125 years of Southern Housing: the people who built us

It started with a will. When the financier Samuel Lewis died in January 1901, he left £670,000 to establish a charitable trust to build homes for people who could not afford a decent one. In today's money, that is somewhere near £30 million.

Lewis was an unlikely founder of a housing charity. Born in Birmingham in 1837 to a poor Jewish family, he started work at thirteen selling steel pens, ran a jeweller's shop, and eventually became the most fashionable moneylender in London, with an office in Mayfair and half the British aristocracy on his books. He had spent his career at the edges of a society that was happy to borrow from him and less happy to accept him. His fortune went, in the end, to people who had far less than either.

His wife, Ada, shaped what happened next. She guided the direction of the money after his death, and had her own record in the same field, founding a nurses' institute and lending her name to a lodging house for single working women. The first Samuel Lewis Trust estate, 151 flats on Liverpool Road in Islington, opened in 1910. Eight estates had been built by 1939.

The founders who came later

Southern Housing today is the product of many organisations, and the people who started them are as much a part of our story as Samuel and Ada.

In 1945, with London's housing stock shattered by the Blitz, Joan Bartlett founded Hearth and Home to house older people who had been made homeless. The first property, The Boltons, was bought the following year. Hearth and Home became Servite Houses, then Viridian, and eventually part of Optivo.

In the mid-1950s, the writer and publisher Maisie Ward and the activist Mollie Walsh founded the Catholic Housing Aid Society. It was funded largely by Catholics and open to everybody: nobody who came to CHAS for help was ever asked about their religion.

In 1967, John Howes and Jack Griffin set up South London Family Housing Association, a direct response to families being failed by the welfare system of the 1960s.

None of these people were housing professionals. They were a moneylender, a philanthropist, a publisher, an activist and two men who thought the system was letting families down. Each of them saw a specific group of people with nowhere decent to live and decided to do something about it.

What has changed, and what has not

A great deal has changed. Council housing was sold off from 1980, and by the 1990s residents were voting to transfer their homes to housing associations, including at Swale in 1990 and Hastings in 1996. We took on former council homes that needed serious investment. We became a partner in Triathlon Homes on the 2012 Olympic site. In 2022, Southern Housing Group and Optivo merged to become Southern Housing. We now provide around 80,000 homes.

What has not changed is the problem. Private rents are still too high for too many people, and the quality is still not always good enough. That was Samuel Lewis's observation in 1901 and it is a fair description of 2026.

Our biggest priority now is our older homes: making them safe, accessible, energy efficient and fit for the way people live today. Some of those homes are the ones his money paid for.

A short timeline

• 1901 – Samuel Lewis leaves £670,000 to create the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust
• 1910 – The first estate, 151 flats on Liverpool Road, Islington, opens
• 1939 – Eight estates built from the original endowment
• 1945 – Joan Bartlett founds Hearth and Home for older people made homeless by the Blitz
• 1950s – Maisie Ward and Mollie Walsh found the Catholic Housing Aid Society
• 1967 – South London Family Housing Association founded
• 1980 – Right to Buy begins the sale of council housing
• 1990s – Council tenants vote to transfer their homes to housing associations, including Swale and Hastings
• 2001 – The Samuel Lewis Trust becomes Southern Housing Group
• 2009 – Southern Housing Group becomes a partner in Triathlon Homes on the London Olympic site
• 2017 – AmicusHorizon and Viridian combine to form Optivo
• 2022 – Southern Housing Group and Optivo merge to become Southern Housing
• 2026 – 125 years of helping people in housing need