Wars, Epidemics and Early Housing Policy: The Long-Run Effects of Temporary Disturbances

Abstract

This chapter considers urban dynamics in response to external disturbances (notably wars and epidemics) and the contribution of early policy development, related to sanitation and slum clearance. Wars, although temporary, are found to have permanent effects on local population distributions, although the nineteenth century cholera and 1918 influenza outbreaks did not. The Second World War had particularly large effects. However, adjusting for age, the relative spatial distribution of health outcomes across London has changed little since the mid-nineteenth century, despite the large London-wide fall in death rates over this period. The most likely cause is residential sorting of the population, rather than intrinsic features of the areas.

I went into a low cellar [in Tyndall’s-buildings] …. There were a woman and two children there; … from a hole in the ceiling there came a long open wooden tube supported by props, and from that flowed all the filth of the house above, right through the place where this woman was living, into the common sewer.

Evidence given in 1884 by the Earl of Shaftesbury before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, quoted in London County Council (1913)

The tenements in which I have visited are occupied from the cellars to the allies, and almost altogether kept for lodging houses, many of them being more fit for pig-styes than dwellings for human beings; and in not a few the donkeys and pigs rest at night in the same apartment with the family. The entrance to these abodes is generally through a close, not unfrequently some inches deep with water, or mud, or the fluid part of every kind of filth, carelessly thrown down, …

Report of the Glasgow Fourth District Surgeon, Perry (1844)