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6. The building of a house for the Vice-Chancellor (about £8,000) and of a block of eight flats for the housing of expatriate professors and lecturers (about £40,000.
Separate notes on these projects are added.
I have set down what are little more, than guesses at the costs of these projects. Shortage of materials, great increases of wages, and the very great amount of rebuilding and new building now going on for the restoration of the Colony have together caused an increase of building costs to between four and five times the pre-war level. Architects are few and are so fully employed that months are required for the completion of sketch designs and estimates.
The sums I have suggested are based on what I have been able to learn from architects and contractors who are unwilling however to regard them as, in any sense, estimates. I make these guesses, based in the main on my knowledge of pre-war building costs and of the scale of increase of these, merely that the Grants Committee may be given some idea of the scale of the help for which we shall apply to it when plans and estimates can be submitted.
The detailed notes on these projects that I now send give a more exact idea of their scope and of their urgency but I should like to repeat that my estimates of costs are no more than an attempt to adjust pre-war prices to new and unstable conditions.
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) D. J. Sloss.
Walter Adams, Esq., Secretary,
Inter-University Council for Higher.
Education in the Colonies,
8, Park Street, London, W.1.
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Private notes are available after approval.