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Extract: - New houses for Yarmouth

Until the late nineteenth century most Yarmouth people lived in the Rows. Although, as we have seen, there were some superior houses, conditions for most of the inhabitants of these crowded alleys were terrible. From the 1840s there were housing developments along the sea front. Although planned and started on a grand scale money ran out and conditions in some of these newer houses were little better than in the Rows themselves.

Nothing but a hard matress to sleep on

Comments in the diary of Elizabeth Oakley show what conditions were like in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was a country girl who came to Yarmouth in the 1840s to work as a servant. She writes, "I was shown into the kitchen which was an underground celler and what a dismal place it was not a bit of light all day except what came through at top through some panes of glass that was put in the roof.... When I went to bed I was shown into a room and the door that I had to pass through was just like a wicket I could not walk into the room but I had to go through head and knees together. When I gets into bed One would have thought they had forgotten to put a bed on for there was nothing else but a hard mattress to sleep on." Not surprisingly Elizabeth left after two weeks.

"Two people live in a space not room for one"

As late as 1898 it was reported that, "there are housed in the Row District some 12,000 persons, 30% of whom never see the sunshine into a dwelling-room, while the remainder see about an hour's sunshine. Many have old, thick walls soaked with moisture and filth. Then there are the Victoria Gardens in which during the last 35 years perfect warrens have been erected in which two people live in a space not room for one, at levels that, were it not for constant supervision and the pumping plant recently put down, their ground floors would be flooded three or four times a year with sewage." Each of the Rows had an open drain running along the centre and the houses had earth closets. The drains were flushed out with salt water.