1. What were the living conditions like for the poor in the 19th century?

2. Take a look at this picture and write a sentence to describe what you can see.

3. The development of factories
The new factories were like magnets.
Made small towns overcrowded cities due to the knock on effect.
The development of factories
Led to poor conditions

4. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, housing was needed for more and more workers. Some landlords seized the opportunity to exploit this situation. They made their profits by cramming as many poorly-built houses into as small a space as possible. Such cramped, squalid living conditions proved the perfect breeding ground for disease.

5. What were Slum houses like inside?
There was no toilet, no running water – sometimes not even windows or a fireplace! Rooms were cold, badly ventilated and running with damp. Worst of all were the cellar and attic dwellings in which the poorest families lived. Cellar rooms flooded in bad weather and might be an inch or so deep in stagnant water the whole year round. Attic rooms were cramped and stuffy, with no way of escaping if the building caught fire.

6. Some houses only had a bucket in the corner as a toilet.
Many of the houses built in the time of the Industrial Revolution had no sewerage system. Instead, each court or street shared a communal privy.
The waste from the privy was tipped into a cesspit – and many landlords would not pay for the cesspits to be emptied until they were overflowing. This meant that human waste could filter through into the water supply that people drank from.
Some houses only had a bucket in the corner as a toilet.

7. Problems with Slum housing – write a sentence for each
Poor ventilation
Sewage
Damp
Rubbish
Hygiene
Dirty drinking water

8. Types of housing Cellar dwellings Back to back housing
Built in a court grid system.
The rows of houses were literally built 'back to back' one room deep.
One-room cellars below ground level.
As a result the small rooms were damp and poorly ventilated

9. Task 1
Identify as many features in these plans that show us why living conditions in towns were terrible for the working class during the Industrial Revolution and explain why.
Questions-
1, Why were back to back houses unhealthy?
2, Explain why cellar dwellings were so unhealthy

10. A cross-section of back-to-back houses, Emily Place, Liverpool.
Source A
‘In Emily Place there are two rows of houses with a street 15 feet wide between them. The houses are built back-to-back. Each room in the house is about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long.’

11. Diseases & killer conditions
Cholera
Typhoid
Diseases & killer conditions
Influenza
Tuberculosis
Pneumonia
Dirty drinking water; poor cramped housing; lack of toilets; damp rooms, rubbish and filth lining the streets resulted in diseases.

12. Life in Victorian England
Life in Victorian England. What experiences did poor people have in Victorian England?

14. Did you notice? Moving clockwise
The poor spelling of ‘lodging house’
The coffin being carried
The infant lying in the filth
The bare-footed children
The boy holding a rat by its tail
The crazy kid doing a head stand in the dung heap
The props holding the ramshackle buildings up

15. So how bad was cholera?
The filthy overcrowded conditions in which so many people lived ensured the rapid spread of cholera. Contact with human excrement and flies which had themselves been in contact with human excrement was inevitable. The worst source however was contaminated water. Cholera attacked with terrible suddenness and victims could die within a few hours, or after a few days of violent pain and diarrhoea. Where transmission was by contact whole households died, but where it was waterborne whole streets and areas were affected. There was no effective treatment, and one in two of those infected died.

16. Why didn’t people do anything about it?
We prefer to take our chance with the cholera than be bullied into health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will or having his floors swept, his hall whitewashed, his dungheaps cleared away and his thatch forced to give way to slate. It is a fact that many people have died from good washing. The truth is that Mr Chadwick has a great many powers but it is not so easy to say what they can be applied to.
The Times, 1854

17. Source B: A sketch of Silvester Court, Liverpool, 1843.

18. What was life like in industrial towns?
Robert Southey wrote: "The dwellings of the laboring manufacturers are in narrow streets, blocked up from light and air, crowded together because every inch of land is of such value that room for light and air cannot be afforded them. Here in Manchester, a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is left to accumulate.”
Friedrich Engels wrote: ‘The irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan. They are crowded literally one upon the other. At the end of the court passage is a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.”

19. Produce a government report
Charles Booth
Produce a government report
In pairs you need to read and take notes on living conditions in the 19th century. In the late 1880s, a man named Charles Booth was put in charge of creating a report on living conditions in urban areas. You are going to write a government report as one of Charles Booth’s employees.
Number of people living in that area/ number of people to a house
Types of houses and what the houses were like inside and out.
Conditions in that area (sewage, drinking water and privies)
The spread of Cholera
P51 Empire
Report for homework

20. This is a report so DETAIL is needed!!
Government Report on living conditions
Inspector………………………… Date 30/1/1888
Housing
Toilets/ sanitary conditions
Water supply
Disease
This is a report so DETAIL is needed!!

21. What would they be thinking?