View report page

152
The main proposal submitted to the County Council by
your Vestry in 1895, was that the offal of the trade of fishmonger,
poulterer, &c., should be stored in galvanised iron receptacles
with tight-fitting covers, and that the offal should be removed
in the vessels, a subsidiary advantage of the plan being that
the storage vessels could be effectually cleansed before being
returned to the shopkeeper. That this course will have to be
adopted sooner or later I entertain no doubt. Removal could
then be effected at any hour without nuisance. But removal
should, in my opinion, be effected in the evening, after business
hours. The existing arrangements, apart from the
sanitary question, entail disagreeable consequences to contractors,
who, to escape prosecution for breach of bye-law in
London, become liable to prosecution for breach of bye-law, say,
at West Ham. Offensive matter may not be removed through
streets in London excepting in the forenoon. Such matter
may not be removed through streets at West Ham excepting
in the evening. Could anything be more unfair than the position
in which the contractors are thus placed, between the
upper millstone of the County Council bye-law and the nether
millstone of the bye-law made by the Corporation of West
Ham—a locality to which much of London's "offensive
matter," i.e., offal, is conveyed for transmutation to useful
products ?
House Refuse.—The work of collection of ashes and
miscellaneous rubbish from our 23,000 inhabited houses, has
been systematised by division of the parish into districts, and
provision has been made for inspection of dust-bins, and oversight
of the dusting-gangs, the arrangements being under the
supervision of the Surveyor. A call is, or should be, made at
every house once a week—twice a week in the "Notting-dale"
district—and, subject to removal on that basis, further
improvement is scarcely possible, until the objectionable
practice of refuse-harbourage shall have given place to the
more rational system of daily, or at any rate, frequent collection
from moveable receptacles.