SLUM CLEARANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23333, 27 October 1937, Page 9

SLUM CLEARANCE

PENZANCE COUNCIL'S SCHEME OPINION SHARPLY DIVIDED LONDON, Oct. 25. Newlyn is divided over the Penzance Council's scheme to modernise its homes. While the fishermen are protesting to the Minister of Health, 400 of the younger residents have sent a petition asking for the homes to be demolished, declaring that they are unhealthy. Many families are being split up over the controversy. For instance, a couple favouring demolition occupy a house owned by the wife's father, who wants it retained. The petition states: " Newlyn is no longer a fishing village. A few elderly persons man out-of-date boats, but the sons are not going to be fishermen. They are finding employment in Penzance and elsewhere." Professor Stanley Adshead, emeritus professor of town planning at London University, recently completed his examination of the picturesque houses and streets of Newlyn which are threatened with demolition by a "slum clearance scheme " of the Penzance Council. Inhabitants of cottages which Professor Adshead examined said that he expressed the view that, as regards light and air, none of the places he had been asked to examine elsewhere in England compared favourably with Newlyn. He was taken by the Marquise de Verdieres, secretary of the Advisory Committee, round the majority of the houses marked " pink" on the council's surveys—houses " condemned for human habitation." Everywhere he went he paid the inhabitants compliments on the spotless cleanliness of kitchens, bedrooms and yards. He made a most careful examination also of the fishermen's net lofts and "cellars," the semi-enclosed places where they do their own tanning. A message in a recent issue of the Daily Telegraph stated that six Newlyn women intended to go to London to present a petition to the Queen protesting against the threatened demolition of their homes.