Some of the houses the Medical Officer of Health had known to be in the same state for the last 36 years.
“… An ill-constructed, unhealthy warren;” some were “regular old shanties—you could hardly find anything like those in the metropolis, they are worth looking at as a curiosity.”
“Some in Clerkenwell Close are large and very old wooden houses, all tumbledown. There is no straight line in roof or windows—the windows are like cabin windows.”
One more case is worth giving details about, as it is one of those rare cases in which one gets a more continuous account of the effects of slum ownership than is usually accessible.[138]
This was the Little Coram Street scheme, in St. George, Bloomsbury, in St. Giles’ District, comprising 119 houses—1,027 inhabitants.
The Medical Officer of Health, in his representation to the Metropolitan Board, gave a minute description of the place.
“The houses are principally let to cab owners, who stable their horses in the lower floor, and reside with their families in the rooms over; they are without back yards, and the rooms mainly derive their ventilation from the staircase leading out of the stable, so that the air is contaminated by the noxious gases which issue from it. All the closets are inside the houses; there are no dustbins, and the drinking-water is often obtained from underground tanks, which serve both for stable, cleaning, and culinary purposes.
“These houses are unfit for human habitation.”
“The district now represented as unfit, &c., constitutes the worst part of the parish of St. George, Bloomsbury, and has been notorious for years as largely contributing to the sick and death rates of the sub-district.”
In 1862 it was reported that it had “habitually a much higher mortality than the rest of the parish.”