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32
Parish of St. George the Martyr, Southwark.
staircase with an upper bedroom. The three-roomed houses, two in number, have one
downstair and two upstair rooms. The four-roomed houses, forty in number, -have
each a front door opening by a passage into kichen at back and living room in front.
An open staircase from the kitchen leads directly to two upstair rooms.
Drainage.— The W.C.'s are in all cases, except one, situated in back yards and
are atmospherically disconnected from the houses. The exception is No. 30, in which
the W.C. opens directly into the single kitchen on the ground floor. For the most
part the closet pans are of the hopper pattern furnished with a separate flushing
cistern. In eleven cases there were defects found in the W.C.'s. Twenty-nine of the
houses on both sides of the street communicate by means of a sewer with the main
sewer in the Old Kent Road, while the remaining eighteen at the other end of the
street open into what is known as the boundary sewer. The street sewers are unventilated,
and the house drains are not disconnected as they should be by means of
interceptor traps from the sewers. The house drains, glazed six and nine-inch pipes
with four-inch T-shaped connections, are laid without cement and with open joints.
Holes as big as nine inches long and four inches wide were found in these pipes. The
sewers in the street are presumably laid in a similar defective fashion. In two
instances combined drains pass directly underneath the houses, namely in Nos. 14 and
28. The street gullies, which open into the Old Kent Road system, are properly
trapped. At the extreme end of the street, however, a gully opens into the boundary
sewer. Up to the 29th September last, when alterations were made, the condition of
this gully was a cause of constant annoyance. It was untrapped and frequently
choked so that the adjoining street was flooded with surface water and filth, aud for
a long time past the inhabitants had complained of intolerable stenches. There
appears to be a sufficient fall in that part of the system connected with the Old Kent
Road drainage, but it should be mentioned that both the latter and the boundary
system are ventilated.
It may be convenient here to summarize the state of drainage in Cornbury Street.
The main facts of this somewhat complicated system are:—
1.—The W.C.'s are, with one exception, disconnected from houses, and are
of fairly good type as regards construction and flushing.
2.—The whole of the pipes, from closet-pan to street sewers, are grossly
defective.
3.—In two cases these defective pipes pass directly under houses.
4.—The street sewers are without ventilation and there are no intercepting
traps, and up till recently one of the street gullies has been untrapped and
frequently choked.
Water Supply is from the Southwark and Vauxhall Company's mains. The
service, so far as I can learn, is fairly though not invariably constant. In most of the
houses it is obtained direct from taps connected with the rising main. In eight of the
houses, numbers 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22, the drinking water is stored in
cisterns situated in the back yards, and unfurnished with overflow pipes. The taps
from the main as well as from the cisterns are in the yards, and both discharge over
trapped gullies.
Summary—Water Supply.—The chief risk of contamination arises from intermission
of supply which takes place from time to time. The house-drains run from
1½ to 3 feet below the water supply pipes. The storage cisterns are additional dangers
owing to their never being kept in practice in a cleanly condition.
General Structural Condition.—The houses are built of brick roofed with slates
generally water tight. The houses are from fifty to sixty years old, and there is no
attempt at impermeable flooring. In the absence of cellars the ground flooring is laid