---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 4 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/4/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 4. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/4/"
---

# The Road to Wigan Pier

*George Orwell*

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> Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Date of first publication: 1937
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Aug. 21, 2018
Date last updated: Aug. 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180878

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _The Road_
                            _to Wigan Pier_

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1947
     Uniform Edition published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd 1949
                    Published in Penguin Books 1962

> Copyright 1937 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> The abbreviation WC has been capitalised.

> [The end of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ by George Orwell]

## 4. IV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/4/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/4/#p-N

[¶0] As you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths
of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos
round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking
dustbins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous WCs. The interiors
of these houses are always very much the same, though the number of
rooms varies between two and five. All have an almost exactly similar
living-room, ten or fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen range; in
the larger ones there is a scullery as well, in the smaller ones the
sink and copper are in the living-room. At the back there is the yard,
or part of a yard shared by a number of houses, just big enough for the
dustbin and the WC. Not a single one has hot water laid on. You might
walk, I suppose, through literally hundreds of miles of streets
inhabited by miners, every one of whom, when he is in work, gets black
from head to foot every day, without ever passing a house in which one
could have a bath. It would have been very simple to install a hot-water
system working from the kitchen range, but the builder saved perhaps ten
pounds on each house by not doing so, and at the time when these houses
were built no one imagined that miners wanted baths.

[¶1] For it is to be noted that the majority of these houses are old, fifty
or sixty years old at least, and great numbers of them are by any
ordinary standard not fit for human habitation. They go on being
tenanted simply because there are no others to be had. And that is the
central fact about housing in the industrial areas: not that the houses
are poky and ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, or that they are
distributed in incredibly filthy slums round belching foundries and
stinking canals and slag-heaps that deluge them with sulphurous
smoke—though all this is perfectly true—but simply that there are not
enough houses to go round.

[¶2] 'Housing shortage' is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely
since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more
than £10 a week, or even £5 a week for that matter. Where rents are high
the difficulty is not to find houses but to find tenants. Walk down any
street in Mayfair and you will see 'To Let' boards in half the windows.
But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a
house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people
will put up with anything—any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs
and rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint
landlords and blackmailing agents—simply to get a roof over their
heads. I have been into appalling houses, houses in which I would not
live a week if you paid me, and found that the tenants had been there
twenty and thirty years and only hoped they might have the luck to die
there. In general these conditions are taken as a matter of course,
though not always. Some people hardly seem to realise that such things
as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of
God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all cling
desperately to their houses lest worse should befall. So long as the
housing shortage continues the local authorities cannot do much to make
existing houses more liveable. They can 'condemn' a house, but they
cannot order it to be pulled down till the tenant has another house to
go to; and so the condemned houses remain standing and are all the worse
for being condemned, because naturally the landlord will not spend more
than he can help on a house which is going to be demolished sooner or
later. In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two thousand
houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole sections
of the town would be condemned _en bloc_ if there were any hope of other
houses being built to replace them. Towns like Leeds and Sheffield have
scores of thousands of 'back to back' houses which are all of a
condemned type but will remain standing for decades.

[¶3] I have inspected great numbers of houses in various mining towns and
villages and made notes on their essential points. I think I can best
give an idea of what conditions are like by transcribing a few extracts
from my notebook, taken more or less at random. They are only brief
notes and they will need certain explanations which I will give
afterwards. Here are a few from Wigan:

[¶4] 1. House in Wallgate quarter. Blind back type. One up, one down.
    Living-room measures 12 ft. by 10 ft., room upstairs the same.
    Alcove under stairs measuring 5 ft. by 5 ft. and serving as
    larder, scullery and coal hole. Windows will open. Distance to
    lavatory 50 yards. Rent 4_s._ 9_d._, rates 2_s._ 6_d._, total
    7_s._ 3_d._

[¶5] 2. Another near by. Measurements as above, but no alcove under
    stairs, merely a recess two feet deep containing the sink—no
    room for larder, etc. Rent 3_s._ 2_d._, rates 2_s._, total 5_s._
    2_d._

[¶6] 3. Another as above but with no alcove at all, merely sink in
    living-room just inside front door. Rent 3_s._ 9_d._, rates
    3_s._, total 6_s._ 9_d._

[¶7] 4. House in Scholes quarter. Condemned house. One up, one down.
    Rooms 15 ft. by 15 ft. Sink and copper in living-room, coal hole
    under stairs. Floor subsiding. No windows will open. House
    decently dry. Landlord good. Rent 3_s._ 8_d._, rates 2_s._
    6_d._, total 6_s._ 2_d._

[¶8] 5. Another near by. Two up, two down and coal hole. Walls
    falling absolutely to pieces. Water comes into upstairs rooms in
    quantities. Floor lopsided. Downstairs windows will not open.
    Landlord bad. Rent 6_s._, rates 3_s._ 6_d._, total 9_s._ 6_d._

[¶9] 6. House in Greenough's Row. One up, two down. Living-room 13
    ft. by 8 ft. Walls coming apart and water comes in. Back windows
    will not open, front one will. Ten in family with eight children
    very near together in age. Corporation are trying to evict them
    for overcrowding but cannot find another house to send them to.
    Landlord bad. Rent 4_s._, rates 2_s._ 3_d._, total 6_s._ 3_d._

[¶10] So much for Wigan. I have pages more of the same type. Here is one from
Sheffield—a typical specimen of Sheffield's several score thousand
'back to back' houses:

[¶11] House in Thomas Street. Back to back, two up, one down (i.e. a
    three-storey house with one room on each storey). Cellar below.
    Living-room 14 ft. by 10 ft., and rooms above corresponding.
    Sink in living-room. Top floor has no door but gives on open
    stairs. Walls in living-room slightly damp, walls in top rooms
    coming to pieces and oozing damp on all sides. House is so dark
    that light has to be kept burning all day. Electricity estimated
    at 6_d._ a day (probably an exaggeration). Six in family,
    parents and four children. Husband (on PAC) is tuberculous. One
    child in hospital, the others appear healthy. Tenants have been
    seven years in this house. Would move, but no other house
    available. Rent 6_s._ 6_d._, rates included.

[¶12] Here are one or two from Barnsley:

[¶13] 1. House in Wortley Street. Two up, one down. Living-room 12 ft.
    by 10 ft. Sink and copper in living-room, coal hole under
    stairs. Sink worn almost flat and constantly overflowing. Walls
    not too sound. Penny in slot, gas-light. House very dark and
    gas-light estimated at 4_d._ a day. Upstairs rooms are really
    one large room partitioned into two. Walls very bad—wall of
    back room cracked right through. Window-frames coming to pieces
    and have to be stuffed with wood. Rain comes through in several
    places. Sewer runs under house and stinks in summer but
    Corporation 'says they can't do nowt'. Six people in house, two
    adults and four children, the eldest aged fifteen. Youngest but
    one attending hospital—tuberculosis suspected. House infested
    by bugs. Rent 5_s._ 3_d._, including rates.

[¶14] 2. House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and
    large cellar. Living-room 10 ft. square with copper and sink.
    The other downstairs room the same size, probably intended as
    parlour but used as bedroom. Upstairs rooms the same size as
    those below. Living-room very dark. Gas-light estimated at
    4½_d._ a day. Distance to lavatory 70 yards. Four beds in house
    for eight people—two old parents, two adult girls (the eldest
    aged twenty-seven), one young man and three children. Parents
    have one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people
    share the other two. Bugs very bad—'You can't keep 'em down
    when it's 'ot.' Indescribable squalor in downstairs room and
    smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5_s._ 7½_d._, including
    rates.

[¶15] 3. House in Mapplewell (small mining village near Barnsley). Two
    up, one down. Living-room 14 ft. by 12 ft. Sink in living-room.
    Plaster cracking and coming off walls. No shelves in oven. Gas
    leaking slightly. The upstairs rooms each 10 ft. by 8 ft. Four
    beds (for six persons, all adult), but 'one bed does nowt',
    presumably for lack of bedclothes. Room nearest stairs has no
    door and stairs have no banister, so that when you step out of
    bed your foot hangs in vacancy and you may fall ten feet onto
    stones. Dry rot so bad that one can see through the floor into
    the room below. Bugs, but 'I keeps 'em down with sheep dip'.
    Earth road past these cottages is like a muck-heap and said to
    be almost impassable in winter. Stone lavatories at ends of
    gardens in semi-ruinous condition. Tenants have been twenty-two
    years in this house. Are £11 in arrears with rent, and have been
    paying an extra 1_s._ a week to pay this off. Landlord now
    refuses this and has served orders to quit. Rent 5_s._,
    including rates.

[¶16] And so on and so on and so on. I could multiply examples by the
score—they could be multiplied by the hundred thousand if anyone chose
to make a house to house inspection throughout the industrial districts.
Meanwhile some of the expressions I have used need explaining. 'One up,
one down' means one room on each storey—i.e. a two-roomed house. 'Back
to back' houses are two houses built in one, each side of the house
being somebody's front door, so that if you walk down a row of what is
apparently twelve houses you are in reality seeing not twelve houses but
twenty-four. The front houses give on the street and the back ones on
the yard, and there is only one way out of each house. The effect of
this is obvious. The lavatories are in the yard at the back, so that if
you live on the side facing the street, to get to the lavatory or the
dust-bin you have to go out of the front door and walk round the end of
the block—a distance that may be as much as two hundred yards; if you
live at the back, on the other hand, your outlook is onto a row of
lavatories. There are also houses of what is called the 'blind back'
type, which are single houses, but in which the builder has omitted to
put in a back door—from pure spite, apparently. The windows which
refuse to open are a peculiarity of old mining towns. Some of these
towns are so undermined by ancient workings that the ground is
constantly subsiding and the houses above slip sideways. In Wigan you
pass whole rows of houses which have slid to startling angles, their
windows being ten or twenty degrees out of the horizontal. Sometimes the
front wall bellies outward till it looks as though the house were seven
months gone in pregnancy. It can be refaced, but the new facing soon
begins to bulge again. When a house sinks at all suddenly its windows
are jammed for ever and the door has to be refitted. This excites no
surprise locally. The story of the miner who comes home from work and
finds that he can only get indoors by smashing down the front door with
an axe is considered humorous. In some cases I have noted 'Landlord
good' or 'Landlord bad', because there is great variation in what the
slum-dwellers say about their landlords. I found—one might expect it,
perhaps—that the small landlords are usually the worst. It goes against
the grain to say this, but one can see why it should be so. Ideally, the
worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop,
who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it
is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings in three slum
houses, inhabits one of them and tries to live on the rent of the other
two—never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.

[¶17] But mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself. To
me as I read them they bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in
themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful
northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief
phrase like 'roof leaks' or 'four beds for eight people'? It is the kind
of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a
wealth of misery it can cover! Take the question of overcrowding, for
instance. Quite often you have eight or even ten people living in a
three-roomed house. One of these rooms is a living-room, and as it
probably measures about a dozen feet square and contains, besides the
kitchen range and the sink, a table, some chairs and a dresser, there is
no room in it for a bed. So there are eight or ten people sleeping in
two small rooms, probably in at most four beds. If some of these people
are adults and have to go to work, so much the worse. In one house, I
remember, three grown-up girls shared the same bed and all went to work
at different hours, each disturbing the others when she got up or came
in; in another house a young miner working on the night shift slept by
day in a narrow bed in which another member of the family slept by
night. There is an added difficulty when there are grown-up children, in
that you cannot let adolescent youths and girls sleep in the same bed.
In one family I visited there were a father and mother and a son and
daughter aged round about seventeen, and only two beds for the lot of
them. The father slept with the son and the mother with the daughter; it
was the only arrangement that ruled out the danger of incest. Then there
is the misery of leaking roofs and oozing walls, which in winter makes
some rooms almost uninhabitable. Then there are bugs. Once bugs get into
a house they are in it till the crack of doom; there is no sure way of
exterminating them. Then there are the windows that will not open. I
need not point out what this must mean, in summer, in a tiny stuffy
living-room where the fire, on which all the cooking is done, has to be
kept burning more or less constantly. And there are the special miseries
attendant upon back to back houses. A fifty yards' walk to the lavatory
or the dust-bin is not exactly an inducement to be clean. In the front
houses—at any rate in a side-street where the Corporation don't
interfere—the women get into the habit of throwing their refuse out of
the front door, so that the gutter is always littered with tea-leaves
and bread crusts. And it is worth considering what it is like for a
child to grow up in one of the back alleys where its gaze is bounded by
a row of lavatories and a wall.

[¶18] In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an
infinity of jobs. She may keep up her spirits, but she cannot keep up
her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. There is always something to
be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn
round. No sooner have you washed one child's face than another's is
dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due
to be cooked. I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were
as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were
so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin
with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable. But
the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin
full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn
newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same
dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking
pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and
bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion
in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated
voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting
you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot
as toadstools! There are scenes that stand out vividly in my memory. The
almost bare living-room of a cottage in a little mining village, where
the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be underfed; and
the big family of grown-up sons and daughters sprawling aimlessly about,
all strangely alike with red hair, splendid bones and pinched faces
ruined by malnutrition and idleness; and one tall son sitting by the
fireplace, too listless even to notice the entry of a stranger, and
slowly peeling a sticky sock from a bare foot. A dreadful room in Wigan
where all the furniture seemed to be made of packing cases and barrel
staves and was coming to pieces at that; and an old woman with a
blackened neck and her hair coming down denouncing her landlord in a
Lancashire-Irish accent; and her mother, aged well over ninety, sitting
in the background on the barrel that served her as a commode and
regarding us blankly with a yellow, cretinous face. I could fill up
pages with memories of similar interiors.

[¶19] Of course the squalor of these people's houses is sometimes their own
fault. Even if you live in a back to back house and have four children
and a total income of thirty-two and sixpence a week from the PAC, there
is no _need_ to have unemptied chamber-pots standing about in your
living-room. But it is equally certain that their circumstances do not
encourage self-respect. The determining factor is probably the number of
children. The best-kept interiors I saw were always childless houses or
houses where there were only one or two children; with, say, six
children in a three-roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything
decent. One thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are
never downstairs. You might visit quite a number of houses, even among
the poorest of the unemployed, and bring away a wrong impression. These
people, you might reflect, cannot be so badly off if they still have a
fair amount of furniture and crockery. But it is in the rooms upstairs
that the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is
because pride makes people cling to their living-room furniture to the
last, or because bedding is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly
many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places. Among people who have
been unemployed for several years continuously I should say it is the
exception to have anything like a full set of bedclothes. Often there is
nothing that can be properly called bedclothes at all—just a heap of
old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on a rusty iron bedstead. In this
way overcrowding is aggravated. One family of four persons that I knew,
a father and mother and two children, possessed two beds but could only
use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other.

[¶20] Anyone who wants to see the effects of the housing shortage at their
very worst should visit the dreadful caravan-dwellings that exist in
numbers in many of the northern towns. Ever since the war, in the
complete impossibility of getting houses, parts of the population have
overflowed into supposedly temporary quarters in fixed caravans. Wigan,
for instance, with a population of about 85,000, has round about 200
caravan-dwellings with a family in each—perhaps somewhere near 1,000
people in all. How many of these caravan-colonies exist throughout the
industrial areas it would be difficult to discover with any accuracy.
The local authorities are reticent about them and the census report of
1931 seems to have decided to ignore them. But so far as I can discover
by enquiry they are to be found in most of the larger towns in
Lancashire and Yorkshire, and perhaps further north as well. The
probability is that throughout the north of England there are some
thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of _families_ (not individuals) who
have no home except a fixed caravan.

[¶21] But the word 'caravan' is very misleading. It calls up a picture of a
cosy gypsy-encampment (in fine weather, of course) with wood fires
crackling and children picking blackberries and many-coloured washing
fluttering on the lines. The caravan-colonies in Wigan and Sheffield are
not like that. I had a look at several of them. I inspected those in
Wigan with considerable care, and I have never seen comparable squalor
except in the Far East. Indeed when I saw them I was immediately
reminded of the filthy kennels in which I have seen Indian coolies
living in Burma. But, as a matter of fact, nothing in the East could
ever be quite as bad, for in the East you haven't our clammy,
penetrating cold to contend with, and the sun is a disinfectant.

[¶22] Along the banks of Wigan's miry canal are patches of waste ground on
which the caravans have been dumped like rubbish shot out of a bucket.
Some of them are actually gypsy caravans, but very old ones and in bad
repair. The majority are old single-decker buses (the rather smaller
buses of ten years ago) which have been taken off their wheels and
propped up with struts of wood. Some are simply wagons with
semi-circular slats on top, over which canvas is stretched, so that the
people inside have nothing but canvas between them and the outer air.
Inside, these places are usually about five feet wide by six high (I
could not stand quite upright in any of them) and anything from six to
fifteen feet long. Some, I suppose, are inhabited by only one person,
but I did not see any that held less than two persons, and some of them
contained large families. One, for instance, measuring fourteen feet
long, had seven people in it—seven people in about 450 cubic feet of
space; which is to say that each person had for his entire dwelling a
space a _good deal_ smaller than one compartment of a public lavatory.
The dirt and congestion of these places is such that you cannot well
imagine it unless you have tested it with your own eyes and more
particularly your nose. Each contains a tiny cottage kitchener and such
furniture as can be crammed in—sometimes two beds, more usually one,
into which the whole family have to huddle as best they can. It is
almost impossible to sleep on the floor, because the damp soaks up from
below. I was shown mattresses which were still wringing wet at eleven in
the morning. In winter it is so cold that the kitcheners have to be kept
burning day and night, and the windows, needless to say, are never
opened. Water is got from a hydrant common to the whole colony, some of
the caravan-dwellers having to walk 150 or 200 yards for every bucket of
water. There are no sanitary arrangements at all. Most of the people
construct a little hut to serve as a lavatory on the tiny patch of
ground surrounding their caravan, and once a week dig a deep hole in
which to bury the refuse. All the people I saw in these places,
especially the children, were unspeakably dirty, and I do not doubt that
they were lousy as well. They could not possibly be otherwise. The
thought that haunted me as I went from caravan to caravan was, What can
happen in those cramped interiors when anybody dies? But that, of
course, is the kind of question you hardly care to ask.

[¶23] Some of the people have been in their caravans for many years.
Theoretically the Corporation are doing away with the caravan-colonies
and getting the inhabitants out into houses; but as the houses don't get
built, the caravans remain standing. Most of the people I talked to had
given up the idea of ever getting a decent habitation again. They were
all out of work, and a job and a house seemed to them about equally
remote and impossible. Some hardly seemed to care; others realised quite
clearly in what misery they were living. One woman's face stays by me, a
worn skull-like face on which was a look of intolerable misery and
degradation. I gathered that in that dreadful pigsty, struggling to keep
her large brood of children clean, she felt as I should feel if I were
coated all over with dung. One must remember that these people are not
gypsies; they are decent English people who have all, except the
children born there, had homes of their own in their day; besides, their
caravans are greatly inferior to those of gypsies and they have not the
great advantage of being on the move. No doubt there are still
middle-class people who think that the Lower Orders don't mind that kind
of thing and who, if they happened to pass a caravan-colony in the
train, would immediately assume that the people lived there from choice.
I never argue nowadays with that kind of person. But it is worth
noticing that the caravan-dwellers don't even save money by living
there, for they are paying about the same rents as they would for
houses. I could not hear of any rent lower than five shillings a week
(five shillings for 200 cubic feet of space!) and there are even cases
where the rent is as high as ten shillings. Somebody must be making a
good thing out of those caravans! But clearly their continued existence
is due to the housing shortage and not directly to poverty.

[¶24] Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was
a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it,
and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one
of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a
couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue
when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And
when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had
to make that two hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said,
was the kind of thing people would put up with 'till they were told
about it'.

[¶25] I do not know whether this is true. What is certain is that nobody _now_
thinks it bearable to sleep eleven in a room, and that even people with
comfortable incomes are vaguely troubled by the thought of 'the slums'.
Hence the clatter about 're-housing' and 'slum clearance' which we have
had at intervals ever since the war. Bishops, politicians,
philanthropists and whatnot enjoy talking piously about 'slum
clearance', because they can thus divert attention from more serious
evils and pretend that if you abolish the slums you abolish poverty. But
all this talk has led to surprisingly small results. So far as one can
discover, the congestion is no better, perhaps slightly worse, than it
was a dozen years ago. There is certainly great variation in the speed
at which the different towns are attacking their housing problem. In
some towns building seems to be almost at a standstill, in others it is
proceeding rapidly and the private landlord is being driven out of
business. Liverpool, for instance, has been very largely rebuilt, mainly
by the efforts of the Corporation. Sheffield, too, is being torn down
and rebuilt pretty fast, though perhaps, considering the unparalleled
beastliness of its slums, not quite fast enough.[1]

[¶26] Why rehousing has on the whole moved so slowly, and why some towns can
borrow money for building purposes so much more easily than others, I do
not know. Those questions would have to be answered by someone who knows
more about the machinery of local government than I do. A Corporation
house costs normally somewhere between three and four hundred pounds; it
costs rather less when it is built by 'direct labour' than when built by
contract. The rent of these houses would average something over twenty
pounds a year not counting rates, so one would think that, even allowing
for overhead expenses and interest on loans, it would pay any
Corporation to build as many houses as could be tenanted. In many cases,
of course, the houses would have to be inhabited by people on the PAC,
so that the local bodies would merely be taking money out of one pocket
and putting it into another—i.e. paying out money in the form of relief
and taking it back in the form of rent. But they have got to pay the
relief in any case, and at present a proportion of what they pay is
being swallowed up by private landlords. The reasons given for the slow
rate of building are lack of money and the difficulty of getting hold of
sites—for Corporation houses are not erected piecemeal but in
'estates', sometimes of hundreds of houses at a time. One thing that
always strikes me as mysterious is that so many of the northern towns
see fit to build themselves immense and luxurious public buildings at
the same time as they are in crying need of dwelling houses. The town of
Barnsley, for instance, recently spent close on £150,000 on a new town
hall, although admittedly needing at least 2,000 new working-class
houses, not to mention public baths. (The public baths in Barnsley
contain _nineteen_ men's slipper baths—this in a town of 70,000
inhabitants, largely miners, not one of whom has a bath in his house!)
For _£_150,000 it could have built 350 Corporation houses and still had
£10,000 to spend on a town hall. However, as I say, I do not pretend to
understand the mysteries of local government. I merely record the fact
that houses are desperately needed and are being built, on the whole,
with paralytic slowness.

[¶27] Still, houses _are_ being built, and the Corporation building estates,
with their row upon row of little red houses, all much liker than two
peas (where did that expression come from? Peas have great
individuality) are a regular feature of the outskirts of the industrial
towns. As to what they are like and how they compare with the slum
houses, I can best give an idea by transcribing two more extracts from
my diary. The tenants' opinions of their houses vary greatly, so I will
give one favourable extract and one unfavourable. Both of these are from
Wigan and both are the cheaper 'non-parlour type' houses:

[¶28] 1. House in Beech Hill Estate.

[¶29] _Downstairs._ Large living-room with kitchener fireplace,
    cupboards and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway,
    largish kitchen. Up-to-date electric cooker hired from
    Corporation at much the same rate as a gas cooker.

[¶30] _Upstairs._ Two largish bedrooms, one tiny one—suitable only
    for a boxroom or temporary bedroom. Bathroom, WC, with hot and
    cold water.

[¶31] Smallish garden. These vary throughout the estate, but mostly
    rather smaller than an allotment.

[¶32] Four in family, parents and two children. Husband in good
    employ. Houses appear well built and are quite agreeable to look
    at. Various restrictions, e.g. it is forbidden to keep poultry
    or pigeons, take in lodgers, sublet or start any kind of
    business without leave from the Corporation. (This is easily
    granted in the case of taking in lodgers, but not in any of the
    others.) Tenant very well satisfied with house and proud of it.
    Houses in this estate all well kept. Corporation are good about
    repairs, but keep tenants up to the mark with regard to keeping
    the place tidy, etc.

[¶33] Rent 11_s._ 3_d._, including rates. Bus fare into town 2_d_.

[¶34] 2. House in Welly Estate.

[¶35] _Downstairs._ Living-room 14 ft. by 10 ft., kitchen a good deal
    smaller, tiny larder under stairs, small but fairly good
    bathroom. Gas cooker, electric lighting. Outdoor WC.

[¶36] _Upstairs._ One bedroom 12 ft. by 10 ft. with tiny fireplace,
    another the same size without fireplace, another 7 ft. by 6 ft.
    Best bedroom has small wardrobe let into wall.

[¶37] Garden about 20 yards by 10.

[¶38] Six in family, parents and four children, eldest son nineteen,
    eldest daughter twenty-two. None in work except eldest son.
    Tenants very discontented. Their complaints are: House is cold,
    draughty and damp. Fireplace in living-room gives out no heat
    and makes room very dusty—attributed to its being set too low.
    Fireplace in best bedroom too small to be of any use. Walls
    upstairs cracking. Owing to uselessness of tiny bedroom, 5 are
    sleeping in one bedroom, 1 (the eldest son) in the other.

[¶39] Gardens in this estate all neglected.

[¶40] Rent 10_s._ 3_d._, inclusive. Distance to town a little over a
    mile—there is no bus here.

[¶41] I could multiply examples, but these two are enough, as the types of
Corporation houses being built do not vary greatly from place to place.
Two things are immediately obvious. The first is that at their very
worst the Corporation houses are better than the slums they replace. The
mere possession of a bathroom and a bit of garden would outweigh almost
any disadvantage. The other is that they are much more expensive to live
in. It is common enough for a man to be turned out of a condemned house
where he is paying six or seven shillings a week and given a Corporation
house where he has to pay ten. This only affects those who are in work
or have recently been in work, because when a man is on the PAC his rent
is assessed at a quarter of his dole, and if it is more than this he
gets an extra allowance; in any case, there are certain classes of
Corporation houses to which people on the dole are not admitted. But
there are other ways in which life in a Corporation estate is expensive,
whether you are in work or out of it. To begin with, owing to the higher
rents, the shops in the estate are much more expensive and there are not
so many of them. Then again, in a comparatively large, detached house,
away from the frowzy huddle of the slum, it is much colder and more fuel
has to be burnt. And again there is the expense, especially for a man in
work, of getting to and from town. This last is one of the more obvious
problems of re-housing. Slum clearance means diffusion of the
population. When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is
to scoop out the centre of the town and re-distribute it on the
outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have got the people out
of fetid alleys into places where they have room to breathe; but from
the point of view of the people themselves, what you have done is to
pick them up and dump them down five miles from their work. The simplest
solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all
they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working
people do not take kindly to flats; even where flats exist they are
contemptuously named 'tenements'. Almost everyone will tell you that he
'wants a house of his own', and apparently a house in the middle of an
unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more 'their
own' than a flat situated in mid-air.

[¶42] To revert to the second of the two Corporation houses I have just
mentioned. The tenant complained that the house was cold, damp, and so
forth. Perhaps the house was jerry-built, but equally probably he was
exaggerating. He had come there from a filthy hovel in the middle of
Wigan which I happened to have inspected previously; while there he had
made every effort to get hold of a Corporation house, and he was no
sooner in the Corporation house than he wanted to be back in the slum.
This looks like mere captiousness but it covers a perfectly genuine
grievance. In very many cases, perhaps in half the cases, I found that
the people in Corporation houses don't really like them. They are glad
to get out of the stink of the slum, they know that it is better for
their children to have space to play about in, but they don't feel
really at home. The exceptions are usually people in good employ who can
afford to spend a little extra on fuel and furniture and journeys, and
who in any case are of 'superior' type. The others, the typical
slum-dwellers, miss the frowzy warmth of the slum. They complain that
'out in the country', i.e. on the edge of the town, they are 'starving'
(freezing). Certainly most Corporation estates are pretty bleak in
winter. Some I have been through, perched on treeless clayey hillsides
and swept by icy winds, would be horrible places to live in. It is not
that slum-dwellers want dirt and congestion for their own sakes, as the
fat-bellied bourgeoisie love to believe. (See for instance the
conversation about slum-clearance in Galsworthy's _Swan Song_, where the
rentier's cherished belief that the slum-dweller makes the slum, and not
vice versa, is put into the mouth of a philanthropic Jew.) Give people a
decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent. Moreover, with
a smart-looking house to live up to they improve in self-respect and
cleanliness, and their children start life with better chances.
Nevertheless, in a Corporation estate there is an uncomfortable, almost
prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well
aware of it.

[¶43] And it is here that one comes on the central difficulty of the housing
problem. When you walk through the smoke-dim slums of Manchester you
think that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations and
build decent houses in their place. But the trouble is that in
destroying the slum you destroy other things as well. Houses are
desperately needed and are not being built fast enough; but in so far as
re-housing is being done, it is being done—perhaps it is
unavoidable—in a monstrously inhuman manner. I don't mean merely that
the houses are new and ugly. All houses have got to be new at some time,
and as a matter of fact the type of Corporation house now being built is
not at all offensive to look at. On the outskirts of Liverpool there are
what amount to whole towns consisting entirely of Corporation houses,
and they are quite pleasing to the eye; the blocks of workers' flats in
the centre of the town, modelled, I believe, on the workers' flats in
Vienna, are definitely fine buildings. But there is something ruthless
and soulless about the whole business. Take, for instance, the
restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house. You are
not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them—in some
estates there is even a regulation that every garden must have the same
kind of hedge. You are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeons. The
Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping homer pigeons; they keep them in
the back yard and take them out and race them on Sundays. But pigeons
are messy birds and the Corporation suppresses them as a matter of
course. The restrictions about shops are more serious. The number of
shops in a Corporation estate is rigidly limited, and it is said that
preference is given to the Co-op. and the chain stores; this may not be
strictly true, but certainly those are the shops that one usually sees
there. This is bad enough for the general public, but from the point of
view of the independent shopkeeper it is a disaster. Many a small
shopkeeper is utterly ruined by some rehousing scheme which takes no
notice of his existence. A whole section of the town is condemned _en
bloc_; presently the houses are pulled down and the people are
transferred to some housing estate miles away. In this way all the small
shopkeepers of the quarter have their whole clientele taken away from
them at a single swoop and receive not a penny of compensation. They
cannot transfer their business to the estate, because even if they can
afford the move and the much higher rents, they would probably be
refused a licence. As for pubs, they are banished from the housing
estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor
places fitted out by the big brewery companies and very expensive. For a
middle-class population this would be a nuisance—it might mean walking
a mile to get a glass of beer; for a working-class population, which
uses the pub as a kind of club, it is a serious blow at communal life.
It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but
it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is
also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their
liberty. The people themselves feel this, and it is this feeling that
they are rationalising when they complain that their new houses—so much
better, as houses, than those they have come out of—are cold and
uncomfortable and 'unhomelike'.

[¶44] I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal
vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which
new tenants are systematically deloused before being allowed into their
houses. All their possessions except what they stand up in are taken
away from them, fumigated and sent on to the new house. This procedure
has its points, for it _is_ a pity that people should take bugs into
brand new houses (a bug will follow you about in your luggage if he gets
half a chance), but it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the
word 'hygiene' could be dropped out of the dictionary. Bugs are bad, but
a state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to be dipped like
sheep is worse. Perhaps, however, when it is a case of slum clearance,
one must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions and
inhumanity. When all is said and done, the most important thing is that
people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties. I have seen too
much of slums to go into Chestertonian raptures about them. A place
where the children can breathe clean air, and women have a few
conveniences to save them from drudgery, and a man has a bit of garden
to dig in, _must_ be better than the stinking back-streets of Leeds and
Sheffield. On balance, the Corporation estates are better than the
slums; but only by a small margin.

[¶45] When I was looking into the housing question I visited and inspected
numbers of houses, perhaps a hundred or two hundred houses altogether,
in various mining towns and villages. I cannot end this chapter without
remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was
received everywhere. I did not go alone—I always had some local friend
among the unemployed to show me round—but even so, it is an
impertinence to go poking into strangers' houses and asking to see the
cracks in the bedroom wall. Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and
seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning
them and what I wanted to see. If any unauthorised person walked into
_my_ house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was
much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should
probably tell him to go to hell. This only happened to me once, and in
that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark;
but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I
wanted.

[¶46] I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews, but
I want here to contradict a reviewer in the _Manchester Guardian_ who
says apropos of one of my books:

[¶47] Set down in Wigan or Whitechapel Mr Orwell would still exercise
    an unerring power of closing his vision to all that is good in
    order to proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity.

[¶48] Wrong. Mr Orwell was 'set down' in Wigan for quite a while and it did
not inspire him with any wish to vilify humanity. He liked Wigan very
much—the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find
with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he
had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier has been demolished, and
even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.

[¶49] -----

[¶50] [1] The number of Corporation houses in process of construction in
Sheffield at the beginning of 1936 was 1,398. To replace the slum areas
entirely Sheffield is said to need 100,000 houses.