Page:Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).djvu/63

Rh people of London. "Every such change in the street geography of London displaces thousands of the poor"—I quote from the Daily Chronicle of July 6, 1898—" and for many years all public or quasi-public schemes have been charged with the liability to re-house as many of them as possible. This is as it should be; but the difficulty begins when the public is asked to face the music and pay the bill. In the present case some three thousand souls of the working population have to be turned out. After some searching of heart, it is decided that most of them are so closely tied to the spot by their employment that it would be a hardship to send them more than a mile away. The result, in cash, is that London must spend in re-housing them about £100 a head—or £300,000 in all. As to those who cannot fairly be asked to go even a mile away—hangers-on to the market, or others tethered to the spot—the cost will be even higher. They will require to have parcels of the precious land cleared by the great scheme itself, and the result of that will be to house them at the handsome figure of £260 a-piece, or some £1,400 for every family of five or six. Financial statements convey little to the ordinary mind. Let us make it a little more intelligible. A sum of £1,400 means, in the house market, a rental of nearly £100 a year. It would buy an excellent, in fact a sumptuous, house and garden at Hampstead, such as the better middle-class delight in. It would purchase anywhere in the nearer suburbs such houses as men with £1,000 a year inhabit. If one went further afield, to the new neighbourhoods which the City clerk can easily reach by rail, a £1,400 house represents actual magnificence." But on what scale of comfort will the poor Covent Garden