WORKERS’ HOMES

Evening Star, Issue 22633, 27 April 1937, Page 2

WORKERS’ HOMES

AN ENGLISH SURVEY THE OLD AND THE HEW In a paper read before the Royal Institute of British Architects recently, and reprinted in the journal, Miss E. Denby revealed that nearly 2,000,000 new dwellings, subsidised to a cost of £160,000,000, had been erected for the working classes since the Armistice. She said that although building was continuing unabated, the fd:ni■; were hardly touched, and that few of the poorer paid workers had y-t helped. Surely it was time to take stock of the 18 years’ work to see if from that experience good value was being obtained for the money. There were thousands of normal working men and women who were forced to live in overcrowded or insanitary surroundings because they had to bo near their work in the centre of the town, or because their employment was too insecure to enable them readily to undertake the responsibility of a council house at a rent higher than that which they were paying. The average rent-paying capacity of the British workman was not high. Four-fifths of the families of Britain were receiving less than £4 a week. The average wage for a labourer was £2 5s a week. For no apparent reason it seemed to be assumed that over one-fifth of a workman’s income (10s) should be spent _on rent, but that was manifestly too high a proportion if enough was to bo left for coal, gas, food, clothing, and the other necessities of life.

Miss Denby said that the working man and his wife were faced with the

disagreeable choice of remaining in unhealthy or overcrowded apartments, for which they paid comparatively low rent, or of moving into purer air and f renter space and stinting their chilren of food. ATTITUDE OF TENANTS. An acid test of the newly established estates, whether cottages or flats, was to find out what the tenants themselves thought of them. Many of the replies were disconcerting. .Isolation, loneliness, boredom, expense in the cottage estates; lack of privacy, noise, inconvenience, a “ barrack ” atmosphere, expense in the flats. And in many cases a lurking shame at being a tenant of a council house. The mass of evidence showed that the housing problem had been cruelly over-simplified. Good housing was not the absence of slums any more than good health was just the absence of disease. Slum _ clearance was not merely a question of substituting a clean box for a dirty one.

Miss Denby agreed with the working man and woman that the choice for a town dweller between a fiat at 50 and a cottage at 12 to the acre was a choice between two impractical and unnecessary extremes. The rows of terrace cottages built in the Regency days, with a small garden in front and a'long one behind, were built at a density of 35 and 40 to the acre. That was the density at which flats were being built in the provinces. The pleasure and pride taken by working people in the few areas left to them, their grief at their destruction, either by a zealov® council or a speculative builder, seemed to point pretty clearly to the popularity of some kind of redevelopment of central areas in that form for tho poorer families with young children. They would certainly he cheaper to construct than tenements, the density would be identical, and the tenants would be able to add considerably to their food supplies while living centrally in touch with many kinds of work. There was'no sense in blaming work done experimentally and under great pressure, but it would be stupid to continue to perpetuate mistakes and to force people into ways of living which were unnecessary as well as abhorrent to them.