Darkest England And the Way Out
ONE of the greatest tasks of ponstructive statesmanship to-day is concerned with re-housing. The Govern- ment have a scheme ; we do not know the details, but we hope that when they are published they will include :
(a) the immediate re-conditioning of such slum houses as cannot be abolished until the shortage of cheap houses is made up. (b) provisions for building 200,000 houses a year until there are sufficient houses for the poorer class of workers. (c) a survey of the housing needs of Great Britain, so that the work of clearance and reconstruction can be undertaken on a definite plan.
The latter point is important, because the more we study the slum problem the more does it become obvious that piecemeal efforts at amelioration, while valuable as showing what can be done under capable management, leave the heart of the problem untouched. Voluntary associations have proved and are proving that slum Property can be bought, rebuilt, and administered with capital paying 4 per cent. interest The straightening out of the muddle is practical politics, therefore, realizable (say) within twenty years. Moreover, the workthat Octavia Hill accomplished in looking after 8,500 tenants is now being carried on by the Association of Women House Property Managers, with 85,000 tenants, and there is no reason why it should not be extended twenty-fold to bring within the sphere of its beneficent activities every poor family in England. Private enterprise, then, is doing a good work, but we cannot expect the philanthropic men and women of England to accomplish by themselves the re-housing and de-urbanization of the whole country. That is the duty and the privilege of this and future Governments and can only be undertaken on the requisite scale by the nation looking beyond party politics. The Conservative Party, however, has a great opportunity before it in inaugurating such a scheme, for Mr. Neville Chamberlain has an exceptional grasp of the subject and rare organizing ability.
Town-planning (a possibly unfortunate word, for the planning must be done in the country before the town has grown) should be an integral part of any and all schemes of slum clearance. In this connexion the late William Booth wrote prophetically of the need " to grow a new nervous system for the body politic." In great centres of population there comes an atrophy of the social conscience, as if the body had grown so unwieldy that the limbs could no longer send messages to the brain. It may well be that towns of about 100,000 inhabitants, and garden cities such as Letchworth and Welwyn will be the ideal of the future. London is so vast that the plight of its 600,000 overcrowded citizens remains dim and distant. Mayfair does not know. how Shoreditch lives ; we still tolerate a huddle of basement dwellers in Westminster Queen's Gate is a different world from the Goldborne Ward in the same borough, where the density is 288 persons per acre, Considered in detail, the complexities of re-planning London are appalling, but details have a way of settling themselves once the main principles are fixed. All are agreed that the slums must go ; the tide nears its flood, and if a well-planned scheme be launched here and now it will lead on to fortune both for the Government and for ' 3,000,000 of our brothers and sisters living without homei.
In some parts of London and other congested areas, the building of tenement houses will be necessary, in other places the making of arterial roads, creating frontage values that would pay at least in part for the better houses required, will assist in removing the filth of a century— for that is what the slums really are. In theory, the Local Authority has already sufficient power to condemn • insanitary houses or areas, to forbid overcrowding and to inaugurate housing schemes. But the admitted injustices of the present compensation law and fear of raising the rates provide excuses for the inertia common to all public bodies. Nothing would be more likely to stimulate Local Authorities and to arouse public opinion that the publication of the scheme which we believe the Govern- ment has in readiness in such a form as could be easily understood by "_the man in the street." He or she will want to know how much the scheme will cost, how many houses will have to be built and the date by which the . Government expects that all our people will be housed decently. In - short, as we suggested last week, and previously, a new Domesday Book of slum areas is -required for Great Britain. _ - In the preparation of such- a report the Ministry of. 'Health would accomplish more than a compilation of statistics, valuable as such information would be by itself. It would also apply the whip of publicity to the slum landlords, for the publication of their names and addresses together. with an official description of the property they owned, would shock the public conscience and compel the Local Authorities to carry out the reforms which they often have the power but not the courage to 'accomplish.
True, not all slum landlords are to blame for the houses from which they draw their rents. Some are poor and uneducated, incapable, therefore, both mentally and financially, of the necessary readjustments. Others are the victims of circumstance or bad tenants. But anyone who receives money from the congestion, promiscuity, dirt and depravity in which so many of our women and children are still compelled to live- has an account to settle with his conscience that can only be squared by unceasing vigilance and activity for refoim.
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