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payers of their District, to use their utmost endeavours to obtain
a representation on a Board to whom so much of their money is
entrusted, and to ask your Honourable Board to take such steps
as may be necessary for enabling your Memorialists to return a
separate Member to your Honourable Board.
8. Your Memorialists would also state that whilst their District
has been thus increasing in population and rateable value, the
District of the Plumstead Board has also been very largely increasing,
although not quite in the same proportion, the figures in respect
of their District being as follows:—Population in 1851,
19,771; according to the last census, 63,663. Rateable value in
1856, £104,930; in 1883, £317,465. Inhabited houses in 1851,
3,310 ; according to the last census, 9,989. It will thus be seen
that the Plumstead Board ranks the 23rd in the list of Metropolitan
Vestries and District Boards sending one representative to
your Honourable Board, and that there are six Boards with less
rateable value sending one Member to your Honourable Board,
not counting the combined District of St. Olave and the Parish of
Rotherhithe.
9. The District of your Memorialists is 6,544 statute acres in
extent, which is a larger acreage than any Parish or District in the
Metropolis, with the exception of the Wandsworth District and the
Plumstead District, with which this Board is joined, and the combined
Districts of Plumstead and Lewisham have an area of 16,938
statute acres, being less than one-fourth but considerably more
than one-fifth of the acreage of the whole Metropolis, including the
City of London, the acreage of your Memorialists' District (6,544
acres) being more than equal to the combined acreage of 17 of the
Parishes and Districts of the Metropolis sending 17 Members to
your Honourable Board.
10. Your Memorialists have been informed that your Honourable
Board are reluctant, at the present time, to enter into any
question with regard to an alteration of the representation at your
Honourable Board, owing to the expectation of some large and
comprehensive Government Scheme for the creation of a new
Metropolitan Municipality in the place of the existing authorities;
but your Memorialists respectfully submit that it is the duty of the
present authorities to perform their work without regard to any
schemes that may hereafter be brought forward, and which schemes,
it cannot be forgotten, have been promised for years, but have