Letters to the Editor
HOUSING AND THE FLOOD
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—Many Londoners have had their eyes opened for the first time by the recent floods to the appalling conditions under which our poor are living in Westminster. One excellent person, who has always pleaded pressure of work when asked to investigate for himself the conditions of the basement dwellers in Victoria Ward, is now white-hot with indignation at the things he has seen with his own eyes.
"I had no idea such things existed in civilized England," he said to a friend," or that people were living in such wretched- ness and misery within a few minutes' walk of Buckingham Palace." And this in spite of all that you and others have written. Truly seeing is believing, and if the present disaster will lead more people to use their eyes and imaginations, it will not be in vain. I have just heard on good authority that various officials drafted in from other parts of London were astonished at the conditions prevailing in Westminster. The slums in this rich borough were in their opinion worse than those existing in other parts of the Metropolis.
There will be much generous giving to relieve the present distress, and much talk (some of it pointless) as to how to avert another such calamity. Do not let us forget a plain issue and a practical one ; are we to continue to allow human beings to huddle together in hutches which we should condemn for valuable rabbits ? Not a single life would have been lost• if basements were abolished as sleeping places. Men and women were not meant to sleep underground and should be forbidden to do so by law while the temptation to overcrowding exists, owing to the negligence of our authorities to build an adequate number of houses.
All the people who were drowned in Westminster were trapped in basements. The Harding sisters must have awakened to find the flood waters at their throat ; the boy in florseferry Road must have struggled frantically between door and window to eseape the doom that bolted every avenue of escape. In Page Street, where the force of the water was sufficient to throw heavy furniture about like a toy, there were fortunately no basement dwellers, or the toll of death would have - been greater.
Will not the deaths of these ten people, whom without exaggeratfon we may call martyrs of municipal neglect, stir all England to abolish the slums, as you have so often and so ably suggested ? I would not be thought, in using the term martyrs, to censure unduly the West- minster City Council, inept though they are. There are• other Bumbles in other boroughs and obstruction to comprehensive .reform will continue until the pressure of public opinion bursts the rotten dams of prejudice, as Father Thames demolished the parapet by Grosvenor Road. In a more superstitious age it would be said that the place where the disaster occurred, near one of the darkest corners of Westminster, was a portent of divine wrath. May the flood tide of .slum reform soon carry all obstacles before it.
You, Sir, have already advocated a National Rehousing Loan and demanded that an estimate be made of the cost of slum clearance and reconstruction throughout England. Surely now is the time when the Govern- ment, with this calamity fresh in our minds, could act with an assurance of public opinion behind it. We are told that to control the Thames so that it shall not flood again may cost £10,000,000. Would it not be better to spend this money on making the nation-wide survey you suggested, and starting to build the clean and Christian England of our
dreams ?• "Dare we leave this part of Westminster alone while children are being born in such death traps f" you asked in your issue of July 2nd. The grey waters of the Thames have answered.
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