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115
The Vestry has, during the year, emphasised the importance
of displaced tenants being re-housed—more especially
in connection with improvement and extension schemes of
Railway Companies, by endeavouring to insist upon the
insertion of clauses in Private Bills, requiring the said
Companies to give definite agreements to provide dwellings
for the full number of persons displaced. The Act allows
the Secretary of State for the Home Department the right
to waive or enforce the condition with respect to providing
accommodation for working classes before the occupants
are displaced—an unwise provision, as it has proved, hitherto,
in Lambeth and elsewhere. It is agreed that these
improvement and extension schemes are needed from time
to time, and prove highly beneficial from a sanitary and
health point of view—old property being removed, but
it is a most serious consideration as to whether a Local
Authority is justified in allowing such displacements of
tenants, without supplying an equal amount of accommodation,
of a class into which the displaced tenants will move,
to live under much better sanitary conditions. It is
customary, when accommodation is supplied, for such
buildings to be in the form of Artizans' Dwellings, in which
are to be found, as the name implies, artizans in regular
work, but never the poor, who are chiefly displaced by
improvement schemes.
The open space in Lambeth Walk* has not yet been
taken over by the Vestry, who have, however, rescinded on
March 10th, 1898, a previous resolution (passed on Nov.
11th, 1897) in which they declined to entertain its purchase
as an open space. The matter still remains in statu
* Consisting of Fountain, Francis, and Paved Courts, and covering
about a quarter of an acre.
H 2