© 2001 by Oxford University Press
ARTICLES |
Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism1
The Queen's College Oxford
A crisis in the London housing market was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a combination of pressure on central London land and the liberalization of rent control in 1957. Economic tensions in the working-class housing market were exacerbated by racial tensions, with large-scale West Indian immigration from the mid-1950s. The scandal associated with the name of Peter Rachman was a product of this crisis, and Rachman has symbolized exploitative landlordism since 1963. It is argued, though, that Rachman's ‘exposure’ was largely accidental—a spin-off of the Profumo scandal—and that what is striking about the episode is in fact the problems encountered by those anxious to give housing a greater prominence, despite the severe problems created by housing shortage. With immigrants driven into house ownership by discrimination in the rental market, the race and housing questions became entwined. Those anxious to make an issue of housing were generally reluctant to amplify racial tensions. Only with the emergence of a racy but tangential scandal was the housing issue made to ‘run’ The episode provides a case study of the way in which conventional politics could fail to provide an outlet for extensive social grievances during the ‘age of affluence’
1I am most grateful to Dr James Walsh of Conservative Central Office for permission to quote from the Conservative Party Archives, to Dr Brian Dyson of the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull for permission to quote from the Parkin papers, to the MacColl family for permission to quote from James MacColl's papers, and to the Churchill Archive Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, for permission to quote from the Michael Stewart papers I am also grateful to Martin Carver and Fiona Johnson of the Committee Section, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for help with the Kensington committee papers, to the staff at the City of Westminster Archives for help with the uncatalogued Paddington committee minutes, and to Professor David Donnison of the University of Glasgow for information concerning the Milner Holland Committee.