August 2010
Plan of the Wollaton Park estate showing Crane Houses, 1928
Reference: CA/TC/10/121/5/14/2
After the First World War there was a great need to improve the condition of working class housing. With prime minster David Lloyd George promising to make Britain 'a place fit for heroes to live in', a Housing Act was passed in 1919 which compelled local authorities to help make improvements in the standard of working class housing. In Nottingham twenty housing developments had been financed by the end of 1924 and more than 1,500 new homes completed.
During this time materials and skilled labour were in short supply and these affected the construction process. To try and solve these issues a number of companies offered alternative houses built in new styles, using steel or concrete. In Nottingham William Crane, chairman of the city council's housing committee and head of a building firm, envisaged a new type of house where the main framework of the walls and roof was made in steel and the walls filled in with precast concrete slabs. These new houses were called Crane Composite Houses.
In 1924 a portion of parkland near Wollaton Hall in west Nottingham was identified for housing. This site, 93 acres in size, was identified for 1,000 Crane houses. The site was purchased in 1925 and work commenced in March 1926. 940 houses in pairs and 60 individual properties were to be built but in July 1926 the remaining 313 houses were constructed using traditional building techniques.
The plan above was produced in 1928 and shows the layout of the Crane Housing estate. It shows the locations of Crane houses along with traditional brick-built properties. The estate was unusual in that it was built with the intention of selling the houses to the general public, and the plan identifies how many properties had been sold.
See the plan in more detail here [PDF 3.6MB]
This plan features in our new exhibition Building for Life and Leisure, highlighting a range of different plans for buildings from around the county. Explore this exhibition here.
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