The Building Society Promise:
Building Societies and Home Ownership,
c.1880–1913
Luke
Samy
Nuff=
ield
College, Oxford
<luke.samy@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
Formed in the mid-nineteenth century, =
the
building societies grew rapidly from their humble beginnings as localised
‘self-help’ organisations to become the dominant player in the
house mortgage market by the inter-war period. Throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the movement presented itself as a true champion=
of
home ownership and thrift among the working classes, but historians of hous=
ing
have generally downplayed the role that building societies played, or could
have played, in furthering these aims. This paper examines the archival rec=
ords
of two London-based building societies to investigate empirically the exten=
t to
which these institutions helped to overcome financial exclusion and to fost=
er
home ownership before the First World War, a time when rental tenure was the
norm. The results show that the case studies examined were not exclusively
middle-class in their membership, with one of them in particular showing a
genuine commitment to working-class owner-occupation by providing loans to =
both
skilled and unskilled workers on easy repayment terms. Its success in doing=
so
was based on its innovative agency network which it used to control the adv=
erse
selection and moral hazard problems involved in lending to lower-income gro=
ups.
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