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The Health of Barking
The tragedy of this story is not only that it is so common, but that it is incomplete
and space will not suffice for me to tell of all that Mary did and all that John
did. They interviewed Councillors, they went here, there and everywhere ; they
even wrote to the Member of Parliament, and after they had done all this it was
only to find that they can't have a house if the house isn't there. Of course, there
are hundreds of people who have had houses and who are very well pleased with
the points scheme, and there are hundreds of people who, if they haven't got all
they wanted, have got something by moving into the accommodation which has
been allocated to them.
John put his views on housing before me very strongly indeed, and, although
I sympathised with him, I did not envy him his job of going home and talking
to Mary about it; in fact to be quite truthful I don't think he told Mary all he had
been willing to explain in his conversation with me !
Population.
Some people reading this report might almost come to the conclusion that
the only people in the town in 1948 were John, Mary and myself, but this, of
course, is not so because there were nigh on 80,000 other people as well.
This is far too many to permit all these people to believe that they belong
to one neighbourhood. As a matter of fact, I was talking over with John and Mary
what would be the ideal population of a neighbourhood unit, having regard to
the fact that each such unit would certainly want its own
Health Centre—incidentally each would want its own infants'
school, pub, etc., and, of course, its own youth centre. We
were, however, discussing this question primarily from the
standpoint of Health Centres. It is quite obvious that the possibility of dividing
the town into small neighbourhood units of, say, 5,000 to 10,000 is impracticable
not only because the numerous Health Centres required would cost so much money,
but because there will never be the man-power available to operate such centres.
On the other hand, when you get units of population of 20,000 to 25,000 they
constitute sizeable towns, and tend to lose the spirit of neighbourliness.
It seemed to us that the ideal compromsie would be to divide such a town as
Barking into units of some 15,000 each, that is, there would be five such neighbourhood
units in Barking with five Health Centres, one of which would be a
super centre and would cater for certain specialist services, which it would not be
economic, so far as man-power is concerned, to provide at the other centres.
Our talk about population naturally brought up the question of flats and whether
if you build flats you can get more people into a town than you can if you give
each family a house. The answer is, of course, that if you build your
flats high enough you can do what you like with regard to housing a large
number of people on a small space, but it is not economical to build this way, I am
very happy to say, because such big buildings are expensive, particularly as they
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NEIGHBOURHOOD
UNITS
FLATS