Living in the Industrial City: Housing Quality, Land Ownership and the Archaeological Evidence from Industrial Manchester, 1740-1850 (original) (raw)
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This paper will look at some of the excavated material for British urban workers’ housing, built and occupied during the period 1800 to 1950 in the Ancoats area of Manchester: Ancoats was notorious amongst contemporary writers and campaigners for its poor quality and over-crowded housing. This archaeological evidence has emerged as a result of developer-funded excavations and represents part of a growing body of data collected since 1990 from within many of the great industrial cities of Britain (Glasgow, London, and Manchester), as well as excavations in the numerous smaller industrial manufacturing towns of the UK. In this study particular attention is given to the impact of national legislation, private acts and local bye-laws aimed at improving industrialized living conditions and the build quality of 19th century workers’ housing occupied into the 20th century. Using excavated examples from more than 50 houses within Ancoats it will be argued that archaeology can provide a distinctive and unique view of urban domestic life in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, whilst demonstrating continuity in occupation patterns during this period. The evidence for urbanized, industrial, living also compliments the more extensive archaeological studies of manufacturing industry from the period.
Industrial Archaeology Review
This paper uses 16 years of targeted fieldwork on excavating workers' housing in the Manchester region, UK, to assess a variety of research approaches to the investigation of urban industrial housing of the late 18 th , 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Manchester was one of the 'shock' cities of industrial Britain, and a honey pot for social commentary during the Victorian period. Using data from more than 30 excavation sites it looks at the way in which archaeological evidence can be used to explore issues around house build quality, overcrowding, sanitation and disease, and reconstructing households from their material remains. Manchester's reputation for poor living conditions during the industrialising period was crystalized around the comments of contemporary social commentators from Engels to Gaskell. Yet, the archaeological evidence reviewed in this article demonstrates the value of archaeological approaches in challenging and testing such views through detailed case studies. More importantly, it shows that archaeological material can be used to study directly features of the new industrialised form of urban living, providing a set of research questions applicable across the industrial urban workers' housing of Britain.
The Excavation of Industrial Era Settlements in North-West England
Industrial Archaeology Review, 2005
In his classic study, The Making of the English Working-Class, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson noted, 'The rich lose sight of the poor, or only recognise them when attention is forced to their existence by their appearance as vagrants, mendicants, or delinquents' (Thompson 1966, 322). The primary international significance of Historic-Period Archaeology lies in its ability to subvert such negative depictions by challenging the dominant historical transcripts that serve to reinforce the brutal inequalities of our modern era. Building upon such an explicitly social perspective, the Alderley Sandhills Project was designed to illuminate the transformative roles of industrialisation and de-industrialisation on working-class rural England. By focusing on a domestic site, we sought to examine how the men, women and children of ordinary rural working households struggled to maintain and improve their conditions of everyday life in the face of the rapid socioeconomic revolutions of the late 17th to mid-20th centuries. Drawing from preliminary results, this paper will explore the nature and operation of class mobility within the social world of Alderley Edge, Cheshire.
Industrial Archaeology Review, 2005
ABSTRACT This paper summarises some of the results of a continuing long-term landscape study into the history and archaeology of modern Tameside as a response to a widespread call for archaeology to make a distinctive theoretical contribution to the study of the era of industrialisation. Whilst there are many modern studies of the industrial development of the cities and towns of England, there are comparatively few by archaeologists dealing with the rural fringes where the contrast between pre-industrial and industrial society were often most dramatic.
City and suburbs: London 1400-1700
Evolução da Paisagem Urbana Cidade E Periferia, 2014
London’s physical and demographic expansion between 1500 and 1700 was dramatic. The population of the city and its suburbs grew from about 50,000 to almost half a million inhabitants. Almost all this increase was in the suburbs, particularly to the west, north and east of the walled city. These developments raise important questions about their effects upon the city’s economy, population and the physical environment, especially in the expanding suburbs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the suburban growth of London, first of all setting out some of the main characteristics of this growth in the early modern period. Next the paper will draw on the results of some major research projects carried out by the Centre for Metropolitan History. These have integrated a range of longitudinal and cross-sectional sources, which survive in abundance for early modern London. These enable detailed ‘micro-histories’ to be written of individual properties and their occupants in sample areas of the city, which provide insights into themes such as household size, the physical size and layout of houses, and the changing urban landscape. The paper presents some conclusions arising from the research into the eastern area of Aldgate, which grew very dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was considerable demand for housing, and multiple occupancy was common and often achieved through the physical division of houses. As the area became built up, patterns can be seen in the development of gardens behind main street frontages into alley ways and courts, around which new tenements were constructed. Most of this was uncoordinated and re-use of older structures was common. On the other hand, the differences between the suburbs and the central parishes should not be over stated.
2015
2014 i Thesis abstract: Historical and contemporary archaeologies of social housing: changing experiences of the modern and new, 1870 to present Emma Dwyer This thesis has used building recording techniques, documentary research and oral history testimonies to explore how concepts of the modern and new between the 1870s and 1930s shaped the urban built environment, through the study of a particular kind of infrastructure that was developed to meet the needs of expanding cities at this time -social (or municipal) housing -and how social housing was perceived and experienced as a new kind of built environment, by planners, architects, local government and residents. This thesis also addressed how the concepts and priorities of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and the decisions made by those in authority regarding the form of social housing, continue to shape the urban built environment and impact on the lived experience of social housing today. In order to address this, two research questions were devised: How can changing attitudes and responses to the nature of modern life between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries be seen in the built environment, specifically in the form and use of social housing? Can contradictions between these earlier notions of the modern and new, and our own be seen in the responses of official authority and residents to the built environment? The research questions were applied to three case study areas, three housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1932 in Birmingham, London and Liverpool. During the course of answering these research questions, three further themes have arisen, which have broader relevance beyond this thesis: How to interpret buildings that have a life extending beyond their original purpose. The practice of contemporary archaeology as it relates to the built environment ii How new kinds of environments are created and experienced, and how this can be investigated through material evidence.
Reconsidering Britain's first urban communities
Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2014
Questions about the foundation and cultural make-up of Britain's first towns have been long debated. The creation of new cities was a crucial element in the economic and cultural assimilation of a new province, having ramifications for the trajectories of later generations as well as the immediate situation following the conquest. A dominant feature of the debate about urban origins in Britain is the interpretation of evidence relating to buildings and urban morphology, whereas the contribution of the evidence from finds has arguably been minimal. My intent here is to review the historical scenario of the foundation of Britain's first towns in light of artefactual evidence. I will focus on the evidence of Claudio-Neronian brooches and imported finewares (and their predecessors), which have already contributed to the debate as chronological indicators but perhaps offer more potential for new insights into cultural connectivity and social practice. 11 Creighton 2006, 130-35. 12 Creighton 2006, 94 and 125; cf. Millett 1994, 433. 13 Perring 2011, 250-51. The basis for Perring's theory is the discovery of an enclosure of c.24.5 ha defined by V-shaped double-ditches, rapidly constructed and dismantled in the late Claudian period, as well as dendrochronological dates for bridge structures on the Cornhill site of no later than A.D. 48, where a rectangular street grid was established before the revolt of A.D. 60/61. 14 Wallace 2013 presents a detailed counter-argument. 15 Aldhouse-Green 2007, 381; cf. Burnham et al. 2001, 71. 16 Goldsworthy and Haynes 1999.