The Slums of Victorian Hatter Street

Manchester expanded massively during the industrial revolution but with the booming number of cotton mills and other factories came an increasing population with little room to house them. As a result, Manchester became notorious for its early 19^th century slums which were poorly built, overcrowded and had little or no sanitation. Back-to-back houses were a single room deep, backing onto another house of the same size. Typically in the early-mid 19^th centuries each room of the house would be inhabited by an entire family. The size of the rooms were 5m² on average. Most of the back-to-back houses had cellars which would have been similarly inhabited by an entire family. Cellar dwellings were particularly bad with even less light than the above-ground rooms and usually with severe damp problems.

The slums in Ancoats area of Manchester were particularly bad, even being mentioned by Engels in his book of 1844. Throughout the 19^th century there were several drives to improve the lives of the inhabitants of the slums. By the end of the 19^th century there were several local laws in place that necessitated the provision of privies for the houses, banned the building of new back-to-backs, outlawed the inhabitation of cellars, and eventually required that existing back-to-backs were demolished or knocked through to make large houses.

Consistent with these initiatives, the houses here on Hatter Street show evidence of having been renovated in the late 19^th century with doors cut through party walls creating houses that were now 2 rooms deep and with the addition of a raised stone floor inside one of the blocks of cellars, complete with inset drains to combat water problems. In addition, a single bucket-privy, formerly serving 13 houses up until the mid 19^th century, was replaced by 8 new privies, connected to the sewerage system, in the late 19^th century. Several of the cellars had well preserved brick-built ranges within the fireplaces, as well as clear evidence of renovation work during the late 19^th century before being demolished along with the rest of the houses by the early 20th century.