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1928
10
to conditions which were practically non-existent in Acton. Our
difficulties arise chiefly from a shortage of houses which can be
rented at a sum within the reach of people earning about £3 per
week and even less. Most of the houses of the Borough have
been built within recent years, and it may be confidently stated
that slum areas are non-existent. There may, of course, be
certain isolated houses in which the conditions inside the house
approximate to those -which we associate with slums, but these
conditions are not primarily due to the structure of the houses.
At the outset we are met by the difficulty that we have no clear
definition of a slum. It may be a convenient word to use but
it is a very vague one. One person may use the word slum
for certain conditions whereas another person with as great but
a different experience would not dream of doing so. I have come
across persons who have hesitated to apply the word to
conditions in Acton as a result of visits to neighbourhoods which
were undoubtedly slums. In one of the latest books published
a slum is defined as a street, court or alley which reflects the
social condition of a poor, thriftless, irregularly employed or
rough class of inhabitants. The inhabitants are not necessarily
very poor or bad, but they are often poor through injudicious
expenditure and sometimes through vice. The author then
describes the outward and visible signs of a slum district. Bread
and litter in the streets; windows dirty, broken and patched with
brown or white paper; curtains dirty and frayed, and blinds half
drawn and often hanging at an angle. The street doors are
usually open, showing bare passages and stairways lacking
bannisters, whilst the door jambs are generally brown with dirt,
rubbed shiny by the coats of the leisured class whose habit is to
lean against them. The site of a slum is generally a pocket of
a main street or nests of streets where through traffic has been
made impossible by the intervention of canals, railway embankments,
or the determination of the original inhabitants or owners
to regard their persons or their land as something select and
inviolable. Another and official definition of an unhealthy area
is an area which contains any houses, courts or alleys unfit for
human habitation; or in which the narrowness, closeness and bad
arrangement or the bad condition of the streets and houses, or
groups of houses within the area, or the want of light, air,
ventilation or proper conveniencts, or any other sanitary defects,
or one or more such causes are dangerous or injurious to the
health of the inhabitants, either of the buildings in the area or of
the neighbouring buildings.
An unhealthy dwelling house is one which is in a state
so dangerous or injurious to health as to be unfit for human
habitation.