HOUSES FOR £298

Evening Star, Issue 18259, 26 April 1923, Page 1

HOUSES FOR £298

HOW IT IS DONE IN ENGLAND. BUILDING SCHEMES COMPARED. At a moment when the Government ij seeking for a housing scheme which will let the taxpayer down as lightly as possible, and wimn the largo cities of Urn country aro pressing for a state subsidy of £6 per houso per annum, Nottingham conics along with the news that it is going to build houses for £298 each and lot them at an economic rent. With a gesture of independence rare in these days when local authorities wait like, mendicants on the doorstep of the Treasury, it scorns the subsidy, refuses the help oven of the ratepayer, and proceeds to build on its own responsibility.

Not unnaturally the Ministry of Health, anxious if it can ti end this business of subsidies and place house-building again in the hands of private enterprise, has directed the attention of the importunate cities represented at the recent Manchester conference to the example of Nottingham, writes a correspondent of the ‘ Manchester Guardian,’ 'the Lord Mayor of Manchester has replied that the comparison of the Nottingham houses with the Manchester houses is irrelevant, in so far as the Nottingham houses aro too small and other conditions are not equal. The fact is that Nottingham itself would ho the last to deny that its houses fall far below the idealist’s vision of a working man’s home, and it would bo the first to repudiate many of the things which seam to be claimed for its scheme in official quarters in London. What has happened has simply been this. The architect to the Housing Committee realised as long ago as April of last year that the lowest inclusive rent (14 lid) of the non-parlor house which they were building was beyond the means of many ex-service men. Ho set himself the task of designing a houso which could bo let at 6s to 7s a week, which, with rates included, would be 11s a week. He took £3OO as his figure and fitted a plan into it, allowing, in addition, £SO for land and road works. The lowest tender of £298 was accepted. Most of those houses have now been built, and the over-all cost has worked out at £349 3s 7d. The fortyfour houses which the council proposes to build on its own initiative are slightly enlarged replicas of the first lot of £3OO houses, and the all-over cost is estimated at £337 19s 7d.

Other authorities, building twelve to the acre, and sitting neither on the edge of nor below the Ministry of Health’s none too ambitious standard of requirements as to size, may ask by what use of the black art Nottingham inveigles a £3OO house out of the present-day builder. The answer is simple. The £3OO houses are built, not twelve, but twenty-four to the acre, they are built in blocks of four and eight, and the frontage of each house is a bare 12ft 3in. They arc not built ou garden-city linos, but are used to fill up small, partially developed-sites, where roads were made before the war, and where the sites are hardly suitable for conversion into open spaces or children’s playgrounds. They are cunningly designed. From outside they have a substantial, prosperous appearance, and convey _ a suggestion of" roominess inside which is dispelled by closer examination. This disillusionment.is inevitable, as the block o! eight houses occupies the frontage which.' would normally bo- occupied by four, i Downstairs there is the living room, the j scullery, bathroom, larder, and coal hole, I upstairs Uioro aro two bedrooms, one with- ; out a fireplace, and in the roof there is | another bedroom. On the whole, tTio 1 house will bo about 2 per cent, below the i standard requirements, but the proposed , houses, Major Hewitt estimates, will be 12 per cent, ou the other side of the line. For £3OO, at to-day’s prices, they seem to be excellent value, and nearly as good as some of the two-up-and-two-down typo of house so common in Manchester. They may bo a slightly tighter fit for the family when it sits downstairs, but they bedroom accommodation is rather better. Besides, every house has a bathroom of sorts, without which, apparently, im one dares to erect a dwelling nowadays. That, at least, is one concession of the reconstruction period which economy has not yet filched from tho working-class house. If Nottingham is held up as a pattern for the rest of tho country, the country should have an idea of what is in the Ministry’s mind. It |s intended that town-pliimnnir ideals should be abandoned to allow of houses with 12ft frontages to bo built in rows at the rate of twentyfour to tho acre? Or is Nottingham quoted for tho solo purpose of propaganda ? Tho Ministry of Health had tried to give the impression that tho £3OO house was tho house for which other towns had paid £9OO. Such a statement was nonsense. Even now, one is inclined to doubt whether Nottingham, without a subsidy, ciiu produce a house within tho means of the ordinary working man. The rents of thirty-six of tho new bouses aro to be 7s 4d, iiiul the vents of eight aro to bo 7s lOd, but when rales and water charges are added these figures wall have risen to 12s lOd and 13s 7d._ Those rentals are only possible by allowing a mere 10 per cent, for repairs, empties, and iimnageni«,nb charges. In one respect Nottingham may feel a, certain amount of legitimate pride. It is one of the few towns which have been able to utilise the servicer, of the professional house - builder—-tho speculative builder of pre-war days. Many of the forty-five builders who have been engaged ou the Nottingham schemes have, been of the old "speculative’’ typo, and the contracts which tlu-y undertook varied from right to forty houses at, a time. The city i# convinced that it saved money by employing these men and by using lumpsum contracts with an up-and-down clause for labor. No fewer than 1,390 houses have been built and are occupied under tho assisted housing sc/icinc.