New kinds of housing

If the all-party Parliamentary Housing Sub-Committee were to embark on a week-long fact-finding tour of Barbados, it would create a tabloid scandal. Yet it might be a good idea all the same. For among the palm trees they will find remnants of a fascinating housing experiment which began almost 200 years ago, yet which affords a useful lesson for housing policy today.

In 1838, when slavery was abolished on the island, plantation owners suddenly found themselves obliged to pay wages to their workers. In an effort to recoup this cost, they churlishly began charging those workers rent for houses they had previously occupied for free. Rents in some cases were so high that emancipated slaves were scarcely better off than before.

The slaves were, in other words, in a similar position to present-day Londoners, especially those under the age of 35: any increase in prosperity was largely neutralised by the ever-rising cost of renting or owning property. The Bajans’ answer to this problem was the ‘chattel house’, a form of housing still seen on the island today. This is a wooden hut large enough — just — to house two people. The best of these are built to the same elegant proportions found in larger homes of the same period, with jalousie windows and verandas shaded by fretwork awnings. But they have one fabulous extra quality. If necessary, four or five people can pick one up and move it in an afternoon.

This was how the landlords were outsmarted. In 1838, if your current plantation owner demanded too much money for you to live on his land, you simply spoke to his neighbour — who was only too pleased for you to re-site your chattel house on his land for a fraction of the price.