Studio: international art (36.1906)

The Dromenagh Estate

the value. The contractor
sells his houses piecemeal,
and retires upon the bal-
ance of receipt and ex-
penditure in ground rents;
and large transference fees
are paid over and over
again to intermediary
lawyers and surveyors.
The result of this entirely
sordid system is that the
landlord is put quite out
of touch with his own
property, so that he can-
not possibly regard it in

'LITTLE COPPICE

C. R. ASHBEE, ARCHITECT

to those who have watched the transformation of the outlying regions
of London in the last twenty years—regions like Putney and bulham
in the West, or regions like Barking, Edmonton, and Tottenham in
the East.

The landlord regards the matter from a purely commercial point of
view, or what is perhaps worse, thinking
it beneath his dignity to be mixed up
with commerce himself, turns the work
over to lawyers and agents to do it
for him. These gentlemen, entirely
uninterested in the estate outside its
capacities as a rent-producing milch
cow, announce it as for “leasehold de-
velopment.” The land is pencilled out
in some London office, possibly with
the assistance of a surveyor interested,
like the lawyer, in fees; the timber is
reckoned “at a valuation,” and cut
down ; the site is cleared, and handed
over to a building contractor to make
what he can out of it for a period of
ninety-nine (if possible of eighty) years,
and the contractor builds as cheaply
as he can for the average. Thus the
landlord converts a doubtful agricultural
into a safe ground rent, probably trebling
48

ground Plan

FIG. 3.—PLANS OF “ LITTLE COPPICE

C. R. ASHBEE, ARCHITECT