View report page

158
The same report of the Housing of the Working Classes
Committee (March 1890), in which they recommended the
provision of Municipal Common Lodging-houses, furnishes
other indications of the lines on which the Council propose
to attempt the solution of the vexed question of the housing
of the working classes, especially those in the lower grades.
The comprehensiveness of the report may be inferred from
the title headings of its several parts, viz.:—
(1). As to the means available for securing the sanitary
condition of existing dwellings.
(2). As to the provision of further and better accommodation
for the working classes in the Metropolis, considered
with reference to—
(а) The re-housing of persons displaced by clearances or improvements.
(b) The further provision of accommodation to meet the increase of the
population.
(c) The provision of "clean, healthy homes for people poorer than those
who at present avail themselves of the existing artizans' dwellings,"
referred to under the heads—
(i.) Unfurnished tenements and small cottage tenements.
(ii.) Furnished tenements; and
(iii.) Common lodging-houses.
A just idea of the scope of the report cannot be
given in a brief abstract, but it may be stated that the
Committee, with regard to (1), recognized the impossibility of
relieving, to more than a very limited extent, the present
unsatisfactory condition of things, by the provision of fresh
accommodation for the working classes, in the form of model
dwellings, whether undertaken by philanthropists or public
bodies: the bulk of the people, they say, must live in existing
houses and be dependent on others for the enforcement of sanitary
conditions. No one can doubt the earnestness or good
intentions of the Council and the Committee (now known as