London, July 1.
Since the war started we have bulls perhaps a couple of hundred houses in the country though at Tease 350,000 are needed. Contracts have been passed for the erection of 67,000 houses and schemes have been sanctioned for 200,000 in all. Hence. if we could build what we have undertaken and build them properly we might solve the problem which continues to be one of the most serious we have to face.
Exprrimestat BUivoers.
There are those who suggest that unless we show greater energy we shall have some sort of a revolution." This is an extreme view, but I should not be surprised if in the coming winter we see a good deal more resentment at the leisurely procedure adopted by every one who is constructing edifices of any sort. I say "of any sort," since although we started this housing campaign with the intention of constructing houses of stone or bricks on the most approved lines, you can now build of almost anything. You can have wooden houses and steel houses. concrete houses and semi-concrete houses, even baked earth houses. asbestos houses and tin sheeting houses. You can have any pattern, any type. No one will complain if you introduce every sort of pattern, any type. No one will complain if you introduce every sort of architecture al vagary so jong as you provide sufficient cubic space for each of the occupants and provide a bath, and indeed, such is the laxity with which official instructions are being interpreted that the Ministry of Health is constantly accused of offending against its own canons of accommodation and propriety.
Once upon a time a man who tried to build a wooden house was chased out of the district by an excited surveyor and Council. Nowadays you have organizations in the country which offer you about 50 types of wooden structures built on Canadian lines by Canadian wood and so standardized that we have almost arrived at the stage when every man can be his own house erector. The authorities even encourage the innovator. There was a time whe~ they threw bricks at kim, but now they. have got to learn that the man who experiments usually takes to build any structure on novel lines about four times the money he would have spent on a simple house, and they therefore
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.