Is it cold at the bottom of the garden?

Beds in sheds and other thoughts…

Here at Beanie Cellars we are looking at the weather forecast, and seeing SNOW.  Which leads us, as always, to the plight of our homeless friends, and how on earth they will cope, especially in light of the sudden plunge in temperatures.  

Any shelter is better than no shelter?  Right?…

Once more we welcome author Carol Hedges, who, of course, has some views.  We will move the coffee mugs, and leave the desk to Carol.

Victorian Values: Alive and Well

Stopped in my tracks the other day by a clip on the radio about a phenomenon in London called ''beds in sheds''. For those who haven't heard of it, such is the unaffordable price of housing, thanks to rich foreign investors buying up property, and rich developers refusing to build affordable housing, and councils of all hues selling off council housing to buy-to-let individuals, that unscrupulous house owners are throwing up primitive breezeblock structures at the back of their properties and letting them out to poor or immigrant families. No sanitary provision, no proper building regs. And local councils seem unwilling or unable to stop it happening.

Presumably these house owners must've been listening to Kevin McLeod (Grand Design bloke) who says if we want to meet the growing need for cheap 'affordable housing', we should model ourselves on the Victorian builders, who leased land and threw up street after street of houses at lightening speed. News for you, Kev mate: we're already there.

All my four Victorian Detective Series books are set during the great Victorian house building boom, when speculative London developers maximised their profits by using cheap cement, known as Billysweet, which never dried out, so these houses actually had their own internal weather system.

They also had no proper foundations, and floorboards laid on bare earth. As a direct result, by 1865 London had some of the poorest people living in some of the worst slums in the kingdom. (In those days, the immigrants were Huguenot silk weavers escaping from France, Irish escaping from famine and Jews escaping from Christians.) Some streets, especially around Kilburn, in North London, acquired 'slum status' from the moment they were built.

At the same time, Parliament passed the Poor Law Act in an attempt to stop anyone who could work from receiving parish relief - it was thought that poverty was caused by 'moral failure', and paying such people only encouraged them to be idle and overpopulate. Is this resonating?

Dickens described these MPs and their property-owning chums as 'Experimental Philosophers ...whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron.'  I guess now we'd call them: 'Rich arrogant posh Tories who don't know the price of a pint of milk.'

Nothing much changes …

And with the new Benefit Cap beginning to bite, there will be more people thrust into the winter cold…

Thank you Carol.  If you would like to connect with Carol Hedges you will find her on Twitter as @carolJhedges …

She also has a blog which you can access from her homepage.

Here at Beanies we share information, act as a noticeboard, and sell stuff with warm hats and scarves, duffle bags and other items going to the homeless.  You can find us via this link

http://www.masato.co.uk/collections/masato-homeless-support

And we are on Twitter as @beanies_masato 

Thank you for dropping in!