View report page

123
by the Local Government Board to every appellant and to the Local Authority, a
printed copy of the notice shall be posted by the Local Authority at every place
specified in writing by the Local Government Board as necessary or suitable for the
purpose.
Conference on Town Planning.—Under the auspices of the Royal Institute of
British Architects an important Conference on Town Planning was held in
London in October, 1910, at which the Council was represented by the Chairman
and Deputy-Chairman of the Public Health Committee
Housing Regulations ancl Back-to-Back Dwellings.
The regulations governing the inspection of districts under the Housing
and Town Planning Act of 1909, issued by the Local Government Board,
contain several requirements which are of importance. The regulations aim
at extending the practice of systematic sanitary inspection of dwellings. All
Councils arc now required to arrange for the necessary inspections of dwellings
to be made by or under the direction of tbe Medical Officer of Health, who is
to submit lists of dwelling houses and areas in the district, early inspection of
which is, in his view, desirable. The inspection is to be of a comprehensive
character, and, in addition to the determination of a series of questions
specified in the regulations, is to include examination for any defects which
"may tend to render the dwelling house dangerous or injurious to the health
of an inhabitant."
The Housing and Town Planning Act contains a clause, which gave rise to
considerable controversy in Parliament, forbidding the future erection of
"back-to-back" houses as dwellings for the working classes, and limiting the
erection of tenement houses in which the tenements are placed back-to-back
to buildings which the Medical Officer of Health certifies to have sufficient
available ventilation. Since the well-known report by the late Dr. F. W.
Barry and Mr. Gordon Smith, in 1887, on "back- to-back" houses, the drawbacks
of this type of dwelling, in a sanitary sense, have been generally recognised.
Bows facing north get little or no sunshine into any part of the house, while
those facing south, having all the rooms exposed to the sun, may become
intolerably hot; the rooms are conspicuously stuffy, while much inconvenience
and nuisance result from the absence of a backyard and the position of closets
and ashbins. The probability that a higher death rate exists in houses built
"back-to-back," when compared with "through " houses in the same neighbourhood,
was indicated for the town of Salford by Dr. J. W. Tathan for the
years 1879-83, and by similar statistical comparisons which have since been
made in a few localities, notably in Shipley, by Mr. Herbert Jones, in Bradford
by Dr. W. A. Evans, and in Manchester by Dr. J. Niven. An extensive
inquiry into the subject has now been made for the Local Government Board
by Dr. L. W. Darra Mair, whose report, with an introduction by the Board's
Medical Officer, has lately been issued as a Parliamentary Paper (Cd. 5314).
In order to avoid, as far as practicable, the many sources of error which are
liable to arise in the comparison of populations for this purpose, Dr. Darra
Mair extended his investigations over 13 industrial towns in the West Riding
of Yorkshire in which "back-to-back" houses are common, and limited the
comparison to houses in good structural condition situated in relatively healthy
areas. With the aid of the Medical Officers of Health concerned, the vital