HOUSING
THE Minister of Health last week a. Dundee con- firmed the Prime Minister's statement lately made in Glasgow that scarcely any improvement was to be found in Scottish housing, and additional encouragement must be given there out of British pockets. In England, however—and we hope that in his mind he included Wales—we had turned the corner. They cannot have meant that effort can safely be slackened, but a little more is at last being done than meets the normal yearly demand, something towards remedying that stagnation in cottage building which began when Mr. Lloyd George's. financial proposals threw property owners into a panic and ,continued while the War engrossed our energies. After the Armistice the Kaiser ceased from troubling us, but the weary found no rest in the homes for heroes which Mr. Lloyd George gaily bade us build. A " re- actionary " policy is an impossible one for a politician to recommend, but after the years of progressive wastage we should have been happy if we could have climbed back again up the steep place down which we and the rest of Europe had rushed. If we had shown in 1919 a spirit of literal reaction to 1909 we might have made more real progress now. As it was, labour was short, the training of new recruits languished (we need not now impute the blame for that), and costs mounted to prohibitive heights. The Government, local authorities, Press and public wrangled about what ought to be done, who ought to do it, who could avoid paying for it, whci could be made to pay for it for other people's benefit. Is this an unfair summary of earnest efforts to hammer out successive Housing Bills on t7ie Parliamentary anvil ? Naturally private enterprise, which with comparatively small exceptions had built every inhabited house in Great Britain, hesitated to pick up again, with any con- fidence, the hod that it had dropped years before. Encouraged by subsidies or with sanguine hopes of profit it did build vastly more houses than those built by local authorities who were pressed successfully to make some conspicuous efforts. We must now admit that these slow-moving bodies are showing more results. By the sides of country roads one sees the work of quite small District Councils, sometimes an eyesore, sometimes a quite tidy, well set-out little colony : at the other end of the scale great towns such as the London County Council's scheme at Becontree. We wonder that Scotland lags behind. She is thought to have some quite pro- gressive municipal bodies, though some spend an uncon- scionable time in squabbling. She has patriotic hard workers of ability like the Duke of Atholl and Lord Weir, who will surely mend matters or stir others to productive rivalry.
The Ministry of Health has the advantage of the advice of Mr. Raymond Unwin, who did so much in the past for the First Garden City and gave much good advice to the organizers of the Cheap Cottages Exhibition held at Letchworth in 1905. He would admit, we believe, that lie also learnt something from that Exhibition. One lesson seems to have been that a number of standing cottages is far more attractive than any volumes of plans and specifications. So the Ministry has organized a small exhibition of cottages inside the Exhibition at Wembley, inviting builders to put up cottages which they will reproduce in large numbers, and asking repre- sentatives of local authorities to inspect them. Many of our readers will remember a delightful thing about the 1905 Exhibition, how on the day that it closed a hundred and more families were ready to occupy the " Exhibits " and have, we hope, lived happily in them ever since. The Wembley cottages are built on the floor of a huge covered structure, called nowadays a Palace. They will all have to disappear. Some which called on us to observe how quickly their frames, slabs, blocks, &e., could be run up (no contemptible quality in our emergency) will also demonstrate how quickly they can be dissected and rearticulated elsewhere.
Though they will have housed no homeless folk as yet, they must have shown their value to many concerned with housing. Besides rapidity in construction, several sig- nificantly claim as a merit that they eliminate the brick- layer or plasterer or both. Cheapness has evidently been studiously_sought, but the casual enquirer who has no contracts for houses by the score to dangle before the exhibitors will find, perhaps inevitably, great difficulty- in getting an accurate idea of the cost of some of these types. Probably none could be habitable until £400 had been spent upon itt There are one er two good examples of planning, but most do not seem to have been designed by architects skilled in cottage-planning. For instance several have the old fault of the stairs being so arranged that all "- slops," &c., from the bedrooms must be carried through the parlour or living-room, a most undesirable and quite unnecessary arrangement. Hove to avoid it is one of the lessons that Mr. Unwin must have learned twenty years ago, • - - • - -- We have little space to deal with these cottages in particular. - The- Dennis-Wild • steel-framed -house has- at single-course brick wall up to the first floor, outside which; with an air-space between, are slabs of coke breeze. This should make a good, non-conducting wall. Messrs. John Laing and Sons use " ferrocrete " and asbestos sheeting,1 and the plan of their bedrooms is among the best. The Universal Housing Co. use poured concrete reinforced. by steel rods for their framed house. The concrete is poured between permanent " shuttering " of Poilite; Asbestos Cement sheets. • The " Tibbenham " cottage is not quite so fanciful as it tries to appear with its claim to resemble a sixteenth-century house, on which we ought to have improved. But at £1,000 a pair the bedroom accommodation is poor. The Festiniog Slate Quarries Association exhibit an " All-Slate " cottage costing L425,1 with good bedrooms, but only two upstairs. The plans with very slight alterations are those of Mr. Williams-, Ellis's cottage reproduced in the Spectator of February 21st; 1914. He built a cottage on this plan of timber, brick and cement at Merrow, at the astonishing cost of £105, al wonderful tour de force, but, as he would admit, the plan was for a single detached cottage. Messrs. Henry Boot' and Sons have a timber house of some merit, though of the three bedrooms only one is a really convenient room: It is weather-boarded up to the first storey and shingled above, with ruberoid and matchboard inside. Anotheri steel-framed house illustrates the patents of the Aerated Concrete Co., whose particularly light blocks seem to have been used successfully in Sweden. Mr. Tarrant, the Byfleet builder, is the latest exhibitor, having put up a' bungalow wh:_li was finished only a few days ago. He. introduces one of the most promising methods. He has a large breeze block for the outer walls. The blocks are so shaped and hollowed that it is possible, when they, are properly bonded, to pour in liquid . cement which: solidifies the whole wall both vertically and horizontally.; We hope that these new methods and materials have been carefully studied and will result in stimulating quick and cheap building. If the year 1905, when the Cheap Cottages Exhibition gave a great impetus and about: 100,000 houses were built, can be taken to mark an adequate annual output, and if we have turned the corner towards reducing the accumulated shortage, then more than 100,000 must have been built in the past year. We trust that this is so and also that the rural shortage in particular is being overcome. We should like to see the, rural demand supplied before the urban because, if the needs are otherwise equal, a rural supply does something, to check the flight to the towns which we deplore ford other reasons. Let us add that the urgency of supplying houses to the homeless must not blind us to bigger ten-, dencies. The population grows ; more and more land is' taken from food production to house food consumers more and more is needed, and some is taken, for recreation grounds. The virgin soil of the Dominions cries aloud for British families to come and till it, but while security of income from insurance or other relief, if not from earnings, increases, and security of housing is im- proved, the answer to that call from overseas grows fainter and fainter.
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