By Sabrina Khatkar, Nicola Hollands, Abigail Kwao and Dammi Jacobs.

 Working people's daily meals were bread, potatoes and beer and are increasingly supplemented by meat, milk and vegetables.  Much of the food was contaminated by chemicals or infected by animal and human excrement.

 The list of poisonous additives includes:  Strychnine in rum and beer  Sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine and preserves  Lead chromate in mustard and snuff  Sulphate of iron in tea and beer  ferric ferrocyanide and lime sulphate in Chinese tea  Copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate  Lead in wine and cider.

 During 1877, the Local Government Board found that about a quarter of the milk it examined contained excessive water or chalk. It also found that 10% of butter, 8% of bread and 50% of gin contains copper to increase the colour. Red lead was added to Gloucester cheese to give it a 'healthy' red colour. These additives result in chronic gastritis and fatal food poisoning.

 The rich were not safe of contamination in their luxury food. A London county medical officer discovered the following in ice cream: cotton fibre, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, and fleas, straw, human hairs and cat and dog hairs. Such contamination can cause diphtheria, scarlet fever, diarrhoea and enteric fever.

In the Victorian period there was a huge increase in the population, that meant that housing was in huge demand and house prices went up and the citizens were left in need of houses and began to live in slums. Often many people had to live in one room, they weren’t even family, complete strangers.

Houses were made of stone, timber and straw. Nowadays houses are made of bricks. In towns poor people lived in back-to-back houses called terraced houses. Rich people sometimes lived in villas.

Poor people in Victorian times lived in horrible cramped conditions, often with the whole family in one room. Many people during the Victorian years moved into the cities and towns to find work in the factories. Most poor houses only had one or two rooms downstairs and one or two upstairs. Tin Baths were put it in front of the kitchen. This was the warmest place in the house and very close to hot water. The whole family would wash themselves one after the other. They would not empty the bath until everyone had finished. The water from the pump was frequently polluted. Some streets would have one or two outside toilets for the whole street to share! Houses were built close together with narrow streets between them and open sewers running down the middle of the streets. Rubbish was tipped into the streets.