THE HOUSING EXHIBITION AT THE CENTRAL HALL, WESTMINSTER.
THIS is principally an Exhibition of plans and models of small houses sent in to a competition organized by the Daily Express and the Sunday Express. They are wisely divided into three classes—namely, houses for unskilled labourers, for skilled artisans, and for clerical workers. This is much more valuable than plans of houses for "the working classes" gener- ally; because they are really three separate problems, and that of housing the humble professional man, who is now often poorer than a skilled artisan yet desires to live with a certain degree of refinement, is the most difficult of the three. A solution is offered here by giving them rather larger and slightly more pretentious dwellings than those of the other two classes— that is to say, houses which will cost nearly £1,000 to build to-day. I think, however, that a solution based on the principle that the greater the refinement of the inhabitant the smaller should be his dwelling is a better one. I do not so much mean lees accommo- dation as greater concentration in the space provided. For instance, many professional men and their wives are used to living in very small flats, where kitchen, scullery, pantry, and larder are combined in one little room. Why should they not do so in the country or suburbs ? But the unskilled labourer and his wife would be lost for space to work in such a room. Also the poor clerical worker often has a smaller family than the other working classes. He cannot either often afford to keep a resi- dent servant, so that the price of a larger house than that of the artisan will be increased work for his wife. It seems to have been generally decided that every one must have at least a living-room, a parlour, and a scullery, whether ho likes it or not, whereas it is quite possible to live respectably—and even ele- gantly—in a single sitting-room with a small kitchen-scullery off it. However, nearly all the elevations for the three classes of houses are good and the models are admirably arranged, each house being dissected horizontally at the first-door level and shown in two halves.
The general public cannot be encouraged too much to study the question of housing, and this form of Exhibition makes it easy and entertaining for them to do so. The models sent by the Local Government Board are disappointing. They are made apparently by an architect of little talent ; and as they have been prepared for the guidance of Housing Authorities, it will be unfortunate if the elevations are adopted as well as the plans.
But the chief interest of the Exhibition is to he found in the basement of the Central Hall, where Mr. Pemberton Billing occupies moat of the space with his stove, accompanied by a loud band. There are two full-size model four-roomed houses with the stove in position, warming three rooms and cooking in the fourth. Moreover, it supplies hot water to the bath, and warms with radiators any other room or passage to Which it dose not have direct access. I admit that if it really fulfils all these promises, the stove would be a great asset in a house at the present day to save both labour and expense. On the other hand, it dictates the plan of the house : you cannot if you wish have four rooms in a row. They must have four corners meeting at one point where the stove can be placed. Hence you have roughly a square plan with the priimipal rooms in the centre and the bedrooms, &c., beyond them. Mr. Billing describes this as a standard unit of construetiou, and bases on it the seven models of houses he exhibits. The moat interesting of these I thought was the one in which four or five units of construction axe superimposed, forming a sort of block of flats suitable to town or country. Lastly, all these dwellings are to be built of Mr. Billing's patent slabs, of which there is also an exhibit. They are made of sawdust, cement, and a chemical residue. It is said that they are quite water-tight, lasting, and of great compressional strength. Thin ones laid between raft:ere these feet apart form a fiat-pitched root The great advantage of them appeared to me to be the speed with which
they can be built up, thus largely reducing the cost of labour hi building.
My conclusion is that if we could infuse our methods of band- ing cheap houses with a little of the radicalism of Mr. Billing's inventions, we might make useful progress. While it is in- creasingly costly to go on building in the traditional manner of the last five hundred years, it might also endanger the beauty of the country to adopt a new method entirely. A com- bination of the two is therefore desirable. Architects should
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