"... Many open places now built upon, or being built upon, have been for years the receptacles for all kinds of animal and vegetable refuse, and have become thoroughly impregnated with the products of their decomposition.... The result to the health of the occupants is daily realised by the excessive number of zymotic diseases and deaths which occur in them." The Medical Officer of Health for Limehouse wrote:-- "Ask about the general health and the houses. 'Never been well since coming in, and the children always ailing; and my husband says he feels more refreshed when he comes from his work than after he gets up in the morning. And then everything spoils; meat put into a cupboard is musty in a night. One can keep nothing.' "These are all new houses." And a few years later, referring to this same subject, he wrote:-- "A half mile off, a few years ago, there were some acres of gravel pits. The gravel had gone for road-making, &c. The large pit was then filled up on invitation of the owner, with the aid of the scavenger and others, with all the slush and filth of a large circle of contributors. When this fund of abominations became consolidated, it was built over in the usual style. They were soon occupied by tenants and lodgers. Now this site during the epidemic (of cholera) has been a great slaughter field--the mortality was shocking." And he added, "there are thousands of such houses built about London." The Building Act of 1855 was very far from being an effective prevention of such devices as these. It required a notice to be given to the Vestry before any new building was commenced, and a plan to be submitted for approval showing the proposed drainage and the levels of the building; but this requirement appears to have been by no means universally complied with, and some local authorities had great difficulty in getting notices of new buildings commenced within the district. And its restrictions were not sufficient to prevent the speculative builder in places from raising his block of houses in the fields with neither road or sewer for their accommodation, and with the frequent result of fever-stricken tenants. With the increasing knowledge of their districts gained by the numerous Medical Officers of Health distributed over the whole metropolis, the widespread prevalence of overcrowding in London, and the virulent evils, physical, social, and moral, consequent thereon, come into greater prominence and more vivid light than ever before.