I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more
clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only
makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and
uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally
ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the
furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new
system--blocks of flats with a central restaurant--will probably, in a
more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I
conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say
blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden
which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one
room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very
necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will
also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its
furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is
developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be
provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance
of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no
coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There
will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining room,
run--and this is very important--_by a committee of tenants_.
That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will
buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase
by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid
laundry maid will check the lists--there will no longer be, as once upon
a time on Saturday evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists.
It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks.
The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few
persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours,
without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household
will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything
that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the
wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the
communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day;
there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I
have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can
do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account