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39
COMMON LODGING HOUSES.

BASEMENT ROOMS.
There are in North Kensington about 6,500 houses wherein the floor of the lowest or basement
rooms is below the street level. Approximately 1,000 of these houses are occupied by single families
in comfortable circumstances, or are boarding-houses or residential hotels; and the basement rooms
are used, as was originally intended, for cooking purposes, food storage, etc. In the remaining
houses, the basements are used as private dwellings by members of the working classes, many
of whom live and sleep therein.
An exhaustive survey of these basement dwellings was made during 1932 by the officers of the
public health department.
Basement Front Rooms.
The basement front rooms included in the survey numbered 5,619; 5,253 of these are underground
rooms, that is to say, the surface of the floor is three feet or more below the level of the
adjoining street. Two thousand three hundred of the underground front rooms are used for sleeping
purposes, and in many cases for day-time living purposes in addition; 2,033 are used for day-time
living purposes only.
When an underground room is not seven feet from floor to ceiling or does not comply with
regulations approved by the Minister of Health, the borough council can close it for sleeping
purposes under the powers granted by Section 18 of the Housing Act, 1925, and Section 20 of the
Housing Act, 1930. Many of these rooms have been closed, and the only result is that the families
live in the basement front rooms in the day-time and sleep in the basement back rooms. Many
of these underground front rooms which are not fit for sleeping purposes are also not fit for day-time
living purposes ; further, it is probably true that no public health advantage is gained by making
people sleep in the back rooms and live in the front rooms. Indeed, such a change is possibly even
more harmful to health.
Basement Back Rooms.
The survey covered 5,244 basement back rooms. In most of these, the floor is at or near the
level of the back yard, with the result that only 1,186 are technically underground. Thus the
existing underground room legislation referred to above does not apply to 4,058 basement back
rooms.
Section 20 of the Housing Act, 1930, enables the borough council to close a single room, whether
it is a basement room or not, if it is unfit for human habitation, provided that it is let as a separate
tenement. The vast majority of the basement back rooms in North Kensington are let in conjunction
with basement front rooms or rooms upstairs. Thus the council are not only precluded from dealing
with most of the basement back rooms by means of underground room regulations, but they
are also precluded from using Section 20 of the Housing Act, 1930.
Basement back rooms, even though not technically underground, are often more unsatisfactory
than basement front rooms ; the window is generally smaller, and the outlook is often into a small,
badly lighted back yard perhaps with overhanging trees or shut in by high walls. The back rooms
generally have a smaller cubic capacity than the front rooms.
General Observations.
The survey undertaken covered 5,403 basements with 10,863 rooms. Of these, 4,134 are used
for sleeping purposes, and the number of ^fersons sleeping in them is 8,898.
In only 27 of the 5,403 basements was there found evidence of a damp-proof couise ; it is probable
that a damp-proof course is present in more cases, but is hidden by the cement rendering which
is commonly applied to walls as a remedy for dampness.
The majority of the basements have wooden floors. In only 317 is there evidence of a concrete
oversite.