[Report 1913] / Medical Officer of Health, Manchester City.

  • Manchester (England). City Council. n 88637066.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1913] / Medical Officer of Health, Manchester City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    166/284 (page 146)
    At the same time house drainage has been reconstructed over the whole of the Central districts of the City, this reconstruction extending over a period of 15 years. During the 7 years October 8th, 1904, to December 30th, 1911, these alterations have entailed re-sewering the back passages and repaving the yards and passages. The dwelling-houses so drained during the last 7 years number 107,623, representing a population of over 400,000. The operations carried out are not only registered in the books of the Sanitary Committee, but are recorded on maps, so that the amount of alteration can be seen at a glance, so far as the houses and closets are concerned. The drainage alterations have not been mapped out. These maps in crowded districts give the impression that but little of the Central areas has been neglected, and tell better than anything else the improve¬ ments which have been effected. The details of the alterations are also preserved not only in the records, but in a growing accumulation of plans which show the past and present conditions. The detailed work contemplated in the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1890, has thus been carried on in Manchester on a great scale for a long period of years, and the beneficent results are not yet fully realised. It is not possible to infer from the improvement in the death-rate of the whole community, either that good work has been done in the older parts of the City, or that improved statistics are due to any particular class of sanitary work. The difficulty disappears when we take the statistics for what may be called the slum area of Manchester, in which the death-rates now are no greater than was the death-rate for the whole Cit% of Manchester in 1891, notwith¬ standing that the poverty of Lancashire seeks the centre of Manchester with increased intensity. At all events some potent causes must have been at work, and improved housing is certainly one of them. Reverting to the tables relating to insanitary dwellings, the corresponding tables for 1913 are given below. Table 4 shows the number of houses certified as unfit for human habitation in 1913, with the result up-to-date. It will be seen that the majority of the houses not closed over the long series of years, during which these Orders have been made, belong to the year 1913, and that this is due simply to the stage which operations had reached at the end of the year.