ELIMINATING SLUMS.

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 4 March 1935, Page 4

ELIMINATING SLUMS.

The real significance of slums today lies not in the hundreds of thousands of poor people who do live in them, but thousands of poor who do not. For now in Britain the first real advances in building houses for the poor are becoming evident. These advances show a considerable change of attitude on the part of the local governments toward the coster, the road mender; the bus driver and the dock labourer. In London, flanking the banks of an offshoot of the Regent’s Canal, stands a large block of flats. Built of golden, brick, with red-tiled roofs and curving eaves, the building has almost a Venetian aspect. The most expensive rent, for the largest flat, is £1 a week. The cheapest is 7s 6d. Such a block is representative of what is occurring throughout Britain. In every large town builders, architects, and local authorities are cooperating to clear up the slums and, more important still, areshowing results. In Leeds a new estate is being built for the poor folk of the city. Already 2000 houses are nearing completion. Over 3000 persons will live on the estate when it is finished. A large shopping centre will be provided. In Liverpool rehousing schemes have probably gone ahead more rapidly than in any other provincial English town. There the flats are built mostly of reinforced concrete. They have been designed by well-known architects, and it has been said that some of these working men’s flats will in the future be considered as representative specimens of “classic” twentieth-century building styles. At Preston, Lancashire, the Municipal Council has built a whole suburb. ' The houses, rents and rates included, are let at from 10s 6d a week to 15s fid. And beside the River Thames, not far outside London, there is a new town. It is as large as Wellington—yet in 1921 it had no population at all. This town is the Becontree and Dagenham Estate. It has grown so rapidly that nobody has given it a name, but it has a population approaching 130,000 persons.- It used to be a terrible factor of London slums that families of six or seven were often found crowded into one room. In a tremendous effort to end forever such squalor, the London County Council has announced the start of a £35,000,000 drive to clear the

crowded, airless areas away from London.’ A great effort is still needed, for more than 19,000 persons in one London borough are still living as many as three per room.