Abstract
IN view of the present housing difficulties, considerable interest has been centred in the results of the experiments in cottage building which have been carried out on the Ministry of Agriculture's Farm Settlement at Amesbury. These results are published in the Weekly Services for May 15 and 22, where we also learn that on Wednesdays for two or three months competent guides have been avail-able to show visitors the experiments actually in pro-gress. The present scheme includes thirty-two cot-tages, sixteen of which are for comparison purposes, and are built of brick on normal lines of construction, while the other sixteen are more directly experi-mental. Each cottage consists of parlour, living-room, scullery, bath-wash-house, larder, fuel store, etc., on the ground floor, with three bedrooms on the upper floor. Experiments in building in chalk include a cottage with cavity walls built of blocks made of chalk and cement, one with walls of chalk and cement rammed between shuttering, one with walls of chalk alone (chalk pisé), and one with walls of chalk and straw (chalk cob) built without shuttering. There is also one cottage of monolithic reinforced concrete and two concrete-block cottages with hollow walls. These two cottages are being erected under contract by two proprietary firms; for all the other experimental cottages direct labour is employed. The experiment also includes a pair of timber-framed cottages faced with elm weather-boarding and two Army huts converted into permanent bungalows. With regard to the latter experiment, results show that no economy is effected by using these huts. Another cottage has walls of clay and gravel, while two single and one pair of cottages are being erected in pisé-de-terre. One of the single pisé cottages is now being roofed—this is the first two-storied pisé house erected in England.
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Experimental Cottage Building. Nature 105, 792–793 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105792b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105792b0