Living in the Industrial City: Housing Quality, Land Ownership and the Archaeological Evidence from Industrial Mancheste
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Living in the Industrial City: Housing Quality, Land Ownership and the Archaeological Evidence from Industrial Manchester, 1740–1850 Michael Nevell
Published online: 29 September 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract This paper looks at the recent archaeological evidence for industrial housing in Manchester, United Kingdom. The paper argues that a fragmented landholding pattern developed in a number of city-centre areas during the second half of the eighteenth century. This land-holding pattern gave rise to overcrowding as a result of the domestic redevelopment of back yard plots and the conversion of older housing to tenements. This redevelopment was at its most acute during the peak decades of population growth in the city, 1800–40, and this led to the conditions of poverty, disease, and overcrowding recorded in contemporary accounts from the mid-nineteenth century. Keywords Back-to-backs . Cellar dwellings . Land-holding . Manchester . Workshop dwellings
Introduction Industrial housing (workshop dwellings, blind-backs, back-to-backs and throughhouses) was a necessary counterpart to the urban, steam-powered, factory. Factory owners needed to be able to guarantee a regular supply of labor in return for standardized wages and hours. A new landless tenantry, accommodated in purposebuilt urban houses, emerged to fulfill this need in the industrializing cities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In the last decade, historical archaeologists and industrial archaeologists from Britain have been involved in recording large numbers of such housing either through standing building surveys or through excavations. Notable areas of activity have included Birmingham, Glasgow, London, Sheffield, and York (Belford 2006; Connelly et al. 2008; Jeffries et al. 2009, pp. 323– 328; Morton 2009; Symonds 2005, pp. 56–62). In interrogating and organizing this M. Nevell (*) Centre for Applied Archaeology, School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Joule House, The Crescent, Salford M5 4NW, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Int J Histor Archaeol (2011) 15:594–606
595
growing body of data, researchers have to be aware of the dangers in maintaining a separation between the archaeological and architectural evidence, and in assuming that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century views of “slum” areas were accurate and applied to earlier periods as well (Belford 2004, pp. 167–169). Archaeology is now the only way of revealing the extent and quality of this housing in most of these industrial cities and the recent economic boom and consequent building activity has provided the opportunity to study, archaeologically, industrial housing in one of the world’s “shock cities”: Manchester. Manchester was, and perhaps still is, a controversial city. It was described around 1540 by the antiquarian John Leyland in almost idyllic terms as the “the fairest, best buildid, quickest and populus tounne of al Lancastreshire” (Bradshaw 1987, pp. 8– 10). Visitors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries co
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