View report page

1909]
234
also borne out by what occurred at Queensland Road, where the presence of
common lodging houses has also had a deleterious effect.
Furnished lodgings of this low class are the outcome of an endeavour to
escape the stringent inspection to which the common lodging houses are subject,
especially as regards night inspection and the separation of the sexes and of
children. They, however, are differentiated from them by the fact that there is
no "common room," and that meals are taken in privacy in the rooms that are
rented. Some people, therefore, prefer them to the common lodging house
because of their escape from supervision by the London County Council
Inspectors.
The residents in these furnished lodgings are altogether unlike those which
usually reside in tenements that are let unfurnished, in which as a rule are to be
found hard-working labourers, skilled artizans, clerks, and women who earn
their livelihood either as assistants in business places or as homeworkers.
Campbell Road has been ever a source of grave anxiety to the Medical
Officer of Health, who has frequently inspected all the houses in it, and has taken
his Public Health Committee on at least two occasions through them, while
he has caused an almost endless inspection to be made by the Inspector of
Houses Let in Lodgings for the district in which it is situated.
In the report which the Medical Officer of Health presented to the Council,
he contrasted the state of Campbell Road in 189(5 with its present condition, and
showed that then nearly every room in it was overcrowded, its sanitary accommodation
altogether insufficient, and the houses themselves infrequently and
irregularly cleansed; whereas in recent years they had been cleansed annually,
sometimes two or three times in the year, while as regards sanitary accommodation,
there was nothing to complain of, and very little overcrowding. Indeed,
he pointed out that one of the houses about which a Poor Law Officer had complained
had been cleansed no less than three times in 12 months. He
also indicated that in the former period the tenants, who were so often in the
landlord's debt, always sided with him and always hindered the efforts of the
Inspectors to ameliorate the conditions under which they lived, and that
uncleanliness used to be general, and vermin to be found everywhere. He
showed that in the inspection of Campbell Road made on the 19th and 20th
April, only G rooms out of 521 let in lodgings contained more people than their
cubic capacity allowed, and that some of these cases were trivial. Again, with
respect to W.C. accommodation, he pointed out that in the furnished and