Anglonautes > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Economy > The Homeless

'Mr Heath trying to find a new home?' said the fruity-voiced London estate agent yesterday. 'Pardon me for laughing, but it really is rather funny.'

Mr Heath, now homeless, is unlikely to see the joke. It is pure social satire. After almost four years of having his own way, the man evicted from No. 10 is now, as a homeseeker, in an appalling position, whereas Mr Wilson has done extremely well from Heath-style capitalism. After being pitched out of Downing Street in 1970, he had time to write his history of the Labour Government. He got between £100,000 and £200,000, took the twenty-year lease of a house in Lord North Street — right in the middle of 'division bell territory' — for £20,000, and bought a country house for £20,000. He has kept his bungalow in the Isles of Scilly.

Hampton's, the London estate agent, which handled the Lord North Street deal, thought yesterday that because of price rises under the Tories the lease had doubled in value. 'But I would not think Mr Wilson would sell it to Mr Heath. If he does , he won't find another so easily. If he is as shrewd as I think he is, he would keep it or let it furnished.' Hampton's had nothing within easy reach of the division bell. They had a few flats in Kensington for between £39,000 and £80,000, but that would be too far away from the Commons. Of course, if Mr Heath wanted a house in Westminster they would try to find him one, but it would not be easy.

Flats for rent? Here again the drift of events has gone against E. Heath, home-hunter. 'Very, very difficult,' Hampton's said. 'The high premiums. I suppose he could get something with rateable value of under £1500 on which premiums cannot be charged.'

A helpful man at John D. Wood kept repeating the word 'Rent? Rent?' in an increasingly incredulous tone when asked about Mr Heath's chances of renting a flat near Westminster remotely as pleasant as his old one at The Albany.

No, Mr Heath should buy. There was a house in Lupus Street, Pimlico, with three-four bedrooms and two-three reception rooms, freehold, with double garage, for £35,000. 'Except,' the obliging house agent said after a moment's thought, 'he's going to have trouble getting his pianos into there.'

Mr Heath may well sigh for the good old days of his rented flat in The Albany. 'I can tell you straight away,' the porter said yesterday, 'there will be nothing available here for a long, long time. Mr Heath would have to go through the usual channels.'

Truly, the Workers have spoken.

Dennis Barker

The Guardian archive,
March 6 1974,
Mr Heath joins the homeless,
G,
Republished 6.3.2007,
p. 34,
http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/03/06/
pages/ber34.shtml

October 10, 1924

The East End's

poor and teeming streets

The Guardian archive

Friday October 10, 1924

Guardian

Karel Capek

It starts not far beyond the centre of the world - the Bank of England, the stock exchange, and a regular jungle of other banks and financial establishments. This golden shore is almost washed by the black waves of east London. "Don't go there without a guide," said the denizens of the West End, "and don't take much money with you." Well, that is decidedly putting it too strongly.

I regard Piccadilly or Fleet Street as a worse haunt of savagery than the Isle of Dogs or Limehouse of ill repute. Nothing happened to me, but I came back feeling depressed, although I have been through the abominations of the harbours at Marseilles and Palermo. The streets are very unsightly with their filthy cobbles, their swarms of children on the pavement, their drunken seamen, their Philanthropic Shelters; and with their stench of scorched rags.

Yet I have seen worse places. But it is not that. The horrible thing in east London is not what can be seen and smelt, but its unbounded and unredeemable extent. Elsewhere poverty and ugliness exist merely as a rubbish-heap between two houses, like an unsavoury nook, a cesspool. But here are miles and miles of grimy houses, hopeless streets, a superfluity of children, gin palaces and Christian shelters.

Miles and miles, from Peckham to Hackney, from Walworth to Barking, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Poplar, Bromley, Stepney, Bow, and Bethnal Green, the quarters inhabited by navvies, Jews, Cockneys, and stevedores, poverty-stricken and downtrodden people, intersected by dirty channels of deafening traffic.

And in the south, in the north-west, in the north-east again the same thing, miles of grimy houses, factories, gasometers, railway lines, clayey patches of waste ground, warehouses for goods and warehouses for human beings.

There are assuredly uglier quarters in all parts of the world; even squalor is here on a higher level, and the poorest beggar is not clad in rags; but good heavens, the human beings, the millions of human beings who live in these short, uniform, joyless streets, which teem on the plain of London. And that is the distressing thing about the East End - there is too much of it. Not even the devil would venture to say: if you will, I shall destroy this city, and in three days I will build it, not so grimy, not so mechanical, not so inhuman and bleak. If he were to say that, perhaps I would fall down and worship him.

· The Czech playwright

is best known as author of RUR:

Rossum's Universal Robots,

which coined the word robot

The Guardian archive > October 10, 1924 >
The East End's poor and teeming streets,
G,
Republished 10.10.2006,
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1924/oct/10/
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