It will be seen that, even in the 4-roomed tenements, there was an average of 1.12 persons per room (room meaning every apartment in the tenements, including sitting-rooms, attics, box-rooms, kitchens or sculleries), and when we remember the small cubical content of many of these "rooms" we see that as many as 12,983,109 persons, or 39.9 per cent. of the population of England and Wales were certainly crowded, if not "overcrowded."
In Scotland, at the Census of 1901, 969,318 families occupied 3,022,077 rooms, giving an average of only 3 rooms per family. Into the 3,022,077 rooms of all sorts were crowded 4,472,000 people.
While overcrowding, measured by room, slightly decreased between 1891 and 1901, overcrowding on area considerably increased. In the ten years a considerable number of model dwellings—models, that is, of everything that dwellings should not be—were erected, and much ground in London and elsewhere which should have been left open, was covered with buildings of every conceivable degree of ugliness.
As for existing houses, thirty years after the passing of the Public Health Act of 1875, and fifteen years after the passing of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, a considerable proportion are actually insanitary, and only a minority conform to the most modest standard of convenience and comfort. In the North of England and in the Midlands there remain tens of thousands of houses built back-to-back, so that there is no passage of air through them.
The Manchester Citizens' Association recently published, from the pen of its secretary, Mr T. R. Marr, a little book,[46] which shows, by a coloured map, that slum property, including many back-to-back and "converted" back-to-back houses, form a great ring round the offices and factories of Central Manchester. Its lessons are enforced by a series of photographs of slum property. Here is a picture of a Salford court, upon which face the living rooms of eleven houses. Standing out in the court, as a public exhibition, are three rotten places of convenience, only one of them usable. Here, again, is a photograph taken in St Michaels' Ward—taken, let us hope, in the absence of St Michael. A group of four closets open on the street, and beside them, surrounded by a group of slum children curiously watching the photographer, is a tap which is the sole water supply of 22 houses. A third picture, also taken in St Michaels' Ward, shows a stone-paved court of eleven houses. There is one tap, an open ash-box, and several closets the doors of which are torn from their hinges.
In Liverpool, according to a paper read before the Royal Sanitary Institute in April 1905 by Mr Fletcher T. Turton, the Liverpool Deputy Surveyor, there were still 8,600 back-to-back houses standing, the death-rate in their area being about 60 per 1,000! Further erection of such houses is forbidden by Mr Burns's Housing Act of 1909, but there are tens of thousands already in existence.
In Leeds there are many of these back-to-back houses, without ventilation, or yard, or private sanitary arrangements, let at rentals varying from 3s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. per week. As many as three and four houses join at one closet. The closets are frequently in yards, forty yards from the house. In wet weather, rather than carry the waste water from the bedrooms the length of the street, women may often be seen pouring it down the street gully. On Sundays, when the inhabitants are all at home, the difficulty as to sanitary accommodation is intensely aggravated.
In Sheffield, in the Potteries, and many other places, these abominable back-to-back houses are to be found. Few workers' houses in the Potteries have more than two bedrooms. The back-to-back houses in Sheffield number 15,000, and sometimes as many as eight or ten persons are to be found in their three little rooms. If we take only 7 persons to the house there are 105,000 Sheffield people living in these dens.
If there are not back-to-back houses or cellar dwellings in London, there are many squalid areas which contain greater aggregations of the poorest of the poor than can be found in any other part of the country. In Marylebone, Southwark, St Pancras, Holborn, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Stepney, and Finsbury upwards of 30 per cent. of the inhabitants live in tenements of one or two rooms. In Finsbury the proportion reaches 45 per cent.; in Shoreditch and St Pancras 37 per cent. In Lambeth, Westminster, Paddington, Chelsea, Kensington, Islington and Bermondsey 20 per cent. and upwards of the population live in tenements of one or two rooms. Only, indeed, in Lewisham, Wandsworth, Stoke Newington, Hampstead, Woolwich, Greenwich, Deptford, Camberwell, Hackney and Fulham, do less than 15 per cent. of the inhabitants occupy tenements of one or two rooms. Not even the school children of Ancoats or Deansgate, Manchester, exhibit the degree of physical deterioration of those of Lambeth or West Ham.