The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureEmily Chung
Cotton mills in Ancoats about 1820.
The Industrial Revolution drastically changed the way people lived, worked, and socialised in Britain’s large towns and cities. England rapidly urbanised in the first half of the 19th century as the country’s population moved from the agrarian countryside into growing centres of industrial activity, drawn in by the promise of work.
Manchester, which represented the heart of the textile industry during this period, more than tripled in population size from 1800-1850 and epitomised early urbanisation in industrial Britain — as well as the problems that came with it. Accounts of the city in this period describe grand boulevards lined with the ‘palaces of merchant princes’ and punctuated by factories and warehouses, but also the cramped and dirty alleyways filled with poverty and disease which lay just beyond them.