“I have inspected sixty-three retail bakehouses within the parish, and found them (with few exceptions) to be in a filthy and unwholesome state, dangerous alike to the health of the journeyman baker, who makes the bread, and to the public who eat it. Twenty-one were completely underground…. In times of heavy rainfall sewage forces itself through the draintraps of these cellars, soiling the sacks containing flour, and fouling the atmosphere.”
Parliament again legislated about factories and workshops in 1895.
Under the Act a minimum space was required in each room of a factory or workshop of 250 cubic feet for each person employed. For the prevention of the infection of clothing, the occupier of a factory, &c., was prohibited from causing wearing apparel to be made or cleaned in a dwelling-house having an inmate suffering from scarlet fever or smallpox. An important step was also taken in extending the provisions of the Factory Acts to laundries, of which there were a great number in London, and where the workers stood in great need of improved conditions of work, and of public supervision.
Lamentable as were the results of the non-protection of the workers in workshops, still more lamentable and disastrous were they as regarded the 2,310,000 dwellers in the 630,569 tenements of less than five rooms. Up to 1889 regulations under the Sanitary Acts of 1866 and 1874 had been adopted in 31 of the 40 London sanitary districts. In only nine of these was any considerable use made of them. Had these regulations been put into force a great amount of overcrowding would have been prevented and the houses kept in a fairly clean and sanitary condition.
In the whole of London, with its 547,000 houses, only 7,713 tenement-houses were on the register in 1897, of which more than a half were in four parishes, namely: 1,500 in Kensington, 1,190 in Westminster, 840 in Hampstead, and 610 in St. Giles’; leaving 3,573 in the whole of the rest of London—a mere fraction of the tenement-houses of London.
In Bethnal Green (1894), “76·1 per cent. of the population lived in tenements of less than five rooms. No houses had been registered.”
In Lambeth over one-half of the population lived in tenements of less than five rooms, and of these nearly one-third lived under conditions of overcrowding. There was one Sanitary Inspector to about 60,000 people. The inadequacy of the staff had been pressed upon the Vestry by the Medical Officer of Health from time to time for a number of years.
Considerable ingenuity was in many cases exercised by the opponents of the regulation of tenements in the working of the bye-laws which resulted practically in rendering them inoperative. In some cases all houses were to be exempted where the rent was higher than certain specified weekly sums. The result was that the “owners” promptly raised the rent above these sums, and so secured their exemption, at the same time getting an increased rent. In others, the bye-laws gave the Vestry power to decide what houses should be registered, and thus enabled the Vestry to evade the necessity of registering any at all. In others, notices were to be given to the “owner” before a house was registered—the notice was not sent. And so, in one way or another, the imperative “shall” of Parliament was evaded by the largest proportion of the Vestries and District Boards.