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property they will go on to build 34 five-room and 87 four-room cottages,
96 cottage flats, 489 three-room and 87 two-room tenements—or accommodation
for 793 families in 2,447 rooms. The total cost, including the
portion mentioned already, will be about £200,000, and the annual yield
of this really philanthropic investment will be, perhaps a little under,
perhaps a little over, 4 per cent. One cannot build cottages on land of
this value to yield a clear 4 per cent.; the three-storeyed tenements serve
to restore the balance of return.
It is easy to see the advantages that result from this gigantic and
patriotic scheme. Of the 22 acres, seven will be devoted to roads, a much
larger proportion than heretofore ; every cottage and tenement has its own
open space on a small scale ; and the Commissioners, both in Walworth,
where they offer over an acre of recreation ground, and in the New Cut,
where they have given half an acre, have been more ready with their gifts
than the local authorities have at first been to make use of them for the
good of the people. We therefore start with an immense advantage in the
shape of light and air. We pass to the question of building, where almost
anything would be an improvement on the tumble-down houses now on
the site. Their places will be taken by rows of neat, unpretentious
cottages, each with a well-sheltered porch, and tenement houses of no
great height, where each suite has a half share in a good copper and
washhouse. One cannot run a scheme like this and have plans from
fashionable architects on a 5 per cent, basis, but "Mitre Street, New Cut,"
will be sufficient evidence of the care that has been taken in the matter of
construction.
But the crux of a business like this is the management. The
Commissioners may build the best of houses and yet find the whole scheme
fail when it comes to the admission of tenants, the payment of rents, the
insistence on proper repairs, and the question of sub-letting. The slum
landlord is generally a mysterious person, but his agent or middleman is
mostly only too familiar to the tenants. The comic papers portray him as
a rotund person with a wealth of watchchain; the poor know him more
exactly. In the place of the middleman, who has only himself to thank
for any injustice that has been done to him, the Commissioners use the
generous services of the middlewoman, in the wholly benevolent person of
Miss Octavia Hill. She has under her a carefully-selected army of women
rent collectors, whose activities do not stop with the mere collecting.
They keep an eye on cleanliness and sanitation, as well as on actual
breakages; they do their best to promote such arrangements as make for
morality, and, though they come for the rent, they are soon regarded as