View report page

7
the North by the High Street, South by the South-Western
Railway. East by Tinderbox Alley, and West by Sheen Lane.
Mr. Grylls has taken a census of the population, with number of
houses and extent of area in acres, he has found that the total
number of houses is 292, but deducting empties, &c., he gives
the number as 278, and these are occupied by 1,336 people,
giving an average of 4.84 per house on an area of 21 acres,
which gives 63 6 persons per acre. The deaths registered for the
locality in 1894 were 14, which is equal to a rate of 104 per
1,000. The diseases notified during the year 1894 were one of
Scarlet Fever, one Erysipelas, and one Membranous Croup. The
deaths registered for the eleven months of this year to the end of
November were n, which is at the rate of 8.97 per 1,000 per
annum, one case of Scarlet Fever and one of Diptheria were
notified during the 11 months."
The localities of which I have given special reports -that is
the Westfields, Barnes, and the Back Lane, Mortlake—are those
which you have considered the least favoured in point of their
sanitary condition of any part of the district, but the result of
the inquiry does not prove it. It is shown that in neither case
is the population by any means dense, nor the houses crowded,
and that the people as a whole are healthy. This, in a great
measure, is to be attributed to the fact that a large proportion of
them spend much of their time in the open air, the parents in
their work, and the children, when not at school, at play in the
many open spaces near at hand. Most of the four-roomed
cottages are occupied by one family only, and one room is almost
invariably reserved as a living room. Sometimes houses with
six rooms have two families, but even then they generally have
sufficient accommodation to permit of a living room indepen
dent of the bedrooms. The one great failure in many of the
poorer houses is a want of cleanliness in the occupants.
Three wells have been closed, the water from which was found
on analysis to be unfit for domestic purposes. I find that it is