The 1919 Addison Act sparked the first major wave of social housing in the UK. 100 years on, a new exhibition celebrates the home building that housed generations of Manchester people.
The exhibition will launch at 2pm on Thursday 19 December in the exhibition area on the Ground Floor of Central Library, with support from the Council’s Archives+ team.
The exhibition looks back at the history of social housing in the city and across the region since the 1919 Act, slum clearances that removed squalid Victorian dwellings, as well as the pioneering building in Manchester that represents some of the first social housing in the country – such as Victoria Square in Ancoats, which dates back to the 1890s.
The Addison Act – or Homes for Heroes – responded to the thousands of men who returned from fighting during the First World War to find a lack of decent homes for them and their families. The ambition of the original Act was to build 500,000 new social homes across the country within three years.
The exhibition also takes a closer look at housing built in Manchester following the acts, with particular focus on the first homes built in Wythenshawe, the Blackley Estate in North Manchester, and Burnage in South Manchester.
Manchester has around 65,000 socially rented homes – around a third of all housing in the city – and one of the highest areas in the UK for this type of housing.
Finally the exhibition looks at key housing issues in the city today, including a current lack of new social housing and how the city is responding to social issues, such as the rise in homelessness
