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The 1919 Housing Act - the Addison Act - received the royal assent on this day in 1919. 176,000 council homes were built under its terms and its standard of high quality housing set a benchmark for decades to come. A 1917 photo of Addison and housing from Newcastle, Lancaster and Winchester.

🚨 New on Substack, a special guest post by Ruth Cherrington on the Canley Estate in Coventry, 'the place where I grew up' ... municipaldreams.substack.com/p/the-canley...

Mannenzaal (Men's Hall), Amersfoort: a dormitory for sick, elderly and poor men, predominantly labourers, founded in the 1390s by a group of wealthy townspeople. A similar women's room was demolished in a major rebuilding programme in 1907 which preserved this medieval relic.

More vision sketches of Craigavon New Town or 'New City' as it was originally optimistically termed, designated on this day in 1965. (Images courtesy of Craigavon Museum Services.)

Modernism isn't for everyone: Graanstraat, Betondorp ('Concrete village'), Amsterdam - a garden village developed by the municipality between 1923-25.

Craigavon, Northern Ireland, was declared a New Town on this day in 1965. Controversial in NI's sectarian politics from the outset, it never fulfilled its early modernist promise but it is now a popular place to live with a population of around 65,000, about half that initially projected.

Woonschool (Housing School), De Ravelijn, Maastricht: 104 homes, school and community centre built by the Catholic housing association Sint Servatius in the 1950s specifically to 're-educate' slum families deemed antisocial.

The fight for the first rural council housing in England (in 1894) - led by FD Perrott, the 'Radical Vicar of Ixworth' and the Ixworth Agricultural Labourers’ Association. municipaldreams.substack.com/p/stow-road-...

1/ Travelling from Maastricht to Liège: departing from Maastricht Station, designed by railway architect GW van Heukelom, 1912-15; the stained glass windows by Charles Eyck in 1949, a gift of Maastricht City Council replacing windows lost during WW2. Arriving at the spectacular ...

Brussels Town Hall, built 1401-55, a masterpiece of Brabantine Gothic. Two kilometres to the south, Ixelles Town Hall, built as a private residence in 1833, bought by the municipality in 1849; currently one of the 19 councils of the fairly ungovernable Brussels-Capital Region.

The second post in the thread includes some lovely pics of the new council housing ...

🚨 New on Substack, Stow Road, Ixworth: ‘Thingoe’s Follies’ - England's first rural council housing, in 1894. One of my favourite posts: historical significance and a good story. municipaldreams.substack.com/p/stow-road-...

Stow Road, Ixworth: ‘Thingoe’s Follies’They called them ‘Thingoe’s Follies’ – the eight homes built on Stow Road in Ixworth, Suffolk, which formed the first council housing built (in 1894) in the English countryside.municipaldreams.substack.com

Some essential Liège (from a touristic perspective at least) - the Impasse de l'Ange and the Montagne de Bueren (374 steps - we counted them!) in the picturesque Hors Chateau area. It's a very interesting, gritty city in other respects.

Centre Céramique, Maastricht, designed by Jo Coenen in 1999 to house Maastricht's City Library, the Maastricht Museum and the municipal music school.

Bookshop, Maastricht.

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This is social housing. De Dageraad (Dawn), Plan Zuid, Amsterdam, designed by Michel de Klerk, 1918-23. If you look closely you'll see a clenched fist representing the housing association and architect's socialist principles.

A sneak preview of Het Breed (the Plan van Gool) designed by architect Frans van Gool for the City of Amsterdam's Urban Development Department between 1968 and 1970.

My latest Substack post examines the life and legacy of Octavia Hill - a complex and seemingly contradictory mix of philanthropy, self-help and opposition to state intervention, and resistance to female suffrage. municipaldreams.substack.com/p/octavia-hi...

Holiday snaps of Amersfoort - canal, the Muurhuizen (houses built along the line of the former city walls) and the Koppelpoort, a land and water gate dating to the 1400s.

A remnant of the old London Bridge donated in 1971 'as a permanent reminder to the citizens of Amersfoort of the esteem held for them by the people of their link town Amersham'.