Introduction

THE SCOURGE OF SLUM HOUSING IN MANCHESTER

(Above) The vast ring of poor quality ‘slum’ housing power visualised by T.R. Marr in this map. Source: Housing Conditions in Manchester and Salford (1904).

Dense terraced housing around St Mary’s Church in Hulme, 1926. Source: Manchester Local Image Collection, ref. m67728.

The engineering workshops and spinning mills across Manchester made some people rich but produced a landscape of poverty for many factory workers. The rapid growth of the city was largely unplanned and it created a disorderly patchwork of factories, warehouses, canals and railways, gasworks, and clusters of small houses and terraces. While the affl uent minority were able to move further away into the suburbs, those living around the industry and transport suffered from overcrowded conditions, pollution and had little open space. Some of the most notorious slums with terrible live expectancy due to insanitary conditions were Little Ireland and Angel Meadow.

Friedrich Engels described Little Ireland in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working Class in England: covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefl y back-to-back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening fi lth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effl uvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as fi lthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles…The race that lives in these ruinous cottages... must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”

Newgates, Corporation Street, 1908. Source: Manchester Local Image Collection, ref. m75639.

Several decades later Reverend Mercer (1897) in his article The Conditions of Life in Angel Meadow spoke to the correlation between poor people’s lives and the places they were forced to dwell, “Do the slums make the dwellers in them, or do the dwellers in them make the slums? The truth, as usual, would seem to lie halfway between these extreme views … a vast amount of preventable misery and degradation, and its conditions are due, not to the characters and habits of the [area] alone, but obvious defects in social machinery.”

The slum problem had emerged in large part because of a lack of regulations over housing conditions. Ernest Simon explained how private builders maximised profi t with little concern for their inhabitants:

“The housing of the working-class population was undertaken by the speculative builder… He could, and did, in the poorest districts, crowd as many houses on to an acre as the space could be made to hold… He could build his houses back-toback, or blind–i.e., with no doors or windows at the back. He was under no necessity to provide yards or air-space round the houses, or to put in a damp-proof course…. Windows might be the smallest size possible, and often were not made to open.” (The Rebuilding of Manchester, 1935)

The worse industrial slums and mean rows of Victorian terraces were giving way to better Edwardian workers’ housing by the early 1900s but the sheer scale of the existing problems needed a step-change in municipal activity to provide decent housing for tens of thousands of families in Manchester.

BUILD A COMPLETELY NEW GARDEN CITY FOR MANCHESTER THE SOLUTION – BUILD A COMPLETELY NEW Welcome GARDEN CITY FOR MANCHESTER

Wythenshawe’s design was based on the ideas of a garden city. These ideas emerged from Ebenezer Howard’s infl uential book Garden Cities of To-morrow published at the turn of the century. The ethos of a garden city was to bring the benefi cial aspects of the countryside – natural light, fresh air and green space – to urban living along with socialist notions of common ownership. It informed planning principles in terms of zoning of activity, separation of homes from factories, and in having well laid out low density residential areas composed of well-built dwellings. The fi rst garden cities to be created were Letchworth in 1904 and Welwyn Garden City in 1920 in Hertfordshire.

Howard’s ideas pervaded early developments in town planning and were particularly appealing to campaigners in crowded industrial cities looking for ways to re-house thousands of working people in a better environment, not least Ernest Simon. He hoped that Manchester could be expanded so as “to develop either selfcontained garden cities or dormitory cities with express transport to the centre of Manchester, and to transfer to those cities large portions of the population now forced to live in slums.”

(Above) Courtesy of Unilever Archives & Records Management. (Above) Idealised model of better urban planning in Howard’s book, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).

(Above) Source: Modern Housing in Town and Country (1905).

Around the same time model settlements like Port Sunlight, built by billionaire industrialist Lord Leverhulme for the workers in his soap factory near Birkenhead, were powerful archetypes of spacious housing with gardens and allotments. More immediate to Manchester in the Edwardian period a number of experimental small garden suburbs and estates were constructed, including ones at Burnage and Chorlton near to the Simons family home in Didsbury. Manchester Corporation’s fi rst foray in municipally funded suburban housing was a small estate of 150 cottage houses at Blackley built in 1904 but this scheme was tiny in relation to the scale of problem.

To progress further and rehouse tens of thousands, along the lines of the fi rst garden city at Letchworth, Manchester City Council needed much more space for low density town planning. Flat open farm land just across the Mersey River in Cheshire seemed to be the ideal choice, if only it could be acquired and developed.