ABSTRACT
The police and the priest were as unable to penetrate as the sunshine. One of the several lines that were later to converge on the birth of housing policy was a series of problematizations in the nineteenth century concerning the relationship between the health of the public and its housing. Acting as a catalyst to these problematizations was a range of statistical and more qualitative publications which emerged during this period related to the ‘housing problem’. The concern for ‘health’ was not simply for the elimination of physical disease, but encompassed the moral and social health of the ‘dangerous classes’. The question of overcrowding was also explicitly linked in with the moral condition of the working classes, although it was admitted in the Report that overcrowding and the single room system might not be the immediate cause of immorality. The evidence adduced suggested a link between the landlords and the vestries, responsible for the regulation of overcrowding.
