“Bricklayers are spreading the webs and meshes of houses with such fearful rapidity in every direction that people are being gradually confined within narrow prisons only open at the top for the admission of what would be air if it were not smoke.
“Suburban open spaces are being entombed in brick and mortar mausoleums for the suffocation as well as for the accommodation of an increasing populace.”[64]
Thus in Islington there were 13,500 houses in 1851, and 20,700 in 1861; in Kensington 6,100 in 1851, and 9,400 in 1861.
But what evoked comment was, that the evils of one sort or another connected with the crowding of houses together were being perpetuated.
“Not only is it to be deplored,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel, “that the houses in most of the poor neighbourhoods are already too closely packed together, but the evil is increasing: for wherever there is a vacant spot of ground, more houses are built, thereby still further diminishing the healthiness of those already existing” (1860–1).
From Hampstead—still but little built on—came a complaint of “the tendency among builders to cover the new ground as thickly and at as little cost as practicable.”
In Wandsworth “houses were erected and new streets formed without due regard to sanitary requirements, and in situations where good drainage seems impossible.”
In Fulham, “cottages out of number were constructed in the excavations of old brick fields with the soft refuse of bricks, habitations run in swamps and quagmires, and their foundations three parts of the year sopped with surface water.”
Efficient sewerage was so manifestly the basis of all wise sanitation that the want of sewers, and the abominable condition of those which existed, were general subjects of complaint.