Octavia Hill

Octavia Hill (3 December 1838 – 13 August 1912) was an English social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born into a family with a strong commitment to alleviating poverty, she herself grew up in straitened circumstances owing to the financial failure of her father. With no formal schooling, she worked from the age of 14 for the welfare of working people.

Hill was a moving force behind the development of social housing, and her early friendship with John Ruskin enabled her to put her theories into practice with the aid of his initial investment. She believed in self-reliance, and made it a key part of her housing system that she and her assistants knew their tenants personally and encouraged them to better themselves. She was opposed to municipal provision of housing, believing it to be bureaucratic and impersonal.

Another of Hill's concerns was the availability of open spaces for poor people. She campaigned against development on existing suburban woodlands, and helped to save London's Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from being built on. She was one of the three founders of the National Trust, set up to preserve places of historic interest or natural beauty for the enjoyment of the British public. She was a founder member of the Charity Organisation Society (now the charity Family Action) which organised charitable grants and pioneered a home-visiting service that formed the basis for modern social work. She was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1905.

Hill's legacy includes the large holdings of the modern National Trust, several housing projects still run on her lines, a tradition of training for housing managers, and the museum established by the Octavia Hill Society at her birthplace.

Octavia Hill was the daughter of James Hill, corn merchant, follower of Owenism and banker, and his third wife, Caroline Southwood Smith. He had been widowed twice, and had six children (five daughters and a son) from his previous marriages. He had been impressed by the writings on education of Caroline Southwood Smith, the daughter of Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, a pioneer of sanitary reform. He had engaged Caroline as a governess for his children in 1832, and they were married in 1835, three years before Octavia was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, her father's eighth daughter and ninth child. The family's comfortably prosperous life was disrupted by James Hill's financial problems and his mental collapse. In 1840 he was declared bankrupt. Caroline Hill's father gave the family financial support, and took on some of Hill's paternal role. Southwood Smith was a health and welfare reformer concerned with a range of social issues including child labour in mines and the housing of the urban poor. Caroline Hill held similar views on social reform, and her interest in progressive education, influenced by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Southwood Smith's daily experience in his work at the London Hospital in the East End inspired Octavia Hill's concern for the poorest in early Victorian London. She received no formal schooling: her mother educated the family at home.

...
Wikipedia