Posted on Feb 26, 2005 - 08:49 AM by Bill McCann
In the 1840s Dr. Hector Gavin, a Member of the Committee of the Health of Towns undertook a survey of the sanitary state of Bethnal Green. His comprehensive report was published in January 1848, and includes detailed descriptions of the condition of the five individual districts. It does not make easy reading today. For example, here is an extract from his report on Three Colt Lane:- A sewer has at last been just laid down by the late Tower Hamlet's Commission as far as Hinton-street; the road is in the worst possible condition, being ploughed up, and very filthy. A row of new houses, called Alpha-row, has sprung up on the north side of the Railway; and on the south side of the Railway 22 new houses are nearly completed. It is between these two rows of houses that the filthy and notorious ditch in Lamb's-fields is situated. The Commissioners, in laying down a new sewer in Three Colt-lane, were chiefly actuated by the outcries which had been raised against them for permitting the continuance of a nuisance in Lamb's-fields, almost, if not quite, unparalleled, as an outrage against a social community. The following was the state of this nuisance when I visited it on several occasions, about three months ago:- "In place of about 300 square feet, as described by Dr. Southwood Smith nine years ago, being covered with putrid water, I found that all the space enclosed between a boarding on either side of the Eastern Counties Railway, and extending from part of Arch 91, and the half of Arch 92, up to the end of Arch 98, a distance of about 230 feet, and from 40 to 60 feet in width, was one enormous ditch or stagnant lake of thickened putrefying matter; in this Pandora's box dead cats and dogs were profusedly scattered, exhibiting every stage of disgusting decomposition. Leading into this lake was a foul streamlet, very slowly flowing, and from it another, which widened and expanded into a large ditch before it disappeared in the open end of a sewer. Bubbles of carburetted and sulphuretted hydrogen gas, and every pestilential exhalation resulting from putrefaction, were being most abundantly given off from the ditches and the lake. The ripples on the surface of water occasioned by a shower of rain are not more numerous than were those produced by the bursting of the bubbles of these pestilential gases which were about to produce disease and death. The construction of the Railway has diminished the extent of this lake, but it has concentrated the evil. Now the concentration of such foci of disease has been proved to be deleterious in a geometrically increasing ratio. What, therefore, must be the effect of this lake of putrescency on the health and lives of those who shall inhabit the houses that are rapidly springing up all around it. A row of 22 new houses of two flats, with cesspools in front, are being built parallel to, and within 10 feet of this most disgusting and degrading scene, which is an abomination dangerous even to the casual inspector."
A year, after his report was published, London was hit by a cholera epidemic which claimed the lives of 14,137 people, from all levels of society. Crucially, it was during this epidemic that John Snow, Queen Victoria's personal physician, first concluded that the disease was water-borne. Although it was not until the epidemic of 1854 that Snow's professional colleagues finally accepted the fact, this focused minds. The complacency of the parish vestries and the water companies was shaken. The growth of a movement to supply fresh drinking water to the poor can be dated to this epidemic.
From www.storyoflondon.com |
