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APPENDIX.
TO THE METROPOLITAN BOARD OP WORKS.
The Memorial of the Board of Works for the Lewisham District.
Sheweth,
That your memorialists have received the Report of the Committee of
Works and General Purposes of your Board, proposing an apportionment
among the several Parishes concerned, of the debt in respect of the two
hundred thousand pounds borrowed by the Metropolitan Commissioners of
Sewers from the Rock Life Office upon the basis of the resolution of your
Board of the thirty-first December last. And your memorialists having
given such Report their most serious attention, regret that, whilst they concur
in the general principle of the resolution referred to, they are unable
to approve the manner in which it is proposed to be carried into execution,
except as to such Sewers the benefit of which is wholly derived by one
Parish.
Your memorialists submit that the circumstances attending the construction
of the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Main Sewer are, with reference
to the Main Drainage of the Metropolis, identical with those under
which the Counters Creek Sewer was executed, and that the cost of both
should therefore be transferred to the Metropolis at large; each of such
Sewers being, in the language of your Committee on the amendment of the
Metropolis Local Management Act, equally "treated by the body who
executed them as a part of the Main Drainage of London," and each being
constructed for the drainage of areas nearly equal in extent; and the cost
of the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Sewer being, in proportion to the area
drained, a work of far greater magnitude than the Counters Creek Sewer,
and consequently bearing with greater hardship than the latter upon the
immediate District for which it was constructed.
And your memorialists submit that the transfer to the Metropolis at
large of the cost of the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Sewer is further rendered
necessary from the peculiar circumstances attending its construction,
and that such circumstances render any equitable apportionment of the cost
of the Sewer impracticable, whether upon the proposed or any other plan,
as will be apparent from the following considerations:—
1st.—That the peculiar and primary object in view in constructing the
Sewer was the purification of the River Ravensbourne, from which the
water supply of the neighbourhood is derived, and not the drainage of
Lewisham Parish, of which upwards of four thousand acres are still used for
agricultural purposes; and that while such water was in 1856 supplied to
upwards of sixteen thousand houses, it was supplied only to five hundred