The Modern Home Flats versus Houses ONE hundred and ten
years ago, according to the Oxford Dictionary, some misguided person first used the word flat " to describe a self-contained set of rooms on one floor—and therely did his fellow-countrymen a diSservice whose effects coe tirate to this day. One would have expected it to date from some thirty- or forty yea–r-s. later than 1824—when the uglification of England and of life had hardly begun. For there is something utterly-- drab • and uninspiring about the word, nor can _better be said of its lower-class counterpart, " tenement." • Today it is probable that the Incorporated Society of Auctioneers and Landed Property Agents (among others) would gladly 'give a pension for life to anyone who could suggest and populariie an agreeable substitute; But I . fear it is too late to -oust the unpleasing ward" itself : _we can only hope to modify its associations. And always in the van against us waves a banner flaunting the words " An Englishman's Home is his Castle." It occurs to few how false this sentiment is when applied to life today; The mediaeval castle was a .self-supporting as well as a self- contained dwelling. Even its 'sanitary system (nOv,-;,-as- a rule, romantically misdescribed as -" oubliettes.") owed nothing to local authority. Once its portcullis was-down and its draw-. bridge up, it could afford to forget the world outside, on which,; indeed,. it -depended for little bid news.' .TodaY life is veiy, different. NeWs is perhaps the one thing we can obtain limn an internal source--thanks to wireless ; in every other way we are far more dependent on the outer world than ever before. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred our light, water and sanitation are communally provided ; our food we grow. but a fraction ; the telephone keeps us in constant touch with the outer World ; our cars are waiting to whirl us out into it at any moment. There is little enough of castle life here, and hardly less of life as it was lived in the early nineteenth cen- tury. Our very homes are less fixed. In 1824 a man was born, began to work, married, settled down, and died—all, probably, within a twenty-mile circle. Today the average tenure of a house must be less than ten years, and even so the occupants may quite possibly spend more time away than at home.
These two changes, our growing dependence on outside services and our increasingly nomadic habits, have. had their effect in' determining what we nowask of our homes. The snobbery which insisted on a showy residence, well up to or above the owner's income, is practically dead, nor do we plant oaks in the confident belief that our grandchildren will fell them. Though few would agree with the bare wording of le Corbusier's definition, " A house is a machine for living in," yet his sentiments do express in essence exactly what most of us are looking for. We want our homes to be as efficient as possible. Three further reasons contribute to this : the servant problem, the speed at which life is lived and the fact that in almost everything around us except politics and inter- national finance we are becoming increasingly accustomed to efficiency.
Under the heading of efficiency I include, of course, economy of money no less than of movement and labour. Let us now examine the modern flat in some detail and see how it answers our requirements. In the first place, those responsible for its existence were probably able to buy the land more cheaply pro rata than would have been possible had it been split up into small plots. Then the building costs should have been much lower. -It may seem superfluous to point out that a flat, which shares certain of its floors, walls and ceilings with adjoining flats, costs—or should cost—less to build than a separate house ; but recent correspondence in the Press shows that this fact is by no means generally appreciated. In the same way, costs of upkeep (which obviously have to come out of the rent in the end, whatever the terms of the lease) are correspondingly reduced. -' So much for the rent—we will now see what other advantages can be offered. We arc all accustomed to the provision of communal gas, water, electricity, drains and telephone ; but we fail to realize the-extravagance of every house heating its own water. The flat offers another economy here with its communal supply, whether for central-heating or washing
purposes. Furthermore, its tenant may quite possibly be able to buy electricity at a specially low rate—lower than would be available to the individual house-owner.
These are the advantages of the flat calculable in hard cash : there may be others no less real, as we shall see. But before proceeding to these, let me try to dispose of one bogey which haunts the minds of many hovering on the brink of taking a flat—the penetration of noise from adjacent flats. It cannot be denied that in the past many blocks of flats have been built With insufficient insulation against noise. The old-fashioned lath-and-plaster ceiling beneath a boarded floor, for instance, 'is not enough to prevent the sound of a piano from being heard with unwelcome clearness by those above or below ; party-walls have been built with too great an- economy or unfortunate choice of materials. But such building practfee is -not normal today : it must be regarded as betraying bieffieiency on the part of the architect. There is a wide variety of effective sound-insulating materials at his disposal and the Statistics of sound-penetration have been worked out sufficiently well for all practical pur- poses. Even the much-maligned ferroconcrete building. can be rendered completely innocuous in this respect. Intending tenants should require a guarantee; before signing their
leases, that the flats are properly sound-Proof. Should the , . agent begin to talk vaguely of the remarkable sound-deadening properties of carpets and furniture, they should proceed with extreme caution.
In other respects the inhabitant of a modern flat may look for even greater privacy than is usually secured by the owner of a town-house. I should like to cite in this connexion a large block of flats a few miles from London at which I recently looked. The rents ranged from about £200 to 1400. The situation could hardly be bettered—a view south and west across three or four miles of open country which can never be built over. Prac- tically all the advantages which I have enumerated were inclUded. Let us assume for a moment that the same site has been split up into small plots and sold separately. What sort of a house could be built there to rent at £135 (f200 minus the rates) ? The answer is that if any house at all were possible, it would be small, jerry-built and surrounded by other little houses as unpleasant as itself. Its garden, if any, would be tiny, hemmed in by other tiny gardens and utterly lacking in privacy. The house itself would be over- looked through most windows, and almost every advantage of the superb site be lost. Compare now the positibn of a tenant in one of the flats. In rent and rates he pays the same ; but he has no exterior upkeep costs and his running costs are considerably lower. None of his windows is overlooked ; he has the use of a large and beautifully-kept garden (and, in this case, the use of tennis and squash courts) ; and his view is unimpaired by the sight of nasty little houses. If he wants to go away, he has only to close the front door (the modern flat, by the way, usually has a tradesman's door also), and the porter will keep an eye on it during his absence.
Put like this, the advantageS- of flat-life seem obvious— provided always that one can find the right flat. There is one further aspect, the sociological. We have lately realized that our large towns are unbearably congested. In a misguided attempt to cure this we are allowing them to sprawl out for miles all round, ruining the countryside and putting what real country there remains further and further away. Surely the rational course is to mend the towns by condensing them, thus ameliorating to some extent the traffic problem, much of which is due to the movement of country and suburban dwellers to and from their work. In theory, London could be reduced to a quarter of its size (and the average health- conditions enormously improved) by building upwards to a height of never more than six storeys. By this means, too, the existing area given up to roads and open spaces could be doubled, and the traffic problem soled. That, of course, is a dream—but one which an increasing preference for flats on the part of all classes would do much to bring true.
- - G. M. BOUBLPHREY.
Previous page
