GOING FAST

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 12, 16 January 1933, Page 8

GOING FAST

LINKS WITH DICKENS

SQUALOR OF SOMERS TOWN

A WOKTHY LOSS

I read the other day that another "link with Dickens" is to be broken. The shop in Barnard Castle which had suggested "Master Humphrey's Clock" must be pulled down. It seems a pity, but I do not know the cireumsianees, nor, though I happen to know Barnard Castle fairly well and esteem its rough, grey beauty, can I remember the actual shop. So I can only surmise that it is an attractive little place, as befits this old town.of fort and market which used to guuri and still overlooks the gate of Teesdale, as that river winds its rocky and torrential course down from the noblest of the English moora. It is Scott country, too, with Eokeby and Brignall close at hand. Dickens found Dotheboys only four miles off and there are some of the most shiversome "links with in the tombstones of a country churchyard, marking the graves of children who died under the dietary and regimen of the man portrayed as Squeers, writes Ivor Brown in the "Manchester Guardian."

It is odd that when so much, of Diekensian England, particularly of Dickensian London, is crying out for destruction, it is so often the happier and comelier links on -which the pickaxe falls. However, I have seen this week some other links being snapped, as they should have been snapped fifty years ago. When Dickens's father came out of the Marshalsea the family moved to Somers Town, which is the district behind Euston; Charles used to -walk down through Kussell square to the hated blacking factory in the Strand,, carrying _ his day's dinner, "some cold hotch-potch," to the scene of his long and hated labours. Later on he went to school in this area—at Wellington. House Academy.. HEAPS OF REFUSE. It was not then and is not now.a.nice area. It functioned as London's dustbin, and in a print of 1836 you jean, see the vast heaps of' refuse that were dumped there: It was the fringe 6i urbanity a, century ago; Camden Town was still a village among the fields below, the hills of Hampstead and Highgate. It was through this area that Mr. Keginald Wilfer used to walk to. his home in Holloway after attendance at the office of Messrs. Chicksey, Stobbles, and Veneering. Dickens desribed it as "a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beaten, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors." Skirting'the border of this desert, by the way he took, when the light of its kiln fires' made lurid smears on the fog, E. Wilfer sighed and shook his head. "Ah me," said he. "What might have been is not what is!" Architecturally it certainly was not. What might have.been'was a planned and/pleasant suburb. It was only a brief walk to the planned and pleasant squares of Blobmsbury, where London had recently made one of its few experiments in applying architectural design to a whole area and not just to a single house or street. But what happened was <squalor, and that squalor is a link with Dickens which shamefully remains. ■ .

Squalor is, perhaps, too weak a word for the slums of Somers Town. There are in England many thousands of streets, links with, the Dickensian age of industrial expansion, which are mean; at the sight of them one's are hurriedly averted ana one's heart chilled. But. in Somers Town there is no mere chilling of the heart; to be taken behind some of the doors ig to bo made physically sick. Behind■: peeling, scabrous walls there are still slums of a savage and a staggering , bestiality. Can "squalor"" be an adequate word for the life of three people in a one-roomed cellar with no, window but just the tiniest infiltration of light through a grating? Here, too, there are twentythree people living in one <ruin of a smallish house with no water supply but a single tap in the yard. No, squalor will not do at all. The rank fox does better in his hole than humans in these vile and verminous cabins with their gruesome, teeming cellarage. A great deal has been said and a certain.amount has been done about housing since 191 S. But neither Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled' (incidentallyj the Westminster slums are a nice rival to these Euston hells) nor the Borough of St. Pancras has seen fit to deal with Somers, Town in the only possible way, which is to raze it •to the ground and start again.' No doubt in Dickens's day the rapidly rising houses of Somers Town looked well enough, but nobody seems to have done anything to them since that day, except to extract rentals. So now, when well-intentioned people talk of "reconditioning," they find that it cannot be done. The thing is about as sensible and feasible as reconditioning a sewer and calling it a Grand Canal. The rubbish heaps of Dickens's "suburban Sahara" have not really gone; they have been knocked together into something that will pass for a house if you do not look too closely at it. Their continued existence is an outrage. Such "links with Dickens" are a pretty commentary on human inertia. We pull down Wren halls in the City; we yearly destroy a myriad ties with tradition and legacies 01 beauty. But Somers Town remains. GIVING PEACE. But not for long. What State and borough will not do, private enterprise, initiated and fostered by an AngloCatholic priest, Father Jellicoe, is slowly but splendidly achieving. It has been proved that, by borrowing money at 3 or 2i per cent., these hovels can be destroyed and economically replaced by excellent flats at rents payable by the original slum victims, only 2 or 3 .per cent, of whom turn out -to be bad tenants, contemptuous of their new advantages. These flats, balconied and finely designed, with' modern electrical equipment for cooking and heating, are gradually, far too gradually, replacing the filth that has hitherto passed for human accommodation. The new buildings have not the monotony or severity of institutions; they are human habitations with individual, amusing touches. When an old fried-fish shop was pulled down, it was replaced by a slap-up fried-fish shop and not by a gloomy committee room, and there are the loveliest fishes dono in tilework outside to wet your appetite and proclaim the profession. In one of these buildings I saw a. charmingly human nursery school .with some of the most robust infants laying into their victuals. (Milk and rusks at ten, dinner at twelve, and then more milk and rusks, for a shilling a week.) And when I saw these children amid the streets where Charles Dickens walked in his hunger I said to myself with joy, "There goes another link."

I make no hesitation about advertising the.'destruction of the Old Somers Town, and the arrival of the New, because the people who are doing this job are quiet and have not made a noisy science of the publicity which they thoroughly deserve and actually need. The-more money loaned (3 per. cent, interest has been paid steadily since the scheme began, and 3 per cent, is quite high interest in these days) the

sooner the New Town will arise; alsa the more labour will be employed. All this is being done about-half £ mile from Bloomsbury, where the wise) men live, the wise men who spend theilj vacations anywhere but in England,; and then come home full of marvellous! reports about the wonderful workingclass flats in Moscow and Stockholm and Vienna. Meanwhile at their \loor3 a few people are doing just the sama thing. But they are not Bussians, and) so Bloomsbury never hears of them. One more point. This rehousing ofi the London poor is being done not only, by private enterprise, but done, as it ought to be done, on the spot. Cover* ing the Home Counties with huge new; suburbs may be - necessary, but it involves even greater strain upon road' and rail and the pockets and leisure of those who must travel to town for theii? work. /The more London can. be rebuilt ana the less it is stretched out;the better for the countryside and tha better for London. By razing ■ and re« building here we lose nothing but evil. The Fascists have refashioned their; links with the Roman past by cleaning away the deposit of medieval squalor . and laying bare the old classic nobilityj if we snap those links with Dickens which are sorry streets of Somers Town we recreate a far more important bond; with his v intentions for humanity. Let it be put this way, that every pound, loaned to the St. Pancras House Improvement Society (at 96, Seymour, street, IST.W.I) contributes immediately, to realising the dreams of. Reginald Wilfer as he passed this way: What might have -"been (and for a centuryj was not) becomes what is. The job is being done, not referred to committees,not awaiting the verdict of commissions, not hanging on the dalliance of Whitehall. The cave-dwellers of Somers Town are escaping into space and'air. Those who regret the passing of Master Humphrey's clock shop can; unfeignedly rejoice in the destructioa of the Somers Town " "J