House property & its management

Thirty-four years ago, when I first began to manage houses inhabited by working people, London was in a very different state from what it is now, and it is useful and interesting to review the changes, their effects, and their bearing on the special work we are considering to-day.

(1) The standard of comfort was far lower then than now. In Marylebone, where I began work, nearly every family rented but one room; now there are hundreds of two- and three-roomed tenements. There were no cooking-ranges in the rooms; water was hardly ever carried up higher than the parlours. There were hardly any amusements open to the people; there was no underground railway, no trams, few cheap omnibuses; there were no free libraries, no Education Act, no Board schools. Wages were very decidedly lower, hours of work were longer. The bright oil-lamps did not exist. Food was not so cheap or so various. Flowers were never sold in the streets to the poor. The people stood in those days far more in need of cheer and of help.

(2) The knowledge of sanitary matters had penetrated hardly at all; gross ignorance prevailed. There were, moreover, few, if any, Convalescent Homes, no country holiday arrangements. The Building Acts took cognizance of very few of the requirements for health, and hardly any sanitary measures were enforcible—fewer were enforced. Few hospitals for infectious diseases existed. Many excellent appliances for drainage were not invented.

(3) There was not one-tenth part of the sympathy and interest in the welfare of the people which permeates all classes now.

From these and many other causes a London court in 1864 was a far more degraded and desolate place than it can be now, even in the remotest and forlornest region, and in taking charge of it one had to do a variety of things oneself, where now one finds the intelligent and willing co-operation of many other agencies.

Again, there were next to no “model” dwellings and little power of cheap locomotion, so that a court in those days was subject to little change of population; the same families clung to it, lived, married and died in it. Cheap locomotion and facilities in reading have brought the different parts of London into much closer communication.

Many of these facts made the necessity for preserving and regulating the old courts and houses far more important than is the case now. The old courts are rapidly disappearing, and numerous blocks of buildings with modern appliances are now scattered over most neighbourhoods. But in 1864 tenants were neither routed out of foul and close courts nor would they have been received into the rare and select model dwellings. Moreover, in the rough courts they were little meddled with, and could pursue in ignorance their insanitary habits further than would be possible now.

It was very natural, therefore, that my first efforts should have been directed to rough courts and the inhabitants as I found them there. Steady and gradual improvement of the people of the houses, without selection of the former or sudden reconstruction of the latter, was our first duty, and my little book on Homes of the London Poor tells the history of that early work. But if there is one duty more incumbent on us than another in such efforts, it is to be quick to see where advance is possible, how higher standards can be realized, and how much old forms may be rightly superseded. With certain exceptions in regard to small old houses, our work of late years has been increasingly in new houses and with chosen tenants.

The principles, however, are the same, and there is one great fact which the changing form has only brought out more and more clearly, and that is that the conduct of houses or blocks, old or new, so as to secure health and comfort and homelike feeling, depends on management. One can see any day excellent buildings execrably managed, and one may see tumble-down old places of wretched construction both healthier and far more homelike because well managed. And I may confidently say that the distinctive feature of our work has been that of devoting our full strength to management. It will be realized at once how much more this implies than “rent collecting.” An ordinary clerk will go from door to door for rents; that is a very different matter from managing houses. We have tried, so far as possible, to enlist ladies, who would have an idea of how—by diligent attention to all business which devolves on a landlord, by wise rule with regard to all duties which a tenant should fulfil, by sympathetic and just decisions with a view to the common good—a high standard of management could be attained: repairs promptly and efficiently attended to, references carefully taken up, cleaning sedulously supervised, overcrowding put an end to, the blessing of ready-money payments enforced, accounts strictly kept, and, above all, tenants so sorted as to be helpful to one another.