For it is the bungalow craze, with all that it now implies, which has most seriously damaged the appearance of rural England during the last eight years. There is nothing inherently unpleasant in the bungalow type of house. Properly designed and constructed, it may be made a thing of beauty harmonising perfectly with its surroundings. But, to my mind, its advantages have been grossly exaggerated. On the count of cost, the primary consideration nowadays, it shows no superiority over the two-floor house; reasonable privacy for its bedrooms is secured with difficulty; and it is apt to sprawl over the ground. One cannot quite realise why it has been so much favoured in recent years; possibly it is merely a transient fashion, like face-powder or crinolines. There was a great and a genuine demand for houses after the War, which had to be satisfied. Nine people out of ten took what they could get, and they got bungalows. For the most part their _ménage_ consisted of husband, wife, and a two-seater. Neither servants nor children entered into the picture. There was a prejudice against everything connected with the pre-War period, especially with its social distinctions, and perhaps the ex-service man sought for the antithesis of the suburban villa. Accustomed for four years to scenes of ruin and to leaky Army huts, his mind readily accepted the slap-dash bungalow with its familiar barbed-wire fence and no-man’s-land of a garden. The effect of flimsiness and impermanence that characterises so many of these little buildings may be ascribed to three causes: the difficulty of paying for a house _and_ a car out of an income that only provided a house before the War, the prevalent restlessness which almost rejects the idea of settling down in one place and letting oneself “take root,” and the insidious hold that the architecture of dumps and sheds had gained on the average man’s mind in 1914-18. His two-seater carried him out into what was (at first) the peace of the country, where land was cheap. Run up at express speed to satisfy an enormous demand, these bungalows spread out for miles along the roads adjoining the towns, thus avoiding the road-making charges that have to be met on an ordinary estate. And next this “ribbon” development continued far out into the country, so that people who had a slight surplus after meeting their hire-purchase payments for car and furniture could enjoy a sight of the sea on Saturday and Sunday from a bungalow perched on the Sussex cliffs. Thus this singular movement has had its main effect in rural districts, whose little Councils, with their often rudimentary by-laws, find the problem almost beyond their power to solve.