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47
In the Metropolis Management and Building Acts Amendment Act, 1882,
by Section 14 it was provided that every new building on a new site, intended
to be used wholly or partly as a dwelling-house, shall have directly attached,
and in the rear, an open space exclusively belonging thereto of at least one
hundred and fifty square feet, increasing according to the length of frontage
to a maximum requirement of four hundred aud fifty square feet, but the open
space was expressly permitted to be entirely covered in up to the level of the
ceiling of the ground floor storey.
In the London Building Act, 1894, although by Section 40 it is provided
that a new domestic building, with a habitable basement, shall have an open
space of not less than one hundred square feet (going back to the requirement
of 18)5), and that it may be erected upon up to the level of the adjoining
pavemenr, yet in a new domestic building abutting upon an old street, and
this iucludes houses to be rebuilt—that is, it applies to all London Streets existing
at the commencement of the Act in 1895, by Section 41 (2) the open space
to be provided to the building may be entirely covered in up to a level of sixteen
feet above the adjoining pavement, or in other words, no open space need
be provided to the lowest floors, namely, the basement and ground floor, and
possibly also an entresol of the house. Furthermore there is no requirement
to provide any open space to public buildings, including schools, colleges,
places of instruction, hospitals, workhouses, theatres, halls, public rooms,
libraries, hotels, lodging-houses, homes, refuges, shelters of greater capacity
than 250,000 cubic feet, or to buildings of the warehouse class, including
factories and workshops of greater capacity than 150,000 cubic feet, nor in any
buildings constructed to be principally used as offices although dwelling-houses.
The open space required about buildings built as or adapted for artizans'
dwellings is specially provided for in the Building Act, but this will not benefit
those who live in ordinary domestic buildings, whether as householders, or subtenants,
or lodgers occupying one or more rooms, and who are a large majority
of the population.
In consequence of this continuously retrogressive legislation old houses
possessing yards, areas, open spaces in some form, at the front or back, or both,
are being rebuilt in such a manner as to entirely cover the whole ground area
two or three stories up, leaving not a particle of open space, not even a shaft
for the purpose of allowing the drainage to discharge in the open, so that the
health conditions of domestic buildings in London will rapidly become worse,
and the bye-laws, regulations and directions of the County Council and the
Sanitary Authorities, which are all devised so as to cause drainage to be
excluded from or to be placed outside of, domestic buildings, are rendered
useless by a Building Act which enables a domestic building to embrace the
whole of the drainage of the premises within its external walls.
The matter wears an even more serious aspect when considered on a wider
basis. The words " open space," originally bore the common meauing of
ground space, to most persons they still bear that common-sense meaning, and
Parliament has attached that meaning to the words in the Open Spaces Acts.
But in the later Building Acts the provision of open space has successively
been lifted from the basement to the ground floor, thence over the first floor
to sixteen feet above the ground level, and in due time may be made by future