page_title: Charles Jenkinson (priest)
section_title: Vicar of Holbeck and Leeds councillor
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Jenkinson (priest) / Life / Vicar of Holbeck and Leeds councillor
caption_attribution_description: English: A Middle East Soldier Revisits Britain- Life in Wartime Leeds, England, UK, 1943 A mother and son walk home in the sunshine past the impressive archway entrance to a curving section of Quarry Hill flats in Leeds, the 8-storey building sweeping round to the right. According to the original caption, the flats had their own shopping centre and recreation grounds for the children. The building featured is probably Oastler House.
context_page_description: Charles Jenkinson was a Church of England clergyman, housing reformer, and Leeds councillor.
context_section_description: In 1927, Jenkinson requested appointment to 'the hardest parish in the country'; accordingly, he was posted to the parish of St John and St Barnabas, Holbeck, one of the worst slums of Leeds. He stood for election as a Labour councillor for the ward of North Holbeck, winning a seat in November 1930.
  Jenkinson's key interest, for which he sought support by drawing on both Christian ethics and socialist thinking, was housing reform, an area in which the Conservative-dominated Council was not even willing to comply with laws such as the Greenwood Housing Act of 1930. His campaigning included publishing the pamphlet Sentimentality or Common Sense? (supported by the local clergy in June 1931); establishing a Council sub-committee on housing policy; in 1933 publishing a ninety-page minority report called Housing Policy in the City of Leeds in response to what he viewed as an inadequate report by the Council; and being the first chair of the new housing committee in Leeds's Labour council of 1933–35, which took the report as its blueprint for action. Within two years of the formation of the committee, Leeds rehoused 6000 inhabitants of slums, mostly to new green-field estates or new flats at Quarry Hill, Leeds, using an innovative differential rent scheme to help poorer families. Many of Jenkinson's own congregation moved to the new estate of Belle Isle, Leeds. In the face of fierce Conservative opposition, however, he lost his seat in 1936. As people were rehoused, they were required to have their furnishings disinfested of lice by the Council, and the vehicle used for this came to be known as 'Jenkinson's bug van'.
  In the ensuing decade, however, Jenkinson was appointed or elected to a range of political roles:
  Labour Party sub-committee on town planning and post-war housing (1941).
  Member of the Board of Trade advisory committee on utility furniture (1942).
  Leeds councillor, later overseeing implementation of Leeds's post-war housing policy (1943).
  Leader of Leeds's Labour group, alderman, chairman of the finance and parliamentary committee, and Central Housing Advisory Committee (1947).
  Chairman of Stevenage New Town Development Corporation (1948).
caption: Quarry Hill Flats, one of Jenkinson's foremost social-housing projects, photographed in 1943.
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