In what ways did twentieth-century planners consider that their new utopia was better than the Victorian urban inheritance
             The official involvement in housing dates back to a mid-Victorian concern with slum properties as breeding grounds for epidemic disease, vice and lawlessness . This left Britain housing its population in a crumbling Victorian legacy in the first half of the twentieth-century, which was now widely regarded as one of the sharpest indictments against laissez-faire society . Before 1914 only ten per cent of homes were owner-occupied , almost all the rest being privately rented from land lords; small property-owners with either no intention or little resources to maintain or improve their houses. Nearly half of all households lacked the sole use of a bathroom, two in every five households lacked a bath at all, and nearly a quarter had no exclusive use of a toilet . Slum conditions were uneven but widespread, in 1911 almost a third of the population of Newcastle and Sunderland, and over a half of Glasgow, lived in the overcrowded conditions of the one room tenement .
             Post-war Britain required a re-development scheme for the 200,000 houses that had been destroyed, 250,000 badly damaged and her newly enlightened growing population with greater expectations and demands for improved conditions . There was complete two party agreement about the need to initiate a substantial house building programme after many years of neglect. In the Labour Party manifesto was written "Housing will be one of the greatest and one of the earlier tests of a Government's real determination to put the nation first. Labour's pledge is firm and direct-it will proceed with a housing p...