In many ways
I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped
sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, as
being there and in the nature of things. I did not see the oddness of
solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designed
nor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of
beauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this that I find
myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community
living in such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to
wearing second-hand clothes.
You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which
Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of London, miles
of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for
prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There must
have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and
fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden
Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the
Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.
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