Industrial Cities: Manchester, Birmingham, and the New Urban World

The industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution, with Manchester and Birmingham at their head, were among the most dynamic and most troubled urban centers in human history.

The Growth of the Industrial Cities

The industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution grew at unprecedented rates. Manchester, often called “Cottonopolis” for its dominant role in the cotton industry, was the world’s first large industrial city, and it was the model for all the others. The article on Cottonopolis and the Manchester cotton industry describes the growth of Manchester in more detail.

The population of Manchester grew from about 25,000 in 1772 to about 142,000 in 1831 to over 300,000 in 1851. The growth was driven by the cotton industry, which provided employment for tens of thousands of workers in the mills, warehouses, and shipping operations of the city and its surroundings.

The Physical Environment of the Industrial Cities

The physical environment of the industrial cities was dominated by the factories, the railways, the canals, and the dense housing of the working class. The factories, with their tall chimneys, were the most visible features of the new industrial cities, and they produced much of the pollution that made the cities unhealthy.

The social structure of the industrial cities was divided into distinct classes, with a small upper class of factory owners and merchants, a growing middle class of professionals and skilled workers, and a large working class of unskilled laborers.

The Decline of the Industrial Cities

The growth of the industrial cities slowed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the rate of natural increase in the cities fell and the migration from the countryside tapered off. The industrial cities of the late nineteenth century faced new problems, including competition from newer industrial cities, the growth of suburbs, and the decline of the older industries.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about the British industrial cities is the same one that has been raised about the rural-urban migration and about the standard of living: were the cities the moral disaster that Engels described, or were they a net improvement over the rural poverty of the early 19th century? The traditional answer, going back to 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 cities were a moral disaster: overcrowding, disease, pollution, child mortality, and a working class that was being slowly ground down by the new industrial system. The revisionist answer, developed in a generation of social history since 1980 and given a quantitative form in the work of economic historians Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Robert Allen, is closer to the second: the cities were unhealthy by 19th-century standards, but they were not unhealthy by 18th-century standards, and the comparative international data suggest that the typical industrial worker in Manchester in 1850 was no worse off, in material terms, than the typical rural worker in 1750. 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 city should be read as a worst case (the Engels reading), as a typical case (the comparative-urban-history reading), or as a transitional case (the post-1880 suburbanization reading). The honest answer, given the recent work, is probably: a transitional 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 suburban housing of late-Victorian London as a substantially better case. The British industrial city, in other words, is best read as a system that produced a wide range of housing and working conditions, and that was in the process of substantial improvement by the time its industrial base began to decline.

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).*