View report page

213
No records of the death-rates in the large provincial towns
were published in 1855, but in 1885 the death-rate of
Manchester was 26'5, and of Liverpool 23'8 per thousand
nersons.
Changes in the
condition
of W estminster
since 1855.
A closer and more permanent interest
attaches to the subject when the review is
concentrated upon the Westminster District,
and the application within it of the principle of local selfgovernment
for thirty years. Outside the City of London
no one of the local authorities constituted under the Act of
1855 can lay claim to the charge of a district so immeasurably
rich in historical association. Small, it is true, in
area, yet it is distingished as containing the places of Her
Majesty's birth, accession, coronation, and marriage, as the
locale of the Palace of the Legislative Assembly of the
Empire, as the seat of the Government, and the headquarters
of its several departments, and as closely identified
with the historical, ecclesiastical, political, legal, and
educational concerns not only of the metropolis, but of the
kingdom.
Whether viewed as to character, statistics, topography,
or sanitary condition, the change which Westminster
has undergone in thirty years can only be adequately
described as a complete transformation. In the St. Margaret's
portion of the district whole streets of fine houses
which were occupied by the nobility and the wealthy
for residential purposes are now let out in offices for
the transaction of legal, scientific, or mechanical business,
while narrow streets, wretched courts, and melancholy homes
of squalid poverty and misery have been replaced on the
one hand by " mansions," containing " mezzanines," " entresols,"
" flats," and floors reaching to the seventh in number,
used either as self-contained residences or professional
chambers, and approached by hydraulic lifts, and on the
other hand by huge blocks of artizans' dwellings, comprising
upwards of 1,200 homes.