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V. Under the last heads of my Report I have touched on matters, which (in so far as they cannot be adjusted without Parliamentary interference) may be considered to lie beyond the present jurisdiction of the Commissioners of Sewers; and the topic which I now approach may, perhaps, be considered equally foreign to the scope of your ordinary functions.

I have to report that there are houses and localities within the City which are irremediably bad;—places, which the uninterrupted presence of epidemic disease has stamped as absolutely unfit for human habitation; places, where drainage and water-supply, indeed, are defective, but where the perfection of these necessaries might exist, in all probability, without giving healthiness to the inhabitants. The predominant evil in the localities referred to is their thorough impossibility of ventilation.

While treating of the manner in which noxious emanations are conveyed to a distance, and are enabled to diffuse their influence over a whole town, instead of concentrating it in some single slaughter-house or burial-ground, I indirectly suggested what I have now to illustrate; that all the evils of all the nuisances in existence acquire their utmost local intensity of action when the diffusion of their gaseous products is interfered with, and when, from absence of ventilation, these are retained in the immediate vicinity of their source.

The inhabitants of open streets can hardly conceive the complicated turnings, the narrow inlets, the close parallels of houses, and the high barriers of light and air, which are the common characteristics of our courts and alleys, and which give an additional noxiousness even to their cesspools and their filth. There are very few who, without personal verification, would credit an account that might be given of the worst of such dwelling-places. Let any one, however, who would do full justice to this frightful subject, visit the courts about Bishopsgate, Aldgate, and the upper portion of Cripplegate, which present some of the worst, though by no means the only instances of pestilential residence. A man of ordinary dimensions almost hesitates, lest he should immovably wedge himself, with whomsoever he may meet, in the low and narrow crevice which is called the entrance to some such court or alley; and, having passed that ordeal, he finds himself as in a well, with little light, with less ventilation, amid a dense population of human beings, with an atmosphere hardly respirable from its closeness and pollution. The stranger, during his visit, feels his breathing constrained, as though he were in a diving-bell; and experiences afterwards a sensible and immediate relief as he emerges again into the comparatively open street.

Now, I am prepared to show that there are many, very many, courts within the City, to which the above description accurately applies; courts and alleys hemmed in on all sides by higher houses; having no possibility of any current of air; and (worst of all) sometimes so constructed back to back, as to forbid the advantage of double windows or back doors, and thus to render the house as perfectly a cul-de-sac out of the court, as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the next thoroughfare.

It is surely superfluous to observe, that these local conditions are utterly incompatible with health. Among their dense population, it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery; and the children, who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit-warren, perish in early infancy. In the worst localities probably not more than half the children born survive their fifth year, and of the 3763 deaths registered last year in the City of London generally, 1410 were at or under seven years of age.

The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born: often extinguishing life prematurely; in childhood, by hydrocephalus; in youth, by pulmonary and renal affections, which you read of as consumption and dropsy; often scarring and maiming where it does not kill, and rendering life miserable by blindness, decrepitude, or deformity; often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.

Typhus prevails there too, not as an occasional visitor, but as an habitual pestilence.

It is impossible for me, by numbers, to give you an exact knowledge of the fatality of such spots; because, in the greater part of the City, hospitals, dispensaries, and private practice, divide with the parochial officers the treatment of the sick, and diminish the returns of sickness which those officers would otherwise have to show. But this I may tell you, as an illustration of what I mean;—that in the few houses of Seven-Step-alley and its two offsets, (Amelia-place and Turner-square,) there occurred last year 163 parochial cases of fever; in Prince’s-place and Prince’s-square, 176 cases—think, Gentlemen, if this had occurred in Southampton-place and Russell-square! that behind the east side of Bishopsgate, in the very small distance from Widegate-street to New-street, there were 126 cases; that behind the west side, from Primrose-street to Half-moon-street, there were 245 cases; that the parish of Cripplegate had 354 cases over and above the number (probably a very large one) treated by private practitioners, by hospitals, and especially by dispensaries. Similarly, though with less perfect information, I am enabled to trace fever to a terrible extent in very many other localities of the City, even on the verge of its better residences, and close behind its wealthiest thoroughfares; in Plumtree-court, in Plough-court and place, in Poppin’s-court, Neville’s-court, Blackhorse-alley, Union-court, Plough-court in Holborn, Field-lane; in the courts right and left of King-street, Smithfield, in Hanging-sword-alley and its vicinity, in Peahen-court, in Bell-alley and its neighbourhood, in Priest’s-alley, in Beer-lane, in Friar’s-alley, in Bromley’s-buildings, and in the whole large space which stretches from Ludgate-hill to beside the river.

And in most of these localities, in addition to other sanitary errors, there predominates that particular one to which I am now inviting your attention—the absence, namely, of sufficient ventilation.

It was in districts such as these, that in the year 1665, the Great Plague of London found the readiest facilities for its reception; and it was by the destruction of such districts that the Great Fire of the following year rendered the utmost conceivable service to the sanitary progress of the people, and completed their emancipation from the horrors of an unparalleled pestilence. Long intervening years have sufficed to reconstruct these miserable habitations almost after their first type, and to re-exemplify all the evils which belong to them; so completely indeed, that if the infection of that same plague should light again amongst us, I scarcely know why it might not traverse the City and decimate its population as quickly and as virulently as before. Meanwhile, however, typhus with its kindred disorders, and the occasional epidemics of influenza and cholera, maintain their attachment to the soil, and require no further re-inforcement from the pestilence of other climates. From these fatal diseases we no longer hope to be rescued by the recurrence of the former casualty. The almost two centuries which have elapsed since the period referred to, have taught men better methods than a general conflagration for remedying such evils; and it is a satisfaction to believe that the wisdom and humanity of the Corporation of the City of London will apply those methods with effect.

As a palliative measure, applicable in many of the least aggravated instances, I may suggest the removal of unnecessary walls which intercept the current of air from place to place; the formation of counter-openings in various blind courts; and, not least, in regard of many houses thus situated, the admission of light and air by additional windows. I cannot pass this portion of the subject without recording my opinion that the operation of the window-tax is in direct opposition to the sanitary interests of the people; and I must venture to express my hope that some different method of assessment may presently be adopted, in place of one which presses on the occupier in proportion to the healthiness of his tenement.[25] I think it very desirable, indeed almost indispensable, that your Hon. Court should have the power, under certain circumstances, to order and enforce the opening of additional windows in houses occupied by large numbers of persons, when your Officer of Health may report their ventilation defective; and if it should seem expedient to you to seek this authority from the Legislature, it might with the greatest advantage be accompanied by some concession from her Majesty’s Government, to the effect that the formation of additional windows, occurring thus under your orders for the immediate necessities of health and life, should not occasion any further assessment on the occupiers of the house.

[25] I ought not to pass this page without a grateful mention of Lord Duncan’s name in connexion with the removal of the Window Tax, at length happily effected. It remains, however, greatly to be desired, in respect of certain specifiable houses inhabited by the poorer classes, that Local Boards of Health should have power to enforce improvements of ventilation.—J. S., 1854.

But, Gentlemen, within the City of London there exist, to a very large extent, architectural evils for which no such palliative treatment is possible; evils against which I would venture to say (borrowing a metaphor from my profession) that no safety can be found except in amputation.

To dwell in hovels like pits, low-sunken between high houses, hemmed in by barriers which exclude every breath of direct ventilation—this can never be otherwise than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose necessities allot them such residence; and, if it be an incontrovertible fact that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived subsistence in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets, then, I apprehend, it cannot be doubted that such a manner of life ought to be dealt with as a great evil, and ought as much as possible to be interrupted.

A surveyor’s inspection of the City would reveal to you many places answering to the description I have given; places to which no ventilation could arrive except by removal of whole streets of houses which wall them in.

To remove the well-constructed houses of the City, in order that its wretched courts and alleys should participate in the blessings of light and air, might seem one method of conquering the difficulty which is before you; but I apprehend the opposite alternative, of proceeding to a gradual suppression of all residence in the former class of dwellings, may more naturally have your approbation.

To the latter aim, sooner or later, the sanitary efforts of the Corporation must be directed.

There are many parts of the City where great and immediate advantage would arise from an expenditure of money applied solely to the purpose of destruction; parts, where the purchase of an entire court, or series of courts, for the sole object of pulling down houses, and leaving open spaces in their stead, would be the cheapest as well as the most effective manner of dealing with their sanitary difficulties. And I have earnestly to suggest for your consideration, that proceedings of this nature will require to be pursued to a very great extent, and at a large annual expense, within the City, before the cleanliness and habitability of its poorer localities will stand in their legitimate proportion to the modern stateliness of thoroughfare and grandeur of public buildings which attest the magnificence of the Corporation.

I would, therefore, beg to recommend that a survey be made of the worst districts which I have specified, with a view to the immediate purchase and destruction of some considerable portion of the court-property lying in them; and, still more, I would urge that this is an exertion, which for some years must proceed systematically, in order to thin the density of a population which now breeds pestilence and augments mortality by its overcrowding and excess.

I am aware that considerable difficulties lie in the way of accomplishing an object of this sort with immediate rapidity. It is my great hope, however, that the principle may be distinctly recognised; and that the City will not tolerate within its municipal jurisdiction the continuance of houses absolutely incompatible with healthy habitation. This principle being once established, and a certain annual expenditure devoted to enforce it, I feel assured that within a few years opportunities will have arisen for that outlay to have been made in the most judicious manner, and for its results amply to have demonstrated the advantages of the system which I recommend.