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47
ing the dust from the shoot is at the foot of the staircase. It is
almost unnecessary to state that these chambers are very offensive at
times.
But the most objectionable are those shoots with shutters or other
openings into the living rooms. The tenants complain that an evil
smell proceeds from them even when closed; that dust is forced into
the room when the shoot is used by tenants on an upper floor; that
when used by themselves the dust is blown back into the room, and
it is consequently extremely difficult to keep the room clean. It
would not have been difficult when these blocks were designed to
have devised some means by which these difficulties could have been
avoided, but now it would involve much labour and expense to make
any satisfactory alterations.
It is an axiom of sanitation that house refuse should be removed
from the neighbourhood of occupied dwellings at the earliest possible
date, and if this is true of the house with its attached open space or
garden, how much more so is it true of a block accommodating some
of them several hundreds of persons?
It is contrary to all sound principles of sanitation that garbage
should be kept at the doors or under the stairs of occupied houses, or
that dust shoots should ventilate into the passages or living rooms of
the same. Even if a daily collection were established it would not
remove the objections to the above.
The shoots must be abandoned, but our difficulty is to find a place
free from objection for the portable bin. It must either be kept in
one of the rooms of the tenement itself, or on the staircase or outside
at the back of the block. The last is so inconvenient to tenants that
they will not adopt it, and of the two former expedients it is difficult
to say which is the less objectionable.
My object in discussing this is to show how easily such difficulties
could be avoided if architects were to give a little of the thought expended
on decorations to the convenience and sanitation of dwellings.
I am also not without hope that the London County Council will endeavour
to obtain such alterations in the Building Acts as will
effectually remedy the above condition of things.