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[Memorial.]
Camberwell, S.E.,
November 21st, 1895.
To the Chairman and Members of the General Purposes Committee of
Camberwell Vestry.
Gentlemen, —We venture respectfully, but earnestly, to direct your
attention to the deplorable condition of that portion of the Parish of
Camberwell lying between Wyndham Road and Avenue Road, and between
Camberwell Road and Pitman Street, and including the following
streets —Sultan Street, Hollington Street, Crown Street, Gange Street,
Beckett Street and Toulon Street.
The overcrowding in this district, and the sad state in which the
inhabitants have for many years been compelled to subsist, have been a
source of the deepest pain to the clergy and others brought into contact
with the poor people dwelling in this neglected area.
In many of the houses five or six families reside, and scores of
instances can be shown where a family (sometimes embracing several
adults of both sexes) exist in a single room. Such a state of things cannot
be conducive to public morality, nor be advantageous to the public health.
The neighbourhood is a black spot in the midst of a comparatively
well-to-do, well-ordered Parish. It is, as it were, shut in with its vice and
wretchedness, having practically no thoroughfare connecting it with the
main roads. Most certainly a through street is, in the first instance,
needed from Camberwell New Road to Camberwell Road. Mr. Charles
Booth in his "Labour and Life of the People," page 403, says, in discussing
the dark spots of London—
"Of the bad patches the most hopeless is the block consisting of
Hollington Street, Sultan Street, and a few more lying to the west of
Camberwell Road. It stands alone in an otherwise well-to-do district,
acting as a moral cesspool towards which poverty and vice flow in the
persons of those who can do no better mixed with those who find such
surroundings convenient or congenial. It is the despair of the clergy, who
find it impossible to put any permanent social order into a body of people
continually shifting, and as continually recruited by the incoming of fresh
elements of evil or distress. . . . . Bad building, bad owning, mismanagement
on the part of the Vestry, and apathy on the part of the Church,
have each had their share in bringing about a condition of things which
now demands and tasks the best united efforts of all to put right.
"This block, as is so often the case when bad conditions triumph, is
without thoroughfare, cut off by the railway from the main road, and it
would seem that no radical change can be made in its fortunes except by
altering this."
The opinion expressed in the last sentence of the above extract is
our deliberate conviction also. We therefore respectfully submit for your
favourable consideration the advisability of continuing Sultan Street in the
xi.