MODERN CITY LIFE.
IT is becoming every day more widely felt that some large efforts must be made ,to abate the evils that result from our town life. Whether very largo cities like London and Chicago ought to exist at all is a point that may well be argued; but we are here dealing with facts as they are. Our chief hope for the future is that water and electric motor-power will probably be substituted for steam, with the twofold result that the ugliness inseparable from steam industry may be eliminated, and that the tendency to enormous human aggregations may be arrested, and that population, whether it continues to grow or whether it remains stationary, may at least be more equally distributed. We quite admit that, short of this great change, all measures to be taken can only be regarded as mere palliatives ; but unless our town popula. tion is to degenerate in a serious way, some speedy palliatives there must be. Our design is to show in what directions the various reforms are most urgently needed.
The first change we require is structural. English towns are mostly of an antique type, even when they are practically new. We can recall two or three industrial towns, such as Barrow, which are laid out on a modern and adequate scale; but, as a whole, narrow streets are the rule. These were well enough under mediaeval con- ditions, but they are singularly ill-fitted for the needs of modern life. Yet in such places as Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Salford, the majority of the streets are mere dingy lanes, some of them congested with traffic, all of them with a vitiated atmosphere, where influenza and tuberculosis find their victims with a fatal ease. We do not say that every English town should be like Washing- ton, a "city of magnificent distances " with avenues 150 ft. wide; for, though we fully believe in such a plan, we know its adoption is impossible in England. But if we take the figures contained in Dr. Poore's " Rural Hygiene," we might well insist that they should form the standard of cubic feet of air for every human being to which our local authorities should work up. Large structural alterations would not only improve the appearance of our large towns—a change in itself desirable enough, heaven knows—but it would lower our city death-rate, and, what is still more important, elevate our health-rate, and make life more worth living for millions of our working popula- tion. Happily, no destruction of beautiful old buildings is involved in such changes, for these buildings are con- tained usually in such non-industrial centres as York, Oxford, Shrewsbury ; our industrial towns are usually innocent of any antique beauty. They are towns made purely for industrial convenience, and we can cut and carve them for the sake of those who live in them without the sacrifice of art. It is one of the titles to fame of the Emperor Trajan that he decided what should be the pro. portion of height in buildings to space in streets in ancient Rome; and what he did by the exercise of autho- rity for the health of the Roman citizen should be done by our self-governing municipalities for the modern English toiler condemned to spend his life, not in a magnificent city like Rome, but in a very dreary and commonplace town at best, and at worst, alas! too often a very hotbed of physical and moral ailments.
Along with the widening of streets and the due propor- tion between height and width, goes the adequate pro- vision of open spaces, parks, and gardens. Thanks more to private generosity than to public foresight, many of our towns contain some excellent parks and spaces. London is far better provided than most of the large in- dustrial towns, and, indeed, in some parts of London there is nothing whatever to complain of. Towns like Bristol and Southampton have immense stretches of beautiful natural common, Oxford and Cambridge have their beautiful College meadows, courts, and gardens, York and Chester have their unique walks around the old walls. But, speaking generally, our large towns are deficient, woefully deficient, in fresh air blowing over free spaces amid refreshing verdure. Not a single Continental city, however narrow the central streets, which are maintained as relics of its past, but provides charming nooks of greenery where the bees hum amid the flowers and the breezes sigh amid the trees, and the tired man on the rustic bench can forget his cares for a moment and breathe air purer at least than that which reaches his garret. One recalls in memory scores of such places in which he has dreamed away an idle hour,—we call it idle, but Nature helps us often to grow more in these idle hours than in days of crowded bustle and industry. Now most of our large towns are not remarkable for such spaces, and it is high time that every available plot which falls vacant and is suitable for the purpose should be acquired by our municipalities as a necessary lung for the big town. Our numerous rich men who have made their fortunes out of the largo industrial towns might well spend a, part of those fortunes on buying up such spaces, and so earn the blessing of posterity.
The next question is that of the prevention of smoke. Indeed, this is possibly the very first question of all for England, which is becoming the smokiest, dirtiest country on the planet. Even such parks as there are in our big industrial towns are spoiled by smoke. Put your hand on the leaf of a tree or the border of a flower-bed, and it is blackened with the dirt. There has always been present to the mind of the writer a sense of dreariness when walking in the parks of Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Blackburn, and other places, due almost solely to the murky atmosphere and the knowledge that every natural object was dirty with the foul smoke. If the effect of smoke on natural objects is pernicious, still worse is its effect on the normal man, though one does hear occasionally of alleged benefits derived by people from the sulphurous fumes of the Underground Railway. That the smoke nuisance can be dealt with has been Proved by the experience of such a great firm as that of Brunner, Mond, and Co., where the smoke is not only consumed, but a profit is made out of the economy of what was formerly a waste product. We do not think any more law is needed on the matter ; enough law exists if it were only rigidly enforced. But the influence exerted by many large firms in industrial towns has hitherto been directed against enforcement, and the appearance on most days of places like Leeds and Oldham is horrible and depressing in the extreme, while their unhealthiness is plain to every one who knows that the human organism needs fresh air and sunlight if it is to resist disease. In London the smoke problem arises more from the presence of hundreds of thousands of kitchen chimneys than from big mills and factories, and here some form of co-opera- tive or associated kitchens would seem to be among the reforms most urgently needed.
The question of cheap and rapid transit is connected intimately with the big city problem, especially as it affects that contact of children with Nature which is so vital. If it is essential that children should be born and brought up in towns, it is no less essential that a con- siderable part of their lives should be spent in the fresh air, amid greenery and the songs of birds. The city arab who never saw a, cow in a green meadow, or heard the song of the lark as it soared into the blue, is the most dreadful product and portent of our civilisation. We do not see why, in large cities, Board-schools should not be built, where possible, in adjoining country districts, where the land can be bought cheaply. Suburban trains which bring business men into town in the morning and return empty could be utilised for taking children out to the schools in the country at very low or nominal season rates, and bringing them back in the afternoon before the business men return. Either this must be or we must confine our towns purely to mills, shops, and warehouses, and build up large out- lying zones of healthy dwellings for the people, sur- rounded by trees and ample spaces, such as the late Mr. Pullman built for his workpeople. In either case, the provision for speedy transit, especially by electric trac- tion, becomes a question of the first magnitude. We are on the threshold of the twentieth century, and we can no longer act as though we were at the beginning of the nineteeenth. The industrial revolution of our time demands a corresponding revolution in our treat- ment of the urgent physical problems of life.
Previous page
