A photographic print of Housing, Post War, Miscellaneous Speculation, Property, Land Deals, Grabs, etc

DAY by day, evidence is piling up of fantastic fortunes being made by speculation in land. The latest story will bring the lesson sharply home to the Labour Party Executive today, when it meets to consider the draft of its new Home Policy aimed at curbing the land speculator. For the latest people to benefit from the building land boom are not speculators at all. They are the Acton Labour Party. In 1948 this local Labour and trade union movement in West London scraped up £1,500 to buy a bomb-site. It was just the place for a Labour hall - a corner site 45 feet deep with a 90ft. frontage on Hill-lane, a busy main road. Labour volunteers cleared the site and got the money together to build a concrete and asbestos hut. They dreamed of the day when they would have enough cash to put up a permanent building. But rising building costs beat them every time. Now they have sold the site to an oil company for £42,000 - 28 times what they paid for it. A petrol station will be built on the site. They hope to find another place - less valuable, of course - in the borough where their unexpected wealth will enable them to buy the land and put up a [...] class building. Housing - Misc, Property & Land Speculations