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neighbouring cesspool. The floor of this privy was reeking with
overflowing soil at the time of my visit. From the upper part of
the house descends an iron pipe which discharges itself into the
cesspool and conveys there all the drainage from the upper rooms,
where the inhabitants reside; the lower part, as I stated before,
being a blacksmith's shop. The whole house is built over the privy
and cesspool, smells fearfully in hot weather, and the men in the
shop declare that they are often ill with sickness and headache
from the stench. I have no hesitation in saying that such a
dwelling is at all times unhealthy, and in times of epidemic likely
to become a hot-bed of disease.
One of the parish Medical Officers, Mr. Nickels, having attended
a case of typhus, and also one of severe sporadic cholera, in Napier's
Place, Plough Road, called upon me to request that I would report
to this board a fllthy nuisance existing near that row of houses, and
to which he attributed the diseases above mentioned.
Napier's Place consists of eight newly built dwellings, on the
left or northern side, as we ascend the Plough Road towards
the Plough Bridge, from the Deptford Road, their front being
turned eastwards, towards the Surrey Canal. The original owner
and builder of the houses drained them in the following manner:—
He carried a brick drain, about eighteen inches in diameter,
through the middle of the back yards, to a large cesspool placed at
some distance from the northernmost house, or one of the furthest
removed from the Plough Road. Over this drain he located the
privies, two by two, at equal distances. The property, however,
passed into other hands, when, I presume, the drainage became
stopped from the filling of the cesspool. Anyone would imagine
that the shortest way of restoring the drainage would have been
to empty the cesspool; but the new landlord hit on a readier and
cheaper expedient. At the back of the row, and a few feet from
the palings fencing in the yards is a sandpit, which had been excavated
while the houses were being built, for the sand that it
supplied. Now, the landlord, instead of emptying the cesspool,
tapped the brick drain near the last house, inserted'a pipe into it,
and carried his drainage into the open sandpit on another man's
land. These statements were made to me by the builder and
original owner. The pit, now full of decomposing sewage, emits a
smell which, in hot weather, may be perceived at some distance
down the Plough Road, and of which the inhabitants of Napier's
Place complain bitterly. I consider that the sandpit ought immediately
to be filled up and the present owner forced to carry his
drainage elsewhere. A well thirty feet deep had been sunk by
the builder near the palings at the back of the houses to supply
them with water. The water, which was originally extremely
pure, has become, from the filtration of the liquid portion of the
sewage through the earth, as fetid as the contents of the sandpit.
The mouth of this well, an opening two feet square, now without