The Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (Artizans Company) was a nineteenth-century philanthropic model dwellings company, which later became a multinational property developer before being absorbed into Sun Life.

Origins

The Artizans Company was established in 1867 by William Austin, an illiterate who had begun his working life on a farm as a scarecrow paid 1d per day, and had worked his way up to become a drainage contractor. The company was established as a for-profit

joint stock company A joint-stock company is a business entity in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders. Each shareholder owns company stock in proportion, evidenced by their shares (certificates of ownership). Shareholders are ...

, with the objective of building new houses for the working classes "in consequence of the destruction of houses by railroads and other improvements".Welch, p. 8 The company aimed to fuse the designs of rural planned suburbs such as Bedford Park with the ethos of high-quality homes for the lower classes pioneered at

Saltaire Saltaire is a Victorian era, Victorian model village in Shipley, West Yorkshire, Shipley, part of the City of Bradford Metropolitan District, in West Yorkshire, England. The Victorian era Salt's Mill and associated residential district locate ...

.Welch, p. 7 Whilst earlier philanthropic housing companies such as the Peabody Trust and the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company focused on multi-storey blocks of flats in the inner cities, the Artizans Company aimed to build low-rise housing in open countryside alongside existing railway lines to allow workers to live in the countryside and commute into the city.Welch, p. 9 The company attracted the attention of Lord Shaftesbury, who served as president until 1875. The company built and immediately sold a group of houses in

Battersea Battersea is a large district in south London, part of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is centred southwest of Charing Cross and extends along the south bank of the River Thames. It includes the Battersea Park. History Batter ...

, then still a rural village. The proceeds of the sale were used to purchase a plot of land in Salford for development, and by 1874 the company had developments in Liverpool, Birmingham,

Gosport Gosport ( ) is a town and non-metropolitan borough on the south coast of Hampshire, South East England. At the 2011 Census, its population was 82,662. Gosport is situated on a peninsula on the western side of Portsmouth Harbour, opposite t ...

and Leeds.

London estates

The Artizans Company is best known for its four large housing estates built on the then-outskirts of London. The first was

Shaftesbury Park The Shaftesbury Park Estate, commonly known as The Shaftesbury Estate, is a residential estate in Battersea in South London, England. It lies north of Lavender Hill and Clapham Common and east of Clapham Junction railway station. The estate o ...

, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea. The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen's Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on of land to the west of London, adjacent to the railway line out of Paddington ( Queen's Park station opened 1879), purchased from

All Souls College, Oxford All Souls College (official name: College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows (i.e., full members of t ...

. A third London estate was planned at Cann Hall, and a site of was purchased. However, the Queen's Park project suffered serious mismanagement and fraud and in 1877 the company secretary William Swindlehurst and two others were found guilty of defrauding £9,312 (approximately £ today) from the project. The company was forced to raise rents and tenants were no longer permitted to buy their houses; by 1880 the company's finances had recovered sufficiently to allow further expansion.Welch, p. 10 A third estate, Noel Park, was built near Wood Green north of London between 1883 and 1929, followed by a fourth in

Streatham Streatham ( ) is a district in south London, England. Centred south of Charing Cross, it lies mostly within the London Borough of Lambeth, with some parts extending into the neighbouring London Borough of Wandsworth. Streatham was in Surrey ...

Leigham Court Leigham is the name of an area of the city of Plymouth in the English county of Devon. Originally a hamlet and manor separate from the city, urban expansion of the 20th century has meant that the area has become widely built up. The area is ...

. The slow take-up of available homes in Noel Park, particularly due to the

Great Eastern Railway The Great Eastern Railway (GER) was a pre-grouping British railway company, whose main line linked London Liverpool Street to Norwich and which had other lines through East Anglia. The company was grouped into the London and North Eastern R ...

's refusal to offer third-class rail fares from the nearby Noel Park and Wood Green station, led the company to begin building centrally located tenement blocks more similar to those of other

model dwellings companies Model dwellings companies (MDCs) were a group of private companies in Victorian Britain that sought to improve the housing conditions of the working classes by building new homes for them, at the same time receiving a competitive rate of return o ...

. Between 1885 and 1892, the Artizans Company built 1,467 dwellings in Central London and the West End, the first being the Portman Buildings in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, opened in 1888.

Diversification and divestment

In 1952, the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company was renamed the Artizans and General Properties Company Ltd. The combination of a taxation system biased against private property developments and legal restrictions on raising rents made the company's traditional model unprofitable, and it began to divest itself of its original low-rent developments and instead to sell vacant houses on the estates and to reinvest in non low-rent housing and commercial property, especially in the United States and Canada where depreciation before tax was permitted, and in

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, Belgium and France. In 1966, ownership of the four original London estates (Shaftesbury Park, Queen's Park, Noel Park and Leigham Court) was transferred to the respective local authorities,Welch, p. 50 leaving 377 homes at Pinnerwood Park in Pinner as the last residential estate in Greater London owned by the company. In 1976, the Artizans Company, by then renamed Artagen Properties Ltd, became a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Life, and on, 3 February 1981, the company was renamed Sun Life Properties Ltd.

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