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DWELLINGS.
179
with the industrial revolution, and with the great movement of migration
into the towns during the latter half of this century.
This lust of modernization has been effectively backed by the new town regulation
plans adopted twenty years ago for most Swedish towns, and generally based
on the familiar chess-board system, reckless of existing conditions, and by the
Buildings Statute of 1874, applying to all the towns in Sweden. This Statute,
for example, fixed the maximum width of streets at IS (in special cases 12) meters,
a greater breadth being prescribed for boulevards; ruled the maximum height of
houses to be the width of the street plus l’/s meters; no house to be more
than 5 stories high; the minimum area of the courtyard to be one half (in
special cases one third) of the area built upon; the minimum height of
dwelling-rooms to be 2’7 meters, and the height of their floors 0’3 meters above the
ground, and so forth.
The new building legislation, the laying down of water-supply pipes and
drains, and other measures, have considerably reduced the danger of fires, and
brought the sanitary conditions to a comparatively high level of perfection.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century town dwellings enter upon an
entirely new phase; the Buildings Statute and the new town plans did away with
the free style of building of former times: instead of houses standing apart in
their gardens, were erected compact masses of buildings, of monotonous
uniformity, block upon block. Formerly each house was built for one person, or one
family, a part being reserved for letting; now houses are appropriated exclusively
to letting purposes, being arranged in flats, one above the other, all the stories
exactly alike. A novelty in the arrangement was the centre corridor (without
direct lighting) running through the flat between the front and back rooms, the
front part of it serving as a hall, and the back part as a kind of pantry, between
the kitchen and the dining-room. This type of dwelling was gradually improved;
the hall and pantry are now supplied with direct light; people are getting
more and more to demand bath-rooms; the old dry closets are being replaced
by water closets. The earthenware stoves, formerly almost universal, are
gradually giving place to hot-water pipes distributing heat throughout all the stories
from one central fireplace. In the houses of the well-to-do, hot water is also
supplied from a central heater to the different floors. In most places
electric-light is in general use, and gas is beginning to oust wood for the heating of
kitchen-ranges. Cold-water pipes and drain-pipes have long been obligatory even
in the plainest dwellings. Apart from the drawbacks necessarily inherent in the
flat system, the modern house is fairly satisfactory from a sanitary point of view,
and reaches a high standard as regards comfort and appearance.
A workman’s family in a Swedish town have generally to content themselves
with one room besides a kitchen, or at most two. Two rooms is apparently
becoming less of a rarity, at any rate where the rents are not too exorbitant.
However, one of the rooms is often sub-let to lodgers, generally unmarried men;
even dwellings of one room and a kitchen have often to be shared with an
"inneboende", a lodger living in the same room as the family. An account will
be found elsewhere- of the work done by Workmen’s Dwellings Societies, and
by employers of labour, for the improvement of workmen’s dwellings.
The middle classes in the towns live in flats of three, four, or five rooms
besides a kitchen. Houses of flats with six, seven, eight, or more rooms are
fairly common, and are nowadays pretty comfortably fitted out, often
luxuriously; occasionally the architecture is of sterling quality. Sweden being rich in
natural stone, various kinds of granite.; limestone, and sandstone are employed
as materials; latterly bricks have been coming into use for facings.
The love of nature inherent in the Swedish people is manifested by the gen-
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