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Cathedral B.C. School, and St. Matthew's School) attended by many
hundred boys and girls, and also that the windows of the Peabody
Buildings overlook Great Peter Street and Chadwick Streets.
Chadwick Street for some time was made a place for the storage of
barrows, thereby bringing into the street many loafers who created
disturbances both by day and by night. As the result of a representation
made by me to the Commissioner of Police, a stop has been put to
this practice.
The houses in Chadwick Street are mostly two and three-storeyed
buildings without cellars, one or two are larger buildings, one evidently
.having been a good class house, while another consists of two houses
which have been made into one. Six are small cottages placed in the
back yards of other houses. The houses 1 to 19 are old, and probably
will have to be re-built in whole or in part, the ground floors of some of
these are below the street level. In 1901 about 600 persons lived in the
48 houses in this street, an average of 12.5 per house, nearly double the
average of the rest of this sub-district. There are about 220 separate
tenements, of which 197 are single rooms, indeed with but one
exception, the whole of the lettings contain less than 5 rooms as compared
with 64.6 per cent, for the City, and the one-roomed tenements
actually amount to 916 of the total lettings. To put it in another way,
of a total of 592 persons, 495, i.e., 83.6 per cent., live in single-roomed
tenements, of these, approximately 170 are men, 200 women, and 130
children under 15 years of age. Of the remainder there are 12 sets of
2 rooms (67 persons), 3 of 3 rooms (15 persons), 2 of 4 rooms (11
persons), and 1 of 6 rooms (4 persons), but this varies continually.
Rents.—Four small cottages in the yards at the back of others
are assessed at £10 gross, £8 rateable. The other houses vary
from £17 to £65 gross, £13 to £55 rateable; Nos. 21 to 31 are
assessed at the lower figure, Nos. 14 and 16 at £20 (£16 rateable),
Nos. 4 to 12 at £25, Nos. 1 to 19 at £30, except No. 13, which
is £35; Nos. 24, 26, 38, 40 at £32; No. 46 at £34, No. 44
at £35, Nos. 48, 50 and 52 at £38, No. 32 at £40, No. 37 at £60,
and No. 39 at £65, No. 41 being £30. Nearly all are let out
as single rooms, the weekly rents varying from 2s. 6d. and 3s. to 7s.
a week; there are only a few at the lower figures, the majority
of the rooms fetching 4s., 5s., and 6s. per week. The usual charge
for one of the "furnished" rooms is 5s. a week, but if the tenants
cannot pay in one sum, Is. a day is charged. The rents paid vary in
a peculiar manner, some houses assessed at the same figure bring in
several shillings a week more than others. One reason for this is that
some (17 or 18) of the tenants have been there for many years (several
for 10, 12, 20 years, two families have lived 40 years in the street,