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Houses occupied in separate Dwellings.—These oonsist of (1) Houses specially
constructed to be so occupied, and (2) houses not constructed to be so occupied.
The former may be so constructed that the dwellings are (a) self contained, as those
in List I. in the Appendix, or they may be so constructed that one or several of
the appurtenances of the dwelling are used (b) partly in common. The latter are
old houses originally constructed for occupation by one family, but let out to more
than one family, and sometimes known as made-down houses.
Registered Tenement Houses.—The number of houses let in separate dwellings, and
registered under the Vestry's Bye-laws, was 152.
Registered Common Lodging Houses. — The enforcement of the Bye-laws as to this
class of premises is still in the hands of the London County Council. The
number of registered common lodging houses in St. Pancras is 26, as set cut in List
II. in the Appendix. There is no legal definition of a common lodging-house,
but the following definition approaches nearly to a definition of such a house.—A
house in which lodgings are let for profit by the night or for a longer period, to
lodgers who are not members of the same family, and who occupy a sleeping-room
or rooms in common, and pay separately for their accommodation to tho master
of the house or of part of the house.
Canal Boats.—Thirty-three canal boats used as dwellings, and moored in this
district, were inspected and found in a satisfactory condition.
Underground Rooms.—During the year in six cases underground rooms let
separately from the rest of the house were discontinued as dwellings.
In his recently published (1897) Weber-Parkes Prize Essay on Tuberculosis, Dr.
Ransome of Manchester has described his experiments, which prove that light
(daylight and sunlight) and air (moving air and windsl and dryness are fatal to
the tubercle bacillus, and that darkness, stagnation, and dampness are favorable
to its growth. He records experiments in which he readily succeeded in growing
the bacillus on ordinary damp wall papers, and papers moistened with various condensed
vapours, including the vapour of ground air from beneath basement rooms,
and the vapour of human breath. These experiments demonstrate the special risk
of injury to health run by those who occupy as dwellings underground rooms from
which light and air are more or less excluded, the walls of which are more or less
imperceptibly damp in the absence of a damp-proof course, the soil and subsoil of
which admit ground-air and vapour in the absence of an impervious surface and of
independent ventilation below the floor, and the interiors of which are occupied,
especially at night, by human beings respiring and perspiring.
Paving of Yards.—The necessity for preventing the pollution of the soil in the
yards and areas of town houses by impervious surfaces has met recently with strong
confirmation (1) from the observations of Sir Richard Thorne, K.C.B., F.R.S., in
his address on "Soil and Circumstance in their Control of Pathogenic Organisms";
(2) from the laboratory experiments of Dr. Sydney Martin, described in the Medical
Officers' Supplement to the Twenty-sixth Annual Report of the Local Government
Board, 1896-97, in which he shows that the typhoid bacillus multiplies in the
polluted soil of towns, and dies out iu the virgin soil of the country; and (3) from
the practical outdoor experiments of Dr. John Robertson, M.O.H. of Sheffield,
published in the "British Medical Journal" of January 8th, 1898, by which he