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Offices of the Board of Works for the Whitechapel District.
Public Health Department
No. 15, Great Alie Street,
London, E.
January 18th, 1895.
Gentlemen,
The District over which you preside is essentially a
changing one, as regards the character of its houses, as well as the
people who inhabit them. When I commenced practice there were
many Courts and Alleys in the North and South portions of Whitechapel,
which have now been replaced by large blocks of Artizans'
dwellings—then Whitechapel was as much Anglo-Saxon in its population
as any other part of Loudon. We have seen all this become
altered, at first slowly, now so rapidly, that at the present time a
stranger coming into some of the streets in Spitalfields might be
excused for doubting that he was in the Capital of England at all.
These changes of Nationality in population carry with them certain
difficulties in administration which must be apparent at the first
thought; difficulties such as could not have arisen if the population
had remained a more or less stationary one. Some of these difficulties
I shall have to mention later on, but for the present I am
concerned with the one as to the probable Census of the District, and
the problem how best to arrive at it. From experience we are inclined
to doubt the accuracy of the Government Census Returns, because we
know how difficult it is for Inspectors to obtain the correct particulars,
even by carefully visiting each tenement. I can, however, only base
my conclusion upon the estimated population in the middle of the year
1894, supplemented by other facts which I will now explain.
During the year 1893, as I showed in my report for that year, 1,926
Foreign Aliens came into and remained in Whitechapel, and in the
last year 1,046 Foreigners were added to our population, or an average
of 1,500 each year. Further, it is to be noticed that the Whitechapel
Board of Guardians' returns indicate the fact that at the close of the
year there were 1,926 in-door paupers chargeable to Whitechapel who
were resident in various Institutions and Schools, mostly outside the
Whitechapel District; only 628 being resident in the Union Infirmary.
Now, as all the deaths which take place in these Outlying Institutions
are included in the Mortality Statistics for the District, I have added
their populations also, and thus at the lowest computation, without
accounting for the year's excess of births over deaths, the population
for the Whitechapel District during the year 1894 can be stated at
78,300.