This Lambeth complaint is specially interesting, as it refers to another great cause of overcrowding—the constant immigration into London of labourers and poor people in search of work or food.
Owing to the ever increasing and urgent demand for house accommodation for the working and poorer classes, it became a very remunerative proceeding for the occupier of a house to sub-let it in portions to separate families or individuals, and the practice gradually extended to and absorbed streets hitherto belonging to the better class. The owner of a property let his whole house to a tenant; this tenant, seeing an easy way of making money, sub-let the rooms in it in twos or threes, or even separately, at a very profitable rate to individual tenants. Nor did the sub-letting end here, for these tenants let off even the sides or corners of their room or rooms to individuals or families who were unable to bear the expense of a whole room. And so the house sank at once into being a “tenement house”—that prolific source of the very worst evils, sanitary, physical, and moral, to those who inhabited them.
Even the underground kitchens and cellars, which were never intended for human habitation, were let to tenants, and thus turned to financial profit.[20] It mattered not that they were without air or ventilation, or even light; it mattered not that they were damp, or sometimes even inundated with the overflow of cesspools; it mattered not that they were inhabited contrary to the provisions of Section 53 of the Building Act of 1844, for that section was of no operative effect whatever. It is true that “Overseers” were to report to the “Official Referees,” who were to give notice to and inform the owners and occupiers of such dwellings as to the consequences of disobeying the Statute, and the “District Surveyor” was to carry out the directions of the Referees. But nothing was ever done—Overseers, District Surveyors, and Referees, all neglected their duties.
Overcrowding was usually at its worst in one-room tenements, and in an immense number of cases in the metropolis one room served for a family of the working or of the labouring classes. It was their bedroom, their kitchen, their wash-house, their sitting-room, their eating-room, and, when they did not follow any occupation elsewhere, it was their workroom and their shop. In this one room they were born, and lived, and slept, and died amidst the other inmates.
And still worse, in innumerable cases, more than one family lived in one room.
When this one room was in a badly drained, damp, ill-constructed, and unventilated house, reeking with a polluted atmosphere, and that house was in a narrow and hemmed-in, unventilated “court” or “place” or “alley”—as an immense number of them were—the maximum of evil consequences was attained.
The evils of overcrowding cannot be summed up in a phrase, nor be realised by the description, however graphic, of instance upon instance. The consequences to the individual living in an overcrowded room or dwelling were always disastrous, and, through the disastrous consequences to great masses of individuals, the whole community was affected in varying degree.
Physically, mentally, and morally, the overcrowded people suffered. Not a disease, not a human ill which flesh is heir to, but was nurtured and rendered more potent in the human hothouse of the overcrowded room; and the ensuing ill-health and diseases not alone doubled the death rate, but increased from ten to twenty-fold, at least, the number of victims of disease of one sort or another—diseases dealing rapid death, or slowly but surely sapping human strength and vitality.