Angel Meadow
Located in the north-eastern part of Manchester City Centre, Angel Meadow was until the 18th century a rural area on the edge of the town centre. The rapid industrialisation of the city during the late 18th century was accompanied by a massive population increase and need for new houses. Maps from the late 18th century show the laying out of new streets during this period to the north-east of the city centre. A new church, St Michael and All Angels, was opened in 1788 with an accompanying burial ground that served the working class population in the immediate area. By the late 19th century, Angel Meadow was one of the most infamous slums in Manchester and indeed by 1888 had a higher death rate even than Whitechapel in London. It was famous for its squalid living conditions, lack of sanitation, rampant cholera and typhoid, cramped cellar dwellings and crowded lodging houses as well as high crime rates and gang violence. Friederich Engels, who visited Manchester in the 1840s, famously referred to Angel Meadows as “Hell upon earth” and painted a vivid picture of the squalor of the area in his 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Sharp Street and Hatter Street Excavations
In 2018 and 2019, Archaeological Research Services Ltd carried out two excavations on opposite sides of Rochdale Road, on the edge of the area known as Angel Meadows. These excavations revealed evidence for back-to-back houses (single room terraced dwellings backing directly onto another block of single room terraced dwellings) and blind-back houses (single room terraces with nothing to the rear) as well as larger “through-terrace” properties, most of which were partially commercial with a shop on the ground floor.
On the corner of what is now Sharp Street and Baptist Street, two blocks of back-to-back dwellings were built around 1820, one fronting Sharp Street and Deakin’s Court (an open yard to the rear), and the other fronting Baptist Street and Deakin’s Court. A further row of three blind-back dwellings was built just to the north-east also fronting Baptist Street. Our excavations of these dwellings revealed that all of these buildings had cellars with staircase access from the street or yard outside and each fitted with a fireplace. Larger commercial properties fronted Rochdale Road including a public house and numerous shops.
On the site of Hatter Street, across the road from Sharp Street, a total of 41 blind-back and back-to-back houses were built between 1821 and 1824, surrounding three rear courtyards (Hanner’s Court, McGill’s Court and Hampson’s Yard). Most of these houses were destroyed by an early 20th century factory built on the site but the footprints of 15 houses were excavated by Archaeological Research Services Ltd in 2019. As with the houses excavated at Sharp Street, all the excavated buildings had cellars and fireplaces, however only a small number had staircase access from the outside. It is probable that the cellars were accessed by ladders from the ground floor, a feature that has been noted in other examples of cellar dwellings across Manchester and Salford. In addition to the houses, heavily truncated remains of privies were found at Hatter Street. As at Sharp Street, larger commercial properties fronted Rochdale Road and there was a public house in the south-western corner of the site.
Cramped living conditions
Census records from the 19th century show that each of these buildings was occupied by multiple families. Commonly an entire family would share a single room dwelling within these buildings, including occupation in the usually damp and dark cellar. The census returns show that this is indeed the case as these two sites, between 1841 and 1881, show that each of the single room footprint houses on the site had at least two and usually three families resident. From 1851 about half of the inhabitants of the Sharp Street dwellings, and around three quarters of the residents of Hatter Street, were Irish, evidence of the mass influx of Irish people to Manchester following the potato famine. A significant change is noted by the 1891 census which shows that now more commonly a single family is resident within the entire house, or else an individual with lodgers. In addition, the majority of the residents are born in Manchester, with occasional Polish families noted.
Privies and sanitation
Sanitation on both sites was originally very limited, a small block of two or three privies was present on each site, serving all surrounding houses. No privies survived at Sharp Street but at Hatter Street we excavated three different types of privy. The earliest of these was a midden pit located in Hampson’s Yard. Midden privies were notoriously unsanitary as they were rarely cleaned out and often were not watertight meaning that material from the pit leeched into the surrounding earth, often contaminating the communal water pumps. Typhoid cases were known to have been considerably higher in households using midden privies, with some evidence suggesting that 1 in 40 households using a midden privy had typhoid. Interestingly, in the mid-19th century, the single communal midden at Hatter Street was dug out and replaced by a block of five “pail” closets (literally a bucket under the toilet seat). These were a slight sanitary improvement on the midden privies since they were at least emptied regularly by the “night soil men” and there were at least now five privies instead of just one. In the 1890s, at the time when the sewerage system was installed in Manchester, at least three water closet privies were installed at Hatter Street. The introduction of water closets and sewers sparked a massive change in public health with typhoid cases dropping to around a sixth of what they had been previously.
Renovations and improvements
The house footprints excavated at both sites were of particular interest because they showed evidence not only of the habitation of cellars, hence each was fitted with a range, but also of improvements added throughout the 19th century. The most obvious addition was underfloor drainage added at both sites, probably an attempt to combat the problem of damp and pooling groundwater in the cellars. In addition, at both sites there is evidence in the later 19th century of the back-to-back rooms being knocked through to create larger through-terraces, a direct response to local laws prohibiting back-to-back dwellings. At Hatter Street there is evidence that the stone floor we excavated was actually a later addition, dating to this knocking through of the former back-to-backs, another improvement to the buildings.
These improvements seen in the excavated dwellings at Sharp Street and Hatter Street are physical evidence of both changing social attitudes and the introduction of various pieces of local legislation that were intended to improve the living conditions of the working classes by limiting the number of inhabitants in houses, introducing sanitation, banning back-to-back dwellings and making cellar dwellings illegal. It is well known that the enforcement of these laws often depended on the landlords themselves and in many cases improvements were slow to take hold, but our excavations at Sharp Street and Hatter Street have demonstrated that at least in some cases improvements were made.
Keep checking our website for more pieces uncovering Manchester’s industrial past – part 6 coming soon!
> If you missed it, see part 4 of our series (involving more of the city’s industrial housing) here.
> See part 6 (workers’ housing in Middlewood Locks) here.