In considering this branch of the subject, the first thing that occurs is the absolute necessity of getting sufficient space to build upon. Other improvements may follow; but almost all of them will be defective, if this primary requisite be wanting. Hence it is of such importance to combat the notion that people must live near their work. It is a great convenience, no doubt. But the question is not of living near their work, but of dying, or being perpetually ill, near it. Mr. Holland has made a calculation from which it appears, that in some parts of the town of Chorlton-upon-Medlock, in a family of five individuals, “there will be on the average about 50 days a year more sickness _due to the insalubrity of the dwellings_.” To avoid this additional illness, it is surely worth while for working men to live even at a considerable distance from their work. Indeed I think two or three miles is not such a distance as should prevent them. Besides, is it not probable that, in many instances, the work would come to them?
Supposing that new building takes place, whether from the poorer classes tending more to the suburban districts, or from the dense parts of towns being rebuilt, much might be done by modifying, if not repealing, the window tax and the tax on bricks.
With respect to the next point, the laying out of the ground, there are most valuable suggestions given by Mr. Austin in the Health of Towns Report. The result of his evidence is, that the average rental paid now in Snow’s Fields, a place which I have endeavoured to make the reader acquainted with before, would return upwards of 10 per cent. upon money laid out in making a substantial set of buildings to occupy the place of the present hovels; and that these new houses should have “every structural arrangement requisite to render them healthy and comfortable dwellings.” I have only to add on this subject, that it would be of the utmost advantage in any new buildings, and especially for small houses, likely to be built by small capitalists, that there should be a survey made of every town, and its suburbs, with ‘contours of equal altitude.’ { 209} As things are managed at present, people building without any reference to a general scale, or any connexion with each other (the non-interference principle carried to its utmost length) the greatest difficulties in the way of sanitary improvement are introduced where there need have been none.