A few illustrations of the overcrowding in certain parishes brings the meaning of these figures home still more.
In Clerkenwell, 25,600 persons lived in overcrowded tenements; in St. Luke, 18,700 persons; in Shoreditch, 41,700; in Islington, 64,600; in Kensington, 28,700; in Lambeth, 43,600. The larger proportion of these lived in one- or two-room tenements.
Figures are dry things to read and difficult to understand. To appreciate the true meaning and import of these, and to enable one who reads them to at all realise the conditions of existence of these hundreds of thousands of people, one must recall to mind the descriptions given by many of the Medical Officers of Health of tenement-houses; of all the misery, the filth, the sickness, the physical and moral degradation of life in tenement-rooms.
These facts now for the first time revealed the full magnitude and momentous nature of the problem of the sanitary housing of the people.
The year 1891 is memorable in the history of the sanitary evolution of London for “the Public Health (London) Act, 1891,”[175] which consolidated and amended the laws then existing in connection with the public health of the metropolis.
The state of the law was recognised as very unsatisfactory, being scattered over some thirty statutes or more—a condition of things which was greatly to the disadvantage of the public health of London.
Moreover, in accordance with the extraordinary custom, London, which on account of its huge population needed sanitary legislation almost more than any other place, had been excepted from much sanitary legislation which had been in operation for many years, with the most beneficial results, in the remainder of the country. Part of this legislation was at long last extended to London. Many amendments were made, recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1884 were given effect to, new provisions introduced, and the general result was a Sanitary Code for London—imperfect still in some important respects, but a great advance on anything which London had previously possessed.
The Act came into operation on the 1st of January, 1892, and it applied to the Administrative County of London only; some few of the provisions extending to the “City.”
And for the first time the new Central Authority—the County Council—with extended powers, occupied a prominent place in this legislation.
Once more did Parliament enact the oft-ignored direction that “it shall be the duty of every sanitary authority to cause to be made from time to time inspection of their district” for detection of nuisances—a duty so shamelessly neglected—and “to put in force the powers vested in them relating to public health and local government so as to secure the proper sanitary condition of all premises in their district.”