Octavia Hill

Octavia Hill managed slum housing for thirty years, invented modern housing management, and co-founded the National Trust. She was the granddaughter of the sanitary reformer Southwood Smith, was running a workshop for ragged-school girls at fourteen, and studied under John Ruskin, who in 1865 bought three cottages in Marylebone and gave her the running of them. Her system was specific and much copied: buy bad property, repair it gradually out of the rents rather than borrowing, collect weekly in person, refuse to evict for arrears without first knowing the household, and employ women as the collectors because the work was as much social as financial. She was managing several thousand tenancies by the 1880s. She was against state housing and against the dole, believing both destroyed self-reliance, which puts her awkwardly across modern political lines. She also fought for open space: she coined the phrase open-air sitting rooms for the poor, saved Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath extensions, and in 1895 founded the National Trust with Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley, which now protects a quarter of a million hectares. She worked with Emma Cons for decades, and refused a public funeral. She trained the first generation of professional housing managers, almost all women, and the profession still traces itself to her. She gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884. Her opposition to old-age pensions and council housing has made her a contested figure among the reformers who inherited her work. A statue of her stands at Red Cross Garden in Southwark, which she laid out.

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