LIVING CONDITIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 26 November 1934, Page 5

LIVING CONDITIONS

HOUSING IMPROVEMENT PRINCE OF WALES’ PLEA GREAT MAJORITY’S RIGHT ADDRESS TO ARCHITECTS 5 By Telegraph—Press Assn. —Copyright. London, Nov. 23. “The great majority of our people should and can have better livirig conditions. I ask you to carry the principle of mass production over to architecture and the building trades,” declared the. Prince of Wales in a striking address at the Guildhall to 2000 architects at. the centenary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects. “I am convinced,” added the Prince, “that by no other way will it be possible to raise living conditions. You could develop the idea of widening streets and raising the height of buildings so that they can be spaced at greater distances from each other, tending to greater openness and less congestion. I feel most strongly about this. You must consider greater the more important ideal \of working for the great majority of our people instead of studying the needs of a minority which is ever dwindling. “I am anxious that the living conditions of the great masses should be improved as quickly as possible. My visits to the slums and depressed area* have impressed me with the Urgency of this.

“We are not the individualists of the Victorian and Edwardian times. We are living, mostly as a result of the war, in a world more collective in principle than individualistic. Wealth is more evenly distributed throughout the country than ever, and is being directed to the greater consideration of the masses and their requirements than to the individual client or the selective group we commonly call s- .iety.”