Urban Expansion & Slum Creation

Victorian Slum Housing

It is difficult to imagine the rate of urban expansion that occured in the C19th.

    • Urban expansion in Britain was the result of the Industrial Revolution and mass unemployment in rural areas, forcing people to seek work in new industries in the shape of factories and workshops.
    • Industrial expansion and the coming of the railways, created hubs of employment around which housing grew up. neighbourhoods around a specific industry grew and a totally new way of living developed.

In Britain in 1850, only London had a population that exceeded 500,000, within fifty years it had been joined by Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester.

    • This influx into the cities by people seeking work, usually poor and malnourished to boot, outstripped the infrastructure to support them.
    • Housing, sanitation and food supply could not meet the growing demand and population growth was checked by death from disease and malnutrition.
    • Filth in the air, the water and pestilence ensured a miserable existence for those agricultural migrants.
    • The prospect of the workhouse or starvation drove them into the urban areas but they soon found that life had put them between a rock and a hard place.
    • The word ‘slum’ evolved into common usage to describe the appalling housing conditions. Originally a word used to describe a place of ‘slumber, a resting place away from home’, it took on a totally different meaning in the filthy narrow alley ways of the cities.

The appalling conditions of workers in cotton mills in Manchester drove Friederich Engels to write ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in 1844’, this was a work of incredible importance and was hugely influential in the work of Karl Marx and provided vital information for the development of the social movement.

It added yet more weight to those concerned with health and sanitation reform.

Urban growth and the conditions it forced had to be addressed. Change was afoot.

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