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14
The addition of this influx, together with the normal increase
of their own people, has placed upon the town districts
a strain to which they are unequal. In proximity to the centres
of business, every available plot of garden or recreation ground
has been converted into building site. Houses constructed
from materials of the poorest quality and by workmen employed
only for the cheapness of their labour, have been
hurried into occupation. The system of close building, at
first confined in its application to the consolidation of the
inner zone, has been adopted in the outer, and with the
demand for shelter, which increases in a progressive ratio
with the growth of the population, the once open suburbs
must ere long become indistinguishable in the monotony of
house row and pavement from Whitechapel or Hoxton.
The art of close building appears to be a progressive one.
In its infancy twenty years ago, the art has now arrived at
a stage nearly approaching perfection. Between then and
now, every step in an ascending scale of growth and development
has its prototype, and is characterised in monuments
discoverable in Lambeth. In the earlier examples, an
examination of the ground-plan elicits the fact that the
space allotted to garden land is more comprehensive in area
than that dedicated to the plumb line and trowel. In the
successive stages the size of the two quantities may be
observed gradually to approximate until reaching an equality,
they again diverge into unequal proportions now however
at the expense of uncovered ground, and this until the final
stage of development is attained, when the extreme limit of
encroachment permitted by the Building Act is reached, and
garden land is represented by a yard 100 superficial feet in
area.
The houses in Bonnington Square, Harleyford Road,
although their arrangements admit of the preservation of a