"Allow me to suggest to his Lordship, and to his friend Lord Ashley to whom he refers, that if, --1. The window-tax were repealed, 2. The building Act repealed (excepting the clauses enacting that party and eternal walls shall be fireproof), 3. The timber duties either equalized or repealed, and, 4. An Act passed to facilitate the transfer of property, "There would be no more necessity for model lodging-houses than there is for model ships, model cotton-mills, or model steam-engines.
"The first limits the poor man's house to seven windows, "The second limits the size of the poor man's house to 25feet by 18 (about the size of a gentleman's dining-room), into which space the builder has to cram a staircase, an entrance-passage, a parlour, and a kitchen (walls and partitions included).
"The third induces the builder to erect the poor man's house of timber unfit for building purposes, the duty on the good material (Baltic) being fifteen times more than the duty on the bad or injurious article (Canadian). The Government, even, exclude the latter from all their contractors.
"The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miserable state of the dwellings of the poor. Small freeholds might then be transferred as easily as leaseholds. The effect of building leases has been a direct inducement to bad building."To guard against mis-statement or over-statement, I have taken the precaution to consult a large East-end builder and contractor of forty years' experience, Mr C. Forrest, Museum Works, 17, Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, who, being churchwarden, member of the vestry, and of the board of guardians, adds extensive knowledge of local public affairs to his extensive knowledge of the building business. Mr Forrest, who authorizes me to give his name, verifies the foregoing statements with the exception of one which he strengthens. He says that "Architect" understates the evil entailed by the definition of a "fourth-rate house;" since the dimensions are much less than those he gives perhaps in conformity with the provisions of a more recent Building Act). Mr Forrest has done more than this.
Besides illustrating the bad effects of great increase in ground-rents (in sixty years from *1 to *8 10s. for a fourth-rate house) which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans for industrial dwellings he had intended to build -- besides agreeing with "Architect" that this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land-transfer due to the law-established system of trusts and entails; he pointed out that a further penalty on the building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens ("prohibitory imposts" he called them): one of the instances he named being that to the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway and sewerage, which is charged according to length of frontage, and which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of a small house than to the value of a large one.
From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation ago and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law-produced mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality in "rookeries," made continually worse by artificial impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding of those which existed, having become a scandal, Government was invoked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans' Dwellings Acts; giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad houses and provide for the building of good ones. What have been the results? A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated December 21, 1883, shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to ratepayers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000 -- the remaining 9,000 to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left houseless. This is not all.
Another local lieutenant of the Government, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working on the same lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lane and Petticoat Square, masses of condemned small houses, which, together, accommodated 1,734 poor people; and of the spaces thus cleared five years ago, one has, by State-authority, been sold for a railway station, and the other is only now being covered with industrial dwellings which will eventually accommodate one-half of the expelled population: the result up to the present time being that, added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, these 1,734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 artificially made homeless, who have had to find corners for themselves in miserable places that were already overflowing!
See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the costs of houses; and prompted, for economy's sake, the use of bad materials in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established regulations which, in medieval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced: there being no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price, it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply. By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building of small houses. Finally, having, by successive measures, produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of better ones, it has at length provided for the artificially-increased overflow of poor people by diminishing the house-capacity which already could not contain them!
Where then lies the blame for the miseries of the East-end?
