Yorkshire Almanac Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

T. Clifford Allbutt. 1876. On the Prevention of Disease by the Reconstruction of the Dwellings of the Poor. Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London, Vol. 3. London: Hardwicke and Bogue. Get it:

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Upon the urgent representations of the Leeds Sanitary Association; the Council of our borough was persuaded last year to elect a medical officer of health, and since his election I believe that the Council has shown some readiness to give real attention to duties which are, perhaps, the most important it has to perform for the poor. On his arrival the medical officer found 1,500 bedrooms over privies, 500 or 600 cellars used as habitations, a large number of inhabited hovels, which were scarcely fit for dog kennels, and a state of overcrowding naturally to be expected in a town which has increased in number by about forty per cent. during the last twenty years, and which must always have been ill-provided with labourers’ houses. For the well-paid artizan cottage houses have sprung up in all directions and with great rapidity. Owing to municipal neglect, however, almost all these are built back to back, and are of the flimsiest material and workmanship. They frequently contain privies under bed-rooms, and in many other cases only avoid this by the simple device of having no privies at all. Still the well-paid artizan does secure something like a home. The unskilled labourer, on the other hand,-the job porter, the hawker, the costermonger, the rug-maker, persons whose livelihood is uncertain, who are improvident or destitute, these, whose number equals or exceeds the number of the skilled classes, get housed as they can. After prowling about by day after such sustenance as the fowls of the air may bring them, they crowd together by night in dank filthy hovels, huddling in heaps like wild animals to comfort their wretched bodies with a little warmth. What builders will compete for the profit of housing such starvelings as these? What builder will risk his hardly-won capital and the provision for his wife and children on dwellings for such wandering hapless creatures. Instead of returning him the high profits and good security of the better kinds of cottages, such dwellings, if properly built and repaired, offer a low and ill-paid dividend and a low security also. If these, and such as these, and if the class of unskilled labourers just above these are to be housed wholesomely, they cannot be housed at a tempting profit. Low rents, troublesome collecting, and incessant leakages tempt no one.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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If a chauldron is 36 bushels, a bushel is 8 gallons, and a gallon of coal weighs 40 pounds, then coal was slightly less than £1/tonne. In 2021 a tonne was retailing at roughly £420, almost three times as much after inflation. Fortunately we have gas. No, wait.

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