In the 19th century, employers like Ackroyd, Salt and Rowntree built model estates for their workers.The estates were designed according to the beliefs of the employer about how his workers should live.The employers tried to influence the behaviour of their workers by the way they built and managed these estates. For example, millowner Titus Salt laid down a long set of rules to govern the behaviour of the workers who lived in his model estate of Saltaire, near Bradford, including a ban on hanging out washing in the streets. Early charitable housing associations like Peabody and Guinness built social housing tenements in the cities. Christian socialist, Octavia Hill pioneered a form of intensive housing management in these tenements. She wrote: "The difficulty with these people is not financial but moral, and therefore I know nothing for them but some individual power and watchfulness. They must be trained." Octavia Hill is seen by some as the creator of modern housing management.

The Garden City Movement and the idea of "balanced communities" 

The Garden City Movement took up the idea that people's behaviour was conditioned by their environment. These architects and planners believed in the idea of a balanced community - people from different walks of life living together in a semi-rural setting. They built New Towns of family housing with gardens, tree lined streets in estates outside the inner city.The Garden City Movement was influential in the design of the first council estates and charitable housing developments. Their ideas went into the Tudor Walters report which set guidelines for the new council estates.

Theme to think about:

The idea that you should carefully select who lives in an estate - and that the way an estate is built and managed can influence the behaviour of its residents - is still a hotly debated argument today.