I
The country is faced by a dilemma probably greater and more poignant
than any with which 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 with which to build them, but has not even the plant
by which that material can be rapidly created. There is not merely a
shortage, but an actual famine everywhere as regards the things out of
which houses are made. Bricks are wanted by the ten thousand million,
but there are practically no bricks in sight. All that the brickyards of
the United Kingdom can do, working all day and every day, is to turn out
something like four thousand million a year. But to those who want
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 what we want. Needless to say we are
short, too, of lime and cement, and probably shall be shorter. _No coal,
no quicklime_, and _No coal, no cement_, and as things look now, it is
going to be a case, if not of no coal, at any rate of much less coal.
Even worse is the shortage in timber--the material hitherto deemed
essential for the making of roofs, doors, windows and floors. Raw timber
is hardly obtainable, and seasoned timber does not exist. The same story
has to be told about tiles, slates, corrugated iron, and every other
form of "legitimate" roofing 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 must not lie down in the high road
of civilisation and cry out that we are ruined or betrayed, or that the
world is too hard for us, and that we must give up the task of living in
houses. Whether we like it or not we have got to do something about the
housing question, and we have got to do it at once, and there is an end.
Translated into terms of action, this means that as we have not got
enough of the old forms of material we must turn to others and learn how
to house ourselves with materials such as we have not used before. Once
again 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 we always 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 material of the house from one quarter of England to another. That
is my apology for introducing to the public a work dealing with what I
can hear old-fashioned master-builders describing as the "bastard" forms
of construction. One of these is Pise de terre, the old system of
building with walls formed of rammed or compressed earth: a system which
was once known throughout Europe and of which the primitive tribesmen of
Arizona and New Mexico knew the secret. Down to our own day it has been
practised with wonderful success in the Valley of the Rhone. Then come
our own cob, once the cottage material _par excellence_ of Devonshire
and the West of England, our system of building with plain clay blocks,
a plan indigenous in the Eastern counties, and again the use of chalk
and chalk pise.
[Headnote: The Search for Cheap Material]