“Along the line of these two wards, and down the street which divides them, and where this sewer has been recently made, numbers of streets have been formed and houses erected without pavement, and hence without surface drainage—without sewers—or if under drainage can be called sewers, then with such as, becoming choked in a few months, are even worse than if they were altogether without. The surface of these streets is considerably elevated by accumulated ashes and filth, untouched by any scavenger; they form nuclei of disease exhaled from a thousand sources. Here and there stagnant water, and channels so offensive that they have been declared to be unbearable, lie under the doorways of the uncomplaining poor; and privies so laden with ashes and excrementitious matter as to be unuseable prevail, till the streets themselves become offensive from deposits of this description; in short, there is generally pervading these localities a want of the common conveniences of life.
“The courts and _culs-de-sac_ exist everywhere. The building of houses back to back occasions this in a great measure. It is in fact part of the economy of buildings that are to pay a good per centage. In one _cul-de-sac_, in the town of Leeds, there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times, there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house; but as these houses are many of them receiving houses for itinerant labourers, during the periods of hay-time and harvest and the fairs, at least twice that number are then here congregated. The name of this place is the Boot and Shoe-yard, in Kirkgate, a location from whence the Commissioners removed, in the days of the cholera, 75 cart-loads of manure, which had been untouched for years, and where there now exists a surface of human excrement of very considerable extent, to which these impure and unventilated dwellings are additionally exposed. This property is said to pay the best annual interest of any cottage property in the borough.”
_Mr. Shaw_, the medical officer of the Hindley district of the Wigan union, after giving a similar description of the streets of that town, adds:—
“The greater number of cases of fever in Tuce is in a great degree to be accounted for from the extremely filthy state of those places where it has been worst. Some of the cases were much worse than others, several being of the malignant kind of typhus. Most of the cases happened in Broom-street, in Tuce, a very uncleanly place, whole pools of stagnant water, decayed animal and vegetable matter, and many other nuisances of alike description lying in heaps from one end of the street to the other. It is extremely probable a little attention to these matters would save the inhabitants from many of the diseases with which they are now continually affected.”
