Housing Problems

Housing Problems is both a propaganda piece and a document of optimism. With its iconic image of new flats rising behind an old row of slum terraces in Stepney, it shows what has been done to improve living conditions by the most ‘enlightened’ local authorities and planners, and provides an exhortation to others to follow suit. Rather than merely asserting the necessity of new housing, it uses the voices and stories of working class men and women to demonstrate the slums’ dreadful conditions, and the benefit of the new estates.

Its method – ordinary people talking straight to the camera about their lives – was an innovation in documentary, though to a modern viewer the rehearsed words sound stilted. A more serious note of condescension might be gathered when the narrator tells us that slum-dwellers ‘quickly respond’ to their improved living conditions by becoming more hygienic themselves. —Danny Birchall, screenonline