Bungalophob ia—A Retort

Ai R. STANLEY CASSON challenges me to justify -1- my alleged prejudice against bungalows with such engaging truculence that it were churlish to refuse him satisfaction. I will try to give it him, and none the less cheerfully for the fact that he has fastened on to me a general intolerance entirely of his own invention.

Having dressed me up as a bungalophobe of the most bigoted and persecuting type, he proceeds to pulverize my distorted effigy with fairness and good sense. How- ever, this perfectly legitimate controversial technique is perhaps a little hazardous when the misrepresented one—the outraged man-of-straw—is given the chance of retaliating, as in this case. Yet I will answer softly, because Mr. Casson says he is tired of abuse, and because it is doubtless abuse that has made him react so violently.. That, and (I hazard) an inner uneasiness with regard to his position, would fully account for his offensive-defensive attitude.

Now, as a first step towards an understanding between us, may I suggest to Mr. Casson that he read what I have actually written about bungalows, particularly in my little book England and the Octopus? His article has reached me in Austria, and having no copy with me, though he is spared verbatim quotation, I sufficiently recollect what I wrote to give him the general drift, which was as follows.

That it is entirely right and desirable that people should seek to live in the country, and it is both selfish and cyni- eat merely to laugh at the often pathetic attempts of bungalow dwellers to achieve an imagined rusticity, so often frustrated by their own tragic ignorance of country ways and traditions as well as by the cheating exploita- tion of their innocence by land and building speculators.

That there obviously is nothing inherently base in a one-storeyed building, as countless charming old cottages can testify—nothing shameful about a stairless house. It is only the debasing of our structural currency by the " Carriage-paid-to-any-station " bungalow hawkers that has given this type of dwelling a now deservedly bad name.

Beyond making our towns more tolerable and civilized, I would by no means deny our already over-urbanized population its right to its enjoyment of the country ; it is indeed that very right that I am concerned to protect.

I want to preserve the country for the towns, not from them, I want it protected for one reason only, that we may have it for our refreshment and enjoyment —all of us, and for ever.

It is not even the shoddy individual bungalows that I deplore so much as their unskilful and anti-social placing. Too often selfishly and planlessly peppered about the landscape without regard for their background or for other people's views, they can recklessly destroy a whole landscape by their discordant presence, or at any rate introduce that taint of suburbanism that rural England is too delicate, too small in scale, to survive.

That is why I plead for a National Regional Planning Scheme, for some measure of effective Amenities Control, so that in our clumsy haste we do not utterly destroy the thing that we love (or profess to love), yet with such shortsighted greed and so little understanding.

I had also much to say under the heading of" assimila- tion "—the harmonizing of a building to its background so that it fitted comfortably into its natural environment and was on friendly terms with its older neighbours.

Ideally, I held, that would generally mean the use of the traditional local materials, but where under modern conditions these proved too costly I laid it down that it was colour that really mattered (especially in the roof) and that if one felt impelled to erect a bungalow in, say, Northumberland or Snowdonia, and. stone and local slate were not cheap enough, then walls (preferably) of plastered brick, whitewashed, with a roof of grey asbestos, would be at any rate inoffensive, certainly in the distance. I would by no means seek to dictate what materials should be used, I am only concerned that they should be reasonably sound and suitable for their purpose, and that they should be used with some discretion and sense of background.

Mr. Casson himself would be far more tyrannical, as he recklessly proposes to make illegal all blue slates and "roughcasting of any kind "—whereby he would unroof practically the whole of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and about half England, and leave countless thousands of charming old timber-framed houses (especially in East Anglia) open to the weather.

What he really means, of course, is that he objects to the wrong sort of blue slate and roughcast wrongly used in the wrong places, wherein we are at one. As to declam- ation against tea-shop Tudor and half-hearted half- timber and all other such pretentious foolishness I have long been accounted a leading bore. Mr. Casson writes that "builders must be disciplined." That is, of course, exactly my 'own view and that of the Council for the

Preservation of Rural. England. All that is in debate is just how and by whom, and what legislative measures are needed to bring about that most desirable reform.

I agree with Mr. Casson that the British architectural profession as a whole has failed to give guidance where guidance was so obviously needed. In its more limited field, it has failed modern civilization in the same way that most of the Churches have failed it.

As to good standard designs for really cheap little houses and bungalows for varying needs and localities, such have been freely published, but little used. Some such service should, however, I agree, he adequately organized and popularized. It is a grim thought, but the general public at present actually prefers, so it would seem, the inconvenient, tawdry, gimcrack stuff that it mostly gets—which is, I admit, the fault of us architects and propagandists, who should have taught it better.

Some time ago, with a rather baseless optimism, I offered to revise the elevations of any wholesale bungalow manufacturers who cared to send me their catalogue— merely simplifying and integrating and modifying the proportions, without adding in any way to the cost.

Several responded rather perfunctorily, frankly telling me, however, that the design of their current products was dictated by the public taste, which they its tradesmen were bound to study, and that they feared that the straightforward simplicity that I advocated would not be considered " tasty " or " artistic " enough by their customers. So one has really got to go much further back—to education.

Mr. Casson categorically asks me where I can show him beautiful modern bungalows suited to the countryside.

I am no more sure that he would like my bungalows than that I should admire his, but I could direct him to some in North Wales and Ireland of whitewashed stone with roofs of blue slate (but small slates, rough and discoloured, known as" seconds" and therefore cheap), to some in the south of England, weatherboarded and thatched, and others in East Anglia of roughcast and colour-washed brickwork roofed with local pantiles.

I should hesitate to claim " beauty " for such simple little buildings, but they have at least been honestly built of sound materials with a care for proportion, colour and texture and with a regard for their situations and for local building traditions. They have in short observed the elementary architectural decencies which one should surely expect even of the humblest buildings of a civilized community.

None of them, I may add, costs more than .£1300, the limit mentioned by Mr. Casson.

Needless to say many other architects could certainly display a far wider range of blameless bungalows than I could, though not one in a thousand of the bungalows that one sees has been sponsored by an architect at all.

By his own Confession it is clear that Mr. Casson has only contrived to make his own " Reach-me-down" even tolerable by pretty drarstic after-treatment, and I am darkly amused to note that he. claims as one of its chief

amenities the fact that there are "no other bungalows anywhere near!" One often reads much the same recom- mendation in estate agents' advertisements—" Unspoilt country—no bungalows near "—though it is very seldom true, which is one reason why so many of us are inclined to spend our holidays elsewhere than in England, and why I for one find myself writing this at the foot of

[This article and its predecessor both go to the root of the present difficulty, but we are still doubtful whether either Mr. Casson or Mr. Williams-Ellis has put his price low enough. We should welcome readers' opinions of the ideal site and prier of a bungalow to satisfy modern demands—En. Spectator.]