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place and Spread Eagle-court—are inhabited by the very poorest
population in the neighbourhood. I also urged to the Government
Officer the great inconveniences which might arise from
???aying the coffins on the floor, and covering them with earth and
charcoal, should the water of the Thames penetrate by percolation
or otherwise into the vaults, which are considerably below
level of high watermark. R. D. Grainger, Esq., promised,
that these weighty objections should be duly considered by him
in the Report which he is about to make to the Government.
The necessity of building a brickwall so as to cut off all communication
between the vaults and the interior of the church,
will, I think, be admitted by every one.
At No. 32, Lower Queen-street, the drainage is good, and
everything is in order, but at times a very foul smell is perceptible
in one part of the house. I expressed to the tenant,
that unless the cause of the stench could be pointed out to be
some imperfection of drainage, the remedy appeared to be more
the business of the landlord of the premises, than of this Board.
Some pigs were discovered in a house in Oak-place, they have
been removed by the activity of the Inspector of Nuisances.
The abominable stenches escaping from the sewer in Paradise-row,
through the newly-constructed air-shafts, continue to
be a perpetual source of complaint, and should not some remedy
to this miserable state of things be speedily found, there can be
no doubt that the value of property in that locality will be much
depreciated. The cleansing of the sewer, which is now in active
operation, can only give a temporary relief for the following
reasons: the sewer is so constructed that it can only discharge
itself into the Earl for about two hours in twelve, and even
then from its outlet being higher than the sewer itself, it only
gets rid of the upper part of its contents, so that during twenty
hours, daily, it is waterlogged, and is in reality not a sewer, but
an elongated cesspool, a mile in length, and the solid part of the
sewage must during that space of time settle to the lower part of
the channel and there permanently remain.
Now, the stagnant mass thus engendered will always give off much
more powerful stenches than those arising from a sewer with a good
fall, which can perfectly empty itself, and be easily cleansed and
washed by the flushing process.
The flushing of the sewer which is the subject of my comments,
can never wash away perfectly the deposit at the bottom, from the
circumstance of the elevation of the outlet above mentioned.
In these times of sanitary improvement it does seem monstrous
that a whole district should be filled with pestilential vapours for the
sake of ventilating a sewer. Nor is this a solitary example of a