Welsh Journals

In general, the contributors to this book do not make value-judgments: what they do is to isolate some of the dilemmas facing municipal corporations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Slum clearance and improvements, which often got under way in the 1840s and 1850s, had the effect of reducing available accommodation and pushing up rents: 'All improvements', said one London medical officer, 'recoiled on the poor'. Two remedies, which were tried in the metropolis, were cheap suburban estates and subsidised housing in the city centres; but these were bedevilled by a host of problems, so that many investors and builders in the later nineteenth century looked for more secure returns in middle- class housing. In the final analysis, the workmen were condemned by their low wages. Only the favoured few amongst them could afford substantial subscription to building clubs, and so the councils were forced, against the feelings of many ratepayers, into the field of housing development. The character of working-class housing is the second major theme of this book. Professor J. D. Chapman and Mr. J. N. Bartlett analyse the plans of several hundred homes in later nineteenth-century Birmingham, and discover that they were of a fairly high quality. But it is difficult to generalize. The Leeds authorities defied both reformers and the govern- ment for decades, and built bleak, back-to-back houses well into the twentieth century. In Liverpool there was the additional problem of several thousand cellar dwellings inhabited by the Irish; these were the breeding ground for diseases, and life expectancy in the city in the mid- nineteenth century was only about twenty-six years. One can but marvel at the silence of the people who stare out from the photographs in this impressive volume, and give thanks for the medical officers and inspectors who fought such a brave battle. The speculators and factors deserve a different epitaph. D. J. V. JONES Swansea RAILWAY HISTORY IN PICTURES: WALES AND THE WELSH BORDER COUNTIES. By H. C. Casserley. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1970. Pp. 111. £ 2.50. Mr. Casserley's book presents in a single volume some of the most interesting photographs of Welsh railways and their locomotives available. As such it is a valuable pictorial historical record, of interest alike to the railway historian, the enthusiast, and the general reader with an intimate knowledge of Wales. The main criticism of the book is one of organization. The division into standard and narrow gauge is sensible, but the presentation of the standard gauge section company by company, gives a disjointed picture and results in a game of geographical leap-frog over the Principality. It would have been more sensible, and would have presented a more coherent picture especially for the reader less familiar with Wales, if a regional approach had been adopted. The contribution of each company could