For that will, inevitably, be the alternative for a great many private persons. National and Public-Utility Housing Schemes and public and industrial works of all sorts will naturally and properly claim priority in the matter of all building materials—and the private individual, so far as he can secure such materials at all, will only do so at a price that is the logical outcome of an unprecedented demand and an ominously inadequate supply.
Local Materials
Timber, tiles, slates, plaster, and ironmongery he must still purchase and transport as best he may—but the shell of his house, its outer walls at least, could and should be raised from the soil of the site itself by the employment of the simplest gear and a small amount of unskilled local labour.
So acute indeed is the transport problem, and so small is the hope of any substantial improvement in the near future, that any expedient tending to ease matters in this respect is worthy of the most serious attention.
The restrictions imposed by high freights will of themselves tend to check the often senseless and unnecessary importation of materials foreign to a district, which in the past was the despair of architects of the “traditional” school.
It was a wasteful practice that had gone far to obliterate all but the most robust traits in the old and very diverse local building conventions of rural England.
Formerly, he who wilfully carried bricks into Merioneth or the Cotswolds, or slates into Kent or ragstone-rubble into Middlesex, was guilty of no more than foolishness and an æsthetic solecism.
Under present conditions such action should render him liable to prosecution and conviction on some such count as “Wasting the shrunken resources of his country in a time of great scarcity, . . . in that he did wantonly transport material for building the walls of a house by rail and road from A to B when suitable and sufficient material of another sort and at no higher cost existed, and was readily accessible hard by the site at B.”
That indeed is our one chance of salvation, the existence and use of “the materials of another sort hard by the site.”
These natural materials and their appropriate use in building will be considered in the following pages.