have been built in 67 places, chiefly small towns and suburban
districts. Of the large towns which have adopted this class of
dwellings Salford stands first with 633 cottages; three London
boroughs, all on the south side of the Thames, have built 234;
Manchester has 228, Sheffield 173, Huddersfield 157, Birmingham
103. The number of rooms in municipal cottages ranges from
three to eight, but the great majority of these dwellings have four
or five rooms.
Some further details of municipal housing in particular towns are of interest. In London, the work of the London County Council down to March 31, 1908, not including three lodging-homes containing 1845 cubicles, is given in the official volume of London Statistics, published by the Council, as follows:—
| No. of Dwellings. | No. of Rooms. | Cost of Land and Building. | No. of Persons in Occupation. |
| 8,373 | 22,939 | £2,438,263 | 26,687 |
With regard to the cost, it is to be noted that the actual cost of the land purchased for improvement schemes was very much greater than that stated, having been written down to an arbitrary figure called “housing valuation.” The financial accounts of L.C.C. dwellings for the year ending March 31, 1908, are thus summarized:—
| Gross Rental. | Deductions for Empties, &c. | Net Receipts. | Expenditure including Interest. | Net Returns. |
| £180,169 | £19,455 | £160,714 | £157,141 | £3,573 |
It appears from this that if the actual commercial cost of the land were taken the housing of the Council would be run at a considerable annual loss. The occupations of the tenants are stated in the following proportions: labourers 789, clerks 312, policemen 251, shop assistants 202, warehousemen 183, printers 182, charwomen 182, tailors 155, cabinetmakers 146, canvassers 122, cigarette makers 118, widows 116, tram drivers 110, postmen 107, packers 97, engineers 87, dressmakers 41, coachmen 31, motormen 26, milliners 19. These proportional figures show that though a considerable number of labourers have been housed, the great majority of the occupants of London municipal dwellings are of a superior class. The mean weekly rent in London County Council dwellings is 2s. 1012d. per room against 2s. 4d. in dwellings erected by other agencies. The most important feature of the County Council’s policy in recent years has been the acquisition of suburban sites for the erection of cottages. There are four such sites, two on the south, one on the north and one on the west side of London; the total area is 349 acres, and the total accommodation contemplated is for 66,000 persons at an estimated cost of £3,105,840; the present accommodation is for about 8000. In addition to the housing provided by the County Council, fourteen London Borough Councils and the City Corporation had at the beginning of 1909 erected or adapted 3136 dwellings containing 7999 rooms.
In Liverpool, down to 1907, about £920,000 had been spent in clearing insanitary areas and building new dwellings; the demolition of about 8000 houses and purchase of land cost about £500,000; and the erection of 2046 dwellings, containing 4961 rooms, cost about £350,000. The size of the dwellings and the number of each class are: 1 room, 193; 2 rooms, 965; 3 rooms, 719; 4 rooms, 167. The great majority are in tenement houses of three storeys. The mean weekly rent is 1s. 612d. per room, but a large number are let at less. The net return on the total outlay is just over 1%, on the building outlay it is 223%. The principal classes of persons occupying the dwellings are labourers 675, carters 120, charwomen 103, firemen 93, porters 80, hawkers 64, sailors 45, scavengers 40. These all belong to the poorest classes, living by casual or irregular work. Liverpool has, in fact, succeeded more than any other town in providing municipal dwellings in which the really poor can afford to live.
In Manchester 956 dwellings have been built at a total cost for building and improvement of £451,932; of the whole number 420 are in blocks, 308 in tenement houses and 228 in cottages. The rents are much higher than in Liverpool; in the tenement houses the mean weekly rent is about 6d. per room more than in Liverpool. The gross profit on the block dwellings is 113% on the capital outlay, on the tenement houses 3%, on the cottages 223%. “The total loss during the last seven to ten years, including loan charges, has amounted to about £54,240” (Thompson).
In Glasgow the corporation has built under improvement schemes 2280 new dwellings containing 4013 rooms and 241 shops. The dwellings, which are all in blocks and centrally situated, are occupied chiefly by artisans; only 28% have been reserved for the poorest class of tenants. The total amount taken from the rates on this account in 30 years is £600,000. Dwellings valued at £400,000 for building and £300,000 for land give a net return of 3.06% on outlay; dwellings valued at £280,000 for land and building return 3.03% on outlay; leaving the sinking fund charges to be defrayed out of rates.
In Edinburgh insanitary areas have been bought for £107,023 and new dwellings containing 1032 rooms have been built for £87,970. Nearly all the dwellings are of one or two rooms only. The rents charged average about 2s. a week per room; actual rents received average 1s. 4d. per room and they have to be subsidized out of the rates to the extent of 2s. 3d. per room to meet the cost of site.
In Dublin provision has been or was in 1909 shortly to be made for housing 5394 families or 19,000 persons; of which 1041 families, or about one-fifth, are housed by the Corporation, the rest by companies and private persons. Altogether it was estimated that £500,000 would be spent under the act of 1890. Fifteen streets, containing 1665 houses, have been declared unhealthy areas by the medical officer, and between 1879 and 1909 more than 3000 houses were closed as unfit for habitation.
Co-operative Building.—Municipal and philanthropic housing by no means exhaust the efforts that have been made to provide working-class dwellings outside the ordinary building market. Their special function has been to substitute better dwellings for pre-existing bad ones, which is the most costly and difficult, as well as the most urgent, part of the problem in old towns. But in the provision of new dwellings alone they have been far surpassed by organized self-help in different forms. Down to 1906 there had been built 46,707 houses by 413 co–operative societies at a cost of nearly £10,000,000. They are most numerous in the manufacturing towns and particularly in the north-western district of England. Of the whole number 8530 were owned by the societies which built them; 5577 had been sold to members, and 32,600 had been built by members on money lent by the societies. These figures do not include the particular form of co-operative building known as co-partnership housing, which will be mentioned later on, or the operations of the so-called building societies, which are really companies lending money to persons on mortgage for the purpose of building. The difference between them and the co-operative societies which do the same thing is that the latter retain the element of co-operation by lending only to their own members, whereas the building societies deal in the open market. Their operations are on an immense scale; at the end of 1908 the invested funds of the registered building societies exceeded £72,000,000. An agency working on this scale, which far exceeds the operations of all the others put together, is obviously an important factor in housing. The number of houses built must help to relieve congestion, and since they are built to suit the owners or tenants they cannot be of the worst class. They also represent a form of thrift, and deserve notice on that account.
The Small Dwellings Acquisition Act of 1899, which has not previously been mentioned, was intended to facilitate the building or purchase of small houses by their tenants by means of loans advanced by local authorities. Down to 1906 about £82,000 had been so advanced by 5 county boroughs, 17 urban councils and 1 rural district council.
Housing by Employers.—No comprehensive information is available on this head, but it has not been an important factor in towns, being chiefly confined to agricultural, mining and suburban manufacturing districts. The former two belong to the subject of Rural Housing, which is separately discussed below; the third has an interest of its own on account of its connexion with “model settlements.” The building of houses for their workpeople by industrial employers has never been widely adopted in this country, but it has attracted considerable attention at two different periods. Sir Titus Salt was a pioneer in this direction, when he built his woollen mills at Saltaire, on the outskirts of Bradford, and housed his workpeople on the spot. That plan was maintained by his successors, who still own some 900 excellent and cheap cottages, and was adopted by a few other manufacturers in the same neighbourhood. Saltaire was a model settlement with many institutions for the benefit of the mill-hands, and as such it attracted much attention; but the example was not generally followed, and the interest lapsed. Recently it has been revived by the model settlements at Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, started about 1888, Bournville near Birmingham (1895), and Earswick, near York (1904), which are of a much more elaborate character. Elsewhere, employers setting down works in some new locality where no provision existed, have had to build houses for their workmen; but they have done so in a plain way, and this sort of housing has not assumed large proportions.
Conditions in 1909.—It has been said above that great improvements have been effected, and of that there is no doubt at all. Both quantity and quality are more satisfactory than they were, though both are still defective. The conditions vary greatly in different places, and no general indictment can be sustained. The common practice of citing some exceptionally bad cases, and by tacit inference generalizing from them to the whole country, is in nothing more misleading than in the matter of housing. Local differences are due to several causes—age,
