Living conditions for urban workers
The rapid expansion of industrial towns and cities resulted in a shortage of housing. New housing was built quickly and to a very poor standard. It often quickly became overcrowded.
Overcrowding and poor-quality living conditions
This quote about the Ancoats district in Manchester gives an impression of what it was like to live in an industrial city in the 19th century:
A more perfectly ugly spot you shall not find between sunrise and sunset. Fancy a street, one side of which is all mills, huge square piles of mills, with six, seven and eight tiers of foul and blackened windows, the grimiest, sootiest, filthiest lumps of masonry in all Manchester.
Cotton mills had been built in Ancoats to take advantage of the local canal network. As workers had moved into the area very quickly, housing was overcrowded and poorly built. During a A bacterial infection caused by contaminated drinking water. epidemic in 1831, it was found that half of the houses in the district had no plumbing.
Back-to-back houses were built around dark courtyards. In some houses, cellars and attics had separate entrances as more than one family was living in the house. Cellars often flooded as many houses had been built on clay soil. Each courtyard had one toilet to be shared by all of the houses, and a rubbish pile in the middle of it.
The air was filled with soot and smoke from both cotton mills and houses. The German writer Friedrich Engels described Ancoats as 鈥淗ell upon Earth鈥 in 1849.
Lack of sympathy from the rich
In the early part of the 19th century, there was little sympathy for the poor. The government believed that living and working conditions were not their responsibility. Many wealthy people thought that the poor themselves were to blame for the conditions in which they lived.
The wealthy had the vote and it was their views that influenced governments. They could afford people like Men who worked through the night to remove the contents of chamber pots (portable toilets) from Britain鈥檚 towns. and did not want to pay extra taxes to provide the poor with better living conditions.