On this Student Spotlight: How rich and poor navigated Industrial Manchester may be different from what was previously thought.

Emily Chung, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, looks through records to shed more light on the history.

Emily is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. She holds a Bachelor’s of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a master’s in Economic and Social History from Cambridge. Her doctoral research studies residential segregation and urban reform in 19th century Manchester, using census microdata alongside cartographic and qualitative primary sources to reconstruct experiences of life in the industrial city. Her recent paper, published in The Historical Journal, explores questions of proximity and segregation in 1840s Manchester.

Few cities were affected by the Industrial Revolution as quickly and dramatically as Manchester, which went from little more than a village in 1750 to the third largest city in Britain a century later. By the 1840s, the pressures of this growth was reflected in widespread overcrowding, disease, and severe social fragmentation. The image that has survived of industrial Manchester is one where rich and poor rarely, if ever, interacted and it has been assumed that this was the cause of residential segregation, keeping different classes to separate parts of the city. Looking more closely at census data from 1851, however, my research reveals the opposite was true: not only did doctors, engineers, and lawyers live in the same neighbourhoods as the poorest factory labourers, but they even shared the same buildings! Reviewing qualitative primary sources from this period, written by social investigators and observers like Friedrich Engels, Leon Faucher and James Kay-Shuttleworth, I find different explanations for mechanisms of segregation. Here, differences in daily and weekly routines associated with work, consumer practices, and approaches to leisure meant that individuals of very different classes rarely occupied the same spaces, and when they did, it was often at different times. Long industrial workdays, for example, were such that by the time middle-class shopkeepers, teachers, and accountants hit the streets, working-class labourers were long tucked away in factories. Throughout the week, the middle classes and domestics visited markets and grocers for freshly delivered produce, but the poor were forced to wait for their wages to be disbursed on Saturday evenings, by which point only the worst products were left and the wealthier long gone. Even on Sundays, the universal day off, classes self-segregated with the rich attending church and the poor gathering in pubs. Understanding the nuances of segregation remains of key importance today as many cities still struggle with the issue, and the case of Manchester shows that housing is but one of many factors which shape inequality and exclusion in urban space.

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[Cambridge Core] - Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester

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Emily Chung, University of Cambridge -Residential Proximity and Class Segregation in the Industrial Era

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Emily Chung, University of Cambridge -Residential Proximity and Class Segregation in the Industrial Era