THE    FIGHTING    FIFTIES	145
pandemonium. London was increasing at the rate of 2,000
houses a year. Efforts of public-spirited individuals to cleanse
it were always defeated by the flow of fresh immigrants from
Ireland and the country. Even the new fashionable districts of
Belgravia and Pimlico .were unpaved and almost without
illumination. Footmen carried lanterns at night in front of
their .masters, and the highway down the centre of Eaton Square
was a £ea of ruts with islands brickbats and rubbish.
For the new London as it grew outwards rose on the muck
of the old. Its Medical Officer of Health, in a report issued in
1849, described the subsoil of the City as " 17 million cubic feet
of decaying residuum." Belgrave Square and Hyde Park Gardens
rested on sewers abounding in the foulest deposits which blocked
the house drains and emitted disgusting smells, spreading
purulent throats, typhus, febrile influenza, typhoid and cholera
among the well-to-do and their servants. As late as the middle
of the century a summer's evening walk by the waters of the
Serpentine sometimes ended in fever and death brought on by
the morbid stench of the stream-borne drainage of Paddingtocu
Even the Queen's apartments at Buckingham Palace were venti-
lated through the common sewer: and a mysterious outbreak of
fever in Westminster cloisters led to the discovery of a mass of old
cesspools from which 500 cartloads of filth were subsequently re-
moved. Many of the busier streets were ankle-deep in horse-dung.
If these were the sanitary conditions among which the
prosperous lived, those of the workers can be imagined. Off
Orchard Street, Portman Square, a single court 22 feet wide,
with a common sewer down its middle, housed nearly a thousand
human beings in 26 three-storied houses. And the passer-by,
pursuing the course of Oxford Street towards Holborn, was
favoured by the sight and whiff of a narrow, winding, evil-
smelling *lane lined with hovels, through the open doors of
which could be seen earthen floors below the level of the streets
swarming with pallid, verminous, crawling human animate,
"Is it a street or kennel?" asked Punch.
"foul sludge and foetid stream
That from a chain of mantling pools sends up a choky steam;
Walls black with soot and bright with grease; low doorways,
entries dim;
And out of every window, pale faces gaunt and grim,"