provement of the dwellings of the working classes, I will refer them to a report prepared and presented in 1865, by Mr. Simon, then the Medical Officer to the Privy Council and now to the Local Government Board, in which he named numerous towns in which the poorer houses were practically unfit for human habitation, but said that they were worst of all in London and five other towns (Bristol, Merthyr, Newcastle, Plymouth, and Sunderland).[1]
To step down from that very high authority to the very humble authority of the Member who is now addressing the House, I have made it my business during the past few weeks to visit various parts of London and to see for myself to what extent the evil existed. Amongst other parts, I have been to courts in the neighbourhood of Holborn, pretty nearly all over the parish of St. Giles, through the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, and also through one of the very worst portions of London—the district called Bedfordbury—but which I hope honourable members will not connect with the name of the Duke of Bedford, whose property is of a very different character. I could not describe to the House the full details of what I saw in the course of my visit to those localities. Honourable members in taking short cuts through the town, as, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, may, perhaps, see places in which they would be very sorry to have to reside; but I do not think that they have any real idea of the character of large masses of the dwellings which exist in our immediate neighbourhood, nor is any such idea possessed by 99 out of every 100 of the wealthy inmates of luxurious West-end houses.
Sir, I myself had no better knowledge of the true state of the homes of thousands of the people who live around us until I visited some of them recently. I will just tell the House two or three of the things which I saw during my excursions into these comparatively unknown regions. In the first place, there are a great many courts which are not only extremely narrow in themselves, but are approached by tunnels passing under other houses. These houses close one end of the court, and the other end is also completely closed up, so that it is impossible that the houses in the court should have any ventilation. There are other houses which are built back to back, so that no air can pass between them. There are other houses which are, perhaps, even worse than these, because, though a very narrow space is left between
- ↑ 8th Report of Medical Officer of Privy Council, 1860, p. 13.
