The expense of fighting the Great War curtailed development and public expenditure, and the influx of munition workers and others into Luton placed a strain on existing facilities, not least housing. There was talk in 1918 of a need for 1,000 new houses in the town, and some existing areas were described as slums. Board of Guardians member Violet Lewis, in an article in the Beds & Herts Saturday Telegraph of December 14, 1918, saw a need for new housing, but, equally important, homes that were family dwellings fit to live in comfortably. Her article read:
“Houses are built to live in, and not to look on, therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except when both may be had” - Francis Bacon.
The above words were written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and it would seem looking at the efforts of mankind in the building direction up and down the country, no one in particular has profited by their infinite wisdom.
How is it that the people of Britain are for the most part so very badly housed? It is due to several reasons. One great cause, and by no means the least, is the over-bearing desire on the part of the people financially concerned, to squeeze as many small houses as possible into a certain area. This overcrowding of dwelling places is shameful and ought not to be permitted. There is no single soul living but should have the chance of decent and sanitary housing if she or he is striving to live and honest and decent life, however poor they may be.
How can we as a nation expect self-respecting men and women to emerge from the miserable and wicked submersion of slum life? The thing is utterly unpractical.
The effect of surroundings is one of the most potent and wonderful influences upon the life of mankind. Impressions are mirrored upon the brain in infancy, moulding silently and invisibly the character of the adult to be. Therefore, with an eye to the man and women of tomorrow, we who are talking so glibly, and many of us really earnestly, today about reconstruction should make this great housing reform scheme our very first care in the new programme of Domestic Policy.
In the past the man has always built the house – but the woman and her children spend most of their lives in it. Personally almost every house I have been in lacks what I call the woman's side entirely. There are, I know, a few women architects, but not very many; and we look forward to the near future when women will come forward to be especially trained in the technical part of this most useful and interesting profession, combining with the special training their peculiarly intimate knowledge of the exact requirements of a model home to bear upon the matter, and thus enable the mothers and housekeepers of this country to enjoy more real comfort than is possible at present.
There are foul alleys and dreary backwaters in this Luton of ours that area disgrace to the town. More than that, they should be condemned as unfit for human habitation, and utterly swept away. Such places – (and I am sorry here to have to include some of the villages round about Luton – I cannot call them houses or even homes), are a festering sore in our local life.
No good can possibly ever emanate from them – crime lurks and loves to lurk around dark places – while misery and despair brood over them like evil spirits seeking whom they may devour.
If Luton is to be really progressive and frankly earnest for the betterment of the community, these conditions must go. Never mind the vested interest, for I maintain interest should not be vested at the price of so much human wretchedness.
While hovels exist there will always be the lesser fortunate or the shiftless to drift into them. Let us then sweep the town clear of hovels. Let us put up decent houses. Let us as a town provide room for all, whether they be the poorest or those earning better wages; places where they will be able to live and breathe and take heart of grace, places where there will be a decent room for families to live in, but where there will no longer be a fit place for the shirker, the man that has a mind to become a millstone wound the neck of the careful, thrifty and industrious citizen.
Now as to the house. Take a 7s 6d a week dwelling. It is one thing to know what you want, but quite another to get it. Convenience is the keystone upon which a house should be built. The best room should be the kitchen, for it is there the work is done and the woman spends most of her day, there where the family have their meals.
Never mind so much about that (for the most part) useless little front room where the Sunday clothes are so often bound to be kept on the sofa and table for lack of proper cupboards upstairs. Never mind about the best suite and the chairs kept in there that are made more to look at than to sit on.
A 'best room' is very naturally dear to the heart of every woman, but the living room must not be sacrificed too much for it. There must be a best room, a place where the valued possessions can be kept in safety, where the children cannot pull things too freely about – but let it cover decidedly less room than the kitchen or living room.
The kitchen grate should not be a contraption with a sulky oven. How often one meets the oven that is completely on strike, or the grate that will smoke. These things sound as trifles very likely to the masculine ear, but all the time the woman lives with them, frets over them and suffers nervous strain and much needless worry in consequence.
Of course, in a town like Luton there is gas to fall back upon for cooking and heating, but a wretched kitchen grate is a daily scourge upon the back of a housewife who lives in the country. There should be in ever kitchen fixed by the landlord several strong laths running the whole length of the room close to the ceiling and capable of being lowered by pulleys and cords for the purpose of drying clothes on a wet day. Steam in the kitchen is dispiriting and bad enough to bear, but when the wet clothes are hanging as high as possible under the ceiling out of the way of everybody's head, and the window open at the top sash, the family feel the inconvenience far less, and the mother knows they will be safer and in far less danger of getting dirty in the process of indoor drying, or being burnt by sparks that so often fly from the grate.
The kitchen window, and every other window in the house should open freely and easily – both sashes. The sink should be in the scullery or back kitchen, with a sufficiently large draining board attached.
Every labour-saving device that can be evolved to save incessant steps of the housewife should be thought out and put in that house. It is useless to have silly little cupboards in the kitchen incapable of holding crockery, and a very ample one in the best room so that every time the china is used it means a journey to get it out, and another to put it away.
And now for an important point. Every house must and shall have have a copper built either inside or outside – preferably outside on account of steam nuisance – whether the family clothes may be boiled on washing day. What is the use of a landlord expecting his tenants to be clean and keep the property well if no practical means are given to them of being so.
There will always be the type among us who would prefer to use the fixed bath for storing potatoes instead of for its legitimate purpose; yet all the same the majority of tenants would be thankful for the boon, so the unconsidered few who would abuse the comfort are not worth talking about.
If every drop of water has to be laboriously heated over the fire, then carried about to a bath, naturally the tired mother thinks twice about that much-needed bath for the children. If all the clothes have to be washed anyhow, and without a single convenience at hand, crowned with nothing in which to boil them, they get a bad colour, and the burden and additional labour upon the housewife who has to do it is twice what it should be.
The sleeping accommodation is very important. There should be at least three good bedrooms in order that the parents and the boys and girls of the family should each be provided with decent accommodation.
Another point with regard to the housing problem. Luton is growing into a very big town. There is no sort of town planning about it, chiefly a confusion of ideas. There has been no set scheme in the past. This is very natural in many ways, because it has evolved from what Dr Johnson once called “an insignificant place consisting of one mean street”.
However, there is no mistake now to its present size or its future, and it is all important that incoming industries should not be squeezed in and dumped down in the thickly populated places or in converted premises in the midst of streets full of homes.
The Electricity Station is a glaring instance if this lack of wisdom and decent forethought for the welfare of the inhabitants of the thickly populated streets that surround it.. It may have been a very smart piece of business from a financial standpoint, the acquisition of the site of the old vicarage, but it is abominable that the people living so closely round should have to endure the befouled air and rain of b lack smuts year in year out so that it is a misery to have the windows open anywhere near.
Again the old Parish Church is the only heritage of rare beauty left to the people of Luton, the only beautiful and historic link with the past. Yet her vulnerable stones are perishing from the action of the smoke from the station upon them, and the hastening decay is apparently proceeding unheeded.
I am certain that if those Town Councillors who decided to place the station there had their dwellings there also – say in Alfred Street, Church Street or Holly Walk – this thing would never have been done.
Noisy industries, objectionable smoky works and like places should all find their homes in some spot in the town where they cannot be a daily and hourly nuisance, where they cannot be an annoyance to street dwellers or a menace to the health of the community at large.