DEFECTS OF ENGLISH HOMES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13806, 18 January 1909, Page 7

DEFECTS OF ENGLISH HOMES.

(By an Idler in .the London " Daily Chronicle.")

To ransack London tor a place to 1 ivt l - iu is a very illuminating experience. Indeed, i doubt whether anypiie can really knu«" England who has not negotiated for and finally taken a house in London. 1 say in London because from the tenant's standpoint it is the most inquitous locality in the whole country. . - Nowhere else is the landlord so rapaciously supreme. -Nowhere else do yOu find such all entrenched and .mountainous mass of red-tape, formality, monopoly, and bntressed conventions. Nowhero else are landlords, lawyers and agents so ingeniously leagued, for the spoliation of their victims. HOUSE HUNTING. , I trust- I am not more gullible or more of a spendthrift than most Englishmen. • Vet, as I review my recent proceedings dispassionately, I am conscious I "could never hope to convince a foreigner of the fact. The truth is that when it comes to taking a house, all Englishmen lose both their heads and' their money, and behaviour that iu any other country would qualify you for a lunatic asylum merely proves in England that you, are English and no rebel against the national customs. - • You . take a. house, say, at £2OO a year. To your immediate landlord's solicitor for drawing up the lepse, to .your ground landlord's surveyors and solicitor for granting you a license; to effect the improvements ou -which your heart is set, to your own solicitor for protecting your interests, and to the Government, for lending its authority to the whole transaction, yoTi pay some £27. Then the house Ls legally yours. You proceed to alter it to your* j tastes and requirements. You find a bare and 'barbarous shell. The doors are mean and skimpy; the bathrooms, like practically all English I bathrooms, belong to the dark ages of sanitation; the fireplaces are atrocities; there is no heating system beyond the archaic gra.te; in nine casts o.ut of ten there is no electric light. All these deficiencies, being an Englishman, you set about making good at your own expense. You discover that it costs you a ten pound note for every visit you pay to the house during * the. process of reconstruction. Some malignant detail, hitherto unnoticed, becomes hideously glaring, v ou order -its removal. When the hills come in, you find that, in addition to the. contributions of the previous tenaut towards redecoration, and in addition to whatever sum you have been able to wring out of the landlord, you have spent some £SOO or £tioo out of your own pocket: ANOTHER MAN'S' PROPERTY. But if you are that sort jof a fool, it niay.be said that it is entirely your own affair. That' is not so. Here* you .are ; shovelling. out money in improving another man's .property. If: you live out the full term of your lease, "all the additions ancl 'alterations you have effected . become the landlord's property, without a penny of .compensation. * . There is , a .point .of public' policy involved here. ISriglaijd will not be ,a free country, for tenants' until they are legally. entitled to be reimbursed for a portion, at any rate, of their outlay in adding to ;the value ol' the residence's "they inhabit-. , -y At present one's 'only cliunec of recouping onoselt 'is by assighing tlie remainder ot tlie leaMj anu ciiaigiug one t new tenant a premium. l> a .vs biic orcniium, yuu win. if lie docs not. all tne money "you put into tne liouse is irrecoverable. It goes to the landlord, and tno improvements it repiese ute are used by him'as a basis tor raising the•'rent.- And when one reuiemuers tnat the tenant lias to pay to keep the house insured, is responsible lur wiiatever defects develop in the drainsj and muy 3 indeed, be forced tiie local sanitary authority to remodel the entire svsteiiy at Jus own expense, and is mulcted for whatever structural alterations he may wish to make—not merely for the cost of making, them, but lor the landlord's permission to set them in hand—one realises that there is still sonic work for a Radicil Government to do. ' . ' Hut what, 1' think, has most astounded me in my course of house-hunting, is to discover, the way English people live, the sort of furniture ■ they attect, the amazing deficiencies of the houses ttiey are contented to inhabit. i am'thiuking, to be precise, of a highly respectable road ill a highly respectable neighbourhood, where the liouset rent from £175 to £250 per annum, a' typical upper middle-class thoioMglifare, rather smug, but solid, substantial, and with great possibilities ol quiet com tort. W itlun tne last tew ..yours, as out after tin.' other came into the agent! hands, 1 have inspected some seven os eight of the houses oil this road. Une and all li-)vc appalled me. \\ lien I loot at the appointments, the mantelpieces the tiles, the curtains, the carpets, tin 1 chairs, and wall-papers, 1. ask mysel > whether William Morris lived m vain whether tlie average of English tasti ' in such tilings' is beyond redemption ' whether we have really made any ad 1 vance at all upon the dastardly stall ' dards of the Early Victorian age. SLOVENLINESS. > .There is no excuse. for this slovenliness. From a hundred to a. hundred and twonty years ago, we turned oul ; furniture not to be surpassed anywhere, in that fine simplicity wlncl; is tho last word in taste. To-daj

it is being reproduced on every band by the ton. The slightest trouble,

the smallest instinct for such things, is all that is needed to turn a, room from a collection of oddments, eachswearing at. the other, into a harmonious and beautiful habitation. Alas! it is just this instinct that is. lacking. The money is? there —one can see that by the amount that is squandered on monstrosities; the opportunity is there; but' the impulse, the education, the sensitiveness, the desire, are woefully- lacking. Or take again the primaeval, system to which we cling with such blind passion of attempting and failing to heat a house by fires, alone. Ot all the additions I have made in the house 1 have takon, none gives me more satisfaction than the: hot-water, pipes and radiators that will diffuse throughout the entire building an even temperature. To anyone taking a London house, I say, install an American heating system. It' can be done so that, except iu the basemeht, not a pipe shows, and in'the saving of trouble and dirt, and in the provision of. heat and comfort, it pays for itself a dozen times oyer. With; a fire in the grate for cheerfulness, and radiators for an equable warmth, even an old-fashioiied London house becomes 1 inhabitable.