If you’ve read previous issues of the CHVRA newsletter, or visited the exhibitions Stella Etheridge, former CHVRA chair has put on, you’ll know about Elsy Borders. A local resident, Elsy campaigned for nationwide housing reform and railed against the 1930’s system of payments between house builders and building societies, which often led to poor quality (‘jerry-built’) houses. The face and the voice of a nationwide mortgage strike, Elsy’s actions helped bring change to the Building Societies act, which still offer us protection today.
If you’d like to find out more about our local heroine, Radio 4 are broadcasting a dramatisation of her life on 27 July from 3pm to 4pm: A House Called Insanity.
Here’s what the BBC have said:
Anne-Marie Duffs stars as Elsy Borders, the working-class heroine whose remarkable true story deserves to be far better known. Even though she became a national figure in the late 1930s, no play celebrating her achievements has ever been written – until now.
The wife of a South London cabby (played by Karl Davies), Elsy did something a working-class woman was not supposed to do, breaking the rules and conventions of acceptable behaviour. Determined to expose the poor quality of workmanship in house-building which continues to resonate today with scandals such as Grenfell Tower, she took the unprecedented step of refusing to pay her mortgage, owing to the dire state of their new, but poorly-built, house on an estate in Kent. When the building society responded by suing for repossession of the house which the family had by now christened Insanity, Elsy counter-claimed for damages.
The fight was on…
With contributions from Stella Etheridge, Jeremy Tagg and Phillipa Tagg who are current residents of the Coney Hall Estate where Elsy lived.