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their resolve to provide MUNICIPAL COMMON LODGINGHOUSES,
having obtained the consent of the Home Secretary
to their proposal to erect one such on a part of the Shelton
Street (St. Giles) area, which was acquired and cleared by
their predecessors. The scheme will be carried out on the
lines so successfully adopted at Glasgow. In that city "the
lowest class of the population, the waifs and strays, too poor
or too improvident to be able to rent houses, are provided
with furnished, airy lodging-houses, with large day rooms,
lavatories, &c., where each has a separate clean bed, at the
charge (including use of cooking range and utensils) of 3½d.
per night; and these institutions are so managed as to be
self-supporting, including 5 percent. interest on the capital."*
This would be an improvement upon our common lodginghouse
system, administered under the supervision of the
police, and which I once heard Lord Shaftesbury commend
as "the perfection of sanitary administration as applied to
the housing of the poor." For persons in the lowest ranks
of the labouring classes nothing better, perhaps, could be
devised.
The model lodging-house, in four storeys, is to accommodate
about 320 persons. The cost of it as originally
estimated was to have been £11,000, including furnishing ;
and the net return, based upon a charge of fourpence a bed
per night, it was estimated, would yield four per cent. on the
outlay and value of the site. Owing, however, to the
increased cost of materials and the rise in wages, and other
causes, the cost will be about half as much again : it is
intended therefore to charge fivepence a bed per night, which
it is estimated will produce a return of four per cent. on
the expenditure.
* Memorandum by Mr. (now Lord) Cross, Home Secretary, in the Supplementary
Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes,
1885 (page 66). The facts staled were more than borne out by the Housing of the
Working Classes Committee of the Council in their report dated 31st March, 1890.
as the result of inspection of this system by members of the Committee;