“Many of the courts and passages are approached by a narrow passage under a house at either end which renders ventilation very defective. Some of the houses are built close together and have dark passages and staircases, others have no back yards, and their sanitary arrangements are placed in the basement. Health under such circumstances is impossible. This part of St. Giles’ has long been noted for its heavy sick and death rates, especially from diseases of the respiratory and pulmonary organs, and from typhus fever and other zymotic disorders in their most contagious forms.”[137]
Dr. Lovett, the Medical Officer of Health, stated that diseases were very rife in it, and a very high rate of mortality as compared with the number of cases.
And he added, “The district is a nest of zymotic diseases of the most contagious kind. In 1874, 27 cases of typhus were sent to Stockwell Hospital. This state of things cannot be dealt with under Torrens’ Act. The houses are built so close together, the people are so huddled together … you must make a clean sweep of the buildings.”
Another of these insanitary areas was Pear Tree Court, in Clerkenwell, “consisting of small tenements of an exceedingly inferior description. All are more or less calculated to engender disease and filth. The condition of the property has been such as to be a reproach to the neighbourhood.
“Occupied by the very poorest of the community. When disease made its appearance it has been fostered and engendered and continued by the state in which the property and its surroundings have been—the death-rate is nearly double of that which prevails over the whole parish.
“Some of the tenements are of the most wretched description—some constructed of lath and plaster—some wooden houses—the floors rotted partly by the cisterns, partly by rain coming in.
“In some cases the sanitary convenience is in the very rooms themselves—also the water-butt—thereby engendering and perpetuating the worst kind of zymotic disease: the chosen home of fever and also of smallpox.
“An entire absence of ventilation.
“… When we come to those occupying only one room each, and remembering that in many of these rooms the closet, the water-butt, the water supply, and everything else was contained in the room itself, and that there was no provision for manure, ashes, or refuse of any kind, you can easily conceive what a wretched state of things that presents. On the average there were 2·80 persons per room permanently occupying them. So it cannot be wondered at an outbreak of the zymotic disease finding a resting-place there, and that such a locality becomes a plague spot in the neighbourhood, and extends its ravages thence into healthier neighbourhoods.”