We note with no small indignation that Mr. Arnold Mitchell,
the architect who built the model £110 cottage at Merrow Common, was fined 20s. and costs by the Chelmsford magistrates because he did not, previous to building a similar cottage near his own house in Essex, deposit plans with the Rural District Council. Mr. Mitchell did not wish to let the cottage, but built it to serve as a working model for other cottages. Very naturally, therefore, he did not think that he was acting illegally in not depositing the plans. Yet apparently because it was called a cottage he was fined. Surely the reasonable plan would have been not to prosecute him, but to inform him that the house could not be inhabited, as he had not obeyed the by-laws. Suppose a rural archaeologist were to erect in his garden a model of an EAquimaux hut or of an Aztec cottage or even of "the dwelling-place of primitive man" in the form of a wigwam on a platform in a pond, but bad no intention of living in it or letting anyone else do so, would the authorities have prosecuted such antiquarian effort because plans had not previously been deposited ? Seriously it is little short of an outrage that a public-spirited attempt like that made by Mr. Arnold Mitchell to decrease the cost of cottage-building should be met in this spirit by a public authority. We are sorry that the magistrates did not take a less technical view of the law, and restrict the fine to a farthing. In any case, however, it is the prosecutors who are to be blamed rather than the Bench.
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