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environment is undergoing profound changes in the wake of modern scientific and technological
developments. There is clear evidence that advances in technology are themselves creating
potential dangers and impairing the quality of the environment. Pressures for more effective
action are growing.
My first sight, at close quarters, of slum housing was in the year 1932 as a student in
the City of Liverpool and later as a housing inspector with the same authority; it was a shocking
experience - Blake's dark satanic mills took no greater toll in human misery and social degradation
than did the slum courts and back to back houses of that time. In the intervening years
there has been considerable change for the better in the social pattern and living standards;
slums are no longer associated with poverty, hunger and squalor reminiscent of the thirties.
But incredibly, the basic problem of unfit houses and that of providing satisfactory housing
for all sections of the community remains.
The growing discrepancy between twentieth-century standards and nineteenth-century
planning has aggravated the housing situation and created new problems. Outside the areas
schedule for slum clearance and redevelopment, there are many thousands of houses which are
neither bad enough to condemn by statutory standards nor good enough for modern living. It is
now accepted that suitability for habitation is as much conerned with the environment in which
a house stands as with its physical condition and equipment. Living conditions in houses
situated close to industrial premises, railway viaducts and heavy traffic may become intolerable
as a result of noise and vibration. As these twilight areas represent the major part of the urban
fabric, improvement of such houses and the neighbourhood environment present a colossal
problem.
The solution to the housing problem seems to have been lost in a tangled web of legislation,
human needs, economics, selective subsidies and agencies. By whom should housing
be provided — local authorities, housing associations, building societies or private enterprise?
Ideally, to produce a balanced community, all agencies should be used. But unless there is a
radical change in housing finance and government subsidies, this can never be a viable
proposition. Meanwhile, with the decline of the private landlord and the inability of private
enterprise owing to the high cost of land, to provide houses at a rent people can afford, it must
be accepted that the hopes of the under-privileged in the housing field rests more than ever
with the local authority.
One of my earliest recollections of food and drugs administration was to sample raw
milk for chemical and bacteriological examination from churns unloaded at a railway station
in the County Borough of Wallasey at 5 a.m. Out of twelve samples, two were found to contain
added water and three failed to pass the test for purity and harmful bacteria. In those days
such a result was not uncommon; today compositional standards, bacteriological purity and
hygienic practices have all come to be accepted, although their maintenance calls for unrelaxing
vigilance. The pace of advance in food technology has created new production and
distribution problems with respect to the ever increasing range of processed and pre-packed
foods, which preclude pre-sale examination by retailer and customer.
The principles and tenets of food reform are unchanged, but now the field has enlarged
and some aspects of the work are only just beginning. The possible dangers arising from
chemical additives in food, and hazards arising from the use of toxic insecticides and pest
control agents in agriculture and food storage, and from the use of antibiotics and synthetic
materials to regulate the metabolism of food animals in order to stimulate growth, have yet to
be accurately assessed. These dangers are felt rather than seen, as unpredictable and portentous
as vitamins must have been to the concepts of nutrition.
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