BIG HOUSING SCHEME

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 16, 28 February 1939, Page 2

BIG HOUSING SCHEME

RURAL VICAR'S UNDERTAKINGS

A WIZARD OF FINANCE

(From The Guardian's London

Correspondent)

LONDON, February 4

A country vicar, with a net income of £300 a year from his living in a tiny English village, is worth £2,500,000. He is 70-year-old Ralph Potts Guy, vicar of Claverley (population 1153) in Shropshire. Once earning £3 a week as a journalist, Mr Guy soon discovered his flair for buying and selling. Gradually he began to accumulate a fortune. He entered the church in 1902, but he did not give up his business' interests. The people of Claverley are grateful. For this financial wizard who is their vicar has solved the local unemployment problem. He has financed schemes for land development and administration. There is more work to be done than there are people to do it. His latest project is a vast housing scheme that will cost him two and a half million pounds. A hundred houses have already been built, and they are the last word in ideal home construction. . Claverley's vicar-house-builder has planned a garden city at Ickenham, Middlesex on generous and far-seeing lines. "I am building only^ six houses to the acre," he said this week. "The gardens are communal and occupy a four-and-a-half-acre ring, round which the houses are being built. Thus the occupants will enjoy rural amenities as long as the houses stand. "And believe me, my houses will stand —they are not jerry-built! They are selling at not less than £1000 each."