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Friday, 5th December 2003

Manchester celebrates 150th anniversary

Ray KIng

MANCHESTER officially celebrated the 150th anniversary of its coming of age as a city on Friday night as Lord Mayor Audrey Jones dedicated her reception at the town hall to the historic event. When Queen Victoria bestowed a Royal Charter upon the municipal borough, whose population had increased fourfold in the previous 50 years and was to double in the next 50, the eyes of the world were on the cradle of the industrial revolution. Manchester had pioneered canals, railways, factories and political ideas, but most of the people were paying a terrible price. Ray King reflects on the city's incredible journey.

IT'S a sign of prosperity in 2003 that so many people are returning to live in Manchester city centre. Luxury apartments, some selling for more than £1m, dominate the skyline and are set to be joined by the tallest residential tower in the country. In the time of our great-grandparents, however, city centre living was the lot of the abject poor, drawn by the prospect of work in the cotton mills hugging the banks of the rivers Irwell, Irk, Medlock and Tib.

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Manchester's exploding population had reached 303,382 by the time of the 1851 Census and would soon surpass the present day figure of around 410,000. Of these, almost 100,000 people were crammed into crumbling rented hovels around Market Street, Deansgate and London Road, and 15 per cent were Irish.

Little Ireland was a notorious slum that only came to the notice of "polite society" during a cholera outbreak. Hitherto, everyone hurried past, glancing away, according to German-born observer Jakob Venedey. Friedrich Engels, a collaborator of Karl Marx, painted an appalling picture of life around Long Millgate and Shudehill, site today of the Printworks, Urbis and Cathedral Gardens:

"The houses [are] dirty, old and tumble-down and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible ... but all this is nothing compared with the courts and lanes that lie behind. He who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime.

"The Irk is a coal-black, four-smelling stream full of debris and refuse. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on the bank from the depths of which bubbles of miasmic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty feet above."

Sanitation was in its infancy and the flow of Lakeland fresh water was still more than 40 years away. The mortality rate in the 1850s was 31.5 per 1,000 of the population, and it got worse before it got better.

But the condition of the poor had not completely escaped the notice of the well-heeled middle classes in their villas on the outskirts. The writer Elizabeth Gaskell, whose former home still stands in Plymouth Grove, had just caused a sensation with her novel, Mary Barton, which, for the first time, drew characters from the poor working class.

The year 1853 saw the first chapters of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford appearing in the magazine, Household World, edited by Charles Dickens, and novelist Charlotte Bronte came to call at her house.