Chalet Fields of The Gower

Stefan Szczelkun's charming photo-book records both ramshackle huts, and fairy-tale new build at two plotland sites on the Gower Penninsula, Wales. Secret, rustic getaways, clad in wood and painted eggshell blue, pink, cedar, with fancy bargeboards, verandas and smokestacks, these impeccable images capture a demotic micro-world, yet one as exotic as a Black Sea holiday resort.' Michael Hampton, author of Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists' Book The 1947 Act made planning key to development, handing house building to those with enough financial and political power to beat the system. The results have been expensive, ugly and environmentally unsound.Looking through the mists of time, this book glimpses a vision of housing that has beauty and was within the reach of normal people. Geoff Beacon Sustainable Plotlands Association The ""Plotlanders"" were working class families who sought to reclaim a little bit of the countryside as an escape from city life between the wars. Their self-built houses created informal communities that were first documented in detail in Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward's Arcadia For All. Stefan Szczelkun's Chalet Fields of the Gower brings this history up-to-date and demonstrates the importance and vitality of this working class culture whose legacy is all the more important in an era in which working class experience is increasingly exploited and devalued. Simon Yuill It is interesting to speculate whether there could be any way that Plotland schemes could happen again and whether they could provide a significant amount of low-cost housing. This was housing that was largely self-built and therefore empowering - in complete contrast to current housing provision... Is it fanciful to suggest such a set of circumstances could occur again in the near future? We must assume that provision of plots would have to be through Government or Local Authorities and be considered as part of their statutory obligation to provide housing...Perhaps as a complementary alternative to Local Authority building of low-cost housing or their imperfect attempt to get developers to provide a proportion of 'affordable' homes as a quid pro quo, LAs could allocate suitable sites with drainage and utility provision to each plot. People would be able to cheaply buy the freehold of a plot and then build their own house and connect to the services. Tony Schonfield