House property & its management

As it now seems fairly clear that the working population of London is likely to be more and more housed in “blocks,” it is not very profitable to spend time in considering whether this is a fact to rejoice in or to deplore, except so far as the consideration may enable us to see how far the advantages of the change may be increased or the drawbacks diminished. The advantages of the change are very apparent and are apt to appear overwhelming, and the disadvantages are apt to be dismissed as somewhat sentimental or inevitable. I have, however, little to say upon advantages. They may, I think, be briefly summed up under two heads. It is supposed that better sanitary arrangements are secured in blocks. It is also certain that all inspection and regulation are easier in blocks; and on inspection and regulation much of our modern legislation, much of our popular hope is based.

With regard to the sanitary arrangements, I think all who are at all conversant with the subject are beginning to be aware that these at least may be as faulty in blocks as in smaller buildings; but it is undoubtedly true that even where this is so, the publicity of the block enables inspection to be carried out much more easily, and so, theoretically at least, a certain standard can be enforced. And though this is not quite so true in actual practice as those who put their faith in enforcement of sanitary law are apt to imagine, still it is true, and it is a very distinct advantage to be noted.

Your readers may be astonished that I do not put down the greater economy of the block system as a distinct gain, but I am not so wholly sure as may seem that it exists. For, first, room by room the block dwellings are not at all invariably cheaper than those in small houses. Moreover, I think we can hardly permit, and assuredly cannot permanently congratulate and pride ourselves upon, a form of construction which admits so very little sunlight into lower floors. So that to the present cost of block buildings must, I should think, be fairly added in the future such diminution of height or such increase of yard space as would allow of the freer entrance of air and light. This would increase the ground-rent payable on each room. I think also that the cheapness of erecting many-storied buildings is exaggerated. I have built very few blocks, but I have been consulted about some, and I have more than once proved in £ s. d. that cutting off a story from the block as shown in the plans was a very small net loss, when cost of building, saving on rates, repairs, etc., and possibly even diminution in wall thickness, justified by the lower elevation, were taken into account. We must also remember the increase of rent gladly paid by the sober and home-loving man for ground-floor rooms lighter and pleasanter than if overshadowed by high blocks. I do not wish to generalize—the matter is one of £ s. d.—but I say that the figures are well worth careful study on each building scheme, and that, as far as the model dwellings are concerned, I think their undue height in proportion to width of yard has sometimes been due to the mistaken zeal for accommodating numbers of families. I say mistaken, for with our increased means of cheap transit we should try to scatter rather than to concentrate our population, especially if the concentration has to be secured by dark lower rooms.

With regard to the disadvantages of blocks, I think they may be divided into those which may be looked upon, by such of us as are hopeful, as probably transitory, and those which seem, so far as we can see, quite essential to the block system. The transitory ones are by far the most serious. They are those which depend on the enormously increasing evil which grows up in a huge community of those who are undisciplined and untrained. They disappear with civilization; they are, so far as I know, entirely absent in large groups of blocks where the tenants are the quiet, respectable working-class families who, to use a phrase common in London, “keep themselves to themselves,” and whose well-ordered, quiet little homes, behind their neat little doors with bright knockers, nicely supplied with well-chosen appliances, now begin to form groups where responsible, respectable citizens live in cleanliness and order. Under rules they grow to think natural and reasonable, inspected and disciplined, every inhabitant registered and known, School Board laws and laws of the landlord or company regularly enforced, every infectious case of illness instantly removed, all disinfecting done at public cost, is developed a life of law, regular, a little monotonous, and not encouraging any great individuality, but consistent with happy home life, and it promises to be the life of the respectable London working man.

On the other hand, what life in blocks is to the less self-controlled hardly any words of mine are strong enough to describe, and it is abhorred accordingly by the tidy and striving, wherever any—even a small number—of the undisciplined are admitted to blocks, or where, being admitted, there is no real living rule exercised. Regulations are of small avail; no public inspection can possibly, for more than an hour or two, secure order; no resident superintendent has at once conscience, nerve and devotion single-handed to stem the violence, the dirt, the noise, the quarrels; no body of public opinion on the part of the tenants themselves asserts itself: one by one the tidier ones depart disheartened, the rampant remain and prevail, and often, though with a very fair show to the outsider, the block becomes a sort of pandemonium. No one who is not in and out day by day, or, better still, night after night; no one who does not watch the swift degradation of children belonging to tidy families; no one who does not know the terrorism exercised by the rough over the timid and industrious poor; no one who does not know the abuse of every appliance provided by the benevolent or speculative but non-resident landlord, can tell what life in blocks is where the population is low class. Sinks and drains are stopped; yards provided for exercise must be closed because of misbehaviour; boys bathe in the drinking-water cisterns; washhouses on staircases—or staircases themselves—become the nightly haunt of the vicious, the Sunday gambling places of boys; the yell of the drunkard echoes through the hollow passages; the stairs are blocked by dirty children, and the life of any decent hard-working family becomes intolerable.

The very same evils are nothing like as injurious where the families are more separate, so that, while in smaller houses one can often try difficult tenants with real hope of their doing better, it is wholly impossible usually to try (or to train) them in blocks. The temptations are greater, the evils of relapse are far greater. It is like taking a bad girl into a school. Hence the enormous importance of keeping a large number of small houses wherever possible for the better training of the rowdy and the protection of the quiet and gentle; and I would implore well-meaning landlords to pause before they clear away small houses and erect blocks, with any idea of benefiting the poorer class of people. The change may be inevitable, it may have to come, but as they value the life of our poorer fellow-citizens, let them pause before they throw them into a corporate life for which they are not ready, and which will, so far as I can see, not train them to be ready for it. Let them either ask tidy working people they know, or learn for themselves, whether I am not right in saying that in the shabbiest little two-, four-, six- or eight-roomed house, with all the water to carry upstairs, with one little w.c. in a tiny backyard, with perhaps one dustbin at the end of the court, and even, perhaps, with a dark little twisted staircase, there are not far happier, better, yes, and healthier homes than in the blocks where lower-class people share and do not keep in order far better appliances.

And let them look the deeper into this in so far as our reformers who trust to inspection for all education, our would-be philanthropists or newspaper correspondents who visit a court or block once and think they have seen it, even our painstaking statisticians who catalogue what can be catalogued, are unable to deal with these facts. Those who know the life of the poor know—those who watch the effect of letting to a given family a set of rooms in a block in a rough neighbourhood, or rooms in a small house in the same district, know—those who remember how numerous are the kinds of people to whom they must refuse rooms in a block for their own sake, or that of others, know. To the noisy drunkard one must say, “For the quiet people’s sake, No”; to the weak drunkard one must say, “You would get led away, No”; to the young widow with children one must say, “Would not you be better in a small house where the resident landlady would see a little to the children?” thinking in one’s heart also, “and to you.” For the orphaned factory girl who would “like to keep mother’s home together” one feels a less public life safer; for the quiet family who care to bring up their children well one fears the bad language and gambling on the stairs. For the strong and self-contained and self-reliant it may be all right, but the instinct of the others who cling on to the smaller houses is right for them.

For, after all, the “home”—the “life”—does not depend on the number of appliances, or even in any deep sense on the sanitary arrangements. I heard a workman once say, with some coarseness but with much truth, “Gentlemen think if they put a water-closet to every room they have made a home of it,” and the remark often recurs to me for the element of truth there is in it, and there is more decency in many a tiny little cottage in Southwark, shabby as it may be—more family life in many a one room let to a family—than in many a populous block. And this is due partly to the comparative peace of the more separate home: for it seems as if a certain amount of quiet and even of isolation made family life and neighbourly kindness more possible. People become brutal in large numbers who are gentle when they are in smaller groups and know one another, and the life in a block only becomes possible when there is a deliberate isolation of the family and a sense of duty with respect to all that is in common. The low-class people herd on the staircases and corrupt one another, where those a little higher would withdraw into their little sanctum. But in their own little house, or as lodgers in a small house, the lower-class people get the individual feeling and notice which often trains them in humanity.

Whatever may be the way out of the difficulty, let us hope that it may come before great evil is done by the massing together of herds of untrained people, and by the ghastly abuse of staircases, open all night but not under public inspection, not easily inspected even if nominally so placed. The problem is one we ought all, so far as in us lies, to lay to heart and do what we can to solve. I have not dwelt here on what may be called the “sentimental” objections to blocks. The first is the small scope they give for individual freedom. The second is their painful ugliness and uninterestingness in external look, which is nearly always connected with the first. For difference is at least interesting and amusing, monotony never. Let us hope that when we have secured our drainage, our cubic space of air, our water on every floor, we may have time to live in our homes, to think how to make them pretty, each in our own way, and to let the individual characteristics they take from our life in them be all good, as well as healthy and beautiful, because all human life and work were surely meant to be like all Divine creations, lovely as well as good.