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23
years have been in lodgings while looking for houses. But, very
properly, the Town Council demands that its tenants shall be
fairly respectable and decent people; and the thriftless and bad
tenant who has made objectionable some of our worst house
property will not, and should not, find his way to a new Corporation
house. He would make it a pig-sty in a month, would
take lodgers into every room and would be evicted before he had
paid any rent. So it must not be thought that the provision of
Corporation houses will render more practicable the closing and
demolition of, say, Ward's Cottages, a block of six back-to-back
houses in North Hill; for the tenants living there are not of the
sort that would be received into a Corporation house.
The sub-letting of houses and the taking in of lodgers, to
which I have referred, is especially in evidence in the Campsbourne
area, although it exists in other parts of the town.
Practically every house in certain streets is sub-let, and in some
instances the original tenant makes a good living out of the
letting of his rooms. Overcrowding can be considered from two
aspects: there is legal overcrowding where each person has less
than 300 cubic feet of space (I believe there is none of this in
Hornsey); and there is moral overcrowding where more than one
family shares a cooking range, a sink, a water-closet and a
copper—and of this there is a very great deal. It is economic in
origih. One family cannot afford to live in a five-roomed house;
but five families can afford to live there. Overcrowding of this
nature will obviously not be remedied by the new Corporation
houses; although these are emphatically needed by a large
number of persons able and willing to pay the rents and to
behave like decent citizens.
Some extremely interesting figures from the last census
regarding the population in relation to its housing are given
in Table N. in the Appendix to this Report. From that it is
seen that 999 families comprising 1,523 persons were living in
single rooms. These figures included one family of seven
persons who were living in one room; two families each of six
persons who were living in one room; eleven families each of
five persons who were living in one room; and so on. But it
is to be feared that such moral overcrowding will not be remedied
by the new houses. These persons do not live and move and