Grim reality of Manchester’s forgotten slums revealed in report and photos

A project from University of Manchester has repaired, photographed and shared forgotten maps of Manchester’s slums.

We might have our complaints about the city centre (in particular Piccadilly Gardens) now but it’s not a patch on how disgusting the city was in the Industrial Revolution.

With factories opening, thousands of people flocked to the city for work and to live in the working-class slums.

Those slums were primarily in Salford and Hulme, but there were also large ones in Pendleton and Chorlton. Two thirds of Ardwick and certain small areas of Cheetham Hill and Broughton were also slums.

The most famous slum from the time though is around the Red Bank area of the city, including what we now know as the Green Quarter and Angel Meadows.

Throughout the Industrial Revolution Manchester was described as “the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution” in Frederick Engels book ‘The Condition of the Working-Class in England 1844’.

The new maps and reports from the University of Manchester go a long way into proving what Engels described as the truth.

The new found reports provide grim and detailed statistical records of the cause of death, occupation age and sex of individuals within each district along with their address and date of death.

The maps were bound into reports by the city’s Medical Office of Health at the time.

The ‘Report on the Health of the City of Manchester, 1880’ shows that the death rate for 1877 stood at a huge 27.79%. This figure is massive when you consider the highest death rate in the world for 2018 was 17.23% in South Africa.

The main causes of death were respiratory related including ‘Diseases of the Lungs’ and ‘Whooping Cough’ due to the high air pollution and terrible housing for the extreme winters.

Adding to this were exceptionally high levels of mortality due to typhus, typhoid and diarrhea due to “a degree of dirt and revolting filth, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere.”

At the time, Engels description of the area said: “the shameful lay-out of the Old Town has made it impossible for the wretched inhabitants to enjoy cleanliness, fresh air, and good health.

“And such a district of at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants lies in the very centre of the second city in the most important factory town in the world.”

The new maps bridge an almost 50-year gap between found surveys in the 1850s and the later 1904 housing map of Manchester and Salford by campaigner Thomas R. Marr.

The maps are an entirely unique sanitary survey for Manchester and include ‘a valuable resource for researchers to better understand the social conditions of the city in the late 1800s’.

The newly discovered maps and reports not only highlight the massive and disgusting social inequalities of the time but demonstrate how the issue was largely ignored by the wealthy, to maintain the wealth in the hands of a limited few, as was the case throughout the industrialised world.

The political uprisings throughout Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century saw changes for the better, at least in the first world.

The digitalised maps and reports are available to view here.