Octavia Hill

In Our Time: History

BBC

History

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2011

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill.From the 1850s until her death in 1912, Octavia Hill was an energetic campaigner who did much to improve the lot of impoverished city dwellers. She was a pioneer of social housing who believed that there were better and more humane ways of arranging accommodation for the poor than through the state. Aided at first by her friend John Ruskin, the essayist and art critic, she bought houses and let them to the urban dispossessed. Octavia Hill provided an early model of social work, did much to preserve urban open spaces, and was the first to use the term 'green belt' to describe the rural areas around London. She was also one of the founders of the National Trust. Yet her vision of social reform, involving volunteers and private enterprise rather than central government, was often at odds with that of her contemporaries.With:Dinah BirchProfessor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Liverpool UniversityLawrence GoldmanFellow in Modern History at St Peter's College, OxfordGillian DarleyHistorian and biographer of Octavia HillProducer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for learning the inartime podcast for more details about inartime and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program
0:12.4	Hello in an alloy just often mall Marleyburn High Street in central London
0:16.8	There's a handsome townhouse with a blue plaque the inscription on this black commemorates Octavia Hill
0:22.4	A 19th century social reformer who started her remarkable work on this spot today
0:27.8	It's a fashionable and wealthy part of the city but in 1865 it was part of a notorious slum known as little hell
0:35.5	That year Hill bought three houses on paradise place refurbished them and turned them into accommodation for the very poor
0:43.2	This was the beginning of six decades of tireless work on behalf of the urban dispossessed
0:48.0	Octavia Hill's ideas about social housing were revolutionary and influential here and abroad
0:53.4	Her insistence on the importance of open space for city dwellers resulted in the preservation of parks and commons and the foundation of the national trust
1:01.6	With me to discuss the life and work of Octavia Hill are
1:04.8	Diner Birch, Professor of English Literature, and Provost Charles Luffer Research at Liverpool University
1:10.4	Lawrence Goldman, fellow in modern history, St Peter's College Oxford, and the historian and biographer of Octavia Hill
1:16.5	Gillian Dalit Diner Birch, Octavia Hill was born in 1838. Can you tell us something of her background?
1:23.2	It was a very unusual background, an exceptional background, and it made her what she was
1:29.9	It was a large family and based in Cambridgeshire
1:33.9	She was called Octavia because she was the eighth of her father's daughters
1:39.5	James Hill, her father, was a progressive radical
1:44.8	prosperous corn merchant when Octavia was born with all kinds of ideas which he had absorbed in part from the
1:53.4	Utopian socialist Robert Owen
1:56.2	About the development of mankind the prospects of mankind
2:00.6	One of the things that was very influential in his pattern of thinking for his daughter was the notion that
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