The Artizans Company was established in 1867 by William Austin, an illiterate who had begun his working life on a farm as a scarecrow paid 1d per day, and had worked his way up to become a drainage contractor. The company was established as a for-profit joint stock company, with the objective of building new houses for the working classes "in consequence of the destruction of houses by railroads and other improvements". The company aimed to fuse the designs of rural planned suburbs such as Bedford Park with the ethos of high-quality homes for the lower classes pioneered at Saltaire. Whilst earlier philanthropic housing companies such as the Peabody Trust and the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company focused on multi-storey blocks of flats in the inner cities, the Artizans Company aimed to build low-rise housing in open countryside alongside existing railway lines to allow workers to live in the countryside and commute into the city. The company attracted the attention of Lord Shaftesbury, who served as president until 1875. The company built and immediately sold a group of houses in Battersea, then still a rural village. The proceeds of the sale were used to purchase a plot of land in Salford for development, and by 1874 the company had developments in Liverpool, Birmingham, Gosport and Leeds.
London estates
The Artizans Company is best known for its four large housing estates built on the then-outskirts of London. The first was Shaftesbury Park, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea. The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen's Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on of land to the west of London, adjacent to the railway line out of Paddington, purchased from All Souls College, Oxford. A third London estate was planned at Cann Hall, and a site of was purchased. However, the Queen's Park project suffered serious mismanagement and fraud and in 1877 the company secretary William Swindlehurst and two others were found guilty of defrauding £9,312 from the project. The company was forced to raise rents and tenants were no longer permitted to buy their houses; by 1880 the company's finances had recovered sufficiently to allow further expansion. A third estate, Noel Park, was built near Wood Green north of London between 1883 and 1929, followed by a fourth in Streatham at Leigham Court. The slow take-up of available homes in Noel Park, particularly due to the Great Eastern Railway's refusal to offer third-class rail fares from the nearby Noel Park and Wood Green station, led the Company to begin building centrally located tenement blocks more similar to those of other model dwellings companies. Between 1885 and 1892, the Artizans Company built 1,467 dwellings in Central London and the West End, the first being the Portman Buildings in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, opened in 1888.
Diversification and divestment
In 1952, the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company was renamed the Artizans and General Properties Company Ltd. The combination of a taxation system biased against private property developments and legal restrictions on raising rents made the company's traditional model unprofitable, and it began to divest itself of its original low-rent developments and instead to sell vacant houses on the estates and to reinvest in non low-rent housing and commercial property, especially in the United States and Canada where depreciation before tax was permitted, and in Australia, Belgium and France. In 1966, ownership of the four original London estates was transferred to the respective local authorities, leaving 377 homes at Pinnerwood Park in Pinner as the last residential estate in Greater London owned by the company. In 1976, the Artizans Company, by then renamed Artagen Properties Ltd, became a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Life, and on, 3 February 1981, the company was renamed Sun Life Properties Ltd.
