FACTS AS FOUNDATIONS
Sta,—Mr. Osborn, who I revere as one or our most effective exponents ot planning, accuses me of being fact-deficient myself. He hazards in explanation that of the statistics that must daily reach me from all sorts of propaganda and other sources, more find a lodging in my waste-paper-basket than in my heao. True, all true! But it is just this uneasy fact-starvation that induces my insatiable craving for the really solid food of popular acceptance, as against the too slickly packed proprietary products of the half-dozen admirable societies that he lists, which, boldly labelled " FACTS " in the honest belief that they are such—taste to me,. none the less, just a bit synthetic.
I grant that my suspicions may be groundless, that these con- clusions may in fact be right (and how convenient that would be), but I do ask that we may have a final check-up by actual and immediate experiment under the different conditions of our new post-war world before we accept the say-so of anyone further removed from reality than the wage-earner's wife. Mr. Osborn himself has been a most acute and beneficent fact-finder, but Mr. Seebonm Rowntree's detailed studies of the condition and aspira- tions of the people of York clearly demonstrates how the facts of one year may be another's fiction. It is much, indeed, that planners should be as well agreed as Mr. Osborn declares, it will be even better if what they are agreed on should prove to be right. My only plea is tha, that should be put to actual test before we back their judgement to the extent of the hundreds of millions of pounds that they will rightly ask for. Once we are as sure as we can be, then let them go full steam ahead and as never before on the charted course that, whatever happens, F. J. Osborn will have helped to plot. Unlike my wretchedly prejudiced self, he justly prides himself on his objective scientific approach to planning problems, but his impressive achievements at Welwyn Garden City might well dazzle any man, and I wonder whether he is quite as detached an observer of actuality as he supposes. His summary of the key-ideas of the planning basis is unexceptionable, save where he says: Insist everywhere (italic mine) on human residential standards, including individual homes and gardens for families."
Mr. Osborn's name is honourably linked in the minds of most of us with the championship of individual homes and gardens as against any other mode of housing, but the words " insist " and " every- where " sound to my suspicious ears more like those of a pre- dedicated partisan than of one impartially awaiting the verdict of scientific research. The possibility that he may in fact be right in no way deters me from thus taunting him, as I know his invariable reaction to irritation is to produce some fresh pearl of high good
Previous page
