Towns and cities

With the spread of industry, Britain's towns and cities got bigger. London and the great ports continued to grow. Mill towns like Oldham and Rochdale appeared from nothing. In 1800, two-thirds of the population still lived in the countryside. By 1850, the figure was down to a half. By the 1890s, three quarters of Britain's people lived in towns.

The first reason for this change was that men and women moved from the country into the towns. They came to work in the factories and mills. The wages were low, but better than labourers could get on the farms. The second reason was that families were large. It was a good thing to have a lot of children if five and six-year-olds could earn money in the mills.

Workers' houses were thrown up quickly and cheaply. A lot of them were two or three-roomed 'back-to-backs'. They stood in rows in narrow streets or clustered round gloomy courtyards. Many families lived in a single room. Most streets were not paved, and the only sewer was an open drain. Water was piped from the river to a pump in the street or yard.

Bad housing and impure water led to disease, of course. People died much younger in the towns than in the countryside. Cholera was common – an outbreak in London in 1849 killed 13,000 people. Typhoid fever threatened not only the poor in the slums - it killed Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, in 1861.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 – 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993/2002, page 46