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During the past year two temporary inspectors were (successively) employed in measuring
rooms in the registered houses. The houses visited for this purpose were 1,768 in number.
Between November, 1900, and the end of March, 1901, 938 houses were dealt with, and 830
in the remaining nine months of the latter year. The dimensions of the several rooms in each
of the said houses were entered in the register in the columns provided for the purpose.
The Advantages of Registration.—Whilst facilitating the work of the public health
department, registration of houses let in lodgings has given rise to none of the evils feared by
the owners and occupiers of houses proposed to be registered; and practically there has been little
objection by any of the parties affected by them. The extension of the operation of by-laws to all
tenemented houses, and other houses occupied in lodgings by the poorer classes, would be an
unmixed benefit, from the public health point of view, by enabling the sanitary authority to maintain
ihe conditions necessary to secure healthy homes for the people who, in regard to such
matters, have little power to help themselves.
Begistehable Lodging-Houses.—Beference was made in the report for 1900 (page 63)
to an interesting question in connection with the registration of houses let in lodgings or
occupied by members of more than one family. A case heard before a police magistrate
raised the point whether flats or single rooms in artisans' dwellings could be brought, as lodginghouses,
within the provisions of section 94 of the Public Health (London) Act, 1891. Proceedings
had been taken at the Southwark Police Court by the late Yestry of St. George-the-Martyr, who
had decided to register Gun's-buildings in that district ; the offence alleged against the owner
being his refusal to comply with the Vestry's by-law requiring him to furnish particulars with
respect to the tenements, and the mariner of occupation, and the names, sex, &c., of the occupants
—in a word, the particulars set out in the Council's first by-law, with respect to registered
houses, and which are necessarily precedent to registration. The Vestry's contention was that
the occupants of the tenements were lodgers, and that each block of buildings was a house let
in lodgings. For the defendant it was claimed that each tenement, though it might comprise
only a single room, was a separate dwelling-house, and that the persons residing therein were not
lodgers but occupying tenants: their names were on the rate books; they were in possession of
the Parliamentary franchise, and in a position similar to that of occupiers of "West-end flats, or
chambers in the Temple. The learned magistrate dismissed the summons, following, as he stated,
decisions of judges of the High Court, in regarding the tenements not as lodgings but as separate
houses. The Vestry appealed. The case (Weatheritt v. Cantlay) has since been before the
Divisional Court, who upheld the magistrate's decision. The Lord Chief Justice regarded the
" buildings " as a collection of houses for the purpose of the section : there was no front door,