Substitution of a standard of superficial area for one of cubic capacity in small houses / by John Honeyman.

  • Honeyman, John, 1831-1914.
Date:
[1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Substitution of a standard of superficial area for one of cubic capacity in small houses / by John Honeyman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    4/10 (page 4)
    you can. Now, within moderate limits, you can give the poor superficial area easier than cubic capacity; you therefore, by following this course, make it easier to get a supply of houses for them ; which means that rents will be easier even when sufficient inducement remains for builders to invest money in such property. But the sanitary results would be even more important than the economic. You will at once see that, so far as the adminis- tration of the law is concerned, the change of standard would make no difference. It would be as easy for sanitary officials to apply the one as the other. The area would be a shade more easily got at than the capacity. The system of ticketing would remain as at present, and there would be no difficulty in dealing with the better class of workmen's house, as it will probably be necessary to do, in Glasgow at least, when their new Police Act comes into operation. The sanitary official's position, then, would remain unaffected. Now, let me refer to the position of the occupants of houses affected by the rule:—(1) Their houses would be cheaper; (2) They would be larger and more comfortable; and (3) They would be more easily ventilated. These things, you observe, have all a direct bearing on health; they constitute, in fact, the most important factors in domestic sanitation—that is, so far as sani- tation is dependent on the structure of the house—which is the only thing we are dealing with at present. Taking these things in the order stated, I must first go a little more exactly into the question of expense. 1. Cheapness. For the purpose of illustration and comparison, I shall take a tenement having on each floor three houses of one apartment and one of two apartments. If the single apartments are to accommodate 3 adults with 400 cubic feet each, they would require to be 10 feet high and to measure 12 feet by 10 feet, and the frontage of the tenement would be 35 feet and the depth 32 feet, and the site will extend to, say, 240 yards. Taking this as it stands, it is evident that if we are content with an area of 40 superficial feet per adult these houses would pass for 3 occupants either by the one standard or the other. But the difference is, that whereas by the new Glasgow standard of 400 cubic feet the tenement must have 10 feet ceilings, by the other the ceilings might be less. Suppose they were only 8 feet high the rooms would still have the cubic capacity which—up till last week—was generally considered enough as a minimum, namely, 300 feet. Now, I need hardly point out that if you reduced the ceilings to 8 feet, and so took 8 feet off the total height of the tenement, you would considerably reduce its cost. But if, instead of reducing the cost in that way, you prefer to keep the building the same height as the other, you could still more reduce the cost per house by gaining an additional storey ; and you would at the same time thus be able to accommodate a larger population on the same