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26
Many of the rain-water pipes and gutters are defective, and in some
altogether absent.
In some the rain-water pipes are not disconnected from the drains.
In many of the tenements the rooms are dangerously overcrowded,
and so badly ventilated that on entering one is almost stifled by the foul
and poisonous and polluted air.
Many of the rooms and passages are in a foul, dirty, and filthy condition,
and some have not been cleansed for years.
The ground floor of Union Terrace is a large cowshed, and at No. 70,
Leather Lane, there is an underground bakehouse.
On account of our inspection and action with regard to Dove Court,
I am glad to learn that these houses are soon to be demolished.
A small area, south of Crown Court and to the north of Union
Terrace, is already cleared.
Many of these grave sanitary, structural, and architectural defects
can only be remedied by rearrangement and reconstruction.
The only way of effecting a satisfactory and permanent improvement
is to treat the whole as an insanitary area, and for this Board to pass a
resolution and direct such a scheme to be prepared.
If any other course be adopted, at the most only a partial and patchwork
amelioration will be the result. New buildings will be more or
less unsatisfactorily intermingled with the old, and, like the proposed
reconstruction of Dove Court, which has already been sanctioned by the
Board, the new paths will be still more devious than the old, and
factories or warehouses take the place of dwellings.
I am sorry I cannot give you the death-rate of this area, as this
Board does not possess the requisite death returns, and it was only at
the beginning of this year that I obtained the consent of the Sanitary
Committee, confirmed by the Board, to have the mortality returns sent
to us from the Registrars. I know, however, that in insanitary areas
in which statistics have been taken, the death-rate invariably is very
high in comparison with that of hygienic and sanitary areas.
The population of this area was, at the time of our enumeration,
965 persons, 225 being under 10 years old.
From the death returns for 1896, I find that there were 43 deaths of
persons belonging to this area, 11 of whom died from phthisis, or a
death-rate of 44.6, and a phthisis death-rate of 11.4 per 1,000