Lodging-House Committee : report of the Medical Officer of Health.

  • Liverpool (England). Medical Officer of Health.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lodging-House Committee : report of the Medical Officer of Health. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    relationship, to the manifest physical injury of all, and to the demoralization of the labourer. By closer relationship is meant the fact, that all these sections of our community live in single rooms in the same overcrowded houses, and in intimate inter-communication. It is to combat this gigantic evil in London, that Miss Burdett Coutts, the Peabody Trustees, the Metropolitan Association, the Labourers’ Friend Society, and numerous Philanthropists, have erected noble Institutions. In aid of their exertions many of the large landed proprietors have not been backward or niggard, but have given space on easy terms for the building of such dwellings. In Liverpool, the Council, as trustees for the public benefit of the greater portion of the laud of the borough, are able freely to entertain the claims of the operatives in this matter, without appealing to the generosity of individual proprietors. An example, one of very many, -will best show, in a sanitary point of view, the working of the present system, of displacing masses of the people without providing for them some equivalent accommodation near their work-yards. There have been erected in New Bird-street five warehouses, which displaced 18 front and 53 court houses, accommodating on an average 500 persons. The advantage of this change was a slight widening of a street; but the per- contra injury an increase of crowding in contiguous streets, and an obstruction, by lofty walls, of the sea breeze. To the east and west of New Bird- street is placed Brick-street, so celebrated for its bad courts, its over- crowded population, and the consequent sickness and mortality of its wretched inhabitants. This street, which had its overcrowding and its sanitary evils intensified by the removal of the cottages of New Bird-street, is now condemned to destruction—properly condemned, for it has proved the focus of contagious disorders ;—but it is evident that to eject the inhabitants, and sell the land to the highest bidder, for the purposes of trade or manufacture, will only serve to poison with the miasm of an overcrowded population other and neighbouring localities. If, at the sale of such land, easy terms of purchase were advisedly given to those who would covenant to erect aud maintain pro- per dwellings for the poor, it would encourage philanthropists, and even specu- lators, to invest money in such undertakings. There is much of similar land in the borough which, though worth pounds per yard, it would be a wise economy partly to devote to the Model Cottages of the labourer. Such liberality might never conduce to the erection of a noble pile like Miss Burdett Coutts’, Columbia-square, but it would produce many buildings on the plan of Laird’s cot- tages, which, placed near the marts of labour, would yield a profitable per-centage. At least, we may be assured that the holy recompense of charity—a benefit to the giver and receiver—will be most manifest in the operations of such liberality \ for it is from overcrowded haunts of indigence that stalks forth the pestilence which spreads terror and sorrow, disease and death, in the houses of the wealthy. W. TRENCH.