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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health—1895.
39
they abut. This Act does not apply to the City proper, for reasons that will be fairly
obvious. Nor does it touch an opposite danger, which is a further outcome of the
excessive value of town lands. The builders, not content with soaring skywards, have
taken to burrowing in the earth, so that we find London basement rooms used as
workshops, being two or even three floors beneath the level of the street.
An "underground workshop" may be defined as "any workshop almost or
wholly below the adjoining street or surface level." This definition includes basements
the roofs of which are raised several feet—say, two or three—above the
neighbouring ground level.
Our attention has been drawn to the subject of underground workshops generally
by an investigation of the bakeries carried on in London basement rooms. The majority
of these places, especially in the older houses, are nothing more or less than cellars.
The process of conversion from the cellar to the bakehouse is simple. The baker rents
a house in a business thoroughfare, furnishes the cellar with a few gas jets, some
kneading troughs, a water tap, and a furnace, and he is forthwith the possessor of a
bakehouse. From cellars of this type, on a moderate estimate, more than one half of
the daily bread of Londoners is issued.
The bakers have hitherto made light of the evils of their underground workshops.
For a long time they contended that however bad the bakehouse no harm could result
to the consumer, as the process of baking sterilized the loaf. The fallacy of that
assumption has been shown by the present writers, who cultivated numerous bacteria
from the centre of newly baked London loaves. In the particular case of the underground
workshops used for the making of bread, we hold that their use, under present
conditions, involves distinct danger to the public safety, as regards both consumer and