The housing market in English cities after 1945

Abstract

Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook opened a new field of analysis. If it was to stimulate further growth of knowledge, it needed to be better related to the economic analysis of housing markets. Research to this end that was conducted in the Research Unit on Ethnic Relations after 1970 is described.

Keywords:

• community
• competition
• demand
• housing
• supply

Notes

1. See ‘Community and Association amongst Urban Migrants’, a working paper presented in 1963 to the team assembled for the Sparkbrook study (Rex 1973, 15–31). It is part of the same picture. Sociologists may find themselves humbled if they compare our generalizations with a novelist's account of community as a lived experience in a Pakistani-owned lodging house in Birmingham in the early 1960s (Hussein 2000).

2. See Wikipedia ‘Rent Regulation in England and Wales’ (accessed 6 April 2014). Also Banton (1983, 346–356), while noting a print error on page 357: 13% of West Indian household heads were renting unfurnished and 56% were renting furnished.

3. More recently, the widespread support for the claims to UK residence of former members of Gurkha regiments shows that ‘colonial’ status could be more complicated than Rex acknowledged in his later writing.

4. For the record, I add that in July 1951 I walked along a stretch of the Stratford Road in Sparkbrook reading, in the windows of newspaper shops, the cards that advertised rooms to let. I counted more cards specifying ‘No Irish’ than ‘No Coloured’.

5. A rereading of Flett's very sensitive account reminds me of one of my first field notes from the research that I started in Stepney in 1950:

Joe and Henry both say that if coloured man is to be properly treated by English officials, he must throw his weight around. “I want my money! If you do not give me my money I'll smash this place up” etc.

Joe and Henry were both gentle characters who would not have been effective had they tried to implement these ideas spread by their fellow countrymen. The reminiscence fits with the message necessarily reiterated in Race, Community and Conflict, that at this time interpersonal relations between people of different background could be very variable.

6. ‘Mixed’ implies an unfavourable contrast with ‘pure’, while ‘race’ gives new life to a long obsolete kind of category. Many of the people so designated identify themselves with more than one ethnic origin, and expect others to respect this.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Banton

MICHAEL BANTON is Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the University of Bristol.