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feel that the occasion has now arisen for a definite expression
of opinion (approval or otherwise) by the Lambeth Vestry
as to the line of action hitherto taken, and still being taken,
by their Medical Officer of Health.
As the official medical adviser to the Vestry, and with my
local knowledge of the amount of congestion and crowding
(whether of houses over areas, or of persons in houses),
1 have always felt that the necessary wholesale displacing of
persons, consequent upon the clearing of a large insanitary
area under Part I., or upon the closing of large numbers of
separate houses under Part II., of the Housing of the
Working Classes Act, 1890, must at all costs be avoided.
Such action simply tends to increase the congestion or
crowding in other immediately neighbouring parts, and so to
create, by means of one Act of Parliament, serious nuisances,
which it then becomes the duty of the Sanitary Authority to
abate by the powers invested in them under another Act of
Parliament—the Public Health (London) Act, 1891. Further,
experience shows that where an area (large or small) is
cleared on account of its so-called slumminess, neighbouring
properties, which were previously (considering all things)
passable, are apt to become rookeries, requiring in their turn
to be dealt with. It is common knowledge that amongst
the persons displaced there are those who must live in the
immediate neighbourhood so as to be near their work, which
may be of a casual or irregular kind, or for other equally
cogent reasons, and they necessarily tend to still more crowd
and over-crowd, and so perpetuate all the evils (sanitary and
moral) attendant thereon. As houses become scarce, rents
increase, and overcrowding consequently results from the
sub-letting of rooms. In this way the difficulty is not overcome,
but simply transferred from one district to another, or
from one house to another, and so the continuity of the
vicious circle is ensured. What applies to Lambeth applies to
other Districts. This picture of overcrowding is not a fancy