The Ending of Slums The year reviewed in the new
Report of the Ministry of Health happens to be the last in the original five-year plan of slum clearance ; so it is possible now to review the working of the plan as a whole. Though at the outset it seemed very ambitious, it is satisfactory to learn that performance went beyond it ; the number of houses, in respect of which clearance orders were made, exceeding the estimate by over io,000. Since 1933 some 800,000 people have been removed from slum dwellings into new homes, and 262,807 new houses have been approved for re-housing under slum- clearance schemes, a figure equal to about 94 per cent. of those to be demolished. The process, of course, is still going forward, but already over most of the country it has brought to an end the main classes of slum, especially that most typical class of all—the succession of courts opening off a street, each built round with back-to-back houses, and each representing the worst conditions in respect of light, air, and sanitation. Outside London and a few other special areas, where it has always been recognised that more time would be needed, these abominations have now disappeared. Authorities in the purged towns are left facing a less acute but far wider problem—that of the countless mean nineteenth- century streets, which without being positively insanitary represent a degrading environment for their inhabitants.
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