By Dean Kirby. ISBN Reviewed by Jim Burns. They talk about travel, and Coningsby wistfully expresses a desire to visit Athens to see the glories that were Greece. The Age of Ruins is past. Have you seen Manchester?
Its rapid development as an industrial centre, with, in its case, particular emphasis on the cotton trade, meant that it was being seen as a forerunner of the industrialised future for British society, and for other countries.
The old phrase about what Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow, had some meaning. The problem was that as the mills and factories opened they needed large numbers of workers to operate them. People poured in from adjoining rural areas, and especially from Ireland where the Famines of the midth Century had left thousands destitute.
People require accommodation and they also often inevitably gravitate towards parts of a town or city that can offer cheap lodgings, and perhaps already has an existing network of those from a similar background. The middle-classes soon deserted Angel Meadow and moved out to what were then the suburbs of Ardwick Green and Broughton. As the middle-classes left the working-classes, and those that Marx would have called the lumpenproletariat, took over.
The houses were divided up and rooms rented out to single men and women, and to families. Even the cellars were seen as suitable for housing the ever-increasing hordes of men, women, and children, arriving in Manchester, attracted by the possibility of work, or in some cases, by the likelihood of opportunities for crime of one kind or another.
