[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell,

  • Camberwell (London, England). Parish. Vestry.
Date:
[1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell,. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/42 (page XI)
    [Memorial.] Camberwell, S.E., November 21st, 1895. To the Chairman and Members of the General Purposes Committee of Camberwell Vestry. Gentlemen, —We venture respectfully, but earnestly, to direct your attention to the deplorable condition of that portion of the Parish of Camberwell lying between Wyndham Road and Avenue Road, and between Camberwell Road and Pitman Street, and including the following streets —Sultan Street, Hollington Street, Crown Street, Gange Street, Beckett Street and Toulon Street. The overcrowding in this district, and the sad state in which the inhabitants have for many years been compelled to subsist, have been a source of the deepest pain to the clergy and others brought into contact with the poor people dwelling in this neglected area. In many of the houses five or six families reside, and scores of instances can be shown where a family (sometimes embracing several adults of both sexes) exist in a single room. Such a state of things cannot be conducive to public morality, nor be advantageous to the public health. The neighbourhood is a black spot in the midst of a comparatively well-to-do, well-ordered Parish. It is, as it were, shut in with its vice and wretchedness, having practically no thoroughfare connecting it with the main roads. Most certainly a through street is, in the first instance, needed from Camberwell New Road to Camberwell Road. Mr. Charles Booth in his Labour and Life of the People, page 403, says, in discussing the dark spots of London— Of the bad patches the most hopeless is the block consisting of Hollington Street, Sultan Street, and a few more lying to the west of Camberwell Road. It stands alone in an otherwise well-to-do district, acting as a moral cesspool towards which poverty and vice flow in the persons of those who can do no better mixed with those who find such surroundings convenient or congenial. It is the despair of the clergy, who find it impossible to put any permanent social order into a body of people continually shifting, and as continually recruited by the incoming of fresh elements of evil or distress. . . . . Bad building, bad owning, mismanage ment on the part of the Vestry, and apathy on the part of the Church, have each had their share in bringing about a condition of things which now demands and tasks the best united efforts of all to put right. This block, as is so often the case when bad conditions triumph, is without thoroughfare, cut off by the railway from the main road, and it would seem that no radical change can be made in its fortunes except by altering this. The opinion expressed in the last sentence of the above extract is our deliberate conviction also. We therefore respectfully submit for your favourable consideration the advisability of continuing Sultan Street in the xi.