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Sanitary Authority to take any action to interfere with the business.
The Company on their part were to take every precaution to avoid
accumulation, and to minimise any nuisance which might arise in
connection with the removal.
Overcrowding.—Only two cases of legal overcrowding were reported
during the year. Our bye-laws require a provision of three hundred
cubic feet of free air space for each person of an age exceeding ten years
and of one hundred and fifty feet of free air space for each person of
an age not exceeding ten 3'ears, to occupy as a sleeping apartment a
room which is used exclusively for that purpose, but where such apartment
is used also as a living room as well as sleeping room the requirements
are four hundred feet for each person over ten years of age, and
two hundred for each person not exceeding ten years of age.
Overcrowding is of course a relative term ; many persons consider
a tenement house to be overcrowded because it contains 30 or more
inhabitants, and report such house to the sanitary authority as "swarming
with children." It rarely turns out, however, upon measuring up
the rooms that the legal amount of free air space has been encroached
upon, in which latter case a notice would be at once served both upon
the occupier and landlord to abate such overcrowding.
Houses let in lodgings.—The number of houses registered under the
Public Health (London) Act, now stands at 840. The London County
Council having instructed their medical officer to make an enquiry at
Midsummer, 1897, as to the extent to which bye-laws or regulations
dealing with houses let in lodgings are enforced in the several sanitary
districts of London, Dr. Hamar reported to the council that in the
parish of Hampstead, " the beneficial operation of the bye-laws was
strikingly apparent in the very fair condition of cleanliness and maintenance
of the houses inspected." Our bye-laws provide for an annual
cleansing and whitewashing in the spring of such houses as require it.
It will be readily understood that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to keep up a high standard of cleanliness in a certain class of
tenement houses inhabited by large families of the poorer class. The
habits of the people themselves are often careless, when not actually
dirty ; indifferent to cleanliness and disliking the disturbance created
to their comfort by the process of whitewashing, &c., they readily agree
with the landlord to put off the evil day as long as possible.