In Our Time - Octavia Hill

Episode Date: April 7, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill.From the 1850s until her death in 1912, Octavia Hill was an energetic campaigner who did much to improve the lot of impoverished city dwellers. She was a pioneer of social housing who believed that there were better and more humane ways of arranging accommodation for the poor than through the state. Aided at first by her friend John Ruskin, the essayist and art critic, she bought houses and let them to the urban dispossessed. Octavia Hill provided an early model of social work, did much to preserve urban open spaces, and was the first to use the term 'green belt' to describe the rural areas around London. She was also one of the founders of the National Trust. Yet her vision of social reform, involving volunteers and private enterprise rather than central government, was often at odds with that of her contemporaries.With:Dinah BirchProfessor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Liverpool UniversityLawrence GoldmanFellow in Modern History at St Peter's College, OxfordGillian DarleyHistorian and biographer of Octavia HillProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in an alleyway just off Marlebone High Street in central London, there's a handsome townhouse with a blue plaque. The inscription on this plaque commemorates Octavia Hill, a 19th century social reformer who started her remarkable work on this spot.

Today, it's a fashionable and wealthy part of this. city, but in 1865 it was part of a notorious slum known as Little Hell. That year Hill bought three houses on Paradise Place, refurbished them, and turned them into accommodation for the very poor. This was the beginning of six decades of tireless work on behalf of the urban dispossessed. Octavia Hill's ideas about social housing were revolutionary and influential here and abroad. Her insistence on the importance of open space for city dwellers resulted in the preservation of Parks and Commons and the Foundation of the National Trust. With me to discuss the life and work of Octavia Hill are

Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at Liverpool University, Lawrence Goldman, Fellow in Modern History, St. Peter's College, Oxford, and the historian and biographer of Octavia Hill, Gillian Daly. Dina Birch, Octavia Hill was born in 1838. Can you tell us something of her background? It was a very unusual background, an exceptional background, and it made her her what she was. It was a large family, based in Cambridgeshire, she was called Octavia because she was the eighth of her father's daughters. James Hill, her father, was a progressive radical, a prosperous corn

merchant when Octavia was born with all kinds of ideas which he had absorbed in part from the utopian socialist Robert Owen about the development of mankind, the prospects of mankind. One of the things that was very influential in his pattern of thinking for his daughter was the notion that character was not formed by will, but by circumstances. And that really is a consistent theme in Octavia Hill's thinking. The family fell on hard times, partly because James spent too much on his utopian projects. But his, her mum, a moment of Mother, Caroline Hill, rescued her family from their difficulties by taking command of the business. James Hill suffered a mental breakdown and really wasn't able to take responsibility.

Caroline took the family to London, where she began to work on the charitable projects that became Octavia's lifeline. and there was also a strong connection with her grandfather, Thomas Southwood Smith, who was a unitarian, radical, health reformer, full of ideas. But I think the important point for Octavia was that because there was an expectation that she would work and she would think and she would work on behalf of others, she was able to challenge social conventions without rebelling against. against her family. And that gave her a kind of strength and a sense of identity that I think she carried with her throughout her life. I think I'm assuming from what I've read from you see that

she was educated largely at home by her mother and she was in this little factory, this little when she was 14. That's right. But there were other, you mentioned her grandfather. He seems to have played an important part in forming what she thought about society. I think that's right. partly because he was so active in his work for the poor, but partly I think because of the influence of his unitarian ideals, which established in her mind the notion that women could take a positive part in public affairs, that was something that was commonly held in unitarian circles to be a self-evident truth. and partly the belief that a spiritual life entailed social responsibility,

that it wasn't simply an internalised matter of saving your soul, that it would be outward facing, that it would involve going out and working for others. So I think that alongside the crucial practical support that her grandfather gave the family, there was also that sense of a kind of ideological support that alongside the support that she had from her mother and sisters, you know, did give her a sort of security and confidence.

Lawrence Goldman, so at 14, she's with her mother working at the Ladies Cooperative Guild. Can you tell us about that organisation? Were there many of them? Was this one of a kind? Well, it was one of a kind, but there were in fact, by the 1850s dozens of cooperatives, some quite evanescent that don't last very long, but others which actually do continue for decades in Britain. The Ladies Guild made craft goods, decorative arts and so forth for sale. It employed women who needed means of support, who didn't have families or husbands to look after them.

And her mother, Caroline, was the kind of supervisor. And Octavia helped her mother, and then herself became supervisor of a group of girls from a local ragged school who needed also a training in a craft that might support them in their lives. Before you go on any further, Lauren, can I ask you how effective the word cooperative is in this phrase?

Right, absolutely. The latest cooperative group. Well, the cooperative movement really traces its origins back to Robert Owen, in fact, who we've already mentioned, an entrepreneur, a cotton spinner, a very wealthy man, who conceived the idea of groups of workers coming together and there being no distinction between owners of capital and sellers of labour in the market.

Did they follow that through? Well, they did. I mean, Owen thought originally of cooperatives on the land, of communes, as we might see it, agricultural cooperatives. But by the 1830s and 40s and 50s, in Britain you had producer cooperatives, often in manufacturing industries, where workers came together to try to make things and sell them in common.

And then, crucially, from 1844, the idea of consumer cooperatives developed, particularly associated with the Rochdale pioneers who set up the first consumer cooperative, where people came together to try to sell to ordinary folk, the basic necessities of life, food and so forth, at a fair price, and the profits then of the enterprise would be shared between all the members. So as Diana said, her mother brought her and presumably her sisters and the family to London to get, and it's a strange way to sort of get the family. It's a rather radical way. I will now form a cooperative field in order to keep this all going. No, it's bold. It's wonderful. I don't think she formed it. What's interesting is that the Ladies Guild, where she was the superintendent, depended upon the capital of a very wealthy Oxford-educated Christian socialist, Edward Van Sittart Neal, who spent his life,

setting up cooperatives and working with the cooperative movement through the 19th century to pursue this idea of workers coming together, owning the business within which they worked. And with that capital and with the support of other women who liked this philanthropic project, the hills were employed in that way. Can you tell us more about Christian socialists? Yes. It's interesting that it's a guy in Oxford that is a striker in this one. Absolutely. It's not just an Oxford,

Yes, indeed, no. Christian socialism, the movement, and the hills have links with this because they become close to the leading Christian socialist, F.D. Morris. Christian socialism emerges at the end of the 1840s, and it's very much a response to the end of chartism, which is the radical working class movement of the 1830s and 40s fighting for manhood suffrage, for the vote for men, and with other social and economic demands as well. We sort of crashed on Westminster Bridge against 17. And what's interesting is two of the key Christian socialist, Charles Kingsley and John Malcolm Ludlow, associates of F.D. Morris, actually go to watch the demonstration of the Chartists on April 10, 1848. And they come back, quite literally, from that experience, and they devise the idea of a movement which will, under Christian principles, try to reintegrate the nation, try to bring the working classes together again with the rest of society to heal. these breaches, which they think of defaced British society in the 1840s.

So the Christian socialists run a journal, politics for the people. They organised debates between different radical groups and different interests here in London. They found the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street, which is a beacon of adult and workers' education for decades thereafter. And they also found these cooperatives as well. Oh, excuse me. Before I move on, how was, can you say Octavia was influenced? How directly was she influenced by that?

I think strongly. I think their general social Christianity chimes exactly with her own sense of a Christianity which has an obligation to all society and particularly to the poor. She knows the Christian socialists through their support of cooperatives, but she and her sisters and their whole family become. very close to F.D. Morris is a sort of protean figure, an intellectual, as well as a theologian, a man of the cloth. He's actually the preacher at Lincoln's Inn at the court in the early 1850s, and they go every Sunday to hear him preach. And indeed one of her sisters, I think it's

Gertrude, possibly Emily, Emily, Emily marries F.D. Morris's son. So they are, in a sense, linked in to the Christian socialist movement by friendship and kin as well as by ideology. Julian Darlie, in her work in the district of her, and she's brought into contact with the local women, and she goes to their dwellings. It's difficult to call them houses, isn't it? What conditions did she see, though? And we're talking about a young girl, we would now call a teenage, wouldn't we?

Yes, I mean, Octavia was in fact teaching children. who were virtually her own age and supervising them. I mean, she had a theory that you could, as it were, bring the education in behind their employment. So they were working as toy makers within the women's cooperative venture. But at the same time, she was teaching them.

Reading and write down, that sort of straightforward. Yes, I mean, and in fact teaching was something she did all, just about all of her working life, because it must be noted at the very beginning, she never took money for any of her reformist activities. So she actually had to make a living to support herself until she was bailed out later by bands of friends. So her obligation towards these children was very considerable.

And she, in fact, then, if somebody wasn't there, she would go and find out what had happened. And that took her into the courts. And the courts were... We're talking about... It's talking about... Absolutely. Court yards.

It's rotten little alleys with sort of suppurating places with open sewers and no fresh water and fantastic overcrowding and sort of families, you know, absolutely on their uppers, I suppose we'd say. And so she was brought up face to face with the reality of poverty about which she knew quite a lot

from, in fact, her grandfather, Tom Southwood-Smith, whose own medical work in the eastern end of London had brought him, confronted him, with the reality, including the cholera epidemics, which he was much concerned with, finding the causes of. Do we have any notes from her at the time of more specifically about the conditions she encountered? Or do we infer it from London Life in London, Poor Mayhew in those sort of books? She was a great letter writer, so from very early on. I mean, I can't remember exactly her first letter, but I mean, she writes if one of her sisters is away.

I mean, the sisters kind of, sometimes there was one abroad. There was an aunt who took one of them to Florence. So there were, and there was also a network. I'm talking about her description of the condition she found in his sons in Hobart. No, but in her letters, this is how she, I mean, this is very much, you know, she did, she didn't write to people about sort of the whimsy of life. She wrote about the grit of life. and, you know, she was utterly directed from that age on.

And there's an interesting comment from Ruskin, who she meets at 15. And he, you know, he just sort of saw her as somebody who was fully formed at that stage. She leapt from childhood to adulthood, you know, within months. And I suspect it was, in fact, that very, you know, first just confronting reality and all the things that Dan has so eloquently said, you know, the putting together of her faith and her family motivation and just the sense of where she could fit into this story. It's quite an extraordinary depth of scholar that we are talking about,

but you've mentioned John Ruskin, and John Ruskin came into her life when she was, as you say, I'm 15, and he took a shine to her, really, and he sort of took her up, really, and supported her. Can you just describe what he seems to have found in her, and how he helped her? Well, he, I mean, he came into her life as an interested party through the Christian Socialist Network,

coming into the Ladies' Cooperative Guild. He came in and bought a piece of, a rather curious, sounding piece of work, some sort of pressed ivy of some sort. And, but in so doing, he met Octavia, and very quickly he spotted something in her. And in fact, very shortly after that, so that was in when she was 15.

Two years later, there'd been sort of intermittent contact, I think, but two years later she's invited to Denmark Hill, with sisters sometimes, with friends, and for 10 years he employs her as a coppist. And again, this and the teaching are the two strands which actually give her income, because she, you know, she's in no position to support, you know, there's nobody else supporting her.

Can you tell the, listeners, what do you mean when you say copyist? Well, for various projects of his own, Ruskin required fine works of art to be reproduced and there was no running to the photocopier, so out went

bands of these girls mostly to illustrate the great works of the public collections. They went down to Dulwich, they went to the National Gallery and the resulting work was used in modern painting,

and modern painters was already appearing. His great book, high volumes, yeah. And of course that was one of the, Octavia sort of knew him from the page before she ever met him, because he didn't, I think, just. So there's serious talent as a painter then? Absolutely, yes. Dina, so why, Danny Burch, why was she so determined to do something about the poor? It became a central vocation.

And this seems to be informed, as we've heard from all three, you very early on, presumably by meeting head on these conditions which we've just begun to sketch in, but can you tell us why? Well, I think Gillian's absolutely right to suggest that the primary motive was her experience of what poverty was like, the filth, the disorder, the disease, the violence, the chaos,

and she saw that she could do something about it. She wanted to work with the poor on a personal basis. She had personal relations with the children that she was taking. She had very strong bonds with those children. And for that reason, she moved into the concept of housing reform. She argued really from the first, as a very young woman that you couldn't separate the lives of the poor from their homes. And that I think is the mainspring of her determination to tackle the suffering that she saw around her through amending housing conditions. And also she seems to have decided that you weren't going to separate the poor from their homes either, in i.e. you were going to refurbish the houses, not knock them down and build them four miles away.

Yeah, that's right. And that was always part of her approach to housing reform. She didn't want to build purpose-built special conditions for the poor. She wanted to amend, she wanted to improve, and she wanted to give the poor something other, as she put it, than food and drains. She wanted to provide open spaces. This goes right back to her earliest work in housing reform, the notion that they would be alongside better housing conditions, playgrounds, small gardens, where she could,

Manage it. Spaces to sit, spaces to strolls, spaces and so. Exactly. And she would plant greenery was always important to her. This was something that Ruskin supported her in. The planting of trees, the planting of creepers, flowers. Very important to what she envisaged for the poor. Do you want to go in briefly, Gillian? I was just going to say that she also, I mean, not only did she believe in what we now call greening the city, but she also was strong. strenuously active in taking her these children out to the countryside. And she had a network of comfortably off women friends with houses in places like Woodford on the edge of Epping Forest and so on. So they would set off, you know, very much as the working men went off on their bean feasts, so went the Octavia Hill tenants. Well, not the tenants at this point, just her children. So this was part of her thinking from the very early stages. Lawrence Goldman, can you put this in context? We're talking now about 1860s, 1870s,

into the second half of the 19th century, obviously. What is the context of this? What is she alone? Are there many other, if you put it into context? Right. I don't think she's alone, and she fits well, I think, into a kind of a structural political pattern, which takes in both the state

and what the state is doing in its concepts of reform and also what the voluntary sector is doing as well as we would understand it. We have to understand that the central state in this era is not in the business of taxing and then redistributing income. It doesn't spend money on the problem of poverty. But on the other hand, some notions that the state has no role at all to play need to be, I think, left to one side because the state is active in trying to reorganise the administration

of things like public health, of things like education in order that voluntary action should fill those spaces effectively and so the mid-Victorian state is trying to establish conditions where charity and voluntary activity and the initiatives of certain local municipalities

are possible. It's not saying that there shouldn't be activism, far from it. It's not a completely laissez-faire state which just leaves it as a free-for-all but what it wants to try to do is to encourage organisations and people to take a role. Now, she is close in this period to something called the Charity Organisation Society, which is founded in 1869. She's a member of it.

She doesn't always agree with their policies. But what Octavia Hill gets from the COS is a concept of reform, which is very much focused on the individual, the morality of the individual, the respectability, the behaviour of the individual. And this is really what mid-Victorian social reform is about. Not the spending of money, not the projection of vast schemes based upon recycle taxation, but instead trying to work with individuals

to teach them habits of order, good management, good household works and so forth. The COS is a sort of London-based professional organisation. It pioneers, as she does, casework with individual family, is. And this is really the structure that the state would allow the voluntary actions of bodies and individuals to try to address these kinds of problems. I think a really important point to register here is how passionately Octavia Hill was opposed to the notion of indiscriminate charity or arms giving, as she called it. She really believed that that would undermine any prospect that the poor might have of seriously amending. and rebuilding their lives. She consistently emphasised that they must develop independence,

they must develop self-respect. And this, after all, is... And self-sufficiency. Absolutely. This is the era of Samuel Smiles' self-help. You know, this is part of a general movement within charitably disposed circles to try to create conditions

in which, as Hill herself put it, justice for the poor rather than arms giving for the poor would be the way forward. So from that point of view, when she was dealing with her tenants in her housing schemes, she could be quite ruthless if they didn't show signs of self-respect, self-amendment, discipline, order. If, for instance, they were heavy drinkers or they led what she considered to be dissolute lives, she would say to them, You must either do better, as she put it, or you must leave. And she didn't hesitate. She would not allow the accumulation of rent arrears.

She would not hand out money, even in cases of acute need, though she might help people to find work and often did help people to find work. But there was a kind of framework of expectation within her schemes of social improvement that made what she was doing a little bit disdemean. instinctive in that context that Lawrence was talking about. Julian, her first venture was the development of, which I mentioned, a paradise place in Marleyburn, which was called Little Hell at the time. How did that come about? How did she get the money? What did she do?

Well, this takes us back to Ruskin, because it was Ruskin who put up the money for her to embark on this project. So we're talking about now 1865, so he's, He had known her for more than 10 years. So impressed was he that when his father died and released an absolutely staggering amount of money, 160,000 pounds, I think, which is who knows what the value was. He had this money to dispose of. And he decided that you couldn't be a socialist and a rich man, so he set about giving it away. But he did it on, and it links into what we've been talking about,

although we're sort of out of sync in terms of time, she's developing her project on the basis that the tenants are paying rents because the man who puts the money on up once a 5% return. So this is 5%. Sorry, this isn't meant to be rude. This is just absolutely clarified because it's still philanthropy. He's still as we're giving it. The system they believe will work best if he charges her 5%.

And therefore, so it's not to do it, I want my money back, because he doesn't in a way, but he wants to charge 5%. because that's the way he thinks it will work for her and she thinks it will work for the... It's a means of replacing the old landlord system, which was rotten to the core, with something that was, you know, completely above board and had, as it were, a framework that you could see the incoming and outgoings. And she was a very, you know, she was a very strict counter in financial matters as in her expectations of morality. So briefly, what did she do in Paradise Place?

I think, you know, it's absolutely central to everything we've been talking about, charity, organisation, society and so on come afterwards. So she looks at these people. She takes on the housing. They're already there. So what she has to do is to turn their attitude to themselves, to where they live, to their surrounding. But what did she actually do? She said to them, you know, you help me put this back together.

You glaze the windows. You whitewash the corridor. stairs, you put fresh water into the water butt and so on. You put flowers on the windowsills. What did she do as it were in return for that? She then visited. Well, that's the magic of the whole system is that by being the rent collector in the sort of baldest term, she was also, in fact, a sort of proto-social worker. So she, and very soon the people she was working with, had access to these houses on a perfectly reasonable basis once a week. They went to collect the

money. But at the same time they could also converse on all sorts of other things. The state of the children. You talk about glazing the windows. Did she provide the force for that? So how did she spend this money that Luskin? The money was I mean some small works were done. I mean these are terraced houses.

They were overcrowded. She made sure that there weren't subletting rooms. That was one of the problems of one of the causes of overcrowding, the subletting. So it was for families only. They got more space. They got, as it were, altogether better conditions, but by their own effort. And so they could see where the money, in a sense, was going, not into the landlord's pocket with absolutely no result. Lawrence Goldman, could you comment on this what she's doing in Paradise Place?

Well, I mean, it's... And how distinctive is it? Well, I think it is distinctive. I mean, it becomes a model that others then take up. I mean, there are efforts in philanthropy. I mean, we've mentioned or we should mention perhaps George Peabody, who in the 1860s

leaves a huge benefaction for the housing of Londoners. He's an American who's made a great deal of money in banking in London, and at the end of his life he gives a huge benefaction and thousands of people are rehoused in buildings, you know, over the capital in the next decades. Absolutely, the Peabody buildings, indeed. And so the idea of focusing on housing is not wholly original.

What I think makes her special is the scale. And it's something we've said before. It's the individual working with tenants and with families. It's the idea that one has to work at a local and small level, and one has to build up from that. That makes her distinctive. But if I may just add, in a sense, a word of criticism, not criticism, but a different perspective,

there remains a problem, really, which is whilst it's an admirable system and vitally necessary in the conditions of the 1860s and 70s and a model, one has to recognise the limitations precisely because it is based on human contact and individuals working with individuals, the sheer scale of cities by the late Victorian period and the sheer scale of the problems that go with housing

are going to, as it were, impel others to think of other less personal, less small-scale solutions which is when, as it were, she will come into some sort of conflict with developing ideas and structures. And volunteer, other people have drawn into her or run, her orbit and they're doing things as well. But in 1877 she has a major breakdown, which lasts about, three years. Do you know what the causes of a dinabuch? Can you take us into that area?

Overwork was one reason. I've no doubt. I mean, she was a driven woman. She was fanatical about working with her helpers and with the families. And really this goes back to that very point that Lauren says just raised, because it was such a personal system. It wasn't based on a bureaucratic system. She didn't, as it were, have an office that was working to administer the funds. Not only was she working individually with the families she was helping. She was also, I must say, with astonishing success working with potential donors. Sorry, excuse me, how do we measure success? What do you talk about her success in raising money? And there it's very measurable. She was very shrewd. She was very shrewd.

about money. At that point Gillian made about the 5%, you know, one of the reasons for insisting that there should be a 5% return was that she understood a fairly early stage, I think. I mean, Ruskin first made the suggestion, but it soon became very much part of her philosophy

that it would attract further donors, and so it did. Can I just nail success from them? Does this mean she's refurbishing hundreds of houses, thousands of houses, scores of houses? What are we talking rather more than she could manage. I mean, we're never talking about hundreds of thousands.

I didn't say hundreds of thousands. 3,000 families at the kind... By the end of the 1870s, something like that. About the point that she was breaking down. So I think that there was considerable overstrained because so much of it depended on personal relations. But there was also a catastrophic row with Ruskin which was painful for all parties,

but particularly painful for Octavia Hill. Hill who owed so much to Ruskin. Ruskin had paid her salary for 10 years. She had derived a great deal of her early thinking from Ruskin. What happened to summarise very briefly?

Well, can we go across to Julian from a moment? Can you tell us what happened there? Well, I wasn't going to interrupt on that one. I was going to be trapped on something else. Well, I mean, what he did was he, I mean, I think his own condition was wavering his instability. And he put into print some reservations that she had about his own ability to run a kind of utopian scheme,

his St George's scheme outside Sheffield. And he decided he had this publication which went to apparently working men. And in print he just made her sound, I mean he just demolished her in print. And she had no right of reply. But what I was going to add to the catalogue of things that sort of mounted towards this major breakdown was that she was not a person who failed well easily or often. And I think it's very interesting to discuss why she was so effective and why she hardly ever did fail.

But the one big project that she wanted to do was to secure the Swiss Cottage fields to which became Fitzjohn Avenue. And she became, I mean, she went... This is in North London. Yes. and she was raising a huge sum of money in August. So when all the sort of grandees were out of town, she raised, she got within a whisker of the asking price.

And then the estate owners, they changed the gold post. They said they wanted the money now and they wanted more money. They somehow rather just changed it to the extent that she lost it. And so she had spent an absolutely frantic. probably not more than two months, raising this money to have another huge tranche of open space for her people. So we're talking about an area just north of Paddington and Marrubon and so on, somewhere that her people could go.

She always called them her people, so I'm using the phrase. And just sort of run in the fields, which was her memory of childhood and which she wanted to share. And that's absolutely core to everything. And then, you know, so she's balked. That failed. and that taught her a huge lesson. She came back in 1880, Laurence Goldman.

Was she changed, woman, after three years, as it were, rest and reflection and work? Well, I mean, her friends club together and produce a very large sum of money so that she will have a decent income thereafter. She needs, I think, a companion. Her family get a companion for her to take some of the pressure off her. She is now a very public figure. She's a public figure. The Octavia Hill Method is known in Britain and indeed in Europe and in America, and there are other projects abroad which are sort of based upon what she's doing.

In 1884, there's a Royal Commission on Housing. And Gladstone wants her on the Commission. The Home Secretary doesn't. She would have been the first woman to have ever sat on a Royal Commission of Inquiry if that had been the case. So she's become a public woman. But I think one begins to see at this point the fact that she is very much a mid-Victorian figure. And around her, ideas are changing. The politics of social reform is changing. And she's in a sense in her groove, very successful and celebrated in her groove,

and still innovating in terms of public space and the establishment of the National Trust later on. but she's not perhaps moving with the times and although she's very celebrated and a certain kind of Victorian social reformer is still attracted to her and she's almost the model for the, as it were, energized woman in public life. There are other strains developing

in socialism and in advanced liberalism which are thinking about these questions quite differently. Can we take up the idea of Danubeuch open space and which you had a big impact? we've heard from Gillian about the Swiss cottage fields and we know she secured Parliament Hillfields a little further north and Higwood's a little further north still this meant a great deal to her she tried to

what suggested graveyards would be turned into playgrounds or walkways for children can you tell us where that drive came from and how successful she was in pushing it forward as part of her became national policy It runs very deep in her nature. To take it back to its earliest origins, I think you'd have to think about her childhood

and her experiences in what was then rural, Finchley. She had always valued that experience of a natural environment to use a word she wouldn't have used. So I don't think it's something that developed later in her life. And from the very beginning of her work with housing, she had tried to establish open spaces on a small scale. But I think Gillian's right to suggest that the trauma, because it was a trauma, of losing Swiss cottage fields, made her understand that in that particular arena, partly because of the scale of the investment that was needed, she did need to establish a different way of working and working with others. The Ruskin connection is important again here, as in so many areas of her life, because it was through Ruskin.

that she met Ronsley, who was one of the co-founders of the National Trust. Cannon Ronsley, who's now very strongly associated with the Lake District, where he lived and worked for most of his life. That's right. She also had a connection with Robert Hunter. Again, it became a family connection. Many of these connections were not only professional, but also a family connection.

so that she worked towards founding a trust that would have the economic power to buy land as it became available so that she wasn't in the position of having to raise money for a specific project in quite the way that she had and had failed with with Swiss Scottish Fields. That was a big difference. Can I just switch to politics now, Gillian Daly, briefly? Did she want to get involved in national politics? We're talking about a time when women are beginning to campaign, very powerful. powerfully for the boat and so on. Where was she on that?

Well, she was through, in fact, from her teens onwards, she was connected to the Highgate Circle who were campaigning for women's property rights, the transformation of women's economic position. But, I mean, there is a very interesting moment before the breakdown when she's actually offered a job as she would have been the first ever woman civil servant. She was offered a job as the workhouse, the government inspector of workhouse, pauper children in particular. And James Stansfield came to her with this offer. She felt that this is 1872, she had too much on her plate, she couldn't let her people down, her tenants were too.

Again, you know, she's in a way over-personalising it. She couldn't step aside. And she gave this job to Gina Nassel Senior, so who became the first ever women's at... civil servant, but thereafter she goes after the breakdown and she returns, then she does become, I mean, her evidence to the Royal Commission on Housing is extraordinary.

And later on, she is on a Royal Commission on the poor law, although by then she's quite rigid. But I must get in the fact that she did not, she didn't think women should have the vote. Is that right? That's right. She didn't think they should have the vote. It must be said that, you know, the women's movement has many mansions in the late Victoria. period, and, you know, she had been involved in the very first feminist campaign in the 1850s,

the attempt to change the laws affecting women's ownership of property after marriage. She'd encouraged women to be social workers alongside her. So, I mean, she deserves her place in, you know, thinking about women and the expansion of their role in late Victorian Britain. She is a role model. But on this matter, admittedly late in her life, when, as you rightly say, She is quite a rigid person in her social and political ideas. She is against women's suffrage.

But there are other women reformers in Britain who take a similar view. And I shouldn't I think see her as an anti-feminist for that reason? We've talked, or you've talked about her influence. We've talked it very lightly, really, and we've got hardly any time left at all, but her influence in her methods in Europe and in America, which we could have tracked down. Does the legacy last, Dana?

I think it has lasted, not necessarily in the way that she might have expected, I mean, certainly, of course, in the Foundation of the National Trust, which is now very important part of our lives, but also simply in that she demonstrated so powerfully that a woman could take part in public life and make a real difference. That example didn't go unobserved. Her work towards establishing a new pattern of trying to help the poor, as it were, working with the poor. It's one of the foundations of the modern profession of social work. It isn't the only foundation.

And of course it was transformed in the process. But I think that in those three ways particularly, she's had an enormous influence. Very briefly, though. Well, I think her stock was rather low until a generation ago because we followed a different pattern. We followed large, bureaucratic, state-sponsored housing solutions.

and we learnt in the post-war era that actually they were not the way to go. And really, until the 1980s, you probably wasn't that significant when thinking about the development of the welfare state. But subsequently now, because of our experience with just those kind of large-scale developments, Octavia Hill has come back into fashion. Thank you very much, Julian Daly, Dina Birch, Lawrence Goldman. Next week we'll be talking about the neutrino, billions of them,

going through our bodies and through the earth. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.ukh forward slash radio 4.