[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In your very businesslike
essay on The Slum and the Emergency House " (Spectator, November 22nd, 1024) you do not suggest the use of existing empty houses as quarters for slum-dwellers while the slums arc being demolished and rebuilt. Something in the nature of war-time regulations appears, as you point out, to be imperative if the problem is to be successfully coped with. But it seems to me that if such arbitrary powers are to be used it would be better and cheaper to use them for the temporary commandeering of the countless large houses which are standing empty all over England than for adding to the numbers of makeshift dwellings, which are already too great.
One town well known to me—an inland watering place which has, like many others, a weakness for calling itself a garden town—contains in one quarter acres of the filthiest slums in England. The other side of its centre, and less than a mile away, there are whole blecks of pretentious old- fashioned houses of three or more storeys almost uninhabited. The aggregate of them cannot be much below a thousand— probably more. As for the great country houses which are going to rack and ruin all over England, they are a tragedy. It seems a pity that still more of the dwindling countryside should be scarred by hutments and temporary dwellings while even in the centre of London thousands of houses are standing tenantless because the owners are unable or unwilling to let them at a reasonable rent. If all these houses were requisitioned for the duration of the housing shortage, and an economic rent paid to their owners by the central authority, who would collect it from the tenants and be responsible for their dilapidations, the problem would be half solved.—
Previous page
