Clement Danes and
St. Martin's in the Fields. At the end of 1899 the London County Council
acquired the property for the Kingsway and Aldwych clearance scheme, and
we found new quarters in a basement at Clement's Inn, a pleasant couple
of rooms, with plenty of light, though sometimes maliciously
misdescribed as a cellar. At the end of 1908 we removed into three much
more spacious rooms at the same address, also in "a dismal basement,"
where we remained until in 1914 the Society rented a house at 25 Tothill
Street, Westminster.
Another undertaking was a conference on Housing. Although the first
public effort of the Society was its conference at South Place Chapel in
1886, this particular form of propaganda has never commended itself to
the Executive, chiefly no doubt because conferences, to which numerous
representative persons are invited, are most useful for promoting
moderate reforms which have already made themselves acceptable to the
members and officials of local governing bodies. Such reforms the Fabian
Society does not regard as its special business; it prefers to pioneer;
it is true that it uses its machinery for spreading a knowledge of local
government in all its forms, but that is mainly a matter of office
routine.
However, for once we took up an already popular proposal. The Housing of
the Working Classes Act of 1890 was an admirable measure, but it was
hedged about with obstacles which rendered it very difficult to work in
urban areas and virtually useless in rural districts.
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