{The Cluster}[20th January 1970]

[Redbook1:114-116][19700120:1605]{The Cluster}[20th January 1970]

Tuesday 20th January 1970  4.05 p.m.

            Today, in Pimlico, I saw a [...] woman beat her little child for falling down.  She had lost her temper.  I do not doubt that the provocation was great, and that the child’s running ahead and falling down was the last straw; but when the child stood up it turned round to look at its approaching mother and wailed.  At first I thought it cried for the pain and indignity of falling over -- a minor thing -- but now I wonder if it did not realise what was coming to it.  For fully three minutes she chastised it and scolded it, while it wailed, and we watched.

            I wonder how often that happens to that child; and I wonder too what will happen to it.  Will it grow up delinquent, and fall to violence, killing and hurting to revenge itself on society for the ills its parents did it?  Or in imitation of their ways?  For children imitate their parents and resent them at one and the same moment. 

            I should like to see flats and maisonettes built to look inwards in groups of, say, between six and twelve families -- probably eight to ten is the best size.  Houses should also be built round a central courtyard with a covered cloister joining them.

            The advantages of this are that statistically, there would be more chance of finding two good parents among eighteen or twenty than among two -- as it were.  Parents would not have to suffer their own offspring continually, babysitters would always be available, and, since other people's children are just as interesting to parents as other people's parents are to children, many of the strains of family life from the children's point of view would be relieved.

            If the community was bigger, it would take teenage gangs into its fold -- there won't be enough teenagers in one community to allow that with ten-family units, probably -- but it would lose something of its essential closed nature.  If it was smaller it would be too intimate and people would get on each other's nerves.

            That is the chief danger, of course -- that the lack of privacy will be resented.  I think that, for the sake of the children, we shall have to redefine our standards of privacy and allow a certain amount of meddling by the community -- as opposed to the State -- in the affairs of individuals.  I should like to see the communities populated on a cross-class, cross-wealth basis, but I am afraid that like tends to gather towards like too much to allow that to happen naturally.  I don't think one should force these things.  To provide for common facilities for e.g. sports and leisure, the small, ten-to-twenty-family groups could be part of a large collection of such groups.

            Private schemes could have common ownership of houses (?) by a community trust which leases the freehold to an individual with first option to the trust if he leaves.  So he has all the rights of an owner-dweller but the community of ten/twenty families retains ultimate control.

            In this way also the day-to-day interests of old people would be cared for to a certain extent.

            I think now that fifteen would be closer to the optimum number of families, with twenty as a maximum.  This will have to be worked out by trial and error to a certain extent.

            For a start, houses in London which have back gardens could have their gardens turned into a central garden and playground.  There would be no way in, other than through the houses, so responsibility for the gardens would remain with the householders i.e. if someone broke into a house from the back he would have to got in through someone else's house.

            Incidentally, the local authority could help solve the parking problem by building car parks underneath.

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