The homes of the Bristol poor / by the special commissioner of the Bristol Mercury.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The homes of the Bristol poor / by the special commissioner of the Bristol Mercury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    few cases will go some way to justify Mr. Goschea's opinion that the real remedy for the present unwholesome dwellings of the poor is to insist on a more thorough enforcement of the responsibilities of the owners of property In numerous cases they will be found to be absentees whose rents are collected by a deputy. la one instance of the most dilapidated tumble-down, crazy-looking buildings, the owner was described as a minister in London, aud the tenants of the wretched rooms that were still con- sidered to be habitable—reduced to a single room in one of the houses—said they paid their rent to a deputy. An adjoining house was closed altogether, and in other instances, where sufficient pressure was put upon the owners, were found house after house in old courts, shut up and untenanted, because the landlord would not carry out the cleaning or repairs demanded by the sanitary officers, or meet the pub- licity of the action which they threatened to take if he continued to let the unwholesome tenement. In the city, the poorest homes are those in the dilapidated and faded mansions, which the ever extending warehouses have still left to be divided and subdivided for the use of many families, and the comparatively large houses similarly let off in rooms in small dingy courts. It is with the latter we have to deal at the present moment, and more especially those lying on the way from Bridewell street through the Horsefair, the Quakers' Friars, Merchant street, Eedcross street, and the Ropewalk. In St. James's Back, like the neighbourhood of the Pithay and the site now occupied by new Union street, some of the worst of the courts aud old houses have been demolished to make room for huge ware- houses, the new Police Court buildings, the present Day Industrial School in Silver street, &o The mere opening out process in the construction of these new thoroughfares aud the admission of daylight seem to have a magic effect not only on the wretche \ homes but the occupants themselves. Haul out the dirt into the light of day, aud it disappears as though people were ashamed of it Even in the blind courts themselves the grimiest spots and the m <st haggard and squalid occupants are nearly always to be found the farthest from the entrance and the light The degree of respectability a court has attained depends as a rule, upon the amount of light it enjoys. The seedy black coats and faded finery draping the front ot fhe old clothes shops of the Horsefair give to the east side of that thoroughfa e a sombre and stuffy appearanc , but the courts on that side have the most light, and the contrast between them and those on the other side will strike any visitor. In most of the former the occupants are single families, and one old lady, renting a house of four rooms at 4s. 8d. per week, took a pride in showing her parlour scrupulously neat and tidy, the walls covered with pictures. Even this court had its dingy quarter at the furthest end, but here two families in four rooms compared well with the courts opposite. In one of these houses lived a potter, his wife, and three children, paying 4s. Id. a week for four rooms, sadly wanting attention, though the tenants white-limed the apartments themselves the year before last, and here would be a case for Misa Octavia Hill's system of supplying the poor in their own neighbourhood with clean, well- lighted, and well-ventilated dwellings, at rent within their ability to pay. But then the tenant was a fairly well-to-do working man, and many degrees above the poor people of whom we shall have directly to speak. Still, iu all the courts to the right of the Horsefair there is a different atmosphere from that of the west side—more air, more light, and with these more brightness and quick, active movement —we may also add more enterprise, for it is here that halfpenny ices are manufactured to cool the parched lips of street urchins and holiday folk in summer, and street music is sent out to enliven the dreary days of winter. Taking now a western court, we come to a very different class of poor and their homes, Wrthin a stone's throw is the open space of the Hay market, and close to that the well-kept carpet-like turf of the pleasure garden into which kind-hearted, phlanthropic pel sons of the parish have changed the old church- yard of St. Jauits's, On a dull day, you would pass the narrow, door-like entrance of this alley without becoming aware of its existence. Entering, we find ourselves iu a court of six or eight three-story houses—the exteriors wearing a generally battered aud depressing appearance, hemmed iu as these d /fellings are in what is kaown as a blind court, narrow, and without through ventilation. These are tenement houses—let room by room to families at Is. 6d. per week—nearly all blank aud miserable-look- ing homes of the very type specially to be dealt with in any future effort for the improvement of the dwellings of the poor. As one enters them the unsavoury mephitic air peculiar to rooms where people sleep and live in common, Seldom wash and rarely change their clothes, is offensive enough, and inside, in the rooms themselves, and on the narrow, dark unventilated staircases, the noxious exhalations make one long for the outer air and the vitalising oxygen. The occupants —labourers, quay rangers, hawkers, and men in uncertain employ meat—would with difficulty be induced to pay more than Is. 6d. per week to be housed at night. They do not attempt to make a home, A bedstead without a bed, or in default