HOUSE-BUILDING.
WE print to-day a letter from a trustworthy correspondent which will, we imagine, amuse all our readers, and interest a good many. W. H. W.," a professional man in a fair way of business, but not burdened, by his own account, with too much cash, says he has solved a grave London middle-class difficulty,— be has got a solid I4-inch roomy detached house, weather-tight, water-tight, and independent of other people's pianos, for £50 a year. In that sum he has not included £8 for a railway pass, but he has included the needless comfort of a garden, and he has overestimated the interest on the money expended, which ought to be -calculated as if raised on a mortgage, i.e., at 4f per cent. Fifty pounds may be taken, therefore, as the true rental, and our correspondent has done what thousands of professional men, superior clerks, young city men, and others are striving in vain to do, namely, obtain a pleasant house at a reasonable rent. Nothing nowadays in this vast city presses on an educated married man, with less than £500 a year, like the cost of lodging himself, or rather his wife and children, as he wishes them to be lodged. Any kind of house can be obtained in London for money, except a good cheap house in an endurable neighbourhood. After the life assurance and income-tax are paid, and the accidental but always recurring losses endured, such a man has rarely more than 1350 actually to spend on the home, and the rent—in which word we include rates and taxes—is the biggest and most inevitable of all the regular outgoings. Continental people in the same position always accept this, and calculate that Tent must be equal to one-third of the total expenditure, and it is. by no means improbable that Londoners may also be compelled to make the same arrangement, and sacrifice, like their neighbours, either service, or food, or little personal comforts. At present, however, they fight against submission almost fermi-ously, and insist that they can and will lodge themselves for a seventh, or, at all events, for a sixth, of their expenditure, that is, at a total outlay of 160 a year, rent and taxes included. A few -of them, by the exercise of untiring patience and unusual common -sense, succeed, getting an old and, therefore, comfortable, small house, at the figure they have fixed; but the infinite majority are hopelessly beaten in the search. Either they have to add ten or twenty pounds a year to their estimate, losing a comfort for every pound, or they are driven into a new house, one of the thousands Tiaing every year all round London, built upon leasehold land, with the single object of being let for the highest interest obtainable for the outlay. To judge by the gradual diminution in the length -of leases, which have receded from 90 years to 50, and even 35, within the memory of man, and the severity of competition, the interest sought is a high one, and it is obtained by deliberately erecting bad buildings. Either the drain-age is imperfect, or the roof requires constant repair, or the walls will not keep out the cold, or, worst plague of all, the entire house is permeable by all sounds. We have been told by architects that this grievance, which to the majority of men is absolutely intolerable, is the result of carelessness, as it could be -corrected without expense ; but the nuisance is nearly universal in new houses, and we suspect "W. H. AV." is right, and that the " careless " building saves the builder's money. It is not a matter, as "W. II. W." seems to think, of thickness of bricks, but of the -quality of the materials, and the honesty with which they are used. We can show him houses in London with fourteen-inch walls in which he can hear every cry of children on both sides. No change is of any use, those who flit as our correspondent did from year to year only changing the form of annoyance, and being pursued everywhere, from street to street and village to village and row to row, by that dreadful permeability to sound. A -removal, too, is the most wasteful of operations. The tenants feel like so many Babbages without the professor's right of recourse to the police courts,—for though an action against a piano is possible, it makes a man ridiculous,—and they get into a state of irritation in which their next-door neighbours seem malicious fiends, or themselves the victims of that torturing disease, nervous exaltation of the sense of hearing.
One-half, probably, of such professionals contemplate at one period or other of their lives building for themselves, but very few have the nerve or the means to set about it. "W. H. W." was most exceptionally fortunate. Sites, despite our correspondent's experience, are extremely difficult to obtain near London, and are snapped up as they enter the market by the builders, who are convenient purchasers, as they buy in large parcels and require for many houses only one set of deeds. Even if a site is obtainable, the unlucky experimenter is only at the beginning of his troubles. An architect such as "W. H. W." found is very rare, more especially an architect who will really look, as his friend appears to have done, into the details of the actual work ; and the owner himself is quite powerless in the matter. To draw the plan of a small house seems a very simple affair ; but non-professional men who try it usually find that their skill ends with the first floor, that they can get neither upstairs nor downstairs, that the kitchen has no light, and that the corridor to connect the bedrooms has a most dangerous curve. We have heard of an amateur of this kind who omitted the staircase, and of another—this is a fact—who submitted a plan with obvious exultation to an architect, admitted with mock modesty that it was "a little rough," but suggested that "in substance" it could hardly be improved. There was not a chimney in the concern. A skilled architect is indispensable, and a skilled architect who will give a good plan for a small house and help to carry it out for a moderate fee is a man who, if he were known, would be loaded in a week with decidedly unprofitable work. There must be men to whom such employment would be acceptable ; but too often they are either without originality, or have an itching for profit fatal to honest work. Then comes the building. The natural way to build is to contract for a house on such and such a plan, with a clear specification ; and were all contractors honest, this would be universally adopted. The contractor knows, and the owner does not ; and were the contractor to sell his knowledge and nothing else, were he, that is, to charge the cost price to a farthing, and add his own fee as a distinct item, an arrangement might be very easily effected. A deep distrust of contracts has, however, sunk into the public mind, while the contractor dreads the British form of meanness, almost the only one incessantly displayed, the reluctance to pay fairly in a lump stun for intangible things like skill and superintendence. The owner who meant to spend £800 on a house would think £80 enough for the contractor, who was probably all that out of pocket by loss of interest. The builder, therefore, supplies goods as well as skill, and under the pressure of competition, brings his nominal prices as low as he can, and takes his profit out in inferior material and the small swindles classed as "extras." Of the only two alternatives, one, to build for oneself, 'that is actually to superintend the building, is usually a silly waste of time; and the other, to select a trustworthy, able, and at the same time cheap foreman of the works, is the most difficult of tasks. It is in that direction, however, that intending builders should look ; and then if they get a good architect, and a good plan, and a good foreman, and find a good site, and have the good sense to defy the vulgar opinion of silly neighbours impatient of tiling and intolerant of shutters, they may get a really good house for " W. H. W.'s" price, £50 a year, without possible increase of rent.
With "\V. H. W.'s " idea that the waste of money is usually in ornament we entirely concur, though wooden chimneypieces are dangerous mistakes while brickwork is to be had and Minton sells tiles ; but we should like to ask Mr. Kerr or some architect of his calibre a question. What is the reason why the roof of the house should not be, in the country, at all events, a pleasant promenade, the children's playground ? Flat roofs are common throughout the East, and in India universal ; what is the special objection to their use in England? What should make a flat roof coated with bitumen, covered with Minton's tiling, and surrounded with a wall, a very costly or inconvenient addition to a house? It would drain perfectly, would if properly made transmit no noise, and would afford just what " villas " want, a good play-room for noisy children in fine weather. We are well aware, of course, that in houses so built that dancing is forbidden in the lease such an addition would be impossible, but assuming a decently well-built house, what is the fatal objection which throughout England haft prohibited this form of architecture, so general where it is not particularly required,—in countries, for instance, like Bengal, where anybody who slept on the roof, as mankind are supposed to do in "the East," would wake with a rheumatism which would last his life?
Previous page
