Housing Conditions in the Industrial Revolution

The housing conditions in the industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution were among the worst in the modern world. The rapid growth of the cities led to a severe housing shortage, and the housing that was built to accommodate the new urban working class was often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and lacking in basic sanitation.

The Housing Crisis in the Industrial Cities

The industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution grew so rapidly that it was impossible to build enough housing to accommodate the new arrivals. The housing crisis was exacerbated by the poverty of the new urban working class.

The Conditions in the Slums

The conditions in the slums of the industrial cities were often appalling. The houses were overcrowded, with multiple families sharing a single building, and the lack of ventilation and sanitation made them breeding grounds for disease.

The Response to the Housing Crisis

The response to the housing crisis came in several forms. The first response was private philanthropy, with wealthy individuals and charitable organizations building model housing for the working class. The second response was public housing, with local authorities building housing for the working class. The third response was the improvement of the existing housing stock, with regulations requiring landlords to maintain their properties in a decent condition.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about 19th-century industrial housing is the same one that has been raised about the factory system and about child labor: how bad were conditions really? The traditional answer, going back to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and given its modern form in the work of E. P. Thompson, is that the housing conditions of the industrial cities were among the great moral scandals of the 19th century: cellar dwellings, overcrowding, lack of sanitation, infant mortality rates above 50 percent. The revisionist answer, developed in a generation of social history since 1980, is that the picture is more mixed: the cellar dwellings of Manchester and Liverpool were unusual, the typical industrial worker in 1850 lived in a brick terraced house with running water and an outside privy, and the comparative international data suggest that the British industrial cities were no worse than their Continental counterparts (and were substantially better than the Parisian slums described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables). The interesting current question, raised in the work of urban historian Robert J. Morris and developed in the recent literature on the comparative history of industrial cities, is whether the British industrial housing of 1800-1900 should be read as a worst case (the moral-indictment reading), as a typical case (the comparative-urban-history reading), or as a mixed case (the regional-and-occupational reading). The honest answer, given the recent work, is probably: a mixed case, with the cellar-and-courts housing of Manchester and the East End of London as a worst case, the brick-terrace housing of Leeds and Birmingham as a more typical case, and the rural-and-small-town housing of Lancashire and Yorkshire as a substantially better case.

Selected Sources

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
Robert J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Working Class 1820–1850 (1976). “Housing.” In The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 1, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (1990).*