Oxcroft Estate
The legacy of a social experiment of the 1930s funded by Andrew Carnegie's Charity is a dispersed group of 40 houses of identical original design dotted across 400 acres of Derbyshire agricultural land.
In the 1930s, in response to a crisis in unemployment in the UK a collaboration between the UK government, a farming cooperative movement from Ireland and Andrew Carnegie’s charity , the Carnegie Trust, set up an experimental organisation to attempt to alleviate the crisis. The organisation was called the Land Settlement Association (LSA). The idea was to buy up large plots of rural land, subdivide it into smallholdings and translocate unemployed people from deprived urban areas with the intention of them working in horticulture and small scale animal production.
Between 1934 and 1940 the Carnegie Trust contributed around £150,000 (over £13Million in todays money) to the national project. There were over 20 such schemes established in Britain and the one at Oxcroft was the only scheme in Derbyshire. In this case nearly 400 acres were purchased from the Duke of Devonshire and the scheme created, initially, 40 smallholdings. Each holding a semi-detached, three-bedroom house, 5 acres of land, a piggery (with 3 pigsties) and other buildings. These houses are all built to the same style and if exploring this delightful rural area one can easily spot the properties that originated as LSA smallholdings. The houses were built to a design by the Architect, Fred Levitt of Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. Back in the day, modification of the buildings was not permitted and for years the houses of the settlement all had the same, all over white, paint job.
Initially the tenancies were let (after a period of training) to unemployed people with no previous agricultural experience with the main aims being to integrate those from depressed areas into rural life and generally the experiment was working in most of the association’s “settlements”. The first batch of “settlers” arrived at Oxcroft in March 1936. All production had to be sold through a collective enterprise managed by the LSA. The LSA in its turn provided central facilities such as a packing house and a collective tractor, with driver, for ploughing the small fields.
By March 1939 all 40 holdings had been developed, on which 37 families had been settled, with 20 men in training. Initially “settlers” were directed towards high value crops such as fruit and the production of bacon pigs. Whilst some of the adults involved found this isolated spot difficult to deal with after their previous urban life both written and oral histories indicate that the children felt that they had been taken to a rural paradise and no wonder given the fantastic views from the limestone escarpment looking west towards the Peak District of Derbyshire.
However during WW2 the emphasis changed to increasing food production and tenancies which became available were given , preferentially, to those with agricultural experience. Furthermore the production of pigs was curtailed so that horticultural food production could be maximised and in order to maintain viability the land holdings of each smallholding was increased, resulting in the reduction of total horticultural businesses to 26. The increase in land area was to make up for loss of income from pig production so as to make the enterprises viable.
After the WW2 the original “social experiment” was essentially abandoned as food production was maintained as a priority. In 1950 the land was taken into the ownership of the Ministry of Agriculture. By 1958 advertisements for incoming tenants stated they were required to have agricultural experience. The scheme was wound-up (starting around 1970) and all properties were sold off by 1983. It is reported that at the time the “settlements” were producing about 40% of home-grown salad crops in England.
Over 40 years later much of the land on the former estate has been put over to larger scale arable production but there seems to be a number of businesses operating from former LSA properties that could currently be described as “horticultural”, albeit that at least 3 are primarily concerned with decorative rather than edible products. Many of the properties are still occupied by descendants of the original “settlers” and ,certainly, the place where the pin is placed is in the ownership of a family which were here in the LSA-controled period.
Know Before You Go
As one explores the area the dominance of former LSA properties becomes apparent, albeit that since the LSA relinquished strict controls on changes to the buildings, many have been added to and a number have had the external finish drastically changed.
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