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85
and the devoting to other purposes of central areas which are at present
congested with such tenements as I have described. But as I endeavour to
show below, provision needs to be made for the rehousing of a very considerable
working class population in the central areas.
It appears to me that to secure the proper amelioration of tenement house
conditions it needs to be recognised that such a house affording for the
families occupying it only such accommodation as that which I have
described is to be regarded, without entering into the question whether it is
dilapidated, damp, partly underground, etc., as being in such a state as to be
unfit for human habitation, and that an area composed mainly of such houses,
even if there is no bad arrangement of the houses, courts, alleys or streets, is
to be regarded as an insanitary area such as is contemplated by Part I and
Part II of the 1890 Act. A full realisation of the evils of our tenement
houses should relegate them to the " insanitary" category.
The practical difficulty is to give the families adequate dwellings in
undiminished numbers in the same districts as they now occupy. Where the
condition of the houses is such that they must be cleared and the area rebuilt,
the only possible mode of rehousing on the site is by the erection of " block "
buildings several storeys high. For instance, in an area of 50 acres in Somers
Town there is a population of not less than 11,000, or over 200 persons to the
acre. In such an area nearly all the displaced population would need to be
rehoused on the site, as there is no other available land at a convenient
distance.
In the tenement house district, where the property is structurally sound,
the proposition arises of altering the houses instead of clearing and rebuilding.
Various suggestions have been made as to how this might be done, but I have
not seen any satisfactory scheme carried through. Unless additional storeys
are built the alterations must diminish the number of families occupying the
houses. The only suggestion of which I have heard that would provide
satisfactory self-contained flats on each floor is that put forward by Bannister
Fletcher some fifty years ago, and referred to with other suggested methods in
Sykes' "Public Health and Housing," 1901, p. 174, and this would considerably
diminish the number of dwellings in the houses.
It must be remembered that the greatest part of the population in a borough
like St. Pancras is housed in tenement houses, and although I am advocating
that the typical tenement house should be recognised as insanitary, I realize
that they cannot all be dealt with in the near future. The problem ought,
however, to be dealt with by an adequate inspection of all the tenement
houses, and by the utilization of existing powers as far as possible ; and by
dealing with the worst areas by schemes under Part I and Part II of the 1890
Act.
If there had been during the past century a law definitely and effectively
forbidding the letting of an ordinary dwelling house to more than one family
unless alterations where necessary were made to the satisfaction of a competent
authority for adequate accommodation in all respects for every
individual family the present tenement house difficulty in London need never
have arisen. The problem would have been dealt with piecemeal instead of