LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
London Housing Standards
SIR,—I read with interest your article on the housing situation, and I should be grateful if you would permit me to publish in your columns this account of the inadequate hottsing standards applied by at least one local authority.
1 am an assistant lecturer, and I live with my mother (who has paid rates in the L.C.C. area for some thirty years). We find our present accommodation inadequate. Although the flat officially contains three rooms, only one of these is fully habitable, as of the others one is very dark and the other very small and without any means of heating. I have therefore little privacy in which to study. Moreover, there is no bath and the only means of lighting is gas.
Since my income is not equal to the unsubsidised rents of the London area, nor my resources to " furnishings and fittings," I applied for improved accommodation to the L.C.C., explaining the circumstances and my need for privacy in which to do my work. The reply was that we could go on the waiting-1:st but that my mother and I were not entitled to more than two rooms, i.e. one living-room and one bedroom.
Although I expected to have to wait, and would not have been much surprised to find my application rejected altogether. I was not pre- pared for such an insulting offer. Whatever the shortage of housing, it is not logical to offer anyone accommodation even more limited than that of which she already complains as inadequate. And in any event, is it humane to expect two adult women, of widely differing ages and habits, to share one bedroom ? Is there to be no decent privacy in the Welfare State ? And is no one in Central London to have space in which to pursue professional avocations until he has attained an income proportionate to the economic rents ?
Difficult as the situation may be, the minimum accommodation at which to aim seems to me to be one roomy bed-sitting room for each person, together with one common-room for each household (and of course the usual offices). At least one Labour Council, however, finds this excessive.—Yours faithfully,
60 Farringdon Road Buildings, London, E.G.!.
CECILY CLARK.
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