View report page

7
In house property of this kind, I complain that there is no
one to look after the accumulation of dust or offensive garbage,
or to see that the closets are cleaned or drains kept trapped,
or to attend to the general cleaning and ventilation of passages,
stairs or rooms.
It is in these houses that we find a man, wife, and five or six
children crowded together into one small back room of 700 cubic
feet space; or the front kitchen a little larger, but with less than
1000 cubic feet space, where there are not more than 100 to 150
feet for each person. A dog or two are often kept under these
conditions.
The following cases are illustrations:—
No. 12 Bouverie Street—man, wife and 5 children in front kitchen,
770 cubic feet space; the beds, cupboards, chairs, tables, &c. reduce the
cubic space less than 100 cubic feet to each person; the man is a journeyman
butcher out of work. In the same house, first floor front, is a man
(plumber and glazier) with his wife and 7 chtldren, with cubic space of
1200 feet only. No. 56 Cirencester Street, was a man, wife and 5 children
in a front room, choked up with furniture, and articles of wet linen hung
all over the room; 2 fine children were suffering from severe Whooping
Cough, and 2 had died the previous week of same disease. At No. —,
was found a small dirty back room, where some people kept 2 dogs, the
man, and wife earning £ 3 a-week, and spending it in drink. No. 22
Cirencester Street, three instances of over-crowding in one house—
14 persons in excess. No. 46 in the same street, 16 persons in excess—
front kitchen 6, back parlour 4; second floor back 6. No. 23 Netley
Street, front parlour contains 5 persons; second floor front 7 persons.
No. 2 Alfred Place, Harrow Road, 5 persons, with a cubic space of
560 feet. In Clarendon Street, nearly 100 persons have been displaced;
and 17 persons were dislodged from one house.
Many of the underground kitchens in Leinster Street, Stanley Street,
Cirencester Street,Woodchester and Clarendon Streets have been inspected
where the people are found living like Esquimaux, in undei ground
cave dwellings—places with impure air, want of light, admitted only
through a grating in front, the upper sash of the window being often out
of repair, or nailed up.
The Sanitary Officers are continually serving notices to
abate overcrowding in single rooms (as the orders of the last few
weeks fully testify). And it is to be regretted that in the newly
built houses of Mews (in the Chippenham Road and Amberley
Road District), rooms are beginning to be thickly populated
with a pauperised class of persons, many of whom have
removed from the worst part of other parishes, and from less
cleanly dwellings in other places. These houses should be
under supervision—many are constructed for the requirements of
one family only, while frequently there are now congregated in
them 4, 5, and 6 families (for which they are originally unfitted).
Serious evils of a physical and moral character, are found to
afflict the population of these over-crowded houses. The want