Welsh Journals

perhaps scullery would be at the back, and, looking up from the valley or from the opposite hill-side, instead of the fronts of all the houses being blocked out by the backs of the higher groups, nothing would be visible but terraces of fronts, and, interspersed between them, the gardens which would secure the necessary separ- ation. All that is necessary to secure this change in the manner of development is to abandon the 40 feet by-law street, and to allow these subsidiary roads, which are only wanted to give access to the buildings, to be of narrow width, from 13 feet to 16 feet of carriage way, according to the length, with a footpath on the high side. This footpath might, at a somewhat higher level, be separated from the roadway by a grass bank, in this way reducing again the amount of excavation, and doing away with the necessity for retaining walls and steps up to the fore- courts to the houses. On the low side of the road, some of the material from excavations would be thrown up to form a bank, on which there would be planted a thick hedge, which would effectually screen the backs of the houses below, and at the same time secure privacy for the gardens of those houses which would run up to the road above. As there would be no houses along the low side of the road, and as all the houses in each road would be standing well above the level, the sewers could be laid at a shallow depth they could be laid on the side of the road nearest to the houses, perhaps under the grass margin between the road and the footpath, so that their cost would be reduced to a minimum, and repairs rendered easy, without disturbance to the road surface. In like manner water and gas can be run along the road, on the side nearest to the houses, and the length of all the connec- tions thus reduced. It is true that this system of development would mean greater length of building streets, because houses would occupy one side only but if, in addition to the saving on the cost of the streets by reason of less digging and filling, less retaining walls and depth of sewer, shorter connections to the house, etc, which would go a long way to meeting the extra cost of the double roadway, account is taken of the enormous sums that would thus be saved in the foundations of the houses, and in the further steps and retaining walls required for the present system of development, it would be found that the single roads, with the terraces of houses all fronting to the sun and the view, would work out at less cost per house than the present attempt to ignore the beautiful Welsh hill-sides, and treat them as if they were commonplace levels. It may be said that more land would be required. So it would be, and so it ought to be. There is no scarcity of land in Wales! Much of it has not that high value for agricultural purposes, which would render it extravagent to provide enough for the building plots and if a rational method of development for the hillsides were adopted, the artificial limita- tion which now sends up the price of the level patches would be removed, and plenty of room for expansion would remain. Nor would the owners of land suffer by such an alternative. No class of men have made a greater mistake, in their hurry to get rich, than the land owners and their advisers, who have allowed houses to be crowded together. They have but succeeded in reducing enormously the area of their land which might have been transferred from agricultural to building value. It is true that they have been able to obtain a