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houses. The present closet accommodation of these courts is extremely
bad; there are in each court some three or more closets of th e
ordinary type with long hopper pans, and without water supply.
These olosets, being open, are used by any vagrants who may happen
to wander into the court, and are nearly always in a filthy condition.
Locks have been tried, but the people either lose the keys or forget to
fasten the doors after use. The only practicable way would, in my
opinion, be to remove all these closets, and to erect in each court a
trough closet with as many stalls as there are at present ordinary
closets; these trough closets should be fitted with some automatic
flushing arrangement under lock and key, such as that which is the
invention of Mr. Rogers Field. It should be the duty of some responsible
person to pay daily visits to these closets, and see that they
are kept clean and in working order. The ordinary small waste
preventer is almost useless with long hopper pans, and moreover tho
inhabitants of these courts are frequently so careless and destructive
in their habits that they rapidly throw out of order any arrangement
they can tamper with; and if the pipes be of lead, they soon
get stolen for the value of the metal. In the matter of the ventilation
of back-to-back houses, some improvement could be effected by
insisting upon the erection of a lantern light in the roof over the
staircase, and this should be constructed with louvred sides, some
amount of ventilation would then be possible.
I had hoped that with the help of the Surveyor we should get some
of these structural alterations carried out in houses condemned under
Torrens' Act where actual demolition was not considered necessary;
but at present the matter remains in abeyance.
THE HAGUE STREET SEWER.
This has given a good deal of trouble, and has frequently been very
offensive; the fall is from the Bethnal Green Road, and the sewer had
until lately no communication with the one in the main road, so that a
dead end was formed and ventilation was impossible; so offensive was
this Sewer that last year all the ventilating openings were trapped by
order of the Metropolitan Board of Works. This certainly bottled up
the stink, but was, in my opinion, a mistake.
A channel of communication has now been cut from Hague Street
to the Bethnal Green Road Sewer, through which air can circulate,
and the ventilation has been thereby much improved.