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1898] 16
Even if the most liberal allowance be made on the ground that
these figures are too arbitrary there must still remain an enormous
population who live under conditions that require careful supervision,
and which should be from time to time carefully inspected, if we would
not have Islington in the course of a few years become, what it certainly
is not at present, a slum district of the Metropolis. We can see
for ourselves what has occurred, and is still occurring, in some
of the neighbouring districts, once the abode of the well.to.do,
and even of the wealthy, aad we can see its effects on their mortality
returns which are proportionally far higher than those of Islington.
Assuredly if great care be not taken, and if stringent precautions be
not adopted, the same fate will overtake us.
We are not sufficiently alive to what is going on.
At the present time there is a room hunger in this district which
is almost alarming; to satisfy which many agents, owners and leaseholders
are converting houses, which have hitherto been occupied by
single families, into tenement dwellings for the artizans or for those
who follow a commercial life in the City (particularly) or elsewhere in
London.
Numerous instances have recently come under the notice of the
Public Health Department where work has had to be postponed for
weeks because the unfortunate tenants could not find lodgings for
themselves and their families. It has frequently been impossible to
take up drains passing under the rooms which they occupied, and
equally impossible to force the landlord to proceed with the work,
because it meant casting the occupiers on the streets. If, under these
circumstances, a man possesses a large family his case is almost hopeless,
for his chance of obtaining apartments is almost nil, unless he resort
to deceit to secure them. Just recently a complaint reached the Public
Health Department from an owner of a house that a man had taken
rooms from him for a family of three, and that now it numbered seven,
because the additional members had been smuggled into them one
by one, while one was a newly.born infant. The overcrowding of the
people, no doubt, affects other metropolitan districts besides Islington,
although it does not affect all equally alike. Here it is of more