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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    ls£. The accommodation for skilled and unskilled artisans is insufficient. 2nd. Many lodgers are, in spite of the watchfulness of the Sanitary Officers, l-eceived in the Families of the tenants of single rooms. 3rd. A great portion of the Lodging-House keepers are obliged seriously to inconvenience their own families in order to accommodate lodgers, being too poor, and in too small dwellings for the purpose of their calling; thus, of 1185 houses on the registry, 213 are at a rent of £10, and under; 611 at £20, and under ; 348 at £50, and under > and 13 above £50. In intimate connection with Lodging-Hovtses for single men and women, is the provision of suitable and cheap dwellings for families. The Deputation visited many of these, but the extent of this Report will only permit a slight reference to the most successful of such establishments—viz., those constructed in renovated buildings. They found that the dwellings dm Wild-court, Drury- lane, containing 13 houses, 106 rooms, and an average population of 336 souls, yield 5$ on investment; and Tyndall’s-buildings, Gray’s inn-lane, witb an average population of 301, yields 3£ per cent. ; and Clarke’s-buildings, Broad- street, St. Giles’, with 11 houses, 80 tenements, and 220 inhabitants, 10^ per cent.; and Charles-street, Lisson-grove, with 5 houses, 25 tenements, 6| per cent. Nothing in the whole range of their enquiries interested the Depu- tation more than the condition of Wild-court; for it illustrated the mode in which sanitary defects, so common in Liverpool, might be remedied, to the manifest advantage of the poor, on the true commercial principle of doing good to others without loss to the capitalist. The following description of Wild-court in 1855 is from the “Morning Advertiser : ”—“ The court contained 14 houses, which were purchased by the “ Labourers’ Friend Society. In the last week in December the Society began “ to pull down those portions of the houses they had determined on removing, “and here they encountered a difficulty which, could it have been anticipated, “ would have been sufficient to deter the most eager philanthropist. It was not “ that they had an overwhelming amount of rubbish to cart away, for that “ would only have been a question of labour and expense. They had 16 cess- “ pools to clear out, and from 140 to 150 loads of night-soil to remove. “Worse even than this, the basement of each house was literally crammed “ with the accumulated filth of many a year ; the refuse of animal and vege- table matter, which lay there rotten and rotting, fermenting into poisonous “gases, which makes one wonder how those who ate, and drank, and slept, “ and worked over sucb sources of infection could exist. “ Of these foetid accumulations, 350 loads were carried out of the basement “and carted away. Nor, bad as this was, was it all. When the Society sent “their workmen into these dens of filth to see what could be done to cleanse “and renew them, the men struck, and were with difficulty persuaded to return