Cottage Building in cob, pisé, Chalk & Clay

by John St. Loe Strachey, Clough Williams-Ellis

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164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

John St Loe Strachey (9 February 1860 – 26 August 1927), was a British journalist and newspaper proprietor.

Strachey was the second son of Sir Edward Strachey, 3rd Baronet, and his wife Mary Isabella (née Symonds), and the brother of Edward Strachey, 1st Baron Strachie, and Henry Strachey. He was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, and later called to the Bar, but chose to take up journalism as his profession. Between 1887 and 1925, he was editor of The Spectator. Strachey also edited (1896–1897) the Cornhill Magazine.

Strachey's son John became a Labour politician and government minister.

His daughter Amabel married the architect Clough Williams-Ellis.

Reviews

[Andrea]

St Patrick's day. My dad's birthday. I am missing him so much. Him eating his big chocolate cake and my family all around and all of us in the adobe house my parents built in the desert. In my sadness I remembered this short book I found on Project Gutenberg I've been meaning to read forever. I knew it was right when I read this from the introduction by J. St Loe Strachey:

My deep desire was to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there. I wanted my house, my cottage in “Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” to rise like the lark from the furrows.

Or like our dream in the desert.

I never knew how deep this kind of building tradition ran here in England, or that some architects looked towards it for a brief time in the 1920s to help overcome the lack of materials and the desperate need for housing after WWI (I greatly enjoyed Strachey's overblown rhetoric):

In this dread predicament what are we to do as a nation? What we must not do is at any rate quite clear. We must not lie down in the high road of civilisation and cry out that we are ruined or betrayed, or that the world is too hard for us, and that we must give up the task of living in houses. Whether we like it or not we have got to do something about the housing question, and we have got to do it at once, and there is an end. Translated into terms of action, this means that as we have not got enough of the old forms of material we must turn to others and learn how to house ourselves with materials such as we have not used before. Once again necessity must be the mother of invention, or rather, of invention and revival, for in anything so old and universal as the housing problem it is too late to be ambitious.

It is the object of the present book to attack part of the problem of how to build without bricks, and indeed without mortar, and equally important, as far as possible without the vast cost of transporting the heavy material of the house from one quarter of England to another.

In the spirit of the time, he began work on the fruit house above, building it of rammed earth (pisé de terre) following a manual for Australian settlers. It worked and they built a dinning hall. Built it collectively, which also reminded me of my house, and how homes can and should be built:

Everyone worked at that wall; the nursing staff, the coachman, an occasional visitor, a schoolboy, a couple of boy scouts, members of the National Reserve who were guarding a “vulnerable point” close by, and even some of the patients.

There is, of course, a fairly large distance between the two of us. He was a member of Brook's Club, known to me only through my long-ago reading of my grandmother's Georgette Heyer regency romance novels, he writes:

Happening to be sleeping in a bedroom at Brooks’s Club in 1916, I noticed a charming Regency bookcase full of old books. Among them was a copy of a Cyclopædia of 1819. I thought it would be amusing to see whether there was any mention of Pisé de terre. What was my astonishment to find that what I thought was my own special and peculiar hobby and discovery was treated therein at very great length and with very great ability, but treated not in the least as anything new or wonderful, but instead as “this well-known and greatly appreciated system of building, etc., etc.”

And even better:

At the end of my researches and experiments I found that Pliny has got it all in his Natural History in six lines! There is no need for more words.

“Have we not in Africa and in Spain walls of earth, known as ‘formocean’ walls? From the fact that they are moulded, rather than built, by enclosing earth within a frame of boards, constructed on either side. These walls will last for centuries, are proof against rain, wind, and fire, and are superior in solidity to any cement. Even at this day Spain still holds watch-towers that were erected by Hannibal.”—Pliny’s “Natural History,” Bk. XXXV, chapter xlviii.

It all started in Africa, of course.

Architect Clough William-Ellis (he built The Village from The Prisoner) doesn't have quite the same gift of words or the happy enthusiasm, and as he starts in on the housing question he set my back up right away:

In a recent speech the Registrar-General said: “War does not only fill the graves, it also empties the cradles.” This is no less true of bad and inadequate housing.

Only the most reckless and thick-skinned of the poorer population will adventure on marriage and the bringing up of a family whilst the odds against decent and reasonable housing persist as at present.

It was that embarrassing period for the upper classes when open discussions of eugenics were floating around, and they blamed the poor for their own poverty with a little more directness than they do today. Much of this little book is made up of letters from around England and the colonies giving precise details of other projects -- very useful indeed actually, for those experimenting, but also serving to show the casual racism of Imperial Britain:

My experience of all black labour is, that they won’t put any ‘guts’ into it. They therefore want fairly heavy rammers, which they can lift and drop, say a foot, and which will do the rest for them.
--Major Baylay, Peter Maritzburg, Natal, South Africa

This signals the larger problems of Empire and the resulting oppression, exploitation and consumption that have played such a large role in getting us into the current ecological crisis that bears such similarity to the period immediately after WWI when this was written, but I shall note them and then set them to one side.

This passage shows the effect the war had on building, and probably exactly the kind of development rules we should have today:

Formerly, he who wilfully carried bricks into Merioneth or the Cotswolds, or slates into Kent or ragstone-rubble into Middlesex, was guilty of no more than foolishness and an æsthetic solecism.

Under present conditions such action should render him liable to prosecution and conviction on some such count as “Wasting the shrunken resources of his country in a time of great scarcity, . . . in that he did wantonly transport material for building the walls of a house by rail and road from A to B when suitable and sufficient material of another sort and at no higher cost existed, and was readily accessible hard by the site at B.”

That indeed is our one chance of salvation, the existence and use of “the materials of another sort hard by the site.”

If only we had really taken that on board in the 1920s, our towns and cities would look completely different (though he makes the point, and it's a good one, that this kind of architecture is better suited to the raw materials found in the countryside rather than an urban setting, this requires more thought).

He starts with cob -- only recently I saw an article about a man who had built his home of this, but had no idea quite how far back it went or what beautiful homes you could build.

It is a mixture of shale and clay and straw, well-mixed through treading and then built in courses upon a stone foundation, lifted on and then trodden well down. It is allowed to project over the foundation, and then pared down and left to dry.

It creates places of beauty built of the very earth they sit on.

Clough-Ellis's design has a bit of the fairytale about it -- ruined a bit by the assumption that its tenants will have servants. This search for alternative building materials has not quite yet joined with a deep desire to live better on the earth...

There is much more -- along with the pictures that make sense of all it -- here.

[Debbie Kuckuck]

Informative

This book has a limited audience but very enjoyable to that audience. Of which I am one. Very easy read and quite informative. Easily understood.