Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/376

372 exercised by persons having for the most part an interest in urbanizing the district—jobbers in residential land ripe for development, tradesmen, contractors and local builders—have been used as an instrument to prevent the erection of dwellings suitable for agricultural laborers and to tie the hands of landowners willing to provide such dwellings. No better example of this can be adduced than Mr. Wilfred Blunt's own case. Having himself experimented with an iron bungalow which he found singularly comfortable and commodious, he directed his estate carpenter to erect on his property in the New Forest where there are no builders' by-laws, two cottages, intending should they prove successful to make them the model for cottage building in Sussex. And highly successful they proved. He found they could be erected at the cost of £130 for a building covering 700 feet area, with a verandah of 240 feet more and an outbuilding containing washhouse and closets—"as snug and sanitary a home as any poor man could wish to inhabit, for there was a fireplace in every room, roof ventilation and ample door and window space."

But when Mr. Wilfred Blunt came to Sussex, where the London building by-laws are in force, there was a lion, and a very fierce lion, in the path. The plan of a cottage was submitted to the rural council and no objection was taken to it until the building materials had been deposited on the ground. Then, however, notice was given that the plan was disapproved by the council as violating the by-law. This notice, Mr. Wilfred Blunt thought it his duty to disregard, and went on with the cottage, which cost £130, and which, with an additional quarter of an acre of land, he could let without loss at 2s. 6d. a week or Is. a week less than an old cottage it replaced. But alas for rural economy! The builder was summoned for building with other than bricks and mortar, and an action was brought against Mr. Wilfred Blunt, as a result of which a continuing penalty of two shillings a day was inflicted on him until the model cottage was pulled down.

It is clear that a check must be administered to rustic Bumbledom, and a stop put to the application to purely agricultural areas of regulations intended for towns, and which in towns have had an altogether salutary effect in preventing the construction of unsafe and insanitary houses. But I can not go as far as some who have urged that there should be no by-laws in country districts, or that such by-laws should not apply to any new building on a freehold property where such building is more than a given number of yards from other dwellings or past the property of adjacent owners. In regard to sanitary arrangements, by-laws seem to us as necessary in the country as in the town. It is not licence, but reasonable liberty that is wanted; not looseness, but elasticity, and it is to be hoped that this will be realized in the model code of by-laws for rural districts promised by Mr. Walter Long, and