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Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. . . . At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of débris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills and gasworks from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. . . . Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the ‘Poor-Law Bastille’ of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hill-top, upon the working-people’s quarter below. . . .
    Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression . . . And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. . . . Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. . . .
    Farther to the north-east lie many newly-built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous. But this can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years. . . . All such cottages look neat and substantial at first . . . But on closer examination, it becomes evident that the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them. . . .
    The object of this is to spare material, but there is also another reason for it; namely, the fact that the contractors never own the land but lease it, according to the English custom, for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or ninety-nine years, at the expiration of which time it falls, with everything upon it, back into the possession of the original holder, who pays nothing in return for improvements upon it. The improvements are therefore so calculated by the lessee as to be worth as little as possible at the expiration of the stipulated term. . . . It is calculated in general that working-men’s cottages last only forty years on the average. . . . The niggardliness of the original expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of emptiness, the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction carried on by the dwellers during the final ten years, usually Irish families, who do not hesitate to use the wooden portions for firewood – all this, taken together, accomplishes the complete ruin of the cottages by the end of forty years. . . . The working-man is constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for other, and because there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps, too, because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on condition of his taking such a cottage.
    Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845; trans. F.K. Wischnewetzky, 1885)
    MIDDLESBROUGH
    [Population in 1801: 25; in 1841, after the