Sumitra Shah's posting on Adam Smith's house for sale reminds me of a news item I read while living in England in the early 1970s. It was a report stating that the last of the homes built by Robert Owen for his workers, probably also in Scotland at New Lanark, were about to be demolished. Interestingly, there were still people living in those structures which must have been built in the very early 1800s. No doubt by 1970 these worker cottages were no longer compliant with whatever contemporary building codes there happened to be, but I thought then, as I believe now, that it was a terrible loss to history to have allowed them to be demolished. 


Dr Steven Kates