PLEA FOR MORE AIR.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4817, 2 March 1925, Page 1

PLEA FOR MORE AIR.

FLAT MENACE IN SYDNEY. PROMPT ACTION URGED. “The Question' of slums hap been dealt with by this State, but crowded dwellings are. still springing up in Sydney, and that on ‘wholesale’ lines.” Mr John Fuller, made the foregoing statement when .emphasising his plea for more air space between large dwelling-buildings, chiefly those erected about the past es the present; He ber ,o£ such buildings, he said, had been erected in recent times. Mr Fuller is not po much concerned aobut the past as the present. He doubts whether it would be right to make any corrective action retrospective. Reason must be exercised, he “says, and care be taken to see that no check is’placed upon enterprise. But what should be done, in his opininc, is to ensure that in the case of! all big dwellings that are subsequently erected provision is made for a reasonable amount of sunlight and air to 1 penetrate between buildings. In Macleay Street, he says,; there are striking examples of • tire type against which he protests—huge conglomerations of flats, crowded together. A’ NATIONAL MATTER. ' "J hold very strongly,” says Mr Fuller, ‘‘that each of such buildings should have a provision for an airwell at least three feet wide, making a minimum of six feet between two buildings.' That Would apply to buildings of five or six stories. With higher buildings the space must be correspondingly wider. The minimum frontage, too, should be fifty or sixty feet, as in the case ofi New Zealand.” Mr Fuller would, not leave a national matter of this kind to a municipal council. There should be, he holds, ; a definite law on the point, so as to preclude the possibility of interested partiep in. the council adapting the regulations to their own ends. AU such large dwellings should be subject to registration by the Department of Public Health. LAW OUTSIDE SYDNEY. Outside the city of Sydney, and throughout the State generally, what Mr Fuller advocates already is the law. A clause was introduced in the building ordinance of the State to keep two-storey flats 3ft away from the neighbouring boundary, or five feet if they are mbre than two storeys in height But flats in Sydney are under the jurisdiction of the City Council and are controlled by the present Building Act. The therefore, seems to lie with the council—or with a public whose condemnation of punless dwellings should stir the authorities into action.