Thus, in the eighteen hundred and forties a new street--New Oxford Street--was formed. It was driven through "a hive of human beings, a locality overflowing with human life." Evidence given before the Commission in 1847 described the results:-- "The effect has been to lessen the population of my neighbourhood by about 5,000 people, and therefore to improve it at the expense of other parts of London. Some have gone to the streets leading to Drury Lane, some to St. Luke's, Whitechapel, but more to St. Marylebone and St. Pancras. The vestries of St. Marylebone and St. Pancras disliked this very much. Places in the two latter parishes which were before bad enough are now intolerable, owing to the number of poor who formerly lived in St. Giles'." And a year or so later, from across the river, came the complaint from Lambeth that "owing to the number of houses pulled down in Westminster and other places, there had been a great influx of Irish and other labourers which necessarily caused a great overcrowding of the miserable domiciles already overfull." This Lambeth complaint is specially interesting, as it refers to another great cause of overcrowding--the constant immigration into London of labourers and poor people in search of work or food. Owing to the ever increasing and urgent demand for house accommodation for the working and poorer classes, it became a very remunerative proceeding for the occupier of a house to sub-let it in portions to separate families or individuals, and the practice gradually extended to and absorbed streets hitherto belonging to the better class. The owner of a property let his whole house to a tenant; this tenant, seeing an easy way of making money, sub-let the rooms in it in twos or threes, or even separately, at a very profitable rate to individual tenants. Nor did the sub-letting end here, for these tenants let off even the sides or corners of their room or rooms to individuals or families who were unable to bear the expense of a whole room. And so the house sank at once into being a "tenement house"--that prolific source of the very worst evils, sanitary, physical, and moral, to those who inhabited them.