EAST LONDON 193 



destitute of open spaces. In all this poor and 

 overcrowded part of the East the tendency has 

 been to get more and more housing-room out of 

 the ground, with the result that not only have 

 the old gardens vanished but even the mean 

 back- yards have been built over, arid houses 

 densely packed with inmates stand back to back, 

 or with little workshops between. One can but 

 wonder that this deadly filling-up process has 

 been permitted to go on by the authorities. It 

 is plain that the people who live in such con- 

 ditions, whose lives are passed in small stuffy 

 rooms, with no outside space but the foul-smelling 

 narrow dusty streets, are more in need of open 

 spaces than the dwellers in other districts ; yet 

 to most of them even Victoria Park is practically 

 as distant, as inaccessible, as Hyde Park, or 

 Hampstead Heath, or the country proper. If 

 once in many days a man is able to get away for 

 needed change and refreshment, he finds it as 

 easy to go to Epping Forest as to Victoria Park 

 and Hackney Marsh ; but it is not on many 

 days in the year, in some cases not on any day, 

 that he can take his wife and children. 



The open spaces of the East district, which 



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