But how small was the limitation, how small the concessions exacted from “owners” in this matter, and how miserably late they came in the history of London building operations.
The tendency of house construction in London was to ever larger size, to greater height. To how great an extent this had been carried on in the “City” was described by the Medical Officer of Health in 1894:—
“It would be a fair and moderate estimate to put the superficial area (of the City) at four square miles instead of one. We have only to point to the construction of business premises—the piling of one floor over another for many storeys high, each floor being occupied by separate occupiers, forming in itself a distinct tenancy, having all the rights and privileges of an independent building, and claiming as much attention from every branch of our municipal system as if it stood alone…. We have, in fact, to deal with about 28,000 separate tenancies, with a day population of 301,384.”
In some of the more well-to-do parts of the metropolis great blocks of buildings were built and let out in flats, most of them with the minimum of light and air prescribed by narrow laws.
In other districts of London considerable numbers of small houses were removed, and large blocks of artizans’ dwellings erected in their stead. Thus, in the parish of St. Luke, nearly one-fifth of the entire population resided in the ten blocks of artizans’ dwellings which existed there.
In the earlier stages of the reform of the housing of London such buildings had been acclaimed as great improvements, as indeed they were. The later opinions of Medical Officers of Health were not so laudatory. Thus, in 1891, the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel, after stating that there were in his district 27 buildings having 3,127 apartments containing 12,279 persons, added that he was “not enlisted amongst the enthusiasts of this method of providing for the housing of the working classes.” In 1896 he wrote: “All model dwellings are not equally models of good sanitary houses.” And in 1897:—
“The increased population are housed in huge barrack buildings which sometimes are constructed so as to allow light and air to permeate the rooms and sometimes not. The effect of this modern invention is to increase the density of population to a damaging degree….
“That the direct influence of these barrack buildings upon the health of their occupants—more especially the children—is adverse, I have not the slightest doubt.”
The Vestry of Shoreditch reported in 1892–3:—
“‘Model Artizans’ Dwellings’ do not appear to have been quite what their title implied. At Norfolk Buildings, Shoreditch, on the Medical Officer of Health causing them to be examined for a certificate for exemption from the inhabited house duty, the whole system of drainage was found to be in a most defective and dangerous state. A number of cases of typhoid, diphtheria, and other infectious illness had occurred on the premises.”