FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER: The grim history of Spinningfields

Over the years, Spinningfields has earned itself the reputation as one of Manchester’s most vibrant and flourishing destinations.

Regarded as one of the swankier ends of town, Spinningfields plays home to many of Manchester’s most exclusive office developments and priciest apartments, as well as one of the UK’s busiest and largest civil courts.

The area has become a thriving hub for both work and entertainment, mainly with thanks to a handsome £1.5bn cash injection from Allied London in the 2000s.

However, things weren’t always this way for Spinningfields, with the area once upon a time being plagued with crippling poverty.

Science Museum Group Collection

If you rewind a couple of hundred years back to the 1800s, technology and economic need had turned the once quaint market town on the banks of the Irwell into the spearhead of England’s Industrial Revolution, with vast slums and chemical factories churning out dyes used in the textile industry lining the river’s banks.

As a result of the boom in job opportunities, overcrowding became a major issue in the area around this time, with three or more families reportedly sharing one room.

This led to a drop in hygiene and sanitation; slaughtered pigs and chickens were kept out in the streets, and there was a near-constant flow of human filth unchecked by sanitation, all where thousands of people lived, worked and, tragically, died.

Friedrich Engels was the man to expose this dire poverty gripping the area; in 1842 and at the age of twenty-two, the budding journalist was sent from his home in Germany to England to help operate the family-run cotton mill.

Science Museum Group Collection

And while his father, a wealthy businessman, had hoped the move would draw him away from his ‘growingly radical beliefs’, a young Friedrich instead became witness to the suffering and exploitation of Manchester’s working class.

According to American socialist publication Jacobin Mag, Friedrich described a public bathroom in the Old Town district as being so squalid that ‘the inhabitants of the court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement’.

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He wrote: “Here are long narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately.

“The most demoralised class of all Manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution.”

Friedrich Engels / Wikimedia Commons

He also described the streets of Spinningfields as been filled with ‘filth and disgusting grime’ and ‘foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement’.

And it wasn’t just Spinningfields stricken with poverty; Engels also reported what are now the bustling districts of the Arndale and the Printworks as also being ‘overrun’.

He described how the tiny public squares were being rented out by ‘pork-raisers’, recalling how the atmosphere, which was ‘confined on all four sides’, was ‘utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances’.

Engels’ investigation into Manchester’s poverty was eventually chronicled into his book The Condition of Working Class England, where the working conditions in the factories during the Industrial Revolution were deemed as unsafe, unsanitary and inhumane.

Dunk / Flickr

It was concluded that workers – men, women, and children alike – spent endless hours in the factories working, with the average hours in a working day varying between twelve and fourteen.

Interestingly, Engels repeatedly used the phrase ‘social murder’ to describe the bleak conditions in which the working class were forced to live.

It took nearly 100 years for Spinningfields to begin rebuilding its reputation, with the slum buildings reportedly being demolished in the 19th century.

Since then, the district has undergone a number of iterations, most recently in the 2000s when Allied London injected £1.5bn into creating the commercial and retail space, which is today a thriving part of Manchester’s economy. 

And, as a nod to the impact Friedrich Engels had upon Manchester, there is now a statue of him in the city centre, though it is some distance from Spinningfields outside the Home cinema and theatre complex.