HOUSES IN GREAT CITIES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 210, 13 April 1877, Page 13

HOUSES IN GREAT CITIES.

(Continued.)

Otjb buildings spring from three sources — the cave, the castle, and the cloister. In Nottingham we find a series of caves, as the name of the town implies, in which the primitive inhabitants sought shelter from men, beasts, and the elements. The lord who vanquished these timid dwellers in caves built his towers for security and not for health. He must have his caves and dungeons still out of sight, his secret passages and ditches of water. W len the town was built it was cramped by its own walls, and had its secret underground passages for protection. The ambitious built also for permanence and durability to perpetuate the memory of the builder. The thunder of Cromwell laid walls and castles in the dust and isolated houses underwent a certain modification. But the modification was imperfect ; protection, darkness, underground passages, and vaults, strength and duiability for ages — these ideas, often hollow shams, but equally destructive, cling to the minds of the builders. Charitable institutions mostly retain the ecclesiastical model — the cloister, cell, the common room or ward. The object of this arrangement originally was not health, but convenience. It was desired that the houses should be able to receive as many persons as possible. When these houses were few and distances great it was thought proper to collect at centres aid and services. It was justifiable,j ustifiable, in the ignorance of sanitary laws which then prevailed, to warehouse even disease. The gaol long remained after the fashion of the castle, sometimes a disused castle and long a focus of disease. Now it has been transformed into the most perfect dwellinghouse from the point of view of health, except that it is insufficiently lighted from without. Our model prisons contain the purest air, the most equable temperature, the dryest and cleanest walls, the cleanest floor 3 and kitchens. Epidemic disease is under instant control. Disease from exposure to extremes of atmospheric variation, from impure air (except by the grossest neglect), excess, or want, from unjleanline33, personal or general, are out of the question. In a word, the occupant of the modern prison house is subjected practically to none other than his acquired or inherited diseases. Some endure mental suffierings, some an excess of physical work, owing to the insane system of treating the prisoners too strictly to one standard of work, as if the physical capabilities of all were the same. But on the whole the prison population is healthy above all other classes. In winter the gaol population decreases in weight, in summer it increases with a physiological precision like the procession of the seasons. But it retains its health so strikingly that in some cases, as Mr. Edwin Chadwick has shown, its death-rate is actually reduced to 3 in 1000. Nothing in the sanitary history of this country is so astonishing as the history of the gaols within 100 years. The other public institutions have not been so fortunate. They had continued unsystematised. By the act of the 39th year of Elizabeth, for the relief of the poor, the churchwardens and overseers of a parish are empowered to build necessary places for habitation, for poor and impotent people, on waste or common lands, and to place more than one family in one cottage or house. The poor-house thus began as a new and secular institution. The poor-house 3 were built like ordinary houses, and had all the faults of the rude dwellings usually found round the castles of the great. They remained so till the new Poor Law system built the Unions, with many improvements but many defects. The hut roofed with thatch or turf is the model of a dwelling-house. Its thick wall is an imitation of that of the castls. The small mullioned windows, the dark passages, the underground recesses, the heavy balustrades, imitated from the castle {or the abbey, still carry with them an historical charm, and are still adopted in many houses of the rich. They are insanitary. The house for occupation is often in another class also the house of trade. Men, women, and children sleep in conditions of dust and close atmosphere which are unfit for the continuance of a wholesome existence. The odour of the shop pervades every nook and corner, and when the business is of an offensive kind the atmosphere is devitalised. The factory system has massed people together in crowded streets and in new houses lacking the first principles of sanitary science, where bedrooms are ventil ated from kitchens, living rooms from cellars, in which ventilation can only be carried on by open doors, and a door cannot be opened | without draught or dust. The houses of the upper, middle, and j professional and independent classes often concentrate the errors of all the rest and of all the past. A part of the house is below the | soil, like the dungeon of a castle. The grand staircases bring the atmosphere of the vaults to the living rooms, that of the living rooms to the bed-rooms, and the whole into a close vault above, which, like the bell jar of a ohymist, catches the gasse3 made in the day, that the occupier may have the privilege of going to sleep in them in the night and may revel in them unconsciously for a third of his life. The lecturer observed that in a late discourse he attempted to describe a model city, in which, however, nothing was out of the range of human science and skill. While the combination remained unproved and waiting for a gradual development, there was no reason why the details should not at once be considered, with a view to their practical application. It would answer the purpose best to take a dwelling-house of one of the middle class, and to leave out of sight the half -filled mansions of the great, or those of the poor, which will hardly be changed till the higher class have set the example of improvement.