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Homes for heroes: 100 years of council housing – a cartoon

This article is more than 4 years old

The illustrated city: In 1919, councils started to build in order to address a desperate need for housing. Tony Forbes and Eugene Byrne’s cartoon traces the impact that municipal housing has had Bristol in particular

Christopher Addison’s 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act gave Bristol and other councils the power and means to create the UK’s first housing estates. In Bristol, it was Addison himself who dug the first ground on the council’s first post-war estate in June 1919 at a tree-planting ceremony.

Homes for heroes: 100 years of Bristol's council housing

Tony Forbes was a prominent Bristolian artist and musician with a keen sense of community and social justice. More of his work can be found on his agent’s website. Eugene Byrne is an author, and journalist and can be found on Twitter as @EugeneByrne

This publication was created as part of the Homes for Heroes 100 programme which is supported by Bristol City Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It marks the centenary of the 1919 Housing Act, which led to the start of building large-scale council housing estates in this country. #homesforheroes100 is a project of Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol Festival of Ideas

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