Ossington Buildings: Early social housing in Marylebone

I was down in London to see some Liberator friends yesterday, and took the chance to visit Chess and Bridge in Baker Street. (Yes, I'm getting hooked on chess again.)

After that I explored Marylebone and, because I've never thought of it as a poor area, was surprised to come across nine blocks of 19th-century "improved dwellings". These were early essays in social housing, provided in slum areas of London.

And West of Marylebone High Street, a draft chapter of University College London's survey of South East Marylebone, tells me all about them:

Most of the Grotto Passage area was redeveloped with blocks of improved dwellings from the late nineteenth century, leaving the old essentially pedestrian street layout. The process began with what is now 8 Garbutt Place, built privately in 1881 in the normal course of lease renewal. 

But the major campaign was over a 15-month period in 1888–9, when some 100 workmen were engaged by Wall Brothers of Kentish Town in building the first seven blocks of Ossington Buildings, on the sites of Conway and Grafton Courts, together with a communal steam laundry in a separate building. Initially called the Portland Industrial Dwellings, these were swiftly renamed in honour of the aged Lady Ossington, co-owner of the Portland estate, though strictly speaking the new name applied only to the north–south street formerly called Grafton Court. 

Two further blocks, on the east side of Grotto Passage, replacing Harrison’s Place, followed shortly after; they were tendered for by Walls, who lost out to Staines & Son. 

The nine blocks, of four storeys plus basements, were the joint work of the architects Alfred Robert Pite and Charles Fowler, the estate surveyor. Although wellbuilt, with fireproof floors and artificial stone staircases, they provided only the most basic accommodation and were at first let by the room, almost all the rooms being fitted with stoves or small ranges. Water and two WC’s were provided on each landing.

The blocks of Ossington Buildings were modernised long ago, but it doesn't surprise me to learn that the facilities here were originally very basic.

In The Yellow Balloon, one of my children-and-bombites-in-postwar-London films, Andrew Ray and his parents live in similar accommodation - one of the blocks on Chelsea's Sutton Estate.

Looking for something good to do before he asks his mother for sixpence, the young Ray lugs a pail of water up the stairs from the half-landing below.

Anyway, here are some photographs from yesterday. If you want to know more about this quarter of Marylebone, The Gentle Author was there long before me.

Oh, and the monogram over the door is PIDC, standing for Portland Industrial Dwellings Company.