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36
Although the Council has no legal liability for the rehousing
of the occupants from a house on which a closing order
has been made, in the interests of the tenants the moral responsibility
is usually accepted. The effect of a closing order would,
therefore, be that a private owner would have the value of his
property tremendously increased at the expense of persons on the
Council's housing waiting list although there would also be an
unfit house made fit. In practice the Council has not been asked
to make closing orders on this type of property but a number of
owners have made offers to tenants of sums of money, and
occasionally quite substantial sums, to vacate the premises and
some of them have accepted.
People who live in Hampstead are rightly and understandably
most anxious that the charm and character of the older part
of the town should be preserved. Preservation means, of course,
that some things which are bad are preserved along with fhe good
and there have been considerable difficulties in some cases in
providing adequate natural lighting and ventilation in some of the
renovated houses and there have been other problems connected
with the preservation of the external appearance and with the
extremely limited sites which some of the houses occupy. The
renovations have, however, usually been most skilfully carried
out and the standard of workmanship has been generally high.
A problem in Hampstead which is perhaps more difficult
of solution than in many other areas is the shortage of garages.
The large number of cars left in the street at night gives some
idea of the extent of this shortage. Many of the large houses
which were built in the early part of the century are in terraces
or built so closely together that there is no possibility of
providing a garage or space for a garage without major alterations
to the house. Although motor cars were in use at the time
when the houses were built, the cars and the horse drawn
carriages were presumably relegated to mews which have now no
connection whatever with the houses which they used to serve.
Many of the houses are very well built and with reasonable
maintenance will last for another fifty years and there is no
reason to suppose that the use of the motor car will decline. The
use and possession of a car is bound up with our standard of
living and unless some solution to the garage problem can be
found it may be that it will have some effect on the type of
occupation of houses in some parts of the Borough.