The position has altered because the margin of profit on which the jerry builder worked does not now exist in the case of the smallest houses, and because the model by-laws have been remodelled. The speculative builder—we will no longer call him by his sobriquet, for we are all very anxious he should start work again, if not quite on the same lines—has now to confine himself to slightly larger houses which he can sell. There is a chance, therefore, that he will have to consider the external design a little more carefully, and perhaps even employ an architect, though the newest little houses in places like Bournemouth have all the same old flapper-like features, the same ostentation and desire to make an immediate impression, while at the same time turning a cold shoulder to the neighbouring house. These are the marks of an uncivil, unurbane, suburban mind, in the modern and worst sense of that term.
The hope is in the smaller houses, which are too expensive for the speculative builder at the rents that can be charged. These are therefore being erected everywhere, though not nearly fast enough, by the municipalities under the various Government schemes. Everyone must have been impressed by the general improvement in design which has come about. The loosening of the by-laws has meant the employment of competent architects both for the lay-out of the roads and for the houses themselves. Instead of long narrow roads of closely packed minimum houses we have now groups of three and four houses of simple shape, which being simple can combine into some sort of unity.
The fault in the present housing schemes, good as they in general are, is, I fancy, that the units are too dissociated. We have gone too far in the opposite direction. We want, I think, more terraces, of anything up to a dozen houses, lineable with the road. We want more of the effect of a village that has grown, rather than of a lot of little model houses squeezed out of the same mould and dotted about on the landscape. But the change has been wonderful, and the chief step towards that change has been the un-modelling of the model by-laws.
VI.
OUR BIG RAILWAY STATIONS.
One reads in the daily papers that one of our biggest railways has commissioned a set of posters from most of the painter-members of the Royal Academy. Whether the R.A.s are equal to this effort in design remains to be seen, but one may take the action of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway as a sign of grace—if not exactly a death-bed repentance. After the spirited and successful deeds of the London Underground in this respect, the bigger railways had to do something. Being big, they naturally thought of the Academy; from a great combine one cannot expect any very tiring effort in clear thinking.
But what has all this to do with the big railway stations? I think it lies very near their heart. It gives at any rate a clue to the strange mystery of their shapelessness. The big railway termini in America have no posters, but are in themselves fine architectural schemes. The big termini in this country, especially the recent ones, like Victoria, have no architectural scheme, but plenty of posters. One can imagine the English director saying, “It does not matter about the shape of our stations if we plaster them with these,” and then, more touchingly, “If we go to the Royal Academy for the plasters, all will indeed be well.”
This state of mind, of course, exhibits a fundamental error of the most primitive kind. Our railway companies to-day seem to have as little faith in their own enterprises as do our banks. If railway transport is the great and important thing a great many people, not even excluding all railway directors, think it to be, the thing in itself is worthy of fine expression.
The terminal station is the gateway of the town, but a gateway through which people are brought from the uttermost parts or through which they set out on illimitable journeys. What structure in the whole of our civilisation should make a finer appeal to the imagination? Yet if we think of our London termini, only King’s Cross and Euston express in any sense this gateway idea, and in the latter an hotel belonging to the railway has been allowed to impinge upon and spoil the great gateway symbol—the Doric Propylea—which Hardwick, the architect, invented for this very purpose.
For the rest, our main railway stations are big railway sheds, leaning up against hotels or blocks of railway offices, the details of which are necessarily entirely out of scale with the spans of the train-shed roof. Sometimes this roof, as at St. Pancras, is in itself a fine thing; sometimes, as at Waterloo, it is, in the words of Mr. Roger Fry, a series of hen-roosts. In no case in England in recent years has the real dignity and importance of the railway as a railway been allowed or given anything like full expression.