London (England) -- Social conditions; Poor -- England -- London
There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in
one-room tenements. Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are
as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room.
The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person. In army
barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet. Professor Huxley, at
one time himself a medical officer in East London, always held that
each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be
well ventilated with pure air. Yet in London there are 900,000 people
living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law.
Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in
charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that
there are 1,800,000 people in London who are _poor_ and _very poor_. It
is of interest to mark what he terms poor. By _poor_ he means families
which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to twenty-one
shillings. The _very poor_ fall greatly below this standard.
The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding,
tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality. Here is an extract
from a recent meeting of the London County Council, terse and bald, but
with a wealth of horror to be read between the lines:—
Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether his
attention had been called to a number of cases of serious overcrowding
in the East End. In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and his wife and
their family of eight occupied one small room. This family consisted of
five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight, four, and an infant; and
three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and twelve. In Whitechapel a man
and his wife and their three daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four,
and two sons, aged ten and twelve years, occupied a smaller room. In
Bethnal Green a man and his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three,
twenty-one, nineteen, and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and
seven, were also found in one room. He asked whether it was not the
duty of the various local authorities to prevent such serious
overcrowding.
But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions, the
authorities have their hands full. When the overcrowded folk are
ejected they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move their
belongings by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow accommodating the
entire household goods and the sleeping children), it is next to
impossible to keep track of them. If the Public Health Act of 1891 were
suddenly and completely enforced, 900,000 people would receive notice
to clear out of their houses and go on to the streets, and 500,000
rooms would have to be built before they were all legally housed again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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