June 22, None of the changes that have come about in post-war England is more noticeable, perhaps because it is the one change in that conservative land which seems likely to endure, than the prevailing determination everyone to own their own house. One sees it, in imagina~ tion, as an unconscious recoil against the danger Englishmen had so narrowly escaped of being no longer masters in their own land, that they must now give themselves tangible proof of their unaltered possession of it, The more practical explanation is that the breaking up of so many big estates whose owners, alas, had become too poor to maintain them, and the universal house famine gave new opportunities to tenants. to acquire their houses by extended purchase, thus supplying capital which would otherwise not have been available. It was a chance both for builders and public. How it has been seized, the whole face of England bears witness, On the hoardings of every railway station, innumerable building societies display pictures of quite impossibly charming houses, surrounded by verdant lawns and many-hued Howerbeds, among which the owner, his wife and children, ever handsome, young and smiting, refresh " themselves beneath ever shining skin And all round the outskirts of London one finds the realization of these visions in eruptions of small dwellings, neat enough and by no means. unattractive if slightly conventional in design, but so ridicule ously alike that one marvels how Jowners manage to identify the property.
Yet more noticeable are the illustrated house advertisements in newspapers, everything that heart could desire from a mansion in Whaddon Chase to a sixteenth century Sussex farmhouse, italily—modernized, company's water, gas and "electric "light, central heating, walled kitchen garden, lerazy pavements" and the rest of it, "Country Life" was first in the field with these jallurements. One knows people "out East" who have regularly imagination, a house a week for years past. But almost every paper that can get owners to advertise now makes a like display, It is curious to notice now the price appears to vary inversely with the size of the property. Here are two rtisements before us as we write, side by side in the came paper, a "genuine XVII century residence, hall, two reception, five bed, bath and large atti all modern conveniences and four and a half acres of ground seemingly well laid out; and a "comfortable family residence, lodges, sixteen bed, two reception rooms, stabling, farmery, bungalow and sixty-eight acres," all within but an hour of London. With five or six times the accommodation and fifteen times as much and, the latter costs only a little more than twice the former; and every would-be "purchaser knows well that the advertised price of one of these big houses is far ahead of what the owner would take. Property tax and "servant problem"-are of course the explanation. "The smallest house you can do with, not the largest you can afford" is always Jo sound maxim. It would be interesting to know how many people buy their louses by these pictures. Presumably a good many, or they would not appear. There is a good deal of a gamble in the whole transaction. We know of one main, retired from the Far East, who "viewed" a hundred and eleven houses, bought the hundred and twelfth and, by latest advices, -was wanting to sell, Another bought his betise, metaphorically, on sslimpse from a railway carriage, completed the purchase next week and remains enchanted.
"Fools build houses for wise men to live in." Would the proverb also apply to bungalows, lof which nowadays there is 2 positive epidemic? Cheapness and manageability are the great attraction in them, But to build a good bungalow is not, after all, so much cheaper than a house; and there is nothing, perhaps, except clothes, in which cheapness is such ' poor economy as in house-building, One wonders gloomily what will bbe the condition of the vast majority of these suburban building estate residences ten years hence, as window frames contract and roofs begin to feel the strain of wind and weather. The ideal of getting out -into the country after the day's business a noble one, but the country ever recedes as human beings multiply and the loveliest distant view ceases to appeal when jone looks at it day by day through a maze of machine-made villas all exactly of the same pattern as one's own and all alike in leaking roofs and bursting water-pipes, Perhaps after all it is the town-dweller who sees most of the romance of the country, feeding his imagitation on recollections of day here and a day there as it may be snatched from business, What the real dweller in the country may feel, the man who Vike his fathers was born and bred and remains ever on the soil away from crowds and the suburban time table, we do not know because such people rarely talk of their emotions. There is a prevailing idea that the bucolic mind is not given to self-analysis, If that be true, the man who is careful not to put his fancies under too hard a test of reality may well have the greater joy in his visions of rural life, The true country remains always the land of our dreams, like, perhaps, the house build mit.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.