“Water companies were prohibited from cutting off the water supply from any dwelling-house for non-payment of water rate, if such rate were payable by the owner and not the occupier of the premises….”
In the middle of this decade, too, anxiety revived, owing to the state of the Thames, a matter which it was hoped had been finally disposed of. The discharge of sewage at the new outfalls make the river in those parts much what it had previously been in London.
A Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the subject. They reported that they found a condition of things which they “must denounce as a disgrace to the metropolis and to civilisation.” They said that in 1884 “the sewage water from the outfalls manifestly reached London Bridge.”
“At Greenwich Pier the water was very black, and the smell exceedingly strong.”
“At Woolwich the river for its whole width was black, putrid, sewage—looking as if unmixed and unalloyed. The stench was intolerable.”
“We are of opinion that it is neither necessary nor justifiable to discharge the sewage of the metropolis in its crude state into any part of the Thames.”
This evil was surmounted by the adoption by the Metropolitan Board of Works of a system of treatment of the crude sewage. Chemical precipitation was effected by adding to the sewage certain proportions of lime and protosulphate of iron, and allowing it to remain for an hour or two in settling tanks. The effluent water was let flow into the river, and the sludge was carried down the river in barges and cast into the sea.
The public interest evoked by the inquiries made by the Royal Commissioners on Housing, and the publication of their Report, certainly quickened the activity of many of the local authorities.
In several of the parishes and districts the Regulations under the Sanitary Acts of 1866 and 1874 were being more readily adopted, and being put into force on a slightly more extended scale; and in every case it was reported that the results had been satisfactory, a great improvement taking place in the houses which were registered.
A report of the Inspector of such houses, for Bermondsey, describes this well:—