I do not blame the costers. They must get where there is an open space for their barrows handy, some bit of waste land where houses have been condemned and pulled down. They stack their barrows here, taking off one wheel and carrying it home, that their property may not be wheeled off in the night. But areas with this waste land are limited, so up go the prices, and the coster must pay. In Green Arbour Gourt, St. Luke's, I came upon a man who was paying eight shillings a week for one miserable room, and all round the district the very vilest accommodation fetches something very near that figure.
Eight shillings a week for one room! Surely a class that can pay that must be worth catering for even by the five per cent, philanthropists.
Some time ago there was a scheme to build a goods station in this district, and before the Bill could be considered Parliment required a labouring-class statement, that is, a statement of the number of poor people who would be displaced.
On looking through the figures I find that to build this station about 3,000 poor people would have to be turned out of their homes.
It is the pulling down of area after area for the purpose of building large warehouses and railway-stations, and that sort of thing, which is, of course, at the root of the overcrowding. The accommodation becomes more limited year after year, and the property built as dwelling-houses under the Artisans' Dwellings Act does not, as I have pointed out before, offer any accommodation to the class displaced.
In another district I made a discovery which I fancy must be unique. I found a public-house which was a highway for traffic. You went out of a street into a bar—you walked straight through and found yourself in a network of courts behind. I found on inquiry that for years the public-house had been used as a footpath, and I have no doubt it was found highly convenient by ladies and gentlemen in a hurry to escape observation.
In another district still I unearthed as sweet a little story as any of the annals of jobbery can, I imagine, furnish. Let me tell it carefully, for the law of libel is a fearful and wonderful thing, and I have no desire that my publishers should eat their next Christmas dinner in Holloway Gaol.
A big block of buildings, falling into decay, was for sale. A person officially connected with the parish drew the attention of the sanitary officers to them, and had them condemned as unfit for habitation. Directly this was done the parish gentleman, in conjunction with a firm of speculators, bought the property for a bagatelle—for old building material, in fact. But the new proprietors didn't pull it down—not they. They gave a coat of whitewash here and there, and let every single room again directly at increased rentals, and every single room is full of rent-payers now. The street of houses which was condemned five years ago has been a little gold mine, and a handsome fortune has been made out of it by the very people who insisted upon calling the attention of the sanitary authorities to it.
It is needless to say that the same attention has never been solicited since.
I should like to know how many more blocks of property—unfit for human habitation—are held in the same way in London.