[janwhin]

My grandmother was born at Togston Woodhouses in 1879, the oldest child, not that the family stayed anywhere for very long in the early years of their marriage. By 1881 they were in Henderson's Buildings in Amble. She was born in April of that year and the Alnwick Rural Sanitary Authority received a report from their Medical Officer of Health in December of that year, reported in the Alnwick Mercury of 20 December:
"The wooden cottages at Togston designed about 40 years ago for the accommodation of miners and their families, are 12, and under one continuous roof, six of them facing northward and the others towards the south. They have each a single room, with an unceiled loft above, and a small pantry projected outwards. At this season especially, they are very cold, their uneven brick floors being half a foot or more below the adjacent soil their outer walls thin and dilapidated, and the roofs of all of them are more or less defective. They are without any outside accommodation their windows are not made to open, and their water is chiefly derived from a trough on the roadside lying several feet below the surface, surrounded and fed by drains whose supply becomes exhausted in dry weather, and is liable to contamination by rats and other impurities. At the time of my visit eight of these cottages were occupied; one of them had been converted into a blacksmith's shop, another of these was empty, and a third was closed till the arrival of new tenants who were immediately expected, and a fourth was about to be vacated by one of the occupants for more comfortable quarters.
It was resolved that the Clerk write to the owner and lessee and send to each a copy of the above report, with a view to the present state of things being remedied."

The amazing thing was that anybody survived!