It was as a campaigning journalist role that he wrote this book, and his (laudable)
storyline was ‘Northern slums are terrible, nothing’s being done’. The fact that the great
interwar estates were going up all over the North didn’t suite his argument, and so, he
was, at best, lukewarm about them

That’s interesting, I have never previously come across council-built homes from the pre-1914 era that look indistinguishable from spec-built houses of the time. There is a nice touch of railway cottage style to them.