The Westminster City Council, who are engaged in clearing an area of 17 acres of property to make room for more than 600 new flats, decided some time ago to apply to this extensive housing scheme what is known as the Octavia Hill system. They appointed as the manager of the estate a woman trained through the Crown Estate Agent's Scheme (Octavia Hill Club), and she has now an assistant who has also studied under Miss M Jeffery, the former secretary and housing assistant to Miss Hill and an agent for the Commissioners of Crown Lands.
It has been said of Miss Octavia Hill that her contribution to the business life of the country was to adjust the balance of all the economic factors which enter into house property management and to expose the slum as bad business. Her work as a housing reformer began in 1864 with the purchase by Ruskin of three dilapidated houses - "full of tenants" in a court in Marylebone. Miss Hill adopted Ruskin's advice that if the work could be placed upon a business footing, paying 5 per cent, on the capital invested in it, it would be taken up and extended by other people.
At the time of her death in 1912 she directly controlled between 1,800 and 1,900 houses and flats, exclusive of rooms in tenement houses. The work had also spread to Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow, and other cities, and had attracted attention abroad. Since 1912 there have been developments which have led to the appointment of numerous women estate managers, who maintain the Octavia Hill tradition and apply, in the light of present conditions, the system she inaugurated.
The training of women estate managers may be said to have grown out of the Octavia Hill management of this and other estates. At present the training is given by the Crown Estate Agent's Scheme and by the Association of Women House Property Managers.
The idea underlying the Octavia Hill system is that social service and business are closely united; that business is itself a service to the community. The personal collection of rents is the pivot on which the work of the trained woman house property manager turns and by means of which she establishes contact with her tenants and their houses. She seeks to bring home in a practical way to the occupiers of the dwellings in her charge the advantages of regularity, system, and order.
Breadth of outlook, a sense of humour, judgement, tact, firmness, and adaptability are put forward as some of the attributes of value in the work of the women managers, and under the Octavia Hill system a personal link is provided between the manager and tenant. This is established during the selection of tenants and is kept up by the regular personal visits required for the collection of rent and the supervision of repairs. Tenants are encouraged to cooperate with a sympathetic manager, and it is claimed that wherever the Octavia Hill system has been properly administered it has been found that both landlord and tenant derive lasting benefit.
