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Parish of Saint George the Martyr, Southwark.
improvements carried out under your orders. Among the most important causes of so much
expense and so much mortality in our overcrowded district, I may state this one, that the poor
are being gradually driven back upon this and upon certain other poor districts of the Metropolis
; that is, upon places too straight to hold them, and upon people too poor to support
them. The illness that occurs in these close places, not only comes more readily, but it is
with so much more difficulty got rid of, and does with great facility slide into death. The
vice, the indecencies consequent upon such a state of things have been so fearfully and so
truthfully pourtrayed by a health officer elsewhere, that I gladly refrain from again touching
upon the loathsome subject. I may, however, at least say, that vice in its most abominable
shapes has often been under my notice, in these places where as yet privacy and cleanliness
are impossible.
It seems dreadful to hear any one say there is no remedy for these evils; nor indeed
ought any one to say it; true, there is no immediate remedy, nor is there for any great social
evil that may gradually grow up, and which may have been first perceived only when it had
become quite intolerable. The ordinary duties of your officers will compass much. The last
table in the Quarterly Eeport shows cases of houses, unfit for human habitation, cleansed and
made fit; houses almost without air, ventilated, and so made fresh and wholesome; foul,
rotten water-butts; drains bringing back pestilence to houses, instead of removing it; cesspools
overflowing, making the houses intolerable, and causing people, used even to these things, to
open their doors and windows at inconvenient and unsafe times; of yards without pavement
soaking up privy and drain overflowings, to give them forth again in the heat and sunshine;
of refuse kept long and strewed about in close places ; of animals so kept as to be reeking in
their own filth; and of owners and others who will have it that all this is wholesome! This,
and more, the 7th table sets forth, and is all capable of remedy under the legal authority of
the Vestry. If we should ever have the good fortune to be relieved of our excessive poorrate
burdens, the question of opening courts, of clearing spaces, of better paving and water
supply in courts, and even of parks, may be entertained with a certain prospect of making
this a very healthy Parish.
Among other salutary changes in progress, not the least, is the great regularity now shown
in removing the house refuse; we have 7,000 houses, each for the most part with its refuse
heap, and hitherto the poorer and closer places have been in this particular almost entirely
neglected: the organization must, however, be rendered still more complete.
I have before spoken of the large number of casual cases relieved at the workhouse of
this Parish. The Michaelmas Quarter, 5,812 were here relieved; in the next neighbouring
Parish, 1,054; the Christmas Quarter 4,018 with us, 523 with them; this Quarter with us