19th C. M'cr & Salford

1823 - Royal Manchester Institution founded.
1823 - Manchester Gas Act passed.
1823 - John Greenwood introduced a horse bus service from Pendleton to Manchester.

1826 - Liverpool and Manchester Railway Act passed.
1826 - Manchester branch of the Bank of England opened.

1837 - Corn Exchange, Hanging Ditch, opened.
1838 - Population given as 181,708 and borough of Manchester formed.

1838 - Ardwick cemetery opened - many of Manchester's leading figures of the nineteenth century buried here including John Dalton.
1838 - Manchester and Bolton railway opened.

1839 - Manchester and Leeds Railway opened as far as Littleborough, completed in 1841.

1846 - Anti-Corn Law League dissolved on passing of act repealing the corn laws.
1846 -John Owens died and left money to found Owen's College, now Manchester University.
1846 - Peel Park, Salford and Philips Park and Queens Park, Manchester opened.

1849 - Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway opened, becoming the region's first true commuter route.

1851 - Queen Victoria visits Manchester for the first time.
1851 - Population of the borough of Manchester recorded as 303,382.

1858 - Watt's Warehouse opened. This was the grandest of the cotton warehouses to be erected in

1858 - Manchester and is now the Britannia Hotel.
1858 - World's first flash-light photograph taken in Manchester by Sir Henry Roscoe.

1862 - Co-operative Wholesale Society formed.
1862 - Cotton famine began because of the American Civil War.

1867 - Albert Memorial handed over to Manchester.
1867 - Last public execution to be held in England.

1877 - New Town Hall in Albert Square opened.
1877 - First horse-drawn trams introduced.

1878 - Newton Heath Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Football Club founded and became the

1880 - Central Station opened.
1880 - Gorton West Football Club formed. Became Manchester City Football Club in 1894.

1887 - Work started on the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal.
1887 - Royal Jubilee Exhibition held.

1894 - Manchester Ship Canal opened.
1894 - Thirlmere Aqueduct opened providing Manchester with water from the Lake District.

1830 saw the opening of the Manchester - Liverpool railway which was the first passenger rail service in the world. By the mid 19^th century, Manchester had become a central terminal for rail lines crossing between most of the manufacturing towns and cities of the North of England. The city became connected up with other centers of industry and population and Manchester served as a major regional and national center of transportation. Manchester emerged at this time as the heart of an industrial region and became known as "the first industrial city."

During the mid- nineteenth century, while cotton remained the major economic good, Manchester's manufacturing base began to diversify and other markets were stimulated including metals, engineering, transport, and chemicals. The urban core became specialized and by the 1880's spinning and weaving moved from the city of Manchester to it's surrounding towns.

One interesting part of Manchester's internal structure that has remained the same is the lack of public green space within the city. Historically, Manchester's structure was distinctive not only for its class stratification, but for the overwhelming domination of the physical landscape by buildings dedicated to trade and industry. The material effects of industrial growth had not been carefully planned out and little attention was paid originally to the importance of green space, the maintenance of nature, or the need for public gathering space. There were no parks in early industrial Manchester and the only space leftover from industrial development in inner Manchester by the late 19^th century were turnpike roads used for sports and recreational play. Unlike many other northern cities such as Sheffield, Manchester's local industrialists did not donate any land for public use. Manchester did not see its first municipal park until 1868 and the city has never caught up in its provision of park space for the use of the general public. There is still a lack of downtown parks and walkways in Manchester today.

Physically the towns grew closer together as well; as industry grew, the space between Manchester and the surrounding towns (including Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale, Bolton, and Salford) shrank. The conurbation emerged as a result of this with Manchester at the centre. This resulted in an expansion of the city's financial and commercial services and the area became the largest manufacturing centre in the world as well as Britain's largest urban region (except for the city of London). Economic activity was accelerated by the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894,

While during this period Manchester was most renown for its booming industry, it also had a reputation as one of England's most crowded and unhealthy places to live. Manchester had a high poverty rate and terrible residential conditions for the majority of its inhabitants. Many social brutalities resulted from the city's economic success. The health situation began to improve with the 1875 Public Health Acts, but environmental damage continued, with smog and air pollution as major concerns.

Despite the growing wealth due to trade and commerce, prosperity lay in the hands of very few of Manchester's residents. The working people, who actually produced the wealth, lived, worked and died in conditions of the most desperate poverty and degradation. Innumerable reports and surveys were carried out during the 19th century, and they all told much the same story : poor wages, impossibly long working hours, dangerous and unsanitary working conditions, even more unsanitary dwellings, little or no health provisions, high infant mortality and a short life expectancy. A map of Manchester showing age of death figures in the mid-nineteenth century revealed that life expectancy was directly related to wealth. Put simply, the poor died younger and the rich lived longer. At that time, Ancoats was the death black spot of Manchester.

In 1819 a demonstration took place in Manchester at St. Peter's Fields. On that August day, the 16^th, a large body of people carrying banners bearing slogans against the Corn Laws, and in favour of universal suffrage, held a meeting at St. Peter's Fields. The magistrates of the day became alarmed and ordered the arrest of the principal speakers. As the Yeomanry attempted to obey the order, they were surrounded by the 'mob', and the Hussars were sent in to help them, and in the general panic which followed, eleven people were killed and about five hundred injured.

The government responded to the Peterloo Massacre by introducing the Six Acts. When Parliament reassembled on 23rd November, 1819, the government 's Home Secretary, announced details of what later became known as the Six Acts. By the 30th December, 1819, Parliament had debated and passed six measures that it hoped would suppress radical newspapers and meetings as well as reducing the possibility of an armed uprising.
The people viewed these Six Acts with alarm as they allowed that any house could be searched, without a warrant, on suspicion of containing firearms, and public meetings were virtually forbidden.

Periodicals were taxed so severely that they were priced beyond the reach of the poorer classes, and the magistrates were given the power to seize any literature that was deemed seditious or blasphemous, and any meeting in a parish that contained more than fifty people was deemed illegal.

Records show that by 1830 there were over 560 cotton mills in Lancashire, employing more than 110,000 workers, of which 35,000 were children - some as young as six years of age. Wages for children were about 2s.3d. (two shillings and three pence) per week (about 11½ new pence), but adults were paid about 10 times more. Hence, it made economic sense to employ as many children and as few adults as possible, and this is exactly what happened. Youngest children were employed to crawl beneath machinery (while still in operation) to gather up loose cotton - they were known as "scavengers" and many died by getting caught up in machinery. Those that survived to adulthood had permanent stoops or were crippled from the prolonged crouching that the job entailed. The typical working day was 14 hours long, but many were much longer, as, without regulation, unscrupulous mill owners could demand any terms they liked.

Average wages in 19th century Manchester were well below subsistence level. A report by Fred Scott for the Manchester Statistical Society in 1889 found that over 40% of working men interviewed in Salford were "irregularly employed", and that 61% could be defined as "very poor" with a weekly income of less than 4 shillings (20p) per week.
The main problem was casual labour. Payments from the Manchester & Salford District Provident Society's Poverty Fund in the winter of 1878-79 revealed that the vast majority of qualifying applicants were casual and seasonal workers - among them were warehousemen, builder's labourers, general labourers, store men and transport men - most of these were of Irish descent. In the days before any welfare provision, there was no sick pay - if you couldn't work, you weren't paid.
Many people worked up to 14 hours a day for 7 days a week; a few "benevolent" employers allowed a 6 day week with compulsory church attendance on the seventh.

During the early 19th century - while London's population doubled, Manchester's trebled!

1811 - 89,068	1831 - 182,016	1851 - 303,382
1821 - 126,086	1841 - 235,507	1871 - 351,189

By and large the workers lived near and around their workplace, and the wealthy lived a few miles outside the city in their garden suburbs. Houses were "jerry" built, without control or regulation of any kind. Builders, usually the employer, would build so as to cram as many houses as possible into the space available.
There was no water or services, and no attempt to provide privacy of any kind. People worked in shifts and shared beds. Ten or twelve people could share the one bedroom, and up to 100 houses shared the one "privvy" - usually a deep hole dug in the corner of a yard, or a "midden" - a heap against a wall.
Houses were damp - there were no damp-proof courses, and no double brick walls. Rain leaked through walls, and even in dry summers, damp rose up the walls. The only relief from damp was the building of cellars to contain it. However, these cellars inevitably became dwellings for subtenants. Manchester and Salford's cellar dwellings were the root of most health problems, and became a national disgrace.

Manchester Royal Infirmary first began as a small house able to care for twelve patients in Withy Grove in 1752. Followed by St Mary’s Hospital in 1790, the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital in 1814, and the University Dental Hospital in 1884. The Infirmary then moved to the area now known as Piccadilly Gardens and then in 1908 in partnership with the University it relocated to our current site on Oxford Road.

The new Manchester Royal Infirmary 2004 - Main Entrance and The A & E Entrance.

Manchester had become a very unhealthy place to live in. Coal burning domestic fires and innumerable factory chimneys meant that the city was overhung with a permanent pall of smoke, drenched with acid rain, and suffered plagues of respiratory diseases (bronchitis, influenza, pneumonia, asthma, as well as other industrial dust-related diseases).
Life expectancy of a workingman in Salford in the 1870s could be as little as 17 years. While the opening of some hospitals after 1850 and the application of public health measures saw a fast decline in infectious diseases such as small pox, scarlet fever and other communicable diseases, there were still many endemic diseases which plagued working people.
In sewage disposal, the city had little or no policy until the late 19th century. Ashpits and communal cesspits were common, and they overflowed in rainy periods, and had to be emptied and carted away. This was, however, rarely done. There were frequent official accounts of "midden" overflowing into the cellars in which a large number of workers lived, with no attempt made to relieve the problem.
Even by 1907 only about one-third of the city's privvies were water closets. Such water closets as there were before the 1870s simply ran directly into the Irwell, from which most people obtained their drinking water. Cholera was a common summer visitor to the city. The Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association was formed in 1852 to promote public health and sanitary reform. They had a vigorous programme that included distributing thousands of tracts (though few poor people could read), and delivering hundreds of public lectures. They also created isolation hospitals for the worst diseases. Despite all this, the city's health failed to improve. But it was the airborne diseases, which accounted for the greatest mortality figures. Pulmonary Tuberculosis killed most people in Manchester.
The highest death risk areas of the city were all inner city zones, occupied by the working poor : Ancoats, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Hulme and Ardwick. It was not until the 1850s that relatively clean drinking water came into the city from the completion of Longendale reservoir, (though ordinary people had to queue at street standpipes to obtain it), and that Thirlmere in the Lake District was added to the system in the 1890s. These measures had a significant impact in improving the health of the city's residents. Cholera and typhoid were virtually wiped out at a stroke.
Things were no better in the working mills of Lancashire. "Mill Fever", aching head, limbs and nausea was common. Workers usually developed tuberculosis, bronchitis and asthma due to cotton lint and dust which hung in the air - there were, of course, no health or safety precautions or safeguards in place.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, free medical care was not available although there were a few charitable hospitals for the poor. Those that were wealthy were able to pay, while others - that were not so fortunate - suffered.

In the 19th century, the effects of the industrial revolution on Salford was phenomenal. Factories replaced home workers and the resident population, which was just 12,000 in 1812, increased by 1840 to 70,244, and by the end of the century to 220,000. This rapid increase, probably the greatest in the whole of Britain, was reflected in the vast areas of poor quality housing that were built throughout the Victorian period when overcrowding created real social problems.

Salford township and part of Broughton township received the charter of incorporation in 1844. In 1853 the adjoining township of Pendleton and part of Pendlebury were merged with Salford which, in 1889, became one of the first county boroughs in the country. With the growth of the cotton, textile, and engineering industries in the 19th century, the city’s population expanded rapidly, resulting in overcrowding and the building of much poor quality housing. Many of the 19th-century houses were demolished after World War II
Houses were crowded together at as many as 80 to the acre. Trade continued to boom, and with the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal and the docks at Salford, the city became an industrial meeting point for all major routes and was receiving raw materials for the whole north west of England, as well as being the main distribution point for manufactured goods being exported out. The fate of Salford during the Industrial Revolution was not an enviable one. Most of the worst effects and excesses of over-industrialisation and human exploitation were to be found there.
It was not all quite so black - there were some real improvements made to the social and material fabric of late Victorian society. For Example, the first Public Libraries Act was introduced in 1850. Salford had, a year previously, already established a library, museum and art gallery, the first municipal authority in Great Britain to do so.

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