The common reluctance of Lon" don's slum-dwellers—for they often are very reluctart—to leave their decrepit dwellings for the beautiful pew flats buili for them by paternal in. Picipalities has been giving the 1.C.C. much trouble. The explanation now discovered is a simple one. Ta the flats there is nothing to do but to look out of the window or get in the way of the wife. In the slums there was always a back yard in which you might tinker about with carpentry, "fancy" pigeons, or even cultivate a bit of garden. And as I wrote in a previous letter, the development of backyard gardens in London's mean street, much -encouraged by the Royal Horticultural Society with cheap seeds and annual competitions, is wonderful evidence of the inborn Anglo. Saxon love of So to give the idle hands of the new flat dwellers something to do the L.C.C. are planning to build community centres, with physical exercises, amateur dramatics, games and rest rooms.
Which is much, but not all that the old backyard with its delightful sense of being "one's own" could give. For Englishmen are not gre-various, and the notion of the house that is a castle is at least as dear to dustman as to duke.
But the problem of the slum-dweller turned flat holder is really that of the nation. Not only the great mansions but the moderate sized houses are giving place to flats, in which there is neither space nor servants for entertaining, and the restaurants dance halls and night clubs supply the want. The home disappears; we live in herds in public. The day seems not far off when we shall take the simplest meal in community kitchens—meals composed of predigested foods and concentrated jellies as fore seen by Mr. H. G. Wells many years ago.
Middle Tower
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.