Note 555 — OF NUISANCES, LEGALLY, MEDICALLY, AND CHEMICALLY CONSIDERED.

The increase of the metropolis may be deemed a medical, though it cannot be restrained as a legal nuisance; this has been long felt but is still without remedy. In 1580 Queen Elizabeth, by proclamation, prohibited new buildings within three miles of the city of London, and commanded the Lord Mayor and officers to regulate the number of inmates in each house, which had become excessive. 2 Stowe’s London, 436. About this time it was made matter of complaint that “Moorfields, which formerly the citizens used for their health and pleasure to walk in and take the air, began now to be enclosed, to the hinderance of these healthful and useful walkings.” The limits of a Sabbath-days journey will not afford the modern citizen a breathing place; what effect this privation may have on the moral as well as physical state of the poorer inhabitants of this overgrown capital we will not attempt to discuss, and as the existing evil is without remedy, we will content ourselves with a hope that some means may be found to prevent its increase. An act of parliament limits the distance from the new road within which no buildings may be erected; an extension of this principle to all other roads five miles round London (exceptis excipiendis) and the imposition of double taxes on all houses to be erected after a certain date, within a limited circuit, (with a decreasing ratio as the radius increases) might possibly obviate the evil without very materially interfering with the value of property. The capital is metaphorically called the heart of the empire; we wish to provide it with sufficient lungs that it may circulate more florid and healthy blood to the extremities.

Since this note was written we have seen, in a collection of the statutes passed in the time of the commonwealth, an act for the preventing of the multiplicity of buildings in and about the suburbs of London and within ten miles thereof, An. Dom. 1656, the preamble of which says, “Whereas the great and excessive number of houses, edifices, outhouses, and cottages, erected and new built in and about the suburbs of the city of London and the part thereunto adjoining, is found to be very mischievous and inconvenient, and a great annoyance and nuisance to the commonwealth; and whereas, notwithstanding divers prohibitions heretofore had and made to the contrary, yet the said growing evil is of late so much multiplied and increased that there is a necessity of taking some further and speedy course for the redress thereof;” certain fines and penalties are therefore directed to be levied on all new houses which have not four acres of land continually used with them, and commissioners are appointed to carry the act into execution. The exceptions in this statute may serve to elucidate the subject, Clare market, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden, Shoe lane, and other places now in the centre of the town are exempted from the penalties, on account of the charges or covenants to which the owners had been or might be liable.