LONDON HOUSING

Taranaki Daily News, 30 April 1937, Page 5

LONDON HOUSING

SMALL HOUSES AND FLATS. KEEN CONTROVERSY EXISTS. Professor S. D. Adshesd, who deliverr ed the last of the series of lectures at the Exhibition of British Architecture at the Royal Academy, London, spoke about flats, states a report in the Times. He. said that no opinion was more divided than that which has raged round the question of the single family house or flat. It had been a key question among housing reformers throughout Europe and America. English people were born as dwellers in small houses, whereas our Continental brethren were born as dwellers in flats. The London County Council commenced its housing programme with the erection of singlefamily houses, 30 to the acre, at Tooting, but it very soon discovered that it could not repeat the small house when rehousing people taken from a densely crowded area, and it was their architect who commenced the building of tenement buildings in the metropolis. Tlie big change from single-family houses to blocks of flats did not occur uiitil after the war, but there was a national desire to continue housing the working class in single-family dwellings. London, Liverpool and Leeds were leading the way in the erection of large blocks of tenement dwellings. Professor Adshead said that the really mjddle-class flat witJl a rent of £10° a year, rates and taxes being included, had not yet been found to be a very practical proposition. Tlie enormous increase in the number of flats that have been built during the last decade had resuscitated' rather that settled the old controversy of "house" or "flat.' A closer investigation of that residential belt which surrounds London between the central area and the suburbs and that portion of it which is occupied by the working and lower middle class showed that at least 80 per cent. of these houses have become multiple dwellings br are occupied by more than one family. A . flat was really more hygienic,

better arranged, and more convenient to work. Where conditions would not permit of a nice little garden— a real garden — covering at the very least one-twelfth of an acre and situated in a well-laid-out suburb, tlie flat was the best.