among agencies. No longer can a single individual have the influence that the Octavia Hill method

was built on. Now a host of different organisations and services exist in a complex web of provision, regulation

and funding combining effectively – at least on a good day – to provide a mix of support and provision that

includes social workers, occupational therapists, surveyors, employment advisers and others – all charged with

achieving their part of the same broad social progress ambition.” 39 (Graham Hindes)

“Huxley's 'Brave New World' is one in which armies of doctors and psychologists are engaged in a re-

conditioning of each and every individual based on detailed investigations. Since they do this from the outside



37 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) px



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and by compulsion, reducing all men to nothing but well-mounted machines in good working order, their super-

individualised world is nevertheless the opposite of a personal universe, for everything in its is contrived, nothing

is created and no one engages in the adventure of responsible liberty.”40 (Emmanuel Mounier)

To conclude this interaction with her critics, this essay disagrees with their conclusions as to the value of Hill's

contribution to the alleviation of poverty and provision of housing primarily because we differ presuppositionally

in our measure of success and our understanding of the value of the singular.

A potential objection might claim that to measure her 'success' correctly one should audit the degree to which the

viability of her mode of housing was due exclusively to the effective subsidy of particular philanthropic

contributions whose input was inspired only by her particular charismatic ability to elicit them. However, in my

reading, such a obvious and effective criticism has been conspicuous by its absence.

I will also concede, in setting her success in frames of measures of criticism, Octavia Hill did conspicuously fail,

by her own measure, in failing to avert the later inhuman brutality of subsequent socialised housing provision, she

failed to inspire any enduring lineage of comparably effective landladies of sufficient strength to swim against the

40 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxvi

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current of impersonalism. This failure does call into doubt how realistic her approach is, however, Octavia Hill's

cottages stand, like cathedrals and conch shells, as testimonies to a mode of dwelling which was once, even

briefly, viable, and on this basis I will ponder them. Considering in them the belief embodied above any method

enacted, and considering her 'large hope'41 before any enlargeable technique – for such a reading is the ambition

she explicitly had for her legacy.

To understand these cottages, it will be helpful discuss them within housing as a concept, as both theatre and

vehicle for philanthropy, as a tool in the export of philosophy or politics; before then considering the houses as an

artifacts, with a tangible and spatial specificity.

Housing conceptually. All houses display the overflow of a concept of the human, but it is acute and intentional

for Hill who so passionately felt grieved by the housing precipitated by popular views of the 'poor' in her time. In

this way, interestingly, she is followed by Mounier who also felt it intuitive and even necessary to apply

Personalism to a household, and so set about to restore and manage one on principles of his philosophy so to serve

the dissemination of this understanding, in his case quite practically through the distribution of his 'Esprit' journal

produced by members of this household.42

This integration of the house and an ambition to affirm personhood finds a more striking parallel and exposition in

the likes of Abbe Pierre who conceived of housing as a protest, as “a provocation to the general conscience of

society”43 Pierre observed that the issue with homelessness was an exclusion of persons which was “a social

rather than economic construct,”44 somewhat as Hill considers that in the challenge of reaching a so-called

'destructive' class the distance was“not financial, but moral.” 45 Murray describes the excluded in these

observations:“..an‘ underclass’, defined by a type of poverty rather than degree of poverty, has entered the

mainstream of academic debate. Underclass status is characterised by anti-social attitudes in childbearing, by

lack of participation in the workforce, and by a lifestyle funded by a combinations of welfare benefits and crime.

These are all moral problems which we cannot spend our way out of.”46 For both Hill and Pierre housing serves

41 Hill, Octavia in Jones, Samuel: Introduction in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of OctaviaHill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p22 “When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out anyspecial system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. ... what we care for most to leave them is notany tangible thing, however great, not any memory, however good, but the quick eye to see, the true soul tomeasure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, hope andpatience to realise them both.”

42 Reagan, Charles E. : Paul Ricoeur - His Life and his Work (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996) p20 - “In1939, Mounier had purchased a large abandoned property in a state of total disrepair. The property was walled,with a large park... Mounier's dream was to create a community of individual apartments occupied by members ofthe Esprit team, where they could form an intellectual community.”

43 Pierre, Abbe: One Earth for Sharing (IME, 1994) in Thompson, Lucy: Emmaus: Homes for the homeless inCommunity, Empowerment, and Sustainable Development (Ed. John Blewitt) (Converging World, Green Books,2008) p126

44 Thompson, Lucy: Emmaus: Homes for the homeless in Community, Empowerment, and Sustainable Development(Ed. John Blewitt) (Converging World, Green Books, 2008) p130


46 Murray, Charles in Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by OctaviaHill (Civitas,1998) p38

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inclusion in much more than a material sense, and it is a cause made urgent to the degree that demographic strata,

or classes are polarised.

Gerard Lemos talks of the problems of homelessness as a “want of conviviality” 47 Hill's housing achieves

inclusion through being a theatre for hospitality and platform for the convivial , where to relate thus is

necessarily to engage the other as a person. Hill pursues authentic convivial inclusion, considering it obvious to

host Christmas parties and speaks of her tenants as her friends and “She would attest … to the intensity of the

emotional bonds between landlady and tenant,”48Ultimately, she considers prosperity to reside in the corporate

life being “thrilled to hear one tenant refer to another as 'one of us'” 49

For Hill also, housing manages inclusion also in the symmetry of reciprocal economic participation:“She felt

that it was vitally necessary to be able to pay five per cent on the capital after clearing all other charges. Her

tenants were thus fully-functioning members of society, not second class citizens needing handouts.”50 In this

way community happens through an exchange of goods which it is short-sighted to pejorativise51 on the basis of

simplistic anti-capitalism. Mounier, as Hill, considered that industry, personhood and relational inclusion are

joined in a virtuous cycle: “Wisdom is to take up industry. ...In this sense, to produce is indeed an essential

activity of the person, … Shackled at first to the immediate satisfaction of elementary needs, then loosened from

them by parasitic interests or betrayed to its own infatuations, production should at last become an activity both

liberated and liberating, shaped by all the requirements of personality.”52

Octavia Hill begins to operate this project to counter exclusion within a 19th century society which already had

established modes of 'charitable visiting' which admirably sought such an interclass Other encounter as a better

alternative to indiscriminate alms-giving, but such visits had become tired to the point of ineffectuality and

inauthenticity. It was ineffectual, as the following criticism inadvertently illuminates by contrasting volunteerism

with the actual need for housing provision: “All the charity and volunteerism of rich ladies, the moralising about

hygiene from scientific experts, or the new building designs from progressive architects have not been able to get

around the basic problem. The free market has never been able to provide decent housing for the vast majority

of the working class.”53

47 Lemos, Gerard: Homelessness and Loneliness (Crisis, 2000) in Thompson, Lucy: Emmaus: Homes for the homelessin Community, Empowerment, and Sustainable Development (Ed. John Blewitt) (Converging World, Green Books,2008) p130


49 Hill, Octavia: Homes for the London Poor 2nd Ed. (London: Macmillan, 1883) p28 in Siegel, Daniel: Charity andCondescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p127


51 prole.info: The Housing Monster (PM Press, 2012) p100 “But living near each other does not make a community. ...We do come into contact with people in the neighbourhood every day, but it's on the market. We exchange money forcommodities. The relationship only happens as a footnote to the act of exchange. Most of what we do is work. Andthe work of different people is only connected through the exchange of commodities. The specific activities we'redoing at work lose most of their meaning and become just work that helps our boss's capital to expand itself..”

52 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p1353 prole.info: The Housing Monster (PM Press, 2012) p78-9

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However, more damaging than this was the inauthenticity it engendered. The difficulty in practising both housing

and visiting is that, in doing so, one confronts a person who is Other, and so one risks a certain vulnerability . In

visiting, however, this risk is softened because the remote forum allows these rich ladies to compartmentalise their

home self and their charitable self, while at the same time their now dependent poor were encouraged to contort

their selves, creating a projection of exaggerated poverty upon the event of this alien visitation. The visit thus

incentivises both sides to shy away from being transparent whole persons. In this disconnect, compassionate

action degenerates into mechanical, defensive, self-related exchanges, inevitably, Mounier would argue: “The

world of others is no garden of delight: it is a perpetual provocation to self-diminishment or aggrandisement. ...

Some, trying to forget it, narrow all their social contacts. Others make themselves into the pliable and useful

objects of those around them – they become the poor of the philanthropists, the juniors of this man or the

servants of that.”54 Octavia Hill rejects such objectification in pursuing immersive, holistic, relational housing

provision in opposition to a detached charitable model.

Efforts towards just and compassionate housing at this time are more complicated still. If housing provision

curtails the inauthenticity of the visiting model, they both still wrestle with the shifting legitimacy of

'condescension' in light of emerging liberalism. “Whereas condescension had once been a principle by which the

superior and the subordinate revealed themselves to one another, it was now the opposite: just a whiff of

condescension on the visitor's part would be an end to contact, another brick in the wall between rich and poor.

And taking the most sceptical view of home visiting, one could argue that this sort of wall-building was inevitable

– that it was even part of the visitor's unacknowledged agenda.”55 In other words, where formerly the rights and

responsibilities of loving patronage and the exercise of power had been subject to universally apprehended and

immutable strata of class it had been possible to do so authentically and with impunity , once those arbitrary

rungs of class are dismantled, those same actions of love and charity are construed as retrogressive derivatives

that would seek to reassemble class distinctions and thus subjugate a group of people once more.

In so far as her housing was “an extreme form of visiting”56 and despite her own family's intermittent poverty57,

Hill was essentially of an educated, near-bourgeois, class, so her project would struggle to avoid an accusation of

subtly re-enforcing class injustice, but for two issues. Firstly , the efforts of liberalism to dismantle class structure

do comparatively little to redress the very real disparity in quality of housing, so to condescend in this provision is

largely a class-less act. And, secondly, the maintenance of a business relationship regarding the famously strict

regime of timely payment of rent was calculated to ensure her housing retained the best of a pre-liberal

condescension motivated by authentic compassion without patronising or disempowering the individual.

54 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p1855 Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio

University Press 2012) p10256 Himmelfarb, Gertrude: Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (Vintage Books,

1992) p202 in Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy(Ohio University Press 2012) p106 “Himmelfarb emphasizes the link between settlement and home visitation,describing the work of Barnett and Hill as “an extreme form of visiting...with the social worker not only visiting butactually residing among the poor.”


14

I will now visit the cottages Octavia Hill created in Southwark in the 1880s and discuss them as artifacts and hope

to show them to be delightful and Personalistically-derived, under four headings: the limits of scale, the use of

open air, the nature of Gothic and the possibility of an holistic approach.

Regarding, the limits of scale. The Red Cross Way development holds six homes, with two rooms upstairs and

two rooms beneath, each with a front door and yard to the back. The scale of this is small, and that smallness is an

essential quality, their cottageyness consists in their smallness. It might seem unjust to permit any other estimation

of these than eccentrically squanderous, offensively small, and detailed with a criminal fussiness. This sort of

reckless density is a callous decadence which actually displays a disregard for the poor given the price of land in

London, in much the same way as Luke chapter 7's58 spilt perfume bespeaks a radically alternative estimation of

the worth of a prostitute's time (notably, following an encounter with the Personal).

However, insofar as critics justifiably bemoan that this framework is resistant to transposition, and that cottage-

scale is not a universal panacea, we should minimally establish on a spectrum of scales how these cottages fix a

precedent of the possible and what good can come of these particular dwellings. Some commentators would try to

extrapolate a crude rule of small scale from Hill's opus, claiming: “local scale creates confidence and re-instates

control; it reduces waste by targeting action directly on problems; ... The converse is true: large-scale systems

and structures are by definition clumsy, insensitive ...”59

Interestingly, both Mounier, of Personalism, and even Schumacher, of Small is Beautiful, resist such universal

application of the smallness they broadly commend although they each caveat instances where small for its own

sake is necessary under certain conditions. Mounier would defend cases serving the purpose of a study into the

effect of grouping human beings together in smaller associations by contrast with great masses.60 Schumacher

considers that, while small may be beautiful where appropriate, small is not necessarily an answer by itself except

in cases where a culture harbours an idol of giantism that needs urgently to be redressed61 These miniature

58 Luke 7:37-38 “And, behold a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in thePharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began towash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them withthe ointment.” which for the purpose of this illustration I have adopted the questionable, if popular, conflation withthe account in John 12 where a nearly identical display is condemned by Judas thus: John 12:5 “Why was not thisperfume now sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor?” The spilling of ointment by Luke's presumedprostitute is a commentary on the price of time, because ointment had been bought with time she had sold hopingwith it to insure future times of earnings – but now poured out without counting the cost (Both KJV)(http://www.kingjbible.com/luke/7.htm accessed Jan 14th 2012)

59 Power, Anne: Inner city turbulence and the spirit of Octavia Hill in “To the utmost in her power...”: The EnduringRelevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p72

60 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p25“It can indeed be mischievous to mix human beings together in great masses; undoubtedly we need to study theeffect of such action on the living experience of smaller associations. Here, the criticism of social gigantism arousesa salutary disquietude in opposition to those who, infatuated with logic or with power, think of men by masses, thebetter to think of them as instruments or as so much matter, and the better to disregard them as persons. But if thiscritique requires us to articulate social relations and to observe the criteria of scale and of the optimum in mattersof human grouping, it does not command us, in any way, to impose once for all a standard model for humansocieties.”

61 Schumacher: E.F.: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Vintage, 1993) px "What I wishto emphasise is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: there is no single answer.

15

cottages, nestled as they are beneath western Europe's tallest idol, serve this prophetic purpose now even more so

than when Hill built in opposition to municipal blocks and Peabody estates.

Jencks writes this of the Shard: “The remorseless horizontal grids, that are all too visible through the glass, are

reinforced by the 11,000 windows of similar panes. … repeated grids and the seamless aesthetic of digital

production betray the power of an institute of sameness.”62 The key is 'sameness'; rightly Personalism is not

averse to large scale per se, but rather to the tumorous extension of sameness often associated with scale. One can

scale-up without restraint only when the individual parts are infinitely abstractable; one will be inclined to scale-

up if one permits that there is nothing absolute in the value of the person, and nothing formative in their domestic

environment. Hill, as Mounier, considers that value to be “absolute, by affirming the creation ex nihilo, and the

eternal destiny, of each and every person. The supreme Being which through love brings them into existence no

longer makes the world a unity through the abstraction of the idea, but by an infinite capacity for the indefinite

multiplication of these separate acts of love. Far from being an imperfection, this multiplicity, proceeding from

super-abundance, bears that superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love.”63 Such as would

apply in the case of a multiplication of further future cottages established in love.

For his different purposes man needs many different structures, both small ones and large ones … the principle taskis always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. itis therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness - where this applies"

62 Jencks, Charles: Architectural Review (1386, August 2012)63 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre

Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxx

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Furthermore, she believed fiercely in “the moral, social and spiritual values of 'home'”64 and that “work among

[the poor] should...grow more naturally out of home life” 65 insisting “that home was where human potential most

flourished,” 66 she was “determined to create a society that would acknowledge the spiritual meaning of family

life and neighbourhood.” 67 In this she believed that giving attention to the microcosm of domesticity that civic

change would be effected, by a multiplicity of individuals' inspiration rather their obligation under legislation.

This organic or fractal concept of 'scale' as it pertained to the influence of the cellular on the organism as a whole

is there also in her hope for open space, the second distinctive I should like to draw attention to in understanding

the Southwark cottages. “open space work and housing work went together: 'We in London have to share the

garden together, perhaps England itself will learn to share some of its gardens'”68 thus drawing the analogy:“Tiny

backyards are as crucial to the health of the poor, just as the countryside is to society as a whole.”69

Open space and the garden are themes observable throughout the life and work of Hill, famously in those parks

which she successfully saved from development. Boyd suggests that Hill's extensive use of 'tending one's

garden' as a metaphor for the work and the local scale she emphasised, reflected aparochial narrowness that

naively attributed too much of the status quo to 'Providence': “Throughout the rest of her long life she helped

create homes and gardens for others, in this repeated and tireless endeavour recreating the home she had lost.

Perhaps she cultivated her own garden and did not look over the wall towards the wasteland of indigent London

because she was afraid that she would find the view too appalling.” 70

Whilst typically a garden may be a private space, and the use of the metaphor may give some insight into the

compensatory and therapeutic domesticity that Hill sought after losing a stable home after her father's breakdown,

a garden is outdoors. Further, in the case of the gardens she provided at homes such as Red Cross Way, it is a

shared and public space. In this sense her use of 'gardening' as a description of her work, is entirely more public-

minded: “she spoke of the 'healing gifts' of space and called her courts 'open air sitting rooms for the poor.'”71

The corresponds with Mounier's description of Personalism as“a Christianity of the open air,” “virile

Christianity,” “plebian Christianity.” Bourgeois Christianity, on the other hand, is like the bourgeois house, “a


65 Hill, Octavia: 'Letter to fellow workers' (1880) in Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill's Letters to Fellow - Workers 1872 -1911: Together with an Account of the Walmer Street Industrial Experiment (Kyrle Books, 2005) p135


67 Boyd, Nancy: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale: Three Victorian Women Who Changed TheirWorld (Macmillan: London, 1982) p122

68 Hill, Octavia (Address to Newnham College students), March 1898 [Ouvry papers], quoted in Darley, Gillian (1990)p181 in Whelan, Robert: Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill(Civitas,1998) p24

69 Power, Anne: Inner city turbulence and the spirit of Octavia Hill in “To the utmost in her power...”: The EnduringRelevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p73



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shuttered house,” and like the bourgeois heart, “a heart circumspect and cautious.”72 With these verdant spaces

there was a proselytising, or at least popularising, agenda derived from Morris thus: “It is idle to talk about

popularising art, if you are not prepared to popularise reverence for nature also, both among the poor and the

rich.” 73 Open spaces serve to level classes, as there is an in-it-together-ness for the rich and poor in the

degradation or beautification of public spaces. These open air spaces display a Love of Nature, the third in

Ruskin's characteristics of the Gothic which distinguish Hill's houses.

Octavia Hill was familiar with Ruskin's writing before she met him in the context of the Ladies' Guild, near

Fitzroy Square, where she oversaw the children working in toy-making. The Hills had come to this cooperative as

a community of support and a mode of income following her father's bankruptcy and subsequent collapse. Ruskin

took Hill into his employment as a copyist and later became her first investor as she started up as a landlady in

Marylebone. They shared a friendship until 1877 when Ruskin burnt all bridges in a dispute over Hill's

disapproval of the utopian nature of his St George's Guild. The word “feudal” 74 has been applied to both Ruskin

and Hill and this not merely an aesthetic similarity in their tendency to inspire mock-Tudor confection in their

followers, there was a shared appreciation of the social roots of the Gothic which Ruskin espoused.

Ruskin's second principle of Gothic is 'Changefulness' or variety, which is a quality apparent in the applied

variation in the façade of the Red Cross Cottages, as she had intended: “In the Tyrol she had admired 'the quaint

irregularity of the home-like oriel windows, set on at the corner of the tiny houses in the village streets, with

pretty little separate conical roofs, and I seemed to see that this home-like irregularity, could be at once applied to

our people's houses.'75 This would be a contrivance, except that changefulness is intended to derive from ennobled

workmanship and so corresponds to her wider ambitions to integrate decent housing and dependable

employment.76 Mounier contributes a similar emphasis on energetic employment which relishes its capacity to

accommodate mistakes:“Wisdom is to take up industry. Industry will make mistakes”77 in the way that Ruskin

intends variety to be a tribute to the redeeming of imperfections:“I have already enforced the allowing

independent operation to the inferior workman, simply as a duty to him, and as ennobling the architecture by

rendering it more Christian. We have now to consider what reward we obtain for the performance of this duty,

namely, the perpetual variety of every feature of the building.”78

72 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxi

73 Darley, Gillian: Octavia Hill p217 in Holden, John: Beauty and aspiration in “To the utmost in her power...”: TheEnduring Relevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p150

74 Hewison, Robert 'You are doing some of the work that I ought to do': Octavia Hill and Ruskinian Values in “To theutmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p59

75 Darley, Gillian: Octavia Hill: A Life (London: Constable, 1990) p240 76 Darley, Gillian: Octavia Hill: Social reformer and founder of the National trust (London: Francis Boutle, 2012) p8

in Jones, Samuel: Introduction in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of Octavia Hill (Ed.Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p17

77 Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) p13 78 Ruskin, John: Nature of Gothic, The Stones of Venice, Vol. II, reproduced

http://www47.homepage.villanova.edu/seth.koven/gothic.html (accessed 14th Jan 2013)

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'Obstinacy', or rigidity, which is Ruskin's fifth criteria, corresponds to Mounier's irreducibility of the person, and

to the literalism of a “close observation of the world, and ... scrutiny of its fabric”79 that we noted in Ruskin and

Hill (and Personalism) earlier. Colour is such an irreducible quality, evidenced in the decoration, the bright red

doors and in Hill's appeal to colourlessness as a measure of poverty:“Till you stay a little in the colourless, forlorn

desolation of the houses in the worst courts, till you have lived among the monotonous dirty tints of the poor

districts of London, you little know what the colours of your curtains, carpets and wall-papers are to you.”80

However, beyond all the independent overlaps between the qualities of Hill's houses and Ruskin's chosen

adjectives and their shared social hopes, I would put forward Hardman's more far-reaching interpretation of

Ruskin's Gothic: that it is more than a collection of attributes constituting a style, but rather a fundamental

approach to the political genesis of what he calls 'primary' architecture thus:“Secondary architecture … is

imported and propagandistic … superimposed by imperial requirements … pseudo-transcendentalist … it is a

merely imaginary aesthesis … that exists in vacuo … its hypothesised population, undifferentiated or

stereotyped.” whereas, “Primary architecture … is rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions. It exists in

perpetuity … it is reconciled to the accidents of its own material, not offering to ‘defy’ the fallen nature of the

world and its inhabitants.”81 Against such imperial import and Jencks' 'power of an institute', Hill and Barnett's

hopes to transcend class and to restrain the abuse of power, are hopes pursued through a bid to restore an

integration of “men of ideas and men of action” an integration that Barnett would explicitly say had been

“ suppressed by both the impersonal conditions of modernity and the scheming of tyrants.” 82

The stylised vernacular is at once a basic aesthetic predilection of Hill's and the outworking of her more

philosophical convictions concerning the origin and purpose of beauty – about which she was quite pragmatic.

She held that “ beauty was primarily located in nature, ... in landscape and in those vernacular English

buildings, constructed from local materials, that seem to grow from the soil.”83 Relating the purpose of beauty,

she commented on Nuremburg during her trip across Europe Hill that, “The town looks very comfortable and

flourishing, as if the old things had been taken into use and would stay; - not like Italy and Constantinople.”84

There is a sense that the old things or vernacular are not valuable for being quaint, but rather for bearing tribute to

a useful continuity or a durable sustainability. Rapoport makes such a connection in the value of the vernacular,

which, I believe, Hill held intuitively: “Neglect of the vernacular buildings which form the environment has had

the effect of making the latter seem unimportant; it is consequently neglected physically and constantly


80 Hill, Octavia 'Colour, space, and music for the people' - (reprinted from) The Nineteenth Century, London: KeeganPaul and Co, 1884, p3) in Jones, Samuel: Introduction in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevanceof Octavia Hill (Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p25

81 Hardman, Malcolm: Intellectual lens and Moral Retina: A Reappraisal of Ruskin’s Architectural Vision, Ruskin &Architecture, (Spire Books, 2003) p191

82 Barnett, Samuel: Hospitalities in Knapp, John: The Universities and the Social Problem: An Account of theuniversity Settlements in East London. (London, Rivington, 1895) p60-61 in Siegel, Daniel: Charity andCondescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p109

83 Holden, John: Beauty and aspiration in “To the utmost in her power...”: The Enduring Relevance of Octavia Hill(Ed. Samuel Jones) (Demos, 2012) p149

84 Darley, Gillian: Octavia Hill: A Life (London: Constable, 1990) p206

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deteriorates.”85 In this vein, I will lastly mention what I find to be an holistic integrity in Hill's cottages.

Of holistic integrity. Central to Personalism is a notion of the person as both-and, across and therefore against a

number of popular dualisms “[Personalism] is a perspective by which man is seen in all of his dimensions,

“ material, inward, transcendental.” It is a method by which the real and the ideal are no longer in conflict.”86 So

Hill sought to considered people and place undualistically.

At the Red Cross Cottages and elsewhere, Hill is said to have “conflated” 87 economic and personal concerns. It is

not certain that she would have made such a distinction between spiritual and temporal concerns being addressed,

we can see in the cottage, hall and garden arrangement that housing and education coincide, vocation and

recreation are provided for, the city and the country are blurred, the sacred and the secular are undistinguished, the

private and the public are given a place within the unity of the enclave.

If the person is a whole not to be considered distinct from their parts, and if serving the needs of a person's parts is

closely bound up in their environment, it becomes imperative to consider the harmony of functions within a

design. And imperative to invest in reinforcing the integrated personhood of a person and so also the consequent

platial88 quality of a given space.

To conclude, I have found Octavia Hill's life fascinating to read, for the portrait of a very possible alternative to

modes of impersonal housing provision. It is joy to witness one so transparently engaged in the open adventure of

Personalism, and if I have not made the case for that sufficiently, it at least clear in Hill's own words that she

predicates her actions on a God has not abandoned us. Kathryn Hughes asserts that, “Unlike so many other

reformers of the Victorian period, Octavia Hill was not overly concerned with saving souls. God tended not to

make much of an appearance in her dealings with the urban poor.” 89 and yet, and yet, “..in letters a foot

high ... in Freshwater Place the purple, blue and green tiles spelled out the passage, 'Every house is builded by

some man but He that built all things is God.' 90

85 Rapoport, Amos – The Nature and Definition of the Field (1969) in Housing and Dwelling : Perspectives onModern Domestic Architecture (Ed. Lane, Barbara Miller) (Routledge, Abingdon, 2007) p26

86 Raunch, Rufus, William (Forward to) Mounier, Emmanuel (trans Philip Mairet) – Personalism (University of NotreDame Press, Notre Dame, 1970) pxiii

87 Jones, Gareth Stedman: Outcast London: A Study in the Relationshipbetween Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford,Uk: Clarendon, 1971) p194-196 in Siegel, Daniel: Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and theDilemmas of Philanthropy (Ohio University Press 2012) p118

88 If I may coin an equivalent to 'spatial' to form an adjective suitable to the qualitative distinction between place andspace.



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Darley, Gillian : Octavia Hill: A Life (London: Constable, 1990)

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Hardman, Malcolm: Intellectual lens and Moral Retina: A Reappraisal of Ruskin’s Architectural Vision in Ruskin &Architecture, (Spire Books, 2003)

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Housing the Person: The Personalism of Octavia Hill's Southwark Cottages

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