The immigrants, however, were far from being all of a desirable character.
The Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell pointed this out:—
“A considerable percentage of our population is composed of persons whose natural tendency is to grovel—beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drunkards, persons of feeble intelligence, persons of lazy and improvident habits, and persons who (like too many of the poor) marry or cohabit prematurely and procreate large families for which they are totally unable to provide; and such persons gravitate from all quarters to large towns and there accumulate…. A large town like London will always attract undesirable residents.”
With the increasing population the number of houses in the metropolis increased also.
From 418,802 inhabited houses in 1871 the number had gone up to 488,116 in 1881, and the same tale was told as to the crowding of houses on the land as in previous years.
The Medical Officer of Health for Bethnal Green (1880) stated that in his parish most of the available ground was already fully built over. The Great Eastern Railway Company, the School Board for London, and the Metropolitan Board of Works, were largely demolishing small house property. “If this sort of thing goes on much longer,” he wrote, “it looks very much as if London in a few years would become a huge agglomeration of Board Schools, intersected by railways and new streets.”
The correct record of the population enabled once more an accurate death-rate to be calculated. The death-rate, which had been 24·6 per 1,000 in 1871, had fallen to 21·3 in 1881.
That was most gratifying testimony to the good results following the sanitary work carried out, under many difficulties, in London, and an encouragement to perseverance.
The vital subject of the housing of the huge masses of the people of London was, during all the earlier years of this decade of 1881–90, uppermost in the minds of those who were solicitous for their welfare.
The Act of 1879 had done but little to help to a solution of the tremendous problem.