HOUSES AND GARDENS 



inharmonious note here, unless it be the modern board school, or a few smug 

 modern villas or cottages. Or again, let us visit, in imagination, a Wiltshire 

 village where the straggling cottages which line the wide High Street are all 

 of pearly grey. And here perhaps the sole discordant note may be a modern 

 arrangement of red bricks and tiles. Or, if we go further north, we shall find 

 in a rugged mountainous district houses and cottages which express the same 

 stern qualities as their neighbour hills. Again, in a chalk district, such as 

 Norfolk for instance, we find that the presence of beds of flint in the chalk 

 causes them to be used for building the walls. And so these old villages 

 constitute a kind of geological, map of the country. Much of the 

 appropriateness of the old buildings to their positions was due no doubt to 

 this use of the local materials. The stone house was thus of the very stone 

 of the hill out of which it grew, so that it became difficult to realise where 

 man's work began and Nature's ended. Or the timbered structure was 

 framed from the trees of the forest near which it stood, and in its curved 

 braces and massive corner posts still there lingered some hints of the forms of 

 the branches from which they were hewn. The step from Nature to building 

 was a short one, and the materials were not subjected to the iron rule of the 

 factory to lose their characteristic qualities under the steam saw and planing- 

 machine. Not only were the conditions more favourable to the retention of 

 local character, but the builders themselves were unconsciously closer to 

 Nature and were almost as much a part of their natural surroundings as 

 their buildings were. Their conceptions were the unconscious result of long 

 hours spent in the open fields, and not the conscious and fantastic imagin- 

 ings bred in offices and factories. And so it will generally be found that 

 communities based on agriculture are usually characterised by buildings in 

 harmony with Nature, while round the factory building becomes mean and 

 sordid. 



Modern facilities of transit, as well as the artificial conditions of modern 

 life, the influence of machinery on the modern workman and his materials, as 

 well as the growth of the commercial spirit are the main causes which have 

 destroyed local character in modern building, and so on the bleak hillside we 

 find the machine-made half-timbered picturesque villa showing in its rugged 

 environment like a child's toy which has been left out in the rain. The town 

 encroaches on the surrounding country like the spreading of some foul 

 disease, and in the wildest and most picturesque scenery the traveller's 

 enthusiasm is checked by the fatal glimpse of a desirable residence " pricking 

 a cockney ear " over the tree-tops. Building, no longer an added beauty to 

 the country, has become a nightmare of ugliness from which there is no 

 escape, and soon the pictures in the railway carriages will be the last surviving 

 record of the beauty of the past. 



In modern building, while we may well learn a lesson from the old work, 

 in using local materials, it would be unreasonable to forego the opportunity 

 modern transit affords of importing materials which are more suitable for our 

 requirements. Such importation, if judiciously effected, will not destroy the 

 harmony between the house and its surroundings. It becomes dangerous 

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