The Press.
London, England, 1858-09-11 00:00:00

DWELLINGS FOR THE POOR.

THE following petition was presented, signed by
some of the most respectable of the inhabitants of
Kensington, last session, to the House of Lords by
Lord Brougham, and to the House of Commons by
➢lr. Slauey

That your petitioners learn that a bill is now before
your honourable house relating to the afftiirs of the Royal
Commission of the Great Exhibition of
That your petitioners beg leave, therefore, to state to
your honourable house that before the estate at Kensington
Gore was purchased by the Commissioners, aided by public
money, there existed on that estate a small hamlet, known

• it seems to us the cable should never have been carried
over the Newfoundland banks, where vessels frequently drift for
twenty miles together, and with a north gale would be aura to
book the cable. It should bo carried round to the deep water.

867

by the name of Gore-lane, inhabited by *bout sixty poor
families, and comprising *population numbering about three
hundred souls; t hut they were living in very tolerable respect-
ability and comfort—earning an honest livelihood—some by
washing, others by being employed by those who took in
washing—others by carrying on different trades—but all
more or less dependent on each other for their subsistence .
Many were attached to the spot as their homes where
they had been born and had lived all their lives; some
were very old, some were weak and ill, some were dying.
That in order to carry out the great improvements of
the property then contemplated by the Royal Commission,
it seemed expedient that this poor hamlet should be de-
stroyed. This has now been nearly accomplished; but, as
no provision was made to secure pruper dwellings for the
poor so evicted from their homes, an amount of distress
and misery has ensued on the details of which your peti-
tioners are unwilling to dwell. It is sufficient for them to
say that many families had to seek shelter in houses pre-
viously greatly overcrowded ; so that the misery and mis-
chief arising from insufficient dwellings for the poor in the
parish of Kensington has been greatly aggravated, both to
the persons evicted and to those ia whose dwellings they
have established themselves. Decency and morality,
cleanliness and comfort, have been effectually banished.
from them. . .

That your petitioners do not desire in any way to con-
demn the destruction of this hamlet ; they well know that,
when great public improvements are to be curried out in a
great city, neither the dwellings of the rich nor of the poor
ought to be allowed to continue an obstacle; but your
petitioners would respectfully point out to your honourable
house that, if for the sake of public improvements great
distress and misery were brought down upon a large num-
ber of the poor inhabitants of a district, it is very ques•
tionable whether those improvements can be correctly
called public improvements.
That your petitioners humbly submit to your honourable
house that there is great public danger likely eventually
to arise from the carrying out of a system which has too
long been in operation in this metropolis—viz., that of
driving the whole of the poor inliabitante from the localities
favoured by the rich to the more distant suburbs, so as
materially to increase their daily toil, by increasing the
distance to go and to return from the scene of their labours.
That your petitioners lament deeply when they see this
system carried out by private individuals; bat they submit
that it is of most injurious tendency when the example is
either followed or set by a powerful and commanding royal
corporation. That your petitioners conceive it to be the
duty of wealth, but still more of wealth united with official
power, to provide residences, eligible both as to come.
nience of locality and fitness of building, for those whom
wealth and power turn adrift, and whose poverty and weak-
ness cannot provide them for themselves.
That your petitioners therefore humbly pray that, since
owing to the destruction of this hamlet a very considerable
audition has been made to the value of the property, in
the bill now before your honourable house a clause may
be introduced, compelling the Royal Commissioners of
Itisl to purchase sonic land in the parish of Kensington,
and to build thereon as many dwellings for the poor as
will provide in comfort and decency for the same number
of parish poor as have been evicted from the hamlet of
Gore lane.