Never So Humble
By KENNETH J. ROBINSON
WHEN I emerged from the recent five-day conference on housing held in London by the Royal Institute of British Architects, I under- stood why the Ministry of Housing behaves in a similar way to A. A. Milne's shipwrecked sailor. You may remember that the old boy had so many things to think about, like 'the hooks (for his food) and the spring (for his thirst)—that he never 'could think what he ought to do first.' But the resemblance stops there, Milne's sailor just 'basked on the shingles—until he was saved.' The Ministry does at least flounder about a, bit. With the help of the Treasury it does many strange, well-intentioned things in its anxiety to bring immediate happiness to all but the ten million people living in sub-Standard conditions.
For example, it subsidises the rents of local authority housing in such a way that according to the calculations of one of the conference speakers (Coventry's city treasurer, A. H. Marshall),, most people are spending a smaller proportion of their incomes on rents than they or their fathers did before the war. It is not, perhaps, irrelevant to mention that the country is paying out 40 per cent. more on tobacco and alcohol than on' housing and water and is well on the way to a state of affluence when many more of its subsidised tenants will own at least one car.
Some of us, as I was reminded by Professor D. V, Donnison, of the London School of Economics, have a pound or two extra each week for tobacco, alcohol or petrol since we bought houses and earned ourselves.tax rebates from a grateful Government. The people less well looked after—apart from those in slum conditions, where relief still comes far too slowly—are those who can neither qualify for council accommoda- tion nor afford a deposit for a private' house:,. Theyare obliged to pay exorbitant rents—often to landlords of some of the 190,000 houses a year that are said to be rapidly wearing out. And unless something is done quickly there will be an increasing number of tenants available for this kind of property. Because local authority houses and fiats are being used more and more for slum clearance, the children of families living in council housing today will find there is not. enough of this well-equipped and comparatively cheap accommodation for them to move into.
How can we cope with this up-and-coming generation as well as the slum-dwellers and the families living in deteriorating property? Pro- fessor Donnison's estimate of our needs in the next eighteen years (similar, to other estimates produced, for this period) means—as the con- ference was told that we must build 330,000 houses a year. It is a sign of the country's lack of a real housing policy that delegates to the conference meekly accepted the suggestion that even such a small increase on our present housing output would be unlikely.
Although the conference, sponsored in colla- boration with the Housing Ministry, was held to discuss the architecture of housing, it revealed so many faults in the present administrative set-up that Leonard Vincent, architect-planner of Stevenage New Town, said in his summing-up that architects ought to hold a proper conference on housing policy—perhaps an annual one. Three of the main faults—apart from the hit-and-miss system for financing housing—are the Govern- ment's failure to (a) allow each local authority to work out a long-term (and therefore cost- saving) programme; (b) guide each authority on financial matters and (c) insist on all private developers making use of qualified designers.
To take the last fault first; it is ludicrous that the Housing Minister, Dr. Charles Hill, should now be going around the country complaining about the 1928-style house plans used by private developers who ought, in his opinion, to be 'employing architects. When his Ministry let the private builder loose again after the war it should have done so with a built-in proviso about the use of qualified designers Of course, it is equally absurd that many of the country's 1,500 local authorities put up housing designed in a borough engineer's depart- ment and that a lot of them—even those who do use architects--spend more money than they need by building high. The RIBA conference heard some alarming statistics from D. W. Nunn (the Ministry's chief quantity surveyor), who showed charts to illustrate how easy it is for a local authority to make a wrong decision to build high and to waste as much as £300 on each dwelling.
The proposed publication of charts of this kind as ready-reckoners for public architects is part of a new, brighter policy by the Ministry which has recently circulated a report, prepared for it by a sub-committee of housing experts, recommending the introduction of better standards in such matters as' room sizes, heating etc. (Hanes for :Today and Tomorrow). There has probably never been such a comprehensive assessment of the design of homes as this one, which is worked out in relation not only to people's basic needs, but also to comfortable standards of living in an increasingly affluent and leisure-seeking society. If its findings had been made obligatory instead of optional we could look forward to slums being replaCed by housing that would be more than merely adequate.
Dr. Hill has said chat some of the report's find- ings may eventually become mandatory. Unlike Milne's old sailor he really did think what he ought to do first. It seemed best, he said, to publish the recommendations before deciding who would pay for their implementation. If enough local authorities 'demanded improve- ments, their requests' would be sympathetically heard.
More recently, at the housing conference, he changed his tune and asked if architects could find a way of reaching the recommended improved standards without spending extra money. The answer to this is that if Dr. Hill cares to make life more tolerable for local authorities, they might be able to build more houses more cheaply. At present they are badly hampered because they can never plan far enough ahead. Although it takes each of them an average of five years to complete dwellings from the time it decides to acquire land for building, the Government insists on making an annual allocation of housing. A three-year programme would help architects to plan ahead and to keep costs down.
Even so, it seems ridiculous that problems which are common to 1,500 local authorities should be independently solved by 1,500 design departments working from scratch. There is a lot to be said for the decision made by the cities of Leeds, Sheffield and Hull, which have formed a consortium to deal with a joint annual pro- gramme .of 4,000 to 5,000 houses, It is possible that they will follow the example of several towns in the Midlands which got together to form the now-famous CLASP system of factory- made schools, with an astonishingly good result both in design and, in cost-saving.
Prefabrication is, in fact, the eventual answer to many of our housing problems, though so far it has not been proved particularly efficient or cheap for domestic building. Oliver Cox, whose Architects Research Group at the Ministry of Housing has adapted the CLASP system for building old people's homes, is at present working on a similar system for ordinary housing. He is confident—as he told the RIBA conference--that a change from site building to factory construc- tion is inevitable. This will, however, be a slow affair because housing constitutes about 30 per cent. of the total output of an industry which includes many small family businesses and a vast number of people producing and supplying materials that are used in outmoded processes. Strangely enough, as Mr. Cox pointed out, it is difficult to get the cost of a factory-made house down to that of the traditionally-constructed one- or two-storey houses. The small house still repre- sents 80 per cent, of. the country's housing output, and because the industry has been built around it the average price of £1,850 for building a three- bedroomed house offers fierce competition to industrialised newcomers.
Why prefabricate at all? Because this is obviously the only way we shall get better- looking buildings that will go up quicker and last longer. And because building operatives, like everyone else, will eventually demand cleaner working conditions.
If the. Housing Ministry's recommendations are followed the house of tomorrow will be different not only in construction, but also in the way it.is used—both inside and out. The interior will be adaptable: that is to say, removable walls will be provided (as in a scheme soon to be started at West Ham) so that room sizes can be changed as children get older and the family's needs change. And the exteriors will be devised so that pedestrians and cars are well separated. This excellent idea is already old fiat at places like the new towns of Basildon, Stevenage and Cumbernauld and in housing estates at Coventry. In fact Coventry's city architect, Arthur Ling, has this kind of planning so well under control that he told the RIBA conference he thought all housing schemes that were not based on the principle of segregating pedestrians and vehicles should be refused planning permission.
Curiously enough if we' do permit the motor- car—a phenomenon only recently discovered by town-planners—to bully us into finding new lay- outs for housing estates we shall automatically get better housing. The buildings themselves may not all be architectural masterpieces, but because we shall be forced to build to larger comprehen- sive plans, they will be designed to have a pleasant relationship to each other and to the paving or green spaces between them. Without any self-conscious attempts to imitate the past we shall find ourselves living in the sort of surround- ings that give us so much pleasure in the small squares, the passages and the narrow lanes of towns built before the motor-car was invented.
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