Manchester: Making the Modern City

Excavating ‘Hell Upon Earth’ Towards a Research Framework for the Archaeological Investigation of Workers’ Housing: Case Studies from Manchester, UK

“…Far more common than subdivision was the backyard or courtyard infilling of urban properties. This is a frequent urban indicator of overcrowding and was noted by 19 th century commentators in many industrial cities including Chester, Glasgow, Manchester and London (34) (Matthews 1999;Harward, Holder & Jeffries 2015;Nevell 2008). This process often created court areas accessed by narrow alleys.…”

“…This phenomenal industrial rise was matched by its spectacular population growth in the first half of the 19 th century; Manchester nearly doubled its size between 1801 and 1821 from 75,281 to 126,066 people, and then more than doubled its population by 1851, when there were 303,382 people within the new borough. This new population required huge amounts of housing and between 1773 and 1821 the number of dwellings in the city rose from 3,446 to 17,257 and by 1851 had reached nearly 50,000 (14) (Hartwell 2001, 17;Kidd 2006, 38;Kidd & Wyke 2016, 29-30;Nevell 2008).…”

“…For most of the 20 th century archaeology had little to contribute to the debate on Manchester's role in industrialisation and urbanism. However, beginning in the 1980s archaeological studies of vernacular domestic buildings and the surviving textile factories began to provide a line of archaeological investigation that developed new perspectives on the 'Shock City' (Nevell 2008). At the end of the 1990s a conscious decision was made by the city's planning archaeologists to record actively, during the redevelopment of central Manchester after the IRA bomb damage of 1996, this dwindling resource and to further expand our knowledge by targeting for excavation key city centre urban areas (15) (Redhead 2011, 53-54).…”

“…Traditionally, the recovery of such identities through their objects has been difficult in this context. This is usually ascribed to the fragmentary nature of much of the material remains excavated, the paucity of available clearance groups, and some of the urban cleansing strategies adopted by the new industrial city authorities the consequences of which are thought to have removed most of the available material culture in many cities (58) (Nevell 2008;Symonds 2005). A poor area such as Ancoats had just such a highly mobile population with a history of later house clearances.…”