The Vestries and District Boards, however, did perform a considerable amount of useful work. Local sewerage and drainage works were on the whole effectively dealt with. The rest of the work done was mostly of the routine order, such as scavenging and paving and lighting, though even that was not always done in the most sensible way, as exemplified in Paddington (1866).
“The street sweepings of mud collected by the scavengers are stored in enormous quantities in the middle of the parish in a closely inhabited neighbourhood. Here it is allowed to decompose, &c. If it were intended to contrive an arrangement for developing malaria in the midst of a town population nothing could be better adapted for the purpose.”
A few of them had soared to the height of widening a street, or acquiring some small open space; in most, if not all, of these cases receiving financial help from the central authority.
But as to the main causes of the prevailing insanitary evils, their aversion to active measures was constantly in evidence; equally so where the enforcement of the law would have entailed cost on the owners of insanitary houses.
In some matters the plea of defects in the legislation might have been justifiably urged by them; in others they were often much hampered by the dilatory procedure attending proceedings for enforcing the sanitary provisions of the Metropolitan London Management Act.
One of the Medical Officers of Health gives an illustration:—
“A very great nuisance was reported to us. We visited it, but had to wait a fortnight before the Vestry met in order to get leave to apply for a summons. The magistrate requires a week before hearing the case, and then he gives a week or two to do the work. So for a month or five weeks the nuisance may remain.”
The result was that infectious disease was given a long opportunity to spread itself unchecked through a whole district; an opportunity which it freely availed itself of.
Complaints were also made by some of the Medical Officers of Health that in attempts to enforce the law against “overcrowding” the magistrate leant very much to the landlord. This, too, might have acted as a discouragement to them. What, however, is certain is, that the Vestries and District Boards were not attempting to grapple with the most crucial questions of all—the overcrowding, and the housing.
The Medical Officer of Health for Clerkenwell pointed this out, so far as his parish was concerned (1861):—