MINERS' HOUSING IN SCOTLAND.
(3) SITES AND PLANS OF COLLIERY VILLAGES

Determining Conditions
In the mining industry, three principles appear to have influenced the selection of sites and the planning of villages; first, the necessity for labour convenient to the mine; second, the commercial necessity to economise on the provision of houses as part of the mining plant; and third, the speculative risk involved in the limited life of the mine. In the selection of sites, probable proximity to the mine was the predominant factor. Frequently, mines had to be sunk at a considerable distance from populous places and in areas that would not naturally have been chosen as building sites. Hence, in the case of older villages, "the site was often ill-chosen, and no consideration was paid to the nature of the soil, subsoil drainage, excavation of soil underneath floors, etc." In the areas inspected by us, it was the exception to find that, in the selection of a site, any attention had been paid either to the nature of the soil or subsoil, or the amenities or exposure.

In the planning of the villages, the line of least resistance has, for the most part, been adopted; the houses, built of the cheapest available material, are arranged in the cheapest form, viz. the straight row. Usually the rows are arranged in parallel lines; occasionally the grouping is varied by "the square." But, whether arranged in rows or in squares, the greater number of the villages show so little consideration for the conditions of life demanded in a modern town, that privies, ashpits, washhouses, and other outhouses have usually been erected in the most conspicuous places, and on the most primitive designs. How gross the conditions continue to be in a large number of the villages, the detailed descriptions given below will demonstrate; but, to speak generally, the design of a colliery village is succinctly expressed in Dr M'Vail's description of a typical mining village in Stirlingshire or Dumbartonshire.

" The village consists of one or more rows of brick or stone or slated houses, opening on a private roadway for cart traffic, with a surface channel for drainage beyond the roadway, pillar wells at intervals beside the channel; a series of blocks of outhouses beyond it; and small gardens or clothes drying-greens on the further side of the outhouses."

Of the Fife coalfields, Dr Dewar remarked that the general improvement in modern miners' houses did not seem to have extended to the setting of the houses. Planning and arrangement he regarded as by no means unimportant; but it was the aspect in which the recently formed and recently extended mining centres of Fifeshire showed least favourably. He also criticised the want of provision of garden ground in some places. (Report on the Housing of Miners in Fifeshire (1909)) These strictures do not apply universally, as in some mining communities the taste for gardening is highly developed, but they apply very widely. It is, however, satisfactory to note that quite recently, not only as regards gardens, but in the matter of planning of the village, a reaction against the old careless and monotonous arrangement of the " rows " has begun to make itself felt on the side both of the mineowners and their employees. The general improvement is, however, very recent. Among the best miners' dwellings seen by us in Lanarkshire was a village of 127 houses erected about the year 1905 by Messrs Wm. Baird & Co. The houses, of two and three apartments, were well built of brick on the double-flatted plan, and had conveniences better than the average. But the number placed on the site was considerable, "between 26 and 27 per acre" though it was surrounded by open fields; and the arrangement of the houses in parallel straight lines, with washhouses, etc., placed at mathematical intervals between the rows, gave a bare and monotonous appearance. Small garden plots had been set aside, but were not made use of. There is, however, a growing tendency to condemn the straight row.

At Valleyfield (Fifeshire), and, in a less degree, at Kirkconnel (Dumfriesshire), and elsewhere, a definite attempt has been made to reach a more pleasing lay-out. Valleyfield is a carefully designed new village. The site is admirable. The amount of open space is very generous. The houses are arranged in crescents. Each crescent has a certain proportion of three-room houses, and a certain proportion of two-room houses - each house with scullery, w.-c. and - in many of the houses - bath, with hot water from the kitchen range for bath and sink, and garden. Every house has a back door opening to the garden. This apparently small detail has been found a great practical convenience in the management of the small houses. On the other hand, it has one drawback : it enables the tenant to subdivide his house into two houses of one room each, with one entrance from the front and one from the back. This has actually happened even in this new village, which, at the time of our visit, still had some houses unlet. The village is only partly built; it will be completed as the Valleyfield Colliery develops. The usual general conditions of housing are fulfilled - drainage, water-supply, and removal of refuse. When the village is completed, and the public buildings essential to the life of such a community - a school, a hall, reading and recreation rooms and churches - are established, this village will have all the machinery necessary for a sound civic life.

Since we visited Valleyfield in 1913 a number of houses have been built in pairs, with suitable garden ground to each. Similar provision of houses in pairs, with garden, has been made at Shotts, in county of Lanark.

In Mid-Lanark, the villages recently erected at Harthill and Cleland by the District Committee of the Middle Ward have been planned in the light of the latest views on garden villages. The contrast between the depressing monotony of the ancient rows and the graceful variety of the new villages is very striking. No doubt the type of house provided is a factor in the general pleasing effect; but the arrangement of the houses is an equally essential factor. For the sake of economy, the cottages are built in groups of two, and occasionally in groups of four; but nowhere is the dreary monotony of the long row repeated.

How far the speculative factor in the life of a mine has operated in inducing the owners to provide houses of inadequate structure, it is impossible to determine ; but it is certain that the failure to close uninhabitable houses has frequently rested on the allegation that the life of the mine was about to end, and that the houses would soon become automatically derelict. In some areas the life of the mine has ended; but it has been found that the houses were transferred to other owners. But, in other areas, where the mines were alleged to be approaching exhaustion, they are still in full operation, and the defective houses continue to be occupied.

(4) OTHER DEFECTS OF SITE AND ARRANGEMENT.
There are, however, serious defects of site in many mining villages, quite apart from defective or haphazard arrangement of the houses. In some cases a badly-selected site throws real difficulties in the way of improvements of sanitation by making satisfactory drainage difficult. In other cases the only outlook of the cottages is upon the " bings " of the pit at which the men find employment, varied in the case of the ironworkers' cottages by "old, obsolete properties," workshops, or needless walls, which cut off all view from the windows. Where this is the case something might even now be done by way of improvement.

We may give an idea of the conditions referred to by describing the surroundings of two Lanarkshire " rows " which we inspected. In one case near Hamilton, the site of the cottages was very low lying, a road running past their backs at a considerable elevation, and a large "bing" shutting out all view in front. They were back-to-back houses, for the most part of a single room ; and the outside privies were peculiarly offensive, even for Lanarkshire. The roadways were in bad condition. In another group of houses in the Bellshill district we noted a dirty combined ashpit and privy ; the premises being grossly exposed and looking, at the time of our visit, as if they were never cleaned. The streets were seas of liquid mud; the gutters broken in place ; and there seemed to be no idea of draining off the surface water either from the general area or from the floors of the latrines. At the same time we noted the cleanliness of several of the interiors of the houses, showing that the housewives at least were not responsible for and had not descended to the level of their surroundings.

(5) IMPROVEMENT OF DESIGN AND MAINTENANCE.
That there is no inherent impossibility in designing a mining village effectively is shown by the lay-out of the Garden Village at Woodlands, Doncaster. But the responsibility for the external amenity of a mining village cannot, unfortunately, be taken as ending with a good initial design. On our visit to Woodlands we were struck by the fact that in the upper and more closely built portion of the village there was a degree of neglect of the surroundings of the houses which, to a considerable extent, neutralised the benefits of the original plan. Nor is it surprising that those brought up in the sordid surroundings of a typical old-fashioned colliery village in Scotland, or the north of England, should not, in every case, at once respond to the improved external conditions of a village such as Woodlands. The indiscriminate keeping of poultry, and the scattering of the contents of ashbins were cited by the architect of the Fife Coal Company as tending to lower the standard of upkeep even in the better rows. But these are matters which can only be set right with the raising of the standard of occupancy through education ; and this process cannot begin until the present foul congeries of middens, ashpits, and coal-sheds are cleared away from the fronts of the houses in the older rows, while it can certainly be stimulated by better design of the villages of the future.

It seems clear that further powers are needed, whether under the Town Planning Act or extended byelaws, to enable Local Authorities to control the site and planning of all new villages. There is undoubted weight in Dr Dewar's further statement that :-

The want of power in the hands of the Local Authorities ... to regulate the formation and laying out of new villages . . . and of elaborating and devising their general arrangement and distribution before actual building is permitted to be commenced, is fraught with a menace to the welfare of the community for a hundred years to come. (Annual Report for Fifeshire for 1909, page 172.)

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