Red Cross Cottages and Garden: a village green in inner London
- London On The Ground
- Sep 13
- 5 min read
The social housing scheme in Southwark was founded in 1887 by Octavia Hill, a social reformer and housing pioneer.
The row of six cottages, their communal garden and community hall on Redcross Way in Southwark were built as model dwellings, offering improved housing for the poor within the private sector.
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Red Cross Cottages were designed in the Arts and Crafts style by Elijah Hoole, known for his social housing designs for Octavia Hill and also for Methodist churches and settlement halls. White Cross Cottages, which are on Ayres Street and back onto Red Cross Cottages, were added in 1890.
Octavia Hill worked to help London's poor with decent and affordable housing that was a huge improvement on the slums that had dominated this part of London.
She was born in Cambridgeshire in 1838 to a family of radical thinkers. Her maternal grandfather, Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, was a health and welfare reformer and pioneer of sanitary reform, who was concerned with a range of social issues, including child labour in mines and housing for the urban poor.
Octavia’s mother, Caroline Southwood Hill, was an educationalist and writer. Her father, James Hill, was a banker-turned-corn merchant. He was a follower of Robert Owen, a philanthropist and social reformer considered to be the father of the cooperative movement.
James Hill’s bankruptcy and mental collapse when Octavia was still very young gave the family first hand experience of financial difficulty.
Assisted by Dr Southwood Smith, they moved to a cottage in the still rural Finchley area, where Octavia was home educated. After training in glass painting at a cooperative guild for ‘distressed gentlewomen’, at the age of 14 she began supervising the making of toys at the guild by the children of Ragged Schools, which provided destitute children in deprived areas a basic, but free, education.
Through the guild, she worked in her spare time as a paintings copyist for John Ruskin, an artist, art critic, philosopher and patron of the arts. He was impressed by her and the two became friends and he provided financial support for her ideas on housing.
In 1865, Ruskin bought three cottages in Marylebone "in a dreadful state of dirt and neglect". He tasked Octavia with restoring them to let to people on low and irregular incomes. This was the start of her management of housing for the poor. Five more houses followed in 1866.
The properties achieved a target of a five percent return on investment for Ruskin and other investors, with any excess reinvested for the benefit of the tenants. This ‘Five Percent Philanthropy’ was a common approach in Victorian model dwellings.
Octavia’s methods were successful and attracted new backers. By 1874 she had 15 housing schemes with c3,000 tenants. In the 1880s she took on the reform and management of 48 slum properties in south London for the Church of England’s Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
Red Cross Cottages and Garden were Octavia’s first opportunity to plan housing and gardens from scratch. The site, which had once belonged to the Religious Society of Friends (The Quakers), was acquired from the Metropolitan Board of Works by philanthropist Julia Reynolds-Moreton, Countess of Ducie, on Octavia’s recommendation.
When Octavia first took over the site, it contained the ruins of a burnt-down paper factory, heaps of unburnt paper and piles of rubbish dumped there over a number of years. Six weeks of bonfires to clear the paper also provided ash for the soil in the garden.
Exemplifying her hands-on approach, Octavia encouraged the planting and tending of the gardens and the decorating of the community hall. She also championed the use of the hall for community activities, including musical performances and army cadet training.
A firm believer in self-reliance, she encouraged tenants at her schemes to better themselves. She was opposed to the municipal provision of housing, since she considered this to be bureaucratic and impersonal.
She enforced strict rules: swearing and drinking could mean eviction and rent arrears were not tolerated. Rent collection was carried out face-to-face by Octavia and her team of assistants, who were all women. This also allowed them to keep an eye on the condition of the premises and to get to know the tenants personally.
Octavia believed strongly in access to open spaces for all. From the outset Red Cross Cottages included a communal garden, which she called an “open air sitting room for the tired inhabitants of Southwark”.
Her ideas and influence reached far beyond the housing schemes that she managed.
The first person to use the term ‘Green Belt’, she campaigned against the development of suburban woodlands. Her efforts helped to save Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from the creeping urbanisation that was swallowing up much of the green spaces on the outer edges of London at the time.
Octavia was also involved in founding the Army Cadet Force, the National Trust and the Charity Organisation Society (now the charity Family Action), which organised charitable grants and pioneered a home-visiting service that formed the basis for modern social work.
Her theories on housing and social reform were influential across Europe and in the United States. However, her passion and commitment led to a heavy workload, which took its toll. She had to take several months’ break after a collapse in 1877 (a bitter quarrel with John Ruskin, in addition to overwork, contributed to her exhaustion).
Octavia Hill died of cancer at her home in Marylebone in 1912, at the age of 73.
Red Cross and White Cross Cottages, which are Grade II listed by Historic England, remain largely as they were in the late Victorian period.
Red Cross Garden was restored to its original size in 2005 after much of it had been paved in the 20th century. It is a public garden managed by Bankside Open Spaces Trust.
Today the cottages are part of Octavia Housing, which manages more than 5,000 homes in central and west London on a not-for-profit basis. This remains true to the principles of Octavia Hill, more than 150 years after she began to manage housing for the urban poor in the 19th century.
Octavia Hill's portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1898.
Her friend, the educationalist and social reformer Henrietta Barnett, described her as follows:
"She was small in stature with a long body and short legs. She did not dress, she only wore clothes, which were often unnecessarily unbecoming; she had soft and abundant hair and regular features, but the beauty of her face lay in brown and very luminous eyes, which quite unconsciously she lifted upwards as she spoke on any matter for which she cared. Her mouth was large and mobile, but not improved by laughter. Indeed, Miss Octavia was nicest when she was made passionate by her earnestness."
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
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