THE NEW HOMES OF ENGLAND
IN England the really important things usually happen without anybody noticing them. And so it is hardly surprising that during all the heat and turmoil of the social controversy in which we live, the beginnings of what is one of the greatest social transformation in the lives of the people which has ever taken place should have remained almost unperceived. This transformation is a transformation in the actual living conditions of the people of our great towns. It is going on, all too slowly it is true, but yet steadily and progressively, on the fringe Of each one of our industrial centres.
For there is not a city in England which has not some sort of a civic housing scheme ; and in most places an appreciable part of that scheme is now completed ; the new houses have been inhabited for a few months, and it is possible to begin to measure what has happened. In- dustrial England now presents a curious spectacle. The great towns lie, as ever, like great dreary, hideous blocks on the landscape. The centre and main mass of them is still composed of those miles of inexpressibly depressing slum and semi-slum streets. As congestion is worse than ever, the unmistakable stench of overcrowded human beings which greets one at the entrances of the courts and alleys is also worse than ever. But round the perimeter of almost all these towns there is now a narrow but ex- tending belt of new Corporation houses.
There is, of course, nothing new in the fact that the great towns are spreading stealthily out into the country ; that has been going on for a century, and the present rate of building is hardly above the average. What is peculiar is not the quantity but the quality of the new streets which are being put up. It is not an exaggeration to say that the new housing schemes represent something per- fectly new, and immeasurably superior, in English working-class housing.
The present writer has recently spent a fortnight living in one of the new Corporation houses outside a typical English industrial town. The house was one of a new estate which must have had about two or three hundred houses on it. The houses themselves were of two types : a non-parlour type which was let at about 12s. a week (with some variations) and a parlour type which could not in practice be obtained unless the applicant was willing to buy the house on an instalment plan. This meant an outlay during the first few years of twenty shillings a week. It was in the latter type of house that I was staying, but I saw a good deal of the non-parlour type as well. The houses themselves, although sensible and well' planned, were small and in some cases not, I thought, particularly well built. Thus, though immeasurably better than anything in the slum areas of the town, they were only moderately superior to an ordinary house letting at perhaps two shillings- less in the better working- class areas of the town.
It was not the houses themselves, however, which made this housing estate, and the many others like it, a world perfectly different from anything in the heart of the town; It was much more the wide spacing of the houses, the well- planned lay-out of the whole estate, the fact that the larger trees had been left standing, that each house had its little garden, that the streets were wide and open. It is this element of care and forethought in the planning of the new estates which is making them something new and different from_anything else in England. In one sen- tence, a civilized, decent life is possible in the new houses and is quite impossible in the old. One of the most striking sights in the new estates is to be seen at about seven in the evening when the men are back from work. The estate is then a scene of startling activity': The gardens, which when the inhabitants arrived a few months ago were dreary little patches of uneven mutt, begin to take shape and form. And in some cases a first faint sign of green has begun to she* the results of the efforts of the man who has worked so hard. There is something' almost feverish in the way these city workers, transported from their liair.OW "Streets 'into these new estates, are setting abont creating their gardens. It is as if the instincts of a peasant origin- Were awakehed by even 'this tiny plot of land.
In a 'yea', these new estates will certainly be garden cities-infact if not in name. - The inhabitants of the more expenSive parlour type of house are, of coarse, hardly any of them manual workers in-the Ordinary sense of the word. They seem to be partly professional and business people with a large proportion of foremen and overseers, &c. But the inhabitants of the non-parlour type of houses, even though the rents are as high as twelve shillings, conic from the great mass of the workers of the city. One man I know who is living in One of these houses spends his day pushing a vegetable barrow through the streets, and his earnings-never exceed forty shillings a week. I asked him why, as he has a wife and family to keep, he choie to come out to one of the new honks, where he has to spend twelve shillings—an appallingly high proportion of his income—on rent alone. He replied that although the rent of his new house often left his family without what one would consider the barest necessaries of life (such as adequate boots and what most people would conaider adequate food, or any margin for amusements) yet he considered his new house " well worth it." He took the view that even though his children might be rather hungry in their new home, their health was considerably better there than it had been when they were better fed but living in the fetid smoke-laden atmosphere of the centre of the town.
Thus it haS come about that most of the families living in the new houses are from sections of the population which one would have thought would have been wholly debarred from living in them. In any case the main difficulty in getting a new house is not the financial one. Only those people get them who were lucky or wise enough to apply several years ago. In the city I have mentioned, for example, there is a waiting list of no less than sixteen thonsond families who have applied for Corporation houses. At the present rate of building they will have grandchildren before they get them. X.
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