George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

I don't think I will bore you with a synopsis of The Road to Wigan Pier. But it is an excellent piece of investigative (?? or at least immersive) journalism. You have to appreciate the extent Orwell went to in order to understand the living conditions of the working class. 

Bear in mind that this wasn't some commissioned article; he wasn't some sort of correspondent in some sort of condescending proletariat "bureau". 

The backstory, I gather, is that Orwell (a person firmly of the middle-class) quit his colonialist job and came back to England with his eyes suddenly open to political and economic reality. Not the Parliament sort of politics, but the day-to-day exploitation and subjugation of capitalism. So he went and explored the mining towns of Sheffield, Barnsley, and Wigan, and reported his findings in the form of a book.

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Wigan Pier fascinates me in so many ways, I don't think this single blog post will come close to exhausting it. 

But for a start... let's talk about housing and the working class.

At the point of Orwell's visit, there was a housing crisis in the mining towns of North England. Because miners needed homes near their workplaces, they paid exorbitant sums to live in, basically, slums. Landlords had no incentive to upgrade their properties when mining families were desperate to rent. Old slum-houses were condemned, but impossible to tear down and rebuild since they were perpetually occupied.

Given this failure of market economics, the government stepped in to build what were known as "Corporation houses". Corporation houses are brand-new estates located a distance from the mining towns (because you need fresh undeveloped land), built uniformly to quite a high standard.

Now, can you see why I'm so fascinated by Orwell's writing on housing? Corporation houses sound exactly like HDB housing estates, especially the "non-mature" estates like Punggol.

Much like our new BTO estates, Corporation houses were designed as a solution to the housing problem. Yet some mining families refused to move, opting to stay in the slums; whereas others started complaining about their "nice" new homes the instant they moved. 

A case of ingratitude? Well - we in Singapore are used to thinking that way. We are supposed to feel grateful to the HDB for providing us with affordable and comfortable homes. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an ingrate.

But Orwell here dives deep into the psyche of ordinary folk. Why would they prefer "the frowzy huddle of the slum"? There are so many tiny, tiny reasons that add up into a snowball of dissatisfaction. 

Corporation houses cost a little more to rent than slum-houses. Of course the rent is comparatively more value-for-money, but if you work in an unstable, seasonal job like mining, every shilling counts. It's not just the rent though. It's more expensive to heat a larger house. It's more expensive to get to work because of the distance:

When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out the centre of the town and re-distribute it on the outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have got the people out of fetid alleys into places where they have room to breathe; but from the point of view of the people themselves, what you have done is to pick them up and dump them down five miles from their work.

Since Corporation houses were built solely for the purpose of accommodation, the government allotted precious little space to the amenities and conveniences of towns. With drastically fewer shops around, things naturally became more expensive.

So, let's pause here, because this sounds a little like Singapore's housing success story. I don't think there's a proper study of this but I get the sense that car ownership is through the roof in newer estates like Punggol and Bukit Panjang. There's also a dearth of food options, so people in these estates eat a lot of "shopping mall food". You pay $8 in Bukit Panjang for a meal that would cost $5 in Toa Payoh and over time that adds up.

But it's not just about money. A certain soulless efficiency about these shiny new estates made their working-class residents long for their beloved slums. 

[Corporation houses] are quite pleasing to the eye [...] But there is something ruthless and soulless about the whole business. Take, for instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house. You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them [...]

Perhaps most significantly of all...

As for pubs, they are banished from the housing estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by the big brewery companies and very expensive. For a middle-class population this would be a nuisance - it might mean walking a mile to get a glass of beer; for a working-class population, which uses the pub as a kind of club, it is a serious blow at communal life.

In Singapore the locus of working-class community life is the hawker centre and wet market. It's a shame this important place is missing from the newer estates - although there have been more recent attempts to remedy this (Sengkang hawker centre for example). Were it up to me, the market and hawker centre is the first thing I'd build, and I'd arrange flats around it.

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I have a couple of other favourite passages...

You know how middle-class people look at poor folk and go, "If you're so poor why do you spend all your money on cheap crap from SHEIN and ordering GrabFood?" Here is the poor man's strategy for dealing with lack of money:

They don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way about - the more natural way, if you come to think of it. [...] a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two points of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips. [...] And abvove all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for,' as they call it) by putting a penny on a sweepstake.

As for "we know you're poor, but healthy food doesn't have to cost a lot!" Here is why poor people don't like to eat healthy food:

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes - an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread? [...] the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. 

And... "Since you're unemployed, why don't you do something constructive with all your free time?"

There is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment on everybody, married or single, and upon men more than women. [...] They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude [...] you also need peace of mind.

If only we could make this required reading for every well-meaning but condescending Good Samaritan!