Poverty and beauty

To The Guardian

Ian Jack is right to suggest that, as with most housing, it’s not the construction that’s at fault in our tenements but the management – and the lack of family planning. If the 19th century Scottish tenements hadn’t been overcrowded, they would have been good, solid homes; inconvenient by our standards – lugging coal upstairs, shared privies – but better than much of what people had had in the countryside before moving into the new industrial cities. John Cleese and anyone who doubts this should visit the Glasgow tenement house belonging to the National Trust, which shows the dignity that was possible on a low income.

There is one thing the Scottish tenements could teach designers of housing now: the drying green. A close of houses would have one or more fixed set of lines for drying clothes. Even at the humblest level, the posts would be cast iron with decorative finials, often a pineapple. Now, people in flats are obliged to use tumble dryers – energy intensive and, recently, potentially dangerous – or else to dry clothes on tiny balconies where that isn’t actually banned. A lovely example of the drying green moving south – and of very good planning provision – was in the Ossulston Street estate in St Pancras, London, in the 1930s, where Father Basil Jellicoe with the London County Council believed that poor people should still have beauty: some of the fantastical finials from those posts survive in the basement of the British Library alongside. Judith Martin, Winchester, Hampshire