Homes For Heroes

By KATHERINE WHITEHORN

WHEN we build,' said Ruskin, let us think that we build for ever.' One of the specula, five builders at the New Homes Show last week had pinned this edifying remark up above his stall; in that setting, it was an appalling thought. The Central Hall. Westminster, was appropriately divided for the show into a large number of cramped little boxes. Each showed architectural drawings in violent perspective, suggesting a $20,000 residential lot in California Heights, and photographs of intensely ordinary suburban villas—both representing the same houses. Fifteen thousand of them were actually for sale.

Every stall offered copious handouts. 'Bril- liantly designed by a team of young architects! Years ahead in design and construction!' sang one, of a building without central heating. An- other listed five sales items only : 'Partially land- scaped front garden; no road charges; insulating blanket in roof space; point for immersion heater; point for refrigerator.' One firm, and one only, had designed an all-electric house with double glazing, underfloor heating, and convincing statistics on low running costs: its price was no more than others in the same area.

One or two accessories were also on show : coloured photograph for a waste-disposal unit showed a busty brunette hanging over it in an advanced state of rapture, as, presumably, the body of her blackmailer was flushed away to eternity; a totem-pole of house names showed Gothic lettering on rustic pine : The Cedars, Treetops, La Tour.

Around the stalls the prospective buyers wandered like children at a fair, wondering how far the pennies would stretch. Most were young couples aching for a real, detached, permanent, mortgaged home of their own.

An electrician's wife from Kent was quite sure what she wanted most. 'A big kitchen,' she said. `That's the first thing. Insulation? Oh, I don't know about all that.'

'We'd like a three-bedroomed house,' her husband explained. 'But it's a question of what we can afford.' If their money would only buy a two-bedroomed house, it seemed, they would have one child instead of two.

Another couple, looking for anything up to £3,500 in greater London, had reached a state of controlled hysteria. 'We know it's short-sighted not to have built-in cupboards and proper heating and things,' they said. But it's a choice between having a house and not having a house, for us.

They won't let you specify—well, it's a seller's market, isn't it?' It certainly is, in the London area--except that it is even more of a seller's market for anyone with land. Within fifteen miles of central London there is no land at all; further out, it costs at least £1,000 a plot.

A sad-looking man leaned over an information desk. 'Is there anything at .EI.500-E1,800, Lon- don?' he asked forlornly. The girl flicked through her records. 'Basingstoke'?' she suggested without much hope.

Another man in the same predicament was stumping morosely from stall to stall, looking for a London house as cheap as the one he had just sold on the South Coast. 'They call it contempor- ary,' he said darkly. 'Open plan. Saves money on the inner walls, if you ask me.'

Of open plan, or genuine contemporary, there was almost none. A good many houses, however, had made some attempt to link one room with another to give an effect of space—one of the few hopeful trends. One large firm had designed a most attractive house with glass panels which enabled the sink-bound housewife to keep an eye on the kids at the telly.

`It's called the TV house.' the salesman ex- plained. 'It's a gimmick really. We put three or four of them on an estate of fifty ordinary ones— people come to see this, and we sell them the others. No, I wouldn't say styles had changed much since before the war—oh, we do put a bit of weather- hoarding on the outside and things like that: His firm does at least go in for insulation—a subject on which many builders seem as luke- warm as their clients are going to be. Chimneys are often placed on outside walls to ensure maxi- mum heat loss: pipes are trained up outside walls to satisfy the plumbers' union; there were plenty of houses in the show costing well over £5,000 which had no central heating at all.

'It's fantastic,' said a woman architect, her nerve ends rasped by almost everything she saw. 'There's hardly a single house here that isn't thirty years out of date by American or continen- tal standards. I suppose they do all have inside lavatories?. she turned belligerently to it salesman.

'Oh, you people,' he said testily. 'You come here and you tell us how to design this and how to design that; but all these things cost more. The price land is. you have to keep cost to the mini- mum or people wouldn't be able to afford houses at all.' He thought he had a good argument against central heating; he didn't realise—perhaps fortunately—that he had an equally good argu- ment against baths.

On the evidence of this show, it looks as if the `design' powers of council planning committees could well be scrapped. The meanest houses rear their ugly roofs without hindrance; it is only the enterprising designs that run into trouble. 'Ribbon development' has become a dirty word— but this only means that the development is tied in a graceless bow and called an 'estate': the effect is the same. The rules obviously don't work; without them, original designs would at least have an occasional chance to set a good example. Technical standards, on the other hand, could be stepped up: more national requirements on brick quality, insulation, plumbing positioning, would be all to the good. But how to make better use of our diminishing space remains the overwhelming problem.

We are an overcrowded island, and sooner or later something will have to be done about this thing of Inner Space. We could cram everyone into towering blocks of flats—but mothers above the fourth floor won't let Bobby go out to play. We could give up the idea of trees, grass and agriculture altogether. We could emigrate, or kill off half the population, or all the speculative builders; we could live underground, or in tents, or just stand. Obviously the best answer is a compromise: near-the-ground living that isn't only on-the-ground living. But of this, at the Homes Show, there was scarcely a sign.