Reports Relating to the Sanitary Condition of the City of London

by John Simon

On the grounds thus expressed by your Committee, I avail myself of the present opportunity for bringing the subject again under your notice.

In my [former Report] I spoke particularly of those [trades and occupations] which deal with animal substances liable to decomposition; and in expressing my knowledge of their danger to the health of an urban population, I argued that no occupation which ordinarily leaves a putrid refuse, nor any which consists in the conversion or manufacture of putrescent material, ought, under any circumstances, to be tolerated within a town. To that subject I now revert, only to assure your Hon. Court that the past year has given me no reason to alter my opinion. But the trades to which I wish, on this occasion, more especially to request your attention, are those which are complained of on the ground of their offensiveness, rather than of their injury to health—as nuisances rather than as poisons. During the year, I have received a very considerable number of complaints of this nature; some of them perhaps frivolous, but many well-founded and reasonable.

At the head of this class of evils stands the flagrant nuisance of smoke. Those members of the Court who have visited foreign capitals where other fuel than coal is employed, will remember the contrast between their climate and ours—will remember (for instance even in Paris) the transparence of air, the comparative brightness of all colour, the visibility of distant objects, the cleanliness of faces and buildings, instead of our opaque atmosphere, deadened colours, obscured distance, smutted faces, and black architecture. Those, even, who have never left our metropolis, but who, by early rising or late going to rest, have had opportunities of seeing a London sunrise, can judge, as well as by any foreign comparison, the difference between London as it might be, and London as it is. Viewed at dawn and at noon-day, the appearances contrast as though they were of different cities and in different latitudes. Soon after daybreak, the great factory shafts beside the river begin to discharge immense volumes of smoke; their clouds soon become confluent; the sky is overcast with a dingy veil; the house-chimneys presently add their contributions; and by ten o’clock, as one approaches London from any hill in the suburbs, one may observe the total result of this gigantic nuisance hanging over the City like a pall.

If its consequences were confined to rendering London (in spite of its advantages) the unsightliest metropolis in Europe, to defacing all works of art, and rendering domestic cleanliness expensive, I should have nothing officially to say on the subject; but inasmuch as it renders cleanliness more difficult, and creates a despair of cultivating it with success, people resign themselves to dirt, domestic and personal, which they could remove but so temporarily: or windows are kept shut, in spite of immeasurable fustiness, because the ventilation requisite to health would bring with it showers of soot, occasioning inconvenience and expense. Such is the tendency of many complaints which have reached me, and of their foundation in truth and reason I have thorough conviction and knowledge.

I would submit to your Hon. Court that these evils are not inconsiderable; and that beside the injury to property (with which I have nothing to do) the detriment to health, if only indirect, claims to be removed. Yet, while I am cautious to speak of this latter injury, as though it were only indirect—only by its obstruction of healthy habits, I ought likewise to tell you, that there are valid reasons for supposing that we do not with impunity inhale day by day so much air which leaves a palpable sediment; that many persons of irritable lungs find unquestionable inconvenience from these mechanical impurities of the atmosphere; and (gathering a hint from the pathology of vegetation) that few plants will flourish in the denser districts of London, unless the air which conduces to their nourishment be previously filtered from its dirt.

If the smoke of London were inseparably identified with its commercial greatness, one might willingly resign oneself to the inconvenience. But to every other reason against its continuance must be added as a last one, on the evidence of innumerable competent and disinterested witnesses, that the nuisance, where habitual, is, for the greater part or entirely, voluntary and preventable; that it indicates mismanagement and waste; that the adoption of measures for the universal consumption of smoke, while relieving the metropolis and its population from injury, would conduce to the immediate interest of the individual consumer, as well as to indirect and general economy. For all the smoke that hangs over us is wasted fuel.

The consumption of smoke in private houses is unfortunately a matter to which hitherto little attention has been given; and it would be vain to hope that the reform should begin with those, whose individual contributions to the public stock of nuisance are comparatively trifling. With the progress of knowledge on these subjects, a time will undoubtedly arrive, and at no distant period, when chimneys will cease to convey to the atmosphere their present immense freight of fuel that has not been burnt, and of heat that has not been utilised; when each entire house will be uniformly warmed with less expenditure of material than now suffices to its one kitchen fire; and our successors[53] will wonder at the ludicrous ingenuity with which we have so long managed to diffuse our caloric and waste our coal in the directions where they least conduce to the purposes of comfort and utility.

[53] To the philosophical thinker there would seem to exist no important difficulty which should prevent the collective warming of many houses in a district by the distribution of heat from a central furnace—perhaps even so, that each house might receive its ad libitum share of ventilation with warmed air. Ingenuity and enterprise, in this country, have accomplished far more arduous tasks; and I little doubt that our next successors will have heat-pipes laid on to their houses, with absence of smoke and immense economy of fuel, on some such general organisation as we now enjoy for gas-lighting and water-supply.—J. S., 1854.

But, while the arrangements of private establishments may, perhaps wisely, be left to the operation of this spontaneous reform, I would venture to recommend in regard to furnaces, employed for steam-engines and otherwise for manufactures within the City, that you should endeavour to control the nuisance of smoke.

The members of your Hon. Court are probably cognisant of the great mass of evidence on this subject, collected by two separate committees of the House of Commons, and of the almost unanimous conclusions to which that evidence led; ‘that opaque smoke issuing from steam-engine chimneys may be so abated as no longer to be a public nuisance; that a variety of means are found to exist for the accomplishment of this object, simple in construction, moderate in expense, and applicable to existing furnaces and flues of stationary steam-engines; that a sufficient body of evidence has been adduced, founded upon the experience of practical men, to induce the opinion that a law, making it imperative upon the owners of stationary steam-engines, to abate the issue of opaque smoke is desirable for the benefit of the community;’[54] ‘that the expense attendant on putting up whatever apparatus may be required to prevent smoke arising from furnaces is very trifling, and (as some of the witnesses observed) the outlay may be repaid within the year, by the diminished consumption of fuel; that the means of preventing smoke might also be applied to the furnaces of steam-boats, but such application would be attended with rather more expense than on land, from the occasional want of space, and the setting of boilers in a steam-vessel. No doubt, however, existed, in the opinions of those examined, that the prevention of smoke could be accomplished in steam-vessels.’[55]