Various - Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 682

A remarkable attempt has been made to bring into one focus numerous suggestions put forth, within the last few years by social improvers and sanitary reformers. These suggestions, as our readers are aware, take a very wide range. Matters relating to water-supply, drainage, disposal of refuse, lighting, ventilation, dry foundations and dry walls to houses, stoves and fireplaces, cookery and kitchen arrangements, washing and drying appliances, cleanliness of person and of garments, cleanliness of rooms and of bedding, special arrangements for unwholesome but necessary trades and employments, provision for the sick that may not be perilous to other persons, moderation in diet and regimen, avoidance of vicious indulgences – all these and many other subjects have engaged the attention of thoughtful persons in a marked degree; and it can be indisputably shewn that the annual death-rate is lowered in districts where improvements in such matters have been extensively adopted. Mr Edwin Chadwick, perhaps the chief worker in this laudable direction, is so confident in the eventual success of such endeavours, that he announces the possibility of building a city that shall have any assignable death-rate or annual mortality, from a maximum of fifty or more in a thousand to a minimum of five or less in a thousand. Dr B. W. Richardson, a physician and physiologist of eminence, has taken hold of Mr Chadwick's idea, and sketched the plan of a city that shall shew the lowest rate of mortality. No such city – we need hardly say – exists, and he has neither the time nor the means to build one; but his purpose is to shew that it can be done, whenever public opinion is ripe for it.

Dr Richardson, in an Address to the Social Science Association, afterwards published in a separate form, speaks of his Hygeia or City of Health in the present tense, as if it already existed. This is done for vividness of description and brevity of language, and will be understood by the reader in the proper sense.

Hygeia, then, is a city for a hundred thousand inhabitants. (The main principles could be worked out in a much smaller community, but in a less complete form.) It has twenty thousand houses on an area of four thousand acres of ground: apparently rather densely populated, but not too much so when good sanitary arrangements are adopted. There are no very lofty houses. In busy thoroughfares, where shops are required, there are three stories or floors over the shops; and some of the best streets in private or 'west-end' neighbourhoods have four stories in all; but in others the general number is three. Underground living-rooms and kitchens there are none; instead of these, every house is built upon arches of brickwork, which form channels of ingress for fresh air, and of egress for all that is required to be got rid of. Running along beneath each main street is a railway for the transport of heavy commodities. All the streets are wide enough to admit plenty of cheerful sunlight and fresh air, and rows of trees are planted between the foot-ways and carriage-ways; the carriage-ways are paved with wood set in asphalt, and the foot-ways with stone pavements ten feet wide. Tramways are not permitted, as they cut up the roadway; omnibuses above ground and railways below will suffice instead.

All the interspaces between the backs of the houses are laid out as gardens. Churches, hospitals, theatres, banks, lecture-rooms, and other public or large buildings, follow the same alignment as the houses in the streets, but all detached; and every one flanked by a garden-space, however narrow.

There is no occasion for those unsightly concomitants of London sanitation, scavengers' carts. The accumulation of mud and dirt in the streets is washed away every day through side-openings into subways, and is with the sewage conveyed to a destination apart from the city; there are neither gratings nor open drains; and there are no 'gutter children,' because there are no gutters for children to paddle and dabble in, and because we may hope that, eventually, 'young Arabs' will disappear from our towns.

There being no rooms or offices whatever below the level of the street, how, it may be asked, are the domestic arrangements carried on? The kitchens and offices are at the top of the house instead of the bottom. Plenty of light and ventilation are thus obtained; while hot odours, being lighter than common air, pass away without contaminating the living and sleeping apartments. All the larger houses are provided with lifts, up which provisions and stores can be conveyed. As there is a constant service of water, available to the highest story of every house, the kitchen boiler may be kept constantly filled; hot water from the boiler can be distributed by conducting pipes to the lower rooms, as well as cold water from the tank or cistern – an inestimable advantage, especially in bed-rooms. Every floor or story has a sink for waste water, whereby the carrying of the uncomfortable slop-pail up and down stairs is rendered unnecessary. The scullery, adjoining the kitchen, has an opening to the dust-shaft; and so have the several floors or stories, every opening being provided with a sliding-door or shutter. The dust-bin, into which the shaft descends, is under the basement of the house. The roof of the house is nearly flat, paved with asphalt or tiles; it serves either as a pleasant little garden or as a drying-ground for clothes – the wherewithal for a laundry being provided in connection with the scullery.

The houses are built of a kind of brick which has the following sanitary advantages – glazed, so as to be impermeable to water and moisture; perforated, so as to admit of circulation of fresh air through the very substance of the walls; glazed in different colours for the interior of the rooms, thereby dispensing with the necessity for paint, paper-hanging, or whitewash, and affording scope for tasteful design in the selection and arrangement of the tints; smooth and hard, so as to be easily cleaned by washing; and some of them flattened into tiles for more convenient use as ceilings. Sea-sand is excluded from the mortar employed, on account of its tendency to imbibe and exude moisture. The chimneys, arranged on a plan prepared by Mr Spencer Wells, are all connected with central shafts; the smoke, drawn into these shafts, is passed through a gas-furnace to destroy the free carbon, and finally discharged colourless into the open air. 'At the expense of a small smoke-rate, the city is free from raised chimneys and the intolerable nuisance of smoke.' On the landing of the middle or second stories is a bath-room, supplied with hot and cold water from the kitchen above. The houses being built on arched subways, great facilities exist for the admission of gas and water into the several domiciles, and for the exit of sewage and refuse. All pipes are laid along the subways, and up thence into the houses; and workmen have easy access to these subways for the adjustment and repair of the several pipes. Abundance of water is at hand for flushing the sewers, which are laid along the floor of the subways. All the domestic offices of every kind being within the four walls of the house itself, there are none of these unsightly outhouses which so much disfigure most of our towns, and so greatly lessen the available garden-space.

In the living-rooms an oak margin of floor about two feet wide extends round the room; this is kept bright and clean by the old-fashioned beeswax and turpentine, the centre only of the floor being carpeted or otherwise covered. In the bed-rooms twelve hundred cubic feet of space is allowed for each sleeper; and all unnecessary articles of furniture, bedding, and dress are excluded – the use of a bedroom as a lumber-room being a fertile source of weakened health to the inmates. The lift already spoken of, for conveying provisions and stores to the upper story of the house, is a simple affair: a shaft runs up in the party-wall between two houses, and in this a basket-lift is raised by a rope; while side-openings connect this lift with the middle story or stories. The living-rooms have the open cheerful fireplace which English folks so much prefer to the closed stoves of many continental countries; but at the back of the fire-grate is an air-box communicating by a passage with the open air, and by another opening with the room; the heated iron box draws in fresh air from without, and diffuses it in the upper part of the room – on a plan similar to that devised by Captain Galton.