Quality of housing has been a major measure of social success in the UK since the Victorian era, when the first proper regulatory standards around housing design and spacing were devised and slums systematically demolished to make way for more appropriate new designs. In 1875, the Public Health Act allowed councils to ban ‘back- to- back’ housing, terraces without gardens which were built directly against each other and often over several storeys.

This act was one of several moves by the Victorians to tighten up legislation around housing quality and begin to improve the quality of housing stock, primarily on the basis of public health and tackling squalor. After the Victorians, the recognition of the importance of housing quality to environmental health and wellbeing continued to be codified into the British governmental system. In 1919, the Ministry of Health Act established the Ministry of Health, incorporating planning and housing. During the Second World War, the Beveridge Report set out squalor as among the five ‘giants’ to be eradicated from society and post- war, in 1951, the Ministry of Health was merged with the Ministry of Local Government and Planning.

Some of the outcomes of these changes included the huge expansion of council housing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, houses built to the highest specification with good space standards and modern amenities – as well as slum clearances and the creation of many new towns such as Milton Keynes.