London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972

View report page

Kensington 1880

[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Kensington]

This page requires JavaScript

121
PUBLIC BATHS AND WASH-HOUSES.
No steps have been taken since the publication of my last
report to give effect to the resolution of your Vestry in favour of
the establishment of public baths and wash-houses.
MORTUARY.
Referring to the need of a Mortuary, and to the steps that had
been taken to give effect to the resolution of your Vestry to
provide one, I stated in my last report that plans prepared by
your Vestry's architect had been approved by the Churchwardens,
and that your Vestry had completed an agreement with the
Churchwardens settling the conditions on which a building should
be erected, as I had recommended, in the disused Parish Churchyard;
and I expressed a hope that in my next (the present) Annual
Report I might have the privilege of congratulating your Vestry
on a successful issue to long continued efforts to supply this much
needed sanitary want. I regret that I may not have this pleasure,
for the matter appears not to have materially advanced beyond
the stage at which it had arrived a twelvemonth ago, and "the
next step" still is, as it was, then "to obtain a faculty" for the
erection of the proposed building.*
CORONER'S COURT.
I have in former reports animadverted on the unseemly
necessity the Coroner is placed under of holding inquests in public
houses, having no proper Court. When the hoped-for Mortuary
shall have been provided, I trust there will be no difficulty in
making an arrangement for obtaining the use of the Vestry Hall as
a Coroner's Court. The large room has been altered for the convenience
of the Divisional Magistrates, who meet in it periodically;
and the alterations have been made so judiciously that the room
* On the 16th July the necessary fifteen days' notice of the application for a
"faculty" was posted at the principal entrance to the Parish Church, as the law
directs, and I am informed that no person appeared in opposition to the granting
of the faculty*