Why Work? by Freedom Press

Author:Freedom Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE “SELF-BUILD” MOVEMENT

First published in Freedom May 17, 1952. Author unknown.

We have discussed several times in Freedom the growing movement for “self-building” houses. In a broadcast talk on Building One’s Own House last month, Mr Fello Atkinson, the architect, said:

It is a sign of the fearful complication of our times that building one’s own house should seem a new idea. What else did our remote ancestors do? And, of course, all primitive and pioneer communities build this way. Grandma Moses, that astonishing ninety-four-year-old American lady who has achieved such fame as a folk painter in the last few years, records in her memoirs how, in her young days, the men of New England wanting to set up home were given land and an axe and set about making their own log cabins. I am certain there are many places where the same thing still happens. The idea is certainly not new but only unusual in modern, highly industrialised communities where each of us, except possibly farmers and sailors, tends to specialise in ever-narrowing fields to the exclusion and even ignorance of all others. The responsibility for housing has now largely passed to government, and there exists a complicated and rigid pattern of planning and building permits, regulations and standards, financing and subsidies.

But, in spite of this, groups of men are building their own houses in this country today; they have been doing so for some time, and they are building them successfully within this complex mechanism. And these “self-build groups,” as they are called, are growing in number.

He went on to describe the activities of groups affiliated to the National Federation of Housing Societies.

This called forth (and it is an indication of the spread of “self-building”), a letter in the Listener from the secretary of a group, who wanted to draw attention to the 194 “self-build” groups affiliated to the London and National Self-Build Housing Association, Birmingham, and to “the difficulties and heartbreak of other groups, already fully trained, with considerable financial resources, who have been ready to build for eighteen months, and who lack one thing only — the cooperation of their local authorities to grant the necessary permission for them to go ahead and build.”

The writer has also paid tribute to the founders of the associations, who “without any prompting, and for no personal gain, have come forward and shown us, for the first time in our lives, how to help ourselves.” For the first time in our lives, how to help ourselves. This is why we believe the “self-building” movement to be so valuable and important.

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