Clearing the Slums—II. The Solution

BY ALFRED C. BOSSOM.

N the last issue of the Spectator I gave a general outline of the slum clearance problem in London. It is still a problem, and a very grave one, in spite of the splendid work done for many years past by the L.C.C. and many of the Borough Councils—work that I do not believe has been equalled by any other group of municipal bodies in the world.

Roughly, the worst remaining 160 acres of buildings must be pulled down and remade. Their present population of sixty thousand will have to be housed as near as possible to the sites they have reluctantly relinquished. Some fifty thousand of them, after being temporarily provided for in the neighbourhood, will be able to return to those sites and to the well-planned, five-storey tenement houses that will have been erected on them. The remaining ten thousand or so will not be able to return without inducing another attack of over- crowding (that perennial breeder of slums), and for them permanent accommodation must be sought elsewhere. No vacant land (or very little), no convertible buildings (or very few) arc available, and the difficulties of the whole enterprise, if we continue to adhere to routine methods, will embarrass even London, while the time taken by it, unless we are very careful and wage a really effective war on overcrowding, will be enough to bring into being almost as many slums as we are out to destroy.

Yet I have committed myself to showing that this vast undertaking can be carried through in about eight years, at a cost less than half the £21,000,000 which the L.C.C. is prepared to spend on its housing programme during the next five years, and by the adoption of practices and principles which will leave a permanently beneficial mark on all public building schemes and on our methods of handling the slum problem wherever it exists.

First as to the land that will be required for housing the dispossessed families while their present homes are being torn down and reconstructed. As such land virtually does not exist, it will have to be created, and the only way in which it can be created is by roofing (as it were) the open railway cuts, and building upon them. This is a feat which to-day is almost an engineering commonplace. It can be accomplished without a minute's interruption of the train service and with a completely successful solution of all the problems of stability, ventilation, noise and vibration.

At present the space above the sunken railway tracks that run hither and thither all over London is just unremunerative and not over-wholesome atmosphere. Cover part of it in with a concrete and steel mat, resting on steel stanchions placed between the tracks (a Mat that in New York carries sixty-storey buildings with perfect security), and it at once becomes most valuable property. Moreover, it gives us, from the slum clearance standpoint, just the elbow room we need. The first step, then, is to negotiate with the railways for their air rights—the -companies -should jump at this as being money for nothing—and so proceed to create at the selected points the foundations of whatever buildings, open spaces, or thoroughfares we may have in mind. .

That solves the land problem speedily, and it is noteworthy that no other solution than this is immediately practicable. The next step is to determine the broad lines on which the decanting of the slum dwellers and the re-erection of their homes shall develop. I suggest that the right clue to this problem is furnished by the estimated number of emigres,. say 10,000, for whom dwelling-space cannot be found on their old sites even after reconstruction. Whatever is done in the way of rehousing and rebuilding, these 10,000 will still have to be catered for. Since we have to end with them we may as well begin with them, and make them the pivot of the plan.

That is to say, it seems sound policy, the moment we have fabricated building property by covering over the railway tracks, to erect upon it sufficient tenement houses to accommodate 10,000 people. There might be five of these rehousing groups in different localities with a thousand people in each and ten smaller groups hold- ing five hundred each at other points—their capacity and site depending on the needs of the neighbourhood.

When these buildings arc completed and equipped at all. points for occupation, the first 10,000 from the con- demned slums nearby would be decanted into them. Simultaneously the homes they had quitted would be torn down and the process of rebuilding set a-going.

As soon as the new tenements on the old sites were finished, the 10,000 would move back to them, leaving the buildings over the railway tracks empty. These would at once be cleaned and prepared for, the reception of the second 10,000, whose slum homes in their turn would be demolished and good new tenements erected on the old sites.

Repeating this process five times, you move 50,000 people out of the slums into the buildings over the railway tracks, and then back again into the newly constructed, infinitely improved and permanent homes awaiting them almost on the very spot where they lived before. The final batch of 10,000, which is the estimated surplus that could not be " repatriated " without over- crowding, would then take possession of the supra- railway buildings which, having served their purpose as a clearing house, would settle down as ordinary tenements- I believe that from the time work began on the railway tracks to the time when the last 10,000 were comfortably housed would take eight years. I am confident that we should thus have broken for ever the back of the slum clearance problem of London.

The advantages of some such plan as this are that it tackles the. question of the slums as a whole, not in a piecemeal or haphazard fashion, but continuously and systematically till the job is done. . This method of approach brings with it benefits that all who have been concerned with big building schemes will very- quickly appreciate. For instance, I can assert without hesitation that the moment this plan was adopted, and the designs for the requisite buildings accepted, it would be possible to estimate very quickly not only the total amount of materials required, but the week, perhaps even the very day—even though it might be five or six years distant—when each item would have to be delivered.

It is this method of tabulating all the necessary information well in advance, of determining what will he needed in the way of bricks, cement and everything else before any work at all has been done on the foundations, and then of working to a fixed time and progress schedule which allows the whole undertaking to go forward with the smoothness of clockwork—it is this common sense and orderly way of doing things that has made building in Canada and the United States an exact science.

I know of no reason why we should not be equally efficient and foreseeing over here. Think what it would mean for the building industry if our authorities were to map out, down to the minutest detail, a slum clearance programme extending over the next eight years, and on that basis were to approach the manufacturers of building material and the contractors with an offer of huge orders at fair prices and the promise of uninterrupted employ- ment during the whole period !

What savings could be effected by stipulating for standardised doors, for instance, uniform interior metal work, and a thousand similar details ! What an exhilaration it would be to watch the progress of the enterprise from point to point, with every operation synchronizing with every other one in accordance with the prescribed time-table with delays and unwanted accumulations abolished, and with no one getting in anybody's way ! And how the. ratepayer would rejoice when he found that at least 20 per cent. had been knocked off his building bill !

[We sent a proof of Mr. Bossom's article to Mr. Bernard Shaw, asking for his comments. He answered that his days as a journalist were over ; but appended the following observations which we publish with his permission.-- En. Spectator.] "This device is a little more practicable than my old proposal to cut a straight channel for the Thames through London and pay for it by the enormous site value of the reclaimed serpentine bed of the river as it now runs and of a motor-boat traffic like that of Geneva, which pays only when the water. is the shortest way.

But the railways have found out the value of their sky property and built £1,000 a year flats on it at Baker Street (Chiltern Court). They will open their mouth3 pretty wide when Mr. Bossom comes into the market. He will then realize that his resort to them is ridiculously unnecessary. There are miles and acres of London streets, some of them even as central as Westminster and Waterloo occupied by mean little houses of two storeys which might just as well be piles of flats like Whitehall Court or the new buildings in Park Lane and Berkeley-Stratton streets, to say nothing of Queen Anne's Mansions.

The only real fundamental remedy is the municipal- ization of city sites and city buildings. At present the authorities may build houses for the poor but not for the rich : that is, they are confined to the refuse of the commercial builders ; and when they buy the land for this they have to humbug the ratepayers by charging in their accounts, not what they have actually to pay, but a fictitious figure assumed to be the value of the land for housing the working class.

'Decanting,' except in police vans, is not usually practicable. The slum dweller cannot afford the new flats ; but the people who can, vacate their old lodgings and crowd into the new buildings. The slum dwellers drift into the vacated rooms. It is a sort of musical chairs game.

The vestries—now borough councils—have had enor- mous powers of cleaning up slums since the middle of last century. Why they have seldom tried to exercise them twice, and mostly have not exercised them at all, is explained in my Common Sense of Municipal Trading published by The Fabian Society." G. B. S.