“ONE CHILDISM.”

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 April 1939, Page 8

“ONE CHILDISM.”

EFFECT OF FLATS. Flats and flat life, as productive of “only childism,” were strongly criticised recently by Sir Walter LangdonBrown, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, at the conference of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association and the Cambridge research branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England at Trinity College, Cambridge. “Everyone here,” he said, “must be oppressed by the feeling that recent developments are making successful co-operation in social life increasingly difficult. Brought up as I was as one of six, in a rambling house with an old walled garden and a river, meadows and woods near at hand, I cannot regard flats, even when equipped with swimming-pool and squash courts, as homes fit for children to live in. “The increase in the number of flats and the fall of the birth-rate are not merely coincidental. Only childism has become a prevalent form of neurosis.

“The huge mushroom dormitories springing up all round London produce problems of their own. The negative side, the absence of communal life, of social interests, of civic centres, lead to a deadness and dullness which must react unfavourably on the whole existence of the inhabitants.”

Declaring that garden cities were the answer to many psychological discontents, Sir Walter remarked: ‘Since the war we have allowed a new problem to take us unawares. We have allowed the slum which stunts the body to be replaced by the slum which stunts the mind.”