Part 1 (2/2)

[Footnote 1: Certain of these have since been issued and will be found in Appendix IV at the end of the book]

[Footnote 2: See Appendix IV]

CONSIDERATIONS

”IF ALL AVAILABLE BRICKWORKS WERE TO PRODUCE AT THEIR HIGHEST LIMIT OF OUTPUT AND WITH ALL THE LABOUR THEY WANTED AT THEIR DISPOSAL THEY COULD ONLY TURN OUT 4,000,000,000 BRICKS IN A YEAR AS AGAINST A PRE-WAR AVERAGE OF 2,800,000,000”--(_See Report by Committee appointed by Ministry of Reconstruction to consider the post-war position of building_)

The first year's progra _alone_ calls for at least 6,000,000,000 bricks That is to say, unless wall materials other than brick are freely used, we shall fall alarly short of what the population of Great Britain needs in bare acco projects whatsoever other than housing must be postponed indefinitely

”THE COUNTRY DISTRICTS OF ENGLAND AND WALES ARE UNSURPassED FOR VARIETY AND BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, AND IT WOULD BE NOTHING LESS THAN A NATIONAL MISFORTUNE IF THE INCREASED DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL HOLDINGS WERE TO RESULT IN THE ERECTION OF BUILDINGS UNSUITED TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND UGLY IN APPEARANCE”--(_Extract from the report submitted by the Departs for Ss, 1913_)

INTRODUCTION

I

The country is faced by a dilenant than any hich it has hitherto had to deal It needs, and needs at once, a million new houses, and it has not only utterly inadequate stores of material hich to build them, but has not even the plant by which that e, but an actual fas out of which houses are made Bricks are wanted by the ten thousand ht All that the brickyards of the United Kingdo all day and every day, is to turn out so like four thousand million a year But to those ant houses at once, what is the use of a promise of bricks in five years'

time? To tell them to turn to the stone quarries is a mere derision Let alone the cost of work and of transport, it is only in a few favoured places that the rocks will give us ant Needless to say we are short, too, of lime and cement, and probably shall be shorter _No coal, no quicklioing to be a case, if not of no coal, at any rate of e in ti of roofs, doors, s and floors Raw timber is hardly obtainable, and seasoned timber does not exist The saated iron, and every other for substance There are none to be had

In this dread predicament what are we to do as a nation? What we must not do is at any rate quite clear We h road of civilisation and cry out that we are ruined or betrayed, or that the world is too hard for us, and that wein houses Whether we like it or not we have got to do soot to do it at once, and there is an end

Translated into terh of the old forms of material we must turn to others and learn how to house ourselves with ain necessity must be the mother of invention, or rather, of invention and revival, for in anything so old and universal as the housing problem it is too late to be ambitious Here ays find that there has been an ancient assyrian or Egyptian or a primitive man in front of us

It is the object of the present book to attack part of the problem of how to build without bricks, and indeed without mortar, and equally important, as far as possible without the vast cost of transporting the heavy land to another That ishat I can hear old-fashi+onedas the ”bastard” forms of construction One of these is Pise de terre, the old syste alls formed of rahout Europe and of which the primitive tribesmen of Arizona and New Mexico knew the secret Down to our own day it has been practised onderful success in the Valley of the Rhone Then coe material _par excellence_ of Devonshi+re and the West of England, our systeenous in the Eastern counties, and again the use of chalk and chalk pise

[Headnote: The Search for Cheap Material]

PISe DE TERRE

For me Pise de terre, ever since I heard of it, has offered special attractions It, and it alone provides, or if one must be cautious, appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many other people into a reality My connection with the problee housing, now nearly a quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap reat experts in building ly), I have had the si you et it by the use of cheap material

It has always seemed to me that there is no other way Whatmaterial was so dear, and then as the cause of its dearness? I found it in the fact that bricks are very expensive things to s to quarry, that ces to s are very heavy and very expensive to drag about the country, and to ”dues or a ss are, to use the conventional phrase, ”urgently dened amusement, nay, contereat deal ofmy brains in the search for cheapin the earth out of which walls could be roup ofthe walls of a house out of what they found there

I wanted e in ”Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” to rise like the lark from the furrows But I was at once dissuaded from my purpose by cautious and scientific persons The chemists, if they did not scoff like the architects, were visibly perturbed ”Your dream is impossible,”

they said ”Nature abhors it as much as she used to be supposed to abhor a vacuum If your soil is clay, and you can afford the ti coal to the spot to make the bricks, you can no doubt turn the earth on the spot into a house, but even then you had far better buy the some chemical which will mix with the earth and turn it into a kind of stone, is the merest delusion It is the nature of the earth to kill anything in the way of cement that is mixed with it For example, even a little earth will kill concrete or mortar Unless you wash your sand most carefully, and free it from all earth stain, you will ruin your concrete blocks” I appeared to be literally ”up against” a brick wall It was that or nothing And then, and when things seemed at their very worst, a kind correspondent of _The Spectator_ showed round passages who suddenly sees a tiny square of light and knows that it means the way out So why I didn't find the thing I wanted in Pise de terre, much used in Australia, and occasionally in Cape Colony Then cahtenment People who had seen and even lived in such houses wrote to _The Spectator_, and the world indeed for the moment seemed alive with Pise de terre I was even lent the ”Farmer's Handbook” of New South Wales, in which the State Government provides settlers with an elaborate description of how to build in Pise, and how toso It was then, too, that I began to hear of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century buildings of Pise in the Rhone Valley In fact, everybody but I seemed to know all there was to be known about Pise de terre For the moment indeed, the situation seemed like that described in _Punch's_ fa lady and the Ger lady ”_Ze universal language_,” says the professor ”_Where is it spoken?_” ”_No vairs_” Pise de terre appeared to be the universal syste, but as far as I could make out, it was practised ”no vairs,” or at any rate not in Europe

[Headnote: Experiot as far as the position described above, when doept the war upon Europe, and everything had to be postponed in favour of the i the ranks of the nation's arht our enemies As the ent on, however, the dereat, and I felt I should be justified in trying some experiments with Pise de terre, even in spite of the difficulty of obtaining labour

I think I can best illustrate the nature of Pise and what it can do, and I believe will do, if I shortly recount in chronological order these humble pioneer efforts