The western group consisted of Westminster, St. James’, St. George (Hanover Square), Paddington, Kensington, Fulham, and Chelsea.
In St. James’ the population was decreasing (having reached its apogee in 1841); in Westminster it was slightly increasing; in all the others rapidly increasing.
The southern group, with a population roughly of about 700,000, consisted of the whole of that portion of the metropolis which was situate on the south side of the river. Beginning on the west, there was Wandsworth (which included Battersea), then Lambeth, Camberwell, Lewisham, with Woolwich and Plumstead on the extreme east, then Greenwich, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, St. Mary, Newington, St. George-the-Martyr, Southwark, St. Saviour, Southwark, and St. Olave, in Southwark.
Many of these were still mostly country.
The various parishes and districts of the metropolis differed remarkably in their rate of increase of population. In all, the number of births was in excess of the number of deaths, but as this excess in no way accounted for the increase in many of them, the rest of the increase could only be accounted for by immigration—immigration either from other parishes or from outside London.
And as it was with population so it was with the houses in which the people dwelt.
In most of the central parts of London, houses crowded every available scrap of land, squares and open spaces being few and far between. Where there should have been streets of good width, there were narrow lanes of houses; where there should have been thoroughfares, there were cul-de-sacs; where there should have been space for through currents of air and for light, there were brick walls stopping both light and air.
Figures giving so many houses to the acre convey little actual idea of the density of houses. Far more suggestive is such a statement as that made by the Medical Officer of Health in Limehouse (1861) that: “There would be no difficulty in marking out courts and alleys where the problem would seem to have been with the originators, how to enable the greatest number of people to live in the smallest amount of space.” Or the description of St. Giles’,[63] where, “exclusive of mews, there may be counted on the map upwards of seventy streets, courts, and alleys, in which there is no thoroughfare, or which are approached by passages under houses.” Nor is it a matter of surprise that this state of things should have come about, when hitherto there had been practically no check whatever upon building.
“It is to be regretted,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Mile-End-Old-Town about his own district (1856), “that the great increase in the number of habitations should have been allowed to take place without some municipal direction, or some supervision competent to supply its place; the general salubrity of the district would certainly have been better secured…. But every owner of a piece of ground has had the opportunity of making the most of it for his own advantage and in real opposition to the public good.”
In nearly all the non-central parts of London houses were increasing rapidly.