The rooms  have different names today and in most  the scullery has been replaced by an indoor bathrooms on the ground floor or there is  an extension on the first floor over the scullery which houses a bathroom  but they still seem to have much to recommend them although their design is well over a century old.

His address begins with a reference to Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, who fought hard to gain recognition for the need to provide working people with decent, affordable housing. She had an uphill struggle - the Victorians considered that old large houses  or purpose-built blocks could be divided up into what were called tenements and let out, at considerable profit, to the working classes, who, in their turn, could divide their tenements room by room and let these out to people less fortunate than themselves. Rents were set with this in mind, leaving the poor with little choice other than to live in run-down property under overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.

Such tenements were in some instances condemned and pulled down and there were thousands of others which deserved to be. But it was unreasonable, Radford argued, to destroy unsuitable dwellings without provided others to take their place, There was no more complete instance of social cruelty than to drive out the poor and helpless creatures who occupy the worst kind of dwellings without providing them with something better. Their only possible course was to go to some place similar to that from which they had been driven and by overcrowding, to make matters worse than before. The only possible solution was to provide enough suitable dwellings and then to condemn and sweep away all that were unfit for human occupation.