House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and large cellar. [...] Distance to lavatory 70 yards. Four beds in house for eight people—two old parents, two adult girls (the eldest aged twenty-seven), and one young man and three children. Parents have one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people share the other two. Bugs very bad—“You can’t keep ‘em down when it’s ‘ot.”
Orwell seemed ambivalent about slum clearance, or perhaps not, just wishful reading:
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which new tenants are systematically deloused before being allowed into their houses. All their possessions except what they stand up in are taken away from them, fumigated and sent on to the new house. This procedure has its points, for it is a pity that people should take bugs into brand new houses (a bug will follow you about in your luggage if he gets half a chance), but it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word “hygiene” could be dropped out of the dictionary. Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse. Perhaps, however, when it is a case of slum clearance, one must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions and inhumanity.
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